Metaphysics

Quotes

• Hegel, Encyclopedia: Metaphysics is nothing else [nichts anderes] but the entire range of the universal determinations of thought, as it were, the diamond net into which everything is brought and thereby first [zuallererst] made intelligible. Every educated consciousness [jedes gebildete Bewußtsein] has its metaphysics, an instinctive way of thinking, the absolute power within us of which we become master only when we make it in turn the object of our knowledge.  (G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, II:11, § 246 (Zusatz): “Denn Metaphysik heißt nichts anderes, als der Umfang der allgemeinen Denkbestimmungen, gleichsam das diamentene Netz, in das wir allen Stoff bringen und dadurch erst verständlich machen. Jedes gebildete Bewußtsein hat seine Metaphysik, das instinctartige Denken, 

• Adorno, Negative Dialectics: "Thought that does not capitulate before wretched existence comes to nought before its criteria, truth becomes untruth, philosophy becomes folly. And yet philosophy cannot give up, lest idiocy triumph in actualized unreason [Widervernunft] … Folly is truth in the shape that human beings must accept whenever, amid the untrue, they do not give up truth. Even at the highest peaks art is semblance; but art receives the semblance … from nonsemblance [vom Scheinlosen] … . No light falls on people and things in which transcendence would not appear [widerschiene]. Indelible in resistance to the fungible world of exchange is the resistance of the eye that does not want the world's colors to vanish. In semblance nonsemblance is promised." (ND 404–5).

• Grondin, Introduction to Metaphysics. Conclusions: The critics of metaphysics are certainly right on one thing: It has constituted, albeit discreetly, the guiding thread of the entire Western tradition. The question is whether it really has to be jettisoned and why that would need to be the case. As this book has argued, there are, to begin with, many forms of metaphysics. The metaphysics one rejects is more often than not just one possibility amongst many and is always taken to task in the name of some other type of metaphysics. Plato is held to be the founder of metaphysics, with very good reasons, yet his theory of ideas was constantly challenged by Aristotle, another founding figure of metaphysics. If Descartes lambasted Aristotelian scholasticism, he did so while presenting his own Metaphysical meditations (1641). Kant, for his part, only called to question the possibilities of knowledge of pure reason in order to lay the groundwork of a new metaphysics. 

• This refreshing variety of metaphysical thinking is however not devoid of a common-core, without which it would make no sense to speak of metaphysics. This book hopes to have made the case that metaphysics is, in essence, the self-critical endeavor of the human mind to understand the whole of reality and its reasons, an undertaking which can indeed be seen to have supported the Western intellectual tradition. It is self-critical since metaphysicians have always corrected their predecessors and even their own previous attempts at coming to grips with the main features of our experience. It is nothing more than an endeavor since most of its thinkers were aware of the audacious nature of their undertaking and of the limits of language in their attempt to grasp “Being.”

• This metaphysical endeavor came to the fore when Parmenides raised Being to the level of thinking: Being and thinking are the same, he said at the beginning of metaphysics. Plato seized upon this insight when he recognized that reason can glimpse true Being when it is arrested by the splendor of the eidos—that is, the order, symmetry and harmony—which shines through the world of our experience. Thinking then, unmistakably but humbly, becomes aware that this world of ours is not only guided by the random whims of fortune and chance, which can hardly guide anything. They testify to some good that rules our world and our action and which we strive to understand when we think metaphysically.  (Grondin, Jean. Introduction to Metaphysics (p. 256).