OVERCOMING MODERNITY, YESTERDAY AND TODAY

Author(s): AUGUSTIN BERQUE

Source: European Journal of East Asian Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2001), pp. 89-102
Published by: Brill
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23615533
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OVERCOMING MODERNITY, YESTERDAY AND TODAY

BY

AUGUSTIN BERQUE

Three centuries and six years

Modernity can be defined from several points of view, according to

which it will be dated differently and said to be less or more specifically

Western. The questions I shall be dealing with concern mainly the

worldview which was established in Europe in the seventeenth century,
both on ontological and scientific grounds, and which I shall call here
the modern-classic Western paradigm, or more briefly the modern
paradigm.1 From the present point of view, its two most outstanding
pillars are Descartes' dualism and Newton's absolute space, the link
between these two aspects being Descartes' identification of matter
with extension, which came to be an essential ingredient of the modern
way of considering things. In scientific terms, it was not consistent

with Newton's conception of space as a pure void, and thus was

discarded by physics, laut it was and remains in fact a main aspect of

the modern requirement to consider things as objects, that is as

absolutely distinct from the subject's consciousness; and as far as human

behaviour on this planet is concerned, it is perfectly in tune with the

conception of space as absolute because it amounts to absolutising the
physical dimension of the Earth's surface and of the things that it bears.

To put it schematically, this worldview made possible the emergence

of technical, economic and military means which gave modern Europe
a decisive edge over other civilisations and led to the present hegemony

of Western civilisation. Yet if the paradigm which framed it was

undisputed for some time, it was eventually challenged both from the
inside and the outside. According again to the point of view, and to the
field one is considering, these disputations of the modern paradigm
started more or less precociously. The case I shall be dealing with is
particularly clear as it is a trend of thought which advocated explicitly
an 'overcoming of modernity', in Japanese, kindai no chkoku. This theme

is associated with a philosophical school centring on the University of

Brill, Leiden, 2001

EJEAS 1.1

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90 AUGUSTIN BERQUE
Kyoto, where its principal proponents were teaching. For this reason, it
is historically known as the Kyoto School, Kyoto gakuha. Its main figure

was Nishida Kitar (1870-1945). Nishida himself was not directly

involved in a famous symposium which was held in Tokyo in July 1942
under the very title of Kindai no chkoku, but some of his disciples
participated in it, and some of the main arguments were clearly based
on his philosophy. As the date and place suggest, the theme of the
symposium was heavily related with the war against the main Western

powers. Indeed, seen from Japan, overcoming modernity implied

directly that Western hegemony should itself be overthrown; and the
theme was thus closely linked with nationalism.2
Because of these links, advocating the philosophical heritage of the

Kyoto School and particularly that of Nishida became taboo, so to

speak, for nearly a generation after 1945. This situation changed when
Japan's re-emergence as a great power came to challenge, on economic
grounds, the hegemony of Western models. This change of mood was
expressed, at first, by an affirmation of Japan's cultural identity, a trend

of thought known as Nihonjinron which flourished especially in the

seventies, though its roots can be traced at least way back to the national

studies (kokugaku) of the Edo period, and most notably to Motoori

Norinaga (17301801). Then, in the eighties, Japan began to assert
itself ostensibly as a paradigm in several domains, especially through a
discourse on Tokyo (Tkyron) and its antecedent Edo (where Tokugawa
Ieyasu established his headquarters in 1590), which presented Japan's
capital city as having been post-modern long before the notion of post
modernity appeared in Western minds in other words, as overcoming

Western modernity from its very start. Such views contributed

substantially to a general trend of thought tending to overrate Japanese

values, a phenomenon which in economic history will remain known

as the Bubble (baburu).3 Meanwhile, Nishida's thought had come again
to the foreground. The publication in 1983 of Nakamura Yjir's book
Nishida Kitar can be considered a turning point after which discussion
of the ideas of the leader of the Kyoto School, far from being taboo,
became an important theme in contemporary Japanese philosophy and
even, little by little, philosophy on the international stage.

