Explaining metaphysics to the nation -- I wish he would explain his explanation. -- Byron

The real drama in metaphysics remains where it has always been, in balancing the rage for order with delight in near chaotic variety. Order prevails from time to time, in the form of theories about some underlying unity, only to break down when unruly aspects of things disrupt our schemes of the world. What seemed a fine drama can even end as farce. Metaphysicians need therefore to combine their traditional high seriousness with a sense of irony and a capacity for self-satire.

In this spirit I offer one more scheme, if we may call it that. For even as it defends a particular unity-in-variety, it celebrates the variety of unities. Just as there are many faces of existence, there are many ways of unifying them. None represents the way things are, some ultimate visage with respect to which the rest are but masks; for there is no such ultimate. Yet this tolerant pluralism is conjoined with ideas often deemed incompatible with it, including a realist notion of objective truth, plus the idea that there is one particular domain of such truth that determines all else, values and meaning not excluded.

This seemingly paradoxical conjunction is but one of several to come, including above all the conjunction of a materialist unification with much that is generally supposed to be incompatible with it. Thus on one level the book endorses physicalist materialism, the thesis roughly that everything whatever is some collection of entities of the kind that mathematical physics is about, and that all truth is determined at bottom by mathematical-physical truth. Yet on another level the book repudiates virtually everything traditionally associated with such physicalism, including the idea that everything is nothing but a physical thing. Not everything real can be brought under some physical or other objective description, and physically irreducible talk is far from automatically false or meaningless. Hence we need not disparage subjective consciousness, or what it is like to be the persons we are, experiencing time and death as we do, and conscience and mystery. Nor need we belittle emotions and secondary qualities; the former can correspond with the facts, and the latter, suitably construed, are among the important ways things are.

Indeed the basic nature of reality is not physical in the first place, if only because there is no such thing as the nature of reality. There is even a sense in which value is prior to fact, physical fact included, and a sense in which we may objectively condemn a descriptive world-view if its moral implications are unacceptable. Such reordering of priorities runs counter not only to the usual materialisms but to much modern philosophy. For according to the modern mind, we ought first to establish a satisfactory world-view, then read off its moral implications, if any; we should attend first to neutral fact, then to values, lest we commit wishful thinking. Within materialism this attitude is part of the recurring Democritean slogan, "Only atoms and the void exist; therefore our values are mere conventions." Or as a leading ethicist would have it, "Materialistic . . . philosophers deny that the objective world of matter in motion has any place for moral goods. . . . Good and evil . . . are rather [our] internal and variable reactions to the ways in which [we] are stimulated by the world" [Gewirth].

By contrast we see in Chapter 6 that the purely objective, descriptive facts determine which of our value judgments are correct, first principles included. True, no ought can be derived from any is, or be reduced to or defined by it; or so I assume, if only for the sake of argument. Even so, the world determines one and only one distribution of truth and falsity over our value judgments, whether or not we could ever know just what that distribution is, and whatever our subjective responses to the stimuli might be. Thanks to this determinacy of valuation, the facts are not neutral but laden with value, objectively, whatever may be our interpretations of or projections onto them. And if all fact is determined by physical fact, as physicalist materialism contends, then the objective world of matter in motion is likewise laden with value.

In these and other ways, then, do the chapters ahead reject traditional materialist theses. Yet they also accept three principles characteristic of physicalist materialism: (i) only physical entities exist; (ii) there can be no difference between things without some physical difference between them; and (iii) all truth whatever, whether in the sciences or beyond, is determined by truths at the level of physics. Principles (i)-(iii), together with a possibly implied realism as regards truth, are the distinctive minimal theses of any physicalism properly so-called. Possibly they are also maximal, in the sense that a physicalism that claims more -- universal physical reducibility, for instance -- is false.

