By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
Wilfrid Sellars distinguishes helpfully between "the 'manifest image—'or our pretheoretical, ordinary conception of the world—and the 'scientific image—'or the world as science tells us it is" (so Lynch, True to Life: 75). But metaphysics, correctly understood, is concerned with neither—unless, of course, "scientific" is used in a very broad sense that includes metaphysics as well as science proper (as it is used, e.g., in Scholz's title, Metaphysik als strenge Wissenschaft, or in Heidegger's statement that "es gibt notwendig zwei Grundmöglichkeiten von Wissenschaft: Wissenschaften vom Seienden, ontische Wissenschaften und die Wissenschaft vom Sein, die ontologische Wissenschaft, die Philosophie" [Phänomenologie und Theologie: 14; italics in the text]).
Metaphysics in the proper sense is concerned, instead, with what may be called the "metaphysical image" of the world. This means that, although, like science, it is concerned intellectually with the structure of the world in itself, as distinct from its meaning for us, what concerns it is not the structure of the immediate reality given empirically, with which science is properly concerned, but the structure of the ultimate reality given existentially, with which religion and theology, in their ways, are also concerned, albeit existentially rather than intellectually.
18 November 2007
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