Being by Proxy

Abstract

Doctrine page of the Ethical Ontology programme, stating the thesis of ontological substitution: focality becomes ontological substitution when the primary case holds the derivative's title to count as a being on the derivative's behalf, so that the derivative appears in the ontological inventory on a warrant it does not itself hold — in short, focality is being by proxy. The page states the thesis, its unpacking, and its genealogy in three stages: practiced and avowed in the participation tradition (ens per essentiam / ens per participationem; conservation; annihilation as revocability of standing), assembled but unjoined in Heidegger (the onto-theological ground-structure; Unvertretbarkeit; ratio reddenda — three components in three registers, with no wire between them), and named here, with the sorting instrument the earlier stages could not apply to their own object: who holds the title, where is it defended, by whom is it revocable. The scholastic doctrine of extrinsic denomination is credited as the semantic ancestor; the step claimed is the promotion from name to title-to-count-as-a-being. The page also states the mirror thesis of the wider programme: the tradition's focal structure made being itself vicarious; the who is the category whose differentia is where vicariousness fails. Following the doctrine section's standing rule, the page states what is claimed, what is inherited, what is not claimed, and how the thesis could be shown false: a precedent performing the join as a diagnosis would end its originality; a collapse of title-holding into definitional, explanatory, or causal dependence would end the thesis itself. The thesis's seat is the four-part specification at Across the Categorial Difference, §3 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21684041), from which the canonical sentence is quoted; it is deployed in Begleiten können: Ownness and the Warrant Structure of the Critical Architecture, §2.3, published at ethicalontology.org, where the demarcation question is argued at §2.6. Published at ethicalontology.org as part of the doctrine pages. Deposited for timestamping and citability; the page states doctrine and argues nothing not seated in the published corpus.