190 and shifting associationism when he argued only for habitual association of ideas for all beings, knowledge and relationships.
191 is therefore needed. For metaphysics to account for extra-experiential realities demonstrate therefore that experiential concept or processes cannot be used to deny metaphysical concepts, because “metaphysical concepts may not be accounted for by appeal to the reality as a whole.”23
Reality is not restricted to objects known through empirical means alone; it involves not only the sensible but also the supersensible. In experiential means, what is involved is that the process of knowing reality starts with the objects that are already known through the senses and still ends with these objects. Anything that transcends what the senses can perceive has gone out of the scope of experiential means of knowing reality, so using experiential method to reject what operates in a way that transcends that experiential method becomes wrong and Hume made this “category mistake” by rejecting metaphysics based on empirical means which only pursues part of the reality while metaphysics pursues reality in whole and therefore adopts a style different and transcendental to empiricism. Hegel argued that the metaphysician sees from one piece of reality what the whole of reality must be. He maintained that; “Every apparently separate piece of reality has, as it were, hooks which grapple it to the next piece, the next piece, in turn, has fresh looks and so on, until the whole universe is reconstructed.”24
Reality is therefore interlinked and from one piece of metaphysics etc. to the other, metaphysics does not limit its problems and as such pursued the knowledge of a higher reality as distinct from that of ever changing things that empirical procedure can only acquire. This is one of the reasons why metaphysical concepts cannot be ascertained through empirical procedures. So Hume‟s denial of metaphysics and its concepts as not constituting
192 reality based on a procedure (empirical procedure) that cannot know metaphysical concepts becomes unsuccessful. Metaphysics is not a specialized field, but studies realities that underlie specialized fields; this is why Aristotle called it the “science of sciences”.
As metaphysics is not specialized, the methods of the specialized fields cannot form the basis of judgment for the validity of metaphysics.
Metaphysics and metaphysical approach are holistic and complete while the specialized sciences and their approaches are incomplete and penultimate…. that which is in exact is a more basic truth than that which is exact, therefore is a truth of higher rank not only because its theme is broader, but even as a type of knowledge, in short, in exact philosophic truth is true truth.25
So, because metaphysics is not specialized, its ways are inexact and very broad, and it therefore embodies a higher truth than that of the specialized and exact fields.
Hume failed to understand this and hence attacked metaphysics, but, this made his view of reality lopsided as it inclined heavily on the empirical side of knowledge acquisition. After rejecting metaphysics and its concepts, Hume still failed to provide any knowledge that is certain. Thus, “by arguing only for habitual association of ideas for all beings, knowledge and relationships, he bases all human inquiry of the shaky foundations of brute sensibility, ephemeral empiricism and shifting associationism.”26 Sensism cannot explain all knowledge; even sense knowledge itself must have a deeper foundation than human person himself as a substance who senses.
But Hume believed just in the opposite, to him, sensism can explain all knowledge, anything it cannot explain is therefore meaningless and non-existent, because of this, Hume held so tight on impressions as guaranteeing reality that in the end, his empirical beliefs was nothing more than mere impressions. Everything that is real is therefore reduced to impressions.
What Hume searched for no doubt was certainty and because of this, he relied on sense
193 experience because, in its limited scope, sense experience seems to guarantee certainty as it has holds on concrete external objects. For Hume, this is where reality lies; going further will lead to absurdity.
But reality as we know does not lie only in one aspect of philosophy; if it does, the philosophy of the ancient philosophers would have explained everything so that, the philosophy of the contemporary philosophers would have been still born. Just as Jacques Maritain “…. Every philosophical system contains some truth and tells us something about the real. No philosophy is totally false without any element of truth in it. Neither idealism nor positivism is totally false; each is an exaggeration of an aspect of reality.”27
Reality therefore has many faces, no one face can therefore claim to embody the whole of reality thus rendering others as meaningless. Only impressions as Hume claimed cannot explain the whole of reality and cannot therefore be used to reject every other aspect of philosophy. As Bertrand Russell argued that in every empirical subject matter I expect, though without complete confidence that a thorough understanding will reduce the more important causal laws to those of physics, but where the matter is very complex, I doubt the practical feasibility of the reduction … they (empiricists) tend to think that only what is experienced can be known to exist and that it is meaningless to assert that some things exist- although we do not know them to exist.
… Everybody, in fact, accepts innumerable positions about things not experienced but when people begin to philosophize; they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid. I will admit that at once that there are difficulties in explaining how we acquire knowledge that transcends experience, but I think the view that we have no such knowledge as utterly integralness.28
194 So because metaphysical concepts cannot be experienced, do not make them meaningless and rejectable, and reality should not be completely reduced, as Hume did, to impression alone because,
The epistemological scientific and ontological heritage of humanity is, we think, more than a series of impressions. They have content and validity based on substantial entity and authentic causality. The numerous good beliefs and ideologies that are the backbones of human, culture, religion, morality and politics are not mere impressions. They are eternal values that make for integralness of the fully human and authentically real.29
Therefore, Hume‟s proposal of sensism as an alternative to our natural and acquired scientific, metaphysical and socio-cultural knowledge did not solve any problems rather it creates more problems. “His epistemological paradigm of reality lying only on impressions leaves one in the “sandy subjection of dry empiricism.”30