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Metaphysics
is 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.
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.
(see also Index: noumenon)
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).
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. (see also Index:
existence)
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?
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.
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. (see also Index: noumenon)
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.
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. (see also Index: mathematics, philosophy of)
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.
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. (see also Index:
Hegelianism)
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.
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. (see also Index:
Analytic philosophy)
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.
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.
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. (see also Index:
number system)
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 (eide,
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.
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. (see also Index:
universal)
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. (see also Index:
geometry)
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. (see also Index: process
philosophy)
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. (see also Index: ontological argument)
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.
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. (see
also Index: mind,
human body, dualism)
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.
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. (see also Index: mind-body
dualism, consciousness )
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. (see also Index:
cogito, ergo sum)
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. (see also Index: psychophysical
parallelism)
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. (see also Index: idealism)
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. (see also Index: free will)
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. (see also Index: artificial intelligence)
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.
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. (see also Index: matter)
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. (see also Index: thing-in-itself)
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. (see also Index: secondary
quality, primary quality)
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. (see also Index: teleology, biology)
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. (see also Index: life)
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.
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.
(see also Index: Christianity)
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. (see
also Index: idealism)
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. (see also Index: spiritualism)
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. (see also Index:
subjective idealism)
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.
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.
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. (see also Index: appearance)
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. (see
also Index: mathematics,
philosophy of)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. (see also Index: science, philosophy of)
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.
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.
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. (see also Index:
a priori knowledge, applied
logic)
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.
(see also Index: analytic proposition )
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. (see also Index: "Meditations
on First Philosophy," )
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.
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. (see also Index: empirical method)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. (see also Index:
induction, deduction)
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. (see also Index: applied logic)
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. (see also Index: occultism)
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. (see also Index:
spiritualism)
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.
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.
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.
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. (see also Index: verifiability
principle)
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.
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. (see
also Index: Analytic
philosophy)
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.
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. (W.H.W.)
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. (see also Index: thing-in-itself)
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.
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.
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." (see also Index: bracketing)
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.
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.
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. (see also Index:
process philosophy)
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. (B.W.W.)
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형이상학 (形而上學, metaphysics)
철학적 기본 가정들을 비판적으로 검토하고 존재하는
것이 무엇인지를 규정하는 철학의 한 분야.
형이상학은 논리학·인식론·미학·윤리학
등 철학의 다른
연구분야와 상호작용한다. 형이상학은 전통적으로 철학적
관심의 대상이 되는 광범한 주제를 다루었다. 그중 가장
기본적인 주제는 그리스 철학자들이 언급한 것으로, 정신의
대상이 되는 추상적 실재, 즉 형상의 존재와 성격이다. 고전
그리스 철학자들이 실재 세계의 대상인 감각할 수 있는
사물들과 정신의 대상인 관념들을 구별한 뒤 형이상학적
철학자들은 추상과 실체의 관계에 관심을 기울여 둘 다
존재하는 것인지, 또는 둘 중 어느 하나가 나머지 하나보다
더 실재적인지를 해명하려 했다. 형이상학자들은 형상과
관념의 관계를 이해하려는 시도 속에서 자연세계, 시간과
공간의 의미, 신의 존재와 본성 등을 해석했다.
형이상학적 논증은 대체로 선험적인 과정으로 이루어진다.
선험적 논증은 서로 정합적인 기본 가정들에서 출발하여
일련의 결론을 도출해내는 과정으로 이루어진다. 만일
이러한 연역 과정에서 조금이라도 불합리한 점이 나타나면
최초의 원리는 거부되거나 재평가되어야만 한다.
형이상학의 결론은 지극히 보편적인 성격을 띠며, 경험에서
나온 사실의 진술이라기보다는 사고의 전형이 되는 포괄적
주장이다. 따라서 몇 가지 반대 사례를 들어 형이상학의
결론을 비판하는 것은 효과적인 비판이 아니다. 더욱이
새롭게 발견된 지식이 기존의 낡은 지식을 대체하고
극복하는 경험 과학과는
달리 서로 대립하는 많은 형이상학 이론들은 모두 시간의
검증을 통과함으로써 단 하나의 형이상학적 진리는
존재하지 않는다는 점을 확인해주고 있다.
