Chapter I
WHAT AND WHY DO METAPHYSICS?[1]
Philosophy is a critical reflection, systematically articulated in order to illumine our human experiences in depth. It leads to a wholistic vision of reality. Doing philosophy is not looking for new experiences or new facts. Here, we simply take the data of our experience and attempt to illumine them in depth. In depth means searching their ultimate grounding, their necessary condition of possibility, their ultimate meaning and their connection with the rest of reality. The philosopher will always look deeper how a particular datum of experience is integrated into the whole vision of reality. This is the classic understanding of philosophy from Plato, Aquinas, and so forth.
1. The Role of Metaphysics.
Metaphysics fits as the innermost foundation in doing philosophy. It focuses its inquiry explicitly on the vision of the whole. In a deeper way, it attempts to explain that which is common to all real beings and what constitutes their connectedness to the universe. It is the basic structure and horizon of inquiry in which all other scientific investigations, fit as partial perspectives. Thus, the metaphysician discerns for the universal properties, constitutive principles, and all the governing laws of all that is real. The classic definition of “Metaphysics is the study of being as being”. This means the study of all beings in so far as they are existing. However, it also includes mental beings, the possibles, abstract, mathematical and logical entities, also theories and imaginative constructs as being-thought-about by the real minds.
Therefore, doing metaphysics starts with where we are: the limited horizon of our experience and ourselves. From the study of the cosmos as experienced, we derive the general properties, laws, and principles governing all the beings of our experience as a community of different beings. From here, we are able to discern few absolutely universal principles applicable to all real beings as such, and argue from the necessary conditions of intelligibility of our finite cosmos to an Ultimate Source beyond our experience – God. This ascent of the human spirit to the Ultimate Reality belongs intrinsically to the project of metaphysics. However, because of its complexity, this is treated separately in “natural theology”.
2. Metaphysics Different from Religion and Theology
Even if the scope of inquiry is universal, the method of metaphysics is philosophical. This means, it uses only the resources of human reason and applies it to our common human experience. It does not derive its data from divine revelation and its theological explication. However, the metaphysician respects such divine source. In fact, occasionally it provides a new illumination on the deeper meaning of the natural and human order itself. This is very true in the case of Christian thinkers, who are both believers and philosophers. For them, there are two books: the Book of Nature, where created things speak to us directly, and the Book of Revelation, where God Himself communicates to us His inner nature, His gifts, and His plans for humanity. There is no contradiction between these two Books.
Metaphysics differs also from religion. Metaphysics is purely an intellectual quest for wisdom about the meaning of the universe and human existence. Religion involves a response of the heart and practical commitment of the whole person to live according to the plan of God and be united with this Ultimate Reality.
3. All Metaphysical Expressions are Incomplete.
Metaphysics is man made. Its expression is tied up to human conceptual and linguistic frames, therefore, limited. These conceptual and linguistic frames are rooted in the intellectual and cultural context. Thus, they are not complete and adequate enough to explain the inexhaustible richness of reality. Although metaphysicians can discover universal metaphysical truths transcending all times and cultures, the conceptual and linguistic frames of what they have discovered always fall short of the fullness of the real. Hence, there is no definitive and exhaustive expressions of metaphysics for all times and cultures. However, this does not mean that metaphysicians are imprisoned in their own cultures and languages, through an open and humble dialogue they can learn from each other. It is in humility that metaphysics can give us a deeper understanding of the universe in its unity-in-diversity and its meaningfulness.
4. Some Objections Against Metaphysics.
Many contemporary philosophers deny the value of metaphysics for several reasons. One, it is not a meaningful inquiry at all, since it does not have a distinctive subject matter. Two, it is not possible for human minds to achieve it. Here are some of the most common objections.
a. No distinctive subject matter. Every branch of science must study a particular group of things with observable traits different from other group of things, like physics, biology, psychology, theology, etc. Metaphysics claims to study all things at once. Being, its focus of study, has no distinguishing trait since all have it. Being is conceptually empty and tells us nothing in particular.
Response: Metaphysics does not have a distinctive subject matter, since it treats all beings. However, it does have a distinctive point of view from which it studies them. It considers in them only their most fundamental attribute of being itself and the properties and laws which they have in common with all beings.
