Paru dans Dokkyo kokusai kôryû nenpô / Dokkyo international review, XIV, 2001, 67-90.
International conference on Knowledge and Place
Sôka, Dokkyo University, 9-10 December 2000
- Where is knowledge? - In the mediate data of the unconscious. by Augustin BERQUE EHESS/CNRS, Paris & Miyagi University, Sendai berque@ehess.fr & berque@mail.sp.myu.ac.jp I. Does knowledge have a place? I.1. Is it in the evening glow? Knowledge depends on who knows. Who knows, for example, what knowledge is. Accordingly, as there are about six billions humans on Earth, one can easily surmise that there are six billions possible definitions of knowledge. Yet it is generally admitted that philosophers have a certain privilege in defining such a thing, since the nature of a philosopher (philosophos phusis)1 is to love knowledge, and people are supposed to know what they love or hate. Unhappily, this is only a commonly held opinion, and philosophers despise opinion. They call that form of knowledge doxa or pistis, and they say that it can only grasp the shadows of things, that is relative beings, not true Being : hotiper pros genesin ousia, touto pros pistin alêtheia2. Yet, after having discussed about Being for two and a half millenia, they have concluded that they cannot say what it is, but only how it seems to be : wie ein Ding ist, nicht was es ist3. In other words, they have closed the circle of knowledge back to opinion. This is a very interesting conclusion for non-philosophers, since it entitles them to look for knowledge not in philosophy, but in their own respective worlds. And, differing indeed from philosophers, they do find it therein : ci zhong you zhen yi 此中有真意4. That would be fine, since there are more non-philosophers than philosophers, and we could content ourselves with our own worlds indefinitely – this is indeed what a profusion of demagogic concepts, which flourished in Late Modernity, invite us to do, like cultural relativism, pensiero debole5, signifiant flottant6, mukitei 無基底7 etc. -, were it not that we can feel some doubt about the location of the above ci zhong 此中 (therein). True, the shifter8 ci 此 (this, here) indicates that the place in which lies the true meaning of things is close to the speaker. Now, the speaker in question (Tao Yuanming) did not find this place so easily. In fact, he had to quit the city and ordinary life, retire to the country, clear a patch of land to the south of his village, at the edge of the wilderness (kai huang nan ye ji 開荒南野際 )9, and 1
Plato, Republic, 376 b. « Truth is to creed what Being is to beings ». Plato, Timaios, 29 c. 3 « How a thing is, not what it is ». Ludwig Josef Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, 3.221. 4 « Therein is true meaning ». Tao Yuanming, Yin jiu, 5.9. 5 « Soft thinking », an expression due to Gianni Vattimo. 6 « Floating signifier », an expression due to Jacques Derrida. 7 « No base », an expression due to Nishida Kitarô. 8 A technical word due to Roman Jakobson , i.e. a word the meaning of which varies according to the situation, and which has no referent unless in a given message. 9 « Clear the bush at the limit of the southern fields », quoted in OOMURO Mikio, Enrin toshi : Chûsei Chûgoku no sekaizô. Tokyo : Sanseido, 1985, p. 495. 2
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from thereon live frugally from the work of his hands for twenty years. At least, according to what he wrote. Quite obviously, that is not a place which anybody can, at any time, reach with a Toyota Land Cruiser, were it adorned, like Land Cruisers are 10, with the catchphrase INTO THE NATURE in bold letters on the cover of its prominent spare wheel (i.e. the emblem of wilderness). Into « the » nature of what (would readily ask a philosopher) ? On strictly grammatical grounds, the answer to such a question should be : the nature of anything (including knowledge), provided that you have enough gas in the Land Cruiser to go there. According to your situation, « there » (i.e. the place of knowledge) may indeed comprise in its range Tao Yuanming’s village, that is Chaisang in Xunyang-jun (to the SouthWest of Jiujiang in today’s Jiangxi-sheng). From that spot, you could, for certain, look in the direction of Mount Lu in the evening glow, which was what Yuanming was looking at (youran jian Nanshan / shan qi ri xi jia 悠然見南山 / 山気日夕佳)11 when he felt that « therein is true meaning ». Yet there is a hic, as a French native speaker would say12. The poem assures us that ci zhong you zhen yi, all right, and this is good news for any Dasein, even if not in Chaisang, since – about fifteen centuries after Tao Yuanming - this same expression was borrowed by Chinese philosophers for rendering Dasein by ciyou 此有 (that is, da by ci 此 and sein by you 有) ; but the poem immediately adds – this is the last verse that yu bian yi wang yan 欲辯已忘言 13 ; which, though in Chinese, says exactly the same thing as that which Ludwig Josef Wittgenstein, also about fifteen centuries later, said in German : Die Gegenstände kann ich nur nennen. Zeichen vertreten sie. Ich kann nur von ihnen sprechen, sie aussprechen kann ich nicht14. I.2. Is it in the vehicle ? Clearly, we have here a problem with the vehicle of/for knowledge, whether it be language or the Land Cruiser. Yuanming knows where Truth is, but he cannot say it, because – this is a commonly held Taoist opinion – words would be unable to convey that knowledge. To be sure, as he is a poet, he does not say so excruciatingly much ; he only suggests it, by pretending to have lost language. On his side, Ludwig Josef, who is a philosopher, says plainly that words cannot be the vehicle of true knowledge ; they can only stand for what things really are. To « stand for » (vertreten) means that words are in another place than that of things. For sure, the function of a vehicle is to go elsewhere than where things were at first. « At first », in the present case, that is before language. Before language, things were present, not represented ; and thus we can infer that the knowledge of things was directly amid things, not about them. Knowledge was amidst reality. That is, knowledge was only information in proximal form, covarying with external data in the animal’s receptors ; e.g. in what physiologists call geotaxy15. This evolutional stage remains indeed in the human body, but it 10