The minimal physicalist theses do not all appear until Chapter 4, and even there they are accepted mainly for the sake of argument, in order to explain just what physicalism is and to explore how far it might nonreductively account for all the aspects of existence. Gradually, in subsequent chapters, our confidence in the minimal theses will grow, as we learn how they are compatible after all with so much that physicalism traditionally is supposed to contradict. Few things if any are only physical entities, yet only physical entities exist. What precisely this seeming paradox comes to and how we can get away with asserting it are first explained in §4.5 and developed further in Chapters 5-8. What lies ahead is an extended exercise in having our cake and eating it too -- an enviable position always, which is why compatibilism is so attractive when the evidence is not totally against it.

A quarter-century has gone by since Wilfrid Sellars first urged the problem of how the scientific and the manifest images of human-being-in-the-world are related, and J. J. C. Smart in effect weighed in on the side of the scientific with his sweeping materialist vision of things [Sellars; Smart]. Meanwhile, physicalism has undergone what amounts to a revolution, especially in the last decade. Philosophers in growing numbers have begun to realize that physicalism need not be reductive -- that nonphysical properties need not be identical with physical properties, and that terms from disciplines beyond physics need not be definable by terms from physics. A few philosophers have gone on to supply the needed positive account of a nonreductive relation between physical truth and other truth. The needed relation is determination, also called "supervenience" (or a variety of it), which we encounter first in §1.1 and in more detail in §4.3.

These somewhat technical developments deserve to be much more widely known. Not only do they render Smart's and many other materialisms nearly obsolete; they suggest that Sellars' two-image problem is badly conceived in ways that would not otherwise occur to his readers. Thus one of my aims is to make a number of technical ideas accessible to a wider audience. Another is to do so in a way that combines the ideas in a large and largely original unifying scheme. Attempting both at once requires more pages than does addressing an audience only of specialists. So yes, the book could be shorter, but then it would be understood by many fewer. And yes, those interested only or mainly in, say, how best to formulate the determination relation could do without the rest. But the result would be a monograph, not a philosophy.

Furthermore, the insight that physicalism can be nonreductive, and that its key relation is determination, suggests new approaches to a variety of topics well beyond the philosophy of mind, where for the most part nonreductive physicalism has so far been explored. Here too I claim originality, in applying the determination relation to problems about truth, objectivity of values, metaphor, pluralism, subjectivity, secondary qualities, the so-called absurdity of existence, and more. Yet the novelty is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, stock objections to objectivism and physicalism are blocked. On the other, because the whole is hard to classify, it risks appearing unintelligible to those who see everything in traditional terms. Where they see either-or, I tend to see both-and, and to stress a compatibilism that must seem paradoxical to those whose categories allow too few distinctions and therefore no middle ground. The resulting philosophy, despite adhering to the minimal physicalist principles, is not happily called physicalism, in view of its inclusion of so much generally supposed to be anathema to the physicalist. A far happier name, surely, would be `post-physicalism'.

Even theism can be accommodated within a nonreductive physicalism, if we may believe the final chapter. Not that the minimal physicalist theses imply some version of theism (so that if theism is absurd, as some think, then the final chapter represents a reduction to absurdity of what has gone before). Nor is the point merely that physicalism is logically consistent with theism, though there are those who will resist even this much (as I do myself) when the theism is of a certain form). Instead, I sketch a theory or synthesis of physicalism and theism within which each enriches the other while correcting the other's occasional extremes. What emerges is the possibility -- admittedly speculative -- of a new natural theology, objective and rational, in which an austere naturalism provides a framework within whose confines one could interpret and support the central theistic claims without having to identify God with any physical entity, or indeed with any entity, hence with any mere God of the philosophers. In a sense we shall be entertaining the possibility that a theologian could do in the twentieth century roughly what Aquinas did in the thirteenth, but without either the Aristotelianism or the Thomism.

The only metaphysical or ontological theses theologians would need to assume are the physicalist's minimal ones. Theism thus construed would be not a matter of what there objectively is but an equally objective matter of how we ought to experience and talk about what there is -- equally objective thanks to the earlier argued determinacy of valuation. What theologians would need to add to the physicalist's metaphysics is a normative argument to the effect that one ought to see and talk as theists do. Such an argument doubtless would be complex and controversial, yet no less objective in principle for all that.

