Imagine waking in an empty room with no memory of how you got there — no captor, no note, no reason. All you can do is reason from whatever scraps you find toward the best explanation of where you are and what to do next. That, more or less, is the human condition: phenomenologists call it being “thrown into the world,” and it comes with no guidance, no explanation, not even a manual. Most people make their peace with that early and get on with living. A few of us never lose the feeling of having been kidnapped — and for us, asking what reality actually is stops being a hobby or a profession and becomes a way of life. It’s mine.
A way of life built on pure speculation would be worthless, though. Metaphysics, as I practice it, is abductive — it reasons from all the available evidence toward the best explanation — and the best evidence we have comes from science: precise, tested, hard-won. So I lean on it constantly, especially physics. But metaphysics is not science and shouldn’t pretend to be. It stays free where science is bound: unafraid of questions that can’t yet be tested, and unwilling to stay inside any single discipline. The two aren’t rivals but partners — science supplies the rigor, metaphysics the reach.
And it is never finished. Metaphysics works at the edge of what we currently understand — the epistemic horizon — reasoning about what lies just beyond it and trying to push that edge outward. That horizon has moved many times in human history, and ours is plainly not the last; the open mysteries are too many. So I hold even my firmest views loosely: mine have turned over completely more than once, and they may again. Expect me to sound more certain than I have any right to — and take it with a grain of salt. This blog is the record of that search: my companion on the way to the next horizon.
Michał Sykutera
michal@metaphysics.blog
