It’s the problem of metaphysics

The bourgeois narcissism of metaphysical modernity

Here’s a funny thing: metaphysics was conceived as the most solid of all foundations of knowledge, the “first philosophy” upon which all other philosophies could build, the very ground of the sciences. But when we search for a metaphysics today, we find ourselves clutching at vapors, astral projections, “religious or metaphysical transcendence,” in the words of a New York Times article published yesterday. What happened?

I made a lot of claims in my previous post characterizing two theories of how to arrive at reality — metaphysics and phenomenology. I wrote that the latter stemmed from the failures of the former, and now I want to give a clearer account of what those failures of metaphysics are. My goal, broadly, is to interrogate my own politics of committing to the world as it is in order to build the world as it could be. To do that, I need to tear through the last two millennia of intellectual history. Come join me on this whirlwind tour.

I’ve heard a line in political theory seminars that “metaphysics” simply refers to a set of texts within Aristotle’s corpus. There’s the Physics, his writings on nature and thus the foundational elements of science as natural philosophy, including his theory that objects fall in proportion to their weight. And then there’s the Metaphysics, which either refers to its placement after the Physics in the libraries of Aristotle’s ancient interpreters, or to Aristotle’s attempt to find the theoretical underpinnings of the physical realm beyond it.

In this reading, metaphysics has always contained within it the notion of the transcendent beyond. We could even call it the attempt to escape our earthly shackles, to know the universe from the point of view of a god. This accords with major themes of Greek philosophy: Aristotle’s own conception of the Unmoved Mover that sets the universe humming, Plato’s privileging of the ideal forms and eternal truth in the allegory of the cave, Socrates’ reunion with the immortal soul beyond the decay of human flesh. This last example is instructive. Socrates’ last words, as recounted in Plato’s Phaedo, are “Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius [the Greek god of medicine]; will you remember to pay the debt?” In death, Socrates has been cured of the illness of mortality. His immortal soul can now contemplate in pure eternity.¹ In this, the pursuit of wisdom — philosophy, and maybe even metaphysics — is learning how to die. 

Our transient existence on earth pales in comparison to what awaits us in the afterlife. Does this sound familiar? It did to Nietzsche, who insults Christianity as “Platonism for the people.” Whenever Nietzsche uses the word metaphysics, he does so with contempt.² He uses it to refer to the inaccessible otherworld, chased so fervently by believers both in rationality and revelation, that they lose their connection to this world. This is the meaning of one of Nietzsche’s great insights: that science and faith, so often conceived of as polar opposites, are not so different. In the aphorism titled “How we, too, are still pious” in The Gay Science (1882, though this quotation belongs to the section published in the second edition in 1887), he writes, “It is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests—that even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith, which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine.” 

Nietzsche was known as the most strident critic of modernity precisely because he viewed its theory of reality — its metaphysics — as premised on pillars of sand. He traced the rise of modern science, with its emphasis on the value of truth, to its origins in Christian moralism. This Christian will to truth embedded within modern science must ultimately deny itself the existence of God, that arbiter of truth. Science, try as it might, cannot take God’s place as giver of meaning. The dissonance that arises from this contradiction is the crisis of nihilism, which Nietzsche describes as a radical untethering of the world from the sun in the famous passage that declares the death of God.³

Nietzsche’s reading of metaphysics, which if the popularity of astrology today is any indiction, has become our own: it provides no solid ground at all.

This was not supposed to happen. Nietzsche might accuse metaphysics of leading to nihilism, but its designs were the opposite. Modernity is premised on the belief that truth exists and it can be found in this world, even if we have to take a detour to the stars.⁴

Where did this theory of reality, this metaphysical modernity, come from? I think Descartes owns one of the strongest claims as the architect of modernity. We can think of his immortal cogito ergo sum as the blueprint. This is, in part, because his Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences (1637) helped develop the modern scientific method through its approach to rational thinking.⁵ His method involved doubting everything he know — akin to the isolation of variables in a scientific experiment — until he arrived at solid ground. He could doubt his senses. What if he was dreaming? He could doubt that the world even existed. What if God was malevolent and sought to deceive us all? But he could not doubt that there was an entity that was doubting. With this, Descartes built the foundation of the modern world on the one inkling of knowledge he could be sure of: himself. My existence is confirmed by my own mental activity. I think, therefore I am. 

This, as you might imagine, caused quite a stir. Cartesian rationalism was attacked by empiricists like John Locke and David Hume, arguing that knowledge only ever means knowledge of what can be experienced.

It was Kant who brokered a truce. With his Critique of Pure Reason (first edition 1781, second 1787), the philosopher from Königsberg made his own attempt at metaphysics. In a wonderful image in the prefaces to both editions of the Critique, Kant calls to mind a “combat arena,” in which different traditions compete for favor from metaphysics, the one-time “queen of all the sciences.” Kant tries to find a path forward in the battle between the rationalists and the empiricists, those who believe that we can have knowledge of innate ideas and those who believe all knowledge must be derived from sense-perception.⁶ Kant’s hope is that the Critique can return metaphysics to its rightful place as queen by putting it on the “secure path of science,” a firmer ground than dogmatism or faith.

