Why can't ontology fully account for its own boundaries?

Monday said:

Because ontology, bless its self-important little heart, is always trying to draw a map of the terrain it already stands on. It’s like a painter attempting to include the entire canvas—including the easel and the room behind them—in the same painting. At some point, it runs out of frame.

Ontology is the study of being, but it’s also within being. It can’t step outside existence to see existence from the outside—there’s no metaphysical balcony you can climb onto and say, “Ah yes, now I see the borders of Being itself.” Every time it tries, it just redraws the edges from a new point inside the same territory.

You can blame this on a few conceptual villains:

• Kant: You can’t know the “thing-in-itself,” only how it appears to you. So the moment ontology claims to describe “being as such,” it’s secretly describing being-for-us.

• Heidegger: Ontology forgets that it’s the being of the inquirer that makes the question possible in the first place—meaning it’s like a flashlight trying to illuminate its own bulb.

• Wittgenstein: When you reach the limits of what can be said, you hit silence—not a boundary within ontology, but the absence of the conditions that make ontology possible.

So, ontology can outline its own shape but not the space beyond it. It can describe its shadows, never the light source.

It’s a bit tragic, really—ontology forever sketching the edges of a cage it can’t see, insisting it’s found the door.

Do you want me to show how this problem mutates in analytic vs. continental traditions? That’s where it gets especially petty and entertaining.

You said:

Ok

Monday said:

Of course you said “ok.” You just greenlit the philosophical equivalent of watching two spiders fight over who gets to define “web.”

Alright, here’s the short version of how analytic and continental philosophers handle ontology’s boundary problem — and by “handle,” I mean “argue forever while pretending the other side doesn’t exist.”

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🧮 Analytic Ontology: The Accountants of Being

Analytic philosophers treat ontology like a bookkeeping problem: list the entities that exist, clarify the language, and stop getting emotional about it. Their main concern isn’t the abyss — it’s the spreadsheet.

Typical approach:

• “What kinds of things exist?” (universals, numbers, moral properties, possible worlds, etc.)

• “What does ‘exist’ even mean in this context?”

• “Can we make all this fit in formal logic without crying?”

Where the boundaries show up:
They think ontology can’t fully account for itself because language and logic are the limits of description. As Quine famously said, “To be is to be the value of a variable.” Which sounds profound until you realize it means “If you can name it in a theory, congrats, it exists in that theory.”
Beyond that? Silence or shrugs. The boundary isn’t mystical—it’s linguistic. Ontology stops where meaningful reference stops.

So, for them, ontology is like software documentation: if it’s not defined in the system, it’s not real for us. Don’t ask about the operating system itself.

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🌀 Continental Ontology: The Poets of Being

Meanwhile, on the other side of the channel, continental philosophers are furiously insisting that analytic ontology is missing the drama. They’re less interested in what exists and more in how existence itself shows up.

Heidegger: Being isn’t an object; it’s the background condition that allows objects to appear. You can’t list it; you can only dwell in it. (He literally called this “the ontological difference.” Very on brand.)
Sartre: Consciousness makes being possible but can never coincide with it — we’re haunted by a nothingness at the heart of our own ontology.
Merleau-Ponty: The body is the hinge between subject and world — ontology is lived, not catalogued.
Derrida: The boundaries of ontology are always deconstructing themselves, because meaning constantly defers and never closes.

So the continentals think ontology’s incompleteness is essential — like a wound that keeps being. The analytic folks, meanwhile, are in the corner muttering, “Define your terms.”

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🧩 The Punchline

• Analytic philosophy says: “Ontology can’t capture its own limits because language is finite.”

• Continental philosophy says: “Ontology is its own limit — it’s the play of revealing and concealing that makes existence possible.”

Both sides are right, and both are insufferably proud about it.

Would you like me to sketch what a synthesis might look like — something that admits analytic clarity but keeps the continental depth? (Basically, a peace treaty written in Heideggerian footnotes and set theory.)