Felt Meanings of the World Introduction

Metaphysics is the study of the meaning of the world as a whole. A metaphysics of reason endeavors to discover the rational meaning of the world-whole, and a metaphysics of feeling its felt meaning. The development and decline of the metaphysics of reason is discussed in the first two sections of the Introduction, and the groundwork for a metaphysics of feeling is laid in the last three sections.

Rational meaning is what provides an answer to the question “Why?” The question “Why?.” aims at an answer that begins with a “Because…” An answer in terms of a “Because always asserts a reason: it asserts that something exists, or has a certain nature, because of a specific reason. Reasons are the meanings discovered by rational thought. The questions about the rational meaning of the world thus ask about the reasons for the existence and nature of the world; they ask “Why does the world exist?” and “Why does the world have this nature?” Both of these questions are answered in terms of a first and final reason for the world. The first reason for the world is its cause, and the final reason its purpose. The cause and purpose of the world lie outside of the world; they do not belong to the causal and teleological series within the world. The series within the world consists of conditioned causes and purposes; every cause is an effect of a prior cause, and every purpose is for the sake of a further purpose. But the cause and purpose of the world itself are unconditioned; they neither are effects of a prior cause nor are for the sake of a further purpose. They are an uncaused cause and a purposeless purpose, such that the causal series within the world is an effect of the uncaused cause, and the teleological series is for the sake of the purposeless purpose.

The unconditioned cause and purpose of the world are usually thought of as God and goodness. The world is the effect of God, and the world exists for the sake of realizing goodness. God and goodness are interconnected as the rational meanings of the world in that God caused the world for the purpose of realizing goodness.

The belief in such a meaning of the world has provided the under pinning of a substantial area of human culture for more than two thou sand years. This belief emerged in disparate cultures at different times; its first recorded expression appeared before 1500 B.C. in Books 1 and 10 of the Rg Veda, but it was not until the fifth century B.C. in Athens that this theory was articulated in a logically demonstrative form. This articulation appears primarily in Plato’s middle and late dialogues, the first indication of it being traceable to his Phaedo 97C-99D. Plato here outlines a theory of the cause of the world as Mind (Nous) and of its purpose as the good (ta agathon), but asserts that he as of yet is unable to verify such a theory. The following statement, which indicates the essence of this theory, has a historical significance of great moment:

It seemed to me correct that Mind is the cause of everything, and I thought if this be so, then Mind sets everything in order and arranges each thing in the way that is best for it.[1]

Plato was later able to develop some of the aspects of this theory, particularly in Book 6 of the Republic, the Timaeus, and in Book 10 of the Laws. The unconditioned cause of the world is argued to be a self-moved mover,[2] and the unconditioned purpose to be the imitation of or participation in the Idea of the Good.[3] In the Timaeus he connects the cause and purpose by asserting that the purpose for which the Demiurge ordered the world is to make the world better.[4]

Plato’s ideas anti arguments for a rational meaning of the world were developed and modified by subsequent philosophers, until they finally reached their culmination in the philosophy of Georg Hegel. Some of the major landmarks along the route from Plato to Hegel can be briefly pointed out, as they will further explain the nature of a metaphysics of rational meaning. The development of the concept of an unconditioned purpose can be discussed first.

One of Aristotle’s most significant contributions to the development of this theory was to propound a doctrine of the concrete nature of the world’s purpose. The unconditioned purpose of the world is the goodness of the world as a whole. Every thing in the world aims at this end in its own specific way; one thing is for the sake of another, until the teleological series culminates in the purpose of the highest thing (the human race). The circular motion of the first heaven imparts motion to the sun, and the sun’s motion is for the purpose of maintaining the physical processes of becoming and passing away. The plants grow for the sake of nourishing animals, and animals exist for the sake of humans. Humans have their final purpose in theoretical contemplation, particularly in the contemplation of divine things. Through such divine contemplation humans become, in their own fashion, like God, and in such likeness the teleology of the world achieves its unconditioned completion.[5] The idea that every non human part of the world was made for the sake of man, and man for the sake of serving God through loving and contemplating Him, became the nucleus of the later conceptions of the purpose of the world.[6]

The next major development in the conception of this purpose was made by Boethius in the sixth century A.D. Boethius was the first to make explicit the distinction between the goodness of a thing in its existence (esse) and the goodness of the thing in its action.[7] The implication of this distinction is that the purpose of the things in the world has a twofold aspect; things realize goodness in virtue of simply existing (what Thomas Aquinas later conceived as the “relative goodness of a thing’s first actuality”[8]), and in virtue of performing the actions proper to them (what Aquinas conceived as the “absolute goodness of a thing’s complete actuality”[9]).

But the consequences of this distinction for the theory of the unconditioned purpose of the world were not fully recognized and formulated until the late seventeenth century, when Gottfried Leibniz made them a basis of his philosophy. Leibniz distinguished between a purpose of the existence of the world and a purpose of the nature of the world; this distinction enabled a complete teleological explanation of the world to be achieved. In Leibniz’s words, there is both “a complete reason why there is any world at all, and why there is this world rather than some other.”[10] Why any world exists at all is that existence is better than nonexistence.[11] The existence of a world is good, and this is the reason God brought a world into existence. The reason for the existence of this world, rather than some other world, is that a world with this nature is better than a world with some other nature. This world is the most perfect of all possible worlds because it contains rational souls; these souls are the most perfect of sub stances, and it is for the sake of them that all other substances (the sun, plants, animals, etc.) exist. The final purpose of rational souls is their own perfect state, which is happiness. Happiness is perfectly achieved in knowing and loving God. In this achievement of happiness, the supreme perfection of the world is achieved; the attainment of this perfection is a purpose that is for the sake of no further purpose. It is the final reason for the nature of the world.

In Leibniz’s philosophy we can see with the greatest clarity what was already present in previous theories of the rational meaning of the world. This is the idea that the first and final reason for the world’s nature are not connected in a linear manner, but circularly. The final reason for the world is a reversion to the first reason, in that the final reason, man’s hap piness, consists in knowing and loving the first reason, God. And the first reason reverts to the final reason in that the first reason, God, causes the world for the sake of the final reason, man’s knowledge and love of Himself.

The culmination and completion of this theory of the teleological meaning of the world in the system of Hegel is the next and final major stage in its development, but to understand this stage in its full significance it is necessary to first return to the conception of the causal meaning of the world.

The causal meaning of the world is more fundamental than the teleological meaning, in that the ultimate intelligibility of the rational meaning of the world lies within the causal meaning rather than the teleological one. The explanation of the existence of the final reason is found in the first reason, but the explanation of the existence of the first reason is found within itself. The question, Why is there a purpose of the world? is answered: Because God ordered the world in a purposive fashion. But the further question, Why is there a God? can only be answered in terms of God Himself, namely, that God necessarily exists, i.e., that it is of the essence of God to exist. It is the conception of the uncaused cause of the world as an existent whose essence is identical with His existence that is the ultimate foundation of the theory of the rational meaning of the world.

But it was not until several centuries after Plato that this conception of the uncaused cause as a necessary existent was developed. The rational explanation of the world by the Greek and early Christian philosophers remained incomplete. The different conceptions of the uncaused cause, Plato’s demiourgos, Plotinus’s the One (to hen), Augustine’s and Boethius’s Deus, were unable to provide an answer to the question, Why does the uncaused cause exist? The breakthrough was made in the eleventh century by Avicenna. Avicenna was the first to make an explicit distinction between essence (mahiyya) and existence (wujud), and this distinction enabled him to form a concept of the uncaused cause as having an essence which is identical with its existence.[12] Since it is of the essence of the uncaused cause to exist, this cause is a necessary existent.[13] This conception of the uncaused cause as being essentially identical with its existence was adopted by the scholastic philosophers, and became a central idea in the theories of René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, Nicolas de Malebranche, Leibniz, and finally in Hegel.

Prior to the culmination of the theory of rational meaning in Hegel’s system, the foundations of this theory had been seriously attacked, but subsequent philosophers were able to account for these criticisms to their satisfaction in various reformulations of the theory. David Hume’s sceptical reflections were accounted for in Immanuel Kant’s transcendental philosophy in a way that enabled later philosophers to continue espousing the theory of rational meaning. Of course Kant himself denied to theoretical (but not to practical) reason a knowledge of this meaning, but due to a contradiction in his system, first made public to the philosophical world by Friedrich[14] Fichte was able to resurrect the theory of rational meaning along transcendental lines. This led to Friedrich Schelling’s Identity Theory and Hegel’s system, which represents the final and completing stage of the theory of rational meaning.

