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Metaphysics (general theory of being)

According to Krąpiec, metaphysics is the extremely crucial philosophical science from which all the other philosophical disciplines are derived or dependent on (since in their very essence they all are but the kinds of particular metaphysics). The chief purpose of metaphysics is to provide an ultimate explanation of both individual beings (substantial) and the whole of being by pointing to a necessary factor common to them all, thanks to which they all are beings. Krąpiec's existential conception focuses on existence and the composition of existence and essence, which in turn enables us to explain in ultimate terms such metaphysical facts as the contingent character of being (that beings do not exist by necessity), the pluralism of beings, mutual relations, and the problem of the source of existence. In this approach the act of existence (esse) is the deepest and the most perfect act of being; without the act of existence every content (essentia) would remain only a bare possibility. When apprehended under the aspect of its existence, being guarantees realism and objectivity of cognition and of language that man uses. Beings as made of existence and essence as their basic components are further described by pointing out their common features, which are called transcendentals. These transcendentals (described in short by the following terms: being, thing, unity, something, truth, good and beauty) are the results of having read both necessary and common features of beings and they are, as basic expressions in language, the basic cognitive structures within which one can conceive the concrete thing as well as the whole of existing reality. Because of the analogical mode of being of things, all metaphysical cognition is also analogical in character. Moreover, the order of metaphysical cognition (i.e. the construction of the theory of being, primacy-secondariness, the hierarchy of descriptions of the composition of being, of the aspects of apprehension, and so forth) is set by the order of the internal and external relations of being. For this reason, metaphysics is formally a system, the consistence of which reflects the consistence of being and the whole of reality. The question of the Absolute is what crowns all metaphysics, in the cognition of which an especially great role is played by the reference to the analogy of being, which consists in the similarity of all things under the aspect of existence and essence. When we recognize the analogical character of being, we can establish the hierarchy of being and answer the question about the ultimate source of existence and about the Being which is to be the reason of all reality. In Krąpiec's entire metaphysics (as well as in any particular metaphysics of his), this completely existential aspect of explanation peculiar to his approach is always clearly predominant.


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