The Asymmetry of Ontological Commitment: Why Indeterminacy Needs No Ground

Western metaphysics has overwhelmingly treated determinacy as the default ontological condition: forms, essences, necessary beings, and brute facts are offered as starting points from which philosophical inquiry proceeds, while indeterminacy is treated as a derivative state requiring explanation. This paper argues that this default rests on an undefended assumption — the symmetry assumption — according to which determinate and indeterminate ontological commitments bear equal justificatory burdens. Against this assumption, the paper establishes an asymmetry principle: any determinate ontological commitment (the claim that some entity exists with determinate properties) requires justification, while the refusal to make such commitments does not. Three arguments — from information theory, from the logic of determination, and from the regress structure of metaphysical explanation — converge on this conclusion. The asymmetry principle yields two meta-ontological consequences. First, maximum indeterminacy (the state carrying zero determinate commitments) uniquely satisfies the terminus condition that the concept of grounding requires: carrying no determinate commitments, it generates no further demand for justification, and is therefore the only legitimate starting point for ontological inquiry. This is a conclusion about what the grounding relation requires of its terminus, not a first-order claim about the ultimate furniture of reality. Second, the concept of maximum indeterminacy is logically incompatible with stasis: a state possessing no determinate properties cannot possess the property of stability. A consistency argument then shows that this conceptual result aligns with well-understood physical dynamics of fluctuation, symmetry-breaking, and self-organisation. The paper thereby dissolves rather than answers Leibniz’s question (“Why is there something rather than nothing?”): both “something” and “nothing” are determinate commitments that require justification; maximum indeterminacy precedes both.