Definition

Metaphysics is the foundational branch of philosophy; it is concerned with first principles. We cannot derive first principles from other axioms; they are first. They are foundational ideas that are the source of all other ideas. Metaphysics is the study of reality from the perspective of finding the first principles of reality.

That broad definition results in the following questions. What is the nature of reality? Where did reality come from? What exists and what does not exist? What exists independent of other things? What is time? What is space? What does it mean for something to exist? What is being? What is identity?

Metaphysics is perhaps the most expansive of all branches of philosophy. Hence there is general metaphysics or ontology which is specifically the study of 'being'. This is primarily concerned with what it means for something to exist.

Common Views in Metaphysics

Claims about metaphysics have been coming in since ancient Greece. We can categories these claims into the common categories of idealism, realism, dualism, monism, and skepticism.

Skepticism

We are not starting chronologically. Skepticism around metaphysics probably existed ever since the first metaphysician made the first metaphysical claim. Skepticism here is synonymous with doubt. Skepticism covers the ideas that the first principles, on which metaphysics is based on, are simply, out of our reach.

David Hume, a British empiricist, in the middle of the 18th century introduced his idea of skepticism where he showed that the only way we know things is through the induction method, which is the scientific method. However, the scientific method is limited. First, we can never be sure about anything, nothing is for granted, and second we simply do not know what we do not know. Hume was not a pure skeptic about metaphysical claims. However, his thought process remains.

We will simply never know if we are even right about any first principle that we discover. There is no way to test and confirm any first principles. So that is the first claim about metaphysics, that we will never know for sure.

Realism

Realism is the closest metaphysical solution to the scientific view about metaphysics. Realism is the common sense view that objects of knowledge exist independent of whether anyone is thinking about them or not. Meaning, that “to exist” is a quality that does not require someone else to perceive it. You look at a wall; it is there. You turn away; does the wall still exist?

Most people of the world are automatic proponents of realism; they are realists. A simpler way to talk about realism is that is the view that the outside world exists independent to the mind.

You may be wondering, how could this possibly by wrong. What theory could possibly refute that things can exist and do exist without needing to be perceived. Well the answer is quite simple and terrifying. You are used to it.

Every time you come back to your house, it is exactly as you left it. Everything that you put in a cupboard remains that way. You often find things you stashed years ago in the same place. We are digging dinosaur bones that were in the ground for hundreds of millions of years. This is a habit that the entire human civilization has. There is no guarantee that a wall will not vanish when you stop looking at it. Maybe it does not vanish until one day it will vanish. Alternatively, maybe it vanishes every time you do not look at it and it pops back into existence as soon as you look back at it.

When we talk about metaphysics, the keyword here is independent existence, for something to exist without having to rely on something else. If you truly believe that the wall exists independent to you, then you are a realist.

Idealism

Idealism has many different paths that converge to one foundational claim. Everything that we see around us is dependent on mind and/or thought. It does not have to be your mind or thought. Mind and thought can mean many different things and are different things to different philosophers. You can have an easier translation for idealism like this. Every material thing around you like the wall or a chair is dependent on some immaterial thing like the mind, consciousness, thought, or something else that we can consider immaterial.

One of the main paths to this claim are to think about 'objects of knowledge'. Knowledge is what you know. An object of knowledge is what you are interacting with in some way. The wall we were discussing in previous section is an object of knowledge. Idealism claims that the object of knowledge is in some way dependent on the mind and/or thought of something else. Why? It is because the only wall I understand is present inside my mind. Maybe there is a wall out there, which is beside the point. The wall that exists, as far as I am concerned, is the wall I can perceive. If I cannot perceive it, how can I ever talk about its existence? This was George Berkeley’s subjective idealism, which redefined existence to mean that unless Object A is being perceived, we cannot assign the quality of existence to Object A. Because if nothing perceives Object A, how can we be sure it is not popping in and out of existence.

Hence, existence is bound to the immaterial mind. The wall stops existing if no one is there to see it. However, walls do not habitually vanish because Berkeley said that God, which is the ultimate mind, perceives all of reality all of the time.

