Metaphysics
Overview
Branch of philosophy that studies the ultimate structure and
constitution of reality—i.e., of that which is real, insofar as it is
real.
The term, which means literally “what comes after physics,” was used
to refer to the treatise by Aristotle on what he himself called “first
philosophy.” In the history of Western philosophy, metaphysics has been
understood in various ways: as an inquiry into what basic categories of
things there are (e.g., the mental and the physical); as the study of
reality, as opposed to appearance; as the study of the world as a whole;
and as a theory of first principles. Some basic problems in the history
of metaphysics are the problem of universals—i.e., the problem of the
nature of universals and their relation to so-called particulars; the
existence of God; the mind-body problem; and the problem of the nature
of material, or external, objects. Major types of metaphysical theory
include Platonism, Aristotelianism, Thomism, Cartesianism (see also
dualism), idealism, realism, and materialism.
Main
the philosophical study whose object is to determine the real nature of
things—to determine the meaning, structure, and principles of whatever
is insofar as it is. Although this study is popularly conceived as
referring to anything excessively subtle and highly theoretical and
although it has been subjected to many criticisms, it is presented by
metaphysicians as the most fundamental and most comprehensive of
inquiries, inasmuch as it is concerned with reality as a whole.
Nature and scope of metaphysics » Origin of the term
Etymologically the term metaphysics is unenlightening. It means “what
comes after physics”; it was the phrase used by early students of
Aristotle to refer to the contents of Aristotle’s treatise on what he
himself called “first philosophy,” and was used as the title of this
treatise by Andronicus of Rhodes, one of the first of Aristotle’s
editors. Aristotle had distinguished two tasks for the philosopher:
first, to investigate the nature and properties of what exists in the
natural, or sensible, world, and second, to explore the characteristics
of “Being as such” and to inquire into the character of “the substance
that is free from movement,” or the most real of all things, the
intelligible reality on which everything in the world of nature was
thought to be causally dependent. The first constituted “second
philosophy” and was carried out primarily in the Aristotelian treatise
now known as the Physica; the second, which Aristotle had also referred
to as “theology” (because God was the unmoved mover in his system), is
roughly the subject matter of his Metaphysica. Modern readers of
Aristotle are inclined to take both the Physica and the Metaphysica as
philosophical treatises; the distinction their titles suggest between an
empirical and a conceptual inquiry has little foundation. Aristotle was
not indifferent to factual material either in natural or in metaphysical
philosophy, but equally he was not concerned in either case to frame
theories for empirical testing. It seems clear, nevertheless, that if
the two works had to be distinguished, the Physica would have to be
described as the more empirical, just because it deals with things that
are objects of the senses, what Aristotle himself called “sensible
substance”; the subject matter of the Metaphysica, “that which is
eternal, free of movement, and separately existent,” is on any account
more remote. It is also evident that the connection marked in the
original titles is a genuine one: the inquiries about nature carried out
in the Physica lead on naturally to the more fundamental inquiries about
Being as such that are taken up in the Metaphysica and indeed go along
with the latter to make up a single philosophical discipline.
The background to Aristotle’s divisions is to be found in the thought
of Plato, with whom Aristotle had many disagreements but whose basic
ideas provided a framework within which much of his own thinking was
conducted. Plato, following the early Greek philosopher Parmenides, who
is known as the father of metaphysics, had sought to distinguish
opinion, or belief, from knowledge and to assign distinct objects to
each. Opinion, for Plato, was a form of apprehension that was shifting
and unclear, similar to seeing things in a dream or only through their
shadows; its objects were correspondingly unstable. Knowledge, by
contrast, was wholly lucid; it carried its own guarantee against error,
and the objects with which it was concerned were eternally what they
were, and so were exempt from change and the deceptive power to appear
to be what they were not. Plato called the objects of opinion phenomena,
or appearances; he referred to the objects of knowledge as noumena
(objects of the intelligence) or quite simply as realities. Much of the
burden of his philosophical message was to call men’s attentions to
these contrasts and to impress them with the necessity to turn away from
concern with mere phenomena to the investigation of true reality. The
education of the Platonic philosopher consisted precisely in effecting
this transition: he was taught to recognize the contradictions involved
in appearances and to fix his gaze on the realities that lay behind
them, the realities that Plato himself called Forms, or Ideas.
Philosophy for Plato was thus a call to recognize the existence and
overwhelming importance of a set of higher realities that ordinary
men—even those, like the Sophists of the time, who professed to be
enlightened—entirely ignored. That there were such realities, or at
least that there was a serious case for thinking that there were, was a
fundamental tenet in the discipline that later became known as
metaphysics. Conversely, much of the subsequent controversy about the
very possibility of metaphysics has turned on the acceptability of this
tenet and on whether, if it is rejected, some alternative foundation can
be discovered on which the metaphysician can stand.
Nature and scope of metaphysics » Characterizations of metaphysics
Before considering any such question, however, it is necessary to
examine, without particular historical references, some ways in which
actual metaphysicians have attempted to characterize their enterprise,
noticing in each case the problems they have in drawing a clear line
between their aims and those of the practitioners of the exact and
empirical sciences. Four views will be briefly considered; they present
metaphysics as: (1) an inquiry into what exists, or what really exists;
(2) the science of reality, as opposed to appearance; (3) the study of
the world as a whole; (4) a theory of first principles. Reflection on
what is said under the different heads will quickly establish that they
are not sharply separate from one another, and, indeed, individual
metaphysical writers sometimes invoke more than one of these phrases
when asked to say what metaphysics is—as, for example, the British
Idealist F.H. Bradley does in the opening pages of his work Appearance
and Reality (1893).
Nature and scope of metaphysics » Characterizations of metaphysics » An
inquiry into what exists
A common set of claims on behalf of metaphysics is that it is an inquiry
into what exists; its business is to subject common opinion on this
matter to critical scrutiny and in so doing to determine what is truly
real.
It can be asserted with some confidence that common opinion is
certainly an unreliable guide about what exists, if indeed it can be
induced to pronounce on this matter at all. Are dream objects real, in
the way in which palpable realities such as chairs and trees are? Are
numbers real, or should they be described as no more than abstractions?
Is the height of a man a reality in the same sense in which he is a
reality, or is it just an aspect of something more concrete, a mere
quality that has derivative rather than substantial being and could not
exist except as attributed to something else? It is easy enough to
confuse the common man with questions like these and to show that any
answers he gives to them tend to be ill thought-out. It is equally
difficult, however, for the metaphysician to come up with more
satisfactory answers of his own. Many metaphysicians have relied, in
this connection, on the internally related notions of substance,
quality, and relation; they have argued that only what is substantial
truly exists, although every substance has qualities and stands in
relation to other substances. Thus, this tree is tall and deciduous and
is precisely 50 yards north of that fence. Difficulties begin, however,
as soon as examples like these are taken seriously. Assume for the
moment that an individual tree—what might be called a concrete
existent—qualifies for the title of substance; it is just the sort of
thing that has qualities and stands in relations. Unless there were
substances in this sense, no qualities could be real: the tallness of
the tree would not exist unless the tree existed. The question can now
be raised what the tree would be if it were deprived of all its
qualities and stood in no relations. The notion of a substance in this
type of metaphysics is that of a thing that exists by itself, apart from
any attributes it may happen to possess; the difficulty with this notion
is to know how to apply it. Any concrete thing one selects to exemplify
the notion of substance turns out in practice to answer a certain
description; this means in effect that it cannot be spoken of apart from
its attributes. It thus emerges that substances are no more primary
beings than are qualities and relations; without the former one could
not have the latter, but equally without the latter one could not have
the former.
There are other difficulties about substance that cannot be explored
here—e.g., whether a fence is a substance or simply wood and metal
shaped in a certain way. Enough has already been said, however, to
indicate the problems involved in defining the tasks of metaphysics
along these lines. There is, nevertheless, an alternative way of
understanding the notion of substance: not as that which is the ultimate
subject of predicates but as what persists through change. The question
“What is ultimately real?” is, thus, a question about the ultimate stuff
of which the universe is made up. Although this second conception of
substance is both clearer and more readily applicable than its
predecessor, the difficulty about it from the metaphysician’s point of
view is that it sets him in direct rivalry with the scientist. When the
early Greek philosopher Thales inquired as to what is ultimately real
and came up with the surprising news that all is water, he might be
taken as advancing a scientific rather than a philosophical hypothesis.
Although it is true that later writers, such as Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz, a German Rationalist philosopher and mathematician, were fully
aware of the force of scientific claims in this area and, nevertheless,
rejected them as metaphysically unacceptable, the fact remains that the
nonphilosopher finds it difficult to understand the basis on which a
Leibniz rests his case. When Leibniz said that it is monads (i.e.,
elementary, unextended, indivisible, spiritual substances that enter
into composites) that are the true atoms of nature and not, for example,
material particles, the objection can be raised as to what right he has
to advance this opinion. Has he done any scientific work to justify him
in setting scientific results aside with such confidence? And if he has
not, why should he be taken seriously at all?
Nature and scope of metaphysics » Characterizations of metaphysics » The
science of ultimate reality
To answer these questions, another description of metaphysics has been
proposed: that it is the science that seeks to define what is ultimately
real as opposed to what is merely apparent.
The contrast between appearance and reality, however, is by no means
peculiar to metaphysics. In everyday life people distinguish between the
real size of the Sun and its apparent size, or again between the real
colour of an object (when seen in standard conditions) and its apparent
colour (nonstandard conditions). A cloud appears to consist of some
white, fleecy substance, although in reality it is a concentration of
drops of water. In general, men are often (though not invariably)
inclined to allow that the scientist knows the real constitution of
things as opposed to the surface aspects with which ordinary men are
familiar. It will not suffice to define metaphysics as knowledge of
reality as opposed to appearance; scientists, too, claim to know reality
as opposed to appearance, and there is a general tendency to concede
their claim.
It seems that there are at least three components in the metaphysical
conception of reality. One characteristic, which has already been
illustrated by Plato, is that reality is genuine as opposed to
deceptive. The ultimate realities that the metaphysician seeks to know
are precisely things as they are—simple and not variegated, exempt from
change and therefore stable objects of knowledge. Plato’s own assumption
of this position perhaps reflects certain confusions about the
knowability of things that change; one should not, however, on that
ground exclude this aspect of the concept of reality from metaphysical
thought in general. Ultimate reality, whatever else it is, is genuine as
opposed to sham. Second, reality is original in contrast to derivative,
self-dependent rather than dependent on the existence of something else.
When Aristotle sought to inquire into the most real of all things, or
when medieval philosophers attempted to establish the characteristics of
what they called the ens realissimum (“the most real being”), or the
original and perfect being, they were looking for something that, in
contrast to the everyday things of this world, was truly self-contained
and could accordingly be looked upon as self-caused. Likewise, the
17th-century Rationalists defined substance as that which can be
explained through itself alone. Writers like René Descartes and Benedict
de Spinoza were convinced that it was the task of the metaphysician to
seek for and characterize substance understood in this sense; the more
mundane substances with which physical scientists were concerned were,
in their opinion, only marginally relevant in this inquiry. Third, and
perhaps most important, reality for the metaphysician is intelligible as
opposed to opaque. Appearances are not only deceptive and derivative,
they also make no sense when taken at their own level. To arrive at what
is ultimately real is to produce an account of the facts that does them
full justice. The assumption is, of course, that one cannot explain
things satisfactorily if one remains within the world of common sense,
or even if one advances from that world to embrace the concepts of
science. One or the other of these levels of explanation may suffice to
produce a sort of local sense that is enough for practical purposes or
that forms an adequate basis on which to make predictions. Practical
reliability of this kind, however, is very different from theoretical
satisfaction; the task of the metaphysician is to challenge all
assumptions and finally arrive at an account of the nature of things
that is fully coherent and fully thought-out.
It should be obvious that, to establish his right to pronounce on
what is ultimately real in the sense analyzed, the metaphysician has a
tremendous amount to do. He must begin by giving colour to his claim
that everyday ways of thinking will not suffice for a full and coherent
description of what falls within experience, thus arguing that
appearances are unreal—although not therefore nonexistent—because they
are unstable and unintelligible. This involves a challenge to the final
acceptability of such well-worn ideas as time and space, thing and
attribute, change and process—a challenge that metaphysicians have not
hesitated to make, even though it has been treated with skepticism both
by ordinary men and by some of their fellow philosophers (e.g., G.E.
Moore, a 20th-century British thinker who has greatly influenced modern
Analytic philosophy). Second, granted that there are contradictions or
incoherences in the thought of common sense, the metaphysician must go
on to maintain that they cannot be resolved by deserting common sense
for science. He will not deny that the concepts of science are in many
respects different from those of everyday thought; to take one aspect
only, they are altogether more precise and sharply defined. They permit
the scientist to introduce into his descriptions a theoretical content
that is lacking at the everyday level and in so doing to unify and
render intelligible aspects of the world that seem opaque when
considered singly. The metaphysician will argue, however, that this
desirable result is purchased at a certain price: by ignoring certain
appearances altogether. The scientist, in this way of thinking, does not
offer a truer description of the phenomena of which ordinary thought
could make no sense but merely gives a connected description of a
selected set of phenomena. The world of the scientist, restricted as it
is to what can be dealt with in quantitative terms, is a poor thing in
comparison with the rich if untidy world of everyday life.
Alternatively, the metaphysician must try to show that scientific
concepts are like the concepts of common sense in being ultimately
incoherent. The premises or presuppositions that the scientist accepts
contain unclarities that cannot be resolved, although they are not so
serious as to prevent his achieving results that are practically
dependable. Many ingenious arguments on these lines have been produced
by philosophers, by no means all of whom could be said to be incapable
of a true understanding of the theories they were criticizing. (Leibniz,
for example, was a physicist of distinction as well as a mathematician
of genius; G.W.F. Hegel, a 19th-century German Idealist, had an unusual
knowledge of contemporary scientific work; and Alfred North Whitehead, a
pioneer of 20th-century metaphysics in the Anglo-Saxon world, was a
professor of applied mathematics, and his system developed from physics
and contained a wealth of biological ideas.) The fact remains,
nevertheless, that few if any practicing scientists have been seriously
troubled by such arguments.
Even if the metaphysician were thus able to make good the negative
side of his case, he would still face the formidable difficulty of
establishing that there is something answering to his conception of what
is ultimately real and of identifying it. The notion of an original
being, totally self-contained and totally self-intelligible, may not
itself be coherent, as the 18th-century British philosopher David Hume
and others have argued; alternatively, there may be special difficulties
in saying to what it applies. The fact that different metaphysicians
have given widely different accounts of what is ultimately real is
certainly suspicious. Some have wanted to say that there is a plurality
of ultimately real things, others that there is only one; some have
argued that what is truly real must be utterly transcendent of the
things of this world and occupy a supersensible realm accessible only to
the pure intellect, while others have thought of ultimate reality as
immanent in experience (the Hegelian Absolute, for example, is not a
special sort of existent, but the world as a whole understood in a
certain way). That metaphysical inquiry should issue in definitive
doctrine, as so many of those who engaged in it said that it would, is
in these circumstances altogether too much to hope for.
Nature and scope of metaphysics » Characterizations of metaphysics » The
science of the world as a whole
Another way in which metaphysicians have sought to define their
discipline is by saying that it has to do with the world as a whole.
The implications of this phrase are not immediately obvious. Clearly,
a contrast is intended in the first place with the various departmental
sciences, each of which selects a portion or aspect of reality for study
and confines itself to that. No geologist or mathematician would claim
that his study is absolutely comprehensive; each would concede that
there are many aspects of the world that he leaves out, even though he
covers everything that is relevant to his special point of view. By
contrast, it might be supposed that the metaphysician is merely to
coordinate the results of the special sciences. There is clearly a need
for the coordination of scientific results because scientific research
has become increasingly specialized and departmentalized; individual
scientific workers need to be made aware of what is going on in other
fields, sometimes because these fields impinge on their own, sometimes
because results obtained there have wider implications of which they
need to take account. One can scarcely see metaphysicians, however, or
indeed philosophers generally, performing this function of intellectual
contact man in a satisfactory fashion. It might then be supposed that
their concern with the world as a whole is to be interpreted as a
summing up and synthesizing of the results of the particular sciences.
Plato spoke of the philosopher as taking a synoptic view, and there is
often talk about the need to see things in the round and avoid the
narrowness of the average specialist, who, it is said, knows more and
more about less and less. If, however, it is a question of looking at
scientific results from a wider point of view and so of producing what
might be called a scientific picture of the world, the person best
qualified for the job is not any philosopher but rather a scientist of
large mind and wide interests. Metaphysics cannot be satisfactorily
understood as an account of the world as a whole if that description
suggests that the metaphysician is a sort of superscientist, unlimited
in his curiosity and gifted with a capacity for putting together other
people’s findings with a skill and imagination that none of them
individually commands. Only a scientist could hope to become such a
superscientist.
More hope for the metaphysician can be found, perhaps, along the
following lines. People want to know not only what the scientist makes
of the world but also what significance to assign to his account. People
experience the world at different levels and in different capacities:
they are not only investigators but also agents; they have a moral and a
legal, an aesthetic and a religious life in addition to their scientific
life. Man is a many-sided being; he needs to understand the universe in
the light of his different activities and experiences. There are
philosophers who appear to find no problem here; they argue that there
can be no possibility of, say, a moral or a religious vision of the
world that rivals the scientific vision. In this view, morals and
religion are matters of practice, not of theory; they do not rival
science but only complement it. This neutralist attitude, however, finds
little general favour; for most thinking people find it necessary to
choose whether to go all the way with science, at the cost of abandoning
religion and even morals, or to stick to a religious or moral world
outlook even if it means treating scientific claims with some reserve.
The practice of the moral life is often believed to proceed on
assumptions that can hardly be accepted if science is taken to have the
last word about what is true. Accordingly, it becomes necessary to
produce some rational assessment of the truth claims of the different
forms of experience, to try to think out a scheme in which justice is
done to them all. Many familiar systems of metaphysics profess to do
just that; among others there are Materialism, which favours the claims
of science; Idealism, which sees deeper truth in religion and the moral
life; and the peculiar dualism of the 18th-century German philosopher
Immanuel Kant, which holds that science gives the truth about phenomena,
while reserving a noumenal, or supersensible, sphere for moral agency.
This conception of metaphysics as offering an account of the world
or, as is more often said, of experience as a whole, accords more
obviously with the position of those who see ultimate reality as
immanent, or inherent in what is immediately known, than of those who
take it to be transcendent, or beyond the limits of ordinary experience.
It is possible, in fact, to subscribe to the legitimacy of metaphysics
as so understood without postulating the existence of any special
entities known only to the metaphysician—a claim that plain men have
often taken to connect metaphysics with the occult. This is not to say,
of course, that metaphysical problems admit of easy solutions when
understood along these lines. There is a variety of widely different
ways of taking the world as a whole: depending on which aspect or
aspects of experience the individual metaphysician finds especially
significant; each claims to be comprehensive and to confute the claims
of its rivals, yet none has succeeded in establishing itself as the
obviously correct account. Even systems that are widely condemned as
impossible, such as Materialism, turn out in practice to command
constantly renewed support as new discoveries in the sciences suggest
new ways of dealing with old difficulties. A cynic might take such facts
as meaning that people subscribe to theories of this sort more as a
matter of emotional than of rational conviction; metaphysics, as Bradley
remarked with surprising frankness, consists in the finding of bad
reasons for what one believes upon instinct.
Nature and scope of metaphysics » Characterizations of metaphysics » The
science of first principles
Another phrase used by Bradley in his preliminary discussion of
metaphysics is “the study of first principles,” or ultimate, irrefutable
truths.
Metaphysics could be said to provide a theory of first principles if
it furnished men with a set of concepts in the light of which they could
arrive at the connected account of experience as a whole just spoken of,
and the two descriptions of the subject would thus be two sides of a
single coin. The idea that metaphysics has to do with first principles,
however, has wider implications.
The term “first principles” is a translation of the Greek word
archai. An arche is something from which an argument proceeds—it can be
either a primary premise or an ultimate presupposition. Plato, in a
famous passage in Politeia (The Republic), contrasted two different
attitudes to archai: namely that of the mathematician, who lays down or
hypothesizes certain things as being true and then proceeds to deduce
their consequences without further examining their validity; and that of
the dialectician, who proceeds backward, not forward, from his primary
premises and then seeks to ground them in an arche that is not
hypothesized at all. Unfortunately, no concrete details exist of the way
in which Plato himself thought this program could be carried out;
instead he spoke of it only in the most general terms. The suggestion,
nevertheless, that metaphysics is superior to any other intellectual
discipline in having a fully critical attitude toward its first
principles is one that still continues to be made, and it needs some
examination.
