The Silence of First Principles: Rethinking Ontological Grounding in Post-Classical Metaphysics

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the perceptual mechanisms by which users interpret syntactic neutrality in AI-generated language as a sign of reliability. Rather than focusing on the internal structure of authority or machine intentionality, it examines the user-side cognitive reflex that equates grammatical restraint, impersonality, and modal minimalism with objectivity and trustworthiness. Drawing from pragmatics, media psychology, and experimental studies on human–AI interaction, the paper argues that neutrality is not just a stylistic feature but a semiotic trigger: one that activates a learned association between form and truth. Case studies include interactions with language models in medical, legal, and customer service contexts, where consistent output tone is misread as consistent epistemic grounding. The article concludes that this “trust reflex” contributes to the stabilization of machine outputs as credible, regardless of their factual basis, thereby externalizing authority into the perception system of the user.
 

1. Introduction: The Crisis of Foundations

For over two millennia, Western metaphysics has been shaped by a persistent demand: to locate, define, and justify a stable ground for being. Whether articulated through the notion of ousia in Aristotle, the ens realissimum in scholastic theology, or the transcendental subject in Kant, the philosophical impulse to secure a first principle has remained remarkably consistent. This quest for grounding has operated as both epistemological anchor and ontological imperative. Without a foundation, so the tradition claims, thought collapses into relativism, reality into chaos, and discourse into incoherence.

And yet, that very foundation has grown increasingly elusive. In the wake of modernity's ruptures—epistemological, ethical, and existential—the authority of first principles has faltered. The twentieth century delivered a decisive blow: Heidegger’s ontological difference dislocated being from beings; Derrida’s deconstruction unravelled textual stability; Quine dismantled the analytic-synthetic distinction; and Wittgenstein exposed the instability of linguistic anchoring. Metaphysics, once the proud guardian of ultimate truths, now finds itself haunted by the suspicion that its ground is, at best, a mirage—a concept retroactively imposed to conceal its own absence.

This article begins from that suspicion. It does not seek to reconstruct a more sophisticated foundationalism, nor to rescue metaphysics through axiomatic ingenuity. Instead, it takes seriously the idea that the absence of foundation is not a failure to be remedied but a structural feature to be embraced. The “crisis” of foundations, then, is not a historical accident, but a philosophical symptom—one that reveals the limitations of the very logic of grounding.

This crisis is not confined to ontology alone. It extends to ethics, epistemology, and political theory, where the collapse of absolute principles has led not only to anxiety but to creative experimentation. Gianni Vattimo, in his reflections on weak thought, suggests that the loss of metaphysical absolutes may open the way for a more plural, interpretive, and historically attuned form of rationality. Rather than lament the absence of ground, we might instead ask what becomes possible in its absence.

We will argue that the persistent rearticulation of first principles across traditions masks an unspoken anxiety: that being might not require a base, a source, or a reason. Jean-Luc Nancy speaks of a sense that “precedes ground”—a sharing of meaning without origination. From this perspective, the very search for ground may be a metaphysical reflex rather than a necessity. It reveals a longing not only for stability but for guarantee.

Drawing on metaphysical trajectories from both Western and Eastern traditions, this article proposes an alternative path—one that listens not for the principle that speaks, but for the silence that sustains. In Nishitani’s terms, this may entail a shift from being as substance to being as emptiness—not a void to be feared, but a space wherein relation becomes possible without ontological foreclosure.

 

2. Aristotle’s Substance and the Search for Grounding

The philosophical ambition to identify a foundational principle finds its classical expression in Aristotle’s Metaphysics. In Book Zeta, Aristotle asserts that substance (ousia) is the primary category of being—the “what-it-is” that underlies all change, predication, and individuation. Substance is what persists through alteration, what explains the unity of composite beings, and what allows categories to refer meaningfully. It is, in this sense, both ontological anchor and epistemological prerequisite. To know what a thing is, one must know its substance; and to explain change, one must posit what remains invariant across it.

This notion of substance, however, is already internally fractured. Aristotle oscillates between multiple candidates for what counts as ousia: the form (eidos), the matter (hylē), the composite of both, or even the universal. His hesitation reveals the instability of the very foundation he seeks. Moreover, his analysis presupposes a logic of being-as-presence—that to be is to be determinate, stable, and locatable. This metaphysical grammar, inherited and expanded in later traditions, equates existence with fixity and visibility.

