Jean-Paul Coujou, philosopher, honorary professor at the Catholic Institute of Toulouse and honorary professor in the Khâgne program (senior chair, exceptional class), and member of the Michel Villey Institute, has published some thirty works, including Pensée de l’être et théorie politique. Le moment suarézien, winner of the Charles Lévêque Prize in Metaphysics, awarded in 2012 by the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. After serving as a visiting professor at the University of the Balearic Islands in Spain and the University of São Paulo in Brazil, he is currently a visiting professor at the Pan-American University in Mexico City in 2026.
This article proposes a rereading of the history of metaphysics based on its constitutive articulation with the political. By bringing to light a common origin between the discourse on being and that of being-in-common, Jean-Paul Coujou develops an “ontopolitical” perspective aimed at overcoming their modern separation. Metaphysics thus appears as inseparable from the historical, juridical, and communal conditions of human existence, opening toward a political ontology in which theory and practice, being and community, tend to converge within a single intelligibility of the real.
- What awakened your interest in metaphysics?
- Which authors in this field have had a lasting influence on you?
- Which metaphysical problems interest you most deeply?
- What led you to immerse yourself in writing this book?
- What are you trying to show in this book?
- Did you encounter particular difficulties? What conclusions do you draw from this writing work?
- Footnotes
What awakened your interest in metaphysics?
The starting point of my works (whether they concerned Antiquity, the Second Scholasticism, the School of natural law, the Enlightenment…) of an interest in metaphysics is inseparable from a reinterpretation of the original meaning of philosophy, of its decomposition into Philia and Sophia: Philia referring to the omnipresence of the political and to the interaction among human beings, and Sophia expressing a theoretical and practical requirement that has meaning and value only in relation to a communal horizon and to a being-in-common. At the origin of the questioning of being and of the mode of being-together, a point of convergence appears: the advent of the Logos, the condition of possibility for the revelation of being to itself and for the search for a foundation of being-in-common. If, initially, this anchoring point does not resemble a mere coincidence, the destiny of ontology would consequently be closely linked to that of the political. The different figures expressing the specificity of their relations therefore remain to be determined.
From that point on, it seemed necessary to make explicit the content of the forgetting of such an articulation in the constitution of the history of metaphysics. The question was to determine to what extent it was possible and legitimate, in light of the development of metaphysics, to write a political history of ontology. It is precisely the observation of a common origin in the unfolding of the field of ontological inquiry and that of political inquiry that motivated a reexamination of the history of metaphysics. This was to make it possible to propose an approach to the systematic unity of philosophy based on the exposition of two guiding themes of thought: the discourse on being and the discourse on being-in-common. In confronting metaphysical discourse, it was necessary to clarify whether strict ontology stands outside political philosophy or is connected to what might constitute its completion. And does political philosophy, in turn, draw nourishment from that which resists it in its apparent irreducibility, namely the discourse on being? Returning to metaphysics thus made it possible not only to bring to light the variations in the content and meanings of ontology and the political but also to ask whether the political should be subordinated to a thinking of being and whether political rationality begins with the discourse on being.
On the one hand, obviously, the work of Suárez (1548–1617), and in particular the Disputationes Metaphysicae (1597), a decisive moment expressing an Aufhebung with respect to the Aristotelian heritage and a turning point toward modernity, constituted a decisive reference in my trajectory. It illustrated an emblematic example (among others) of what I sought to bring to light: an ontopolitical reading of metaphysics. Originally, reading Leibniz, Schopenhauer, and Heidegger allowed me to discover indirectly the work of this author of the Second Scholasticism and subsequently to determine its influences, notably in seventeenth-century philosophy, in the School of natural law, and in the Schulmetaphysik.
On the other hand, prior to any examination of the School of Salamanca and the Second Scholasticism, the aim of my work consisted in bringing out, from three significant phases in the history of metaphysics [1) the ontology of essence as the foundation of the political (Plato) and the ontology of phusis in its process of creating a specific space of the political (Aristotle), 2) the decomposition of classical ontology as the condition for the rise of political theory (Hobbes) and the transformation of an ontology of substance into a political metaphysics (Spinoza), 3) the critique of metaphysics and the constitution of a politics of finitude (Rousseau, Kant)], the meaning and limits of a political history of ontology. The discourse on being, in its genesis and in the successive forms in which it is embodied (ontology of the Idea, of substance, …), finds its fulfillment in the discourse it presupposes: that of being-in-common. And the latter either finds its ultimate guarantee in ontology or is condemned to produce a new ontology at the very moment it claims to reject it.
