The Highlands Institute is not known for its hospitality to metaphysics. In my experience with this group, the term has served more often for reproach than reflection. There are reasons for this, but they are internal to our history and need not concern us now. The more urgent task, I shall argue, is to look beyond our little circle to great public issues shaped from white-hot values on the anvil of ultimate beliefs.

I take "religion" in principle to be our most intense and comprehensive way of valuing. Religious engagement tends to raise the temperature of whatever issues are on the forge. Religion is the domain of worship and commitment. Religion motivates. It gives to the topics it touches their sense of ultimate importance.

"Metaphysics," in contrast, is in principle our most critical and comprehensive way of thinking about reality in general. Metaphysics may therefore seem dry, abstract, and cerebral -- cool theory, compared to the glowing heat of religious passion. But the contrast is by no means complete. Without valuing there would be (and could be) no thinking. As I argue in Knowing and Value (SUNY 1998), valuing enters all the way down at the primal level of world-awareness, where regularities in experience are found worth notice and recognition. Valuing enters at the level of language-readiness, where some of these important natural regularities in experience are linked to other important regularities -- the regularities of recognizable sounds emitted by care-giving others. Valuing enters wherever concepts are formed and defined to provide bulwarks against mere useless babble and to provide stability of shared meanings in the vital interest of cooperative behavior. Valuing enters where concepts are used to construct theories, even small ones, relating aspects of experience in intelligible ways and shaping expectation for future experience, thereby providing local pockets of order and limited domains of understanding. Thus, of course, valuing enters when it is considered worthwhile to draw local understandings into a common framework, to construct concepts capable of giving intelligible order to larger and larger domains -- finally to the entire domain of experience, to put experience itself into a unified context of ideas within which it is possible to feel at home and move mentally without jumps or blockages from concept to concept.

But this project of theory-construction, in search of the values of mental unity and completeness, involves its own built-in constraints, internal requirements set not externally, not "hegemonically," but by these aims themselves. If mental unity is valued, then conceptual inconsistency will represent at least temporary defeat. If mental wholeness is valued, then positive connections, analogies, and inferential pathways are needed: providing what we philosophers call coherence. And if mental completeness is valued, then overlooked or avoided data will represent at least temporary defeat. A would-be comprehensive theory about reality is not simply to be applicable to some or many areas of experience worth noticing but ideally to be relevant and illuminating for all experience. It should have the quality we call adequacy.

The struggle for adequacy and coherence is hard work. This is true especially because the two deeply valued goals are in tension with each other. They are polar opposites that need each other. The more varieties of data we recognize as relevant to our theories of reality, the more difficult it is to keep these data coherent. Narrow coherences are relatively easy to maintain. Lawyers fight tooth and nail to exclude evidence that, if admitted as relevant, would threaten their simple theory of the case. The more we honor our quest for fullness (completeness), the harder it is to satisfy our thirst for wholeness (unity). The aim of this game, however, is for complete comprehensiveness without sacrifice of coherence. Little wonder that many have despaired! I, too, agree that a final, complete, and perfectly unified metaphysical theory for human knowers is an impossible dream. But it is a wonderful goal. Even if unrealizable, it offers an ideal standard by which better and worse approximations can be measured. And when this quest for comprehensive coherence is valued in a highly intense way, it becomes, to that extent, religious.

Returning to religion, it would be too sweeping -- and downright wrong -- to claim that all religion requires metaphysical theory. Some intense and comprehensive schemes of valuation reject theory as such, preferring other states of consciousness. We all know that there are strands of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in which anti-theoretical (and thus anti-metaphysical) values are prominent. But these are not the values that shaped Christendom and the modern world. Christianity, even in its infancy, was influenced by Greek theory. Metaphysical beliefs, only implicit in the Synoptic Gospels, are clearly present in the Gospel of John, thanks to Philo of Alexandria's prior Platonic interpretation of Scripture. Then the early Fathers, especially Clement of Alexandria, his student, Origen, and St. Augustine -- all Platonizers -- blended Christianity for a millennium with a profoundly comprehensive and coherent theory of reality. The Aristotelian revolution, when it came through Albert the Great and his even greater student, Thomas Aquinas, represented an internal dispute between metaphysical schools within Christianity. Despite genuinely anti-metaphysical attacks (from mystics like Meister Eckhart and from delightfully cranky thinkers like Duns Scotus and William of Ockham), the mainstream of the premodern religion that shaped public life in Europe was committed to a mainly unified and largely comprehensive theory of reality. From this value-charged theory grew many of the characteristic public institutions -- notably churches and universities -- which we have inherited from premodern civilization. From the same value-charged premodern public metaphysics flowed many public policies as well. Some are still in effect; some, under pressure from modern counter-theories, are at the root of the most intractable of our public debates.

