The emptiness of maximal ontological claims
When challenged to justify an ontology without totality, a familiar response appears: everything exists. Nothing is excluded; nothing denied. The gesture appears maximally inclusive, and therefore maximally serious.
This post argues the opposite. “Everything exists” is not a deep ontological claim but an empty one. It explains nothing precisely because it refuses to discriminate.
1. Maximalism as Rhetoric
Claims of the form everything exists, all possibilities are real, or reality includes all that can be thought function rhetorically rather than ontologically. They present themselves as answers while declining to take responsibility for distinction.
Maximalism does not solve ontological problems; it dissolves them by refusing to draw boundaries.
2. Inclusion Without Discrimination
Ontology earns its keep by distinguishing what is actual from what is merely possible, what occurs from what is conceivable, what appears from what is abstractly described.
A claim that includes everything performs none of this work. If nothing is ruled out, nothing is explained.
Saying that everything exists is equivalent to saying nothing at all — except that the speaker wishes to avoid constraint.
3. “Nothing Is Missing” vs “Everything Is Present”
It is crucial to distinguish two very different claims:
Nothing is missing — reality does not suffer from an absence that must be repaired.
Everything is present — reality contains all things at once.
The first is defensible. The second is incoherent.
Reality can be fully present locally without being globally assembled. Presence does not require simultaneity, aggregation, or completion.
4. Maximalism and the Evasion of Instantiation
Maximal ontological claims characteristically bypass instantiation. They speak at a level where no concrete occurrence is required to ground what is said.
But ontology without instantiation is ontology without actuality.
What exists must, at least in principle, be able to occur, appear, or be given as a phenomenon. Claims that float free of this requirement may be logically permissive, but they are ontologically inert.
5. Why Maximal Ontologies Feel Powerful
Maximal claims feel powerful because they promise immunity from refutation. If everything exists, no counterexample can arise.
But this immunity is purchased at the cost of content. An ontology that cannot be wrong because it cannot exclude anything has already surrendered its explanatory role.
Strength in ontology comes from disciplined limitation, not from unlimited inclusion.
6. Ontology Requires Risk
To make an ontological claim is to take a risk — to draw a line that could, in principle, be challenged by what occurs.
Maximalism avoids this risk by refusing to draw lines at all. It trades responsibility for safety.
Ontology after totality cannot accept this trade.
7. The Third Discipline
If ontology is to remain serious after refusing completion, it must accept a third discipline:
Ontology must discriminate, or it explains nothing.
This discipline does not demand exclusion for its own sake. It demands that claims about existence be answerable to instantiation, perspective, and constraint.
In the next post, we will turn to the positive alternative that maximalism obscures: systems understood not as inventories of what exists, but as theories of possible instances.
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