The Philosophy of Everything 2e — Part II: On Metaphysics

Once I had a way of checking a claim before I leaned on it, the natural question came next. What was actually there?

This was the second thing I had to figure out. What was the world made of, underneath the explanations laid over it. Was somebody running it. Why did things change. Why did anything hold still. Were my choices actually mine, or was the choosing being done somewhere I could not see. Was there a God. And what happened to a person when they died.

Philosophers have a long word for this work too. They call it metaphysics. The word scares most people, because it sounds like making things up. It does not have to mean that. The right kind of metaphysics is not more speculation piled on the speculation already there. It is the slow work of taking the pictures of reality that have been handed to you. You ask of each one, patiently, what part of it can be checked and what part cannot. Then you ask how to live honestly with the bit that cannot. Most questions about what is there sit just past where the lab can reach. One mistake is to fill the gap in with whatever story your tradition gave you. Another is to throw the question away because the lab cannot answer it. There is a third way, which is to keep the question, look very hard at what you can see from where you are standing, and reason carefully about the rest.

This turns out to be more useful than it sounds. The universe is the same machinery at every size. What looks enormous and far away, the kind of thing you would usually need a telescope to study, is also at work, in smaller form, right around us. In the body. In the weather. In how a fire burns. A surprising amount of the work of understanding can be done from where you are sitting, with the eyes and the time you already have.

Knowing what is actually there is the second step towards freedom. The first step was clearing the lens, which meant knowing how to know. The second is using the cleared lens to look at the room you are in. The room turns out to be stranger than what they told you, and simpler.