Raymond Ruyer's Posthumous Metaphysics of Creation Published

A previously unpublished volume by French philosopher Raymond Ruyer, 'L'Embryogenèse du monde et le Dieu silencieux,' has been released by Klincksieck twenty-five years after his death. Ruyer, known for the 1974 hoax 'La Gnose de Princeton' and as a professor at the University of Nancy, influenced thinkers like Gilles Deleuze. The book, written around 1970-1980, constructs a metaphysics of 'world' and 'God' bridging observable phenomena to knowable truths. Ruyer engaged deeply with sciences: quantum microphysics, embryology from the 1930s, and molecular genetics later. He followed Henri Bergson's path rather than Georges Canguilhem's, arguing that life is characterized by 'creative advance' (Alfred North Whitehead) beyond mere becoming. Rejecting both external finalism and scientific reductionism, Ruyer posited a new finalism where complex forms emerge from simpler ones without external causes. His earlier work 'Consciousness and the Body' (1937) defined consciousness as 'original relation to itself without duality or mediation,' an auto-affection not localized in organic matter but ubiquitous, as in dreams and memory. The new book extends his embryological insights to cosmic scale: God as an inexhaustible reserve of themes that 'explodes into World,' distributing itself into billions of lineages subject to chance. Editor Fabrice Colonna frames the work as moving from the 'observable' to the 'knowable.' Ruyer died in 1987 at age 85.