Metaphysics

Metaphysics is the study of existence as such — reality, and what it means for anything at all to be.

What It Answers

Before anything can be known (Epistemology) or acted on (Ethics), there has to be something to know and act within. Metaphysics answers the most basic question there is: what is real, and what is its nature?

The Three Axioms

Everything else rests on three irreducible, self-evident axioms — each provable only by the fact that denying it requires using it (see Axioms as Invulnerable):

• Existence — something exists, as opposed to nothing.
• Identity — to exist is to be something specific; A is A.
• Consciousness — the faculty of perceiving that which exists.

The Fork That Decides Everything Downstream

All of metaphysics reduces to one question: does existence hold primacy over consciousness, or the reverse?

• Primacy of Existence (correct): reality is what it is, independent of anyone’s wishes, feelings, or beliefs. Consciousness’s job is to perceive and identify reality, not author it.
• Primacy of Consciousness (the fallacy): the idea that wishing, believing, or willing something can make it so. Self-refuting — consciousness presupposes something to be conscious of, which is reality, so reality has to come first.

Every downstream error catalogued in this vault — central planning, value subjectivism misapplied past economics into ethics, Polylogism, Mixed Law — is ultimately a Primacy of Consciousness error: some claim that reality (economic law, human nature, the nature of value) bends to a plan, a class, or a vote, instead of the other way around.

Feeds Into

Metaphysics doesn’t stop at “what is.” Because reality — including human identity, i.e. what kind of entity man is — has a fixed nature, metaphysics is what makes an objective Epistemology possible, which is what makes an objective Ethics possible. See Philosophy for the full chain, and for where a popular account of it (Objectivism) adds a branch that doesn’t belong.