The future of metaphysics is both dark and promising simultaneously, and this bittersweet scent is the very essence of the discipline itself. The darkness will lie in the fact that it will be less and less recognized as a relevant discipline as such, being diluted in endless fallacious and yellowish discourses. Still, at the same time, it will become freer as it has no defined owner nor an all-powerful institution guarding it. Its dilution as such will be so acute that it will come to exist in another realm, the realm of metaphysics, a realm of its own. That is, in other words, it will return home. And if the pre-Socratics heatedly discussed the arjé, this is the origin of reality, where one would allude to fire, another to water, another to air… in the same way, there will be an absolute metaphysical multipolarity in which the discipline will be divided into countless ways of understanding. Defined opinions will be found everywhere, loaded with refined rhetoric and, to an extent, reduced to hyper-processed packets of information. No one will be the total master of it. Still, this does not mean that some particularly acute thinkers won’t be able to herd big populational groups into schools of thought, as spiritual coaches do nowadays. Yet, by their deeds, thou shall know them, and it will ultimately be their results in terms of service for the population, which is the main factor that will determine the legitimacy of the school of thought that they promote.
This whole process, I believe, will be nothing more than a continuation of what happened in the last two centuries with the advent of modernity, but it is by no means a dead end nor an exact repetition of what has already happened. In fact, the very process of liberation and extreme democratization of metaphysics will give the discipline more power and influence than ever before. Just like the concept of divinity, metaphysics does not depend on the opinion or attention of a group of the faithful, but it exists beyond the spheres of ordinary reality on its own as a disruptive agent of homogeneity able to break through the thickets of tradition. It is for this reason that I believe that the essence of metaphysics lies not in its capacity to design definite discourses but in carving directly into the rock of reality and ending up generating realities as solid as that very rock.
It is an unrelenting force akin to antimatter and pre-existent to time itself, the mother of philosophy who is in itself the mother of all other forms of knowledge. Metaphysics would thus be the basis and support of reality rather than an appropriable discipline. And if there is a particular idea we have grasped from XX-century schools such as Heiddegger´s, it is that reality tends to work in negative and chaotic ways, tending more towards nothingness than towards something, for in nothingness is found the relief from the burdens and anxieties generated by the infinite multitude of somethingness. A definitive wink to many Eastern traditions, nonetheless, and an opening of dialogue between East and West, which will only enrich and empower the discipline even more.
The idea of a negative metaphysics, which is negative in terms of negation of the absolute regarding worldly phenomena, is not new, but in many ways, self-evident.
The clock of death begins to count down from the moment a human being leaves the womb, and then the rush into that tunnel towards nothingness, a tunnel that we call life, seems to be nothing and meaningless. If we are to live, the search for meaning in life is presented to us as a bad joke. However, when that exact search for meaning is turned inwards, the individual finds his particular flavor, his tendency beyond the influences of the masses. Then, he no longer needs to show his worth or his importance but exists in an extremely light and, in some sense, childlike state of consciousness. The contradictions of the mass cannot enter his mind; he has generated, perhaps even unknowingly, his own metaphysical framework, which is but a particular personalization of the larger and unapproachable whole that is metaphysics as a discipline, that is, reality itself. How can one create a discipline of reality? This can seem a prideful endeavor, easily leading to hubris and excess. But it is precisely the negative, abstract, and, to a certain extent, chaotic essence of metaphysics that prevents such a fall in the first place and humbles us to the point of becoming vessels of something much greater than our mundane egos.
On the other hand, if metaphysics is the discipline of reality itself, then the individual’s metaphysical formation will influence his well-being and contribute to weaving the web of metaphysical constructs around him into a focus of authenticity and freedom from the neurotic anxieties of concerted reality. The world will be in free fall, but in that fall, there will be a cascade of possible worlds, personalized cosmologies, and spirituality turned into a gift as an endless spring to quench the existential thirst of the individual. Free will at its best will either make us happy or drive us mad. What must be avoided, in my opinion, is fanatism for a specific paradigm, as we should always be ready to immerse ourselves in a kind of epistemological chaos that will help open the doors to new horizons.
During the zenith of academia in the 20th century, Cartesian rationalism gave intellectual elites in universities a false sense of security that they retain to this day. The quest for the squaring of thought that is especially prevalent in contemporary academia does not respond to a philosophical conviction but to mere convenience on the part of a kind of intellectual nepotism in which there seems to be a kind of “rite of passage” consisting of spending years and large sums of money on supposedly sophisticated training. This rite of passage, far from the benign initiation that expands the subject’s consciousness and places him in awe of himself and the universe around him, far from achieving that goal, is more akin to a cookie-cutting tool that eliminates any true divergence among the subject´s thinking. Therefore, the future of metaphysics will lie above and beyond academia and above and beyond anything or anyone that tries to cage it into a four-wall room. The future of metaphysics will be free, and so will humanity.
