The Metaphysical Menu: Part 1

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10 minutes

What I’ve not seen anyone do — at least online — is lay out the possible universes of personal metaphysics. The typical modern narrative of Reason goes something like this: “Once upon a time, human beings were ignorant, and made up stories to explain things they didn’t understand. Lightning and earthquakes and floods and all that were frightening, and sunlight and rain and forests were pleasant and necessary, so each one was assigned its own explanatory god. Sometimes there were many gods, and sometimes there was only one. Later on, for some reason, the Enlightenment happened, and the smart folks began to look for reasons for all those things. Some people still clung to the old gods as explanations, or because of a certain softness in the head, and so religious beliefs did not pass away. And yet, since the brightest and best educated knew about Reason and Science, and since the latter are entirely concerned with what can be seen and measured, belief in god and gods has been relegated to the realm of “subjectivity,” the same region where personal preferences, and musical tastes, and other such imponderables reside. And if you want to go in for such things, then fine, but let’s leave them out of the serious, objective conversation; the realm of the verifiable and practical.”

This is the assumed background philosophy of modern man. Even religious moderns often implicitly subscribe to it, happy enough to concede that since faith is “personal,” it is therefore a sort of protected property, safe from attack. 

Now against such a backdrop, physicalism — the idea that all that exists is some kind of stuff or energy — becomes the default position. Physicalism itself never has to win an argument, nor to justify its own existence. It is enough to be the last objective worldview standing. In this first of a two-part post, I want to set the record straight by putting physicalism in its proper place, as only one of a very limited number of possible metaphysics. Next week, I will consider whether any of these options, considered only on its own merits, deserves to be the default position for a reasonable person. For now, let us take a look at the options on our metaphysical menu.

Possible Cosmologies

Physicalism

Everything that exists is some kind of stuff. Some of this stuff is relatively stable in space and time so that we can safely call it “matter,” whereas the same stuff in another form is called energy. Stuff is arranged into various structures, and each structure is built out of smaller or larger arrangements of stuff. So if we want to understand a particular identity of stuff, we need only describe the more basic stuff of which it is composed. Take an oak tree: 

The oak tree is a certain arrangement of organs and parts — bark, cambium layer, xylem and phloem, living wood, dead wood, bole, branches, buds, leaves, stipules, flowers, roots, rootlets, root hairs, and the various processes and behaviors resulting from the above. But if we want a deeper explanation than this, we shall have to proceed up (or rather, down) to the next level: to the various cells, proteins, and enzymes of which all the above are composed. And if we want to explain these, we proceed onto the oak’s DNA, which specifies all of the above. But molecules are composed of atoms, and atoms of neutrons, electrons, and protons. And we are not finished yet! There are still quarks, and leptons, and bosons, and gluons...and on and on. And of course there are field forces, at least four of them. In addition to all this, there’s dark matter and energy that we cannot “see” but know is there, because we can detect its effects. 

So what, according to physicalism, is an oak tree? It’s a certain stable arrangement of stuff seen from a particular scale in the universe. Considered in physical terms, it’s mostly empty space. But what of our thoughts about the tree? Since thoughts are found in brains, and brains are made of stuff, then useful concepts like “tree” must represent a certain arrangement or function of brain matter and brain energy. Likewise thoughts about anything, including reason, and logic, and the sciences generally, are just processes of stuff. Generalizations and abstractions, insights and intuitions, truth and falsehood, right and wrong — it’s all stuff, or the functional arrangement of stuff, or the supervenient, emergent expression of stuff. On the physicalist account there is nothing but stuff, and the functions that stuff performs. Even that last sentence, and the thought contained in it, is just stuff. Stuff in your brain, and stuff in mine, which correspond (enough?) to be called “the same.” (“Sameness,” of course, is also some type or mode of stuff.)

Now there are many varieties and sub-schools within the physicalist umbrella, but the thing to keep in mind is that in all of them, whatever really exists (and even whatever is only imaginary) is stuff, or a certain arrangement of stuff, even if that arrangement performs a function or displays properties whose sum is greater than its parts. Moreover, the “stuff” that exists turns out not even to be very much like what we humans think of as stuff. This is because physical reality is apparently replete with directed stuff, stuff like taste and smell with an intentionality (or aboutness) that cannot be reduced to mere matter. But mere matter cannot be about anything; therefore intentionality, on the physicalist view, has no reality independent of the mind. Matter as materialists understand it is composed of tasteless, colorless, particles, while sensations (like thoughts) are purely subjective; qualitative properties, or projections from the mind. Even moderns considered heretics, like Berkley and Descartes, embraced the same basic assumptions about reality. Berkeley takes the physicalist account of nature to a radical, but logical conclusion, while Cartesians (who are still basically physicalists) try to escape their world of mere particles through the back door of the mind, into some occult “consciousness property” which somehow interacts with objective, physical reality. For this reason, we include Berkley’s idealism and even Descartes’ dualism under the category of physicalism, rather than under any form of theism.

