The urgent question of being

Reading | Metaphysics

A. A. Adedire, BSc, BA | 2026-07-03

If the question about Being is to be explicitly formulated and carried through in such a manner as to be completely transparent to itself, then any treatment of it in line with elucidations we have given requires us to explain how Being is to be looked at, how its meaning is to be understood and conceptually grasped; it requires us to prepare the way for choosing the right entity for our example, and to work out the genuine way of access to it. Looking at something, understanding and conceiving it, choosing, access to it—all these ways of behaving are constitutive for our inquiry, and therefore are modes of Being for those particular entities which we, the inquirers, are ourselves. Thus to work out the question of Being adequately, we must make an entity—the inquirer—transparent in his own Being. The very asking of this question is an entity’s mode of Being; and as such it gets its essential character from what is inquired about—namely, Being. This entity which each of us is himself and which includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its Being, we shall denote by the term Dasein.
[Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1962), 26–27.]

In our epoch, the true nature of reality has been withheld from us not for lack of curiosity, but by our unwillingness to contend with the strangeness of an answer—by our complacency and our eagerness to be misled in all directions, either through self-deception or by any loud charlatan, and by our intelligentsia, our ruling class, and the sustained societal pressure to average the intellect so to make all docile. Today, we are confronted with philosophical questions not out of the spirit of philosophy, of raptured wonderment with the ordinary, but out of necessity in our time, which is careening every day closer to the obsolescence of man’s mental and physical labors. With the advent of artificial minds, the question “What does it mean to be conscious?” is, once again, posed out of necessity, as an examination of the uniqueness of a shared humanity or, perhaps, as an inspection of life’s utility.

This question of consciousness, the question of the immediacy of subjective experience—the single fact of all states of affairs that is truly known—has slowly seeped into culture, ignited by the dawn of silicon intelligence. Expectedly, its definitions—debased, diluted, and distorted through ignorance—are definitions propagated by those aforementioned groups, bewitched by algorithms and emboldened by scientism. Unbeknownst to them, the proponents of physicalism, the metaphysics of matter, reanimate a philosophical corpse with every word, weaving a blatant contradiction of ideas that reflects the spiritual confusion of our age, all while compounding the convolution of terms through the guise of reason. The poly-crisis of today is then redoubled by the collision of these two seemingly distinct questions: reality and consciousness, both believed to be settled as physical processes. But a coming metaphysical reevaluation is at hand, sensed by every institution of understanding, and with which we must reckon.

In our modern history, the question of reality has proceeded uninterrupted with a search “out there,” outside ourselves, but must progress to a search inward towards awareness. Metaphysics is an inescapable dimension of human inquiry, and while the idea of any consensus on metaphysical matters may be overly hopeful, a fair aim should be a philosophy that moves closer to truth. As such, all honest and rigorous inquiries into the nature of reality will ultimately come to the realization that fundamental Nature is conjoined with the phenomenon of consciousness, plainly defined as the felt quality of being or, more generally, the underlying operation of the mind, an operation neither borne of aptitude nor retrofittable to silicon. Following a principled evaluation of its epistemic primacy and its irreducibility, the suggestion naturally follows: the end of physicalism—an ill-defined, muddled metaphysics—marks the beginning of a serious inquiry into being and a renewed clearing of collective understanding. Thus, with the death of this ontology comes the fertile soil needed for our maturation.

We find ourselves in important times, at the inflection point of a new age of contemplation, burdened by a walking-dead ontology willfully ignored amid mounting, unspoken external pressures. What is the nature of reality? What is the nature of consciousness? The answers to these questions are not to be found somewhere; the answers must be remembered, as they are writ large in the forgotten recesses of an unconscious that predates spoken words—sewn into the fabric of our souls, so to be felt. In a word, the primordial processes that animate Nature are inextricably linked to who we are as beings, to what we are at our core. The former cannot be excised from the latter, for all that is, is unified.

The task set forth in the downfall of matter is to build a concept of the world anew. It is to extirpate any remnant half-thoughts of physicalism and to rediscover an ontological reasoning so as to elevate new ways of seeing. This new reasoning is cyclically bound to an ancient intuitive thinking, an embodied perspective—lived experience, unabstracted, becomes the starting point of an ontology. The recurrence of this intuitive thinking is a sign of a deeper core sensibility: a lack of spiritual satiation in a hollow metaphysics, and a growing recognition of the necessity of being in uncovering the world; that is, the primacy of the participation of being in the dialog of revealing reality. This idea constitutes the tacit refutation of the subject–object distinction and the acceptance of a singular, wholistic becoming and un-concealment of the world—an unfolding in which reality gradually renders explicit what lies implicit within it, a disclosure of its own inner coherence that evades stagnant definition. So, Nature teaches in the process of birth, maturation, and senescence. Such a view aligns with ordinary experience; consequently, what emerges, then, is not a rejection of the scientific enterprise, but a demand that inquiry expand beyond quantitative abstraction and into the dimension of phenomenology.

What is needed now is an unwavering discernment, the ability to unmask being as being, to closely interrogate an ever-present awareness at the heart of all experience. At the outset of any such investigation, we must forget all priors so as to come back to awareness afresh, to sit in silence with being, arms outstretched, to receive an untainted understanding. Abandon all preconceptions and beseech awareness. Retreat to being. The task should turn neither to intuition untempered, nor to reason constrained, but to a middle path of unbridled, honest study. What hints of reality’s unbounded queerness could be surmised from such an approach? Must not our science be equally as odd to unveil the oddities of reality? Any uncovered scientia from such methods obliterates the knowns of physicalism, the invented, inverted truths of physicalism: perceived multiplicity, the frailties of mind, and even death as a finality. And so, the inertia of the coming age is the need to investigate a world beneath a world. And until such a time when all fields of study are unshackled from the restraints of the physical, a new science will be born, and mankind will rejoice that the world is no longer lifeless.