These twelve interviews, written with Annie Cidéron, have the sole purpose of making metaphysics accessible to all. This discipline is in turn confronted with other sciences, religion, sex, matter, mysticism, esotericism, various metaphysicians… making it possible to answer the question “What is metaphysics?” in a final interview.
Contents
Part 1. General Metaphysics
1. Metaphysics and Science
2. Metaphysics and Religion
3. Metaphysics and Mysticism
4. Metaphysics and Esotericism
Part 2. Personal Metaphysics
5. Metaphysics Biography
6. An Adventure into Metaphysics
7. Metaphysics and Metaphysicians
Part 3. Special Metaphysics
8. Metaphysics of Believing
9. Metaphysics of Sex
10.Metaphysics and Matter
11. Metaphysics and the Post-Mortem state
12. What is Metaphysics?
Excerpt
To believe or to know?
BB: We often set the believers who believe and the knowers who know into opposition. In this oppositional setting, “believing” pertains to religion and “knowing” to science.
But it’s not that simple. Can we believe in something we know nothing about? Or again, do we really know something we do not believe? Clearly it is an illusion to think that believing and knowing are mutually exclusive.
AC: But don’t we have the cognitive order, which goes from ignorance to knowledge by way of belief?
BB: In fact, it is necessary to add to the cognitive order the volitional order, that is to say the assent that implies the will (Borella). It is even demonstrable that any proof is necessarily a belief.
AC: How so?
BB: There is this perpetual confrontation between these two disjointed domains in the order of rationality: words and things, discourse and facts. “A proposition will be proved if, after having been established by a recognized method, it is the subject of a belief.” We have in fact these two disjointed elements: the statement to be proven and the objective
apparatus for testing the statement. A first, necessary belief is the recipient’s subjective belief in the proof ’s efficacy; the second, intersubjective belief is a belief in the validity of the procedures of the proof (Fernando Gil, 1937–2006).
AC: Indeed, but these two necessary beliefs are rarely put forward in science.
BB: Yes, because, in science, the technical or practical efficiency often serves as a proof. In any case, we see here that believing and knowing are inseparably combined. When Kant says “I had to suppress knowledge, to find a place for faith,” it seems to me that this irreducible combination is missing.
AC: Could you remind me of his reasoning?
BB: He postulates that the metaphysical objects: myself, the world, and God, are unknowable (Critique of Pure Reason, 1781), and yet, although they are empirically unknowable (one cannot see, feel, or touch them), it is nevertheless reasonable to postulate them as morally necessary hypotheses (Critique of Practical Reason, 1788).
AC: It’s a balancing act!
BB: Unstable, as soon as one is no longer captivated by rationalist constructions, or, if you will, rationalist reductions. The next distinction in our approach to believing is between knowing and cognizance.
Knowledge or cognizance?
To go straight to the point, I would say that knowledge is constructed, cognizance is a given.
AC: You need to tell me more.
BB: The world of knowledge is itself paradoxical. On the one hand, what we know is that we know nothing (Socrates/Plato; Montaigne, 1533–1592); but on the other hand, the accumulation of knowledge is obvious in sciences, technologies, craftsmanship. This is because theoretical knowledge always remains plausible hypotheses, while practical knowledge is irrefutable.
Cognizance is something else entirely! It is unable to be generated, it is a pure acknowledgement (Borella): there we have cognizance! That is the intellect, which comes from the outside (Aristotle), as we have said—that is, the understanding that happens, the meaning that reveals itself.
AC: This is what Meister Eckhart says: “The intellect is uncreatable as such”!
BB: Exactly! cognizance is the transcendental condition for any cognitive act. An example is that of light that infuses a crystal. Is it produced by the crystal? And if not, how do we distinguish the intellect from the light it receives? (Borella). We conclude that in its superhuman essence the intellect is uncreated and uncreatable and that “the cognitive content of the intellect exceeds the degree of reality of its manifestation”
(Borella), as already quoted. To believe is therefore to give one’s assent to a statement
one takes to be true. It can be, for example, a family relationship or that water boils at 100°c; either we will give our confidence to a testimony, or we can verify it empirically by ourselves.
AC: Suffice it to say that for the vast majority of knowledge we trust testimonials, even if very indirect. But what if this has to do with cognizance?
BB: Cognizance is the simple awareness of the power of intelligence as compared to mere reason (Plato), of the supernaturality of the intellect or of intelligible forms (Aristotle), of the ingeneretability of meaning or the “semantic principle” (Borella). These are also the examples mentioned during a previous interview: the experience of the thought of the greatest (St Anselm) or God as the source of the thought of God (Descartes).
If intelligence is indeed “supernatural by nature” and “metaphysical in essence,” if “the intellect already is a divine something” (Borella), the cognizance we are talking about is access—by the nature of this intellect—to what exceeds man.
AC: And can man really know what exceeds him?
Notice of publication
METAPHYSICS FOR EVERYONE is the first in an exciting new series of interviews with prolific French religious philosopher and metaphysician Bruno
Bérard, whose work Angelico Press first introduced to anglophone readers with the publication in 2018 of his important work, A Metaphysics of the Christian Mystery: An Introduction the the Work of Jean Borella. Further volumes of this series will include Theology for Everyone, Esotericism for Everyone, Jean Borella for Everyone, and Wolfgang Smith for Everyone (the pivotal contemporary thinkers Jean Borella and Wolfgang Smith are also authors featured by Angelico).In her preface to this initial volume, interviewer Annie Cidéron points out that the questions we all ask ourselves—“Why is there something rather than nothing?”, “Who am I?”, “What’s comes next?”—surely deserve to be answered, and that the science fit to provide the answers is metaphysics. The ensuing discussion between Cidéron and Bérard consists of a lively, personal, sometimes grave, sometimes humorous, interweaving of vibrant and personal questions and answers, confessions and exchanges, offering easy access to the beautiful and often stunning pedigree of human thought ever since metaphysics was founded by Plato and Aristotle.
This modest book opens the door, but as it makes clear, it is up to each and every one of us to walk through that door in our quest for the meaning of our humanity and of our world.
We may be surprised to learn that metaphysics is a science, developed by the very founder of science: Aristotle. The rigor of his scientific discourse thus completes what Plato established once and for all before him: a metaphysics by access of the intelligence to what goes beyond Nature and to the meaning of the things of the world and of life.
Confronted with religion, sex, mysticism, death, matter, belief… metaphysics then appears obvious and, like M. Jourdain discovering he talks in prose (Molière), everyone discovers himself, like any human beings, to be a “metaphysical animal” (Schopenhauer).
These interviews, almost casual conversations with Annie Cidéron, provide an easy approach to metaphysics and may lead to adopt the approach, if desired.
Reviews
Although we live in dark, uncertain and superficial times, certain fundamental questions keep coming to mind: “Why is there something rather than nothing? “Who am I? “What happens after we die? Arduous, difficult and sometimes almost impossible answers, but well worth the effort. It’s even necessary! This is the task that, in the history of thought and ideas, has been entrusted to metaphysics, which, while preserving itself from all data of ordinary experience, is not afraid to push back the limits of human knowledge and beyond. In this immense, boundless task, which dantestically “makes the veins and wrists quiver” (cf. Dante), this interview conducted with intelligent sensitivity by Annie Cideron with Bruno Bérard, the last but no less important representative of an illustrious line-up of thinker-scholars who explicitly refer to universal Tradition and the profound speculative doctrines of Christian philosophy, theology and mysticism, will help everyone.
