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<< Previous: A Brief Sketch of Philosophical Metaphysics: Before Kant
David Hume's skeptical arguments, however, woke Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), a German philosopher in Koenigsberg, Prussia, from what he later referred to as his "dogmatic slumbers". In his book Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Kant created a new and revolutionary kind of philosophy, remarkable for its method. He called this philosophical method Kritik (which means criticism or critique), and his philosophy critical philosophy. (Later it also became known as the transcendental philosophy, for reasons we shall see.)
Kant's new critical philosophy analyzed the nature of knowledge. It attacked the belief that human beings can have absolutely certain knowledge about most of so-called ultimate reality, that is, reality beyond human senses whether exterior or interior. It then delimited the areas where Kant believed absolutely certain knowledge of ultimate reality could be had.
Now like many earlier metaphysicians, even the earliest pre-Socratics like Thales and Anaximander, Kant assumed that there is indeed an ultimate world behind and structuring the ordered cosmos we see. Kant called this ultimate world the "noumenal world". The world we see and sense (which he assumed is different from the noumenal world) he called the "phenomenal world of appearances". But, unlike Plato, Kant did not believe that the noumenal world, the structuring world, was somewhere else; in, for instance, another dimension. (Plato had believed the perfect World of Forms somehow participated in the imperfect things in the world of experience; the imperfect things of our experience world imitated the Forms.) Kant believed instead (like some ancient Greek metaphysicians -- Leucippus and Democritus, for example) that the ultimate background reality or manifold, the noumenal world, was atomic. However, Kant was highly confident that the atomic nature of the ultimate reality was neither important nor certain. Kant was sure we could have very little knowledge (he meant, absolutely certain knowledge) of that world. Except for the terms which we know to be true by definition (which he called analytical terms, or tautologies), our usual knowledge is a knowledge of mere appearances: it is based on making a synthesis of appearances. Therefore Kant called this kind of knowledge (which he was sure was uncertain) contingent, synthetic, a posteriori.
Kant believed that we spend most of our time in a world of contingent truths, truths that just happen to be true but could have been untrue if circumstances had been different. For example, it may be true that we in fact married this person or that; but we might just as well have married someone else but for chance. Another example: the United States did not annex Canada in the War of 1812; but the matter was a close-fought one and might have turned out differently. So, that we are married to the spouse we married is a contingent truth; and so is Canada's being an independent country.
Our senses, Kant believed, distort our perceptions of the noumenal world into the world that we sense, the phenomenal world of appearances. And, as the English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) had shown, we do not perceive the phenomenal world without at least some distortion. While, Locke believed, we see the shapes of things correctly, our vision does not perceive what Locke called secondary qualities correctly. Each of us, Locke believed, perceives secondary qualities like color individually. What I see as red you may see as green.
According to Kant, we can have almost no certain knowledge about most of the noumenal world. Only a few principles embedded in our consciousness (which Kant called "categories" -- his terminology appears to come from a book of Aristotle's) can give us the degree of certain knowledge about noumena that we can have. (For the moment, I ignore what Kant believed this knowledge was.) For the categories structure all the ways we perceive the world. There is no way to get beyond them -- none at all -- to perceive the "real" world as it is. For it is exactly beyond our senses. Only a study of the categories can give us solid knowledge of the real world.
Instead of being concerned, then, with the noumenal world, Kant's philosophy was almost entirely concerned with the way the noumenal world appears to us. He believed it doesn't appear as it really is. Instead, we have only phenomena, "the phenomenal world of appearances". Kant was concerned that much of the world of phenomena is contingent, that is, uncertain. He was thus concerned to understand and to delimit the certain knowledge (beyond mere tautologies or knowledge of appearances) human beings can have; he named this knowledge "synthetic a priori knowledge".
To explain the synthetic a priori, Kant explained the mental structures or "categories" which, he believed, structure appearances (including the way reality, interior as well as exterior, appears to us). The Critique of Pure Reason, his most important work, attempts to explain these categories. For Kant, the categories create our useful certain knowledge because they structure all certain knowledge that we can have.
Now there is no doubt that -- to an extent -- Kant was right. Our mental structures do structure the way we perceive reality. They control what we are able to see, hear, touch, taste, and in general, sense. They control what our attention is drawn to, and what we are likely to notice. For instance, we humans have evolved to have vision in daylight, in what we call the visible spectrum. We have no ability to see into the infrared or ultraviolet. Cats, on the other hand, can see superbly into the infrared; they have excellent night vision.
