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Existentialism and Metaphysics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Philip Leon
Philip Leon
Affiliation:
University College, Leicester
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Extract

There has been for some years a feeling in the philosophical world in this country that we have had enough of the unproductive working of the treadmill of linguistics and of the new logic and that Metaphysics is at least not criminal, and even justifiable; notable justifications of Metaphysics are Professor Emmet's The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking and Professor Barnes” The Philosophical Predicament. But what is Metaphysics about? That, it seems to me, is a question which has to be looked into far more carefully than it has been, before we can think of justifying Metaphysics (or, for that matter, of attacking it). “About the Whole” would appear to be the answer which no would-be metaphysician can avoid, however frightened he may be of being sent into a concentration camp by his Ayerian colleagues for giving it. What is this Whole and how is it to be got? Judging at least by most nineteenth-century metaphysics, it would seem that the Whole is some kind of totality (of all that is known or to be known), comparable, save in respect of comprehensiveness, to the totality say which Physics deals with, and that it is got by reflecting on the nature of any knowing (epistemology) and/or on all the branches of knowledge and their relations to each other; Metaphysics, we should conclude, is a synthesis or construct both crowning, and confirmed by, knowledge.

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Articles
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Philosophy , Volume 28 , Issue 107 , October 1953 , pp. 342 - 347
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1953

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References

page 342 note 1 A compilation of passages (non–philosophical and non–theological) in which “the Whole” or its equivalents, “Being” and “Reality” occur is badly needed and would be very instructive. It would show, I think, that these expressions are applied neither to anything in particular nor to everything in general, yet always to what is most important, indeed all–important.

page 342 note 2 The Metaphysics which consists of drawing out the implications of the fact that anything is at all is characteristic of the Middle Ages and neo–Thomism rather than of the nineteenth century.

page 343 note 1 Cf. Cassirer, An Essay on Man, and S. K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key.

page 343 note 2 Minds which can rest satisfied that mankind has meant nothing by the things which for the major part of its sapiential existence have meant most for it must be very extraordinary and very happy–capable of solving every problem or of seeing none.

page 344 note 1 It might be objected that “the lived object” is a peculiar object because grammatically it can only be expressed by the cognate accusative. But exactly the same may be said of the cogitatum which figures in epistemological Metaphysics. The language can, no doubt, be misleading, but it need not be if we beware against being misled.

page 344 note 2 Cf. Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, p. 2: “Philosophy answers to our need of forming a complete and unitary conception of the world and of life, and as a result of this conception, a feeling which gives birth to an inward attitude and even to outward action. But the fact is that this feeling, instead of being a consequence of this conception, is the cause of it.” The feeling is, no doubt, strongest in the mystical state. Cf., among many, the description given in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Book VII, C. IV: “There seemed to be threads from all those innumerable worlds of God, linking his soul to them, and it was trembling all over in contact with other worlds.” But mere feeling, it must be remembered, is as much an abstraction as cognition.

page 346 note 1 The most valuable contribution of a metaphysical synthesis is just the frisson métaphysiqne. This is neither a frivolous nor a contemptuous remark.