Metaphysical Anthropology: Toward a New Philosophical Paradigm
Summoned into life without sufficient guidance, human beings are destined to seek and struggle.
In doing so, we can turn toward things that are high or those that are low. More often than not,
we embrace both. Our natural impulses and instincts guide us, but only up to a point. At that
threshold, we must decide whether to ennoble those impulses—or overcome them. Since our
civilizational drive has been pushing us toward the latter option for centuries, it is hard not to
notice that our lives have become alienated from the natural world and increasingly accelerated.
A closely related, but even more pressing, issue is that deepening contradictions lie at the very
heart of our lives: we seem to know neither what we want, nor where we are going, nor who we
are. In our restlessness and disorientation, combined with our advanced ability to manufacture
and mutilate, we have become a problem—a danger not only to ourselves but also to other forms
of life on this planet. Is human life, then, worth preserving as it stands? What can validate it in
light of such inner contradictions and outward destructive tendencies?
I am not primarily concerned with preserving our existence but with preserving our humaneness:
not how to survive, but how to flourish. These reflections on what makes us different and what
makes our existence worth preserving are the central concerns of this inquiry, which I call
“metaphysical anthropology.” It is a normative project that examines when we are at our best and
at our worst. It explores the meaning of the entire human enterprise: What animates us most, and
what deadens us? What is our greatest fear, and can it be overcome without comforting illusions
and “noble lies”? What is our most cherished dream and ambition? What is our highest
accomplishment? What is the hardest task we face as human beings?
To compress these and related questions into one, we can ask: What can a human being become,
and how good can one be when dedicated to the noblest and highest aspirations, striving to
become as humane as possible?
I have come to believe that the need for truth is one of our most elementary needs. The truth we
need is not necessarily Truth with a capital T; it can be dynamic and pluralistic, but it must be
grounded in the natural orders of rhythm and rightness, which seem somehow woven into the
very fabric of reality. And while nature and its orders should not have the last word, they must
have the first. Emerging from this insight is a profound challenge, which can be summarized in a
single question: Can we absorb and transform the energies of nature without extinguishing them?
So much of our cultivated world consists of artifacts and substitutes, and so much of our
common life requires concealments and compromises, that we struggle to recognize those orders
of rhythm and rightness, even though they are embedded in the very tissue of which we are
made. The greatest challenge in developing and sustaining our humanity may well consist in
finding the right balance between our commitment to truth and our need to compromise: When
and to what extent must we remain faithful to the truth, and when and to what extent is
compromise necessary?
Our other most fundamental need is love: to love and to be loved. To become, and to remain,
human, we need others; an isolated individual would cease to be a personality. The will and
intelligence are instrumental in creating socially acceptable masks, but love involves a face-to
face encounter and helps us see who people (and what things) truly are. Love personalizes
everything it loves and opens the path toward its innermost understanding. Lived experience and
empathetic understanding provide the surest path to knowing the truth of who we are, as well as
the truth of those we care about most.
Love’s nature is even more complex and ambiguous than that of truth. Love is an emotion, a
feeling for other human beings (and other aspects of reality), but, most importantly, it is a
disposition to relate to others lovingly. Love is concerned not primarily with a push, as
instinctual drives are, but with a pull—with what appeals to us most, with what draws us toward
itself—the truth included.
Despite the obvious differences between truth and love, there are also fundamental similarities.
Both are relational. Through its connection with order, truth relates to what holds the world
together; love, however, concerns what brings us together and what moves the world. Both truth
and love are also fundamentally different from the will and from what is up to us: just as truth is
what it is, regardless of whether we want or like it, we cannot choose whom or what to love.
Love comes to us, or it does not. It happens, or it does not. In our urge to control and manipulate
every aspect of life, we try to make truth and love unmysterious and ordinary, accessible and
trivial. When we fail, we readily prepare substitutes for both. Yet only genuine truth and love—
not their substitutes—create an environment in which human life can flourish. Like oxygen
needed for survival, the absence of truth and love is detrimental to our humanity.
After years of wrestling with how best to provide a suitable structure for an in-depth examination
of our struggles with truth and love, I have come to believe that it should be organized around
four pillars of human existence: personality, interactions, values, and transcendence. In a
nutshell, these pillars address the following questions:
1. Personality, which centers on the problem of identity: How can we integrate our shared
humanity with our irreplaceable uniqueness?
