Metafysik

The term “metaphysics” has been appropriated in recent years to function as a synonym for “new age” or “occult.” I still vividly remember the two older women in my college metaphysics course who kept asking questions about crystals and astral projection, and who grumbled outside class that the professor was not covering any “real-world metaphysics.”

As a branch of philosophy, metaphysics could be defined as the study of the fundamental nature of reality. It asks such questions as “what is real?” – and, as Heidegger will shortly tell us, “what is being?” Metaphysics asks the most fundamental questions in philosophy – and thus it asks the most fundamental questions possible for human beings.

What Heidegger teaches, however, is that metaphysics should be thought of less as a timeless, perennial area of human inquiry and more as a “project” that began with certain assumptions that were very much rooted in a particular time and place. The project of Western metaphysics then changed and developed and played out the consequences of those assumptions, until it reached a climax and, for all intents and purposes, came to an end. For Heidegger, what has driven the Western metaphysical project is the desire to give expression to what being is. Curiously, however, Western metaphysicians have not only seldom actually identified this as their aim, they have systematically obscured the question of being itself.

Metaphysics begins with the pre-Socratic philosophers, some of whom speculated about a primal and eternal “stuff” from which all things came. Others, like the Pythagoreans, believed in objective ideas after which the material world was fashioned. Plato’s “theory of forms” developed out of such speculations. Aristotle took up that theory, revising it and arguing for the existence of a God that causes worldly change and transformation through the unrequited love all things feel for him