Imagine you suddenly find yourself in the control room of a vast
technological apparatus, sometime in the future, where you are told
that science has satisfied all the needs of all living humans.
Furthermore, you learn, the next generation of the species will not
be produced in the usual way, but instead by this machine, provided
only that somebody push a little red button. The catch: you have to
give a reason for pushing it. You hesitate: what do you say? Our
own world is more like this scenario than we at first may be
inclined to admit, not least in the fact that, mutatis mutandis, we
seem to be struggling to come up with a good answer. The problem,
says Remi Brague, is fundamentally a metaphysical one. Now, mention
of 'metaphysics' in decent society these days is likely to elicit a
smile or an unimpressed shrug. If there is a shelf with that label
on it in your typical bookstore you are as likely to find guides to
crystals, chakras, or hemp care there as you are treatises by
Aristotle, Aquinas, or Kant. And, in spite of the ongoing revival
of academic interest in metaphysics, it remains a rather specialist
domain, a marginal sub-discipline in departments of philosophy, be
they analytical or continental in cast. If you should take it too
seriously, you'll lose your bearings in the real world, and you'll
go adrift in some ethereal sea of dreams. It is, in a word,
irrelevant - right? Wrong, Brague writes. Sustained reflection on
the nature of being, undertaken in the hope that something can
indeed be said about it, was for millennia considered to be among
the most important of intellectual pursuits, and not without
reason. With his characteristic combination of erudition and wit,
Brague takes us on a sweeping tour of the discipline's varying
fortunes, from its early Athenian practitioners through its Jewish,
Muslim, and Christian heirs, to the chorus of critics who in the
last few centuries succeeded in putting an end to its dominance.
But the questions that metaphysics was asking, Brague shows, did
not disappear with its demise, and so, whether implicitly or
explicitly, metaphysics itself has resisted relegation to the
history books. For the nature of being, and especially our
relationship to it, has continued to haunt its triumphant critics.
One quintessentially metaphysical claim above all, as Brague
suggests, seems to have horrified them: the doctrine that all that
is, insofar as it is, is good. And yet, in rejecting the
"convertibility" of the "transcendentals" of being and goodness,
critics of the old metaphysics - Voltaire, Kant, Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche, Heidegger, Carnap, and Levinas among them - in their own
ways offered metaphysical counter-claims, even as they turned
increasingly anthropological in their interests. They also raised
the stakes. For, whether the denial of the goodness of being can
legitimately be attributed some causal responsibility for a world
in which our species could rapidly and deliberately ensure its own
extinction, this is the world we live in, and that denial does form
the basis of the intellectual background from which we tend to
begin our speculations. If we need to be able to articulate reasons
for our project not to end, then we also need to rethink the
rejection that we have come to take for granted. What Brague offers
us here is not a narrative of decline, not a Jeremiad, not a
nostalgic lament for the thought-world of a bygone era, but a
sympathetic outline of some of the major tensions in the
philosophical underpinnings of the modernity that we all inhabit.
As such, it forms a part of his ongoing effort take modernity "more
seriously than it takes itself", to expose its hidden foundations,
and to push it to its logical conclusions. In so doing, he hopes to
help clarify where it is that we are going as a species, and to
ensure that wherever it is, there is room for us humans in it.
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