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.

___

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.

___

Using a concept to say how things are, I understand myself so to use it. Thus there is a concept I use in using any concept: the concept of being, the “being” from which “are” derives in “This is how things are” or “is” in “So it is.” Since I use this concept in using any concept, it is in this concept, being, that any concept is constituted as such. In this way, the concept of being is not one among the many concepts that I use. It does not lie on the same plane. It is sui generis.

If being is not one among the many concepts, then metaphysics is not one among the many sciences. Indeed, having announced, “There is a science…,” Aristotle continues, “The other sciences cut out a part of what is.” A science is distinguished from other sciences by its object. For example, biology is the science of life and the living, economics, the science of production and exchange. Now, it may seem that we can lay alongside these a further science: the science not of life, not of production, but of what is. And is this not how it appears in the university? There is biology, there is economics, there is philosophy, all fields of study and research, each with their proper object. Yet Aristotle explains why this not so. 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.

SUGGESTED VIEWING The return of metaphysics With Hilary Lawson, Galen Strawson, Patricia Churchland, Maria Balaska

Metaphysics does not concern itself with something other than the other sciences. Any science is concerned with what is (where “is” derives from “so it is”). This concern constitutes a science as a science. Therefore, no science is distinguished from another by being concerned with what is. Yet there is a science, says Aristotle, whose object is what is, as such—a science, that is, that makes the concern in which any science is constituted as such its own proper object! If there is such a science, then it is the soul of all sciences. For any science has always already understood its office to be the study of what is: that segment of it that it has cut out as its object. Any science, then, puts to work an understanding of what is as such. When Aristotle declares that there is metaphysics—the science of what is as such—he proclaims that there is the task systematically to articulate that very understanding, the understanding that is the soul of any science.

How can there be such a subject as metaphysics?

If there is a science of what is as such, then it is not a science next to others. It is sui generis. It is the science in which any science is constituted as such; it is science as such, the soul of all sciences. But is there such a science? Aristotle declares that there is: metaphysics. Nowadays, it is not customary to make such a declaration. It is assumed as a matter of course, or perhaps as established by the existence of journals accordingly named. So people get right to it and make assertions that are to belong to metaphysics. Claims are put forth, unfazed, about reality, for example, its fundamental layer, or the absence of any such layer.

In his declaration, “There is a science…,” Aristotle manifests his recognition that it is anything but obvious that there is such a science. Metaphysics has no object next to those of the other sciences. Each of these cuts out an object, setting it apart from other objects, which may be the object of other sciences. By contrast, the term that indicates the concern of metaphysics, “being,” does not cut out. There is no cutting out that, for it is that within which anything is cut out. So the science of being does not investigate something, not something next to and distinct from something else. But if metaphysics does not study something, does it then study nothing? And is studying nothing not the same as not studying?

___

The concern of metaphysics is being, which is not one object next to others.

___

It may have seemed that Aristotle answers that question. Since all sciences study what is, it is not possible to identify a particular science by saying that this is its object: what is. Yet the Aristotelian formula (and Aristotle takes a certain pride in this formula) seems to address this: metaphysics studies, not straightaway what is, but what is as such. However, this does not help. For that concept, being, cuts out nothing. Thus the proposal comes to this: metaphysics is the study of nothing, as such!

The history of metaphysics is not one of the development of a science that grows and matures and step by step builds a body of established knowledge and theory, knowledge and theory concerning its chosen object: being, as such. Rather, it is the history of the effort to clarify how there can be such a science, in the lucid consciousness that the natural impulse is to think that this is bogus. You can study any reality you want: elementary particles, kinds of stuff, living beings. But to suppose that there is such a thing as studying reality, as such, is nonsense. So central is this response to metaphysics that moments when it becomes the dominant motive, as in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, or when it is developed to its final conclusion, as in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus, are high points of the metaphysical tradition.

Now this may be fine, yet it all seems rather theoretical, as it were. It does not reveal the source of the attraction of metaphysics. Perhaps the following does. The concern of metaphysics is being, which is not one object next to others. Now, the metaphysical tradition has it that metaphysics treats, further, of the soul. Further? In addition to being? This makes no sense unless the soul, too, is not one object next to others. And, indeed, so it is—if there is a science that studies what is, as such. For then our consciousness will not be, not fundamentally, a consciousness of this object and that one and that one, each one cut out and thereby distinguished from and set alongside every other. Rather, the soul will be, fundamentally, an openness to being. Indeed, that openness will define the human soul as the soul that it is. And then it will be impossible to reflect upon the soul without using this concept: being, explicitly and thematically. (This is the reason why it belongs to the metaphysician to treat of the soul.) So, if Aristotle is right that “There is a science …,” then the human soul is not one object next to others. The soul will lie, not on the same plane as this object or that one, but on the same plane as being. This may be considered a reductio ad absurdum of the idea of metaphysics. Or its vindication.