Why Metaphysics Matters: Introduction

A lively discussion about why metaphysics matters in our current Metamodern era

Metaphysics has acquired a bad reputation. I want to show you why metaphysics matters. Metaphysics means different things to different people. In the history of philosophy it has become somewhat a catch-all for all types of meta-philosophizing. Metaphysics can be reclaimed by examining its roots in mathematics and geometry — which no one would argue don’t matter to physics. Theoretical mathematicians, creating mathematical frameworks that are built up in rigorously logical ways, through complex rules of logic and translation, are the purest metaphysicians of all. Metaphysics in this regard is the study of, understanding of, and creation of conceptual frameworks that can function in a variety of ways: for beauty, for usefulness, for meaning-making, for deconstructing limiting frameworks, for experimenting, for trying something new just for the hell of it, for creating new languages such as writing computer codes or “inventing” non-Euclidian geometry, for creating fantasy worlds in literature or virtual reality.

Metaphysics gets into trouble when it tries to make truth claims about the world. No true metaphysician would make such claims, because the pre-requisite of a valid metaphysics, is that it understands what underlies all truth claims, namely a cognitive-conceptual architecture, i.e., a metaphysical framework. While it may not be possible for the philosopher to reveal the contours of their framework, (in other words, think themselves out of their metaphysical box), a good metaphysician reminds themselves that there is one, beyond the horizons of their capacity to think.

The goal of a metaphysics, contemporarily, is to sew together what Kant’s metaphysics tore apart: the domains of epistemology and ontology. Here I use the simple working definitions that “Epistemology concerns itself with how we know about reality,” and “Ontology concerns itself with reality.” Kant pointed to the limitations of the human mind, language, thought and existential conditions as barriers to knowing the world as it really is. He highlighted certain rules of logic, science and judgment that could serve as accurate correspondences to what is real. Ontology was thereafter whisked away from the discourses of theology and theosophy and made subservient to the rules and methodologies of scientific reasoning. 

Once the post-modern mind began to “see” that the scientific enterprise itself could also be contextualized by deconstructive critique, the very idea of an ontologically real truth was abandoned. The philosopher Roy Bhaskar created an entire new philosophy called Critical Realism to redress the postmodern overcorrection. With the word “critical” Bhaskar preserved the deconstructive act of metaphysical examination. With the word “realism” Bhaskar restored the belief in levels of reality that exist independent of human reasoning, positing that there is an ontologically real domain of existence that is not dependent upon epistemological claims. Bhaskar emphasized that this ontologically independent domain is available to examination through methods of reasoning and knowing that generate epistemologically valid truths. Yet, even the epistemologically untapped domain of the real, persistently calls us, to listen at levels deeper than the reasoning mind.

This untapped domain, calls to us with what Bhaskar called the alethic truth. The alethic truth is not an epistemologically known or empirically verifiable truth. Rather it discloses itself through our own existential condition, which is an impulse to greater degrees of freedom. This impulse realizes greater freedoms by throwing off the shackles of slavery and bondage, but also, and perhaps more importantly, by acts of pure creation, by presencing what is absent, as, for example, in Charles Eisenstein’s words, “creating the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.” [1]

Critical Realism plays an important role in healing the rift between epistemology and ontology. But what of metaphysics? When Bhaskar says that philosophy should “under-labor” for science, he comes close to describing a new metaphysical orientation. Under-laboring means revealing the boundary conditions in which certain scientific truths are (and are not) true. If we do a simple empirical test, let’s say, by dropping a feather and a stone from a tower at precisely the same time, our naïve results might suggest that the “falling force” pulls at selective speeds, depending on the substance.

We might conclude that the “falling force” has greater affection for rocks over feathers; or we might conclude that the speed of gravity depends upon the mass of the object. To think of gravity, as Einstein did, as accelerating inertial frames, is an act of pure metaphysical innovation. As such, Einstein argued, the feather and the stone fall at the same velocity and reach the ground at the same time. The difference we see in our experiments are due to the different effects of air resistance. Einstein’s new metaphysics, had such explanatory power, that science switched to his position. Only recently were we able to actually observe a feather and a stone falling (to the earth) at the same velocity and reaching ground at precisely the same time.[2]