2. Interactions, which concern the problem of community and of living together through
exchanges and common rituals: How can we form societies that are not mere aggregates of
people?
3. Values, which concern the problem of orientation: How do we find our way through the
complex flow of reality? What is right and what is wrong, and how can we distinguish between
them?
4. Transcendence, which concerns the problem of our deepest commitments: What are our
ultimate bonds? What do we hold to be most sacred?
These four pillars provide the core structure of the novel project of metaphysical anthropology. It
is not an attempt to establish a new philosophical discipline (like philosophical anthropology) but
to outline a new paradigm for a reflective and responsible, interactive and creative life.
Metaphysical anthropology aims to discover not the truth about human beings but the truth of
being human.
The most anthropological part of this project deals with the formation of personality and our
interactions with others. The metaphysical part focuses on the nature of the values we pursue in
our persistent quest for transcendence, understood in terms of our deepest commitments.
The central concern of the first part of this project, entitled “Personality,” is to explain the
transition from the life of the human animal to that of the human personality. We neither live in a
fully socially constructed reality nor exist as isolated individuals free to do whatever we imagine
or desire. Personality is a mode of being in between, which can, in a preliminary way, be
understood as being human in one’s own way. This approach underscores both our common
humanity and our individual uniqueness. It also suggests that, while in a minimal sense we are all
persons simply by living as and with human beings, the development of personality is a task—a
complex, difficult, lifelong task.
Not every person is equally developed: some people possess little personality, while others are
far ahead in their personal development, even though such development can never be fully
completed. The development of personality is accomplished not directly through acting but
rather through what prepares and grounds our actions: (i) what we honor and affirm; (ii) our
readiness to be accountable for our actions; and (iii) our ability to integrate the darker impulses
of our nature into a well-rounded personality. Since the ultimate goal of human life is not to do
well but to live well, this emphasis on personality broadens our moral concerns toward the
reconciliation of vitality and spirituality, of labor and love. It invites us to focus on the integrity
and dignity of life rather than on any single one of its many aspects.
The ultimate challenges of this project can be summarized in two complementary ways. First,
since personality means being human in one’s own way, we need to understand both the cost of
being who we are and the cost of not being who we are. When the emphasis is placed on the
development of personality, its integrity, and its flourishing, the questions also shift: What
exactly is gained by developing personality? Why, and in what sense, is an integrated personality
better off than one that is only minimally developed?
The second part of the overall project of metaphysical anthropology concerns “Interactions.”
Two basic metaphysical assumptions of this project are that the views according to which (1)
everything is ultimately one and (2) everything is ultimately individual are both inadequate
because they claim too much.
Many relations that matter most to us as human beings fall between these two extremes. They
concern cases in which there is neither complete separation nor complete overlap. This is the
defining characteristic of interactive relations.
In the natural sciences, it has long been recognized that interactions are the fundamental ways in
which physical entities relate to one another. But just as electrons interact with one another, so
do human beings. I treat interaction not primarily as a category of thought but as a dynamic
mode of life. It stands opposed to isolation, self-sufficiency, and a black-and-white picture of
reality. Our lives consist neither of actions nor reactions but of responsiveness to the reciprocal
effects that events and encounters have upon us, both in the natural and the human world.
Studying interactions leads us to resist the temptation to “fix” things once and for all; it also
makes us more sensitive to the dimension of the in-between among human beings and all other
entities. We need to take interactions seriously because life is full of ambiguities, paradoxes, and
antinomies, some of which cannot be resolved in an either-or manner, if they can be resolved at
all.
Personality emerges only in relation to others, only where it is possible to relate to other beings
through genuinely personal relations: as “I and Thou,” as Martin Buber put it. Many of the
relationships that matter most to us—those grounded in love or in being true to someone or
something—are precisely interactive in nature. This interactive approach, with its emphasis on
personal and intimate relations, also calls for a different kind of explanation, one in which
reasons and meanings, rather than causes and effects, answer the question “Why?” We can live
and develop as personalities only through an interactive dialogue with others, in which we must
justify our choices and actions to them, just as we call upon them to vindicate their conduct
before us.
