Philosophy as Metaphysics

From the History of Metaphysics

Philosophy can be assessed from a dual perspective: a) it is a knowledge of a particular kind; b) it is a form of spiritual activity that produces this knowledge. Knowledge, as the result of activity, is characterized by its subject (that is, what it pertains to), content (meaning), and its correspondence to the questions that precede the acquired knowledge. Temporarily setting aside the requirement that well-formulated questions themselves demand some initial knowledge, one can agree on an initial situation where a prior human inquiry exists, to which knowledge will be the response. When it comes to philosophical knowledge, the inquiry must also be philosophical in nature. Philosophy should only be expected to provide answers to philosophical questions. The poet's rhetorical question, “Why am I not a falcon, why do I not fly?” is an address to God, not to the philosopher. In contrast, the question about the cause of a hot summer pertains more to specialists in meteorology, atmospheric physics, and so on. Most questions that concern people in their everyday lives do not actually relate to science: someone gives advice or teaches about daily matters, while others arrive at their own understanding through their own or others' experiences. As for scientific questions about the unknown, they are formulated and answered by the scientists themselves.

In ancient times, the first philosophers were also nature researchers, although the specificity of different types of scientific knowledge was already clearly understood by the ancient Greeks. The term φύσις (phusis), which translates today as "nature," referred to everything that grows, the process of growth itself, and what has emerged from that process. This refers not only to the growth of plants and animals but also encompasses the entirety of the sensory world, including humanity, which is presented to humans in their immediate experience and exists independently of their involvement. The Greek term φυσική (phusikē, or in a more common modern transcription, "physics") denoted the science of phusis. Works titled "Περί φύσις" ("On Nature") were commonly attributed to thinkers of the pre-Socratic period in the development of ancient science and philosophy; thus, to some extent, they can be referred to as "physicists." These "physicist-philosophers" perceived their task as revealing the true essence of things and phenomena, offering knowledge that is "true" in contrast to the ordinary, everyday knowledge of common mortals, which is regarded as imaginary. The means of acquiring genuine knowledge about existence lay in rationalist thought—purely deductive reasoning concerning the fundamental principle (ἀρχή - "archē") from which things are composed and to which they can be reduced. Thus, scientific knowledge relied on what is sensibly given and sought to explain it purely speculatively, that is, intellectually, arriving at a certain principle to which the diversity of the world can be traced. The main questions of such science were:

• How is the unity and multiplicity related in the world?
• What is mutable and what is immutable in the world?
• What is more inherent to things: motion or rest?
• What are being and non-being, and what is their existence?

The first to consciously break the tradition of equating "physical" knowledge with true science was Socrates. In Plato's dialogue "Phaedo," there is a heartfelt confession from Socrates about his path to genuine knowledge: “In my youth, I had a true passion for that kind of wisdom which is called the knowledge of nature. It seemed to me something grand to know the cause of every phenomenon—why something is born, why it dies, and why it exists. I often swung from one extreme to another, and here is the kind of question I asked myself at first: when warmth and coldness cause decay, is it not then, as some thought, that living beings are created? What do we think with—blood, air, or fire? Or perhaps none of these, but it is our brain that evokes sensations of hearing, sight, and smell, and from them arise memory and imagination; and from memory and imagination, when they attain stability, arises knowledge. I pondered the demise of all this and the changes that occur in the heavens and on Earth, all for the sake of ultimately acknowledging my complete incapacity for such inquiries.” We do not know precisely how Socrates thought, as we only judge based on the accounts of his student Plato; however, it is undeniable that the turn to a new understanding of the essence of philosophical (scientific) knowledge originates with Socrates. Physical knowledge is, in fact, indifferent to humanity; the mysteries of the universe belong to the divine, and to unravel them exceeds human capabilities. What pertains to humanity is what one can and should know—namely, the general norms of all human activity, such as the good, justice, courage, beauty, etc., which are expressed in concepts, the study of which constitutes the essence of science.

Following Socrates, Plato rejects the possibility of true knowledge concerning the sensory world, as it is too mutable and lacks a genuine foundation for knowledge. Everything given in experience and connected to sensory material is merely an object of opinion, not of true knowledge. We cannot explain, Plato asserts, the diverse world of visible things based on them alone; thus, he posits the existence of a primary world of ideas, where each thing corresponds to its so-called twin—an ideal, perfect model or archetype. Moreover, this is not merely about the similarity between the model and the actual thing, but about the causal dependence of the visible world on the ideal. Plato is convinced that philosophical knowledge pertains to the realm (accessible to the intellect) of true essences, separate from the visible things that previously constituted the subject of "physical" knowledge. Consequently, Plato assigns philosophical knowledge to a level that transcends physical knowledge, which is limited, imperfect, and untrue, as it does not provide explanations of things and phenomena. Essentially, Plato seeks to demonstrate the necessity of existence for genuinely scientific knowledge beyond the "pseudoscience" of visible things. Such knowledge can be termed metaphysical and, in essence, philosophical.

