How Is the Inter-Ontological Possible
The Subjective Conditions and Emergent Structure of Freedom
📄 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19297847How is the inter-ontological possible? The standard answer comes from institutional philosophy: design the right laws and rules so that different subjects can coexist peacefully within the same space. This paper offers a different answer: the inter-ontological is possible not because institutions maintain order from without, but because each subject is already a coexistence structure of multiple cannot-nots from within. The "between" does not first happen externally. It first happens internally.
Working from the Self-as-an-End (SAE) framework, this paper argues that freedom is not the space of choice granted by institutions, but the capacity to grow cannot-not — inner necessity — from within. A two-dimensional model is proposed: the base layer asks whether the subject's own cannot-not is established; the emergent layer asks whether the subject can empathize with and acknowledge the cannot-not of others. The paper introduces a three-criterion test for genuine versus pseudo cannot-not, names the mechanism of introjected colonization (where a pseudo cannot-not occupies the growth space of genuine ones), analyzes the transmission pathways of colonization and nurturing through institutional and relational layers, and engages in dialogue with Kant's autonomy ethics, Spinoza's freedom-as-necessity, and Deci & Ryan's Self-Determination Theory. Four non-trivial predictions are derived. Greta Thunberg and Alysa Liu serve as running case studies illustrating colonization and nurturing transmission modes.
1. The Problem: Why Freedom Is a Subjective Condition
1.1 Three Layers of Freedom Through Progressive Negation
Layer 1 — Pseudo-freedom (libertinism): Freedom is not doing what you want. What looks like absolute freedom is enslavement to biological impulse, dopamine cycles, and external stimulation. In SDT terms: external regulation — remove contingencies, behavior stops. This is the pseudo-freedom of libertinism.
Layer 2 — Suspended freedom (existentialism): Freedom is not refusing what you don't want. The existentialist answer can dismantle every given meaning yet cannot construct a single one. A subject who can only say "no" hovers in a vacuum. In SDT terms: the borderland of introjected regulation and amotivation.
Layer 3 — Cannot-not (genuine freedom): Freedom is doing what you cannot-not do — knowing what must be done and doing it with everything you have. This necessity is grounded in objective law or inner absolute imperative — not coercion, not guilt-pressure. In SDT terms: integrated regulation. SAE goes deeper: motivational content emerges from the subject's self-establishment as an end.
Terminological clarification: three levels of cannot-not. The phenomenal level: the first-person experience of "I must do this" — proves nothing about its source. The structural level: a genuine cannot-not that has passed the three-criterion test (§3.1) and plurality verification (§3.2). The ontological level: action-necessity that emerges from the subject's self-establishment as an end — the ultimate ground, the point where SAE contributes beyond SDT.
1.2 Why Subjective Conditions, Not Institutional Conditions
Negative liberty is an institutional question; positive liberty is a subjective question. The core argument: without cannot-not growing from within the subject, even the largest institutional freedom-space produces only libertinism or suspension, never genuine freedom.
Institutional freedom is necessary but not sufficient. Krieger & Sheldon's (2004, 2007) longitudinal study of law students showed that institutional culture can systematically suppress intrinsic motivation — those who entered law school pursuing public service often graduated pursuing salary and ranking. Freedom analysis must trace the complete transmission chain: institution → relationship → subject. The true transformation bottleneck is in the subject — but the subject is continuously being shaped by institutions through relationships.
1.3 Two Contemporary Cases
A subject of enormous energy who entered the public sphere at fifteen through climate activism. The structural question: when a subject's direction of action is primarily supplied by external narratives (climate movement, political machinery, media demand), and the subject's own internal cannot-not is still under construction, what structural challenges arise? Her trajectory — from climate strikes to UN speeches to Gaza solidarity — presents a subject searching for an anchor across multiple external constructs. We diagnose, and we prescribe.
