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As they come to maturity, most human beings seem to require an understanding of the Universe around them, and of how they fit into it. Without such an understanding, many suffer from anomie; that is, they feel lost and without purpose. So as long as human beings have been conscious, humanity has tried to understand the wonder and perplexity of the cosmos.
Staring up at the sky has filled human beings with many questions. They have asked: What is this magnificent and terrible world? What is it made of? How does it work? And why does it even exist? Did a god make it?
Humanity has also wondered: What am I doing in the world? Where did my people come from? What should I do with my life?
To answer these questions, leaders always seem to come forward -- bidden or unbidden. Or, sometimes, old and wise-seeming persons -- persons who appear to have superior experience and insight -- are asked what they believe.
These leaders -- elders, gurus, preachers, or poets -- then dispense their answers. Sometimes these answers are accepted, and become the wisdom that guides the tribe. If held solemnly and firmly, as if the people were bound to this wisdom, this wisdom became the tribe's religion (a word from Latin roots meaning, roughly, "that to which one is bound").
In the distant past the wisdom of the gurus often began with a story accounting for the origins of the world (or of humanity) as the actions of some god, spirit, or animal. The story (the ancient Greek word for "story" was mythos) would sometimes be taken simply as a fanciful, humourous fable.
But often the guru believed his story was true, or intended it to be taken as true. Sometimes, though he did not, others took the story to be truth. The story would then become the basis for ceremonies or rituals intended to bring the community closer to the god or animal of the story, to make his or her actions real for the tribe. Often the community believed that carrying out the ritual preserved the action that the ritual depicted. Therefore the community acted out stories repeating the god's actions. Sometimes the community believed that performing this ceremony preserved the life and structure of the world.
At first guru wisdom was usually taken on faith. How could anyone disbelieve a seemingly honourable wise priest or shaman? Often a faith community arose around his teachings and ceremonies. The myth was the basis for the tribe's customs and cohesion. "We are the people who worship Baal." "We are the faithful who submit to Allah."
But over time the wisdom of gurus and shamans was inevitably questioned by some intrepid student. Something just did not make sense. It didn't fit in with everything else the student had been taught. Perhaps the guru had made a mistake.
Students tended to ask simple, then more difficult questions of their guru or teachers. New and more difficult replies had to be created. With the development of literacy, simple books like the Proverbs of the Bible inevitably spawned more and more complex written Jewish and Christian commentaries. The Torah led to the Mishnah, the Mishnah to the Gemara. The Gospels led to commentaries, and commentaries led to the higher criticism. "Of the making of books there is no end."
At the beginning of Wisdom, students often sang or chanted the sacred teachings (the Wisdom was often in the form of poetry) until they had memorized it. We see students do this today with Tibetan and Buddhist scriptures and, in the Muslim countries, with the Qur'an.
But over time, with the development of writing (and with no good musical notation for a long time) the music of the text was often lost, or reduced to simpler chanting or speaking styles (as in Hebrew prayer today). Writing led to increased study, and to increased discourse and logic. In communities where it was permissible to question religious teachers, previous established Wisdom was challenged by objections, and replies became systematic and often forbiddingly difficult.
Our first records about European thinking about ultimate reality begin in Ancient Greece, at a period about 600 years Before the Common Era (B.C.E.). At this time the field of thinking deeply about life did not have the names we give to it today: if anything, it was still called Wisdom (in Greek, sophia). But at this time, perhaps because the alphabet had been invented and had come to Greece, a tradition began of which most of us on Earth are still a part. This is the tradition of Western philosophy.
Western philosophy is concerned with reasoning about one's experience of the world.
With the invention of writing, the question naturally arose whether guru wisdom on ultimate things should be written down. Some gurus resisted. Neither Socrates of Athens (469-399 B.C.E.) nor Jesus of Nazareth (circa 4 B.C.E.-ca. 29 C.E.) wrote out his philosophy, though both could read. But the convenience of books for memory and study inevitably won out.
When the wisdom of teachers about ultimate things began to be written, a branch of philosophy to deal with these matters came into existence. It depended increasingly on known fact, and on logical argument from known facts rather than from articles of faith. This branch of philosophy was named First Philosophy by the Greek philosopher Aristotle. Today it is called metaphysics.
