Laurent Cournarie, Senior Professor of Philosophy, is the author of several books on Sensibility (Ellipses, 1998), Existence (A. Colin, 2001), Imagination (A. Colin, 2006), The Principle, a Metaphysical History (Vrin. 2021) and numerous articles on general philosophy, epistemology, aesthetics, the history of ancient and modern philosophy, and the societal challenges of EIA.
It would certainly be excellent news to learn that metaphysics is not dead. But one may doubt its proclaimed rebirths as much as its endlessly repeated deaths. This doubt may well be the rather “deflationary” standpoint we personally adopt with regard to metaphysics.
Being a metaphysician, doing metaphysics
The little we have published on metaphysics—both Le principe (The Principle)1 and the article “Prolégomènes sur la métaphysique” (Prolegomena on Metaphysics)2—has in fact always been occasional writing, produced in connection with a philosophy syllabus3. As a result, the analyses in these texts do not display the kind of theoretical commitment one expects from a philosopher when speaking about metaphysics. Out of prudence, modesty, or incapacity, we have always judged our intellectual work unworthy of an authentic philosopher. Yet can one be a metaphysician without being a philosopher, and can one “do metaphysics” without being a metaphysician? Still, one would first have to know what it means “to be a metaphysician,” and whether that is indeed the best way to do metaphysics. René Descartes, who knew a thing or two about metaphysics, thought it pointless to devote more than a few hours to it in an entire lifetime—unlike mathematics, and above all the conduct of life. Hence our reluctance even to claim that we can precisely determine our own conception of metaphysics.
Teaching philosophy in a metaphysical way
And yet, a certain way of teaching philosophy can take on a metaphysical bearing, both by method and by conviction—and, on reflection, it was surely ours. The method consists in radicalizing inquiry: presupposing as little as possible, avoiding unnecessary multiplication of concepts, while also—when it comes specifically to metaphysics—refusing to be satisfied with a mere history of metaphysics that always ends with a death certificate.
This search for “desert landscapes” Willard Van Orman Quine becomes a metaphysical disposition when it supports a conviction: that nothing in philosophy is better than metaphysics, or what could come closest to it. Metaphysics is to philosophy what poetry is to prose, or mathematics to physics itself: the fulfillment of its aspiration in the most theoretical form.
That is why so many philosophical publications today, which have clearly broken with the memory of any metaphysical past, can seem so arbitrary—or so desperately talkative. Metaphysics has been accused of being discourse about nothing, a chain of meaningless statements. The situation has reversed: philosophy deprived of metaphysics, without being devoid of meaning, is all too often empty of philosophy.
But it is not enough to ask metaphysical questions, or to treat abstract and unusual objects “metaphysically,” in order to construct a metaphysics—which would nevertheless be the significant project in philosophy.
The “meta” privilege
For this reason, an assertive “revival” of metaphysics may have something suspicious about it. Some may read it “politically”: as a return to conceptual order, serving in practice as a war machine against Modernity, blamed for every ill. For a long time—even within the university—it was said that metaphysics, coupled with morality, was right-wing, whereas epistemology, paired with politics, was readily left-wing. Metaphysics was dogmatic: preserving it would be conservative, restoring it reactionary.
Such a charge is obviously ridiculous, because it does not measure itself against the fundamental problems metaphysics raises about “what there is.” Our reservations are rather “epistemic,” because our mind—perhaps still under a Immanuel Kant spell, still intimidated by transcendental argumentation and the “correlationist” prejudice—does not dare opt for an unambiguous realism.
For metaphysics, if it is not “first science,” will always usurp that name. Yet metaphysics is not, and cannot be, a science—unless one redefines the concept of science “beyond” its “nomological” model. But that is already, in modern terms, the question inspired by the Aristotelian decision: if there are regional sciences of being, there must be a first science of being as being.
Hence the impression that metaphysical revivals may exploit the indeterminacy opened by the prefix itself. Everything “meta-,” falsely taken as “trans-,” and thus liable to look like a form of “surpassing,” whatever its domain, will be (or would be) called “metaphysical.” This resurgence is, all in all, rather strange: yesterday an unfindable science, metaphysics is now everywhere. One should note, however, that “metaphysics of…” proliferate all the more easily when one refrains from defining the essence and destination of metaphysics.
Ontology without metaphysics
If, conversely, we maintain a robust link between science and metaphysics, without rushing to legitimize the latter on the pretext that it would fill the void left by the ignorance, limits, and incompleteness of the former, we may ask whether metaphysics today can be anything other than a metaphysics starting from the sciences—or a “metaphysics of nature.” If so, metaphysics can hardly depart from the program of a “descriptive ontology,” returning once again to the inaugural gesture of Aristotle.
Yet descriptive ontology, by acknowledging the fading of “transcendence,” risks stripping metaphysics of its attraction and of its co-originary aim: to speak the Principle capable of grasping the ultimate of reality, or of unifying the whole world through it. That was both the starting point and the end point of our book Le principe: an age that so strongly recoils from essences tolerates the principle no better—unless it comes in the plural, and under an expressly transcendental or immanent regime.
Hence, nevertheless, for “continental” philosophy—shaped by so many centuries of onto-theology, even imbued with a latent spiritualism—the strangeness of the current metaphysical effervescence in analytic contexts, which develop, on ancient questions, razor-sharp arguments and theories as technical as they are bold: about tropes, universals, property atomism, personal identity, the emergence of mind, even panpsychism… and above all possible worlds.
In the end, since no one can claim in philosophy to completely exempt themselves from metaphysics without at least taking a position on the thesis of its supposed end, how should we define our own stance toward metaphysics? Here we will simply call it “nostalgic”—and a paradoxical nostalgia, if metaphysics has never taken place, does not take place, and never will. Might the ultimate impossibility of metaphysics be the first possibility of philosophy—and more than that, its finest risk, the proof that philosophy will never be finished with metaphysics?