Her father Arthur Liu enrolled her in skating from age five with a "next Michelle Kwan" goal. At thirteen, youngest U.S. Championship women's singles winner. After the 2022 Beijing Olympics at sixteen, she retired — exhausted from political pressure, isolation, and her father's expectations. During two years of retirement: Starbucks, UCLA psychology, hiking, skiing. Then during a skiing trip she discovered she still loved movement, music, and dance — and returned. 2025 World Championship gold. 2026 Milan Olympics gold — America's first complete figure skating grand slam. Her father also transformed: committing to non-intervention in coaching and training decisions. A structural demonstration of the chisel-construct cycle from "forced stop" to "active reconstruction."
2. The Two-Dimensional Structure: Base Layer and Emergent Layer
2.1 Establishing the Model
Main Theorem: The inter-ontological is not primitively given but emergently produced. It becomes possible only when a self that has become an end acquires enough internal plurality to recognize another irreducible end.
Horizontal axis (base layer): whether the subject's own cannot-not is established — the "I am an end" dimension.
Vertical axis (emergent layer): capacity to empathize with and acknowledge others' cannot-not — the "the other is an end" dimension. The vertical axis measures not "others matter" (abstract) but "sustain the other's irreducibility" (concrete).
Key structural claim: the vertical axis is not independent of the horizontal axis; it emerges from it. A subject whose own cannot-not is not yet established cannot genuinely acknowledge another's cannot-not — they will either instrumentalize the other (Q2) or dissolve into the other (Q4).
2.2 Four-Quadrant Analysis
| Emergent Layer HIGH | Emergent Layer LOW | |
|---|---|---|
| Base HIGH | Q1 — Genuine high-high. Both subjects have their own cannot-not and can acknowledge the other's as incommensurable. The only relational structure requiring neither suppression, surrender, nor dissolution. Conflict → mutual chiseling → consensus or acknowledged incommensurability. Both can walk away. | (Structurally: only Q1 is genuinely high on both axes. Without base layer, vertical cannot truly stand.) |
| Base LOW | Q2 — Pseudo-high horizontal: Subjectivity inflation. Appears to be "I am an end" but actually universalizes a single cannot-not — imposing individualized action-necessity as universal moral command. Colonizers, enlightenment elites, "I'm here to save you" missionaries. Not a moral character defect — a structural one. | Q4 — Pseudo-high vertical: Subjectivity surrender. Appears to be "the other is an end" but is actually post-self-dissolution proxy attachment (borrowed telos). Cannot distinguish "the other's cannot-not" from "the other's co-optation of me." |
| Double LOW | Q3 — Bilateral subjectivity collapse. Nothing is worth doing; no one is worth caring about. The floor of nihilism. Existentialism stuck at suspended freedom eventually slides here. | |
Quadrant asymmetry is the key to understanding this model. The four quadrants are not a symmetrical taxonomy but an asymmetric topology organized by the emergence relation. Q1 is the only genuinely high-high quadrant. Q2 and Q4 are two pseudo-high states. Q3 is the collapse floor.
2.3 The Emergence Mechanism: Why the Vertical Emerges from the Horizontal
Empathy vs. acceptance — the crucial distinction:
- Empathy: I have my own cannot-not. I see that you have a different one. I know from internal experience what "must" feels like, so I can understand yours. Precondition: I must first possess the experience of cannot-not.
- Acceptance: I have no cannot-not of my own. You tell me what your must is. I have no reference frame to judge whether it is genuine or implanted. I can only take it at face value. This is not empathy — it is the precondition for being colonized.
With a horizontal axis, the vertical emerges as empathy (Q1 direction). Without one, the vertical tends to collapse into acceptance (Q4 direction). The precondition for empathy is not kindness but complexity — internal plurality. A polyphonic inner life creates the processing framework for meeting another's cannot-not.
2.4 The Symbiotic Structure of Q2 and Q4
Q2 and Q4 are not two independent personality types but two ends of a symbiotic structure. Colonizers need the colonized; leaders need followers. Without Q4's surrender, Q2's inflation has nowhere to land; without Q2's conscription, Q4's surrender has nothing to attach to.
Q1 is the existential threat to both. Q1's premise — that every subject possesses an irreducible finality that cannot be absorbed — simultaneously cancels Q2's justification for conquest and Q4's justification for surrender. This is why Q2 and Q4 often politically unite against Q1.
