Metaphysics is confronted here, according to the contributions of several hommes de lettres, philosophers, a physicist and mathematician: to its practice, to art, to politics, to poetry, to its recent history and its rediscovery of analogy, to the logic of which it constitutes the limit, to the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, to physics, to phenomenology and to mysticism, to its possibility in Buddhism, to any dogmatic doctrine which would affirm the truth or absolute doubt, and to the history of its name and concept.
Contents
Introduction – Bruno Berard
- Overview of Metaphysics, Theory and Practice – Pamphile
- “Why is there Something Rather than Nothing?” – “Martin Heidegger”
- The Other Side of Speech – Metaphysics and Poetry – Jean Biès
- Metaphysics as “Seeing” – Wolfgang Smith
- In Search of the Metaphysical Foundations of Politics – Kostas Mavrakis
- Metaphysics Yesterday and Tomorrow. Analogy of Love – Emmanuel Tourpe
- Given, Given Nothingness: Metaphysics in Christianity – Alain Santacreu
- Metaphysics and Logic – François Chenique
- The Great Metaphysical Crisis of Art – Aude de Kerros
- Metaphysics in Buddhism. The Law of “Conditioned Production” (paṭicca-samuppāda) and its Ontological Implications – Jean-Marc Vivenza
- Metaphysics as Anti-Dogmatism and as Non-System – Bruno Bérard
- On Metaphysical Knowledge: Metaphysics as an Epiphany of the Spirit – Jean Borella
Excerpt
It is clear, if one is honest with oneself, that direct access to the metaphysical realities experienced by our intelligence is extremely difficult to obtain, if not impossible. Not that we can doubt their existence and their truth, but because our being here below is not “at their height”. We know them, but “partially” says St Paul, precisely in the intellective mode. And besides, even sticking to the intellective mode alone, let us question ourselves sincerely. When we are told of what is “beyond being”, when we are told of Non-Being or Beyond-Being, what do we think of? What are we considering? Very often we think of “something” which is still “better than being”, meaning a “being” which is “more than being”. We are entitled to wonder if the whole content of this thought is not reduced to the feeling of superiority it gives us over ordinary mortals, over all profane ignorant of what Plato calls, not without irony, a “wonderful transcendence” (Republic, VI, 509 c). Or, seduced by the promise of astonishing discoveries, we rely, with complete confidence, on the authorities who make us see them from afar. Does this mean giving up on metaphysics, rejecting, as nonsense, the meontological (or superontological) perspective towards which it directs us, on the pretext that the initial enthusiasm has been followed by some speculative disappointment? Certainly not. And the most decisive reason in favor of the metaphysical option is that access to the meontological “point of view” alone makes it possible to account for the “possibility of being” and to really answer the question of Leibniz taken up by Heidegger, at least according to whether light is given to a human intelligence.
Whoever wants to enter into metaphysics, therefore, has to become aware, seriously, both of our finiteness as creatures, and of the intrinsic infinitude of the intellective light in which God has allowed us to participate; which means: to reject, on one hand, the puffiness of pride as well as the “mystical” exaltation (even if these erroneous reactions have, in their way, contributed to awakening us), and on the other hand to honor the intelligence as a divine grace and as a kind of theophany.
This is what the mysterious Heraclitus taught two thousand five hundred years ago:
Limits of the soul you cannot find by following your path,
However long the road is, So deep is the Logos that it contains.
[Borella, “Metaphysics as an Epiphany of the Spirit”, pp. 177-178]