Meditation 78: What is Metaphysics?

What is metaphysics?  In the Western tradition, metaphysics concerns the nature and description of an Ultimate Reality that stands behind the world of appearances. One dominant strand holds that we can somehow come to know a world that exists undetected by our sense perceptions and unexplained by the natural operation of causes and effects.  Unfortunately, our powers of sense and perception reveal to us only a partial survey of the contingent universe unfolding around us and within us.  We are part of that unfolding process, no doubt, but we have profound limitations in what we can do and what we can know. We are radically limited in our contact with the universe, and it is hard to see how, in our embodied state, we can overcome these limitations.  Despite all that our sciences have done to inform us of realities unknown to sense perception or naïve common sense, we are unable, using the normal touchstones of truth, to argue convincingly for the character of Ultimate Reality or for Beings that exist in a supersensible or supernatural world.

Despite this observation, no ink has been spared to describe and argue about the nature of a supersensible realm. Philosophers and theologians have claimed special dispensations from Reason or Divine revelation that gives them privileged access to a world beyond the one in which we live and have our being. With these magical means at hand, it seems to metaphysical thinkers that it should be possible to devise a systematic metaphysical theory that is both true and covers the ‘reality’ side of the “appearance versus reality” divide. Metaphysics is conceived as thinking that pierces the veil of appearances and gets right down to what is really real.

So, how is the ‘really real’ to be distinguished from the ‘apparently real’? A close examination of contingent perceptual experience reveals the outlines of metaphysical reality as precisely not the findings of ordinary experience. In experience we find a world of perceptible objects and imperceptible forces that we can measure and in some cases control. We discover a universe in a constant state of change. Stars are born, live and die, planets follow the came course, as do all things on them. We are the stuff of stars and follow their fate. Nothing remains the same. All things flow. This is what we know about the world of our sense experiences.

Metaphysical reality, in the Western philosophical tradition, is the negation of all this flux, namely, an unchanging Reality. However, it is notoriously difficult to say what an ever-changing universe has to do with an unchanging Reality. Additionally, the contingent world we know is morally and aesthetically imperfect, to say the least.  It follows that Reality, by contrast, must be supremely good and beautiful. This strand goes right back to Plato, and the idea that there exists a world that is more ‘real’ and more ‘true’ and the ‘so-called’ real world we inhabit in our embodied state. This is the world of the perfect Forms, but their relation to the particulars of which they are the Forms is difficult to describe adequately.  How can two things that have absolutely nothing in common be related to each other in any way whatsoever?

A short list of metaphysical theories from the history of philosophy features those that reduce reality to some underlying Substance. The ‘Father of Philosophy,’ Thales, famously thought it was water, but others thought is was “Air”, “Fire”, “Earth” and “water”, the “Indeterminate”,  “Love and Strife”, “Atoms and the void”, “ Eternal Forms”, “Being qua Being”, “Mind and Matter”, “the Absolute”, “God”, or philosophical Substance. What is important for my purpose is to note the fact that these theories form such a large plurality.  Many of them seem to survive in some form or other despite repeated attempts to refute them.  No sooner are they advanced than they possess all the defenses against attack necessary to remain a possibility in the heaven of metaphysical theories. This should make us wonder if we are in a field that is capable of generating knowledge or consensus.

Logic fails to curtail metaphysical theorizing. Prudent philosophers, like Kant, despaired of curbing the ‘metaphysical impulse’ that insists on confusing flights of fancy with knowledge of a supersensible world. It seems that we are programmed to think metaphysically and to attempt to conjure Reality out of thin air.

Kant showed that there is essentially no difference between traditional metaphysicians in the Western tradition, like Plato, Aristotle or Descartes, and the spirit seers, like Swedenborg, who spin gossamer webs of unseen worlds and powers, or theologians with their ideas of God, angels, devils and such. Against taking such thoughts as literally true, Kant argued that reason ought to stop at the bounds of sense, critically aware of the limitations of our powers of understanding. We simply cannot grasp infinity with our understanding, even though we can reason quite well about infinity in mathematics. Metaphysical ideas of God, soul, immortality, the Good, Freedom, Substance, and so on, are not logically impossible, but neither are there conclusive proofs for them.

Metaphysical thinking is misused when we take for reality the ideas we develop in a purely imaginative way. At this point magical thinking is endorsed, and the seeds of discord are sown. Since nothing can be proved to be true or untrue in metaphysics, the assertion of a metaphysical truth opposes other truths that claim metaphysical status.  However, they cannot all be true together.  Since no one can prove anything conclusively, the fight is really over which theory will triumph. When metaphysical thinking takes itself seriously as absolute truth and sets itself in opposition to all other pretenders, it claims a knowledge that cannot be justified except by extraordinary means.

Metaphysics is a form of magical thinking that intimates a productive relation with a supernatural reality or relies on faith to affirm its basic unprovable assumptions. As such, it is a species of imaginative projection. A single look at the variety of metaphysical, magical and religious systems that have existed in history shows just how hard the imagination is at work in metaphysical thinking. There is much that is wonderful about it as long as we recognize metaphysical thinking for what it is, and for what it is not. The power to think beyond the bounds of sense and empirical reason is a great boon as long as we do not take the conclusions of our speculations too seriously as the last word on what ‘is’ or ‘how things are.’