Metaphilosophy: The Three Modes of Philosophizing

Introduction

One finds in Jean Borella the outline of what may be called a genuine metaphilosophy, that is, a reflection on the conditions and forms of philosophical activity itself:

The philosophical act appears to us to comprise three modes: interrogative (or heuristic), metaphysical (or theoretic), and scholastic (or grammatical). The first mode is one of research: questioning; the second, of apprehending truth: contemplation; and the third, of teaching: formulation. Every great philosophy combines these modes in varying proportions, or tends to reject the validity of one mode in the name of another. This is because these three modes exist in a dialectical tension, each finding both its limit and its raison d’être in the other two. This is a (philosophical) theory of philosophy yet to be developed.¹

Indeed, the philosophical act cannot be reduced either to inquiry, to the contemplation of truth, or to its conceptual exposition. It comprises at least three fundamental moments or modes: the interrogative, the metaphysical, and the scholastic. These are not three distinct disciplines, but three constitutive dimensions of every authentic philosophy.

The Interrogative Mode: Philosophy as Quest

What does it mean to philosophize? To seek the truth, to contemplate it, or to teach it? Drawing on an insight of Jean Borella, this article argues that the philosophical act comprises three inseparable dimensions: interrogation, contemplation, and formulation. Every great philosophy is shaped by the tension among these three modes, sometimes privileging one at the expense of the others. Such a perspective opens the way to a genuine metaphilosophy: no longer a particular doctrine, but a reflection on the very nature of philosophizing itself.

The philosopher’s first act is wonder (thaumazein), already discussed by Plato and Aristotle, and perhaps echoed in Quine’s notion of “surprise.”

Contrary to what Heidegger sometimes appears to suggest, it is precisely the astonished human being who becomes aware of this alleged “forgetfulness of Being.” The astonished person is that being who always already possesses a certain understanding of Being: not knowledge, certainly, but an implicit comprehension of what it means “to be.” For this reason, it seems particularly inaccurate to us to claim that metaphysics is incapable of sustaining the speculative effort involved in the question of Being because it identifies Being with beings, or with substance (ousia), or again with the Supreme Being (God), so that ontology (“the thought of Being”) would never cease seeking repose from its speculative effort by collapsing into theology (“the thought of God”), thereby realizing what would be the very essence of metaphysics, its original sin: onto-theology (sic).²

This wonder, “that capacity to question a blinding obviousness, that is, something so evident that it prevents us from seeing and understanding the most immediate world,”³ is foundational, but by no means new. We encounter it already in Plato: “wonder is a philosophical feeling; it is the true beginning of philosophy,”⁴ just as in Aristotle: “all men begin by wondering why things are as they are” (Metaphysics, A, 2, 983a). The philosopher Jeanne Hersch (1910–2000) traced this theme from the Presocratics to Jaspers,⁵ providing numerous illustrations of its enduring philosophical relevance.⁶

If this wonder is a “blinding obviousness,” it is above all because, as this oxymoron suggests, it is contradiction or opposition that provokes it.⁷ Moreover, if wonder is the salutary recognition of one’s own ignorance—as Aristotle teaches⁸—then blind faith in one’s own intellectual light is precisely what obstructs it. If humility is required, it is because “the intellect comes through the door” or “from without.”⁹

Philosophy is thus born from a wound inflicted upon intelligence by reality itself: Why is there something rather than nothing? What is truth? What is Being? What is the good?

This mode is heuristic (from the Greek heuriskein, “to find”). It does not yet possess the truth; it seeks it. The virtues proper to such a mode are necessarily openness, intellectual receptivity, and the rejection of every form of dogmatism.

The paradigmatic “interrogative philosopher” is Socrates. His wisdom consists essentially in refusing to confuse his opinions with truth. He destroys false certainties in order to make authentic knowledge possible. Yet this mode contains a danger of its own: that of endless questioning. Inquiry can become its own end and collapse into skepticism. A question exists only because it is oriented toward a possible answer.

The interrogative mode therefore calls for its own transcendence.

The Metaphysical Mode: Philosophy as Contemplation

Every inquiry tends toward an apprehension of truth; this second mode is therefore theoretic (theoria), that is, contemplative. Its primary task is no longer to seek, but to see.

In this mode, intelligence attains, at least partially, what it was seeking. It grasps a truth that presents itself as intelligible. Philosophy thus becomes a contemplation of Being.

In Plato, this moment corresponds to the vision of the Ideas; in Aristotle, to the knowledge of first causes; in Plotinus, to the intuition of Intellect; in St. Thomas Aquinas, to the understanding of the principles of Being. This mode is properly metaphysical because it concerns that which grounds all reality. Here one may speak of intellectual intuition, access to first principles, and the unification of knowledge.

Yet this mode also possesses its own danger: doctrinal closure. Contemplation can degenerate into a self-sufficient system. What was once a living intuition may become an abstract construction.

The truth contemplated must therefore remain constantly open to the interrogation that made it possible in the first place.

The Scholastic Mode: Philosophy as Formulation

The truth that has been apprehended must still be expressed. This is the third mode: formulation, conceptual explication, and teaching.

It may be called “scholastic,” not in the sense of the historical school, but as a universal function of thought. Every philosophical truth or insight must be defined, articulated, demonstrated, and transmitted.

