Laurent Theophile D’Artagnan

This article argues that several central problems in MARP can be clarified only through a foundational distinction between real finitude and attributive finitude. Real finitude is not a cognitive limitation, nor a byproduct of judgment, but the comprehensive condition of actual determination as such. Attributive finitude, by contrast, is the local limit through which measurement, stabilization, and attribution become possible within a specific referential framework. Without this distinction, the question of attribution is easily misconstrued as a transformational passage from the absolute to the limited, complete induction is misunderstood as exhaustive possession of the object, and recurrent behavioral or affective phenomena are reduced to their merely psychological aspect. The article first shows that attribution does not generate real finitude but operates within it as a local organization of identities, relations, and measurable differences. It then argues that complete induction in MARP is grounded not in exhaustive objectivity but in the continued success of the framework that stabilizes subject, predicate, and relation across time. Finally, the article extends this structure to behavioral and affective repetition, suggesting that certain forms of addiction, habit, attachment, and love can be understood as attempts to reactivate a previously successful structure of passage while confusing local success with global viability.

This paper argues that philosophy too often seeks the truth of a thing under a prior assumption: that the thing first stands in isolated identity, complete in itself, and only afterward enters into relation, attribution, and comparison. Against this, the paper argues that presence is prior to isolated identity. What appears first is not a self-sufficient unit, but a field of co-presence within which what will later be distinguished as self, thing, and predicate is first sustained together. Presence is therefore not reducible to mere perception, nor can it be decomposed from within, since decomposition already presupposes the attributive order through which distinct identities become available for thought. From this it follows that identity is not originary but derivative: a real but secondary stabilization achieved through attribution. The paper then argues that truth cannot be found by fleeing co-presence in search of a self-sufficient entity hidden behind it. Abstraction is legitimate, but it becomes false when it forgets its derivative status and presents itself as metaphysically prior to the field from which it was drawn. Truth must therefore be sought within truth: not outside presence, but within the prior reality from which isolated identities are abstracted. The result is a reversal of the ordinary metaphysical order of priority. What is primary is not isolated being, but co-presence; identity is secondary, attribution is derivative, and the truth of the isolated thing is never prior to the field within which it first becomes available at all.

This paper argues that metaphysical regress need not terminate in a first entity, cause, or mover. The dominant inherited model, exemplified by first-mover and first-cause frameworks, assumes that the demand for termination must be satisfied by a first ontological term. I challenge that assumption. Drawing on the conceptual architecture of Metaphysics of the Absolute and Reference Points (MARP), I propose that regress can terminate instead at a minimal threshold below which attribution itself collapses. On this view, what halts regress is not a first being within the order of explanation, but the limit beneath which comparison, predication, and explanatory continuation cease to be possible. The paper develops this claim by distinguishing ontological priority from attributive viability and by showing that logical and explanatory practices depend not on a fixed essence but on the preservation of sufficient continuity for return, comparison, and correction. The result is a reframing of metaphysical priority: termination is no longer understood as the discovery of a privileged first entity, but as arrival at the minimal condition required for attribution to remain intelligible at all.

This article offers a theoretical clarification within MARP by tracing a single argumentative sequence from the impossibility of ontological nothingness to a revised account of objecthood, attribution, and truth. Ontological nothingness cannot function as an original explanatory term, because positing it as an independent counterpart to the absolute already subjects the absolute to differentiation and thereby compromises its absoluteness. The argument then turns to presence, not as an external proof of being, but as the non-negatable limit within which denial itself must occur. From there, the demand for proof is shown to presuppose difference and relation, and thus continuity. Continuity in turn excludes both nothingness and a silent, undifferentiated origin. On this basis, the object is no longer treated as prior to attribution; objecthood emerges through attribution as a stabilized determination within a determinate horizon of reading. Truth is accordingly redefined, not as simple correspondence between mind and a ready-made object, but as disciplined reading responsive to a differentiation no single determination can exhaust. Error, revision, and the advancement of understanding then become intelligible as internal to attributed reading rather than external to it. The result is an account of being in MARP that preserves ontological seriousness without converting the absolute into an object of predication.

This paper argues that addiction and suicide are not two degrees of the same self-destructive process. Addiction is a form of directed self-destruction governed by a partial internal determination that remains structurally tied to the continuability of the larger self that bears it. It therefore degrades the self without seeking its immediate abolition and is intrinsically allied with repetition, survival, and renewed enactment. Suicide, by contrast, is destruction ordered not to continuation but to extinction: the end governing it no longer operates within the continuability of the self as a sustaining bearer. The paper argues that addiction is not total collapse but a directed form of collapse under an internal destructive asymmetry, whereas suicide belongs to a different structural configuration. More broadly, self-destruction is shown to be a non-uniform category differentiated by governing ends and by relation to self-continuability.

