No neutral metaphysics: Miklos Vetö

Miklos Vetö is a Hungarian philosopher who lives and teaches in France. His recent book, L’élargissement de la métaphysique (and its companion volume of nineteen essays, Explorations métaphysiques) is the mature and crowning achievement of a prolific career. This metaphysical project offers, in the author’s own terms, an “image” of metaphysics and a path towards its contemporary enactment that has come to fruition at the far end of a lifetime of historical research, primarily, as is well known, in German Idealism. What follows are some orienting remarks to this last work: a brief look at the philosopher and his oeuvre in order to discern the continuity of the present “constructive” work with his previous, primarily “historical” research; an overview of the metaphysical texts, in order to orient ourselves towards a discussion of only their most fundamental elements: the concept of élargissement itself, and the role of the Kantian discovery of the a priori synthesis for such a task, which boils down, as we will see, to a return to the classical problematic of the “good beyond being,” albeit problematized and (such is Vetö’s backdrop thesis) fructified by the data of revelation. The essay concludes by setting beside Vetö some comments made by Russian philosopher Sergius Bulgakov in his early work Unfading Light concerning this difficult but “enlarging” relation of metaphysics to religion.