Philosophy, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics

“Metaphysics” is an overworked word that gets people into trouble, particularly pragmatists. There are so many ways of defining metaphysics, like epistemology, that Rorty has remarked that we should just leave it alone, that it is undefinable. While true, philosophical conversation would be a good deal harder since everybody still insists on using it, even Rorty. Given that Pirsig defines his philosophy as a “metaphysics” and Rorty defines metaphysics as the most basic philosophical wrong turn, I’ve often been asked how the two are supposed to hang together, as I’ve claimed they can. My answer is typically that Pirsig’s definition of “metaphysics” is basically the same as what Rorty and pragmatists would define “philosophy”: a really big, general view of things. Rorty’s use of metaphysics, however, is more narrow than that, basically commensurate with the way Heidegger defined it: Platonism. Maybe not Plato himself, but the whole line of footnotes that extend from him. In what follows, I’d first like to offer definitions (in the form of questions) of my title characters and suggest the ways in which I see them hanging together.

1) Metaphilosophy: What way of life are we going to follow?

2) Philosophy: How do things, in the broadest sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest sense of the term?

3) Metaphysics: How do things really hang together?

The first is taken from Pierre Hadot (in, for instance, What is Ancient Philosophy?), which is a use that rhymes quite well with Wittgenstein. Each form of life uses certain vocabularies with which they make sense of the world. So while doing philosophy (stolen from Wilfrid Sellars), we try and develop a vocabulary with which we try and get the rest of our vocabularies (scientific, moral, religious, literary, political, etc.) to hang together. Doing metaphilosophy involves a conversation about which form of life is better, which kind of philosophical vocabulary we should be using to get our other vocabularies to hang together. One way of describing metaphysics, then, is as a particular kind of philosophical vocabulary, a kind of philosophy that tries to force metaphilosophical consequences by an outside source. By bit by bit hammering down how things really hang together, the choice of what form of life we are going to be is taken away from us, determined instead by something other than us (e.g., Reality or God).

In the sense of these terms, most propounded philosophies by philosophers are a tangle of metaphilosophical and philosophical theses, though most philosophers in the past (and present for that matter) take their meta- theses for granted and disentangling them is a bit of a chore. What Rorty shunts under the name “pragmatism” is mostly just metaphilosophical theses, though from time to time he’ll be inconsistent (in the sense that pragmatism is only the name for a metaphilosophical stance, which historically it hasn’t only been) and attribute a philosophical thesis to pragmatism. But with the above distinctions in hand, it is fairly easy to distinguish Rorty’s meta- from philosophical theses (with the realization, then, that he spends most of his time doing metaphilosophy).

Doing philosophy can sometimes vault us up into metaphilosophy. Philosophy can have metaphilosophical consequences, or rather, some philosophies won’t be appropriate for some forms of life. This isn’t so much because of any “metaphysical hammering,” but because the two are more like on a continuum, there isn’t a hard and fast distinction between the two (which is why philosophers like Stanley Cavell say that there isn’t any such thing as metaphilosophy). Sometimes when doing philosophy you are forced into a discussion about what form of life we want to be. This happens when, for instance, there isn’t anywhere else for the conversation to go, when a straight out argument isn’t going to work because both sides seem to be begging the question over each other. What distinguishes metaphysical philosophy from nonmetaphysical philosophy is that metaphysics tries to get things hammered down by something else, e.g. Reality or Facts, whereas in nonmetaphysical philosophy the only thing doing any hammering are people.

What I'm trying to get a distinction between is the view that “there is a way things are” and “there is a way things really are.” The way pragmatists see philosophy is as taking common sense and finding something wrong with it. Common sense, as ways in which we make our way about the world, entails a way things are. That's what it is. A rock is a rock exactly because it is a rock and not a book of philosophy or Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. What the metaphysicians have taken to be philosophy is the correction of common sense by getting at the way the things really are. What fully pragmatized thought tries to do is change common sense by offering us better ways of thinking how things are.

