Understanding Reality: Metaphysics and Human Perception
The Theoretical Rationale
The human being has a unique ability that allows them to interpret and transform reality, which distinguishes them from other living beings. Reason has two functions:
- Theoretical capacity: Human faculty for specific skills, abstract, particular, and universal.
- Practical capacity: Capacity to learn by acting, directing our actions to establish our public and private behavior.
Starting Points
For the ancient Greek thinkers, the theoretical rationale was the ability to think in order to understand what surrounds us, our reality, and our situation in it. This means taking a human-specific capacity: intelligence, through which we can develop the capacity for abstraction, is to create universal concepts. This is called the logos.
Universal Concepts
In ancient Greece, pre-Socratic philosophers raised the difference between what is grasped by reason and what appears to be perceived by the senses. They said that if knowledge was based only on the senses, it was impossible to obtain stable and secure knowledge. The Democrats affirmed that access to the truth was necessary to define things, that is, seeking universal concepts: permanent general aspects of all individuals of the same class. Later, Aristotle said that true knowledge needed to capture not only how things are but also to know why things are, their causes so as to argue, and is proven to justify what it means. Therefore, we have the reality of universal concepts and the different degrees of being and knowing:
- Doxa
- Equivalent to the view
- Depends on the senses
- Superficial and limited knowledge
- Uncritical: not analyzed or shown; it is a pseudo-knowledge
- Limited explanations of reality
- Episteme
- Equivalent to science
- It depends on external reality
- It is rational, systematic, organized (coherent order)
- Critical: analyzes, evaluates, and judges before stating
- It explains all of reality
The Reality
Physis means all that exists and what is done.
Metaphysics
The human being has always wondered about reality and created various special sciences to study specific parts of reality. But in addition to studying, humans are concerned with knowing what characterizes their origin, etc. The meaning comes from the Greek Meta-Physik, beyond, and refers to physical or natural events.
Thus, metaphysics is defined as a study of reality that is beyond what our senses perceive materially. This reality can be rationally intuited.
The Question of Aristotle
For Aristotle, metaphysics (first philosophy) is the study of being as that being and its essential properties. Not studied in a particular way (i.e., do the special sciences).
He asserted the existence of two different modes of being:
- Substance: Is the subject, the being that exists by itself, like a horse.
- Accidents: Also called attributes, are the qualities of the subject, what we can say about it, so there are no accidents on their own if they are not related to the subject.
Metaphysical Problems as Reality
Humans not only need to know (science) and transform reality (technical) but have other needs, for example, to understand reality. Humans need to know what it is and what it is for. There is a need to give meaning to life and existence; there is a need to know that the world has a meaning and an explanation. To that end, models or systems create metaphysical explanations of reality.
Difference Between Appearance and Reality
We know that the senses are a tool of limited knowledge; they do not tell the whole truth, and they also give us data that are reprocessed by our brain. This is one of the great metaphysical debates: the difference between things that are and those that appear to be. That is why, for many philosophers, this hidden reality is behind appearances; what we perceive is only a representation of reality.
Matter or Spirit: Elements of Nature or Reality
- Matter: It is that of what things are made, belongs to the senses, and remains despite the changes. Materialist theories argue that it is the cause and the last element of all reality.
- Spirit: It’s mental, understanding, conscience, the essence, the soul, the psychic, and its products. Spiritualistic or idealistic theories claim that it is the true element of reality.
Fundamental Elements of Reality
- Monism: All that exists is explained through a single substance or element, material or spiritual, above others.
- Dualism: Reality can be explained from two dimensions or different substances: an opposite material and a spiritual one.
- Pluralism: Reality is composed of a plurality of originating principles and substances.