As regards mathematics, for example, it might be said that
mathematicians could be uncritical about the first principles of their
science in the following ways: (1) They might take as self-evidently
true or universally applicable some axiom or primary premise that turned
out later not to possess this property. (2) They might assume among
their first principles certain propositions about existence—to the
effect that only certain kinds of things could be proper objects of
mathematical inquiry (rational as opposed to irrational numbers, for
example)—and time might indeed reveal that the assumption was
inappropriate. The remedy for both sorts of error, however, is to be
found within the realm of mathematics itself; the development of the
discipline has consisted precisely in eliminating mistakes of this kind.
It is not clear even that the discovery and removal of antinomies in the
foundations of mathematics is work for the metaphysician, although
philosophically minded persons like Gottlob Frege, a German
mathematician and logician, and Bertrand Russell, perhaps the best known
English philosopher of the 20th century, have been much concerned with
them. The situation is not fundamentally different when the empirical
sciences are considered. Admittedly, the exponents of these sciences
give more hostages to fortune insofar as they have to assume from the
first the general correctness of the results of other disciplines; there
can be no question of their checking on these for themselves.
Mathematicians, too, begin by assuming the validity of common argument
forms without making any serious attempt to validate them, and there is
nothing seriously wrong with their proceeding in this manner. If
confidence in bad logic has sometimes been responsible for holding up
mathematical advance, bolder mathematicians have always known in
practice that the right thing to do is to let the argument take them
wherever it will on strictly mathematical lines, leaving it to logicians
to recognize the fact and adjust their theory at their convenience.
It thus seems that the assertion that a special science like
mathematics is uncritical about its archai is false; there is a sense in
which mathematicians are constantly strengthening their basic premises.
As regards the corresponding claim about metaphysics, it has at one time
or another been widely believed (1) that it is the business of
metaphysics to justify the ultimate assumptions of the sciences, and (2)
that in metaphysics alone there are no unjustified assumptions.
Concerning (1), the question that needs to be asked is how the
justification is supposed to take place. It has been argued that the
metaphysician might, on one interpretation of his function, be said to
offer some defense of science generally by placing it in relation to
other forms of experience. To do this, however, is not to justify any
particular scientific assumptions. In point of fact, particular
scientific assumptions get their justification, if anywhere, when a move
is made from a narrower to a more comprehensive science; what is assumed
in geology, for example, may be proved in physics. But this, of course,
has nothing to do with metaphysics. The difficulty with (2) is that of
knowing how any intellectual activity, however carefully conducted,
could be free of basic assumptions. Some metaphysicians (such as Bradley
and his Scottish predecessor J.F. Ferrier) have claimed that there is a
difference between their discipline and others insofar as metaphysical
propositions alone are self-reinstating. For example, the Cartesian
proposition cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”) is
self-reinstating: deny that you think, and in so doing you think; deny
that you exist, and the very fact gives proof of your existence. Even if
it could be made out that propositions of this kind are peculiar to
metaphysics, however, it would not follow that everything in metaphysics
has this character. The truth is, rather, that no paradox is involved in
denying most fundamental metaphysical claims, such as the assertion of
the Materialist that there is nothing that cannot be satisfactorily
explained in material terms or the corresponding principle of Aristotle
that there is nothing that does not serve some purpose.
The view that metaphysics, or indeed philosophy generally, is
uniquely self-critical is among the myths of modern thought.
Philosophers rely on the results of other disciplines just as other
people do; they do not pause to demonstrate the legitimacy of the
principles of simple arithmetic before entering on calculations in the
course of their work, nor do they refrain from employing the reductio ad
absurdum type of refutation (i.e., showing an absurdity to which a
proposition leads when carried to its logical conclusion) until they
have assured themselves that this is a valid way of confuting an
opponent. Even in their own field they tend, like painters, to work
within traditions set by great masters rather than to think everything
out from scratch for themselves. That philosophy in practice is not the
fully self-critical activity its exponents claim it to be is shown
nowhere more clearly than in the reception that philosophers give to
theories that are unfashionable; they more often subject them to
conventional abuse than to patient critical examination. It is,
nevertheless, from the conviction that philosophy, and especially
metaphysical philosophy, operates without unjustified assumptions that
current claims about the superiority of this branch of thinking derive
their force. This conviction connects with the views already mentioned,
that metaphysics is the science of first principles and that the
principles in question are ineluctable in the sense that they are
operative in their own denial.
Nature and scope of metaphysics » Metaphysics and other branches of
philosophy
It may be useful at this point to consider the relations of metaphysics
to other parts of philosophy. A strong tradition, derided by Kant,
asserted that metaphysics was the queen of the sciences, including the
philosophical sciences. The idea presumably was that those who worked
within fields such as logic and ethics, as well as physicists and
biologists, proceeded on assumptions that in the last resort had to be
approved or corrected by the metaphysician. Logic could be conceived as
a special study complete in itself only if the logician were allowed to
postulate a correspondence between the neat and tidy world of
propositions, which was the immediate object of his study, and the world
existing in fact; metaphysics might and sometimes did challenge the
propriety of this postulate. Similarly, ethics, like law, could get
nowhere without the assumption that the individual agent is a
self-contained unit answerable in general terms for what he does;
metaphysics had the duty of subjecting this assumption to critical
examination. As a result of such claims it was widely believed that any
results obtained by logicians or ethicists must at best be treated as
provisional; followers of Hegel, who advanced these claims with
passionate conviction, were inclined in consequence to regard logic and
ethics alike as minor branches of philosophy. It has been a feature of
20th-century philosophical thought, especially in Britain and the United
States, to dispute these Hegelian contentions and argue for the autonomy
of ethics and logic; that is, for their independence of metaphysics.
Thus, formal logicians of the school of Frege and Russell were apt to
claim that the principles of logic applied unequivocally to all thinking
whatsoever; there could be no question of their having to await
confirmation, still less correction, from the metaphysician. If
metaphysical arguments suggested that fundamental laws of logic such as
the principle of noncontradiction—that a statement and its contradictory
cannot both be true—might not be in order, the only conclusion to draw
was that such arguments must be confused: without observation of the
laws of logic there could be no coherent thinking of any sort.
Similarly, G.E. Moore, in a celebrated section of his Principia
Ethica (1903), tried to show that statements like “This is good” are sui
generis and cannot be reduced to statements of either natural or
metaphysical fact; the Idealist belief that ethics ultimately depends on
metaphysics rested on a delusion. Moore perhaps failed to see the force
of the Idealist challenge to the individualist assumptions on which much
ethical thinking proceeds, and he did not note that, in one respect at
least, ethical results can be dependent on those of metaphysics: if
metaphysics shows that the world is other than it is initially taken to
be, conclusions about what to do must be altered accordingly. Again, the
reaction among logicians to Hegelian attempts to merge logic into
metaphysics certainly went too far. There is a genuine philosophical
problem about the relation between the world of logic and the world of
fact, and it cannot be solved by simply repeating that logic is an
autonomous discipline whose principles deserve respect in themselves.
None of this, however, shows that metaphysics is the fundamental
philosophical discipline, the branch of philosophy that has the last
word about what goes on in all other parts of the subject.
Nature and scope of metaphysics » Metaphysics and analysis
Modern British and American philosophers commonly describe themselves as
engaged in philosophical analysis, as opposed to metaphysics. The
interests of a metaphysician, according to this view, are predominantly
speculative; he wants to reveal hitherto unknown facts about the world
and on that basis to construct a theory about the world as a whole. In
so doing he is necessarily engaged in activities that rival those of the
scientist, with the important difference that scientific theories can be
brought to the test of experience, whereas metaphysical theories cannot.
Eschewing this conception of philosophy as impossible, the critic of
metaphysics believes that philosophy should confine itself to the
analysis of concepts, which is a strictly second-order activity
independent of science and which need involve no metaphysical
commitment.
The notion of analysis in philosophy is far from clear. Analysis on
any account is meant to result in clarification, but it is not evident
how this result is to be achieved. For some, analysis involves the
substitution for the concept under examination of some other concept
that is recognizably like it (as Gilbert Ryle, an English Analyst,
elucidated the concept of mind by replacing it with the notion of “a
person behaving”); for others, analysis involves the substitution of
synonym for synonym. If the latter understanding of analysis is
required, as in Moore’s classic example of the analysis of brother as
male sibling, not much enlightenment is likely to ensue. If, however,
the philosopher is permitted to engage in what is sometimes pejoratively
described as “reductive analysis,” he will produce interest at the cost
of reintroducing speculation. Ryle’s Concept of Mind (1949) is a
challenging book just because it advances a thesis of real metaphysical
importance—that one can say everything one needs to say about minds
without postulating mental substance.
A further aspect of the situation that deserves mention is this. If
it is the case, as is often claimed, that analysis can be practiced
properly only when the analyst has no metaphysical presuppositions, by
what means does he select concepts for analysis? Would it not be
appropriate for him, in these circumstances, to take any concept of
reasonable generality as a suitable subject on which to practice his
art? It turns out, in fact, however, that the range of concepts commonly
recognized as philosophical is more limited than that, and that those
concepts to which Analytic philosophers give their attention are chosen
because of their wider philosophical bearings. Thus, recent philosophers
have paid particular attention to the concept of knowledge not just
because it is a notion whose analysis has long proved difficult but also
because on one account at least it involves an immediately experienced
mental act—something that many Analysts would like to proscribe as
mythical. Similarly, the celebrated analysis of the idea of causality
put forward by David Hume was not undertaken out of idle curiosity but
with a wider purpose in mind: to undermine both the Aristotelian and the
Cartesian views of the world and to substitute for them an atomism of
immediate appearances in which all objects were “loose and
separate”—that is, logically independent one of another. The insight
into the constitution of nature promised in different ways by Aristotle
and Descartes was an illusion, the truth being that scientific advance
serves only to “stave off our ignorance a little.” What Hume said about
causation connects internally with his views about what exists. Despite
his polemic against books of “divinity and school metaphysics,” he had a
metaphysics of his own to recommend.
The truth is that metaphysics and analysis are not separate in the
way modern Analytic philosophers pretend. The speculative philosophers
of the past were certainly not averse to analysis: witness the splendid
discussion of the concept of knowledge in Plato’s Theaetetus, or, for a
more recent example, Bradley’s account of the meanings of “self.” The
legend that a metaphysical philosopher has his eye so firmly set on
higher things that he is entirely careless of the conceptual structure
he seeks to recommend is absolutely without foundation. A metaphysical
philosopher is a philosopher after all: argument and the passion for
clarification are in his blood. Although some contemporary philosophers
profess to undertake analysis entirely for its own sake and without
explicit metaphysical motivation, it may be doubted if their claim is
capable of being sustained. The “logical analysis” practiced by Russell
in the early part of the 20th century was not metaphysically neutral,
nor was the analysis of the Logical Positivists, who recommended a
strongly scientific view of the world. Some current analytic work is
motivated less by the desire to forward an overall theory than by a wish
to destroy a prevailing or previously held theory that is considered
objectionable. To seek to overthrow a metaphysical theory, however, is
itself to engage in metaphysics—not very interesting metaphysics,
perhaps, but metaphysics all the same.
It may be added, as a historical note, that the Rationalist
philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries, who emphasized the
predominant role of reason in the construction of a system of knowledge,
believed that the philosopher’s task fell into two parts. He must first
break down complex concepts into their simple parts; this was a matter
of analysis. Then he must proceed to show how knowledge of these simples
would serve to explain the detailed constitution of things; this would
involve synthesis. That there are deep obscurities in this program—e.g.,
whether it is a matter of analyzing concepts or getting down to the
simplest elements of things—is less important in the present context
than that analysis and synthesis were thus taken to be complementary.
The classical statement of this point of view is to be found in
Descartes’s Discours de la méthode (1637; Discourse on Method), with the
corresponding passages in the Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii (published
posthumously 1701; Rules for the Direction of the Mind). That the idea
persisted well into the 18th century is evidenced by the remarks made by
Kant in his essay Untersuchung über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der
natürlichen Theologie und der Moral (1764; Inquiry into the Distinctness
of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morals), in which he said that
metaphysics was not yet in a position to pass beyond the stage of
analysis to that of synthesis. He did not mean that for the time being
philosophy must remain entirely nonmetaphysical, in the way some moderns
suppose it can, but rather that it needs to go on elaborating a
conceptual scheme, which, however, cannot be used constructively until
it is complete. Actually, Kant belied his own professions at the time
insofar as he thought himself in possession of a definitive proof of
God’s existence, which he explained in his essay Der einzig mögliche
Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseyns Gottes (1763; “The Only
Possible Ground for a Demonstration of the Existence of God”). This,
however, only illustrates the not very surprising fact that philosophers
are often less clear about the nature of their own activities than they
think.
Problems in metaphysics
To give a comprehensive account of the main problems of metaphysics in
the space of a few pages is clearly quite impossible. What follows is
necessarily highly selective and to that extent misleading; it,
nevertheless, attempts to offer an introduction to metaphysical thinking
itself rather than reflection on the nature of metaphysics.
Problems in metaphysics » The existence of forms, categories, and
particulars » Forms
The early Greek philosophers asked the question ti to on, “What is
existent?” or “What is really there?” They originally interpreted this
as a question about the stuff out of which things were ultimately made,
but a new twist was given to the inquiry when Pythagoras, in the late
6th century bc, arrived at the answer that what was really there was
number. Pythagoras conceived what is there in terms not of matter but of
intelligible structure; it was the latter that gave each type of thing
its distinctive character and made it what it was. The idea that
structure could be understood in numerical terms was probably suggested
to Pythagoras by his discovery that there are exact correlations between
the lengths of the strings of a lyre and the notes they produce. By a
bold extrapolation he seems to have surmised that what held in this case
must hold in all cases.
The Pythagorean theory that what is really there is number is the
direct ancestor of the Platonic theory that what is really there is
Forms, or Ideas (eidē, or ideai). Plato’s Forms were also intelligible
structures and not material elements, but they differed from Pythagorean
numbers by being conceived of as separately existent. There was, as
Plato put it, a “place accessible to the intelligence,” which was the
place, or realm, of Forms. Each Form was a genuine existent, in the
sense of being precisely what it pretended to be; the Form of Beauty,
for example, was beautiful through and through. By contrast, the many
particular things that partook of or resembled what was truly beautiful
were one and all defective. However beautiful any one of them might be,
it was also in another respect lacking in beauty. It turned out to
possess contradictory characteristics, and as such could never be
identified with true reality.
Plato had taken over from his predecessor Heracleitus, who flourished
at about the beginning of the 5th century bc, the doctrine that the
world of sensible things is a world of things in constant flux; as he
put it in the Theaetetus, nothing is in this world because everything is
in a state of becoming something else. Forms were needed to provide
stable objects for knowledge as well as to answer the question of what
is ultimately real. Although Plato played down the reality of sensible
things, making them mere objects of opinion and describing them as
falling between what is and what is not, he did not deny their
existence. It was not his thesis that Forms alone exist. On the
contrary, he appears to have held that God (who was certainly not a
Form) had somehow fashioned the physical world on the model of the
Forms, using space as his material. This is the description that is
given in the Timaeus, in a passage that Plato perhaps meant his readers
not to take quite literally but that stated his view as plainly as he
thought it could be stated. In this passage God appears in the guise of
the “Demiurge,” although he is referred to freely in other Platonic
dialogues. Souls were also distinct from Forms in Plato’s thought.
In the discussions that developed around the theory of Forms, many
difficulties were revealed, most of them familiar to Plato himself. The
question of how the one Form was supposed to relate to the many
particulars that participated in or resembled it was nowhere
satisfactorily answered. The difficulty turned on how the Form was to be
thought of at once as an existent and as a structure. Plato seemed on
occasion to think of it as a structure hypostatized, or given real
existence. This thesis led to the antinomies exposed in the “third man”
argument. According to this theory, particular men were alleged to be
human because of their relationship to “Man himself”; i.e., the Form of
man. But whence did the latter derive its nature? Must there not be a
second Form to explain what the first Form and its particulars have in
common, and will not this generate an infinite regress? Again, the
problem of the precise population of the world of Forms never got a
definitive solution, perhaps because the theory of Forms was put to more
than one purpose. Sometimes it was said that there is a Form
corresponding to every general word, but elsewhere the theory was that
what is merely negative (e.g., lifeless) has no need of a special Form,
nor does what is manufactured. There is even a question as to whether
trivial everyday things such as mud and hair and dirt have Forms, though
it is agreed that there is a Form of man.
The problems just referred to were stated trenchantly in Plato’s
dialogue the Parmenides; the discussion there ends with the statement
that the Forms must be retained if an account of intelligible discourse
is to be given, but no indication is offered as to how the theory is to
be refurbished. Some Platonic scholars have inferred that Plato
virtually gave it up, but such evidence as there is suggests that he
only transformed it into a theory of Form-numbers, more openly
Pythagorean than the earlier version. There are many references in
Aristotle to this theory of Form-numbers, but no writing of Plato’s own
on the subject has survived, and it is virtually impossible at this late
stage to say what this theory really comprised.
One further feature of the theory of Forms must be mentioned here:
the view that there is a supremely important Form, the Form of goodness,
or of the Good, which somehow determines the contents of the world of
Forms and brings order into it. In a celebrated but brief and
tantalizing passage in Politeia, the Form of the Good is spoken of as
being to the intelligible realm what the sun is to the visible realm;
just as the sun makes living things grow and renders them visible, so
the Good is responsible for the existence and intelligibility of Forms,
though it is itself “on the other side of Being.” This passage had a
tremendous historical influence on the Neoplatonists, who saw it as
anticipating the ultimate ineffable reality—the One, from which
everything describable was in some way an emanation—in which they came
to believe. It seems possible, however, that Plato had no such mystical
thoughts in mind but simply wanted to say that the world of Forms is
ordered through and through, everything in it being there for a purpose.
The Form of Good is, in fact, the counterpart of the nous (Mind) of
Anaxagoras, another of Plato’s predecessors, which was supposed to
arrange everything for the best.
Problems in metaphysics » The existence of forms, categories, and
particulars » Categories and universals
The most famous critic of Plato’s theory of Forms was Aristotle, who
devised his doctrine of categories largely to counter it. According to
this doctrine, “being is spoken of in many ways”: one can say that there
are such things as individual horses, but one can also say that there is
such a thing as being a horse, or as being upside down. Expressions can
be classified under various heads: predicates signify substances (e.g.,
“man” or “horse”), qualities (e.g., “white”), relations (e.g.,
“greater”), quantities (e.g., “three yards long”), time (e.g., “last
year”), and so on—sometimes Aristotle listed ten categories, sometimes
only eight. The kind of being that any predicate possesses, however, is
derivative in comparison with the being of an individual substance, a
particular man or a particular horse. It is such things that exist in
the primary sense, and it is upon their existence that the existence of
other types of being depends. Or, to put the point in not quite
Aristotelian terms, primary substances are the only concrete existents;
Socrates, the bearer of a proper name, exists in a way in which humanity
or whiteness or being greater do not. The latter are really no more than
abstractions, and nothing but confusion can arise from neglecting that
fact.
Mention has already been made of the difficulties into which this
doctrine led when it came to describing primary substances; it appeared
that these entities could not be characterized but only named or pointed
to, a conclusion accepted much later by Ludwig Wittgenstein, a
20th-century philosopher, in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and by
Russell in his lectures on logical atomism. These difficulties, however,
were not seen at the time the theory was promulgated, and it is more
important here to emphasize the fact that it undermined any doctrine of
the Platonic type. To argue that Forms, or numbers, alone are real is to
argue for the reality of abstractions; to put the point succinctly,
beauty exists only so long as something is beautiful, and that something
must be a concrete individual. Or if this is not quite true (for, after
all, it could be said that there is such a thing as having a million
sides even if nothing in fact has a million sides), concrete existence
must precede abstract existence in some cases at least: the “x” in “x is
red” must sometimes be replaceable by an actual rather than a merely
possible entity.
A prominent subject of philosophical discussion in the Middle Ages
was what came to be known as the problem of universals, which concerned
the ontological status, or type of existence, to be assigned to the
referents of general words. One of Plato’s critics had said, “I see
particular horses, but not horseness”; and Plato had answered, “That is
because you have eyes but no intelligence.” There can be no doubt that
Plato thought that horseness, the Form of horse, or Horse itself, to use
his own expression, was something that existed separately; it could be
discerned not by the bodily eyes but by the eye of the soul. The view
that besides individual horses there also exists the Form of horse was
known in the Middle Ages as Realism. Aristotle was also alleged to be a
Realist, because he too thought that Forms were really there, although
only as embodied in particular instances. More skeptical philosophers
denied the reality of universals altogether, some identifying them with
thoughts (conceptualists), others with mere names (nominalists).
