Part Three - The Adventure of Metaphysics

Unveiling Misconceptions: Reassessing 'Metaphysics' and Its Misuse

William of Ockham:

The Singular in Place of the Universal

After St. Thomas, the initiator of that sound metaphysics recommended by the Church and cultivated by his disciples, especially Dominicans up to our days, metaphysics began to decline in other Church environments, losing its perfection and allowing defects and antinomies to occur that Thomas had managed to avoid.

It continues to define itself as the science of being. Still, it is no longer about the analogous being that Thomas deals with, but about the univocal being of Blessed Duns Scotus and the equivocal-univocal being of William of Ockham. The concept of being begins to be more interesting than being itself. More importance is given to sensory experience than to intellect.

With Ockham, English empiricist philosophy arises, which continues to our days after producing philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, and reaching current empiricists of various denominations such as logical positivists, analytical philosophers, and philosophers of language. To them, metaphysics represents a meticulously structured, coherent, and continuously updated compendium of categories and predicates that encompass the entirety of existence

But there is no trace of being leading to ipsum Esse for them. For them, the entire fundamental question of the foundation of knowledge and being, of life, existence, and morality, is merely a matter of logical, grammatical, terminological, and syntactic organization of the general categories of everyday language as principles of moral action.

Their interest in the singular, the individual, and the concrete, the factual, linked to the matter, prevails over that for the essential, the necessary, and the universal, expressions of the spirit. Therefore, rather than undertaking the daunting task of abstracting beyond the bounds of sense and imagination to explore the domain of metaphysics and grasp pure intelligibility and spirit as its horizons, preference is given to experiential and empirically verifiable data.

But in this way, metaphysics declines from its nobility and foundation, becomes uncertain, and descends to the level of logic, mathematics, or physics, or even, as happens in Ockham, of grammar and language. It is no longer a question of seeing the order of being but of respecting grammar’s rules, logical analysis, and syntax.

In this context, when discussing metaphysics, they aim for simplicity: merely entering the realm of the meta-sensible through mathematics, entities of reason, logic, and syntax of propositions, certainly not into the world of the spirit, the proper terrain of metaphysics, to believe they have reached the summit and the impassable peak of theoretical philosophy [1].

Ockham, by orienting metaphysics toward the individual instead of toward being, gives metaphysics an individualistic turn, which makes it forget the universal. The ego begins to fold in on itself. The empirical approach and the excessive utilitarian care for existing concrete things push it to narrow and lower the horizon of thought, which for truth can only form a demonstrative science by basing itself on universal essence and by surpassing sensibility to rise demonstratively to the supreme degree of being and essence, which is God, singular yes, but at the same time universal and spiritual principle of all reality.

This process of self-reference continues with Luther, who declared himself a disciple of Ockham. With Luther, metaphysics is an object of contempt, mistakenly seen as an expression of human pride and as foreign to the contents of the biblical message. He deliberately refuses to enter the field of metaphysics, thus misunderstanding those Catholic doctrines where the help provided by metaphysics is most present, such as the concept of God, creation, the nature of faith, the Incarnation, Redemption, justification, the sacraments, the relationship of sin to grace, free will, and the apologetic function of reason.

In this way, Luther, without thereby disregarding the valid and stimulating elements of his passionate theology and his powerful and suggestive oratory rich in continuous biblical references, lacked an intellectual formation disciplined by Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, which in the preceding centuries had contributed to the formation of ecclesial dogmatics, fell into the heresies contested by Leo X and refuted by the Council of Trent.

The religious subjectivism initiated by Ockham and then by Luther, combined with the Italian Renaissance anthropocentrism, are determining factors of the disintegration of medieval Christianity and the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries.

The Reformation initiated by the Council of Trent undoubtedly marked a significant clarification of key tenets of Catholic doctrine. However, it may have been executed with excessive rigidity towards the Protestants, leading to a hardening of their positions in response.

Not at all persuaded by the appeals and condemnations of the Council, the Protestants nevertheless returned to a certain recovery of metaphysics. A certain success was achieved in Germany by the metaphysics of Francisco Suárez, who brought together voluntarism and intellectualism, essentialism and existentialism, Duns Scotus, Ockham, and St. Thomas. He will exercise a certain influence on Leibniz.

