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| Zorns Lemma, Hollis Frampton, 1970 (capture d'écran) |
University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy Lectures. Komaba Campus, 6 November 2012
Mesology
in the light of Yamanouchi Tokuryû’s Logos and lemma
by Augustin BERQUE
要約 – 風土論の中心概念（手懸り、風土性、通態化…）は山内得立が『ロゴスとレンマ』において提案したレンマの論理と比較される。特に、彼が四句分別における第 三のレンマを二重肯定ではなく、二重否定にしたことは風土論におけるr = S/P（ＰとしてのＳ）という現実の定義との類似が指摘される。要するに、人間の風土や生物の環世界の論理はレンマ的論理であろうと推定される。
Abstract – An analogy is drawn between the main concepts of mesology – affordance, mediance, trajection… – and the logic of lemma put forward by Yamanouchi Tokuryu in Logos and lemma. In particular, a comparison is made between the order in which he puts, in the tetralemma, binegation before biassertion, and the definition of the reality of a milieu as r = S/P (S taken as P). The logic of milieux (those of the living in general as well as those of the human in particular) would then be a lemmic.
キワード – 四句分別、通態化、手懸り、風土、風土性、山内得立 、レンマ。
Key words – Affordance, lemma, mediance, milieu, tetralemma, trajection, Yamanouchi.Abstract – An analogy is drawn between the main concepts of mesology – affordance, mediance, trajection… – and the logic of lemma put forward by Yamanouchi Tokuryu in Logos and lemma. In particular, a comparison is made between the order in which he puts, in the tetralemma, binegation before biassertion, and the definition of the reality of a milieu as r = S/P (S taken as P). The logic of milieux (those of the living in general as well as those of the human in particular) would then be a lemmic.
キワード – 四句分別、通態化、手懸り、風土、風土性、山内得立 、レンマ。
1. The origin of mesology (fûdoron 風土論)
The question of milieu (fûdo 風 土) was first problematized as such on June 7th, 1848, in a lecture given by Charles Robin, a physician, at the inaugural session of the Société de Biologie in Paris, entitled Sur la direction que se sont proposée en se réunissant les membres fondateurs de la Société de Biologie pour répondre au titre qu’ils ont choisi (“On the direction intended by the founding members of the Société de Biologie in accordance with this title”). Robin expounded Auguste Comte’s classification of sciences, dealing in the same spirit with the tasks of biology, among which the constitution of a study of milieux, for which he even invented the term mésologie.#
Although the birth of mesology can thus be dated, and though its object, the notion of milieu, is as we shall see not much more ancient, the question itself, on the other hand, goes back almost as far as ontology in European thought. Indeed, if one defines this question as that of the relationship between beings and what surrounds them, one can already find it in Plato’s Timaeus under the name of chôra (χώρα). The basic meaning of this term is that of the territory of a polis (city-state), enabling it to exist in a relationship of mutual fitness. Concretely, chôra is, in the first place, the countryside which surrounds the city proper (astu), and which nourishes it. Plato uses this term by analogy as an ontological image, in which chôra becomes the nurse (tithênê) of relative Being (genesis), which was born, lives and is bound to die. Differing from absolute Being (ontôs on, eidos, idea), which exists in itself and transcends space and time, genesis cannot exist without a chôra. Both are inseparable, and this relationship is ambivalent, since the chôra is not only the nurse or even the mother (mêtêr) of genesis, but also its imprint (ekmageion).#
As regards relative Being, chôra – in other words the milieu# of a certain being – is thus both one thing (a matrix) and its contrary (an imprint); i.e. both A and non-A. Here is an aporia which Plato does not surmount. Accordingly, he does not define chôra, only suggesting it by means of various metaphors, like those above, and leaving unresolved the contradiction between imprint and matrix. I have recently put forward# the hypothesis that this aporia comes from the fact that Plato’s rationalism relying on the principle of the excluded middle, i.e. that there cannot exist a third term which would be both A and non-A, he could not intellectually admit the “third and other gender” (triton allo genos), neither absolute nor relative Being, which he nevertheless attributes to chôra.
