Abstract

This dissertation is a speculative account of human experience as essentially moral--involving passion and interest, habit and action. Thought is itself moral, the endeavor to fix habits of action--i.e., beliefs. Metaphysics, then, is thought concerned with those basic beliefs that orient our being in the world. In as much as this essay strives to articulate metaphysical belief, it is a confession. The first chapter clarifies the notion of confession, calling upon the pragmatists' treatment of belief and action, and upon Plato's analysis of thought and being in the divided line. The more fully I integrate myself in a belief, the more fully I engage reality. The divided line schematizes the degrees to which beliefs engage reality. ;The reality whereby a person engages reality is "the soul"; the second chapter presents a theory of the soul, based on the hypothesis that the soul is participation, taken in three abstractly distinct but concretely unified senses: the ontological participation of a being in the ground of being, with Plato called the Good, the cosmological participation of the being in other beings, and the axiological participation of a being in the Idea. The ontological questioning of existence becomes the means for the theoretical clarification of this participation, and for the dialectical adjustment of life to the Good. ;What a being is is its cosmological participations in other beings. A being is a complex of participations; it is also an integral participation in other integral beings, given self-identity by the corporate participation of its components in a relevant norm or Idea. At the level of human experience, an integral participation is one moment in a transaction, the mutual participation of two beings in a new being which is the real concrescence of their interaction. ;To believe this methaphysics is to employ it for the orientation of thought and action. One test of this belief is undertaken in the third chapter, a critique of the philosophies, considered as methaphysical beliefs, of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Santayana, and Bergson