At this juncture, I initiated in 1994 a six-year co-operative research

program entitled 'The Overcoming of Modernity, Yesterday and

Today', aimed at making an assessment of this controversial theme

from various perspectives (philosophy, linguistic and literary studies,
and the main social sciences), from both a historical and a contemporary

point of view. This programme, which was conducted at the Centre de

recherches sur le Japon contemporain of the HESS (cole des hautes
tudes en sciences sociales), Paris, came to involve, more or less directly,

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OVERCOMING MODERNITY, YESTERDAY AND TODAY 9 1

about forty researchers from ten countries.4 In addition to numerous
pieces of individual research, it has led to the publication of three
volumes of proceedings.5 As a personal conclusion to these six years
of international co-operation, I shall oudine the main ideas that I now
have on the subject.6

Absolutising the world

From my point of view, that of a geographer, the most interesting aspect

of Nishida's philosophy is what he called basho no ronri (logic of place),
a theme which, from the end of the twenties to his death in 1945, was
also at the core of his reflections.7 Alluded to in many of his later works,
this theme is directly treated in Basho (Place; 1927) and Bashoteki ronri to
shkyteki sekaikan (Logic of place and religious world view; 1945).8 As

we shall see, the logic of place is directly at stake in the theme of the
overcoming of modernity.
In the first two pages of Basho, Nishida refers to Plato's notion of
chra, which is dealt with in the Timaios. After having stated that 'what
is must be within something' [aru mono wa nanika ni oite nakeraba naranu),9

he writes a few lines further: 'I shall call that thing basho [place], imitating
what Plato says in the Timaios of that which should be called the thing
which receives the Ideas' (ideya wo uketoru mono to iu beki mono)}9

In the following developments of Basho, Nishida does not modify

this interpretation of the chra. Now, this is a radically un-Platonic
interpretation. In fact, for Plato, chra is that which takes in genesis, that

is relative beings, not absolute Being Idea or Form (idea or eidos)

of which genesis is only a copy or an image (eikn), and which does not

need a place in order to be. Nishida's interpretation of the chra

exemplifies the fact that that the Japanese verb aru, like the Chinese
you, is not equivalent to being (einai, esse, tre, sein, ser, etc.), but rather to
being there (y avoir, da sein, estar, etc.). 'And when he states that there is

necessarily something for taking in Being, it shows that he conceives of

Being as a 'there is', in the basho of its there. '1

Of course, this is not only a matter of linguistic determinism; it is

the whole philosophical construction of the basho which hinders Nishida
from acknowledging that Plato, in the Timaios, explicitly distinguishes
idea and genesis] whereas this distinction in other words the distinction

between the beings of the sensible world and absolute Being, which is
the concern solely of the intelligible is indeed the main heritage of
Platonism. In the Western tradition, this distinction generated not only
metaphysics but also the scientific mind, the first definition of which
can be found, according to a commonly held opinion, in a passage of

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92 AUGUSTIN BERQUE

the Timaios where Plato asserts that what concerns genesis belongs to
mundane creed, whereas truth is a matter of Being (hotiper pros genesin
ousia, touto prospistin altheia, 29c).

As for basho, on the contrary, it absolutises that which Plato calls

chra and which Nishida's works refer to as 'place' {basho) or 'nothingness'

(imu, which more exactly should be translated as 'non-being-thereness',

or even 'absence') or 'historical world' (rekishi sekai), or 'predicative plane'
(jutsugo men). This absolutisation of worldhood is, in Nishida, as explicit

as, in Plato, is that of Being: 'The world ..., this does not mean a world
opposed to our self. It is nothing else than that which wants to express
absolute being-thereness (zettai no bashoteki u), and this is why it can be
said to be the absolute'.12 I extract this passage from Nishida's last
book, Bashoteki ronri to shkyteki sekaikan, which reveals the essentials of

his thought: Being (u, the Chineseyoii) is bashoteki, which means that it

is a being-thereness supposing a place; and this place comprises the

existence of the self, which means that it is a higher universal than that
of the object conceived of in the modern fashion, which, by abstracting

the self from the world, can grasp only a part of the world, not its
entirety. This higher or, rather, more profound universal is what Nishida

calls here the absolute (zettaisha), and elsewhere the universal or the
general (ippansha).

Overcoming modernity, first try

Absolute being-thereness is a fascinating notion, as it promises to

overcome the evident deadlock of modern universality, which does not
comprise the self. A universality which does not comprise the self is
indeed not universal. Modernity could solve this dilemma in only two
ways, either as Descartes did by radically abstracting the subject's
consciousness from extensio (considered as the world), or as scientism
did by reducing the subject itself to an object; either solution failing to

grasp the reality of existence, and consequently disrupting the existen

tialness of the world.

