UNBUNDLING METAPHYSICS AND METAPHYSICAL THINKING IN POSTMODERN REGIME

Abstract

The orientation derived from the doctrine and understanding of Being is that the more constantly it is interrogated, the more revolutionary reality becomes and the greater our appreciation of existence. This is to the extent that it becomes impossible to pin down or reduce the nature of things to this or that, as each attempt in doing that will always throw up a more compelling alternative begging for attention. This, has been the trajectory of the historical sojourn of metaphysics and metaphysical thinking. Finding reveals that the attempt to reduce the familiar, the convenient and the knowable to all there is, has made the unfamiliar, the inconvenient and the unknowable more compelling in exerting attention. Thus, the notion of metaphysics as the study of what is turns out to be the problematic in metaphysical thinking, as what is not becomes consigned into nothingness and this very act, invariably, continues to render what is not as object worthy of investigation in postmodern regime. On the strength of the foregoing issues, this paper, with the aid of phenomenology, seeks to unbundle the ossified notion of metaphysics as what is by revealing its compelling nature and different ways metaphysics and metaphysical thinking do radically manifest in human experience. The objective of the study is to rescue metaphysics from ossification and excessive abstraction which it is often accused of. This new dimension to metaphysics avails fresh opportunities for scholarship and societal progress As an exercise in postmodern thought, the paper submits that metaphysics is not only dynamic in nature, but also that everyone engages in it in one form or the other in the course of human daily rounds.