Of Reality by Gianni Vattimo

Author:Gianni Vattimo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI036000, Philosophy/Hermeneutics, PHI013000, Philosophy/Metaphysics
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

IV

APPENDIX

9

METAPHYSICS AND VIOLENCE

A Question of Method

If contemporary philosophy wants to continue its work as philosophy, that is, if it wants to be something more than merely essay writing or the historiography of the thought that has come before it and to avoid being reduced to a purely auxiliary discipline of the positive sciences (as epistemology, methodology, or logic), it must recognize a preliminary problem that is posed by the radical critique of metaphysics. The adjective “radical” is emphasized because only this sort of critique of metaphysics truly constitutes an unavoidable preliminary problem for every philosophical discourse aware of its responsibility. Those forms of the critique of metaphysics that, more or less explicitly, restrict themselves to considering it just one philosophical point of view among others—a school or current in thinking that for some philosophically argued reason one ought to abandon today—should not be considered radical. For example, the widespread scientism of twentieth-century thought takes it as more or less evident that one must no longer do metaphysics but rather epistemology, method, logic, or even just the analysis of language. This total “transfer of duties” from traditional philosophy to a scientistic philosophy that can no longer distinguish itself from science (whether as purely auxiliary thought or as the positive scientific approach to everything belonging to a particular domain of philosophy, namely, the human sciences) can be contrasted with a defense of metaphysics as the “science of spirit,” as the place where one elaborates those self-descriptions in which conscience may achieve the elaboration of its own fundamental conflicts (Dieter Henrich), in which it may achieve what is ultimately a renewed theory of self-knowledge, such as the one clearly defined by Kant as particular to modern metaphysics.1 This “transfer of duties” not only brings with it the reconsideration of the metaphysics of self-knowledge as its unavoidable shadow and correlate, but also carries an obvious metaphysical residue that remains unconsumed to the degree that, as seen in positivism, it simply transfers the locus of truth from traditional metaphysics to the natural or human sciences, or that it simply recovers metaphysics as “semantic-linguistic” ontology in the sense exemplified by Donald Davidson.2 Even in this case the critique of metaphysics, classically understood, does not become radical because—as happens in many areas of neoempirical thought, even within a Popperian idea of metaphysics—its detachment from the metaphysics of the past nonetheless occurs through an explicit terminological continuity that may even express a conceptual continuity. In question here is a philosophical theory of the most general and “constitutive” features of the world of experience, even if they are not thought linguistically but objectively. The observations regarding the limited radicality of the critique of positivistic metaphysics can even be extended to the various forms of “reductionist naturalism” (as Dieter Henrich has called it, using a Nietzschean expression),3 to the various “schools of suspicion.” These schools consider metaphysical propositions, all of the “primary self-interpretations” of humanity and of Being (once again, Henrich’s expression), as fictions that are brought back and dissolve in reference to the explication of the conditions that determined their formation.

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