1. Oratores attici, 78.

2. This is recognizably related to the theory of André Leroi-Gourhan, Le Geste et la parole, Paris, Albin Michel, 1964, 2 vols, which links hominization to the development of technical and symbolic systems by the externalization of animal body functions. On the generation and ontology of the ecumenal relationship see my book Ecoumène. Introduction à l’étude des milieux humains, Paris, Belin, 2000.

3. I am indebted for this idea to my reading of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, New York, Basic Books, 1999. However, the idea of ‘prime metaphor’ occurred to me from the combination of this and Leroi-Gourhan; it is something more fundamental than the ‘primary metaphors’ mentioned by these two authors.

4. To quote the crucial passage in this regard: ‘That whither the work withdraws, and what it draws out by this withdrawal, we have named the earth. It is that which, emerging, takes back within itself (das Hervorkommend-Bergende). The earth is the tireless, indefatigable flow of what is there for nothing. On the earth and in it historial man bases his sojourn in the world. Bringing a world into existence, the work brings forth the earth (Indem das Werk eine Welt aufstellt, stellt es die Erde her). This bringing-forth should be thought of in a strict sense. The work carries and maintains the earth itself in the opening of a world. The work liberates the earth so that it can be a world … World and earth are essentially different from each other, and yet never separate. The world is based in the earth, and the earth emerges through the world.’ Martin Heidegger (from the French translation by Wolfgang Brokmeier), Chemins qui ne mènent nulle part, Paris, Gallimard, 1962 [1949], pp. 49-50, 52.

5. An image borrowed from Gilbert Durand, Introduction à la mythodologie, Paris, Albin Michel, 1996, who stigmatizes (p. 78) ‘the inadequacies, dead-ends, failures, ethical bankruptcy of the fragmented, monocephalous human sciences, deluded by the non-sense of semiotics and the arbitrary nature of the signifier’.

6. Scientists (including social scientists) love presenting reality as ‘paradoxical’ and contrasting it with the illusions of popular opinion (doxa). This attitude is entirely Platonic; its most striking illustration was the Copernican revolution. We should note that among Heidegger's followers a distinction is made between the historial (relative to history experienced according to a world, geschichtlich) and the historical (relative to history as established by historiographic science, historisch). Personally I use historical for everything, since the plurality of worlds is in fact the result of objective history, and what is experienced is so in the present, in the ecumenal relation (in this respect I take the same attitude as Watsuji, whose critique of Heideggerian temporalism will be mentioned later).

7. Which means that the physicist's object is simply the logician's subject: S. By reducing S (which is only as it is relative to P) to an object existing in and of itself, the vision of physics performs an operation that is the reverse of the founding metaphor of the ecumene's worlds: it ‘reduces on this side’ instead of ‘carrying beyond’ (meta-pherô). So in relation to r (i.e. S/P) the reduction R = S is the mirror image of the common metaphor S = P. While the latter mythically makes reality into what we say it is, the reductionism of physics, by eliminating the matter of P, illusorily absolutizes an inhuman truth that ignores the human truth of the ecumene and history. Indeed it is here, insofar as it rests on physics, that modernity reaches its impasse: it cannot take account of the very principle of the human. In other words it reduces the world to a mechanical system, whereas the symbolism inherent in it stems from the metaphor S (for example, this thing) = P (for example, this word).

8. This term is in general use only in law and psychoanalysis with meanings peculiar to them. I use it here in its primary sense: to put outside (foris) and close the door (claudere), an equivalent of the English ‘lockout’. To exoticize reality compared with feeling, by the abstraction that reduces S to an object in and of itself, is to commit this kind of act, putting truth out of the reach of our existence as indigenous peoples. Thus there is a structural lack of truth in the modern world.

9. In the context of Newtonian cosmology the margin of error of physics was already around 1/10⁶; in the context of Einstein's cosmology it was reduced to 1/10¹² (a thousandth of a billionth). Insofar as a world, by definition, assumes a cosmology, and unless we opt deliberately for error (and so abandon all our technology), tomorrow's world can only rely on today's technology. Nevertheless - is it necessary to spell it out? - this precision of modern physics applies only to objects (i.e. S abstracted from its structural relationship to P). It ignores human existence and cannot take account of the symbolism inherent in the ecumene as well as history (see above, note 7). So though it is an essential element of our vision of the world, scientific cosmology is not by any means sufficient for it (it can be sufficient only for scientistic reductionism).

