For the sake of clarity, I'll include a short preface here that was not present in the original paper: Norris Clarke is an interesting philosopher who basically "modernizes" Thomist philosophy, and he clearly explicates the delicate system in a way that addresses the philosophical problems of modernity (nihilism, namely), and utilizes various existentialist themes. Point is, he's not an idiot, and while admittedly, this essay was written before I had even finished the book (so please excuse whatever specifics I got wrong, I'm too lazy to do corrections), I hold a lot of respect for Clarke. I have also generally become more sympathetic to ideas of divinity (in a pluralistic way, at least), so I urge you to give his view a chance.
For W. Norris Clarke, philosophy is the reflective and systematic elucidation of the human experience, that is to say, when done right, it “really” describes some aspect of our lives, and intelligibility “and sets it in a vision of the whole;” for Clarke, a philosopher does not think of “new things” solely for the sake of it, but rather they extract a concept that is “presented” from the world. Particularly, in his book The One and the Many, he presents a “creative retrieval” of Thomistic metaphysics, arguing, for one, that metaphysics is a necessary component to philosophy in doing justice to our experience. Secondly, that the modernist approach to philosophy has undermined metaphysics’ importance, and presents a danger to the future of our just representation of experience and our lives. This essay will propose and defend Clarke’s argument for the necessity of metaphysics against reductive positions, while also seeing how it contrasts something like Heidegger’s phenomenological approach to fundamental ontology.
We will begin by critically looking at Clarke’s understanding of metaphysics, and situate his conception within philosophy generally. Clarke begins by proposing the idea that all intellectual inquiry, including and specifically in our case, metaphysics, is rooted in the human desire to know; this goes back to the Aristotelian notion that “man is a rational animal,” as Clarke similarly recognizes our existential drive to connect with what he calls “the fullness of being as true.” Clarke is arguing, then, that not only is our inquiring “true,” in that what we are looking for is something to be looked for (which may also inadvertently respond to the paradox of learning as present in Plato’s Meno), but that all inquiry and understanding can be understood as a component of the whole. Metaphysics can then be understood as having the “horizon of… nothing less than the totality of being;” metaphysics concerns itself with elucidating the intelligibility of all entities, making it universally applicable to any real being. What is true in metaphysics will, by extension, be true analogously for any other real being. By “analogy,” we mean either “analogy of extrinsic attribution,” or “analogy of proportionality.” With the former, this is what makes it possible for us to say that two separate things can share certain qualities in distinct but essentially related and similar ways. For example, a food can be “healthy,” while a person can also be “healthy;” the person and the food are not totally the same in their “being-healthy,” as the food is not healthy in the sense it maintained a diet and exercised regularly, just like the person isn’t healthy in the sense that if we eat them they will benefit us. Nonetheless, there is still an essence of “health” of which we have access to and can intelligize across different concepts. Analogy by proportionality is what makes it possible for us to speak of metaphysics; certain concepts, like knowledge, can be considered analogous in the sense that they manifest in the world by certain levels of proportionality, but sharing a common essence. Clarke writes that “a worm knows; a human knows; God knows.” Knowing has an analogous property here as it captures both the real act of “knowing” common to the beings, but “how much” knowing is going on is not the same. Metaphysics requires us to use these analogous concepts in order to be able to inclusively account for being non-particularly.
One contemporary critique of metaphysics asserts that metaphysics has no distinct subject matter; even Clarke would admit that when we think about metaphysics and the nature of being as such, we aren’t talking about any one thing, but rather all things’ fact of existence itself. Many modernist thinkers, such as David Hume and empiricism, similarly reject metaphysics precisely because it “lies beyond any empirical testing or confirmation either by science or phenomenology.” Because being as such cannot be distinctly observed, there is no distinct object which we can begin to consider, therefore, as we can only encounter specific objects, we can’t speak of terms like “being,” “substance,” or “matter” except by negating the empirically “real” thing of experience. Thus, empirically, metaphysics has no object of study. What this critique fails to see, however, is that metaphysics is necessarily suited, and is valid in doing so, to take on this wider perspective of the universe. Clarke explains that while metaphysics has no distinct object of study, it does have “a distinctive point of view from which it studies [all being].” Metaphysical study implies that all fields of study already participate in this “whole” of being, of which metaphysics sets its sights. Thus, metaphysical inquiry is not a negation of real things, but rather an inclusive dive into the richness of being. Further, with this realization, we ought even be more critical and cautious to any metaphysical step we take, as the articulation of metaphysics must be able to account for any instance of being: if experience or sense perception is “more real” than metaphysics, its intelligibility must then “elude” metaphysics in some sense. This, evidently, is not the case, because how could there be anything (being it the “elusive object” itself, or some elusive part of that whole object) if it did not have some governing sense to its being?