If you pay a little extra. « I look leisurely at the Southern Mount / the vapours of the mountain are auspicious in the evening glow » Yin jiu, 5, 6-7. 12 The French expression voilà le hic (meaning « here is the snag »), literally « here is the here », is derived from the Latin hic est quaestio (« here is the problem »). 13 « I would say it, but I have forgotten words ». 14 « I can only name objects. Signs represent them. I can only speak about them, I cannot pronounce them ». Wittgenstein, ibid. Emphasis in the original. 15 Geotaxy is the orientation of an organism according to gravitational force. In mammifers like us, it is made possible by the stimulation of a statocyst, i.e. a bag containing one or more statoliths (small calcareous concretions which, according to the animal’s movements, strike the sensory cells of the bag). On these questions, see Joëlle PROUST, Comment l’esprit vient aux bêtes. Essai sur la représentation, Paris, Gallimard, 1997 (e.g. p. 117 for more about geotaxy). 11
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cannot immediately be assimilated to what we generally figure as knowledge, which supposes representation (in geotaxy, we feel our orientation toward verticality, we do not know it). But now that representation works, where is knowledge ? This is a difficult issue, since language is at stake here and we are told by both Yuanming and Ludwig Josef that it is not a reliable vehicle for true knowledge. For my part, being neither a poet nor a philosopher, I shall suppose first that the hic is about the other vehicle, i.e. the Land Cruiser ; and consequently, in a sound positivistic fashion, I shall change it for a Land Rover. Indeed16, Land Rovers do not unreliably pretend that they will drive you « into the nature » ; they only run from one place to another. That is, they rove (and accordingly are called « Land Rovers »). Besides, roving may be a good approach to knowledge, since it originally means, in archery, « shoot at casual mark with range not determined »17. So, instead of an unreliable nature of things, Land Rovers may casually hit the knowledge of things, and therefore indicate its place. Into the bargain, the root of the verb rove is said to be « obscure »18. As obscure, in fact, as that of the French verb rêver (to dream), which originally meant the same : to rove. Now, if darkness is that which may contain anything, including knowledge 19, it also enables humans to dream ; and since Plato says in the Timaios (52 b) that the place (chôra) of relative being (genesis) is like a dream (oneiropoloumen blepontes)20, I shall suppose that the knowledge of it, also, is like a dream, and I shall let the Land Rover drive me there. I.3. Is it in dreaming? « There », I guess, might well be the Red Centre of Australia, in a range of about one thousand miles around Uluru (a place which, in British knowledge, roved into « Ayers Rock ») ; because it is the place where Truth maintained itself for the longest time, as far as Humankind is concerned. In other places, including Mesopotamia, Egypt or China - not to speak of Western Europe, North America or Japan - Truth has changed so frequently, at least on the same scale of time, that some shade is cast on the possibility to drive, there, « into the nature » of knowledge. If we take the case of the Kukatja21, the nature of knowledge is called Tjukurrpa. Western anthropologists generally translate this term as « Dreaming », because, according to local people, dreaming is the most reliable and ordinary way to attain what it means. Unfortunately, the Kukatja use a specific term for saying what we call « dreaming » : kapukurri. That is, Tjukurrpa is not a dream. It is real. Yet, neither is it reality as we understand it. In fact, for a Kukatja, there are three modes of reality, Tjukurrpa, kapukurri and daily experience in wakefulness. These three modes are « culturally distinct and yet interdependent. Their respective manifestations, on the one hand, and the transformational relationship which unites them, on the other hand, define the field of veracity and of reality, the actual and the virtual »22. Accordingly, along with wakeful experience, both Tjukurrpa and 16
As far as I know. According to The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, 5th edition, Tokyo : Oxford University Press, 1964, p. 1091. 18 Ibid. 19 Which is the reason why, for example, Taoism dubbed itself « the study of the Obscure », Xuanxue. For sure, this is not a very Platonic conception of knowledge. 20 « Seeing it, we dream ». On this topic, see Thorsten BOTZ-BORNSTEIN, ‘Chôra : l’espace du rêve et la question de l’authenticité’, in Augustin BERQUE (ed.) Logique du lieu et dépassement de la modernité, Brussels : Ousia, 2000, vol. II, p. 243-273. 21 For what follows, I rely on Sylvie POIRIER, Les Jardins du nomade. Cosmologie, territoire et personne dans le désert occidental australien, Münster : LIT Verlag, 1996. The Kukatja live in the Western Desert in the region of Balgo Hills, about 500 miles NW of Alice Springs. Of course, the way I use Poirier’s findings does not commit her own thesis. 22 Poirier, p. 123-124. 17
