Metaphysics and Ultimate Questions

Abstract

Sure he that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and god-like reason To fust in us unused. (1) AT THE HEART of gravest crises our societies face today lies culture. And at heart of that culture one finds a growing mistrust among humans of their own humanity, of what means to be a human being, and a consequent loss of affirmation, joy, and creativity that being human should entail; so said Blessed John Paul II in his famed speech to General Assembly of UNESCO in Paris, on June 2, 1980 (cf. n. 13). (2) It may be recalled that in his first encyclical, Redemptor hominis (cf. n. 15), he had expressed concern about whether qua (as one says ens qua ens), in midst of progress of knowledge in so many fields, did indeed progress and become more conscious of dignity of his own humanity, or rather instead regress and become degraded in his own (3) Fides et ratio, concern, more specific still, was our present mistrust of powers of reason, which makes much contemporary philosophy abandon study of ultimate human Questions--the deep-seated distrust of reason which surfaced in most recent developments of much of philosophical research, to point that there is talk at times of 'the end of metaphysics' (n. 55; cf. 83, 84, 61). (4) Although John Paul seems to go even farther than they do, he does echo in that regard some of best philosophical minds of twentieth century. A clear instance, of course, was Husserl, for whom greatest historical phenomenon of is, in a striking phrase, the struggle of humanity to understand itself. his great book, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl also made point that factual sciences make a merely factual humanity. In our vital need, he adds, science has nothing to say to us. For it excludes in principle precisely questions which man, given over in our unhappy times to most portentous upheaval, finds most burning; questions of meaning or meaninglessness of whole of this human existence. Do not these universal and necessary for men, demand universal reflections and answers based on rational insight? final analysis they concern man as a free, self-determining Positivism dropped questions vaguely termed ultimate and highest, so-called metaphysical questions, which, taken broadly, surpass world understood as universe of mere facts and which all claim a higher dignity than questions of fact. Thus in a manner of speaking, positivism decapitates philosophy. For philosophy implied a meaningful order of being and thus of problems of being. Accordingly, metaphysics, science of ultimate and highest questions (der Metaphysik, derWissenschaft von den hochsten und letzten Fragen), was honored as queen of sciences; its spirit decided on ultimate meaning (letzten Sinn) of knowledge supplied by other sciences. The enigma of enigmas is indeed the deepest essential interrelation between reason and being in general. (5) No less apposite, though perhaps less known, are following remarks by Bergson in his Huxley Lecture, delivered at University of Birmingham, May 29, 1911 (I quote from original English): are we? What are we doing here? Whence do we come and whither do we go? These, seems, are essential and vital questions of supreme interest, which first present themselves to philosopher and which are, or should be, very cause of philosophy's existence. But not at all. ... Either I am much deceived or future belongs to a philosophy which will give back to these problems their rightful place--the first--which will face them in themselves and for themselves, directly. (6) One should also recall here Whitehead's denunciation of what he very aptly called fallacy of misplaced concreteness, which is what we commit when we mistake our abstractions for concrete realities. …