Locating Metaphysics

Hans-George Gadamer, in his “Word and Method” (1960) uses the word “hermeneutic” to cover the whole of our existence and how we interpret it. He sees being, what is, what has happened, as belonging to this “hermeneutic universe” and sees here, even in an age of method and empirical science, of conclusions which may be coercive but which are also revisable, the recovery of metaphysics and the beginning of the end of the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns.

In the West, we associate metaphysics with Aristotle and perhaps too, with the Church. Aristotle’s scientific world of cause and effect has given way to the empirical scientific world with Riemannian Bendy Space, with Heisenberg’s uncertainty and with probability theory. With Sir Karl Popper we discover that any scientific statement must be revisable. We find ourselves in a universe which moves forward with the expectation of new discoveries and the reversal of old positions – which may have to wait until the old professors depart the scene. Cause and effect have become mathematical correlation without causality and without explanation. If Aristotle’s “causation” has departed the scene, the Church, which still, like the world of commonsense, speaks of cause and effect, has not expressed her philosophical position to the modern world. She awaits perhaps a new Thomas Aquinas and since the Second Vatican Council (1962 - 5) realises that there is a huge task to be done to relate Revelation to modern culture in a mutually beneficial way. As commonsense knows about causation from billiards, so the Church knows about it from creation out of nothing.

Gadamer sees a science based culture as tending to shallowness but takes heart from the fact that accounts of scientific methods are missing something which is essential to them. In Germany, in the nineteenth century historical studies “took off”, to use Rostow’s phrase, and were aware of themselves as the heirs of Renaissance humanism and doing something quite equivalent to what was going on in the realm of natural science. They were though, quite unable to account for what they were doing. If the natural sciences fall short in explaining what they do, then the same was true of the historical science as it began to emerge confidently. Indeed the historical sciences thought at first that they must be, like the natural sciences, using a form of induction. Their task though was not to conclude to what always happens but to account for the particular.

Gadamer is strong on concepts which emerge and shape man, so that something happens which shapes us over and above what we might choose. Such a concept in nineteenth century Germany, was Bildung. In medieval times man was seen as made in the image of God. Bildung expresses that man has something to make of himself, so in the nineteenth century, Herder expressed Bildung as being made in the image of humanity. On the one hand one sees here how the Modernist crisis arose but also we can contrast Bildung with the English ideas of “the gentleman”. Bildung was a classless ideal for all. The scholar was held by it as a personal ideal but also it describes what should go on in all.

Another such forming concept is Erlebris experience. Time is not something going forward with pendulums or atomic clocks as it is experienced – our experience of time is around an event which shapes us and is memorable. So the Second World War was such an event and indeed a shared one, shared differently by different peoples. So as well as personal experience, there is the tradition and self expression of different peoples as Droyson pointed out. This is where the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns breaks down for we are all formed by such experiences.

Helmholtz and others tried to explain their historical work referring to “tact”, but quite what they meant is unclear. It is something to do with the way memory is shaped and not just by the inductive method. It is perhaps helpful to note that there can be insights into data without conceptualisation and express formulation and this would allow much more data to be covered. Perhaps this expressed insight accounts explicitly for at least part of what was meant by “tact”. Tact thus is being in touch with realms of data which may be relevant to some new understanding. Wide reading does not as such give wisdom even though one of the historian’s slogans was “understanding through research”. There is a sort of liveliness of mind which recognises the emergence of a new idea.

For example, St Birinus crowned Cynegils, a soldier, in about 640 and though the West Saxon monarchy which emerged was for a while subject to others, it eventually, by adding Mercia and Northumberland, made England the oldest integral nation in the world today. Was there something in the Chrism alone making a king – as opposed to blessing one who already was kingly – which accounts for the energy of the new monarchy? Or does location explain the matter? There is a flux of ideas and in time maybe a judgement to be made.
When it comes to judgements being made, Gadamer is very much under the continuing influence of Kant. If the theory one has is an priori construct how can it tell one about the a posterior? So Gadamer sees all conceptualisation as lacking being referring back to the hermeneutical experience where being is to be found. But how is being to be found in the hermeneutical experience if it is not to be found in some way in conscious experience? The tabula rasa is no doubt full of orientations but the development which goes on must be some combination of experiences and memory. If being is to be found in the hermeneutic world then it must somehow be found in the world of experience, for the hermeneutic world is built up by a succession of experiences.

The mistake is to think of being as the concrete other in the duality of experience, subject, and object. The being which is directly apprehended includes evidence about the subject as well as about the object. I see an ashtray. The way forward is not to focus on the ashtray but to focus on the ashtray and its observation. So with Galileo the thing is to focus not just on the moon and its craters but Galileo and his interpretation. With Newton we have one who has a certain mechanical formulation but is it certain? How does one ground certainty? What is certain is not the theory as such but that a theory is being formulated which is thought to be certain. Where we have certainty in a genuine way there we have “being” and so material for metaphysical science or more importantly, material for our hermeneutical take on existence. Hermeneutical of being, knowledge of being, thus arises from judgements of truth. These may be made by others who teach us explicitly, but they may be communicated by true insights which do not bother to get themselves formulated and affirmed. If this shorthand in de facto communication of being is inconvenient to philosophers, it is convenient to the human race. Philosophers can help the rest of us to recognise what is sheer mythology in our apprehension for example the apprehension of the future by tea leaves in the tea cap. It is an everlasting task to discriminate between what is thought to be and what in fact is so.