René Descartes: The "I am" Instead of "He is

The Catholic thinker who will provide a philosophical basis for German Protestantism will be Descartes. With him, a new concept of metaphysics arises, no longer based on being, which for Luther was a stumbling block, but on the ego, in line with Luther's famous act at the Diet of Worms where he declared war on the Catholic Church with a dramatic appeal to his conscience.

Descartes no longer places being as the object of metaphysics but one's ego, which, becoming the principle of certainty, knowledge, and being, clearly transcends the limits of the individual ego and tends to enlarge immeasurably to bear the weight of the totality of reality.

Descartes' ego certainly appears at the beginning with modesty as Descartes' ego, created by God, and yet, is implicitly conceived by him as the foundation of truth, in Descartes' followers, who explicitly develop the logical consequences of his exaggerated ego conception, this ego in the following centuries will gradually manifest its claims to transcend the individual ego or the human ego to become the divine Ego, the "I Am" of Sacred Scripture.

Descartes brings about a turning point in metaphysical interest, which is always directed towards being, but if before him the metaphysician uses the verb "to be" in the third person so that the metaphysician says: it or he is, or being is, now the interest shifts to the first person: I am. We still have the predication of being without nominal predicates, as St. Thomas had already done when inspired by Scripture, he says of God: He Is (Exodus 3:14), but now this predication shifts to the first person: ego sum, which can be translated as I am or I exist. So, however, the problem arises: there is no difficulty in saying I exist. But can I say I am? Christ says it because He is God, in fact only God can say of Himself, as is clear from the Bible (Exodus 3:14), "I Am," because, as St. Thomas had already noted, He is ipsum Esse, the same Self-subsisting Being, so only God can say of Himself I am Being. I, a creature, must say, instead, I possess the being. Existence has been bestowed upon me, not by myself, but by God, the Creator. If He had not made me exist, I would be nothing. Everything I am I owe to Him.

Instead, Descartes' sum in its ambiguity (do I exist or am I?), will be interpreted by Fichte as if I, a creature, could predicate this absolute being of myself. It must now be acknowledged that I can affirm my existence through judgment - and perhaps Descartes meant this, even though I cannot posit it as inherent, for there is a distinction between being as conceived by me and being as it exists independently of my thought—my existence predating my cognition.

Idealists refer to this as a 'presupposed being,' which poses a challenge for them as it implies a being independent of themselves, as they pursue a philosophical being to be dependent upon their cognition.

Thus, Fichte conflates two concepts: the affirmation of judgment and the act of positing or creating being. For this reason, Fichte can say: I, by affirming my existence, posit myself, I posit my being, and with this, I posit being simpliciter, I posit being in toto, so there is no other being distinct from mine that posits my being; I posit it by myself. However, if it is God who establishes my existence by creating me, it becomes evident that I am supplanting God. For this reason, Fichte was rightly accused of atheism. And Descartes leads to atheism.

At the same time, with the substitution of "he is" with "I am," the "you are" without a nominal predicate also disappears, which is present in Scripture referring to God and which corresponds precisely to the "I Am." This means that the dialogue with God, prayer, and religion disappear. It is clear that if I am God, should I perhaps pray to myself? The whole problem of spiritual life then reduces to my awareness of being God, so if before I believed that thought depended on being, now I understand that the being depends on my thoughts. This is the conclusion to which Descartes' cogito leads.

This is why in the development of German idealism from Kant to Hegel, God is gradually devalued because man appropriates His attributes, and in the end, with Nietzsche, only the human ego remains, and God has disappeared. Man in place of God. This is the outcome of Descartes' cogito and of Descartes' "metaphysics."

With Descartes, there arises a serious misunderstanding and abuse of the term "metaphysics," destined for immense success up to today, a doctrinal program that will be the magna carta of the so-called "modern philosophy," a term coined by Cartesians to propagate Cartesianism - a very successful operation - and from there passed on to their idealist heirs up to modernists of our days.

I refer to Descartes' famous "Meditations on First Philosophy," which, in reality, have nothing to do with true metaphysics, which is not the consciousness that I exist but is the science of being as being and the properties of being. And I am not being, nor do I produce being. Nor do I deduce being from my self-consciousness, but I presuppose knowledge of it, otherwise, I could not exercise my self-consciousness, which is the self-consciousness of myself, thinking the entity.

Immanuel Kant: Reason Instead of Being

Kant's attitude towards metaphysics is not easy to understand. One interpretation presents him as the philosopher who showcases the emptiness of metaphysics' claim to elevate reason to the science of purely intelligible objects (being, soul, spirit, God) starting from the experience of sensible things.

