Analogy and the Disrepute of Metaphysics

ANALOGY AND THE DISREPUTE OF METAPHYSICS T HE INABILITY of metaphysicians to reach common and lasting agreement on any of their propositions is notorious. Furthermore, metaphysical philosophizing regularly produces statements which strike many as being strange or even meaningless. If the metaphysician's words are given the meanings they have in ordinary language, his statements may appear to be either internally inconsistent or to contradict contingently given matters of fact. Modern philosophy has responded to this situation in two ways. Descartes felt that all a metaphysician had to do was to find a foolproof way to distinguish the certain from the doubtful and then apply this method to our philosophic problems . His method was modeled on that of mathematics; more recently we have been advised that the guarantee of success is the construction of our metaphysics on the basis of logic, or of biology, or of phenomenology, etc. The other way, made classic by Hume and Kant, holds that there is no such thing as a sound method for metaphysics because it is by nature an enterprise undertaken only as the result of some mistake. One contemporary version of this approach has it that metaphysical statements presuppose confusion about the logic of terms in everyday language. This essay proposes a different kind of approach to metaphysics ' difficulties. Drawing out implications of a familiar doctrine which is itself metaphysical, the doctrine that being is not a generic concept, it will argue that paradoxical formulas and great problems in achieving common agreement are to be expected in metaphysics without its necessarily being an illegitimate pursuit and without there being a still undiscovered royal road to answers for its questions. In other words, it will be argued that metaphysics has difficulties unique among human 387 888 JOHN C. CAHALAN intellectual endeavors because it is by its nature uniquely difficult . Not all the reasons that could be put forward for this claim will be examined here. The one I will focus on is important both because it involves previously unseen consequences of a classic discovery about the logic of many metaphysical concepts and because it is relevant to the attempt to deal with philosophical problems linguistically. As metaphysical, the presuppositions of this account will be highly controversial if not thoroughly disreputable, and of necessity this will appear to the reader as a major weakness. But if the argument that there is no foolproof method to rid us of problems of the kind to which metaphysics gives rise is correct, then reliance on disputed assumptions must in fact be unavoidable. Actually, arguments have been offered many times in support of the assumptions made here; this essay will add nothing to them. What it hopes to contribute is an explanation of why arguments of precisely that kind have such difficulty winning common agreement, an explanation, however , which does not render these arguments null and void. But of what benefit can it be to learn that, included in metaphysics ' bag of tricks, are ways of accounting for its own peculiarities? Unless one shares its metaphysical assumptions, what could one learn from this study other than that metaphysicians are sometimes capable of cleverness, a point which is probably not in doubt. There is more to it than that. What is involved here is a choice between naive and non-naive approaches to these problems. Metaphysics is considered disreputable because of its embarrassing queerness and scandalous lack of agreement. But all attempts to rid us of these, whether of the Cartesian or the Humean-Kantian kinds, have generated as much controversy and paradox as they were trying to eliminate. So, a theory which can explain the existence of a type of problem that it can be subject to itself and which does not at the same time claim to be a way of avoiding that type of problem will have the advantage, unlike these other theories, of being consistent with the facts of our philosophical experience . That experience suggests that, whether we are pro- or ANALOGY AND THE DISREPUTE OF METAPHYSICS 389 anti-metaphysics, when we humans begin to philosophize, we are not going to avoid difficulties of the kind metaphysicians get into. A significant, though partial, reason for...