The Operator That Cannot Place Itself

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's 1787 objection to Kant's transcendental idealism identified a structural problem that remains unresolved in the tradition of nested ontological frameworks: any system that posits causal relations between distinct ontological levels requires an operator to mediate those relations, but this operator cannot itself be ontologically located without generating an infinite regress. We argue that this problem is not peripheral to Kant's system but constitutive of it, and that its modern descendants, including layered ontologies of mind and body, hierarchical emergence theories, and multi-level realist frameworks, inherit the same defect. We further argue that the problem dissolves, rather than is solved, once the assumption generating it is abandoned: the assumption that ontological levels are real strata rather than epistemic modes of access to a single physical reality. Drawing on the perspectival entity ontology and dimensional logic developed in prior work (Stegemann 2026a, 2026b, 2026c), we show that replacing causal inter-level operators with reflexive epistemic operators eliminates the regress, preserves scientific realism, and reframes classical puzzles, including the Hard Problem of Consciousness and the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, as dimensional category errors rather than metaphysical mysteries.