The dispute about universals was in fact very confused. At least two
quite separate issues were involved. First of all, there was the
question about the status to be assigned to whatever it was that
predicates referred to; this question seemed urgent just because, for
example, geometricians were able to discuss the properties of the
triangle or the circle. What and where were the triangle and the circle?
In fact, the Aristotelian doctrine of categories had already indicated
that the being of any predicate was necessarily different from that of
primary substances; the circle did not and could not exist as this man
or this horse did. When Aristotle is described as a Realist in the
dispute about universals, the description is very misleading. In one
sense he did not believe that universals are real at all; in another
sense, however, he did, and this is where the second issue arose. Some
people who denied the reality of universals wanted to say that all
classification is artificial; the descriptions men give of things depend
upon their interests as much as upon what is really there. Aristotle, by
contrast, believed in a doctrine of natural kinds; he thought that every
particular horse, for example, embodied the form or objective essence of
horse, which was accordingly a genuine, if abstract, constituent of the
world. The question of the extent to which classification is artificial
is clearly quite different from that of the status of universals; it
remains to be answered even if the latter problem is dismissed, as it is
by modern philosophers who say that only proper names and individuating
phrases have referents; general words do not. These differences,
however, were not clearly seen either in the Middle Ages or during the
17th century, when the whole question was discussed at length by
philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.
Problems in metaphysics » The existence of forms, categories, and
particulars » Basic particulars
In discussions of the problem of universals, it was frequently claimed,
especially by nominalists, that only particulars exist. The notion of a
particular is in many respects unclear. Strictly speaking, the terms
particular and universal are correlatives; a particular is an instance
of universal (for example, this pain, that noise). It would seem from
this that particulars and individuals should be the same, but there are
writers who distinguish them. Bradley, in his Principles of Logic
(1883), treated particulars as mere momentary instantiations of
universals and contrasted them with individuals as continuants
possessing internal diversity. An individual can be not merely
identified but also re-identified; because it lasts through time, it may
possess incompatible attributes at different periods of its history. A
particular, on the other hand, is nothing but an instantiation of an
attribute and as such must possess that attribute if it is to be
anything. Similarly, a particular can be met with once, but not again;
as time moves on, it passes out of existence and is replaced by another
particular that may resemble it but is not literally identical with it.
If particulars and individuals are thus distinguished, it is by no
means clear that only particulars exist, or indeed that they exist at
all; it could be that they are no more than abstract aspects of
genuinely concrete entities such as persons or material things. But
there are arguments on the other side, advanced in a variety of forms by
David Hume and Bertrand Russell. Hume believed that the ultimate
constituents of the world were either impressions or their fainter
copies, ideas; both were species of perceptions. Impressions he defined
as “internal and perishing existences”; they were of various kinds,
embracing feelings as well as such things as experienced colours and
smells, but all were at best extremely short-lived. Impressions arose in
human consciousness from unknown causes; their existence could not,
however, be denied. By contrast, the existence of continuing and
independent material objects and of continuing minds was extremely
precarious; analysis showed both to be no more than bundles of
perceptions, united by certain relations, and Hume more than once
referred to them as “fictions,” although it turned out on examination
that they were not fictions in the way ghosts are. Hume’s reasons for
advancing these views were primarily epistemological; he thought that
statements about continuants were all open to doubt, although statements
about the contents of immediate experience could not be challenged. When
it was a question of what really existed, the only sure answer was items
in consciousness—namely, impressions and ideas.
Russell, who was generally sympathetic to this answer, added another
argument derived from logic: proper names, he said, were names of
particulars, which must accordingly exist. Ordinary proper names (such
as “Socrates”) had other functions than to denote, but logically proper
names (“this” was Russell’s example) served simply to pick out objects
of immediate acquaintance. Russell was apparently unabashed by the
consequence that such objects would be both private to the experience of
particular persons and of very brief duration; he thought his doctrine
of “logical constructions,” which allowed for “inferred entities” on the
basis of what is immediately certain, would provide the publicity and
continuity necessary to do justice to actual experience. These
assumptions, however, have met with serious criticism. P.F. Strawson, a
British philosopher whose thought centres on the analysis of the
structure of ordinary language, especially in his Individuals: An Essay
in Descriptive Metaphysics (1959), not only attacked Russell’s account
of proper names but argued that experience demands a framework of basic
particulars that are not Russell’s momentary private objects but
continuing public existents—in fact, individuals in the terminology
explained above. If experience consisted of nothing but sounds, the
minimum prerequisite of intelligibility would be that there should be a
continuing master sound, an analogue in this medium of continuing
material substance in the material order. Without such basic particulars
as continuing material things, identification and reidentification would
be impossible. Strawson conceded that persons as well as things were
genuine continuants, but maintained all the same that the hypothesis
that reality might consist of nothing but minds was quite untenable.
Minds are no more than aspects of persons, and persons have bodies as
well as minds. Strawson agreed that disembodied existence was logically
possible, but added that such existence would make no sense except as a
survival of embodied existence in a common public world.
If this is correct, what exists cannot consist, as Hume supposed, of
momentary items but must rather take the form of substances in the
Aristotelian sense. These act as basic particulars in the actual
intellectual scheme men adopt. Strawson, however, was not content merely
to assert this fact; he wanted to argue that things must be like this if
reference and description in their familiar form are to be possible at
all. His main theory, which plainly owes a debt to Kant as well as to
Wittgenstein, was worked out with primary reference to the physical
world. It would be interesting to know if an examination of social
reality would yield comparable results: whether individual persons or
something larger—continuing societies or institutions—should be taken as
basic particulars in that sphere. Many philosophers assert dogmatically
that a society is nothing but an aggregate of its individual members.
Nevertheless, men are members of society in virtue of their performance
of a number of social roles, and role itself is a concept that makes
sense only if the notion of society is presupposed. In one sense, a
society is nothing apart from its members; remove them, and it would
disappear. Equally, however, the members themselves are what they are
because of their various roles; it is arguable that they would be
nothing apart from their social relations. Hence, the force of Bradley’s
remark is evident, namely, that “the ‘individual’ apart from the
community is not anything real.”
It remains to add here that a number of philosophers have tried to
argue that the basic items in reality should be described not as
substances but in some other terms. Russell at one stage in his career
spoke of the world as consisting of events; his former colleague A.N.
Whitehead made the notion of process central in his metaphysics.
Developments in modern physics undoubtedly lend a certain plausibility
to these and similar views. Yet it remains difficult to understand what
an event could be in which nothing was concerned, or how there could be
a process in which nothing was in process. Event and process, in fact,
are expressions that belong to derivative categories in the general
Aristotelian scheme; like all other categories, they depend on the
category of substance. If the latter is removed, as these metaphysicians
propose to remove it, it is hard to know what is left.
Problems in metaphysics » The existence of God
Perhaps the most celebrated issue in classical metaphysics concerned the
existence of God. God in this connection is the name of “the perfect
Being” or “the most real of all things”; the question is whether it is
necessary to recognize the existence of such a being as well as of
things that either are or might be objects of everyday experience. A
number of famous arguments have been advanced from the time of the
Greeks in favour of the thesis that such a recognition is necessary. The
neatest and most ingenious was the a priori argument of St. Anselm in
the 11th century, who said that “that than which nothing greater can be
conceived” must exist in fact as well as in thought, for if it existed
only in thought and not in fact, something greater than it could be
conceived, namely the same thing existing in fact. God necessarily
exists, because the idea of God is the idea of that than which nothing
greater can be conceived. This is the argument later known as the
ontological proof. Relatively few philosophical theologians, either in
the Middle Ages or later, could bring themselves to accept this bold
piece of reasoning (although Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Hegel all
accepted it in principle); most preferred to ground their case for God’s
existence on premises that claimed to be empirical. Thus, St. Thomas
Aquinas, perhaps the most influential Scholastic philosopher, in the
13th century argued that to explain the fact of motion in the world, the
existence of a prime mover must be presupposed; that to account for
contingent or dependent being the existence of something that is
necessary or self-contained must be presumed; that to see why the world
is orderly and why the different things in it fit together harmoniously,
a situation that might not have obtained, a Creator who fashioned it on
these lines must be postulated—adding in each case “and this all men
call ‘God’.” These are versions of the first cause argument and the
argument from design, which were to figure prominently in the thinking
of later theistically inclined metaphysicians.
The first cause argument should, perhaps, be examined in somewhat
greater detail, because it both has an immediate plausibility and lies
at the basis of many different kinds of metaphysical systems (that of
Hegel, for example, as well as that of Aquinas). The argument begins
with the innocent-looking statement that something contingent exists; it
may be some particular thing, such as oneself, or it may be the world in
general (thus, the description of the proof as being a contingentia
mundi, or “from the contingency of the world”). In describing oneself or
the world as contingent, one means only that the thing in question does
not exist through itself alone; it owes its being to the activity of
some other thing, as a person owes his being to his parents. Contingent
things are not self-complete; they each demand the existence of
something else if they are to be explained. Thus, the move is made from
contingent to necessary being; it is felt that contingent things, of
whatever order, cannot be endlessly dependent on other contingent things
but must presuppose a first cause that is self-complete and so exists
necessarily. In Hegel the necessary being is not a separate existent
but, as it were, an order of things; the loose facts of everyday life
and even of science are said to point to a system that is all-embracing
and in which everything is necessarily what it is. The principle of the
argument, however, is unchanged despite the change in the conclusion.
Damaging criticism was brought against all the traditional arguments
for God’s existence by Hume and Kant in the 18th century. The
ontological proof was undermined by the contention that “being is not a
real predicate”; existence is not part of the concept of God in the way
in which, for example, being all-powerful is. To say that something
exists is not to specify a concept further but to claim that it has an
instance; it cannot be discovered whether a concept has an instance by
merely inspecting it. The first cause argument, it was contended,
suffers from two fatal weaknesses. Even if it is correct in its
assertion that contingent being presupposes necessary being, it cannot
identify the necessary being in question with God (as happened in each
of the Thomistic proofs) without resurrecting the ontological argument.
If it is true, as supporters of the causal proof suppose, that God alone
can answer the description of a necessary being, then whatever exists
necessarily is God and whatever is God exists necessarily. Modern
supporters of the causal proof have tried to meet this objection by
saying that the equivalence is one of concepts, not of concept and
existent; the existence of a necessary being is already established in
the first part of the argument, and the equivalence in the second part
of the argument is between the concept of necessary being and the
concept of God. In other words, they distinguish between existence and
essence. In the first part of the argument, the existence of a necessary
being is proved; in the second part of the argument, the essence of that
necessary being is identified with what men call God. Beyond this first
contended weakness, however, there are grave difficulties in the move
from contingent to necessary existence. Things in the experienced world
are causally related, and some account of this relationship can be given
in terms of the temporal relations of events; causal relations hold
primarily between kinds of events, and a cause is, at least, a regular
antecedent of a specific kind of effect. But when an attempt is made to
extend the notion of causality from a relationship that holds within
experience to one that connects the experienced world as a whole to
something that falls wholly outside it, there is no longer anything firm
on which to hold. The activities of God cannot precede happenings in the
world because God is, by definition, not in time; and how the
relationship is to be understood in these circumstances becomes highly
problematic. Some metaphysicians, like some recent theologians, seek to
evade the difficulty by saying that God is not the cause of the world
but its ground, or again by distinguishing causes of becoming, which are
temporal, from a cause of being, which is not. It is doubtful whether
these moves do more than restate the problem in different terms.
The argument from design is itself a form of causal argument and
accordingly suffers from all the difficulties mentioned above, together
with some of its own, as Hume and Kant both point out. Even on its own
terms it is wrong to conclude the existence of a Creator rather than an
architect. Furthermore, it infers that the being in question has
unlimited powers, when all that the evidence seems to warrant is that
its powers are very great. The argument lost much of its force by the
publication of the English naturalist Charles Darwin’s theory of natural
selection. The unbroken reign of law throughout natural evolution is
impressive, but as a line of reasoning it does not seem to bear close
examination.
The metaphysical problem of God’s existence is more of an issue today
than the problem of universals; there are still thinkers who hope to
restate the old proofs in more convincing ways. The ontological proof,
in particular, has won renewed attention from thinkers such as Norman
Malcolm, a philosopher strongly influenced by Wittgenstein, and Charles
Hartshorne, an American Realist whose form of theism is called
panentheism (the doctrine of a God who has an unchanging essence but who
completes himself in an advancing experience). Increasingly, however,
philosophers of religion are preoccupied not with these metaphysical
abstractions but with the status and force of actual religious claims.
“The most real of all things” is no longer at the centre of their
attention: they seek to investigate God as a suitable object for
worship.
Problems in metaphysics » The soul, mind, and body » The soul–body
relationship
As well as believing in the reality of Forms, Plato believed in the
immortality of the human soul. The soul was, he thought, an entity that
was fundamentally distinct from the body although it could be and often
was affected by its association with the body, being dragged down by
what he called in one passage “the leaden weights of becoming.” The soul
was simple, not composite, and thus not liable to dissolution as were
material things; further, it had the power of self-movement, again in
contrast to material things. Ideally the soul should rule and guide the
body, and it could ensure that this situation persisted by seeing that
the bodily appetites were indulged to the minimum extent necessary for
the continuance of life. The true philosopher, as Plato put it in the
Phaedo, made his life a practice for death because he knew that after
death the soul would be free of bodily ties and would return to its
native element. He also thought that the soul was “akin” to the Forms;
it was through the intellect, the purest element in the soul, that the
Forms were discovered.
Plato mentioned and attempted to refute alternative accounts of the
relationship of soul and body, including a Pythagorean view that
described the soul as an “attunement” of the body and thus tried to
explicate it as a form or structure rather than an independently
existing thing. A theory of this kind was worked out but not taken to
its logical conclusion by Aristotle in his treatise De anima (On the
Soul). Aristotle defined soul in terms of functions. The soul of a plant
was concerned with nutrition and reproduction, that of an animal with
these and with sensation and independent movement, that of a man with
all these and with rational activity. The soul was, in each case, the
form of some body, and the clear implication of this was that it would
disappear as the body in question dissolved. To be more accurate, the
soul was the principle of life in something material; it needed the
material element to exist, although it was not itself either material or
immaterial but, to put it crudely, an abstraction. Even though Aristotle
wasclearly committed by everything he said in the earlier parts of the
De anima to the view that the soul is not anything substantial, he
nevertheless distinguished toward the end of this work between what he
called the active and the passive intellects and spoke of the former in
Platonic terms. The active intellect was, it appears, separate from the
rest of the soul; it came “from outside” and was in fact immortal. It
was, moreover, essential to the soul considered as rational, for
“without this nothing thinks.” Aristotle thus showed the Platonic side
of his thought in the very act of trying to emancipate himself from this
aspect of Platonism.
Problems in metaphysics » The soul, mind, and body » The mind–body
relationship
In more recent metaphysics less has been heard of the soul and more of
the mind; the old problem of the relationship of soul and body is now
that of the relationship of mind and body. Most, if not all, subsequent
discussion of this subject has been affected by the thinking of
Descartes. In his Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (1641; Meditations
on First Philosophy), he argued that there was a total and absolute
distinction between mental and material substance. The defining
characteristic of matter was to occupy space; the defining
characteristic of mind was to be conscious or, in a broad sense of the
term, to think. Material substance was, so to speak, all one, although
packets of it were more or less persistent; mental substance existed in
the form of individual minds, with God as the supreme example. The
mental and the material orders were each complete in themselves, under
God; it was this fact that made it appropriate for him to use the
technical term substance in this context: mental substance and material
substance. The logical consequence of this view, drawn by some later
Cartesians, was that there can be no interaction between mind and body;
all causality is immanent, within one order or the other, and any
appearance of mind affecting body or of body affecting mind must be
explained as the result of a special intervention by God, who, on the
occasion of changes in one substance, brings it about that there are
corresponding changes in the other. Descartes himself, however, had no
sympathy with this view, which was called occasionalism. On the
contrary, he stated explicitly that he was not in his body as a pilot is
in a ship but was “more intimately” bound up with it. Mind could affect
body and vice versa because mind and body had a specially close
relationship, which was particularly evident in the aspects of conscious
life that have to do with sensation, imagination, and emotion as opposed
to pure thought.
Descartes’s conviction that, despite their intimate union in this
life, mind is really distinct from body sprang from his confidence in
the cogito argument. It was possible, he believed, to doubt the
existence of his body (what was certain was only that he had the
experience of having a body, and this might be illusory) but not the
existence of his mind, for the very act of doubting was itself mental.
That mind existed was evident from the immediate testimony of
consciousness; that body existed was something that needed an elaborate
proof, involving his doctrine of clear and distinct ideas and his
attempt to establish the existence of a God who is no deceiver. Apart
from this, Descartes appealed to arguments of a broadly Platonic type to
bring out what was truly distinctive about mind. He admitted that
sensation and imagination could be understood only if referred to the
mind–body complex but contended that acts of the pure intellect and of
will (here his thought was influenced by that of St. Augustine, the
great 5th-century Christian thinker) belonged to the mind as it was in
itself. Descartes did not claim to have a philosophical proof of the
immortality of the soul—that, in his view, required the assurance of
revelation—but he did think that his theory prepared the way for that
doctrine by establishing the separate existence of mind.
The Cartesian account of mind and body had many critics even in
Descartes’s own day. Hobbes argued that nothing existed but matter in
motion; there was no such thing as mental substance, only material
substance. Materialism of a sort was also supported by Descartes’s
correspondent Pierre Gassendi, a scientist and Epicurean philosopher. A
generation later Spinoza was to refashion the whole Cartesian
metaphysics on bold lines. In place of the two distinct substances, each
complete in itself yet each liable to external interference should God
will it, Spinoza posited a single substance, God or Nature, possessed of
infinite attributes, of which the mental and the material alone are
known to men. The “modes,” or manifestations, of this substance were
what they were as a result of the necessities of its nature; arbitrary
will neither did nor could play any part in its activities. Whatever
manifested itself under one attribute had its counterpart in all the
others. It followed from this that to every mental event there was a
precisely corresponding physical event, and vice versa. A man was thus
not a mysterious union of two different elements but a part of the one
substance that, like all other parts, manifested itself in different
ways under different attributes. Spinoza did not explain why it was that
physical events could be correlated with mental events in the case of a
human being but not in that of, for example, a stone. His theory of
psycho-physical parallelism, however, has persisted independently of his
general metaphysics and has found supporters even in modern times.
One way in which Spinoza threw fresh light on the mind–body problem
was in calling attention to the influence of the body on the mind and in
taking seriously the suggestion that they be treated as a single unit.
In this respect, his work on the subject was far in advance of the
Empiricist philosophers of the next century. Hume notoriously dismissed
Cartesian substance as a “chimera” and argued that minds and bodies
alike were nothing but “bundles of perceptions,” interaction between
which was always possible in principle; in practice, however, he stuck
to the old-fashioned view that mind is one thing and body another and
did nothing to explore their actual relationships. Empiricist philosophy
of mind, both in Hume and in his successors, such as James Mill, was
generally crude; it consisted largely in an attempt to explain the
entire life of the mind in terms of Hume’s ontology of impressions and
ideas. Nor did Kant make much, if any, advance in this particular
direction, convinced as he was of the necessity of accepting an
empirical dualism of mind and body. It was left to Hegel and the
Idealists to look at the problem afresh and to bring out the way in
which mental life and bodily life are intimately bound together. The
accounts of action and cognition given by T.H. Green and Bradley, and
more recently by R.G. Collingwood, are altogether more enlightening than
those of Empiricist contemporaries just because they rest on a less
dogmatic basis and a closer inspection of fact.
No metaphysical problem is discussed today more vigorously than that
of mind and body. Three main positions are held. First, there are still
writers (e.g., H.D. Lewis in his work The Elusive Mind [1969]) who think
that Descartes was substantially right: mind and body are distinct, and
the “I” that thinks is a separate thing from the “I” that weighs 170
pounds. The testimony of consciousness is invoked as the main support of
this conclusion; it is alleged that all men know themselves to be what
they are, or at least who they are, apart from their bodily lives; it is
alleged again that their bodily lives present themselves as
experiences—i.e., as something mental. The existence of mind, as
Descartes claimed, is certain, that of body dubious and perhaps not
strictly provable. Second, there are writers such as Gilbert Ryle who
would like to take the Aristotelian theory to its logical conclusion and
argue that mind is nothing but the form of the body. Mind is not, as
Descartes supposed, something accessible only to its owner; it is rather
something that is obvious in whatever a person does. To put it crudely,
mind is simply behaviour. Finally, there are many philosophers who,
although more generally sympathetic to the second solution than to the
first, wish to provide for an “inner life” in a way in which
Behaviourism does not; P.F. Strawson is a typical example. To this end
they try to assert that the true unit is neither mind nor body but the
person. A person is something that is capable of possessing physical and
mental predicates alike. This is, of course, to say that the “I” that
knows simple arithmetic and the “I” that has lost weight recently are
the same. How they can be the same, however, has not so far been
explained by supporters of this view.
