by Bruce E. R. Thompson.
Of all the terms that make up the technical jargon of philosophy, none is more mysterious and misunderstood than the word ‘metaphysics’. Since it is well-known that metaphysics is a branch of philosophy, the misunderstandings sometimes bleed into a misunderstanding of philosophy itself. I was once at a cast party (I forget whether I was in the cast, or just at the party) at which I met an aspiring starlet who—upon learning that I taught philosophy—wanted to know what predictions I had made and whether I might be interested in hearing about her past lives.
As a branch of philosophy, metaphysics is sometimes described as an attempt to lay out the fundamental constituents of the universe, as well as the fundamental principles by which those things move and change. But this is a description that more accurately applies to physics itself, rather than to metaphysics. The word ‘metaphysics’ exists at all because it is the name of a book by Aristotle. Hence, it seems reasonable to suppose that metaphysics is the study of…whatever that book is about. Okay. Unfortunately, that book is a mishmash of texts on various quasi-related topics. It contains numerous contradictions. The philosopher John Herman Randall—whose opinions I generally trust—is of the opinion that the texts are all by Aristotle but written at different periods of his life, ranging from the time he was a student under Plato to the time when he was a mature philosopher running his own school. Others have suggested that the texts aren’t by Aristotle at all: they might just be notes taken by Aristotle’s students—some of whom simply misunderstood him.
Be that as it may, sometime during the first century C.E., the great librarian, Andronicus of Rhodes, took it upon himself to organize Aristotle’s writings. He gave pride of place to Aristotle’s treatises on rhetoric and logic. He titled those works Organon, or ‘tool’, implying that they provided the fundamental methodology of philosophy. At some point in his work, Andronicus came across a bunch of untitled texts discussing such ideas as ‘form’, ‘substance’, ‘universals’, ‘being’, ‘being qua being’, and so on. He patted them together into a single book, placed them after the book titled Phusike Akroasis (which means “lectures on nature”), and titled the book Ta Meta ta Phusike.
The Greek word ‘meta’ has many meanings. They include ‘among’, ‘along with’, ‘next to’, ‘after’ (in the sense of ‘pursuing’), ‘after’ (in the usual sense), ‘right after’, and ‘beyond’. In this context, the most natural interpretation probably is that it means ‘right after’. In other words, Andronicus could come up with no better name for the book than “the stuff I’ve placed right after the Physics.” That gives us precious little help in deciphering what the term “metaphysics” means.
Aristotle would surely have disputed the placement of the materials in any case. In several of the texts Aristotle refers to the topic under discussion as “first philosophy,” a phrase that was later borrowed by Rene Descartes for his famous work Meditations on First Philosophy. Aristotle presumably meant the phrase in the same way that Descartes did: these are the topics that must be considered before the rest of philosophy is even possible. Perhaps the question, as Aristotle understood it, can be explained in this way. If philosophy (understood broadly to include all the sciences) means an investigation into the nature of things, the first question to be asked is “What must be true of a thing for it to be considered a ‘thing’ at all (and therefore open to investigation)?” This question was probably raised for the ancient Greeks by Parmenides and his student, Zeno of Elia. (That’s the same Zeno who created the famous paradoxes, of course.) Parmenides insisted that nothingness could not exist because, if it did exist, it would not be nothing. Hence, motion is impossible, because, if there is no nothingness for things to move into, then things will have no room to move!
Among modern philosophers, Jean Paul Sartre wrote an entire treatise, Being and Nothingness, trying to grapple with roughly the same problem. Sartre’s answer is that nothingness is not a fact about the physical world at all. It is only a way of seeing things: if I walk into a café expecting to meet my friend Pierre, but Pierre hasn’t arrived yet, I become aware of his absence. But, in perceiving his absence I do not thereby perceive some sort of emptiness into which a chair could be moved.
Nowadays most philosophers take a dim view of metaphysics. They considered it a cluster of pointless and unanswerable questions—which, however, it may be the business of philosophers to un-ask. In Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams puts his finger on a key truth about philosophical inquiry: it is often easy to find answers to questions, and the answers are often quite simple. What is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything? That’s easy: 42. The hard part is framing the question. The task of philosophy is not to answer questions but to ask them, that is, to frame them correctly. This frequently involves debunking, or un-asking, questions that make no sense because they are nonsensical or incorrectly framed. “How can nothingness exist?” is a perfect example.
As Edmund Husserl suggests in his book Cartesian Meditations, “first philosophy” has less to do with the nature of reality than it has to do with the way we perceive and make sense of things. That inquiry might be more appropriately named “meta-psychology” rather than “meta-physics.”