Introduction

Modern science and the world we have built up around it deny both the existence and the need for metaphysics. At best it is considered the quaint and antiquated preoccupation of classical philosophical speculation. At worst it reflects the whimsy of New Age and religious ignorance and willfulness in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In either case, metaphysics today is thought to be barely worthy of serious consideration.

From the beginning of rigorous philosophical thought in the West - since at least the time of Thales (C. 585 B.C.) - the way we look at reality has remained essentially unchanged. Thales saw only water, i.e. material substance as the grounding for the world. Today, though we are more sophisticated, we would still agree with him that the only knowable reality is material and objective.

Despite protests to the contrary, mystical cosmologists then and now have looked at the world in much the same way as Thales and our modern sophisticates. The difference is that people of this ilk still insist that there are metaphysical or otherworldly things such as gods, spirits, minds, souls or radical mystery lurking everywhere in the background of objective reality.

Many of those who accept the material as the only true basis of reality nevertheless often have a need to feel spiritual in some abstract or metaphoric sense. Perhaps in ways similar to those who used to marvel that the universe worked like a great timepiece, they now claim to see the material flux as all inter-connected and inter-related and thus somehow cosmic and spiritual because of that.

But when it comes right down to it, all sides have essentially shared the same common sense view of reality. Papyrus, and clay tablets are clearly material, external, and exist separately. Thales and the mystic are also material and external. The brain, mind, soul, spirit, the observer are considered internal.

What do we really mean by inside and outside? It seems like a very simple straight-forward question. But as we will soon discover, it really isn't. To try to better understand why, we will go back to Thales and the mystical cosmologists; to start again to think about what we mean when we talk about reality as a metaphysical project. Too often today such an exploration gets mired in a dense Hegelian, Heideggerian and Catholic phenomenology of mind and spirit or smug Anglo exercises in language, words and their meanings. While the journey will still not be an easy one, we will nevertheless try to avoid such mind-numbing traps.

In 1980 I was in the library periodical room at the State University of New York at Albany talking to an Indian Brahman friend. I tried to explain to him a philosophical idea I had begun to struggle with. As I went on and on he seemed both bored and amused by a mere American attempting to be philosophical. He asked me what I called this idea. For lack of any better name I immediately decided to call it the Metaphysics of Blue. The thinking that will be developed here has nothing to do with blue and any metaphysical properties it may or may not have. I could just as easily have called it the Metaphysics of Red or anything else.



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