The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (143 page)

The idea that metaphysics is a humanistic discipline has been exemplified throughout this enquiry. Most of our protagonists have been explicitly concerned in one way or another with the place of humanity in the larger scheme of things. When I was discussing these matters in §4 of
Chapter 13
I mentioned how this was true in particular of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. There are many other examples in what preceded that chapter which I could just as readily have invoked – as of course there are in what has come since in
Part Three
.

It is because I take metaphysics to be a humanistic discipline that I am prepared to dismiss certain forms of sense-making as unfit to act as input in my definition (see §1). The most obvious casualty is natural-scientific sense-making. If that is fed into my definition, then the result is just high-level physics or something of the
sort. (Cf.
Ch. 9
, §2;
Ch. 12
, §6; and
Ch. 16
, §6(b).)

But natural-scientific sense-making is not the only casualty. I am also prepared to dismiss any sense-making that is peculiar to any of the empirical human sciences, such as history. This has to do with the
kind
of humanistic discipline that I take to metaphysics to be. Both Hume and Collingwood gave us a vision of metaphysics as an empirical human science, and in Collingwood’s case specifically as a branch of history (
Ch. 4
, §4, and
Ch. 19
, §2). I tried to show that this is not quite the aberration that it appears to be. Nevertheless it is an aberration, born in each case of what seems to me a distorted conception of the sort of sense-making that is available to the metaphysician (
Ch. 4
, §5, and
Ch. 19
, §4).

The truth is, metaphysics is not a
science
at all. It is no more a kind of history, or sociology, or anthropology, than it is a kind of physics.
³²
Its humanistic aspect is of a different sort. It does nonetheless have a humanistic aspect; and it needs to be true to that aspect. Metaphysics may not be anthropological, but it does need to be anthropocentric. That is, it needs to be from a human point of view. It needs to be an attempt to make the sort of general sense of things that we its practitioners can appropriate as distinctively ours. Only then can it involve the kind of self-consciousness that it should.
³³
Only then can it enjoy the kind of
importance
that it should. Importance, where human beings are concerned, is importance to human beings.
³⁴

But am I not now begging the recurrent question, which I first advertised in §6(a) of the Introduction, of who ‘we’ are? Even granted that metaphysics, as ‘we’ practise it, needs to be from ‘our’ point of view, and even granted that metaphysics throughout this discussion can be understood as elliptical for metaphysics as ‘we’ practise it, is it not a further question whether ‘we’ in this context are best understood as we humans?

Well, but who else could ‘we’ be? If a narrower constituency is entertained, say humans in the modern Western world, then that poses an
immediate threat to the generality of metaphysics.
³⁵
If a wider constituency is entertained, say rational beings, then that falls foul of the brute fact that we humans are not in dialogue with any other rational beings, which means that there are no other rational beings with whom we can arrive at a suitably self-conscious conception of a shared activity of sense-making targeted at results of shared importance. Human metaphysics needs to be anthropocentric. And human metaphysicians need to be unashamed about that. In fact they can glory in it. There seems to me truth in what we saw Husserl say about metaphysics in
Chapter 17
, §7: that it brings us to ‘questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human existence’ (Husserl (
1970
), §2), and that ‘the quite personal responsibility [of metaphysicians] … bears within itself at the same time the responsibility for the true being of mankind’ (ibid., p. 17).

But what about the point that we considered at the very end of the last chapter in connection with Deleuze, that ‘we’ should be open to non-human possibilities? Well, so we should. But what this means, or at least what I think it had better mean, is that we
humans
should be open to non-human possibilities. In particular, we should be open to the possibility that our metaphysics will one day no longer need to be anthropocentric. Even so, we cannot oversee its becoming non-anthropocentric except by overseeing its evolution from something anthropocentric. And ‘evolution’ is the right word here. Nothing can happen in a metamorphic flash. Quite apart from whatever gradual transformation may have to be involved in our coming to embrace non-human possibilities beyond metaphysics, there is a gradual transformation that will certainly have to be involved in our coming to embrace them within metaphysics. This is really just the point captured in Neurath’s image: we cannot come to make sense of things in ways that are radically new save through a progressive piecemeal process. (This is a conceptual point, not an anthropological point. There is a limit to how drastic and how rapid an upheaval in our sense-making can be while still counting as an upheaval in our sense-making – as opposed to our being as it were magically transported to some new ship on the intellectual sea.) So
for now
our metaphysics needs to be anthropocentric.

One of the exciting features of Deleuze’s metaphysics is how little it presupposes. He has an account of sense that appears utterly neutral, dependent neither on a prior conception of universals nor on a prior conception of particulars nor on a prior conception of the subject. Indeed, if his account is successful, then it can be used to explain how universals, particulars, and the subject are all constituted (
Ch. 21
, §4). But am I not now challenging all of that by in effect suggesting that there can be no satisfactory account of sense
that is not at least dependent on a prior conception of whose sense it is – that is, given that it is ‘our’ sense, on a prior conception of who ‘we’ are?

I am not sure. And I do not mean this rhetorically. I am genuinely not sure. The supposed neutrality of Deleuze’s account of sense does concern me. It is here especially that I have Wittgensteinian misgivings about what he offers us. (See
Ch. 10
, §3.
³⁶
) But quite what relations of priority obtain between us and whatever sense we make of things is an enormous question for another occasion. My concern in this final section has been with other relations that obtain between us and whatever sense we make of things. It has been with relations that need to obtain between us and whatever sense we make of things for our sense-making to constitute good proper metaphysics.

