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Editorial

Let’s Get Metaphysical

by Rick Lewis

So, what’s it all about, then? Metaphysics is a word to scare the timid. It wraps itself in an air of mystery. The ever-flexible term covers an enormous range of fundamental questions and is regularly used by authors of a mystical bent to label their nuttier ideas. If someone sidled up to you at a party, fixed you with an intense glare and offered to explain their system of metaphysics, you’d probably start plotting your exit.

This is in some ways a pity, as you may already be interested in a number of metaphysical questions, even if you don’t habitually call them that. Metaphysics is about the underlying nature or structure of the universe – those aspects of it that cannot be detected by our senses or measured by the instruments of science, but may be accessible to our reason. The word itself was coined by one of Aristotle’s posthumous editors as a title for the manuscript of his that came immediately after the one called the Physics. Metaphysics is Greek for ‘After Physics’. The manuscript discussed a whole assortment of knotty problems that had struck Aristotle as foundational, particularly concerning the nature of being, and of substances, and essences, and universals. These days, questions regarded as being metaphysical include:

What is time?
Is there a God?
Why is there something rather than nothing?
Is there such a thing as cause and effect?
Are things that happen ever ‘meant to be’?
Is there an ultimate reality not accessible to us through our senses?

These are some of the enduring core problems of philosophy. When in the 18th and 19th centuries German professors used to craft huge multi-volume philosophical systems, they’d generally give metaphysics pride of place. First sort out how things really are, you can imagine them saying, contentedly puffing smoke rings from their meerschaums, and then afterwards you can move on to relative trifles such as ethics, aesthetics and theology. Metaphysics was the “Queen of the Sciences”, as Immanuel Kant called it, until eventually it was deposed by economics, as we all know.

No single issue of this magazine, alas, could possibly address all of the vital and fascinating questions listed above. It does, however, have an article examining Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing (perhaps we should call it WTISRTN studies, for convenience?), which explores whether it is even worth us asking that question. (Plot spoiler: the author thinks that it is). We also have an article – well, two, actually – on whether there’s such a thing as causality. When one billiard ball strikes another, and the second one then moves off in a more or less predictable direction towards the corner pocket, is that because the second was caused to move by the first? “Of course it is, buffoon! Have you never played billiards?”, you yell, throwing down your magazine. Yet David Hume, Britain’s greatest philosopher, history’s greatest sceptic, cast such a penetrating gaze upon causality that philosophers still look askance at it today. Yet cause and effect is the foundation of our daily existences. One thing leads, predictably and reliably, to another and while that may sometimes be inconvenient for us it does at least provide some sort of foundation upon which we can construct our lives. And what is ultimate reality? Physics has moved on enormously, and quantum mechanics provides mathematical tools with astonishing power to predict the behaviour of the microscopic world. Yet we still aren’t really sure what is going on, how we should interpret all the mathematics in intuitive handwaving terms. Another article here says that for this we could use some help from Immanuel Kant, and in particular from his famous distinction between the phenomenal world (which is accessible to our senses) and the noumenal world, (an underlying reality which is not). The other two articles in this section examine metaphysics itself, asking what it is and how it has differed between different paradigms, in this case between two ancient Indian philosophical schools and the approach of modern physics. What do these disparate traditions of knowledge and inquiry have in common? It is valuable to step outside our own front door if we want to be able to take a proper look at where we live.

2,300 years after Aristotle wrote the book we call Metaphysics, it is probably about time to ask ourselves why none of its big questions have been definitively solved yet. Does this mean they are simply not solvable? Or just that they are really, really hard, and our ability to solve them has been waiting on developments and discoveries in other fields of human knowledge – such as quantum physics – to give us the tools to do the job?

If you would like to read more about metaphysics, your thirst raised but not slaked by the magazine you are now holding, then why not pick up a copy of the Ultimate Guide to Metaphysics, a collection of some of the best metaphysics articles from the first 35 years of Philosophy Now. It is currently available from newsstands in most English-speaking countries as well as from our website shop.