HSS II.

2 (2013)
DOI: 10.2478/hssr-2013-0006

The Infinite Third

Pompiliu Crăciunescu*
West University of Timişoara, Romania

Abstract
Basarab Nicolescu’s book What is Reality? is an attempt to enlighten the
contradictory logic promoted by Stéphane Lupasco. However, it also proves
to be the solid ground necessary for the axiomatic crystallization of the
transgressive-integratory view of the world, a vision based on
transdisciplinary thought. For this reason our text will focus not only on the
connection between the Included Third (Stéphane Lupasco) and the
Hidden Third (Basarab Nicolescu) but also on the “fusion between
horizons” in an Infinite Third, one which belongs to Meaning.

Keywords
Reality, Included Third, Hidden Third, levels of Reality, reliance between
Subject and Object, Ternary Meaning.

There is no doubt that Basarab Nicolescu’s book What is Reality?

Reflections on the Work of Stéphane Lupasco (2009) points out to rare example
of the “fusion of the horizons” (in Gadamer’s words,
Horizontvershmelzung). However, it is much more than that, What is Reality?
offers to reveal the expression of “continuity in intelligence.”1 Reliance-
transgression,2 this cognitive transmission proves to be a true work of
trans-mission. By also answering the Heideggerian assertion mentioned at
the end of the The Principle of Identity conference – where he said that:
“Only when we go back and think of what has already been thought can we
be useful to that which is still left to be though of” (Heidegger, 1991: 19) –,

*
Department of Romanian Literature, Faculty of Letters, History and
Theology, West University of Timişoara, Bd. V. Pârvan 4, Timişoara 300223,
Romania; p22cra63@yahoo.fr

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What is Reality? constructs solid connections between Science and

Tradition, which are the two levels of Reality which constitute the two
infinities (or between the two realisms, the classical and the quantum),
but also between this one and a third infinite, which is integrative-
transgressive: the Infinity of Meaning.
The gödelian opening that unites two realms – one formed around the
idea of the Included Third (Lupasco), the other around the Hidden Third
(Nicolescu), – What is Reality? is truly a “treasure chest,” as Ion Barbu
states (“sipet cu giuvaercale”). The book brings together all the light of the
world’s vision, according to Basarab Nicolescu. This light is what moves
between Isarlik and The Vale of Amazement (Valea Uimirii).3 Thus, while I
focus on this, I am also somehow located on the edges of the prismatic
alphabet of transdisciplinarity itself.4 From such a perspective, What is
Reality? looks like a wonderful center of automorphic light. By concentrating
on the lupascian included third, the title-question is watched, without respite,
by the hidden third which it constantly feeds. Basarab Nicolescu’s book,
which is also a journey, turns into a quest which answers Wolfgang Pauli’s
imperative, which he formulated in 1948 regarding a whole new idea of
reality. The purpose itself is built step by step into a growing illumination
which envelops “the multiple splendors” of Reality and Being. If Stéphane
Lupasco’s axiomatic formalism is “the bone structure of quantum logic
itself” (1987: 25), then the trans-categorical logic of Basarab Nicolescu is the
logic of open unity itself which “envelops both the Universe and the
human being” (2009: 91).
Inextricably bound to the issue of knowledge, the philosophy of
Lupasco is situated, from the beginning, under the double sign of the
included third and of the complex Reality. This philosophy is based on three
interlinked substances (or, rather, of three divergent perspectives on the
same matter): macrophysical, biological and quantic (both microphysics and
mental). By introducing the contradiction “within the structure,
functions and operations of logic itself” like he himself says in his most
important text from 1951, Le principe d’antagonisme et la logique de l’énergie.
Prolégomènes à une science de la contradiction, Stéphane Lupasco does not
remove the principle of non-contradiction, as some have hastily believed.
He only denied, in a justified manner, its absoluteness. Basarab Nicolescu
thouroughly demonstrates that lupascian thought reaches the non-fusional

