As its name suggests, this book proposes a novel strategy by which to avoid metaphysics. There is nothing new about trying to avoid metaphysics, of course – in the memorable words of Hegel, “metaphysics is a word from which more or less everyone runs away, as from someone who has the plague” – but unlike recent proposals, the chapters which follow pursue a therapeutic, rather than apophatic, approach to doing so. One of the difficulties facing any attempt to overcome metaphysics, it seems, is that certain metaphysical presuppositions about what it means to be in touch with reality – and about reality itself – have become common sense. A crucial first step in overcoming metaphysics, then, is to render these presuppositions visible as presuppositions; on a therapeutic approach, this is accomplished by defending an alternative account of reality, of “being in touch,” and so on, thereby stripping such presuppositions of their apparent self-evidence. Not just any account will do, however, since one who has long been in the grip of metaphysics may feel as if its loss leaves him or her out of touch with reality, as if condemned to a life among shadows. The therapeutic strategy, then, is to inoculate one against such feelings by explaining that which metaphysics purports to explain – what reality is like and what it means to be in touch with it – in terms of ordinary practices and experience, thereby deflating these notions and demonstrating that one need not appeal to metaphysics in order to do them justice. Before elaborating this strategy, however, we need to say more about the metaphysics at which it takes aim; to this we now turn.

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Modern thought has engaged in a recurrent rebellion against metaphysics: so, for instance, Kant’s critical philosophy aims to make the world unsafe for Leibnizian metaphysics; Nietzsche insists that Kant is still beholden to the metaphysics at which his critique took aim; Heidegger claims that Nietzsche’s “will to power” is the culmination, rather than overcoming, of metaphysics; Jean-Luc Marion argues that Heidegger’s “ontological difference” keeps us bound within a metaphysics of Being/being; John Caputo maintains that Marion’s “de-nominative” theology remains complicit in the metaphysics of presence; and so on. This recurrent rebellion against metaphysics indicates that although we moderns may want to avoid metaphysics, we have a hard time doing so. It would appear, in other words, that metaphysics is a kind of temptation: we want to resist it, but find it difficult to do so.