10. For a recent overview of these questions, see Augustin Berque (ed.), Logique du lieu et dépassement de la modernité, 2 vols, Brussels, Ousia, 2000; also Augustin Berque and Philippe Nys (eds), Logique du lieu et oeuvre humaine, Brussels, Ousia, 1997. I have detailed my personal views in Ecoumène (2000, op. cit.) as well as ‘La logique du lieu dépasse-t-elle la modernité’ and ‘Du prédicat sans base: entre mundus et baburu, la modernité’, pp. 41-51 and 52-61 in Livia Monnet (ed.), Approches critiques de la pensée japonaise du XXe siècle, Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 2001. Nishida himself developed his ideas on the logic of place mainly in two books: Basho (Place, 1927) and Bashoteki ronri to shûkyôteki sekaikan (Logic of Place and Religious Worldview, 1945) reprinted respectively in vols IV and XI of his complete works: Nishida Kitarô Zenshû, Tokyo, Iwanami Shoten, 1966 (from here on, NKZ).

11. The same observation of course applies to the God of the Bible: if God creates Man in his image, he supposes Man to be what he is: God. Being absolute Substance, God is in theory unpredicatable; the fact that he is predicated by the human image relativizes him. The same aporia applies to the absolutization of the object in the modern paradigm, which in this respect emerges from the combination of Plato's metaphysics, Aristotle's logic and Christianity.

12. I quote some characteristic passages (my translation into French): ‘The historical world is formed from itself (jiko jishin wo keisei suru) self-formatively (jikokeiseiteki), as willing active being (ishi sayôteki u to shite)’, NKZ, XI, p. 391; ‘The world … this does not mean a world opposed to our ego. It is no different from what wishes to express the absolute being-in-its-place (zettai no bashoteki u wo arawasô to suru), that is why it might be said it is the absolute (zettaisha)’, NKZ, XI, p. 403; ‘That it may comprise indefinitely this self-negation (jiko hitei), that is precisely the reason why the world exists of and by itself (sore jishin ni yotte ari), moves by itself, and why it can be seen as absolute existence (zettaiteki jitsuzai)’, NKZ, XI, p. 457. And in this baseless world, ‘by contradictory self-identity of what creates with what is created’ (tsukurareta mono kara tsukuru mono e to mujunteki jiko dôitsuteki ni: NKZ, XI, p. 391), ‘all things determine themselves without basis (mukiteiteki ni jiko jishin wo gentei suru), that is to say that they take their peculiar being from their very self-determination’, NKZ, XI, p. 390.

13. On the connection between the Kyôto school and nationalism, see James Heisig and John Maraldo (eds) Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School and the Question of Nationalism, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1994; and more especially Pierre Lavelle, ‘Nishida, l’École de Kyôto et l'ultranational-isme’, Revue philosophique de Louvain, XCXII (1994), 4. However, these studies do not show what I believe to be the intrinsic link between the logic of place and the absolute ethnocentrism represented by Nishida's political choice; on this point see my position in Ecoumène, 2000, op. cit.

14. Fortunately there are a few exceptions! I am thinking, for instance, of the work by Bernard Stevens at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve. And it has been suggested by some, and supported in particular by Reinhard May, Ex oriente lux: Heideggers Werk unter ostasiatischem Einfluss, Stuttgart, Steiner Verlag, 1989, that the greatest 20th-century European philosopher was inspired, but did not say so, by Nishida's thought, with which he became acquainted indirectly through Japanese colleagues spending time in Germany. Personally I think light is thrown on the enigmatic ‘dispute’ between the Earth and the World in The Origin of the Work of Art if it is compared with the relationship between subject (= hupokeimenon = substance = base = Earth) and predicate (= World = kosmos = sky = Void - which in Japanese is written with the ideogram ‘sky’- = nothingness); see my article ‘L'Art, et la terre sous le ciel’, Art press, 2001, 22 (Ecosystèmes du monde de l'art), pp. 8-12. However, in Heidegger's thinking the withdrawal of the Earth into itself has no connection with the subject's absorption into the predicate, according to Nishida. It will be understood that in this matter I side with Heidegger.