Aside from these main positions, an interesting development is the
stress laid by writers—such as Stuart Hampshire, an “ordinary language”
philosopher—on self-activity as the distinguishing characteristic of
mind. According to this view, a human being is a body among bodies but
is, as Plato said, self-moving as material things are not. That this
should be so—that human beings are possessed of wills and can in
favourable circumstances act freely—is taken as an ultimate fact neither
requiring nor capable of explanation. It is often denied that any
scientific discovery could give rational grounds for questioning this
fact. It is also stressed that the causality of a human being is
fundamentally different from that of a natural subject, intentional
action being quite other than mere behaviour determined from without.
Connected with these topics is the problem, much discussed in recent
philosophy as a result of the rise of cybernetics, of what
differentiates men from machines. Two answers used to be given: the
power to think and consciousness. Now, however, there exist machines
whose calculating abilities far surpass those of any human being; such
machines may not literally think, but they certainly arrive at
conclusions. Furthermore, it is not true that their operations are of a
purely routine nature: there is a sense in which they can improve their
performance in the light of their “experiences.” They even have an
analogue of consciousness in the sensitivity they show to external
stimuli. These facts suggest that the gap between minds and machines is
less wide than it has often been thought to be; they do not, however,
destroy it altogether. Human beings possess powers of creative thought
unlike anything found in machines; as Noam Chomsky, an American
linguistics scholar, has stressed (and as Descartes urged in his
Discours de la méthode), the ability of human beings to handle language
in such a way that they comprehend any one of an infinite number of
possible expressions is something that cannot be explained in mechanical
terms. Again, as J.R. Lucas, a British philosopher, has argued, human
beings have the ability to diagnose and correct their own limitations in
a way to which there is no parallel in machines. As some older
philosophers put it, man is a being with the power of
self-transcendence; he can work within a system, but he can also move to
another level and so see the shortcomings of the system. A machine can
only work within a system; it operates according to rules but cannot
change them of its own accord.
Finally, mention should be made of an extreme Materialist solution to
the mind–body problem: this solution holds that states of mind are in
fact states of the brain. Supporters of this theory agree that the two
are separate in idea but argue that physiology shows that despite this
they are contingently identical. What seems to be a state of mind, above
all to its possessor, is really a state of the brain, and mind is thus
reduced to matter after all. It is not clear, however, why physiologists
should be granted the last word on a topic like this, and, even if it
were agreed that they should be, the correlations so far established
between mental occurrences and states of the brain are at best sketchy
and incomplete. Central-state Materialism, as this theory is called,
professes to have the weight of contemporary science behind it, but it
turns out in fact to have drawn to a remarkable degree on what it thinks
will be the science of tomorrow.
Problems in metaphysics » Nature and the external world
The problem of the existence of material things, first propounded by
Descartes and repeatedly discussed by subsequent philosophers,
particularly those working within the Empiricist tradition, belongs to
epistemology, or the science of knowledge, rather than metaphysics; it
concerns the question of how it can be known whether there is a reality
independent of mind. There are, however, problems about nature and the
external world that are genuinely metaphysical.
Problems in metaphysics » Nature and the external world » The reality of
material things
There is first of all the question of the status, or standing, of
material things, the kind of being they possess. It has been repeatedly
suggested by metaphysical philosophers that the external world is in
some way defective in reality, that it is a mere phenomenon, something
that seems to be what it is not. Plato, as has already been pointed out,
held that objects of the senses generally answered this description;
they each appeared to possess characteristics that they could not in
fact have (water could not be at once hot and cold) and were to that
extent delusive rather than real. There was no stability in the world of
phenomena and therefore no true reality. In taking this view, Plato drew
no contrast between the world of nature and the world of man, although
he undoubtedly believed that souls had a superior status. Leibniz, a
later philosopher who also followed this general line of thought, began
by explicitly opposing souls to material things. To speak precisely,
nothing truly existed except monads, and monads were souls, or spiritual
beings: all had perceptions, although these varied enormously in degree
of clarity (the perceptions of the monads constituting what is commonly
called a stone were singularly faint). Although the final description of
the world must thus be given in mental terms, it did not follow that
nature as normally perceived is a total illusion. Men perceive as well
as think, and, although perception is in fact simply a confused form of
thought, it is not for that reason to be set aside altogether. The world
of nature, the world of things in space and time, is, as Leibniz put it,
a “well-founded phenomenon”; it is what all men must judge to be there,
given that they are not pure intellects but necessarily remain to some
extent prisoners of their senses.
A theory on somewhat similar lines was worked out by Kant in the
Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781; Critique of Pure Reason), despite
Kant’s explicit dissent from Leibniz’ account of perception as confused
thinking. Kant contrasted a realm of things as they are in themselves,
or noumena, with a realm of appearances, or phenomena. The former are
unknown, and indeed unknowable, though it seems clear that Kant tended
to think of them on lines like those of Leibniz; phenomena do not exist
independently but are dependent on consciousness, though not on any one
person’s consciousness. Kant expressed this position by saying that
things phenomenal are empirically real but transcendentally ideal; he
meant that they are undoubtedly there for the individual subject, though
when examined from the point of view of critical philosophy, they turn
out to be conditioned by the mind through the forms of sensibility and
understanding imposed upon them. Kant’s most striking argument for this
conclusion was that space and time are neither, as the English physicist
Sir Isaac Newton supposed, vast containers inside which everything
empirical is situated nor, as Leibniz had suggested, relations between
things confusedly apprehended but are rather what he mysteriously called
“pure intuitions,” factors inherent in the sensibilities of observers.
Without observers space and time disappear along with their contents;
but once the human point of view is assumed, in the form of percipients
who are directly aware of the world through their senses, space and time
become as real as anything—indeed, more real because of their pervasive
character. There is nothing that falls within experience that does not
have temporal relations, and all the data of the senses have spatial
relations as well.
Kant’s arguments in support of his revolutionary thesis about space
and time unfortunately depend to a large extent on his mistaken
philosophy of mathematics, and they have accordingly been discounted by
later philosophers. In modern philosophy the issues raised in these
discussions survive only in the form of an inquiry into the status of
nature as investigated by the natural scientist. Descartes already
pointed out that material things in fact have properties different from
those they seem to have; they appear to possess secondary qualities such
as colour or smell but turn out when thought about strictly to be
colourless and odourless lumps of matter occupying and moving about in
space. Locke endorsed this distinction between primary qualities (such
as extension, motion, figure, and solidity) and secondary qualities; but
George Berkeley, a major British Empiricist of the early 18th century,
criticized it sharply as absurd: to imagine something that has primary
but no secondary qualities is psychologically impossible. For Berkeley
the world of the scientist was a fiction and perhaps not even a
necessary fiction at that. It seems clear, however, that Berkeley’s
arguments do not undermine the important distinction between primary and
secondary qualities, where the former are treated as fundamental and the
latter as derivative; they are valid only against Locke’s mistaken claim
that primary qualities are objective and secondary qualities subjective.
Whatever the explanation, the fact remains that the scientist often
knows why the phenomena are as they are, in contrast to the plain man;
to that extent nature as he understands it is truer, if not more real,
than nature as it is taken to be in everyday experience. Why this should
be is not satisfactorily explained by philosophers who follow Berkeley’s
lead on this question. Nor has either party to the controversy noted
sufficiently the extent to which nature as commonly thought of is
conceived as penetrated by mind, both when it is taken as intelligible
and, still more interestingly, when poets ascribe to it moods or treat
it as kindly or hostile. There is analytic work to be done here to which
critical philosophers have still to address themselves.
Problems in metaphysics » Nature and the external world » The organizing
principles of nature
Connected with the questions just discussed are problems about the
organizing principles of nature; i.e., about natural causality. It has
been said that the Greeks thought of the world as a vast animal (indeed,
the conceptual scheme that Aristotle devised for dealing with nature
makes sense only if something like this is presupposed). Nature is the
sphere in which different kinds of things are all striving to realize
their characteristic form; purpose, though not perhaps explicit purpose,
governs it throughout. Aristotle was not entirely insensitive to what
are now known as the physical and chemical aspects of the universe, but
he treated them as subordinate to the biological aspect in a way modern
thinkers find surprising. Even the four elements—earth, air, fire, and
water—were seen by him as each seeking its natural place in the cosmos.
The contrast between this view and that favoured by Descartes could
hardly be sharper. According to Descartes nature is not an organism but
a mechanism; everything in it, including animal and human bodies,
although not including the human mind, must be understood on mechanical
principles. In taking this line, Descartes was endorsing a way of
thinking that was central in the new physical science developed by
Galileo at the beginning of the 17th century and that was to remain
central in the thought of Newton. Descartes himself was not a pure
mechanist because he believed that mind was governed by principles of
its own; his work, however, undoubtedly encouraged the thought,
frequently debated at the time of the Enlightenment, that mental life
equally with the physical world must be explicable in mechanical terms.
This was a position whose validity at the theoretical level Kant
reluctantly admitted, only to try to turn its edge by his dichotomy of
theory and practice. Everything in nature, including human behaviour,
was subject to causal determination. The dignity and uniqueness of man,
however, could be preserved because of the fact that in moral action man
raised himself above the sphere of nature by thinking of himself as part
of a world of free spirits.
Kant also produced interesting thoughts on the subject of living
phenomena. Reflection on the concept of an organism had convinced him
that a being of this sort could never be accounted for satisfactorily in
mechanical terms; it was futile to hope that someday in the future there
would appear a Newton of biology capable of explaining mechanically the
generation of even so apparently simple a thing as a blade of grass. To
judge or speak of organic phenomena demanded a special principle that
was teleological (i.e., related to design or purpose) rather than
mechanical. Kant, however, refused to allow that this principle had
constitutive force. It belonged, he said, only to “reflective judgment”
and thus did not rank alongside the principles of understanding that
were so important in physical science. Men must have recourse to a
principle of purposiveness in order to speak of living things, but they
must not imagine that such recourse would enable them to explain their
existence and behaviour in any strict sense of the term. They have
insight only into what they can produce, and what they can produce are
machines, not organisms. Many of Kant’s detailed remarks on this subject
seem outmoded in the light of subsequent scientific developments;
nevertheless, the problem he raised is still the subject of vigorous
debate among philosophically minded biologists. His emphasis on the
uniqueness of the concept of an organism, which he says is only
imperfectly explicated in the language of ends and purposes, is
particularly valuable.
It remains to mention the seemingly eccentric view of nature taken by
Hegel, who regarded it as at once the antithesis to and a prefiguration
of the world of spirit. Nature had to exist to provide material for
spirit to overcome, although it was a gross mistake to think of it as
essentially a lifeless mechanism. Instead of reducing the organic to the
inorganic, men should see the latter as pointing forward to the former,
which in turn offered a foretaste of the rational structure exhibited by
the world of mind. Hegel’s disdain for scientists of proved ability,
such as Newton and John Dalton, and his endorsement against them of
amateur scientists such as the German writer Goethe, make it hard to
take his philosophy of nature seriously. It contains, even so, some
interesting points, not least the demonstration that in finding nature
to be throughout subject to law the scientist is presupposing that it is
thoroughly penetrated by mind. To understand these views properly,
however, it is necessary to understand Hegel’s system as a whole.
Problems in metaphysics » Space and time
Many metaphysicians have argued that neither time nor space can be
ultimately real. Temporal and spatial predicates apply only to
appearances; reality, or what is real, does not endure through time, nor
is it subject to the conditions of space. The roots of this view are to
be found in Plato and beyond him in the thought of the Eleatic
philosophers Parmenides and Zeno, the propounder of several paradoxes
about motion. Plato conceived his Forms as eternal objects whose true
location was nowhere. Similarly, Christian philosophers conceived of God
as existing from everlasting to everlasting and as present in all parts
of the universe. God was not so much in space and time as the source of
space and time. Whatever falls within space and time is thereby limited,
for one space excludes another and no two times can be simultaneous.
God, however, is by definition an infinite being and so must exist
timelessly and apart from space.
Reference has already been made to the way in which Kant argued for
an intimate connection between time and space and human sensibility:
that human beings experience things as being temporally and spatially
situated is to be connected with the nature of their minds, and
particularly with their sensory equipment. Kant was entirely correct to
describe space and time as “intuitions,” by which he meant that they are
peculiar sorts of particulars; he was right again to insist on the
centrality in sensing of the notions of here and now, which can be
indicated but not reduced to conceptual terms. It is highly doubtful,
however, whether he had sufficient grounds for claiming a priori insight
into the nature of space and still more that of time; his case for
thinking that space and time are “pure” intuitions was palpably
inadequate. The lesson to draw from his careful discussion of this
subject might well be not that there must be a form of reality lying
beyond space and time but rather that nothing can be real that does not
conform to spatial and temporal requirements. Space and time are bound
up with particularity, and only what is particular can be real.
It was only in a weak sense that Kant denied the reality of time and
space. Other philosophers have certainly been bolder, though generally
on the basis of a less solid grasp than Kant possessed of what it is to
experience temporally and spatially. Thus, Bradley argued against the
view that space and time are “principles of individuation” by alleging
that no specification of spatial or temporal position, whether in terms
of here and now or by the use of spatial coordinates or dating systems,
could achieve uniqueness. Any descriptions such as “at 12 o’clock
precisely on January 4, 1962” or “just 75 yards due north of this spot”
might apply to infinitely many times or places in the universe, for
there was nothing to prevent there being infinitely many temporal and
spatial orders. Bradley forgot that the whole meaning of a spatial or
temporal description is not exhausted when attention is given to the
connotations of the terms used; what has to be considered is the words
as used in their context, which is that of a person who can indicate his
position in space and time because of the fact that he is himself
situated in space and time. One cannot express uniqueness in words as
such, but he can use words to express uniqueness. Bradley’s suggestion
that it is possible to conceive of many temporal and spatial orders is
by no means free from controversy. In general, men think of all events
as happening before, simultaneously with, or after the moment that is
called “now,” all spatial positions as relating in some way or other to
the point that is called “here.” In circumstances where this cannot be
done, as with events or places in a dream, men dismiss them as quite
unreal. That there might be events or places with no relation to their
own now and here is something they often refuse to take seriously,
though there are theories in modern science that suggest that they are
wrong to do so.
It was pointed out earlier that to say that something is unreal in a
metaphysical context is often to say that it is unintelligible, and it
is not surprising to find that arguments about the unreality of space
and time have often turned on conceptual considerations. Thus, it is
alleged that there is an incoherency in the notion of space because it
claims to be a whole that is logically prior to its parts, and
nevertheless turns out in practice to be merely an indefinitely
extensible aggregate. Everything that occupies space falls within a
wider spatial context; the thought of space as such is, as Kant saw,
involved in any spatial description. Yet space as such is something that
constantly eludes man’s grasp; space, as man knows it, is just one
spatial situation after another.
The difficulties found in the notion of time turn on the combination
in it of the idea that time is continuous and the idea that it is made
up of discrete parts. Henri Bergson, a French philosopher who was
concerned with the notions of duration and movement, said that time was
experienced as continuous; it was only the “spatialized” time measured
by clocks that was taken to have separable parts (minutes, hours, weeks,
and so on), and this “public” time was merely conventional. This,
however, seems altogether too easy a solution of the problem, for
privately experienced time also goes by (one stretch of it follows
another), and the thesis that public time is merely conventional is at
best highly controversial. It must be allowed that time is commonly
thought of as at once flowing and, as it were, subject to arrest.
Whether this is, in fact, openly inconsistent may be doubted, but it is
on points like this that the metaphysical case in question rests.
Few British or American philosophers discuss these questions now,
largely because they have been persuaded by Moore that any attack on
such central notions in men’s thought as these must be mistaken in
principle. As a result, little attention is given to a question that
deserves investigation; namely, what is to take the place of space and
time in metaphysical thought. Idealist writers constantly said that
space and time qualified appearances, and that nothing that did so could
fail to be taken up in the higher experience that was experience of
reality. But how is this supposed to be done? Time is perhaps cancelled
and yet preserved in the idea of eternity, space in the thought of
something that is at once omnipresent yet not in any particular place.
But what is there that is positive about these notions? The eternal, it
is sometimes said, is not to be identified with what lasts through all
time; it is, strictly, outside time altogether. But what does it mean to
say this? When it is said, for example, that numbers or truths are
eternal, the proper inference is that they have nothing to do with time;
to inquire when they came into or will go out of existence is to ask a
question that is ill posed. When God, however, is said to be eternal,
the impression is often given that he has temporal characteristics,
although in some higher form. What this higher form is deserves careful
consideration, the result of which might be that it is not the
conception of time that is incoherent but the conception of God.
Problems in metaphysics » The conception of spirit
As well as arguing for the separate existence of mental substance,
metaphysicians have claimed that mind is, as it were, the key to the
understanding of the universe. What exists is spirit, or at least is
penetrated by spirit. This is the thesis of Idealism, a type of
philosophy that is often derided but that, like its rival Materialism,
has a constantly fresh appeal. This view is worth examining in more
detail than has so far been possible.
It is best to begin by distinguishing the thesis of Idealism proper
from some others with which it is readily confused. Leibniz said that
the true atoms of nature were monads or souls; at bottom nothing existed
except minds. Berkeley claimed that sensible things have no existence
without the mind; there are spirits that experience, including an
infinite spirit, and there are the contents of their experiences, but
there is no independently existing world of matter. For the philosophers
who followed Hegel, both Leibniz and Berkeley were “subjective”
Idealists: they conceived of reality in terms of the experiences of
individual minds. Hegel’s view, by contrast, was that what exists is not
so much pure mind as mind writ large; i.e., the universe is penetrated
by mind and exists for the sake of mind, and it cannot be understood
unless this fact is grasped. Hegel was thus not committed to denying
that there is an independent world of nature but, on the contrary,
openly proclaimed it. Nature was there for mind to master it and in so
doing to discover itself.
The field in which Hegel first worked out this theory was that of
human affairs. The human world may be said to be mind made objective
because it consists of a series of structures—examples would be a
language, a set of moral or political procedures, a science, a practical
art such as medicine—that constitute mental achievements. The mind
involved in structures of this kind, however, is collective rather than
personal. An art such as medicine or a science such as mathematics is
not the invention of any particular individual; and although individuals
have contributed and are contributing to the advancement of each
structure, they do so not in their personal capacity but as embodying
impersonal intelligence.
Because the human world thus embodies mind, or spirit, it needs to be
understood in a special way—in terms of what Hegel called “concrete
universals.” Concepts of this kind are in order when it is a question of
grasping a particular sort of subject matter—one in which there are
intimate connections between the data under consideration. Connections
in nature are, on the surface at any rate, of a purely external
character; striking a match, for example, has nothing internally to do
with producing a flame. When, however, a historian considers the
different stages of some movement or process, or when an anthropologist
studies the various aspects of the life of a society, the material they
confront is internally related just because it represents the work of
mind—not, of course, of mind working in a vacuum but of mind facing and
reacting with greater or less intelligence to particular situations. It
is not surprising in these circumstances to find that the conceptual
structure employed by the student of human affairs is, in important
respects, profoundly different from that employed by the student of
nature. In the latter, what are in question are constant conjunctions,
observed but not understood; in the former, men have insight into what
happens or obtains because they can reenact in their own minds the
thought behind the material they study.
All this is, or should be, comparatively uncontroversial; it
represents the truth behind the claim of Wilhelm Dilthey, a German
philosopher and historian of ideas, that human affairs can be
understood, as it were, from within, by means of what he called
Verstehen (“understanding”). But of course it is one thing to say this
and another altogether to argue that the universe at large should be
construed as if it were mind writ large. What makes Hegelianism
intriguing to some and totally implausible to others is precisely that
it makes this extravagant claim. As has already been mentioned, the
world of nature for Hegel is in one way independent of mind: its being
is certainly not its being perceived. It is, nevertheless, relevant to
mind in all sorts of important ways: in providing a setting in which
mind can act, in constituting an obstacle that mind can overcome, in
presenting mind with something seemingly alien in which it can
nevertheless find itself insofar as it discovers nature to be
intelligible. If Hegel were asked why there was a world of nature at
all, his answer would be “for the sake of mind.” Just as man’s social
environment affords opportunities to the individual to come to full
knowledge of himself by realizing his differences from and dependence
upon others, so the world of nature affords similar opportunities. By
transforming the natural scene, men make it their own. In so doing they
come to know what they can do, and thus what they are.
