The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (5 page)

How exactly, then, does this definition serve my purposes? What does it provide that is not provided by other pithy definitions of metaphysics that I might have appropriated, say

• the attempt ‘to give a general description of the whole of the Universe’

• the attempt ‘to describe the most general structural features of reality … [by] pure reflection’

• the attempt ‘to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term’

• ‘a search for the most plausible theory of the whole universe, as it is considered in the light of total science’

• ‘the science of things set and held in thoughts … [that are] able to express the essential reality of things’

or even

• ‘the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct’?
¹

All three of the expressions ‘most general, ‘attempt’, and ‘make sense of things’ do important work for me. This is as much for what they do not suggest as for what they do. I shall expand on each in turn. I shall also comment on some significant structural features of my definition.

2. ‘The Most General …’

‘Most general’, or some equivalent, is the expression that is most likely to be shared by any rival definition to mine. I have two observations about its occurrence in my definition that primarily concern what sort of generality is intended, two that are more structural.

The first observation concerning what sort of generality is intended is the obvious one. The generality of metaphysics is in large part the generality of the concepts that it trades in, concepts that subsume a wide range of other concepts and whose application is prevalent, however implicitly, in all our thinking. An unobvious way to appreciate this obvious point is to look at the main section headings of the first part of Roget’s
Thesaurus
.
²
They are ‘Existence’, ‘Relation’, ‘Quantity’, ‘Order’, ‘Number’, ‘Time’, ‘Change’, and ‘Causation’. That is almost a syllabus for a standard course in metaphysics.

The second observation concerning what sort of generality is intended, though less obvious, is no less important. Many people take metaphysics to be concerned with what is necessary rather than contingent, typically because they take it to be an
a priori
enterprise and they think that the
a priori
is concerned with what is necessary rather than contingent. Others are unsympathetic to the idea that there is any such necessary/contingent distinction, although this lack of sympathy does not translate into a lack of sympathy for the practice of metaphysics itself. I do not want to beg any questions in this particular dispute. ‘Most general’ suits both parties, in the
one case because it can be interpreted as extending to all possibilities, not just those that happen to obtain, and in the other case because it need not be interpreted in terms of possibilities at all.
³

The first of my more structural observations concerns the fact that ‘most general’ in my definition qualifies ‘attempt’. To some ears this will sound strange. ‘Most general’ will sound better suited to qualify ‘sense’. Thus in the other definitions listed in §1 above, ‘most general’ and its cognates always applied, in the search for some suitable representation of how things are, either to the sought-after representation or to the object of that representation, never to the search itself.

I set no great store by my positioning of this expression. I might just as well have defined metaphysics as the attempt to make the most general sense of things, or indeed as the attempt to make sense of the most general things, provided that in all three cases it was understood to be an open question what ultimately conferred the generality. Whether there is generality in metaphysical dealings with things because of the nature of the dealings or because of the nature of the things, or because of both, or perhaps because of neither, is another matter of dispute about which I do not want to beg any questions. Using ‘most general’ to qualify ‘attempt’ strikes me as the best way of registering my neutrality, however clumsy it may be in other respects.

The second of my more structural observations concerns the fact that ‘most general’ is a superlative. In this context it selects from among all possible attempts to make sense of things whatever is at the highest level of generality. So one immediate consequence of my definition is that
there is no denying the possibility of metaphysics
. (This admittedly presupposes that there is a highest level of generality.
⁴
But it would not make much difference if the presupposition were rescinded. The definition could be amended in such a way that a pursuit’s being a metaphysical pursuit admits of degree: the more general, the more metaphysical. Still there would be no denying the possibility of metaphysics, at least to some degree.) There is room for dispute about whether metaphysics can be pursued in this or that way, or to this or that effect, or in contradistinction to this or that other discipline, but not about whether it can be pursued at all.

That is one controversy on which it suits me to take a stance from the very beginning. Why do I call it a controversy? Because countless philosophers have understood metaphysics in such a way that they have felt able to deny that there can be any such thing: we shall see many examples in what follows. Others, it should be noted, have gone to the other extreme of
insisting that metaphysics is unavoidable. This view is less of an affront than it sounds. It allows for the possibility, if it does not entail it, that the guise in which metaphysics normally appears is one that would not normally count as metaphysical, say the basic exercise of common sense. As Hegel puts it, ‘metaphysics is nothing but the range of universal thought-determinations, and as it were the diamond net into which we bring everything to make it intelligible’ (Hegel (
1970
), §246, ‘Addition’, p. 202); or again, as C.S. Peirce puts it, ‘everyone must have conceptions of things in general’ (Peirce (
1931
–1958), Vol. I, p. 229). (This is part of the reason why both Hegel and Peirce, in the same contexts, urge us to be reflective in our metaphysics, lest it has control of us rather than we of it.) But whether or not metaphysics is unavoidable, I want to commit myself from the outset to its being at least possible. For reasons that I hope will emerge, that seems to me the best way of construing much of what those philosophers who have denied the possibility of ‘metaphysics’ have themselves been engaged in.

3. ‘… Attempt …’

I now turn to the word ‘attempt’. One significant feature of this word is that it would be less likely to play the same role in the definition of a non-philosophical discipline. True, we might define bioecology as the attempt to understand the interrelationship between living organisms and their environment. But it would be at least as natural to define it as the
science
or
study
of the interrelationship between living organisms and their environment. Is there any reason not to adopt something analogous in the case of metaphysics?