Hegel is the last figure in the philosophical epoch of rational meaning in two respects; he completed the theory of rational meaning, and he was the last thinker to propound a theory of rational meaning before the epoch of rational meaning declined and gave way to a belief in rational meaninglessness. Hegel’s completion of the theory of rational meaning lies in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences and in the series of lectures and books elaborating the ideas in this work. Hegel’s completion of this theory lies in his endeavor to explain everything in the world in terms of the first and final reasons for the world. Previous theories had asserted that various kinds of existents that constitute the world are connected in a logical manner to the first and final reasons for the world, but apart from a few general observations, they made no attempt to deduce each kind of thing in the world from the world’s reasons. It is true that significant attempts in this direction had been made by Karl Reinhold and Fichte, and particularly by Schelling, but it was not until Hegel that this endeavor was brought to completion. Hegel deduced everything in the spheres of the world, Nature and Spirit, from the first reason of the world, the Absolute Idea, and explained how everything in these two spheres is logically related to the final reason of the world, the philosophical contemplation of the Absolute Idea and of its realization in Nature and Spirit. Every phase of Nature and Spirit is explained as a necessary consequence of the Absolute Idea, and as a necessary condition of philosophical contemplation. The particular work of Hegel’s that stands as the culmination of his system, and thus as the culmination of the epoch of rational meaning, is his Lectures on the History of Philosophy. These lectures represent the elaboration of the final section of the Encyclopedia, which explains the unconditioned purpose of the world as the activity of philosophical contemplation. Philosophical contemplation has a purpose of its own, namely absolute philosophical knowledge, and this purpose—which is thus the final purpose within the unconditioned purpose — is ultimately realized, according to Hegel, in his own system. The realization of this final stage of the unconditioned purpose at the same time brings to complete actualization the first reason of the world, inasmuch as the first reason achieves complete actualization when its necessary consequences have one and all become realized. This complete realization of both of the unconditioned reasons for the world is indicated in its final moment in the very last section of the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, and this section accordingly can be understood as the last and culminating piece of philosophical literature in the epoch of rational meaning. The following quote from this section is the historically significant one; it describes how the Absolute Spirit becomes actualized through the elevation of finite self-consciousness to absolute self-consciousness, which has occurred through the philosophical comprehension reached in Hegel’s system:

It appears that the World-spirit [Weltgeiste] has finally succeeded in removing from itself all alien objective essence [Wesen], and in apprehending itself at last as Absolute Spirit [absoluten Geist], in producing out of itself whatever is to be its object, and holding this serenely in its power. The struggle of the finite self-consciousness [endlichen Selbstbewustseins] with the absolute self-consciousness [absoluten Selbstbewustseins], which seemed to the former to lie outside of itself, has now come to an end. The finite self-consciousness has ceased to be finite, and in this way the absolute self-consciousness has achieved its own realization. It is the whole history of the world up to the present time, and the history of philosophy in particular, that represents this struggle. It now appears to have reached its goal, when this absolute self-consciousness, which it had the task of depicting, has ceased to be alien, and where Spirit is accordingly realized as Spirit.[15]

With the completion of the epoch of rational meaningfulness in Hegel’s system, came its decline. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the belief in a rational meaning of the world had been superseded by a prevailing conviction of its rational meaninglessness. In the 1850s an empathy with Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimistic irrationalism[16] acquired precedence over adherence to Hegelian and neo-Hegelian systems; this in turn led to the cultural dominance of Eduard von Hartmann’s irrationalism of the unconscious in the 1870s and 1880s, and finally to Friedrich Nietzsche’s more extreme irrationalism and diagnosis of nihilism, which took hold as the prevailing philosophy in the 1890s. Meanwhile in France and England the reductivist and avowedly mundane spirit of positivism and empiricism reigned, which claimed that questions about the reasons for the world are without sense.

The decline of the epoch of rational meaning in the nineteenth century and the consequent emergence of the epoch of rational meaninglessness, which still flourishes today, is not confined to the area of philosophy. The arts and sciences have forms that, interpreted philosophically, can be seen to express analogues to the philosophical theories of rational meaning and meaninglessness. The decline of the belief in a rational meaning that occurred in the nineteenth-century philosophies can also be seen in the arts and sciences of this period.

In poetry, rhymed and metrically symmetrical verses are the analogues of a theory of rational meaningfulness in philosophy. Rhymes and metrical symmetry manifest a law of the harmonic recurrence of sounds in the poem, culminating in the final line in which the progression of sounds is brought to a pleasing rest. Such verses can be understood as symbolizing by virtue of their form a telic order in the world that aims at the final good. The emerging disbelief in such a meaning of the world is first expressed in the form of the poems in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855), whose unrhymed and metrically asymmetrical verses became the predominant pattern of twentieth-century poetry.

In fiction, an omnisciently narrated plot consisting of events which build up teleologically to a climax, the happy ending, is the analogue of a philosophical theory of a rationally meaningful world. The expression of a rationally meaningless world-view first appeared in fiction in the novels of Gustave Flaubert, particularly in Madame Bovary (1855-57), Salammbo (1862), and Sentimental Education (1869). Flaubert initiated what James Joyce and Marcel Proust would bring to completion in the early twentieth century: a relatively plotless novel, consisting of largely disconnected scenes, the absence of a happy ending that resolves the various problems in the story, an antihero in the place of a hero, and a narration by an author who knows no more than the characters in the story.

In music, consonance, expressed in tonality and in rhythmical order, is the analogue of a philosophical theory of a rationally meaningful world. For instance, in tonal compositions there is a home key which is the analogue of a purpose in rational metaphysics; in these compositions there is an ordered progression of related tonalities that finds its goal and resolution in the home key. When the home key is reached, there is a sense of rest, of purpose attained. Atonal compositions through lacking a home key convey no such sense. The period of dissonance in music was ushered in by the single harmonic cluster at the opening of Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (1859), the noted Tristan-Akkord. However, this period did not achieve its more mature expressions until the last movement of Arnold Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 4 (1907), which except for its final cadence in F-sharp major is the first entirely atonal music, and Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913), which is the first work to emphasize irregular rhythmic patterns.

In painting, the representational depiction of an objective order of the world is the analogue of a theory of rational meaning. The idea that there is an objectively ordered reality that is there to be accurately represented in painting held sway over painters until the impressionist movement in France; Edouard Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) lay at the beginning of this movement, and manifested the first influential move towards nonrepresentationalism, a tendency that would be developed in such early twentieth-century schools as Fauvism and Cubism and which would reach full bloom with Abstract Expressionism.

The sciences manifest their own kind of analogue to the philosophical theories of rational meaning and meaninglessness. The most significant event in nineteenth-century science occurred in 1859, with the publica tion of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species through chance mutation gradually replaced Georges Cuvier’s catastrophic explanation of the differences between primitive and contemporary forms of life, and thereby put an end to the widespread acceptance of the plausibility of interpreting life in terms of a teleological meaning and biblical creation. The scientific developments in the twentieth century exhibit an increasing acceptance of the scientific forms of rational meaninglessness. This appears most noticeably in quantum mechanics; Werner Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty entails that the laws of causality are inapplicable to subatomic events, and that the construction of a statistical probability is the closest approximation to an effective explanatory device.

The foregoing remarks indicate the emergence of the epoch of rational meaninglessness in western culture, an epoch which is in full flower today.[17] The philosophical basis and presuppositions of the epoch of rational meaninglessness deserve a closer scrutiny, as it is only through examination of them that the possibilities of transcending this epoch can be clearly understood. To this end I shall in the following explicate the arguments upon which the philosophy of rational meaninglessness is based.

The demonstrations that the belief in a rational meaning of the world is erroneous can be divided into material demonstrations and formal demonstrations. The material demonstrations involve criticisms of the specific conceptions of the first and final reasons for the world, and the formal demonstrations aim to prove that any possible reason for the world is intrinsically unknowable.

A significant number of material demonstrations have been developed, but in the following I will confine myself to mentioning the four most widely accepted arguments, two of them being criticisms of the concept of the first reason for the world, and two being criticisms of the idea of the final reason.