I have been trying to reinforce the claim of importance that I have made on behalf of metaphysics. That is a claim that I hope the enquiry as a whole has helped to illustrate. The unexamined life, Socrates said, is not worth living (Plato’s
Apology
, 38a). He may have overstated his case. But even if he did, his remark is very pertinent here. For what is it to examine life if not to try to make sense of it? And how can we try to make sense of life without trying to make sense, more generally, of things? To whatever extent the unexamined life is not worth living, neither is the life without metaphysics.

1
‘And’ to think that metaphysics must be a pursuit of truth? Is this something additional? Strictly speaking, yes. There are propositional ways of making sense of things which are successful in their own terms but in which the propositions concerned have some desideratum other than truth, such as solace. (Cf. the comment about Nietzsche above.)

2
I take any remotely sophisticated science to involve a significant element of self-consciousness too. This kind of reflection is by no means peculiar to metaphysics.

3
For one very interesting contribution to the project of drawing such distinctions, see Skorupski (
1999
). See also, for an extremely wide-ranging discussion of the issues that arise here, the superb Wright (
1992
). For an account of philosophy in general and metaphysics in particular that is firmly opposed to the liberalism that I have advocated in this section – an account that strikes me as highly scientistic – see Williamson (
2007
). Someone else who would be unsympathetic to my stance, despite proclaiming a kind of liberalism, is Dean W. Zimmerman: see Zimmerman (
2004
). Finally, see n. 7 for an indication of how I also find myself in disagreement with Dummett.

4
I take this to be an apposite example even for those who think that Quine was right subsequently to repudiate the idea; for at least Frege made clear what was to be repudiated. (Quine would have had a softer target if he had had only Kant’s idea to reckon with.)

5
Note: I have focused on the example of Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ in order to downplay the assimilation of metaphysics to an art form. But I do not mean to suggest that an artist’s engagement with a great work of art of the past is always of that kind. Sometimes it is far more like the engagement of a historian of metaphysics with a great metaphysical idea of the past. Consider Lichtenstein
vis-à-vis
Monet.

6
But it may be all the more surprising, conversely, that Collingwood was as conservative as he was. All I can do in response to any such surprise is to repeat the diagnosis that I gave in
Ch. 19
, §4: Collingwood overlooked the possibility of metaphysical sense-making that was non-propositional.

7
This section owes a huge amount to Bernard Williams: see esp. Williams (
2006d
), (
2006m
), and (
2006n
). Also very helpful are Simons (
2000
), §3; Wood (
2001
), Pt 4,
Ch. 6
; Ameriks (
2006
), esp. the Introduction and Essays 1, 8, and 13; and Dummett (
2010
),
Ch. 16
. Dummett draws some conclusions very different from mine because he takes for granted precisely what I wish to query, namely that philosophy, and by implication metaphysics, ‘is a sector in the quest for truth, or … a search for a clearer understanding of the truths we already know’ (p. 148). That, to echo my complaint against Wittgenstein, is what
some
metaphysics is; it is not what all of it is. (I also incidentally have a very different view from Dummett’s even about the metaphysics that is of that kind. His view is far too progressivist for my liking. I find it astonishing that he can write the following: ‘There seems to me every reason to think that [metaphysics can settle the question whether there are rational grounds for believing in the existence of God] …, and will even do so in the lifetimes of our great-grandchildren’ (ibid., p. 151).)

8
I am however less inclined to agree with a sentiment implicit in the last sentence of that section, namely that metaphysics is possible ‘
before
all new discoveries and inventions’ (ibid., emphasis in original). That sentence encroaches too much for my liking into the arena of the Novelty Question.

9
I also incidentally see
some
rationale for simply defining the immanent/transcendent distinction as the distinction between what we can make sense of and what we cannot make sense of, which would settle the Transcendence Question by
fiat
: cf. Moore (
1997a
), pp. 110–114.

10
It is a view that I have tried to defend elsewhere too: see esp. Moore (
1997a
), Chs 6–9.

Note: in
Ch. 18
I talked merely about idealism, not about transcendental idealism; but the idealism at stake was a descendant of the transcendental idealism that I had earlier found in Husserl.

11
I count it a
metaphysical
puzzle because it raises some highly general questions about the relations between our language, our thought, and reality. Note that although Wittgenstein himself did not discuss this puzzle, he did make a number of interesting observations (not irrelevant to the puzzle) about vagueness: see e.g. Wittgenstein (
1967a
), Pt I, §§84 and 88.

There has been much written recently both about the puzzle and about vagueness more generally. Preeminent is Williamson (
1994a
). An excellent collection is Keefe and Smith (
1997
). I myself have contributed to the discussion in Moore (
2002a
), §§V and VI. This interlude provides an abridged version of the argument in the second of those two sections. (Note that my argument places me in a very different position from Timothy Williamson. In Williamson (1994a) he argues that vagueness is an epistemic phenomenon, a matter of our ignorance concerning what are in fact sharp cut-off points. That is very un-Wittgensteinian. It violates the principle that, in metaphysics, ‘everything lies open to view’.)

12
Cf. Dummett (
1978h
), p. 264. Note: this is the essay in which Dummett argues that the notion of practicability is unintelligible (see
Ch. 14
, §3(b)). His argument is essentially that the notion of practicability is a vague notion which we cannot regard as intelligible without succumbing to a version of the sorites paradox, this paradox being in Dummett’s view insoluble.