Martin Heidegger.Camera Press/Globe Photos
According to Heidegger, to rethink the problem of reality at its roots, it is necessary to rethink the fundamentally temporal, already-given structures of human involvement. Prejudice in the West, which construes reality, or being, on the basis of beings (that is, being as the most general feature of beings), must be overturned, and the problem of the real, the “transcendent,” must be rethought on a ground on which distinctions between immanent and transcendent and between perceptual and categorial have been reconstructed. The being of the world transcends any constitution of the meaning of the world and is a condition of experience. Thus, a sense is required of being not as object but as the underlying condition for the reality of the being of all objects.
Heidegger wanted to propose a genuine phenomenology, a study that would presuppose nothing of the traditionally formulated distinctions such as subjective–objective or phenomenal–real. The transcendence of the world can be understood only as it appears; i.e., when they are encountered openly, things appear as appearing in part, as both revealing and concealing themselves. If to the uneducated eye the Sun appears to be smaller than it is, the naive inference can be corrected only by educating the person to interpret appearances—to calculate, for example, the speed and direction of light. The real is given in and through its appearances. The thought of Whitehead
The thought of Alfred North Whitehead is a distinctive variation on these contemporary themes. Dualisms are undermined by a phenomenology that does not bracket factual assertions. Logical and mathematical deductive schemes must be able to be interpreted in relationships crudely observable in experience, and abstractions of physics and common sense parading as realism (e.g., that things exist separately within their own surfaces) must be revealed for what they are, namely, abstractions. The basic units of reality are organismic unities, “actual occasions,” which are spatial and temporal extensions that cannot be exhaustively expressed in terms of distributions of matter at an instant. Their unity is constituted in a perception-like responsiveness to the universe that, though usually lacking consciousness or apprehension, is an appropriation to and for itself of the whole. This appropriation cannot be exhaustively expressed by point-instant mechanics (mechanics that is worked out in connection with the physics of relativity and thus measures not only the distance but also the time intervals between points) but is minimally a “prehension” (a term proper to Whitehead indicating the point-transcending function of perception and consciousness).
Whitehead, Alfred NorthAlfred North Whitehead.
Each enduring object of ordinary perception—tables, chairs, animals—is, for Whitehead, a “society” of actual occasions inheriting, through a process of appropriation and reenactment in a predictable way, characteristics of its predecessors. Human perception is understood as a special case of prehension, in which qualities of the environment are mediated and projected on the basis of organic and affective experience of the perceiver’s body, but in such a way that some of this process can be acknowledged by the percipient upon reflection. Because human consciousness is regarded as only a special case of prehensive relations, and because vacuous realisms and notions of transcendence are regarded as “fallacies of misplaced concreteness and simple location,” mind–body dualisms are rejected.
Whitehead thought of “the primordial nature of God” as a general ordering of the process of the world, the ultimate basis of all induction and assertion of law, a “conceptual prehension” that functions in the selection of those “eternal objects,” or repeatable patterns that are enacted in the world. God, however, does not create actual entities. He provides them with initial impetus, in the form of their subjective aim, to self-creation. Even God is the outcome of creativity, the process by which the events of the world are synthesized into new unities. It is the creative, not fully predictable, advance into novelty of a pluralistic process. The freedom of man and the determinism of nature were regarded by Whitehead as another artificial dualism.
The future of metaphysics is uncertain, not mainly because of 20th-century critics, the Logical Positivists, but because of its own not fully predictable nor controllable dynamisms. Bruce Withington Wilshire
Citation Information
Article Title: Metaphysics
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 26 July 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/topic/metaphysics
Access Date: August 22, 2019
Additional Reading
These works deal mainly with the nature and possibility of metaphysics.
For a discussion of the apparently conflicting views of Plato and Aristotle, see the commentary in Aristotle, Metaphysics, ed. by W.d. Ross, rev. ed., 2 vol. (1924, reissued 1966); and Werner Jaeger, Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development, 2nd ed. (1948, reprinted 1968; originally published in German, 1923). Modern discussions of the methods of metaphysics are found in René Descartes, The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross, 2 vol. (1911–12, reprinted with corrections, 1981), and Philosophical Letters, trans. from the French and ed. by Anthony Kenny (1970). On the geometrical form of metaphysics, see the essay by Benedict Spinoza, “Ethica, more geometrico demonstratis,” available in a translation by W. Hale White and rev. by Amelia H. Stirling, Ethic: Demonstrated in Geometrical Order . . ., 4th ed. rev. (1927, reprinted 1930). Christian Wolff combined both the practice and theory of metaphysics in his voluminous metaphysical writings: Vernünfftige [sic] Gedanken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele der Menschen, new enlarged ed. (1751, reprinted 1983), Philosophia Prima Sive Ontologia, 2nd ed. (1736, reprinted 1962), Cosmologia Generalis, rev. ed. (1737, reprinted 1964), Psychologia Rationalis, rev. ed. (1740, reprinted 1972), and Theologia Naturalis, rev. ed., 2 vol. (1739–41, reprinted 2 vol. in 3, 1978–81). Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Metaphysica, 7th ed. (1779, reprinted 1963), was in effect a digest of these last four works. The problem of the origin of ideas was first posed in John Locke, An Essay Concerning Humane [sic] Understanding (1690, reissued 1979), on which G.W. Leibniz wrote a critical commentary, Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain (1765), available also in an English translation ed. by Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett, New Essays on Human Understanding (1981). George Berkeley criticized Materialism in his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710, reissued 1983), available also in a contemporary edition ed. by Colin M. Turbayne. David Hume applied Empiricist principles with complete generality in A Treatise of Human Nature, 3 vol. (1739–40, reprinted in 1 vol., 1975), and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748, reissued 1977).