How Substance Ontology, Nominalism, and Dualism Lock Us Into Adversarial Minds

John Vervaeke identifies a philosophical lock-in among three commitments that have co-evolved across Western intellectual history: substance ontology, nominalist epistemology, and dualistic psychology. Substance ontology — the Aristotelian inheritance that reality bottoms out in independently existing entities — generates pressure toward nominalism, the view that universals and relations have no mind-independent reality. If relations are merely mental constructs, the mind becomes ontologically severed from the world it purports to know. That severance is Dualism. Together, these three commitments form a self-reinforcing complex: each makes the others appear necessary, and once inside the triad, adversarial processing becomes structurally inevitable rather than a contingent failure of discourse.

Religion, on this account, historically functioned as a counterweight — not primarily through doctrinal claims but through its cultivation of nonpropositional, participatory, and relational modes of knowing. As that counterbalancing function has eroded in modernity, the substance-nominalist-dualist complex has become the default Cognitive architecture, and adversarial engagement has become increasingly automatic.

The required inversion is Ontological: relata must be understood as derivative of relations rather than the reverse. Pure relationality becomes the ground of being. This is the convergence point between Neoplatonic participation and Zen's dismantling of subject-object structure — two independent traditions arriving at the same structural insight. The sacred, reframed accordingly, is not a supernatural domain but the advent of a mode of apprehension that disrupts the subject-predicate grammar underwriting substance ontology. It reopens genuine relatedness, genuine contact with reality, and genuine orientation toward what Vervaeke calls ultimacy.