Some Misfortunes of Metaphysics

What is it about?

The philosophy of the Enlightenment in France and that which drew inspiration from it during the revolutionary period adopted an anti-metaphysical stance in that, following Locke, they denied that we could know the nature of things and reality. What we know is only the way that things affect our minds, in short, our ideas. However, this way of viewing things immediately raises a question: if we only know our ideas, how do we know if they correspond to the things that cause them, and even how do we know that these things exist, given that some of our ideas do not correspond to anything, for example hallucinations. This brings the philosophers of that era back to a metaphysical question, that of idealism: how do we know that there is something else beyond our ideas, that the external world exists? As we can see, criticism of metaphysics itself implies metaphysics. It is therefore not surprising that the authors of this period did not ultimately condemn metaphysics as such, but rather bad metaphysics (to use Condillac's expression), which was that of philosophers before Locke. Since good metaphysics is centered on our ideas, other philosophers preferred to rename it: Destutt de Tracy spoke of ideology and Charles Bonnet of psychology. As for Maine de Biran, who closed this period, after following Tracy and then Bonnet, he returned to a more classical position.

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Photo by Jalal Ajmal on Unsplash

Photo by Jalal Ajmal on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The debate on metaphysics that stirred up this era highlights two things. First, the question of what ultimately exists, what reality is made of, inevitably arises at some point in philosophical reflection. Second, contrary to what we might spontaneously think, we have no proof that the external world exists, even if we cannot help but believe it does. This marks a limit to our cognitive abilities.