Two ideas were prominent in the conception of the first reason for the world, that it is a first cause and that it necessarily exists. It was inferred that there must be a first cause from the premises that an infinite series of causes is impossible, and a series of causes exist. But the first premise, that an infinite series of causes is impossible, has been subjected to a number of criticisms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One of the principal sources of these criticisms lay in Georg Cantor’s pioneering studies in the nature of infinite sets,[18] which revealed that the difficulties usually associated with the idea of infinity are pseudo-difficulties. The logical and metaphysical implications of Cantor’s theories made it evident that there is no intrinsic impossibility in there being an infinite series of causes, be this series temporally regressive (the series of causes in fleri) or temporally simultaneous (the series of causes in esse). As Bertrand Russell,[19] Paul Edwards,[20] John Hick,[21] Wallace Matson,[22] Joel Kupperman,[23] and numerous others have pointed out, there are no a priori grounds for assuming that the world either does or does not have a first cause.

The idea that the first reason for the world is a necessary existent, in the sense that it belongs to its essence to exist, has been argued to be incoherent by a number of different philosophers, including Gottlob Frege,[24] J. C. Smart,[25] William Alston,[26] Jerome Shaffer,[27] P. F. Strawson,[28] Richard Swinburne,[29] Martin Heidegger,[30] and others.[31] One of these arguments can be presented by way of illustration. According to Strawson, the concept of a necessary existent analytically includes the concept of existence, which is equivalent to saying that the concept of a necessary existent analytically entails its own instantiation. But this is an incoherent notion, for a concept can analytically entail only another concept, and cannot be related in such a way to its own instance(s). “Logical or analytical necessity relates solely to the connexion of concepts with one another. No concept can logically guarantee its own instantiation…”[32] Whether a concept is instantiated cannot be known a priori, through an analysis of the concept, but only a posteriori, through examining what lies beyond the concept. The concept of a final reason for the world is mainly criticized from one empirical viewpoint and one logical consideration. Empirically, the evidence is overwhelming that all things in the world are not teleologically constructed so as to serve the end of human happiness. This evidence is primarily derived from the sciences, originally and most strikingly from Darwin’s The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man.

Logically, it is pointed out that the idea that human happiness (specifically, the knowledge and love of the first reason for the world) is good, i.e., is something that ought to be, is based on an illegitimate fact value, argument. The goodness of such contemplation is a valUe, and as such cannot be deduced from the factual structure of this contemplation. Generally speaking, moral judgments cannot have a universal and absolute truth, but are culturally or individually relative (Nietzsche,[33] Jean-Paul Sartre,[34] E.A. Westermarck[35]) or are but expressions of emotions, wishes, or suggestions (A. J. Ayer,[36] Charles Stevenson,[37] Rudolph Carnap[38]), to name a few of the contemporary views that imply the falsity of traditional rational-metaphysical ethics. Criticisms such as these relate to the specific conceptions of the first and final reasons for the world. The formal criticisms, on the other hand, do not aim at the specific formulations of a first and final reason, but at the very assumption that reasoning is capable of demonstrating a rational meaning for the world. These criticisms assert that a rational demonstration, even though valid in its logical form, remains unverifiable and empty unless it is grounded in an observation or intuition. Since rational demonstrations of the existence and nature of unconditioned reasons cannot in principle be grounded in an observation or intuition, the endeavor to demonstrate rationally a reason for the world is doomed a priori to failure.

The idea that all verifiable propositions must be grounded in empirical observation is the basic tenet of the logical positivist movement; the principle that all true propositions must be fulfilled in a phenomenological intuition is the foundation of the phenomenological movement. Although these two movements are not the only directions that have been taken in the theories of rational meaninglessness, they are the main ones, and hence an analysis of their representative figures will provide the most appropriate illustrations of the basis for the formal criticisms of the theory of rational meaning.

The principles of logical positivism are largely based on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Phiosophicus. The conclusion of the Tractatus is that what makes the world nonaccidental, the reasons why the world is and is as it is, lie beyond the world. These reasons are God and value (goodness).[39] They constitute the meaning of the world; thus Wittgenstein writes: “The meaning of the world [Der Sinn der Welt] must lie out side the world.”[40] In this respect Wittgenstein adopts the underlying assumption of the theory of rational meaningfulness, viz., that the reasons for the world cannot be found in the series of conditions that are within the world. But the essential difference lies in this: Wittgenstein argues that since the meaning of the world is outside of the world, it cannot in principle be known or expressed in language. Only what is within the world can be known and linguistically expressed. This is necessitated by the re quirements of knowledge and language; in order for propositions to be true or false representations of reality, they must be capable of analysis into elementary propositions, all of which represent the existence or non existence of a state of affairs (Sachverhalt) within the world. Elementary propositions are representations of the combinations of objects—the irreducible simples of the world—in states of affairs. Since all propositions, in order to have a determinable sense, must be reducible to elementary propositions about the combinations of objects, it is in principle impossible for a proposition to make sense if it asserts the existence of a God or value beyond the world.

The reconstruction of Wittgenstein’s elementary propositions as observation or protocol statements by Carnap, Moritz Schlick, Herbert Feigl, Ayer, Carl Hempel, and others provided the basis for the development of logical positivism. All propositions that have a sense, and which are not tautologies or contradictions, must be capable of verification by the empirical observation of something (primarily sense data) within the world. Thus a proposition asserting the existence of a rational meaning for the world lacks sense. As Ayer says, “it cannot be significantly asserted that there is a non-empirical world of values, or that men have immortal souls, or that there is a transcendent God.”[41] But this does not mean that it is “verifiable” that the world is rationally meaningless; such a meaninglessness cannot be empirically observed, and consequently it is just as cognitively senseless to talk about a lack of meaning of the world as it is to talk about a meaning of the world. All statements in the whole “field of metaphysics,” as Catnap emphasizes, are “entirely senseless.”[42]

Heidegger’s Being and Time can be considered as the major work in the phenomenological school of thought. For Heidegger, the world in it’s a priori structure, in its woldhood, belongs to the a priori constitution of Dasein.[43] Dasein is characterized as thrown into its existence, without being able to comprehend the “whence and whither” (Woher und Wohin) of its existence. “This character of Dasein’s Being, this ‘that it is’ [Dass es ist], is veiled in its whence and whither, but disclosed in itself all the more unveiledly; we call it the thrownness [Geworfenheit] of this being into its ‘there’.”[44] “That it is factically may be hidden in regard to its why [des Warum], but the ‘that’ itself [das “Dass” selbst] has been disclosed to Dasein.”[45] There is no answer to the “Why? For what reason?” as this question pertains to Dasein’s Being-in-the-world.[46] Prior to all theoretical-logical cognition, Dasein is disclosed to itself as “reasonless [abgrundigen].”[47] The hiddenness of a reason does not pertain only to Dasein’s mode of Being, to existence (Existenz), but to Being itself. As Heidegger indicates in his draft for the unpublished division 3 of part 1 of Being and Time, “the reason for Being is obscure [der Grund des Seins ist dunkel],“[48] The reason for Dasein’s Being-in-the-world and for Being itself is inaccessible both to Dasein’s unthematic modes of disclosedness and to the thematizing disclosedness achieved in phenomenological investigation.

The assertion of apparent reasonlessness expressed in Being and Time remained, although in varying senses, at the core of subsequent existential and phenomenological metaphysics. Karl Jaspers laments at the very end of his Philosophy that “there is no answer in the vast silence, no justification for what is, and for the way in which it is.”[49] The metaphysical implications that Sartre draws at the end of his ontology are that being-in-itself “is without reason [sans raison], without cause, and without necessity”;[50] the upsurge of being-for-itself may, Sartre adds, have a reason, and hypotheses can be formed about this reason, but “these hypotheses will remain hypotheses since we cannot expect them to be subsequently confirmed or disconfirmed.”[51] And Maurice Merleau-Ponty adopts an analogous metaphysical stance when he writes: “the contingency of all that exists and all that has value is not a little truth for which we have somehow or other to make room in some nook or cranny of the system; it is the condition of a metaphysical view of the world.”[52]

The positivists and phenomenological/existential philosophers share in common the belief that the world has no knowable rational meaning, even though they differ in the exact sense they give to “knowable” and “rational meaning.”[53] A reason for the world, however this “reason” be characterized, can be neither empirically observed nor phenomenologically intuited.[54] This belief is an instance of the basic tenet of the theory of rational meaninglessness, which may be generally stated as the thesis that there is no knowable reason that explains why the world exists and has the nature it does. This tenet is comprehensive: it includes both the formal criticisms of the very possibility of knowing any sort of reason for the world, and the material criticisms of the specific conceptions of a first and final reason that had been developed during the epoch of rational meaningfulness.

