TRADITIONAL METAPHYSICAL THINKING

• RELATED QUESTIONS:
  •   Traditional metaphysical thinking presents an obstacle to peace and tolerance. Discuss.  
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  The Root Cause Of Traditional Metaphysical Thinking
  Traditional metaphysical thinking is the after-effect of the confusion found in the house of being. This confusion is between the two senses of ontology and it arises from the fact that both “Metaphysica generalis” and “Metaphysica specialis” actually tend to explain and analyse the meaning of “being” in very much the same style. This should not be because they have different responsibilities, as one is meant to discuss “what it means for what is to be” and the other to discuss “what is”. Hitherto, two serious problems arise from this sort of confusion. Firstly, a radical and well grounded understanding of the true meaning of being would not be gotten. Secondly, several territories of possible achievements that have not been explored within the universe of metaphysics would be left abandoned (especially by Metaphysica generalis, since they are both distractedly not doing what they should be doing in a proper manner). For example, concerning Metaphysica specialis in answering to the question of being, psychology would say that “being is mind”; mathematics would say that “being is number”; theology would say that “being is God”; political science would say that “being is power” and so on and so forth. Metaphysica generalis (ontology) followed in a similar manner, as after Parmenides, professional philosophers started looking for “pure being” in definite entities. For Plato “being is idea”; for Aristotle “being is matter”. Others postulated being as mind, God, will, subjectivity and so on. Nevertheless, they seem to forget that all these entities are “beings” (individual aspects of being), and not “being” itself. Hence, the practice of expressing an aspect of reality as the totality of same is what created the confusion in the house of being; and this has led to traditional metaphysical thinking. The after-effect of this is that a third holistic sense of metaphysics has emerged in contemporary times to fill in the inconsistencies, whereas this should not have been the case if things were rightly done in the first place by Metaphysica generalis.
  
  
  Problems Caused By Traditional Metaphisical Thinking            
              From the foregoing, the root cause of all the problems influenced by the traditional treatment of ontology is that, particular aspects and specific entities of reality, or what is known as “beings”, were presented as though they were the entirety of reality. This made traditional metaphysics (especially ontology) to become a dogmatic discipline, with each philosopher and scholar holding his views on what being is. This dogmatism led to other more serious problems which (for the sake of explanation) would be analysed in three steps:
  
  Problem 1: Objectification of reality
  
  Presenting particular aspects and specific entities of reality, or what is known as “beings”, as though they were the entirety of reality objectifies reality. This implies that “beings” get treated as objects, and as objects, they surely are assigned fixed attributes. Hence, this will make beings to become predictable, as they would always be seen in the same way; objectively and having a specific nature. Accordingly, anyone who then sees beings differently from the fixed manner in which they have been portrayed would be seen as a subjective person; a person of wrong ideas and erroneous opinions.
  
  Problem 2: Rigidity of beings
  
  The objectification of reality further made beings rigid and created a world of inflexible beings. Thus, people and ideas alike began to take the shape of rigidity according to the fixed nature of beings. Hence, the dogmatic “law of identity” in logic became the order of the day and this gave room for fanaticism and traditional metaphysical thinking. A clear example of this tragedy can be found in religion. In religion, “being” is God. But, the “being” of God which is meant to be universally the same to all religious men, has taken a poly-dimensional perspective. In the first place, if religion truly holds that “being” is God, then there should only be one religion. But this is never the case. Instead, to the Christian, Jesus is God; to the Moslem, Allah is God; to the Hindis, Brahman is God; to some traditional African religions, sango/amadioha/ogun e.t.c is God. To make things worse, the “being” of God has been further conceptualised into modes like theism, atheism, henotheism, polytheism, deism, pantheism and agnosticism. How bad!
  
  Problem 3: Attitude of contest and conquest
  
  A world of rigidity and inflexibility surely created room for contest and conquest among man in society, by fostering the attitude of vengeance and hostility. This finally led to the sending of being on compulsory leave (exile). This happens because when a thinker decides that the specific idea of a thing is the true being, he tries all his possible best to create ways to focus the whole of reality in line with that dogmatic idea. Hence, anything that fails to conform to the standards and parameters of this rigid idea of being is not true being (non-being) and thus all efforts must be made to suppress or destroy it. This happens because the reduction of “pure being” to the level of individual being has limited reality in such a person’s mind. Therefore, that specific being has unknowingly become the whole of being to him such that saying something against it would be a fight against humanity, and it must be seriously dealt with.
  
  
  Terrorism: the result of this ontological confusion
  In a nutshell, western philosophical thought, by its traditional ontological-metaphysical character, has nurtured a tradition that thinks violence and vengeance, and this has led to terrorism. Terrorism is a product of the will to power, the will to dominate, the will to dictate and control world affairs by the global powers. All these are a result of the concept of "being is; non-being is not". This implies that, "being" is that which is the trend in the scheme of things while "non-being" is that which wants to counter this existing trend of things. For example, in the western world, white skinned man is "being", black skinned man is "non-being"; to the Christian, Christianity is "being", other religions are "non-being". This is the spirit of traditional metaphysical thinking encouraged by the traditional treatment of ontology in western philosophy.
  
  
  
  
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