Meeting with Jean Grondin: The Beauty of Metaphysics

On the Critiques of Metaphysics

BB. Although mocked by Voltaire and later deemed impossible by Kant, metaphysics has clearly not disappeared, whether within the academy or beyond it—where it is understood in an even broader sense. How do you view this situation in general, and in relation to your own work?

JG. It is actually quite fortunate to have interlocutors such as Voltaire and Kant. Voltaire was far from being the first to mock metaphysics. In the first edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1694), the adjective “metaphysical” was said to “sometimes mean abstract,” illustrated by the phrase: “What you are telling us is very metaphysical” (sic). This usage can also be found in Descartes and Molière, and it remained current until the 19th century.

That metaphysics should be an object of ridicule is no dishonor—quite the contrary. The real question is why it is ridiculed. Voltaire did so because he belonged to an age that privileged experimental science and discredited any reflection deemed to go beyond the bounds of experience. Yet privileging experience is itself a metaphysical decision: it presupposes that reality is nothing but what is given through the senses. This is already a thesis about being—and therefore a form of metaphysics.

Much the same constellation is found in Kant, though in a more sophisticated form. Trained in scholastic metaphysics, Kant sought not to abolish metaphysics but to place it on secure foundations, notably through practical reason. His critique of metaphysics is therefore also an attempt to refound it.

If metaphysics has only such “enemies,” it is in good health. As Kant himself famously remarked, metaphysics is like a lover with whom one has quarreled, yet to whom one inevitably returns.

My own work belongs to this return to metaphysics after the critiques it has undergone. Today, however, we must also reckon with later critiques—Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, logical positivism—which compel us to rethink what metaphysics is and why it remains foundational to both philosophy and science. At the same time, our historical awareness allows us a deeper understanding of how it has developed.

Hence my two main concerns: to determine what metaphysics is—thereby refounding and practicing it—and to understand what it has been historically and how it has shaped our intellectual tradition.

BB. You are right to recall these historical and contextual elements. There is always the risk of thinking within an anonymous and constraining framework—that of a given epoch and language (as Michel Foucault would say). One thinks here of Immanuel Kant in his “critical slumber” (as Jean Borella puts it), or, if one remains at the level of mere reaction, of Voltaire dismissing metaphysics as nonsense; perhaps even of Martin Heidegger, with what may appear as a partial reading of Aristotle and a certain sidestepping of Plato—at least, such is my impression as a non-specialist in Heidegger.

Return to Plato and Aristotle

It seems to me that if metaphysics has endured to this day, despite all its detractors, it is because it is rooted in two epistemological certainties brought to light at the very beginning of our European intellectual tradition. The first, formulated by Aristotle, is that of a transcendent antecedent: “If nothing is first, nothing is a cause” (Metaphysics, I, 2)—science being knowledge through causes. The second, formulated by Plato, is that of a meaning not generated by man but received from above (if not from on high), along with his essential distinction between intellect and reason—a hierarchy that Kant would later invert, hence the kind of mental energy with which humanity now equips itself, though it might more properly be called “AR,” for artificial reason.

Does such a “return” to these primary certainties form part of metaphysics as you refound and practice it after all the critiques it has undergone?

JG. Absolutely (if one may say so—and what is good about metaphysics is that one may). You are right to say that Plato and Aristotle are the founders of our tradition of thought, whose roots, to use René Descartes’s famous image, are metaphysics (“all philosophy is like a tree whose roots are metaphysics, the trunk physics, and the branches issuing from the trunk all the other sciences…”).

Aristotle and Plato both proceed from experience to lead us into what we call metaphysics, though they themselves use other names for it: Aristotle speaks of first philosophy, and Plato of dialectic or simply science (epistēmē), by which he means knowledge of first principles.