In the 20th century after Jesus some scholars believe that metaphysics divides into two parts:
The first is ontology (which means, literally, the "study of being"; the word has been in use since the 17th century). Ontology deals with the number and kind of fundamentally distinct things that make up the Universe. Is the Universe really monist -- that is, One -- as Plotinus (205-270 C.E.) and Thales (625?-546? B.C.E.) thought? Or is it dual, composed of two fundamentally distinct things, as mind and matter are postulated to be in the philosophy of René Descartes? Or is it plural, as William James and Bertrand Russell thought, consisting of more -- perhaps far more -- than two ultimate kinds of distinct things; if so, of how many?
The second part of metaphysics is said to be metaphysics proper. Metaphysics proper describes the nature and traits of the universe in the most far-reaching and abstruse general terms. (Originally, in ancient Greece, metaphysics proper was cosmological, but modern science, especially modern physics, has gradually taken over the cosmological and cosmogonical parts of metaphysics proper.) Metaphysics proper evolved to deal with matters like substance, causality, time, the existence of God, and the nature of being (that is, as we shall see, until the 20th century).. With the steady increase of humanity's knowledge, and the gradual development of specialized fields of natural science, metaphysics proper gradually ceased to be about the physical understanding of the universe, but instead retreated to the foundations of its field, namely, the ultimate principles and abstruse structure of reality.
This retreat into more and more abstruse matters gradually caused metaphysics to be regarded with a mixture of increasing bafflement and scorn. In the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) spoke of metaphysics as a "bottomless abyss," and as "a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse." He thought of metaphysics not as a knowledge, but as speculation "where there is usually a great deal of wind." Despite Kant's efforts to clear up metaphysics, in the 20th century it was in even lower repute.
Let us now look at the history of metaphysics, both of ontology and of metaphysics proper.
Before we can get on to the early history of metaphysics we must deal first with a matter which, if we do not understand it, will bedevil us. This is the inextricable connection of metaphysics and epistemology.
Epistemology is the name philosophers give to the branch of philosophy that deals with the theory of knowledge. (Episteme was the Greek word used by Aristotle for what we would call scientific knowledge; that is, in Aristotle's terms, knowledge that had been arrived at through inquiry and right reasoning.) To get involved with metaphysics is inevitably to have to discuss epistemology. How can you discuss the theory of the world unless you have some theory or understanding or certainty about knowledge, and the means by which you are attempting to understand the world? How can you discuss experience or reality without a feeling of confidence about your ability to understand things?
Epistemology discusses these problems. It answers questions like, What is knowledge? How do we know that what we believe is the truth? and other similar questions. It teaches about these things and gives us confidence to proceed with further thought.
At the end of the 20th century it was generally held by most philosophers that epistemology is the most important branch of philosophy, and that metaphysics is largely an exploded relic of past errors.
But I disagree. Metaphysics is very important to philosophy, and not just to its history.
While to discuss the history of metaphysics without discussing epistemology is impossible, I shall go through my sketch of the history of metaphysics from a metaphysical perspective, minimizing my contact with epistemological problems. These I shall discuss in my epistemology essay. The two essays will each illuminate the other, as well as the current situation in philosophy.
The time since the traditional date of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth is gradually coming to be known by scholars as the Common Era (abbreviated as C.E.), and the time before it as Before the Common Era (B.C.E.). Beginning in the 6th century B.C.E., the earliest metaphysicians of the Western world were the numerous Greek philosophers of Ionia on the west coast of modern Turkey. Their primary concern was how the world around them was composed, of how many basic substances it consisted, and how it had come into existence.
Was there, for example, a single substance (φυσις physis, pronounced FOO-sis) of which everything was somehow made? Thales of Miletus (625?-546? B.C.E.) thought so. He was the first monist. His candidate was water. Water had several forms, as a liquid, or as snow, or as ice. Perhaps earth was a kind of dense ice, and the sky a rarefied kind of water.
Thales believed that everything had proceeded from water, and would eventually be resolved into it again. Because his theory was the first in the Western World to explain the Universe without relying on the actions of gods, Thales is regarded as the founder not only of Western philosophy and metaphysics, but also of Western science.
Thales wrote no books. But his friend and pupil the student of physis Anaximander (circa 611-c.547) did. He was also of Miletus. Anaximander was the first Western philosopher to write out his ideas about metaphysics. In a prose work Anaximander argued that the primordial material, the physis -- whatever it was -- had at one time undergone a separation of opposites. Hot had separated outward from cold, then dry things had separated from wet. One day they would recombine.
