Heaven Save Us from Metaphysics in Denial

On the Philosophical Feud between Walter Veit and Philip Goff

Philosopher of science Walter Veit is in a metaphysical fight with panpsychist philosopher Philip Goff.

To Hell with A Priori Metaphysics

Already by framing it this way—as a “metaphysical” fight—I am inviting controversy: Walter is likely already upset because I am implying that he, too, is engaging in the dreaded anti-Enlightenment heresy of metaphysics. Only a superstitious and misty-minded Scholastic could still believe in such woo!

The stakes are high. Who knows how many unsuspecting simpletons have already imbibed the harmful misinformation conveyed in the meme Philip shared the other day?

Philip and I have distinct approaches to philosophy of mind. We explored how my own process-relational panexperientialism differs from what I’ve called his substance-quality panpsychism in a dialogue back in 2020. And in 2025 we met again to discuss some new ways of looking at religion.

I find his cat meme entirely unobjectionable. Rather than accepting Walter’s supercessionist view (that metaphysics has been replaced by scientific physicalism), I read it as expressing something like the point that Albert Einstein made in his foreword to physicist and philosopher Max Jammer’s historical study of the concept of space (originally published in 1953):

the scientist makes use of a whole arsenal of concepts which he imbibed practically with his mother’s milk; and seldom is he ever aware of the eternally problematic character of his concepts… He uses these conceptual tools of thought as something…immutably given…which is hardly ever…to be doubted. How could he do otherwise? How would the ascent of a mountain be possible, if the use of hands, legs, and tools had to be sanctioned step by step on the basis of the science of mechanics?¹

Einstein knew a thing or two about science. While it is true he was a Machian and signed an anti-metaphysical manifesto as a younger man, the wisdom of age led him to see just how important it is even for scientists to examine their underlying conceptual presuppositions. In other words, to do metaphysics. Or at the very least, to take the history of philosophical reflection on such matters seriously.

A knight argues with a philosopher about how many angels are dancing on the tip of his sword.

Walter claims that “a priori metaphysics” is a relic of mediaeval times. He quotes Don Ross saying that metaphysics is an “anti-Enlightenment project.” To put on my Kant hat for a moment (it has “Sapere Aude” embroidered on the visor), I would agree with Walter (and Ross) that dogmatic metaphysics has been superseded. But the transcendental method Kant inaugurated seeking the necessary and universal conditions of possibility underlying our knowledge and experience (including scientific knowledge) remains as relevant as ever. This is true even if we can no longer accept all the details of Kant’s original articulation of the meaning of the “synthetic a priori” or the phenomenal limits he placed on such knowledge. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, though inspired by Kant, already conducted extensive renovations on his critical method. Walter mentions how Darwin changed everything, and I don’t disagree. I would just add that the concept of evolution was not new with Darwin (even if the principle he and Wallace discovered was), and that transcendentalism was “naturalized” and “historicized” long before Darwin—at least in Schelling’s and Hegel’s senses of these terms.

My point isn’t that the German idealists got it finally right, either, but that since Kant’s Copernican Revolution, there’s a new metaphysical sheriff in town. To dismiss transcendental along with dogmatic metaphysics seems to me to be where the real danger lies. The danger is that we end up with a dogmatic, anti-Enlightenment concept of natural science, one where we are encouraged to conflate mathematical models with concrete reality.

Walter suggests that natural scientific knowledge has no metaphysical presuppositions. His preferred materialist ontology simply “falls out of our best science.” I find this claim odd. Fundamental physics has developed mathematical conceptions of reality that bear little if any resemblance to the mechanistic materialism that modern science originally sharpened its teeth on back in the 17th century. You could say that, in the 20th century, “our best science” discovered that nature is not matter at all, but all a matter of form. Or at least it has discovered that the most effective ways of modeling nature require giving up old materialistic metaphysical ideas like “nature at an instant” and “simple location.” Nature is not made of bits of stuff.

Now is probably a good time to quote Alfred North Whitehead. Neither simply analytic nor continental in orientation, he is to my mind the most important metaphysician of the last century precisely because of how he reformulated transcendentalism in the wake of what we may as well call the Second Scientific Revolution (I mean that brought about in the early 20th century by relativity and quantum theories, but already prefigured by the electromagnetic, thermodynamic, and evolutionary theories articulated in the 19th century).

In Science and the Modern World (1925), Whitehead revisits the way one of the architects of modern science, Rene Descartes—despite breaking sharply from the Scholastic view of a teleologically ordered nature inherited from Aristotle—nonetheless continued to tacitly assume this tradition’s substance-quality metaphysics.