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kapukurri are mularrpa, which means true, or real. This is because they are manifest ; and « all that which manifests itself is true (mularrpa), that is, it deserves to be considered and inserted in the sphere of actual experience [la sphère du vécu] […] »23. Anthropologists have also made use of the term « Dream Time » for translating Tjukurrpa, because one of its meanings, corresponding to what is called Genesis in the Bible, is that of the origins of the world ; i.e. a cosmogony, saying how the Ancestors appeared and made what is reality. But such a translation is misleading, because Tjukurrpa is not only situated in the past, it is also present in the landscape, as it is in the events of life. Anybody can experience it virtually at any time, though dreaming is actually a privileged way to do so. Consequently, anybody24 can know what is Tjukurrpa. However, this knowledge is also a social construction, because a dream must be interpreted and discussed by the community in order to be recognized as mularrpa kapukurri, a « true dream », deserving as such to be added to the corpus of Tjukurrpa. It must be acknowledged, and this is a social affair25. Then only does it become knowledge : an aspect, among others, of the environment and the way of life of the Kukatja. This is to say that Tjukurrpa is not away from actual places, roving in some undefinable dimension as we think of dreams ; it is right here in the territory of the Anangu (« Aborigines » in Kartiya26 language), and it is not here only : « it is a pluridimensional complex. Human society and all that is inherent or adjacent to it, territory and cosmos, emanate from the Tjukurrpa »27. It is both space and time, presence in the landscape and origin of the world. To put it simply in current Western categories, it is at the same time myth, dream and land. For a modern mind, such an entity is unconceivable ; because, for us, 1. Myth is a collective discourse which explains and sustains a certain world, e.g. that of the Kukatja. In that sense, it is often assimilated with common knowledge, that which Plato called doxa or pistis, and which he distinguished from true knowledge (alêtheia), the ancestor of modern science. 2. Dream is the roving of a person’s mind during sleep. It has no clear connections with either myth or science, i.e. with knowledge, though it may have obscure connections with them. And 3. Land, in the modern mind, is par excellence what Descartes called extensio : the objective extension of matter in space, radically alien to the subject’s consciousness. For this reason, land is, above all, an object of science (as shows indeed the origin of the word geometry), existing in itself independently from either dream or myth, although there can be dreams and myths about land. The modern worldview admits indeed that people can know a certain land, either mythically or scientifically ; but the land itself cannot be knowledge at all. I.4. Is it in the land ? However, this view is entirely founded upon an ontological option, that of dualism, which not only is negligible in statistical terms – in the history of Humankind, not to speak of animals, not distinguishing land from knowledge has been an infinitely more common attitude than the reverse -, but, as we shall see later, it is questionable right know in philosophy itself. In non dualistic terms, the res cogitans (Descartes’ terms, meaning the « thinking thing », i.e. the thing which possesses knowledge about other things) is not separate from the res extensa (the « extended thing », i.e. that which is known by the thinking thing). In other words, land is not separate from knowledge. Land is knowledge. 23
Poirier, p. 124. Provided that this person is initiated, which anyone is in due time. 25 On this process, see Poirier, chap. 5 : « La mise en œuvre sociale du rêve ». 26 « In the region of Balgo, kartiya designates a kind of lizard with a whitish skin, hence the choice of this appellation by the Aborigines for designating the White ». Poirier, p. 15. 27 Poirier, p. 48. 24
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In fact, that land is knowledge is the founding principle of all human cosmologies except the modern one. True, this principle is generally not enunciated as such ; it is only expressed symbolically, through sets of metaphors which assimilate the macrocosm (nature in general, the sky, the wilderness…) with the mesocosm (the environment, the village or the city, the human realm..) and with the microcosm (the human body, the room or the house, a garden or a field…). These sets of metaphors are what anthropologists call a myth, or a mythology. They are prone to analyse them in linguistic terms, since myths are primarily what people say about their world (indeed, the Greek muthos meant « what is said »). This, as we know, has been particularly the case in structuralism. Following the same bent, in the last third of the XXth century, all sorts of things, on the ground that they had some kind of meaning, have been interpreted in linguistic terms ; e.g. architecture. Radicalizing this option, poststructuralism has tended to reduce any kind of knowledge to an interplay of signs, again in linguistic terms ; e.g. Jacques Derrida’s interpretation of Plato’s chôra28, which strives to show that it is a text about a text, a sign about a sign. In other terms, a predicate of predicate. In that sense, poststructuralism belongs to the same trend of thought as Nishida Kitarô’s « logic of place » (basho no ronri 場所の論 理), or logic of the predicate (as opposed to Aristotle’s logic of the identity of the subject), which absolutizes the predicate ; that is, it shows that the predicate, ultimately, predicates itself29. This is also to say, as Nishida’s philosophy shows that the world is a predicate, that worldliness is an absolute, needing no base ; an idea which is strictly homologous to Derrida’s conception of the signifier as freefloating. Therefore, I call this trend of thought metabasism.30 Metabasism may gratify some philosophers and would-be philosophers ; but it definitely cannot satisfy either myth or science, the nature of both of which is to give a base to the world. When considering what reality is for non-philosophers (and for many philosophers as well), it always has a ground. For example, the ancestors of the Anangu, in the Tjukurrpa, emerge from the ground at some given place, e.g. at Anthwerrke (Emily Gap) for the caterpillars which the Arrernte (Aranda) are descending from ; and one can see them in the forms of the land, e.g at Ntyarkarle Tyaneme where these ancestors prepare to cross the Lhere Mpartnwe (Todd River, in