Toward a Meta-Level Theory of Everything

Any attempt to explain everything already presupposes a conception of what explanation is, what belongs to the domain being explained, and what makes different phenomena intelligible within a common account. A theory can expand its explanatory reach across increasingly broad ranges of phenomena, domains, and levels without exceeding the conceptual framework through which that reach is defined. Its universality may therefore grow in scope while remaining bounded by the principles that determine what counts as fundamental, relevant, and intelligible. This becomes apparent when comprehensive theories are considered across different disciplines. What appears as a Theory of Everything within one domain may leave fundamental questions unresolved in another, and the reverse may also be true. Different disciplines may organize reality through different assumptions about what exists, what is fundamental, what constitutes explanation, and what makes a description adequate. The resulting plurality is therefore a plurality of ways in which reality can become theoretically intelligible, but the intelligibility established within one framework does not necessarily extend to others. This raises the question of whether the ambition of “Everything” can itself be reformulated at a level capable of encompassing the plurality of frameworks through which reality is rendered intelligible. The present essay develops the concept of a Meta-Level Theory of Everything by reconsidering “everything” as a heterogeneous field of descriptions, models, concepts, principles, claims, and comprehensive frameworks through which reality is disclosed and organized. The resulting conception treats universality as a property of coordination across difference, opening a meta-systemic dimension for transdisciplinary approaches to “Everything” without reducing heterogeneous descriptions to a common substantive framework.