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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 |
