Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

I have recently had the pleasure of reading two fine, slim volumes of philosophy by the Jesuit philosopher James Felt (pictured above, far right, next to Thomas and to Alfred North Whitehead). One is a volume dedicated to epistemology entitled Human Knowing: A Prelude to Metaphysics. The second volume is dedicated to metaphysics and is entitled Aims: A Brief Metaphysics for Today. These books follow from and complete an earlier work of his entitled Coming To Be: Toward a Thomistic-Whiteheadian Metaphysics of Becoming. The first two books mentioned could serve as excellent textbooks in philosophy classes for beginning students. But they are also, in my opinion, of great interest to philosophers and theologians.

Felt does a very interesting thing in these volumes, something that a few short months ago I would not have even thought possible. He synthesizes, in a coherent presentation of the value of first philosophy, the metaphysical systems of Thomas Aquinas and Alfred North Whitehead.  And, remarkably, he does so without compromising Thomas’s explication of God’s nature as Pure Act.

As a Thomist, I have always found Whitehead to be an extremely frustrating philosopher to read. There are many good things to be found in Whitehead, to be sure. He is probably, outside of the sphere of explicitly Catholic thought, the most important and constructive modern critic of scientific materialism. He shows, perhaps even more clearly and doggedly than Edmund Husserl, another great critic of scientific materialism, that metaphysical materialism entails radical skepticism, and he develops a metaphysical system based on a realist assumption of the full variety of human experience. If scientific materialism is true, Whitehead realized, then human knowledge cannot tell us anything true about the world, except by pure chance and accident. We could not, then, even know that scientific materialism is itself true.

Yet, there are many frustrating elements in Whitehead’s thought. The most frustrating thing of all, which probably leads to all of the other problematical elements in his system — including an incoherent theology – is that he misunderstands the Aristotelian category of substance. He understood substance in the sense of Descartes, Locke, and Hume, as an underlying substrate of accidental properties that does not change when its accidents change. He attributed this modern view of substance erroneously to Aristotle himself. He thereby vehemently rejected the very category of substance as leading to all kinds of deformation of thought.

This rejection caused him to postulate that the primary actual entities in the world are tightly ordered successions of legions of atomic entities that do not endure. So, on his view, the human person, like all other beings in the world, is not an enduring entity but a succession of societies of atoms that pass on their experience and value to succeeding entities. In other words, the unity of the human soul, or of any other being in the world, can have no real basis in Whitehead’s thought.

Yet, the positive aspects of Whitehead’s thought are still so prevalent that he remains of extreme interest to philosophers and theologians alike. His persistent cosmological and scientific focus, which is sympathetic to religion, makes him a valuable dialogue partner for Catholic thinkers. This is so because the cosmological question remains the area of primary concern in the modern age in explicating the truth of divine revelation. Indeed, the cosmological question is of eminent importance generally speaking. Physical nature cannot be given over to mechanist materialism without turning the human person into just another object in the physical domain. Whitehead saw this fact and tried to turn the tables on metaphysical materialism.

Yet, given that his manner of turning the tables on materialism was so tied to a rejection of the category of substance, how can a Thomist possibly find common ground with Whitehead? The category of substance is central to Thomas’s theology and metaphysics. Whitehead’s obstinate rejection of it has made his thought very off-putting, to say the least, to many Thomists.

James Felt, in the books mentioned above, opens a possible path to reconciliation between Thomas and Whitehead. He shows that Whitehead’s essential insights on the nature of human experience are redeemable. He shows that the category of substance cannot be thrown out in the way that Whitehead did. But, at the same time, he shows that Whitehead’s recognition that sensory perception has a deeper connection to physical nature than materialism can allow is of great value and can help bring out in a manner thinkable for the contemporary age the Thomist doctrine of creation’s participation in Divine Being.

Whitehead argued that human experience perceives, in a non-sensory way, the causal influence of the world, and that all things are goal-directed and value-laden. This insight into experience is directly opposed to that of David Hume, who can be taken as one of modernity’s most representative mechanist materialists. Hume argued, based on his mechanist materialism, that we can have no knowledge of real causal influence in the world. All that we can know are our ideas of reflection, based on impressions of sensation. The latter are, essentially, the atoms of the material world that meet our sense organs in sensation and are turned by human intelligence into the structures of perception.

What we perceive, Hume argued, has no essential connection to the matter of sense. So, for instance, Hume argued, colors, sounds, tastes, values: none of these tell us anything about the actual world. Nor can we, according to Hume, know about causality. All that we experience through sense are our immediate sensations. These can tell us nothing about the past or the future. No sense impression has essential reference to what comes before it or what will come after it. We can only intellectually infer causality. But this inference has no objective validity. We build up our notions of causality from repeated experience of associated sensations, even though these sensations have no essential connection to one another.

Hume’s doctrine became an essential tenet of modern philosophy. Indeed, materialist presumptions must lead, by logical implication, to some variant of it. It is the core doctrine of modern skepticism, entailed by mechanist materialism.

Whitehead saw that if Hume’s account of sense-perception is true, then no human intellectual endeavor can have validity, not even science. It is often argued, as Hume himself did, that scientific materialism undermines the epistemic validity of religion. Whitehead argued, to the contrary, that scientific materialism undermines the epistemic validity of science itself.

In countering Hume, Whitehead showed that human perception has a more fundamental basis than sensory interaction with the atoms of the material world. The world presents itself to us not only as a congerie of sensations but as a causative agency that spurs us on to the achievement of value.

It is this fundamental insight of Whitehead’s that Felt incorporates into his explication of first philosophy. He uses it to bring out the basic fact of our experience, which shows us that all things are oriented to value and to purposeful ends. He shows us, with the assistance of the Whiteheadian alternative to Hume, that creation is, as Thomas understood, essentially marked by an exitus-reditus relationship to the Divine Alpha and Omega.

Felt’s accomplishment is worthy of further exploration and seems to answer in an unexpected way the question asked in the title of this post. Yes, indeed, Thomists and Whiteheadians can get along, though both may have to be a bit less dogmatic about their metaphysical systems in order to do so. Perhaps it is better to say that Thomas and Whitehead can get along, and to leave their followers out of it. At any rate, Felt helps to show that a corrected Whitehead has a place in the perennial tradition of philosophy. There is much more that could be said here, but I shall leave it to potential readers to explore Felt’s interesting books for themselves.