Western metaphysics overwhelmingly treats determinacy as the default ontological condition: forms, essences, necessary beings, and brute facts are taken as the starting points of philosophical inquiry, while indeterminacy is treated as a derivative state requiring explanation. The paper argues that this default rests on an undefended assumption — the symmetry assumption — according to which determinate and indeterminate ontological commitments bear equal justificatory burdens.
Against this, the paper establishes the asymmetry principle: any determinate ontological commitment (claiming that some entity exists with determinate properties) requires justification; the refusal to make such commitments does not. Three arguments — from information theory, from the logic of determination (omnis determinatio est negatio), and from the regress structure of metaphysical explanation — converge on this conclusion.
The asymmetry principle has two meta-ontological consequences. First, maximum indeterminacy (the state carrying zero determinate commitments) is the only terminus that satisfies the conditions a grounding relation places on its terminus: it generates no further justificatory demand and is therefore the only legitimate starting point for ontological inquiry. This is a conclusion about what grounding requires of its endpoints, not a first-order claim about the ultimate constitution of reality. Second, the concept of maximum indeterminacy is logically incompatible with stasis: a state without any determinate property cannot have the property of stability. A consistency argument then shows that this conceptual result aligns with the known dynamics of fluctuation, symmetry breaking, and self-organisation. The paper therefore dissolves rather than answers Leibniz's question.