R. W. van den Broek

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Paper I · Manuscript

The Incompleteness of Object Ontology

A Transcendental Argument

Ruben Willem van den Broek

Abstract

What are the conditions under which there can be any determinate thing at all? Whatever answers it cannot itself be determinate — and that result exposes a structural limit in the metaphysics implicit in modern science. Its dominant unstated assumption — that what there is, at bottom, is objects and the relations between them — supports tremendous explanatory work within its proper domain but fails as a candidate for ontological completeness. The argument is transcendental: to be an object is to be determinate; determinacy obtains only within a structured field of distinction; and that field cannot itself be one more object among objects without contradiction. The result is a strict dilemma — any ontology reducing all that exists to objects either presupposes what it claims to derive, or leaves its own conditions ungrounded.

It rests on one structural claim, the Difference Principle: to exist is to make a difference; what makes no difference is nothing. From it follows the Conditioning Asymmetry: whatever is determinate depends on conditions of determinacy that cannot themselves be determinate. The same asymmetry recurs across space, time, consciousness, causation, agency, meaning, truth, and normativity, and the convergence of these domains reveals a single conditioning element common to all, which the paper names the Origin. The paper locates the Origin within the philosophical and contemplative traditions that have independently approached it, corroborates the argument by independent results in logic (Gödel, Tarski) and physics (quantum mechanics), and points forward to the constructive program to which the present argument is the gateway.

Keywords

object ontologyobject-reductionismtranscendental philosophyphilosophy of sciencehard problem of consciousnessfree willgrounding

Contents

  1. What Is at Stake
  2. What It Takes to Be an Object
  3. The Transcendental Lineage
  4. The Difference Principle
  5. The Ontological Incompleteness Argument
  6. The Pattern Across Domains
  7. What the Pattern Reveals: The Origin
  8. Two Convergences
  9. The Argument Generalizes
  10. The One and the Many
  11. What Follows

Status

Manuscript, approximately 19,000 words. Not yet under review. A preprint link will appear here upon posting.