A I M S

A Brief Metaphysics

for Today

James W. Felt

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

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© 2007 University of Notre Dame Press

Copyright © 2007 by University of Notre DameNotre Dame, Indiana 46556www.undpress.nd.eduAll Rights Reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Felt, James W., 1926–Aims : a brief metaphysics for today / James W. Felt.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN-13: 978-0-268-02901-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)ISBN-10: 0-268-02901-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)1. Metaphysics. I. Title.BD111. F275 2007110—dc22

2007030482

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Preface

“Know yourself!” challenged the Oracle of Delphi, and phi-losophers engaged in metaphysics or “first philosophy” havestruggled to meet that challenge ever since. No ordinary kindof knowing, metaphysics necessarily includes knowing our re-lation to the peopled world in which we live. Neither is it sci-entific knowing in the modern sense. It is such an unusual kindof knowing that its peculiarity has led many modern philoso-phers to deny that it exists or could even make any sense.

I disagree with that view and submit the following shortessay as a project in metaphysics. Now no philosophic view,even if it is internally coherent, is directly demonstrable. It canonly recommend itself as more consonant with and illumina-tive 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 isthe knowledge gathered by a naturally transcendent reasonin its search for the first principles, or first causes, of what isgiven in sensible experience.”1 There are two peripheral pointsimplied in this description.

The first point is the question of how we derive the prin-ciples underlying such an account in terms of causes and prin-ciples. In this regard I submit that we normally adopt such

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principles to the degree that they seem consonant with whatwe find in immediate experience, as well as illuminative of thatexperience when taken in their full-blown applications. Thereis no getting away from looking at the world through some setof philosophic assumptions or other, but the adoption of suchassumptions is more often subconscious and implicit than rec-ognized, and implicit assumptions are all the more influentialfor their being unnoticed.

The second point is that such a set of principles, acknowl-edged or implied, constitutes a metaphysical perspective thatin turn establishes a possible intelligible horizon determina-tive of the sort of objective world that can be recognized fromsuch a perspective. As Oz explained to Dorothy, everything inEmerald City looked green to her because she was wearinggreen glasses. The world revealed to us in our philosophy ispretty much the world we were looking for, the world that fitsour adopted philosophic perspective.

The aim of this essay is to establish just such a philosophicperspective through which we can plausibly view ourselves andour relation to the world. In short it is to respond, at least ina limited and provisional way, to the Delphic challenge. Theresult will be a brief, bare-bones metaphysics, but a metaphys-ics nonetheless.

It may be helpful to the reader to know the provenance ofthis essay. In the early 1970s I proposed that it might be worthtrying to combine the better insights and principles of the phi-losophies of St. Thomas Aquinas of the thirteenth century andAlfred North Whitehead of the twentieth, while omitting whatseem to be the weaker aspects, so as to achieve a transformedand more modern philosophic perspective.2 In my book Com-ing To Be (2001) I very belatedly published a defense and firstsketch of what such a metaphysics might be like. The presentessay is the natural follow-up of this project, but here I paymuch less attention to the actual philosophies of Aquinas andWhitehead and much more to my own manner of melding the

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two. I leave it to the reader to judge whether the attempt issuccessful, at least as a beginning.

Of course there are other philosophic influences at workhere as well, and I want to acknowledge that the chief intellec-tual assumptions dominating the following discussion seem tome to be the following:

(1) The ontology of St. Thomas Aquinas whose centralphilosophic insight pivots around participation in the act ofexisting (esse) with its bipolar directionality reminiscent ofPlotinus: its flowing from a Source and its simultaneous ori-entation back toward that Source.

(2) Henri Bergson’s stress on the intuitive aspect of philo-sophic insight, of the distinction between the continuity inher-ent in immediate experience and that of quantity or space, andof the authenticity of the feeling of freedom within humandeciding.

(3) Alfred North Whitehead’s recognition of a level of sen-sory experience that runs deeper than what is ordinarily no-ticed. On this more fundamental level we are immediatelyaware of being causally influenced by things in the world, ofthe derivation of the present from the past, and of the valuedimension of experience that partially grounds a teleologicalmetaphysics.

(4) The phenomenological point of view, such as that ofMaurice Merleau-Ponty, with its subject-object polarity of ex-perience and its perspectival-horizonal view of the world.3

In the considerations that follow I have allowed the argu-ment to grow by itself in a natural way. Thus the elaborationis self-referential, sometimes repetitious, and cumulative ratherthan linear (which would be far from natural). For that reasonI venture to make the same appeal as did George Berkeley inthe preface to his Treatise Concerning the Principles of HumanKnowledge: that the reader withhold judgment on this viewuntil he or she has read through the whole with the attentionit may seem to deserve.4

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Whatever the merit of this present experiment in construc-tive metaphysics, I wish to express indebtedness to my philoso-phy teachers and colleagues over many years whose wisdomhas doubtless affected my thinking in more ways than I know.I think especially of W. Norris Clarke, S.J., of Fordham Uni-versity, and of John H. Wright, S.J., of Gonzaga University,who opened for me the riches of the philosophic thought ofSt. Thomas Aquinas; of Richard J. Blackwell and the late Leon-ard J. Eslick, model philosophers and teachers at Saint LouisUniversity; and of Lewis S. Ford of Old Dominion Universitywho has for all these years benevolently challenged me withthe thought of Alfred North Whitehead. I am grateful to SantaClara University for a Presidential Research Grant in the springof 2002 that gave the initial impetus to this essay, and to mysister for helping to make the writing possible.

J.W. F.

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