Metaphysics

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METAPHYSICS

METAPHYSICS is generally understood as a philosophical inquiry into the fundamental nature of reality. The word metaphysics derives from the Greek meta ta phusica ("after the things of nature"), a classificatory rubric used by commentators on and editors of Aristotle's corpus to refer to an untitled group of texts concerned with "first philosophy." Western medieval and modern philosophers often have construed metaphysics as the most basic and most comprehensive of philosophical inquiries, one that is primarily focused on the ontological status of objects, the existence of entities that transcend nature, and the generic features exhibited in experience. African and Eastern philosophers usually have conceived of metaphysics (in the sense implied by the word's etymology) as more closely interwoven with the axiological (or value-laden) character of the cosmos and the moral quality of human community.

A distinctive feature of Western metaphysics is the attempt to understand the universe by means of a logical investigation of concepts rather than an empirical inquiry based on sensory evidence. Such metaphysical sentiments rest upon a relative distrust of the variable, visible, and sensible world and involve a quest for the invariable, invisible, and intelligible world. They also assume a basic unity of thought and being, of logic and the world. Rationally coherent and logically consistent systems of thought are believed to reveal the way the world really is.

The origins of Western metaphysics go back to Parmenides of Elea (c. 515–475 bce). In the poem usually titled On Nature, Parmenides provides the first exemplary philosophical argument of Western metaphysics. In the form of a journey to the heavens to receive wisdom from "the goddess," Parmenides attacks the reality of the physical world, condemns difference as illusory, and proposes that fundamental reality is invariable, invisible, and intelligible, as well as single, indivisible, and homogeneous. This metaphysical viewpoint rests upon the deployment of the basic binary opposition of reality and appearance, in which the realm of the former is qualitatively different from and superior to the realm of the latter.

Parmenides' metaphysical conception of being, grounded in his logical reasoning and monistic conclusions, has been a major influence in Western metaphysics. This Parmenidean legacy can be seen in Plotinus's One, Spinoza's God, and Hegel's Absolute. The most immediate influence of Parmenides is found in Plato's Phaedo, in which, despite subtle gradations, the reality/appearance distinction is appropriated to undergird the existence of a separate order of Forms accessible only to the mind and more real than the senses. In his heroic efforts to refute the skepticism of the Sophists, Plato (427–347 bce) extends the ontological binary opposition of reality/appearance to epistemology, morality, and politics, thus including distinctions such as knowledge/opinion, nature/convention, and philosopher/sophist. In this way, Plato's metaphysics, like that of some African and Eastern thinkers, is inseparable from ethics and political philosophy.

The religious significance of Plato's metaphysics is his doctrine of recollection, which defends the immortality of the soul. In Meno, Plato portrays Socrates interrogating a slave boy, an interrogation that results in the boy arriving at a geometric truth. Socrates then argues that since this truth was not told to the boy but rather elicited from him, the truth must reside in the boy at birth and in a previous existence: his questions merely prompted the boy to remember what he had forgotten from an earlier life. Similar arguments, related to the existence of a separate order of Forms, are found in the Phaedo, while a more speculative account of the transmigration of souls, life after death, and the soul fleeing the bondage of the body is put forward in the tenth book of the Republic.

Aristotle (384–322 bce) set forth the first Western metaphysical system, including a new vocabulary, an articulation of the central issues, and a thorough treatment of these issues. He conceives of metaphysics as a "first philosophy" that investigates the fundamental principles presupposed by the other sciences. Aristotle's metaphysics can be viewed as a profound and persistent polemic against the notions of indeterminacy and infinity. Its aim is to establish a fixed beginning point, the limits of inquiry, the determinateness of concrete individual objects, and the termination of epistemic chains of justification. Aristotelian notions of causality (material, formal, efficient, and final), substance, being, essence, form, and actuality set the terms for Western metaphysical discourse through the twentieth century. The legacy of Aristotle's metaphysics in religious thought is found most clearly in the Christian systematic theology of Thomas Aquinas and the neo-Thomist tradition of the Catholic church exemplified in thinkers such as Étienne Gilson (1884–1978) and Jacques Maritain (1882–1973).

The last great metaphysical system of classical antiquity was the Neoplatonism best represented by the Hellenized Egyptian philosopher Plotinus (205–270 ce), his pupil Porphyry (232–306?), the Syrian school of Iamblichus (250–330?), the Athenian school of Proclus (c. 410–485), and the Latin Christian school of Boethius (480–524). This system (and its various versions) is rooted in Plato's devaluation of the sensible world and elevation of the intelligible world. Yet, as in certain themes in Plato's second and seventh letters, Neoplatonism promotes a kind of mysticism and asceticism that deeply influenced the Christian theology of the African thinker Augustine (354–430). This mysticism is based on an intuition of the unity and wholeness of being, the One, which differentiates itself downward into lesser degrees in spirits, souls, and, lastly, physical objects. This process of emanation from undifferentiated unity to modes of differentiated disunity results in a return (or epistrophe) to unity and wholeness.

The Syrian philosopher Porphyry not only made Plotinus's lectures available but also wrote a short introduction to Aristotle's Categories, titled Isagoge, that directed attention to the relation between the essential and accidental attributes of things and the status of universals. This influential text, translated into Latin by Boethius, provided the framework and language for metaphysical reflection in the early Middle Ages by Christian theologians such as John Scottus Eriugena (fl. 847–877), Anselm (c. 1033–1109), and Bonaventure (c. 1221–1274).

The thirteenth-century translations of Aristotle and his Arabian commentators into Greek and Latin by Robert Grosseteste and William of Moerbeke facilitated the crowning achievement of Western metaphysics in the late Middle Ages: the magisterial system of Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224–1274) and the critical nominalism of William of Ockham (c. 1280/1285–1349?). Thomas creatively appropriated Aristotelian metaphysics into a Christian philosophy, whereas William paved the road for the new "modern way" (via moderna ) by separating metaphysics from Christian faith and thereby emphasizing religious faith and church tradition. William influenced major figures of the Reformation.