I intend here to carry on with this hypothesis, by showing that this “third and other gender” is well and truly the reality of milieux, and that Yamanouchi Tokuryû 山内 得立’s Logos and lemma (1974) allows us now to conceive of a lemmic – a logic of the affordances# or holds (prises, i.e. λήμματα, from λαμβάνω, take ; hence lemma) which we have on the reality of the concrete things of our milieu, contrasting with the abstractions of formal logic –; a lemmic susceptible to overcome rationally the aporias which the principle of the excluded middle and its ontological avatar, modern dualism, have bequeathed us; yet without being swallowed up in the illusion that it would suffice to capsize the logic of the identity of the subject into its enantiomer, the logic of the predicate (jutsugo no ronri 述語の論理), or “logic of place” (basho no ronri 場所の論理), in order to actualize the “overcoming of modernity” (kindai no chôkoku 近代の超克), as was formerly professed by the Kyoto school (Kyôto gakuha京都学派)#, surrounding Nishida Kitarô 西田幾多郎.
2. Distinguishing milieu (fûdo 風土) and environment (kankyô 環境)
In the sense indicated above – the relationship of beings with what surrounds them –, the notion of milieu dates from the second half of the XVIIIth century. Georges Canguilhem has expounded its history in La connaissance de la vie.# This notion derives from mechanics, where it already existed but under another name. Newton used in this respect the term fluid, the type of which being ether. The Concise Oxford dictionary (1964) defines the physical acceptation of ether as follows: “A medium assumed to permeate space & fill interstices between particles of air and other matter, medium in which electro-magnetic waves are transmitted”.
For Newton, the problem was to explain distant interaction between two bodies. Canguilhem shows that, for Descartes, such a problem did not exist, since in the frame of his physics, the interaction between bodies could only result from direct contact, without a middle term. This vision is evidently related with Descartes’ dualism. In fact, dualism eventually expelled ether out physics.
However, in biology and in the humanities, the matter was not settled so simply. With Auguste Comte, milieu acquires the status of a universal and abstract principle of explanation in biology. Many naturalists conceived the relationship of living beings with their environment (called milieu in French in those times) in terms of reciprocity, like already did Comte himself, for whom an organism is fit to its milieu, and the milieu favourable to the organism. However, the general trend of European thought in that respect drifted toward a determinism in which the environment exerts, causally, an influence on the organism. This way of seeing was particularly remarkable in German geography; whence the expression “geographic determinism”.
On the contrary, “possibilism”, in the French school of geography, was later to show the limits of that conception; notably so Lucien Febvre’s (a historian in fact) La Terre et l’évolution humaine (The Earth and human evolution). However, since this amounted to stress the free will of the human subject, confronting an objective environment, one remained there within the frame of dualism. The accent which possibilism put on contingency did not constitute an explanatory principle, and in a sense, it even dodged the central problem posed since the origin by the notion of chôra. This tendency, after the second world war, was to lead the humanities to seeing that question only in terms of an arbitrary projection of the subject onto the object.
Yet, at about the same time, a radical change occurred both in the natural and the human sciences. The German naturalist Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944), in 1934, summarized in a small book the leading ideas of his long research on the way which was to become ethology. Entitled Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen (Incursions in the milieux of animals and humans)#, this book stresses a revolutionary distinction between Umgebung (the objective data of the environment) and Umwelt (the ambient world, or milieu, proper to a given species, as it exists for that species). Correlatively, Uexküll introduces a whole series of concepts, like Merkbild (perceptive image), Suchbild (quest image), Wirkbild (action image), Merkmal (perceptive sign), Fresston (eating tone), Wohnton (dwelling tone), etc. The general idea is that a species and its milieu are a mutual elaboration, in which the animal is not like a machine reacting to an action with a movement, but rather like a driver reacting to a signal with an operation.
