Grondin Jean - Introduction to metaphysics: from Parmenides to Levinas

INTRODUCTION TO METAPHYSICS

JEAN GRONDIN

TRANSLATED BY LUKAS SODERSTROM

INTRODUCTION TO METAPHYSICS

From Parmenides to Levinas

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Introduction la mtaphysique 2004 by Les Presses de lUniversit de Montral

Published under arrangement with Les Presses de lUniversit de Montral, Qubec, Canada

English translation 2012 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-52723-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Grondin, Jean.

[Introduction la mtaphysique. English]

Introduction to metaphysics : from Parmenides to Levinas / Jean Grondin ; translated by Lukas Soderstrom.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p.).

ISBN 978-0-231-14845-0 (cloth : alk. paper)ISBN 978-0-231-14844-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-52723-1 (ebook)

1. MetaphysicsHistory. I. Title.

BD112.G7613 2012

110dc22

2011012094

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To all my students

There is a science which investigates Being as Being.

ARISTOTLE, METAPHYSICS, IV, 1

Thus, all philosophy is like a tree, of which Metaphysics is the root, Physics the trunk, and all the other sciences the branches that grow out of this trunk, which are reduced to three principal, namely, Medicine, Mechanics, and Ethics.

REN DESCARTES, PREFACE TO THE PRINCIPLES OF PHILOSOPHY

Metaphysics is without a doubt the most difficult of all things into which man has insight.

But so far no metaphysics has ever been written.

IMMANUEL KANT, INQUIRY CONCERNING THE DISTINCTNESS OF THE PRINCIPLES OF NATURAL THEOLOGY AND MORALITY

A people without any metaphysics is like a temple without a Holy of Holies.

G. W. F. HEGEL, PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION OF THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC

Metaphysics belongs to human nature. It is neither a division of academic philosophy nor a field of arbitrary notions. Metaphysics is the fundamental event of our existence. It is our existence itself.

MARTIN HEIDEGGER, WHAT IS METAPHYSICS?

CONTENTS

This book hopes to introduce the reader to the intellectual discipline called metaphysics. If quotation marks are called for, it is because metaphysics is not a science that is taught today in any significant way. Even though some once considered it to be the queen of the sciences, there are no faculties of metaphysics like there are, say, departments of physics, mathematics, or theology. In fact, there never were any such faculties or departments. Nowadays, and for quite some time now, metaphysics is more often than not used as a foil for so-called postmetaphysical thought as though being nonmetaphysical were some kind of philosophical virtue. Indeed, most major trends in contemporary philosophyphenomenology, analytic philosophy, and deconstructiongenerally agree on the urgency of overcoming metaphysics. But what is thereby overcome? Is it always known? And, are these new postmetaphysical trends even thinkable without the insights of their metaphysical forbearers?

The author of this book belongs to a generation that was not schooled in metaphysics and was taught instead that it represented an illusory, inherently repressive, and even tyrannical form of thought from which one had to be freed. This was proclaimed, and quite autocratically at that, in the name of the philosophies of Heidegger and Kant. But as any impartial reader will not fail to notice, both Kant and Heideggers philosophical projects were not only profoundly influenced by metaphysics, they were metaphysical to the core. To be sure, Kant faulted traditional metaphysics for laying claim to a form of knowledge that would go beyond experience, but he himself laid the groundwork of a metaphysics of nature and a metaphysics of morals, which culminated in a proof of the existence of God and of the immortality of the soul. Quite a feat for a gravedigger of metaphysics. As for Heidegger, he stigmatized metaphysics because it aimed at a rational, theological and totalizing account of Being. But he was himself seeking a new understanding of Being (for which he unearthed indicative names, like Ereignis or Seyn), obviously set forth reasons and arguments for doing so, and did so in the hope of preparing a new experience of the divine in a modern world which has been abandoned by the gods. As with Kant, all his basic terms (Being, essence, truth, existence, ground, foundation, identity) were borrowed from the metaphysical tradition, to which his major interlocutors (Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schelling, and Nietzsche) belonged. Indeed, one does not need an advanced degree to know that Kants ultimate goal was to make metaphysics possible and Heideggers was to reawaken the question of Being, which is undoubtedly one the most important themes of all metaphysics. Why was this overlooked in the rush to overcome metaphysics?

Moreover, when did metaphysics ever exert its purported hegemony? Certainly not during Antiquity. Since the term metaphysics was not coined until the twelfth century, the Ancients can hardly be called metaphysicians. Now the thinking of Being and its reasons we call metaphysics did indeed first appear during Greek Antiquity, and it may be considered one of the greatest achievements of classical thought. But it only appeared in highly elliptical and difficult texts of authors like Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle, who ceaselessly emphasized the fact they were leaving behind the well-beaten paths of mortal discourse when they spoke of Being. And their new way of thinking always and immediately raised the same problem: What was the real object of their new discourse? What did they mean by Being, the Ideas, or Being as Being? So even as early as Antiquity any explanation of the world oriented by the question of Being has been met with puzzlement. Thus the immobility of Parmenides Being was countered by the evidence of movement. And Aristotle famously stigmatized the Platonic theory of ideas for its useless metaphysics (in which he saw a vain duplication of our world with little or no practical use), despite having himself put forth the idea of an enigmatic first philosophy, which would later come to be identified with metaphysics. In fact, metaphysical thought was of so little importance during Antiquity that neither the post-Aristotelian Hellenistic schools (Stoicism, Epicureanism, Skepticism) nor the Romans really prolonged its first halting steps in any meaningful fashion (at least until Neo-Platonism).

What about the Middle Ages? The image of a Middle Ages completely beholden to metaphysics is an unfortunate myth. Since the medieval world encountered metaphysical thought rather belatedly and, since it strongly relied on a revelation which came from another source than feeble human reason, metaphysics was never dominant or uncontested. In fact, the average reader will be hard-pressed to name even a single medieval author who presented his own thought as metaphysics.