METAPHYSICS. - It is the ultimate philosophical consideration of the meaning, the principles and the structure of reality. Therefore all the contrasts, the controversies and the doctrinal oscillations that form the historical fabric of philosophy are first and foremost essentially the search to clarify the possibility and the nature of metaphysics. The term seems to derive from the title that Andronicus of Rhodes (v.) gave to the books of Aristotle arranged by him after the treatises on physics (τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσικά).
I. NATURE AND METHOD
The problem of being as being (ὃν ἦ ὃν: Aristotle, Met., IV, 1, 1003 a 21), which is the object of metaphysics, poses two fundamental requirements that seem to be in conflict: 1) the affirmation of reality, insofar as metaphysics properly considers reality in act and what precisely it is that makes it and posits it in act; this reality in act presents itself to consciousness always as singular, limited, contingent. 2) The affirmation of truth, insofar as metaphysics has as its task precisely that of "grounding" the consistency of what in the immediate presentation of experience declares itself to be inconsistent; this inconsistency of the real according to its immediate appearance demands recourse to principles of reality of a universal, absolute, necessary nature. To this fundamental tension that poses the problem of the theoretical foundation of metaphysics are traced the principal aporias raised against it in all ages: the exhaustive solution of the problem lies in the equilibrium of the two requirements, such that the one does not gain the upper hand and absorb the other. In these two extreme cases metaphysics disappears as absolute knowledge of being: in fact, if the affirmation of reality prevails, the real is identified outright with the immediate datum of experience (v.), whether ordinary or scientific, in which the "presence" of the real is given (phenomenalism, positivism..., [v.]); if the affirmation of truth prevails, the real becomes a result of the "coherence" of reason (conceptualism, rationalism, critical and absolute idealism [v.]...). The conciliation or overcoming of the antithesis between the positing of reality and the affirmation of truth is given in traditional metaphysics by the "mediation" (if it may so be called) of the "first principles" of knowing, which satisfy both requirements at once: the principle of contradiction, of identity, of excluded middle, of causality, of whole and parts... These are in fact the most universal propositions of human knowing and the more or less proximate foundation of all the other derived principles of knowledge and specialized science. But the first principles enjoy together the immediate evidence (v.) of reality both in external and in internal experience. Aristotle, followed and deepened by St. Thomas, showed that from experience, almost by a process of noetic intensification that he calls ἐπαγωγή ("induction" [v.]), the first concepts (the "universals") and the first judgments (ἀξιώματα: Met., I, 890 b 25 ff.; Post. An., II, 99 b 23 ff.) are formed in consciousness. Nevertheless the evidence of reality and the necessity of value that belongs to the principles do not constitute an absolute a priori of content from which one could proceed analytically to the deduction of the structure of reality itself, of the concrete, or of the procedure and conclusions of the particular sciences: the first principles constitute the absolute requirement that the contents of reality must satisfy in order to be intelligible. Aristotle rightly, in his moderate realism, places at the first foundation of metaphysics the "principle of contradiction" (v.), on which all knowledge and all principles depend (Met., III, 3, 1005 b 18 ff.): for metaphysics it raises problems from time to time in order to distinguish and clarify them in the subsequent complicating of the analysis of reality. This is seen from the very situation of consciousness that Aristotle, after Plato, considers as the beginning of metaphysics, that is, "wonder" or astonishment (διὰ τὸ θαυμάζειν ἤρξαντο οἱ ἄνθρωποι φύλακτον: Met., I, 1, 982 b 12; Plato, Theaet., V, 155 d). "Wonder" is nothing other than the ineffable awareness of the tension between the affirmation of reality and the necessity of truth that never abandons knowing or qualifies it as human: it will suffice to allude to the principal structures of this tension generated by "wonder," which then resolve themselves into the fundamental structures of being itself.
