"Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck"
- Immanuel Kant
About this Quote
This quote by Immanuel Kant is a cautionary declaration regarding the research study of metaphysics, which is a branch of approach that handles abstract concepts such as existence, causality, as well as the nature of fact. Kant is recommending that metaphysics is a vast and also mysterious realm that does not have any type of set limits, making it difficult to navigate and understand. He compares it to a dark sea without shores or lighthouse, where ships (or in this case, philosophers) can conveniently get lost or accident onto the rocks. The "philosophic wreckages" he describes are the many fell short attempts over the centuries to understand metaphysical problems, such as the nature of the spirit, God, as well as the afterlife. In other words, Kant is alerting ambitious thinkers not to be too confident in their capacity to plumb the depths of metaphysics, lest they wind up stranded or sunk by the complexity and also obscurity of the subject matter.