Realism is not one philosophical option among others. It is the price of entry for thinking anything at all.

Before all theory, all critique, all negation, there must already be something. Before all method, all science, all deconstruction, intelligence must already be caught up in being. One can play for a long time with words, models, and postures, but one never thinks from nothingness.

And once one accepts this—that reality is, that it acts, that it changes—one is already engaged much further than one thinks. Each honest step leads to the next. Each refusal to cheat tightens the grip. Reality does not let go.

Classical theism is not a belief plastered onto the world to reassure anxious consciences. It is the point where reason finally stops lying to itself. The point where it accepts to look all the way through what it already does, at every instant, when it understands, distinguishes, explains, acts.

One can refuse God. But one cannot do it properly. One cannot do it without cost. And this cost is always the same: mutilating intelligence, introducing tolerated incoherences, calling "mystery" what is refusal of consequence, calling "chance" what is admission of impotence, calling "absurd" what surpasses.

Étienne Gilson said it with definitive sobriety in The Realist Beginner's Handbook: one may well try not to be a realist, one cannot not be one. All thought that claims to deny reality already presupposes it. All critique of realism only holds by what it seeks to destroy.

It is exactly the same here.

Why realism is stronger than all other metaphysics

One might think that realist metaphysics is one option among others: facing materialism, idealism, naturalism, structuralism, etc. This would be an error of perspective. Realism is not a competing thesis in a market of ontologies; it is the minimal framework in which any coherent metaphysics can only exist.

In other words: every metaphysics already lives within realism, whether it admits it or not.

Why? Because every metaphysics, to be something other than a word game, must satisfy an elementary condition: it must be thinkable as true or false. And this single requirement suffices to bind it irreversibly to being.

Every metaphysics already presupposes reality

Let us take them one by one.

Materialism affirms that everything is matter. Very well. But then matter is. It exists independently of the mind. It possesses properties, structures, a minimal intelligibility. In other words: materialism is a realist metaphysics of matter.

Idealism affirms that everything is idea, mind, representation. Fine. But then these ideas must be, must have sufficient ontological consistency to be thought, compared, criticized. Idealism is therefore a realism of mind, even when it claims to deny external reality.

Structuralism affirms that only relations matter. But a relation without terms is nothing. Structures must be something, even if one refuses to give them a substantial support. Here again, one does not escape being.

Even the most radical nihilism, as soon as it is formulated, presupposes:

• a discourse that is,
• a meaning that it denies,
• a truth that it claims to affirm.

It destroys itself performatively, but it never escapes reality.

Thus, every metaphysics that does not immediately collapse already presupposes:

• that there is something rather than nothing,
• that this something is intelligible,
• that thought can relate to it.

This is exactly what realism says. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Realism denies nothing: it integrates

Here is where its strength truly appears.

Realist metaphysics does not need to deny matter, mind, structures, laws, probabilities, indeterminations.

It only asks one thing: that one say what they are, ontologically, rather than brandishing them as verbal talismans.

• Matter? → A mode of being, changing, composed, intelligible.
• Mind? → A mode of being, intentional, reflexive, not reducible to extension.
• Laws? → Regularities grounded in the nature of things, not floating entities.
• Chance? → A mode of description of contingency or potency, not a cause.
• Indetermination? → A limit of determination, not an absence of being.

Nothing is rejected. Everything is hierarchized, distinguished, grounded.

This is precisely what other metaphysics do poorly: they absolutize one aspect of reality, then try to reduce everything to it. Realism refuses reductions, because it refuses to mutilate being.

Why realism is a meta-metaphysics

If by "meta-metaphysics" one means not an abstract overarching position, but the framework that makes all metaphysics possible without being confused with them, then yes: realism deserves this title.

It does not begin by saying what reality ultimately is (matter, mind, structure). It begins by saying that there is reality, and that thought cannot escape it.

It does not choose one content before others. It fixes the conditions of possibility of all ontological content.

This is why one can always discuss within realism, but never against it, without incoherence.

And this is precisely why it leads to classical theism

Once one accepts:

• that reality is,
• that it is intelligible,
• that it changes,
• that it is structured,
• that it does not suffice to itself,

then classical theism no longer appears as an added option, but as the rational point of closure.

Not because it would explain everything, but because it is the only one that subtracts nothing.

It does not suppress matter, science, contingency, or freedom. It gives them a foundation that does not devour them.

Final word

Realism is not spectacular. It is not fashionable. It does not promise to dissolve everything.

It does worse.

It obliges one to look at reality all the way through, and to accept that thought is not sovereign, but accountable.

All metaphysics can play in its field. None can escape it.

This is why it is uncomfortable. And this is why it is true.

God is not a hypothesis added to reality. He is what reality imposes when one refuses to cheat.

One can look away. But reality never looks away.