I do not know whether theologians could finally construct and successfully defend some such normative argument, and indeed I raise a number of possibly insuperable objections to it. But at least it would be compatible with physicalism, and even though theologians would still have work to do, it would be work in value theory, or axiology, rather than in metaphysics, or ontology. They would not need to multiply entities beyond what there objectively is in order to defend theism. Thus freed of worries on the score of what there is, they could concentrate instead on persuading us what objectively there ought to be.

These Delphic remarks about theism demand explanation, of course. The intervening chapters supply some of it, cumulatively, though that is not at all their main purpose. This is true even of Chapter 3, which reaches the Aristotelian-Thomistic conclusion that, suitably defined, the First Cause does exist and indeed is eternal, metaphysically necessary, and self-existent. But even though the conclusion sounds thus traditionally theistic, the assumptions and inferences are not. Principles of Sufficient Reason, for instance, are repudiated earlier, as are the usual notions of necessary being. Furthermore, the First Cause as defined in §3.3 proves identical with the whole of spacetime plus its contents -- that is, with the Universe. Pantheists and monists might therefore rejoice, but not theists. Missing, according to them, would be God the loving Creator, utterly transcendent, who yet acts and is revealed in history. No mere philosopher's abstraction, much less the Universe, could ever be the living God of faith. Or so we are told.

A certain concept of truth underlies much of what I've said and yet may seem incompatible with it. The concept is a realist one, according to which truth depends on how things are in the world, not on human or other consciousness or understanding, and not on what is verifiable, or warrantedly assertible, even in the long run by ideal inquirers. According to a realist concept, truth may be said to be "invariant," or objective, roughly in the sense that the truth-value of a true sentence does not vary with the time or place in which it is uttered, or with the persons who utter it, or with their evidence, or even with the totality of the (humanly) accessible evidence. Realist truth is not perspectival but truth period.

How then can objective truths possibly express, let alone determine, perspectival or subjective matters such as, say, what it is like to be a bat? Let us assume, if only for the sake of argument, that what it is like cannot be expressed in any objective idiom, and probably not in any human language at all, even though there is a fact of the matter as to what it is like to be a bat. This "irreducibility of experience" would obtain anywhere an experience involves the subject's point of view. What it is like to be the persons we are, experiencing time and death as we do, plus intentionality, valuing, and more, would elude objective description precisely because such description omits the subjective point of view. But even granting this irreducibility of experience, objective truths nevertheless determine these objectively inexpressible facts about what it is like to be the subject. The subjective point of view is irreducible and sometimes inexpressible, yet even such perspectival matters are determined by nonperspectival truth, as we see in §5.4. Thanks to the relation of determination, a realist notion of objective truth need filter neither us nor our experience out of existence.

Nor is a realist notion of truth incompatible with the insight that understanding often enjoys a kind of priority over objective truth, or that what Heidegger calls "truth as disclosure" is more basic, on occasion, than propositional truth. Things appear to us, or are disclosed, under certain of their aspects rather than others, in virtue partly of our prior choices of vocabulary and metaphor. Thus we bear some responsibility for the ways things become part of our world or worlds; for us, things never have their being or their properties by themselves but only through the combined activity of our understanding and some undisclosed ground beyond. At the same time, realism is right that propositional truth depends on bow things objectively are. In a sense explained in Chapter 7, we are the measure of all things, yet reality takes our measure.

Realist concepts of truth have also seemed incompatible with various theories of metaphor and with certain notions of metaphorical truth. That they are not is the lesson of §§5.2-5.3, even though metaphorical truth will prove to be determined by literal truth. Nor does an austere realism force truth-seekers to abstain from vagueness or from the novel, poetic, sometimes tortured usage that so often precedes new ways of seeing things. Reduction to the literal, let alone to aseptic precision, is nowhere envisaged. Yet there will prove to be a sense in which the poetry that so often precedes even physics is itself also grounded in physics.

