Ontology
Ontology asks what it means to be, and what kinds of beings humans are when they live, act, relate, suffer, know, and become.
Definition
Ontology is the branch of philosophy concerned with being, existence, and the basic nature of reality. It asks what exists, what it means for something to exist, and how different kinds of beings can be understood.
Within psychology, counselling, and the human sciences, ontology becomes especially important because human beings are not simply objects to be measured from the outside. They are living, interpreting, meaning-making beings who act within worlds, relationships, histories, cultures, languages, and social roles.
Core Idea
The core idea of ontology is that before we can ask how human beings think, behave, develop, suffer, or heal, we must ask what kind of beings humans are. A person is not only a biological organism, a set of behaviours, a diagnostic category, or a private inner self. A person is a being-in-relation: embodied, situated, agentic, cultural, historical, linguistic, and existential.
For this website, ontology provides the foundation for thinking about human experience as more than isolated mental processes. It supports an understanding of people as beings who come to know themselves through relationship, action, memory, language, culture, land, identity, and meaning.
Key Components
- Being: Ontology begins with the question of what it means to be. For human beings, this includes existence as lived, felt, interpreted, and embodied.
- World: Human life always takes place somewhere. A person exists within social, cultural, historical, ecological, and relational worlds.
- Meaning: Humans do not merely experience events; they interpret them. Meaning shapes identity, suffering, belonging, purpose, and change.
- Agency: Human beings are capable of acting, choosing, responding, resisting, adapting, and shaping parts of their lives, even when agency is constrained.
- Relation: Being is not purely individual. Identity and experience are formed through relationships with others, communities, institutions, language, culture, and place.
- Coming to know: Ontology also concerns how a person comes to understand themselves and their world. Knowing is not only intellectual; it can be relational, ethical, embodied, cultural, and lived.
Example
A purely symptom-focused view of grief might ask what symptoms a person has, how severe they are, and whether they meet diagnostic criteria. An ontological view asks a deeper question: what has changed in this person’s world of being?
After a major loss, a person may not only feel sadness. Their sense of time, identity, home, future, responsibility, belonging, and meaning may all shift. They may no longer know who they are in relation to the person, role, or world that has been lost. Ontology helps make sense of this deeper disruption. It asks not only “what is happening inside the person?” but also “how has the person’s way of being-in-the-world been altered?”
Connections
Ontology connects multiple disciplines because each field offers a different way of understanding what kind of beings humans are.
- Psychology: Ontology shapes how psychology understands the person. A person may be viewed as a cognitive processor, an agentic actor, an embodied organism, a developing self, a relational being, or a meaning-maker.
- Philosophy: Ontology is directly philosophical because it asks about being, existence, reality, freedom, responsibility, and the nature of human life.
- Anthropology: Anthropology shows that ways of being are culturally organized. Kinship, ritual, land, social roles, and shared meanings shape how people understand themselves and others.
- Sociology: Sociology reveals how institutions, norms, class, gender, power, and social roles structure the possibilities available to a person.
- Linguistics: Language shapes what can be named, communicated, remembered, resisted, and made meaningful. It influences how people interpret themselves and their worlds.
- Counselling: Counselling becomes a space where a person’s way of being can be witnessed, clarified, protected, questioned, mourned, and reorganized.
Barriers to Being
Barriers to being are forces that constrain, distort, fragment, or narrow a person’s way of existing in the world. These barriers may be psychological, relational, developmental, cultural, structural, linguistic, or existential.
- Psychological barriers: shame, fear, trauma, dissociation, depression, anxiety, rigid self-beliefs, or loss of agency.
- Relational barriers: isolation, rejection, misattunement, coercion, abandonment, or the absence of trustworthy recognition.
- Developmental barriers: disrupted attachment, role instability, identity foreclosure, or lack of support during key transitions.
- Cultural barriers: loss of tradition, displacement, assimilation pressure, cultural invalidation, or the severing of inherited meaning systems.
- Structural barriers: poverty, discrimination, inaccessible systems, institutional violence, social exclusion, or restricted life opportunities.
- Linguistic barriers: not having words for one’s experience, being named inaccurately by others, or living within categories that cannot hold one’s reality.
- Existential barriers: meaninglessness, despair, alienation, guilt, loss of purpose, or the collapse of a previously trusted world.
From this perspective, distress is not always only a problem located inside the individual. Sometimes suffering emerges because a person’s way of being has been constrained by conditions that make agency, belonging, coherence, or meaning difficult to sustain.
Implications
Ontology matters because every theory of psychology, therapy, development, culture, and society carries assumptions about what a human being is. If those assumptions remain hidden, people can be reduced to symptoms, behaviours, diagnoses, roles, identities, or social categories.
An ontological approach keeps the question of being open. It asks what is being protected, lost, constrained, expressed, or transformed in a person’s life. It also resists treating human beings as detached individuals separate from culture, language, relationship, history, land, embodiment, and social structure.
For counselling, this means that therapy is not only about symptom reduction or improved functioning. It can also be a space where a person comes to understand their way of being, their barriers to being, and the possibilities for living with greater coherence, agency, relation, and meaning.
For this website, ontology is the ground beneath the larger project. It supports the study of states of being, barriers to being, identity formation, meaning-making, social roles, and the human sciences as interconnected ways of understanding human life.
References
- Bandura, A. (2006). Toward a psychology of human agency. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1(2), 164–180. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6916.2006.00011.x
- Craig, E. (2015). The lost language of being: Ontology’s perilous destiny in existential psychotherapy. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 22(2), 79–92. https://doi.org/10.1353/ppp.2015.0027
- Kolopenuk, J. (2020). Miskâsowin: Indigenous science, technology, and society. Genealogy, 4(1), 21. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy4010021
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