Hamlet and Horatio

     Any attempt to limit what can possibly count as real by means of a metaphysical theory is bound to be reductive. There are either “more things in heaven and earth (i.e., in reality) than are dreamed of in your philosophies (i.e. including science).” Or: there are fewer things that we take for real: this seems to be the consequence of making a metaphysical philosophy out of the axioms and methods of natural science. For example, if all events involved agents consisting of matter-energy, and all things consisting of matter-energy are subject to the laws of cause and effect, then reality is denied to human freedom and to spiritual phenomena. Even something as fundamental to humanity as love or courage would be reduced to caused events of matter-energy, subject to the same kind of explanation of the orbit of the planets of the freezing of water. Another possibility broadens the second to include into the real other phenomena we can explain in human, worldly terms. 

        The first possibility seems true: there is the fact of mystery: why anything exists rather than nothing, why exactly this universe and not another, what exists beyond our sensory and cognitive limitations; the feeling of amazement over the beauty of the earth or the eyes of a beloved person; the sublime vastness of the universe, of some music, of Shakespeare and Dante…. The first option leaves open fundamental mystery, all so many of our most important experiences and insight presuppose Mystery. Reality as such, Being imagined as a limited whole, can never be one factual state-of-affairs among others. The second possibility reduces the fundamental Mystery into a Sherlock Holmes type mystery: there seem to be phenomena that science cannot explain; it is like a detective game to find the scientific explanation that do not so much explain these phenomena as explain them away, showing that only what science can investigate is real and in need of explanation.  Like in Star Trek (or Scooby Doo) – the apparently magical or divine always had a scientific explanation. I grew up thinking there was a scientific explanation to everything because of Star Trek.  Spock was my hero. Believe only what the scientific evidence supports, nothing more, and have faith that there is always a scientific explanation, which is to say have faith that all of reality without remainder is scientifically explainable.

        The third possibility – the Real is the rational and the rational is the Real – also leaves no space for Mystery. While more inclusive than reductionism, this “humanism” denies the reality of the sublime, the transcendent, which the first possibility leaves open. And that also makes it reductive, given that a border to drawn between the world and the other-worldly, although some phenomena just are other-worldly – Jesus’ actions to save the adulterous from stoning can be explained in worldly terms, but that would miss the essence of the action, for example. Metaphysics (or ontology) is a conception of Being as a limited whole, from the point of view of eternity as it were, which we can only access through imagination and our deepest core emotion-and-thought pregnant moments of most intense life. (A terrible mistake to think of

metaphysics as a dry logical or pseudo-scientific exercise in abstract thought.)

       Indeed it seems a blessing that we cannot know reality as such. A true metaphysical theory would tend to be dogmatic and totalitarian. We know how the Catholic Middle Ages, which believed themselves for long periods of their history to be in possession of such a theory, dealt with dissenters. A parallel case existed in the countries of real-existing socialism in the 20th century. [The metaphysical significance of the Hamlet quote was pointed out to me by Peter Kreeft in The Philosophy of Tolkien.]