15. The first translation of Fûdo into a western language, the one that was made under UNESCO auspices by Geoffrey Bownas in 1961 (reissued under the title Climate and Culture: A Philosophical Study, New York, Greenwood Press, 1988), rendered the term as ‘climate’. Though there are reasons for this put forward by Watsuji himself (who refers to the German Klima in Herder), the context of Bownas's translation - which is not faithful or consistent - makes the philosophical intention that Watsuji expresses with fûdo incomprehensible in ‘climate’. The translation into German by Dora Fischer-Barnicol and Okochi Ryôgi (Fûdo - Wind und Erde. Der Zusammenhang zwischen Klima und Kultur, Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1992) is qualitatively far superior. I myself have translated into French the crucial theoretical chapter from Fûdo in Philosophie, 51 (1996), pp. 3-30; as well as another substantial extract: ‘Sabaku (Désert) de Watsuji Tetsurô’, in the journal Ebisu (Maison franco-japonaise, Tokyo), 29, 7-26. As for Watsuji's original text, which has been reissued many times, it is currently available in the paperback collection Iwanami Bunko (Tokyo).

16. On this matter the article by Ohashi Ryôsuke could usefully be read: ‘Le vent comme notion de culture au Japon’, pp. 257-74, in A. Berque and P. Nys (eds), Logique du lieu et oeuvre humaine, 1997, op. cit.

17. That is, a power of movement as in mechanics; an idea that Watsuji gets partly from the use of Moment in German philosophy, especially in Hegel's work.

18. As Watsuji himself writes in the Preamble to Fûdo (pp. 1 and 2 in the edition mentioned above; my translation): ‘Personally I started to think about the problem of mediance (fûdosei) in the early summer of 1927 in Berlin, when I was reading Heidegger's Being and Time. I found this attempt to apprehend as temporality the structure of being of humans (ningen no sonzai) extremely interesting. However, I wondered why this foregrounding of temporality as the structure of subjectal being (shutaiteki sonzai kôzô [shutaiteki: “subjectal”, i.e. relative to subjectness, the quality of subject, is different from shukanteki: subjective, i.e. due to a subjective view]) was not paralleled by a stress on spatiality, also as the basic structure of being. Granted, even in Heidegger spatiality is not completely absent. Here German Romanticism's “living nature” appears to re-emerge in the observation of concrete space in human existence (hito no sonzai). But it is scarcely perceptible under the powerful light of temporality. It felt that this was the boundary of Heidegger's work. A temporality that is not rooted in spatiality is not yet truly temporality. If Heidegger stopped there it was because in the end his Dasein was only an individual (kojin).’ As for me personally, I might have started to think about the problem of mediance in the middle of the summer of 1969 in Tokyo, when I was reading Watsuji's Fûdo; but at the time I approached it through the English translation, which put me off, since it simply showed me an argument for geographical determinism. Bownas did not even take the trouble to give a consistent translation for the central concept of fûdosei (which he renders by various words or phrases, depending on the context), or to make the link between Watsuji's purpose and Heidegger's ontology, since without an allusion to this Fûdo is incomprehensible … and indeed not understood by most of its commentators, who only grasp from it an environmental determinism explicitly dismissed by Watsuji from the very first page. Indeed Fûdo opens with these lines (my translation): ‘What this book aims to do is elucidate mediance (fûdosei) as a structural moment in human existence (ningen sonzai no kôzô keiki). So we are not dealing here with how the natural environment (shizen kankyô) governs human life. What we normally understand by “natural environment” is a thing that has been extracted by objectivization from human mediance, its concrete ground (gutaiteki jiban). When we consider its relationship with human life, this too is already itself objectivized. Thus this viewpoint involves looking at the relation between two objects; it does not concern the subjecthood of human existence (human existence as subject). Our question deals with this. Even if we are continually asking questions here about medial phenomena (fûdoteki [which means: relative to milieux and mediance]), it is as expressions of human existence as subject, not as natural environment. I reject in advance any confusion in this respect.’ It was only 10 or so years later, when I had read Fûdo in the original, that I began to think seriously about the topic, and only in 1985, in Tokyo again, that I came to translate fûdo as milieu and fûdosei as médiance. On this work of gestation, see my book Japan: Nature, Artifice and Japanese Culture, Yelvertoft Manor, Pilkington Press, 1997 [1986]. And I had to read Sein und Zeit and Le Geste et la parole (in other words repeat Watsuji's journey to Europe half a century on), without mentioning Nishida, in order to reach my present conception of mediance and the ecumene.

