What's It All About?

“What’s it all about, Alfie?”

  

  That was the opening lyric of a popular song from the mid-1960s, written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David and sung by Dionne Warwick.

   Only recently, many years later, did I realize that it also qualified as a metaphysical question.

   Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and fundamental properties of being. What is existence? and What is it comprised of? would be two basic questions to start out with in a metaphysical inquiry.

   Epistemology is another branch of philosophy. It explores the sources, nature, limits, and criteria of knowledge. How can we know for sure what we know or at least discover a semblance of certainty? This would be an example of an epistemological question.

   In many inquiries, past and present, these two branches have been closely aligned.

    A third branch that comes into play is logic—the theory of correct inference. In making any examination, there is an established criterion of valid reasoning and demonstration that is utilized. Simply stating your opinion doesn’t cut the mustard, at least not in philosophy.

       So, as we were saying, What’s it all about?

    At some moment in the early history of humankind, perhaps huddled around a fire or while reposing in a cave, that question was asked. And, just as important, was the follow-up: Where did we come from?

  

From those basic wonderings arose creation stories—told orally, handed from one generation to the next, expanded upon, possibly revised to fit changing circumstances, later written down, depicted in art, and with the emergence of large and like-minded societies sanctified as the foundation of that group’s belief system or religion.

    Such was the case of the Greeks who in the sixth century B.C.E. inhabited the geography of what is now modern Greece, but who had settlements along the western coast of Asia Minor as well. As a seafaring people, they ranged far and wide around the rim of the Mediterranean Sea. Their religion included an array of gods and goddesses as well as a host of minor deities, ranging from Zeus who ruled the world from his home on Mount Olympus to Pan, the half-man, half-goat who roamed the countryside. These supernatural beings and their actions, told through stories and holy rituals, explained the world these ancient Greeks inhabited, their lives, and how and why events took place. Nowadays, we call this belief system ‘Greek mythology.’

    A break in that pattern occurred in Ionia, a seaport located on the coast of Asia Minor. It was here that the initial metaphysical explorations began.

   “These first Western philosophers are known collectively as the pre-Socratic philosophers, a loose chronological term applied to the Greek philosophers who lived before Socrates,” wrote Brooke Noel Moore and Kenneth Bruder in their book Philosophy: The Power of Ideas.

  “Most (of them) left little or nothing of their own writings, so scholars have had to reconstruct their views from what contemporaneous and later writers said about them,” the authors explained, but noted that their impact would turn out to be enormous.

    “During this period in Western history, a decisive change in perspective came about that ultimately made possible a deep understanding of the natural world,” the authors pointed out, adding that this perspective would eventually lead for good or ill to our present-day advanced civilization.

     “It was not inevitable that this change would occur,” Moore and Bruder added.

    What prompted it was the result of two developments that occurred at this particular time and place with this society. One was “the discovery by the Greeks of mathematics and the other is the invention by the Greeks of philosophy, specifically metaphysics.”

    Thales, who lived in Ionia from 625-547 B.C.E., got the metaphysical ball rolling. He thought that water was the fundamental ingredient out of which everything else is made. When you consider how much water is contained in a person’s physical body and in other living creatures, the life-giving quality of rain, and all of that water in the nearby Mediterranean Sea, his theory was hardly far-fetched.

    In postulating that theory and backing it up with reasoning and natural observation, he helped “introduce a non-mythological way of looking at the world.” In the seeming complexity of existence, with all of its variety of appearances, Thales was searching for a simple, underlying substance, or fundamental reality. What is existence? What is it comprised of? How did it operate (cause and effect)? 

    Religious belief with its creation stories did not go away. Many Greeks went on accepting the premise that their gods were in charge of natural forces, like Zeus influencing the weather, but a new avenue of intellectual exploration and speculation had arrived.

    The ball did not stop rolling. Other thinkers in that region followed Thales example. Among their metaphysical concepts were that existence or the physical world consisted of:    

     --infinitely divisible particles, with the universe caused by mind (nous) acting on matter;

    --air as the primary element;

    --imperceptible, indestructible, indivisible, eternal, and uncreated atoms;

    -- basic particles that change their positions and thus change the appearance of things. Of these particles there are four: earth, air, fire and water. The cause of the changes that take place in them, creating different appearances, are the forces of love and strife;

    --reality that is a permanent, unchanging, indivisible and undifferentiated being and that change and motion are illusions of the senses.

    While those inquiries were influential and moved knowledge forward, none matched the impact of three philosophers who resided in Athens—Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

   Socrates, the first one to come on the scene, lived from 470 B.C.E. until his execution in 399 B.C.E. He had the good fortune (as far as being remembered posthumously) of having Plato as one of his students. Plato (c. 428-347 B.C.E.) produced a couple dozen written works (known as dialogues) with his teacher serving as a main participant in all but one of them. These dialogues sought to discover the essential nature of such things as knowledge, justice, beauty, goodness, and traits of good character. They also discussed the ideal state, the nature of right and wrong, what laws should be contained in a good constitution, and the soul in relationship to the physical body.