"The soul" is a metaphysical idea with extremely ancient roots. At its earliest, it seems to have had to do with the power of movement. Aristotle reports that Thales, the first recognized philosopher, considered that magnetite, or lodestone, possessed "soul" because it is capable of moving iron. Aristotle's overall theme is that the soul has regularly been associated with something "kinetic" (De Anima 405a 19). Certainly in the view of his teacher, Plato, the soul is something essentially dynamic. In his dialogue, Phaedo, Plato argues that since soul is the very principle of life in whatever lives, soul-reality must be incompatible with death. From this it is a short step to the conclusion that the soul must be immortal, not only outliving its body but also pre-existing all bodily incarnations, dwelling naturally in the realm of the eternal. Aristotle's own doctrine, stressing the unity of Form and Matter, ties the soul more tightly to animated bodies, but it remains the principle of life in whatever lives. Further, the human soul, because rational and at home with eternal truths, may, Aristotle hints, have a special way of existing beyond the body to which, as form of the body, it gives special character and telos.⁽²⁾

These metaphysical doctrines were in some ways changed when heated to religious temperatures at the Christian forge, but in main respects they remain recognizably true to their origins. What needed to be changed, in view of the intense Christian valuation of God's incomparable glory and the worm-like status of sinful humanity, was the Platonic doctrine of pre-existence for the soul. Such a metaphysical inference would make humans co-eternal with God -- a much too exalted status. Instead, to preserve the Christian value-scheme, God must be thought to create de novo each human soul, each launched toward an eternal future but without an eternal past (except, perhaps, as an intention in the divine mind). This specially created soul would be associated with one (and only one) body at the moment of conception or very shortly thereafter. The newly-animated body is doomed eventually to die, but the soul (whether essentially immortal, à la Plato, thus immediately judged, or essentially a bodily form, à la Aristotle, thus after an interim joined to a resurrection body at Judgment Day) is a focus of ultimate concern. All hopes for eternal bliss, all fears of never-ending torment, are focused on this freshly created soul. Absolute issues are at stake. Ancient metaphysics, welded by the heat of faith into premodern doctrine, powerfully shapes attitudes toward the unborn.

This is especially well illustrated by the premier premodern institution continuing to function in our own day, the Roman Catholic Church. This church is of course not the only fierce defender of the premodern metaphysics behind the powerful anti-abortion debate, but if the world could be imagined without this Church -- without its global reach, its billion or more followers, its wealth, its publicity, its political connections -- the situation would be immensely different.

Here in Germany, the role of public metaphysics in shaping public policy is especially vivid. From the founding of the Federal Republic and then for the next twenty years, 1949-69, and once again since Chancellor Helmut Kohl's election sixteen years ago, the Christian Democratic Union (with its Bavarian partner, the Christian Social Union) has ruled this part of Germany. The word "Christian" in these party names is no mere rhetorical flourish. As elsewhere in Europe, it signals an intimate alliance with the Roman Catholic Church. And in keeping with the premodern metaphysics maintained and defended by that powerful Church, the CDU/CSU-led governments of the German Federal Republic have made abortion as difficult as public pressure would permit. Even in the first trimester of a pregnancy, women here have had to find "indications" to justify its termination, and have been required to submit to counselling (from which the Pope has recently forced the withdrawal of Catholic cooperation) at governmentally approved centers.

A sharp contrast was provided by public policies toward abortion in the former East Germany, grounded, as these policies were, in the very different modern metaphysics of Karl Marx. The embryo, on that metaphysics, was taken to be a wholly material thing, warranting by its nature no standing in law or ethics. In the East, a woman's right to abortion was unquestioned, and the procedure was fully paid for by state medical insurance.