The modern conception of metaphysics in the West begins with René Descartes (1596–1650), who tried to apply the rigor and standards of mathematics and geometry to metaphysical claims. Descartes's quest for indubitability within the immediate awareness of a thinking self and his call for clarity and distinctness in truth-claims reflect an ingenious and influential philosophical response to the rise of modern science, especially the wedding of quantitative models with physics and chemistry. Barukh Spinoza (1632–1677) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) followed the Cartesian project of scientific rigor and philosophical boldness by setting forth deductive metaphysical systems. Spinoza's mechanical and deterministic view of the universe, in which the only two known attributes of substance are thought and extension, yielded a pantheistic conception of God as identical with nature. This conception would inspire later forms of German idealism. Leibniz's rationalist commitments to a priori reasoning, the analysis of concepts according to logical necessity and rational intelligibility, produced refined versions of ontological arguments for the existence of God that sharpened modal logical tools for subsequent efforts by Christian theists.

The crisis of modern Western metaphysics begins with the major empiricists: John Locke (1632–1704), George Berkeley (1685–1753), and, especially, David Hume (1711–1776). All three assumed the Cartesian starting point for philosophical reflection as within the arena of immediate awareness of a thinking self. But in contrast to Descartes, Locke argues that sense impressions are the primary data for knowledge of the world, self, and God. This restriction requires that we cannot have "clear and distinct ideas" of substance and essence, only empirical access to their properties and powers. Therefore, the most privileged notions in traditional Western metaphysics, such as substance and essence, were rendered problematic. Berkeley further questioned the distinction between ideas of objects and properties of objects that cause ideas, thereby radically calling into question material substance. Hume changed the course of Western metaphysics by dissolving philosophical conceptions of the self, subject, and mind into mere bundles of sensations and perceptions. By replacing philosophical notions of necessity and causality with psychological accounts of imagination and sociological notions of habit and custom, Hume defended an inescapable skepticism regarding the possibility of metaphysics. This position presented religious thinkers with the options of a rational agnosticism or a nonrational religious faith.

The significance of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) lies in his rescue of Western metaphysics by specifying the limits of human knowledge. This rescue took the form of rejecting the dogmatism of Cartesian metaphysical projects and circumscribing the skepticism of Hume's empiricism. The result was a critical idealist metaphysics that preserved the objectivity of knowledge-claims yet prevented human access to ultimate reality. The aim of Kant's metaphysics was to disclose the universal conceptual scheme that people employ in theoretically ordering the world and practically acting within it. For Kant, religious faith became a mere appendage to ethics, a practical postulate for moral behavior.

The last great metaphysical system in the modern West—a response, in part, to Kant—was that of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). Like Plato, Aristotle, and the Neoplatonists, Hegel attempted to penetrate to the fundamental nature of reality by means of rational deliberation. Yet he conceived of this reality as a historical and dialectical process intelligible only to the discerning and retrospective philosopher. Hegel's metaphysics emphasized the radical dependence of God upon the world and promoted a divine immanent presence in human history.

Western metaphysics has been under severe attack since Hegel. Apart from the ambitious project of Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), the vitalistic program of Henri Bergson (1859–1941), the versions of logical atomism of Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) and the early Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), and Paul Ricoeur's (b. 1913) recent metaphysics of narrativity, post-Hegelian philosophy has been strongly antimetaphysical. The Christian existentialism of Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) and the transcendental phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) inspired the ontological hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), which claims to have "destroyed" the Western metaphysical tradition. The logical positivism of the Vienna Circle (Otto Neurath, Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, and others) and ordinary-language philosophy served as stepping-stones for the later Ludwig Wittgenstein's linguistic conventionalism, which claims to have "dodged" the bewitching traps of Western metaphysics. The perspectivism of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and the structuralist vocabulary of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) provided resources for the present-day poststructuralist skepticism of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), which claims to have "deconstructed" the Western metaphysical tradition. Lastly, the pragmatism of William James (1842–1910) and John Dewey (1859–1952) and the epistemological holism of W. V. Quine (1908–2000) and Nelson Goodman (1906–1998) are employed by Richard Rorty (b. 1931) in his contemporary attempt to "demythologize" the Western metaphysical tradition. Whether the influential attacks of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida, and Rorty on Western metaphysics are skeptical moments in the history of Western philosophy (like those of Pyrrho and Montaigne in times past) or proleptic precursors of a new stage remains an open question. The religious significance and implications of these attacks—within and outside the West—remain relatively unexplored.

Bibliography

Ayer, A. J. Philosophy in the Twentieth Century. New York, 1982. A noteworthy and well-written sequel to Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy (1945) by a major figure active on the contemporary scene since the 1930s.

Hancock, Roger. "Metaphysics, History of." In The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Paul Edwards, vol. 5. New York, 1967. The best short and concise article-length treatment of major historical developments in Western metaphysics. An extensive bibliography on central figures and periods is included.

Passmore, John. A Hundred Years of Philosophy. 2d ed. Middlesex, U.K., 1970. The most comprehensive and detailed history of academic Western philosophy dealing with post-Hegelian developments. Reliable reportage and exposition, but lacks an overarching interpretive framework.

Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, 1979. A highly provocative, imaginative, and learned interpretation of Western philosophy that puts forward devastating critiques of metaphysics.

Russell, Bertrand. A History of Western Philosophy. New York, 1945. The most informative, stimulating, and engaging history of Western philosophy available in one volume in English, by one of the most brilliant thinkers of the twentieth century.