The Great Substitution: From Metaphysics to Metaphysics

This essay argues that modern philosophy has never escaped metaphysics but has instead repeatedly reproduced it under new descriptions. From Enlightenment rationalism to contemporary data-centrism, every declared “end of metaphysics” installs another metaphysical framework that performs the same structural labour while denying its ancestry. The essay names this recurring pattern the Great Substitution: the recursive migration of metaphysical commitment from theology to reason, history, structure, language, and finally information. Through a genealogical analysis of Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, structuralism, post-structuralism, and dataism, the work shows how anti-metaphysical projects continually regenerate ontological residues. In response, it advances Dis–Integration as a non-foundational discipline of philosophical maintenance: a posture that treats conceptual frameworks as provisional scaffolds rather than final grounds. The essay thus reframes metaphysics not as a domain to be abolished, but as an inevitable feature of intelligibility that demands ongoing care.