When the former East Germany dissolved itself and the five "new Länder" that had made up the GDR entered the Federal Republic, the clash of public metaphysics was especially visible in the sudden change of abortion-policy in the new five states. The metaphysics of Karl Marx was overridden by the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas. Women were suddenly expected to behave differently toward unwanted embryos, based on a different theory about their ultimate status in reality. By the Christian Democratic government and its supporters, this was not considered an issue of religious imperialism. It was, they thought, simply a question of the natural law. What gave the governing coalition such serene confidence in this matter was a different conceptual rendering of the supposed facts of the case. If a foetus is seen in a materialist metaphysics as an unwelcome growth of tissues, the obvious appropriate behavior is to remove it. But if a foetus is seen, instead, as being animated by a divinely created immortal soul, then the obvious appropriate behavior will be to protect and defend that uniquely precious human soul by all means possible. Public metaphysics, as we see in this case, influences public policy by presenting a theory of the situation. Usually it is not presented or understood as "theory," of course. Neither the Marxist government of East Germany nor the Catholic government of West Germany was particularly self-conscious about the epistemic status of its own metaphysical beliefs. Beliefs about the ultimate nature of reality profoundly influenced decision-making, but were not themselves subjected to profound scrutiny. The fact of this widespread naivete about the metaphysical and epistemological basis for public policy encourages much "excessive firmness" in public advocacy debates (if I may put the matter gently) but also -- I suggest -- a glimmer of hope for better policy-making in a postmodern age of pluralism.

The hope, when dim public awareness of metaphysical foundations is the problem, lies in the possibility of raising general levels of awareness; the hope, when flawed metaphysical ideas is the problem, lies in the availability of better -- more comprehensive and more coherent -- ideas with which to debate. The clash over abortion policy, and recently in the United States a new spate of so-called "foetal protection" laws, is trapped between premodern supernaturalism and modern materialism. Better metaphysical possibilities are needed and (as every Whiteheadian knows) are available. The either/or around which much of the public debate tends to revolve -- namely, either the embryo is a full-fledged person with all the rights and privileges thereunto appertaining, or it is a complex of material tissues with no status at all until the state decrees them at its birth -- fails both in adequacy and in coherence.

As to the standard of adequacy to all the data concerned, the supernatural metaphysics, formed long before and without the help of modern science, deems irrelevant whole domains of embryological information when it imputes personal qualities to a blastula. The materialist metaphysics, at the other extreme, though attentive to scientific information, is pitifully inadequate regarding ethical and religious intuitions, which also have a rightful place in human experience and demand inclusion in a full metaphysical perspective. As to coherence, both positions are embarrassed by unbridged theoretical disconnections. Supernaturalism chokes on the radical incommensurability between nature and supernature; materialism cannot overcome the unintelligibility of mind, freedom, and personal responsibility functioning in a universe defined as nothing but lifeless, insensible, wholly determined matter. These are broad-brush criticisms, obviously in need of refinement to avoid legitimate "straw man" concerns. Such fine-textured exposition and critique is impossible in a short essay like this, but I have attempted to supply these in detail in Being and Value (SUNY Press, 1996), where my constructive alternatives are also more fully developed.

Turning, then, to construction: to replace the interminable either/or of most public debate over abortion, what is needed is better metaphysics, inspired by, relevant to, illuminative of, and disciplined by experience. This would be a science-friendly, ethically sensitive metaphysics, capable of recognizing real possibilities and real processes leading to the achievement of real degrees of value in the world. One such viewpoint I call "personalistic organicism." In recent decades I have been attempting to develop this view in some detail -- detail that obviously must be suppressed in a brief address like this one. But, painting in large strokes, the metaphysical view I advocate to guide public policy is inspired by the "philosophy of organism" of Alfred North Whitehead. From its perspective, the living tissue that is a human fertilized egg is properly seen, in line with embryological science, as the starting-point of a complex process of development, fraught with many real possibilities, among them the wonder-filled possibility of becoming a human person. The fertilized cell is not a person at the start. Possibilities, although real, must not be confused with actualities. But the possibilities of personhood are real and must not be undersold. The fertilized cell, the undifferentiated hollow ball of cells (called the blastula) that forms after a few days of cell division, the tiny fish-like foetus -- all these are portentous, precious not so much for what they are as for what in the natural course of events they genuinely may become. A materialist reduction is no more appropriate than is a supernaturalist exaggeration of the facts and values concerned.

