Metaphysics in Action-First Philosophy

Metaphysics has traditionally been treated as first philosophy: the discipline tasked with answering the most fundamental questions about what exists, what is necessary, and what ultimately grounds knowledge, value, and reason. On this traditional picture, metaphysics precedes psychology, epistemology, and action. One must first determine the structure of reality, then determine how minds relate to that structure, and only afterward account for how agents act within it. The present view rejects that ordering entirely. Metaphysics is not first philosophy. Action is.

Inquiry does not begin with theories, ontologies, or commitments about what must exist. It begins with organisms acting in the face of uncertainty. Living systems must cope before they can explain, and they must coordinate before they can justify. Action is therefore not something that presupposes metaphysics; metaphysics is something that emerges only once action has already been underway for a long time. Any philosophical framework that reverses this order mistakes reflective articulation for origin and confuses orientation with explanation.

The priority of action is not a slogan but a developmental claim. Organisms encounter environments that constrain what they can do. Some ways of acting persist; others break down. Through repeated engagement, patterns of adjustment form. These patterns are not guided by inner pictures of the world but by sensitivity to disruption and ease, failure and success. What develops is not a map of reality but a repertoire of dispositions for coping. The world does not need to be represented in order to resist. Resistance is encountered directly in the course of action itself.

Psychological capacities arise as refinements of this basic activity. Anticipation, affect, habit, and correction emerge as ways of stabilizing engagement under uncertainty. These capacities allow action to become more flexible and less brittle, but they do not introduce a new relation between mind and world. They refine responsiveness. Even what is often called “prediction” is better understood here as readiness to act in ways that have tended to work before, not as the construction of inner models aimed at mirroring external structure. Psychology, on this view, explains how action becomes regulated, not how reality becomes internally duplicated.

Only when reflective and linguistic capacities develop does something like metaphysical pressure arise. At this point, agents become capable of articulating their own activity, evaluating patterns of success and failure, and coordinating action through shared descriptions. Language allows practices to be named, expectations to be stabilized, and disagreements to be negotiated. But language also allows articulation to outrun experience. Words can continue where correction cannot. Questions can be posed that no longer track breakdowns in practice but instead reflect the internal demands of articulation itself.

It is here, and only here, that metaphysical questions emerge. They do not arise because agents fail to grasp reality as it truly is, nor because they lack access to some hidden structure of the world. They arise because reflective articulation generates demands for justification that cannot be met by further experience. When explanation reaches its practical limit, orientation does not disappear. It intensifies. Metaphysics is the conceptual space in which this intensification occurs.

For this reason, metaphysics should not be understood as an attempt to answer ultimate “why” questions. It is better understood as an attempt to articulate those questions and to embed their presuppositions into explanation and prescription. Metaphysical frameworks do not deliver discoveries about what must exist; they stabilize ways of moving forward when action cannot wait and explanation cannot advance. They function as orientations adopted under conditions of unavoidable ignorance.

This reframing dissolves a persistent philosophical confusion. The failure of metaphysics to deliver final answers is not a defect. It is evidence that metaphysics was never in the business of answering such questions in the first place. Metaphysical inquiry persists precisely because the conditions that give rise to it—uncertainty, finitude, the need to act without guarantee—are permanent features of human life. Metaphysics is a response to unanswerability, not a solution to it.

The mistake of the rationalist tradition lies in treating these orientational commitments as if they were discoveries about reality itself. Once a metaphysical framework proves effective in stabilizing inquiry, it becomes tempting to treat it as necessary rather than adopted, explanatory rather than regulative, and descriptive rather than practical. What begins as a way of moving forward hardens into a claim about how things must be. At that point, metaphysics overreaches.

This overreach explains the historical entanglement of metaphysics with epistemology. When metaphysical commitments can no longer be asserted directly—because scientific inquiry undermines claims of necessity—they are reframed as questions about justification, truth, and rationality. Epistemology emerges as metaphysics in defensive posture: metaphysics without ontological candor. It governs belief by appeal to idealized norms while denying that it is doing metaphysics at all. In this way, epistemology functions as a secularized theology, regulating assent by invoking standards that lie beyond any particular practice.

Once belief is understood as a matter of habit, coordination, and correction within activity, epistemology loses its distinct subject matter. There is no independent realm of justification standing apart from practice. What epistemology calls justification is simply the stabilization of action in the face of constraint. What it calls truth is the cessation of error propagation within coordinated activity. These are not relations between propositions and reality; they are features of how practices hold together over time. When this is recognized, epistemology does not need to be refuted. It is reabsorbed.

This reabsorption does not eliminate normativity. On the contrary, it locates normativity where it actually operates. Norms arise because coordination fails, because action breaks down, because errors matter. They are not imposed by metaphysical law but generated within practice itself. They are local, revisable, and responsive to consequences. That they lack necessity does not make them arbitrary; it makes them answerable to life.

A common objection at this point is that such an account merely replaces one metaphysics with another. But this objection misunderstands the claim being made. The present view does not deny that any account of inquiry presupposes an orientation. It insists on it. What it denies is that such orientations must be elevated into claims about the ultimate structure of reality or treated as immune to revision. The error is not having metaphysical presuppositions; the error is denying that one has them.

In this respect, Dewey’s notion of a “common faith” is instructive. Faith, on this view, is not assent to doctrine but commitment to a way of going on in the absence of certainty. Metaphysics belongs with faith in this sense. It articulates what matters when proof runs out. It expresses how we choose to proceed when no final answers are available. Its danger lies not in its existence but in its disguise—when orientation presents itself as explanation and commitment masquerades as necessity.

To say that metaphysical questions cannot be answered is therefore not to dismiss them. It is to respect them. “Beyond physics” does not mean beyond some future science; it means beyond experience itself. And beyond experience there can be no empirical correction, no explanatory leverage, no grounds for law-like governance. What lies there can be named, explored, and reflected upon, but not settled. Metaphysics marks that boundary.

Once this boundary is acknowledged, philosophy changes its self-understanding. It is no longer a quest for foundations or final descriptions. It becomes a reflective practice concerned with how humans orient themselves amid uncertainty, how concepts arise from action, and how those concepts can mislead when they are taken too seriously. Philosophy, in this sense, is not first philosophy. It is second-order reflection on a life that is already underway.

Action, then, is first philosophy. Psychology explains how action becomes regulated and stabilized. Metaphysics explains how reflection arises when regulation reaches its limits. None of these domains grounds the others in the traditional sense. They stand in a developmental relation, not a hierarchy of authority. When this order is reversed, philosophy generates problems it cannot solve. When it is respected, many of those problems dissolve.

The aim of this view is not to close metaphysical inquiry but to place it where it belongs: as an honest acknowledgment of the unanswerable conditions under which inquiry proceeds. Metaphysics does not tell us what the world ultimately is. It tells us how we go on when we cannot know that—and why we feel compelled to ask anyway.

Produced with assistance from ChatGPT