To use Levinas’s distinction, ontology is inquiry into being within a totality; metaphysics is inquiry into the being of infinity.

The two inquiries can be seen as “containing” one another in different senses, the former subjectively, the latter objectively. Ontology contains metaphysics within its subject — its manner of inquiring — because metaphysics can be seen as a category of being, but one that is understood to “overflows” or stands beyond contact (and certainly the grasp) of the mind. The “object” of metaphysics contains the object of ontology, in that every entity treated within ontology is also treated within metaphysics as a subset of some kind — an effect, manifestation, superstructure, etc. of metaphysics’s more primordial categories of being.