Personalistic organicism takes its start from what Whitehead himself called his "philosophy of organism" (a better description than the more recently coined "process philosophy"), in which every actual entity is self-constituted while enmeshed in relations. These are relations both to the immediate physical environment and to abstract possibilities not physically present. The dominant story of the physical universe, continuity, solidarity, causality -- these are contributed by physical prehension. Novelty, progress, freedom, in contrast, are contributed by the capacity of entities, in varying degree, to take account of absent possibilities. Most of the entities comprising the physical universe have a very small -- negligible -- capacity for interesting novelty, which accounts for the massive stability of the physical, which has evolved mutually reinforcing social hierarchies of energy, bound to patterns in which virtually all spontaneity would be maladaptive and thus instantly snuffed out. But very gradually, some improbable patterns of physical organization, capable of self-propagation, managed to arise, exhibiting still more complex properties and patterns of regularity. Thus atoms evolved, and chemistry evolved from physics, and, from chemistry, societies of matter so complex that, in their relatively rich context, significant novelties could be expressed and sustained. This is Whitehead's definition of life. There is no absolute "line" between living and nonliving organizations of matter. Nonliving societies of actual entities have negligible spontaneity because of their relatively low orders of complexity (or "information"). The simplest living societies are on a continuum with the most complex nonliving societies, but it possible to discern in them a greater degree of relevant spontaneity. In structure, a virus is not very different from a complex crystal; but for anyone studying them or (worse) infected with a strain of viruses, they seem as "living" (and wily) an enemy as unambiguously living bacteria. Like bacteria, they hide, reproduce, and attack -- and their talent for mutation is legendary.

More complex organic societies, such as plants, have noteworthy capacities for mutation and adaptation, although the cells and organelles that make them up seem to be "democracies" (as Whitehead put it) lacking linkages and internal structures to allow centralized management of themselves as wholes. Animals, in contrast, when equipped with means of locomotion, sensors for the environment, and a central locus for experiencing themselves, processing information, and directing behavior, exhibit still more impressive orders of complexity and relevant novelty. In some animal species, including our own, a central nervous system, organizing the whole system under a huge network of relations called the brain, provides great quantities of high-quality information to a central location capable of experiencing for and coordinating the behavior of the whole organism. It is an evolved method of enhancing the ability of these highly coordinated societies to survive and to thrive within the exigencies of an ever-changing environment.

Surviving, of course, is the necessary condition, and thriving the sufficient condition, for life's satisfaction. "Thriving," in Whitehead's philosophy of organism, is the measure of quality in lived experience. Most generally, every moment in which harmonious actuality is wrestled out of discordant possibility -- every such moment counts as intrinsic satisfaction for the actualizing entity. Sheer arrival at concreteness is intrinsic value, however modest, for the achiever; this arrival, moreover, provides instrumental value for its successor occasions, whose future creativity will be conditioned, helped or hindered, by the quality of the patterns it bequeaths.

Now consider public policy toward foetal life. Here everyone acknowledges that living tissues, not just electrons or crystals, are at stake. Living substance is distinguished for the complexity of its systematic structures and for its powers of expressing novelty -- for growing into something new. Even the undifferentiated blastula, therefore, has two kinds of value. First, it is the complex arrangement of many entities enjoying dim value of their own, thriving in the satisfactions of sustaining a living society. But second, it is the promise of vastly more complex systems and incomparably richer satisfactions. It is the promise of a person.

It would be unfair to Whitehead to understate his implicit personalism. There is a vibrant appreciation for personhood in his "philosophy of organism," but I have come to believe that this aspect of his thought needs shoring up. Whitehead uses the concept of "personal" (as in "personally ordered society," for example) in odd ways that may obscure other things he has to say about the unique -- incomparable -- values of actual human personhood. At any rate, I want a metaphysics in which personalism shines as brightly as the organicism. When the blastula gives rise to the foetus and the foetus to the child, we have an instance of the most astounding system of complex possibilities in the known universe. The human brain, with its billions of cells and trillions of connections, is the most complex system in the known physical world. Based on this physical complexity, and other evolved characteristics of the human body -- larynx, tongue, etc., -- the acquisition of language enlarges, to even higher orders of magnitude, the child's capacity to take account of what is physically absent -- the capacity, that is, to live, work, and play among finely distinguishable, subtle, powerfully value-laden symbols. This capacity in turn allows purposeful innovation, conscious deliberation, moral responsibility, aesthetic discrimination, contemplation of the universe, and worship. It gives to the achievement of personal satisfactions a uniqueness, a special character, worthy of awe and protection, a level of honor for these values so high as to be almost off the scale of respect due other real but much less conscious, less complex harmonies of satisfaction.

