Anyone who claims metaphysics is outdated has already made a metaphysical decision. The assertion that only the measurable is real is not an empirical finding but a premise about the constitution of reality — which is precisely what metaphysics investigates. If you believe that natural science has left metaphysical questions behind, you have not stopped doing metaphysics. You have stopped noticing that you do it.
#What “Beyond Physics” Means
Aristotle arranged the writings he composed after his treatises on physics under the title ta meta ta physika — that which comes after the physics. It was initially a librarian’s designation. But it hit upon a reality: there are questions that become visible only once physics has done its work. What is substance? What is cause? Is there something that does not move yet sets everything else in motion? Aristotle called this investigation the first philosophy — not because it comes first in time, but because it concerns the foundations on which everything else rests. Every empirical science presupposes what metaphysics first asks: that there is an ordered reality, that this order is knowable, that cause and effect are reliably connected. Without these presuppositions, no single experiment makes sense.
#Kant’s Demolition and What Came After
Immanuel Kant attempted in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) to show that metaphysical knowledge is impossible for reason, that human beings never reach the “things in themselves” but always recognise only their own forms of cognition. The consequence was devastating. Already in 1796 a contemporary wrote: “The bare thought of the total unreality of human knowledge with respect to things in themselves has something monstrous, horrifying, paralysing all higher exertion of force. Kantian criticism of reason represents the most open nihilism.” What Kant understood as a purification of reason became the foundation of a nihilism that Friedrich Nietzsche would diagnose a century later: the instincts of decline had become master over the instincts of ascent (Nietzsche, 1886, Beyond Good and Evil).
Western philosophy has taken two paths since Kant. One declares metaphysics dead and confines itself to linguistic analysis and methodology. The other takes up the challenge and asks whether Kant’s own delimitation does not rest on unexamined presuppositions. If you wonder which path is more honest, a close look at what science actually presupposes is worthwhile.
#The Hidden Metaphysics of Natural Science
Arthur Schopenhauer recognised that materialism proceeds from a petitio principii: it presupposes what it would have to prove — that matter is the absolutely given (Schopenhauer, 1844, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2). Matter is treated as the ultimate ground without noticing that the knowing subject who performs this stipulation cannot itself be derived from matter. Schopenhauer drew a consequence that reaches far beyond epistemological critique: physics needs metaphysics. All forces in nature are also forces of will, and every force of nature has a metaphysical principle. The interior of nature is not accessible through measurement but through analogy with one’s own will.
Jochen Kirchhoff developed this insight over four decades. The materialistic premises of natural science are, in his analysis, “bad metaphysics”: not superseded superstition but an unconscious attitude of belief that takes itself for knowledge of the world. The natural scientist builds on metaphysical premises from which he cannot disengage, just as the mathematician has axioms that are unprovable within his own science. The assumption that there must be nothing divine, no purpose, no directedness in nature is not a scientific finding. It is a metaphysical stipulation that determines the framework of all subsequent research (Kirchhoff, J., 2019, Was ist Erkenntnis?).
#What Conscious Metaphysics Means
The demand is not to return to pre-critical metaphysics, to a system of dogmatic assertions about God, soul, and world. The demand is to make the metaphysical presuppositions that every science and every worldview already contains visible and to examine them. Whoever takes “consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain” for a scientific fact is doing unconscious metaphysics. Whoever asks whether consciousness is derivable from matter or constitutes an autonomous dimension of reality is doing conscious metaphysics. Conscious metaphysics does not require you to erect a philosophical system. It requires you to examine the premises on which your thinking already rests.
Jochen Kirchhoff described the self as lived metaphysics: The truly metaphysical is the self — we ourselves are the lived metaphysics (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 2023, Nihilismus uberwinden). Self-hood is a quality that cannot be captured reductionistically, a mystery that neurobiology claims to have dissolved. Yet the claim that there is no self is a performative contradiction: who speaks when no self speaks? The modern human being lives, as Kirchhoff puts it, in the flattest nihilism — without metaphysics, without transcendence, completely hollowed out (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 2021, Dem modernen Menschen fehlt der Sinn). The religions no longer sustain, the natural sciences promise explanation but deliver no overarching meaning. If the human being is a metaphysical being, then a culture that declares metaphysics finished is a culture that lies to the human being about itself.
#The Question Behind Every Question
Epistemology asks how we know. Natural philosophy asks what nature is in its essence. Metaphysics lies a layer deeper still: it asks what we presuppose when we ask at all. This is why it is neither one specialised field among many nor a historically finished discipline. It is the space in which it is decided whether a culture is capable of giving an account of its own foundations — or whether it builds on premises it does not even recognise as premises. Schelling put it in his Philosophy of Mythology: There is a science that stands above all sciences and seeks the object that stands above all objects (Schelling, 1842, Philosophie der Mythologie). The real work of metaphysics consists not in delivering answers that are exempt from experience. It consists in uncovering the questions that every empirical inquiry has already answered without having posed them.
#Sources
Aristotle. Metaphysics (c. 350 BCE).
Kant, I. (1781). Critique of Pure Reason.
Kirchhoff, J. (2019). “Was ist Erkenntnis? Wissenschaftliche Methode & Philosophie” [Video]. Jochen Kirchhoff — In Memoriam, YouTube.
Kirchhoff, J. (2023). “Nihilismus uberwinden — Jochen Kirchhoff bei Cicero Online” [Video]. Cicero Online. https://youtube.com/watch?v=Swv105iOWiY.
Schelling, F. W. J. (1842). Philosophie der Mythologie.
Schopenhauer, A. (1844). Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. 2.