From here, these interpreters deduce that Kant was the underminer of metaphysics by confining our understanding within the sphere of phenomena and empirically verifiable knowledge, excluding any possibility of scientifically and demonstratively knowing the world of the spirit.

Now, to doubt such an interpretation, it would suffice to note that Kant was a professor of metaphysics. How can someone who teaches metaphysics deny the possibility of metaphysics? The matter becomes clear when considering what Kant meant by "metaphysics."

Here we surprisingly discover - something that no one points out - that he possessed three concepts of metaphysics that coexisted in his mind, albeit in conflict with each other: one concept of metaphysics as a posteriori, which Kant declares impossible, vain, and illusory, and two others: one, a concept of metaphysics a priori, which can be pointless, like that of Wolff; and another concept of metaphysics a priori, yet to be built, which can be science, under the conditions he poses in the Prolegomena to any future metaphysics that wants to present itself as science.

In this way, Kant in metaphysics follows a double line: on the one hand, he maintains that metaphysics does not yet exist as a science; he asserts, as Luther and Descartes had already asserted, that metaphysics is over, but on the other hand, he relies on Descartes' metaphysics, presenting himself as the realizer of the Copernican revolution in metaphysics. In short, a Cartesian revolutionary overturns Descartes' realism in the name of Cartesian idealism. A formidable undertaking!

So, what does Kant do? After rejecting with vain sophisms the realistic metaphysics of Aristotle and St. Thomas, based on Descartes ("Cogito, ergo sum"), he does not give up metaphysics, hence realism, but warns those who in the future will want to do metaphysics to adhere to his warnings as laid out in a special publication [2]. In essence, Kant understands metaphysics in the same way as Descartes: not as the science of being, but as the science that reason has of itself:

"The kernel and essence of metaphysics is the application of reason only to itself and meditating on its concepts, the knowledge of objects that presumably derives precisely from it, without needing the mediation of experience and without it being possible to arrive at it through it in general" [3].

At this point, we could ask a question: but here isn't Kant referring to what he did in the Critique of Pure Reason? So, is he presenting us with a metaphysics? Is this Kant's metaphysics? So, what did Kant want to do? Did he want to establish the conditions for the metaphysics building or did he do metaphysics himself? Let's examine the complexity in which Kant has gotten himself into by wanting to adopt Descartes' cogito ("I think") without renouncing the realism of the thing-in-itself, i.e., being, as we have in Aristotelian metaphysics.

Kant maintains, like Wolff, being understood as essence (the thing) as the object of metaphysics, only that this time the essence is no longer the extramental being, composed of essence and existence, as in Thomas, but is a pure essence without being or existence. Therefore, being is not the act of essence but is the simple copula of judgment. Thus, the object of metaphysics remains, as for Descartes, the sum of the cogito, with the pretense of preserving the extramental thing-in-itself, without it being possible to know its essence in itself, but only the phenomenon, i.e., the essence as it appears to us. The groundwork is already laid for Husserl's phenomenology as a vision or intuition of essence ("wesenschau"), "correlated with consciousness."

Hegel: the Confusion of Metaphysics with Logic

Hegel rejects the distinction between thought and being, so for him, the object of metaphysics is not reality, but the ideal; the real coincides with the rational, and the thing coincides with the concept of the thing. Now, since the focus of logic concerns itself primarily with an intellectual entity, the conceptual, achieved through the reduction of the real entity to its rational counterpart, he identifies the object of metaphysics with that of logic. For this reason, he states:

"The logical science constitutes true metaphysics, that is, pure speculative philosophy."[4] However, to understand logic as metaphysics, as the science of reality, Hegel proposes a new concept of logic that no longer presupposes the realistic distinction between the concept of the thing (thought) and the thing itself (being), but where the thing coincides with the concept of the thing. Understanding the object amounts to nothing more than comprehending its conceptual representation no longer an external thing in itself to thought, but inherent to thought.

Here we see the confusion Hegel makes between metaphysics and logic. Indeed, the object of metaphysics is the entity or thing external to thought or mind (extra animam), which is reached through the concept (idea) of the thing. Logic, on the other hand, considers the thing not in itself but as represented in the concept (idea), it regards the conceptual entity not as a thing but as thought, as it is in the mind or soul (in anima). It considers the concept of the thing, not the thing itself. Now Hegel, identifying the thing with the notion of the thing, makes it clear why he reduces metaphysics to logic.

