Meeting with Bruno Bérard: Metaphysics for Everyone

Introduction, about the teaching of metaphysics

If speaking about metaphysics can be done from multiple points of view, it is because metaphysics is almost never taught as an autonomous discipline in the strict institutional sense. Thus, it is hardly ever a “department,” unlike history, sociology, or economics. Outside of a curriculum explicitly named “Metaphysics,” it appears in a diffuse manner, more transversal, and is taught through other subjects, or even remains simply implicit.

Nevertheless, several major institutional settings can be identified where it is taught: the history of philosophy, ontology, philosophy of science, epistemology, as well as certain specialized seminars.

The history of philosophy is the principal and most classical setting. Metaphysics appears there through major authors of antiquity (Plato, Aristotle), the medieval thinkers (Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Meister Eckhart), the “groups” Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, then Kant and Hegel, sometimes Heidegger. Here, one studies above all metaphysical systems, but rarely metaphysics as such. The conceptual depth one may find there is often neutralized by its historicization, the inevitable relativization of juxtaposed doctrines.

Ontology, since Heidegger, seems to have become an acceptable euphemism (!). One finds metaphysics there, typically, in courses on general ontology, formal ontology, or ontology of properties, relations, events… Metaphysics is especially present in analytic philosophy or in dialogue with logic and philosophy of language. There, metaphysics is treated as a theory of what is. The advantage of the great rigor linked to highly developed formalization nevertheless favors the loss of the existential or principial dimensions of metaphysics. For a meontological (or supra-ontological) domain, one might add that it is quite paradoxical to see metaphysics treated within ontology!

The philosophy of science is another major locus of metaphysics, with notions such as realism/anti-realism, laws of nature, causality, as well as time, space, emergence, consciousness. Here, metaphysics becomes a “second philosophy”; while it benefits from its grounding in positive knowledge (making explicit what the sciences presuppose), it is subordinated to the sciences and loses its status as first philosophy.

Epistemology approaches metaphysics through its conditions of possibility. One deals there with the status of the real, the relation between subject and object, the ontological presuppositions of knowledge… There, the persistence of Kantian or post-Kantian influence, behind its display of critical lucidity, effectively reduces the metaphysical perspective to below its intrinsic openness to the supra-rational¹.

Some specialized seminars (master’s or doctoral level) allow “real” metaphysics to survive. One finds seminars centered on an author (Aristotle, Spinoza, Leibniz, Heidegger), thematic seminars (time, being, possible, world, causality), and research groups. Here, teaching acquires real freedom, but one may lament its great institutional precariousness.

One may also note some significant differences between academic traditions: continental (France, Germany, Italy) and analytic (UK, USA).

In the continental tradition, metaphysics is most often historicized. The strong presence of Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger maintains a persistent suspicion toward so-called dogmatic metaphysics ².

In the analytic tradition, metaphysics has indeed become central again since the 1970s, with themes such as possible worlds, identity, properties, time… but its strong logical formalization disconnects it from questions of Principle, ultimate meaning, or the Absolute. We view this formalization as a reduction of thought to the available words or concepts. The intelligible exceeds the conceptible; noēsis surpasses dianoia, as Plato already showed. If in the positive sciences one rightly seeks the strictest equivalence between definiendum and definiens, this is ultimately impossible, by definition, in metaphysics!

We may conclude this overview by saying that many philosophers “do” metaphysics while claiming not to. Since every human being is a metaphysician, as Schopenhauer says, we understand why metaphysics always returns, even when its end is proclaimed.

Thus, for lack of an autonomous academic discipline called “metaphysics,” it is often taught without being acknowledged as such. This is regrettable.

What awakened your interest in metaphysics?

Essentially, curiosity about what lies beyond the physical world or prior to nature. These are questions such as “what was there before?” or “why is there something rather than nothing?” (Leibniz) that intrigued me. Words at least exist to designate what lies beyond physics—that is metaphysics—or beyond nature—that is the supernatural.

Allowing oneself to study the invisible is characteristic of many sciences. This is of course the case with electromagnetism or quantum physics. But one remains within the chain of secondary causes. These “go in circles,” like the water cycle. Even if the chain is more complex—for example, heat comes from combustion, which requires oxygen produced by plants through photosynthesis due to the sun and chlorophyll, etc.

Yet there are indices that lead toward the metaphysical.

First index. This chain of secondary causes must lead to a first cause that is its own cause; this is the Greek anankè stênai: “it is necessary to stop” (for example in Aristotle, Metaphysics, II, 994b; XII, 1070a). The conclusion is that “if nothing is first, absolutely nothing is cause” (Metaphysics I, 2), and then all science—which is knowledge through causes—is impossible. This is the “scientific” index of a “higher antecedent” to physical things.