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unification of the deductive logic with the intuitive one. It reaches the
ontologic articulation of classcical realism - which culminates in the space-
temporal theory of relativity – with the post-Einsteinian cuantic realism. In
this necessary atempt toward illumination the decisive role goes to the
notion of level of Reality, confronted and strengthened by the
contributions of Heisenberg, Nottale or Thirring. Also, thanks to his
cognitive ability, the notion5 also receives the name of key-concept of
transdisciplinarity.6
By being introduced into the lupascian thought, this concept clarifies
the axiome of the included third (there is a third T therm that is simultaneously
both A and non-A), an axiom that is responsible for the silence that once
surrounded (and continues to do so) a revolutionary vision of the World.
Truly, the contradictory tension born at a specific level of Reality, A and
non-A, the wave and the corpuscule project themselves into a dinamic and non-
contradictory relationship, and the cuantic or the T stage manifests itself in
another level of Reality. Neither actual nor potential, as Stéphane
Lupasco himself calls it, this state shows not only a surrmounting of the
disastrous binarism that poisons transcendence, but also the possibility
to reconsider the infinite miltiplicity of Reality. The reconsideration will
start from the three logical cuantums: A, P and T (Actualization,
Potentialization, Included Third).
Basarab Nicolescu signals that the epistemological implications of the
Lupascian conception are similar to those from Kurt Gödel’s theory. This
theory mentions the open unity, the logical and mathematical apophasis
which secretly resonates with the artistic and mystical apophasis. These
reinstate the dialogue between Subject and Object and mark “the fusion
between knowledge and being” (2009: 126). The historical merit of
Lupasco’s work derives from the constant claim regarding the falsity of
the gap between objective reality and subjective reality – the famous distinction
between res extensa and res cogitans (Descartes) – which was also attacked
by Werner Heisenberg in Ordnung der Wirlichkeit7 as an exaggerated
simplification of things. The theoretician of the three matters clearly shows
that, by simultaneously having a macrophysical and a quantic structure,
the human being is the most powerful materialization of the fact that
true Knowledge means the transgression and reliance of the two infinities –
the large infinite and the small infinite – into a wondrous T state: the

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psyche. By opposing entropy, this other world (in which the third matter
does not represent the synthesis of macrophysical and biological matter
but more likely the inhibiting struggle between them) makes a confession
regarding the constantly open complexity of the whole Universe. The
dream for a theory of totality (the famous Theory of Everything),
confirmed as such by Stephen Hawking, is counterbalanced by the
rareness of this affirmatory fullness built upon the contradictory-
dynamic game between the area that is resistant to perception, experiment,
representation or mathematical formalizing and the area of non-resistance.
Sovereign of the resistance area, the Included Third gains sense from the
Hidden Third, sovereign over the other area, “because, Basarab Nicoelscu
writes, in order to unite the contradictory A and non-A, situated in the
resistence area, it must traverse the area of non-resistence” (2009: 90);
the reliance between Object and Subject, “the supreme contradictory
elements” (2009: 90), is thus possible due to this last realm (the non-
resistance area), common to both yet impregnable.
The reliance between Object and Subject is a personant flux of the Nameless
Third. By focalizing and projecting the Included Third into an articulation
of aulic rigor, Basarab Nicolescu enlightens and extends the
contradictory lupascian conception into a truly transdisciplinary vision of the
world or, better yet, it connects it to the basis of the transgression of
damaging duality. Being a brilliant contiguity of intelligence What is Reality?
also fundamentally grounds a singular comprehension in its triple and
simultaneous manifestation: plastic, rational and transrational. Noble
Traveler in this infinite multiplicity, Basarab Nicolescu remains the same
lucid knight of “unsplit knowledge” (“cunoaştere neîmpărţită”), as
gödelian as Ion Barbu, both similar in spirit, together with whom he
started his Journey towards the Vale of Amazement. It is natural then
that this double quest – to enlighten lupascian logic and to crystallize in
an axiomatic manner the nicolescian vision on Reality – would be
constantly linked to other “thinking natures” (“naturi cogitale”) which
illuminate (in) the same galaxy of (in/from) different galaxies. What is
Reality? is a masterpiece of theoretical transdisciplinarity.
Stephane Lupasco’s vision of Reality is grounded, basically, on the
isomorphism between the quantic world and the world of thought. This is the
central strength of his ontological model. Because, by following different

