1357. On Metaphysics

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On Metaphysics

When Whitehead treats the question of "symbolic reference," he argues that such reference requires a "common ground," that is, "there must be components in experience which are directly recognized as identical in each of the pure perceptive modes" (PR, 255). Assuming, as I believe one can and must, that metaphysics is properly the analytic of perception in the pure mode of causal efficacy, while science analyzes perception in the pure mode of presentational immediacy (or, in Bergsonian terms, that metaphysics is based on "intuition," while science is based on "intellect"), one can say that there is also a "common ground" between metaphysics and science. But this is a subtler and more adequate way to approach a definition of metaphysics vis-à-vis science than seems to be implied by Hartshorne's distinction between "nonempirical" and "empirical"; or "general principles" and "specific facts." It is, indeed, the kind of approach that he himself sets out when he says that the necessary is "an element or aspect of the sensible, but not as such sensible; for it is experienced only in universal union with the sensible, from which it can be distinguished only by operations of thought. Metaphysical statements are not descriptions of particular things, but without them no description of anything is complete or fully explicit" ("The Structure of Metaphysics," p. 229). 

There are several related reflections. One has to do with how, exactly, we are to understand the relation between "whole" and "part," or "all" and "some." It would appear that by "whole" we properly mean more than simply all the parts, in that we also intend the new unity of the parts realized at a higher level than that of any of the parts itself. So too, "all" is distinguished from "some," not only quantitatively but qualitatively, so that, for example, to know all things differs from knowing only some things in that it alone can know anything with complete adequacy. All of which is to try to suggest that the metaphysical differs from the scientific along more than one line of possible difference: not only is it more comprehensive in scope, but it is also more fundamental in depth. (Could this be why Coreth speaks of it as both the "fundamental" and the "total" science?) 

Another reflection pertains to the fact that the "common ground" between science and metaphysics is in "world," as distinct from "self," on the one side, and "God," on the other. Both self and God are strictly transscientific, or transempirical realities, whereas world is both scientific or empirical and transscientific or transempirical. (Could the reason for this have anything to do with the fact that self and God are alike individuals, whereas world, as such, is not an individual but a collection of individuals?) As such, world may he described both metaphysical and scientifically, both concretely and abstractly, both on the basis of analogy and on the basis of the study of behavior.