It should now be clear that metaphysics can be considered as a valid pursuit with a directed objective toward illumining real being. But it is not yet certain that answering metaphysics, that is, truly articulating the intelligibility of being and situating it in the whole, is even possible; how are we to say that we even have the means of finally considering the totality of being as limited creatures ourselves? How can we, limited creatures only part of this greater whole, come to consider this whole itself? This is similar to the early critique of metaphysics in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time: early Heidegger’s prioritization of ontology through phenomenology was in part due to what he believed to be how metaphysics drove philosophy to “lose touch” with being as such. Simply put, early Heidegger criticizes metaphysics for losing touch with being, favoring and existential-phenomenological approach beginning at human experience. Early Heidegger argues that metaphysics are “top down,” and must presuppose the external world, for instance, by “offloading” it to some other metaphysical concept. Heidegger thus thinks that instead we must work from the bottom up, via our experience with things or entities ontologically, and thereby philosophy can assert reality from the get-go (whereas Descartes, for example, needs God).
Clarke’s response to this notion, (that metaphysics cannot take up its task as we are only limited parts of a whole, and thus cannot even begin to consider the whole and its totality, is that this critique is fundamentally misguided in its conception of metaphysics. Firstly, for Clarke, metaphysics has a personal element being grounded in our intelligibility of being that lets us begin “outward” from ourselves, and we are not limited to a top-down perspective. This is why Clarke is clear about our need as metaphysicians to gain awareness of the meaning of being through existential experiences, such as the loss of a loved one or love itself. Clarke describes how metaphysics can take a “descriptive” or “explanatory” approach; descriptive metaphysics takes from the whole of being and designates the common attributes or categories through its discovery. The latter specifically is what necessitates metaphysical questions as important, since metaphysics governs the “why” of all things, and the “what.” We need to reckon with this explanatory side of metaphysics precisely to avoid Heidegger’s concern; it is not that Clarke’s notion of God as the ultimate source of being is “presupposed,” but rather it is specifically that God is necessitated from this descriptive side, which alone would leave us wondering why things are the way that they are, but without sufficient reason for their being. Metaphysics needs to have this explanatory element because of the two laws which guide intelligibility: the principle of non-contradiction, that something cannot be both itself and not itself at the same time in the same way, and also the principle of sufficient reason, which means that any thing needs an explanation for its being-a-thing. Something cannot “be” if it contradicts itself, or if it has no explanation.
Secondly, Clarke writes that “by the very fact that we can raise the question about being as a whole, the human person is not just a part of the universe but a whole, within the whole.” Clarke is arguing that our ability to ask a metaphysical question in the first place implies a real receptivity to the world in our intelligibility (by asking “why is there something rather than nothing?” we are relating ourselves existentially to that “something”). Clarke’s notion that we are a “whole within the whole” is to say that we ourselves exist and present ourselves as a “whole.” He writes explicitly that “a biological organism is an actually undivided whole as long as it is alive.” We do not need to specify every individual part of someone to refer to them because their personhood is already complete. Therefore, our personhood innately gives us a relatability to the unity of being as a whole ourselves. Clarke writes that “every person endowed with intelligence is thus, at least implicitly, a point of view of the whole;” while our view of the whole cannot be “total,” it can still be “whole” in its own right as being concerned with all things, which thus makes the “object” of metaphysical inquiry possible and accessible to us.
Clarke is not unjustified in taking up the task of metaphysics, despite Heidegger’s concern of “forgetting the meaning of being” with metaphysics. Though Heidegger seems to think that we ought to start philosophy in ontology, concerning being as the foundation of our experience, yet Clarke essentially demonstrates that it is specifically and solely metaphysics which can take up the task of considering being as such, given that it can set situate both our intelligibility (which would ground our phenomenology through its descriptive lens) of entities and the whole (explaining out of necessity the “why” there is a whole at all) simultaneously. This is why Clarke argues that “being itself is for intelligence.” The intelligibility that we partake in transcribing our experience and knowledge into words is gathered from the things which reveal themselves to us. Further, being itself is a transcendental and real word, having real significance alongside its non-precise nature, in the sense that we are truly referring to an actual mode of existence in the whole of the universe when we say “being;” metaphysics is not taking an alienated position from the “real things” like Heidegger thinks, but rather it is precisely the intelligibility of the world that can only be accounted for properly by metaphysics. For Clarke, via intelligibility, metaphysics grounds the ontological unity that Heidegger wants to explain with fundamental ontology.
Metaphysics must not be ignored, lest we continue to lose touch with the meaning of being. If metaphysics is thrown to the side, we risk missing out on the fullness fundamental to our intelligibility, and the inexhaustible meaningfulness that being has to offer. Metaphysics is not a cold and merely systematic philosophical “play” that alienates itself from real beings, in fact, metaphysics is personally tied to the metaphysician through being’s intelligibility. The whole itself cannot be just “presupposed,” but rather must be explained to do justice to our experience. Without metaphysics, we lose touch with the meaning of being, and limit ourselves to reductionist positions; what’s more, by ignoring metaphysics, we ignore that there is a “reason” for all intelligibility itself, in the sense that the sciences by themselves would need “sufficient reason” to be real and meaningful inquiries themselves. Without the principle of sufficient reason necessitating the world to be real, the sciences then, from an empiricist position, would only be able to assume that the cohesion between the fields are a coincidence. With metaphysics, it is possible to have a truly meaningful relationship with the world.
Works cited
Clarke, W. Norris. The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001.
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