This logic would echo throughout medieval scholasticism, where ens becomes systematically subordinated to esse, and substance is elevated into theological necessity. In Thomas Aquinas, substance converges with divine essence: God as ipsum esse subsistens becomes not only ontological ground, but also the necessary condition for all contingent beings. The metaphysical project acquires a theological spine.

The Aristotelian framework continues to evolve. In Islamic philosophy, Avicenna rearticulates ousia within a distinction between essence (māhiyya) and existence (wujūd), further emphasizing the ontological primacy of existence while retaining the notion of essence as an intelligible structure. In Francisco Suárez, the notion of substantia prima is formalized as the indivisible core of being. These developments solidify the expectation that being must be grounded in a self-identical principle.

What Aristotle inaugurates, then, is not merely a metaphysics of substance, but a structure of expectation: that being must have a ground, and that such a ground must be singular, self-sufficient, and ultimately intelligible. This expectation becomes dogma. In Descartes, substance is reformulated as res cogitans and res extensa, where substance is no longer simply the “whatness” of things but the ontological condition of the thinkable. Grounding is now internalized, yet still presumed necessary.

Yet this inheritance is not without cracks. By insisting on substance as the first principle, the tradition risks reifying abstraction as reality. Substance becomes less a descriptive category than a metaphysical placeholder—a guarantee that being has depth, even if that depth is conceptually elusive. In this way, the search for grounding often obscures its own speculative character. Substance does not demonstrate grounding; it performs it. It stages intelligibility, even as its internal tensions remain unresolved.

Contemporary metaphysics, especially in its analytic variant, still bears the imprint of this Aristotelian architecture. The debates over essentialism, natural kinds, or metaphysical realism are, in many ways, footnotes to Metaphysics Zeta. Even where the terminology has shifted—toward modal metaphysics, property theory, or grounding relations—the fundamental impulse remains: to locate what lies “beneath” or “within” the object, and to express this interiority in terms of ontological primacy. Thinkers like Kit Fine, while refining the logic of metaphysical grounding, nonetheless perpetuate the expectation of depth structure.

These questions, however, carry a hidden premise—that grounding is possible, and that the task of philosophy is to locate it. But what if this premise is unfounded? What if, as we shall explore, the assumption that being must be grounded in a first principle is itself a metaphysical construction—neither necessary nor universal?

The next section will trace how modern philosophy begins to dismantle this architecture, replacing metaphysical confidence with ontological uncertainty.

 

 

3. The Collapse of Ontological Certainty in Modernity

If Aristotle constructed the edifice of metaphysical grounding, modern philosophy began its systematic erosion. The Cartesian project, though often read as a foundationalist endeavor, in fact introduces a radical instability into ontology. By privileging the cogito—“I think, therefore I am”—as the sole indubitable certainty, Descartes internalizes the ground. Substance becomes something mediated by thought, abstracted from extension, and ultimately detached from any external criterion. Ontological grounding now resides in epistemological access, not in the structure of being itself. The metaphysical order becomes indexed to the subject’s capacity for clear and distinct representation.

This shift intensifies with Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason reconfigures grounding altogether. Grounding is no longer a matter of discovering what exists, but of identifying the a priori conditions for the possibility of experience. The noumenon—“the thing in itself”—is formally posited yet forever inaccessible. Ontology is subordinated to transcendental critique, where the focus shifts from being to the conditions under which being appears. What presents itself as ground is in fact a limit structure, a constraint that enables representation but withdraws from presence. Being recedes behind the conditions of its legibility.

With Nietzsche, the erosion becomes existential and cultural. The “death of God” is not merely a theological claim but an ontological diagnosis: there is no ultimate foundation, no absolute referent, no transcendental guarantor of truth or value. “There are no facts, only interpretations”—and no interpretation can lay claim to metaphysical finality. In place of substance, Nietzsche offers force, perspective, and the will to power: dynamic, unstable, and irreducibly plural. Ground becomes flux; truth becomes event.

This metaphysical destabilization reverberates across the twentieth century. Heidegger deconstructs the metaphysical tradition by exposing its “forgetfulness of Being”—its tendency to reduce Sein to Seiendes, being to beings. For Heidegger, the very question of the ground is a symptom of metaphysical alienation. The essence of being, he insists, is not something that can be captured by foundational principles, but something that reveals itself historically, obliquely, and often through concealment. Being is not a presence to be grasped but an event that resists possession.

Structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers radicalize this disruption. Derrida, with his notion of différance, asserts that all presence is deferred, all identity haunted by alterity. Every sign refers to another, in an endless chain without origin. Grounding is not merely impossible—it is structurally excluded. Foucault extends this logic to historical regimes of knowledge: truths emerge not from correspondence to reality, but from discursive practices governed by power. The subject, too, is ungrounded—produced rather than presupposed.

