Ontological does not mean "about philosophy", it means "of ontology (subfield of metaphysics)". Ontology is a branch of philosophy that studies "being". Your original statement is ontological. Your analogy is also ontological, postulating a difference in essence between two parties. But it is wrong, for the difference is in fact null, as they are both suffering the same accident (hunger), just for different periods of time. You yourself have postulated an ontological difference (in essence) while there is none. Furthermore, you put that in analogy with the ontological categories of man and incel, essentially different due to their relationship status, but the same way as the hungry men analogy, this too is null, for relationship status is accidental to being a man.
There is no need to repeat your original statement, you must address the ontological criticism that arises from such a postulation. Your comment is not a reply to it. Your quote is not a tautology, not a sentence of the form "X is X", but an incorrect attribution of the category "essence" to an "accident".
You cannot know, do you realize that? You made such a general statement to prove that inceldom is a platonic idea, which is only supported by your interpretation of inceldom as a platonic idea. This is a petitio principii, and a tautology, making this logically void.
Furthermore, no metric internal to our realm can measure the number of incels who break either of the letters (lying, over-exaggeration, lack of accounting for nuance are only the most evident blind spots of such measurements).
At last, if you state that it is not about perfection, but standards, then you are disavowing your initial statement about the essential ontological difference between man and incel, and merely operating a pragmatic distinction. There is nothing inherently wrong with employing pragmatism alone, especially for the constituency of a forum, but what are you then basing your distinction on, since you rendered your only discriminant logically void?
You misunderstand my use of “essence.” I did not mean essence in the strict Aristotelian or Thomistic ontological sense, as though “incel” were a metaphysical species distinct from “man.” That would indeed be absurd.
A man remains a man independently of relationship status. I never denied this.
My statement operates on a different level: not ontology properly speaking, but existential structure and teleological outcome.
Your criticism is correct if my claim were:
“Incelhood is an ontologically distinct essence inhering in a subject.”
But that is not what I mean.
When I say Qui ascendit incel nunquam fuit, I am speaking retrospectively and phenomenologically. The phrase distinguishes between:
temporary involuntary celibacy,
and lifelong structural exclusion.
The distinction is therefore not metaphysical essence, but existential trajectory.
You accuse me of confusing accident and essence, but my point is precisely that what appears accidental in the present may reveal itself to have been merely transitional when viewed from the completed whole of a life.
The starving traveler and the permanently starving man are indeed both hungry in the same ontological sense. I grant this fully. But existentially and teleologically, their situations are radically different.
One inhabits deprivation temporarily.
The other inhabits deprivation as the dominant structure of existence.
That difference is not ontological in the scholastic sense, but neither is it trivial.
Likewise:
a man celibate at 18,
and a man celibate at death,
share the same present accident but not necessarily the same existential condition.
You are correct that no internal metric can infallibly identify the “true incel” beforehand. In fact, this uncertainty is central to the entire aphorism.
The statement is intentionally retrospective.
It does not function as:
“I can know now who is essentially incel.”
Rather:
“Only the completed trajectory of a life reveals whether the condition was temporary or structural.”
Thus the aphorism is not a scientific classification nor an ontological theorem. It is an existential observation about permanence versus transience.
You accuse me of petitio principii because I interpret inceldom as a Platonic idea. But again, you over-literalize the metaphor. “Platonic” here does not mean participation in a transcendent metaphysical Form existing independently in the heavens.
It means an idealized abstraction:
the archetype of permanent exclusion,
never perfectly instantiated,
but approached to varying degrees by real individuals.
Much like “the miser,” “the tragic hero,” or “the outsider” in literature.
Therefore my distinction survives your criticism because it does not rely on ontology strictly speaking. It relies on:
existential permanence,
retrospective totality,
and phenomenological structure.
You are attacking a stronger metaphysical claim than the one I actually made.
And had I truly intended “incel” as a literal ontological category distinct from man, your criticism would have destroyed my position completely.
So to test you:how would you reply shortly to my Antithesis? I want to see if you can directly go to the point