This fundamental dimension of being itself is taken for granted by all other branches of knowledge. What is taken for granted does not mean not important. This is what metaphysics aims to do: to draw into the explicit light of reflection what all other human inquiry takes for granted – the foundation of actual existence upon which all else is built. Heidegger calls this the “forgetfulness of being”.
b. We, as part of the Whole, cannot comprehend the Whole. It is impossible for us to do metaphysics, because each one of us is only part of the whole of reality. It is impossible for the part to comprehend the whole. Since this is impossible, let us be content to take the universe of reality as a whole for granted and focus our attention to the parts inside it and how they operate and fit together. Thus, “How come there is a universe at all?” which a question about reality as a whole is meaningless.
Response: Our spiritual intellect is ordered to being as such as its proper object. It is open to the entire horizon of being without restriction. Thus, we can think of reality as a whole and our place in it. Our mind can encompass it in a certain sense in its own thought. We raise question about being as a whole. The human person is not just part of the universe but a whole, within the Whole.
c. Objections to metaphysics from modern restrictive theories: Most modern are objectors of metaphysics. Objections are based on the limitations of our human knowledge. These objections can be classified into three: empiricism, Kantianism, and relativism.
Empiricism: It denies our capacity to know something not directly derived from sense experience (David Hume, 1711-76). Thus, we are never justified to argue by intellectual inference from something within our experience to some cause (God) or ground beyond our experience.
Response: This objection cannot give justice to the subject or self who is asking questions, since this is at the root of every conscious sense experience, but not in front of our sense experience as an external object. Empiricist kind of thinking undermines the age-old pure desire to know its direct experience in terms of deeper causes not directly accessible to us. The human spirit cannot be satisfied to operate only within the frame of an arbitrarily restrictive epistemology.
Kantianism: This originated from Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) who claimed that we cannot know reality in itself (noumena). We can only know things as they affect us, appear to us (phenomena) in our consciousness. The real world acts on us, but they reveal themselves in terms of jumble images without intelligible order, form, structure. The human spirit is the one who imposes order and intelligibility on the content of our sense experience. This is accomplished by means of the apriori forms of intelligibility – plus the apriori sense forms of space and time which are innate in all human minds. This is the “Copernican revolution”: the world does not inform us, or molds our minds, but it is our human minds that impose intelligibility – forms, structure, order, etc – on the world. We make the world intelligible.
In later forms of Neo-Kantianism, we still impose intelligibility on the world from within our own apriori’s. However, these apriori forms are no longer universal to all human minds. They are now the apriori’s of culture and language imprinted in us by society. They are no longer universal to all human minds, but variable and changeable as history goes on.
Response: The main flaw of Kant’s theory of knowledge is by blowing up the bridge of action by which real beings manifest their natures to our cognitive receiving sets. He admits that things act on us, but such action reveals nothing intelligible. What it reveals are only unordered, unstructured sense that we have to order and structure from within ourselves. But action that is completely indeterminate is no action at all.
St. Thomas’ epistemology shows that action is the “self-revelation of being” – it reveals a being as this kind of actor on me. While this does not deliver a complete knowledge of the being acting, but it does deliver an authentic knowledge of the real world as a community of interacting agents. This is an effective relational realism, not the unrealistic ideal of the only thing Kant will accept as genuine knowledge of real beings. He does not allow a medium between the two extremes. It is either perfect knowledge with no mediations of action or no knowledge of the real at all. Thus, there is no explanation how we can know other human beings as just as real as ourselves and successful exchange of information with them in interpersonal dialogue. If it is really I that am structuring your being and the messages you seem to be sending in to me through your senses, then it follows that you are also structuring me and my messages. This cancels out into incoherence; both cannot be true at once. This is not the case, because we are open to truth-grounding communication about themselves from the real active beings that surround us, across the bridge of their self-expressive action. This is the meaning of the human spirit open to being.
Relativism: Our human knowledge can never be universal and objectively true, but always relative to the apriori context of culture and language from which it emerged historically. These vary from society to society and from one period to another. Since there is no culture transcending knowledge, neither can there be any metaphysical knowledge of real being that claims universal and objective truth.
Response: We must indeed take into account the partially differing modes of thinking and self-expression of different cultures. But we can transcend our own culture enough to do that. This is evidenced by our capability of translating more or less one language to another.
Any theory of knowledge that claims no access to time and place-transcending objective truth, it immediately turns back upon itself and self-destructs, like a snake devouring its tail. Any attempt to block effectively our access to objective knowledge of the real automatically blows up in the face of the one making the claim.
