Nihilism & Metaphysics: English & German Translation.

i received a question from the audience
about metaphysics probably the most significant thing to note is that i've now recorded more than one thousand videos on one thousand different topics and never once have i been asked anything to do with metaphysics never once until today have i been asked how my philosophy applies to metaphysics i've never been asked what possible meaning the study of metaphysics has had in my life right and i think this really does reflect the profound triviality of metaphysics from a mature 21st century perspective now if i were to engage in a critique of metaphysics it would really be the habit of mind that becomes inculcated into us through metaphysics rather than any particular posit i would say that some assertions in metaphysics are so uncontroversial so bland that nobody bothers to dispute them and then we cross over a dotted line where seemingly everything that's posited or disputed within metaphysics is such dangerous lunacy that it generally belongs in the province of religion indeed even of religious fanaticism and not of philosophy not of politics so to give an example of something very bland in metaphysics but again my warning would be to try to imagine the habits of mind you'd cultivate if you were really raised with this sort of education someone might say to you that we never see gravity we see objects falling we see the effects of gravity but we never perceive gravity itself but we can posit this prior entity this real thing whatever gravity truly is out of sight out of mind to some extent unknowable and to some extent something we can speculate about and then they can start to talk about this this metaphysical concept of gravity that's the sort of reasoning most people just do not bother to object to and it slips into madness and lunacy when they say something to you like well you can see the effects of intelligence right in the same way you see things falling and you then infer or impute this thing called gravity well you see someone doing intelligent things you see someone acting down but then there is this there is this real entity there is this reality of whatever intelligence is that something quite different from its particular effect its particular behaviors oh well you know you feel you know this person you feel you know their personality but then there's this metaphysical notion of the soul right something prior to and something more real than some transcendental super thing it's not really just a thing it's a super thing that only exists through our inference and imputation and of course the greatest metaphysical football of them all is the judeo-christian god like oh you just see the universe but there was this thing before the universe now why is this so rarely asked about or worth debating if you met someone who was really into kind of cosmological theoretical physics like someone who's really into theories about gravity and the origin of the universe and you see you deadpan sirius said to them well given what we know about the existence of the universe there must be something prior to the universe and then this person wants to refer to this as god it would just be laughably meaningless i mean if you make this inference if you make this imputation there's no connection between that notion of god and the book you know written in ancient greek called the new testament yes by the way the new testament was written in greek not hebrew deal with it wasn't written in aramaic either you know well you have this kind of you know literary tradition starting in ancient greek with these stories and it's you know it's concerned with the roman empire conquering jerusalem and you know the temple and the politics and you know moral questions there is just no reason why you connected to this this notion of abstract physics now in terms of the um essentializing tendency of of mind here that people train themselves in if they revere metaphysics and metaphase gold thinking it might seem harmless for you to look at intelligence and then think there is this thing that truly that truly is intelligent look at the person and then think there is this thing called the soul there is this essence of who the person really is um you know i eat food some number of hours later i go to the bathroom i never see digestion right what what is this true thing what is this metaphysical concept of digestion that exists prior to and outside of our merely physical knowledge of digestion there's absolutely no reason to think this is something meaningful inspirational significant or even worth debating digestion is an abstraction abstractions contain less information than particulars that's all it is these concepts the soul intelligence even gravity the riddle you're playing with you know it's like a game of solitaire you're dealing with cards it's just that you're playing with abstractions and then wanting them and wanting to believe that those abstractions are more real than the real things they describe or they summarize and they're not the reality is empirically we see things falling and we generalize and talk about gravity it's a generalization it's an abstraction right we see people doing intelligent things and we describe them as intelligent people and we think about intelligence and intelligence is just an abstraction right intelligence is less real not more real than what we can empirically observe so the storied history of metaphysics from my perspective should end with this century the 21st century in the same way that the practice of circumcision should end uh with this century all it is is taking a fundamentally superstitious frame of mind and kind of painting it with the colors of proper science or proper philosophy it can never lead us to any conclusions about anything other than the psychology of human stupidity [Music] maybe we can we can practice