The universe for Anaximander was "a number of concentric cylinders, of which the outermost is the sun, the middle is the moon, and the innermost is the stars. Within these cylinders is the earth, unsupported and drum-shaped." (Microsoft Encarta 97 Encyclopedia)
(Fans of Martin Gardner's Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science will remember fondly the Iowa crackpot Alfred Lawson, whose philosophy -- Lawsonomy -- was basically Anaximander's ideas of separation and recombination warmed over. But the philosophy of Empedocles (see below) was also similar.)
Other Ionian physicists and metaphysicians picked other substances to be the basic stuff of the universe. Anaximines of Miletus (circa 570-500) picked air. Perhaps it, expanded and condensed, made up everything. Condensed, it was water and earth; rarefied, it was air and vacuum.
Heraclitus of Ephesus (circa 540-475) was not so closely related in thought to the other Ionians. He thought fire to be the physis. His philosophy (in his treatise On Nature, of which we have fragments) emphasized that the universe was in a state of constant change. For the earlier Ionians, ontos ("being") was as most people perceive it, composed of solid, liquid, and gaseous things. But, for Heraclitus, fire -- constantly changing and even more fluid than water -- seemed the basic stuff. Condensed and rarefied in the manner of the air-physis of Anaximenes' philosophy, fire made up all things. Despite its appearance of solidity, the world, Heraclitus thought, is really a flux so constantly changing that, as he said, "no one can step into the same river twice." The world was a form of becoming. Heraclitus emphasized not the static ontos of the world, but its becoming or flux.
The Ionian physicist Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (500-428) was an original and influential metaphysician. He felt that the Universe had originally been a Chaos (in Greek, a "gap") containing primordial material in numerous infinitely small bits of many sizes, shapes, and weights. Some thinkers have compared Anaxagoras's bits to the atoms of later Greek thinkers. An eternal intelligence that Anaxagoras called Nous (Greek for "mind", "intellect", or "reason") caused these bits to separate out of chaos, and to agglomerate as the world.
In about 480 B.C.E. Anaxagoras came to Athens to teach. He stayed for at least three decades; then intolerance of his ideas forced him to emigrate to Lampsacus. (He got in trouble for teaching that the sun was a fiery stone, and the moon was made of earth.) But his ideas heavily influenced the Thracian philosopher Democritus of Abdera (see below), a developer of atomism.
(A hasty note before we continue: Anaxagoras' Nous may be the ultimate origin of the idea that God is a disembodied intelligence, behind, far away from, and transcendent of all things. And Anaxagoras' Nous may also be the source of the Unmoved Mover of Aristotle of Stagira (384-322 B.C.E.; see below). Aristotle's idea of the Mover in turn heavily influenced St. Thomas Aquinas (1224?-1274), the architect of later Catholicism, in Thomist thinking about God.)
Back to our story.
The Ionian metaphysicians had not been alone in trying to explain the origins and structure of the cosmos. There were also religious groups.
One of these religious groups was the Pythagoreans. Their founder, Pythagoras of Samos (582?-500? B.C.E.), believed that earth was a sphere travelling about a central fire in a perfect circular orbit. On the other side of that fire was a counter-earth similar to ours.
The other planets also moved about the central fire. They were separated at distances proportional to the physics of vibrating strings.
For the Pythagoreans the world was intensely and covertly mathematical. Number ruled and structured all. Everything was in proportion and ratio. To discover the ratios was to discover the hidden structure of things.
Pythagorean metaphysical beliefs were wrapped up with a great deal of religious dogma. Pythagoreans believed in reincarnation and the transmigration of souls. Like modern-day Scientologists they had a great many beliefs that we would consider superstitious.
But their interest, indeed obsession with mathematics caused the study of mathematics to become very important in philosophy. And their studies in number theory were fruitful in mathematics. Their habit of looking at the Universe as one harmonious whole (or cosmos, a word which, it is said, Pythagoras first used to mean the world) caused later philosophers to see the world in their way.
Plato of Athens (circa 428-c. 347) was greatly influenced by the Pythagoreans. He thought that this world, the one most of us think of as real, is an imperfect illusion. The real world, he thought, is elsewhere, a world of perfect forms (or ideas; in Greek eide) which causes our world through our world's imperfectly partaking of and imitating it. The Platonic World of Forms (or "ideas") was perfect; our daily "real" world was a kind of imperfect shadow or debased, approximate copy of the original. Through reasoning, thinkers would "recall" the truth of these ideas, a truth that they (without knowing it) had known from birth.
Plato's ideas not only "explained" the Earth, but also were influential in epistemology. In metaphysics, Plato's ideas continued to be believed in and powerful well into the 3rd century C.E., where they formed the infrastructure of the philosophy of Plotinus (205-270 C.E.) and other Neoplatonists.