However, neither Plato nor Aristotle was responsible for the emergence of the term "metaphysics" in the philosophical lexicon, although it is often associated with Aristotle's works. When, in the first century AD, these works required ordering and some classification, Andronicus of Rhodes named Aristotle's books that followed “Physics” (in Greek, τά μετά τά φυσικά - ta meta ta physika) as "Metaphysics." Today, among scholars, there is a view that the term "metaphysics" was used long before Andronicus of Rhodes and had the meaning that in knowledge, we move sequentially from natural ("physical") phenomena to that which lies beyond them, or, alternatively, after (μετά) them. However, if we turn to the essence of the matter, Aristotle did not distinguish metaphysical knowledge from other scientific knowledge. What we now call "Metaphysics" was referred to by the author as "first philosophy." Its task was to substantiate the foundations of any other scientific reasoning: "There is some science that investigates being as such and also what is inherently appropriate to it. This science is not identical to any of the so-called special sciences, as none of the other sciences investigates the general nature of being as such, while all of them, separating some part of it, examine what is inherent to that part, as, for example, mathematical sciences do. And since we seek the principles and higher causes, it is clear that they must be the principles and causes of something that is self-subsisting." The position that "first philosophy" (metaphysics) occupies in the structure of intellectual knowledge is outlined by Aristotle as follows: "Natural science deals with subjects that exist independently but are not immovable; some branches of mathematics study what, although immovable, does not exist independently, but as something that relates to matter; first philosophy, however, studies what exists both independently and as immovable." Ultimately, the subject of this first philosophy is intellectual, the most super-sensory, divine being. In contrast to Plato, Aristotle does not reduce scientific knowledge solely to metaphysical knowledge, which is absolutely opposed to physical and mathematical knowledge, as they too pertain to knowledge of the super-sensory. Aristotle merely places metaphysics above other types of knowledge due to its foundational role and its complete, noble selflessness, without denying the scientificity of other forms of knowledge.

In the medieval period, metaphysics was entirely subsumed under theology, where the first principle (God) was not established through proof but accepted on faith. The most prominent representative of medieval scholasticism, Thomas Aquinas, borrowed nearly all essential concepts from Aristotle's "first philosophy" (essence, existence, matter, form, etc.), but infused them with distinctly Christian meaning. Thus, in his view, only God embodies the unity of essence and existence, while individual things exist not due to their own essence but through their participation in the Creator. According to Aquinas, metaphysics, by examining the foundations of all that exists, must delve into its ultimate cause—the absolute being of God. However, in the late Middle Ages, attempts arose to critique metaphysics as such. These attempts stemmed from the nominalism of that era (W. Ockham), asserting that metaphysics is impossible due to the conceptual ineffability of God, since general concepts cannot be meaningfully applied beyond experience.

Regardless, metaphysics endured into the modern era, and this endurance bore dual significance. On one hand, exemplified by René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, metaphysics served increasingly as a means of providing finite justification for scientific knowledge; on the other hand, it remained a relatively independent “knowledge” of the supersensible, with subjects such as God, the Soul, and the World as a whole examined in terms of their essence and existence.

Radical doubts regarding the rights of metaphysics to exist emerged with David Hume, continued through the works of French Enlightenment thinkers, Immanuel Kant, and extended into the positivism of the 19th and 20th centuries. Rooted in empiricism, where experience is reduced to sensory impressions, and rejecting the old scholastic metaphysics, Hume reduced the tasks of philosophy to the investigation of sensations and perceptions and the elucidation of the relationships formed among them in our consciousness. Hume’s critique of the objectivity of causal dependence resonated strongly in subsequent philosophical debates. He utilized this critique to deny the existence of material substance. He also dismissed the existence of a separate spiritual substance, categorizing all that so-called thinking engages with into two groups: relations of ideas and facts. The former are propositions whose evident truth is based on intuition (such as all mathematical judgments), while the latter, namely facts, lack such evident truth and reliability, making their veracity always problematic. This line of reasoning clearly led Hume to skepticism regarding the possibility of a true representation of reality.

Summarizing his radical stance toward contemporary philosophy, Hume made a striking conclusion-advice: “If we, convinced of the truth of these principles, were to review libraries, what devastation we would wreak therein! Take, for example, any book on theology or school metaphysics and ask: does it contain any abstract reasoning about quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experience-based reasoning about facts and existence? No. Then throw it into the fire, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and errors.”