Kant's categories gave rise to arguments about the structure of the minds of humans and animals that continue to this day (see the work of the German psychologist von Uexkull), and which experimental psychology and neuropsychology have attempted to settle. But I think there were two other main effects of Kant's metaphysics, and they were perhaps unfortunate.
One was to cast doubt on humanity's ability to perceive the world directly, if at all. The other was to give rise to the suspicion that there is no ultimate reality: that human mental structures create the only world we can perceive.
It is easy to see that this latter position is akin to solipsism.
Later German 19th-century philosophers followed on from Kant and either dismissed the noumenal world altogether (like Arthur Schopenhauer) or speculated without proof about its structure (like Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel).
In a number of long works the German philosopher Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel (1770-1832) created a vast system of metaphysics. This has been described as a system of absolute idealism.
Hegel's system was based on the development of a principle he called, variously, the Absolute Idea or, in German, Geist ("spirit" or "mind"). Hegel held that this principle, Geist or the Absolute Idea (sometimes called simply the Absolute) had developed and was developing through history.
The Absolute Idea was what most people would call the principle of Reason. Hegel thought that the history of civilizations showed that history was becoming, in some sense, more permeated by Reason. For instance, he thought, philosophies and societies were becoming more rational; knowledge was accumulating; states were becoming less arbitrary, more rational, ordered and free.
Hegel often seems to have seen the Absolute Idea's growth through history as the development of God himself (though this connection of the Absolute Idea and God is fuzzy and debatable). Hegel sees the development of the Idea of Reason as God's providential work, his continuing action through history. (One thing is not clear to me: does Hegel mean that God is actually improving over time, or is it human understanding of Him that is improving?) Did Hegel believe, as the English poet William Blake (1757-1827) believed that God was the human imagination, that God was human reason? Or something like human reason? Hegel seems to have believed that humanity, by becoming rational, was becoming like God and perhaps God. But against this idea, Hegel seems to have believed that there is a principle of reason in Nature also, developing the cosmos itself, and that this principle is identical with the other. In this idea of an exterior Logos Hegel's thought seems to be similar to that of several early Greek philosophers.)
Because he was the first philosopher to postulate an evolutionary direction for history Hegel is considered the founder of the branch of philosophy now called the philosophy of history.
Hegel's philosophy of history studied (get ready for a paradox) the history of philosophy; Hegel seems to have believed that we can understand Reason's growth most in depth by studying the philosophies that human beings have put forward; each historical philosophy, Hegel thought, had value, but were becoming progressively better and making their societies better.
Hegel postulated a dialectical movement of principles through history. According to Hegel (or at least, this is a common interpretation based on a few meager references), a conflict of a one idea or principle in history (a thesis) and its opposite idea or principle, an antithesis, inevitably leads to a kind of mixture or solution of them, a resulting synthesis. The synthesis in turn inevitably becomes the thesis for another antithesis; and so on). The end of the dialectic process, Hegel thought, was the constitutional monarchies of his own time and the advancement of liberalism. Hegel thought this development inevitable: it was Mind or Spirit (Geist, Hegel's term, means both) advancing unstoppably through history to realize the Absolute.
Hegel's views were very influential in Germany and led to two factions that disputed the right interpretation of his teachings, the so-called left and right Hegelians. Right Hegelians were supporters of monarchy; Left Hegelians (like Karl Marx) were interested in revolution.
Some decades later, metaphysics came under another, very different sort of attack. The German journalist and propagandist Karl Marx (1809-1883), in his youth a left Hegelian, dismissed the importance of metaphysics. For him, the only fact of importance, the only fact of reality that mattered (a metaphysical fact?), was the struggle for power between social classes.
For Marx, the structuring difference between social classes was their relation to "the means of production" (by which Marx meant their employment in agriculture or factories or as investors). He outlined a theory of the structure and development of social classes and stated that the outstanding fact of reality was that the classes are perennially at war. The owners of factories, business and properties are always trying to exploit their employees by stealing the surplus value of the labor of the employees. Marx believed his analysis to be scientifically correct, a scientific fact, and his philosophy a scientific one. Man lived in a materialistic historical continuum dominated by the increasing class war.
