Regarding objects, it is clear today philosophers tend to privilege the physical object, the object of inquiry in physics, and so interpret the anthropological object, sociological object, mathematical object, psychological object, geographical object, historical object, indeed the object of inquiry in general in this light.  By “meta-physics” we thus usually mean the most fundamental physics: quarks, general relativity, quantum gravity, etc., which really isn’t metaphysics at all but just more sophisticated physics than Newton – and so we don’t even ask about the true matter of metaphysics: the object in general. 

Freud thus interpreted his model of the unconscious according to physical causality where “like produces like” and thus misses Nietzsche’s insight about Will to Power causality, that for example triplets growing up in the same abusive home could result in one having severe PTSD, the next unaffected, and the third stronger for it – that which does not kill me makes me stronger.  When we ask after the object in general (what pertains to an object of inquiry as such) and not just objecthood cast in the light of physics, we seem to be approaching a kind of metaphysics not determined by empiricism and the objects of sense as the “really real,” though such empiricism too is creative Will to Power asserting the “really real” according to the empiricist agenda.  Nietzsche in the Will To Power notebooks said such stamping Becoming with Being was the highest form of Will to Power.     Beyond empiricism’s deifying of the physical object, Heidegger thus points us regarding the “thing” that (and with an English word “thing,” the English-speaking world being the home of empiricism):

“The Roman word res designates that which concerns somebody, … that which is pertinent, which has a bearing … In English ‘thing’ has still preserved the full semantic power of the Roman word: ‘He knows his things,’ he understands the matters that have a bearing on him … The Roman word res denotes what pertains to man, concerns him and his interests in any way or manner. That which concerns man is what is real in res … Thus Meister Eckhart says, adopting an expression of Dionysius the Areopagite: love is of such a nature that it changes man into the things he loves (Heidegger,Poetry, Language, Thought: Thing, 175-6).”

Even formal systems like mathematics are grounded in the physical object, though we tend to forget this because we have lived in it our entire lives. But, if you teach mathematics to children, you know you have to explain it using manipulatives for it to make sense. 3X2=6 can be learned by rote by a child, but for a child to understand you need to model it in various ways, such as groups of 3 counters, with 2 such groups, for a counted total of 6 things. We also model math concepts visually, even when it results in absurdity. We might say a line can be divided in half, and then in half again, and then again to infinity. Of course, the infinite divisibility of a line is mathematically true but actually impossible to do. Similarly, we can imagine infinity by picturing a line that extends forever even though we can’t visualize what an actually infinitely long line would look life. Rovelli shows we see something similar in physics when the categories we use to interpret everyday experience like substance with properties don’t work to understand reality at the quantum level.

SO WHAT IS METAPHYSICS OF THE OBJECT IN GENERAL?

1. What does history as a discipline inquire after? History inquires after the human past—specifically, the sequence of past events, actions, decisions, and processes involving individuals, groups, societies, institutions, cultures, and civilizations, together with the contexts, causes, consequences, and meanings of those events. Its object is not the past as a static collection of facts, but the change over time in human affairs, reconstructed and interpreted through surviving evidence (documents, artifacts, oral traditions, landscapes, etc.). Historians ask questions such as: Why did this event happen when and where it did? How did people experience and interpret it? What patterns of continuity or rupture can be discerned? The discipline therefore studies temporally situated human agency and its outcomes, always with an eye to contingency, context, and the limits of our knowledge of the past.

2. What does psychology as a discipline inquire after? Psychology inquires after the mind and behavior of living organisms (primarily humans, but also other animals). Its object is the internal processes and observable actions that constitute mental life: cognition (perception, memory, reasoning, attention), emotion, motivation, personality, learning, development, social interaction, and psychopathology. Psychologists ask questions such as: How do we perceive and process information? What mechanisms underlie decision-making, emotion regulation, or social bonding? How do biological, environmental, and cultural factors interact to shape behavior? The discipline therefore studies mental processes and their behavioral expressions, whether through experimental manipulation, observation, self-report, neuroimaging, or computational modeling. (Note that different subfields—cognitive, developmental, social, clinical, evolutionary, etc.—slice this broad object in distinct ways.)

3. What are the characteristics of “an object of inquiry in general?” An object of inquiry (sometimes called the “subject matter” or “domain” of a discipline) has several defining characteristics:

• Specificity: It is a delimited portion of reality or experience that the discipline carves out as its focus. History’s object is not “everything that ever happened,” but the past as humanly experienced and evidenced. Psychology’s object is not “all biological processes,” but mental life and behavior. Other disciplines have their own cuts (physics: fundamental physical laws and entities; economics: resource allocation under scarcity; literary studies: texts and their aesthetic/cultural functions, etc.).
• Epistemic accessibility: The object must be investigable by the discipline’s characteristic methods and evidence standards. Historians rely on traces and inference; psychologists on controlled experiments, observation, and measurement. The object therefore determines (and is in turn constrained by) what counts as valid data and explanation.
• Explanatory target: The object is what the discipline seeks to describe, explain, predict, or interpret. Disciplines generate theories, models, narratives, or laws about their object (historical causation, psychological mechanisms, etc.).
• Openness to refinement and contestation: Objects of inquiry are not fixed once and for all. They can be narrowed, expanded, or re-conceptualized as knowledge grows or paradigms shift (e.g., psychology’s object moved from “soul” to “mind” to “information-processing systems” to “embodied and situated cognition”). Boundaries between objects can blur, leading to interdisciplinary work.
• Ontological commitment: Every object carries implicit assumptions about what kind of thing it is (e.g., history assumes the reality of past events and human agency; psychology assumes the reality of mental states or at least functional processes).

In short, an object of inquiry is the disciplined “slice” of the world a field commits itself to understanding on its own terms, using methods suited to that slice, while remaining open to revision and dialogue with neighboring fields. This is why history and psychology can study overlapping phenomena (e.g., collective memory) yet do so with radically different questions, evidence, and explanatory goals.

Conclusion: The Analytic of Dasein:

Heidegger famously inquired into the nature and manner of the human condition, and one of the key points he brought out was “world.” We mean the same thing when we say the entities in the world of the schizophrenic appears to her in a conspiracy-saturated way. But if this is the extreme, what is the average, gentle way the world appears to the average person?