Sir Isaac Newton’s Laws of Motion constitute a set of metaphysical assumptions that prove to be helpful. Still, they lock us into a certain frame of reference that limits what can be known about the world. Newton’s metaphysics claims that “an object in motion will stay in motion unless an external force is applied to it.” In Newton’s metaphysics, there is no place for self-animated objects. We are comfortable, then, with not including living beings like ourselves. But what of electrons moving in a copper wire wrapped around a magnet? Here we don’t need a third term that identifies the external force. The objects themselves are participating in this dance of movement. We can choose to separate the objects and the “forces” that move them, in much the way that Georg Ohm’s equations do to describe laws of electricity. Ohm conceived of electricity as “currents” just like currents in a stream. This is an act of metaphorical imagination, which releases the complexity of the equations he needed to describe certain fixed relationships between voltage (intensity) and resistance. What if, instead of creating a third term like “current” Ohm thought of the action of electrons as population dynamics of self-organizing systems? There would be no need for a third term. What he viewed as “currents” would become, instead, the “emergent patterns” of complex self-organizing dynamics.  What I want to point out here is that good metaphysics creates greater clarity by improving the precision of the description of phenomena. Mathematics is a language of great descriptive precision. This is the reason why Charles Hartshorne (1983) considered mathematics as the purest form of metaphysics.

Another alternative would be to switch to a metaphysics of self-animated form? Einstein moved in this direction when he reimagined gravity not as an external force “pulling” on objects (mass) but rather, as something that mass (objects) does. Two objects dance around each other, and self-organize a familiar pattern we call “acceleration due to the force of gravity.” Yet, with a metaphysics of self-animation, we have no need for the third term “force of gravity.” I first discovered this query in high school when we learned about electricity. Wrap a copper wire around a magnet, and voila! you get electric current. In the laboratory I would shake my head and ask “But where does the electricity come from?” This persistent need for a third term is a necessary consequence of a Newtonian metaphysics of inanimate objects. It’s the metaphysics that cries out for a third term. You can experience this yourself by watching this video of the world’s simplest electric train. In similar fashion, the term “ether” was posited as a substance that propagated the light wave, in the same way that sound is the propagation of air waves. Hence, there is no sound in the vacuum of space. We now think of light as a wave form unto itself, capable of propagating through space without a theory of an ether. In the procession of metaphysical vies, third terms like “ether” “gravity” and “electric current”, are both presented and absented at different times. [3]

This one metaphysical revision alone would have enormous impact for the reality we come to believe in. It would be a re-enchanted reality, where every object, at every scale, was participating with every other object, at all different scales. It would align itself with what Graham Harvey (2014) calls Neo-animism. Suddenly everything would be living and experiencing! There is actually a term for this approach – pan-experientialism. It is a term used to describe the reality that was derived by Alfred North Whitehead’s (1979) process metaphysics. Whitehead, however, was no fool. He understood that he was making things up, creating entirely new ways of thinking and entertaining a really big thought experiment about “reality.” This uniquely philosophical practice is called speculative ontology, and Whitehead was careful in his admonitions to those who might swallow the hook of reification while nibbling on the bait of imaginative reasoning. Right up front in his introduction to his magnus opus, Process and Reality, he cautions us

There remains in the final reflection, how shallow, how puny, and imperfect are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things. In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement, is an exhibition of folly.

Whitehead took great pains to outline a practical methodology for speculative ontology. For him, speculative ontology means to form a theory of reality, with a freely acting, imaginative mind. Taking speculative ontology as a serious philosophical pursuit means the possibility of disclosing worlds that could be possible, which otherwise do not seem possible, given the set of constraints on the metaphysics of ontology conventional to one’s domain, culture and/or milieu.

Whitehead believed that speculative philosophy could be productive of important, undiscovered knowledge if one “endeavor[ed] to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience [could] be interpreted” (p.5). He thought that speculative philosophy, if done right, could be a work-around in lieu of the logical positivists’ efforts to found a metaphysics of reason based on strict categories of logic and mathematics. Instead, Whitehead emphasized imagination, intuition, experience and essence. “Here is what we have in our intuition and experience,” he might have spoken in a casual conversation. “How can we use our imagination to derive a theory of essence that accounts for them?” He could have said, without any special inflection, “Suppose we assume we know nothing about reality. Yet here it is, this existence. It holds together. There must be some essential necessities. And here it is, this inquiring mind, these feelings of curiosity and intimacy. They must be adequate and applicable to them.” Writing alongside the great logical positivists, Whitehead was adamant that useful metaphysical principles were not to be captured by logical reasoning, but rather, through flashes of insight that propagated through “the play of free imagination, controlled by the requirements of coherence and logic” . This, “true method of discovery” he likened to the flight of an airplane:

It starts from the ground of particular observations; it makes a flight into thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.

