Metaphysics for Everyone?

That's the title of the book we'll be discussing (minus the question mark), which is in the form of an interview of Bruno Bérard, a French philosopher and theologian who has written ten books, only one of which having been translated to English. 

First of all, everyone? In an interview Schuon was asked why we need metaphysics if we have religion: "It is because metaphysics satisfies the needs of intellectually gifted men." Elsewhere he say something to the effect that we need metaphysics because metaphysicians exist, implying that they are more born than made.

For what it's worth, I know I was born this way, and there's not a damn thing I can do about it. I could try to deny it. I have indeed tried to be like the others, but it just didn't work.

Well, I try my best to be just like I am / But everybody wants you to be just like them / They say, "Sing while you slave" and I just get bored / I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more (Dylan)

Well, I ain't gonna work on matter's farm, or something. 

Regarding the agenda of one of his books, What is Metaphysics?, the interviewer says "Nice program! many readers?"

I haven't checked recently, but I'd say several hundred, which corresponds pretty well to the readership for this type of work.

So, apparently not for everyone.

And yet, everyone is, without exception, a metaphysician, for the same reason everyone is a linguist, insofar as he uses language without thinking about how or why. Likewise, every person is a psychologist, being that we all have our theories, whether implicit or explicit, about what makes people tick, including ourselves.

The book is rather holographic and nonlinear, in that every chapter is about all the others, and more. Each chapter is brimming with implications, which is just the way I like it: a springboard for my own peculiar cogitations. The interviewer says as much:

Even though the door to such an adventure has been thrown open here, it is up to each person who wishes to enter "within," or rather to step outside and walk in the open air of metaphysics.

It is an unavoidably personal adventure into the limitless. One might say that because it is a finite engagement with infinitude, it is necessarily refracted through the individual; in Voegelin's words, our Quest is "reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable."

First of all, what is metaphysics, anyway? It is "the science of what is beyond nature and matter." You -- well, not you per se, but my vast audience of nonreaders -- may insist that there is nothing beyond nature and matter, precisely. Which is, of course, a metaphysic, albeit a stupid one. 

You can reduce everything to quantity, but no amount of numbers adds up to a mathematician, not even a bad one like me. Have you ever heard of a mathematician who isn't a person? Me neither.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Like I said, the book is very triggering, provoking my own thoughts at every turn. Like so:

Collision with an intelligent book makes us see a thousand stars.

Now, metaphysics is 

"what comes" (or, more precisely "the question that arises") once one has encountered the physical world.

I myself have encountered the physical world, and I still have questions -- questions which are not, and cannot be, answered by the material world. Like, how did it get here? Why is there something instead of nothing? What was before the Big Bang? And most importantly, what am I doing here? How am I -- which is to say, persons -- even possible? 

So, metaphysics is "the science of what is beyond the physical world." Ah, but what is science? It is of course "knowledge by causes." Each scientific discipline has both a material object and a formal object, the latter being the perspective from which the object is regarded.

Human beings, for example, can be regarded from the perspective of neurology, or economics, or anatomy, or politics, or medicine, etc. Same material object, many perspectives. 

Metaphysics, you might say, is simply the "science of sciences" dealing with the Cause of causes. It puts an end to "this indefinite merry-go-round of secondary causes." This or that science is limited by its formal object, but 

they cannot and must not exceed those limits. When they reach their limit, they either stop or tip over into metaphysics.

In other words, stay in your lane! And do not confuse your lane with the whole durn freeway, for this is to pretend your little silo is the whole existentialada -- like the the frog at the bottom of a well that thinks the sky is a little blue disc:

Or just say Plato's cave.

The cave of physics "cannot deal with causes beyond the physical world without stepping outside its native realm," for "the cause of the universe is not part of it, it is beyond it, it is metaphysical." Science by its nature gives us the how but not the why.

Maybe there is no why.

In that case, why is there no why? Why would we have an intellect ordered to the intelligibility of the world, only for it to be reduced to one of the objects it knows? 

A man, entirely enclosed in his subjectivity, would not even be able to conceive the notion of subjectivity if he did not have the faculty of objectivity. The animal evolves in an environment; only man, by the nature of his intellect, can posit the world as an objective reality.

Much of this goes back to Gödel, in that man is condemned, as it were, to transcendence:

The common point of all metaphysics is this experience of the intellect as a mirror of a light that goes beyond it, that is transcendent to it. 

So, it seems the intellect is like the moon, or a crystal, that can only reflect a light that it does not produce. 

An abrupt ending, but there's much more to come.