Now let us return to the question of abortion, which will bring us back to grown women and growing embryos. Throughout history both have suffered grievously, one way or another, from bad applied metaphysics. Women are actual persons. Their achieved and potential values combine, on Personalistic Organicism, to demand ideally the highest respect and protection. But female persons have had the misfortune to have been widely marginalized by our society, for many reasons -- reasons significantly abetted (alas) by influential metaphysicians like Aristotle and his theological followers. Such social distortions should be given no protection in a reformed public metaphysics. In conflicts between a grown woman and a growing embryo, the woman has earned the presumption of priority. Blastulas, even though shot through with organic value and still more weighty with possibility, have not. Personalistic organicism thus supports the free, thoughtfully deliberated, norm-guided, responsible choice of potential mothers concerning the continuation, or not, of the non-personal embryos they carry. This is a pro-choice metaphysics. But cautions are also given. Embryos have also suffered ill-deserved callous treatment. This is a situation in process, and therefore the human embryo is never negligible. This is the most important, though hardly explicit, metaphysical insight underpinning the landmark Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. Despite the minor shortcomings of this often-unfairly maligned ruling, the Court was metaphysically right in trying to institutionalize recognition that the key values at stake are in a process of dynamic balance. Over time, the actual value of an embryo increases with its development, as the personal possibilities it represents become ever more nearly realized. Claims on behalf of the unborn potential person become more weighty and need to be balanced increasingly with those of actual persons. Neither premodern supernaturalist prohibition nor modern materialist permissiveness make appropriate public policy. A different reading of the underlying realities of the case gives a different public outcome.

Endless examples of the pervasive influence of metaphysics in public life beg for attention, but I shall content myself with just one more. Still, my "one more" example sprouts prolifically in public life: Why should we pay taxes? Why should childless citizens be required to pay for public schools? Why should poorer school districts be subsidized by taxes collected from wealthier school districts? Why impose health and safety regulations? Why not deregulate public utilities? Why not privatize Social Security? The underlying issue is the question of public goods. This is an issue close to the heart of environmentalists -- who seem always embroiled in arguments supporting putative public goods against the private interests of polluters and exploiters -- but the question is much more general. Underneath the familiar images of "rugged individual" vs. "paternalistic government" lies deep conflict over the nature of society, the ultimate character of relations, and the balance between individuality and community. Metaphysically speaking, it is the ancient problem of the One and the Many replayed on the political stage.

The United States has for years been the world center of tax- and regulation-phobia. Since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who never saw a tax or regulation he didn't hate, the conception has taken root in many minds that government is alien, "other" than its citizenry, intrusive, and greedy for its own ends. The individual, in contrast, is conceived as having, by right, the claim to complete, unhindered control over all his or her property. The citizen may choose to make use of private wealth for charitable purposes in individual cases, but there is no room in this vision for public obligations to trammel the free enjoyment of the free market. Put in metaphysical terms, the individual is related to other individuals (excepting the family circle, perhaps) exclusively by external relations -- those that do not make an essential difference to the individuals related -- and all important goods are private. Even government, pictured as the instrument of various special interests, is seen as competing for private goods in a zero-sum game, but with the unfair advantage of coercive powers. From this viewpoint, the regime "governs best, which governs least." From an avalanche of examples, let me choose just one. There is in U.S. law, under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a title VI, which prohibits any state agencies receiving Federal money from taking actions that unfairly burden racial minorities. Today one of the applications of that title is in respect to state agencies which license incinerators, dumps, toxic waste sites, and like environmental hazards to health and life. These state agencies, in many states, have found great -- and growing -- resistance to locating such toxic sites virtually anywhere. For obvious reasons, no one wants them nearby. Especially in affluent, well-connected neighborhoods, the Not In My Back Yard (or NIMBY) reflex has been swift and powerful. For years, therefore, state agencies have been taking the course of least resistance (literally) and establishing socially necessary but foul or dangerous facilities near the residences of the weakest resisters. Who are these weakest among us? They are, of course, the nonwhite poor, those politically least well defended, and those sadly accustomed to bearing the insults of a heedless majority. For years, as a result, state agencies, by unfairly burdening racial minorities, have been in systematic violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Admittedly, the Civil Rights Act when it was originally passed -- six years before the establishment in (1970) of the Environmental Protection Agency -- did not specifically have toxic waste dumps targeted as the sorts of "burdens" that state agencies might unfairly distribute. But incinerators and dumps are burdens, as every outraged NIMBY-shouter knows; and to place these hazards disproportionately in minority neighborhoods is on its face unfair distribution.

