Metaphysical Reality: Reality And Limitations Behind The World Of Reality

What is metaphysics? In the Western tradition, metaphysics concerns the nature and description of an Ultimate Reality that stands behind the world of appearances. One dominant strand holds that we can somehow come to know a world that exists undetected by our sense perceptions and unexplained by the natural operation of causes and effects. Unfortunately, our powers of sensation and perception reveal to us only a partial survey of the contingent universe unfolding around us and within us. We are part of that unfolding process, no doubt, but we have profound limitations in what we can do and what we can know. We are radically limited in our contact with the universe, and it is hard to see how, in our embodied state, we can overcome these limitations.

However, it is notoriously difficult to say what an ever-changing universe has to do with an unchanging Reality. Additionally, the contingent world we know is morally and aesthetically imperfect, to say the least. It follows that Reality, by contrast, must be supremely good and beautiful. This strand goes right back to Plato, and the idea that there exists a world that is more ‘real’ and more ‘true’ and the ‘so-called’ real world we inhabit in our embodied state. This is the world of the perfect Forms, but their relation to the particulars of which they are the Forms is difficult to describe adequately. How can two things that have absolutely nothing in common be related to each other in any way

Against taking such thoughts as literally true, Kant argued that reason ought to stop at the bounds of sense, critically aware of the limitations of our powers of understanding. We simply cannot grasp infinity with our understanding, even though we can reason quite well about infinity in mathematics. Metaphysical ideas of God, soul, immortality, the Good, Freedom, Substance, and so on, are not logically impossible, but neither are there conclusive proofs for