In the material world the proletarian class of workers would inevitably clash with the bourgeoisie that attempted to impoverish them, until, at length, the contradictions inherent in capitalism caused bourgeois (i.e., middle class) rule to end. Just as aristocracy had inevitably given way to the bourgeoisie, so the proletarians would seize power from the bourgeoisie in a violent revolution. The proletariat would then rule over the remnants of the bourgeoisie in a proletarian dictatorship. Gradually, as their property was confiscated and socialized, the bourgeoisie would cease to exist. (Presumably many of them would become honest, hard-working, god-disbelieving proletarians.) Society would no more be hampered by the control of the bourgeoisie over thought and the means of existence. The bourgeoisie would no longer spread its propaganda (which Marx called ideology) to suppress the proletariat. Eventually all people would become a classless, unified proletariat, both free and paradisal, with geniuses like Darwin and Michelangelo everyday occurences.
From a concept by Marx's friend, colllaborator, and benefactor Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), this postulated historical process became known as "historical materialism". (Sometimes it was also known as "dialectical materialism".)
Although one might argue that metaphysics existed in Marx's vision (in that there was one principle of reality that both existed and counted: namely, the class struggle), yet Marxism officially dismissed traditional metaphysics. It was totally concerned with social transformation. "Philosophers have said the purpose of philosophy is to understand the world," Marx famously said. "The purpose is to change it."
In English-speaking countries an important metaphysical philosopher is mostlly ignored. That man is the Austrian philosopher Ernst Mach (1838-1916); the reason he is mostly ignored is because of his position in epistemology.
Mach is important because he stated a limit for scientific knowledge. From this we may construe his metaphysics. Mach believed that we must pay attention only to what we can see and sense and measure. He was therefore skeptical about grand postulated metaphysical schemes, whether idealistic or materialistic. Probably influenced by positivism, he dismissed what could not be seen or measured.
Mach was very influential on scientists like the great German-Swiss-American physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955), and on physical theorists like Percy Bridgeman and the American pragmatist philosophers Charles Saunders Pierce (1839-1914) and William James (1842-1910).
But in the early 20th century the brilliant Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1892-1951) wrote his influential Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. A prisoner in World War I, Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus in notebooks and finished it in 1918. When it appeared in German in 1921, a school of Austrian philosophers known as the Vienna Circle read it and were much impressed. It happened that Wittgenstein was in Vienna in 1926 designing a house for his sister. The leader of the Vienna Circle, Moritz Schlick (1882-1936), approached Wittgenstein and discussed his book with him. From these conversations Wittgenstein gradually became discontent with his own book. When he was again in Cambridge in 1929 a chance conversation with his friend X cause him to begin to rethink his work. This eventually led to his later, much different philosophy, which was, however, not published until 1953, two years after Wittgenstein's death.
Meanwhile, the Vienna Circle had became known as the Logical Positivists. 19th century positivists, like the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857), had emphasized the important of science; some of them had been skeptical and dismissive of the value of statements that could not be verified. The Logical Positivists were in this tradition. But they agreed with the Tractatus-period Wittgenstein that metaphysical statements were meaningless. Two of the leaders of the Logical Positivist movement were Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) and the English philosopher A. J. Ayer (1910-1989).
The Logical Positivists attacked the meaningfulness of certain kinds of statements. In their opinion, these statements (or, to use the logical term, "propositions") could not be proved true or false. These unverifiable kinds of statements they called (from one kind of them, the kind dealing with ultimate reality) "metaphysical". They thus postulated a theory of meaningfulness which "metaphysical" statements failed.
From these attacks the long-respectable words "metaphysics" and "metaphysical" picked up near-lethal contagion. Although other philosophers attacked the doctrines of the Logical Positivists, and gave the positivists' main argument, "the verification theory of meaning" promulgated by Ayer telling blows, philosophers nonetheless increasingly came to feel that there was much truth in the logical-positivist criticisms. Many assertions about God or the whole of reality were indeed (they thought) vague, irresponsible, purely speculative, and poorly founded. How could such assertions be verified? So assertions about reality as a whole came under suspicion. Soon the assertions of occultists were being dismissed as "metaphysical". And the occultists embraced the term! So philosophers who were at all serious gradually became extremely uncomfortable if the words "metaphysics" or "metaphysical" were used to describe their work; few any longer felt happy to be described as "metaphysicians". Nor did they wish to be labelled as dealers in "metaphysical" utterances. The words had taken on fatally pejorative meanings.
