Starting out in metaphysics: radical questioning
If you want to gain a foothold in metaphysics, you have to start with a certain radical questioning. This is to increase your ability to step back from experience, and reflect on it as a whole, and not in part. Radical questioning is not as easy as it seems, even if you are eager and fully prepared to engage with it. This is because we tend to divide our experience up into various compartments and pretend that some of them are off stage when this is not the case. For example, if you are asked, or if you decide for yourself, to try to put all your experience into a single mental ‘glance’, or into a single mental idea, you will likely find – after long and careful reflection – that you only choose a part of your total experience for ‘all of it’, leaving out some features which you have subliminally decided are not relevant. You may, for example, leave out your sense of ‘being here’ or ‘being present’ in your experience, thinking to yourself that it is only your central, participative, interactive experience which counts as experience, not the peripheral features such as thought, location, vagueness, confusion, the unknown, and so on. This is quite difficult to explain, but very important to realise. It is difficult to explain because it is about pointing out to you areas of your experience that you have failed to include in ‘everything’, and this is hard to do when you can’t see directly the mistakes you have made: only you can see what you have done, in terms of gathering your experience into a single idea. Another example would be the sense of ‘watching your experience’, or ‘witnessing it’: that sense is present in all your experience, and certainly in all your reflective experience, but you would likely leave it out of any radical glance at ‘everything’ because you would feel that the witness is not part of the experience as it is the ‘bounding mechanism’ or the boundary of the experience. But witnessing is not outside of experience, it is part of it, and you have to include it if you want to include everything. Just as ‘thought’ or ‘mind’ or ‘sense of witnessing mind’ is not outside of experience, but is an integral part of it, you have to include all that as part of your total glance. Also you have to include your total glance in the total glance as well, if you are not to commit the same mistake again, but in another form. Everything ought to mean everything, not some things that you choose to designate as everything: everything means everything. Putting everything into a single radical mental glance is not as easy as it seems. It takes a great deal of careful pondering – over a great deal of time – to see how it works, and even then you will be surprised how slippery a task it is, and how you continually delude yourself into thinking that you have included everything when you really have not.
As you become more successful in constantly reappraising your seeming inability to direct your glance radically enough, you should begin to notice certain features of what a truly radical starting point might look like, as well as what a less than radical starting point looks like.
As you become more successful in constantly reappraising your seeming inability to direct your glance radically enough, you should begin to notice certain features of what a truly radical starting point might look like, as well as what a less than radical starting point looks like.