3. The Authenticity Problem of Cannot-Not
3.1 Introjected Colonization: Being Colonized by Cannot-Not Itself
Introjected colonization: an externally installed "must" that has turned around to define the subject. Cannot-not has become the master; the subject has become its executor.
Introjected colonization is far more dangerous than external control. External control is transparent — you know you are not free, you retain the awareness of resistance. Introjected colonization is invisible — the gun has been internalized as your own voice. You think that "must" is you. You may even take pride in it, because it looks exactly like a product of free will.
SDT evidence (Howard et al., 2021 meta-analysis): introjected regulation predicts persistence and performance — a person under introjected colonization does keep going, may perform well. But simultaneously rises alongside anxiety, psychological depletion, and ill-being. Persistence is not a sufficient condition for freedom.
Three criteria for genuine cannot-not:
- 1. Persists after external contingencies are removed. Strip away rewards, punishments, social approval, identity labels. Does the "must" still exist? Alysa Liu, after two years of retirement with no competitions, no audiences, no paternal expectations, discovered on a skiing trip she still loved movement and music — that is the test with all external contingencies removed.
- 2. Coexists with other important ends without consuming them all. Genuine cannot-not allows other cannot-nots to exist alongside it; pseudo cannot-not tends to devour everything. Does this cannot-not enrich your life, or narrow it?
- 3. Temporary interruption does not produce purely introjected shame/anxiety collapse. When genuine cannot-not is interrupted → regret and a drive to return ("I want to go back"). When pseudo cannot-not is interrupted → identity collapse and existential anxiety ("without this I don't know who I am"). Alysa Liu: no collapse after retirement, found return motivation in calm.
3.2 Plurality: Verification Mechanism, Empathy Prerequisite, Decidability Condition
A single cannot-not is in principle undecidable as to its authenticity. The entire self is bound up in this one cannot-not — chiseling it away equals chiseling away the self. No reference frame.
Plurality solves the reference-frame problem. Multiple independently sourced cannot-nots automatically generate friction and tension. An inconsistency between a pseudo cannot-not and other genuine ones is itself the signal. Plurality is an automatically running internal verification system.
Critical distinction: pluralization ≠ projection-pluralization. Greta's multi-issue engagement — climate, Palestine, Armenia, LGBT — appears to span multiple domains, but these are projections of a single external construct ("I am the voice of justice") onto different issues. Genuine pluralization is multiple independently sourced, non-mutually-consumable cannot-nots coexisting. Test: if you remove one, do the others still stand independently?
Plurality serves three functions: (1) Verification mechanism for cannot-not's authenticity. (2) Structural prerequisite for inter-subjective empathy. (3) Necessary condition for cannot-not's decidability — without plurality, the subject cannot even formulate "is my must genuine?"
Apparent singularity is usually the result of other cannot-nots being suppressed or unacknowledged. Van Gogh was not only about painting — the deep interpersonal connection cannot-not, the religious-salvational cannot-not. His problem was not too few cannot-nots but insufficient coordination capacity. Ramanujan was not only about mathematics — his Brahmin vegetarianism and devotion to Namagiri were independent cannot-nots; his collapse at Cambridge was the battlefield of two cannot-nots in conflict.
3.3 The Hardest Cut: Rupture as Bootstrap Condition
If a subject is currently occupied by a single pseudo cannot-not that tends to consume all time and attention, how does a second independent cannot-not emerge? Alysa Liu's answer: the second cannot-not did not grow while the first construct was fully operating. It grew after the first construct was interrupted — retirement created a vacuum. The transition from singularity to plurality typically requires a rupture.
One key function of nurturing: to preserve sufficient blank space before rupture occurs, so that seeds of other cannot-nots have an opportunity to sprout. Working at Starbucks, studying psychology at UCLA, hiking and skiing — these activities' value lay in creating time and attention not filled by a single construct.
The hardest object to chisel is not what was externally imposed but what you believe to be your own but was actually installed. Alysa Liu chiseled away not a bad thing but something that looked like herself — "become the next Michelle Kwan." Her father Arthur Liu completed a parallel chisel: from colonization transmission node to nurturing transmission node.