Other Greek philosophers, continuing on along the lines of the Ionian metaphysicians, thought that a small number of substances might all be equally fundamental. Empedocles of Agrigentum in Sicily (circa 490-430 B.C.E.) thought four: earth, air, water, and fire. Two forces, Love and Strife, united and separated all things in a repeating cosmic cycle of condensation and rarefaction.1 Plato's student Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.), who I mentioned earlier, added a fifth fundamental substance, called the "quintessence" or "ether", which, supposedly, was fiery and surrounded earth and the stars beyond the sphere of the moon.
Other thinkers, like Leucippus (circa 450-370) and Democritus of Abdera (circa 460-c. 370) were atomists; inspired by Anaxagoras, they thought the ultimate substance was made up of little particles that could not be further reduced; atoms were "uncuttable".
After writing On Physics, On the Heavens, and the Nicomachaean Ethics, Aristotle (384-322 BCE) wrote a work dealing with the most fundamental part of his philosophy
A later editor of Aristotle's manuscripts, Andronicus of Rhodes (circa 70-c. 50 B.C.E.), created a new edition of his works in the 1st century B.C.E.. In his edition, Andronicus placed the work about reality, "First Philosophy", after Aristotle's book on physics (probably because it refers to the On Physics several times). The book "First Philosophy" gradually became known as 'After The Physics' (in Greek, meta ta physika). So the work came gradually to be called by philosophers through the centuries Aristotle's Metaphysics. Because Aristotle's book discussed substance, God, causality, and other ultimate and basic matters, and was influential through many centuries, it gradually gave its name to the whole field of philosophy we have discussed: the study of the complex structure of the Universe and its constituents in the broadest, most abstract terms, that is, the study of the ultimate issues of reality.
That branch of philosophy became known as "metaphysics".
Until the late 19th century most philosophers discussed matters of the nature of reality unselfconsciously under that name.
After Plato and Aristotle the metaphysical picture of the Universe constructed by Aristotle remained dominant. But there was also widespread belief in a soul (or psyche) that formed the centre of the human personality. In several of his philosophic dialogues, for instance, the Phaedrus, Plato explained the soul as a kind of harmony that might survive the death of the body. In On the Soul (in Greek, Peri Psyche; in Latin, De Anima) Aristotle outlined his belief in a three-part human soul.
The Christian theologians in the first years of the first millennium adopted the basic idea of the Platonic soul. Christians, said St. Paul of Tarsus (circa 3-62 C.E.), would at the resurrection of the dead rise in their (presumably reconstituted or spiritual) bodies. Popular Christianity muddled together this notion with the notion of the Platonic soul's survival after death.
Even in Paul's time he felt compelled to defend Christianity to pagan philosophers. As Christianity continued it felt the pressing need for a philosophical basis to counter the skeptical pagan thinkers. Theologians like St. Augustine (354-430) tried to explain and establish Christianity on something like a philosophical foundation. Replacing the natural actions of physis or Nous in pagan philosophy was the action of God, an all powerful spirit who, it was believed, had created the Universe from nothing (ex nihilo, Latin). The central fact of the Universe was not physis but God, or, to be more accurate, the Godhead: for, according to Christians, God was part of a tripartite entity with his son Jesus of Nazareth and a lesser entity, the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost. According to some versions, of this Trinity it was the aspect of God we know as Jesus the Son which had created the world.
For Christians the world had an ultimate fate. God would ultimately cause the end of things. Jesus would return at the Second Coming and rule the world for a thousand years of peace. Then there would be a Last Judgement at which the saints would be resurrected into Heaven, to live joyously forever with God.
In the fourth century Christianity was made the official religion of the Roman Empire. For centuries it persecuted other religions. It closed down the pagan schools of philosophy in the sixth century. It then subordinated metaphysics to theology for many centuries. Philosophy was used only to bolster the Church's authority and power. Faith was dominant. After the ideas of the Italian theologian and philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas (circa 1224-1274 C.E.) became the ruling theology of the Church in the twelfth century, Aristotle's theories of the Universe became official Christian dogma. Anyone who questioned them was in danger of being seized by the authorities and executed.
This caused intellectual stagnation in the Church. Since it dominated Western Europe, European metaphysical and philosophical thought stagnated.
