The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (7 page)

Because it is not clear that our most general way of making sense of things cannot be radically improved. There is more to be said of course,
but that is the very simple, very basic reason for taking revisionary metaphysics seriously.
²³

Not that it is an entirely straightforward matter what revisionary metaphysics is. There is an issue about how far we count as making sense of things in a way that is radically new if we make judgments that are radically new, but using old familiar concepts.
²⁴
Suppose we are inclined to say one thing and a metaphysician urges us to say the very opposite. Is that revisionary because the metaphysician is challenging what we think? Or is it non-revisionary because the metaphysician is acceding to the concepts we use?
²⁵
Is
the metaphysician acceding to the concepts we use? Perhaps saying the very opposite of what we are currently inclined to say would be so revolutionary that, if any of us did that, he or she would have to be interpreted as using old words to express new concepts (see further
Ch. 7
, §7). These are familiar philosophical quandaries. And it is noteworthy, in this connection, how unobvious the classification of metaphysicians as descriptive or revisionary can be. Strawson, immediately after introducing his distinction, goes on to classify Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. It is an interesting exercise for anyone who is familiar with these six thinkers, but who is unfamiliar with Strawson’s classification or who has forgotten it, to see how well they can anticipate his six verdicts! The fact remains that there are some things that would indisputably count as instances of revisionary metaphysics, the paradigm being the introduction of highly general concepts enabling us to adopt beliefs that we could not so much as entertain before. And the point is simply this. It is unclear why we should eschew anything of that sort. It is unclear why we should think that nothing of that sort could ever be to our advantage.

(c) The Creativity Question

To turn finally to the Creativity Question, there is a further issue in this case about what is ‘scope’ and what are ‘limits’. In other words, the Creativity Question might be better reversed: is there scope for our discovering the sense that things themselves already make, and thus for being right, or are we limited to inventing the sense that we make of things in a way that admits of no distinction between being right and being wrong?
²⁶
The fact
that the Creativity Question is equivocal in this way reflects the fact that we can broach metaphysics with quite different aspirations. If we are limited to inventing the sense that we make of things, then that curbs our more scientific pretensions; if we are limited to looking for the sense that things themselves already make, then that curbs our more artistic pretensions. The equivocality also reflects the fact that the Creativity Question allows for endless variations on a theme. Do we find things intelligible or do we render them intelligible? Does our sense-making inevitably reveal more about us (our sensibilities, our commitments, our values, and suchlike) than it does about the things we make sense of? To what extent can all rational enquirers be expected to make the same sense of things? Can we make sense of things in a way that is completely objective? Does our sense-making have infinite scope? Can our sense-making be, in Edward Craig’s terms, a participation in ‘the mind of God’, or is it a product of ‘the works of man’?
²⁷
And of course, underlying all of these, there is the recurring issue of who ‘we’ are.

Note that, as in the case of the Novelty Question, what is at stake is what we can aspire to
when we practise metaphysics
. It would not be at all outrageous to hold both of the following: that, when we practise physics, we can aspire to complete objectivity, indeed to what Bernard Williams famously calls an ‘absolute conception’ of reality ([B.] Williams (
1978
), pp. 65–67), and, in line with what I suggested in the previous section, that our attempting to make sense of things at a higher level of generality involves an unavoidable element of self-consciousness which is in turn incompatible with such objectivity.
²⁸

(d) The Significance of the Three Questions

These three questions, then, along with the three
²⁹
pairs of alternatives that they present, have played an important role in shaping disagreement about the scope and limits of metaphysics during the modern period. Those who have accepted any of the more restrained alternatives (whichever that is in the third case) have
ipso facto
repudiated certain activities as ‘off-limits’. It is an extremely important fact about the story of metaphysics during
this period that, very often, they have also thought of ‘metaphysics’ as precisely what they were repudiating. This is in part just a fact about their use of the word, which, during the same period, has more often than not served as a derogatory term.
³⁰
But it is not only that. Throughout this period metaphysics has been a source of suspicion, even among those who on my broad conception count as metaphysicians. Time and again metaphysics has been pilloried as something illegitimate by those who, had they been more focused on their own activities and had their own conception been broader, might just as well have championed it, and metaphysics has contracted as a result. Yet each time it has subsequently expanded again. One of my aims is to show that there is something in this recurrent systole and diastole that can properly be regarded as ‘the evolution of modern metaphysics’, and not just as a wearisome sequence of repeated mistakes.

I shall not make any effort to remain non-partisan. There would be a limit to how well I could achieve the aim just specified if I did. In tandem with telling the evolutionary story that I wish to tell, I shall develop my own stance on these three issues. But I shall do so only incidentally and not very thoroughly; that is not my main concern. For now I shall simply record, without any of the necessary glosses, qualifications, or disclaimers, my own three verdicts.

