Metaphysics Today

Monday musings on the necessity of history and its overcoming. 

Mythos is an indispensable method in metaphysics. Metaphysics only comes to life in the midst of philosophical dialogues, and so sometimes it is helpful to perform a seance by invoking conceptual personae: Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Aquinas, Hegel, Whitehead. These and many other names tell a story, and conjure movements in our minds, setting the stage for metaphysical experimentation. 

As anyone attempting to think philosophically in the present knows all too well, there is an ever-growing history of metaphysics that must be inherited and made new. There are also social and natural histories to inherit. These histories are metaphysical facts. We are engulfed by the past. It is not an idea, not a principle or category, but a necessary surd we find ourselves always already swallowed in, half-digested by its churning gut. In such conditions we are just barely able to babble our way toward a halfwit understanding of the immensities of our pluriverse. Metaphysics is a response to being stunned to silence by existence. Not by what there is, but just that there is anything at all. 

What is it?, we wonder at the closed surfaces and open expanse of space around us. 

Who am I?, and the time inside our faces unfurls us into a yawning abyss.

A new metaphysician is born every time another human being sees their seeing or tries to think the thinker for the first time. The entire mood of the scene of life is transformed in that moment. The I awakens behind our eyes. 

Metaphysics is the art and science of beginnings, but not one of us can pretend to begin alone. We begin in the womb and take our first breaths in our mother’s arms. We learn the language and lifeways of our place and time. Before we can make, we are made.We are earthbound, as the late Bruno Latour put it in his Gifford lectures. Sure, by now several hundred humans have left the earth in expensive metal craft and spacesuits, turned and looked back, and really felt for the first time in their adult lives that an invisible umbilical cord still binds them to the planet of their birth. But despite the triumphant billionaire parade toward Martian technocracy I can’t help but bet against the strange and temporary petroleum interval we call modern industrial civilization. Business as usual is teetering on the edge of a cliff while our leaders pretend the economy can grow forever. The whole thing seems likely to collapse before Lord Musk’s star ship escape plan can hatch. Even if anyone did make it to Mars, the human body is not incidentally related to the Earth. It is an organelle in the earth-cell. Our metabolism and circadian rhythm are wedded to our home planet. We won’t survive long on 1/3 earth mass without an EM field to block DNA scrambling solar and cosmic radiation. Only machines could survive on Mars, if they’re lucky.

To think not about objects in space-time but with or as the ongoing creation of reality moment by moment—to partake in Creality—requires first remembering who and what we think with; that is, recollecting the makers of the language of thought that inhabits us, compels us, and empowers us to critique them, to critique ourselves, to seeand feel more today than we did yesterday, to grow beyond all prior a prioris. This Logos we breathe together is the source of all our good ideas, which means the good ideas never belong to me or you or anyone. Their beauty bleeds between us. Their truth compels us all. 

Among the desiderata for a good, true, and beautiful metaphysics-in-process I would include the following: 

We must historicize the transcendental, which is what Hegel tried to do.

We must also naturalize it, which was Schelling’s aim.

When we’re done with those imponderable projects, we can begin to work on ourselves, on the soul. That was Jung’s vocation. 

Can we inherit all this labor of thought and build on it? Are we to stand upon their shoulders in an attempt to escape the cave? Or is our task today better understood as a descent? Can they then embolden us to journey deeper into the mines of time? Do they increase the light and warmth of our lamps? Might all the well-worn equipment they’ve provided us also weigh us down, their myriad lenses obscuring our sight of novel passageways? Have we brought enough water with us to nourish the seed germinating in our souls since that first breath of Barfield’s beta-thinking? Can we plant it deep enough that its roots grow to tap the core of everything? 

To do metaphysics afresh, to make it matter today, for us, in our time, we must forget as much as we remember. Creativity need not always destroy. We can include what we transcend.

We think Plato through Aristotle, then both and neither through Plotinus, all in all through Aquinas, absolute negation through Hegel, and all in each in Whitehead. 

And then?