There are certain metaphysical assumptions (including assumptions about what the term “metaphysics” means) underlying the conceptual journey of Inside the Liberal Arts. But if that isn’t enough to scare you off, here’s the good news: it isn’t all that complicated. In this post I will make and link some of the core assumptions that hold the world together – my world at any rate – and lend a semblance of order to the seeming chaos.
I say “seeming,” because, outside of the political realm, there isn’t all that much chaos to complain about. In fact, without some order we couldn’t even have consciousness. Consciousness is order. And in that sense, we are swimming in order, positively luxuriating in it. Even most of what we call chaotic involves things that on a deeper level are highly ordered, in the sense that we can discern objects, events, actions, and causes and effects. Consciousness is (among other things) the ability to discern order in the world and therefore to act in it. That’s assumption No. 1.
But let’s back up a bit and begin with a definition: “Metaphysics” is about how our minds conceive the world in the broadest sense, and why that is worth doing. It overlaps with the other core region of philosophy, epistemology, or the theory of knowledge. What we can know, and why and how we can know it, is epistemology; what there is, and how the mind and the world interact, is metaphysics – so it’s really just epistemology in a slightly wider gauge.
Metaphysics is about our conceptual tools (concept words; words in general; and language itself). It’s about how we choose them, and how they reflect and/or differ from what we use them for: the construction of models of reality. It has nothing to do with the metaphysics section in your local bookstore, with mysticism, or with strange, occult, or arcane thinking. It’s all business – conceptual business.
If this already seems suspiciously abstract, well, here’s the bad news: all words are abstractions. They are not things (objects, qualities, events, relations, etc.). They are merely the tools we use to model those things, and they’re all we’ve got. The complication is that words, in themselves, designate things, ideas, etc.; but deeper and broader meanings require us to use more words, in most cases lots more. We need not just words as isolated particles of meaning, but discourse. And discourse has its problems, too. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Individuation is an essential (if not the essential) part of metaphysics: how we distinguish and differentiate things. Parts and wholes are a related metaphysical question, going back to Plato, along with the particular, the general, the universal, and how we can commute between different levels of thinking, being, and doing.
Another aspect (or axiom) of metaphysics is that thinking, being, and doing are different (but usefully distinguishable) aspects of one big manifold, which is the world and our conscious experience of it. (If we weren’t here, what would it matter?) As you can see, starting with a bare-bones foundational definition of metaphysics, we’ve already built up a considerable bit of metaphysical superstructure, so to speak.
Consciousness, per se, is one of the ultimate mysteries. We know that we have it, and that we need it for the lives we lead as humans. Dogs and cats have it; clams, maybe not so much. Maybe viruses don’t have consciousness – although they may behave as if they did. I’ll deal with consciousness further in a future post, if I can summon the nerve.
Moving right along: What we like to call reality (all of us, not just philosophers) is at best an approximation or inferior reproduction of what we think of as the world outside our minds. Maybe nothing’s “out there” and it’s all in our minds, or maybe it’s vice versa… well, you get the idea. But the core metaphysical assumption that is most relevant to the liberal arts is that there is no ultimate reality, no ultimate truth, and not much certainty; there is just what we can make sense of using our fallible, largely subjective, and extremely limited individual minds. But it gets better from here.
We have some powerful tools: consciousness (including perception, feeling, sensations) and the tools of reasoning that we’ve invented to deal with experience.
And through language and technology we have ways of embedding, storing, retrieving, revising, and applying knowledge of the world. Your lawn mower, for example, speaking of powerful tools. Revising is the most important part, given our lack of certainty or complete knowledge of anything. Revision in light of new evidence or better ways of thinking is the essence of rigor in science, philosophy, and elsewhere.
Rationality is what gets us as far as we can go, including the expansion and the endless revision of knowledge. Rationality is useful. (See consciousness, above). It’s our only answer to problems, metaphysical or otherwise. Louis Armstrong advised to “Try thinking with your heart.” It’s good advice as far as it goes; but our hearts don’t exist in non-rational bubbles. We are not either rational or emotional creatures, but eternally both, and they are intensely interpenetrating. Our feelings are constantly formed or adjusted by what we know, believe, deduce, infer, etc. Formal logic, informal logic, analytic thinking, scientific method, empirical computation, mathematics: these are some of the various forms our rationality takes.
When I say our rational tools are “powerful,” I’m of course speaking in very relative terms. They are powerful compared to not using them. They are powerful because they’re all we’ve got, and we’ve got them. And they are powerful because, if there’s anything more powerful – say, the mind of God, or the Ultimate Secret of the Universe – we don’t have access to it and never will. Metaphysics, as rationality on the most general level, enables us to say: if we can’t have it, it doesn’t matter and might as well not be said to exist.
One final point, before leaving you to play paddy-cakes with the absolute, is this: a consequence of my assumptions about mind and reality is that all metaphysics is radically pragmatic. Nothing we think or say about the world is worthwhile except to the extent it works – helps us to understand and manage the manifold of mind and nature in which we find ourselves. It can’t be anything else than radically pragmatic – because if it doesn’t work, why bother with it at all?
Broadly speaking, all philosophy is pragmatic: it’s there to help us think, and for no other reason. We tend to equate pragmatism with doing, and not with thinking. But of course that’s totally wrongheaded. We don’t “do” much of anything without thinking. Physical reflexes, or experiencing our bodies, isn’t a form of doing; but they can lead us down the doing road. And conversely, there isn’t much thinking that doesn’t ultimately connect with doing.
Summing up: reality is a semi-coherent mess, and we impose order on it, or locate order in it, if you prefer. Either way, it’s a mind/world joint effort. We do this because we must. Consciousness itself – everything that we can know, feel, believe, or experience – is only possible because there is a measure of rationality hardwired in it. Consciousness is what tells us that we are in the presence of one person or a crowd, and that the train is or is not leaving the station, and so on. It tells us, above all, that we are a self. It makes distinctions and connections – the nuclear elements of all knowledge – not because we ask it to, but because that’s what our conscious minds do. That is what separates us from clams and viruses. To be conscious is to think.
It’s hard to summarize a summary of how the world makes sense to us. Takeaways are for boring lectures that make two or three important points, if you’ve dozed off. But that said, one takeaway I’d suggest is the central role of rationality in everything. The radical pragmatism of the whole enterprise is another.
And a third is the importance of self-conscious mental flexibility, a.k.a. critical thinking, regardless of how much of my conception of metaphysics you agree with. But you can disagree only at your peril with the notion that rationality enables us to recognize our mental powers and limits, or with the inherently experimental and provisional character of all human knowledge – even that embedded in technology. You may love your lawnmower, but there’ll be a better one out next year.