4. Colonization and Nurturing: Negative and Positive Transmission
4.1 The Colonization Transmission Pathway
Institutions never directly tell an individual: "hand over your subjectivity." Colonization is accomplished through the relational layer's trust interfaces. Relational transmission nodes — parents, mentors, romantic partners, closest friends — influence individuals without passing through rational review, entering the subject's construct directly.
The cruelest feature: the relational layer's trust structure is precisely the institutional layer's most efficient channel for co-opting individuals. The institution does not need direct contact with the individual — it only needs to capture a key node in the individual's trust network. Constructs installed through that node will not only not be resisted; they will be worn with pride.
Greta Thunberg's case: the media machine needs a young high-impact face; NGO networks need a symbolic figure; political figures need moral high ground. Each institutional layer exerts influence through relational-layer contact points. The structural risk: when multiple institutional layers simultaneously transmit demands through the relational layer toward a young person still constructing her subjectivity, the growth space for her cannot-not may be compressed.
SDT evidence: Nicaise et al. (2025) — elite adolescent athletes perceiving higher parental pressure reported higher burnout and more controlled motivation. Krieger & Sheldon (2004, 2007) — law school's institutional culture transmitted through student-faculty relationships reshaped students' motivational structure; the institution commanded no one to abandon their ideals, but did so through every micro-interaction in the relational layer.
4.2 The Nurturing Transmission Pathway
Nurturing is not the opposite of colonization — it is not installing a "better" cannot-not to replace a "worse" one. Nurturing is making space for cannot-not to grow from within.
Support ≠ permissiveness. SDT: autonomy support comprises (1) choice provision, (2) meaningful rationale provision, (3) structure with boundaries. A completely permissive environment is not autonomy support — it is throwing the individual into pseudo-freedom. Genuine nurturing provides structure while not predetermining structure's content.
Instrumental autonomy support vs. ontological autonomy support. Instrumental: "I give you freedom, but you'd better use that freedom to produce what I want" (Google's 20% time → Gmail, AdSense). Ontological: "I give you space; whatever grows is yours." Alysa Liu's father in his later period: "this is your decision" — not presupposing whether she would return to skating or do something else entirely. This is nurturing.
Important limitation: pure ontological autonomy support — "whatever grows is yours" — is possible only in the relational layer: intimate relationships, genuine mentorships. Every institution has built-in maintenance and production purposes. Institutional autonomy support can manage not to colonize, but it cannot achieve pure nurturing.
4.3 The Asymmetry Between Colonization and Nurturing
Colonization is easy; nurturing is hard. This is structural, not accidental. Installing a construct is far faster than waiting for one to grow from within. A controlling father can set a "world champion" goal at age five and immediately launch an action plan. A nurturing father must wait — wait for the child to discover interests, encounter setbacks, grow new directions from setbacks. The former can report progress monthly; the latter has no KPI the institutional layer will accept.
Institutions naturally favor colonization because external regulation is observable, quantifiable, standardizable. A person with strong autonomous motivation and a person deeply under introjected colonization can look exactly the same from outside: both work hard, both persist, both produce results. This explains the SDT paradox: decades of cross-cultural empirical foundation consistently showing autonomous motivation outperforms controlled motivation — yet almost no penetration in educational policy or organizational management. Not because no one knows, but because the institutional layer's operating system is built on external regulation, and SDT's conclusions amount to asking institutions to operate on themselves.
5. Theoretical Positioning: Dialogue with Existing Frameworks
5.1 Dialogue with Kant
The SAE framework shares a core equation with Kantian ethics: freedom = autonomy. Cannot-not corresponds to the unconditionality of the categorical imperative — acting from duty (aus Pflicht), not merely in accordance with duty (pflichtmäßig).
But SAE and Kant diverge in three fundamental ways:
- Kant does not acknowledge the remainder. When two equally valid moral imperatives collide — "cannot lie" vs. "protect the innocent" — Kant's framework either falls silent or produces counterintuitive conclusions (he cannot lie to a murderer). SAE uses the remainder argument (§5.4) to handle this irreducibility.