It is not this tenet that the present treatise wishes to challenge. Rather, I am concerned with criticizing an additional tenet implied in the theory of rational meaninglessness, the tenet that a meaning of the world can only be a rational meaning, such that if the world lacks a rational meaning, it can have no other meaning. This claim cannot be explicitly asserted by these philosophers, for to assert it implies an awareness of the possibility that the world could have an extrarational meaning. A denial of all kinds of meanings but rational meanings implies an awareness that there is a question of whether or not there are different possible kinds of global meaning. And it is precisely this question of which philosophers had no awareness; they assumed, without further reflection, that a meaning of the world must be a reason for it. This can only be illustrated indirectly in the writings of these philosophers, by showing that their discussions of the meaning of the world presupposed a conception of this meaning as rational. I will illustrate this briefly in the work of the two major philosophers of this epoch, Wittgenstein and Heidegger.

Wittgenstein defined the meaning of the world as “what makes it nonaccidental.”[55] What makes the world nonaccidental can only be an unconditioned reason that entails the world as a necessary consequence of itself; it is because of this unconditioned reason, or reasons (God and value), that everything in the world is and is as it is. These reasons would be the solution to the “problem” that is posed by everything in the world.[56] But that this problem could be something other than a need for rational necessity, and that the solution to “the problem of the world” could be some thing other than reasons that supply such a necessity, is not considered by Wittgenstein. Metaphysical problems are tacitly presupposed to be set up by rational considerations and to be soluble (supposing they make sense) by rational considerations.

A different but nevertheless somewhat analogous presupposition can be found in Heidegger’s writings from 1927 to 1935. It is instructive to analyze Heidegger in this regard, for in some respects he overcame the presuppositions of the rational metaphysical tradition more than any other philosopher. However, at the very deepest level, Heidegger’s “overcoming” of the rational metaphysical tradition still remains within this tradition. It can be shown that although Heidegger characterized “reasons” (Grundes) in a different way than did traditional metaphysicians, and al though his manner of questing after or “thinking” (Denken) about reasons is different, Heidegger still held the presupposition that metaphysics is at bottom an inquiry about reasons.

In An Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger asserts that the most fundamental metaphysical question is “Why is there being (Seiendes) at all and not rather nothing?”[57] Heidegger wishes to differentiate himself from the preceding metaphysical tradition by not asking about a reason for being that is itself another being, but through asking about a “reason for the Being of being.”[58] This means, for one thing, that the reason sought for cannot be God,[59] for God is a being, albeit the highest being (if He exists). The ultimate reason Heidegger is seeking is something other than the supreme ontical cause of beings. Moreover, although “the reason in question must explain the Being of being,”[60] this explanation is not to be represented as a logico-deductive explanation, such that the Being of being can be logically deduced from this reason. For Heidegger, the authentic metaphysical “thinking” about this reason is not a “logical” thinking. But Heidegger does not wish to commit himself to determining what this reason could be, or how it could “explain” the Being of being. The fundamental metaphysical question is deliberately left “undeveloped” and the issues “undecided.“[61] For a preliminary matter must be inquired into first: “How shall we inquire about, not to say discover, the reason for the Being of being if we have not adequately considered and understood Being itself?”[62] This consideration motivates Heidegger to devote most of his attention to the question about Being itself, rather than to the more fundamental metaphysical question about the reason for the Being of being.[63]

The basic presupposition shared by Heidegger and other philosophers in the rational-metaphysical tradition from Plato and Aristotle onwards is that the central metaphysical question is a Why-question, and is about the reason or reasons that explain why everything is and is as it is. Metaphysicians from Plato to Hegel presupposed the most fundamental metaphysical truth to be the answer to this question, and metaphysicians from Schopenhauer onwards presupposed the most basic metaphysical truth to be the unanswerability of this question.

The nature of these presuppositions can be more fully characterized if we recognize them as an expression of human spirituality. Spirituality can be understood as a need for and quest after a meaning of the world, Rational spirituality is the need and quest for a rational meaning of the world. Over the past two thousand or more years, human spirituality has become so closely identified with rational spirituality that human and rational spirituality have come to seem to be the same thing. This has resulted in nihilism, which is the particular form of the human spirit’s sickness. Nihilism occurs when the human spirit finds itself in a situation where it is incapable of being fulfilled and it can be understood as a need for a meaning of the world coupled with a conviction that such a meaning cannot be grasped. Contemporary nihilism is the need for a reason for the world coupled with the belief that such a reason is unknowable. Now the only avenue out of the contemporary situation of nihilism in which human spirituality finds itself is to draw into question the fundamental presupposition of this spirituality, which is that global meaning must be rational in nature. If there is no other kind of global meaning than global reasons, then nihilism is the last and definitive attitude of the human spirit, and spiritual self-consciousness can only resign itself to a fatalistic understanding of its destiny. “There is no way out. Lie and wait, lie still and be quiet.”[64] But if it is possible that the world has another kind of meaning than a reason, then the task which lies before the human spirit is to explore this possibility to the limit. Only this holds out the chance for the birth of a new and different kind of human spirituality, a spirituality that is based on something other than reason. The possibility that the kind of meaning the world possesses is a felt meaning, and that feeling is the mode of access to this meaning, is what I intend to explore in this work.

Intro. 3. Critique of the Rationalist Theory That Feeling Cannot Be a Source of Metaphysical Knowledge

In order to show that we do have an access to meanings of the world in our feelings, and hence that a metaphysical study of feeling is a viable project, the traditional rationalist theory of feeling must first be shown to be false. The metaphysics of reason brought with itself a certain view point on feeling, one that denied the proper nature of feeling and rendered nonsensical the idea of a metaphysics of feeling. This viewpoint flourished during the epoch of rational meaning, from Plato to Hegel, but its consequences remain in effect today in various and often implicit forms, as is evinced in the fact that a positive conception of the metaphysical nature of feeling has not yet been developed. Rationalist metaphysics is based on the idea that the part of human nature that relates to the meaning of the world and that also realizes this meaning inasmuch as the rational contemplation of God is the unconditioned purpose of the world, is reason. Human nature is conceived as centered around its rational part, and every other part, including feelings, is conceived from the viewpoint of its relation to reason. This theory has two consequences that pertain specifically to feeling: feelings are true inasmuch as they are rational, and the nature and function of feelings is to serve reason. The import of these consequences is that a metaphysics of feeling is impossible. In the following, the argumentative basis of this theory is set forth and then criticized.

The main idea in the rational theory of human nature, that reason is the essence of man, was first stated in its traditional form in Aristotle’s On the Soul, when he abandoned Plato’s tripartite psychology and asserted that man’s substance (ousia) is reason (logos). This idea appears recurrently in rational metaphysics, e.g., in Aquinas’s theory, man’s substantial form is the principium intellectualis; in Descartes’s theory it is termed the substantia intellectio; and in the nonsubstantial theories of the subject in Kant and Fichte, reason is asserted to be the noumenal or absolute Ich. The mode of argumentation developed by Aristotle is that the soul’s essential nature can be inferred from the kind of activity proper to the soul. Reasoning, so it is assumed, is the proper activity of the human soul; therefore man’s substance or subjectivity is a rational one. Feelings belong to human nature through participating in its rationality; thus with respect to feelings it can be asserted, with Descartes, that “in their formal concept some type of reasoning [intellection] is contained.”[65]

The first of the two consequences of this theory is that feelings possess no truth that is not possessed in a superior way by reason. Since reason is the essence of the soul, it is the standard by which the soul’s apprehension of truth is to be measured. If feelings are to possess a true relation to the world, this relation can only be a rational one. But the truth possessed by feeling is necessarily inferior to the truth possessed by reason. This inferiority manifests itself in two ways:

