The Life of the Mind Read Free

know, have fallen into disrepute. If this were merely a matter of modern positivist and neo-positivist assaults, we perhaps need not be concerned. Carnap's statement that metaphysics should be regarded as poetry certainly goes counter to the claims usually made by metaphysicians; but these, like Carnap's own evaluation, may be based on an underestimation of poetry. Heidegger, whom Carnap singled out for attack, retorted by stating that philosophy and poetry were indeed closely related; they were not identical but sprang from the same source—which is thinking. And Aristotle, whom so far no one has accused of writing "mere" poetry, was of the same opinion: poetry and philosophy somehow belong together. Wittgenstein's famous aphorism "What we cannot speak of we must be silent about," which argues on the other side, would, if taken seriously, apply not only to what lies beyond sense experience but even more to objects of sensation. Nothing we see or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given to the senses. Hegel was right when he pointed out that "the This of sense ... cannot be reached by language" 8 Was it not precisely the discovery of a discrepancy between words, the medium in which we think, and the world of appearances, the medium in which we live, that led to philosophy and metaphysics in the first place? Except that in the beginning, it was thinking, in the form either of
logos
or of
noesis,
that was held to reach truth or true Being, while by the end the emphasis had shifted to what is given to perception and to the implements by which we can extend and sharpen our bodily senses. It seems only natural that the former will discriminate against appearances and the latter against thought.
    Our difficulties with metaphysical questions are caused not so much by those to whom they are "meaningless" anyhow as by the party under attack. For just as the crisis in theology reached its climax when theologians, as distinguished from the old crowd of non-believers, began to talk about the "God is dead" proposition, so the crisis in philosophy and metaphysics came into the open when the philosophers themselves began to declare the end of philosophy and metaphysics. By now this is an old story. (The attraction of Husserl's phenomenology sprang from the anti-historical and anti-metaphysical implications of the slogan "
Zu den Sachen selbst
"; and Heidegger, who "seemingly remained on the metaphysical track," actually also aimed at "overcoming metaphysics," as he has repeatedly proclaimed since 1930. 9 )
    It was not Nietzsche but Hegel who first declared that the "sentiment underlying religion in the modern age [is] the sentiment: God is dead." 10 Sixty years ago, the Encyclopaedia Britannica felt quite safe in treating "metaphysics" as philosophy "under its most discredited name," 11 and if we wish to trace this disrepute further back, we encounter Kant most prominently among the detractors, not the Kant of the
Critique of Pure Reason,
whom Moses Mendelssohn called the "all-destroyer," the
alles Zermalmer,
but Kant in his pre-critical writings, where he quite freely admits that "it was [his] fate to fall in love with metaphysics" but also speaks of its "bottomless abyss," its "slippery ground," its Utopian 'land of milk and honey" (
Schlaraffenland
) where the "Dreamers of reason" dwell as though in an "airship," so that "there exists no folly which could not be brought to agree with a groundless wisdom." 12 All that needs to be said today on this subject has been admirably said by Richard McKeon: In the long and complicated history of thought, this "awesome science" has never produced "general conviction concerning [its] function ... nor indeed much consensus of opinion concerning its subject matter." 13 In view of this history of detraction, it is rather surprising that the very word "metaphysics" has been able to survive at all. One almost suspects that Kant was right when as a very old man, after having