The trend of thought which is known as the Kyoto School is

characterised by its will to overcome this false universality both in its
ontological foundations and in its historical expression as the hegemony
of Western power. This double goal is contained in the expression kindai
no chkoku (overcoming modernity). Its historical aspect was linked with
nationalism and war. It seems at first that its ontological aspect, because

of its essentially speculative character, and notably so in Nishida's

thought, can be dissociated from the historical one; but in fact, and
even without considering Nishida's political writings, the link between

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OVERCOMING MODERNITY, YESTERDAY AND TODAY 93

the two is contained in the very principle of absolutising the world.13
Indeed, in Nishida, the world is deprived of any external reference. It
determines itself without any base:
Everything determines itself without base (mukiteiteki ni), which means
that it holds its own being from its very self-determination.14

The historical world forms itself self-formatively (jiko keiseiteki ni) as

voluntary-active being-thereness (ishi sayteki u to shite).15

(...) the world exists just by itself (sore jishin niyotte ari), moves just by
itself, and can be considered as absolute existence (,zettaitekijitsuzai).16

This absolute self-determination (jiko gentei) of worldhood, that is an

absolute disregard of objective external markers, is the ontological

argument which nationalism made use of and this comprises

Nishida's own writings in order to present the Japanese imperial
regime as a universal basho, apt to subsume all the nations of the world,

an idea expressed by the slogan hakk ichiu (eight corners, one roof).
Indeed, considering the world, as Nishida does, as 'absolute existence',
is nothing other than the very essence of ethnocentrism. It is the logic

at work, for example, in the name that many peoples give themselves:
'Human' (Inuit, Ainu, etc.), as if there were no other such beings on
Earth and they alone deserved that qualification.
This disregard of otherness one should be the same, or not be at

all is also displayed in two outstanding phrases in Nishida's

philosophy: 'absolutely contradictory self-identity' (zettai mujunteki jiko

ditsu) and 'the multiple is the one, the one is the multiple' (ichi soku ta, ta
soku ichi). Though ambivalent (as they contain the essence of symbolicity:
A is non-A, which is that of predicativity: Sis P), they amount indeed to
saying that qualitative distinctions and quantitative differences between

matters are superficial, and by so doing abolish any summetria that

measurable relation of things to themselves and to others (autpros auto

kai pros allla, 69b) which the Timaios postulates, and which is the
condition of objective knowledge: A is not non-A, and S cannot be
reduced to P, because there are proportions between these terms.17
Ignoring proportion, and therefore absolutising his own world in its
subjectiveness, is the redhibitory defect of Nishida's system. A singular

historical form (the Japanese imperial regime) cannot be a universal,

and even less an absolute. This absolutisation of a relative being is in
fact nothing other than Motoori Norinaga's stance when, in a famous
controversy, he answered to Ueda Akinari that:
The Supreme Nation [Sumeramikuni, i.e., Japan] is the First Origin and
the Sovereign Ruler of the four seas and myriad nations; and if its area
is not so vast, it must necessarily be for a profound reason [fukaki kotowan]

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94 AUGUSTIN BERQUE
that it holds this character since its birth from the Two Gods. The small

intelligence of ordinary man ought not to take the measure [hakari shiru

beki ni arazu] of this reason Pretending to measure forcibly the

incommensurable [fukasoku wo shihite hakaramu to suru], this is the defect

of the small intelligence of the Chinese way of thinking [karagokoro no

kuse nari]. The Supreme Nation is evidently superior [takaki wa ichijirushi],

first and needless to say, because the Sacred Imperial Descent is

immutable [fueki], and because rice, which sustains human life, is

beautiful [uruhashiki].... The Supreme Nation is the only one which has
never been invaded, and were it only this fact, it should be held as an
incommensurable reason [fukasoku no kotowari].18

For all that, did the history of the overcoming of modernity end in the

flames of Hiroshima? And, confronting the falseness of modern

universality, is there nothing left for us other than the hedging of
pensiero debole, la Vattimo, or of the signifiant flottant, la Derrida?

In short, can we do nothing more than play with the shadows on the

wall of the Cavern?

