During the past ten or twenty years this question has begun to concern a great many thinkers. The interest which it holds for our time is not only of an academic order. The vigorous growth of various forms of teaching of translation and interpreting; and the setting under way of gigantic programs of translation by electronic machines (to cite only two “spectacular” facts) illustrate its practical importance.

Ever since there have been paintings and they have been framed, it is somewhat surprising that no serious research has ever been undertaken on the problem of the frame. To be sure, some scholars have published studies on the different types of frames employed, particularly in Europe during the last centuries; they have classified them according to certain criteria and traced out their variations through various epochs and countries. But the principal question has been avoided: why the frame? Perhaps because it is not capable of being answered; perhaps because located at the limits of esthetics, at the border between painting and furniture, it is considered to have lesser importance in comparison with theories of the visual arts, which have particularly drawn the attention of historians and art critics, not to mention essays full of good will by amateurs in the mood for writing.

It has been asserted that the African family is the “most significant feature of African society” and its “central institution.” (Phillips, 1953, p. ix) It has further been pointed out that African marriage is far more than a contract between two individuals but also represents the establishment of a link between two kinship groups. In this respect the payment of some type of wealth is an important part in the forging of a bond between the two kinship groups. Students of African sociology have paid great attention to the payment of cattle or money or other commodities as, perhaps, the most important aspect of the marriage contract. Not only has there been much discussion as to the best definition of this process but until relatively recently the exact significance of the “bride price” has not been too clearly understood. In part this was due to the fact that the wider implications of this aspect of the marriage contract were not understood. There was a tendency to view the payment of “bride price” as the key to the contractual relationship. We now know that this is not the case: in addition to the “bride price”—which is far more than simple barter-—other and equally important points of contact are established in ritual and economic and social affairs. In other words, marriage in African society is very much an integral part of the functioning of society as a whole. At one and the same time it establishes points of conflict and tension which are ritualized by a wide variety of sanctions, and leads to strengthening of the whole fabric of the society.

It is now almost two centuries since James Cook discovered the oikoumene, and fifty years since explorers planted their flags at the Poles. Clio has marched more cautiously. Historians, those sons of Herodotus, have only slowly rounded off his domain. The textbooks of my childhood remained confined to the Mediterranean and the “little promontory” of Europe, as at the times of Bossuet. I would not swear that they have progressed very much. If La Fontaine required two days to travel from Paris to Clamart, a single day suffices for us to reach the tip of Africa, and soon we will be able to circle the globe several times in eighty minutes. The earth is no more than a house and the antipodes are close neighbors. It is no longer enough, therefore, to know only oneself and one's own history.

In recent years it has frequently been pointed out that one of the salient characteristics of contemporary art, that is, abstraction, is the fact that it is not bounded by local traditions or cultures, but has rapidly affirmed itself and spread throughout the civilized world. This phenomenon, the international quality of abstraction, it seems to me, has not yet received the attention it deserves. In general, people have contented themselves with noticing it and, according to the circumstances, either enjoying or mistrusting it. Those who see in abstraction an elevated form of culture, to which the entire human race should adhere in order to achieve a rapid ascent toward a higher common destiny, are pleased. Their opponents also judge the phenomenon from a “cultural” point of view, but they find it a typical phenomenon of mass culture, of the sort of culture that breaks up true and proper culture into utilitarian and demonically hypnotic forms. Both optimists and pessimists make the same mistake: they attribute a merely mechanistic significance to what they call culture, considering it a means of transmission and diffusion. According to them, the internationalization of abstraction is due to the simple fact that today, with television, radio, airplanes and illustrated papers, ideas and novelties travel more quickly than in the past. It would be as valid to maintain that the people of the earth have not all in turn been simultaneously Platonists or Buddhists or Christians only because Plato and Buddha and Christ could not send telegrams or grant interviews to newspapers.

The rise of numerous African states to independence and participation in international organizations is only a moment—undoubtedly a very powerful moment—in the extraordinary process of historical acceleration which our epoch has both the misfortune and privilege of witnessing. Future historians will very likely determine that the true revolution of the 20th century was not the Russian revolution or the nuclear revolution. Infinitely more important for the destiny of mankind and civilization is the fact that, for the first time since the beginnings of the human race, the great majority of men have the right and possibility to intervene actively in the consideration of world affairs. This sudden evolutionary leap can only be compared with what happened when our Germanic ancestors, fifteen centuries ago, seized from the Roman empire its hitherto uncontested supremacy. One must go back to the 5th century of our era to find an occurrence equally capable of exercising on the future of the human race and the evolution of civilization, consequences as wide and as deep as those which the events we are witnessing today will undoubtedly have. For these new-risen peoples, if only by force of numbers, are inevitably summoned to take not only their own destiny into their hands, but also—and perhaps sooner than is imagined—the destiny of the globe.

Serious intellectuals in Japan have been concerned with problems of tradition and modernization not only in the postwar period but at least as far back as the Meiji Restoration, although it is true that in each period the problems were viewed in different ways. The issue of tradition and modernization is not peculiar to Japan. However, there are sufficient reasons for the fact that this issue has been and is being conspicuously argued among the Japanese.

Forms are produced, it seems to me, by chance, by growth, by design or by imprint. The curves of a pebble, the elusive architecture of clouds, flames, cascades, the cracks in dried-out soil are the result of a variety of causes, or if you like, a variety of interacting accidents, compromises between concurrent forces, balances, wear, or varying degrees of inertia. These, though perhaps calculable, are hardly worth calculating. For we know ahead of time that the final outcome must be arbitrary, depending as it does on thousands of successive and transitory rivalries. No significant phenomenon can result from such a series. Forms generated in this way are the outcome of an infinity of varied accidents, which are conjoined, composed or cancelled out in an unpredictable manner. They are like dream images, and sometimes, just as ravishing. No law presides at their formation, which obeys too many laws at once, and, what is more, laws unaccustomed to one another and brought together by accident. The origin of this kind of form is properly assigned to chance, though I am well aware that such forms owe their appearance to a welter of determining causes, each of them tyrannical in their separate domain. But the welter, though in the end determinant, is itself accidental.