Metaphysics: The Third Way

The strict contemporary separation between secular philosophy and confessional theology is indeed fully aligned with the intellectual framework of our time. However, it has the effect of confining thought within the alternative of either “philosophical metaphysics” or “confessional metaphysics.” Yet these two are not mutually exclusive: the most complete metaphysics must aim at thinking the totality of reality, and metaphysical speculation necessarily unfolds beyond the “limits of reason” (notwithstanding Immanuel Kant).

It is therefore possible to maintain a distinction between orders while rejecting their radical separation. Metaphysics, as such, may be understood as a third way between (modern) philosophy and religion—this is the hypothesis proposed here.

A Brief History of the Division of Thought

At its “origin,” social life and the sacred appear to have been scarcely distinguishable, and human beings emerged—well before the so-called “religions”—as homo religiosus by nature, aware that nature itself does not arise from nothing, but necessarily from a higher nature, a supernatural principle.

In antiquity, the question does not arise in terms of a separation between philosophy and theology; rather, knowledge is marked by an original unity: being, the divine, and the cosmos. There is a single quest for reality, in which the divine—or what lies beyond the visible—is fully involved.

To simplify: “theology” (under that name) appears in Aristotle as first philosophy (being qua being and the First Principle). In Plato, myths are drawn out of philosophy, while philosophy itself is necessarily an ascent toward the divine. In Plotinus, this philosophy takes on a “metaphysical-mystical” dimension, scarcely distinguishable from theology, even if myth is reintroduced for pedagogical purposes.

It is the Middle Ages that formally distinguish the two orders: philosophy as grounded in natural reason, and theology in revelation. This distinction is not false—assuming that “natural reason” is a meaningful concept—but it remains incomplete. For with this division, one may say that the seed of fragmentation was already present: where, then, does the suprarational—proper to metaphysics—find its place? What remained possible for minds such as Thomas Aquinas or Bonaventure would become far more difficult thereafter.

For example, Kant falls into the trap of mutual exclusion when he writes:

“I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”¹

Modernity thus finds it easy to transform philosophy into an autonomous science—that is, a discipline entirely separated from theology—thereby relegating theology to the domain of belief, of subjectivity. This is unfortunate for theology, which becomes marginalized and largely internalized (as religious experience); Aristotle is thereby lost. More seriously, philosophy itself loses its strong metaphysical dimension—here, Plato is lost. It is reduced to rational discourse alone, that is, to a form of knowledge by abstraction, severed from the intelligence of reality.

This leads to what might be called the “critical slumber” of Kant, who denies intellectual intuition and places reason above intelligence². Reason ends by limiting itself through its own critique, whereas, as he himself suggests, the sea does not limit the sea (cf. Critique de la raison pure)³. Knowledge becomes reduced to abstraction—legitimately so in the case of science—but mathematical abstraction eventually inverts the epistemic order: reality must now conform to abstraction.

In this context, Willard Van Orman Quine sees no essential difference between philosophy and science: both become systems of abstraction, with philosophy as a mere continuation of science, devoid of any foundational role.

With modern hermeneutics, we first encounter what Martin Heidegger calls the “forgetfulness of Being” (based on a partial reading of Aristotle and a neglect of Plato). Then, with Hans-Georg Gadamer, philosophy becomes universal hermeneutics: understanding is historicized, and truth relativized as an event of interpretation. The question shifts from “What is being?” to “How does meaning arise?”

Finally, in Paul Ricœur and Jean Grondin, a form of implicit metaphysics of meaning emerges—non-systematic, centered on language, history, and interpretation. Insofar as metaphysics is reoriented toward meaning, symbol, and understanding, does it not, at least implicitly, rediscover something of Plato?

The Coherence of Language and the Coherence of Thought

Meanwhile, a “well-formed language” (to which Étienne Bonnot de Condillac reduces science) appears to have become the criterion of scientificity: the concept expressed by the speaker and that understood by the listener must coincide in content (following here Jean Borella)⁴.

Certainly, language brings thinking to completion. Yet while thought may verify its coherence in discourse, it does not derive this coherence from discourse itself, but from its own intrinsic consistency and, more fundamentally, from its certainty—that is, from its objectivity, or its openness to the object.

Conceptual coherence—the non-contradiction of thought—is defined as the agreement of thought with itself, but necessarily in dependence upon the agreement of thought with what it thinks: its object. The principle of non-contradiction is indeed a requirement of thought, but insofar as thought is essentially the act by which an object is known, that is, insofar as it is ordered toward being.

Ultimately, the principle of non-contradiction expresses a requirement of being itself. It is because a thing is truly known and grasped in its essence that thought understands that it cannot be other than it is—and therefore that the concept of a thing cannot be identical with the concept of its contrary.

Of course, as a psychological act, thought may fall into contradiction, and even take a certain complacency in it. It is constrained to avoid contradiction only insofar as it aims to think being, that is, insofar as it is attentive to reality. Outside this ontological orientation of the concept, the principle of non-contradiction loses its necessity.

The coherence that language imposes upon thought is thus profoundly different from that imposed by openness to being:

• the former is formal and external, more or less controllable depending on the “perfection” of language;
• the latter is ontological and interior, not subject to control, since it depends upon “the informing of the concept by reality, which ultimately gives itself only through an intuition of the intellect, escaping all external criteria.”