Nishida and Derrida

Let us come again to the chra. In his great study of the Timaios, Luc
Brisson translates this term as 'milieu spatial T. Alain Boutot also uses
the word milieu when he writes that chra is ' le milieu o se produit le devenir

(the milieu in which becoming happens).20 Jean-Franois Pradeau, for

his part, has shown that, in the text of the Timaios, topos and chra are
used in a different meaning: whereas topos signifies only the place where

a thing happens to be, chra possesses an ontological link with that

thing.21 This difference becomes clearer if one refers to Aristotle's
conception of the topos. In his Physics (IV, 212a), the Stagirite compares

the place (topos) of a thing to 'a vase which cannot be moved' (aggeion
ametakinton); which means that if one moves the thing, its place becomes

another place. This implies that the identity of the thing, or its being,
is not linked to its place. On the contrary, in the Timaios, an ontological
link makes relative being and its chra pregnant with each other. Indeed,
chra is here compared to a nurse (tithn, 52d) or a mother (meter, 50d),
and there to an imprint in wax (ekmageion, 50c).
Thus it appears that, between topos and chra that imprint-matrix
of existence there is a difference analogous to that which Heidegger,

in Being and Time, established between Stelle and Platz. Stelle is the

accidental location of any object which could as well be located

elsewhere, whereas Platz partakes of the being of the thing which is
there. The nature of that thing is to be in that place, not in another
one. Yet, given the main accepted connotations of the word chra in

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OVERCOMING MODERNITY, YESTERDAY AND TODAY 95

ancient Greek, it also has something of that which Heidegger calls

Gegend, the 'country' in which things and their places share a common
existence. Besides, if one translates topos with 'place', it is indeed 'milieu'
which seems convenient for translating chra.

In this respect, what Nishida writes about basho can, as he does

himself, be related to the Platonic chra. The basho is indeed as

indissolubly linked to being-there (u) as the chra is to genesis. Yet, a
genesis necessarily takes its existence after the absolute Being of which
it is an image, whereas in Nishida u is produced by the self-negation of

place as an absolute non-being (zettai mu) at the bottom of a structure

in which, as a relative non-being (sotai mu), it successively negates any
being at all. Therefore, the chra and the basho are oriented in opposite
directions: the former toward being, the latter toward non-being. There
is indeed an essential difference between the positivity of the image of
birth (genesis) and the negativity of the image of engulfing (botsuny),

which Plato and Nishida respectively make use of in order to figure

the relationship of a being with its place or milieu.
The same contrast appears between Nishida's conception of the
'logic of place' (basho no ronri) as 'predicative' (jutsugoteki), that is, based
on the identity of P (the predicate), and Aristotle's logic, which is based

on the identity of S (the subject). For sure, Nishida's point of view is

not so radically opposed as it may seem at first to that of Aristode,
because, since the latter conceives of the subject (hupokeimenon) as a
being or a substance (ousia), its predicate does not properly exist ,22 It is

not an ousia, and in this sense, one could go as far as to consider it as

non-being, like Nishida does with the basho. The essential difference is
that Aristotle's logic is oriented by the primacy of the subject, whereas
Nishida's is oriented by that of the predicate.
This primacy of the 'predicative plane' (jutsugomen), in Nishida, is
accompanied by the principle of a world devoid of any base (mukitei)
whereas, on the contrary, in Europe the image of a base that which
is under determined the very notions of hupokeimenon (that which is
put under), subjectum (that which is thrown under), and substantia (that

which stays under). That base is Being; and there lies the kinship
between Plato's and Aristotle's ways of thinking, even though Aristode
refuses the Platonic separation between relative beings and absolute
Being. Just as the chra is oriented toward being, the predicate supposes
substance. It cannot be closed upon itself, without a base.
Now, closing the predicate upon itself is precisely what Nishida did.
It is also what Derrida does in his interpretation of the chra, by reducing
it to the Escherian figure of a text looped upon itself, in other words a

predicate without a base.23 The so-called post-modern critique which,

in the wake of (de)constructivism, has thrived in Anglo-Saxon thought

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96 AUGUSTIN BERQUE

since the eighties, may also be considered to be a doctrine of the

predicate-without-a-base, that is an absolutisation of worldhood.