For Aristotle, one principal gateway into metaphysics is the notion of cause (alongside others: being or “being qua being,” nature, act, the One, the Good, and intellect thinking itself). This perhaps reflects his profoundly scientific cast of mind—he founded most of the sciences. For him, one truly understands a thing only when one knows its cause, as he states in the Metaphysics (994b29) and elsewhere. As first philosophy, metaphysics is necessarily the science of first causes and first principles (981b28). There must therefore be a first cause; otherwise, as you rightly recall, nothing would be a cause at all. Aristotle’s genius lies in showing that the notion of cause admits of multiple meanings, the highest being that of final cause—an idea that underlies both his physics and his metaphysics.

Plato’s fundamental experience—that of Aristotle’s teacher, and this is plain to see—is indeed that of the “meaning” that runs through all things. Plato may not speak explicitly of “meaning,” but rather of eidos: the idea that stands at the origin of all things and accounts for their order, regularity, and beauty. It is something that can be seen, for the term eidos is itself related to seeing (ideō, whose aorist oida means “I know”: I know because I have seen). What kind of vision is this? It may be a sensory one, as is evident in the case of beauty, which is visible and encountered everywhere; yet, followed to its fullest extent as the great principle of order, it becomes an act of intellectual vision, a grasping by the intellect of the principle that permeates all things.

In my work on Plato, I have argued that eidos also means “beauty” in Greek. This is often forgotten or simply overlooked in favor of a more intellectualized understanding of eidos. Such a reading is probably too modern, in that it neglects the beauty inherent in everything that pertains to eidos. Beauty, understood in the Greek sense, of course encompasses not only aesthetic beauty, but also goodness, intelligence, and finality. In my view, Plato inaugurates metaphysics by leading us to discover this beauty (and thus this order, this intelligence, this finality, this overarching meaning) in things.

Incidentally, the link between eidos and beauty has been preserved in Latin: eidos was most often translated as species, usually rendered as “form” or “kind,” yet any good Latin dictionary will confirm that species also means beauty (splendor, radiance). As with the Greek eidos, this beauty in Latin is something offered to sight—spicio or specio, then specto. This fundamental conception of beauty, or of the idea, is central to Plato. Aristotle recalls this at the opening of his Metaphysics (982b10), when he states that first philosophy is the primary science (archikē) which knows that for the sake of which each thing is made, and thus knows the good (to agathon), the supreme good—what Plato called the Idea of the Good that governs all ideas.

These are the ideas I sought to recall or bring to light in my works on metaphysics, such as Du sens des choses and La beauté de la métaphysique. I have never had the impression that these works have been widely read, but that is not in itself important (it is more important to read Plato and Aristotle). What matters to me is the beauty of metaphysics itself and what it has to say about beauty, order, and the meaning of things. That was the double meaning of the title.

BB. I am in full agreement with you, and although we may not have read each other extensively (in my case, it is perhaps more “logical” not to be read), I wrote an essay entitled “Return toward a Metaphysics of Beauty” (in Du religieux dans l’art, L’Harmattan, 2012, pp. 41–54). There, following an anti-chronological journey beginning with contemporary art, one ultimately sees Plato show how one can move from the desire for beautiful bodies to the love of beautiful souls, culminating in the contemplation of beauty itself.

The initiation into Beauty unfolds in three stages: purification, ascent, and contemplation. Beauty belongs to a sphere higher than that of the senses and the understanding; it is something intelligible, addressed to the spirit: “launched upon the ocean of beauty, and wholly given over to this spectacle, one gives birth with inexhaustible fertility to the most magnificent and sublime thoughts and discourses of philosophy, until, strengthened and elevated in these higher regions, one perceives only a single science, that of the beautiful […]” (Symposium, 210d). This “science” is gnosological; it is metaphysical knowledge—that is to say, supra-knowledge or, at the very least, supra-rational knowledge.

