'Pseudo-Problems'

 

                Anywhere, anytime there is always an established way of seeing, doing, thinking, or believing. Not only that it is unavoidable, it is actually necessary. We cannot organize our social lives unless we have something which we with all the rest around us respect and follow. Imagine for instance a road where vehicles from different places would go through to reach different directions each intersecting another with no traffic light, no traffic signs, no traffic officers, and each car honks like a mad cow. One does not surely want to pass by that road, unless he is a cow. However, not all systems of rules – either written or unwritten – are necessary. Sometimes, they contribute more to the destruction of our well being than in maintaining our lives intact and stable. The burdens they impose become problems that, upon critical scrutiny, are found to be mere pseudo-problems, problems created by a false sense of what things ought to be. So they cause such unreasonable suffering. They give useless worries.

                It is perhaps this feeling of discomfort in having to confront these sorts of problem that led many philosophers of language a century ago to take it as their personal mission to debunk once and for all what for many centuries was held as the ‘queen of all sciences’ – metaphysics. For those who do not know metaphysics, it is actually a study about what make things what they are, not really as a specific thing, but as being a something. So metaphysicians ask, “What makes something, a something?” See? The question does not only strike us as weird and out-of-this-world. For many, the question itself is, by default, unanswerable. Unless we know what is that something really (is it a bird or a plane?), we cannot know what makes it what it is. But believe it or not, for a very, very long time, people have devoted thousands of their days and millions of pages trying to answer this question. It is, so they held, the ultimate question. Before anything becomes whatever it is, it should become a something at least first of all. So to ask about this being something before actually becoming something (confusing, huh?) is then to ask the very foundation of reality. By having this as its one and only question, metaphysics becomes the queen of all sciences. Sciences try to understand specific things such animals, plants, our brain, the planets, etc. While the sciences do that, metaphysics on the other hand tries to explain why there are these things in the first place, why there is something at all. Pretty tough task. But the term “being” or “something” around which the entire world of metaphysics is formed betrays this royal science, as far as the philosophers of language are concerned.  The term is too general that it can only be used to refer rather than define; they can only be used to point something out, but not to describe anything. The term is functional, but meaningless. It does not tell us anything. So trying to understand what in the first place is never meant to clarify is like trying to peal an onion just to see its seed. Metaphysics, as critics claim, is not a queen science; it is a pseudo-science.

                As a metaphysics teacher, I know of course that philosophers of language are too unfair in their insult. There are a lot we would miss if we only focus on what things are in their specificity, and exclude a reasonable curiosity about why they are, why they are there, in the first place. Imagine this, all that we see around us including ourselves, they have their own nature, their own identity. We can explain why a thing is such and such. But besides that, they all exist, and if they did not exist they would not have become what they are. So their existence is pretty much important. They can change what they are, but they can never alter the fact that they exist. In fact, to be able to change into something else requires first of all that they exist. Metaphysicians ask, and rightly so, why is there existence in the first place? Why is there something rather than nothing? That worry, no matter how unnecessary it feels to be, does make sense.

                The thing is that only a few of us could afford to worry about that problem. Unless you are rich and someone else feeds you, provides your needs, and pays the bills, then the problem is not worth the worry. In fact, the problem is so unnatural that you even had to take philosophy just to come across it. Unless answering the problem grants you entrance to the eternal heaven, better take it for granted. True, the meaning of the entire universe is at stake in that one complicated question, but who said the universe is your responsibility? This is perhaps why our philosophers began to hate the question and became dead-serious to annihilate it.

                I guess the point of this “postmetaphysical” attitude is that something can only become that important if it has something to do with your life or with the life of someone else. At other times we may feel that something is a problem worth worrying because we believe something about us is at stake only to realize that it is actually our belief that makes it so. The clever thing about us is that we have made our world so complicated enough so that we could no longer distinguish real from pseudo-problems. A student worries about one grammatical error in her submitted essay when the professor would not even care to detect it. A secretary worries about not being able to submit a report on time, a report that nobody would even read. An applicant had to suffer filling up a lot of forms just to win a chance for an interview even when it is only his qualification (that can be said face to face) that matters for the interviewer. A pedestrian had to walk double by climbing the overpass when its common sense for a car not to run over any alive being it meets along its way. We have made these sorts of problems so natural that worrying about them becomes the common sense. We have a made a mad cow out of ourselves. If this is so, then perhaps existence is the better problem to worry about. At least, here, we can make ourselves some holy cow.