This does mean that if God blinks; we are all gone, if Berkeley's God had eyelids or eyes. Overall, the requirement of idealism fits. The wall's existence is dependent on the mind of individuals and God's mind which are both immaterial.

Immanuel Kant was also an idealist, something called a transcendental idealist. He claimed that we do not know what the Object of knowledge is really like. However, our brain, that gooey mess, during the processing of the object creates something different. Meaning, what we see is a construction by our mind based on its internal structures. Kant said that even assigning things shape, space and time is not necessarily a part of external reality. Instead, it is our brain's structures that the output has three spatial dimensions and a time dimension.

This means that maybe every wall is an “11 dimensional being” beyond comprehension but our mind restructures it into a measly a 3 dimensional wall. Take the example of our eyes. We perceive light and if we see nothing, we claim there is nothing there. However, those same light rays may be in different format like the radio waves, microwaves, x-rays, gamma rays, ultraviolet, and infrared that our mind and brain cannot absorb. Hence, every knowledge we have is dependent on our mind. Maybe there is no wall and our mind just conjures up walls based on some conditions.

There is one different understanding of idealism from Plato. The conclusion Plato makes is that every material thing that we see is dependent on some immaterial thing. Plato claimed that there was an immaterial world full of blueprints with the ideal or best version of everything. If you tried to draw a circle, there would be some imperfections in it. In the physical world, it is impossible to draw a perfect circle. It is impossible to be a perfect man. However, we know there is a perfect circle and similarly we can conceive of a perfect man. These ideals exist somewhere else and all material things are imperfect copies. Thus, we reach the same claim. Everything that we see is dependent on the immaterial ideal forms.

All of these ideas between Kant, Berkeley, and Plato share the same statement. The immaterial exists independent of the material.

Dualism

Dualism is the marriage of idealism and realism. Dualism claims that both material and immaterial things exist independent to each other. They may interact with each other but they operate independently. Dualism is not well respected compared to others because it is too wishy-washy.

However, dualism might be more common than even realism based on your interpretations of religious metaphysics. Because most religions are in some form dualists. Most religions accept an immaterial existence of soul, consciousness, a spiritual plane and God who is immaterial as well. Then all religions concede that the material world exists as well. If both have independent existence, we get dualism. However, if you claim that the material world exists at the whims of the immaterial God, then it is idealism and not dualism.

Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy, and a great lover of Christianity was a dualist. He claimed that all humans have a thinking part, the soul, and a physical part, the body. The soul thinks, the body moves. However, all dualism has a fundamental problem. The point of the material realm is that rules of science apply to it. We can figure out all the forces on an object. So how is the soul interacting with the body? How can something immaterial interact with something material?

There is no good answer to this. Descartes thought that soul and mind interacted in the pineal gland in the center of our brain. Ibn Sina also known as Avicenna a Muslim philosopher also had a similar claim about brain being the seat where the material meets the immaterial.

The idea of dualism comes out of necessity. How can you make the idea of the afterlife believable if there is only the material world? Hence, there must be something immaterial about the human body, which survives after the body’s destruction.

Monism

Monism feels likes the weird cousin of the family. It is not easy to deny that material things do not exist. However, it is also not easy to deny that immaterial things like the soul, mind, and thoughts, and an afterlife do not exist. Maybe, the material and the immaterial things are part of the same thing. If you think that, you are a monist.

To remind you of something, metaphysics talks about things that exist independently of others. There is nothing stopping you from considering the whole of reality as one thing, and then by definition it exists independent of others.

However, this is not just a play on word. Instead, monists believe that all of reality is one thing, often called God, Nature, or The Substance. Our reality is not a bunch of small things bundled into one giant thing. Instead, there is only one giant thing. We are a part of that one thing; everything around us is also part of the same thing. 'Part of' is not accurate here. 'Part of' has literary connotations of taking 'apart', the idea that you can be a part of something and then removed from it.

Monism does not allow this; a common example is one of ocean and waves. We can say waves are a part of the ocean. However, you cannot take a wave out of the ocean. It is nonsensical and physically impossible. Instead, waves are a specific manifestation of the ocean. When the ocean behaves a certain way, we get the ocean. Everything that we see, including ourselves, are a manifestation of that God, Nature, or whatever you might want to name the totality of existence.