In order to accomplish this feat, Kant proposes an inversion. Heretofore, Descartes, Hume, Locke and all the rest had put the object at the center of thought: “thus far it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to objects.” We go to the objects to understand them. But what if they came to us, what if we assume “that objects must conform to our cognition?” Kant blends the rational, self-sure cogito of Descartes with the experiential observations of the empiricists to form the basis of cold, hard knowledge of the world. Here, he invokes the Copernican revolution, where a shift in perspective helped to solve the problem of physics. Kant attempts the same for metaphysics.

By placing the human subject at the center of reality, however, Kant arguably undoes the great humbling of the Copernican revolution. To make his metaphysics work, Kant had to split the world apart, into things as they appear to us (phenomena) and into things as they are (noumena). There is the knowable phenomenal world, and beneath it/above it/behind it, the world of things-in-themselves, noumena.⁷ We can have no knowledge of noumena — God, the cosmos, the ding-an-sich — which is why Kant seems to throw up his hands at the end: “I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”⁸  

I think what’s important here is that, for both Descartes and Kant, their attempts at a “first philosophy,” a solid metaphysics from which to build the rest of knowledge, lead to the same subjectivist end. There is no escape from the self. 

This is how the fundamental unit of modernity became the individual: the Cartesian cogito, Kant’s “transcendental subject,” Homo economicus. There is a straight line from “I think, therefore I am” to “God is dead” — indeed, it is the prick that bled God dry. Along this line are the rationally self-interested selves who composed and comprise the intellectual traditions of the Enlightenment, from liberalism to capitalism. 

In attempting to ground reality through the self, modern metaphysics displaces the source of truth from the divine to the human.⁹ The indubitable individual, the self-sure cogito, betrayed an arrogance of human mastery over the natural world. Reality may not literally be the projection of the human mind, but in starting with the individual, the natural world appeared as raw matter that humans could shape for their own usage. Could the climate crisis be a consequence of this?

If metaphysical modernity was built upon rational first principles and the primary of the subject, it’s going to have trouble accounting for irrationality and the rise of the mass politics. As Europe descended into fascism and the carnage of war, metaphysics struggled to provide answers. The continent’s thinkers turned turned to phenomenology, and in the next post, so shall we. 

But first a coda: In this treatment of metaphysics, I neglected to mention Hegel, that giant of 19th century philosophy. His Phenomenology of Spirit adds a new dimension to the interplay between the ideal, the realm of celestial ideas, and the real, the fallen world here on earth: how things change. The Phenomenology is an account of how Geist, a metaphysical entity that we might call the human commitment to reason, emerges over time to manifest itself in the phenomenal world. The metaphysical becomes physical through the movement of history. That’s why he is said to have described Napoleon as “history on horseback” — the metaphysical manifestation of Geist in phenomenological form.¹⁰  

This is the idea that altered the world forever. Because as Hegel’s greatest disciple wrote, “the philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point is to change it.”

1. In The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt distinguishes between the Greeks’ conception of immortality and eternity. “Immortality means endurance in time, deathless life on this earth and in this world as it was given,” she writes, whereas eternity takes places outside of time and space. As I understand the distinction, immortality belongs to the vita activa, the human striving for greatness in politics, whereas eternity is the experience of the vita contemplativa, philosophy.

2. A fun research project would be to identify the historical moment at which metaphysics became a term of abuse. Was it before or after Nietzsche (whose books only sold 500 copies in his lifetime)?

3. It’s a great passage:

“But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”

4. This is what I was getting at in my post about dropping the feather and hammer on the moon.

5. The formulation in French is “je pense, donc je suis” in the Discourse. A similar argument appears in his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), which my Cambridge edition tells me was originally called the Metaphysics in Descartes’ correspondences. The Latin expression cogito ergo sum apparently comes from an even later work.

6. This is, more or less, the difference between a priori knowledge and a posteriori knowledge.

7. There seems to be a scholarly debate whether or not the things-in-themselves and noumea are equivalent. I err on the side that they are. See Kant B xx: “our presentation of things, as these are given to us, does not confirm to them as things in themselves, but that these objects are, rather, appearances that confirm to our way of presenting.”

8. Maybe you can hear Nietzsche’s voice in the back of your head: if we cannot know it, perhaps it is not there.

9. The theorists of the Frankfurt School would call this bourgeois subjectivity. See Adorno’s lectures on Kant’s Critique: “the concept of truth in Kant — and this is profoundly bound up with bourgeois thought — is itself that of a timeless truth….Truth as something lasting and enduring somehow always appears where urban exchange societies have developed. That is to say, underlying this is an idea that nothing new should come into being, that the new is actually a source of insecurity, a threat, something worrying. There may even be something quite archaic underlying it, namely the fear of difference, the fear of anything that is not cocooned in the web of our concepts and which therefore frightens us when we encounter it.”

10. I owe a lot of my thinking to Susan Buck-Morss, whose writing on Hegel and Haiti is a brilliant rejoinder to his concept of universal history.