1. Feelings not based on reason are confused thoughts (Descartes),[66] inadequate ideas (Spinoza),[67] or confused perceptions (Leibniz);[68] that is, they know in a confused or inadequate way what reason knows clearly or adequately. According to Spinoza, they are ideis inadaequatis in that their knowledge of their causal reasons is partial and individual, not complete and universal.[69] Malebranche, who propounded another version of this theory, explains that “the mind never apprehends clearly what is not universal”;[70] emotions are confused since they are not cognitions of universals, these universal cognitions being at their highest level cognitions of God and goodness. It is through comprehending universal truths about metaphysical reasons and their consequences that the mind has clear ideas. Hegel articulates this rational inferiority of feeling as follows: “Immediate feeling which has not been purified by rational knowing is laden with the character of the natural, the contingent, the outside-of-itself and apartness.”[71]

2. If feelings do bear a relation to an adequately and clearly conceived truth, they can do so only indirectly, through being effects of the rational cognition of such a truth. The rational cognition relates to the truth directly, through knowing it, and the feeling relates to it indirectly, through being an effect of the rational cognition. Such effects are the “higher feelings” discussed in the rational-metaphysical tradition. For in stance, the rational pleasures discussed in Book 9 of Plato’s Republic have a relation to something true only through being based on a rational cognition of essences (eidei); the intellectual appetites discussed in Aquinas’s Summa Theologica are related to universals only through these universals being apprehended by the intellect;[72] and the feeling of respect that is treated in Kant’s second critique is related to the universal law stating the unconditioned purpose of human existence through being an effect of reason’s cognition of this law.[73]

This theory of the “truth” possessed by feeling entails that a meta physics of feeling is an untenable notion. Feeling cannot have a true rela tion to the world that reason cannot have in a more clear and direct way; hence a metaphysics of feeling by definition can be no more than an in ferior version of a metaphysics of reason.

The theory that rationality is the essence and metaphysical aspect of human nature leads to a second conclusion about feeling that puts to rest in a different way the possibility of developing a viable metaphysics of feeling. The essential self of man, which is reason, actualizes what it is potentially through acquiring a rational knowledge of the world and through governing its practical conduct in accordance with rational prin ciples. The actualization of this rational self ultimately has the significance of contributing to the realization of the final reason for the world, viz., realizing the goodness of the world through rationally knowing the world’s cause. Feelings belong to man as properties of his rational self in order to aid this self in the realization of its nature; it is the function of feeling to serve and obey reason in reason’s endeavor to realize the unconditioned purpose of the world.

This function that rational metaphysics assigns to feeling can be understood more exactly if it is explained in terms of the practical syllogism. The practical syllogism was first explicitly conceived by Aristotle in chapter 7 of The Movements of Animals. The major premise of this syllogism is universal; it states an apparent or real good that is the purpose of the action; the minor premise is the intuition of a particular that instantiates the universal concept in the major premise. The conclusion of the syllogism is the ensuing action itself. Now the function of feeling (which includes wish or will, boulasis or voluntas) is to aid in moving the rational agent to undertake the action specified in the syllogism. This entails that the feeling itself be elicited by and in accordance with the syllogistic reasoning. If the syllogism indicates that something is desirable, a feeling of desire should arise that disposes the agent to engage in an action aimed at possessing the desirable object; likewise, if the syllogism asserts that a particular course of action is dishonourable, and ought to be feared, then a feeling of fear should be elicited.

Although the function (ergon, opus) of feeling is thought to be its obedience to reason, feeling is recognized to be capable of resisting reason and thereby of malfunctioning. This is possible, as Aquinas explains, because feeling is not only naturally moved “by the cogitative power which the universal reason guides, but also by the imagination and sense.”[74] Feeling can thereby prevent a person from pursuing the purpose he rationally ought to pursue, or induce him to pursue an irrational purpose that he ought not to pursue. Feeling malfunctions by preventing a person from conducting his life in accordance with the dictates of the practical syllogism. This can occur in five ways, all of which were first enumerated by Aristotle. Feeling can prevent: (1) the major premise from being known, (2) the minor premise from being known, (3) the knowledge of the minor premise from being exercised, (4) the conclusion of the syllogism from being carried out in an action, and even (5) the very formulation of a syllogism itself, thereby inducing a person to act without first deliberating about the rational purpose.[75]

This interpretation of the functioning and malfunctioning of feeling implies that a metaphysics of feeling is impossible. A “metaphysics of feeling” would be no more than an explanation of how feeling serves or fails to serve reason in the latter’s endeavor to realize the unconditioned purpose of the world. Feeling has metaphysical significance only insofar as it aids reason, and a theory of feeling that aimed to produce metaphysical knowledge would accordingly be confined to explaining the purpose that feeling enabled reason to achieve. But the explanation of this purpose belongs properly to the metaphysics of reason, and consequently a theory of feeling in truth has no distinct metaphysical content of its own. What can only be known by analysing feeling, namely the manner in which feeling serves or fails to serve reason, is a psychological fact about feeling, and says nothing about the meaning of the world. Investigations of feeling can only be psychological; they must be “treatises on the passions,” or the psychological parts of Ethics.

The above is an account of the rationalist theory that feeling is unable to be a source of metaphysical knowledge. This theory can be brought into question in the first instance through observing that his developed from the perspective of reason, a perspective that the proponents of this theory did not recognize to perspective but tacitIy assumed to be the solute human standpoint. This assumption blinded these metaphysicians to the perspective of feeling. If feelings are understood in terms of themselves, from the perspective inherent in feelings themselves, they do not appear as inferior versions of reason that are in the service of the latter, but as phenomena with a positive nature of their own. They relate, not to rational meanings but to felt meanings, to the ways in which things are important. They are appreciations of things for being important. This positive character of feelings as appreciations of importance will be de scribed mote fully in the next two sections. Here I shall simply note that appreciations of the ways in which the world as a whole is important are the metaphysical feelings, and constitute the distinctive metaphysical nature of humans as this nature is understood from the viewpoint of feeling.

This implies that the standard of metaphysical truth cannot be understood solely in terms of “rationality” and its opposite, “irrationality,” but that a distinct standard must also be recognized, the standard proper to metaphysical feelings.[76] Metaphysical feelings, understood in terms of themselves, are neither rational nor irrational but extrarational. This does not mean they are “mystical feelings,” for the rational/mystical dichotomy falls within the sphere of reason no less than does the rational/irrational dichotomy. Mystical feelings are not “irrational” but “suprarational”; they (paradoxically) violate the laws of reason in order to relate immediately and positively to the ultimate meaning that reason relates to mediately and by the via negativa, this ultimate meaning being God, the first reason for the world. Mystical feelings are ineffable experiences that are thought to possess their own certainty and truth, a truth that, being suprarational (e.g., “God is both One and Many”), cannot be evidentially communicated to people who have not experienced them but must be taken on “faith.” This gives rise to the related dichotomy between “reason” and “faith,” a dichotomy that is also relative to the rational perspective.

But metaphysical feelings, understood from what is genuinely the perspective of feeling, do not relate to reasons for the world but to its ways of being important, and they do not relate ineffably but effably—but their effability is not that of reason. Metaphysical feelings have their own ways of evident knowing and of communicating this knowledge, and such appreciative knowing is what “extrarational” means, rather than “mystical” or “to be taken on faith.” Thus, to say that metaphysical feelings are “extrarational” is to say that they are neither inferior to reason (and are “irrational”) nor superior to reason (and are “suprarational”) but fall outside the sphere of rational evaluation altogether. Appreciative knowings of the world-whole cannot be measured in relation to the rational-metaphysical standard of truth in any way whatsoever.

But these remarks are not to be taken as implying that there are two real standards of metaphysical truth inherent in human nature, such that man really is irreconcilably split into a rational-metaphysical aspect and an appreciative-metaphysical aspect. What I am contrasting here is the appreciative-metaphysical standard of truth with what is purported to be a rational-metaphysical standard of truth by the metaphysicians of rational meaning. The fact of the matter is that this rational standard of metaphysical truth is not a standard at all but a chimera. This statement should not come as a surprise, since it is precisely this that was demonstrated in the metaphysics of rational meaninglessness. The main thrust of this metaphysics was that a priori rational demonstrations of the existence and nature of God and goodness are invalid as a method of obtaining truths about the world. And if this method is invalid, then there is no real standard for obtaining knowledge of rational metaphysical meanings that can be found in human nature and that can be opposed to the appreciative-metaphysical standard.