Plato and Penrose

The common trait of Nishida's and Derrida's discourse, the negation

of a base, contradicts the presuppositions of modern-classic science,

the double origin of which resides in Platonic metaphysics and

Aristotelian logic, in other words in the primacy of Being. Moreover,
in Nishida, as we have seen, the reduction of S to P (i.e. the subsuming
of the subject under the predicate, or the 'engulfing' of being into

place) invalidates the very principle of measure, which supposes

otherness (A is not non-A) and proportion (the measurable difference
of A from non-A). He writes for example:
At the same time as the predicative plane becomes unlimited [mugendai
to naru], the place itself becomes true non-being, and what is there
becomes a mere intuition of itself [jiko jishin wo chokkan suru].24

Which, as we can see, also brings the world back to subjectiveness. It is

significant that Derrida, in order to loop the chra upon itself, curtails
the text of the Timaios precisely at the point where Plato is going to
expose the principle of summetria;25 this is a curtailment which hides
exactly that which Derrida, like Nishida, refuses to acknowledge: P
(the predicate or the sign, which says something about a thing) cannot
be closed upon itself, because, by its very possibility of being the sign
(P) of a thing (S), it supposes that thing and cannot subsume it (or
'engulf' it, botsuny suru, as Nishida says). Derrida's sophism, by closing
the chra upon itself, conceals its most evident trait, which is to open
itself in order to beget genesis.
Does this mean that Aristotle was right, both against Nishida or
Derrida (that is, because the logic of the identity of the subject should
prevail over that of the predicate) and against Plato (by considering
the idea as a predicate of the hupokeimenon and the chra as matter, hul)?

And correlatively, does substance prevail over relation?

One cannot answer such a question without taking physics into

account, since, precisely, it concerns not only the logic of the predicate

(hereafter IgPj but equally the logic of the subject (hereafter IgS), and
physics is outstandingly IgS (it is about things, S). Now, contemporary
physics, be it on the quantum or the astronomic scale, relies on an
intimate association of mathematics with observation. And this is

possible only because mathematics (a system of P) attains an accuracy

here (a degree of coincidence of P with S) of roughly 1 /10.12 In

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OVERCOMING MODERNITY, YESTERDAY AND TODAY 97

Newtonian cosmology, this degree of coincidence was already roughly
1 /10,000,000. What, to borrow Eugene Wigner's expression, does this
'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences'

signify?26 Simply the reality of the summetria which the Timaios

advocated. As Roger Penrose recently wrote, one cannot but think of
'...a profound mathematical substructure that was already hidden in
the very workings of the world'.27 Such a thesis is nothing other than
what Plato writes in the Timaios (34c) about the 'soul' (psuch) of the

world (kosmos); and indeed, Penrose postulates the existence of a

'Platonic' world, besides the mental and the physical worlds, linking
these two, the mathematical truths of this Platonic world being progre

ssively discovered by science. Yet this correspondence remains myste

rious, since, according to Penrose, its truths are absolute and cannot be

reduced to any algorithm of human origin.

D'Espagnat, Heidegger and Laozi

As this example shows, physics suggests two ideas. First, that signs (P)
and things (S) have a common ground in the nature of the Universe,
and that meaning radically exceeds the Saussurian principle of the
arbitrariness of the sign; which is to say that it is false to close, like
Nishida, the world (P) upon itself or like Derrida the sign upon itself.
Second, that, on the other hand, this relationship between S and P is

mysterious, ungraspable by human predication. It is real (S), but

irreducible to reality (S/P), which we cannot grasp if not by dint of P.

It is in the same sense that Bernard d'Espagnat, on quantum

phenomena, speaks of the rel voil (veiled real), which means that
empirical reality, that which we can know, is not the real, that is the
true nature of things, which remains 'veiled' because, by the very deed
of grasping it, we reduce it to the terms in which we can know it.28 In

other words, grasping S reduces it to P which, contrary to Nishida's

conception, signifies precisely that the proper nature of S cannot be
reduced to P. This is what Wittgenstein acknowledged when he wrote:
I can only name [nennen] objects. Signs represent them. I can only speak
about them [von ihnen sprechen], not pronounce them [aussprechen]. A
proposition can but say how a thing is, not what it is.29

And this seems also to be the sense of Heidegger's sibylline words,

which become clearer if it is seen that Welt (world) is here equivalent
to P, and Erde (earth) to S:
World and earth are essentially different from each other, and yet never
separate. The world is founded on the earth, and the earth arises through
the world.30