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paths (psychological and microphysical), both Jung and Pauli will reach
the same conclusions, this proves undeniably that it is necessary to
radically reconsider the psycho-physical issue; even though it is both
physical and mental, in its complex manifestations Reality transcends its
own appearances as considered by established scientific methodologies.
The silence that still envelops the approaches of these great visionaries –
located more likely according to the tradition of Novalis and not in a
Cartesian manner – comes from the fear that by accepting the before-
mentioned isomorphism “the whole evolution of the modern world will
be put into question, starting from Galilei up to the present times.”
However, Basarab Nicolescu also justly adds, by reopening this
discussion a negation will not automatically follow. The discussion will
be fruitful because it would mean “a return to the sources of modernity
which will be enriched with the whole experience of the adventure of
technoscience” (2009: 113). The gap between what has already been thought
and that which needs to be thought of would thus gain, I believe, the
transparent depth of a reverse flight. This flight is its dynamic
manifestation. Regardless of the perspective of the enriched return,
contemporary thought remains too deeply inserted in the manner of the
seventeenth century, as Pauli said. The contemporary way of thinking
swims in a sweet poison of binarity (subject-object, physics-metaphysics,
mater-spirit, etc.) and has abandoned itself with joyful ease to either the
hermetic irrationalism or to intellectual negligence that dominate the
New Age. It is not by chance that Basarab Nicolescu mentions the
logical and epistemological error of Umberto Eco (in his book The Limits
of Interpretation) by showing that “the theatre of the world cannot be
reduced to a linguistic phenomenon” because it is „only a fragment of a
much richer Reality” (2009: 122). The coincidence of the opposites does
not eliminate, as Eco thinks, the axiome of identity or the axiome of
non-contradiction. It only replaces the excluded other with the included
other which amplifies identity and the non-contradiction in the presence
of different levels of Reality. Both reductionism and anti-reductionism
reconciliate due to these levels and form, according to the author, a trans-
reductionism which is fundamental for a new vision of Reality (2009: 125).
At the antipode of binary fascination one can find the world of art, a
place where the evidence of dinamic-contradictory complexity, revelated

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by the cuantic world, had a major impact.8 Regarding afection and,

implicitly, “the cosmological conflict between Subject and Object,” for
Stéphane Lupasco’s art represents the search for esential contradiction,
as he wrote in Logic and contradiction, while estetics becomes “cuantum
physics at its beginning.” An understanding such as this created the
succes his writings had in artistic circles attended by Salvador Dali,
Georges Mathieu (the one who introduces him to the artistic universe of
Paris), Frederick Benrath, Karel Appel, or art critics like René Huyghe or
Alain Jouffroy. The idea that art and science complete each other due to
the fact that they are not “two separate worlds, with frontiers and
customs officers” (Huyghe) point out the cognitive contiguity in which
both art and gnoseology are part of. For Stéphane Lupasco, just like for
Vintilă Horia – the author of a theory of contemporaneities which point out
the value of the unity between cubism and impresionism as a revelated
expression of the unity between wave and particle (Horia, 1976) –
modern art is a globalising realms of knowledge, a place where all cognitive
paths emerge and interfere. Because of this he focuses on the mistery of
the affection which is present in the paintings of Mathieu. He sees Appel
as a “painter of the infra-vital,” while the works of Benrath seem like
“the lightning-fast incursions of another Universe which it fundamentally
constitutes.” Obviously, we are talking about the same mysterious
Universe that emerges in Dali’s works, a visionary which captures,
according to Basarab Nicolescu, “cuantum movement, continued
creation and the anihilation of forms, while in the same time bringing
forward strange entities which are not simialr to anything belonging to
this world but which are real in theirs” (2009: 148). According to
Lupasco his work is best characterised by subrealism and not suprarealism.
This brings him closer to Barbu’s infrarealism. Dali imagines the most
startling image of the cuantic subworld, an infraworld that comunicates
through the Hidden Third – as Basarab Nicolescu clearly affirms – with
the overworld and transcendence (he viewed particles as “angelic elements”).
A work such as this confirms the osmotic-contradictory existence of the
three lupascian universes (macrophysical, biological and mental).
Transcendency is connected to the inner mental universe, “of Divinity
itself” (linked to affectivity). The religios energetics and “God’s orgasm”
– the awareness of the fundamental contradiction – gambles with a meager

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conception regarding Divinity. Basarab Nicolescu makes remarks about

this lupascian affirmation by saying that such a thing implies an
“energetic theophisics.” This fact is clear because the only transcendence
of energy is “ontological affectivity […] – claims Lupasco – where God
is the affectivity.” By inserting him into the presocratic tradition, alchemy
and the religious perspective of Jakob Böhme, Basarab Nicolescu points
out the productiveness of the logic of the included other and also the
productiveness of the different levels of reality in the rational reading of
the Trinity dogma. Antoine Fevre claimed that the filosophy of Lupasco
counters “the clench of the identitary hydra.” Basarab Nicolescu adds
that “The correspondence between the logic of the included other and
the levels of reality show the connection between the rational and the
transrational. The transrational without the rational, just like the rational
without the transrational, will eventually lead to the irrational” (2009:
182). This is why “only the conversion of technoscience could stop our
descent into nothingness” (2009: 215). What is Reality? is a manifesto for
awakening the evolution of conscience and from the pile of
reductionisms. Moreover, it is also a manifesto for a conscience of conscience.
The dialogue with Edgar Morin, which was inserted almost at the end of
the book, takes it towards the stringency of a new rationality which is
similar to the new image of Reality cristalised in this prophetic book.
The Rationality of Reality, structured in different levels connected
with the included third, nourished itself from its own underlining
transrationality induced by the Hidden Third. The Hidden Third, which is
also the ireductible link of Reality in its full openness, proves to be the
core of transdisciplinary methodology. This methodology was edified by
Basarab Nicolescu, with fervor and rigor, according to three
fundamentals: logic, ontology and epistemology. For those who deny the
evidence of the opened unity of light, this paradise is closed. It represents a
new “horizon of knowledge in the XXIst century” (2009: 101), the basic
guarantee of human autotranscendency, the path toward the man that will
appear beyond the microbian fauna from Kali Yuga. The undivided man,
“celui dans lequel ce qui fut rencontre celui qui sera, dans un espace-
temps non-euclidien” (Horia, 1966: 252). By integrating reason and mistery,
transdisciplinarity is the royal way for the resurgenge of the Subject and