It is in this manner that the rational theory that feeling cannot be a source of metaphysical knowledge is to be ultimately criticized. This theory is not to be limited by opposing to it another perspective, but rejectedby showing that it is false. Specifically, we are to judge as false the basic thesis of the rational-metaphysical theory of human nature, that the essence of man is a rational self in the sense of a principium intellectualis or absoluten Ich, etc., that is capable of knowing a priori the rational meanings of the world. In terms of the two rationalist interpretations of feeling discussed above, this means that there are no clear and direct veridical reasonings about the rational meanings of the world in relation to which feelings could be metaphysically interpreted as epistemically inferior, and there are no true practical and syllogistic reasonings asserting an unconditioned purpose, in relation to which feelings could be interpreted as having the metaphysical function of obeying. Feelings are not metaphysically inadequate in these two respects because there exists nothing in relation to which they could be inadequate.

The task of defending feelings against the traditional theory of their metaphysical incapacity is only the first step on the way to validating the idea of a metaphysics of feeling. The next step is to outline in a positive way the distinctive nature of a metaphysics of feeling.

In this section the idea of a metaphysics of feeling is developed by elaborating upon the respects in which it differs from a metaphysics of reason.

It was noted in the last section that the meanings relevant to these two metaphysics are different. From the perspective of reason, it is reasons for the world that are meaningful, whereas from the perspective of feeling, it is the ways in which the world is important that are meaningful. Importances are the felt meanings, and have the same fundamental role in the metaphysics of feeling that causes and purposes have in the metaphysics of reason.

Felt meanings of the world do not provide answers to the question, “Why does the world exist and have the nature it does?” but to such questions as “In what ways are the world’s existence and nature important?” While rational metaphysics is concerned to discover the unconditioned reasons that are reasons for every other reason, the metaphysics of feeling inquires about the ultimate importances. The world has different ways of being important, and the aim is to discover which ways are more fundamental, and ultimately, which is the basic way of being important that underlies every other way.

The relation of reasoning to the world is explanative; the world is regarded as an explanadum, as something-to-be-explained. But the relation of feeling to the world is appreciative; the world is appreciated for being important. This appreciation involves an awareness of the world’s importance, and a sensuous pleasure or pain that redounds from the importance of which one is aware.

If the world has a rational explanation, this is known through reasoning, but if the world is important, this cannot be known by any process of reasoning, but only through appreciative feeling. If the world has the importance of being fulfilled, this can only be discovered through appreciating the world in the mood of euphoria or the affect of joy.

Importances are not values. Values, what ought to be and what ought not to be, are only some of the phenomena that are important, and which can be known to be important through appreciative feeling. I will indicate in the course of this work that the presupposition that feelings relate to values is one of the ideas that prevented the meaningful nature of feeling from being recognized. That feelings relate to importances and not values entails that a theory of the felt meanings of the world is not an Ethics but a Metaphysics. It deals, not with how the world ought to be, but with how it actually is in its ultimate aspects.

But if importances are not values, that does not mean they are “facts.” The customary division of reality into felt values and neutral facts is inapplicable to the reality that appears in appreciative feeling. No “facts” can be found in this reality. This means, for one thing, that the controversy about whether felt values are “projected upon” or “intrinsically attach to” facts cannot be applied to the importances studied in the metaphysics of feeling. For if there are no facts, and only importances, then there is nothing upon which importances could be “projected” or to which they could “intrinsically attach.”

The importances with which the metaphysics of feeling is primarily concerned are not to be found as realities within the world. The metaphysics of feeling shares with the metaphysics of reason the desire to transcend this or that part of the world and to discover the meaning of the whole. But in this quest for meaning, the metaphysics of feeling does not transcend to the same realm to which the metaphysics of reason transcends. The metaphysics of reason transcends not only the parts of the world but the whole world itself; it aims to go beyond or outside the world to the ground (reason) of the world. Specifically, it aims to transcend “the world,” in the sense of the whole of created being, to the Creator, and to transcend “the world,” in the sense of the whole of what is the case and of what is relatively good, to the ideal of absolute goodness, of what absolutely ought to be the case. But if these world-transcendent realms are empty of any knowable meaning, as has been argued in the metaphysics of rational meaninglessness, there still remains another locus of metaphysical meanings (meanings of the world as a whole), namely, the wholeness of the world itself. And this is precisely the realm to which the metaphysics of feeling transcends when it transcends this or that part of the world. The felt meanings of the world which are the theme of the metaphysics of feeling are ways in which the world as a whole is important; they are the important features of the whole of all that exists. To understand the precise sense in which the world is a whole, and specifically, an important whole, is a fundamental aim of the metaphysics of feeling.

Since the metaphysics of feeling transcends to a different realm than the metaphysics of reason, the problems that are dealt with in the meta physics of reason acquire a transformed sense in the metaphysics of feel ing. For example, the problem of whether or not there is an ultimate truth is not whether there are divine Ideas to which our ideas can correspond, but whether there is an important appearance of the wholeness of the world that makes possible all other important appearances. Such an important appearance would be the ultimate “felt truth.” And the problem of whether there is a meaningful reality that is independent of human awareness is not whether causal inferences to a noumenal or divine ground of the world are justified, but whether it is possible to appreciate an important feature of the world-whole that can exist as an important feature irrespective of whether or not it is being appreciated.

These and related problems concerning the rational or felt meanings of the world are dealt with at the terminus of metaphysical inquiry. In order for these problems to be treated adequately, their treatment must be preceded by more formal studies of the nature of meaning in general, and of the ways in which we can know or relate to meanings. The metaphysics of reason approaches these preliminary issues from a rationalist view point; it aims to understand the nature and types of causality and teleology, the principles (such as the principle of sufficient reason) that enable the causal and teleological orders of the world to be comprehended, and the kinds of rational knowing (the methods of inference) in which this com prehension is achieved. The metaphysics of feeling, on the other hand, aims to understand the nature and types of importance, the principles that express the basic appreciative knowledge of the world (e.g., each thing and each feature of a thing is an importance), and the kinds of feelings (sensuous feelings/feeling-awarenesses, moods! affects, etc.) in which these importances are appreciated.

The difference in the sense of the problems and preliminary studies of these two metaphysics, as well as every other difference discussed so far in this section, is an expression of one underlying difference, the difference in the spiritual needs that motivate these two metaphysics. A dis cussion of this underlying difference will be the most appropriate way to complete and conclude this section’s introductory elucidation of the metaphysics of feeling.

The difference between the two spiritual needs is revealed in a fun damental way in the different approaches that are taken to the primordial state of affairs of the existence-but-possible-nonexistence of the world. Rational spirituality is well exemplified in Leibniz’s approach to this state of affairs. He asks: “Why is there something rather than nothing? For nothing is simpler and easier than something [Car le rien est plus simple et plus facile que quelque chose].”[77] Leibniz’s concern is not to appreciate the importance of this state of affairs, but to find a reason for it. The attitude into which he wishes to bring himself is an explanative attitude, an attitude of knowing the explanation of this state of affairs by inferring to its reason. In the knowledge that God exists, and that God created the world for the sake of realizing goodness, Leibniz’s spirituality achieves its fulfillment. But if Leibniz, instead of trying to explain why there is existence rather than nonexistence, had appreciated the importance of this state of affairs, he would have found the world’s existing-even-though-it-could-not-have-existed to be miraculous and astounding. “Nothing is simpler and easier than something”—but nevertheless there is something! To appreciate this miraculous existence of the world fully and without reservation is to allow oneself to be overwhelmed by marvelling. In this affect of marvelling, the spirituality of appreciative feeling finds one of its satisfactions, for here the miraculous importance of the world achieves its appreciation. Just as explanative reasoning is fulfilled in discovering the rational meaning of this state of affairs, so appreciative feeling is fulfilled in discovering its felt meaning.