today’s Alice Springs)31. These forms are material indeed ; they are the land as a the ground of all beings. That is, chôra is the land itself ; which indeed is the primary meaning of the word chôra in Greek32. So, before translating this reality into words, then into words about words, we should rather do the reverse : see how reality is connected with the ground. In fact, the very word muthos can represent the ground, or an aspect of it. It can be a real place, not only a saying or a text about place. Athenaios, a sophist of the IId-IIId century A.D., speaks for example of a garden called Muthos, in Syracuse 33. True, this is a toponym, that is, a predicate about the earth ; but what it shows is that predicates can be material, as gardens are. That garden, Muthos, was first a real place ; and what it « said » (as indeed is the function of a myth) is that a human world is not limited to words. It necessarily has a base, 28
Jacques DERRIDA, Khôra. Paris : Galilée, 1993. See in particular his essays Basho (Place, 1927) and Bashoteki ronri to shûkyôteki sekaikan (Logic of place and religious worldview, 1945), resp. in vol. IV and XI of Nishida Kitarô Zenshû. Tokyo : Iwanami, 1966. 30 Nishida says expressly that the world is mukitei, « without base » ; e.g. in vol. XI, p. 390. For more argumentation about metabasism, see my book Écoumène. Introduction à l’étude des milieux humains. Paris : Belin, 2000 (Fûdogaku josetsu, forthcoming at Chikuma, Tokyo). 31 See David BROOKS for Mparntwe people, The Arrernte landscape. A guide to the dreaming tracks and sites of Alice Springs. Alice Springs, Institute for Aboriginal Development, 1991. 32 That is, what we call the countryside. For example, Attica was the chôra of Athens. 33 ATH., 542 a, quoted in Anatole BAILLY, Dictionnaire grec-français. Paris : Hachette, 1950, art. muthos, p. 1303. 29
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which is the earth. The earth is the necessary subject (hupokeimenon in Aristotle’s vocabulary, i.e. « that which is laid under »)34 of any human predication, the base of any human cosmology (except the modern one). In that sense, the cosmos - of which it is said in the last sentence of the Timaios that it is the sky (ho kosmos […] gegonen heis ouranos hode monogenês on)35 - needs the earth (gê), as that which « is laid under the sky » : hupo tô kosmô keimenê36. Knowledge being a predicate, since it is what we know and sometimes can say about things (which are the subject of this predication), like the world (kosmos) is a predicate, since it is the totality of the things we can have knowledge of, this means that knowledge needs the earth for being knowledge. And this is indeed what human societies have expressed, since times immemorial, in the ways they had to organize their settlements on the earth 37 ; e.g. , like the Romans when they founded a city, by projecting a templum (i.e. a part of the sky) on the land, and by calling mundus (= world = kosmos = sky = predicate = order) a sacred hole in the earth, relating the cosmological axes of the city (cardo and decumanus, respectively NS and EW) to the pivot (cardo) of the sky, i.e. the polar star. Thus, by dint of this coupling of earth and sky into a specific horizon, a new polity (civitas) was founded. Equating a singular hole (mundus) to the universal whole (mundus), the ground of the city was predicated into a mesocosm, corresponding to the macrocosm, and materializing human knowledge in the land itself. I.5. Is it Platonic after all ? In the same way, mundus and kosmos had also the meaning of making the human body beautiful and orderly, by dressing or painting (hence our cosmetics) or marking it, e.g. by circumcision or tattooing ; that is, by predicating it into a microcosm, corresponding to the meso- and the macrocosm. And this triple predication, materializing and embodying human knowledge, gave it ground and life. Sky, land and flesh were knowledge. That is, like the sky needs the earth in order to be the sky 38, the res cogitans needed the res extensa in order to cogitate, i.e. to be itself (as far as we can give credit to Descartes’ Cogito, ergo sum). This corresponds to what Heidegger, in Being and Time, has called « being outside oneself », Ausser-sich-sein. In other words, the place of our existence participates in our very being. Though Heidegger’s ontology refused Plato’s metaphysics, this is in fact, as far as the world (kosmos) is concerned, exactly what is meant in the Timaios when Plato says that the chôra is both the matrix39 and the imprint40 of relative being (genesis) ; i.e. that it is deeply fraught and pregnant with it, and reciprocally. Plato says also that we cannot have a clear knowledge of the chôra, since, as was said above, we can only « see it as in dreaming » (oneiropoloumen blepontes, 52 b 3). This verb, oneiropolein, is quite interesting. It comes from onar, dream, and polein, turn around a polos (pivot, pole). Like the chôra is both an imprint and a matrix of genesis, it can mean both to 34
On this terminology, see Robert BLANCHÉ and Jacques DUBUCS, La Logique et son histoire. Paris : Armand Colin, 1996 (1970), chap. II. 35 « The world is born : it is the sky, which is one and unique in its race ». 36 This expression can be found in Isocratês, quoted from Oratores attici, 78, in BAILLY, op. cit., art. kosmos, p. 1125. 37 See Alexandros-Ph. LAGOPOULOS, Urbanisme et sémiotique dans les sociétés préindustrielles. Paris : Anthropos, 1995. 38 This is probably what Heidegger, in The Origin of the Work of Art, has conceptualized as a « fight » (Streit) between world and earth : « World and earth are essentially different of each other, and yet never separate. The world is founded upon the earth, and the earth surges through the world », i.e. it is necessarily predicated by human existence. See Martin HEIDEGGER, Holzwege, 1949 ; p. 52 in the French translation Chemins qui ne mènent nulle part. Paris, Gallimard, 1962. 39 Mêtêr (mother), 50 d 2 ; tithênê (nurse), 52 d 4. 40 Ekmageion (wax support for imprints), 50 c 1.
