Suppose that there is something that is maximally foundational, i.e. all other things depend on it, but it does not depend on something else. In short, there is something which is the foundation of reality. Now, why couldn’t this foundational being be, for instance, a tea cup? Let’s call this bizar view teacupism (TC). The state of affairs envisioned by TC may seem absurd, but many things about reality are weird and surprising. So what is our objection against TC going to be? Well, one might reply, tea cups don’t exist necessarily, and therefore a tea cup cannot be the foundation of reality. But here the response of proponents of TC could be as follows: Ah, but we are talking about a very special tea cup and this tea cup does exist necessarily. Hence, it could be the foundation of reality.

At this point, we could point out that a tea cup lacks certain other features necessary for it to function as the foundation of reality. But I want to put forward a slightly different objection to TC, namely that its foundational being is (or seems to be) arbitrarily fundamental. The problem with TC is that tea cups do not essentially have the features of maximal fundamentality and there does not seem to be a reason for any particular tea cup to have such features. It is only by adding on such features that the tea cup of TC can be the foundation of reality. But why does that tea cup have these additional features, as opposed to, for example, the tea cup in your kitchen cupboard? It seems we cannot locate the reason for this in the essential features of tea cups. Saying that the foundational tea cup has some special property in virtue of which it has the features of fundamentality offers no escape, because that feature is also not inherent to tea cups. The essential features of tea cups do not entail the essential features of fundamentality, and vice versa. Thus, it seems a proponent of TC is going to struggle to explain why the foundation of reality is a tea cup and why it is the particular tea cup that it is, as opposed to some other.

Now, this type of objection to TC generalizes to any view that makes a typically non-fundamental entity the foundation of reality. If it succeeds, we can rule out a whole host of conceivable metaphysical theories. Arguably, only beings that are (plausibly) essentially fundamental would be left as plausible candidates for the foundation of reality, if we are to have non-arbitrary fundamentality.