There is. An immediate analogue would be to define metaphysics as the most general science of things, or the most general study of things, and there are many who would subscribe to just such a definition. But I want to leave open the possibility that metaphysics is not appropriately regarded as a
science
at all. Indeed I want to leave open the possibility that metaphysics is not appropriately regarded as a
study
of anything either, not even a study of ‘things’ in whatever liberal sense that already liberal word is taken. (One of the virtues of the expression ‘make sense of things’, to anticipate some of what I shall say in the next section, is that it can be heard as enjoying a kind of indissolubility that accords with this.)

A second point in connection with the occurrence of the word ‘attempt’ is that it further ensures the possibility of metaphysics on my definition. Or rather, it insures that possibility – against the impossibility of making sense of things. For, as centuries of attempts to trisect an angle with ruler and compass testify, it is possible to attempt even what is not itself possible.
⁵

A third and final point. The phrase ‘make sense of’ may admit of a ‘non-success’ interpretation whereby it already signifies (mere) endeavour, as in the sentence, ‘I spent the entire afternoon making sense of this passage, but in the end I gave up.’ I am not sure how natural such an interpretation is. But at any rate I want to exclude it. That is one thing that the word ‘attempt’ enables me to do. By explicitly referring to endeavour in my definition, I indicate that ‘make sense of’ is not itself intended to do that work. But this is the only constraint that I want to impose on the interpretation of either ‘make sense of’ or its concatenation with ‘things’, as we shall now see.

4. ‘… to Make Sense of Things’

I turn finally to the expression ‘make sense of things’. This is an expression with myriad resonances. They will not all be prominent in the course of this book, but I do want them all to be audible throughout.

The ‘sense’ in question may be the meaning of something, the purpose of something, or the explanation for something. This is connected to the fact that a near-synonym for ‘make sense of’ is ‘understand’ and the range of things that someone might naturally be said to understand (or not) is both vast and very varied. It includes languages, words, phrases, innuendos, theories, proofs, books, people, fashions, patterns of behaviour, suffering, the relativity of simultaneity, and many more. Thus making sense of things can embrace on the one hand finding something that is worth living for, perhaps even finding the meaning of life, and on the other hand discovering how things work, for instance by ascertaining relevant laws of nature. I do not want to draw a veil over
any
of these. The generality of metaphysics will no doubt prevent it from embracing some of them, but that is another matter.
⁶

When ‘make sense’ is used intransitively, there is a further range of associations. It is then equivalent not to ‘understand’ but to ‘be intelligible’, ‘admit of understanding’, perhaps even ‘be rational’. I mentioned parenthetically in the previous section that ‘make sense of things’ can be heard as enjoying a kind of indissolubility. What I had in mind was the way in which the sheer non-specificity of ‘things’ can put us in mind of simply making sense. As I shall urge shortly, this point must not be exaggerated. ‘Make sense of things’ does have its own articulation and we must not lose sight of this fact. Nevertheless, I want the many associations of simply making sense, like the many associations of making sense
of
, to inform all that follows.
⁷

But the phrase ‘of things’ does make a difference. For one thing, it serves as a check on the temptation, which must surely be resisted, to pursue metaphysics as though it were a form of pure mathematics, to be executed by devising abstract self-contained systems. The phrase may also, despite the non-specificity of ‘things’, serve to distinguish metaphysics from logic, and from the philosophy of logic, which are arguably concerned with making sense of
sense
. (This is not to deny the relevance of the latter to the former. There will be ample opportunity to witness such relevance in the course of this book.) One other function that ‘of things’ serves is to reinforce some of the resonances of ‘make’. For where simply making sense is a matter of being intelligible, making sense
of
something is a matter of rendering intelligible, with all the associations of productivity that that has. Indeed I want to leave room for the thought, however bizarre it may initially appear, that sense is literally made of things, as bread is made of water, flour, and yeast.

In general, it should be clear that my use of the expression ‘make sense of things’ is intended to take full advantage of its enormous semantic and syntactic latitude. I want my conception of metaphysics not only to cover as much as possible of what self-styled metaphysicians have been up to, but also to cover a range of practices which seem to me to be profitably classified in the same way even though the practitioners themselves have not conceived what they were doing in these terms.
⁸
Thus, to take the most notable example, I believe that much of what Aristotle was engaged in, in his
Metaphysics
, would count as metaphysics by my definition (see e.g. the first two chapters of Book Γ). It is worth noting in this connection that the opening sentence of
Metaphysics
is ‘All men by nature strive to know,’ where the Greek verb translated as ‘to know’ is ‘
eidenai
’, about which Aristotle elsewhere says that men do not think they do that to something until they have grasped the ‘why’ of it (
Physics
, Bk II, Ch. 3, 194b 17–19). It would surely not be a strain to construe Aristotle as claiming that all men by nature strive to make sense of things.
⁹

Among the many important possibilities left open by the latitude of the expression ‘make sense of things’ are

• that what issues from a successful pursuit of metaphysics is not knowledge, or, if it is knowledge, it is not knowledge that anything is the case,
but rather knowledge
how
to reckon with things, or knowledge
what
it is for things to be the way they are, or something of that sort
¹⁰