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dream and to be dreamt. Yet it has a pivot, like the world has a polar star and the land of the Anangu has Uluru at its red centre : something which does not rove. A stable referent. Are there really stable referents to the roving of the human mind ? In the Greek heritage, starting with Pythagoras (VIth c. B.C.), the answer is : yes. Numbers. And since then, philosophy and science, conspicuously so with mathematics, have elaborated the ways to get there. That is, to attain the stable referent itself, not only to know a certain predicate of it. And history and experiment have shown, as a matter of fact, that this claim has some ground. Mathematics really seem to drive the human mind into the nature of things, beyond the phenomena of the sensible world. It is said for example that, in Newtonian cosmology, the discrepancy between calculation and actual facts was only 1/10 7 ; and that in our present Einsteinian cosmology, it has been reduced to a mere 1/1012. This « incredible efficiency of mathematics »41 in physics is in itself an enigma. Indeed, for mathematicians like Henri Poincaré (1854-1912), it is the human mind which constructs mathematical laws. That is, these laws are mental, not natural objects ; « the only natural object in mathematical thought is the whole number »42. In other words, we invent mathematics. Yet this conceptualist or constructionist thesis can strictly not explain why mathematics work in physics. So, there is another thesis, which dates back to Plato : the nature of things itself is ultimately mathematical ; and what our mind does is to progressively discover – not invent – its laws. That is, as Galileo professed, the real place of knowledge is in the Great Book of Nature itself. And it is the role of mathematics to go into the nature of what is written in this book. This interpretation may indeed explain how modern astrophysics differ from premodern cosmologies ; but in fact, it does not indicate at all where knowledge can be 43. It does not tell the place of the mathematical world, except that it links mysteriously the mental and the physical ones. This corresponds in fact exactly to Plato’s ontology, in which true knowledge refers to absolute Being, which transcends space and time, and therefore has no place. Indeed, a mathematician like Arthur Penrose, who advocates the discovery thesis against the invention thesis, explicitly speaks of a « Platonic world » of mathematical truth44. A world eternal and which, beyond things and mind, does not need a place in order to be. And though Penrose, notwithstanding, professes that the « three worlds » (the mental, physical and mathematical ones) are in fact only one world, this trinity/unity exceeds either calculation or sense. It cannot be knowledge. In such an interpretation, it becomes impossible to say, like Tao Yuanming did, that true meaning is in the sensible world ; and by the same token, the shadows of worldhood, which our existence implies and is implicated in, must be dissipated for us to have the knowledge of truth (alêtheia). There must be a-lêtheia : « un-veilment, dis-covery ». However, can we - while we necessarily have a place - satisfy ourselves with a knowledge referring to no place at all, that is, alien to us ? A truly universal knowledge ? Certainly not, if we are to stay humans ! Humans ? That is, not whole numbers but ex-sisting beings, in the genesis of ourselves in a given chôra.
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I borrow this expression from the title of Dominique Lambert’s article (itself alluding to a famous lecture given by Eugene Wigner in 1960) ‘L’Incroyable efficacité des mathématiques’ in the Jan. 1999 issue of La Recherche. 42 Poincaré, quoted in Roman IKONIKOFF, ‘Le Miroir intérieur de la réalité’, Science et Vie, 984 (Sept. 1999), p. 57. 43 Unless for those who confuse mathematical forms with substances (i.e. commit a magical hypostasis). See for instance, against such a confusion, Jean-François GAUTIER, L’Univers existe-t-il ? Arles : Actes Sud, 1994. 44 E.g. in his book (in the French translation) Les Ombres de l’esprit. À la recherche d’une science de la conscience. Paris : Interéditions, 1995, p. 406.
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II. Knowledge as a choresis II.1. Topos and chôra In the Timaios, Plato uses two terms for saying « place » : topos and chôra. Yet he does not use them in the same meaning45. Topos appears as only the physical location which any material being necessarily has. On the other hand, chôra appears as the set of relationships which enables beings to exist as what they are ; it is their ontological place in the world. This distinction foreshadows that which was made by Heidegger between Stelle and Ort in Bauen wohnen denken46. We can understand it more precisely if we refer to Aristotle’s definition (in his Physics, IV) of the topos as « a motionless vase »47 which is « the motionless immediate limit of the envelope »48 of a thing. This definition, in its turn, foreshadows the modern conception of place as the location of an object in an extensio defined by Cartesian co-ordinates. Aristotle’s conception of the topos has also much to do with the principle of identity, which founds his logic : A is not non-A. It means indeed two things. Firstly, that the identity or being of a thing cannot exceed its outer limit ; because if it did, it would have another topos and be another thing. Secondly, it separates the identity of a thing from that of its place ; because, since place is motionless whereas a thing can move, movement entails a change from one topos to another one, while the moving thing retains its identity or being. In other words, there is no ontological link between things and places ; and though Aristotle refuted Plato’s distinction between relative being (genesis) and absolute Being (on), his definition of place, in fact, together with Plato’s metaphysics - in which absolute Being needs no place -, paves the way to the modern dualistic disconnection of objects and places. That is, objects retain their identity in any possible location in space, which is absolute or universal, as Newton’s Principia Mathematica defined it and modern architecture applied it to this world. On the contrary, the notion of chôra implies that things, in the sensible world (kosmos), are situated in a « country » (Gegend in Heidegger’s vocabulary) ; that is, a set of ontological links which makes them ex-sist : exceed their topos. By the same token, this implies that place and existence in the world exceed Aristotelian logic (and consequently the claims of modern architecture), which can grasp only topos and on, not chôra and genesis. II.2 The ground of the world As we have seen above49, Nishida Kitarô (1870-1945) attempted to replace the Aristotelian principle of the identity of the subject – which founds the Western conception of rational inference and in particular the modern classical paradigm of science – by what he called the « logic of place » (basho no ronri) or « logic of the predicate » (jutsugo no ronri 述語の論
45
On this difference, see Jean-François PRADEAU, ‘Être quelque part, occuper une place. Topos et chôra dans le Timée’, Les Études philosophiques, 1995, 3, 375-400. 46 « Building, inhabiting, thinking » (1951). French translation in Essais et conférences, Paris : Gallimard, 1958, p. 170-193. In Sein und Zeit (1927), Heidegger already makes a distinction between Stelle and Platz. For more comments, see Jacques DEWITTE, ‘Monde et espace. La question de la spatialité chez Heidegger’, p. 201-219 in the collective work Temps et espace. Brussels : Ousia, 1992. 47 Aggeion ametakinêton, 212 a 15. 48 To tou periechontos peras akinêton prôton, 212 a 20. 49 I.4. For a recent discussion of this question in Western languages, see Augustin BERQUE, ed. Logique du lieu et dépassement de la modernité. Brussels : Ousia, 2000, 2 vol.