It appeared that any mode of presenting the historical development of political philosophy could not dispense with reference to the ontological presuppositions that accompany it. The questions of the state of nature, natural law and the right of nature, natural law and sociability, in examining their successive variations, reject the confinement of a thinking of being within metaphysics. They are traces that carry the possibility of misunderstanding the relation between the discourse on being and the discourse on being-in-common. The question was what ontological inquiry must be so that it cannot dispense with its reference to political philosophy.
Such interdependence is legitimate, first, only if one recognizes the historical realization of the communal and ethical dimension of the Logos. Thus, the transformation of Logos into ratio within the framework of the problematic of a mathesis universalis constitutes the anchoring point of the formation and foundation of modern political philosophy.
Second, it is necessary to assign to the thought of being a logical-practical scope. This allows for a renewal of the examination of the field of practice by bringing out, for example, the political forms that its discourse may take. Third, if the political process and the ontological process are identical, then being-in-common and being are one and the same. A political history of ontology becomes legitimate only from the movement of synthesis that would constitute its completion: a political ontology. The extension that may result from this is the following: the exposition of the movement of metaphysics toward a political ontology. The latter includes metaphysics but is not exhausted within it. It must then be said that the question of being is not a theme exhausted by metaphysics but that it extends beyond what metaphysics can say about it.
Which metaphysical problems interest you most deeply?
The guiding line of my research has been and remains the elucidation of what an ontopolitical reading of the history of metaphysics might be. It is inseparable from determining the meaning of the link between theory and practice. The aim is to present political ontology as carrying a system of interpretation of metaphysical discourse that subjects it to the test of reason and of history. It is its role to open the history of metaphysics to its reverse side, which structures it and constitutes its guiding thread. Through the filiations and the various modalities of articulation between the discourse on being and the discourse on being-in-common that it brings to light, it constitutes a means of decoding and interpreting the development of philosophical reflection. It reveals the political as the universal framework within which the constitutive practice of being-in-common and of human being is focused. Through its hermeneutical and descriptive function, it makes it possible to account for the meaning of being of communities, as well as socio-historical realities such as ideology, the communal project, law, power, legislation, and the foundation of the State.
What led you to immerse yourself in writing this book?
My latest work, Posterity of Suárez. Politics, History and Metaphysics1 followed on from earlier research on the Second Scholasticism. It aimed to show the persistent trace, whether manifest or repressed, both in the metaphysical and political orders, of Suárez’s thought in authors as different in their philosophical perspectives as Grotius, Spinoza, Hobbes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Rousseau, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Heidegger. In a certain sense, there is a contemporaneity of Suárez, an untimely author… Such a parallel made it possible to establish links between tradition and modernity while making explicit the ruptures and conceptual reversals at the heart of the evolution of political and metaphysical reflection. One may say that a requirement of meaning, inseparable from any exercise of reason, lay at the origin of such research.
What are you trying to show in this book?
The aim was the following: Suárez’s work, when one analyzes its protean influence on modernity, makes it possible to reveal its persistent relevance in the constitution of the political ontology of the moderns. A path is opened to investigate what kind of freedom human beings are entitled to hope for in light of their reason and their finitude. Political freedom must henceforth be thought under the aegis of law in such a way that everyone finds realized within it the right to have rights, which would constitute a metaphysical and ethical objective of the State—that is, a way of responding in practice to the finitude and weaknesses of human existence. The mastery of nature, as announced in the seventeenth century by a mathematical science of the real accompanied by technical power, is inseparable from the search for a mastery of history, yet always referred back to its own limits, that is, to respect for the humanity of the human being. This is precisely what the relation between ontology and the political—thus a history of metaphysics as ontopolitics—could lead us back to, as developed in Suárez’s work.
Did you encounter particular difficulties? What conclusions do you draw from this writing work?
All writing is confronted with this paradox: it is not finished when it is objectively finished; it is finished when one decides that it is complete. It must accept itself in its gaps, its ignorances, its indeterminacies, and its blind spots. The monumental work of Suárez, by its encyclopedic knowledge, places the reader before a set of concepts and a mastery of the history of metaphysics that can only be intimidating. This latest work was intended to show the indelible trace of his thought across the two centuries of the history of metaphysics that followed. That is precisely what made it difficult.
Footnotes
- Cf. Jean-Paul Coujou, Postérité de Suárez. Politique, histoire et métaphysique (Posterity of Suárez. Politics, History and Metaphysics), Domuni-Press, 2026.[↩]