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98 AUGUS TIN BERQUE

The world, indeed, is nothing other than the terms in which we grasp
things, namely a predicate. This is what Nishida perceived, and it is
what his logic of place brings to light. Yet what he did not want to see
is that there cannot be a predicate, or a world, if not through that
which Heidegger calls a 'fight' (Streit) between the world and the earth,

in other words between predicate and subject. The world predicates

the earth, but in the very movement of this predication, the earth's
nature is hidden. P cannot be S; yet, in its turn, S cannot come out as
a world if not by dint of P:
The world liberates the earth in order that it be an earth... The earth is by
essence that which closes into itself. Making the earth come out means
to make it come into the open as that which closes into itself.31

This fight between S and P is the dynamics of reality: S/P, which cannot

be reduced to P. As for the true nature of S, we can say nothing about

it: it is ineffable by essence. Maybe divine, since the ineffable is no
more a matter of philosophy, but of religion. It is for example in this
way that Saint Augustine heard the 'poem of the world': velut magnum
carmen cujusdam ineffabilis modulatoris.32 As for physics, it gives us
as many reasons to imagine this ultimate truth in the light of an absolute
Form, like Plato and Penrose do, as to content ourselves, like d'Espagnat

does, with seeing there only the darkness of the unknowable (i.e. the
unpredicable). This second option was already that of Laozi:
Wu ming Without name : S :

Tian di zhi shi the genesis of heaven nature of

and earth the universe33

You ming Having name : P :

Wan wu zhi mu the mother of begetting of

the myriad beings the world
()
(...)
(...)
Ci Hang zhe These two together make reality
Tong chu eryi ming out from the same but fight each other
with different names

Tong wei zhi Xuan34 together are on a dark background

called the Dark

Overcoming modernity, second try

I discovered Watsuji Tetsur (1889-1960) as a young geographer, but

it took me sixteen years before I could translate his concept of fiidosei
by mdiance.35 Watsuji defined this concept as 'the structural moment

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OVERCOMING MODERNITY, YESTERDAY AND TODAY 99

of human existence' (ningen sonzai no kz keik).x To understand such a
phrase, we need to bear in mind Heidegger's notion of Ausser-sich-sein
(being-outside-of-oneself), in other words the etymological sense of
existence as 'standing outside' (ex-sistere).

I now understand this as meaning that our Being is invested in the

chra of our milieu (that which Watsuji calls fiido), not limited to the
topos of our body. This establishes an ontological structure possessing a
moment, similar to the 'the moment of a force' in mechanics. But neither

Heidegger nor Watsuji engaged in the analysis of human bodyhood

which such a conception of existence required. This was done by

Merleau-Ponty, who has shown, on the grounds of clinical neuro
physiology, that our 'phenomenal body' is indeed not limited to our
'objective body', because it extends to the reality of our milieu by loading
it with 'anthropological predicates'.37 Lakoff and Johnson have recently

deepened this analysis38 by showing, on the basis of the second

generation of cognitive science, that thought (or let us say the
predication of the world) springs from a ground of 'primary metaphors'
which are rooted in our flesh.39

Leroi-Gourhan's work in palaeontological anthropology, besides, has

shown that the human species emerged as such through an

'extriorisation' of the functions of our 'animal body' into a 'social
body' formed by the development of the technical and symbolical
systems that are proper to Humankind.40 It seems to me, however, that

whereas technical systems are evidently an extension of the functions

of our animal body, symbolical systems first of all language on
the contrary, are that which repatriates our social body into our animal

body. This return of the world into the body can be exemplarily
observed in the symbolicity of alimentary practices, and Christianity,
among other religions, even shows it explicitly through the Eucharist.41
This pulsation of human existence the extension of our corporeity
by dint of technics and its repatriation by dint of symbols is what I
call trajection.42 It cosmises our body by projecting it on the earth as a
world (lgP), while somatising the world by introjecting it in our body as

flesh (lgS). However, the reality of this bodyhood/worldhood can only

emerge as a relationship which supposes both the nature (lgS) of the
things which we grasp (lgP), and our nature (lgS) as Homo sapiens, which
is to predicate (lgP) the things and ourselves through perception, action,

words and thought.

This complex reality is that of the human milieux, the combination
of which makes the ecumene the relationship of Humankind with
the Earth and the Universe. It comes out from the unceasing trajection
of S into P and P into S, in the structural moment of human existence,

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100 AUGUSTIN BERQUE

which dynamically couples our Being with that of things. In other words,
its base is mdiance, which one can formulate as (lgS/lgP)/[lgP/IgS), in which

IgS/IgP represents the reality of things and IgP/IgS human existence.

