First Principles of the Metaphysics of Life Charting the Human Condition Man’s Creative Act and the Origin of Rationalities

Abstract

Postulates for “Every Future Metaphysics”. The issue which we will treat concerns the urgency to investigate the nature and origin of the multiple rationalities with which the enormous growth of human knowledge about nature, the world, and man confronts us today. To approach it, the basic mode of access to such a query is of primary importance. It means no more and no less than finding the key to unlock the door which would open the realm of metaphysics. Indeed, my master, Roman Ingarden, in his less than successful attempt of discovery sought the “specific type of knowledge” that would reveal the key to metaphysics understood by him as the direct investigation of reality and of real existence. Does Ingarden’s failure to find such a type of cognition mean that for phenomenology with its radical criticism of philosophical procedures there is no access to the first principles? Seeing the unsuccessful attempts of Husserl himself and Heidegger, as well as Merleau-Ponty after them, to bring together the eidos with the concrete fact would confirm such a doubt. However, these great thinkers do not seem to have delved deeply enough into the genesis of the constitution of objectivity; this objectivity meant for them the essential “givenness.” In contrast, I propose its inner workings as the locus whence eidos and fact simultaneously spring. This amounts to saying that not constitutive intentionality but the constructive advance of life which carries it may alone reveal to us the first principles of all things; not the givenness of the world but the “poetics of life.”