Paul Weiss’s Metaphysics of Human Experience: A Review Discussion

PAUL WEISS'S METAPHYSICS OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE A Review Discussion * A metaphysics that never quits a high level of abstraction is as irrelevant and arbitrary as one that, for a specific domain, is merely an assemblage of trivial generalizations and wooden applications of its categoreal scheme. Paul Weiss's You, I and the Others is a challenge to contemporary philosophers precisely because it successfully runs these metaphysical risk~. The result is an account of human existence of uncommon density and scope, providing a formidable argument for the integrity and status of human individuals and social realities under certain ultimate conditions.1 The method Weiss employs in You, I and the Others is simply brilliant. In successive chapters Weiss analyzes the use of the personal pronouns ' you ', ' me ', ' I ', ' we ', and ' they ' and ' others ' to establish that each human existence is a highly complex, yet privately unified actuality expressing itself in a public domain. Consciousness is not deified as something inscrutable though Weiss recognizes that 'I' and 'me' have unique referents maximally intelligible to their sustaining self alone. Unpacking these terms requires more of the philosopher than phenomenological inspection and simple analysis of the neutral medium of language. The exclusive pursuit of these methods amounts to either a disguised idealism, collapsing the individual into a social Geist, or a thinlyveiled naturalism plying its trade as behaviorism or social Darwinism until neurology comes of age. What is required beyond these contemporary philosophical methods is a statement of content, a description of language's users and referents, of human actualities interacting with ultimate conditions , such as only a speculative and realistic metaphysics can supply. Only by making a metaphysical turn, if Weiss is right, can philosophy retain its integrity and be of genuine service to other disciplines. Indeed, You, I and the Others offers exciting possibilities for a vast and fruitful reconstitution of theoretical and practical disciplines from political economy and jurisprudence to psychology and social sciences. But the importance of Weiss's work for philosophers is its demonstration that the real end of *Paul Weiss: You, I and the Others (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1980), Pp. 416. $22.50. 1 To those acquainted with Weiss's metaphysics in Beyond All Appearances and First Considerations, these conditions are the familiar five finalities: Being, Substance , Possibility, Existence, and Unity. These finalities form the backdrop for Weiss's metaphysics of human experience in You, I and the Others. All quoted passages are taken from You, I and the Others, followed by the page number. .599 600 DANIEL DAHLSTROM the analysis of human language and experience is speculative metaphysics. The following critical study of Weiss's metaphysics of human experience is in two parts. The first part is a chapter-by-chapter synopsis of You, I and the Others. In the second part I raise a number of difficulties with Weiss's effort. Despite these reservations, however, Weiss's work make~ a convincing case for the thesis that there is a wisdom concerning human affairs to which metaphysics alone is privy. I I. "You, Public and Sustained." As in the expressions "I love you" and " I'm going to kill you," ' you ' signifies what is able to be present to others as the terminus of relations or actions they originate. Whether others approach you or not, your ' you ' is confrontable, i.e., present for them or able to be present to them. Yet since you alone terminate relations and actions originated by another , you are more than simply what is confrontable. The you that I love (or hate) is more than the mouth or laughter I confront, even though" you remain inviolable, penetrable only to a degree." (6) Much like any thing or animal, you have dense privacy. But unlike any thing or animal, your privacy is particularly elusive because you have an interiority independently functioning back of all public expression. To develop this notion of a public yet privately sustained you, Weiss contrasts (a) language and discourse, and (b) accountability and responsibility . (a) Whereas language is a communally defined set of signs and rules of their combination, discourse is primarily about something, in which things are spoken of. Discourse transforms language from communally...