The experience of the meaning of being is so fundamental, so deeply rooted in our relation to reality, that it generally passes unnoticed. And yet, it is this experience that makes the reception of the new possible: forms that nothing allowed us to anticipate, that we could not conceive, and that only sensible perception reveals to us. It is this experience that brings the rose forth as “rose” — and although our language is limited to that word, the inner experience we make of it remains unique, identifiable, irreducible in its mystery. This shadowy dimension stems from the fact that what the intellect grasps is not the pure being of the essence, but the essence insofar as it gives itself as meaning. In other words, if the intellect can apprehend a “semantic presence” of the essence, its ultimate reality remains in God alone (cf. Borella).
More specifically
By semantic experience, one means the immediate encounter through which reality signifies itself even before being thematized by concepts. The intellect does not fabricate meaning; it recognizes a meaning that is given — a discreet donation antecedent to the categories that discourse will subsequently impose. This priority of meaning does not exclude analysis; it enables it, reminding us that every conceptualization arises from an original intuition in which form and meaning appear together.
On this basis, the symbolicity of the world becomes perceptible: things are not merely objects but signs that reverberate a depth of being. The “identity” of the rose is not exhausted by its measurable properties; it bears an intelligible quality — a “semantic presence” — that makes it this rose and no other. Meaning is thus irreducible to words or representations: it is a mode of presence in which essence is intimated without being exhausted. Hence two requirements:
- to acknowledge the finitude of language, which names without saturating;
- to maintain a metaphysical openness, through which the intellect ascends from meaning to its Source. In this ascent, the unity of being, truth, and beauty becomes manifest: authentic meaning is participation — referring, by analogy, to the Pure Act in which essence and existence are identical.
For further reading
Jean Borella, The Crisis of Religious Symbolism, L’Harmattan, 1984.
Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, Stanford UP, 2002.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. I, Ignatius Press, 1982 (on form and meaning).
Bruno Bérard, Metaphysics for Everyone (Angelico Press), trans. of Métaphysique pour tous (Paris, L’Harmattan, 2022); Ital. Sui sentieri della metafisica; Span. ¿Qué es la metafísica?; Ger. Was ist Metaphysik? — on the metaphysical understanding of archetypes as universal principles linking being, consciousness, and symbol.
See the excerpt from the presentation of the book Jean Borella, la Révolution métaphysique.