Of course, substance and quality, as well as simple location, are the most natural ideas for the human mind. It is the way in which we think of things, and without these ways of thinking we could not get our ideas straight for daily use. There is no doubt about this. The only question is, How concretely are we thinking when we consider nature under these conceptions? My point will be, that we are presenting ourselves with simplified editions of immediate matters of fact. When we examine the primary elements of these simplified editions, we shall find that they are in truth only to be justified as being elaborate logical constructions of a high degree of abstraction.

…

The seventeenth century had finally produced a scheme of scien­tific thought framed by mathematicians, for the use of mathemati­cians. The great characteristic of the mathematical mind is its capacity for dealing with abstractions; and for eliciting from them clear-cut demonstrative trains of reasoning, entirely satisfactory so long as it is those abstractions which you want to think about. The enormous success of the scientific abstractions, yielding on the one hand matter with its simple location in space and time, on the other hand mind, perceiving, suffering, reasoning, but not interfering, has foisted onto philosophy the task of accepting them as the most con­crete rendering of fact.

Thereby, modern philosophy has been ruined. It has oscillated in a complex manner between three extremes. There are the dualists, who accept matter and mind as on an equal basis, and the two varieties of monists, those who put mind inside matter, and those who put matter inside mind. But this juggling with abstractions can never overcome the inherent confusion introduced by the ascription of misplaced concreteness to the scientific scheme of the seventeenth century.

-Science and the Modern world (1925), pgs. 52, 56.

Metaphysics is unavoidable. As the case of Descartes makes clear, it becomes dangerous only when we pretend we can do without it. You may dress and act like a grown-up, imagining you have disabused yourself of all your childish beliefs in Santa Claus and flying reindeer; meanwhile right under your own nose you are still secretly siphoning mother’s milk. Better, I say, to dip our cookies in full consciousness.

“Every scientific man in order to preserve his reputation has to say he dislikes metaphysics. What he means is he dislikes having his metaphysics criticized.”
-Whitehead

We can and must do better than dogmatic metaphysics, whether of the mediaeval Scholastic or modern scientistic sort. What would that look like? Whitehead’s metaphysical method is almost the opposite of what Walter imagines when he hears the word.

I used to blame Barnes and Noble for distorting the meaning of “metaphysics,” but it looks like they finally took my advice and changed the name of this section to “self-transformation.” Philosophy can make a difference!

Metaphysics is not a rival to science, nor a God of the gaps, nor a scholastic game of verbal shadowboxing. It is simply an attempt to generalize from experience, where “experience” includes but is not exhausted by laboratory measurements and formal models.

Whitehead is a radical empiricist in William James’ sense and a pragmatist in Charles Sanders Peirce’s sense. Radical empiricism does not mean that only measurable sense data counts. It means we refuse to truncate what is given in experience even when it overflows our favored abstractions. James thus includes not just bare sensa but relations, transitions, felt intensities, meanings, valuations, aesthetic patterns, habits, purposes, and the very act of knowing as ingredients of nature-as-experienced, rather than supernatural add-ons. Pragmatism does not mean “whatever works is true.” Still less does it mean whatever your colleagues will let you get away with saying, as the neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty once said. I am talking about OG pragmatism. It means that our most general ideas should not only be distilled from experience but should earn their keep by their consequences for further experience: by how well they coordinate inquiry, render our accounts of everyday life more coherent, and enable the fruitful expansion of practice, whether scientific, ethical, artistic, political, or spiritual.

In his first lecture at Harvard University in 1924, Whitehead argued that every special science operates with presuppositions about what counts as real, what counts as explanation, what counts as evidence, and what kinds of entities and relations are even eligible for consideration. These presuppositions are not delivered by physics as “results.” They are the conditions under which physics is intelligible in the first place.

Metaphysics is the search for the most general features of experiential reality (what other kind of reality is there?) presupposed not only by all the special sciences, but in ordinary life as well. Physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, law, art, ethics, religion, etc., each take up a region of experience and develop modes of thought adequate to that region. Metaphysics seeks what is common to them all, the generic categories that might allow us to coordinate all their conceptual specifications under one rationally coherent and empirically adequate scheme of thought.