So, if I, as a (hopefully) fully pragmatized philosopher, am to be identified as a materialist (as in thinking that corpuscularianism is a good way of thinking about what science does), or a nominalist (as in thinking that, if there is distinction between universals and particulars, it can only be made within a language and not between language (universals) and non-language (particulars)), or a Darwinian (as in thinking that humans are simply one more species of animal doing its best), it is not because I think that any of those ways entail a way things really are (or rather, the way things really are entails them), but that they entail a way things are, in that I act and behave and think as if those things are the way they are--because that's what common sense is: “the way I act and behave and think.”

What metaphysicians think is that our common sense can be corrected by the way things really are, that the ways we act, behave, and think can be changed by ascertaining the way things really are in the world. Pragmatists only think that the ways we act, behave, and think can be changed by alternative ways of acting, behaving, and thinking and that the “ascertainment of the really real” is a wheel that plays no part in the system. It’s not that the metaphysicians aren’t motivated in their redescriptions by their belief that their redescription is closer to the way things really are, but I’m suggesting that there’s no difference between redescriptions offered by metaphysicians who think that they finally have it and by pragmatists who think that this is just one more potentially better alternative to try out. So by an act of Ockham’s Razor, we’d like to cut out the wheel spinning all by itself.

So in practice there is often no difference between what a metaphysician and a poet does: they offer redescriptions of our language to expand the space of reasons, to expand what we can talk about and direct our attention towards what we should talk about. We can offer a distinction between two different kinds of metaphysicians to be more detailed: speculative and empirical (see the beginning of "Do Analysts and Metaphysicians Disagree?"). Speculative metaphysicians proceed by offering gigantic redescriptions of their subject and eventually tack on the claim “this is how things really are.” Empirical metaphysicians proceed by making an inquiry into a suitably large and fundamental topic like “Truth” or “Reality” or “Language” and, when finished with such an inquiry, suppose they’ve found out something essential about their subject. But on both sides these are tack-ons. For instance, sociobiologists like E. O. Wilson and Steven Pinker think that their work in biology or the brain or language say something about the large, important sounding topic philosophers have called “Human Nature” and that finding out the way we are will tell us something about what we should do. Pragmatists think that not only is the notion of “Human Nature” too metaphysical to tell us anything useful, but that how we are or have been will never do more than give us a starting point or possibly guidance towards what we should do or become.

Particularly with empirical metaphysicians, the difference in practice between metaphysicians and non- is that metaphysicians will tend to waste time and effort trying to make an impossible establishment of essence, of how things really are rather than sufficing with making the case that this is the way things should be. Pragmatists side with the Romantics in thinking that the human species is an infinitely malleable creature. Platonists believe that there is an essential way we are and it is by distorting this essence that bad things happen, like injustice. Neo-Romantics like pragmatists, however, think we can toss the representational notion of “distortion” and still be able tell the difference between better and worse and change are practices to make things better.

The choice between Romanticism and Platonism is the major struggle in metaphilosophy. One of the particular battles is over whether pragmatists can be Romantics and still hope for the same things Platonists hope for, like the end of injustice. Platonists don’t think they can. Pragmatists think that shared hopes about the end of injustice and the particular possibilities opened up by redescriptions are more important than the Platonist tack-on. But Platonists think that without the tack-on you cannot have the hope or the redescriptions. So for philosophers, the last major site of battle is over Platonism, though nothing else seems to hang in the balance. Platonists think everything hangs, pragmatists think nothing hangs, but at the end of the day they both have the same hopes and dreams. Pragmatists think this bodes well for them, for it at least foists the burden of proof on Platonists. 2500 years of having the burden of proof and being driven further and further back has marginalized Platonic philosophy (i.e. academic philosophy) from the rest of society. The more society gets on well enough and improves itself without having what Platonists think it requires, the more pragmatists think this suggests that Platonism is a scholastic endeavor that adds little to society. Pragmatists would like to end the scholasticism and get on with something else. Rather than harassing everyone else about how they are living in bad faith, nonmetaphysical philosophers would at least be able to add some small measure of perspective to their compatriots work in other areas.