When it came to enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act against state agency environmental racism, from its founding under President Richard Nixon until President Bill Clinton's executive order of 1994, directing the Federal government to reduce environmental injustices, the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency preferred to look the other way. But since then, the EPA has adopted a new policy aimed against inequitable burdening of the least advantaged, and last April 22, on Earth Day, Vice President Al Gore, in a high-profile move, directed all Federal agencies to re-emphasize enforcement of the new policy. An Office of Civil Rights within the EPA now carefully reviews charges of environmental discrimination, and even when a state's pollution permit passes the ordinary tests of local environmental statutes, it may be illegal under the civil rights law if it contributes to a pattern of disproportional pollution in a minority neighborhood. In that case the state must either change the permit, justify the siting to the Federal agency, or face a loss of Federal money and possibly a lawsuit.

This, I submit, is good public policy, reflecting the basic intuition that public needs, as for the handling of our joint wastes, are truly social and that public burdens, as in the locating of necessary facilities, should be fairly distributed among the common beneficiaries. Cost-benefit analyses offered in aggregate economic terms are not enough. In the interests of a healthy society of mutual interconnectedness, we must also ask: "Who pays the costs?" and "Who gets the benefits?"

But holding up such a metaphysical ideal of social wholeness cuts no ice with those who operate with other metaphysical models. The United States Chamber of Commerce, for example, bitterly opposes introducing issues of fairness into the equation. In a recent statement defending building highly polluting plants in minority neighborhoods, a Vice President of the Chamber complained: "For the last 10 years, we have been trying to move financial resources into urban areas, trying to encourage jobs and growth. No one is looking at the long-term economic benefit."⁽³⁾ Benefit for whom? Cost for whom?

One important case currently under consideration involves a $700 million chemical plant, aimed at the production of vinyl chloride, planned by Shintech Inc. in Convent, Louisiana, in the heavily polluted zone between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Convent is inhabited almost exclusively by minorities, whose lungs and property would be significantly harmed but whose share of the profits would be minuscule compared to the managers, owners, and investors living comfortably elsewhere. And let me add that the South is not the only culprit. In a mostly black area of Chester, Pennsylvania, a state grant of a waste treatment permit is being fought on appeal. The lower court ruled that the "mere" issue of racial equity gave no standing to local residents, but this ruling has been overturned. The case is still pending.

The question of the appropriateness of equitable sharing of common costs and benefits rests on a hidden metaphysical agenda. The Environmental Council of the States, which brings together the top environmental officials of the several states, voted in March formally to oppose the holistic model. Among the states on record against the new rules are New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, California, Virginia, Oregon, Wisconsin, and Louisiana. They oppose the requirement to consider fairness to their minority citizens as "burdensome." Lawyers for industry groups, allied with state regulators, argue that the EPA had no legal authority to put the new policy into effect. The Business Network for Environmental Justice, an umbrella group including the Chamber of Commerce, The National Association of Manufacturers, and other business groups, concluded, instead, that "If the permit applicant meets the requirements of a statute and its implementing regulations, the agency must issue the permit, regardless of the racial composition of the surrounding community."⁽⁴⁾ Clearly a different metaphysical model is behind their thinking. At last report, Shintech Inc. has averted a national test case over its plan to build its plastics plant in Convent by abandoning the project in favor of another location next to a Dow Chemical Company plant in the already ruined, purely industrial, site of Plaquemine, Louisiana. A relieved resident of Convent mused: "Hopefully, we can stop them opening this kind of facility anywhere. Because nobody should have to live with production of vinyl chloride in their community."⁽⁵⁾

