Why “the whole of reality” is not an ontological object
Ontology has long been animated by a powerful aspiration: to speak of everything that exists, taken all together. Whether framed as substance, being, spacetime, or the total set of facts, the ambition is recognisably the same — to finish the world in thought.
This post argues that this ambition is not merely unattainable, but misconceived. Totality is not false, hidden, or unknowable. It is category‑mistaken. The error lies not in what we fail to include, but in what we are trying to include at all.
1. The Seduction of “All There Is”
Phrases like the whole of reality, everything that exists, or all events taken together carry a rhetorical force that is hard to resist. They promise maximal seriousness: nothing excluded, nothing left unexplained.
But this seriousness is illusory. Such phrases operate grammatically — as ways of generalising over claims — while masquerading ontologically, as if they named a thing.
They do not.
2. “All” Is Not a Thing
The word all is an operator, not a referent. It ranges over instances relative to a domain; it does not name a further object that gathers them up.
To treat everything as something that itself exists is to commit a familiar but subtle error: to reify a mode of description into an item of ontology.
This mistake appears whenever abstraction is mistaken for actuality. The move from for any x to there is a thing which is all x is not an innocent step. It silently crosses a categorical boundary.
3. Why Totality Cannot Be Instantiated
Ontology, as argued throughout this blog, concerns what can be actualised — what can occur, appear, or be instantiated.
But totality cannot be instantiated.
There is no perspective from which the whole of reality appears. No situation in which everything that exists is given as a phenomenon. No cut at which reality presents itself already completed.
This is not a contingent limitation. It is structural.
An ontology that requires totality therefore requires something that can never occur.
4. Completion vs Coherence
It is crucial to distinguish completion from coherence.
Completion aims to leave nothing out. Coherence aims to hold together what is included.
Ontology does not gain coherence by demanding completion. On the contrary, the demand for completion undermines coherence by forcing abstraction to do the work of actuality.
A coherent ontology respects the conditions under which reality appears. A completed ontology denies those conditions in the name of an impossible overview.
5. Totality as a Failed Abstraction
When ontologists insist that everything exists, or that reality as a whole is such‑and‑such, they are not making deeper claims. They are making emptier ones.
Detached from instantiation, totality has no discriminatory power. It cannot explain difference, novelty, or perspective. It merely repeats the gesture of inclusion without content.
Nothing is gained by saying that everything exists — because nothing is ruled out.
6. What Refusing Totality Does Not Mean
Refusing totality does not mean:
that reality is fragmentary or incomplete,
that ontology must retreat into local description,
or that anything goes.
It means that reality is fully present without being globally assembled.
Presence does not require gathering. Actuality does not require totality.
7. The First Discipline
To work after totality is to accept a first discipline:
Ontology may not claim what cannot, even in principle, be instantiated.
This discipline does not impoverish ontology. It frees it from a fantasy that has quietly distorted it from the beginning.
In the next post, we will show how ontology can remain rigorous and even exhaustive — without closure, and without returning to the illusion of totality.
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