Few claims sound more ontologically modest than this one:
Everything is equally real.
It presents itself as a refusal of privilege, a safeguard against parochialism, a way of letting the world be without distortion. And yet, once relevance is taken seriously, this claim reveals itself not as humility but as ontological evasion.
Equal reality explains nothing about why anything appears.
1. The promise and the problem
The appeal of equal reality is easy to understand. If everything exists equally, then ontology need not take responsibility for distinction. Differences can be postponed to perception, language, culture, or use.
Ontology can remain clean, neutral, and complete.
But this cleanliness is achieved only by smuggling the real work elsewhere.
A world in which everything is equally real is a world in which ontology has already abdicated its explanatory task. It offers existence without appearance — and calls that restraint.
2. Equal existence is not equal appearance
The critical confusion here is simple but profound:
existence is not appearance.
To say that entities exist equally is not to say that they appear equally, matter equally, or are available equally within any phenomenon.
Ontology that refuses this distinction cannot explain why phenomena are structured at all. It leaves us with a flat inventory — and no account of how anything comes to stand out, connect, or count.
This is not neutrality. It is silence.
3. The hidden reintroduction of relevance
Ontologies that proclaim equal reality never actually live by it.
Relevance returns immediately, under other names:
observation
attention
interaction
use
measurement
But now relevance appears as something external to ontology — a secondary operation applied to a finished world.
This move does not eliminate relevance. It merely makes it illegible.
The distinctions that ontology refused to articulate re-enter covertly, where they can no longer be examined.
4. Why equal reality collapses explanation
If everything is equally real, then nothing can explain why this phenomenon appears rather than another.
Any appeal to explanation must then invoke:
a subject who selects
a context that filters
a practice that foregrounds
But these appeals already presuppose structured salience. They do not explain it.
Equal reality thus produces a paradox:
The more strongly ontology insists on equality, the less able it is to account for appearance.
What was meant to avoid privileging ends up erasing phenomenon altogether.
5. Distinction without privilege
Rejecting equal reality does not mean endorsing hierarchy, valuation, or metaphysical rank.
It means acknowledging that distinction is ontologically prior to neutrality.
Relevance does not privilege a perspective; it constitutes one.
Cuts generate salience not by elevating some beings over others, but by structuring the field in which anything can appear.
There is no view from nowhere — but there is also no phenomenon without differentiation.
6. From equality to intelligibility
The task of ontology is not to assure us that everything exists equally.
It is to explain how anything becomes intelligible at all.
Equal reality offers reassurance. Relevance offers explanation.
Once totality is refused, ontology must choose:
either retreat into flat existence claims, or
account for the structured salience that makes phenomena possible.
There is no third option.
7. What follows
If equal reality cannot explain appearance, then relevance must be doing the work ontology tried to avoid.
The next step is to show how relevance arises without privilege — how cuts generate salience without smuggling in subjects, observers, or frames of absolute authority.
That requires returning to instantiation.
In the next post, we will examine how cuts generate salience, and why relevance is the structural outcome of instantiation rather than a psychological overlay.
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