There is, perhaps, more to this doctrine than appears at first sight.
It is, however, easier to assent to it in general terms than to follow
Hegel over it in detail. According to the Idealist account, there is in
the end only one true description of the universe, namely that which is
couched in terms of the concrete universal. Reality is a single
self-differentiating system, all the parts of which are intimately
connected; it is spirit that expresses itself in the natural and human
worlds and comes to consciousness of itself in so doing. Any other
account of the matter—for example, that given by the scientist in terms
of experienced uniformities—must be dismissed as inadequate. To Hume’s
objection that there is an absolute logical difference between
propositions expressing matters of fact and existence and propositions
expressing relations of ideas, Hegel replies brusquely that the
distinction is untenable. At a certain level, perhaps, facts are taken
as “brute.” Even the scientist, however, never abandons his aspiration
to understand them—it is only provisionally that he talks in terms of
“ultimate inexplicabilities”—and the philosopher knows that the demand
to incorporate all knowledge in a single system is not to be denied. It
is a demand that, as Hegelians are willing to admit, can in practice
never be met but that, nonetheless, ceaselessly makes itself felt. That
such is the case is shown by the extraordinary fascination exercised by
this strange but remarkable type of philosophy.
To try to understand the universe in terms of spirit is
characteristic of philosophers whose main extra-philosophical interests
are in the humanities, particularly in historical studies. Relatively
few scientifically minded thinkers have followed this line of thought,
and many Idealists of repute, including Bradley and Benedetto Croce (an
Italian philosopher and literary critic whose major philosophical work
was published in four volumes between 1902 and 1917 under the general
title La filosofia dello spirito (“The Philosophy of the Spirit”), have
been least convincing when writing about science. Hegel himself,
perhaps, had less sympathy with scientific than with historical
aspirations; this is not to say, however, that he was ill-informed about
contemporary science. He knew what was going on, but he saw it all from
his own point of view, the point of view of one who was entirely
convinced that science could not produce any ultimate answers. He valued
science but rejected the scientific view of the world.
Types of metaphysical theory
To complement and, in a way, to correct this brief survey of the
problems of metaphysics it will be useful at this point to insert a
short summary of a number of overall metaphysical positions.
Metaphysics, as already noted, professes to deal with “the world as a
whole”; the thoughts of a metaphysician, if they are to make any impact
at all, must be connected in a system. The object in what follows will
be to present in outline metaphysical systems that have exercised and,
indeed, continue to exercise a strong intellectual appeal. In all cases
but one, these systems were given classical shape by particular
philosophers of genius. Relatively little attention, however, will be
paid to this fact here because the present concern is with types of view
rather than with views actually held. Thus, reference will be made to
Platonism instead of to the philosophy of Plato, and so on in other
cases.
Types of metaphysical theory » Platonism
The essence of Platonism lies in a distinction between two worlds, the
familiar world of everyday life, which is the object of the senses, and
an unseen world of true realities, which can be the object of the
intellect. The ordinary man recognizes the existence of the former and
ignores that of the latter; he fails to appreciate the extent to which
his beliefs both about fact and about values are arbitrarily assumed and
involve internal contradictions. The philosopher is in a position to
show him how insubstantial is the foundation on which he takes his
stand. The philosopher can demonstrate how little thought there is in
popular conceptions of good and evil, and he can show that the very
concept of sense knowledge involves difficulties because knowledge
presupposes a stable object, and the objects of sense are constantly
changing. The claim, however, is that he can do more than this. Because
of the presence in him of something like a divine spark, he can, after
suitable preparation, fix his intellectual gaze on the realities of the
unseen world and, in the light of them, know both what is true and how
to behave. He will not attain this result easily—to get to it will
involve not only immense intellectual effort, including the repeated
challenging of assumptions, but also turning his back on everything in
life that is merely sensual or animal. Yet, despite this, the end is
attainable in principle, and the man who arrives at it will exercise the
most important part of himself in the best way that is open to him.
That this type of view has an immediate appeal to persons of a
certain kind goes without saying. There is ample evidence in poetry and
elsewhere of the frequently experienced sense of the unreality of
familiar things and the presence behind them of another order
altogether. Platonism may be said to build on “intuitions” of this kind;
as a metaphysics, its job is to give them intellectual expression, to
transfer them from the level of sentiment to that of theory. It is
important, however, to notice that Platonism is not just the
intellectualizing of a mood; it is an attempt to solve specific problems
in a specific way. In Plato’s own case, the problems were set by loss of
confidence in traditional morality and the emergence of the doctrine
that “man is the measure of all things.” Plato thought he could counter
this doctrine by appeal to another contemporary fact, the rise of
science as shown in the development of mathematical knowledge.
Mathematics, as he saw it, offered certain truth, although not about the
familiar world; the triangle whose properties were investigated by the
geometrician was not any particular triangle but the prototype that all
particular triangles presuppose. The triangle and the circle belonged
not to the world of the senses but to the world of the intelligence;
they were Forms. If this could be said of the objects of mathematical
discourse, the same should also be true of the objects of morality. True
justice and true goodness were not to be found in popular opinions or
human institutions but should be seen as unchanging Forms, eternally
existing in a world apart.
Modern philosophers have found much to criticize in this system: as
indicated already, they have objected that Forms are not so much
existents as abstractions, and they have found the argument from science
to morality quite inconclusive because of what they allege to be an
absolute dichotomy between fact and value. It may be that nobody today
can subscribe to Platonism in precisely the form given it by Plato
himself. The general idea, however, has certainly not lost its hold, nor
have the moral perplexities to which Plato hoped to find an answer been
dissipated by further thought.
Types of metaphysical theory » Aristotelianism
For many people, Plato is the type of an other-worldly, Aristotle of a
this-worldly philosopher. Plato found reality to lie in things wholly
remote from sense; Aristotle took form to be typically embodied in
matter and thought it his job as a philosopher to make sense of the here
and now. The contrast is to some extent overdrawn for Aristotle, too,
believed in pure form (God and the astral intelligences—the intelligent
movers of the planets—were supposed to satisfy this description), and
Plato was sufficiently concerned with the here and now to want to change
human society radically. It remains true, nevertheless, that
Aristotelianism is in essentials a form of immanent metaphysics, a
theory that instructs men on how to take the world they know rather than
one that gives them news of an altogether different world.
The key concepts in Aristotelianism are substance, form and matter,
potentiality and actuality, and cause. Whatever happens involves some
substance or substances; unless there were substances, in the sense of
concrete existents, nothing could be real whatsoever. Substances,
however, are not, as the name might suggest, mere parcels of matter;
they are intelligible structures, or forms, embodied in matter. That a
thing is of a certain kind means that it has a certain form or
structure. But the structure as conceived in Aristotelianism is not
merely static. Every substance, in this view, not only has a form but
is, as it were, striving to attain its natural form; it is seeking to be
in actuality what it is potentially, which is in effect to be a proper
specimen of its kind. Because this is so, explanation in this system
must be given in teleological rather than mechanical terms. For
Aristotle, form is the determining element in the universe, but it
operates by drawing things on, so that they become what they have it in
themselves to be rather than by acting as a constant efficient cause
(i.e., the agent that initiates the process of change). The notion of an
efficient cause has a role in Aristotelianism—as Aristotle put it, it
takes a man, a developed specimen of his kind, to beget a man; it is,
however, a subordinate role and yields pride of place to a different
idea, namely, form considered as purpose.
For reasons connected with his astronomy, Aristotle postulated a God.
His God, however, had nothing to do with the universe; it was not his
creation, and he was, of necessity, indifferent to its vicissitudes (he
could not otherwise have been an unmoved mover). It is a mistake to
imagine that everything in the Aristotelian universe is trying to
fulfill a purpose that God has ordained for it. On the contrary, the
teleology of which use is here made is unconscious; although things all
tend to an end, they do not in general consciously seek that end. They
are like organs in a living body that fulfill a function and yet
seemingly have not been put there for that purpose.
As this last remark will suggest, an important source of Aristotelian
thought is reflection on natural growth and decay. Aristotle, who was
the son of a doctor, was himself a pioneer in natural history, and it is
not surprising that he thought in biological terms. What is surprising,
and gives his system a continuing interest, is the extent to which he
succeeded in applying ideas in fields that are remote from their origin.
He was without doubt more successful in some fields than in others: in
dealing with the phenomena of social life, for instance, as opposed to
those of physical reality. His results overall, however, were impressive
enough for his system not only to dominate men’s minds for many
centuries but to constitute a challenge even today. Men still, on
occasions, think like Aristotle, and, as long as that is so,
Aristotelianism will remain a live metaphysical option.
Types of metaphysical theory » Thomism
The advent of Christianity had important effects in philosophy as in
other aspects of human life. Initially Christians were opposed to
philosophical claims of any kind; they saw philosophy as an essentially
pagan phenomenon and refused to allow the propriety of subjecting
Christian dogma to philosophical scrutiny. Christian truth rested on
revelation and did not need any certificate of authenticity from mere
reason. Later, however, attempts were made to produce a specifically
Christian metaphysics, to think out a view of the universe and of man’s
place in it that did justice to the Christian revelation and
nevertheless rested on arguments that might be expected to convince
Christians and non-Christians alike. St. Thomas Aquinas was only one of
a number of important thinkers in medieval times who produced Christian
philosophies; others—such as the philosophers John Duns Scotus in the
late 13th century and William of Ockham in the first half of the 14th
century—took significantly different views. In selecting the system of
Aquinas for summary here, the factor that has weighed most has been its
persistent influence, particularly in postmedieval times. Aquinas was
not the only medieval philosopher of distinction, but Thomism is alive
as other medieval systems are not.
The central claim of Thomism is that reflection on everyday things
and the everyday world reveals it as pointing beyond itself to God as
its sustaining cause. Ordinary existents, such as human beings, are in
process of constant change. The change, however, is not normally the
result of their own efforts, and even when it is, it does not depend on
them exclusively. No object in the familiar world can fully account for
its own esse (i.e., its own act of existing), nor is it wholly
self-sufficient; all are affected from without, or at least operate in
an environment that is not of their own making. To say this is to say
that they are one and all finite. Although finite things can be, and
commonly are, stimulated to activity or kept in activity by other finite
things, it does not follow that there might be finite things and nothing
else. On the contrary, the finite necessarily points beyond itself to
the infinite; the system of limited beings, each dependent for its
activity on something else of the same kind, demands for its completion
the existence of an unlimited being, one that is the source of change in
other things but is not subject to change itself. Such a being would be
not a cause like any other but a first or ultimate cause; it would be
the unconditioned condition of the existence of all other things.
Aquinas believed that human reason can produce definitive proofs of the
existence of an infinite or perfect being, and he had no hesitation in
identifying that being with the Christian God. Because, however, the
movement of his thought was from finite to infinite, he claimed to
possess only so much philosophical knowledge of the Creator as could be
arrived at from study of his creation. Positive knowledge of the divine
nature was not available; apart from revelation, man could only say what
God is not, or conceive of his attributes by the imperfect method of
analogy.
Aquinas worked out his ideas at a time when the philosophy of
Aristotle was again becoming familiar in western Europe after a period
of being largely forgotten, and many of his detailed theories show
Aristotelian influence. He assumed the general truth of the Aristotelian
picture of the natural world and the general correctness of Aristotle’s
way of interpreting natural phenomena. He also took over many of
Aristotle’s ideas in the fields of ethics and politics. He gave the
latter, however, a distinctively different twist by making the final end
of man not philosophical contemplation but the attainment of the
beatific vision of God; it was Christian rather than Greek ideas that
finally shaped his view of the summum bonum (“greatest good”).
Similarly, his celebrated proofs of God’s existence proceeded against a
background that is obviously Aristotelian but that need not be
presupposed for their central thought to have validity. Thomism can
certainly be seen, and historically must be seen, as the system of
Aristotle adapted to Christian purposes. It is important, however, to
stress that the adaptation resulted in something new, a distinctive way
of looking at the world that still has its adherents and still commands
the respect of philosophers.
Types of metaphysical theory » Cartesianism
René Descartes worked out his metaphysics at a time of rapid advance in
human understanding of the physical world. He adopted from Galileo the
view that physical things are not what they are commonly taken to be on
the strength of sense experience—namely, possessors of “secondary”
properties such as colour, smell, and feel—but are rather objects
characterized only by the “primary” qualities of shape, size, mass, and
mobility. To understand why a constituent of the physical world behaves
as it does, what should be asked is where it is, how large it is, in
what direction it is moving, and at what speed; once these questions are
answered, its further properties will become intelligible. Descartes
held further that all change and movement in the physical world is to be
explained in purely mechanical terms. God was needed to give initial
impetus to the physical system as a whole, but once it had got going it
proceeded of its own accord. To pretend, as the Aristotelians had, to
discern purposes in nature was to make the impious claim to insight into
God’s mind. Descartes applied this theory to the movements of animals as
much as to those of inanimate bodies; he thought of both as mere
automatons, pushed and pulled about by forces over which they had no
control.
Although Descartes thus acquiesced in, indeed emphasized, the
mechanistic tendencies of contemporary science, he was far from being a
Materialist. Besides material substance there was also thinking
substance, and this was in fact wholly different from matter both in
kind and in operation. Bodies had as their essence to occupy space;
minds were not in space at all. Bodies, again, were determined in their
movements; minds were in some sense free, because they possessed will as
well as intelligence. Descartes was less explicit on this point than he
might have been; the principles on which mental substance is supposed to
operate are not made clear, with the result that critics have said that
Descartes thought of mental activities in para-mechanical terms. Whether
this is true or not, however, there was no reason for Descartes to be in
any special difficulty over this point. All he needed to urge was that
minds act in the strict sense of the term, which is to say that they
take cognizance of their situation and respond more or less
intelligently to it. That they can do this differentiates them
fundamentally from material things, which are caused to do what they do
and are entirely unaffected by rational considerations.
The main crux in Descartes’s metaphysics was the difficulty of
bringing together the two orders of being, once they were separated.
Mention has already been made of the expedient to which later Cartesians
were driven in trying to solve this difficulty: in effect, they made the
unity of the universe a continuing miracle, dependent upon the grace of
God. It is worth mentioning here another move in the same area that many
have found instructive. Kant, who was in some respects both a latterday
Cartesian and a latter-day Platonist, argued that human activities could
be looked at from two points of view. From the theoretical standpoint
they were simply a set of happenings, brought about by antecedent events
in precisely the same way as occurrences in the natural world. From the
standpoint of the agent, however, they must be conceived as the product
of rational decision, as acts proper for which the agent could be held
responsible. The moment he began to act, a man transferred himself in
thought from the phenomenal world of science to an intelligible world of
pure spirit; he necessarily acted as if he were not determined by
natural forces. The transference, however, was a transference in thought
only (to claim any knowledge of the intelligible world was quite
unjustified), and because of this the problem of the unity of the
universe was dissolved. There was no contradiction in a man’s thinking
of himself both as a subject for science and as a free originator of
action. Contradiction would appear only if he were present in both
respects in an identical capacity. But appeal to the doctrine of the two
standpoints was thought by Kant to rule this out.
It is only with some hesitation that one can speak of Kant as having
put forward a metaphysics. He was in general highly suspicious of claims
to metaphysical knowledge, and a principal aim of his philosophy was to
expose the confusions into which professing metaphysicians had fallen.
Nevertheless, it is clear that Kant had metaphysical convictions, for
all his denial of the possibility of metaphysical knowledge; he was
committed to the view that men can conceive a non-natural as well as a
natural order and must necessarily take the former to be real when they
act. The language he used—particularly his talk about man as phenomenon
and man as noumenon—is not to the taste of present-day philosophers, but
the thought behind it certainly survives. It is in this form, indeed,
that Cartesianism may still be said to present a serious intellectual
challenge.
Types of metaphysical theory » Idealism
Descartes and Kant were both adherents of metaphysical dualism, though
they worked out their dualisms in interestingly different ways. Many
thinkers, however, find dualism unsatisfactory in itself; they look for
a single principle by which to compass whatever exists. There are two
broad steps that are open to the person who confronts a dualism of mind
and matter and finds it unsatisfactory: he can either try to show that
matter is in some sense reducible to mind, or conversely seek to reduce
mind to matter. The first is the solution of Idealism, the second that
of Materialism. Idealism has already been treated at length, and it will
not be necessary to go into it again here. Only one point about it needs
emphasis. As was pointed out, there are various forms of Idealism. In
one version, this philosophy maintains that there literally is no such
thing as matter; what the common man takes to be material things are,
upon closer consideration, nothing but experiences in minds. Nothing
exists but minds and their contents; an independently existing material
world is strictly no more than an illusion. This was the view taken by
Berkeley. In the more sophisticated Idealism of Hegel, however, it is
not maintained that mind alone exists; material things are, in one way,
taken to be as real as minds. The thesis advanced is rather that the
universe must be seen as penetrated by mind, indeed as constituted by
it. Spirit, to use Hegel’s own word, is the fundamental reality, and
everything that exists must accordingly be understood by reference to
it, either as being directly explicable in spiritual terms or as
prefiguring or pointing forward to spirit. Whatever the merits of this
thesis, it is clear that it differs radically from that maintained by
Berkeley. Idealism in the form espoused by Berkeley relies largely on
arguments drawn from epistemology, though formally its conclusions are
ontological, because they take the form of assertions or denials of
existence. Hegel, however, had little or nothing to say about
epistemology and was not even concerned to put forward an ontology. What
he wanted to urge was a doctrine of first principles, a thesis about the
terms in which to understand the world. The Hegelian “reduction” of
matter to mind was thus reduction in a somewhat attenuated sense. It is
important to get this point clear, if only because it has its parallel
in the rival doctrine of Materialism.
Types of metaphysical theory » Materialism
The simplest form of Materialism is found in the claim that only matter
exists. Stated thus baldly the claim is absurd, because it is clear that
all sorts of things exist that are not of the nature of matter: thoughts
and numbers and human institutions would be instances. In the light of
these facts, the claim has to be revised to say that matter is the only
substantial existent, with appeal being made to distinctions first
worked out in Aristotle’s doctrine of categories. According to this
explanation, many things besides matter exist, but all of them are
explicable (or so it is said) as modifications of matter. Thus, human
institutions consist in patterns of movement among specific groups of
human beings, and human beings in turn are nothing but highly
complicated material bodies.
It is clear from these instances that Materialism is a controversial
doctrine; it is also clear that its key word, modification, requires
further explanation. When, for example, minds are said to be
modifications of an underlying material substance, what is meant? A
first and relatively easy point is that, like qualities and quantities,
they could not exist separately. Unless there were material bodies,
there could not be minds, because minds are—to put it crudely—states
found in some material bodies. Minds are here equated with mentality,
and mentality is clearly an abstraction. To say this, however, is not to
remove the whole difficulty. When it is said that mentality is a state
of some material body or bodies, is that meant literally or
metaphorically? Bodies can often be described from the physical point of
view as being in a certain state—for example, as being in a state of
internal equilibrium. What is meant here is that the different particles
of matter concerned stand in a certain relationship and as a consequence
develop certain physical properties. But is mentality to be conceived as
a physical property? It sounds extravagant to say so. Yet some such
doctrine must be defended if Materialism is to be advanced as a form of
ontology with a serious claim for attention. It is interesting in this
connection to notice the arguments advanced by scholars like J.J.C.
Smart, which purport to identify states of mind with states of the
brain. If the two are identical—literally the same thing described from
two points of view—thoughts may really be modifications of matter, and
Materialism may be tenable in a strong form. If, however, the identity
cannot be made out—and very few philosophers are in fact ready to accept
it—Materialism can be true at most in a modified form.
This modified form of Materialism is perhaps better described as
naturalism. Naturalism holds not that all things consist of matter or
its modifications but that whatever exists can be satisfactorily
explained in natural terms. To explain something in natural terms is to
explain it on scientific lines; naturalism is in fact a proclamation of
the omnicompetence, or final competence, of science. It is not essential
to this type of view to argue that phenomena can be spoken of in one way
only; on this point, as on the point about ontological reducibility, the
theory can afford to be liberal. It is, however, vital to make out that
the scientific account of a set of happenings takes precedence over any
other. Thus, the language in which men commonly speak of action and
decision, which may be called for short the language of reasons, must be
held to be secondary to the language in which scientists might speak of
the same facts. Scientific language is basically causal, and the thesis
of this form of Materialism is that causal explanations are fundamental.