Among later serious 20th century philosophers only the Russian-American novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand notably and defiantly used the word "metaphysics" to describe her work on the structure of reality. This was because she was a proud Aristotelian and a defiant, non-academic outsider who hated Kant's philosophy and the later philosophies that derived from his work. Under the influence of German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), the words "ontology" (meaning 'the study of Being") and "ontological" increasingly came into vogue to describe the formerly thriving field of philosophy dealing with the ultimate nature of things. Perhaps because the words "ontology" and "ontological" were less familiar and sounded more scientific they allowed philosophers to discuss old "metaphysical" problems under new names.
But the final indignity to metaphysics was the change in connotation in words brought about by the Logical Positivists. It speeded metaphysics' exit from ultimate questions. The bad connotations with which the words "metaphysics" and "metaphysical" had come to be cluttered damaged their ability to be useful in thought.
These attacks on metaphysics seem to me to have been useful (for stimulating clarity in our ideas), but ultimately inaccurate, unsatisfactory, and overdone. (See my essay on epistemology.) To me, there seems a place in the year 2000 for metaphysical thought. True, cosmogony, cosmology, astrophysics, and their kin have by now created a picture of the origin and structure of the Universe -- namely, the Big Bang, Inflation, and the First Three Minutes -- which few informed people doubt. But I believe there are useful, meaningful questions still to be asked and answered about Being and its near twin existence (usually spelled without a capital letter); about being (with a little letter) and several other terms in the metaphysical lexicon.
So let us look, first, at physicists' standard picture of reality in 1999. Then let us ask some questions about Being and its friends.
1. What is the ultimate nature of reality?
It appears that reality is ultimately structured matter-energy, the stuff (or physis) of the Universe. According to some physicists (though this is still controversial), the Universe's vibrating matter-energy superstrings are arranged in ten (or eleven) dimensions, all but four of which curled up and "disappeared" near the origin of the Universe. This origin (which began to be called the "Big Bang" in the 1950s) is supposed to have occurred about 13.7 billion years ago.
Superstrings ultimately combine to form the known subatomic particles; these in turn are arranged in patterns that form our more familiar atoms and molecules. Atoms and molecules can be accumulated in varying concentrations, arrangements, and densities; space is defined as what is "between" these concentrations. Matter-energy in turn is controlled and shaped by a few powerful and fundamental "laws" of the Universe -- descriptions, really, of the way matter-energy is observed always to behave.
These "laws", which the physicists John Archibald Wheeler and Kip Thorne (in the book they co-authored in the 1970s called Gravitation) called the "pre-geometry of the universe", brought the universe into being and still control its development. This development, as scientists have learned in the 20th century, involves the origin of the universe from a singularity between 11 and 13 billion years ago, the almost-instantaneous development of the four universal forces of nature, the Universe's rapid but gradually slowing expansion, matter-energy's eventual complication into negentropic forms (that is, forms that, at least for some time, concentrate energy; this includes human beings and animals), and -- probably -- the Universe's eventual collapse.
Among the most significant of the Universe's overriding laws is said to be the Uncertainty Principle formulated about 1927 by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976), which, later Canadian physicist Hubert Reeves has said, allows very occasionally for the spontaneous creation of universes. In short, for the kind of place that surrounds us and, apparently, makes us possible.
Another fundamental structure of the Universe is the Laws of Thermodynamics discovered by Clausius, Joule, and Boltzman in the 19th century; these laws require that the Universe dissipate energy; in other words, that entropy (the measure of energy dissipation) continually increase.
2. Is there a God?
In answering questions, it is always good to know what kind of answer is sought. To this question I reply, What kind of God? A supernatural being, supremely good, with the power to make a universe and create its laws? Well, this is not likely. How would such an entity be spawned? (If it was living, and was born like other living things.) Or how could it come into existence? Or how could it simply go on existing forever, since this would violate the law of entropy?
Would such an entity have been spawned in this universe, and mature here? If not, how could it live outside this universe, when there probably isn't an outside?
Basically, most concepts of gods seem to run into contradictions. If we believe in the principle of non-contradiction, the notion of a god or gods seems to be in violation.
3. What is the purpose of humanity?
Humanity (as well as other living species) simply doesn't seem to have a purpose. Species of living things seem to be an accident, one of the things, as a scientist once said, "that come about when hydrogen has enough time." By means of their individual members species seem simply to act (for the most part) to continue the existence of their species. That is, there is no purpose for the species; it simply exists.
[To Be Continued and Revised]
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