From Science to Metaphysics and Back Again: A Mutual Positive Feed-Back

Just starting from Scienza e fede we can see an important turn in Agazzi’s meta­physical reflection, which until that point, as we have said, had been essentially aimed at defending the possibility and legitimacy of metaphysics in the strict sense, i.e.

(a) «the science of “reality as such”, i.e. of the most universal features of reality» (Agazzi 1988a: 12);

(b) «the science of those dimensions of reality which overstep its empirically ascertainable level (or, to put it briefly, [...] the science of the “suprasensible”)» (Agazzi 1988a: 12).

While about the second aspect there are no substantial novelties,^{[161] [162] the focus put on the first aspect, until that point only discussed in passing, leads Agazzi to a partially different conception of the relationships between science and metaphysics, which pass from a state of mere “non belligerency” to a state of «mutual dynamism» (Agazzi 1988a: 22), as expressly stated by the title of one of the sections of Science and metaphysics. But this can be seen in almost all the further Agazzian writings, but particularly in Metafisica e razionalitd scientifico-tecnologica (2000), in the item Realismo of the Dizionario di scienza e fede (2002) and in Metaphysical and scientific realism (2002).}

Indeed, as Agazzi shows through both a brief overview of the history of philos­ophy and an analysis of our perception, «the individual can be “known” only within the framework of a universal model» (Agazzi 1988a: 14), regardless the fact that it is conceived in the sense of Plato’s Ideas, Aristotle’s forms, Kant’s cate­gories or modern psychology’s Gestalt.¹¹ Science has often forgotten this aspect, because it does not start from zero, but from ordinary knowledge, of which it rep­resents essentially a deepening and, so to speak, a “specialization” (cf.

First of all, the atoms are not given prior to the unit, but may be singled out by an analysis of the whole Gestalt, of which they appear as constituents. Secondly, this Gestalt may serve to organize other and different atoms, and in this sense it is universal. Thirdly, the atoms themselves may be “identified” because they have in turn a certain Gestalt (which enables us to say that they are the same atoms - the Platonic “recognizing” - when they are organized in different structures and units). In conclusion, there is no moment in which our knowledge can dispense with the universal, be it because we need the “unity of the multiplicity”, be it because we must be able to grasp “the permanent under the muta­ble” (Agazzi 1988a: 15-16).

This is the reason why in the past it was even believed that it is possible to deduce from some universal properties all the particular aspects of physical reality. The extraordinary intuition of Galileo has been precisely to understand that such a “deductive” method in the case of natural science does not work, This is why sometimes it is believed that science is in itself antimetaphysical: but this is noth­ing but a misunderstanding, since

the “affections” Galileo is speaking of are not at all Kantian “phenomena”, taken as “pure appearances”, but some particular “accidents” of natural “substances”. [...] Therefore, committing ourselves to study these “affections” does not mean renouncing to know the things of the physical world, but studying precisely their objective properties» (Agazzi 2000: 101).^[163]

Therefore, «if we take metaphysics in the first of its two basic meanings, [.] met­aphysics appears as the unrolling of the general conditions of intelligibility of real­ity, and in this sense it is unavoidable» (Agazzi 1988a: 21): as such, it is inextricably interlaced to science itself, even if very often only implicitly and unconsciously (cf.

the relationship between science and metaphysics is analogous to the relation between experiments and theories in science. Experiments presuppose a theory, since they are designed and performed by using the concepts, laws, methods of a certain theory, and with the view of answering “questions” asked within it. In this sense they “depend” on the theory. However, their outcome does not depend, and it inevitably introduces a modifica­tion in the theory. If an experiment is successful, it not only “confirms” or “corroborates” the theory, but actually enriches it, by bringing in an additional detail to the Gestalt of the domain of objects which the theory is about. If an experiment shows a “negative” result, the theory must be modified, its proposed Gestalt proves not to be fully adequate, and it may even happen that it has to be abandoned and replaced by another. [...].What theories are with regard to experiments and empirical data, metaphysical frameworks are with respect to scientific theories. They are Gestalten of a higher order, within which theories take shape: therefore theories “depend” on these more general criteria of intelligibility, but are not “deduced” from them and interact with them in a feed-back loop, which in any case produces modifications (of different importance) in the metaphysical background» (Agazzi 1988a: 22-23).^[165]

Therefore, not only science is not an enemy of metaphysics, as we have already seen, but now it appears even to be its best friend, if correctly understood, so that in Dizionario di scienza e fede Agazzi goes so far as to say that if we recover scientific realism, we also recovered the cultural condition needed to estab­lish metaphysical realism, since scientific realism can be recovered: by overtaking epis­temological dualism, by recognizing the role of intellectual intuition, by accepting the synthetic use of reason in the mediation of experience. These are the conditions needed to build a cognitive metaphysics, in the double sense of an investigation of reality as such and of a knowledge of the suprasensible. The differences from science are not eliminated, but are reduced to the fact that metaphysics assumes “the point of view of the whole” without any restriction» (Agazzi 2002a: 1188).

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