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HEIDEGGER AND CHARLES HENRY ON 'METAPHYSICS'

Heidegger claims that 'the essence of Humanism is metaphysical' (p.247) and that metaphysics is an obstacle to approaching the truth of Being: 

'In defining the humanity of man humanism not only does not ask about the relation of Being to the essence of man; because of its metaphysical origin humanism even impedes the question by neither recognising nor understanding it. On the contrary, the necessity and proper form of the question concerning the truth of Being, forgotten in and through metaphysics, can come to light only if the question "What is Metaphysics?" is posed in the midst of metaphysics' domination' (p.226).

This reads like an invitation to turn to Heidegger's essay What is Metaphysics?, his inaugural lecture given when he took up his post in Freiburg University in 1929. But before I do that I'd like to turn to Charles Henry,  mathematician and a friend of Gleizes's, who also set himself in opposition to 'metaphysics' which, like Heidegger, he also regarded as a term suitable for characterising the predominant mode of thought in the world surrounding him.

Henry is now best known for working out a mathematical account of sensations, positive or negative, which was of particular interest to the 'Neo-Impressionists' in the late nineteenth century, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, who, despite the very different appearance of their work, were in many ways intellectual precursors of Cubism (we are of course talking about Cubism as something that deserves to be taken seriously, not Cubism as it appears in art history books).

Henry was in his day perhaps the leading French representative of the school of 'psycho-physics', associated in Germany with Gustav Fechner and in North America with William James. The psycho-physicists argued that, when we think we are studying or perceiving the external world, the object of study or perception is always a mental phenomenon, a sensation: 'Gravity, light, biophysics are qualities derived from our consciousness.' [4] To treat these objects of study as if they were something other than mental phenomena is 'metaphysics': 

'the old metaphysical idea of "substance", by creating in the mind of a large number of specialists an abyss between the domain of thought and the domain called material has been one of the most regrettable conceptions for the progress of science' [5]

[4]   Quoted in Robert Mirabaud: Charles Henry et l'idealisme scientifique, Librairie Fishbacher, Paris, 1926, p.13.

[5]   Charles Henry: Essai de Généralisation de la Théorie du Rayonnement, J.Hermann, Paris 1925, p.139.

Henry saw no distinction between 'consciousness' and 'matter': 

''Is consciousness an irreducible fact or an epiphenomenon of certain combinations of unconscious facts? From a metaphysical point of view both theories can be maintained; but if we look at it from the scientific point of view of the expression, the problem does not even arise. With regard to quantitative science (and that is the science towards which everything is trying to turn) sensibility can be nothing but a modification in the motor reaction [la réaction motrice] to stimulants [excitants]. It is clear that the exercise of consciousness will be correlative to certain motor conditions [conditions motrices]. There is a common psychic base to all the phenomena of sensibility, unconscious and conscious ...' [6]

[6]   'Le Contraste, le rythme, la mesure', Revue philosophique de la France et de l'étranger, t.xxviii, July-Dec 1889, p.379.

The 'metaphysical' point of view is here the view that there is such a thing as 'matter' qualitatively distinct from consciousness.

Heidegger's complaint against metaphysics, which may or may not resemble Henry's, is that it concentrates attention on 'beings' rather than on Being. In What is Metaphysics? he says:

'The relation to the world that pervades all the sciences as such lets them - each according to its particular content and mode of being - seek beings themselves in order to make them objects of investigation and to determine their grounds. According to the idea behind them, in the sciences we approach what is essential in all things. This distinctive relation to the world in which we turn towards beings themselves is supported and guided by a freely chosen attitude of human existence. To be sure, man's prescientific and extrascientific activities are also related to beings. But science is exceptional in that, in a way peculiar to it, it gives the matter itself explicitly and solely the first and last word. In such impartiality of inquiring, determining, and grounding, a peculiarly delineated submission to beings themselves obtains, in order that they may reveal themselves. This submission in research and theory evolves in such a way as to become the ground of ... the whole of human existence ... Man - one being among others - "pursues science." In this "pursuit" nothing less transpires than the irruption by one being called "man" into the whole of beings, indeed in such a way that in and through this irruption beings break open and show what they are and how they are. The irruption that breaks open, in its way, helps beings above all to themselves.' [sic. Should presumably be 'to reveal themselves'] (pp.94-5)

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