Overcoming modernity, the false universality of which was based

on IgS, required more than capsizing it into IgP, as Nishida did. One
had to acknowledge that reality comes out from a fight, which is the
trajection of S into P and P into S, and which expresses the mdiance of

our existence amidst the ecumene. Acknowledging the logic of this

being-there, which can be reduced neither to P nor to S, is what I call
trajective reason [raison trajective): the reason of a real universality, compri

sing human predication, while not reducing Being to that.

HESS/CNRS, Paris, and Miyagi University, Sendai

berque@ehess.fr and berque@mail.sp.myu.ac.jp

1 My conception of this paradigm refers mainly to Alexandre Koyr, From the

Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: John Hopkins U. P., 1957 ) (Du Monde clos

l'univers infini. Paris: Gallimard, 1973). For a more detailed argumentation of the
present views, see Augustin Berque, Ecoumne. Introduction l'tude des milieux humains
(Paris: Belin, forthcoming).

2 For a discussion of these links, see James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo (eds.),
Rude Awakenings: Jen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism (Honolulu: University

of Hawaii Press, 1994). See also notes 5 and 13.

3 For an analysis of these links, see Augustin Berque, Japan: Cities and Social Bonds
(Yelvertoft Manor, Northamptonshire: Pilkington Press, 1997) {Du Geste la Cit. Formes
urbaines et lien social au Japon, 1993).

4 Japan, Korea, France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, the United

Kingdom, Canada and the United States. The programme was made possible by
financial aid from the EHESS, the Japan Foundation, the CNRS (Centre national de
la recherche scientifique) and the Collge international de philosophie (Paris).
5 Augustin Berque and Philippe Nys (ed), Logique du lieu et uvre humaine (Brussels:
Ousia, 1997); Augustin Berque (ed.), Logique du lieu et dpassement de la modernit (Brussels:

Ousia, 2000, 2nd vol.). A selection from the last two volumes, in English, is now being
edited in the United States by Yoko Arisaka (arisaka@usfca.edu) and Andrew Feenberg

(feenberg@sdsu.edu).

61 shall be relying here, to some degree, on my article 'Raison trajective et dpassement

de la modernit. En hommage Nakamura Yjiri Furansu tetsugaku shis (French philosophical

tought), Revue de philosophie franaise Vol. 5 (2000), part of which has been reproduced
in La Lettre de l'Association pour la recherche l'Ecole des hautes tudes en sciences sociales 23

(2000) pp 21-5. These views are developed in my book Ecoumne (see note 1).

7 Following its founding father, Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845-1918), the French
school of Geography has considered this discipline as a 'science of places (science des
lieux), not of men'.
8 I refer hereinafter to the edition of Nishida's complete works, Nishida Kitar Jensh

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OVERCOMING MODERNITY, YESTERDAY AND TODAY 101

(hereafter abbreviated as NKZ) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1966).

9 NKZ, Vol. 4, p. 208.

10 NKZ, Vol. 4, p. 209.
11 This, as we shall see, he later identified with the Japanese imperial regime.

12 NKZ, Vol. 11, p. 403.

13 An acute analysis of Nishida's writings can be found in Pierre Lavelle, 'Nishida,
l'cole de Kyoto et l'ultranationalisme', Revue philosophique de Louvain Vol. 92 No. 4 (1994).

Basing himself on these writings, Lavelle judges that 'Nishida Kitar was an adept of
the ultra-nationalistic version of the main trend of the Japanese imperial doctrine,
that is a religious nationalism fraught with millenarianism' (p. 453). However, he does
not relate Nishida's political positions to the core of his philosophy. It is precisely this
link that I am stressing here.

14 NKZ, Vol. 11, p. 390.

15 NKZ, Vol. 11, p. 391.
16 NKZ, Vol. 11, p. 457.
17 It may be recalled that metre means 'to measure'.
18 MotooriNorinaga zensh (Complete works of Motoori Norinaga) (Tokyo: Chikuma
Shob, 1972), Vol. 8, pp 442-3. By contrast, Akinari, in a very modern way, argued
that, judging from the scale to which Japan was drawn in Dutch maps of the world,
its cosmogony had to be relativised.
19 Luc Brisson, Le Mme et l'autre dans la structure ontologique du Time. Un commentaire

systmatique du Time de Platon (Sankt Augustin: Akademia Verlag, 1994).