With the development of the Protestant Reformation under the German theologian and reformer Martin Luther (1483-1546) and others in the sixteenth century, Europeans began again to think about philosophy. In certain areas of Protestant northern Europe, England and Holland notably, a certain amount of unorthodox thought was allowed to be printed. Major philosophers and metaphysicians like the French Catholic thinker René Descartes (1596-1650) appeared.
But in Catholic-dominated southern Europe the Church's Office of the Holy Inquisition sought out heretics and caused them to be executed. The Italian thinker Giordano Bruno of Nola (1548?-1600) in fact suffered burning at the stake in 1600 for becoming a non-christian Neoplatonist and pantheist. (Giordano also maintained there there was a plurality of worlds.) And the great Italian astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was threatened with torture for maintaining unorthodox views of the Universe. (Galileo believed in the heliocentric universe of the Polish canon and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), that the moon had mountains, and that four satellites orbited about Jupiter.) Galileo was forced to recant in 1633 and sentenced to permanent house arrest.
For many centuries "science" was simply the Latin word for knowledge. But at the beginning of the 17th century the word gradually began to change its meaning to the meaning it predominantly has today: natural science. In the 17th century one of the greatest transformations of the world began in earnest: the development of modern (natural) science.
In The Advancement of Learning (1605) the English politician and essayist Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam (1561-1626) promulgated a new method for advancing knowledge (science). He put forward a vision of wise men working experimentally in "natural philosophy", making careful observations, collecting data, and testing theories. Wise men would make testable explorations into Nature. Bacon tested several theories himself. Soon he was followed by natural philosophers like the Englishmen William Harvey (1578-1657), Henry Cavendish (1731-1810), and Robert Hooke (1635-1703), and the Dutch microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), men who dabbled in alchemy, chemistry, astronomy and physics, and found out indisputable truth by the discovery of hard experimental evidence. The greatest of these 17th century natural philosophers or virtuosi was the English physicist Isaac Newton (1649-1727), who pioneered scientific optics, measured gravity, defined inertia, and discovered three laws of motion.
With these and similar discoveries natural philosophy developed into the modern sciences. The development of modern astronomy, physics and chemistry meant that the kinds of concerns philosophers had discussed for two millennia in metaphysics, the kinds of questions they had pondered and speculated about, were beginning to be authoritatively answered -- without any apparent need for metaphysical "speculation". "I do not make speculations," said Newton (Non fingo hypothese.). In the branches of science spinning off from physics known as astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, and cosmogony, real testable knowledge was discovered about the origin and nature of all things. Philosophy (that is to say, metaphysics) was gradually displaced from biology, chemistry, and other sciences. Having asked its important questions, but being unable satisfactorily to prove its answers, metaphysics seemed gradually to be unnecessary.
But the actual situation was worse. In the early 18th century the very idea of metaphysics came rapidly under fierce attack.
Through the Christian centuries of Europe, metaphysics had evolved to be largely about God and His role in the Universe, since it was presumed that God existed (the only question was whether reason could prove His existence). But Scottish skeptic David Hume (1711-1776) changed all this: he threw several parts of traditional metaphysics in doubt.
In his Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) Hume stated that he could find no logical reason to believe in causality. According to Hume, one might see one billiard ball strike another, and the second ball move; one might see this sequence thousands of times. But in no case would one actually ever see a cause of the second ball's motion. In no case could one ever logically conclude that the second ball should move as a result of the first ball's hitting it. To Hume it was evident that human beings come to believe in causality because of repeated successive events (for example, repeated collisions of billiard balls). Because of the propinquity and repetition of the succeeding events, people inevitably come to believe that one event causes another. But one never can logically say that one event must cause another.
That is, Hume gave a psychological account of why human beings believe in causality. Causality itself, Hume thought, can never be proved.
Hume also attacked the idea of a human soul or mind, a belief that had been around since Aristotle. "When I look into myself," said Hume in effect, "I see many things, many ideas and images. But I do not see a self." For Hume there was, again, no proof of a human self or soul, though most people believe in them.
These arguments shook and consternated many philosophers. Causality and the existence of the soul were vital parts of classical metaphysics. Now they seemed disturbingly difficult or impossible to maintain. Many metaphysicians believed that these fundamental doctrines had suffered a devastating attack. To counter Hume's arguments, throughout the 18th century a dogmatic school of metaphysicians -- the most important of whom was the pupil of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Christian von Wolff (1679-1754) -- continued to assert that, despite Hume, causality exists.
1. The forces Love and Strife in the philosophy of Empedocles operate like heat and cold in the philosophy of Anaximander.
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