Philosophy still needs metaphysics

Philosophy seems to have long since abandoned its destiny: to offer an explanation of reality in its entirety and of the way in which thought – that is, what constitutes us – understands it. Metaphysics is precisely this, and if philosophy renounces metaphysics, it renounces its very own existence. This is also why Maurizio Ferraris’s “Il mondo è tutto ciò che resta” (il Mulino) deserves close attention, because it attempts to restore to the centre of philosophical reflection that metaphysics without which philosophy risks losing its raison d’être.

The book’s fundamental insight is encapsulated in its title, which reverses the proposition with which Wittgenstein opens the Tractatus: the world is not everything that happens, but everything that remains. What happens becomes part of the world to the extent that it leaves a trace and continues to have an effect. A promise can bind us many years after it was made, just as a decision can shape our lives long after the circumstances that prompted it have passed. The present cannot be understood without what of the past remains inscribed within it.

Ferraris calls this principle ‘hysteresis’, borrowing the term from physics which describes, for example, the ability of a magnetic material to retain the effects of a field even after it has been removed. The philosophical extension is more radical. Hysteresis is not the same as memory or mere duration, but denotes the condition by which effects persist beyond their causes and generate new configurations of reality. This gives rise to a conception of being not as an immobile substance traversed by time, but as the result of processes that acquire stability over time.

What makes this structure more evident today is the digital revolution, not because reality has become digital or can be reduced to information, but because the extraordinary capacity to record and preserve actions, words and behaviours has brought to light a principle that has always operated in the world: the persistence of traces and their ability to continue to produce effects. Even the mobile phone, originally designed as a tool for speaking, has gradually been transformed into a machine for writing, recording and storing. It is precisely this perspective that gives rise to what Ferraris calls ‘technosophy’ – a metaphysics that does not merely reflect on technology or judge its consequences, but utilises it as a tool for understanding reality. Rather than distancing humankind from its own nature, technology enables us to recognise its deepest structures and, through them, to gain some understanding of the very constitution of the world.

This era, much like the late 18th and early 19th centuries – a time of profound transition – calls for true philosophy: that is, conceptual frameworks capable of interpreting reality through the lens of reason. ‘Finding the human’ in the age of artificial intelligence does not mean taking refuge in the cheap sentimentality of so-called belles-lettres about beautiful souls, but rather in the creativity – and I emphasise this word – of reason’s interpretative potential and its logic. Ferraris’s theoretical momentum is powerful, regardless of whether one shares his perspective, first and foremost because he strives to provide an interpretative paradigm of reality. If philosophy does not do this, it is dead and buried. It remains only as a name to be specified – the philosophy of this or that – thereby emptying it of all meaning, or as an adjective to be tacked onto the dialogues of some pretentious television series.

Philosophy is either the codification of its own time, and of time in its entirety – that is, of the whole human experience – as grasped through thought, or it simply does not exist. But this possible ‘non-existence’ of philosophy is not the neutral disappearance of some discipline. If what has been said above holds true, the disappearance of philosophy coincides with the very disappearance of a specific, and irreplaceable, possibility of thought.