20 Alain Boutot, Heidegger et Platon. Le problme du nihilisme (Paris: Presses

Universitaires de France, 1987), p. 222.
21 Jean-Franois Pradeau, 'Etre quelque part, occuper une place. Topos et chra dans le

Time' (Being somewhere and occupying a place: topos and chra in the Timaios), Les
tudes philosophiques Vol. 3 (1995) pp. 375-400.
22 On this point, see Robert Blanche and Jacques Dubucs, La Logique et son histoire
(Paris: Armand Colin, 1996), p. 35 ff.

23 Jacques Derrida, Khra (Paris: Galile, 1993).

24 NKZ, Vol. 4, p. 288.

25 Indeed, Khra ends with a quotation from the Timaios (69b), where Plato writes:
'And let us try to give as an end to our story a head according with its beginning, in
order to crown what precedes', which Derrida makes use of in order to crown his
own thesis (i.e., the looping of the sign upon itself); whereas, in the Timaios which
does not end in 69c, far from it , this sentence in fact introduces the immediately
following one: 'Now, as was said in the beginning, all things being in disorder, the god
introduced proportions [summetrias] in each one toward itself and toward the others',
which frames one of Plato's main ideas and means, as we shall see, exactly the contrary

of what Derrida wants to show.

26 Eugene Wigner, 'The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural

sciences', Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, Vol. 13, No. 1 (February

1960).

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102 AUGUSTIN BERQUE

27 Roger Penrose, Shadows of the Mind: A Searchfor the Missing Science of Consciousness

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 415.

28 Bernard d'Espagnat, Le Rel voil. Analyse des concepts quantiques (Paris: Fayard, 1994).

29 Ludwig J. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 3.221. Quoted in Andr

Coret, L'a-prhension du rel: la physique en questions (Amsterdam: OPA/ditions des
archives contemporaines, 1997), p. 124.
30 Martin Heideggger, L'Origine de l'uvre d'art. Chemins qui ne mnent nulle part

(Holzwege, 1949) (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), p. 52.

31 Martin Heidegger, 'L'Origine de l'uvre d'art', p. 50-1. Heidegger's italics.

32 'Like a great song from an ineffable composer' Epistulae 138, 5; quoted in

Pierre Hadot, 'Physique et posie dans le Time de Platon' (Physics and poetry in Plato's
Timaios), Revue de philosophie et de thologie, Vol. 113 ( 1983), pp 113-33, p. 133.
33 It may be recalled that natura comes from gnascor (to be born).

34 Laozi, Vol. I. Edited by Ogawa Kanju (Tokyo: Chk Bunko, 1973), p. 5.

35 I have recounted the throes of this translation in my book Japan: Nature, Artifice
and Japanese Culture (Le Sauvage et l'artifice. Les Japonais devant la nature, 1986) (Yelvertoft

Manor, Northamptonshire: Pilkington, 1997). I coined mdiance from the latin medietas,
the root of which (med-) has given the French and English milieu, and it is with this
word that I have come to translate the Japanese fudo. Yet, since medietas means'half', I

later came to consider mediance as signifying, as will be shown below, that 'half' of
our being resides in our body, and the other 'half' in our milieu. See also Mdiance. De
milieux en paysages (Paris: Belin, 2000 [1990]); and Ecoumne (see note 1).
36 Watsuji Tetsur, Fdo: ningengakuteki ksatsu (Milieu: a humanological study)

(Tokyo: Iwanami Bunko, 1979 [1935]), p. 3.

37 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phnomnologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. 3 70.

38 As the first generation was based on the assumption of analytic philosophy that
truth is literal, in other words that reality can be reduced to a hypostasis of mathematics.

Experimentation has shown that such is not the case. Hence the second generation
which, by analysing the effective functions of the brain, has established that reality
supposes also metaphor. To change the wording: that it is S/P, not S.
39 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and
its Challenge to Western Philosophy (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
40 Andr Leroi-Gourhan, Le Geste et la parole (Paris: Albin Michel, 1964,2 vol.) (passim).

41 Inasmuch as one adopts a Durkheimian point of view on religion. See Emile

Drkheim, Les Formes lmentaires de la vie religieuse (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1991 [1912]).
42 See note 35.

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