As a philosopher, Immanuel Kant also achieved global renown through his critique of metaphysics; everything else in his work is, to some degree, a consequence of this critique. Beginning with the question of the possibilities of metaphysics as a science, he turned to the investigation of human cognitive faculties, the general characterization of knowledge, and the pathways and conditions for its attainment. Kant concluded that the classical metaphysical subjects—God, the Soul, and the World—cannot be encompassed by theoretical, i.e., scientific knowledge, as they are not given to us through experience; scientific knowledge is ensured through the combination of a priori forms of understanding with data from experience. Any attempt to transcend the realm of phenomena and assert something about the noumenal world is doomed to failure due to the fatal inability to construct coherent judgments about it. Ideas of pure reason (God, the Soul, the World) lack their correlates in the realm of sensory observation, making it impossible to associate them with anything that would translate into the domain of theoretical knowledge. Thus, metaphysics as a science of the supersensible is impossible.

Nevertheless, Kant does not deny metaphysics the right to exist. But on what grounds, in what role, and in what form? “For the human spirit,” he wrote, “to entirely renounce metaphysical inquiries is as improbable as for us to cease breathing out of fear of inhaling impure air. Always, moreover, each person, especially the thoughtful, will possess metaphysics, and in the absence of a universal measure, each will have it in their own way.” Kant added that a persistent incompleteness of experience and the natural presence of a priori ideas of God, the Soul, and the World in the mind will continually compel humanity toward metaphysics. Not as a system of scientific-theoretical knowledge akin to the natural sciences, but as a categorical analysis, a systematic compilation of concepts divided according to their various origins (sensation, understanding, reason), metaphysics is possible. Kant viewed metaphysics as the culmination of the entire culture of the human mind, for everything that the mind learns through the pathways of science is accomplished through the aforementioned system of general concepts.

The implications of Kant's critique of metaphysics were significant. On one hand, they stimulated the development of philosophical systems within German idealism, where Hegel provided the most refined network of interconnected categories as instruments of human thought. Although Hegel endowed the term “metaphysics” with a negative connotation, signifying an antithetical mode of thought that denies the dynamism of concepts from dogmatic positions, he nonetheless remained to some extent a continuator of Kant's thought regarding metaphysics, which investigates speculative means of understanding the general concepts of reason. On the other hand, after Kant, the denial of metaphysics as philosophy in general gained strength through their identification. This tendency became particularly pronounced in positivism and classical Marxism. The founder of positivism, the French philosopher and sociologist Auguste Comte (1798-1857), preoccupied with synthesizing all scientific knowledge around sociology, advanced the doctrine that humanity, in its intellectual development, passes through three stages: the theological, the metaphysical, and the scientific (positive). “Metaphysics, like theology,” emphasized Comte, “seeks to explain the inner nature of beings, the origin and purpose of all things, the fundamental mode of formation of all phenomena; but instead of resorting to supernatural factors (as occurs in the theological phase), it increasingly replaces them with essences or embodied abstractions…” Ultimately, he considered metaphysics nothing other than a diminished form of theology. In the third and final stage, our reason is confined to the simple investigation of laws, i.e., the established relations that exist among observed phenomena. Thus, for Comte, metaphysics is necessarily transcended by the growing maturity of reason, as humanity transitions into the positive (scientific) stage.

As is well known, subsequent generations of positivism (empirio-criticism, neo-positivism) also insisted on the elimination and overcoming of metaphysical issues as having exhausted themselves and being incompatible with contemporary science. If we turn to the principal pronouncements of the founders of Marxism, we will find similar ideas regarding the overcoming of the inclination to construct speculative philosophical systems, including metaphysics. For instance, as we recall, Friedrich Engels pointed out that philosophy still retains the doctrine of thought, logic, and dialectics, while everything else falls within the positive science of nature and history.

This small “still” deserves particular attention, as it clearly indicates the view regarding the transience and ultimate refuge of philosophy.

In our times, traditional metaphysics has been subjected to thorough critique by the eminent German philosopher Martin Heidegger. His principal remark concerns the fact that all previous metaphysics had as its object “the being as a whole.” He fundamentally distinguishes between “being” and “becoming,” for it is only through being that “is” being. In European culture, a metaphysical attitude toward reality has established itself, where all reality (including the relationship between human beings) manifests in the form of “objects,” “objectivity,” and humanity perceives itself as the creator of objective reality. “Being” for such a culture is synonymous with the objective world, that is, “the being.” Beginning with the Eleatics and Plato, European culture has lost (“forgotten”) being. For Heidegger, metaphysics is not merely some foreign philosophical doctrine for most humanity; it represents a dominant mode of worldview concerning us all. Therefore, the overcoming of metaphysics cannot occur merely through the critical passion of any particular philosopher, but requires a radical, fateful reorientation of all humanity. This task is facilitated by the fact that in the roots of European culture (Ancient Greece) there were seeds of the ability to attune oneself to “being.” These seeds are preserved in the structure of our language, which is the thread connecting contemporary humanity with the ancient, yet forgotten ability to “listen to being.”