Aims: A Brief Metaphysics for Today

Preface

Preface “Know yourself!” challenged the Oracle of Delphi, and philosophers engaged in metaphysics or “first philosophy” have struggled to meet that challenge ever since. No ordinary kind of knowing, metaphysics necessarily includes knowing our relation to the peopled world in which we live. Neither is it scientific knowing in the modern sense. It is such an unusual kind of knowing that its peculiarity has led many modern philosophers to deny that it exists or could even make any sense. I disagree with that view and submit the following short essay as a project in metaphysics. Now no philosophic view, even if it is internally coherent, is directly demonstrable. It can only recommend itself as more consonant with and illuminative of direct human experience than its denial. As illustrative of what I mean by metaphysical knowing, I cite this description of it by Etienne Gilson: “Metaphysics is the knowledge gathered by a naturally transcendent reason in its search for the first principles, or first causes, of what is given in sensible experience.”1 There are two peripheral points implied in this description. The first point is the question of how we derive the principles underlying such an account in terms of causes and principles . In this regard I submit that we normally adopt such ix Felt-000.FM 8/1/07 5:45 PM Page ix principles to the degree that they seem consonant with what we find in immediate experience, as well as illuminative of that experience when taken in their full-blown applications. There is no getting away from looking at the world through some set of philosophic assumptions or other, but the adoption of such assumptions is more often subconscious and implicit than recognized , and implicit assumptions are all the more influential for their being unnoticed. The second point is that such a set of principles, acknowledged or implied, constitutes a metaphysical perspective that in turn establishes a possible intelligible horizon determinative of the sort of objective world that can be recognized from such a perspective. As Oz explained to Dorothy, everything in Emerald City looked green to her because she was wearing green glasses. The world revealed to us in our philosophy is pretty much the world we were looking for, the world that fits our adopted philosophic perspective. The aim of this essay is to establish just such a philosophic perspective through which we can plausibly view ourselves and our relation to the world. In short it is to respond, at least in a limited and provisional way, to the Delphic challenge. The result will be a brief, bare-bones metaphysics, but a metaphysics nonetheless. It may be helpful to the reader to know the provenance of this essay. In the early 1970s I proposed that it might be worth trying to combine the better insights and principles of the philosophies of St. Thomas Aquinas of the thirteenth century and Alfred North Whitehead of the twentieth, while omitting what seem to be the weaker aspects, so as to achieve a transformed and more modern philosophic perspective.2 In my book Coming To Be (2001) I very belatedly published a defense and first sketch of what such a metaphysics might be like. The present essay is the natural follow-up of this project, but here I pay much less attention to the actual philosophies of Aquinas and Whitehead and much more to my own manner of melding the — A I M S x Felt-000.FM 8/1/07 5:45 PM Page x two. I leave it to the reader to judge whether the attempt is successful, at least as a beginning. Of course there are other philosophic influences at work here as well, and I want to acknowledge that the chief intellectual assumptions dominating the following discussion seem to me to be the following: (1) The ontology of St. Thomas Aquinas whose central philosophic insight pivots around participation in the act of existing (esse) with its bipolar directionality reminiscent of Plotinus: its flowing from a Source and its simultaneous orientation back toward that Source. (2) Henri Bergson’s stress on the intuitive aspect of philosophic insight, of the distinction between the continuity inherent in immediate experience and that of quantity or space, and of the authenticity of the feeling of freedom within human deciding. (3) Alfred North Whitehead’s recognition of a level of sensory experience that runs deeper than what is ordinarily...