This article develops a structural account of how what preserves the self may, under sufficient pressure, become burdensome to it. Working within the broader philosophical framework of Metaphysics of the Absolute and Reference Points (MARP), it argues that personality collapse, burdensome privacy, rigid persistence in costly positions, and destructive attraction toward what is held to be of highest value are not isolated phenomena, but structurally related outcomes. The central claim is that organizing references remain stabilizing only so long as the cost of sustaining them remains within the self’s capacity for endurance and resumption. Once that threshold is crossed, what once functioned as support may become a source of strain, rigidity, collapse, or reversal. The article concludes by distinguishing normative centrality from structural sustainability and showing why what remains highest in significance may nevertheless become unlivable within the structure that bears it.

This paper argues that the classical formulation of the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” rests on a false symmetry between “something” and “nothing.” In its standard metaphysical form, the question treats both terms as if they were equally available explanatory alternatives and then asks why one obtains rather than the other. Against this framing, I develop a reconstruction of the problem from within MARP (Metaphysics of the Absolute and Reference Points). On this view, judgment does not begin from an absolute standpoint but from a point of reference: a structured condition under which differentiation, attribution, and intelligibility become possible. What appears as certainty, stability, or presence is therefore not evidence of an unconditioned absolute, but the effect of highly stabilized referential configurations. On this basis, unity is reinterpreted not as an ontological primitive but as an operational consequence of determination, while determination itself is understood not as an object before judgment but as the condition of possibility of judgment. The central claim is that “nothing” fails to qualify as a genuine explanatory alternative to “something,” because it lacks the conditions of determination, reference, and inferential support required for comparison. The question of existence must therefore be reformulated: not why being was selected over nothingness, but how determination becomes possible such that something can appear at all.

This essay approaches the question “Why am I here?” as more than a request for a ready-made cause or purpose. It argues that the question is, at a deeper level, a question about the very nature of human presence. Beginning with an analysis of the structure of the question itself, the essay considers the major classical answers—religious, naturalistic, existential, psychological, and spiritual—showing both what each genuinely captures and what each leaves unresolved. Its central claim is that human existence is not lived as a raw or mute fact, and that meaning is not an external supplement added to an already completed life. Rather, meaning is bound up with the way human beings are present in the world and with the intelligibility of that presence itself. From this point, the essay opens toward a broader philosophical horizon that the project of MARP seeks to develop more systematically.

The familiar phrase “struggle for survival” usually assumes that beings already exist as sufficiently formed units and then enter conflict in order to preserve themselves. This paper argues that such a picture is metaphysically incomplete. Drawing on Metaphysics of the Absolute and Reference Points (MARP), it contends that struggle is often better understood as a process of ontological fixation rather than a secondary response to external threat. Under determinate conditions, beings do not struggle only to remain what they already are; they struggle because existence at the level of attribution must be stabilized, resumed, and carried within a limited field of reference, differentiation, and constraint. Conflict, on this view, is not fundamentally a clash among ready-made substances. It arises where differentiated manifestations press toward incompatible stabilizations within the same constrained field. The paper further argues that the truth at stake in struggle is not always a detached object wholly external to the strugglers, but may function as a constrained mode of manifested existence: a legitimate stabilization of readable difference within a limited economy of measurement. The argument is strictly philosophical and non-justificatory. To explain struggle as a structural consequence of ontological differentiation is not to endorse violence, domination, or oppression.

This article examines causality in light of MARP: Metaphysics of the Absolute and Reference Points and argues that causality should be understood neither as a self-subsisting metaphysical necessity nor as a mere accidental conjunction, but as an operational economy of linkage. On this account, causal legitimacy depends on three interrelated conditions: sufficient determination of identity, the possibility of explanatory and practical passage, and the reduction of explanatory cost while preserving revisability. Causality is thus not a hidden force added to the world, but a disciplined mode of organizing change within a determinate level of attribution. The study further argues that causal judgment is conditioned by stabilized identity, bounded by medium, reference, and measured item, and evaluated through passage, stability across copies, cost reduction, and openness to correction. In this way, the article relocates causality from metaphysical dogma to a disciplined and revisable horizon of philosophical analysis. This formulation is explicit in the article’s title, opening sections, and concluding argument.