“There is nothing for it: we are still the contemporaries of the Young Hegelians” Jürgen Habermas, Nachmetaphysisches Denken, 36.

I’ll bet not many people recognise the handsome chap in the picture. Do you know what really annoys me? The fact that people are so philosophically sloppy these days in theology. How many theologians have read the majesterial annals of German Idealism past Kant and Hegel (apart from Barth and Jüngel…), or got to grips with the rigours of the early Presocratics (apart from Jüngel…)? The standard answer is that we are now in a post-metaphysical era. We have learned to overcome the problems of the past.  However, as Michel Foucault has put it, the danger now is that all philosophers are “doomed to find Hegel waiting at the end of whatever road [they] travel” (cited in Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others, 96).  Ultimately, the very notion of overcoming metaphysics keeps revealing itself as dialectically dependent on what is to be overcome. If this is the case then any attempt to do philosophy or theology post-metaphysics has to be aware that it will not exist sui generis but will reflect back the metaphysics which it sought to overcome.

Furthermore, I would hazard that an attempt at metaphysics is useful to the theological task.  Rorty again claims that:

 ”There are three ways in which a new belief can be added on previous beliefs  – viz., perception, inference and metaphor… Both perception and inference leave our language, our way of dividing up the realm of possibility, unchanged. They alter the truth-values of sentences, but not our repertoire of sentences… By contrast, to think of metaphors as a third sources of beliefs, and thus a third motive for reweaving our networks of beliefs and desires, is to think of language, logical space, and the realm of possibility, as open-ended. It is to abandon the idea that the aim of thought is the attainment of s God’s-eye view.” Rorty, ibid., 12)

The fact is that the question of metaphor inherently complicates the question of metaphysics, something that Jacques Derrida was frequently reminding his contemporaries. Karl-Otto Apel suggests that, in a post-Wittgensteinian philosophical milieu, most of the big words of the history of philosophy, ‘being’ for example, give rise to ‘metaphorical illusion’ rather than in the way that Kant saw  the traditional concepts of dogmatic metaphysics as giving rise to a ‘transcendental illusion’. These big words create insoluable philosophical problems because they tempt us to ignore the fact that language cannot meaningfully say anything about such words as ‘being’. However, Apel goes on:

“One can ask whether it is not the case that the same metaphorical hypostasisations, which have recurrently given rise to illusory ontological problems, are not on the other hand indispensable for the progressive extention of human consciousness in the history of thought, e.g. not least for the heuristics of scientific questions and models. Were not all speculative metaphors – as Heidegger puts it - ‘at the same time revealing-concealing?” (Karl-Otto Apel, Transformation der Philosophie, 326-327)

This lead H Holtz (in his work on Ernst Bloch) to claim:

“Every philosophy, then, is basically metaphorical, because it names and opens up with means of the known what is not yet known… Everything which is not empirical can only be said in metaphor. By being made into an image it can generally be experienced – and this experience is always intially an understanding of the image. The concept arises from analogy, comparison, and metaphor, when the image comes to be used in a fixed and identical way and more  and more loses its metaphorical character.” (cited in Axel Würstehube, Das Denken aus dem Grund, 146)

So here’s to the reading of philosophy in the future of theology; and here’s to the future of philosopy for the understanding of the world.

Oh and it’s Fichte by the way.