This amounts clearly to overcome dualism. The reality of a milieu (Umwelt) lies below the dichotomy between subject and object, A and non-A. It is a third gender, a triton allo genos which cannot be grasped by modern dualism and its logic of the excluded middle. However, Uexküll himself did not draw the ontological and logical conclusions of his discovery; yet his thought influenced nonetheless philosophers like Heidegger, Deleuze, Agamben and others.#
It is not impossible that Watsuji Tetsurô和辻哲郎 (1889-1960) may have heard of Uexküll during his stay in Germany, which lasted one year and a half in 1927-1928; but there is no evidence of it. It is explicitly in reaction to Heidegger that the Japanese philosopher, from 1928 on, started writing a series of articles which he gathered into a book published in 1935, Fûdo. Ningengakuteki kôsatsu風土 . 人間学的考察 (Milieux. A study of the human linkage). In this book, Watsuji introduces a founding distinction between kankyô 環境 (the environment, as abstractly objectified by modern science) and fûdo 風 土 (the milieu, as concretely experienced by a certain society). This distinction is exactly homologous to that which Uexküll established between Umgebung and Umwelt, while Uexküll deals with the ontological level of the living in general, whereas Watsuji deals with that of the human in particular. In other words, culture and history in Watsuji are homologous to species and evolution in Uexküll, both posing, as we shall see later, the question of subjecthood (shutaisei 主体性) as a key to the reality of milieu (be it fûdo or Umwelt).
3. Mediance and trajection
Correlatively, Watsuji introduces the ontological concept of fûdosei 風土性, which he defines, in the first line of the book, as « the structural moment of human existence » (ningen sonzai no kôzô keiki 人存在の構造契機). I have translated this concept in French with médiance#, a neologism derived from the Latin medietas, which means “half”. Watsuji’s idea is indeed that, in the human, ningen 人 間, two aspects, or halves, are dynamically combined into a “moment” (like two forces in mechanics), one which is individual, the hito 人, and one which is collective, the aida 間or more concretely aidagara 間 柄, i.e. the linkage intertwined between people and, through this linkage, between people and things, historically constituting a milieu (fûdo 風土). Ningen人間being properly the linkage of these two halves, human existence is necessarily medial (fûdoteki 風土的); hence the ontological concept of mediance (fûdosei風土性).
With Watsuji, the theoretical approach of mediance is initially that of phenomenological hermeneutics. Nevertheless, seen from now, the above homology with Uexküll’s approach gives it from the start a basis in the natural sciences, which has become more and more evident with the findings of ethology and the recent post-genomic revolution. Indeed biology, considering the formation of the living at all levels, attaches a growing importance to epigenetics, that is the processes of interaction between the living (the gene, the cell, the organism…) and its environment.# On the side of the humanities, to say nothing of phenomenology (particularly the bringing out of corporeality by Merleau-Ponty) # , in Leroi-Gourhan’s interpretation of the emergence of our species#, the coupling of the “animal body” (which is individual) with a “social body” (which is collective), made out of technical and symbolic systems externalizing the initial functions of the former, though expressed in positive terms which owe nothing to hermeneutic phenomenology, amounts in fact to Watsuji’s mediance. Closer to the present, by linking to the biological notion of neoteny a very ancient idea according to which the human, at birth, is incomplete, Dany-Robert Dufour has shown in psychoanalytic terms that this entails structurally in the individual, in order to be complete, the need of an alienation to a “Big Other”, which, for instance, monotheism has deified into God.# This coupling of an individual with a “Big Other”, once more, amounts in fact to that which Watsuji calls “the structural moment of human existence”: mediance.