This is why I find Walter’s supersessionist picture misguided. Science and metaphysics are not competing, so the former cannot replace the latter. Replacing superstition with peer review remains a valuable endeavor! But natural science cannot itself explain, to take one example, why it is that the nature of things should reward inductive reasoning. Whitehead’s diagnosis in Science and the Modern World is that modern scientific materialism, far from abolishing metaphysics, simply replaced an explicitly dualist metaphysics with an implicitly materialist one. Metaphysics thus went underground, dressed in drag as “physicalism,” and so became harder to criticize. Physics has for most of the last century chanted the “shut up and calculate” mantra, though more and more physicists are now realizing that it was only an unconscious materialistic metaphysics that made quantum weirdness seem so weird.

Of course, the new metaphysics must always remain in reciprocal exchange with the experimental sciences. This is a crucial point: metaphysics is not a “foundation” laid once and for all. But nor is it simply parasitic on scientific progress. Metaphysics and science exist in a negative feedback relation. When scientific advances destabilize its own inherited metaphysical categories (eg, quantum indeterminacy disrupting classical substance ontology), metaphysics must adjust them to restore conceptual coherence to our scientific understanding of the universe. Conversely, if metaphysical categories drift too far from empirical observation, scientific findings ought to constrain and force us to recalibrate them.

Scientific discoveries force revisions of our general categories. Revised general categories, in turn, can open new interpretive and experimental possibilities for the sciences. Metaphysics without science is empty. Science without metaphysics is blind. Without metaphysics to function as “the critic of abstractions” (Whitehead), natural science is all too prone to mistake the leading models of the day for the final ontology.

Science proceeds by abstraction. It selects, isolates, idealizes, quantifies, and formalizes. This is not a defect but its genius. But the genius has a cost. Abstraction always involves omission, and it invites the temptation to treat the abstract as the concrete.

The 17th-century picture of nature—simply located matter out there, private minds representing it in here—was a particularly successful abstraction. It was an astonishing engine of prediction and control. But by mistaking the abstraction for reality, modern societies have gone about applying the power of techno-science to actual nature in a way that has severely degraded the life systems of our planet. As if that were not bad enough, the correlate idea of isolated minds has totally deformed our image of the human being.

Whitehead’s “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” is perhaps his single most relevant concept for diagnosing the rhetoric of contemporary scientism. The fallacy involves taking mathematical models developed for certain purposes under certain idealizations and insisting that whatever does not fit inside them is unreal.

Following Peirce, Whitehead’s metaphysical method is best understood as abductive and iterative. He attempted to construct a categoreal scheme sufficiently general to make sense of the widest range of experience. Our task as inheritors of this scheme (should we choose to accept our mission!) is to continually check it against the deliverances of experience, including especially those of the natural sciences, but also all the other domains of human experience where science is less relevant. We then revise it where it fails, judging success by the tests of coherence, adequacy, and speculative fertility. Metaphysics of this sort is not a medieval relic but what prevents science from hardening into a a new kind of dogmatism all its own.

And this is where Philip’s panpsychist cat becomes philosophically elucidating rather than scientifically scandalous. To grant interiority, feeling, purposiveness, etc. to ourselves while insisting that the rest of nature is just dead stuff is not to practice good scientific or metaphysical discipline; it is simply to assume the infamous modern problems of dualism, whether between mind and body, value and fact, or freedom and determinism.

Whitehead’s alternative is not to anthropomorphize nature in the way those who caricature the panpsychist view imagine (eg, “you think rocks can think?!”), but to de-anthropocentrize experience. “Experience” becomes a genus with many species. Human consciousness is one highly evolved, complex mode of it, not the sole instance of it in all the universe. This is why a Whiteheadian approach to philosophy of mind cannot be dismissed as a speculative add-on to neuroscience. It is an attempt to construct categories that do justice to both ends of the spectrum: to the objectively quantifiable regularities modeled by physics and to the qualitative subjective immediacy disclosed in sensation, perception, emotion, valuation, and decision. By banishing the latter from nature, we do not become more scientific but rather more metaphysically narrow-minded.

What falls out of “our best science” are formal models with predictive success. The inference from model to ontology is always a philosophical move, and it is exactly the move Whitehead wants to make explicit so it can be criticized and improved. In that sense, we do not have to choose between metaphysics and science. Rather, we have to strive to surface the metaphysical presuppositions already animating science, and then compare what the special sciences disclose with the wider evidence made available to human experience across all the domains of practical life, including art, ethics, religion, law, politics, and so forth.

So, by all means: to hell with dogmatic metaphysics! But heaven save us from metaphysics in denial!

1. Einstein, Foreward to Max Jammer, Concepts of Space: The History of Theories of Space in Physics (Mineola: Dover, 1993), xiii-xiv.