In a university context—certainly more open, perhaps less shaped by the French model of laïcité, if not deliberately and methodologically atheistic—have you been able to employ or develop philosophico-metaphysical reflections that one might call “supra-rational” (or that open onto such a dimension), perhaps even elements of “wisdom” or theology—whether drawn from Greek sources or from a Christian Neoplatonism such as one finds in Hans-Georg Gadamer, of whom you are a specialist (among others)?

Metaphysical Tradition

JG. Yes, I have been able to do so, or at least I have ventured to try. I am not sure that our context is more open. The university, despite the universal vocation implied by its name, remains a small world that can be quite confining. We have recently imported French-style laïcité, as a kind of substitute religion, and in our academic environment, atheism is almost taken for granted.

I have never been overly troubled by this. What helps me is that metaphysics is a fundamental discipline of philosophy, and I have been teaching an introductory course in metaphysics at my university since 1991. I always begin with the Greeks—which, I admit, is not very original. The main Greek authors I cover are, after Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus. After that, I turn to Augustine of Hippo, on whom I have also conducted several seminars. In my view, he is the finest representative of Christian Neoplatonism and an author with whom I have always felt a deep affinity.

I am not required to teach medieval philosophy, yet I do so nonetheless, because its metaphysics is indispensable: Anselm of Canterbury, Avicenna and Averroes (with limited means, as I cannot read Arabic), Thomas Aquinas, a little Nicholas of Cusa, and a few others. The moderns revived metaphysical reflection with René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. I am mainly called upon to teach the Germans, such as Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, or Martin Heidegger. It may even be through them that I came to classical metaphysics. They speak so much about metaphysics—seeking at all costs to make it possible (Kant), to fulfill it (Hegel), or to frame its question more adequately (Heidegger), namely that of being—that I wanted to understand what it is and why it is so essential to philosophy.

Then there is Hans-Georg Gadamer, indeed perhaps the greatest philosopher I have had the privilege to meet. In France, he is less well known than the classical figures I have just mentioned, but I have always admired his sense of tradition (at a time so readily given to iconoclasm) and his vital optimism (at a time that had lost all hope and, without always admitting it, embraced nihilism). In his own way, he rediscovered the Platonic metaphysics of beauty as a fundamental trait of being, as well as the doctrine of the transcendentals. He set these two great metaphysical traditions against the modern primacy of the subject.

He encouraged me to develop a metaphysics inspired by hermeneutics, and a hermeneutics that is not ashamed to call itself metaphysical. Hermeneutics thus helped me to rediscover and renew metaphysics. I readily acknowledge that there are several ways of entering into metaphysics.

And you—how did you come to metaphysics?

BB. I fully appreciate the contribution of contemporary hermeneutics, which introduces a reflexive distance in keeping with that intrinsic to metaphysics itself—particularly in Martin Heidegger’s reminder of the irreducible involvement of the metaphysician in every metaphysical question (Was ist Metaphysik?), following Aristotle (“it is not the intellect that knows, but the human being,” De Anima, III, 4–5; 429a–429b) and Thomas Aquinas (hic homo intelligit or intelligere est actus huius hominis; e.g., Summa Theologiae, I, q. 75, a. 2 and q. 76, a. 2).

For my part, this is how I came to metaphysics. From childhood, and by temperament, I found myself questioning what ultimately exists. By force of circumstance, lacking both a formal academic training and career, I progressed in a largely self-taught manner. If one must name “masters” (despite themselves), let us mention Plato and Aristotle, Augustine of Hippo, René Descartes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Pamphile, Jean Borella, and above all Dionysius the Areopagite and Meister Eckhart (as well as Nicholas of Cusa).

Several clues led me into metaphysical thinking—besides, on the one hand, the Leibnizian question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” and, on the other, the fact that someone as intelligent as Thomas Aquinas (or Bonaventure) devoted himself to Christianity.

The first clue is that of Aristotle, already mentioned: “if nothing is first, nothing is a cause,” which compels—scientifically, rationally, or logically—the thought of a first and necessarily transcendent antecedent.