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理 ). This amounts, as Nakamura Yujirô has shown50, to the « palaeologic » of metaphor, in which A becomes non-A. As a matter of fact, the predicate is not the subject ; and in that sense, it can be considered as non-A. When we say, for instance, « this is a dog », the predicate « a dog » is not the subject (this real dog) ; and we have the proof of this non-identity in the fact that the word « dog » does not bite, as a dog does. This means that predication is a metaphor, and that signs (notably words) are predicates, which tell us metaphorically what things are ; that is, by representing them in another topos than their actual one. Metaphorein means indeed « transporting to another place »51. For instance, the word « dog » can represent a dog where in fact there is none. For Nishida, the logic of place is that of worldhood (sekaisei 世 界 性 ). Indeed, the world is nothing else that the total set of predicates by dint of which we grasp reality. This includes not only what we say or think about things, but equally the ways we have to feel them and act upon them. So far, so good. However, as we have seen, Nishida absolutizes this logic ; and by doing so, he is wrong, because predicates cannot be about themselves. This impossibility has been proven by Gödel’s theorems of incompleteness and undecidability on both logical and mathematical grounds52. In a more intuitive way, one can say that the world must have a ground in order to be a world ; that is, if there is to be any predication or worldliness at all. This is what Heidegger implies when he says, in the Origin of the work of art, that the world and the earth need each other, though they are essentially different 53. The earth is the ground which makes the world be a world, and reciprocally : the world is that which makes the earth be an earth. We can understand here the earth as that which, in itself, cannot be predicated, though it exists as the earth because it is predicated as such by the world. Indeed, the earth is that subject (hupokeimenon) which, lying (hupokeimenê) under the sky, is predicated by it, since the sky (ouranos) is the world (kosmos), and the world is a predicate. And were not this relationship contradictory – if it was not a « fight » (Streit), as Heidegger says -, that is, if the world was not based on the earth though turning it into a predicate, there would be no world at all. Kosmos would remain chaos, because there would be no horizon, and there would be no meaning, because predicates would have no subjects to predicate, and signs nothing to say 54. By the same token, there would be knowledge of nothing ; that is, no knowledge at all. II.3. Cosmisation, somatisation, trajection Though philosophers, not poets, have established them, the above figures are metaphors. However, they have a long history in the human mind, and what they express metaphorically is a certain knowledge. Knowledge, anyhow, is by essence metaphorical, since it is not constituted by the things in their own place but by their representation somewhere else, in a place which we generally call the mind. What, then, do these metaphorical figures express, and how could they be formed ? 50
NAKAMURA Yûjirô, Nishida Kitarô. Tokyo : Iwanami Shoten, 1983. In modern Greek, buses and railways are metaforai. 52 As a matter of fact, Nishida’s absolutization of the predicate (i.e. the world) amounts to saying that a proposition can enunciate the consistency of the system to which it belongs ; which Gödel’s theorems have proven to be impossible. This consistency can be proven only from the outside of the system. These theorems infirm Nishida’s thesis as well as they infirm Derrida’s theory of différance ; because what they imply is that a predicate needs a subject outside of itself, and that a sign needs a referent which is not a sign, if this predicate or this sign are to be a predicate or a sign (that is, to say something). To put it more simply, both Nishida’s and Derrida’s theses amount to saying that the word « dog » can bite as a real dog, which is not true. 53 See above, note 38. 54 This also to say that substance (substantia, « that which stays under ») is as necessary to relation as the subject (« that which is thrown under », subjectum, or « that which is laid under », hupokeimenon) is necessary to the predicate ; and reciprocally : no substance if no relation, and no subject if no predicate. 51
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A first evidence is that these metaphors are not only cosmological – that is, speaking about the cosmos (= sky = world = predicate = order) and about its adverse entity the chaos -, they are intrinsically cosmic ; because what is working at their very core is nothing else than gravity. Gravity does not only make that things have a top and a bottom, and that matter is heavy ; it makes that there is an earth and a sky to begin with. As a matter of fact, today, we scientifically know that without gravity there would be neither matter nor universe ; but for a long, long time (as the Anangu would say), what people knew about that fact was only what geotaxy made them feel in their flesh : standing as a human being, with one’s head toward the sky and one’s feet on the earth, is not the same as crawling on the ground. And they expressed metaphorically that cosmic principle in their cosmologies, including the very nature of words like « subject », « substance », etc. Even concepts which – lightly enough – contradict this cosmic principle, like mukitei, signifiant flottant, fuyûtai 浮 遊 体 55 and other metabasic rovings of the mind, do nothing more than express it a contrario. Human mind – the place in which such unconscious awareness becomes conscious cosmologies and concepts -, in that way, relies on geotaxy. That is to say, as Lakoff and Johnson have shown on the grounds of cognitive science, that meaning is founded in the body through chains of « primary metaphors », which « are cross-domain mapping, from a source domain (the sensori-motor domain) to a target domain (the domain of subjective experience) »56. Now, the same authors add that « the source domain [is] in predicate nominal position » and « the target domain in subject position »57 ; and earlier, Merleau-Ponty had shown that corporéité (bodyhood) works in such a way that reality, around us, is chargé de prédicats anthropologiques58. Thus, it appears that subject and predicate interfere in the interplay of environment, body and mind. What predicates the other two terms in one sense (making them its subjects) is predicated in another sense, and becomes a subject – in other words, it is determined by one or the other of the other two terms. For example, if my physical environment becomes too cold, it predicates me into death ; and when I say « I think, therefore I am », I predicate the other two terms into objects, while my cultural environment predicates me into thinking that way. This means, for what concerns our present matter, that there are different levels working together in different ways to produce human knowledge, starting with the fundamental forces of the universe to end with our latest individual speculations in all kinds of domains. Yet all these levels have in common that, in some way or other, they converge in our body, which is the focus of that predication or cosmisation (making-of-our-world). This means also that if our body is such a focus, and thus can express this cosmisation through words and other symbols which constitute our knowledge, bodyhood, and consequently knowledge, is not limited to this topos ; that is, to our animal envelope or skin. This is only, as Aristotle could have put it, the peras akinêton prôton59 of knowledge, which in fact needs also a chôra. It needs even more than an extended phenotype, which many animals have60. This is 55
