The History of Metaphysics – from Physics to Absolute Existence

Metaphysics is not an attempt to describe something supernatural or mystical, but a concept that arose from a very concrete context. The term "metaphysics" was not coined as the name of a particular doctrine, but as a practical designation. When Aristotle's writings were organized into scrolls, certain texts were placed after his work on nature, the "Physics". These texts therefore came to be called ta meta ta physika – that which comes after physics.

In terms of content, these texts addressed matters that did not directly concern observable natural phenomena, but rather the fundamental conditions for anything to be at all and to be understood. Questions of existence, essence, cause, and possibility thus precede the physics that studies changing phenomena.

In antiquity and far into the early modern period, it was taken for granted that philosophical inquiry was not reserved for any particular authority. The investigative attitude was available to anyone who had the time and inclination to think things through. Philosophy was not an expert discipline in the modern sense, but a shared human effort to understand the ground of existence.

With the Renaissance, this landscape began to change. The invention of the microscope in the late 16th century and the telescope in the early 17th century created a strong hope that the smallest unchanging constituents of reality could be discovered empirically. Atomic theory gained renewed relevance precisely because it was imaginable: small, indivisible components that together build up the world.

The telescope also led to a historical turning point. Galileo Galilei's observations of the movement of sunspots showed that even the Sun was subject to change. This contradicted the prevailing cosmology and led to Galileo being forced to make a public recantation. Here a rift emerged between religious authority and scientific observation, a rift that would shape the entire history of modern knowledge.

Over time, however, the hope of finding a smallest unchanging material part was abandoned. Instead, a form of physics developed in which fundamental entities are described as energy quanta – temporary disturbances in fields. These fields in themselves lack poles and direction; they express no goal or inherent orientation, but function as mathematical descriptions of probabilities.

A field without poles, however, is not a genuine prerequisite. It resembles emptiness more than something capable of bearing explanation. It is difficult to ascribe the concept of Existence to such a field. At most, one might speak of Essence, but only in a highly reduced sense, since the field lacks the Faculty of Perception and thus any form of inner perspective.

Science presupposes neither an Absolute Existence nor an Essence inherent in such an Existence. Its methodological delimitation leaves aside everything that cannot be weighed, measured, or calculated. This does not mean that these questions are invalid, only that they are not scientific in the strict sense.

If, instead, one assumes an Absolute Existence as unchanging and indivisible, a metaphysical subject immediately arises. Not in a psychological sense, but in the sense that Existence has the Faculty of Perception as its inherent nature. The Faculty then constitutes the first pole, and the realization of the faculty of perception the second. Between these poles a field of tension arises with direction, from possibility to actualization.

Faculty and realization are here not phenomena, but essential concepts. All Essence requires an unchanging Existence as its ground. The phenomena studied by physics can then be understood as expressions of this direction, rather than as independent ultimate realities.

Metaphysics thus appears not as a competing alternative to physics, but as an investigation of what must logically be assumed prior to any physical description. It is not mysticism, but a consistent line of thought concerning the conditions for anything at all to be able to appear as something. If all experience is relative, then what appears as the universe could be the shining that realizes the Existence of the Absolute? Perhaps the search for the Absolute says it all? Perhaps the Absolute Existence is the dimensionless intangible adjectival zero point? Perhaps the Absolute Existence (Subject): The One who is. The pure presence? Perhaps Essence (Capability): Adjective power. The inherent "ability" of the Absolute. It is not what it is at rest, but what it has the ability to do?

Perhaps Phenomenon (Verb): The exercise of the ability. The very event where the ability becomes action? Perhaps the Subject (Absolute Existence) initiates the impulse? Perhaps the faculty of perception (Essence) is the very pulse of possibility, the "dimensionless zero point" that contains all "ability"? Perhaps the Verb (Phenomenon/Universe) is when the faculty of perception is activated and becomes visible – the brilliant insight? Perhaps this makes the search for Absolute Existence a search for Source? Perhaps this can explain why the universe is so complex; if the Essence is an infinite faculty, the verb (the phenomenon) can be an equally infinite and varied expression that gives the impression of the living image of the universe?

Perhaps?

As long as we categorize the Absolute and label it as a 'subject' or a 'zero point,' we keep it at a distance with the intellect. When the model collapses, the distance disappears. One stops thinking about the source and becomes part of the flow instead.
The infinite cannot fit: If the Essence is truly infinite, isn't it reasonable that every human definition sooner or later must give way? A container trying to hold everything will eventually burst. The crack is where the light gets in: As Leonard Cohen sang: "There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in." Perhaps it is precisely in the collapse of our understanding that the "brilliant insight" actually occurs?

Who really has the responsibility for thinking about reality?

Can it really be delegated to anyone other than the thinker themselves?
If assumptions about reality are a matter that academic philosophy has completely handed over to consciousness research, theoretical physics, and non-dualist philosophy, like for example absoluteexistence.org,
Who is the one thinking instead of just dreaming?

If we assume something about reality and then test the assumption, we see and learn what holds up or breaks down in relation to what we assumed.
So, we create a mental image of what might be possible, and when we test this assumption against the reality shown to us, we see with our own eyes if it was a sustainable assumption or not.

We can also reason using language about our assumptions about reality, and in this way discuss all the conditions that exist in reality.

In this way, we get a mental, language-based, reasoning picture of reality that allows us to imagine what we don’t have in our sight or in hand at the moment.

With the help of language, we can take part in what other thinkers have thought about reality and what they assumed about the foundation that supported all of reality.

We can read in history books about Thales of Miletus, who tried to imagine a substance that everything was made of and thought that, at the core, everything was water.

In the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments also mention water as the substance that forms the basis from which something can be formed. "The earth was made out of water and through water...."

