Learning Journal 2: The Accidental Metaphysician

I’ll be honest: some of this week’s material bounced right off me. I struggled with Simic. The idea of him as a “displaced metaphysician” interrogating gloves and umbrellas at 3 a.m.? I get it intellectually, but it didn’t resonate. Maybe I’m too literal-minded from years staring at spreadsheets, or maybe I just missed the point. Either way, poetry as a vehicle for metaphysical inquiry feels foreign to me.

Kornhaber’s piece on “wait-there’s-more-ism” in pop culture, though? That clicked immediately. In data analytics, we’re constantly searching for patterns in apparent noise, hoping that with the right algorithm we can reveal some underlying order. It’s the same impulse he identifies in shows like Arrival: this belief that there’s a deeper structure we can access if we’re just smart enough.

The paradoxes genuinely unsettled me. The Grandfather Paradox and Zeno’s Paradox aren’t just logic puzzles. They’re probing whether free will actually exists or whether we’re sophisticated meat-machines running predetermined code. That possibility is terrifying. It reminded me of my critique of Utilitarianism last term, where I argued that even simple scenarios have billions of variables that only a deity could calculate. But what if the universe is deterministic on that scale? If we had all the variables, the equation, and a few trillion CUDA cores, could we calculate what I’m going to do tomorrow? Wild stuff.

I didn’t resonate with Kant either. The Stoics just have more practical appeal to me than transcendental idealism, whether or not they’re “correct” in some absolute sense.

But here’s the revelation that actually changed my thinking: I’ve been doing metaphysics all along without knowing it. I thought metaphysics was just theology or mysticism, asking whether God exists or souls are real. But this week clarified that metaphysics asks fundamental questions about the nature of reality itself. Does the universe have inherent purpose? Is meaning discovered or created?

My Absurdism makes specific metaphysical claims: the universe is indifferent, there’s no cosmic purpose, meaning is human-created. This isn’t just “I’m an atheist.” That’s a narrow claim about God. My worldview is a comprehensive metaphysical framework about what kind of universe we inhabit. I’ve been constructing a metaphysical position this entire time and just calling it my “worldview.”

That’s genuinely humbling and reframes everything I’ve been writing, both in your class and last term in Ethics, as part of an ongoing metaphysical inquiry. I suppose I am, despite my discomfort with the label, a metaphysician. Just not one who contemplates gloves at 3 a.m.