Even in analytic philosophy, the collapse is visible. Quine’s rejection of the analytic–synthetic distinction dissolves the idea of a foundational semantic layer. Kripke’s challenge to descriptivism undermines the stability of naming. Putnam’s “internal realism” and Wittgenstein’s later philosophy converge in asserting that meaning and reference are inseparable from usage, context, and community. The language in which we seek metaphysical certainty is itself porous and historically situated.

Contemporary metaphysics does not end with this collapse—it is transformed by it. For some, like Meillassoux, the very correlation between thought and being must be broken to restore access to the absolute; for others, like Deleuze, ontology becomes a matter of difference and becoming, not identity and ground. In both cases, grounding is no longer a presupposition—it is a problem.

The question now becomes: can we think being after the ground? Can ontology proceed without anchoring itself in a foundational principle? If so, what becomes of metaphysics once it is no longer tasked with closure, but with enduring openness?

The following section turns to the rise of post-foundational philosophy, where this very tension is brought to the foreground—and reconfigured.

 

4. Post-Foundationalism and the Illusion of Coherence

In the wake of metaphysical destabilization, a new philosophical orientation emerged—not one that seeks to restore lost foundations, but one that accepts their absence as constitutive. This is the domain of post-foundationalism: a position that denies the necessity of a final ground, yet does not collapse into relativism or nihilism. It holds that structures can exist without an ultimate principle; that coherence is possible without closure; and that meaning does not require metaphysical anchoring to be intelligible, operative, or ethically binding.

Post-foundational thought resists the binary of foundation versus fragmentation. It refuses to treat the absence of ground as a deficit. Thinkers such as Ernesto Laclau, Claude Lefort, and Giorgio Agamben articulate political and ontological frameworks that are internally contingent, open-ended, and historically situated. Power, identity, and subjectivity are not grounded in essence but in iteration, displacement, and contestation. Judith Butler, in this context, emphasizes that the performativity of norms is not grounded in ontology but in repetition without origin. The ground is not what precedes performance—it is what it retroactively appears to be.

In metaphysics, this position has older and more radical precedents—most notably in the work of Jacques Derrida, for whom every system is structurally haunted by its own conditions of impossibility. The center of a system, Derrida writes in Structure, Sign, and Play, is not a part of the structure, but a functional placeholder that postpones instability. There is no absolute reference—only a regulated deferral, a différance that resists ontological finality.

The illusion of coherence arises when provisional structures are misrecognized as necessary truths. Foundational discourse performs a stabilizing gesture—it produces a semblance of order, often by silencing contradiction or ambiguity. But this coherence is retroactive, dependent on a forgetting of its own genesis. As Jean-Luc Nancy suggests, “there is no ‘ground’ except in the opening of meaning itself”—which is always contingent, shared, and exposed to alteration. This openness does not negate the structure; it renders it possible as structure.

Yet post-foundationalism is not an endorsement of arbitrariness. Rather, it redefines coherence as procedural, not metaphysical. A structure is not legitimate because it rests on a principle, but because it operates—it functions, adapts, responds. This shift from being to operation, from essence to event, marks a profound reconfiguration of metaphysical ambition. In Gianni Vattimo’s terms, it reflects a turn toward pensiero debole—a “weak thought” that replaces metaphysical strength with hermeneutic pliability.

 

Still, the seduction of foundational thought lingers. Philosophers continue to speak of “ontological commitment,” “metaphysical necessity,” or “deep structure,” as if some residue of ground were still accessible. Even the act of critique can become complicit: by exposing the failure of foundations, it risks reaffirming their centrality through the very intensity of its denial.

To think beyond this impasse, we must ask: what does metaphysics become when it no longer seeks a base? Can a concept of being be formulated that resists the gravitational pull of foundation? These questions require not only a re-reading of Western philosophical assumptions but also a confrontation with traditions that never framed being in foundational terms to begin with—traditions where emptiness, indeterminacy, and silence are not conceptual failures but ontological conditions.

The next section will explore such possibilities by turning to classical Daoist and Buddhist metaphysics—traditions that offer ontological models grounded not in essence or substance, but in emptiness, relationality, and silence.