The second clue is that of Plato, already mentioned: that of a meaning which man cannot generate by himself, but can only reflect as in a mirror (speculum in Latin); philosophically—or supra-rationally—it is a matter of “revealing” a transcendence. It is thus an experience akin to revelation.

The third clue is the universal existence of wisdom traditions and religious revelations—the first two clues seeming to me already to refute any reduction of them to merely organic or psychological productions.

Pursuing metaphysical thought beyond what might be called “mere” philosophical reflection, I have studied as deeply as possible the metaphysical (and spiritual) teachings of these traditions. This resulted in a first, essentially metaphysical work: Introduction to a Metaphysics of the Christian Mysteries in Light of the Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, Jewish, and Taoist Traditions, for which I sought and received an imprimatur, in order to ensure that I would not be spreading misunderstandings—at least with regard to Christianity. I must admit that, after this book, I had the impression of having reached the outermost limits of the most ultimate and radical forms of human thought. It is at this point that thought shifts from the discursive to the contemplative; it has, in a sense, reached its own limit.

In order nevertheless to proceed on a more philosophical level and to compensate (in part) for my own limitations in this domain, I wrote a thematic synthesis of the philosophical work of Jean Borella (Jean Borella: The Metaphysical Revolution after Galileo, Kant, Marx, Freud, Derrida).

Feeling then better equipped in metaphysics, I sought to disseminate this metaphysical perspective in a more “pedagogical” manner, offering metaphysical interpretations of dreams, fairy tales, sexuality and the sexes, democracy, artificial intelligence, ecology, and cyclological doctrines (currently in progress).

In more strictly academic terms, I have also attempted—analogously to what has been done with analogy—to develop an original epistemology: a Metaphysics of Paradox, distinguishing the paradoxes of reason from the paradoxes of intellect, and culminating in a possible ultimate form of knowledge: a “paradoxical knowledge.”

In another register, I am working toward proposing a “metaphysics of relation,” which seems to me capable of resolving questions that metaphysics of being alone does not fully address.

All of this perhaps reflects more disproportionate ambitions than recognized or even demonstrable results. Yet, having no particular objective in this regard, these reflections are simply made available to as wide an audience as possible, notably through the quintilingual (or rather pentaglot!) site metafysikos.

Opening it to other approaches to metaphysics is the present endeavor—somewhat in the Indian spirit—where the synthesis of viewpoints points toward the reality of the thing itself.

Metaphysics and Religious Confession

JG. What a remarkable intellectual journey—and how ignorant I feel by comparison! Openness is a great metaphysical virtue. I find its illustration in The School of Athens by Raphael, depicting Plato and Aristotle discussing the great principles of the order of the world, surrounded by all the great thinkers who preceded them, their contemporaries, and several of their successors (including Raphael himself). All belong to the same school: they listen to one another, read books, and contemplate the order of the cosmos.

How can we continue this Raphaelesque conversation today? It is a question I often ask myself. There is teaching, of course, as in the time of Plato and Aristotle. Like my own teachers, I have favored articles and books, but books are read less and less, and I fear that many will soon content themselves with summaries of articles produced by artificial intelligence.

Today, new forms of discussion and transmission have emerged: videos, podcasts, websites, blogs, and the ephemeral world of social media. I believe you have made the right choice with metafysikos. I must also acknowledge here my own ignorance and limitations. Let us continue to explore the avenues of philosophical reflection and communication.

One of the questions your reflection raises in me is to what extent metaphysics should be confessional. It has certainly been developed by Christian authors in patristic and medieval Latin thought, and later by modern thinkers—from René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to Étienne Gilson—but it has also been practiced by the Greeks, who knew nothing of revealed religions, by Jewish thinkers such as Philo of Alexandria or Maimonides (not to mention Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas), and by Muslim thinkers such as Al-Farabi, Avicenna, or Averroes.