We are, in practising metaphysics, (a) constrained to make sense of immanent things, (b) free to make sense of things in a way that is radically new, and (c) engaged in a fundamentally creative exercise. Or, to put it glibly and question-beggingly, but also, I hope, suggestively, we are, in practising metaphysics, (a) constrained to make
nothing but
sense of things, (b) free to make
any
sense of things, and (c) attempting, literally, to
make
sense of things.
³¹

On this conception there have been real advances in the understanding of what metaphysics is over the past four hundred years, and they have been both liberating and restricting. They have been liberating to the extent that they have revealed the capacity of metaphysics to deepen, broaden, and enrich our understanding of reality (b and c). They have been restricting to the extent that they have revealed the incapacity of metaphysics to carry
that understanding beyond its inherent finitude or to provide it with any grounding in reality itself (a and, revealing the equivocality of the Creativity Question, c again).

My own combination of answers to these three questions, at least insofar as those answers are conceived as choices between three pairs of alternatives, is one of eight that are possible. I believe that we can find important traces, within this four-hundred-year period, of all eight. This is not to say that we can find eight thinkers who are suitable to act as their representatives. It would be hopelessly simplistic and procrustean to think that we could do that. There are very few thinkers, if any, whom we can straightforwardly categorize in terms of their stance on these three issues, even once the issues have been conceived in binary terms, and even once we have taken into account developments in the thinkers’ ideas and the distinction between what they practise and what they preach. Typically, it is more a question of a given thinker wrestling with, and trying to work through, opposed tendencies. For one thing, some combinations of views may be inherently unstable. Thus even if the view that our sense-making is invention rather than discovery is not irreconcilable with the view that we are limited to making sense of things in broadly the same way as we already do, it takes a peculiar kind of philosophy to reconcile them, and a thinker inclined to accept both may decide that subscribing to that kind of philosophy is too costly. The same applies to the pairing of the view that we can make sense of transcendent things with the view that our sense-making involves an element of self-consciousness that precludes complete objectivity. A further complication is that many thinkers have been suspicious, not so much of one of the two rival answers to any given question, but of the idea that there is a genuine focus of disagreement there. And a yet further complication, perhaps the most serious of all, is that only a tiny proportion of the thinkers who can usefully be classified with respect to any of these issues can usefully be classified with respect to all three.

For these and other reasons my references to the issues in what follows will be infrequent and often oblique. Even so, the issues have been a significant factor in my choice of protagonists, and they should be constantly discernible in the background.

7. The Importance of Metaphysics

Metaphysics matters. Making sense of things is an integral part of simply making sense and there is a fundamental nisus in all of us to do that.
³²
But to what extent does metaphysics matter for its own sake? Only to a very limited extent, I suggest. In (large) part this reflects my view of metaphysics
as a fundamentally creative exercise. If metaphysics were an attempt to find the sense that things themselves already make, then an aphorism of Galileo’s might apply to it: ‘He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature … is the way to elevate one’s gaze’ (Galileo (1967), Dedication, p. 3). But if metaphysics is an attempt to create sense, then it needs to confront the question, ‘What is the attempt for?’ And if the answer is simply, ‘For its own sake,’ then it is easy to understand the charge of pointlessness that is so often levelled against metaphysics. I am not denying that there is such a thing as creativity for its own sake. Nor am I denying its importance. But creativity in the context of sense-making incurs special commitments. The most general attempt to make sense of things is part of the overall attempt to make sense of things, in all its diversity and complexity, and with all its myriad specific concerns and its myriad specific purposes. Unless the former subserves the latter, which is as much as to say unless the former
makes a difference
, it will be like a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it.
³³
It may have some ornamental value, but it will not perform the function that it purports to perform.
³⁴

Thus to broach the question of how many angels could dance on the point of a needle, to take the hackneyed example,
³⁵
even if it were part of an attempt to devise suitable conceptual apparatus for relating the incorporeal to the corporeal, would straightway invite the further question, ‘Why?’ (That is, why bother? What turns on this? In what ways and to what ends do we need to relate the incorporeal to the corporeal?) And it is an obvious point, but still an important point, that this further question would be all the more urgent for anyone who did not believe in angels.
³⁶

Very well, then, how is metaphysics able to make a difference? One simple way, to which I alluded in the previous section in connection with the Novelty Question, is by combating the confusion to which we are prone when we indulge the urge that we already have to make the most general sense of things. In other words, metaphysics can fulfil the function of rectifying bad metaphysics. Nor should this function be taken lightly. Since we are all, to a greater or lesser extent, natural metaphysicians, and since we are prone to do metaphysics badly, there is a real need for something to counteract the debilitating and damaging effects of our relatively instinctive, relatively primitive efforts. There is a real need, that is, for good metaphysics. On the other hand, the importance of this function should not be exaggerated either. Some philosophers take the view that this is the
only
function
of metaphysics, that we would have no need for metaphysics if we did not have a deleterious attraction to it. But, apart from anything else, that view makes too great a mystery of the attraction itself.

A second way in which metaphysics is able to make a difference is by combining with other endeavours and with other areas of enquiry, including other branches of philosophy, in helping us to make more particular sense of things. Of especial historical significance are the ways in which it has combined with science, ethics, and theology – exemplified respectively in my first three protagonists.
³⁷
There will be plenty of further examples in what follows, but I shall here cite three comparatively simple and much more recent examples to give an indication of what I have in mind. In each case, as we shall see, metaphysics helps that with which it combines to ‘make sense’, whether in the sense of assisting the latter in its own sense-making or in the sense of helping to render the latter itself intelligible.