The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (6 page)

•
hence that what issues from a successful pursuit of metaphysics is not knowledge which can be expressed by descriptive declarative sentences
¹¹

• relatedly, that metaphysics is not a search for the truth, still less for the Truth, whatever honour the capitalization might confer

• that the best metaphysics involves creating new concepts

and

• that, on the contrary, the best metaphysics involves being clear about extant concepts and about what it is to make correct judgments with them.

I shall have more to say about some of these possibilities in §6 below (and about all of them in the rest of the book).

Among the many pitfalls that the expression ‘make sense of things’ signals for the practising metaphysician, there are two that are worthy of special mention. First, trying to make sense of things, or even for that matter successfully making sense of things, can be an unprofitable and even destructive exercise, especially when it involves the analysis of what is already, at some level, understood; jokes, metaphors, and some works of art are particularly vulnerable to this kind of spoiling. As Bas van Fraassen laments, ‘metaphysicians interpret what we initially understand into something hardly anyone understands’ (van Fraassen (
2002
), p. 3). The second pitfall is that it simply may not be possible to make (some kinds of) sense of things. We must take very seriously Adorno’s question of what the prospects are for metaphysics after Auschwitz.
¹²

5. Metaphysics and Self-Conscious Reflection

Many people would say that metaphysics involves a significant element of self-conscious reflection. Ought I to have included some reference to this in my definition?

‘Most general’ already accounts for it. Or so I claim. To make sense of things at the highest level of generality, I would contend, is to make sense of things in terms of
what it is to make sense of things
; it is to be guided by the sheer nature of the enterprise. To attempt to do that is therefore necessarily to reflect on one’s own activity, and to try to make sense, in particular, of the sense that one makes of things.

If I am right about this, it helps to explain why so much great metaphysics, perhaps all great metaphysics, has included some story about what metaphysics is. By the same token it ensures that, insofar as what follows is a kind of history of meta-metaphysics (as I put it in the Preface), it is at the same time a significant part of the history, simply, of metaphysics.

But even if I am wrong – even if it is not true that whatever satisfies my definition must involve a significant element of self-conscious reflection – the fact is that it
has
done so. There will be examples of this throughout what follows, especially when we come to the various traditions in the late modern period (that is, roughly, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) where much of the attention is focused on sense itself. But perhaps the most no- table example, once again, is supplied by Aristotle, who, in the third chapter of Book Γ of
Metaphysics
, identifies as the most certain principle of reality that nothing can both be and not be, and who does so on the grounds that no making sense of things can include believing something both to be and not to be.
¹³

There is however a further pitfall which such self-consciousness creates and which I should mention in this connection. Self-consciousness and self-confidence make notoriously bad bedfellows. It is hard, when we reflect on the sense that we make of things, not to be afflicted by all sorts of doubts about it, as will be evidenced from the very beginning of the historical narrative that I am about to tell.
¹⁴
This means that, to whatever extent making sense of things needs a measure of self-confidence, there is a further danger that metaphysics will turn out to be a forlorn endeavour: it will turn out to be an attempt to do something that is subverted by the very methods used in the attempt. And of course, any self-conscious attempt to rectify the problem, like an insomniac’s self-conscious attempt to fall asleep, will only make matters worse.

6. Three Questions

My aim in this book is to chart the evolution of metaphysics from the early modern period to the present. Because of its generality, metaphysics is the one branch of philosophy that is not the philosophy of this or that specific area of human thought or experience. It is ‘pure’ philosophy. That makes its evolution peculiarly difficult to separate from the evolution of philosophy as a whole. One way in which I hope to keep the project manageable is by concentrating more on how metaphysics has been viewed during that time
than on how it has been practised, although, for reasons given in the previous section, the two are not cleanly separated.

The story of how metaphysics has been viewed is a story of disagreements about its scope and limits. There are three questions in particular, about what we can aspire to when we practise metaphysics, that have been significant foci of disagreement.

The Transcendence Question
: Is there scope for our making sense of ‘transcendent’ things, or are we limited to making sense of ‘immanent’ things?

The Novelty Question
: Is there scope for our making sense of things in a way that is radically new, or are we limited to making sense of things in broadly the same way as we already do?

The Creativity Question
: Is there scope for our being creative in our sense-making, or are we limited to looking for the sense that things themselves already make?
¹⁵

(a) The Transcendence Question

The Transcendence Question in turn raises all manner of further questions. It suggests various contrasts between our making sense of what is ‘beyond’ and our making sense of what is ‘within’. But beyond and within what? Who, for that matter, are ‘we’?
¹⁶
While it is certainly true that there has been fundamental disagreement about whether our sense-making can take us over this boundary, the divisions between competing conceptions of what the boundary itself comes to may have been even more fundamental. It has variously been viewed as a boundary between:

• what is inaccessible (to us) through experience and what is accessible (to us) through experience

• what is unknowable (by us) and what is knowable (by us)

• what is supernatural and what is natural

• what is atemporal and what is temporal

• what is abstract and what is concrete

• what is infinite and what is
finite

•
what bespeaks unity, totality, and/or identity and what bespeaks plurality, partiality, and/or difference
¹⁷

and even, question-beggingly in the context of the Transcendence Question,

• what we cannot make sense of and what we can.