The third part of this overall project is devoted to “Values.” Well-developed, flourishing, and
individually and socially integrated personalities are grounded not so much in definitive
authority as in aspirations. This is why values, and the allure they have, are so important to our
lives. A value-free reality is a fiction maintained by those who imagine that human beings create
values. Values exist independently (as ideal beings, as Nicolai Hartmann argues), whether or not
we recognize them or attempt to realize them in our lives. This applies primarily not to
instrumental values but to intrinsic ones. Among them are justice, personal and brotherly love,
dignity, trust, truthfulness, empathy, wisdom, beauty, sublimity, and many others. Our
discernment of values and our taste for them may vary greatly from one person to another and
from one epoch to another. They require continual cultivation, but even then, value conflicts
remain unavoidable. Some values conflict because they cannot both be realized at the same time
and under the same circumstances. More importantly, there are genuine value conflicts that
emerge from the very nature of values themselves (for instance, brotherly love can be unjust,
while justice need not be loving at all). Much of our mature life consists in facing such value
conflicts, and our practical wisdom depends upon navigating between our commitment to truth
and love and our need to compromise. The structure of the most serious value conflicts is not that
of a positive value opposed to a negative one. Rather, we are normally called upon to choose
either the more compelling of two positive values or the lesser of two evils in the case of
negative values. The unavoidable existence of value conflicts, and the inescapable sacrifice of
one value for the sake of another, is not in itself tragic. Conflicts of values, and the choices they
require of us, can stimulate us not only to refine our discernment of values but also to become
more responsible in our decision-making. Value conflicts are obstacles that can—and should—
be transformed into opportunities for further personal and collective growth.
The last and most metaphysically oriented part of metaphysical anthropology concerns
“Transcendence.” The prefix trans- signifies reaching toward something that extends beyond its
usual limits, connecting it with what is not ordinarily connected. I take transcendence to refer to
the horizon of our world, to the edge of the natural order. As such, it may serve as the point of
intersection between the ordinary and the extraordinary, between the temporal and the timeless.
The allure of transcendence, which human beings have always experienced, should not lead us to
lose ourselves in something larger and more powerful but rather to find ourselves and our proper
place in the world. In reaching toward the transcendent, we often move beyond the limits of
reason and must rely upon symbols, as we do in art and religious ritual. Yet we are also
connected with the transcendent through our deepest feelings, which reveal our ultimate
commitments and our sense of the sacred.
There are many conceptions of transcendence, both within the world’s religions and within
philosophy, but Roger Scruton clarifies one important aspect of transcendence through his notion
of transcendental bonds. For him, these are non-transferable attachments characterized by two
features: their long-term social function and their lack of internal plasticity. They are not matters
of social contract or convention but of inherited trusteeship. Scruton argues that all obligations of
love are of this kind. I shall develop this social-interactive conception of transcendence further
by showing that its significance lies in its double aspect: it refers both to what is separated from
everything familiar, inviting us to reach beyond ourselves, and to what is already at work within
everything, allowing us to be grounded and to feel that we are not strangers in this world but that
we truly belong here. Furthermore, I shall argue that, just as interaction is a precondition of
meaning, transcendence is a precondition of truth, especially of the truth concerning our inner
calling.
This project of metaphysical anthropology is intended as a response not only to the
fragmentation of philosophy and other intellectual disciplines but, more importantly, to the
profound moral and spiritual disorientation of our age. Metaphysical anthropology must amplify,
rather than merely analyze or deconstruct, the meaning of our place in reality. It must help us
understand how to orient ourselves toward the highest and noblest ideals of being human, rather
than continue to adapt one-sidedly to the actual. Finding the right measure between the real and
the ideal, as well as between the individual and the universal dimensions of humanity, is among
our most difficult and yet most important tasks.
Human beings both are and are not of central significance to the universe. We can validate our
presence in this world not only by developing a deeper understanding of why we are here and
what we should do with our lives, but also by connecting ourselves with—and measuring
ourselves against—something that is neither merely human nor merely immanent: the
transcendent. We must recognize our calling and summon the courage to live in accordance with
our deepest commitments.