Whitehead contended that the reason why this method of “imaginative rationalization” works, where other methods fail, is due to the fact that influences (what he called factors) that are present yet not presently observed, emerge through the free play of imagination. Here he was anticipating Bhaskar’s notion of how absence presences itself through the alethic truth. What was imaginative rationalization for Whitehead, Bhaskar called “retroduction,” echoing Charles Sander’s Peirce’s notion of abduction.[1] Whitehead writes of the power of imagination to “supply what the differences which the direct observation lacks.” And yet while Bhaskar appeals to a subtle reductionism in his notions of the real, Whitehead remains firmly de-ontological, by staying within the practical “adequacies” of the human imagination and its participation in everyday ordinary experience:

[The imagination] can even play with inconsistency; and can thus throw light on the consistent, and persistent, elements in experience by comparison with what in imagination is inconsistent with them.

The power of Whitehead, over Peirce and Bhaskar, is that he makes his imagination transparent to his philosophical enterprise. By contrast, Peirce ­was reluctant to “pierce through” his metaphysical veil and realize that he was examining the features of his own mind. There is a great quote from the movie series “True Detective” that illustrates to me what being around Pierce must have been like. The detective Rustin Cohle, (played by Matthew McConaughey), has episodes of “otherworldly” perception and intuition. In one scene, Cohle says that during these episodes of deep intuitive listening, there were “times when I thought I was main-lining the secret truth of the universe."[2] This is the overall impression that Pierce can leave us with. Similarly, reading Bhaskar, especially when he is writing about meta-Reality, the astute reader (the reader wearing their metaphysical decoding ring) can discern a subtle residue of the realist’s ontological reductionism to his otherwise imaginative and creative foray into speculative philosophy. The point I want to emphasize here, is the truth about all metaphysical truths: at the end of the day, what metaphysics describes is the architecture of the most fundamental interface where mind and raw reality participate—the finely grained texture of our imagination and participation.

            To live in a post-metaphysical world, does not mean to throw the baby out with the bathwater. A post-metaphysical orientation asserts that there is always 1) either an implicit or explicit ontology operating in any truth claim and 2) either a transparent or hidden metaphysical framework that is foundational to that ontology. Metaphysics is like mining — the deeper you dig, the more gold you’re likely to find. For the metaphysician “gold digging” is all about looking for what is implicitly functioning but not yet explicitly known, and the ambitious gold digger wants also to reveal the hidden metaphysical framework deep at the core of any ontology. Whitehead’s speculative philosophy, his process ontology of reality, proved to be a gold mine for a radical new metaphysical excavation. By situating his ontological musings in a process metaphysics of becoming, Whitehead’s process ontology became the bedrock for a radically new kind of process metaphysics. But before we go further, we need to take a look at the relationship between metaphysics and existence.

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[1] Similarly Sloterdiik speaks of “vertical tension” that propels us toward future possibilities.

[2]

For an updated interpretation, see

[3] For an fascinating paper on the intersection of Nagarjuna and Quantum science, see David Ritz Finkelstein’s Emptiness and Relativity which can be accessed here http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.68.4935&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Finkelstein rejects third terms in science, which he calls “idols.” For example, he writes:
                In physical theories so far there have always been absolutes, vestiges of being, essences. Indeed, Einstein first called his brain-child a theory of invariants, not of relativity. What remains now that is absolute? What must we empty next? As we have seen, we cannot always detect important absolutes easily from within a theory. By never moving, idols tend to become invisible. We must step outside the theory and examine both what physicists say and what they do, and especially to the connection between these two modes of action, the semantics of the theory, to discover what absolutes are tacitly assumed. … When the question arose whether concepts like a variable matter-space-time law unity had ever been expressed, Nagarjuna’s verses on the Madhyamika (the Middle Way) were cited. From a recent translation of a translation [Nagarjuna (1995)], it seems that they can indeed be read as saying that space, time, matter and causation are relative, with no permanent essence, and that this is inferred from the very fact that we perceive them.