Naturalism is thus the obverse of Hegelianism; it is a theory of first
principles, and it draws its principles from science.
If the question is raised why anyone should take this form of
Materialism seriously, the answer lies in a number of significant facts.
Physiologists have established correlations between general states of
mind and general states of brain activity; their hope is to extend this
to the point where particular thoughts and feelings can be shown to have
their physiological counterpart. Cyberneticists have produced artifacts
that exhibit mindlike behaviour to a remarkable degree; the inference
that man is no more than a complicated machine is certainly strengthened
by their achievements. Sociologists have shown that, whatever the
explicit reasons men give for their beliefs, these are often
intelligible in the light of factors of which they themselves take
little or no account. The old assumption that human judgments are
typically grounded in reason rather than merely caused, is called in
question by the results of such investigations, which gain support from
findings both in Freudian and in orthodox psychology. None of this
evidence is decisive by itself; there are ways in every case of blocking
the conclusions that Materialists tend to draw from it. Yet it remains
true that, cumulatively, the evidence is impressive. It certainly has
enough force to make it necessary to take this type of theory with the
greatest seriousness. Metaphysical disputes in the modern world are
fundamentally arguments for or against Materialism, and the other types
of theory here explored are all seen as alternatives to this compelling,
if often unwelcome, view.
Argument, assertion, and method in metaphysics
Attention is now turned from description of the content of particular
metaphysical views to more general treatment of the nature of
metaphysical claims. The questions that will arise in this section
concern such things as the nature and basis of metaphysical assertions,
the character of metaphysical arguments and of what are taken to be
metaphysical proofs, and the parts played in metaphysical thinking by
insight and argument, respectively. They come together in the inquiry as
to whether metaphysics can be said to be a science and, if so, what sort
of a science it is.
Argument, assertion, and method in metaphysics » Metaphysics as a
science » Nature of an a priori science
Sciences are broadly of two kinds, a priori and empirical. In an a
priori science such as geometry, a start is made from propositions that
are generally taken to be true, and the procedure is to demonstrate with
rigorous logic what follows if they are indeed true. It is not necessary
that the primary premises of an a priori science should in fact be
truths; for the purposes of the system they need only be taken as true,
or postulated as such. The main interest is not so much in the premises
as in their consequences, which the investigator has to set out in due
order. The primary premises must, of course, be consistent one with
another, and they may be chosen, as in fact happened with Euclidean
geometry, because they are thought to have evident application in the
real world. This second condition, however, need not be fulfilled; a
science of this kind can be and commonly is entirely hypothetical. Its
force consists in the demonstration that commitment to the premises
necessitates commitment to the conclusions: the first cannot be true if
the second are false.
This point about the hypothetical character of a priori sciences has
not always been appreciated. In many classical discussions of the
subject, the assumption was made that a system of this kind will start
from as well as terminate in truths and that necessity will attach to
premises and conclusions alike. Aristotle and Descartes both spoke as if
this must be the case. It is clear, however, that in this they were
mistaken. The form of a typical argument in this field is as follows:
(1) p is taken as true or given as true; (2) it is seen that if p, then
q; (3) q is deduced as true, given the truth of p. There is no need here
for p to be a necessary or self-guaranteeing truth; p can be any
proposition whatsoever, provided its truth is granted. The only
necessity that needs to be present is that which characterizes the
argument form, “If p is true, and p implies q, then q is true,” that is
[p · (p ⊃ q)] ⊃ q, in which · symbolizes “and,” and ⊃ means “implies”;
and this is a formula that belongs to logic. It is this fact that makes
philosophers say, misleadingly, that a priori sciences are one and all
analytic. They are not because their premises need not answer this
description. They, nevertheless, draw their lifeblood from analytic
principles.
Argument, assertion, and method in metaphysics » Metaphysics as a
science » Metaphysics as an a priori science
It is clear that metaphysical philosophers have sometimes aspired to
present their results in the form of a deductive system, to make
metaphysics an a priori science. For this purpose they have taken a
deductive system to require not just that the premises entail the
conclusions but further that they themselves be necessarily true.
Spinoza thus began the first book of his Ethics by laying down eight
definitions and seven axioms whose truth he took to be self-evident and
then proceeding in the body of the text to deduce, as he thought with
strict logic, 36 propositions that follow in order from them. He
repeated the procedure in the rest of his work. That philosophical
conclusions should thus be capable of being set out “in the geometrical
manner” was something that Spinoza took as axiomatic; to be worthy of
attention at all, philosophy must issue in knowledge as opposed to mere
opinion, and knowledge proper had to be exempt from the possibility of
doubt, which meant that it must either be intuitively evident or
deducible from what was intuitively evident. Spinoza took this
conception of knowledge from Descartes, who had himself toyed with the
idea of presenting metaphysical arguments in the geometrical manner.
Descartes, however, pointed out that, although there was no difficulty
in getting agreement to the first principles of geometry, “nothing in
metaphysics causes more trouble than the making the perception of its
primary notions clear and distinct”; the whole trouble with this
discipline is that its students fail to see that they must start from
what are in fact the basic truths. Descartes himself spoke as if the
problem were no more than pedagogical; it was a question of making
people see as self-evident what is in itself self-evident. His own
“analytic” approach in the Meditationes was chosen to overcome these
difficulties; it was, he said, “the best and truest method of teaching.”
But it may well be that this account is too optimistic. The difficulty
with a system such as those of Descartes and Spinoza is that there are
persons who cannot be brought to see that the primary propositions of
the system are self-evidently true, and this not because they are
lacking in attention or insight but because they see the world in a
different way. This suggests that in any such system there will
necessarily be an element that is arbitrary, or at least noncompulsive.
However cogent the links that bind premises to conclusions, the premises
themselves will lack a firm foundation. If they do, the interest of the
system as a whole must be greatly diminished; it can be admired as an
exercise in logic but not valued for more than that.
To avoid this unpalatable conclusion, two expedients are possible.
The first is to say that the first premises of a metaphysical system
must be not merely self-evident but also self-guaranteeing; they must be
such that any attempt to deny them can only result in their
reaffirmation. Descartes believed that he could satisfy this requirement
by grounding his system in the cogito, though strictly this was the
primary truth only from the point of view of subjective exposition and
not according to the objective order of things. Aristotle somewhat
similarly had argued that the logical principle of noncontradiction,
which he took to express a highly general truth about the world, must be
accepted as axiomatic on the ground that its correctness is presupposed
in any argument directed against it.
Even the Idealists Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet at times spoke as if
the first principles of their system were in some way logically
compulsive; as Bosanquet put it, one had either to accept them or
recognize that one could know nothing. Whatever the position may be
about particular metaphysical propositions, however, it seems clear that
not all truths that are taken as basic in metaphysics have the
characteristic of being self-guaranteeing. A Materialist takes it as
fundamental that whatever occurs happens as a result of the operation of
natural causes; a theist sees things in the world as finite and thus as
pointing beyond themselves to the infinite being who is their ground. No
contradiction is involved in denying these positions, though of course
for those who accept them the denial necessarily involves commitment to
falsehood. It is, however, one thing for a proposition or set of
propositions to be false, another altogether for it to be necessarily
false. If the first principles of metaphysics were really
self-guaranteeing, only one system of metaphysics could be coherent, and
it would be true just because it was coherent. The very fact that there
is an apparent choice between competing metaphysical systems, which may
differ in plausibility but agree in being each internally
self-consistent, rules this possibility out.
The alternative is to argue that fundamental metaphysical
propositions, though not self-guaranteeing, are nevertheless not
arbitrary; they have or, to be more cautious, can have a firm foundation
in fact. Metaphysical speculation is not, as some opponents of
metaphysics have suggested, essentially idle—that is, the mere working
out of the logical consequences of premises that the metaphysician
chooses to take as true. Or, rather, it does not necessarily answer this
description because a metaphysician can have insight into the true
nature of things and can ground his system on that. This second position
in fact involves arguing that metaphysics is not an a priori but an
empirical science.
Argument, assertion, and method in metaphysics » Metaphysics as a
science » Metaphysics as an empirical science
If metaphysics is an empirical science, the question of whether or not
to accept a metaphysical theory must be answerable, in part at any rate,
by reference to experience. It will not depend on experience alone, any
more than does the acceptability of a scientific theory, because here,
as in the scientific case, thinking comes into the reckoning too. A
metaphysician can be mistaken in his deductions, just as a scientist
can. But even if these are impeccable, he will not necessarily succeed
on this view of his undertaking. It may be that he argues correctly from
premises that are unacceptable—unacceptable because they lack the
necessary foundation in fact. He will then be like a scientist who puts
forward a hypothesis and deduces its consequences without mistake only
to find that experience fails to confirm the supposition on which he is
working.
Scientific hypotheses are refuted, or at least called seriously into
question, when predictions based on them fail to come true. As Karl
Popper—who has emphasized that there is a unity of method in all
generalizing or theoretical sciences—has insisted, every scientific
hypothesis must be testable, and the way to test it is to look for
circumstances in which it does not hold. To content oneself with
favourable evidence is not enough; one must be searching all the time
for unfavourable evidence. Further, it must be possible, if the
hypothesis is genuinely scientific, to specify in advance what would
count as unfavourable evidence; the circumstances in which the
hypothesis needs to be abandoned, or at least modified, must be
indicated precisely. In ideal conditions it is possible to devise a
crucial experiment that will test a hypothesis definitively; the
Michelson–Morely experiment, which disposed of the theory of the
luminiferous ether, was such an experiment.
It can be asked, however, what parallels there are to this in
metaphysics. The difficulty with testing a metaphysical thesis is
twofold. First, metaphysical theories tend to be extremely general and
as such highly unspecific. They announce, for example, that every event
has some cause or other, or that every change is part of a process that
serves some purpose. To find counterexamples to theses of such
generality is on any account exceedingly difficult: how can one be sure
that all the possibilities have been explored? There is, however,
another and still more serious difficulty. The scientist, once he has
laid down the conditions that would have to obtain for his hypothesis to
prove false, makes no bones about their occurrence; it is, typically, a
matter of whether or not a certain pointer reading is registered, and
this is a simple question of ascertainable fact. Fact for the
metaphysician, however, is altogether more slippery. Different
metaphysicians see the world each in his separate way; what they take to
be the case is coloured by their metaphysical conceptions. There is no
neutral body of facts to which appeal can be made to show that a
metaphysical theory falls down, and this being so, the attempt to
assimilate metaphysics to science must fail.
That this should be the case is perhaps not surprising. Scientific
thinking proceeds within a framework of presuppositions that it is the
business of the scientist to use, not to argue for and still less to
challenge—presuppositions to the effect, for example, that every change
has a natural explanation. No doubt scientists can change their
presuppositions, but they seldom do so consciously; their usual practice
is to take them for granted. Metaphysicians, however, necessarily take a
very different attitude toward presuppositions. It is their business to
tell men how to understand the world, and this means that they must,
among other things, put forward and argue for a set of interpretative
principles. Metaphysicians differ radically in the interpretative
principles they accept, and it is this that explains their failure to
agree upon what to take as fact. It is naïve to suppose that the points
at issue between, for example, a Thomist and a Materialist can be
settled by observation or even by experiment; the facts to which one
might appeal in support of his theory may be seen in a very different
light by the other, or perhaps be dismissed as simple illusion.
Reflection on the phenomenon of religious experience will illustrate
what is meant here. That men undergoing this experience are affected
mentally and physically in certain specific ways is perhaps common to
both Thomist and Materialist. But the further description of their state
is entirely controversial and owes its controversial character to the
varying preconceptions that the disputants bring to their task.
Argument, assertion, and method in metaphysics » Initial metaphysical
insights » Origin
If metaphysics is far from being a simple empirical discipline, however,
it does not follow that it is wholly without foundation in fact. The
true situation can perhaps be put as follows. Every metaphysic consists
in an imaginative view of the world elaborated into a conceptual system.
Metaphysics, like poetry, begins by being a matter of vision; a
metaphysician sees the scheme of all things in a certain light; for
example, as nothing more than a vast mechanism or as God’s creation. As
a metaphysician, however, he cannot be content to rest in a vision of
this sort, as for example the Romantic poet William Wordsworth does in
his “Intimations of Immortality.” He needs to think out terms in which
whatever exists can be described so as to accord with his primary
insight; he needs to produce and apply a conceptual system and to argue
against possible alternatives. Whatever its origins, metaphysics is
strictly intellectual in its development. When the question is raised of
the source from which metaphysicians gain their initial insights, the
answer that occurs most readily is that they are derived from reflection
on certain evident facts. Thus, the source of the Materialist view of
the world is undoubtedly the practice of science; the Materialist
proposes to give unrestricted validity to ways of thinking that
scientists have found effective in a certain restricted sphere. The
source of Idealist thought is to be found in the practice of history, or
more generally in the interpersonal relations of beings who are at once
rational and sensitive; the Idealist philosopher takes concepts that are
appropriate in these limited areas to apply to the whole of reality.
Every system of metaphysics is grounded in some real experience and owes
its initial appeal to that fact. This is not to say, however, that the
metaphysician builds on experience as does his scientific colleague. To
think that is to take altogether too simple a view of the whole
question.
Argument, assertion, and method in metaphysics » Initial metaphysical
insights » Tests of validity
A question of immense importance is whether there are any means of
comparing the validity of initial metaphysical insights. If it has to be
answered negatively—if it has to be allowed that, as it were, all
candidates in this field start and finish on an equal footing—the
argument that each of them has a foundation in fact will be entirely
discounted. Whatever respectability their concepts possess in their
original homes will be lost once they fall into the hands of the
metaphysician, because the procedure of the latter in taking them up and
extending them is essentially arbitrary. For example, that one sees the
sum of things as a vast machine may be suggested by what goes on in
science, but this view can neither claim scientific warrant itself nor
draw on scientific prestige, because it seems to spring from nothing
better than mere whim. There are, however, two reasons for thinking that
initial metaphysical insights are based not on mere whim but on valid
grounds.
First, the number of what may be called viable metaphysical insights
is in practice limited: there are varying ways of taking the world as a
whole, but not an infinite variety. In the outline account of
metaphysical theories given above, six different kinds of view were
distinguished, each of which may be said to be grounded in one or more
areas of experience. It would be possible to extend the list, but
probably not very far; further candidates might well turn out to be no
more than variations on themes already considered. Thus, Leibniz might
be seen as a latter-day Platonist, and Spinoza as offering a different
version of the dualism of Descartes, one that is more sympathetic to
Materialism than was Descartes himself. If these claims are true, they
are certainly important; for the facts here adduced suggest that the
experiences or visions on which different metaphysicians build are not
peculiar to individual minds but occur commonly and regularly. They are
not the product of passing moods, seized on and exploited for no good
reason, but connect with thoughts that recur repeatedly in sensitive and
intelligent reflection.
Second, there is a sense in which, despite everything said above,
metaphysical theories are subject to the test of experience. That
metaphysics aspires to give an account of the world as a whole means
that each metaphysician claims that his fundamental insight illuminates
every department of life. It may be that there are no neutral facts to
which a metaphysician can appeal to show the shortcomings of his
opponents; metaphysicians pronounce on what is to count as fact, and
this puts them in the happy position of being judges in their own case.
It remains true, however, that everyone who engages in that type of
philosophy has the formal task of accounting for all the facts that he
recognizes, and this is something that can be done more or less well.
The value of different metaphysical insights is sometimes shown in the
success with which they are applied. Furthermore, it is not quite true
that the metaphysician need consult no opinion but his own when it comes
to working out his views. What might be called public opinion has a part
to play as well, though it has no absolute right to a hearing. A
metaphysician who chooses to dismiss areas of experience or ways of
thinking that are commonly accepted as being in order does so at his
peril; he reduces the initial plausibility of his own theories the
oftener he finds himself in this position. He could, of course, be right
and common opinion wrong; no genuine metaphysician is put off by the
thought of such a conflict. Though he is not put off, however, he has to
be wary all the same. He may be able to say what in the end is to count
as fact, but if this involves him in dismissing as illusory what
instructed opinion generally takes to be real, his triumph may be
hollow. Whether he likes it or not, he has to frame a theory that will
carry conviction with experts in the different fields concerned, or, if
that is going too far, one that will strike them as not wholly
implausible. A metaphysician who exercises his veto past that point is
simply failing to do his job.
It must be admitted that the tests one can apply to determine the
value of a metaphysical theory are at best unsatisfactory. Often one is
driven back onto the expedient of asking if the theory is internally
self-consistent; a surprisingly large number of philosophical theories
are not. To confute a philosopher out of his own mouth is, perhaps, the
most effective form of confutation. If this expedient will not apply,
however, the questioner is not quite helpless. Whatever the explanation,
it is a well-known fact that a philosopher can purchase consistency at
the expense of plausibility; he can put forward theories that evade
difficulties by simply declaring them nonexistent. In so doing, he turns
his back on what instructed opinion generally takes to be fact. His hope
is, of course, to persuade others to see the situation as he does, and
there is always the possibility that he will succeed. If, however, after
a suitable interval he has not, that must surely count against him. It
is by this test that one decides, for example, that the metaphysics of
Hobbes is not worth prolonged study, despite the enormous ingenuity of
its author; there is too much in this system that seems to be sheerly
arbitrary. The same comment could be made of certain forms of Idealism,
which are so intent on the omnipresence of spirit that they neglect the
materiality of the material order. Admittedly, the test is harder to
apply when attention is transferred to the major theories in their most
persuasive form, because here the question concerns views that have
stood the test of time. It is not, however, entirely inapplicable even
there. An individual, at least, may feel that this or that view will not
do precisely because it achieves comprehensiveness by turning its back
on fact; and, though it is unsatisfactory to fall back on personal
judgment in this way, there is perhaps no other alternative in this
difficult area.
Argument, assertion, and method in metaphysics » Initial metaphysical
insights » Role of personal or social factors
Some writers on the philosophy of philosophy, such as Dilthey, have
suggested that the persistence of a plurality of metaphysical systems is
to be explained in terms of personal or social factors. Certain kinds of
metaphysical outlook appeal to certain types of human being, or gain
currency in social circumstances of this kind or that; to understand why
they are accepted, recourse must be had to psychology or sociology or
both. In the above account, stress has been laid on the historical
background against which a number of famous metaphysical theories got
their classical formulations; it is idle to deny that each was
originally designed to solve a problem deemed to be urgent at the time.
Nevertheless, the problem was, of course, an intellectual problem, and
the solution offered claimed to be true, not simply comforting. No doubt
wishful thinking is as rife in the field of metaphysics as anywhere; it
is all too easy here to confuse what men ought to believe with what they
want to believe. Philosophies reveal something about their authors and
even about their historical age, as works of literature do; they
constitute historical evidence as books on mathematics, perhaps, do not.
Yet all this can be admitted without agreeing that metaphysics is merely
of psychological or historical importance. Science does not cease to be
true because it is shown to be useful. Nor is it true that metaphysical
theories always in fact give comfort; there are cases in which men find
themselves returning over and over again to possibilities that they
would very much like to believe were not realized. A philosopher can
commit himself to a view of the world that is not at all to his taste,
simply because it seems to him on due consideration that this is how
things are. That philosophers are godlike beings able to rise entirely
above the limitations of their age seems unlikely. It is equally
unlikely, however, that their opinions are determined throughout by
nonrational factors, and thus that their thinking can lay no claim to
truth.
Argument, assertion, and method in metaphysics » Metaphysical arguments
» Logical character of metaphysical statements
Metaphysical statements fall into two main classes: statements about
what exists and prescriptions about how to take or understand what
exists. It might seem obvious that the first is the more important; the
metaphysician first lays down what he takes to exist, and then tells how
to interpret it. This would be correct if metaphysics were a
departmental inquiry like, for example, botany; but, of course, it is
not. Metaphysicians possess no special resources for the detection of
unfamiliar entities, and in consequence the realities they accept must
all be argued for. The fundamental items that fill the metaphysical
world are one and all theoretical; they are not so much palpable
realities as artificial constructs. That being so, there is less of a
gulf between the two types of metaphysical pronouncement than might at
first appear. It could indeed be argued that the two go closely together
to constitute what may be called a metaphysical point of view, a
standpoint whose primary purpose is to provide understanding. In a
metaphysical context, to say what exists is itself a step on the way to
understanding; it is not something that antedates theory, but part of a
theory itself.
It may be asked whether metaphysical pronouncements are empirical or
a priori and, if the latter, whether they are analytic or synthetic.