The philosopher thus becomes a master rather than a seeker or a contemplative; and the virtues proper to this mode are rigor, coherence, terminological precision, and communicability.

This is the privileged domain of distinctions, definitions, and argumentation. Without them, philosophy would remain a private intuition or an ineffable illumination.

Naturally, this mode also carries its own danger: fossilization. Concepts may ultimately come to replace the realities they are intended to designate. Scholasticism then becomes a language closed in upon itself, forgetful both of the living question from which it arose and of the truth it claims to express.

A Constitutive Dialectic

These three modes are neither successive nor separable within genuine philosophizing; rather, they constitute a permanent dialectic.

Indeed, without interrogation, metaphysics degenerates into dogmatism and scholasticism into mere repetition; without contemplation, interrogation collapses into skepticism and scholasticism into an empty argumentative technique; without formulation, contemplation remains mute and interrogation remains incomplete.

Each mode therefore limits the other two while simultaneously making them possible.

Great Philosophies as Configurations of the Three Modes

The history of philosophy could be reread as a history of the relations among these three dimensions.

• Socrates privileges the interrogative mode; the question is almost more important than the answer.
• Plato seeks a balance between interrogation and contemplation.
• Aristotle strengthens the scholastic dimension without sacrificing contemplation.
• Plotinus strongly privileges the theoretic mode.
• Thomas Aquinas offers an exceptional synthesis of the three modes.
• Descartes reactivates the interrogative moment through methodical doubt.
• Kant grants primacy to formulation and closes reflection upon the conditions of knowledge.
• Certain existentialisms privilege lived questioning at the expense of systematic formulation.
• Certain analytic currents sometimes exalt the grammatical dimension at the expense of contemplation.

Metaphilosophy: Toward a Philosophical Theory of Philosophy

Such a perspective would make it possible to define philosophy itself not as a particular doctrine but as an ever-unstable equilibrium between the search for truth, the contemplation of truth, and the communication of truth.

In other words, philosophy begins as a question, is fulfilled as a vision, and is transmitted as discourse. Or again: the philosopher is successively—and simultaneously—a seeker, a contemplative, and a teacher.

The greatness of a philosophy could then be measured by its capacity to maintain alive the tension among these three poles without sacrificing one to another: an interrogation that does not renounce truth, a contemplation that does not disdain discursive reason, and a formulation that never substitutes itself for what it seeks to express.

This triad could constitute the nucleus of a genuine philosophy of philosophy, analogous to what logic is for thought or aesthetics for art.

Such a triad also reflects the very structure of the human spirit itself: man as seeker (homo quaerens), as contemplative (homo contemplans), and as teacher or transmitter (homo docens). The act of philosophizing thus appears not as an accidental activity of the mind, but as the unfolding of its deepest vocation.

Footnotes

1. Jean Borella, Penser l’analogie, no. 3, p. 137. « Scholastic in French includes « discusive »[↩]
2. Quite obviously, we do not follow Heidegger in his reduction of metaphysics to “onto-theology,” according to the term he borrows from Kant (e.g. Critique of Pure Reason, Ak. III, p. 420; Œuvres philosophiques, “Pléiade,” vol. I, p. 1239); cf. Bérard (ed.), What Is Metaphysics?, “Being or beings, ontology or metaphysics,” pp. 25–27. Jean-François Courtine (1944), in Inventio analogiae: métaphysique et ontothéologie (Paris: Vrin, 2005), distinguished “different ‘ages’ of metaphysics […] in order to bring out the highly specific conditions of its (Arabic-Latin) interpretation as onto-theology.”[↩]
3. Cf. Jeanne Hersch, L’étonnement philosophique. Une histoire de la philosophie, Paris: Gallimard, 1993.[↩]
4. Plato, Theaetetus, 155d (trans. V. Cousin), Paris: Bossange, 1824, vol. II, p. 74.[↩]
5. The Presocratics, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans, the Stoics, Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Comte, Marx, Freud, Bergson, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Jaspers; cf. L’étonnement philosophique, op. cit.[↩]
6. Let us add Bertrand Russell (1872–1970): although philosophy “cannot answer as many questions as we might wish, it has at least the merit of asking questions which increase our interest in the world and reveal the strangeness and wonder lying just beneath the surface of the most commonplace things of daily life”; My Philosophical Development, ch. 1, final paragraph. As Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel notes, Russell’s “wonder” is also the literal meaning of the ancient Greek thaumazein; cf. “Le ‘réalisme métaphysique’ ou Frege et Russell comme expression du réalisme traditionnel,” Workshop “Autour de Frege et Russell,” University of Ottawa, Dec. 2012, online, p. 11.[↩]
7. See Metaphysics of Paradox (L’Harmattan, 2019), ch. II, “Worldly Paradoxes,” §1.2, “Philosophical Wonder Distinguishes Being from Beings.”[↩]
8. “To perceive a difficulty and to wonder is to recognize one’s own ignorance,” Metaphysics, A, II, 14. “To question oneself and to wonder at phenomena is already to know that one does not know them” is the translation by Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire (Paris: Germer-Baillière, 1879, vol. I).[↩]
9. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, II, 3, 736a27–b12. “There remains only one possibility: that intellect alone comes from outside and alone is divine” (ibid., II, 4, 737a25). Repeated by Alexander of Aphrodisias, On the Soul, 91, 1–2.[↩]