    The method of discovery that Socrates used was to start with a tentative proposition and then ask a series of questions, testing out the validity of each ensuing answer. The outcome was that Socrates, along with the other person taking part in the dialogue, by answering each question and testing out its merits or logic, either arrived at the desired knowledge or had a deeper awareness of the limits of knowledge. This pedagogical technique came to be known as the Socratic or dialectic method.   It’s still in use today, particularly in the teaching of law.  

     Plato, while conveying what Socrates taught, also used the dialogues to put forth his own ideas. A main concept, detailed in several of his compositions, is his (metaphysical) Theory of Forms.  According to this Theory, wrote Moore and Bruder, “…what is truly real is not the objects we encounter in sensory experience (the physical world we’re part of) but rather Forms, and these can only be grasped intellectually.”

     By way of an example, we see circular objects in nature but never a “perfect” circle. Plato called these physical objects “things.” A stone might be round and so it is a “thing” that has the property of circularity.

    Another example would be the aspect (or Form) of beauty.  We might look at a flower in a garden or a painting in a museum and describe each as “beautiful.” Neither is alike, yet they offer a pleasing sight. According to Plato, what they have in common is the Form of beauty.

     But, as the authors pointed out, Plato is not suggesting that Forms are human concepts of what is perfect. Rather, he believed that the Forms of different things such as circles and beauty exist apart from humans. “They are ageless and eternal, unmoving and indivisible,” the authors explained.  

      To Plato, the Forms are the true reality and what we see or experience or feel in the physical world are a reflection of that reality.

   Since, according to Plato, only Forms are perfect, this realm—understandable only through the intellect and through the study of philosophy--is far superior to the physical world we live in. In the famous “Parable of the Cave,” found in The Republic, he suggests that we are deceived by the shadows of reality, accepting as real what our senses of the physical world seem to indicate, and acting accordingly. Only by understanding the Forms, this actual reality, can we obtain sufficient knowledge of existence.

   Plato also indicated that there existed a hierarchy, with some Forms like truth and beauty of a higher order that other Forms such as that for a chair. Goodness (or the Good) stood as the supreme one; the ultimate source of existence and essence.

    “Individual things are real only insofar as they partake of or exemplify this ultimate Form,” they explained. “They are less ‘real’ the less they partake of the Good.”

    In explaining all of this, Moore and Bruder pointed out that, “Plato was aware that there is a sense in which the objects we see and touch are real. Even appearances are real appearances. But Plato’s position is that the objects we see and touch have a lesser reality because they can only approximate their Form and thus are always to some extent flawed. Any particular beautiful thing will always be deficient in beauty compared with the Form beauty.         

     What Plato did with this Theory and its various aspects was “introduce into Western thought a two-realm concept—the physical world that we are aware of with our senses and the realm of Forms understandable through the intellect.

     The first, Plato contended, consists of “flawed and lesser entities and (is) a source of error, illusion, and ignorance,” while the latter is “eternal, fixed, and perfect and the source of all reality and of all true knowledge.”

     All of this would be quaint history, except that many parts of Plato’s writings—including his view on the division between the physical body and the soul—would be incorporated by the early Christian leaders and cemented into place by the writings of St. Augustine.

      It was St. Augustine who “provided Platonic philosophical justification for the Christian belief in a separate, immaterial reality known as the transcendent God,” noted Moore and Bruder, adding that “Augustine found philosophical justification for Christianity in the metaphysics of Plato, as reinterpreted by the Neoplatonist Plotinus who took the concept of the Good and changed it to god or the One.

    “For Plotinus, god is above and beyond everything else—utterly transcendent—and that god can be apprehended only through a coming together of the soul and god in a mystical experience,” the authors explained. “This mystical ‘touching’ of god (Plotinus believed), this moment in which we have the ‘vision’, is the highest moment of life.”

    “Augustine accepted the Platonic view that there are two realms, an intelligible realm where truth itself dwells, and this sensible world which we perceive by sight and touch,” the authors wrote. “Like Plato before him, St. Augustine thought that the capacity of the human mind to grasp eternal truths implied the existence of something infinite and eternal apart from the world of sensible objects, an essence that in some sense represented the source or ground of all reality and of all truth. This ultimate ground and highest being Augustine identified with God rather than with Platonic Forms.”

    A major difference is that, unlike Plato or Plotinus, Augustine’s believed in a personal God who was involved in human affairs.

     This Platonic view seems to have also influenced the Christian concept of life after death. If we take the notion that mind and body are a single, combined entity (the soul being God’s breath into the earthly body, giving it life), and that death is the end of life, then a physical resurrection of our earthly body, as written about in the Bible, would constitute eternal life.