Holistic Modalisms

At the other end of the spectrum are various sorts of idealisms, pantheisms, and spiritual modalisms. According to these — and in common with physicalism — all reality is really reducible to another, hidden reality. This Total Being — whether called Brahman, or the Demiurge, or by some other name — is reality-in-itself, whereas other beings are either illusions (as in Buddhism,) shadowy reflections of the Absolute (as in Platonism,) or manifestations/modes of the Absolute (as in Hinduism.) We can summarize this view by saying that there is a God, but that God is everything. God is the Absolute Reality to be discovered, either by getting past the illusion of sensible reality (in the more eastern forms,) or by encountering the God’s particular manifestations in sensible realities, and ascending from these shadows to the perception of the Total.

To be sure, there are differences among the modalisms.  There’s a difference between saying that all material reality is an illusion hiding the Absolute, and that all material reality is a manifestation or mode of the Absolute, and yet there is also a great similarity here. Along the spectrum of modalisms, some are more immanentist and others more transcendentalist. What they all share is a kind of occult process-metaphysics. What makes this monism different from physicalist monism is that it permits a reality higher than “stuff.” It does not locate the Absolute in eternal matter, but in a higher Process. Corresponding to this higher process are some lower processes by which creatures are joined to (or discover their true identity with) the Process Itself. 

Now the idea that God is everything, or that physical reality is a kind of conscious process working out the Absolute, appeals to many people. For one thing, it can accommodate any number of “gods,” since these can be conceived as particular manifestations of the Absolute. For another, it seems to account for the “aboutness” and “intentionality” which is replete throughout physical reality, and which physicalism is forced to locate entirely in the mind (as a kind of interpretative illusion.) What’s more, depending on its flavor, it can either affirm the soul (as a particular locus of the world soul,) or deny the soul (as part of the general illusion one is trying to get past.) Spiritual modalisms are very accommodating in that way. They have an almost democratic quality, inasmuch as they seem to be able to affirm everything as part of the Great Mystery, while at the same time affording an “upward view,” something higher than the self, in which to believe.

Polytheism

This is the coarsest item on the metaphysical menu, and that is not an entirely bad thing. Polytheists, of which there are not many left on earth, take as given the reality of such things as trees, rocks, men, and beasts, and — not being saddled with some sort of monism — can afford to affirm them as actual things. In addition to those concrete realities, polytheists can also believe in mysterious personages who embody or govern concrete realities. There is something deep in the human soul that wants to locate the Divine, to establish a particular relationship between higher and lower things, casting them both in greater relief. There is something deep in the human soul that wants to make the Divine practical and specific, even to the point of closely associating it with a mysterious forest, or a breathtaking mountain, or a mighty entity (like the ocean, or a volcano,) or even with a specific nation. Polytheism is rooted in the wholesome human desire to put a face on things that seem shot-through with personality. There is a certain manly sanity in this.

I will not much address here the “standard” view that primitive man proposed gods to “explain” nature, except to say that if he did so, this was not his main reason for believing in them. Anyone who has ever been to, say, Iceland, can understand perfectly well the instinct to believe in trolls and elves. Anyone who has been in an earthquake can understand the sudden, awesome sense of terror at the power and personality of nature.  For that matter, anyone who finds himself happy on a sunny, temperate day, or reduced to silence by the star-filled sky, can grasp — if only for a moment — the healthy, human part of polytheism. Each place has its own flavor, its own mysterious identity, and one by which even the native trees, animals, and human cultures seem shaped. Polytheists may be technically wrong in saying that a certain god lives on a certain mountain, but they are perfectly right in saying that he ought to live there. At least they’ve managed to capture something in human experience that is left out of the physicalists’ purely descriptive, merely modular account of the same spaces.

But polytheism is also coarse in the sense that it is irrational. When asked to explain the gods, the polytheist can only push the question back to some higher-level gods. When this becomes unsatisfying, the gods must eventually point back to some Absolute. Often this Absolute is a cosmic chaotic maw, presumably eternal, except when it spontaneously and uncharacteristically produced super-powered rational forms. One has the sense that with paganism it is bad manners to ask where the gods came from. But the question will be asked, and so must eventually lead to the maw. And if it was not there, then to the Absolute. But if this Absolute is not the gods, and not the Totality, then it must be a singular, transcendent being, beyond change.

