Metaphysics

William H. Walsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429514265
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Originally published in 1963. An outline of the metaphysical positions held by such major philosophers as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hegel, Kant, Hume, Moore, Bradley, Wittgenstein. The author maintains – controversially – that metaphysical arguments have a close bearing on religious and moral beliefs.

1

Introduction

THE very word ‘metaphysics’ is full of controversy; the emotions it excites vary in character, but are seldom anything but strong. There was a time when metaphysics was thought to be the highest form of knowledge, the most fundamental and comprehensive of all the branches of study to which human beings could devote themselves. Metaphysicians were said to be occupied with ‘reality’ as opposed to ‘mere appearance’, and they were supposed, as Plato put it, to take all being and all knowledge for their province. Because metaphysics was the fundamental discipline which discovered the most important of truths, its results might be expected to affect those of every other form of enquiry; the findings of all other sciences must accordingly be regarded as provisional, in need of revision or ratification by the metaphysician. It was to the metaphysician, again, that we must turn for enlightenment on those ever-present questions men asked themselves about the scheme of things entire: questions concerning the nature and origin of the universe as a whole, the nature and destiny of man, the existence of God. Metaphysicians not only undertook to pronounce on these subjects, but claimed to do so with peculiar certainty. For metaphysics was, its exponents said, a uniquely self-critical science; it was the only form of intellectual activity which left nothing unquestioned and proceeded entirely without assumptions. The only propositions with which a metaphysician could properly be content were propositions whose truth could not be denied, or whose truth was seen to be involved in their own attempted denial. To be ‘in earnest with metaphysics’, to use a phrase beloved of metaphysically minded Victorians, was accordingly seen as the highest of intellectual ambitions.

The prestige of metaphysics did not depend solely on the bold claims made on its behalf : it owed much also to the actual achievements of those who were described as metaphysicians. Plato and Aristotle among the ancients, Thomas Aquinas among the medievals, Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz in the seventeenth century, even Hegel in the early nineteenth century, were on any estimate men of quite remarkable abilities. Others might have made more spectacular contributions in particular spheres—geometry, for example, or physics; what marked them off was the variety of fields to which they invited attention, the diversity of subjects on which they had illuminating things to say, and above all the combination of satisfying simplicity and promise of further application which characterized their theories. They each sought to produce a connected account of knowledge, and in each case the attempt proved positively useful as well as intellectually stimulating. Barriers between existing disciplines were broken down or challenged, fresh syntheses or groupings indicated. Thus the development of mathematics in the fourth century B.C. owed something to Plato’s commitment to the ‘synoptic’ study he called ‘dialectic’, whilst the possibilities of the subject now known as mathematical physics were sketched for the first time in the Timaeus; the programme for a comprehensive account of natural phenomena, including living phenomena, in mechanical terms, which has proved so enormously influential in modern scientific investigations, was originally urged by Descartes as part of a large-scale metaphysical synthesis; the work of Hegel, long denounced for its barren apriorism, has turned out to be remarkable for its historical and sociological insights, and is having an effect on the growth of the social sciences which is certainly not diminishing at the present time. Proof that these writers still have something important to say to us is to be found in the fact that their works are extensively read and studied, as major works of literature are. The very fact that the ranks of metaphysicians have included men of this calibre would seem to be some ground for taking the large claims made for metaphysics seriously.

But whatever enthusiasm metaphysics may have aroused in its devotees it must be allowed that the reaction against it has been at least as violent, so violent indeed as to suggest that the issues involved in the controversy must be something more than academic. It was in the eighteenth century that the classical criticisms of the claims of metaphysics were first developed by Hume and Kant, but the subject had fallen into bad odour well before these criticisms could be considered and digested. The term ‘metaphysical’ was already pejorative for writers as diverse as Voltaire, Herder and Burke. The motives behind the many attacks on metaphysics which were developed by these and other thinkers of the period 1750–1850 were correspondingly various.