     Physical resurrection and its connection to eternal life is certainly still part of Christian doctrine, but the popular view that’s emerged for many people is that our soul (which includes human consciousness) departs the body at the moment of death for eternal life. The underlying belief is that the soul (our spiritual being) is separate from the physical body—an example of Platonic dualism. This view of body and soul as separate entities has a similarity to the Greek cosmology of that time period, namely of an Underworld, ruled by the god Hades, where the souls of the dead go.

     It was Plato’s view, expressed in his dialogues, that our soul (mind) was immortal because it had an affinity for the realm of Forms and sought to escape the imperfect body that was part of the world of Things. He postulated that we know Forms through a remembrance of the soul's past lives. Here, of course, is a reference to a belief in reincarnation; one of the aspects of Plato that was not incorporated into the Christian belief.

    It’s easy to see how Plato’s assertion that an eternal truth or reality, above and beyond our physical world of senses, dovetailed nicely with the emerging philosophy of the Christian church that would be erected upon the gospels detailing Jesus’ life and ministry and the interpretation of his message and the meaning of his life, death and resurrection as contained in Paul’s various letters. Of course there was judicious editing by St. Augustine and other early Christian theologians of what fit into that doctrine and what didn’t and what would be incorporated and what would be discarded.

   This separation of body and mind, of physical being and soul, of sensory appearances and an underlying reality—this two-realm concept--has profoundly impacted, and still influences Western thought.

    Aristotle was a student of Plato’s. In the finest tradition of that relationship, he found fault with his teacher, in particular his Theory of Forms and its practicality. He thought them to be metaphorical and therefore meaningless. Instead, he thought that any knowledge or understanding of existence came from careful examination of the physical world around us and what the evidence tells us.

   It was Aristotle, by the way, who coined the word metaphysics which he called “first philosophy”.

   As to the question of What is it to be?, Aristotle contended that “to be is to be a particular thing” and that “each thing is a combination of matter and form,” adding that “you need both form and matter to have a thing, and, with the exception of god, neither form nor matter is ever found in isolation from the other.”

   Because things do change and can become something new, the ensuing question is “What produces a change?”

    Moore and Bruder noted that “in Aristotle’s opinion each change must be directed toward some end, so just four basic questions can be asked of anything:

    --What is the thing? It’s Formal Cause.

    --What is it made of? It’s Material Cause.

    --What made it? It’s Efficient Cause.

    --What purpose does it serve? It’s Final Cause.

      

     Of more historical importance was his approach or methodology. “Aristotle emphasized the importance of direct observation of nature and believed that you must obtain factual data before you can begin to theorize,” the authors pointed out. “He also maintained that knowledge of things requires descriptions, classification, and causal explanation.”

    This approach would prove to be the harbinger of what became modern scientific examination.

    Many centuries later, long after his death in 322 B.C.E., when Western Europe was emerging from its Dark Ages, Aristotle’s works were re-discovered. Christian theology, after a tug-of-war, shifted from its Platonic influence to one that incorporated the writings of his famous student.

   Helping incorporate Aristotle’s multitude of observations and propositions, as well as his empirical approach and his overarching philosophy into Christianity, was St. Thomas Aquinas. The latter, who embraced Aristotelian philosophy, made it compatible to the prevailing Christian theology and to a belief in God and spiritual truths through revelation and scripture, but also helped whet the appetite for more knowledge and understanding of the physical world that was coming to the forefront at that time in Western Europe.

   “Some fifteen centuries after his death, Aristotle was considered as the definitive authority on all subjects outside religion,” wrote Moore and Bruder.

     Since he had a wide repertoire of subjects he had dealt with during his long life, he wielded a lot of authority for quite a long time. While the seeds planted by Aristotle would eventually result in the harvest of modern science and technological advancements, his role as the gatekeeper of “truth” was possibly a hindrance, at first,  as far as scientific progress was concerned. “For science to go anywhere,” noted the authors, “scientists (or philosophers for that matter or even journalists) cannot assume that something is so solely because some authority says that it so.”

    With that in mind, we return to that question asked in the Burt Bacharach-Hal David song: “What’s it all about, Alfie?”

   The reply was “love” coupled with the qualifier “that without true love we just exist.”

     True love? Water? Perfect Forms? Matter and Form? Immortal Souls? Physical Matter? From the time of Thales to the present, we ask this question and others, and seek the answers and some measure of certainty that they are correct. Then and now, they have been framed in religious contexts, scientific investigations, and metaphysical speculations.  We might accept the answers, but the ball keeps rolling. We keep asking and wondering.

  Maybe when all is said and done, the curiosity to ask and the courage to seek an answer are who we are and what this world, for us, is all about.