My concern is to respect, as far as possible, the boundary between theology—which is confessional—and metaphysics, which is more rational, even though it too is not without commitment. In the contemporary world, philosophy is expected to be more universal and to speak to everyone, regardless of their confessional affiliations. This was an idea dear to Paul Ricœur.

You seem to point the way forward by placing Christianity in dialogue with Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, Jewish, and Taoist traditions. This is an inspiring way of continuing the Raphaelesque conversation. But how can we bring in agnostics and atheists, who are not without metaphysics, nor without a fundamental questioning of the meaning of things?

BB. You are quite right: one would like to distinguish a strictly philosophical metaphysics from a confessional one—this is, at the very least, the contemporary secular injunction in the West. Yet we should not allow ourselves to be hemmed in by this alternative alone: metaphysics is far broader and must encompass the whole of reality, even if, formally speaking, it will never be universal.

A universal metaphysics, moreover, was the disappointed hope of the twentieth century. René Guénon, who helped break with nineteenth-century Kantianism and scientism and reopened access to a sacred intellectuality—like Frithjof Schuon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Titus Burckhardt, and Leo Schaya—attempted to construct such a universal metaphysics, even a religio perennis (Schuon’s “transcendent unity of religions”). Yet all of them, often through conversion, ultimately aligned themselves with particular confessions (Islam, Hinduism, Judaism), without metaphysics ever formally encompassing the religions themselves. The metaphysical endeavor is universal; its formulation never is, since it stands beyond all form. One illustration would be the coexistence of the analogy of being in Thomas Aquinas and the divine exemplarism of Bonaventure, which can “neither exclude nor coincide” (Gilson).

Whereas ancient (pre-religious) societies unified social life and sacrality, modern Western societies attempt to separate these two aspects within the human being. Yet there is no opposition between believing and knowing. The opposition between believers who believe and scholars who know is a false one. The cognitive order proceeds from ignorance to knowledge, while the volitional order enables one to adhere—or not—to that knowledge, by adding belief to it. This holds true in science as much as in philosophy… or in religion. Metaphysics occupies an intermediate domain, concerning what is meta-physical or supra-natural—let us say, supra-rational—which is, by its very constitution, excluded from the sciences and from rational philosophies.

Thus, far from any opposition between believers who believe and scholars who know, there exists a nearly continuous gradation between rare religious fanatics and militant atheists, such that the average believer and the average non-believer—who are in fact quite similar in today’s Western world, and perhaps elsewhere—represent the majority of humanity.

“God is dead—and it was Kant who killed him!” is a provocation from Metaphysics of Paradox (2019). His work of rationalist reduction, in his view, seeks to remedy mysticism (1790) and to bring religion back within the limits of reason alone (1793). On this basis of an inaccessible supernatural, some move toward a nonexistent supernatural: God no longer exists—He is dead. Literature followed suit, with poets such as Heinrich Heine or Gérard de Nerval in the nineteenth century.

Yet what is striking is that even the most anti-religious—or anti-clerical—figures end up referring, in one way or another, to God or to an absolute. Even dead, God continues to haunt them—even among philosophers: L’homme-Dieu (Luc Ferry, 1996), Le religieux après la religion (Luc Ferry, Marcel Gauchet, 2007), Traité d’athéologie (Michel Onfray, 2005), L’esprit de l’athéisme (André Comte-Sponville, 2006), or even among scientists: Is There a Grand Architect of the Universe? (Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow, 2010/2011), The God Delusion (Richard Dawkins, 2006)…

Certainly, these authors are far from being metaphysicians. It is therefore worth pointing out what Michel Onfray has called the “perverse neo-religious secularism.” After the Revolution, there was the cult of the Supreme Being. Today, we see, for example, “secular baptisms” held in town halls, secular wedding ceremonies that parody religious ones, and the fashionable notion of “living together,” which serves as a substitute for charity but proves rather ineffective for want of any foundation.