For want of the concept itself, such approaches nevertheless all focus on the idea of mediance, and all show that conceiving of the human as a mere individual is definitely obsolete. On the contrary, the human is medial, and his degree of mediance is higher than that of any other living being, since, more than any other species, he has added to his animal body an interlace of technical and symbolic systems, all necessarily collective and constituent of his very existence; that is to say that he cannot live without this medial body : his eco-techno-symbolic milieu.
Nevertheless, contemporary ontology remains largely that of dualism and its correlative individualism. We are still far from accepting easily the idea that the reality which surrounds us is not that of an objective environment (Umgebung), constituted with objects confronted by an individual subject, but is that of a milieu, constituted with things which participate in our very Being because of our mediance. Heidegger’s Dasein itself did not change much this vision, since, as Watsuji subtly remarked, the idea that the Dasein is a “Being toward death” (Sein zum Tode) is essentially individualistic. Mediance, on the other hand, entails that the human, on the contrary, is a “Being toward life” (sei e no sonzai 生への存在) #, since the medial body outlives the animal body.
Mesology# (fûdogaku 風土学, or fûdoron 風 土論), on the other hand, has developed in this respect a conceptual apparatus which specifically takes into account the “third and other gender”, between subject and object, which is that of the reality of human milieux, and which is entailed by our mediance. The things, indeed, participate in our medial body, that is our milieu. They are not only a physical an-sich (in-itself), but also an eco-techno-symbolic für-uns (for-ourselves). This is expressed by the concept of trajectivity (tsûtaisei 通態性)# : between the two theoretical poles of the objective and the subjective, of an sich and für sich, things are trajective.
Trajectivity means that the things exist according to the way we grasp them through our senses, mind, words and action. This grasp (prise) is analogous to a predication, the subject of which (S) is a thing as an object in itself (i.e. the Umgebung), and the predicate (P) the way that thing appears to us by dint of this grasp, or affordance. The reality r of the thing (i.e. our Umwelt) can thus be formulated as r = S/P, which reads : reality is S taken as P.
This is not the same as a subjective projection onto the object. Trajectivity results from a historical process, trajection (tsûtaika 通態化), in which indefinitely occurs a subjectivation of the object, objectivation of the subject, and a cumulative transmission of this change. Indeed, each new generation takes for granted (as a Gebung), i.e. as S, that which in fact has been constructed (S/P) by the former generations, and grasps it anew with its own predicates. Thus, the initial datum or Gebung (S) never ceases to evolve into S’, S’’, S’’’ etc. , which is indefinitely grasped as P’, P’’, P’’’ etc. In other words, there indefinitely is an assumption of S as P, and hypostasis (substantialisation)# of P into S’; which can be formulated as (((S/P)/P’)/P’’)/P’’’… and so on.
This means not only that the human, unlike Descartes’ cogito, never confronts mere objects out there, but also that he himself is indefinitely constructed by his milieu, which he constructs in return, in a mutual elaboration, or concrescence (growing-together), the present state of which is nothing else than mediance.
Effectively, this “structural moment of human existence”, mediance, has never ceased to evolve along history, always contingently, since the choice of P always depends on the concerned humans. On the other hand, this contingency has nothing in common with the arbitrariness of a mere subjective projection onto an object in itself, since a real thing is always already constructed (S/P, not S), and the human is necessarily medial, that is, constructed by that very relationship. This entails that, in this historical process, there is neither chance nor necessity, but, fair and square, that third and other gender which is contingency. Indeed, in the mediance and trajectivity of milieu and history, the things might always be otherwise than they are; yet, they are what they are (S/P) by dint of that history and in that milieu, in their own singular way.
The same principle applies, homologically, at the ontological level of the living in general, and the temporal scale of evolution#.
4. Logos and lemma
If the ontological perspective thus opened by mesology seems to have effectively overcome modern dualism, what about its logical framework ? What about, particularly, that “third and other gender” which the principle of the excluded middle has locked out for such a long time?