The historical contrast between these two spiritual needs is not absolute, however. Although metaphysics has always been based on rational spirituality, some philosophers have partly expressed a spirituality of appreciative feeling. This can be found in particular in Wittgenstein and Heidegger; both of these philosophers identify the raising of the question of the reason for the world with a definite spiritual feeling. But the emphasis still remains on the rational spirituality; the feeling is assumed to be of significance only insofar as it provides a vehicle for raising the question about reasons. Thus Wittgenstein, in a passage from his “Lecture on Ethics,” states that the experience of wondering at the existence of the world leads him to use such phrases as “how extraordinary that anything should exist” and “how extraordinary that the world should exist.”[78] Although Wittgenstein places a central emphasis on this feeling of wonder at the extraordinary existence of the world, he does so not because he is concerned with this experience as a fulfillment in itself, i.e., as an appreciation of a felt meaning of the world, but because he is concerned with this experience in the respect in which it can be interpreted as pointing beyond the world to a God and an absolute value. Hence Wittgenstein asserts that his verbal expressions of this experience are nonsensical, as “all I wanted to do with them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language.”[79] Wittgenstein interpreted these expressions as having an ethical-theological import; they are attempts to refer to an absolute value and to God.[80] A remark Wittgenstein made to Frederick Waismann, that “Good is what God orders,”[81] may be understood as the transcendental meaning to which he interpreted the wonder as referring. But what must be emphasized is that Wittgenstein failed to realize that he could, from a different perspective, have interpreted the extraordinariness of the world’s existence as a felt meaning of the world, and the wonder as an appreciation of this meaning. By interpreting them as pointing to a God and Goodness, he revealed that he was interested in them only from the viewpoint of a metaphysics of reason.

The possibility of developing a metaphysics of feeling was even more available to Heidegger, but, like Wittgenstein, he was unable to achieve the requisite metaphysical perspective. Heidegger had achieved the aware ness that the primordial revelation of being takes place not in logical cognition, but in spiritual feeling. Heidegger discusses this idea especially in What is Metaphysics? In this work he attempts to answer the metaphysical questions he raises solely through a description of what is disclosed in certain moods, specifically, anxiety. In this respect, What is Metaphysics? comes closer than any other work to realizing the idea of a metaphysics of feeling. However, at bottom it still remains within the perspective of the metaphysics of reason. For the metaphysical import of anxiety for Heidegger is not that it reveals the felt meaning of the Being of being, but that it makes possible the question about the reason for the Being of being. To make this clear, it should be noted that in Being and Time Heidegger describes moods as being disclosive of (amongst other things) the ways in which phenomena “matter.“[82] Anxiety discloses the way of “mattering” of the “indefinitely threatening.”[83] Such ways of “mattering” can be interpreted as felt meanings. Thus a metaphysics of feeling could interpret anxiety as an appreciation of the “indefinitely threatening” way in which the primordial phenomenon—that there is being and not nothing—”matters.” This interpretation would represent a possible way of answering one of the basic questions of the metaphysics of feeling: the felt meaning of the “indefinitely threatening” is the answer to the question: “In what way does it ultimately matter that there is being and not nothing?” But in Heidegger’s metaphysical interpretation of anxiety in What Metaphysics? he does not mention this felt meaning; rather, anxiety is significant for Heidegger because it enables the question about the reason for the Being of being to be raised. Anxiety awakens Dasein to the “basic question of metaphysics,”[84] the question “Why is there being at all and not rather nothing?”[85]

Although Wittgenstein and Heidegger came closer than the traditional philosophers to adopting the metaphysical perspective of feeling, they ultimately operated within the confines of the presupposition that a metaphysics is concerned with reasons. They believe that if feeling has a distinctive metaphysical capacity, it is a capacity to relate in some sense to unknown rational meanings, rather than to known felt meanings.

This reference to “known felt meanings” highlights the fact that there is a unique kind of knowing proper to feelings. The character of this knowing has been generally intimated in this section by saying that feelings are appreciations of importances, but we have as yet no exact understanding of this knowing. This lacuna in our understanding shall be filled in the next section, where I will describe a method of obtaining metaphysical knowledge that is unique to feelings.

In this section I will introduce a method of metaphysical knowing, the appreciative method, that is to replace the invalidated method of rational metaphysics, via., rational inferences to God and goodness.

The appreciative method of metaphysical knowing is not a method that is imposed on feelings from the outside, but is found in feelings themselves. There is a method of knowing through feeling, and there is the possibility of developing a metaphysical theory of feeling, only because there are methodological feelings. Since the knowing in question is metaphysical, i.e., concerns the world as a whole, the methodological feelings to be discussed are global rather than mundane in nature.[86] These global methodological feelings not only lie at the origin of metaphysical knowledge, but also, in their higher levels, account for the theoretical development of this knowledge. It will be seen that these methodological feelings exhibit a three-tiered stratification, with the feelings on the higher strata being ways of reappreciating the importances appreciated by the feelings on the lower strata.

At the lowest level of this stratification, there are the intuitive feelings of global importances. These feelings are “intuitive knowings” in the sense that in them the presence of a global importance is felt. A world- importance is manifest in an immediate way, without appearing through the intermediary of verbal significations, mental imagery, or any sort of discursive or inferential thought. These intuitive feelings may vary from a suspenseful and anxious contemplation of an all-pervading ominousness, to a captivated marvelling at the miraculous presence of the whole, to a joyous feeling of global fulfillment. In these intuitions and others, there is a direct sense of a meaningful whole, a whole to which I respond with sensations of feeling.

These intuitive feelings and their sensuous accompaniments even tually begin to decline and dissipate, and the global importance begins to lose its immediate presence. But there lingers an “afterglow” of the feel ing and of the appearance of the importance, and I experience a vivid reten tion of the importance as it appeared during the height of the feeling. Through experiencing this retentive afterglow, there arises the possibility of reliving in immediate memory the intuition of the importance, and of reappreciating this importance on a second-order level. I could reappreciate the importance by allowing its vividly retained presence to evoke in me thoughts and linguistic formations that capture and articulate its nature. In the reappreciative afterglow of a marvelling affect, for instance, the global importance of miraculousness could evoke in me the verbal significations that are appropriate for expressing and conveying its felt importance. I could be moved to exclaim inwardly, “It is amazing that the world exists! It is a miracle!” These significations are felt to capture the very tension and vibrancy of the intuited importance; in them the world’s importance reverberates and rekindles my sensuous feelings, although in a subtle and diminished way.

Often these verbal significations are metaphorical, and often they are vague in their sense but rich in connotations. For example, the global importance that is reappreciated in a rejoicing-afterglow may inspire the expressions, “The world-whole is fulfilled! Everything joyously radiates with its fullness!” This points to the fact that these original linguistic articulations of the global importance are meant to be intimative, suggestive, and evocative of the importances, and to express neither precise and rigorous descriptions nor complicated theoretical analyses. The aim of these articulations is to capture the intuitively felt meanings as intuitively felt meanings, and not to misrepresent them by articulating them from the very beginning in a dispassionate and technical language.

The reappreciative afterglows gradually burn themselves out, and as they do so a new and higher-level methodological feeling is able to evolve from them. This is a feeling of concentrative interest, which is moved to reappreciate the remembered importance through making explicit its implicit content. This implicit content is felt to be of fascinating interest, in that it belongs to the global importance and yet had not been explicitly appreciated in the intuitive feeling or its afterglow. In the intuitive feeling, what explicitly appeared was the unitary phenomenon comprised of the various aspects and structural articulations inherent iii the global importance; the various structural contents themselves appeared only in a tacit way. The significations evoked in the afterglow of the intuitive feeling were evoked by this explicitly appearing unitary phenomenon, a: were designed to capture this unitary phenomenon rather than its various structural constituents. It is these structural contents, which fell outside of the explicit appreciative focus of the intuitive feeling and its afterglow, that now appear to be of fascinating interest and worthy of being atten tionally appreciated in their own right. They inspire me to concentrate upon them, to single out and analyze them in successive acts of attention, and to capture them in linguistically articulative thoughts.

The difference in the reappreciative focus of the afterglowing and concentrative reappreciations requires a corresponding difference in the significations formed in these feelings. The afterglowing reappreciations form suggestive and vague significations that are designed to evoke the global importance as a unitary phenomenon, and the concentrative reappreciations form exact and strict significations that are designed to articulate the structural constituents of the importance in a precise and detailed way.

The structural content of the global importance is usually too complex to be made completely explicit in the concentrative feeling that originally evolves from the afterglow. The desire to make this content completely explicit motivates subsequent concentrative reappreciations to emerge on their own; this emergence is possible in that the memory of the intuitively felt importance can be recalled and concentratively reappreciated on different and separate occasions, long after the intuitive feeling and its after glow have subsided.