- Kant's "humanity as end" points toward others; SAE reverses it toward the self. SAE's reversal: before you can treat others as ends, you must first establish yourself as an end. Self-as-end is the structural prerequisite for empathizing with the other — not selfishness.
- Universality vs. individuality — the deepest divergence. The categorical imperative demands universalizability. But SAE's cannot-not is inherently individualized: Alysa Liu's cannot-not (skating) does not apply to everyone. Universality is Kant's strategy for avoiding the remainder; individuality is SAE's premise for confronting it.
5.2 Dialogue with Spinoza
Spinoza: "freedom is the recognition of necessity." SAE and Spinoza agree: freedom is not the absence of external constraint but the correct relationship with necessity. But SAE continues where Spinoza stopped. Spinoza solved the epistemological problem: understanding necessity, thereby no longer blindly resisting. SAE asks the axiological problem: after understanding necessity, why do you act?
Recognizing necessity does not equal freedom of action. Between recognition and action lies a leap — the subject's value-affirmation. SAE's answer: when the subject establishes the self as an end in itself, the direction of action emerges from inner necessity. Spinoza tells you what freedom is (recognition of necessity); SAE tells you where freedom comes from (self-finalization) and how it guides action (cannot-not).
5.3 Dialogue with Self-Determination Theory
SAE and SDT are not opposed but hierarchically complementary. SDT's motivation continuum maps well onto SAE's three layers: pseudo-freedom ↔ external regulation; suspended freedom ↔ borderland of introjected/amotivation; cannot-not ↔ integrated regulation and intrinsic motivation.
SAE's incremental contribution: SDT describes the conditions of autonomous motivation (three basic needs: autonomy, competence, relatedness) and its effects, but does not answer the question of motivational content's ontological source. Why is this person's cannot-not philosophy while that person's is skating? SAE fills this gap: motivational content emerges from the subject's self-establishment as an end.
Three qualifications on this mapping: (1) SAE's "pseudo-freedom" goes one layer deeper than SDT's external regulation — questioning not only the source of motivation but the content of desire itself. (2) Not all "refusal" is introjected regulation — some refusals are highly autonomous. (3) Cannot-not must coexist with identity breadth — this is the function of plurality verification.
5.4 The Remainder Argument
Between two SAE subjects: mutual chiseling. When cannot-nots conflict, they do not suppress each other — they chisel mutually, re-examining their own constructs in the other's frame of reference. Two outcomes: consensus (pseudo-constructs revealed, compatibility found) or mutual acknowledgment of incommensurability (each retains their own, peaceful coexistence). A genuine SAE subject's self does not depend on the outcome of this particular conflict.
SAE subject facing non-SAE subject: walk away. Staying to entangle with someone who does not operate on cannot-not is not bravery but waste. Walk away is itself an expression of freedom: my cannot-not does not need your validation to stand.
When walk away is not feasible: external arbitration. In entangled cases — shared children, shared institutions, scarce resources, third-party harm — the SAE subject's recourse is not violence but external arbitration (law, institutions, third-party adjudication). Ceding adjudicative authority to an external body is awareness of subjectivity's boundaries, not failure of subjectivity.
The remainder is theoretically ineliminable (entangled situations necessarily exist) but practically minimized (when both parties are genuine SAE subjects, mutual chiseling and walk-away suffice for the great majority of conflicts). Structurally isomorphic with ZFCρ: ρ necessarily exists within the formal system but its actual value can be pushed arbitrarily small.
6. Non-Trivial Predictions
6.1 Base → Emergent (Positive): Internal Plurality Predicts Empathy Capacity. Individuals possessing multiple independent, non-mutually-consumable cannot-nots will more readily empathize with others' cannot-nots than those with a single cannot-not. Non-triviality: empathy capacity is typically attributed to personality traits or moral education. This paper predicts empathy is a structural byproduct of internal plurality, not a product of moral education. Testable corollary: individuals with multiple independent identity domains display higher perspective-taking in interpersonal conflict scenarios.
