Metaphysics is both irresistible and absurd. It promises to reveal fundamental reality, yet makes no progress, forever circling back to millennia-old questions. Metaphysics cannot progress like an ordinary science, argues German metaphysician Sebastian Rödl, because its subject—being itself—isn’t one object among others. Yet it also cannot be dismissed as empty posturing, because every science presupposes a grasp of what it means to say that something is. Consciousness, on Rödl’s view, is not ultimately an awareness of separate objects, but rather an openness to being, from which we build the world of objects. Metaphysics is the project—strange but essential—of becoming aware of this openness.

What is metaphysics?

Metaphysics is Janus-faced. It is attractive, even seductive. It appears to concern itself with what ultimately matters, with what matters if anything does. Therefore even, or especially, outside academia, there is a certain cachet to anyone who declares themselves to be a metaphysician. Yet, in equal measure, metaphysics is repulsive, even odious. Through the millennia, it seems not to have made the slightest progress, returning again and again to the same questions, the same ideas, the same authors. There is an obdurate conservatism about it, and the practitioner of it seems like someone who clings to an aristocratic title which has long lost all meaning.

This is how it should be. When metaphysics takes on the public appearance of, and represents itself to itself as, a respectable science, like physics or psychology, honorably pursued by women and men who, within the bounds of their discipline, furnish society with useful knowledge, then we will know that there and then metaphysics has died. Metaphysical thought is able to rest neither in the idea of its ultimate significance nor in the recognition of its perfect pointlessness, yet it is unable to let go of either.

Why? What is metaphysics that it can neither be put on the path of a mature science nor be dismissed as empty ostentation? And here we go again: to Aristotle.

He declares: “There is a science that investigates what is insofar as it is, and what pertains to it as such.” Since he asserts this in the first substantive book of the work subsequently named Metaphysics, we may assume that the science he thus introduces is metaphysics. Metaphysics, then, is the science of what is as such.

Being as such

Aristotle identifies metaphysics by its object, and that object by its concept: the concept of being. This concept is peculiar.

An elementary way of using a concept—any concept—is to say how things are. For example, I use the concept phosphorus when I say, “Phosphorus melts at 55 °C.” When I use a concept in this way—to say how things are—I understand myself so to use it—to say how things are. I can make this understanding explicit, saying: “This is how things are: phosphorus melts at 55 °C.” Someone else, to whom I say this, if she understands me, understands me so to use the concept. Again, she can make her understanding explicit, responding, “Indeed, this is how things are.

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Metaphysics is not one among “the other sciences.” It stands opposed to them all, in this way: the other sciences cut out. Metaphysics does not. The concept that signifies its object, being, does not cut out. Rather, it signifies that within which anything may be cut out

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