1. First with respect to becoming
Being, as it presents itself to man both in external nature and in consciousness, demands to "preserve itself" in order to be able to affirm itself for what it is; in reality the being of experience changes, acquires and loses, arises and declines... and therefore in a certain sense such being is and is not: it falls to metaphysics to explain in what sense it is and in what sense it is not. To the "wonder" of becoming (v.) and to its phenomenological "contradiction" are to be referred the two fundamental pairs of Aristotle's analysis of being, act and potency (v.), substance and accident (v.). That which moves, since it "passes" from one state to another, can be said to be and not to be. Potency explains the passing in respect of what the subject that passes says it is not, and act explains it as the reason and the very term of becoming (Met., IX, 6, 1048 a 27 ff.). Moreover every becoming is the passing of some determinate "thing" that does not change according to all aspects at once, but according to some "persists" at least within certain limits of space and time (St. Thomas, De spir. creat., a. 10 ad 8). Finally the multiplicity of aspects that the real presents is not chaotic but structured according to a more fundamental principle of unity of the changing manifold and of cohesion of the diverse: such a principle is substance, the principal reality, while the changing and diverse manifold that lies almost at the surface or that develops being in space and time is called accident (Met., VII, 13, 1038 b 24 ff.). Thus the requirement of the principle of contradiction is satisfied for the second time, and already the "structure of the real" is delineated in all the breadth accessible to consciousness.
2. With respect to the structure of the real
If the real, which is the object of metaphysics, is "that which is," its structure lies in the relation between the "what" and "being," or between the nature or essence that exists and its actuality of being. Therefore it is the task of metaphysics to determine both the content of the "what" and the "mode" of its being: then the first onto-phenomenological determinations of act and potency, of substance and accident permit a deeper interpretation of the real, first with respect to essence in itself and then concerning the relation of essence to the act of being. The requirement of the principle of contradiction is that the real be always something defined in itself according to characteristics that can indeed be integrated and limited but not opposed in such a way as to cancel each other out: essence therefore, if on the physical-metaphysical plane it can have a "composition" of the two principles (matter and form) that stand in the relation of act and potency, in itself must express a degree and a form of the entity. From the nature and perfection of the essence one infers the nature and perfection of the act of being, and one can proceed to establish the ontological hierarchy of things: it has at its two extreme poles, by the requirement of contradiction, prime matter as "pure potency" and God as "pure act" (prime matter that were endowed with any actuality whatsoever, even the lowest, implies, according to St. Thomas, an open contradiction [cf. Quod., III, q. 1, a. 1]). God, if he had any "potentiality," would be limited and dependent and therefore no longer God (cf. Comp. theol., ch. 18-21).
3. With respect to the grounding of the real
If the real, according to the characteristics that it presents in experience, is qualified according to the supreme classifications of body (v.) or spirit (v.), the determination of the "mode of being" of the entity does not yet appear satisfied: because the human soul and the pure intelligences are still finite entities, and if they can "have" the presence in themselves of the truth of things, they can neither ground it nor sustain it. Hence the problem of the integral truth of the real, which can be found neither in the real itself nor in finite intelligent subjects. This is the tension of the relationship: finite-infinite, around which the various historical forms of metaphysics seek and struggle against one another. In traditional metaphysics the solution of the contradiction lies in positing the "causal dependence" of the finite on the infinite, so that the finite, if as "essence" it is founded in itself, yet insofar as it is a "finite being" is founded in "another," that is, in its cause; and if the proximate cause is finite, it too becomes, by the logic of contradiction, the effect of another cause, until a cause is reached that is act alone, and this is the pure Infinite: "Deus ex hoc infinitus (est) quod tantum forma vel actus est" (St. Thomas, Comp. theol., ch. 20). Aristotle defended, against the sophists, the impossibility of an "infinite regress" in the chain of causes and the necessity of an absolute principle: "ὅτι γ' ἔστιν ἀρχὴ καὶ οὐκ ἄπειρα αἴτιν τῶν ὄντων" (Met., II, 2, 994 a 1). In the elaboration of the real, to which metaphysics attends, multiple demands therefore converge, which nevertheless are articulated according to relations of complementarity for the attainment of an absolute foundation of the truth of the real itself. Man knows the real through the senses and through the intellect: sensory experience (external and internal) attests both the quality or nature of essences and concrete existence, but it is the reflection of the intellect that posits and resolves the metaphysical demand for the unity of essence and the unity of act. The first ontological determination expresses the fundamental principles and modes of being (act and potency, substance and accident), but the process of ontological foundation and the very hierarchy of beings presuppose an absolute emergence of one of the terms over the other, that is, the "primacy" of act over potency: φανερὸν δὲ ὅτι πρότερον ἐνέργειν δυνάμωσεν ἔστιν (Met., IX, 8, 1049 b 3). Finally, the ultimate foundation of the real demands to be understood and posited in the Infinite and the Absolute of that act which by definition admits of no further reference: this is the essential demand of metaphysics. The historical difference and opposition among the various metaphysics arises from the divergence and diversity in resolving the tensions mentioned above; but it must stand firm, if one is to speak of metaphysics, that it is the ultimate and highest knowledge insofar as it relates everything to the foundation of act, and that the ultimate foundation must be pure Act.