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Reality in their infinite richness, both “knowable and unknowable”

(Nicolescu, 2009: 234).
The Hidden Third, which is a source of reliance-transgression, also
compensates for the discontinuity – the non-rezistence area9 – between the
different levels of the Reality of the Subject and the different levels of
the Reality of the Object. The Included Third allows rationality the jump
from one of the levels to the next. This is why, in my understanging, the
Included Third of Lupasco is, logically, the manifestation of Nicolescu’s
Hidden Third. Onto-logically, it is its revelated energy. The Hidden Third is the
echo of the secretive energy which mistifies the Consistency and the
Persistence of Being and the Unvierse. Basarab Nicolescu wrote: “The
Hidden Third, which is a source of Reality, also nourished itself from
that Reality through a cosmic breath that includes both us and the
Universe” (2009: 234). The wording of this final phrase launches us
towards the sources of Meaning while in the same time directing us inside
the burning level of self-awareness, in vivo, there, where reasons and
apophatic revelation (and apheretic) breathe together. “Simulatneous
joining” of breaths, the Included Third and the Hidden Third work together
towards the unpassable transparency of an infinite other: Meaning.
With a very dense and contracted title which is (also) a question,
Basarab Nicolescu’s Quête de sens ou quête du sens? was published as an
introduction in the first edition of “Mémoire du XXIe siècle” (1999). It
distinguished between two levels of meaning: a horizontal one, “qui
attribue un ordre aux expériences, représentations, descriptions, images et
formalisation mathématiques relatives à un seul et même niveau de
Réalité,” and a vertical one, “véritable opérateur de reliance entre deux
ou plusieurs niveaux de Réalité.” Both functioned in the resistence area of
Reality. In this work Basarab Nicolescu clearly claims the necessity to
introduce a “sens tiers. Ce sens tiers est associé à la zone de non-résistance, par
rapport à nous, de la Réalité. Il reste dans le domaine du rationnel mais il
ne se soumet à aucune rationalisation.” This third other is connected not
to Reality, but to the Real (“that which is eternally veiled”) and to the
inexuastible richness of our inner lives. This text ends with the prophetic
wods “Alors ‘quête de sens’ ou ‘quête du sens’? Et ceci et cela: le sens du
sens est ternaire. […] Notre quête du sens du sens est la racine de notre
espérance dans le siècle qui s’annonce” (1999: 15).

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What is Reality? breviary of knowledge and of future man, is a book

published in the beginning of the century. It crowns this quest watched
upon by the Hiden Third. This Hidden Third is more than a concept. It is
the ternary meaning which envelops and enlightens from the inside both
the cosmos and ontos, like the sacred. It names and gives substance to the
Infinite Third, the infinity of Meaning. It is clear that, by building bridges
betwen one question and the next, between fractal Reality and the veiled
Real, Basarab Nicolescu reveals “the gate of the invisible,” just like
Daumal. Thus, Basarab Nicolescu, Noble Traveler, high priest and guide
on matters of the Infinite Third, increases the hope that the gates of the
future will remain open. In a world that tends more and more toward
intelectual thinning and excessive spending for quantity, his work,
endomorphic in nature, strongly towers against onto-cognitive separation
and against the joyous offensive of relativism. It stands strong against
falling into nothingness.
Doubtlessly, then, What is Reality? is a book in which that which still
needs to be thought of entertains a visionary dialogue with that which has
already been thought of. It intensifies something that is evident yet not
necessarily new: Basarab Nicolescu is a major thinker of our times and of
times to come.