The question which one may at once make out is that the classical foundations of rationality in the West – the three principles of identity, contradiction and excluded middle already used by Aristotle for structuring the logic of the subject – do not enable us to grasp mediance nor trajection. Yet the solution could not be to capsize the logic of the subject into a logic of the predicate, as Nishida attempted to ; because the latter, as Nakamura Yûjirô 中村雄二郎# aptly remarked, boils down to the metaphors of a “palaeologic” (this term is borrowed from the psychoanalist Arieti) which, for sure, is at work in all human minds and which, consequently, we have to acknowledge, be it as the unconscious, but which certainly cannot replace the logic of the subject as for rational thinking.
However, Nishida made a decisive point for what concerns mesology: he has shown that the world is predicative (jutsugo sekai 述語世界). Seeing the things that way enables one to understand, among others, that obscure “dispute” (Streit) which Heidegger, in The origin of the work of art, imagines between the earth and the world#, and which is nothing else than the relation between S (the earth or the Umgebung, the aboriginal subject of human predication) and P (the world or the Umwelt, that is the whole of human predicates); in other words, it is the reality S/P, in which the “dispute” corresponds to the trajection of S into P, and P into S’. Dispute indeed there is, since this relation cannot be reduced to identity: it is a “moment”, always dynamic.
But then, what is the logical nature of the holds which we have on reality? These affordances which the concrete things of our milieu afford us, indeed, cannot be reduced to the identity of the object (in other words, to S); however, they cannot be reduced either to the identity of the predicate (the way of grasping S), since, as we have seen above, in the process of trajection, S is indefinitely assumed as P, P’, P’’, P’’’ etc, and P is indefinitely hypostatized into S’, S’’, S’’’… and so on.
Now, if one excepts the concept of trajection itself, this process is enlightened by the “logic of the lemma” (renma no ronri レンマの論理) – let us say straight out the lemmic, since it is precisely not a “logic” in the sense of logic of the logos, rogosu no ronri ロゴスの論理 – which Yamanouchi Tokuryû山内得立 put forward in Logos and lemma. The logic of the logos keeps to the three principles of identity, contradiction and excluded middle. This is the case even in Hegelian dialectic, where synthesis does not make thesis and antithesis coexist, but sursumes (aufhebt, 止揚する) them, i.e. abolishes and heightens them at the same time, thus respecting the principle of the excluded middle.#
Yamanouchi shows that this impossibility to admit middle terms (which are both A and non-A) follows from the very deployment of the logos (chap. II, Rogosu no tenkai ロ ゴスの展開), which has led it to pose itself in itself, in an abstract and formal logic, decoupled from things, and confronting objects. This amounted to absolutize language (logos). Eastern thought, on the other hand, particularly in Buddhism, was careful not to do so. # This is illustrated by Nagarjuna’s tetralemma (catuşkoţi, shiku 四句or shiku bunbetsu 四 句分別), which deconstructs any “logic” in a series of four lemmas: A (assertion), non-A (negation), neither A nor non-A (binegation), both A and non-A (biassertion). Only the first and second of theses lemmas can be admitted in “logic”, where they correspond to the principles of identity and contradiction. The third and fourth lemmas, which transcend these principles, correspond to what Buddhism calls “supreme truth”, paramārtha (shôgi 勝義).
Contrary to most commentators in this respect#, Yamanouchi places binegation (neither A nor non-A) not in fourth, but in third position. He shows indeed that the latter is the node of the tetralemma, because it is that which not only makes biassertion (both A and non-A) possible, but makes it a real deployment; since if binegation was in the fourth place, the tetralemma would endlessly repeat the same loops.
