IN DEFENCE OF METAPHYSICS

Since the arrival of empiricism and its slow rise to the upper ranks of a lot of the philosophy being conducted by philosophers in the field today and of late, will be found as one will by chance happen to observe in this steady rise of empiricism a dual effect that has occurred in philosophy in the sense that a slow pernicious and damaging effect has been produced by the apparent success of empiricism at the expense of metaphysics. Now I find it to be my duty as well as my optimistic desire to repair some of this damage that has been perpetrated towards metaphysics at the hands of empiricism and its over confident supporters, of which I myself have been.
Now in the following passages that are to come, I will endeavour to repair the great name of metaphysics and so raise its proud banner high once again, so that all the world can marvel in its brilliant and creative radiance and this I do so that its efforts and offerings of which there are many shall never be lost by the hasty and ignorant of temperament. Metaphysics by its very nature is a cause of wonder and speculation and is a highly creative and all encompassing way in which to view reality itself (that is the essence of reality itself) and it is the type of outlook that got the early Greek philosophers thinking in a constructive way in the first place all the way back in the days when religion, mystery and superstition predominated. Now philosophy proper as a force was largely metaphysical at first and slowly began to branch out and take on other disciplines. One main reason why metaphysics now gets a bad name is because a lot of the philosophers around (especially the logical positivists) are only interested in trying to explain things which are easy to explain which are empirically obvious, they are not interested in all those mysterious things about reality which is harder to describe and explain. A lot of philosophers and peoples opinions and attitudes today have even degenerated into a somewhat petty belief that philosophy is only now good for a clarification of thoughts or for minor descriptions of phenomenon and a limited play with language etc. A lot of philosophers and people in general today doubt the greatness that philosophy has and also once had which was especially great in the minds and hands of the legendary figures like Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and this general attitude today is an indication of the nihilistic, apathetic, cynical and hopeless state in which some people live by and have allowed their opinion of philosophy to degenerate into and this negative outlook is partly due to science and the empirical method, which I am sorry to say, does not satisfy us in all departments and should be relegated to what it is good at. Metaphysics is one subject that has suffered the most at the hands of this poor outlook that I have described above that attempts to make us into automatons of so-called logic and hard scientific facts. Human beings in general mostly think in a philosophical, rational, symbolic, imaginary, metaphysical and desire-orientated way and not in a hard logical and scientific way, which hardly does not satisfy us at all as human beings. Metaphysics gets a bad reputation for supposedly consisting of all the erroneous speculations, subjective fancies and imaginary mystical beliefs that have ever been invented by the minds of human beings. Metaphysics it must be shown, does not necessarily consist of all those erroneous concepts that have ever been thought up, such as an all encompassing substance that surrounds everything or that matter consists of spirit or has spirit in it or that there is a swirling aether in space. Metaphysics as a subject should be approached as an extension of realism and materialistic philosophy, for instance, it is not known why energy perpetually vibrates both infinitely and eternally or why energy and space are infinite in extent and quantity and so on.
Some people even go so far as to claim that the concept of the will in nature is a purely metaphysical concept or is only an automatic physical process; but these views, it must be pointed out, are absurd at best and are only one-sided and incomplete views of the will. The concept of the will in nature is in fact both physical and metaphysical and the people who are ignorant at heart always want the physical to be separated from the metaphysical, as if in their estimation the metaphysical is going to weaken somehow what they consider to be a fact that is purely explainable by empirical, physical and literal means or by using a purely scientific type of language and description that is not always possible, seeing as it is usually hollow and without any true meaning and description of reality. Metaphysics attempts to describe and explain the very essence, nature and meaning of reality and existence itself and one will find no other subjects which attempt to do this and so therefore metaphysics cannot be replaced by any other subject and can also not be discarded in favour of any other subjects. Metaphysics as a subject is concerned mostly with first principles and basic causes and how they influence processes and this because it is an attempted understanding of all those activities and processes that occur as energy vibrates and forms physical and creative situations within space involving forces, rules, laws and universal forms. Metaphysics cannot attempt to explain first principles and basic causes in the literal sense because these things do not exist, that is there is no first or last principles for processes universally because there is no beginning or end to processes universally, but there is first principles for particular processes like the big bang. There are only first principles for particular processes like the creation of our universe. As time goes by one will find that physics will increasingly become more like metaphysics as it progresses and this is because the boundary between what we are capable of knowing in the sciences and what is highly real and unknowable in reality (i.e., metaphysics) gets blurred and one can find this occurring already in string theory. Metaphysics attempts to understand the deeper issues of reality and existence, such as why does matter exist at all? Why does energy perpetually vibrate? Why is space and energy infinite? And metaphysics never goes away because it is one of the most important subjects around.