Such intuition is no longer strictly discursive thought (which is movement), but rather immediate, contemplative vision. “The work of thought consists only in not preventing it, through a persevering attentiveness to reality”: this is “the opening of the concept to being.” “To open the concept to being is, for thought, to accept that there is a beyond of the concept, that what it thinks of reality through the concept does not exhaust reality, that there is for it a hidden face of being.” This hidden face is not unknowable, “but its knowledge requires a transformation of the knowing subject, a radical conversion of its speculative intention, as Plato explains in the symbol of the Cave—one must, in short, transcend the ordinary plane of philosophy and thought in order to reach that of a genuine ‘gnosis’” (Jean Borella).

Epistemic Openness and Closure of the Concept

If philosophy aims at such an openness of thought to being, science, insofar as it is knowledge, cannot be reduced to mere language—“even if, with the Vienna Circle, one holds that the possibility of a formalized translation of scientific discourse constitutes the criterion of its coherence” (Borella). For science must indeed employ concepts if it is to speak of anything at all.

The task, therefore, is to wrest the concept from the indeterminacy implied by its openness to being. Such an operation may be called the epistemic closure of the concept:

• closure, because everything that might prevent an exhaustive definition is excluded; the concept is closed upon itself;
• epistemic, because this closure is specific to scientific knowledge (“epistemic” designating what pertains to the general form of scientificity, whereas “scientific” refers to science in its concrete realization).

Thus, what defines science is not the reduction of the concept to a well-formed language, but its renunciation of the ontological openness of the concept—that is, of any possible knowledge of the essence of things. Conversely, the openness characteristic of philosophical knowledge, awaiting a revelation of essence, corresponds to another renunciation: that of conceptual completion. Philosophy accepts what Borella calls “an incompleteness lived as speculative humility,” the sign and condition of an absolute speculative demand: the love of divine Sophia, that is, of the self-revelation of the Principle to itself—“the desire for the knowledge by which the Absolute knows itself.”

From this perspective, the end of philosophy is the “disappearance of conceptual knowledge through the transformative absorption of conceptual form into its own transcendent content.” The concept belongs to the order of knowledge, yet vanishes in its own fulfillment. Science, by contrast, terminates the mental act that produces the concept, allowing it to acquire a kind of self-consistency—an exhaustive definability whereby the “idea” becomes almost a mental object. In so doing, it leaves the order of knowledge proper and submits to that of technical activity (Borella).

Fundamentally, the philosopher never ceases to think until thought finds its Master in that which it thinks. The scientist, by contrast, brings the act of thought to an end through a technical decision, since practical activity constitutes that “beyond” of thought from which it becomes possible to close the concept as the concept of that activity. For a living being, there are only two ways of ceasing to think: to contemplate or to act.

The proper end of science is therefore technique, not pure knowledge—a simple observation already made by Auguste Comte. Wherever a purely speculative interest appears, it belongs to philosophy, even if such speculative interest may coexist, within the same individual, with a technical orientation.

Consequences for Metaphysics

This metaphysics of knowledge—whether of science or of a philosophy reduced to it—clearly shows that any rationalist reduction (to a diminished reason, as Jean-Paul Sartre might say) truncates philosophy in its very vocation, which is the epistemic openness of concepts toward the essence of things. Failing this, philosophy ceases to be philosophy and becomes merely a discourse confined to linguistic coherence: a narrow nominalism, an analytic determination of linguistic options that has forgotten how to think. One may recall, for example, Rudolf Carnap seeking, in a Condillac-inspired manner, the “overcoming of metaphysics through the logical analysis of language” (1932).

If one now speaks of a “philosophical metaphysics” opposed to a “confessional metaphysics,” these cannot be mutually exclusive, since they address the same fundamental questions. Their mutual permeability is well established: Christian or Islamic metaphysics receive Plato and Aristotle, while philosophical metaphysics is permeated by a Christian metaphysics of relation.

More fundamentally, they share a common metaphysical core: the suprarational role of intelligence (beyond reason) as the reception of a meaning that exceeds it. Every genuine metaphysics perceives the intelligibles of confessional metaphysics. These are invariably aporetic, suspended, paradoxical, apophatic (or “mysterious,” as they say), and it is precisely the function of metaphysics ultimately to efface itself, to abolish itself before the realities to which its concepts have led. At that point, the contemplative mode succeeds the discursive mode: the intelligible transcends all that is conceptible.

If one distinguishes, classically, the material and formal objects of any science, the universal formal object of metaphysics lies precisely in this passage from the intelligible to the contemplative—that is, in the transition from knowledge by abstraction to knowledge by participation. As for its material object—what makes it the “science of sciences” (or, more recently, a “universal hermeneutics”)—it is simply the totality of the real, including all other sciences, whether or not they are confessional.

Finally, a decisive element challenges the very notion of a “philosophical metaphysics” understood as a merely rational reduction: namely, the intrinsic operativity of metaphysics—this passage from concept to object, or again, “the disappearance of conceptual knowledge through the transformative absorption of conceptual form into its own transcendent content” (Borella).

Lacking such operativity, any so-called “philosophical metaphysics,” reduced to a speculative system, would never be truly metaphysical. Such operativity is essential to any metaphysics—confessional or otherwise. Since Plato, it has been not merely a science but a way. In the end, one might even say that it tends toward a kind of non-knowledge (nescience), and that the very claim to be a science would betray its failure to be truly metaphysical.

Footnotes

1. Critique de la raison pure, PUF, 1971, p. 24.[↩]
2. Critique de la raison pure, PUF, 1971, p. 226.[↩]
3. Alcan, 1905, p. 444.[↩]
4. Le mystère du signe (Maisonneuve et Larose, 1989), rééd. Histoire et théorie du symbole (Lausanne : L’Âge d’Homme, 2004 puis L’Harmattan, 2015.[↩]