There is only one metaphysics, and everyone believes it. At least, everyone’s metaphysics has a large overlap with everyone else’s. The interesting part is that this includes the metaphysics of secular materialists.
This metaphysics amounts to belief in five things: this world, the other world, destiny, élan, and souls. This world is not controversial or particularly obscure. Of the others:
Everyone knows that there is another world beyond the one we see. In Celtic studies, it is just flat-out called “the Otherworld.” Or it might be “the spirit world.” Very often, it is divisible into sub-worlds, like heavens and hells.
The secular version of this is all the particles and forces we can infer but never directly see, and could arguably include things like additional dimensions, other cosmoi of a multiverse, and regions beyond the event horizon.
Everyone believes that some things must happen and some things cannot. We’re not talking about how 1 + 1 = 2 has to happen or how round squares can’t happen; we mean things that you can imagine happening or not, but they won’t or they will because that’s how things are destined.
The mythic version of this is something like the Delphic Oracle telling Oedipus that he will kill his father and marry his mother. The romantic version is that you know these two kids will be together eventually, and they may know too.
The physicalist version is more full of negatives: The total charge, mass-energy, momentum, spin, baryon number, etc. in a closed system will not change, and the total entropy will not go down.
It isn’t generally called élan, but it has a great many other names: mana, prana, numen, foyson, orenda, baraka, chi, ki, etc.. Ever since Democritus and Lucretius, materialists have longed to get rid of élan, or at least reduce it to the totally unmysterious shove of mechanical contact. As a result, Newton’s theory of gravity was initially criticized for falling back on “occult” causes, because he could give no clockwork/billiard-ball explanation of gravity, unlike Descartes’s theory of whirlpools in an ether. This longing for clockwork was also the motive behind the famous luminiferous ether, designed to give a mechanical explanation for electromagnetism. — All in vain.
Everybody believes in ghosts. Generally, everybody believes in a lot of other spirits, too, and most people believe in God or the gods. This is what materialists want to get rid of more than anything else, but they still have a form of souls in their world—“observers,” firmly cemented into any physicalist scheme and given downright amazing status in some interpretations of quantum mechanics.
Immanuel Kant famously said that maybe space, time, and causality are not real existences in themselves; maybe our minds just insist on seeing the world that way. Might the same be true here, on a slightly less abstract level? Are the other world, destiny, élan, and souls just things we always, or almost alwaysn make up when we think about how the world is organized? I don't know, and I don't have a way of proceeding from here.
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