The Concreteness of Metaphysics

Costantino Esposito - Inside the thought that creates reality

Reflections on Massimo Cacciari's latest book, amidst empathetic bonds and fierce disagreements on how to "open" the world in the space of our questioning.

It may sound like a paradox, but it is considered to be the most concrete "thing" in human experience. Common sense‌ — ‌often mistreated as superficial and homogenized but actually a primary resource for our being in the world‌ — ‌would perhaps prefer the empirical immediacy of perceiving, feeling, and touching to the abstractness of thinking.

It's more concrete to touch the world sensitively, to feel one's own body and that of others, to perceive in the soul the changing flow of things as they pass by, than to seek the theoretical structures and universal concepts that determine our knowledge of the world.

Provided, that is, that such structures and concepts actually exist and aren't merely - as many reductionist projects suggest — a mental construction born with the illusory, almost desperate intention of giving logical and meaningful order to reality. That is, to order the disorder and regulate the chaos.

This view of things derives somewhat from the anti-metaphysical attitude that erupted at the end of the nineteenth century (think Nietzsche). This attitude has continued as a trend, accompanying twentieth-century philosophy up to contemporary neuroscience, which is committed to tracing the irreducible character of human thought to brain activations in response to environmental stimuli.

But now, in the age of realized nihilism-the age in which an ultimate meaning of things turns out to be impossible, and consequently the search for something that does not really exist ends up appearing vain or even useless-what was born of militant philosophical criticism seems to have become a standard position, quietly accepted as the necessary "spirit" of our time.

It is an age, ours, in which the "concrete" seems to coincide more and more with the "conditioned," both biologically and socio-politically. Philosophical thought would have no choice but to mourn the irreversible loss of a unified sense of the world, that is, the impossibility of a logos that holds entities together, now replaced by the mere connective function of the web.

But philosophy is a stubborn experience of thinking that surprisingly "resists" and, through all its crises, revives the stakes of human thinking. This philosophical obstinacy has the emblematic name of "metaphysics." Seldom in philosophy has there been a name more appropriate and ambiguous, more shared and divisive than this.

For those who wish to unravel the marvelous and enigmatic layering of metaphysical practices in Western thought, from Greek origins to medieval flourishes, from modern systems to contemporary crises, the multivoiced volume entitled History of Metaphysics, edited by the pitied Enrico Berti for Carocci in 2019, remains invaluable.

But for a deeper understanding of the problems of metaphysics, indeed of metaphysics itself as a constitutive problem of human reason, it is certainly worth picking up today the recently published “Metafisica concreta” by Massimo Cacciari for Adelphi.

This book has so far attracted pathetic adhesions and fierce dissent, which is already significant given the question it raises.

For my part, I think that the essential point lies not so much in the agreement or disagreement with the interpretive solutions of its author, nor even in the linguistic style of his arguments, but above all in the reopening that he tries to do of the fundamental questions of the "metaphysical" dossier, to verify precisely the possible or impossible "concreteness" of his questions for the experience that we have of ourselves and of the world.

And this, is to the limit, even if one chooses a philosophical practice other than that of Cacciari.

This requires a real reversal of the usual meaning of "metaphysics": it does not refer to an identity structure or an unchanging essence but rather to the continuous, permanent, I would say, "historical" dynamics of the constitution of things that come into being in space and time. Metaphysics does not allude so much to a transcendence that simply transcends the empirical and the sensible (metaphysics only as the beyond of physics) but to a transcendence that inhabits and sustains the level of immanence from within and plays itself out in it (metaphysics as the through-law of physics).

The "beyond" is interesting precisely because it is embodied within.

A point of great interest and truly transversal in the many problems addressed in this dossier of concrete metaphysics is the fact that the real as such is always and only constituted in the perceptive, intentional, constructive openness of our thinking.

This does not mean in any way reducing the objectivity of the world to subjective conditions, but always returning to the co-participation of being and our understanding of being: both are originally given precisely in their relation (manifesting itself as true only to thought), thanks to which the difference that exists between them is also shown (remaining other, irreducible to thought).

According to Cacciari, the sciences themselves—from physics to biology to psychiatry—require this very concrete but often hidden or presupposed metaphysical foundation to know each of their relational objects.

A foundation that does not "stand" fixed in relation to what it finds, but which innervates guides, and sustains it in its empirical becoming. Here metaphysics becomes necessary to epistemology itself.

Finally, metaphysics is "concrete" not so much because it applies or bends in the empirical field, but because, much more than a philosophical discipline, it belongs to the very attitude of the thinking being in the world. This is why Kant, in a letter to Marcus Herz in 1772, proposed to develop a "metaphysics of metaphysics," not to mitigate its problems, but to show that it constitutes the *natural disposition* of the human being, or, as Heidegger would say in 1929, the way in which our being "happens.

That is, we have the nature of questioning beings, capable of "opening up" the world and understanding the truth of things in the space of our own questioning.

That questioning which, as analytic philosophers would say, constantly asks, "What is there? and what is what there is?" Or, as continental philosophers would add, "What is the meaning of being? And how do we know its truth?" These are precisely the questions that are most concrete and, therefore, most irreducible in our thinking.
Unrevised translation by the author. PDF Article.