Conclusion: It seems that all those who deny the possibility of metaphysics are implicitly committed to some metaphysical positions: (1) to deny metaphysics as the study of being they must start with a metaphysical stance in looking over the entire field of human knowing and its relation to reality; in a sense they start off as fellow metaphysicians. (2) if they refuse to do metaphysics; they must all take for granted their own existence, that of other human beings, and the whole horizon of experience which are their data – the given – to be explained.
The objections are based on some form of arbitrarily restrictive theory of knowledge. What is interesting to note is that in the ancient and medieval philosophy it was metaphysics that dominated epistemology. In modern philosophy, it is epistemology that dominated what metaphysics is allowed to say. The metaphysical quest will lead us to confront some of the profoundest problems of the origin and meaning of the universe, and therefore the meaning of our life.
5. The Ultimate Root of Metaphysical Inquiry: the pure desire to know and the Intelligibility of Being
a. Radical dynamism of the human spirit toward all being as true and good.
At the root of all intellectual inquiry is the radical dynamism of the human spirit toward the fullness of being as true. As Lonergan calls “the unrestricted drive of the mind to know being, that is, all there is to know about all that there is.” The horizon of inquiry is the totality of being. This pure dynamism is in born in us. Thus it defines our nature as human and not merely animal.
The drive of the will toward the fullness of being as good compliments this drive of the mind to know. In a sense, this drive is deeper than the drive to know. As St. Thomas would put it, unless knowledge itself appeared to us as something good to possess, we would not be moved to desire and actively seek it. At the first moment of our existence, we live our life in an implicit manner. Metaphysics helps us to raise them into explicit reflective consciousness and understand their role in our lives.
b. How does one discover the presence of this dynamism? We do so by reflecting on our basic human experience of knowing and willing and its implications. When we first come to know some particular finite being, we are satisfied with it for a while. But as soon as we discover its limits that it is not the fullness of being, our minds will seek to know some further being. We keep rebounding spontaneously as soon as we hit the limits of partial truth or goodness.
To conclude, my mind is by its nature oriented toward the totality of being as knowable, as its final goal which alone can satisfy its drive to know. My will is oriented towards the fullness of being as good that alone can satisfy my longing for happiness.
c. The intelligibility of being. The pure desire to know gives rise to metaphysics, i.e. the search for the ultimate intelligibility of all being. This is matched by a correlative openness of all being to be known, in other words, the intelligibility of being in itself, otherwise the drive to know becomes absurd, a cruel illusion.
The whole history of human development in coping with nature, meeting and solving its challenges by use of creative science, technology, etc., bears witness to the success of our common commitment to the intelligibility in principle of all of nature. The real world of nature answers back our commitment to its intelligibility by saying equivalently, “Yes, I am open to being understood by mind, I do not give up my secrets easily to human intelligence, but if approached properly and with patience and cooperation I am open to being understood by mind on all the levels of my being. It may take a long time; but come and try. I’m ready and waiting.”
Our success at problem-solving has always been partial down through the ages. It is impossible for us to prove ahead of time that all being is intelligible, since no one of us can ever know being in its totality in this life. However, if the parts of being have been shown to be intelligible one after the other down through time, why not the whole? All the positive evidence invites us in this direction, since there is no clear evidence shown to us in history of the contrary.
Therefore, in order to live our human lives effectively at all we are called to make a kind of commitment in hope, an act of natural faith in the radical intelligibility in principle of all real being. Einstein has stated, “All science of a high order presupposes a kind of act of faith in the intelligibility of nature. And the wonder of all wonders is that in fact nature has shown itself to be intelligible.”
The first great conclusion of our metaphysical inquiry: mind and being are correlative to each other, made for each other, open by nature to each other, as the two complimentary poles of the universe. The mission of the human spirit (mind) in the midst of being is to bring the whole of being into the light of consciousness – the “spokesman of being” as Heidegger puts it. However, we cannot master this primordial correlation of mind with being by our own limited minds, since we are not the author of it. To describe this primordial correlation, Jacques Maritain puts it, “There is a nuptial relationship between mind and being.”
