‘The only way to avoid becoming a metaphysician is to say nothing,” wrote the distinguished American philosopher E. A. Burtt nearly a hundred years ago in his classic and frequently republished Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science. Language, conscience, rationality, will, freedom, meaning, personal identity, and purpose — the distinctively human attributes — have a non-natural, metaphysical character that has been apparent to wise and reflective persons ever since Socrates. They form the core of what the great polymathic German mathematician-scientist-philosopher G. W. Leibniz called “the perennial philosophy” (philosophia perennis), which for two thousand years has been the central civilized legacy that higher education and culture in the West were meant to transmit, adding to it whatever else was true, good, beautiful, and useful across the centuries.
The “perennial philosophy” has always had enemies, the main ones being ignorance, sloth, and self-interest, but since the 18th century those enemies have been massively strengthened by the growth of reductive naturalism, by arrogant “nothing buttery” — reason, consciousness, conscience, will, and purpose conceived as something lower than themselves, as impulse, instinct, DNA, or “evolutionary” anything. Despite critiques of such reductive “scientism” by distinguished modern philosophers and scientists such as Pierre Duhem, A. N. Whitehead, C. S. Lewis, Jacques Maritain, Michael Polanyi, Stanley L. Jaki, and, most recently, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Thomas Nagel, the massive, tempting over-simplifications of modern naturalism have grown rapidly and influentially. Voluble academic philosophers and social scientists promote astoundingly reductive and transgressive views of the human person that can only help augment the domination of ideologies of “power-knowledge,” technocratic rationalism, and cut off access to the central wisdom traditions of the West and the rest of the world.