Thus Voltaire associated metaphysics with theology : the elimination of metaphysics was for him part of what was enjoined in the celebrated slogan ‘Écrasez l’infame’. Burke and Herder, by contrast, thought of metaphysics as the acme of abstract speculation; it was in the name of empiricism, thought tied close to the realities of life, that they denounced it. Hume wished to commit books of ‘school metaphysics’ to the flames, ‘as containing nothing but sophistry and illusion’, largely because of his antipathy to the claims metaphysicians like Descartes had made on behalf of human reason; to his way of thinking the reason of man was no more competent to reach ultimate truth than the reason of animals. This naturalistic outlook was by no means shared by Kant, who protested against metaphysics of the kind practised by his predecessors partly in the interests of natural science, but more because of his ambition ‘to abolish knowledge in order to make room for faith’, which meant in effect to keep the world safe for morals. To show up the pretensions of transcendent metaphysics was essential if men were to be able to hang on to certain fundamental beliefs, in God, the freedom of the will and the immortality of the human soul, without which the moral life would make no sense; speculative reason could provide no adequate warrant for these beliefs, which must become matters of what Kant called ‘pure rational faith’. This is a view significantly different from that of Kierkegaard, a slightly later critic of metaphysics, who also opposed faith to reason but would certainly not have been satisfied to describe his faith as ‘purely rational’, even if that term were interpreted in the peculiar Kantian way. It was different again from the position of Auguste Comte, in whose Positive Philosophy metaphysics was seen as an intermediate stage in an inevitable human progress from animistic to scientific thought, a stage in which men freed themselves of the illusion that all things are full of gods only to set up a rival mythology of reified abstract forces. Metaphysics in this account was something we must grow out of in order to attain intellectual maturity.

The period in which these attacks were being mounted was itself a time of renewed metaphysical activity. The successors of Kant, reacting against what they saw as the shallow materialism of the Enlightenment, and more conscious than their predecessors of the manifold activities of the human spirit, in art and literature, in religion, in the whole field of social life as well as in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, sought to construct fresh metaphysical syntheses which should take account of this diversity. Hegel in particular produced a system of striking power and originality, a system which, it is worth remarking, was still being imitated a hundred years after Hegel’s death. (Whitehead might be described as an Hegelian at one remove.) But Hegel’s intellectual pretensions were so vast, his style so barbarous and obscure and his explicit logic, so far as it could be discerned, so peculiar that hostile reaction to Hegelianism was intense. Baffled by the verbiage of the Hegelian system and affronted by what they took to be its author’s cavalier attitude to empirical facts, critical philosophers were led into renewed denunciations of metaphysics.

A metaphysician, it was now argued, is the exact antithesis of a scientist : whereas the latter submits himself to the patient investigation of experience, taking the facts for what they are and accepting or rejecting theories as they accord with them or not, the metaphysician turns away from reality and constructs a fantasy world of his own. Unwilling to face unpleasant truths, he pretends that a different sort of reality underlies the obvious facts, a reality which is not accessible to the senses but whose nature can be established by pure thinking. The task of metaphysics is then to deal with what is really real, as opposed to empirically real. Yet how, the critics asked, could what metaphysicians said even be shown to make sense, let alone to be true, on this account of the matter? There were (the critics thought it obvious) only two kinds of significant statement: analytic statements which were true in virtue of the laws of logic and for that reason tautologous, and putative truths of fact which were meaningful in so far as they were capable of being checked against empirical evidence. Metaphysical statements could be put in neither category. They were clearly not analytic, since they professed to tell us something about the true nature of the world. But equally they could not pretend to the title of straightforward truths of fact, for metaphysicians notoriously despised the empirical world and had their eyes fixed on higher things. But if it was the case that nothing could count either for or against them, if metaphysical statements were, as they must be admitted to be, compatible with any empirical state of affairs whatsoever, then we must dismiss metaphysics as neither true nor false but ‘literally senseless’. It was not denied that some metaphysical sentences might have an emotional effect, of the kind the critics associated with poetry (hymns or incantations might have made a better comparison); for weak minds metaphysics might certainly be meaningful in this non-literal sense. But nobody who had reflected could take its intellectual pretensions seriously for a moment.

Such, in summary outline, were the views of the Logical Positivists who flourished in Vienna in the 1920s and early 1930s and who sought to fashion, in their celebrated Verification Principle of Meaning, a weapon which would destroy metaphysics once and for all. The philosophers who adhered to the Logical Positivist movement were men with a conscious mission; many of them were scientists as well as philosophers, and ‘Unified Science’ was one of their principal watchwords. Their antipathy to metaphysics was like the antipathy of genuine practitioners to the lore of witch doctors; they abhorred it as senseless obscurantism. Whether they had ever examined it from close to is another matter, on which all that need be said now is that few of them showed much evidence of having done so. But, fair or unfair, the Positivist criticism of metaphysics had a tremendous effect on philosophical thinking in the years before and immediately after the 1939–45 war.

