Metaphysics

Discussion

Metaphysics is necessary because we are in a time between worlds

Zachary Stein:

"Metaphysics is a difficult word to define outside its simple origin as the title marking the volume that followed the Physics in Aristotle’s canon (in Greek, meta = after / beyond). In the West, metaphysics has been a distinct branch of academic philosophy ever since Aristotle’s works were translated by the Church. Ontology is a related word (based on the Greek, ontos = being), which I use to refer to the practice of working out the details within a larger metaphysical system. Medieval monastics would conceive some of the most complex and ornate metaphysical systems in history, justifying all kinds of miracles and biblical paradoxes through metaphysical theorizing and ontological speculations – and they would buttress it all with a theory of Intuition. Premodern metaphysics is often what people think of when they think of metaphysics pejoratively as a kind of magical thinking (e.g., “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”). Premodern metaphysics also gets a bad reputation from having been used to justify the Inquisition, religious wars, and all manner of theocratic insanity. This is all true, but I am not out to beat the dead horse of premodern metaphysics, which both scientistic New Atheists and postmodern progressives continue to enjoy doing. Instead I am going to argue that contemporary cultural trends signal a “return” to metaphysics. I argue that the modern and postmodern absence of metaphysics causes its own problems, like those now encountered by the modern capitalist world-system as it reaches its terminal limits to growth. Part of responding to our global crises requires finding a way to live again within a metaphysics that puts the human being in context. The phrase “metaphysics after Kant” is used to talk about the difficulty that professional philosophers have in practicing metaphysics during our current epoch of cultural evolution. Metaphysics was taken away from the religious authorities by Immanuel Kant during the Enlightenment. At the time, Kant was considered by some to be the most dangerous and revolutionary man on the European continent – more dangerous even than Napoleon. This idea was comical to others because Kant lived on a meager salary in the same small attic most of his adult life. He never traveled, supposedly never lost his virginity, supposedly never raised his voice in anger, and every day he took a walk at exactly the same time with such regularity that his neighbors set their watches by it (Cassirer, 1981). However, the quip about Kant being dangerous is funny because it is true. Kant’s project was radical (and more dangerous than violent uprisings) to the foundations of religious authority, and in turn to political authority. Kant had thought out a way to overthrow the ancien régime of Leibnizian “metaphysics as apologetics,” and in so doing to make separate places for science and faith under one system. Along with other thinkers of his time, Kant would literally destroy the way a whole culture justified its most important beliefs and values. After Kant, metaphysics was done in a different way. Reality – the thing-in-itself – was put out of reach, which meant that theologians could no longer claim to have intuitions into divine ideas but also that science could claim only to “understand” and never to have the total truth. Science and theological metaphysics were put in their respective places by Kant’s “Copernican Turn” away from the objects of science and theology and towards the knowing subject. His so-called “transcendental subject” was what he thought philosophers should be researching instead of metaphysics, as it is prior to metaphysics. The categories of the subject that structure perception were more important for Kant than the “object” they perceived; he theorized that consciousness constructed the object and the whole of nature, including time and causality. Nature as it really is cannot be known. We can only know nature as it appears to us through the structures of our consciousness. Premodern metaphysics was over, and Kant had ushered in a new era in philosophy during which it would support the activities of the physical sciences while also being freed from the reigns of the church. As modernity progressed metaphysics would be denied and avoided, eventually withering away into the bare bones “flatland” universe implied by the physical sciences (see Bhaskar, 1986). The practice of metaphysics was in disarray 78 years after Kant, when Darwin brought about the most massive changes to our understanding of the physical universe since Newton. Evolutionary theory would change what it meant to practice philosophy, and philosophers would slowly begin their journey “back” to metaphysics. Peirce was one of the first to follow the implications of evolutionary theory up into the aperspectival complexity on the other side of modernity (what we call postmodernism) and then beyond that into a new metaphysics of humanity and the universe (Brent, 1998). I have documented elsewhere Peirce’s work as a proto-Integral metatheorist (Stein, 2015). Here I trace the development of his thought again (but from a different angle) in order to frame a discussion of what it means to do metaphysics after Kant and Darwin. I then follow a line through Peirce’s semiotics and objective idealism to current trends in metamodern metaphysics, including speculative realism. Granted, there are other ways to frame a discussion of post-metaphysical philosophy besides my story about Peirce. For example, there is a line that runs from Kant through Heidegger to Badiou, and another from Hegel through Marx to Bhaskar (as it is, I arrive at Bhaskar via another route). I frame my account using Peirce because at the core of Peirce’s scientific, post-Kantain metaphysics was the idea of evolutionary love, which is an important forerunner to the conception of Eros that is at the core of cosmo-erotic humanism."

(http://integral-review.org/issues/vol_14_no_1_stein_love_in_a_time_between_worlds.pdf)