6.2 Base → Emergent (Negative): Singular Cannot-Not Predicts Moral Absolutization. Individuals whose cannot-not is highly concentrated in a single domain tend to universalize their personal ethical imperative into a universal moral command. Non-triviality: the most sincere, most energetic subjects are precisely the most likely to universalize their own imperative — not from malice but from lacking a plural internal reference frame. This is a structural characteristic, not a character defect. Testable corollary: identity highly concentrated in a single domain → lower value-pluralism tolerance in moral judgment tasks.
6.3 Emergent → Base (Positive): Empathy as Self-Chiseling Tool. Individuals who have been genuinely moved by another's cannot-not more readily identify pseudo cannot-nots within themselves. Non-triviality: empathy is typically viewed as an outward relational capacity. This prediction identifies an inward feedback effect. When you see another person's cannot-not — entirely different from yours but equally genuine — your reference frame opens, giving you the ability to examine which of your own cannot-nots were installed. Flagged: highest-risk prediction (thinnest empirical bridge).
Positive feedback loop between 6.1 and 6.3: internal plurality opens empathy → deep empathy experience serves as external reference frame accelerating internal chiseling → stripped pseudo-constructs reveal genuine cannot-nots → stronger plurality → stronger empathy. Q1 is not a static terminal state but a self-reinforcing dynamic process — the freer you are, the more you can empathize; the more you empathize, the more you can chisel away pseudo-freedom.
6.4 Emergent → Base (Negative): Unanchored Empathy Leads to Subjectivity Surrender. Individuals high in empathy but low in self-differentiation, when persistently facing others' cannot-nots, are more likely to lose their own cannot-not. Non-triviality: empathy is universally considered a positive trait. This prediction identifies that empathy, when it loses base-layer anchoring, becomes another form of Q4. A person who over-empathizes continually internalizes others' cannot-nots as their own responsibility, eventually becoming a server for others' finality. Precision: the risk is not perspective-taking but self-oriented empathic distress — experiencing others' pain in a self-involved manner without self-differentiation.
7. Conclusion
7.1 Recovery
Freedom is not doing what you want — that is pseudo-freedom, enslaved by desire. Freedom is not refusing what you don't want — that is suspended freedom, hovering in negation. Freedom is doing what you cannot-not do — knowing what must be done and doing it with everything you have.
But a person's cannot-not is a genuinely free expression only when it was not installed, is not singular, and does not consume everything. Introjected colonization — being defined by a "must" that looks like your own — is the most covert and most pervasive form of unfreedom.
The inter-ontological is possible not because institutions maintain order from without, but because a self that has become an end, having acquired sufficient internal plurality, gains the capacity to recognize another irreducible end. The "between" does not first happen externally. It first happens internally. The other as end becomes possible only in a subject that no longer universalizes itself.
7.2 Contributions
Four incremental contributions: (1) An ontological supplement to SDT — motivational content emerges from the subject's self-establishment as an end. (2) A mechanism for determining cannot-not's authenticity — three-criterion test plus plurality as the necessary condition for decidability. (3) Naming and pathway analysis of introjected colonization — why a person with energy and sincerity may still not be free. (4) The remainder argument — an ethical framework aimed at subjective autonomy has as its logical remainder the ceding of adjudicative authority to external arbitration when encountering entangled situations, but this cost of completeness is minimized when both parties are genuine SAE subjects.
7.3 Open Questions
- Cannot-not in the age of AI. When AI assumes all tasks that external regulation can drive, cannot-not transforms from a philosophical ideal into a survival necessity. Does this fundamentally change the conditions for cannot-not's nurturing?
- Can cannot-not be taught, or can it only be nurtured? SDT's autonomy support provides a direction for nurturing, but between autonomy support and the growth of cannot-not there remains an ontological leap: SDT cannot answer for you "who am I" and "what is my must." Can this leap be institutionally supported, or is it something only the individual can complete alone?
- Institutional cannot-not. Can an organization, a nation, have its own cannot-not? If so, what is its relationship to the cannot-nots of the individuals composing it? This is the bridge from individual ethics to political philosophy, left for future work.
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Part of the Self-as-an-End Applied Paper Series.
Related: Internal Colonization and the Reconstruction of Subjecthood · SAE Judgment and Aesthetics · The Subjectivity Crisis in the Age of AI