II. — HISTORICAL SKETCH. — In Greek philosophy all the principal forms of philosophy made their appearance, and therefore of metaphysics itself, which Western philosophy has taken up again in order to rework them, with opposite outcomes, first with patristic-scholastic thought and then with modern and contemporary thought. The first form of Greek philosophy is the naturalistic metaphysics of the Presocratics: the most recent studies on the fragments of their lost works (cf. K. Joel, W. Jaeger, O. Gigon...) have shown that the "physical" aspect and content of the principles of being (water, air, fire, numbers and atoms...) had a metaphysical meaning, both insofar as the single element is called upon precisely to resolve the contrast between appearance and truth, and because a doctrine of the Absolute is already outlined in it, and often the very doctrine of the immortality of the soul (v.) is present. Plato's criticism, and especially Aristotle's, of the metaphysics of the Presocratics as "materialist" has raised substantial reservations (cf. H. Chermiss). It may be affirmed that from a critical-historical point of view the metaphysics of the Presocratics cannot strictly be qualified either as materialist or as spiritualist, because it remains at a moment prior to this classification. Materialistic metaphysics in the rigorous sense appears first with Democritus alone, and is then developed by the Stoics and the Epicureans, followed by certain sects of Neoplatonists and Gnostics: the distinction between materialistic and spiritualistic metaphysics is understood in function of the struggle waged by these later systems against the ontological and ethical spiritualism of the Socratic systems. Nevertheless it must be recognized that Greek metaphysics could not definitively resolve the problem of the foundation of the real, either from the point of view of essence or from that of the act of being: essences were in fact determined either in exclusive function of the data of experience (naturalistic and materialistic metaphysics) or of conceptual exigency (Platonic, Aristotelian and Neoplatonic metaphysics); in the first case the truth itself as a necessary value escaped, while in the second an unbridgeable rift was established between reality and appearance. "Metaphysical dualism" is not overcome, but rather, in a certain sense, is reaffirmed by the Aristotelian metaphysics of act and potency, even while admitting Aristotle's progress toward a higher form of Platonism (J. Stenzel). The symptomatic sign of this Greek metaphysics of "completed incompleteness" is the insistence, present in every system, on the "dominion of act" and the admission of something (which is "potency" according to Aristotle) that not only remains outside act itself but escapes its definitive dominion (eternity of the uncreated world). Perhaps at the foundation, rather than as a consequence, of the absence of the concept of creation (v.) in Greek metaphysics, one must place the absence of the concept of "spiritual personality" in the absolute sense, that is, understood as a subject of effective freedom in the life of time and of individual immortality after death. This prevented the conception of God as absolute spirituality, to whom belonged not only the perfect function of his life (Aristotle, Met., XII, 7, 1072 b 20-30), but the first origin of every reality.