The philosophical question about the Absolute has previously been a topic dealt with by Thomas Aquinas, Kant, Leibniz, Hegel, Spinoza, Schelling, and most recently Heidegger.

Thinking about the fundamental has also had different methods by different thinkers.
Via negativa.
Parmenides.
Advaita Vedanta
Quantum mechanical exposition
And as ontological oscillation and the thought of consciousness, which instead of being thought of as the end product of thought, is considered as “the ability to perceive”
as something that can vary in the on and off states as the inherent nature of Being itself.

All of this is assumptions that provide a synthetic model of an Absolute Existence as the primal subject.

Why the question of the Absolute dissolves As long as we consider the Absolute as an object – a holistic object, a Being-in-itself, a quantum field, or a deity – we end up in an endless search. An object always requires a perceiver (a subject) that stands outside and observes it. This creates an unbridgeable gap between subject and object. When 'the thing' instead is the Subject: No distance left: There is no distance between the observer and the observed. The Absolute is no longer something you try to find, understand, or reach with language – it is what seeks, understands, and speaks. The map is no longer needed: All assumptions, theories, and models (like Advaita, Parmenides, or Hlatky) are objects that arise in the Subject. When the Subject realizes itself as the foundation, it stops mistaking its own mental maps for reality. The thing-in-itself (Kant) demystifies: Immanuel Kant claimed that we can never reach the 'thing-in-itself' (Ding an sich), only how it appears to us as an object. But if the thing-in-itself is not an external object, but the Subject's own irreducible presence, then the Subject 'knows' the thing-in-itself directly – simply by being it.

From Epistemology to Pure Ontology

When the thing is a subject, philosophy ceases to be an intellectual exercise in gathering knowledge (epistemology) and becomes pure being (ontology) instead.

The Absolute does not become "Everything" in the sense of a gigantic container that holds all objects in the universe. Instead, it becomes the only substance-less subjectivity where all forms, thoughts, and sensations briefly appear and disappear.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz touched on this with his monads – fundamental units of reality that aren’t material objects but 'soulful' points of sensation. But while Leibniz divided reality into infinitely many isolated monads, subjective insight points to there being only one primal subject, experiencing itself from seemingly different points.

So the circle is complete: Language (the map) belongs to the world of objects. When the thing is recognized as the Subject, language falls silent, because the Subject doesn't need to define itself to exist.

If you ask: "But how can I feel like an autonomous individual if I'm not a separate part of Existence?" ---→ Then you're mixing up phenomenal autonomy (level 03) with ontological origination (level 01).
If you ask: "How can the Absolute have a relationship with itself without parts?" ---→ The relationship isn't intersubjective (between two things), but structural (the tension between receiver and reception, potential and realization).

Reality then appears as the experience within the present ongoingness.

Why thinking and consciousness cannot be set up in a simple, linear chain of cause and effect where consciousness is just the 'final product' spat out at the end of a thought process.

Conclusions require experience: A conclusion is not just data or a binary calculation like in a computer. For a conclusion to even become an insight or an experience of understanding, it needs to 'land' somewhere. Consciousness as a prerequisite (perception): The perception – the faculty of perception or sense that "A leads to B" – must already be there for reasoning to make sense. Resonance: Here, consciousness functions more like a "resonance base" or the space where thinking takes place, rather than a passive end product that just appears when thinking is finished. If consciousness were merely an end product (a so-called epiphenomenal byproduct of the brain's mechanical thinking), we wouldn't be able to have an ongoing, intellectual process where we continuously weigh, sense, and adjust our thoughts along the way. Thinking and perception occur in constant interaction.

Thought gives us a choice. We can either start from an absolutely objective dead reality base that has somehow come alive, or an absolutely subjective living reality base.

​1. The dead objective epistemological circular reasoning becomes faulty thinking because in order to even conduct science, measure matter, observe brain cells, and set up a theory about 'matter,' you already need to have consciousness/a perception going.

​Materialism's claim: 'Matter creates consciousness.' ​The logical review: How do we know that matter exists? Through perception and experience. ​The contradiction: Claiming that the thing which forms the very basis for all our observations (consciousness/perception) is just a temporary byproduct of what is observed (matter) is putting the cart before the horse. You're trying to explain the observer by what is being observed.

2. The Category Mistake (Creating "Something" out of "Nothing") In logic, ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes from nothing) is a fundamental rule. If the fundamental "Primordial Being" or matter is defined as completely lacking in sensation, subjectivity, and quality (consisting only of quantity, measurability, and geometry), an unbreakable chain arises:

How can a combination of X number of non-conscious units suddenly generate subjective experience?

No matter how complexly you stack or connect objects that have 0 capacity for sensation (0 + 0 + 0 ...), the sum remains 0. Claiming that complexity itself causes quantity to turn into quality without an in

3. "Matter" is itself a theoretical model What the materialist calls "matter" is in fact a conceptual model created in the mind to categorize our perceptions.

Quantum physics has shown over the past century that the deeper we dig into "matter," the more the solid substance dissolves into mathematical probability waves and patterns of relations. There is no "hard lump of matter" at the core – what remains is information and relationships, which are structures that require a perceiving context to be translated into reality.

Conclusion From a strictly logical and phenomenological perspective, materialism starts at the wrong end:

The other possibility is to instead live in the experience of a reality that unfolds as an interacting state within the Absolute subject, giving a completely different sense of reality than facing a dead reality.

Humans thus have free will: You can choose which path you want to take (turn left or right at the intersection – a shared condition for the same reality or individual conditions for different realities). Fate has a final destination: But no matter which path you choose, it is precisely your choices and your effort to relate to existence, or whether you are focused on trying in vain to change the unconditional. It's like “All roads lead to Rome” (Via Appia).

And you can also meet your destiny on the path you took to avoid it.