 

5. Comparative Groundlessness: Daoist and Buddhist Metaphysics

While Western philosophy has often pursued being through the logic of foundation—substance, cause, principle—other traditions have approached ontology from a radically different angle. In particular, classical Daoist and Buddhist metaphysics offer compelling models of groundlessness, not as deficiency, but as structural openness. These traditions do not seek to establish a first principle beneath or beyond phenomena; rather, they illuminate the dynamism of existence without invoking an underlying substance. The absence of a metaphysical base is not a gap to be filled, but the very condition under which relational intelligibility becomes possible.

In Daoism, the Dao is described not as an entity or origin, but as a generative movement that precedes all differentiation. It is not an object among others, nor a causal principle to be deduced, but a self-concealing rhythm that animates appearances without fixating them. In the Dao De Jing, Laozi writes: “The Dao that can be spoken is not the eternal Dao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.” This is not a rejection of ontology, but a suspension of conceptual grasping. The Dao is not reducible to logos or ratio—it is non-assertive, prior to the metaphysical division between being and non-being. As such, it enables emergence through non-coercive indeterminacy.

Similarly, in the Zhuangzi, metaphysical certainty is treated with irony and subversion. Zhuangzi dismantles binary oppositions—life and death, true and false, self and other—not by resolving them into a higher unity, but by exposing their mutual contingency and reversibility. Being, in this vision, is fluid, plural, and perpetually in flux. The search for a final ground is viewed not as a philosophical triumph, but as an imposition—a violence of form against flow. As Sengzhao, a Daoist-influenced Buddhist philosopher, later wrote: “Nothing exists independently, thus all things rest on the absence of ground.”

In Madhyamaka Buddhism, especially in the thought of Nāgārjuna, this refusal of foundation is rendered with surgical philosophical precision. Nāgārjuna’s doctrine of śūnyatā (emptiness) asserts that all phenomena are empty of svabhāva, or intrinsic nature. This is not a nihilistic erasure of reality, but a radical ontological thesis: entities do not exist from their own side, but only in dependent co-arising (pratītyasamutpāda), conditioned by causes, relations, and cognitive framing. Even the doctrine of emptiness itself is declared to be empty (śūnyatā śūnyatā), preventing its reification into a hidden ground.

This groundlessness is systematic and affirmative. In the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, Nāgārjuna deconstructs every potential ontological anchor—substance, causality, identity, temporality—demonstrating that none can serve as ultimate basis. In Jay Garfield’s commentary, this move is not simply destructive; it clears the conceptual space for a non-foundational ontology grounded in relationality and non-clinging. The absence of ground is not a metaphysical failure, but the very condition for intelligibility: things exist, transform, and dissolve precisely because no fixed substratum arrests their movement.

What unites Daoist and Madhyamaka thought is a refusal to reify the real. There is no ultimate “whatness” to be captured, no foundational bedrock to be uncovered. Instead, both traditions suggest that openness, indeterminacy, and even ontological silence are not obstacles to knowledge, but its precondition. Groundlessness does not preclude coherence—it makes alternative forms of coherence possible.

This comparative detour exposes the provincialism of Western metaphysical expectations. The assumption that being must be grounded, that coherence requires a center, or that truth emerges from principle, is not universal. It is a philosophical inheritance, not a necessity. Groundlessness is not chaos; it is a different logic of order, one that does not derive stability from essence but from the integrity of interrelation.

From this vantage point, we are now positioned to articulate a concept of “ontological silence”—a mode of grounding that is not grounding at all, but the structural possibility of relation without foundation, of presence without possession..

 

6. Towards an Ontology of Silence

What remains after the collapse of foundation, the exhaustion of principle, and the comparative unveiling of non-grounded metaphysics? Perhaps not a concept, but a gesture—a reorientation of thought toward what resists articulation. This is the domain of ontological silence: not the absence of being, nor the negation of truth, but the suspension of the demand for finality. Silence, in this sense, is not an epistemic limitation but a metaphysical structure, a way of encountering being without enclosing it in definition.

To propose an ontology of silence is to shift the philosophical gaze: from what grounds being to how being manifests without ground. It is to recognize that coherence does not require closure, that meaning may arise from contingency, and that presence need not emerge from essence. In this framework, silence is not a metaphor but a mode of ontological operation: the unspeakable remainder that sustains articulation, the inexpressible excess that renders expression possible. Silence is not what lies beyond language, but what lies beneath it—its latent precondition.

This ontological silence is not inert. It is generative—not in the sense of producing determinate entities, but in allowing for their emergence, transformation, and dissolution. It functions structurally, not substantively. Rather than positing a hidden substrate beneath appearances, silence operates as the non-foundational horizon that makes phenomena intelligible without rendering them absolute. It provides a kind of operative indeterminacy, a space where sense can arise without being fixed.