In light of the three clues mentioned earlier, it seems difficult not to develop a broad and encompassing metaphysics. Such a metaphysics is not necessarily confessional, but it cannot ignore the third clue.

To respond to your question—”how are we to integrate agnostics and atheists?”—I would say that a fully developed metaphysics cannot be a mere average (even a weighted one) of opinions. It is their freedom that allows agnostics and atheists not to adhere to a search for truth in intelligible realities.

What do you think?

JG. It is clear that this is a question you have studied extensively, and it can only benefit from your insight. What I take from it is that we must be wary of any peremptory answer that claims to have done away with God and to possess a ready-made secular spirituality capable of satisfying the full human need for meaning. Such claims are merely new versions of the positivist catechism of Auguste Comte.

You are also right to point out that there exists an infinite range of metaphysical dispositions between militant atheism and religious fanaticism. A contemporary, hermeneutical metaphysics must place greater emphasis on openness, on listening to others, on the humility of learned ignorance, and on the continuation of dialogue. For me, metaphysics is precisely this open and vigilant dialogue on the meaning of things.

As for the distinction between the theological-religious (confessional) and the metaphysical (more rational and universal), I regard it primarily as a regulative idea, in the Kantian and Ricœurian sense. It is a meaningful distinction, even though everyone knows that the boundaries are porous. The example of militant atheists that you mention confirms that their atheism is often only a façade—a way of convincing themselves—which conceals a genuine spiritual need. Immanuel Kant and all metaphysicians have understood this well: metaphysics is a natural disposition of our intelligence.

The Beauty of Metaphysics

BB. I share this view. To conclude, would you say a few words about The Beauty of Metaphysics?

JG. Gladly, and I thank you for your interest. It is my third book explicitly devoted to metaphysics, and thus the culminating point of a trilogy that was not initially conceived as such.

In the first book, I sought to offer an Introduction to Metaphysics (2004), deliberately taking up Martin Heidegger’s title (which had also been used by Henri Bergson), though my intention was not, as with Heidegger, to move beyond metaphysics, but rather to enter into it properly. I wanted to show that there has indeed been a common core of metaphysics throughout all the major stages of its history.

In the second book, Du sens des choses. L’idée de la métaphysique (2013), I sought to defend an understanding of metaphysics as the vigilant effort of human reason to comprehend the whole of reality and its reasons—what I also called the meaning of things. There, I defended a conception of truth as an approximation to the truth of things themselves and suggested how hermeneutics might enable us to overcome metaphysical nominalism—or, if you prefer, the prevailing materialism.

In The Beauty of Metaphysics, the aim was to bring out the three pillars of metaphysics: its ontological pillar (the world is inhabited by a certain meaning, which its beauty—understood in the full Greek sense—makes manifest), its theological pillar (the requirement of a first principle), and its anthropological pillar (the idea that the human being is capable of grasping something of the meaning of the world and of introducing more meaning into it).

The emphasis was placed on beauty as understood by metaphysics, that is, as a fundamental characteristic of being, manifested through order, goodness, finality, and intelligence. The title of the book carries the double meaning mentioned earlier: it expresses both the beauty of metaphysics itself—as a discipline and as a foundation of our civilization—and the beauty as conceived and inspired by metaphysics.

This conviction of the fundamental beauty of the world compelled me to address the difficult problem of evil, in continuity with Paul Ricœur, who always regarded it as the greatest challenge for philosophy. The question is probably insoluble, yet it cannot be avoided.

In these reflections, my principal sources have been Plato and Aristotle, and I have often approached these issues through contemporary hermeneutics and through authors such as Kant or Heidegger, who sought to move beyond metaphysics. May it contribute, in its modest way, to the dialogue on the meaning of things that is metaphysics—a dialogue that we continue and that brings us together, you and me.

BB. Many thanks for this illuminating account of the essential “beauty of metaphysics,” in all its double meaning.