The most famous monists are pantheists such as the Sufis in Islamic thought. Pantheism is the monism that calls the whole of reality 'God' and invoke some sort of divine will, thought, or order to the reality. If I remember correctly, there are only two monists or pantheists we are going to be looking at, Sufis and Spinoza.

Other Related Jargons

Substance

Substance is a catch all word to talk about the most fundamental things that can exist. For reference, monism claims that there is only one substance in the whole of reality. Dualism claims that there are two substances. Looking at Descartes, he said that there are two substances, res cogitans and res existensa, the thinking substance and the extended substance meaning soul and physical things respectively.

One nice way to understand the word substance is that the only things that can exist are substances. We can only assign the label of existence to a substance, and a substance must have the label of existence. Nothing else can have the label of existence. It is a catch all term. From these substances, the whole of reality is constructed. Therefore, for John Locke, substance is the underlying reality of everything around us, something like the fundamental particles that come together in unique ways to create the whole universe.

Philosophers define their own 'substance', but collectively they use substance to talk about the most fundamental thing that exists independent of any other thing.

Essence

In metaphysics, the word essence is a part of the substance. Essence gives the substance its primary properties and main qualities. The details are going to vary between philosophers but essence goes on top of the substance to give it the flair, which allows the same substance to appear in different shapes and sizes.

The easiest way to think of essence is to think of substance as a blank slate. It exists. It just does. However, what is it? That answer depends on its essence. An essence defines the substance into what we can understand and identify with. Maybe you can consider that all humans and animals are the same substance, the same building block, but each human, animal, and plant has their own essence, which fully describes them.

In the modern world of science, essence is mostly obsolete. Especially since Jean Paul Sartre said "Existence precedes essence" meaning essence has nothing to do with substance and existence. So earlier ideas about essence were that each human had their own essence. You were born with it, and that is what you were. However, with post modernism, we have the idea that it does not matter how, where, and what you were born as. You can be anything you want completely unshackled from your origin.

However, the idea of essence is still there as a concept, it is the sum of your defining traits. Maybe it is more malleable now, but substance is your underlying base and your essence is the construction on top of it.

Causality

Causality is a fundamental concept in common sense and metaphysics exploring the connection between events. Common sense claims that causation does exist. I clap, it creates a sound, and the sound reverberates around the room. No sound is spontaneous, and neither has a clap ever not made a sound.

Hence, we can make the distinction between independent events and dependent events. The clap is the independent event and the sound it makes is the dependent event. Causality just might be the most important area of metaphysical inquiry because it led to the first conception of 'God' as the first cause, the beginning of everything.

Causality is interesting because if we give in to classifying events as independent and dependent, we reach a terrifying conclusion that all events happening around us are dependent. The clap is dependent because I had to exist, and for me to exist my parents had to exist and for them to exist my set of grand parents had to exist and so on. This leads to philosophers questioning the existence of freewill. If everything is happening one after another, do we have any control over where we are going and what happens to us?

Modality

Modality is a technical term talking about the categories of existence.

Modality is the categorization of events, statements, or propositions into different categories such as necessity, contingency, and impossibility. For example, Ibn Sina claims that there are only three types of beings. There are necessary beings, which in Ibn Sina's case is only one. Then there are contingent beings that pop in and out of existence so to speak, we live and we die, we are contingent beings, dependent on the necessary being for existence. Lastly, there are impossible beings, an absence of being, something like a unicorn, something that is logically impossible, like a table made up of liquid water.

Teleology

Last jargon to mention here is teleology. The Greek word telos means 'to end'. Teleo is always concerned with the purpose or what 'end' something has. In metaphysics, every philosopher has his or her own bias. Most are concerned with the cause of something, and others are concerned with the purpose of something. Most philosophers think about causation as the primary mode of thought, concerned with the 'how' of existence, teleology tries to answer the same questions with 'why'.

Teleology is one of the most impactful part of metaphysics on broader society. Because it does not matter if we view reality through the lens of realism or idealism. Instead, the more important question is why are we here? Teleology likes to answer this question about everything around us and is thus very anthropomorphic and religious coded in a sense.