« Deriving body », in contemporary Japanese architecture, a figure much influenced by Derrida’s floating signifiers. 56 George LAKOFF and Mark JOHNSON, Philosophy in the Flesh. The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. New York : Basic Books, 1999, p. 58. 57 Ibid. 58 « Charged with anthropological predicates ». Maurice MERLEAU-PONTY, Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris : Gallimard, 1945, p. 370. 59 « First motionless limit ». See above, note 47. 60 See Richard DAWKINS, The extended phenotype. The long reach of the gene. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982. The phenotype is « the manifested attributes of an organism, the joint product of its genes and their environment during ontogeny. (…). In this book the concept of phenotype is extended to include functionally important consequences of gene differences, outside the bodies in which the genes sit » (1999 ed., p. 299). For
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because human bodyhood, as Leroi-Gourhan has shown61, adds to its individual animal body a social body constituted by technical and symbolic systems, without which not only would humans not be able to live, but their primate ancestors would not even have evolved into Homo62. I have called trajection63 (tsûtaisei 通態性) this excession, by our human bodyhood, of its animal topos. It is not only an exteriorization of the initial functions of the animal body, as Leroi-Gourhan saw the social body ; because if technical systems, indeed, extend these functions into our world, symbolic systems, on the contrary, are that which brings back the world into our body, and by so doing make it a flesh (chair, mi 身 ). Technics cosmise the body, and symbols somatise the world. In other words, technics predicate the body into a world, and symbols subjectivate the world into a mind, while the body and the mind predicate each other and the environment at different levels. This is the paradoxical condition of the human, that being which is both predicate and subject of itself. When I say « I », I predicate my own being as « I » ; which is to say that I am at the same time a subject (myself) and a predicate (« I »). And this is because I have returned the symbolic system of words – an aspect of my world, i.e. a predicate – into myself. This makes me a subject in both the logical (shudai 主題) and the ontological sense (shukan 主観), both the source and the target of the predication-subjectivation which makes me a « person » - a word which comes from the Latin persona, mask. In that sense, as Rimbaud perceived when he wrote « Je est un autre »64, consciousness is a mask which predicates the unconscious (its earth) into its own order (= kosmos = world), in that Streit65 which we call « personality ». Yet if I can be such a person or mask, it is because I am a bodyhood to begin with, cosmising (predicating) itself into my world and somatising (subjectivating) my world into myself. Therefore I exist (ex-sisto66, bin ausser mir67, soto ni dete iru 外に出ている68) : I am both inside and outside of myself. And so is my knowledge. By the same token, trajection - this pulsation (going out and coming in) of human existence - makes that the things of our world are neither mere objects standing out there, nor mere subjective representations of such objects in our minds ; they are trajective, inbetween the subjective and the objective. It is in this sense that human ex-sistence is, concretely, a « being-outside-of-oneself » (Ausser-sich-sein)69 in a human milieu (fûdo 風土) ; and it is this trajection which constitutes, historically, the « structural moment of human existence » (ningen sonzai no kôzô keiki 人間存在の構造契機)70, as Watsuji defined fûdosei 風土性 (mediance)71 : because being human is to reside « half » (medietas in Latin, hence médiance) example, the extended phenotype of the bee is its hive. 61 André LEROI-GOURHAN, Le Geste et la parole, Paris : Albin Michel, 1964, 2 vol. 62 Leroi-Gourhan’s theory was primarily founded on palaeoanthropological data, correlating the transformations of the body with the progressive exteriorisation of its functions into technical and symbolic systems. 63 From the Latin trajectio : going beyond. I have introduced this notion in Le Sauvage et l’artifice. Paris : Gallimard, 1986 (Japan : Nature, Artifice and Japanese Culture, Yelvertoft Manor, Northamptonshire : Pilkington, 1997 ; Fûdo no Nihon. Shizen to bunka no tsûtai. Tokyo, Chikuma Shobo, 1988). For a broader theoretical frame, see my Écoumène, op. cit. 64 « I is another one ». 65 « Fight » ; see above, note 38. 66 Same sense (this is Latin, referring to etymology). 67 Same sense (this is German, alluding to Heidegger). See below, note 69. 68 Same sense (this is Japanese, alluding to Watsuji). See below, note 69. 69 Heidegger’s concept, argumented in Sein und Zeit. WATSUJI Tetsuro translated it as soto ni dete iru in Fûdo, Tokyo : Iwanami, 1935. The word fûdo can be translated as « human milieu », or simply « milieu » as far as human beings are concerned. 70 Watsuji’s definition of his concept of fûdosei, in the first line of Fûdo, op. cit. 71 I proposed this translation of fûdosei in Le Sauvage et l’artifice, op. cit., since I translated fûdo with milieu (same root med-, meaning « mid » or « amid »). Combining in that way a logic of the identity of the predicate
