Metaphysics

I am a music snob–and, unfortunately, I don’t mean the well-informed, musically-literate snob that knows quality. I am more of the pretentious music snob that would never listen to pop music. It’s not totally my fault: I grew up in the angsty 90’s when the only respectable music genres were fringe styles like grunge or gangster rap. Needless to say, when iTunes first came out and I saw how it classified some of my favorite bands, I was mortified. I must have spent days inputting thecorrect genres. That’s when I first noticed a problem: where should I put the Public Enemy-Anthrax classic collaboration “Bring the Noise”? iTunes only allowed for one category, but different aspects of the song were endemic to the two different genres of rap and metal. Further, it was on both groups’ albums, so it was related to both the metal and the rap worlds.

When trying to explain what the discipline of metaphysics is, philosophers face a similar problem. They can never quite agree as to what the nature of the study is or what kinds of things metaphysicians get to claim as their own. Does metaphysics get to talk about whether free will is real or not? How about the mind? Is the metaphysician out to prove things exist or does she just give the best explanation for things and leave it at that? With all the variegated projects and people involved in metaphysics, it can be difficult to nail down exactly what of it is actually metaphysics and what of it is cross-genre. Why is it that music genres and philosophical disciplines can be so hard to agree on?

One possibility is that classification words like ‘discipline’ and ‘genre’ are ambiguous between criteria. In music, you could classify by the types of beats, the vocals, the musicians that made it, or even by the kind of radio station you might hear it on (which is a convenient way of veiling the racism behind how the Beastie Boys, but not The Roots, could ever be considered alternative). Something similar could be said for metaphysics. We might try to classify the different disciplines of philosophy by the questions they pose, in which case metaphysics is just another name for what we do when we seek to answer, “In what ways are things real?” Alternatively, we could classify by the object of the inquiry, in which case metaphysics could be another name for what we study when we look at things insofar as they are real. A third option is to classify based on methodology, in which case metaphysics might be what we do when we abstract the differences from all things and consider their existence, or ‘being,’ alone.

Another possibility might be that some categories overlap at places in ineluctable ways. R&B and Hip-Hop constantly have cross-over songs that overlap styles. In philosophy, epistemology is the study of knowledge, but what it is that we can know and how we know it depends on what is real and how we access that reality, i.e. metaphysics. Conversely, how we come to understand the reality of things will depend on how human knowledge works in the first place. How, then, can we seek to understand what level of reality knowledge is at when that all depends on how we know? Whatever the answer, it seems like we are doing both metaphysics and epistemology together, and not one or the other alone.

Notice, however, that this doesn’t mean our classifications are totally arbitrary. There would still be a correct answer as to whether, for example, philosophy of mind is a subset of metaphysics or not. This would only mean that we would have to be more precise about what we mean by metaphysics. If we mean, for example, “the study of being only insofar as it is being” then it excludes minds, which are being insofar as it is capable of thought. However, if we mean “the study of the different ways things are real” then since the mind has a unique way of existing, it should be included in metaphysics. Further, since categories can overlap, we should say the philosophy of mind is a part of metaphysics even if it is also a part of epistemology (though we may want to make a note of the overlap).

A final thing to note is that there is a way of categorizing things that is pragmatic only, and has no basis in the things we are categorizing. For example, I might classify Bone Thugs-n-Harmony under rap because, when I hit shuffle on a genre, that’s where I like to hear it. In the same way, I might classify philosophy of mind under metaphysics because all my metaphysician friends talk about it even if it isn’t metaphysics. If this is how we are using the classification term, then it seems like the classification is no more real than our arbitrary tastes. Some philosophers accuse metaphysicians of doing exactly that. They claim that there is no such thing as metaphysics really, only questions of how we use language. Metaphysics is just a group of guys that like to talk about particular words. To these philosophers it must be asked, “The question of how real a category is–what discipline of philosophy would you file that under?”