They are certainly not straightforwardly empirical, for reasons just set
out, and cannot be merely analytic (i.e., true in virtue of the
definitions of their terms and of the laws of logic) if metaphysics is
to retain any significance. The conclusion that they must be synthetic a
priori (i.e., such that, unlike analytic propositions, they convey new
knowledge and yet claim complete universality and necessity) seems to
follow, and it is just what the opponent of metaphysics wants the
metaphysician to adopt. Metaphysics, as he sees it, is a wholly
unwarranted attempt to say what the world must be like on the strength
of pure thinking, an attempt that is doomed to failure from the start.
Before this condemnation is accepted, however, the function that the
metaphysician assigns to his principles should be considered. When this
is done, it becomes plain that the charge that he claims factual
knowledge of a nonempirical sort is false; in one way he recognizes
exactly the same facts as anyone else. Where he claims superiority is in
knowing how to take facts, and the burden of his message consists in the
advocacy of principles that, he alleges, will provide overall
understanding. One can describe these principles as synthetic a priori
if one chooses. It is probably best, however, to avoid this misleading
term and simply say that they are thought of by the metaphysician as
applying unequivocally to whatever falls within experience. These
metaphysical principles are instructive at least in the sense of having
alternatives, and they are certainly treated as being necessary. It is
not true, however, that they take the form of statements of fact, even
highly general statements of fact; nor is their necessity the same as
that which characterizes logical truths. The principles are
prescriptions rather than statements, and their necessity arises from
the role they play in the constitution of experiential knowledge. It is
a necessity that is in one way absolute: nothing that can claim to be
real can escape their jurisdiction, because they tell how to take
whatever occurs. Nevertheless, in another way the necessity of the
principles is merely conditional, for other ways of interpreting the
same data can be conceived, and it is admitted that there are
circumstances, however hard to specify exactly, in which it would have
to be agreed that they do not apply.
Argument, assertion, and method in metaphysics » Metaphysical arguments
» Logical form of metaphysical arguments
There is also the question whether metaphysical arguments are inductive
or deductive or whether they have some logical form peculiar to
themselves. It is obvious that much metaphysical reasoning is, or
purports to be, reasoning in the strict sense, which is to say that its
form is deductive. Arguments like the first cause argument for God’s
existence claim to be demonstrations; their exponents believe that
anyone who commits himself to the truth of the premises stands logically
committed to the truth of the conclusions. This claim can stand, even if
it turns out that the project to set out metaphysical results in the
geometrical manner is a mistake. It may be impossible to model
metaphysics on mathematics, but that does not make particular
metaphysical arguments any less deductive.
As regards inductive arguments, it would be odd to find a
metaphysician contending, as, for example, historians regularly do, that
p is true and q is true and therefore it is reasonable to conclude that
r is true. To assess probabilities in the light of established facts is
too cautious for the average metaphysical mind. Yet it would be wrong to
deny that metaphysicians are preoccupied with facts. Their objective is
to give a reasoned account of what exists or obtains, and for this
purpose attention to fact is of course indispensable. It figures in
metaphysical thinking at two stages. First, at the beginning, when the
metaphysician is concerned to formulate his main thesis; here there is a
move from what holds in a restricted sphere (the sphere of physics, for
example) to what is supposed to hold generally, a move that is possible
only if the theorist concerned has an interest in the sphere in
question. To arrive at his own position the metaphysician must
extrapolate from what goes on outside metaphysics, and this means that
he must be sensitive to significant developments in at least some of the
main fields of learning and areas of practical activity. But he needs
this extra-philosophical knowledge for a second purpose too: in
estimating the success of his own theories. In principle he must show
that his interpretation of experience covers the facts in an adequate
way, and for this purpose what experts in the different spheres take to
be established is of crucial importance. Metaphysics is not an empirical
science—the element of speculation it includes is too strong for
that—but the metaphysician can no more ride roughshod over facts than
the scientist can. At the least he must explain away phenomena that seem
to count against his thesis, or indicate how they might be explained
away. Whether he explains or explains away, he needs to know what the
main phenomena are.
Finally, it is sometimes said that metaphysics can make use of a form
of argument that is neither deductive nor inductive but transcendental;
a transcendental argument is supposed to proceed from a fact to its sole
possible condition. A transcendental argument is simply a form of
deduction, with the typical pattern: only if p then q; q is true;
therefore, p is true. As this form of argument appears in philosophy,
the interest, and the difficulty, reside not in the movement from
premises to conclusions, which is absolutely routine, but in the setting
up of the major premises—in the kinds of things that are taken as
starting points. In Kant’s case, it was such things as the possibility
of pure mathematical knowledge, the possibility of making objectively
true statements, the fact that there is a unitary system of time. Kant
purported to prove a number of surprising propositions by the use of
transcendental arguments; he tried to commend major premises such as his
arguments about causality and substance by showing what would result if
the protasis (i.e., p) did not hold. What he had to say under this head
has attracted particular interest in recent years. It seems clear,
however, that from the logical point of view no special significance
attaches to this form of argument. Although Kant had been successful in
demonstrating that a sufficient is also a necessary condition, he did
not make clear why it should be taken as the sole such condition. There
is an important gap in his reasoning here, as there is in that of other
metaphysical writers.
Criticisms of metaphysics
Metaphysics has many detractors. The man who aspires “to know reality as
against mere appearance,” to use Bradley’s description, is commonly
taken to be a dreamer, a dupe, or a charlatan. Reality in this context
is, by the metaphysician’s own admission, something that is inaccessible
to sense; as Plato explained, it can be discovered only by the pure
intelligence, and only if the latter can shake itself free of bodily
encumbrances. The inference that the metaphysical world is secret and
mysterious is natural enough. Metaphysics in this view unlocks the
mysteries and lets the ordinary man into the secrets. It is, not to put
too fine a point on it, a study of the occult.
Criticisms of metaphysics » Metaphysics as knowledge of the
supersensible
That there are aspects of metaphysics that lend colour to this
caricature can scarcely be denied. The language of Plato, in particular,
suggests an absolute distinction between the deceitful world of
appearances, which can never be an object of knowledge, and the unseen
world of Forms, each of which is precisely what it appears to be. Plato
urged his readers not to take seriously the things of sense; he told
them that everything having to do with the senses, including the natural
appetites and the life of the body, is unreal and unimportant. The
philosopher, in his view, needs to live an ascetic life, the chief
object of which is to cultivate his soul. Only if he does this, and
follows a rigorous intellectual training, has he any hope of getting the
eye of his soul fixed on true reality and so of understanding why things
are what they are.
Yet even this program admits of an innocuous, or relatively
innocuous, interpretation. The “dialectician,” as Plato called his
metaphysical philosopher, is said in one place to be concerned to “give
an account,” and the only things of which he can give an account are
phenomena. Plato’s interest, despite first appearances, was not in the
unseen for its own sake; he proposed to go behind things visible in
order to explain them. He was not so much disdainful of facts as
critical of accepted opinions; his attack on the acquiescence in
“appearances” was an attack on conventional wisdom. That this was so
comes out nowhere more clearly than in the fact that his targets
included not just beliefs about what there is but also beliefs about
what is good. It is the opinions of the many that need correction and
that can happen only if men penetrate behind appearances and lay hold on
reality.
Plato is often presented as an enemy of science on the ground that he
was bitterly opposed to Empiricism and because he said that, if there
was ever to be progress in astronomy, the actual appearances of the
starry heavens must be disregarded. He understood by Empiricism,
however, the uncritical acceptance of apparent facts, with the attempt
to trace regularities in them; it is an attitude that, in his view, is
marked by the absence of thought. As for the starry heavens, it is
certainly difficult to take Plato quite literally when he compares their
function in astronomy to that of a well-drawn diagram in geometry. Yet
he was not wrong to suggest that no progress could be made in
astronomical inquiries until appearances were seen to be what they were
and not taken for absolute realities. The subsequent progress of
astronomy has shown this view to be entirely correct.
There are respects in which Plato’s attitude to phenomena was
precisely the same as that of the modern scientist. The fact remains,
nevertheless, that he believed in a realm of unseen realities, and he is
of course far from being the only metaphysician to do so. Many, if not
quite all, metaphysicians are committed to claiming knowledge of the
supersensible, in some degree at least; even Materialists are alleged to
make this claim when they say that behind the familiar world of everyday
experience there lies material substance that is not accessible to the
senses. It has been a commonplace among critics of metaphysics since the
early 18th century that no such claims can be justified; the
supersensible cannot be known about, or even known of, whether directly
or by inference.
Criticisms of metaphysics » Specific criticisms » Hume
An early but powerful statement of these criticisms is to be found in
the writings of David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) and An
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). Hume argued first that
every simple idea was derived from some simple impression and that every
complex idea was made up of simple ideas; innate ideas, supposed to be
native to the mind, were nonexistent. There were eccentricities in
Hume’s conception of idea (and for that matter in his conception of
impression), but these did not destroy the force of his argument that
the senses provide the materials from which basic concepts are
abstracted. A being that lacked sense experience could not have concepts
in the normal sense of the term. Next, Hume proceeded to make a sharp
distinction between two types of proposition, one knowable by the pure
intellect, the other dependent on the occurrence of sense experiences.
Propositions concerning matters of fact and existence answer the latter
description; they either record what is immediately experienced through
the senses or state what is taken to be the case on the basis of such
immediate experiences. Such statements about matters of fact and
existence are one and all contingent; their contradictories might have
been true, though, as a matter of fact, they are not. By contrast,
propositions of Hume’s other type, which concern relations of ideas, are
one and all necessary; reflection on the concepts they contain is enough
to show that they must, in logic, be true. Though, in a sense, knowledge
of these propositions is arrived at by the exercise of pure reason, no
real significance attaches to this fact. It is not the case of some
special insight into the nature of things; the truth is rather that
these propositions simply make explicit what is implicit in the
definitions of the terms they contain. They are thus what Kant was to
call analytic propositions, and it is an important part of Hume’s case
that the only truths to which pure reason can attain are truths of this
nature.
Finally, Hume sought to block the argument that, even if the
supersensible could not be known directly, or through pure intellectual
concepts, its characteristics could, nevertheless, be inferred. His
analysis of causality had this as one of its aims. According to Hume,
the only means by which men can go beyond the impressions of the memory
and the senses and know what lies outside their immediate experience is
by employing causal reasoning. Examination of the causal relation,
however, shows that it is, among other things, always a relation of
types of events in time, one of which invariably precedes the other.
Causality is not, as Descartes and others supposed, an intelligible
relation involving an internal tie between cause and effect; it is a
matter of purely factual connection and reduces on its objective side to
nothing more than regular precedence and succession. The importance of
this for the present inquiry lies in the consequence that causal
relations can hold only between items, or possible items, of experience.
According to Hume, if the temporal element is removed from causality,
nothing concrete is left; if it is kept, it becomes impossible to argue
that one can proceed by causal reasoning from the sensible to the
supersensible. Yet it was precisely this that Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas,
and Locke had all attempted.
Hume’s own explicit pronouncements about metaphysics are ambivalent.
There is a famous passage in which he urged men to consign volumes of
divinity and “school metaphysics” to the flames, “as containing nothing
but sophistry and illusion,” but in at least one other place he spoke of
the need to “cultivate true metaphysics with some care, in order to
destroy the false and adulterate.” “True metaphysics,” in this
connection, meant critical philosophical reflection.
Criticisms of metaphysics » Specific criticisms » Kant
Hume’s successor Kant made a sharper distinction between metaphysics and
critical philosophy. Much of Kant’s philosophical effort was devoted to
arguing that metaphysics, understood as knowledge of things
supersensible, is an impossibility. Yet metaphysics, as a study of the
presuppositions of experience, could be put on “the sure path of
science”; it was also possible, and indeed necessary, to hold certain
beliefs about God, freedom, and immortality. But however well founded
these beliefs might be, they in no sense amounted to knowledge: to know
about the intelligible world was entirely beyond human capacity. Kant
employed substantially the same arguments as had Hume in seeking to
demonstrate this conclusion but introduced interesting variations of his
own. One point in his case that is especially important is his
distinction between sensibility as a faculty of intuitions and
understanding as a faculty of concepts. According to Kant, knowledge
demanded both that there be acquaintance with particulars and that these
be brought under general descriptions. Acquaintance with particulars was
always a matter of the exercise of the senses; only the senses could
supply intuitions. Intuitions without concepts, nevertheless, were
blind; one could make nothing of particulars unless one could say what
they were, and this involved the exercise of a very different faculty,
the understanding. Equally, however, the concepts of the understanding
were empty when considered in themselves; they were mere forms waiting
to be brought to bear on particulars. Kant emphasized that this result
held even for what he called “pure” concepts such as cause and
substance; the fact that these had a different role in the search for
knowledge from the concepts discovered in experience did not give them
any intuitive content. In their case, as in that of all other concepts,
there could be no valid inference from universal to particulars; to know
what particulars there were in the world, it was necessary to do
something other than think. Thus is revealed the futility of trying to
say what there is on the basis of pure reason alone.
Kant’s distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions has
peculiarities of its own, but for present purposes it may be treated as
substantially identical with Hume’s distinction set out above.
Similarly, the important differences between Kant and Hume about
causality may be ignored, seeing that they agreed on the central point
that the concept can be properly applied only within possible
experience. If it is asked whether there are substantial differences
between the two as critics of metaphysics, the answer must be that there
are but that these turn more on temperament and attitude than on
explicit doctrine. Hume was more of a genuine iconoclast; he was ready
to set aside old beliefs without regret. For Kant, however, the siren
song of metaphysics had not lost its charm, despite the harsh words he
sometimes permitted himself on the subject. Kant approached philosophy
as a strong believer in the powers of reason; he never abandoned his
conviction that some of man’s concepts are a priori, and he argued at
length that the idea of the unconditioned, though lacking constitutive
force, had an all-important part to play in regulating the operations of
the understanding. His distinction between phenomena and noumena,
objects of the senses and objects of the intelligence, is in theory a
matter of conceptual possibilities only; he said that, just as one comes
to think of things sensible as phenomena, so one can form the idea of a
world that is not the object of any kind of sense experience. It seems
clear, however, that he went beyond this in his private thinking; the
noumenal realm, so far from being a bare possibility invoked as a
contrast with the realm that is actually known, was there thought of as
a genuine reality that had its effects in the sense world, in the shape
of moral scruples and feelings. A comparison of what was said in Kant’s
early essay Träume eines Geistersehers erläutert durch Träume der
Metaphysik (1766; Dreams of a Spirit-Seer), with the arguments developed
in the last part of his Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785;
Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals), would seem to put
this judgment beyond serious doubt.
Though Kant remained convinced of the existence of things
supersensible, he, nonetheless, maintained throughout his critical
writings that there can be no knowledge of them. There can be no science
of metaphysics because, to be true to fact, thinking must be grounded in
acquaintance with particulars, and the only particulars with which human
beings are acquainted are those given in sense. Nor was this all.
Attempts to construct metaphysical systems were constantly being made;
philosophers repeatedly offered arguments to show that there must be a
first cause, that the world must consist of simple parts, that it must
have a limit in space, and so on. Kant thought that all such attempts
could be ruled out of court once and for all by the simple expedient of
showing that for every such proof there was an equally plausible
counterproof; each metaphysical thesis, at least in the sphere of
cosmology—i.e., the branch of metaphysics that deals with the universe
as an orderly system—could be matched with a precise antithesis whose
grounds seemed just as secure, thus giving rise to a condition that he
called “the antinomy of pure reason.” Kant said of this antinomy that
“nature itself seems to have arranged it to make reason stop short in
its bold pretensions and to compel it to self-examination.” Admittedly,
the self-examination led to more than one result: it showed on the one
hand that there could be no knowledge of the unconditioned and
demonstrated on the other that the familiar world of things in space and
time is a mere phenomenon, thus—to Kant—clearing the way to a doctrine
of moral belief. Though this doctrine could not be expunged from Kant’s
philosophy without destroying it altogether, it is quite wrong to
present it, as some modern German writers do, as amounting to the
advocacy of an alternative metaphysics. What Kant was concerned with
here is what must be thought, not what can be known.
Criticisms of metaphysics » Specific criticisms » Logical Positivists
Despite what has just been said, it must be admitted that Kant’s
constant talk about the supersensible makes many critics of metaphysics
regard him as a dubious ally. This was certainly true in the case of the
Logical Positivists, the philosophical school that has attacked
metaphysical speculation most sharply in the 20th century. The
Positivists derived their name from the “positive” philosophy of Auguste
Comte, a 19th-century Frenchman who had represented metaphysical thought
as a necessary but now superseded stage in the progression of the human
mind from primitive superstition to modern science. Like Comte, the
Logical Positivists thought of themselves as advocates of the cause of
science; unlike Comte, they took up an attitude toward metaphysics that
was uniformly hostile. The external reason for this was to be found in
the philosophical atmosphere in the German-speaking world in the years
following World War I, an atmosphere that seemed to a group of thinkers
known as the Vienna Circle to favour obscurantism and impede rational
thought. But there were, of course, internal reasons as well.
According to the Positivists, meaningful statements can be divided
into two kinds, those that are analytically true or false and those that
express or purport to express matters of material fact. The propositions
of logic and mathematics exemplify the first class, those of history and
the natural and social sciences the second. To decide whether a sentence
that purports to state a fact is meaningful, one must ask what would
count for or against its truth; if the answer is “nothing,” it cannot
have meaning, or at least not in that way. Thus, they adopted the slogan
that the meaning of a (nonanalytic) statement is the method of its
verification. It was this verification principle that the Positivists
used as their main weapon in their attacks on metaphysics. Taking as
their examples statements from actual metaphysical texts—statements such
as “The Absolute has no history” and “God exists”—they asked first if
they were supposed to be analytically or synthetically true, and then,
after dismissing the first alternative, asked what could be adduced as
evidence in their favour or against them. Many metaphysicians, of
course, claimed that there was empirical support for their speculative
conclusions; thus, as even Hume said, “the order of the universe proves
an omnipotent mind.” The very same writers, however, proved strangely
reluctant to withdraw their claims in the face of unfavourable evidence;
they behaved as if no fact of any kind could count against their
contentions. It followed, said the Positivists, that the theses in which
they were interested were compatible with any facts whatsoever and thus
were entirely lacking in significance. An analytic proposition, such as
“It either will or will not rain tomorrow,” tells nothing, though there
may be a point in giving voice to it. A metaphysical proposition claims
to be very different; it purports to reveal an all-important truth about
the world. But it is no more informative than a bare tautology, and, if
there is a point in putting it forward, it has to do with the emotions
rather than the understanding.
In point of fact, the Positivists experienced great difficulty in
devising a satisfactory formulation of their verification principle, to
say nothing of a satisfactory account of the principle’s own status. In
the early days of the movement the demand for verifiability was
interpreted strictly: only what could be conclusively verified could be
significant. This had the effect of showing that statements about the
past and propositions of unrestricted generality, to take only two
instances, must be without meaning. Later a move was made toward
understanding verifiability in a weak sense: a statement was meaningful
if any observations bore on its truth. According to A.J. Ayer, an
English disciple of the Vienna Circle, writing in 1936,
It is the mark of a genuine factual proposition, not that it should
be equivalent to an experiential proposition, or any finite number of
experiential propositions, but simply that some experiential
propositions can be deduced from it in conjunction with certain other
premises without being deducible from those other premises alone.
As Ayer admitted in his second edition, however, this formulation
lets in too much, including the propositions of metaphysics. From “The
Absolute has no history” and “If the Absolute has no history, this is
red,” it follows that “This is red,” which is certainly an experiential
proposition. Nor were subsequent attempts, by Ayer and others, to
tighten up the formulation generally accepted as successful, for in
every case it was possible to produce objections of a more or less
persuasive kind.
This result may seem paradoxical, for at first glance the Positivist
case is extremely impressive. It certainly sounds odd to say that
metaphysical sentences are literally without meaning, seeing that, for
example, they can be replaced by equivalent sentences in the same or
another language. But if the term meaning is taken here in a broad sense
and understood to cover significance generally, the contention is by no
means implausible. What is now being said is that metaphysical systems
have internal meaning only; the terms of which they consist may be
interdefinable but perhaps do not relate to anything outside the system.
If that were so, metaphysics would in a way make sense but for all that
would be essentially idle; it would be a game that might amuse but could
hardly instruct. The Positivists confront the metaphysician with the
task of showing that this criticism is not correct. Whatever
difficulties are involved in formulating a principle of verifiability,
the challenge can hardly be ignored.
Criticisms of metaphysics » Specific criticisms » Moore and Wittgenstein
The Positivists were not the only modern critics of metaphysics. G.E.
