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.