Personalistic organicism would side with comparatively powerless local communities on this and similar issues, and would urge businessmen and local regulators to picture the world as made up of societies nested within larger societies, the health of each smaller society depending on the continuing health of the larger society within which it must function. And further it would remind balky business groups of the enormous intrinsic value present in every "living organic society" (i.e., human being) complex enough to have attained human personhood. Such lives, black- or white-skinned, are precious to themselves and therefore in themselves. Their status in reality undergirds their claim for equitable consideration. The world is not best seen, this metaphysics would say, as a vector of forces between massive aggregations of private interests, endlessly colliding with one another, as might be modeled after the kinetic theory of matter. It is instead a place where caring for the whole, and the health of all the parts in the whole, is -- or should be -- as natural as tending a garden or, better, raising a family. On the gardening metaphor, we find plenty of sheer organicism. So far so good. But when, early in the growing season, we thin out our rows for the sake of the best crop, we are not usually concerned about the discarded radish or carrot sprouts as though they were intrinsically valuable. Therefore in human affairs, we need to add personalism to our organicism. This is why the family metaphor is better, when persons are involved. Personalistic organicism, even as it fights rapacious individualism on behalf of social holism, can simultaneously defend the value of persons against mere aggregation of benefit for the collective good.

Public metaphysics is a perilous business. To the right there is the powerful array of private interests, with a model of reality ill-suited for healthy life together on an increasingly crowded planet. To the left there is the ever-lurking danger of totalitarian collectivism. Behind, but still powerfully present and perhaps even gaining, is premodern absolutism, not interested at all in pluralistic debate. Since public policies are profoundly shaped by such metaphysical conflicts, we are deeply in need of something better to guide public policies for the millennium ahead. But are metaphysical matters of such public urgency publicly discussed? Are they openly debated on their merits and weaknesses? How laughable even to ask! What could be more absurd than imagining a Metaphysics section in one's daily paper? One thing might be still more absurd: imagining a thoughtful metaphysical discussion on the evening television news or public affairs programing. This brings me to my final, short coda, a mini-peroration on the "outing" of metaphysics for the twenty-first century.

The original topic of this Conference was "Public and Private Religion in an Age of Pluralism." Since I cannot imagine public or private religion without an (at least implicit) framework of beliefs about reality, and since I cannot conceive public policy-making without a similar grounding in suppositions about what finally is the case and (consequently) what finally matters, I have now tried to add Public Metaphysics to the agenda.

The paradox remains, however, that there is nothing even approaching similar importance that is less well examined than our mostly implicit metaphysical hunches and prejudices. If what I have said this afternoon is even partly correct, this situation amounts not so much to paradox as to scandal. What we need is earnest debate about what can be done about this "reflection gap" that threatens the quality of all our public policy making. One answer would urge more philosophical attention in the schools, earlier introduction of metaphysical awareness, better provision of tools for the criticism of better and worse in metaphysics, more effective nurture of a climate for recognition and development of more adequate and coherent, more empirically responsible metaphysics.

Let me therefore urge my readers, if hitherto hostile or indifferent to metaphysics, to rethink your opinions -- and refeel your attitudes -- toward the enterprise of critical thinking about basic reality. You will find, if you put your mind to it, that there are some positions you will consider worse than others. That is a good start. In metaphysical thinking, not everything is equal. True, there is no realistic hope of finding a single theory that can coerce universal agreement. Nor should there ever be such a hegemonic theory. That would be to undermine our precious personal dignity of shaping who we think we are. Such dignity demands a significant degree of cognitive freedom. No theory is attained without choices being made, and choices depend on judgments of value and importance. Some theories fall below the threshold of responsible application of appropriate criteria; other theories remain viable. Even determining which are which requires value-drenched choice. There is no escape from value judgments. It is not within the human condition to eliminate metaphysical responsibility by some impersonal algorithm, but this does not allow us to turn our back on metaphysics. It is too important for our personal lives and for our common life to permit continued neglect or scorn.

1. Presented August, 1998, as keynote address to the Highlands Institute International Conference on Philosophical Theology, Bad Boll, Germany.

2. Aristotle, Psychology, Translated by Philip Wheelwright (N.Y.: Odyssey Press, 1951), pp. 146-47.

3. William L. Kovacs, Vice President of the United States Chamber of Commerce, quoted in the New York Times, May 10, 1998.

4. New York Times, May 10, 1998.

5. New York Times, September 20, 1998.