# Totalism The conviction that existence can be understood both as a whole and in detail, just as history can be summarized and concluded, all this with the aid of the philosophical genius' rationality. The idea exists already in Plato and has never really disappeared, even though we ourselves firmly maintain that *the principle of explanatory closure* makes all forms of totalism both ontically and ontologically impossible; see also *transrationalism.* Hegel brazenly converts the totalist ambition to the insight that the constantly incomplete is the total in itself, and calls this insight *absolute knowledge*, whereupon the metaphysical project is assumed complete.