Second index. Plato discovers the “philosophical” index. Meaning cannot be generated by man; one cannot force oneself to understand what one does not understand, as Simone Weil says. Meaning is received from above, from the world of Ideas in Plato. To understand Plato properly, it suffices to distinguish reason, which calculates and reasons within the limits of logic, and intelligence, which receives meaning “from above.” It is one thing to reason (reason, dianoia), and another to understand the reasoning (intelligence, noēsis)³. This reception of meaning by intelligence is common to all human beings. It is a “revelation” in itself.

Third index. Since our societies have disentangled sociality and sacrality, homo religiosus appears less clearly (in France, at least). Nevertheless, the religions of the earth—these “revelations,” or so-called “wisdom traditions”—seem to constitute a third index that responds to or echoes the first two. These revelations are metaphysical in several respects, particularly in terms of content. To give just one example, the metaphysics of relation in Christian theology constitutes a decisive complement to the immemorial metaphysics of being and the insoluble problems it has posed.

Which authors in this field have had a lasting influence on you?

We will be brief by citing the main ones: Aristotle and Plato, the inaugural formulators of the first two indices, with complements in Descartes and Leibniz. Then come proponents of the third index, but the traditional list would be far too long here; let us mention only the most radically metaphysical: Dionysius the Areopagite and Meister Eckhart. Among contemporary metaphysicians, if one must mention only one, let us cite Jean Borella, indispensable, though certainly better known outside France⁴.

Which metaphysical problems interest you most deeply?

From a metaphysical distance taken on metaphysics itself, it is not so much particular metaphysical problems that have interested me—such as individuation, time, consciousness—as the development of a metaphysical point of view on metaphysics.

To put it candidly, I have not seen problems, nor the importance they might represent. I readily admit, given the great minds who have addressed so many metaphysical problems, that this position may seem naive. Nevertheless, once the three indices have been gathered, once the metaphysics of being has been complemented by a metaphysics of relation—thus resolving, we believe, rather easily, the paradoxes of the one and the many, transcendence and immanence—and once one has situated oneself on the side of intelligence (in the sense of noēsis) or the supra-rational and the overcoming of paradoxes⁵ rather than a rationalistic reduction of the real, one is rather in a mode of presenting configurations or “freeze-frames” that are more suggestive than strictly coherent (in the sense of a purely rational logic).

What led you to write this book?

The desire to share a perspective on metaphysics in the simplest possible way with the greatest number of people. Hence the idea of comparing metaphysics with other sciences, with religion, mysticism, esotericism; of distinguishing belief, knowledge, and understanding; of examining what matter, death, sex⁶ are metaphysically; of presenting several major metaphysicians and, in particular, since objectivity is impossible, of including a personal biographical testimony in order to situate the necessarily subjective point of view of any communication.

What are you trying to show in this book?

That each of us is a metaphysician who more or less ignores it; that metaphysics provides the most radical standpoint one can adopt; that thought is broader than words; that intelligence and the intelligible exceed the limits of reason—so dear to Kant—and that reason often risks becoming an enclosure, a “ratiocination,” as Sartre would say, that is, an activity of reason that runs empty, an abstract thought that protects itself from reality, a logical discourse used to avoid existential engagement.

Did you encounter particular difficulties? What conclusions do you draw from this work?

I had already attempted to present metaphysics in an illustrated way, with the metaphysical interpretation of three dreams⁷ and, with Jean Borella, the interpretation of fairy tales⁸. With this third attempt at “metaphysics for everyone,” the conclusion is simple: aiming at a general audience with a book on metaphysics is even more difficult than I had thought. At the very least, metaphysics has been brought out of the university, where, as we have seen, it is only partially present.

There is still work to be done, for all of us—and that is a good thing!

Footnotes

1. See “Philosophy and science, openness and closure of the concept.”[↩]
2. See the article “Metaphysics as antidogmatic and as non-system”; from Bruno Bérard (ed.), What Is Metaphysics?, L’Harmattan, 2010, 190 pp. One might return to Kant his “critical slumber” (Borella), when he limits reason by… reason![↩]
3. See the article “Reason and intelligence, the two faces of the mind.”[↩]
4. Cf. Bruno Bérard, Jean Borella, the Metaphysical Revolution, L’Harmattan, 2006, 373 pp.; Bruno Bérard and Paul Ducay (eds.), Jean Borella for Everyone, L’Harmattan, 2025, 246 pp.; Thomas Zimmermann, The Metaphysics of Symbol in the Work of Jean Borella, L’Harmattan, 2005, 244 pp.[↩]
5. Cf. Bruno Bérard, Metaphysics of Paradox, L’Harmattan, 2019, vol. 1; vol. 2. See the article “Paradoxes of reason, paradoxes of intelligence.”[↩]
6. Cf. Bruno Bérard, Metaphysics of Sex, L’Harmattan, 2022, 252 pp.[↩]
7. Bruno Bérard, Introduction to Metaphysics. The Three Dreams, L’Harmattan, 2009, 148 pp.[↩]
8. Bruno Bérard and Jean Borella, Metaphysics of Fairy Tales, L’Harmattan, 2011, 184 pp.[↩]