2.1 No Fear of the Big Questions
Now there are people who say: such big questions — “What is the human being?”, “What is truth?”, “What is the good?” — are obsolete. The age of metaphysics is over. Since Kant, we have known that such questions cannot be answered.1
This objection rests on a misunderstanding. The British philosopher Jonathan Lowe (1950—2014) put it aptly:2 whoever claims that metaphysical questions are unanswerable is already making a metaphysical claim. Whoever says that there is no reality beyond what natural science can measure is making a statement about reality — and one that cannot itself be tested by natural science. Lowe writes: “For every rational thinker, metaphysics is unavoidable.”3
Fleeing the big questions, then, is no solution. There is no thinking that does not already presuppose certain assumptions about reality. The only question is whether one is aware of these assumptions — and whether one is prepared to examine them.
The objection that “after Kant, metaphysics has been overcome” likewise rests on a confusion. As for the so-called post-metaphysical age, it is, as Robert Spaemann remarks, usually a misunderstanding: “A post-metaphysical age would be an epoch in which human beings no longer had any words at their disposal to reach an understanding about life and about the role and reach of natural-scientific theories within the total context of life.”4
But precisely the opposite is the case: people keep asking. They cannot do otherwise. The question “What is the human being?” does not fall silent merely because some philosophers declare it unanswerable. Spaemann puts it sharply: “Skepticism is always a way of withdrawing from the controversy by renouncing truth. Philosophy is the opposite of this resignation.”5
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Fußnoten
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Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781), especially the Transcendental Dialectic. ↩
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Lowe, The Four-Category Ontology (2006), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. ↩
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Lowe, The Possibility of Metaphysics (1998), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998, pp. 4f. ↩
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Spaemann, Philosophische Essays (Philosophical Essays, 2012), Stuttgart: Reclam, 2012, p. 279. German original: „Ein postmetaphysisches Zeitalter wäre eine Epoche, in der die Menschen über keine Worte mehr verfügen, um sich über Leben und über die Rolle und Reichweite naturwissenschaftlicher Theorien im Gesamtkontext des Lebens zu verständigen.” ↩
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Spaemann, Philosophische Essays (Philosophical Essays, 1994), Stuttgart: Reclam, 1994, p. 118. German original: „Skepsis ist je eine Weise, sich der Kontroverse zu entziehen durch Verzicht auf Wahrheit. Philosophie ist das Gegenteil dieser Resignation.” ↩