THE ANTI-METAPHYSICAL TRADITION IS OUTDATED

My own interest in physics originates from a very early interest in metaphysics; the present essay may be no more than a projection of my own case history into the history of science at large.

In my undergraduate days I used to resent the hostility toward metaphysics displayed by my physics teachers; my present view is in a sense an inversion of theirs. They derided all metaphysics as the physics of the past; I extol some metaphysics as the physics of the future. But I wish to be fair to their view, and perhaps the best means to arrive at a fair attitude to a doctrine is to try to see it in its historical perspective.

Francis Bacon’s anti-Aristotelian-metaphysics, which was the first fanfare of the modern positivists, was very valuable. In launching an attack on Aristotelian metaphysics, he overenthusiastically took it to be an attack on all metaphysics. This was an exaggeration, and a very understandable and effective one at a time when Aristotelian metaphysics reigned supreme. Then came the victory of Copernicanism and of the Galilean-Cartesian metaphysics. This development admittedly altered the situation. From then onward Bacon’s exaggerated idea might have been profitably cut down to size by studying the difference between Aristotle’s bad metaphysics and Descartes’s good metaphysics. Yet this is debatable, since at that time there was still a need to encourage experimentation rather than speculation. Moreover, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries metaphysics was closely linked with religion; and religion had to be banned from scientific discussions for very obvious social and political reasons. Since the early nineteenth century both of these factors have become negligible, but other factors have taken their place; fortunately for the positivist knight-errants, there was the task of slaying such awful metaphysical dragons as the Hegelians and the existentialists.

Unlike Aristotelianism, positivism has not been useless during its period of obsolescence. It is still fighting bad metaphysics, under the somewhat absurd guise of fighting metaphysics as such.

In addition to being an overzealous criticism of irrationalist metaphysics, positivism has also served the rationalist metaphysician. Metaphysics can easily degenerate into pseudo-science by providing a framework for ad hoc explanations instead of scientific ones. The Baconian- positivist attack on metaphysics as ad hoc or pseudo-scientific helped the good metaphysician by putting him on guard against irrational practices.

It is unfortunate that the merits of positivism are so often exaggerated, since positivism is conducive to ignorance. I have met physicists who know about only one metaphysician - Hegel - and only one detail concerning him - that he said when a doctrine of his turned out not to accord with facts “so much the worse for the facts.” Rarely has anyone paid more dearly for a silly joke.

It is not my purpose here to disprove positivism but I feel I have to stress that in this essay I am speaking of good metaphysics while intentionally ignoring bad metaphysics, after having acknowledged the partial justice of the positivist attack on it. Every field of human activity ought to be judged by its very best, and it is time to notice that examples of bad metaphysics do not show that all metaphysics is bad. One can show that all metaphysics is bad, but only after abandoning the ordinary or traditional meaning of the word ‘metaphysics.’ This word is used by Hegelians and by positivists to signify the theory of the cosmos as a whole, of the very mystery or essence of the universe. In his Tractatus Wittgenstein accepted Newton’s metaphysics as a framework for physics, but he did not call it ‘metaphysics’; he considered ‘the mystical’ alone to be the subject matter of metaphysics. The positivists, the Hegelians, and the mystics, rightly claim that the mystical is unexpressible.

This is a point which Russell rightly considered (in his Mysticism and Logic) trivially true. Metaphysics in the sense of a theory of the mystical is hence impossible. My own use of the word ‘metaphysics’ here is in its traditional and much narrower sense. Metaphysical doctrines are to be found, first and foremost, in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, especially in Book Alpha: all is water; atoms and the void; matter and form; etc. There are a variety of sets of first principles of physics. Do these belong to scientific physics? Are they entailed by scientific theories? Are they useful for scientific research? I think they do not belong to scientific physics (though in principle they might). Metaphysical ideas belong to scientific research as crucially important regulative ideas; and scientific physics belongs to the rational debate concerning metaphysical ideas. Some of the greatest single experiments in the history of modern physics are experiments related to metaphysics. I suggest that their relevance to metaphysics^contributes to their uncontested high status. And yet, I contend, the metaphysical theories related to these experiments were not parts of science. This raises the problem of what kind of relation between a given theory and observable facts renders that theory scientific.

III.

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Source: Agassi Joseph. Science in Flux. Springer,1975. — 559 p.. 1975

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