One cannot here delve further in the details of a book of 400 pages on such a topic. Yamanouchi’s central idea is that the tetralemma makes possible an overcoming of the limitations of the logos. There is much to learn there from the point of view of mesology, as we shall see later; but let us straightaway draw a frontier. That is, for Yamanouchi, the two last lemmas do express a supreme truth, i.e. an absolute. In doing so, his lemmic adopts just as it is the position of Buddhism, which is a religion. There hides a mystic leap, which mesology refuses to accomplish. For mesology, absolutizing whatever knowledge one may have is out of the question, since the very fact of knowing S establishes it in the perspective (S/P) of a certain predicate P#, were it purely non verbal like in mystic ecstasy or in Zen satori 悟り. In what follows, we shall keep modestly to a profane and agnostic use of the tetralemma, that is, to pose reality as S/P.
5. Conclusion: meso-logic is a lemmic
The eco-techno-symbolic holds which our milieu affords us do not concern language only (as does predication in the strict sense), but also, at the same time, our senses, mind and action. Accordingly, they cannot be reduced to the abstraction of logos, as in particular is illustrated by their symbolicity. In symbols indeed, A is always at the same time non-A (fourth lemma: biassertion). More widely, as the An-sich of a thing (that which would be the pure identity of S) cannot be accessible if not as S/P, reality necessarily overcomes the principle of identity: S supposes P, which supposes S. Between S and P, there is not only relation (sôtai 相対), but interdependence, or even, in the historic-medial concrescence of things and Being, that which Yamanouchi calls sôdai (相待) : a coawaiting.
Coawaitingness (sôdaisei相待性) is one of the most powerful concepts of Logos and lemma. One can fruitfully put it side by side with mediance, since between animal body and medial body, there is indeed a coawaiting. This is in fact what, without knowing these concepts nor their authors, Leroi-Gourhan had shown in his interpretation of the emergence of our species. One can summarize his theory as follows: in this process, there occurred a feedback – in other words, a coawaiting – between the anthropization of the environment by technique, the humanization of the environment by symbol, and the hominization of the animal body into our present shape. Put into light a few decades ahead of schedule, this evolutional coawaiting, or concrescence, is nothing else than the paradoxical principle of these self-referential loops which, in the last quarter of a century, have come to the forefront in the theory of evolution, granting a growing importance to the intrication of epigenesis, phylogenesis and ontogenesis. # This perspective is properly mesological, since it doubly fits the concepts of mediance on the one hand (with the spatial complementarity of the organism and its milieu), and trajection on the other hand (with the temporal interaction of the epigenetic and the genetic, as well as that of the individual and the specic).
In other words, just as does history according to Watsuji, evolution also could well be a matter of milieu (thus of motivation and contingency) rather than of environment (thus of consecution, in the mechanical alternative of chance and necessity). Isn’t, after all, self-reference another name for subjecthood (shutaisei 主 体性) ? And, at the ontological level of the human, didn’t Watsuji pose subjecthood as the key of milieu, just like Uexküll did at the level of the living in general? This perspective could lead to rediscovering some of Imanishi Kinji 今西錦司’s theses, since, at the level of the living in general, he posed subjecthood as the key of evolution#, while speaking correlatively of “environmentalization of the subject, subjectivation of the environment” (shutai no kankyôka, kankyô no shutaika 主 体の環境化、環境の主体化), which in fact is strictly homologous to Leroi-Gourhan’s thesis, both processes being, moreover, nothing else than that of trajection in the perspective of mesology.