There is also an important strand in the history in which it has been taken for granted that, if there
is
scope for our making sense of transcendent things, then it is only by operating at the level of generality that is characteristic of metaphysics that we are able to do so, since it is only when we are dealing with the most general features of what is immanent that we are either obliged or indeed able to distinguish it from what is transcendent. The Transcendence Question is then, in effect, the question whether metaphysics has its own peculiar subject matter, radically different in kind from the subject matter of any other enquiry. This possibility also suggests a potential problem for those who think that we are limited to making sense of immanent things, a potential problem whose significance in the history of metaphysics would be hard to exaggerate: there may be no way of registering the thought that our sense-making is limited to what is immanent except by distinguishing what is immanent from what is transcendent, and thus either doing the very thing that is reckoned to be impossible, that is making sense of what is transcendent, or failing to make sense at all. We shall see plenty of manifestations of this aporia in what follows.
¹⁸

(b) The Novelty Question

The Novelty Question calls to mind P.F. Strawson’s famous distinction between ‘revisionary’ metaphysics and ‘descriptive’ metaphysics, where ‘descriptive metaphysics is content to describe the actual structure of our
thought about the world, [while] revisionary metaphysics is concerned to produce a better structure’ (Strawson (
1959
), p. 9).
¹⁹
Like the Transcendence Question, but even more pivotally perhaps, the Novelty Question raises the further question of who ‘we’ are. It is a platitude that people in different cultures, and in different eras, make sense of things in different ways. But the question of who ‘we’ are cuts deeper than this platitude. P.M.S. Hacker, in an essay on what he calls ‘Strawson’s rehabilitation of metaphysics’, refers to the ‘major structural features of our conceptual scheme that lie at the heart of Strawson’s investigations’ and describes them as ‘partly constitutive of our nature as self-conscious human beings, involving concepts and categories that we could not abandon without ceasing to be human’ (Hacker (
2001b
), p. 368). Hacker’s intention is to defend a version of the view that metaphysics has to be descriptive. But it is a real question whether ‘we’ should not be open to just such non-human possibilities, open, that is, to possibilities that involve ‘us’ in transcending ‘our’ present humanity.
²⁰

Why then should anyone think that, as practising metaphysicians, we are limited to making sense of things in broadly the same way as we already do?

Well, the phrase ‘as practising metaphysicians’ is critical. One view would be the following. Anyone operating at a lower level of generality, attempting to make relatively specific sense of relatively specific things, can have occasion to innovate in all sorts of ways, but the
metaphysician
, responding to nothing but the sheer demand to make sense of things, should be concerned only to protect whatever sense-making is already under way, in particular to protect it from confusion: any innovation not prompted by some specific need merely carries the risk of new confusion. (That is not by any means a crazy view, although it is always in danger of degenerating into a conservative resistance even to
non
-metaphysical innovation – a resistance, more specifically, to any departure, at any level of generality, from ‘ordinary language’ – which really is crazy.
²¹
) Another view would be that, at the relevantly high level of generality, there is only one way of making sense of
things that is available to us. Strawson himself holds a variant of this view. He claims that descriptive metaphysics aims to ‘lay bare the most general features of our conceptual structure,’ adding that ‘there are categories and concepts [which constitute that structure and] which, in their most fundamental character, [do not] change’ (Strawson (
1959
), pp. 9–10).

That raises the following question. How, if at all, does whatever counts as descriptive metaphysics, on this conception, count as metaphysics on mine? How does the endeavour to ‘lay bare the most general features of our conceptual structure’ count as a general attempt to make sense of things, as opposed to an anthropological or perhaps even historical exercise in depicting the attempt(s) that we, whoever ‘we’ are, already make?

Many people, as we shall see, have thought that an exercise of this latter kind is indeed a substantial part of metaphysics, even on roughly my conception – and Collingwood was quite explicit about its being a historical exercise. The point is this. It need not be a detached, ‘meta-level’ exercise. It can be an engaged, reflexive, self-conscious exercise
in our own sense-making
. The aim of the exercise might be to elucidate that sense-making where it is not clear, or to hone it where it is not sharp, or to reinforce it where it is in danger of disintegrating, or to guard it against distortion and abuse; and its methods might include making explicit what would otherwise be implicit or imposing system where there would otherwise be an assembly of unordered, disconnected parts. Consider the ancient paradoxes of motion, for example, the most famous of which is that of Achilles and the tortoise.

The Paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise
: Achilles, who runs much faster than the tortoise, nevertheless seems unable to overtake it in a race in which it has been given a head start. For each time Achilles reaches a point that the tortoise has already reached, which is something he will always have to do as long as it is still ahead of him, it has moved on.
²²

It would not be implausible to think that these paradoxes result from our having an insecure grasp of our own basic preconceptions about the nature of space, time, and the infinite. And if one did think this, one might respond by using formal mathematical techniques in an effort to give new and clearer expression to those preconceptions. That would certainly count as metaphysics by my definition.

Very well, then, why should anyone give the opposite response to the Novelty Question? Why should anyone think that, as practising metaphysicians, we have license to make sense of things in a way that is radically new?