International Conference "Metaphysics between logic, ontology and subjectivity"

What is metaphysics? Although one might suppose there is a clear sense to the term that, so far as the discussion within Kantian and post-Kantian thought is concerned, can be derived from the thought of Wolf and Baumgarten, it also seems to be the case that, even within that tradition, how metaphysics should be understood is open to debate. If one treats metaphysics as concerned with the inquiry into being, both in general and in specific ‘regionalities’, this merely bring to the fore the fundamental question as to how being should be understood, and how one answers this may give rise to very different answers about the question as to the nature of metaphysics and its possibility. My comments here, which remain somewhat partial and do not constitute a fully-worked out or systematic approach, are aimed at thinking through some of the issues here in more general fashion rather than in relation to specific texts but are nevertheless influenced by that version of the Kantian tradition that seems to me to culminate in the work of both Davidson and Gadamer. What I offer, then, is a somewhat hermeneutic response to the issues concerning the relation between logic, ontology, and subjectivity and the possible tensions that may emerge here. This response is somewhat anti-metaphysical in character, even while it allows both for a form of ontology that is essentially tied to the working out of the fundamental structure implied by what Davidson referred to as ‘objective thought’, and a relativised sense of metaphysics tied to particular (and always revisable) discursive or conceptual frames as these might be employed in certain limited settings. In the sense that metaphysics aims at a single unique description of things, then in this sense, I shall argue, metaphysics is an impossibility, and the attempt to uncover such a description is not only mistaken and confused, but also leads to significant problems in the sciences, in philosophy, and elsewhere.

Traditionally, metaphysics is defined as inquiry into being as such, or into constitution of rigid and objects that comprise the whole of what there is. Quite often the proper subject of metaphysics is considered as mind-independent. In other words, metaphysics is perceived as dealing with rigid and modally robust objects so that subjectivity as such is excluded from metaphysical consideration. Contemporary metaphysics continues this trend. In this talk, I want to draw on Kantian legacy that takes subjectivity to be at the center of metaphysical enterprise. Metaphysics works with certain concepts and concepts are subject to deliberate revision in our theories. In particular, I want to shed light on the intersection of metaphysics as a conceptual activity; the latter has recently been known as conceptual engineering.

One of Kafka’s aphorisms reads as follows: “The indestructible is one thing; it is each individual person and at the same time it is something common to all, hence the supremely indivisible connection among people.” Another aphorism reads: “Man cannot live without an enduring trust in something indestructible within him, though both the indestructible element and the trust may remain forever hidden from him. One of the ways of expressing this abiding hiddenness is the belief in a personal god.” In my talk I will present and discuss the critiques of metaphysics by Heidegger [“The Overcoming of Metaphysics” (GA 7: 68-98), and “The Last God” (GA 65: 405-417)] and Adorno [“Meditations on Metaphysics” in Negative Dialectics, GS 6: 354-400], focusing on their shared philosophical modernist premises and their concentration on the abject negativity of modernity. In addition, I will shed light on how they accommodate, in radically different ways, “the indestructible” that Kafka points to.

Attempts to see reality as inherently in conflict and motion rather than at rest have a famous unsettling quality, namely, of treating conflict and motion as something at rest. This is what happened to Engels’ “dialectical laws” in his Anti-Dühring—allegedly an elaboration of what he and Marx referred to as their “old Hegel” and their logical reconstruction of the infinitesimal calculus. I will demonstrate how the “old Hegel,” in fact, differs from such opinions, arguing that conflict and motion are not an opposition of objects at rest, but something contained within, or belonging to, their form. This also resolves the initial paradox.

In many varieties of Post-Hegelianism, Neo-Pragmatism and Critical Theory, it has become a point of orthodoxy to claim that viewing things 'sideways-on' (J. McDowell) is impossible and to reject traditional metaphysical thinking on that basis. In my paper, I will challenge this widespread assumption by arguing that viewing things 'sideways' is not only natural but an unavoidable feature of human rationality. Knowledge is by definition transcendent, and it is only by virtue of its transcendence that knowledge claims become intersubjectively accessible. Hence if traditional metaphysics fails, it does not do so because of this purported methodological flaw.

Where concepts are identified with arbitrary predicates, two problems arise: Firstly, logic is reduced to a content-free technique of defining complex sentences S and propositional forms S(x) or S(x,y,...) using operators such as ‘non’, ‘&’ and ‘for all x’. Secondly, the subject areas for assigning the variables x or y are merely presupposed without analyzing their transcendental constitution. Ontology thus turns into a kind of mere belief. In contrast to this, Plato already recognized the projective relationship of generic concepts to their instantiations. Genera and kinds of things are not simple sets of entities. Rather, we need a First Philosophy as it had developed from Heraclitus and Parmenides to Aristotle that clarifies the constitution of general species and their ‘methexis’ or ‘conceptual projection’ to empirical individual things in time and space.