In conclusion, what does Yamanouchi contribute to mesology? Both a confirmation, and several paths for more research in the coming years. The confirmation is that the bimillenary locking out of the “third and other” gender of chôra by Western rationalism, and in particular by modern dualism, can rationally be overcome by means of the tetralemma, in which A, at the same time, is and is not non-A. What invites, more: what summons us to do so is physics itself (with the paradoxical ambivalence wave/particle, etc.), and so much the more the homology between Uexküll’s ethology and Watsuji’s mesology. For sure, even when Yamanouchi speaks of a “concept of middle” (chû no gainen 中の概念, chap. IX), he does not have in mind the question of milieu in Watsuji’s sense. Yet the whole purpose of Logos and lemma enlightens the meso-logic – the logic of milieu# – which, indeed, Watsuji himself did not elaborate, but which has taken shape in more recent developments of mesology. It should prove fruitful, for instance, to compare what Yamanouchi names “logic of soku” (soku no ronri 即の論理, chap. XI) with what mesology calls l’en-tant-que écouménal (the ecumenal ‘as’)#, the type of which is S/P (read “S as P”, S en tant que P). In the trajective relationship of S and P, the subject (the Earth, the Umgebung, nature…) is and is not the predicate (our world). In short, S soku P. In this respect, the immense heritage of Eastern thought cannot but enrich contemporary research, which on the other hand can bank on the most recent problematics of the natural sciences. A real coawaiting (that is, many paths for more research) is thus standing out between the East and the West – with all due respect to Kipling’s famous East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet…
For all that, it is the very idea of lemma which enlightens mesology. As we have seen, this word derives from a verb which means “to take”. Medial holds (prises médiales, fûdoteki tegakari 風 土的手懸り), that is, the affordances of our milieu, precede and found logical reasoning; which exactly amounts to Yamanouchi’s thesis, according to which lemma precedes and founds logos. It also amounts to the general thesis of phenomenology, as exposed for instance by Husserl in Die ur-arche Erde bewegt sich nicht (1934) : the archae-originary Earth does not move, and we have hold on this soil (Boden). These medial holds, indeed, function beneath our consciousness, and thus beneath any rationalism. Relying unconsciously on these holds, we take them for granted, i.e. as a Gebung (a gift), in other words as an S, although it is our own history (and, beneath, the evolution of our species) which has elaborated them into S/P, just for indefinitely hypostatizing them into S’, S’’, S’’’ and so on. These hypostases – these substantializations into S of the insubstantial P – correspond to what Yamanouchi, taking up a Buddhistic term, calls eji 依止 (also read eshi), which translated the sanskrit niśraya. Girard (2008) renders this term with “appui” (support), and quotes the following example# : “It is because they are without a proper nature that (all the dharma) arise / The anterior gives support to the posterior (wu ziti gu cheng / qian wei hou yizhi 無自体故成、前為後依止) ”. #
Effectively, in human milieux, as in living milieux in general, reality does not possess a proper nature (it is not the An-sich of an object as a pure S), since it results from a trajection: the assumption of S as P, the hypostasis of P into S’, and so on. Nevertheless, we count on its holds (S/P); in other words, on the supports it affords our existence, by dint of what is called in mesology calage trajectif (trajective wedging, i.e. the hypostasis of P into S’). The difference between these wedges and the eji of Buddhism is that, as Yamanouchi shows, the latter ultimately proceed from the absoluteness (zettaisei 絶対性), or rather, as he prefers to say, from the abtentivity or abwaitingness (zetsudaisei 絶待性) of the void (kû 空), whereas mesology cannot bring itself to the mystic leap which would lead beyond the relation S/P: it will always suppose that P wedges itself on S, were it forever an S’, that is, forever already S/P, never a pure S. Minus absoluteness, this amounts all the same to what says the third lemma, that of binegation, since S/P is neither S nor P, but forever already their trajection. And it also amounts to saying what Yamanouchi says when he places this third lemma before that of biassertion ; because it is indeed this double negation of S and P which makes possible the overcoming of their respective identity, thus the concrescence of the reality S/P, in which trajectively, and definitely beyond modernity, words and things, the things and our existence are coawaiting, all this producing historically that “third and other gender” which is nothing else than the mediance of our milieu: both the imprint and the matrix (fourth lemma: biassertion) of our genesis.
Palaiseau, 2 November 2012.
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Born in 1942, a geographer, orientalist and philosopher, Augustin Berque is director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris. A member of the Academia Europaea, he was in 2009 the first Westerner to receive the Fukuoka Grand Prize for Asian cultures. E-mail: berque@ehess.fr