Moore never argued against metaphysics as such, but nevertheless he
produced criticisms of particular metaphysical theses that, if accepted,
would make metaphysical speculation difficult, if not impossible. It was
characteristic of a certain type of philosopher, according to Moore, to
advance claims of a highly paradoxical nature—to say, for instance, that
“Time is not real” or that “There are no such things as physical
objects.” Moore’s case for rejecting such claims was that they go
against the most central convictions of common sense, convictions that
people accept unhesitatingly when they are not doing philosophy. Men
constantly say that they did this before that, that things are better or
worse than they were; from time to time they put off things until later
or remark that tomorrow will be another day. Moore took these facts as
definitive proof of the reality of time and definitive disproof of any
metaphysical theory that denied it. Supporters of Bradley, the
philosopher here criticized, replied that Moore had missed the point.
Bradley never denied the truth of temporal propositions as used in the
description of appearances; what he questioned was the coherence and
ultimate tenability of the whole temporal way of thinking. As Rudolf
Carnap, a Logical Positivist, was to put it, he raised an external
question and was given an internal answer by Moore. It was an answer,
however, that carried considerable conviction. The simple denial of what
seem to be obvious facts had always been part of the stock-in-trade of
metaphysicians; they make much of the distinction between appearance and
reality. Moore may not have demonstrated the impropriety of this
insistence, but at least he made it necessary for the metaphysician to
be more circumspect, to explain explicitly what he was denying and what
he was ready to accept, and so to make his own case sharper and thus
easier to confirm or reject.
Moore’s implied criticisms of metaphysics lead on naturally to those
of Wittgenstein. Moore took his stand on common sense, whereas
Wittgenstein based his on living language. Arguing that men are each
involved in a multitude of language games or autonomous linguistic
activities, insofar as they are scientific investigators, moral agents,
litigants, religious worshipers, and so on, Wittgenstein asked in what
language game the claims and questionings of philosophers arose. He
replied that there was no genuine linguistic context to which they
belonged; philosophical puzzlement was essentially idle. Philosophers
were preoccupied with highly general questions; they aspired to solve
the problem of meaning or the problem of reality. Against that
Wittgenstein argued that words and sentences have meaning as used in
particular contexts; there is no single set of conditions that has to be
fulfilled if they are to be thought meaningful. Equally, there is no
single set of criteria that has to be satisfied by everything one takes
to be real. Sticks and stones and men are taken as real in everyday
discourse, but so are numbers in the discourse of mathematicians, and so
is God in the discourse of religious men. There is simply no warrant for
preferring one of these above the others—for saying, for example, with
persons of an Empiricist turn of mind, that nothing can be real that
does not have existence in space and time.
Wittgenstein’s antipathy to metaphysical philosophy was in part based
on self-criticism; in his early work the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,
published in 1922, he had himself tried to give a general account of
meaning. At least one doctrine of that enigmatic book survived in his
later thought: the distinction between saying and showing. Wittgenstein
in the Tractatus sought to pronounce on “what can be said” and came to
the conclusion that only “propositions of natural science” can be.
Though at this stage he spoke as if metaphysical statements were
senseless, his motives for doing so were very different from those of
the Positivists. The latter saw metaphysics as an enemy of science; in
their view there was only one way to understand the world, and that was
in scientific terms. But Wittgenstein, though agreeing that science
alone can be clear, held that scientific thought has its limitations.
There are things that cannot be said but can, nonetheless, be shown; the
sphere of the mystical is perhaps a case in point. Unlike his Viennese
contemporaries, Wittgenstein had no wish to rule out of court the
thought that there are more things in heaven and earth than can be
compassed in the language of science; writers whom he admired—such as
Blaise Pascal, a 17th-century French scientist and writer on religious
subjects, and Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher and theologian who
is regarded as the founder of modern Existentialism—had discoursed of
such matters in a way that was highly illuminating. They had made clear,
however, that, just as one here went beyond the province of science, so
also one went beyond that of philosophy. For them the idea that the
metaphysician is privy to the most important of all things is absurd.
There may be a sense in which men transcend everyday experience in
moments of religious feeling or artistic insight, but there is no
justification for thinking that when they do they arrive at the
metaphysician’s Absolute. As Kierkegaard said, the man who looks for
speculative proofs in the sphere of religion shows that he does not
understand that sphere at all.
Criticisms of metaphysics » Specific criticisms » Religious philosophers
It is important, in considering current criticisms of metaphysics, to
appreciate that this discipline is now under double attack. In the first
place, it must face the assault of those who regard it as a rival to
science; it is against this assault that sympathizers like R.G.
Collingwood, a British philosopher, historian, and archaeologist, seek
to defend it. But metaphysics is also in disfavour among many religious
philosophers. In earlier days, partisans of religion, and more generally
believers in a spiritual order, looked to metaphysics to vindicate their
claims against skeptical attack; now they are altogether more reluctant
to do so. The continuing controversy about metaphysics has no doubt
influenced this development; it scarcely seems sensible to take refuge
in a fortress whose walls are so frequently breached. There is, however,
another motive that operates here: the feeling that metaphysics is not
only dubious but, worse, unnecessary. In an age whose tendencies are
antiphilosophical rather than philosophical, there is widespread
acceptance of the view that religion and morals, and for that matter
science and history, are their own justification; none of them stands in
need of a certificate of respectability from philosophy, and any
pretense by metaphysicians to supply or refuse such a certificate must
be without foundation. Though this view is widespread, it is even so not
unchallenged; there are persons who find the fragmentation it
involves—belief in God on Sundays, belief in science for the rest of the
week—intolerable. For such persons, at least, the search for
metaphysical truth and metaphysical answers must retain its fascination.
William Henry Walsh
Tendencies in contemporary metaphysics » Tendencies in the United States
Kant’s efforts to limit metaphysics opened new lines for its
development. He had thought that reason is established by being limited
and that some truths are certain independent of anything that can happen
in experience because experience is structured by the interpretive
categories reflected in these truths. Thus, it is possible to be certain
of the world in its general structure but only insofar as it is an
experienced, or phenomenal, world—that is, a world known by man, not a
world as it is in itself. Hegel, however, argued persistently that
knowledge of a thing unknowable in itself is a contradiction and that
reason can know all that is real if the mind first accepts the given
thing as “always already within experience as other.” The mutual
implication of knowing mind and reality known is accepted, and a science
of self-consciousness that relates all categories and all reality to the
knowing subject is envisaged. Thus, Kant’s mutual implication of knowing
subject and phenomenal thing was given ultimate metaphysical validity by
Hegel, and Kant’s reformulations of traditional dualisms—e.g.,
subject–object, appearance–reality, perceptual–categorial,
immanent–transcendent, regulative–constitutive—became momentous for
metaphysics.
Tendencies in contemporary metaphysics » Tendencies in the United States
» John Dewey
In this milieu, John Dewey, an American educational reformer and
pragmatic philosopher, published his “Kant and Philosophic Method” in
1884 in the journal of a group known as the St. Louis Hegelians.
Although Dewey later rejected the full-scale Hegelianism expressed in
the article, he did so only after gathering up in a partial synthesis
the thought of both Kant and Hegel. In this he sounded the thematic
notes of much contemporary American and continental metaphysics. Whether
or not this metaphysics is explicitly termed transcendental (that is,
concerned with experience as determined by the mind’s conceptual and
categorial makeup), it does two things: (1) it affirms Kant’s insight
that physical particulars cannot first be identified and later
interrelated by means of the categories, but, to be identified at all,
they must be assumed to be already categorized, and reasoning must
proceed to expose those categorial structures that make the actuality of
knowledge possible; (2) it agrees with Hegel’s critique at least to the
extent that Kant’s idea that the source of sensations is external to the
mind in a noumenon is regarded as a transgression of Kant’s own doctrine
that the categories, particularly that of causation, can be applied only
within phenomenal experience. Dewey thought that Kant confused the
empirical and transcendental standpoints by mixing analysis of the
organism as sensationally responsive with analysis of mind. Kant forgot
that it is only because the knowing subject already grasps the world
through its categories that it can self-deceivingly regard its
sensations as subjective and as caused by something not known. Thus, for
Dewey, “The relation between subject and object is not an external one;
it is one in a higher unity that is itself constituted by this
relation.”
In Dewey’s extended later thought, metaphysics became the study of
“the generic traits of existence.” Concern with God and immortality
slips nearly from view, and this is typical of much contemporary
philosophy. Even so, Dewey’s rethinking of the subject–object relation
engenders a concept of a democratic and scientific community of persons,
bound to each other through common ideals, which has religious
overtones. Vague and ambivalent as this concept may be, it helps
undermine the whole contrast between immanent and transcendent and leads
metaphysics on new paths.
Tendencies in contemporary metaphysics » Tendencies in the United States
» William James
The work of William James, a leader of the Pragmatic movement, was
typical of many contemporary tendencies, one of which was the attempt to
locate the role of science in knowledge and culture. Trained in
medicine, James hoped to protect the autonomy of psychology as a science
by adopting a dualistic view of mind and matter. He “supposes two
elements, mind knowing and thing known, and treats them as irreducible.
Neither gets out of itself or into the other, neither in any way is the
other.” He presumed that mental states could be identified independent
of a commitment to the metaphysical status of the things known by them
and that they could then be correlated to the brain. Ironically, his
attempts to identify mental states involved him in commitments to the
nature of the world as presented to mind. The only meaning that can be
given things is in terms of the anticipated consequences of one’s
actions upon these things in the world; this anticipation also supplies
the meaningfulness of thoughts. This is the basis of the “instrumental”
view of thoughts—i.e., reflecting upon thoughts as “tools,” or as “plans
of action,” tells one something about the things known by them, the
“tooled”; the converse also occurs.
Each realm of the world is experienced in terms of temporal standards
of thought natural to that realm; e.g., standards of mathematics are
peculiar because of their ideal, changeless objects. These criteria are
not derived from mind alone or from things alone but from their
relationship in what is termed experience. This is a “double-barreled”
term—that is, an experiencing of experienced things. The mind cannot be
specified independent of things that appear to the mind, and things
cannot be specified independent of their modes of appearing to the mind.
Phenomena regarded abstractly as singular, or “pure,” are neutral
between mind and matter, which are different contexts of the very same
pure experiences—contexts that comprise a single world.
James would not claim that his method is transcendental. Yet the fact
remains that for him subject and object cannot be specified independent
of each other, and James undercuts dualism and moves toward a
transcendental explanation of the conditions of knowledge.
James tried to avoid what can be called logicism, physicalism, and
psychologism. The last claimed that, because knowing is a psychical act,
all that is known about must be subject to psychological laws. James
replied that the known-about, the experienced, has its own autonomy,
either as pure experience, a “specific nature” studied by philosophy, as
a physical context studied by physics, or, finally, as a psychical
context, a human history, studied by psychology. The latter two are both
dependent, at least for their ultimate meaningfulness, upon the first.
Physicalism attempts to infer the nature of the psychical directly from
the physical, thus reducing it to the physical. Most logicisms claimed
that pure reason can grasp the real in itself. James agreed that reason
entertains ideal objects, the relations between which are fixed
independent of the sequence of sensory experience, but he asserted that
this experience must decide which necessary truths apply to the world.
Although some always do apply, the ascertainment of what is categorial
for the world is always incomplete. Just when the world “plays into the
hands of logic” is decided in that endless interaction of “worlds” or
“orders of experience”—such as the perceptual, the imaginary, the
mathematical—occasioned by a thing experienced sifting through the
orders trying to find one that can contain it without contradiction;
Pegasus, for example, is a mythical creature just because it cannot find
a place in the world of real horses. The world of perceptual things,
experienced as experienceable by all and as existing simultaneously,
serves as a paradigm of reality even though other orders of experience
are not reducible to it. Existence is an unusual predicate for James; it
means that practical relationship of doing and concern within which
things must be able to stand to men if they are to be counted as
fundamentally real. James was not giving a subjectivistic account of
reality, however, because he included in the fundamentally real all that
can be related spatially and temporally to what can stand over against
men’s bodily selves. This was commonly forgotten by critics of James’s
popularized theory of truth, Pragmatism, which was thus systematically
misunderstood.
James’s contemporaries Charles Sanders Peirce and Josiah Royce stood
in close dialectical exchange with him on these themes. Differences
between them concerned the scope and conditions to be assigned
experience. In general, Peirce argued that experience is to be construed
more narrowly, in terms of mathematical logic and physics, whereas Royce
argued that the understanding of truth, error, and meaning requires the
assumption of an absolute knower or experiencer. Peirce was a seminal
thinker whose thoughts were often beginnings in the more systematically
developed philosophies of the other Americans.
Tendencies in contemporary metaphysics » Tendencies in continental
Europe » Edmund Husserl and Phenomenology
Edmund Husserl, the German philosopher, used the term Phenomenology to
name a whole philosophy. In order to rid his transcendental
investigation of empirical prejudgments and to discover connections of
meaning that are necessary truths underlying both physical and
psychological sciences, Husserl bracketed and suspended all judgments of
existence and empirical causation. He did not deny them; rather, he no
longer simply asserted them. He reflected upon their intended meaning.
In reflection he claimed to see that things have meaning in terms of how
they appear to men in their pre-reflective life and that awareness is in
terms of this “how.” In pre-reflective life, however, men are not aware
of the “how” as such. By exposing this basic meaning through which men
refer to things, he can free their eyes of the “cataracts” of the
stereotyped and the obvious and can summon them “back to the things
themselves.”
Husserl took traditional metaphysics to be infested with precritical
commitments to existence, either physicalistic, psychologistic, or
logistic. He used the term ontology, however, to apply to his study of
objects of consciousness and even appropriated the Aristotelian term
first philosophy. The world appears within the reflective bracket as
existentially neutral (that is, as regards whether things have existence
in themselves or exist for men) but ontologically ordered because, if
various orders of beings exist, then what they are can be nothing but
what they are intended to be. And what they are cannot be known until
all they are intended to be is known.
Husserl distinguished two types of ontologies: formal ontologies,
which are the domain of meanings, or essences, such as “one,” “many,”
“whole,” or “part,” that are articulated by formal logic and which
Husserl referred to as empty; and material ontologies, which discover
and map the meaning and structure of sensory experience through
transcendental investigation. In material ontology, for example, the
essence of any physical thing is discovered by varying in the
imagination the object that is given within its strictly correlative
mode of perceptual consciousness; the essence is that identical
something that continuously maintains itself during the process of
variation. It is intuited that the perceived thing cannot vary in the
imagination beyond the point of something given perspectively and
incompletely to any given perceiving glance; hence, this is the essence
of any physical thing. This is a truth of eidetic necessity and
comprises a first principle in Husserl’s projected philosophical
science; e.g., numbers are what they are because of the ways in which
they are not like things.
Tendencies in contemporary metaphysics » Tendencies in continental
Europe » The Existentialists
Husserl had early distinguished the primary task of description of
“morphological essences” (those with “floating” spheres of application
in the sensory life) from description of essences like those in
geometry, which described closed, or definite, manifolds; but the
question of the theoretical status of the ordinary perceptual world, or
lived world (Lebenswelt), became increasingly disputed among
Existentialists. They asked whether there can be a philosophical science
that has made all its presuppositions transparent to itself. If
transcendental elucidation of the Lebenswelt, with its historically
established sediments of meaning, is really essential to show how
theoretical sciences are grounded, then one may reasonably ask how
Phenomenology can be sure it has accomplished the elucidation completely
because it is itself a theory. The question gained urgency by Husserl’s
nearly imperceptible slide into what appeared to be an Idealist position
regarding the source of all meaning, a commitment to an absolute ego. If
this ego is regarded as individual in any way, the problem arises of how
any other individual can be as other because it is constituted in this
primal ego.
Husserl’s theory of the ego was rejected by French Existentialists
such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. For the latter, the
bracketing of meanings can never be completed, for consciousness is not
an enclosed individual that could grasp through reflection all its
possible motivations to experience and give meaning to a world. Knowers
are subjects with bodies, whose perceptual life is articulated only
incompletely and discloses the world in progressively surprising ways.
More meaning is found in existence than can at any moment be expressed,
and even the meaning of existence is not reducible to any definable set
of meanings.
Husserl’s approach was not nearly radical enough for Martin
Heidegger, a German thinker sometimes called an Existentialist. In
thinking that he could prescind so neatly from facts and retain the
essence of facts, Husserl was still involved to some extent in the
prejudgments—the psychologistic, physicalistic, and logistic
dualisms—that he inveighed against. For Heidegger there is no realm of
consciousness that constitutes meaning, and he does not think that some
sharp but harmless line could be drawn between essence and fact. The
ambiguity in Husserl’s thought between “object” as sense of the
particular and as the encountered particular in its bodily presence is
not harmless. It is unjustifiable to think that consciousness can
finally demarcate the essential sense of a thing. Thus, Heidegger
discarded the very concept of consciousness and proposed a “fundamental
ontology” of human being (Dasein). Man as a subject in the world cannot
be made the object of sophisticated theoretical conceptions such as
“substance” or “cause”; man, furthermore, finds himself already involved
in an ongoing world that cannot as a whole be made the object of such
conceptions; yet the structure of this involvement is the transcendental
condition of any science of objects. For example, a man can band with
other men in philosophical groups and can think about the metaphysical
status of other men only because he is already essentially with others.
He cannot hope to so purify his own thinking that it becomes that of an
impersonal thinker, an absolute ego.
According to Heidegger, to rethink the problem of reality at its
roots, it is necessary to rethink the fundamentally temporal,
already-given structures of human involvement. Prejudice in the West,
which construes reality, or being, on the basis of beings (that is,
being as the most general feature of beings), must be overturned, and
the problem of the real, the “transcendent,” must be rethought on a
ground on which distinctions between immanent and transcendent and
between perceptual and categorial have been reconstructed. The being of
the world transcends any constitution of the meaning of the world and is
a condition of experience. Thus, a sense is required of being not as
object but as the underlying condition for the reality of the being of
all objects.
Heidegger wanted to propose a genuine phenomenology, a study that
would presuppose nothing of the traditionally formulated distinctions
such as subjective–objective or phenomenal–real. The transcendence of
the world can be understood only as it appears; i.e., when they are
encountered openly, things appear as appearing in part, as both
revealing and concealing themselves. If to the uneducated eye the Sun
appears to be smaller than it is, the naive inference can be corrected
only by educating the person to interpret appearances—to calculate, for
example, the speed and direction of light. The real is given in and
through its appearances.
Tendencies in contemporary metaphysics » The thought of Whitehead
The thought of Alfred North Whitehead is a distinctive variation on
these contemporary themes. Dualisms are undermined by a phenomenology
that does not bracket factual assertions. Logical and mathematical
deductive schemes must be able to be interpreted in relationships
crudely observable in experience, and abstractions of physics and common
sense parading as realism (e.g., that things exist separately within
their own surfaces) must be revealed for what they are, namely,
abstractions. The basic units of reality are organismic unities, “actual
occasions,” which are spatial and temporal extensions that cannot be
exhaustively expressed in terms of distributions of matter at an
instant. Their unity is constituted in a perception-like responsiveness
to the universe that, though usually lacking consciousness or
apprehension, is an appropriation to and for itself of the whole. This
appropriation cannot be exhaustively expressed by point-instant
mechanics (mechanics that is worked out in connection with the physics
of relativity and thus measures not only the distance but also the time
intervals between points) but is minimally a “prehension” (a term proper
to Whitehead indicating the point-transcending function of perception
and consciousness).
Each enduring object of ordinary perception—tables, chairs,
animals—is, for Whitehead, a “society” of actual occasions inheriting,
through a process of appropriation and reenactment in a predictable way,
characteristics of its predecessors. Human perception is understood as a
special case of prehension, in which qualities of the environment are
mediated and projected on the basis of organic and affective experience
of the perceiver’s body, but in such a way that some of this process can
be acknowledged by the percipient upon reflection. Because human
consciousness is regarded as only a special case of prehensive
relations, and because vacuous realisms and notions of transcendence are
regarded as “fallacies of misplaced concreteness and simple location,”
mind–body dualisms are rejected.
Whitehead thought of “the primordial nature of God” as a general
ordering of the process of the world, the ultimate basis of all
induction and assertion of law, a “conceptual prehension” that functions
in the selection of those “eternal objects,” or repeatable patterns that
are enacted in the world. God, however, does not create actual entities.
He provides them with initial impetus, in the form of their subjective
aim, to self-creation. Even God is the outcome of creativity, the
process by which the events of the world are synthesized into new
unities. It is the creative, not fully predictable, advance into novelty
of a pluralistic process. The freedom of man and the determinism of
nature were regarded by Whitehead as another artificial dualism.
The future of metaphysics is uncertain, not mainly because of
20th-century critics, the Logical Positivists, but because of its own
not fully predictable nor controllable dynamisms.
Bruce Withington Wilshire