Christianity, therefore, by proclaiming the doctrine of creation from nothing, secured the absolute transcendence of God with respect to the world of nature and hence the absolute foundation of metaphysics itself; by defending the "freedom" of the will and personal "immortality," it guaranteed to man the possibility of having, in the attainment of absolute Truth, the fullness of his own life, and thereby broadened the very meaning of metaphysics as inquiry into the fulfillment of the life of the finite spirit. In a rigorous sense there is no patristic metaphysics as a "theory" of the real, because the Fathers are first of all teachers of the faith; nevertheless they often have recourse to concepts and problems of the Greek culture by which their milieu was still animated: first of all Platonism, but with profound reflections of Stoic and Aristotelian doctrines. The most complete figure of patristic metaphysics is St. Augustine, who has rightly been called "a thinker neither ancient nor medieval, but the classic representative of ancient Christian metaphysics" (A. Dempf, Metaphysik des Mittelalters, Munich and Berlin 1930, p. 15), because in St. Augustine, as later in the medieval metaphysics of the Augustinian type, metaphysical reflection starts from the truth of faith (the uncreated Word as the source of every particular truth) and returns to faith with the central affirmation of the vanity and inconsistency of the finite.
The classical age of metaphysics is the Christian Middle Ages, in that with the acceptance of Aristotle a proper consistency was attributed to the finite in its own order, and therefore the problem of the theoretical determination of its constitutive principles remained open. This work of speculative reflection constitutes a kind of "new beginning" in Christian metaphysics, owing to the more mature conceptual technique of Aristotelianism, to which even those who ranged themselves on the anti-Aristotelian front (Avicennian-Corbinian Augustinians, nominalism) remain indebted; however, some extreme representative of nominalism, such as Nicholas of Autrecourt, passes over to atomistic metaphysics (cf. J. R. O'Donnel, Nicholas of Autricourt, in The Medieval Studies, I, Toronto 1939, p. 181 ff.). The most mature form of medieval metaphysics is that of St. Thomas, in that he achieved the equilibrium of all the principal tensions indicated above: the progress of Thomist metaphysics lies in the theoretical foundation of the "positivity" of the creature in its finiteness, which had its technical expression in two characteristic theses: the real distinction between essence and act of being in creatures, and the doctrine of the agent intellect as a faculty of the individual person; both theses were bitterly opposed both by the theologizing metaphysics of the Augustinian school and by Averroism (v.), which was loyal to reason alone. The endless controversies of the medieval schools are directed in particular against Thomist metaphysics, and the disciples of the Angelic Doctor did their best to resist: nevertheless some of them yielded, as it seems, to the temptation to take up problems and terms in the field of metaphysics that indicate a certain weakening in the understanding of the basic principles, and perhaps they were not without influence if, from the 16th century onward, Thomism increasingly narrowed its ranks (cf. C. Fabro, Per una storia del tomismo, in Sapienza, 4 [1951], p. 27 ff.).
The most distinguished work, which gathers into an attempted synthesis the results of this crumbling of Thomist metaphysics, is represented by the Disputationes metaphysicae of F. Suárez, which had a very wide following not only in Catholic schools, also as a consequence of the dominion exercised by Spain over Europe in the 17th century, but also among the most distinguished representatives of modern thought, for example, in Leibniz and from him down to Wolff, Baumgarten, Meier and Kant, who channel Protestant philosophical Enlightenment of Lutheran inspiration (cf. P. Mesnard, Leibniz dans le sillage de Suarez, in Archives de philosophie, 18 [1949], p. 22 ff.).