Transcendent Monotheism

Before continuing, I note that it is possible to believe in just one god, without believing in the One God. A person who worships the sun, or the earth, or the universe as a singular entity is really no different than a polytheist, in a metaphysical sense. If he identifies the universe with ultimate reality, then he is a kind of holistic modalist. But if he merely denies the reality (or the worthiness) of gods other than his own, but one still located within the structure of the universe, then he fails to assert anything fundamentally different about the nature of reality than what polytheists assert. And this is a rather important point, for it has become fashionable for physicalists to write, “I do not believe in god,” as if in using the lowercase, they were also denying the God affirmed by the Jewish and Christian religions, and (to one extent or another) by certain pagan philosophers. This is ignorance at best; at worst, it’s a petty slap at the God they claim not to believe in.

Transcendent monotheism is actually as follows: there is One God, whose very essence is to exist. This One God is the basic, fundamental reality. As such, God is utterly different from every other being that can be conceived, because God is not an instance of some category of being. God is the necessary, and fundamentally basic being. Creatures are dependent, each one a great might not have been. God is that which just is. There cannot be two such beings, since then one would have to lack a property the other possessed. If so, neither could be the self-existent reality monotheists are referring to, and we’d have to proceed further. Eventually, we must arrive at One Who Just Is, who can’t not be. 

According to transcendent monotheism, this One must possess its qualities in an absolute, infinite, and singular degree. Other beings, since they are not self-existent, must have derived both their existence and their essences and attributes from the One God. But since they cannot possess either existence or essence in the same singular manner as the One Whose Essence Is To Exist, then they are not parts of God. They are not emanations of God. They are separately existing, but dependent beings. In other words, they are creatures. God meanwhile is not a creature. This basic division of reality between self-existent creator and dependently-existent creature has certain consequences for cosmology.

First, creatures are forms or kinds; they have proper identities which define and delimit them from other creatures. The rational instinct to divide beings into such categories as animal, vegative, mineral, angelic, rational-animal, etc, is rooted  in the very nature of reality itself; not in some general illusion (as the modalisms would hold) nor in an unavoidable mental imposition (as physicalism tends to hold.) This is the one point that polytheism and transcendent monotheism have in common: they both affirm the reality of distinct beings. Polytheism does so in a vulgar, unapologetically human way; monotheism does it in both a human and a principled way. Transcendent monotheism permits and rationally justifies the commonsense view of poets and working men that the variety in Nature is real.

Second, on the transcendent monotheistic view, Reason is real. Since Nature is creation, and is the product of a being Who is pure intellect and will, it therefore has an objectively rational structure. It is knowable by rational minds, because it is the product of a rational mind. Human wisdom is therefore a holistic thing, an upward-looking faculty that can afford to affirm the distinct realities within Nature without reducing them to some other reality. Truth is not an occult property, something to be found underneath the illusion of apparent reality; truth is simply the particular affirmation of each individual reality, and creation as a whole is composed of beings whose essences are like stepping stones, leading upwards toward the One whose Essence corresponds perfectly to His Existence; a being Who is not part of creation, but Who is the origin and end of creation.

Third, as a consequence of the above, freedom is actually possible for rational beings. Within the modalisms, human action, both good and bad, is part of the Process. Since the Process is the Total Reality, it is difficult to see how any node of it can act on its own. Within physicalism, every “higher level” is dictated by the supervenient influence of some lower level, making freedom an illusion, just another of the subjective illusions by which conscious beings are unavoidably enthralled, locked as they are within a prison of qualia. Meanwhile, transcendent monotheism distinguishes between beings who possess an intellectual faculty and beings that don’t. The former can grasp possibilities, and act upon them without coercion; the latter cannot. It follows that created intellects have been afforded an incredible dignity by the One God, the dignity of being sub-creators within God’s creation. This does not mean their actions are not anticipated, permitted, empowered, and coordinated within God’s act of creation, but it does mean that God permits them to make an actual contribution to the shape of reality. 

There you have it, a menu of possible metaphysics. All the philosophies, ideologies, religions, and total systems on earth fit somewhere within the categories above. Since a priori any of these might be correct, and since each is mutually exclusive of the others (with the possible exception of forms of polytheism that fit within pantheism), then it is not intellectually honest to assert one of these as the default position of a reasoning person without first taking the time to justify that position. In next week’s post, we will try to discern whether any of these worldviews should be preferred over the others.

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