6. The Method of Metaphysics
Thomistic metaphysics unfolds two lines of inquiry:
a. Descriptive. The discovery and description of the basic attributes common to all beings, the basic general kinds or categories of being and the basic data about the universe of our experience which give rise to the central problems of metaphysics calling for a solution.
b. Explanatory. The search for the ultimate laws, constitutive principles, and explanatory causes of the beings of our experience when they are shown to lack intelligibility in some way when taken by themselves alone. In a word, it is the passage from what we can observe in our experience to what lies beyond our direct experience but is necessary to posit in order to save the intelligibility of the latter, lest it sink into the darkness of absurdity or unintelligibility. Most analytic philosophers can accept the validity of the first phase – descriptive metaphysics. But they cant accept the second phase – explanatory metaphysics, because this lies beyond any empirical testing. Good example is the argument on the existence of God as the ultimate cause that renders intelligible the existence of our finite and changing world.
7. Two Great Guiding Principles of Metaphysical Inquiry
a. The Principle of Non-Contradiction: The Static Intelligibility of Being
This is the principle of contradiction which lays down the basic law of intelligibility governing all beings and all discourse about anything. In the case of all beings: “Nothing can both be and not be at the same time and under the same aspect.” In the case of discourse: “No proposition can be both asserted and denied at the same time and under the same aspect.” You can say the words but it is meaningless.
If we deny this principle, all meaning, truth, and intelligibility would immediately be destroyed. Nothing will hold firm in language and in thought about being. The positive expression of this principle is called the principle of identity: A is A, this points to the stability of being against nothingness.
It is impossible to prove such a principle in terms of more fundamental, since all meaningful assertions already presupposed it. Thus, it is the primary ultimate principle of all use of intelligence or discourse, grasped immediately and intuitively by anyone who understands the terms.
Role of the principle in intellectual inquiry. It is not the starting point of any argument from one can deduce anything from it. It is purely static, A is A, A is not not A. Instead, it serves as a watch-dog principle that comes into action whenever one violates it in a conversation.
b. The Principle of Sufficient Reason: The Dynamic Intelligibility of Being
The principle of sufficient reason is a dynamic one because it enables the mind to pass from one being to another in search to make sense out of it. All progress in thought to infer the existence of a new being from what we already know depends on this principle. The ancient and medieval thinkers was not very explicit about this principle, but included this in the principle of intelligibility of being.
The principle can be formulated thus: “Every being has the sufficient reason for its existence (i.e. the adequate ground or basis in existence for its intelligibility) either in itself or in another.” If the being contains this sufficient reason in itself, then it is a self-sufficient being. If not, then it must have its sufficient reason in some other real being, which is called cause. This leads to the most general formulation of the Principle of Causality: “Any being that does not contain the sufficient reason for its own existence within itself requires a cause.” Again, being and intelligibility are linked inseparably together. This is the fundamental grounding principle for all explanatory metaphysics.
This principle of sufficient reason cannot be reducible to the principle of non-contradiction. For example, if one asserts using the principle of sufficient reason, “No being can come into existence without a cause,” it is not a contradiction to deny this; a contradiction would give you only “Being is non-being.” But to assert that “Being cannot come from non-being” is a step beyond contradiction into the dynamic relationship of intelligibility between beings. To deny this would not land you into formal contradiction, but it would lead you into a situation of radical unintelligibility, not making sense. For if nothing at all is required for something new to come into existence, then anything at all can happen at any time with no explanation needed or able to be provided – and thi squite contrary to ur whole experience. It takes effort to make things happen.
The principle must be used very cautiously and responsibly, however, to get reliable results. It does not mean that there are not or cannot be mysteries, things which I cannot yet understand. Nor can I impse any answer that appeals to me just in order to get rid of the mystery. It means only that being in itself is intrinsically intelligible, open to being intelligibly known in some way.
To apply the principle properly we must follow this procedure. (1) First we must show clearly why a given being, or event, or set of data to be understood does not contain within itself the sufficient reason for its own existence as it is, but, rather, if taken by itself alone, positively excludes any adequate sufficient reason of its own, is irremediably unintelligible by itself alone. (2) we can proceed to affirm that it must have its sufficient reason in some other being or set of beings. (3) we about seeking for the appropriate identification of its explanatory cause. We do so either by hypothesis and empirical testing or by showing that all alternative solutions save one are either contradictory or unintelligible.
Readings:
Multiple Meaning of Metaphysics
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
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[1] W. Norris Clarke, S.J., The One and The Many (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001) pp. 5-24. I edited the chapter for the use of undergraduate students in philosophy.