최초의 형이상학자 파르메니데스와 플라톤은
현상과 실재 사이의 근본적인 차이를 인식했다. 플라톤은
감각세계의 가변적이고 기만적인 실재를 거부하고 불변라는
참된 이데아의 세계를 선호했다. 아리스토텔레스는
질료와 형상에 대한 플라톤의 구별에서 출발하고 생물학적
모델을 사용해 그 2가지를 통합했다. 아리스토텔레스는
질료가 자신 속에 잠재된 이상적 형상을 향해 끊임없이
움직인다고 가정했다. 이러한 방법으로 물질세계는
유기적 변화의 연속체로 인식된다. 그리스도교의 발전과
더불어 철학자들은 신의 존재에 대해 선천적으로 증명·개발하는
데 관심을 가지게 되었다. 성 토마스
아퀴나스의 형이상학에 기반을 둔 토마스주의는
아리스토텔레스의 사상과 그리스도교 사상을 결합했다.
토마스 아퀴나스에 따르면 일상사에 대한 명상(아리스토텔레스가
질료와 형상의 관계를 고찰한 방법임)은 신이 존재한다는
사실, 신이야말로 물질세계의 최고의 지속적 원인이라는
점을 깨닫게 해준다. 유한하며 항상 변화하는 물질세계를
고찰함으로써 사람들은 필연적으로 그 변화의 원천인
신에게 인도된다.
르네 데카르트는
형이상학 사상에서 또다른 주요한 흐름을 낳았다.
데카르트의 이원론 철학은 물질 영역과 정신 영역을
구분하고 그 둘은 서로 독립적인 영역이라고 규정했다.
데카르트는 그리스도교 철학자들이 주장한 신 개념에
반대하여, 물질세계가 최고의 동인(動因)에 의해 움직이기
시작했지만 그 이후에는 마치 커다란 기계처럼 신의 영향을
받지 않고 움직였다고 주장했다. 이마누엘 칸트는
이원론을 받아들였지만 데카르트의 설명을 거부하고 지각의
중요성을 입증함으로써 형이상학에 혁명을 일으켰다.
칸트에 따르면, 객관적 실재는 인간정신이 만든 시간과
공간의 구성물을 통해 지각될 수밖에 없다. 그러므로
물리세계에 대한 인간의 견해는 항상 지각 메커니즘의
영향을 받는다. 칸트는 모든 관찰을 관찰 메커니즘에
종속시킴으로써 이전 형이상학자들이 객관적 실재라고 본
것을 단호히 거부했다. 유물론과 관념론은 각기 단일한 이론
내에 정신과 물질 개념을 종합하려 했다. 관념론자들이
물질을 정신에 종속시킴으로써 그 2가지 영역을 통합한 반면,
유물론자들은 정신을 물질에 종속시킴으로써 모든 존재가
물질이며 정신은 객관적 상황에 의존한다고 주장했다.
여러 철학자들은 형이상학의 방법론과 결론의 진리성에
의문을 제기해왔다. 데이비드 흄은
모든 지식이 감각을 통해 생겨난다고 주장했다. 모든
기본관념들은 감각경험에서 파생한 것이기 때문에 순수
사유는 존재하지 않는다고 흄은 결론을 내렸다. 20세기
철학학파인 논리실증주의에 따르면 모든 진술의 의미는
어떻게 그것이 검증될 수 있느냐에 달려 있다.
논리실증주의자들은 형이상학의 주장은 검증할 방법이 없기
때문에 무의미하다고 주장했다. 루트비히 비트겐슈타인은
형이상학적 경험이란 언어의 영역을 초월한 것이라고
보았고 말할 수 있는 것과 단지 보여질 수만 있는 것을
구별해야 한다고 주장했다. 비트겐슈타인에 따르면
형이상학적 이론화는 성공할 수 없다. 왜냐하면 그러한
이론화는 언어가 조명할 수 있는 영역을 넘어서 존재하는
영역에 대해 말하려는 시도이기 때문이다.
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