It is true that relatively few British and American philosophers were willing to enrol themselves under the banner of Unified Science, and again that difficulties were experienced from the first in producing a satisfactory formulation of the Verification Principle (and for that matter in justifying the sharp dichotomy of propositions into analytic and tautologous on the one hand and synthetic and putatively factual on the other). But whatever problems were encountered in stating and defending Positivist principles, the anti-metaphysical conclusions urged by the Positivists were very widely accepted. It became customary at this time to say that philosophy should not try any more to construct theories about the nature of the world as a whole, but should transform itself rather into a critical activity, concerned with the elucidation of the concepts of natural and social science. The major philosophers of the past were to be studied as analytic philosophers, not as metaphysicians.

Nor was the situation altered in any fundamental respect when the brief ascendency of the Logical Positivists came to an end and their place was taken by the so-called Linguistic Philosophers. The latter were, admittedly, committed to fewer dogmas than the Positivists; in particular, they felt no very strong urge to defend the cause of science. But if they had little inclination to repudiate metaphysics in the name of empiricism, the devotion to common sense which they had learnt from G. E. Moore made them no less hostile to the subject than the Positivists. It was characteristic of metaphysicians as these philosophers saw them to find difficulties, or even contradictions, in concepts of which we all make an everyday use; concepts such as thing and property, relation, cause and effect, time, space, activity, change. What we took to be obviously true, as for instance that the world in which we live contains a great number of material bodies, was declared by metaphysicians to be false; what was there was really a collection of monads, or a set of appearances of the Absolute. To followers of Moore paradoxes of this kind were evidently absurd: if philosophy found itself in conflict with common sense, it was clearly in the wrong. And their strong predisposition to dismiss metaphysics as misguided was reinforced when, thanks to the influence of Wittgenstein, the notion of common sense ceased to play a major part in their thinking and was replaced by talk about ordinary language. What we say in real-life contexts, as opposed to philosophical discussions, is all ‘in order as it is’, as is shown by the very fact that it is understood and acted on. A philosopher who questions the propriety of our everyday language can have no understanding of the many subtle distinctions we are able to make by using this language. He is, in a Burkeian sense (there are many similarities between Burke and Wittgenstein), committed to abstractions; and the only thing to do with him is to display to him the richness of what he is repudiating and the poverty of what he proposes to put in its place.

These remarks may suggest that metaphysics has been written off altogether by contemporary philosophers, in this country at least, but this is in fact not true. There has indeed been a distinct revival of interest in metaphysical writers and writings in the last few years, a revival manifested not only in renewed attention to philosophers like Plato, who were once dismissed as offering nothing but a combination of bad argument and distasteful uplift, but also in full-scale studies of individual metaphysical philosophers. Spinoza, Hegel and Bradley have each been the subject of monographs which are appreciative rather than critical; Aristotle and Leibniz enjoy more favour in professional circles than Locke and Hume; and the claims of Aquinas are being steadily pushed. It is true that the enthusiasm for metaphysicians is somewhat greater than that for metaphysical theories; the inclination is to say that the writer in question has interesting aperçus on particular points rather than to place a high value on his overall outlook. In the case of Aristotle, for instance, the tendency is to neglect the central doctrines of the Metaphysics and the articulation of the Aristotelian system as a whole in favour of a study of particular theories like that of the Categories; in a broad sense, it is the logical side of Aristotle’s work which still attracts attention. But one may be permitted to wonder if this tendency will continue. A certain disenchantment with analytic philosophy, whose promise to deal with restricted problems piecemeal and in a scientific fashion has remained unfulfilled, together with an appreciation, derived from reflection on the case of Wittgenstein, of the importance of individual genius in philosophy, are among the factors which could conduce to a more full-blooded revival of interest in metaphysics. It would then be necessary to ask, once more, what metaphysicians are trying to do and what qualifications they have for carrying out the tasks in question.