There are philosophical precedents for this view. Heidegger’s Gelassenheit—a “letting-be”—describes a form of openness to being that does not strive to possess or define it. Levinas, in his ethics of alterity, speaks of the face of the Other as a silent call that precedes and exceeds ontology. Even Wittgenstein, in his closing proposition of the Tractatus, gestures toward a limit within which language must fall silent—not as defeat, but as fidelity to what resists saying. This silence is not void, but the trace of an encounter.

Beyond the Western canon, Nishitani offers an understanding of emptiness as “absolute nothingness,” not as negation but as the field in which self and world co-arise. In this reading, silence is not the absence of being, but the groundless ground from which relation becomes possible. Masao Abe similarly affirms that the awakening of true awareness arises not through affirmation or denial, but through direct confrontation with that which escapes all dichotomy. Silence here becomes a disclosure without declaration.

Yet the ontology of silence proposed here is not a mystical withdrawal, nor a retreat from rationality. It is a discipline of non-imposition, a mode of thinking that refrains from legislating what being must be. It resists the drive to categorize, finalize, or contain. Instead of asking, “What is the ground of being?” it asks, “What kind of relation is possible in the absence of ground?” It is a question of posture, not of possession.

This has significant implications. It means that philosophy must operate not as a science of first principles, but as a practice of exposure—a sustained attentiveness to what appears without justification, endures without essence, and dissolves without loss. It calls for a metaphysics that is neither affirmative nor negative, but open: a metaphysics that listens, even when it does not understand.

In this listening, we do not find certainty. We find resonance, asymmetry, and interruption. We find the ungrounded conditions for relation. And in that ungroundedness, we may discover not the silence of failure, but the silence that allows being to speak otherwise—not in proclamation, but in presence; not in order, but in possibility.

 

7. Conclusion: Thinking Without Ground

To think without ground is not to abandon philosophy, but to reimagine its vocation. It is to recognize that the metaphysical desire for origin, certainty, and principle—so deeply rooted in the Western tradition—is not an eternal necessity but a historical construction. The collapse of ontological foundations in modernity, the emergence of post-foundational critique, and the presence of non-grounded metaphysical models in Daoist and Buddhist thought all converge on a singular insight: being does not require a base to be thinkable.

This insight is not nihilistic. It does not entail that all claims are equally valid, or that thought must dissolve into arbitrariness. Rather, it affirms that coherence, meaning, and relation can arise within structures that are contingent, open-ended, and exposed to revision. The silence at the heart of ontology is not a void to be filled, but a space of potentiality—a generative silence that resists domination by principle. In this sense, what has traditionally been viewed as a lack—the absence of a foundational center—may instead be understood as a condition of philosophical fertility.

The metaphysical project, then, is not to secure being, but to accompany it—to trace its appearances without demanding justification, to listen without reducing. This requires humility, patience, and a willingness to think without the comfort of a first principle. It also requires vigilance, for the impulse to ground is always near: the desire to anchor meaning, to name the unnamable, to rest in closure. To resist this impulse is not easy—but it may be the condition for a philosophy adequate to the complexity of being.

Indeed, the metaphysical tradition has often confused clarity with legitimacy, and determinacy with truth. But if we accept that sense emerges not from foundations but from relational exposure, we begin to understand silence not as negation but as orientation. This is the kind of silence evoked at the outer edge of language, where articulation falters and presence becomes felt rather than known. It is a silence that does not halt thought, but suspends its certainty—an opening, not a conclusion.

We may draw here on a logic of reverberation: where ground is absent, resonance becomes central. To think without ground is to remain attuned to the shifting interplay between absence and emergence. This attunement finds echoes in Daoist non-assertion, in Nāgārjuna’s rejection of ontological affirmation, and in Heidegger’s call to let being be. In each case, the refusal to impose structure is not passivity but a form of active responsiveness—a way of letting being articulate itself without metaphysical coercion.

In this article, we have proposed an ontology of silence—not as erasure, but as a mode of philosophical hospitality. We have shown that foundational absence need not entail philosophical collapse; it may instead be the very space in which thinking becomes possible again. Silence, then, is not the negation of reason, but its transformation. It marks the threshold where thought ceases to dominate and begins to listen.

To think without ground is to think otherwise—to allow metaphysics to breathe where it once sought to bind, and to accept that sometimes the most profound relation to being occurs not through what is said, but through what remains unsaid.

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