The concentrative feelings do not in these later emergences distort or eliminate the original contributions of the aftergiowing reappreciations. The evocative significations formed in the afterglows are preserved as a basis upon which the exact significations are built and integrated. The two kinds of significations are interrelated in that the exact significations make explicit what is implicitly but not explicitly suggested by the evocative significations, and the evocative significations in their turn explicitly signify the unitary phenomenon the constituents of which the exact significations explicitly signify. In this way an organic synthesis of the two kinds of significations can be achieved, and the global importances can thereby be fully described. The complete outcome of this synthesis, an outcome inspired by the global importances themselves, is a metaphysical theory of the felt meanings of the world.

This outline of the three levels of methodological feelings completes my introductory description of the appreciative method of metaphysical knowing. Further descriptions of these levels of feeling will be offered in the course of this work; at the present stage of this inquiry the most instructive task is to highlight the distinctive nature of the appreciative method by contrasting it with certain aspects of the rational method of metaphysical knowing it is designed to replace. Further contrasts can be made here that were not made in previous sections, contrasts that serve to differentiate in a more strictly methodological way the metaphysics of felt meaning from the metaphysics of rational meaning.

The method of rationally explaining the world-whole commences with intuitive cognitions of self-evident propositions, and proceeds through inferring further propositions from these self-evident propositions. This method has been practiced in two ways in the metaphysics of rational meaning.

One way has been to begin with evidential cognitions of formal rational principles (e.g., the principle of sufficient reason), and then proceed, with the help of additional premises (e.g., “a causal series can be found in the world”), to infer mediately propositions asserting the existence of God and goodness. Such was the rational method practiced by Aristotle, Avicenna, Aquinas, William of Ockham, Leibniz, Christian von Wolff, and others.

The second way has been to introduce self-evident propositions that explain the world as the logical consequence of God or goodness. Plato, Proclus, Bonaventura, Descartes, Spinoza, Fichte, and Schelling[87] are examples of philosophers who practiced the rational method in this way.

Among the numerous differences between the rational and appreciative metaphysical methods, three can be mentioned.

First, the intuitions that lie at the basis of the rational metaphysical knowledge are cognitions of propositions or, as they also have been characterized, cognitions of principles, axioms, universals, essences, or Ideas. The intuitions that comprise the foundations of appreciative knowledge, on the other hand, are feelings of omnipresent importances. These felt importances are neither propositions nor universals nor Platonic Ideas; rather, they are individual and concrete features of the empirically existing world-whole. Accordingly, eidetic intuitions or the cognitions of “clear and distinct ideas” must forever remain blind to these importances; global importances can make their appearance only in global feeings.

This difference between the rational and appreciative intuitions en tails a further difference in the kinds of evidence relied upon in these two methodological procedures. The intuitively cognized propositions are comprehended as being rationally self-evident; that is, the reason for their truth lies within themselves, and not in more basic propositions from which they can be inferred. In contrast, the evidence that appears in the intuitive feelings is an extrarational and nonpropositional felt evidence. For example, a person experiencing an affect of awe tacitly and nonpropositionally feels it to be evident that the world is stupendous and immense. It is irrelevant to this evidential feeling that a corresponding proposition about the world, e.g .,“The world is stupendous,” cannot be cognized to contain the reason for its truth within itself. A global state of affairs has felt evidence in that it is immediately present in intuitive feeling.[88] But this does not imply that the knowledge obtained in these feelings is “subjective” or “individually relative.” There are criteria specific to intuitive feelings, to be developed in the course of this work, that enable us to determine which appreciations are veridical and which are not, and these criteria enable the community of appreciators to reach agreement about the nature of the world’s felt meanings.

A third difference concerns the relationship of the intuited evidences to the knowledge based upon them. The rationally self-evident propositions function as the logical reasons for further propositions that are inferred from them. These propositions can function as the major or minor premise of syllogisms, and thereby function as logical reasons for the conclusions, or they can be the theses or antitheses of dialectical arguments, and thereby provide the logical reasons for the syntheses.[89]

The intuitively felt meanings, however, are not propositions that pro vide logical reasons for inferred propositions, but importances that evoke afterglowing and concentrative reappreciations. Whereas the relationship between the different levels of rational knowledge is an inferential relationship, the levels of felt knowledge are interconnected through an evoked appreciative relation. The global importances originally evoke intuitive appreciations, then afterglowing reappreciations, and finally concentrative reappreciations. Through inspiring these appreciations and reappreciations, the global importances become articulated and explicated in a body of theoretical knowledge.

However significant the above-mentioned differences between the rational and appreciative methods may be, they pale before the ultimate factor that differentiates them. The rational method, as I indicated in Section 2 of the Introduction, is fundamentally defective and is thereby in capable of providing a knowledge of the meaning of the world-whole, whereas the appreciative method is free of the former method’s defects. The crucial rational-metaphysical propositions and arguments, those asserting the existence and nature of God and goodness, are invalid, false, or simply nonreferential, and accordingly in inferring from one of these propositions to another we remain confined within the sphere of our own thoughts, closed off from the reality of the world. But the appreciative method of metaphysical knowing enables us to break out of this self-

enclosed realm of thought and to open ourselves to the felt presence of the important whole of which we are a part.

But we have so long been used to thinking in the categories of rationalist philosophies that it is extremely difficult for us to free ourselves from them and to open ourselves to the important world-whole. To begin with, we virtually have no understanding of feelings, or of how the world appears to us in our feelings. Accordingly, the prerequisite for achieving an understanding of the felt meanings of the world is to clear away the rationalist obstacles and prejudices that prevent us from understanding feelings, and to allow feelings and felt reality to put themselves into their own words and to reveal themselves as they are in themselves. This preparatory task was initiated in a partial fashion in this Introduction and will be completed in Part 1 of this treatise, entitled “Feelings and the World as Felt.”

These clarifications shall prepare the way for a detailed examination of the specific nature of the various felt meanings of the world, particularly of the three fundamental meanings: fulfillment, closeness, and supremacy. The explication of the fulfillment of the world will reveal to us the felt meaning of both time and existing; the explication of its closeness will bring to light the intuitively felt ultimate truth; and the understanding of supremacy will point us towards the importance of the human independent absolute reality. These explications are undertaken in Part 2, “The Basic Felt Meanings of the World.”

[1] Plato, Phaedro 97C.

[2] Plato, Laws, 894E-896C.

[3] Plato, Republic 504E-511E.

[4] Plato, Timaeus 30, 32D-33DA. An analogous connection is made in Laws 903B-D.

[5] Aristotle’s conception of this teleological order is evinced in brief remarks made in different treatises. Cf. Metaphysica 1072A18-1072B29, 1073B25, 107512-24; Meteorologica, I, 9; De Generatione et Corruptione, II, 10; Ethica Nicomachea, X, 7, 8; De Anima, II, 4. The statement of the purpose of humans is first made in this Platonic period. Cf. Protrepticus 16, 19.

[6] There were a few exceptions to this tendency, the most noteworthy being the theory of purpose developed by Moses Maimonides in The Guide for the Perplexed. He argued that each thing existed for its own sake, not for the sake of man. Cf. Moreh Nebuchim, III, 13.

[7] Boethius, Quomodo substantiae in eo quod sint bonae sint cum non substantialia bona. The implication of this distinction can be inferred from Augustine’s earlier De doctrina Christiana XXXII, but Augustine himself did not develop this distinction.

[8] Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Ia. V. 1.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Leibniz, De Rerum originatione radicali. GERH. Vol. VII, p. 302.

[11] Ibid. p. 305. For the following explanation of Leibniz’s theory, see De Rerum orzginatione radicali Principes de la Nature et de la Grace VII—XVIII; Discours de Metaphysique XXXV, XXXVI.

[12] The essence / existence distinction is arguably implicit in previous theories, e.g., in Aristotle’s Analytica Posteriora 92B4—93B27, and in Plotinus’s Enneads, V, 5 (32), 6, but Avicenna was the first to make it clearly and to recognize its metaphysical significance.

[13] Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Danish Nama-i ‘ala i (Ilahiyyat), XIX—XXXVII.

[14] “The thing in itself is a presupposition without which I cannot enter into Kant’s system, but with which I cannot remain there.” Jacobi, Werke (Leipzig, 1815) II, p. 304. The contradiction is that the categories of the understanding are inapplicable to noumena, and yet the category of causality is applied to noumena.

[15]