Philosophy was largely metaphysical when it began as a major force in Greece and philosophy will always invariably lead to metaphysics because all absolute and ultimate questions and answers are metaphysical. Science by itself as a discipline and a method to attain knowledge cannot be relied on as a complete description and explanation of reality and processes, because it only concerns itself with how phenomenon operates and so on, but rarely asks questions like why does this phenomenon exist? And why does this phenomenon operate in this manner? Also why do processes produce a situation in which things operate in a certain way?
And why is it that the apparent infinity of space that we know of is able to produce a universe that only we know about that we exist in but yet we do not know if any other universes exist and if they do, how far away they are? The real tangible world human beings know about that we have representations of in the manner of ideas, abstract concepts, symbols, images and words is only partly real or only an interpretation of the truth of reality due to the correspondence of our perceptions to objective reality, but yet there are aspects of reality and the cosmos which is more real than our representations, and ideas and are in themselves undifferentiated. It is the human world of representations, ideas, concepts, images, symbols, languages, images and correspondence that creates the world of things for us as human beings and this so even if we are able to manipulate reality by the use of objects in science, but there are realities and processes that are outside our languages, representations and symbols which resist symbolization absolutely and this is what Immanuel Kant called the thing-in-itself and is a very useful label to assign all those things and processes that exist in reality that we are unsure about and do not know that are beyond our powers of perception and comprehension. Metaphysics as a subject as well as all those mysterious and unknown things about reality that we do not know will always motivate our curiosity and sense of wonder and so this will always lead human beings to probe further into reality to understand more about it, but there will always be things beyond the reach of our senses that we cannot, and will not know because they are beyond the comprehension of our limited physical human brains and this is because a finite thing cannot understand an infinite thing, it can only understand a finite portion of it. The logical positivists (empiricists) claim that all metaphysical statements and propositions are nonsense and false, but this is like saying that all statements and propositions that describe the nature of reality and existence are nonsense and false. What the logical positivists think are metaphysical statements and propositions are not really true metaphysical statements and propositions if they think they can dispense with metaphysical statements and propositions all together as being nonsense and false. If a person claims that there is a swirling substance called an aether that exists in space and also that this aether is responsible for gravity and many other things then one would using logic infer that this is not really a metaphysical claim but is an imaginary claim. Genuine metaphysical claims should not be dismissed as unnecessary or as nonsense simply because false imaginary metaphysical claims have been propounded by thinkers in the past. The logical positivists claim to use the word "nonsense" to mean that a statement or proposition cannot be independently verified rather than meaning that a statement or proposition is "without meaning". In science many theories cannot be verified with certainty but scientists still know that the available truth is still in accord with their theories and metaphysical statements and propositions that cannot be independently verified with certainty still have a validity as long as they correspond to and are in accord with the available truths of reality.
It is strange how in science today new theories like: for instance, energy being alike to looped vibrating strings and forces like gravity supposedly existing as a postulated particle called a graviton that is exchanged between most particles are accepted as science even though they fail the criteria of being science (that is, "demonstrable knowledge"), whereas metaphysics always gets attacked for being unscientific and unverifiable. What a lot of people do not seem to realize today, is that there is a very thin line between what we call science and metaphysics!