19. See above, Note 2. Though he visited Japan before the war (to carry out ethnographic research in Hokkaidô), Leroi-Gourhan had not read Watsuji, nor does he refer to the notion of Ausser-sich-sein (being-outside-oneself) in Heidegger. His viewpoint has no connection with the latter's hermeneutic phenomenology. As for the most eminent of our Heidegger experts, they do not even know Watsuji's name and have not taken anything from Leroi-Gourhan's exteriorization theory.

20. Since human milieux are not only technical and symbolic (that is the World) but also ecological (that is, linking the World with the Earth, and thus ecumenal), I am referring here to the medial body and not merely the social body like Leroi-Gourhan.

21. As Watsuji writes (op. cit., p. 26; my translation): ‘Fundamentally the nature of our existence is not only to be charged [with a milieu and a past], it is freedom too. While already being, it anticipates its being, and while being charged, it is free. In this can be seen the historicity of our existence.

Nevertheless this historicity corresponds to a mediance; and if, as a result, our charge is not only a past, but consists of a milieu as well, medial regulation (fûdoteki kitei [which is radically different from kankyôteki kettei, environmental determination]) must also confer a certain character on the free actions of humans.’

22. That is, beyond the pre-modern subsuming of the subject in the predicate, but also beyond the modern separation between the subjective and the objective (which, as we have seen, illusorily ignores P by absolutizing S as an object in itself), assuming trajective reason as solely capable of taking account of the fact that human truth, the ecumene and history are S / P. This trajective reason combines the logic of the subject's identity (lgS) and the logic of the predicate (lgP). From this viewpoint mediance (the structural moment of human existence) may be represented by the formula (lgS / lgP) / (lgP / lgS), bearing in mind that the nature of humans is to be subject predicate of oneself. This topic is discussed in detail and illustrated with concrete examples in Ecoumène, 2000, op. cit.; I summarize it in my articles ‘Raison trajective et dépassement de la modernité. En hommage à Nakamura Yûjirô’ [Nakamura is the Japanese philosopher who, in Nishida Kitarô, Tokyo, Iwanami Shoten, 1983, demonstrated the metaphorical essence of the logic of the predicate], Tokyo, Nichi-Futsu tetsugak-kai, Furansu tetsugaku shisô kenkyû / Revue de philosophie française, V (2000), pp. 29-48, and ‘Tsûtaiteki risei to kindai no chôkoku’ [Trajective reason and going beyond modernity], Sendai, Nihon genshôgak-kai, Genshôgaku nenpô, XVI (2000), pp. 83-98.

23. By absolutizing S as an object in itself, the modern view produces a world without symbolism, that is, an increasingly mechanical one. In the market absolutism that currently rules us, ‘the invisible hand of the market’ (which is assumed to be purely objective) symbolizes this mechanicity; and this, by virtue of the fact that technical systems are inherently human (see above, preliminary and XIth sections), affects humans and transforms them into Cyborgs: beings mechanized by their mechanical world. Market absolutism is thus a machine absolutism based on the absolutization of S as object. On this topic, its relationship with fetishism and its expression in current trends towards reorganizing the ecumene (particularly its determination by the development of the system of objects of the automobile), see my articles ‘Cybèle et Cyborg: les échelles de l’écoumène’, Urbanisme, 314 (September-October 2000), pp. 40-2, also more especially ‘On the Chinese origins of Cyborg's hermitage in the absolute market’ and ‘Research on the history of disurbanity - Hypotheses and first data’, pp. 26-32 and 33-41 in Gijs Wallis de Vries and Wim Nijenhuis (eds) The Global City and the Territory: History, Theory, Critique, Eindhoven, Eindhoven University of Technology, 2001, and ‘L'habitat insoutenable’, L'espace géographique, XXXI (2002), 3, 241-51.