References
Bolle de Bal, Marcel. Voyage au cœur des sciences humaines. I. De la reliance. Paris:
L’Harmattan, 1996.
Heidegger, Martin. Principiul identităţii. Bucureşti: Editura Crater, 1991.
Heisenberg, Werner. Philosophie. Le manuscrit de 1942. Paris: Seuil, 1998.
Horia, Vintilă. Introducción a la literatura del siglo XX. (Ensayo de epistemología
literaria). Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1976.
Horia, Vintilă. Journal d’un paysan du Danube. Paris: Editions de la Table Ronde,
1966.
Lupasco, Stéphan. Le principe d’antagonisme et la logique de l’énergie. Prolégomènes à
une science de la contradiction. Monaco: Rocher, 1987.
Nicolescu, Basarab. Ce este realitatea? Reflecţii în jurul operei lui Stéphane Lupasco.
Iaşi: Junimea, 2009.
Nicolescu, Basarab. De la Isarlîk la Valea Uimirii. Vol. II. Drumul fără sfârşit.
Bucureşti: Curtea Veche, 2011.
Nicolescu, Basarab. Quête de sens ou quête du sens? “Mémoire du XXIe siècle.”.
Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 1999.

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1
The central idea of Vintilă Horia’s novel¡Perseguid a Boecio! Madrid: Editorial
Dyrsa, 1983.
2
For Marcel Bolle de Bal, reliance (la reliance) means “le partage des solitudes
acceptées et l’échange des différences respectées” (1996: 58).
3
I am obviously refering to his first book, Ion Barbu – Cosmologia „Jocului secund”,
first published in 1968 and reedited in 2004 by Univers Enciclopedic. The
foreword was written by Eugen Simion and the afterword by Pompiliu
Crăciunescu. I am also taking into account his most recent one, De la Isarlîk la
Valea Uimirii, I-II, București: Curtea Veche, 2011. Between these lies “podul de
raze” (the golden Bridge): Nous, la particule et le monde (1985, 2000, ed. rom.:
2002, 2007), L’Homme et le sens de l’Univers. Essai sur Jakob Boehme (1989, ed.
rom.: 1993, 2000, 2007), Théorèmes poétiques (1994, ed. rom.: 1993, 1996, 2007,
2009), La transdisciplinarité. Manifèste (1996, ed. rom.: 1999, 2007).
4
In the before-mendioned afterword as well as in his Strategiile fractale (Iaşi:
Junimea, 2003), we have amply followed the definitory concepts of the
transdisciplinary reasoning of Nicolescu which converge in this amazing and
deeply prophetic book.
5
The level of Reality defines “a combination of sistems that do not change
under the action of a certain number of general laws” (2009: 78). It refers to
cuantic entities that can be found subject to the algebra of operatives and not
in the numbers that govern the macrophysical world.
6
The concept was already presend in an article written in 1982 for “3e
Millénaire.” The concept, however, deepens in the books we mentioned
peeviously as well as in Basarab Nicolescu’s foreword written for the second
edition of Le principe d’antagonisme et la logique de l’énergie (Rocher, 1987).
7
A novel text until 1984 when it was translated into French by Catherine
Chevalley with the title: Philosophie. Le manuscrit de 1942 (Seuil, 1998).
8
The singularity of Lupasco in French philosophy can be confirmed in
multiple ways: from his underground influence – with polemical traits (toward
Bachelard and Bréton, for example) to entusiastically dissimulated (toward
Ionesco, Morin and Cioran) – , from his ideatic convergence – by looking
through the evolutiion of conscience and the conversion of science (Abellio,
Huyghe, Morin, but in different degrees) – and from the major impact he had
in the world of art. Basarab Nicolescu carefully analises all of these and,
beyond direct sources, he also uses documents from his own archive or from
that of Alde Lupasco-Massot. From this point of view, Ce este Realitarea? Is a
lively illustration of the multiple faces on which/of which reality edifies itself.

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9
“This area of non-resistence is a corespondent for a third term which defines
the Interaction between Subject and Object but cannot be reduced to either
Object or Subject. I call it the ‘Hidden Third’”(Nicolescu, 2011: 17).

Biographical Note
Pompiliu Crăciunescu is Reader at the Faculty of Letters, History and
Theology, West University, Timisoara; active member of Centre International de
Recherches et Etudes Transdisciplinaires – Paris (CIRET) and member of the
Romanian Union of Writers. Between 1997 and 2001 he was Attaché Temporaire
d’Enseignement et de Recherche/Temporary Attaché for Education and Research (ATER)
at “Jean Monnet” University, Saint-Etienne. The books he authored include
Eminescu. Paradisul infernal şi Transcosmologia (2000); Strategiile fractale (2003);
Vintila Horia – Translittérature et Réalité (2008; Romanian edition: Vintilă Horia:
Transliteratură şi Realitate, 2011).

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