Kantian thought is caught between the a priori with its clear conclusions and the concrete in which man lives. Judgement cannot reach the concrete save by an infinite series of judgements which is an impossibility. So “taste” is brought in and it is good taste that must ensure good concrete judgements, whether personal or social.

Here Kantian thought has abandoned Anglo Saxon enlightened thought. Lord Shaftesbury, following the Romans, had discoursed upon “commonsense”, which appears to have been more than a sense of what is common, but a sense commonly shared by those who have to do with the common. In France the same sense was recognised as “le bon sense”. In Germany though such a sense was not applicable to a set of small states, and so “commonsense” was neglected by Kant. With it the frivolous matter of feeling was omitted from the serious, precise matter of moral judgement. I recall my mother who lived through the Second World War, thinking that concentration camps would not be possible in England, “because of the way people felt”. The truth is, about a value which matters, we develop feelings so that we have energy to defend what is precious. Correlatively, the fact is that where we have strong feelings which are beyond criticism (as after a rare, good film), then values are implicit which, may not as yet, have been explicitly formulated and may never be.

It is not true then that all over values are brought to light in concrete circumstances. We hold more than we realise. But circumstances may force this or that issue to be expressed in a way recognisable by all, including historians.

Gadamer then is right to point to the hermeneutical world in which we live and acknowledge being. His fault is not to recognise that being and value can be expressly formulated by human beings especially when the situation demands such a response. The fault here though lies not so much with Gadamer as with the Kantian world in which he lives with the realisation that there is a certain shallowness to a prior empirical scientific conclusions.

Gadamer then stands in a world where “Being is dead” and various philosophies, pragmatic, existential, phenomenological and empirical reign and by turning to various forms of experience, the historical and the aesthetic. He declares being to be alive in the hermeneutical experience which shapes us largely despite ourselves as we learn a language and get more profoundly shaped by concepts as their meanings change and develop through linguistic changes and new discoveries. A child of the 1960s – his book was published in 1960 – he largely ignores religious life as a further hermeneutical source for the recognition of being. The fact that, with Descartes, philosophy attained its autonomy from religious life does not in fact mean that religion has ceased to exist and to be a huge influence for good and evil in the hermeneutic world of man. He writes “When science expands unto a total technocracy and brings on the cosmic night of the forgetfulness of being, then one may look at the last fading light … or turn around to look for the first shimmer of its return”.

Though science is wonderful, the death of being is a serious cultural weakness in our Western world for it would dismiss religion and history and confirm morality to some sort of adjunct of technocracy.

The addition needed to Gadamer’s view is the realisation that the hermeneutic experience is not to be had without conscious experience and it belongs to conscious experience to assess the case again and again and to ask “Is it so?”. When that is done, being is touched upon and sometimes affirmed. One does not have to be religious to see that Cynegil’s coronation was quite different from that of St Ethelbert if indeed St Ethelbert was crowned. Whether this difference was relevant to subsequent history is a further question. A question though is laden not just with theoretical matters but matters of fact – and so, being.

If one considers metaphysics as a matter of ontologically true propositions, causality, logical deductions which are certain then the subject becomes “moon-sick” and rather limited, but if the first principles are persons operating according to the norms of diligent attention, restless intelligence, rational judgement or posing of a theory, and consequent praxis, then one has a metaphysics which recognises the heuristic structures and the methodology of natural science, history, philosophy and theology. One comes across a world of being which always includes human being and the state of human understanding as it develops through time. Such metaphysics does not, as Aristotle’s did, obstruct natural science, but would allow different disciplines to recognise their common ground.

By recognising that the first principles for a modern metaphysics are persons acting in the concrete, normatively authentically, responsibly – and indeed lovingly – we find that metaphysics is a personal challenge to overcome any sort of bias.

By bringing in the human dimension in any empirical judgement we bring in a dimension which is absolutely affirmable. Thus being is affirmed whilst not in any way restricting the onward flow of scientific discoveries or historical development. With Gadamer the metaphysical is somehow present in what we know. I think, bringing in the subject and the object, the metaphysical element is present as we puzzle and as we bring in the best theory to date. It is present when we rush to judgement and declare certainty prematurely, as with Laplace, Malthus or maybe a multitude of experts today discoursing upon CO2 and ice caps melting. Metaphysics does not vanish because truth is rashly and erroneously proclaimed.

Metaphysics which, perhaps with the help of historical science, bases itself on the human subject as well as the object of his thought and care, is not thrown by the fact that theories are hypothetical and in development or by the fact that thinkers are not always aware of the conditions which need to be fulfilled if a judgement is to be sound, truth and so being attained.