In modern thought metaphysics achieves a notable success with the rationalism of Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz and their direct followers down to Kant: the truth of being is conceived as the perfect coherence of reason, and the content of being is given by the structures that reason gives to itself (principle of immanence [v.]). English empiricism, on the other hand, conceives the truth of being according to the subjectivity of phenomenal appearing, which in Hume becomes feeling (feeling) or belief (belief) in the reality of existence: shaken by Hume, Kant declares the impossibility of metaphysics, in that the human mind lacks the pure intuition of the "thing in itself," so that the sphere of the objects of metaphysics (existence of God, creation of the world, freedom and immortality of the soul) is only "postulated" by practical reason. Transcendental idealism, by bringing the "thing in itself" back into consciousness, erects subjectivity itself as Absolute, as freedom: Fichte in creative practical activity, Schelling in the intuition of the Absolute in nature, Hegel in the unfolding of Reason as absolute Idea in nature and in history. The passage from critical philosophy to idealist metaphysics takes place through the following stages: "there is no knowledge without category" (Kant); "There are no categories without a self-consciousness (v.) that produces them: but a productive self-consciousness must be absolute" (Fichte); "self-consciousness is not absolute unless it is the identity of nature and spirit" (Schelling); "this identity (Reason) cannot be conscious unless it is self-conscious reason, that is, the Spirit (Geist) which represents the concordant principle of the world" (K. Fischer, Logik und Metaphysik oder Wissenschaftslehre, Stuttgart 1852, p. xiv ff.). With the rapid collapse of idealism, metaphysics fell into oblivion, first through the work of positivism (v.) and then of neo-Kantianism in the second half of the 19th century: Italian and English neo-idealism itself does not admit metaphysics, and to the Absolute in itself (preserved by Hegel) it substitutes the dialectic (v.) of facts (idealist phenomenism and historicism) or of the pure Act (Gentile).
In contemporary philosophy — with the exception of Marxism (v.), which tends to dissolve philosophy into the natural sciences (Zhdanov) — one witnesses a "rebirth of metaphysics," owing especially to "phenomenology" (Brentano, Husserl, Max Scheler, Wust...): in Husserl, however, because of the principle of the "intentionality of consciousness" understood in a transcendental sense, one falls back into the metaphysics of immanence (cf. G. Lehmann, Die Ontologie der Gegenwart in ihren Grundgestalten, Halle 1933, p. 10). M. Scheler understands metaphysical knowledge as the "participation of a being in the essence" (als die Teilhabe eines Seienden am Sosein: cf. Vom Ewigen im Menschen, Leipzig 1923, I, 1, p. 9 ff.). N. Hartmann has devoted himself to the elaboration of a "critical ontology" of Aristotelian inspiration, but independent of every ultimate, that is, theological, metaphysical concern. In existentialism metaphysics returns as phenomenological ontology (v.) or as analysis of the structure of finiteness, but with a negative or, at most, problematic outcome. In J. P. Sartre, who returns to the Cartesian dualism of extension and thought, being is irremediably split into the two trunks of consciousness (pour-soi) and of the world (en-soi), and the attempt to bring them together is declared a "useless passion" (L'être et le néant, Paris 1943, p. 706). For Jaspers, who takes up the doctrine of the Kantian noumenon (das Umgreifende), the absolute truth of being is deferred to infinity, and man must keep to his "situation" and at most envisage with "philosophical faith" the totality of being (cf. Der philosophische Glaube, Munich 1947, p. 17 ff.). The problem of a radically new foundation of metaphysics has been undertaken by Heidegger, according to whom all Western philosophy, whether ancient, medieval or modern, is a "philosophy of essence" and therefore has resolved itself into a "metaphysics of subjectivity": its error is to have taken as the object of metaphysics "being as being" and to have reduced being to essence, whereas what is at stake is to bring being back to "Being" and to ground it on the actuality of "Being itself" (Sein selbst). The true foundation of metaphysics is therefore Being, and the truth of Being no longer lies in the "conformity" (ἀγώσως, αδαφησίος) between subject and object (v.) but consists in the primordial "making itself present" (this would be the original meaning of ἐνδία) of Being itself (cf. especially Was ist Metaphysik, Frankfurt a. M. 1949, Introd.). A resolute adversary of metaphysics today is the neo-positivism (v.) of the Vienna and Prague Circles, according to which only what is accessible to experience is "real," so as to be able to be treated with the symbols of logistics: therefore all the questions and terms of metaphysics are "meaningless" (cf. R. Carnap, Wissenschaft und Metaphysik, French trans., Paris 1934, pp. 10 ff., 26 ff.: critique of Heidegger). V. CONOSCENZA; ENTE; SOSTANZA.
Bibliography36 works
Cornelio Fabro