Despite all these reassuring compatibilities, there remains a grinning skeleton in the realist's closet. For there is still the question of what exactly is the relation between words and the world, in virtue of which a true sentence is true. Realists have been far less successful in saying what the relation is than in criticizing their opponents. Classical relations of correspondence, obviously flawed, have long since yielded to Tarskian notions of satisfaction, or to notions of causal or other objective reference. These in turn have fared little better, according to many, in view of Quine's arguments against determinate reference, Putnam's model-theoretic argument against the very idea of the intended interpretation of our words, and so on. The relation between words and the world in virtue of which a true sentence is true appears as elusive as ever, especially if, as everyone seems to have supposed, it must involve some relation of objective reference between terms and the world. The realist account in §1.1 overcomes these difficulties by explaining how truth is determined by the world even if reference is not, and even if no sense can be made of the idea of the intended interpretation. This relation of truth-determination by the world then enables us to define a suitable relation of correspondence.

Some philosophers, perhaps especially some philosophers of science, worry that a realist notion of truth must be so transcendent as to have no implications for the actual practice of inquirers. But we shall see that it has crucial implications for practice, even if there should happen to be no criteria for truth or even for probable truth. There would remain prerequisites for truth -- logically necessary conditions for the truth of a belief. At least seven such prerequisites may be derived, and they apply no matter what the domain of discourse. Thus to the extent that we are interested in truth -- meaning truth period -- there is a unity of method common to all the domains, religion and values included. We are not free to departmentalize by claiming that reason applies only so far, leaving the rest to the passions or to faith. That way lies bureaucratization of the mind.

I have been introducing some of the seemingly paradoxical conjunctions asserted in the chapters ahead: monism yet pluralism; objectivity yet subjectivity; value determined by fact yet irreducible to the facts; determinate truth yet possibly indeterminate reference; physicalism yet possibly theism; and more. Even if some of these conclusions should some day prove untenable, the arguments for them contain ideas and methods that philosophers of any persuasion might use. Metaphysicians of any stripe, not just physicalists, might use the idea of nonreductive determination to good effect if challenged to explain the relation between their unifying existents and the aspects of life we are supposed to account for. Philosophers could also profit from a distinction so far unmentioned: between a philosophy that is completely comprehensive or unifying and one that is monopolizing, totalizing, or Procrustean. And many could usefully emphasize, against their opponents, that the priority so often claimed by metaphysicians on behalf of certain existents is, like all such primacy, always priority only in a respect; and that partly as a consequence, many a metaphysical dispute is really a value dispute in disguise.

So I shall not be very perturbed if many of my conclusions end some day as just one more moth circling the flame. That, after all, is the fate of every philosophy. And beyond all particular doctrines and methods, I am animated anyway by the conviction that metaphysics is much more closely related to our everyday lives than is often realized. If here and there the chapters ahead help to clarify this closeness, I shall be content.

Life's good things are possible only if we do or become certain things. We have long since begun to learn this art of the possible when philosophy challenges us to learn it still better, through disciplined reflection on how best to attain as many of our ends as realistically we can. Typically, such reflection reveals what most of us already sense: the ends often conflict and must be modified, or replaced by others, in a lifelong pursuit of some sort of balance, however provisional. And instead of lurching from crisis to crisis, we are enabled by such reflection to anticipate. We look beyond the horizon of immediate troubles; we unfold our maps of the larger world; strategy informs tactics; and we perceive our individual fate tied to the fate of others and to the lay of the land. The balance we pursue proves sensitive after all to what we think about how our little worlds fit into the larger one, and to what we think of its ways, its meanings, its explanations and origin. In the long run, and for practical reasons, we cannot afford indifference to the larger questions, even if we totally lack the gift of wonder. The faces of existence seem to frown upon it.