Hegel thus aims to overcome realistic metaphysics, which presupposes the distinction of thought from being, so that only logical being is inherent to reason or mind, whereas metaphysical being is external and transcendent. He, therefore, takes up the concept of logic as the science of the concept and the thought as thought, for which its object is intrinsic to the thinking subject, thus not an extramental being, but an intra-mental being, the entity of reason.

Hegel leaves to common consciousness the conviction of the extra-mentality of being and claims to have established "pure science", and "absolute science", which at the same time is a new logic and is the true metaphysics by removing the distinction between thought and being:

"The pure science therefore presupposes liberation from the opposition of consciousness. It contains thought as it is at the same time also the thing in itself or consciousness in itself as it is also pure thought. As a science, truth is pure self-consciousness that develops and has the form of Self, that what is in itself and for itself is the concept known and that the concept as such is what is in itself and for itself.

The content of pure science is precisely this objective thinking. Far from being formal, far from being devoid of the matter required for effective and true knowledge, this science instead has a content that is only the absolute Truth or, if one still wishes to use the word matter, that is only the true matter, - a matter, however, to which form is not something external, since this matter is rather pure thought and therefore the absolute form itself.

Logic is therefore to be understood as the system of pure reason, as the realm of pure thought. This realm is the truth, as it is in itself and for itself without a veil. One can therefore express it as follows, that this content is the exposition of God, as He is in His eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite spirit."[5]

Isn't this demanding too much from metaphysics, besides being confused with logic? Presenting metaphysics in this way to a serious and honest person makes metaphysics credible and authoritative, or rather exposes it to ridicule? Who can believe in this nonsense of Hegel if not vain and eager spirits to impress people?

Henri Bergson: the Apology of Temporal Being

Bergson [6] possesses a realistic vision because he admits the possibility of intuiting the real, however, it is colored by a worldly perspective that denies the existence of an eternal and immutable realm above time and history. Spirit, for him, is continuous movement; stability is a flattening and stiffening of life that materializes and fades away.

Being, reality, is attainable, but it is not the object of the intellect, which with its fixed, universal, and abstract concepts de-realizes the concrete, stops what evolves, fixes what is mutable, and separates what is united. Reality is the object of creative intuition, which engages the intellect indeed, but inseparably connected with sense and never abandoning it; and it is innovative because it does not reflect a fixed and immutable datum, but develops and advances its object at the very moment it intuits it and by intuiting it.

Here too, the starting point is always Cartesian cogito, however, at this juncture understood as an empirical self, which grows on itself and creates itself by intuiting itself becoming in time, history, and space.

Spirit, for Bergson, is not an immaterial substance as a subsisting form, yet nothing else but a vital impetus, empirically verifiable, an ever-increasing and unstoppable impulse of a physical and biological life that transcends itself by absolutizing itself without abandoning and transcending space-temporality. Thus, if in this view one can speak of God, this God is not a pure infinite and eternal spirit transcending time, becoming, and history, but is the same progress of intuition understood in an absolute sense as the absolute intuition of absolute being, coinciding with being itself, which therefore is not static but evolutionary not only spiritual but also material. We thus find in Bergson, a Jew, a curious resemblance to the God of the Jewish Spinoza, a synthesis of thought and extension, derived from the Kabbalah.[7]

Fr. Giovanni Cavalcoli OP

Fontanellato, March 7, 2024

Source:

https://padrecavalcoli.blogspot.com/p/lavventura-della-metafisica-parte-terza.html

[1] Michael J. Loux-Dean W. Zimmerman, The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics, Oxford University Press, 2003; Michael J. Loux, Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction, Routledge, New York and London, 2006.

[2] Prolegomeni ad ogni futura metafisica che si presenterà come scienza, Carabba Editore, Lanciano, 1924, pp. 94-95, 137-139.

[3] Ibid., p. 94.

[4] Scienza della logica, Edizioni Laterza, Bari, 1983, pp. 5-6.

[5] Scienza della logica, op. cit., p. 31.

[6] For a critique of Bergson, see Jacques Maritain, La philosophie Bergsonienne: Études critiques, Téqui Éditeur, Paris, 1948; De Bergson à Thomas d’Aquin: Essais de Métaphysique et de Morale, Paul Hartmann Éditeur, Paris, 1947.

[7] These views can be found in Introduzione alla Metafisica, Edizioni Laterza, Bari, 1994.