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in the topos of an individual body, and « half » in the chôra of a common milieu. Therefore, knowledge – the consciousness we have of our world – is an expression of that structural moment of our existence, mediance ; it is medial72. II.4. Concreteness, topicity and choresis Trajection exceeds in fact two topoi : that of the individual human body, and that of the individual object. It links these two topoi into a chôra, in a process which makes the former a person, and the latter a thing. This corresponds to Watsuji’s conception of the human (ningen 人間 ) as a relationship (aidagara 間柄 )73, and to Heidegger’s conception of the thing as a meeting (the etymological sense of the word Ding)74. On the other hand, trajection would not be possible if thing or person had not their respective topos. Persons need an animal body, and things need a substance if they are to meet anything at all. This is to say that topos and chôra - a physical location and the milieu in which trajection takes place - are both necessary to the concreteness of things and persons. I have called topicity (topicité, honshosei 本所性) and choresis (chorésie, bashoka 場所化) these two aspects of the concreteness of things and persons75. « Concreteness » comes from the Latin cum-crescere : « grow together ». It is properly the genesis of reality, in which environment, body and mind grow together into a certain chôra, while retaining their respective topoi. Choresis is the process of that « making of a place », that of ex-sistence into a concrete milieu on the earth. This concreteness, implying necessarily the physical dimension of topicity, is that in which choresis differs from mere predication. It is that in which the ecumene (the total combination of human milieux, i.e. the milieu of Humankind) differs from the world. This is to say that choresis cannot be reduced to worldhood. It necessarily comprises earthliness, in its identity and non-predicability; that is, its topicity. In that sense, this concept is radically alien to metabasism. In the relation of choresis to topicity, the earth cannot be capsized into the sky, and the subject (hupokeimenon) cannot be subsumed into the predicate. The earth is and remains hupokeimenê. And this cosmic (not only cosmologic) principle cannot be overturned, though humans, and particularly so philosophers, are prone not to look at their feet and thus to fall into that hole, the mundus76. Conclusion : in the mediate data of the unconscious (lgP) and a logic of the identity of the subject (lgS), mediance can be represented by the following formula : (lgS/lgP)/(lgP/lgS), in which lgS/lgP is the thing and lgP/lgS is the human subject. See Écoumène, op. cit. 72 Medial (« pertaining to a certain milieu ») comes from the same root –med as mediance and milieu. 73 Ningen is thus distinguished from hito (Homo without the socialness which makes it human). See WATSUJI Tetsuro, Fûdo and more specifically Ningen no gaku toshite no rinrigaku. Tokyo : Iwanami Zensho, 1934. 74 Martin HEIDEGGER, Das Ding (1950), transl. ‘La Chose’ in Essais et conférences. Paris : Gallimard, 1958, p. 194-223. 75 I have introduced these notions in Le Sauvage et l’artifice (op. cit.) and more specifically in ‘Chorésie’, Cahiers de géographie du Québec, 42 (1998), 117, 437-448. 76 We can compare to a mundus the imperial palace precincts (kôkyo) at the centre of Tokyo, and it can be said that Nishida’s assimilation of the imperial regime to an absolute basho (i.e. the world) was to fall into that particular mundus ; exactly like, more recently, did Prime Minister MORI Yoshio when he said that Japan was « the Land of Gods, with the Emperor at its centre » (Tennô wo chûshin ni shita Kami no Kuni). On Nishida’s political stance, see Pierre LAVELLE, ‘Nishida, l’École de Kyôto et l’ultranationalisme’, Revue philosophique de Louvain, XCXII, 4 (Nov. 1994) ; and for more discussions, James W. HEISIG and John C. MARALDO, ed. Rude Awakwenings : Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism. Honolulu, the University of Hawaii Press, 1994. On Mr Mori’s declaration, see Asahi Evening News, 2 June 2000, p. 1-2.
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Human systems of signs, like Nishida’s conception of the historic world (rekishi sekai 歴史世 界) producing itself, or Derrida’s signifiers floating freely in their différance, tend to develop according to their own predicative logic, and thus to absolutize themselves. This is the worldhood of mundus, in which the singular tends to subsume the universal, the predicate to subsume its subject, and by doing so capsizes the earth (hupokeimenê = hupokeimenon = subject = substance) into the sky (ouranos = kosmos = mundus = world = predicate = sign). It is the proper movement of creed (including scientism), fashion (including paradigms), economic bubbles, ethnocentrism, nationalism and fanaticisms of any kind. Knowledge, which is about things and not only about the signs of things, cannot be reduced to this mere predicativity ; because, in the reality of the ecumene, a mundus has to be bored into the ground, and the sky is above the horizon while the earth is below. This is the necessary topicity of knowledge. It has a ground in the substance of things, that of our body to begin with, and that of the universe to end with. For the same reason, it has a ground in the unconscious ; which is to say that it can never be totally objective. On the other hand, knowledge cannot be reduced to this topicity, because it is a predication about things, which makes them our world ; and this is to say that knowledge cannot be universal. A world is not the universe. By the same token, this is the double limit of science : in that it is about objects (it is not the things themselves), and in that it is about objects (not things). That is, though science is more objective and correlatively more universal than any other form of knowledge, it cannot grasp human reality77, which is trajective, not objective. Thus knowledge lies, at some degree of choresis, in the structural moment of human existence : our mediance, which is neither the pure universality of objectiveness, nor the pure worldhood of subjectiveness. « At some degree of choresis », this means that the place of knowledge is our bodyhood-worldhood. That is, knowledge is not only in the topos of our brain within our animal body ; it is also in that historical and situational « half » of our being which is constituted by our technical and symbolic systems, while being anchored in the real, as what is for us reality, in our physical and social environment (e.g. data banks, libraries and librarians, cities, countries etc.). Needless to say, this medial half of our being is not directly accessible to our individual consciousness ; it is necessarily, as we have seen (II.3), determined and predicated, that is, mediated by our body and mind. In that sense, knowledge is in the mediate data of the unconscious78, and in that way, of the universe. Just like dreaming the Tjukurrpa is to rove on the earth itself. Sendai, 11 December 2000.
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Let us remind that one of the translations which were initially proposed in French for Heidegger’s Dasein was « la réalité humaine ». On this topic, see François Vezin’s comments at the end of his translation of Sein und Zeit : Être et Temps. Paris, Gallimard, 1987. 78 This is an intentional allusion to Henri BERGSON, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1982 (1888).