6052  I’m going to try and show you just where ontology breaks down, or at least one alluring place.  The first division we must make is between ontological things and ordinary things.  That last is the everyday, commonsense world, but it is also the strange, sometimes twisted world of fantasy and quantum physics.  It is even the realm of the gods and myth.  So you see it is about everything.  Then there are the otherworldly things of ontological analysis, things talked about only by ontologists, most of whom don’t believe in them as anything more than ad hoc ways of understanding.  Therefore, I’m going to jump to ontology.

There are certain classical philosophical, metaphysical, ontological things, widely known and handily and clumsily discussed by thousands of would-be thinkers.  Hundreds of thousands, I among them.  Being, the Platonic Forms, matter, relations, the One, Beauty, participation, substance, essence, and on and on.  There are also bare particulars and universals and connectors of all kinds.  This list is protean.  If that list crashes it’s more from being top-heavy and cumbersome than logical evaporation.  I want to talk about yet a “deeper” list.

Consider a bare particular and a universal and a nexus.  Also a set and a fact and actuality.  I will call them entities.  Then there are the sub-entities: bareness and particularity and even bare-particularity, the nature of the universal (eg. the redness of the universal Red) as something different from its universality and its being that particular universal.  Then there are difference and existence and simplicity (or complexity) and the “way” those sub-things (subsistents?) pervade the higher things.  Is setness a universal property of sets?  What individuates sets and what is the connector between a set and the elements of "their" set and do the elements have the property of being elements and what is that connector and is it one or many?  How do actuality and potentiality hook up into (ooze through) some things (facts) and not others and what or who sets the proper ordering?  And what about facticity and things that are potentially actual?  I think you see how much of an entanglement this is becoming.  There are two traditional ways out.

To stop the philosophical head-swimming we could follow Wittgenstein and say that these ontological things show themselves but we cannot speak them, in which case everything I just wrote is philosophical, meaningless nonsense and we should stop it with moral force.  Or we could say that only the individual, ordinary things exist and everything else is mental, linguistic abstraction, sometimes useful, often not.

When philosophy crashes it finds itself in a lurid jungle, a squalid circus, a noisy slum, a bad dream, in head-spinning love around the god of enchantment.  Halfway between ontology and the ordinary, a sort of divine incarnation.  And I have written it up with perfect syntax.