I have written this book in the conviction that metaphysical literature has a fascination and an importance which have not been sufficiently appreciated by philosophers in Britain in the last half-century. I do not mean to imply by this that I regard the claims set out in my first paragraph above as one and all justified. As will become apparent, ‘metaphysics’ in my view is not the name of a single, simple activity; diverse metaphysicians have had diverse intellectual ambitions, and some of these seem, when viewed in perspective, altogether more respectable than others. But I should want to say that the theories of the great metaphysicians have a continuing interest in themselves as well as for the incidental light they throw on points discussed by analytic philosophers; despite all that has been said in criticism of them they deserve constantly renewed examination. To set them aside as ‘literally senseless’ is impossibly crude; to dismiss them as consisting of hopeless paradoxes, or seek to explain them away as reflecting the diseased minds of their authors, is scarcely better. We need to enter into the thought of a metaphysician as we enter into that of a writer of imaginative literature; we can derive enrichment and illumination from the first as much as from the second. A person who has succeeded in mastering the thought of a major metaphysician sees the world with fresh eyes; whether he accepts the point of view urged or not, the possibilities of experience have been multiplied for him. As in the parallel though also importantly different case of poetry, it will not do to set aside what is said here on the grounds that it is not the plain literal truth, or not what the scientist would tell us. What else it is if it is not the plain literal truth is of course another question, but one which can be discussed profitably only if we conduct the discussion with actual examples before us.

This brings me to the last point in these introductory remarks. The questions I shall be asking are the questions which were discussed a generation ago in the heyday of Logical Positivism, questions about the nature of metaphysical theories and their relation to experience, about the character and truth-conditions of metaphysical assertions and about the claims which metaphysicians have made to pass beyond the sensible world to the intelligible ‘reality’ which lies behind it. But I hope that in one respect at any rate the present discussion will break fresh ground. The anti-metaphysical polemics of the Positivists were conducted in vacuo, i.e. without reference to particular metaphysical writings; it was thought to be enough to quote an occasional sentence to illustrate the sort of nonsense with which the discussion was concerned. The effect of this was to turn the metaphysician into a man of straw; actual metaphysicians could and did say that the arguments adduced had nothing to do with them. We can avoid this unhappy result by keeping at least as close an eye on what metaphysicians have said as on what has been said about metaphysics. And we need to follow this policy if our discussion is to have any significance or interest for the modern student of philosophy, who has been brought up in an atmosphere which is predominantly anti-metaphysical and whose familiarity with the main classics of the subject is minimal. It is for this reason that I have chosen to begin with a short sketch of the philosophy of Plato, who, if not literally the first metaphysician, was the first man of genius to work at the subject and one of the greatest who ever took it up.

2

The Philosophy of Plato

1. Knowledge and belief, with their practical implications

A CONVENIENT point of entry into the thought of Plato is to see it as reflecting dissatisfaction with the state of knowledge achieved, and the claims to knowledge made, by Plato’s contemporaries. At the end of the fifth book of the Republic Plato himself draws a contrast between two conditions of mind or ‘capacities’, to use his own term, to which he gives the names γν

σιζ and δóξα, conventionally though somewhat misleadingly translated as ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief’. The contrast is explained, in the first place, as a contrast in clarity: knowledge is a state in which everything is seen as it is and seen distinctly, belief one in which things are discerned dimly, seen as we see things in a dream. Believing as opposed to knowing, again, is said to be like seeing objects indirectly, by means of their shadows or reflections in water; the contrast here is with seeing them face to face and in a clear light. In the former set of conditions mistakes, and in particular the mistake of confusing one object with another, are all too likely to occur; in the latter they will not. It was Plato’s conviction that ordinary men are in a state of belief throughout their lives; it was further his view that those who professed to teach them wisdom and understanding, the Sophists who thought that the secret of things would be yielded up if only we noted regular recurrences in experience, were themselves in no better case. Wisdom and understanding could come, according to Plato, only if men would abandon belief for knowledge, a process which would involve a violent break with past habits and ways of thinking, followed by a course of rigid intellectual discipline. In this way alone could they pass from acceptance of things as they appear to be, the condition of ordinary men and Sophists alike, to apprehension of things as they truly are, the condition of the true philosopher.

The passage from appearance to reality in this account is presented by Plato as if it were a transition from contemplating one class of entities to contemplating another, and this impression is confirmed by his charac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Philosophy of Plato
• 3 Metaphysics as News from Nowhere
• 4 Materialism and Aristotelianism
• 5 Metaphysics without Ontology
• 6 The Limits of Reason: Descartes and Cogito ergo sum
• 7 The Limits of Reason: Hume and Causality
• 8 Contemporary Anti-metaphysics
• 9 The Origins of Hegelianism
• 10 Metaphysical Assertion and Metaphysical Argument
• 11 True and False in Metaphysics
• 12 Metaphysics and Analysis
• Bibliographical note
• Index