human and social studies

HUMAN AND SOCIAL STUDIES

Journal edited by the “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iaşi, Romania

Human and Social Studies ISSN: 2285-5920 EDITOR IN CHIEFProf. dr. Tiberiu Brăilean, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iaşi, Romania

HONORARY EDITORS Prof. dr. Vasile Işan, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iasi, Romania Prof. dr. Basarab Nicolescu, International Center for Transdisciplinary Research, France

EXECUTIVE EDITORDr. Simona Mitroiu, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iaşi, Romania Editorial Assistants: Alina-Mihaela Bursuc, Oana Chisăliţă Designer: Aritia Poenaru SCIENTIFIC BOARD Prof. dr. Ştefan Afloroaei, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iasi, Romania; Prof. dr. Patrice Brasseur, University of Avignon, France; Prof. dr. Alexandru Călinescu, “Alexan-dru Ioan Cuza” University of Iasi, Romania; Prof. dr. Olivier Chantraine, Charles de Gaulle University - Lille III, France; Prof. dr. Valerius M. Ciucă, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iasi, Romania; Prof. dr. Vasile Cocriş, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iasi, Romania; Conf. dr. Pompiliu Crăciunescu, West University of Timişoara, Romania; Prof. dr. Carmen Creţu, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iaşi, Romania; Prof. dr. Ioan Dafinoiu, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iasi, Romania; Prof. dr. Daniel Dăianu, National School of Administrative and Political Studies, Bucureşti, Romania;Prof. dr. Nicu Gavriluţă, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iasi, Romania;Prof. dr. Astrid Guillaume, University of Paris Sorbonne (Paris IV), France; Prof. dr. Gheorghe Iacob, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iasi, Romania; Prof. dr. Maximiliano Korstanje, University of Palermo, Argentina; Prof. dr. Dumitru Luca, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iasi, Romania; Prof. dr. Thierry Magnin, Catholic University of Lyon, France;Prof. dr. Adrian-Constantin Marinescu, Ludwig Maximilians University Munich, Germany; Prof. dr. Simona Modreanu, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iaşi, Romania; Prof. dr. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, University of Montréal, Canada; Prof. dr. Ovidiu Pecican, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania; Prof. dr. LăcrămioaraPetrescu, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iaşi, Romania; Prof. dr. Florin Platon, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iasi, Romania; Prof. dr. Andrei Pleşu, University of Bucureşti, Romania; Prof. dr. pr. Ghoerghe Popa, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iasi, Romania; Prof. dr. Geoffrey Skoll, Buffalo State College, New York, U.S.A; Prof. dr. Virgil Stoica,“Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iasi, Romania.

Human and Social Studies

Vol. 1, No. 1 (2012)

Editor in Chief Tiberiu Brăilean

Editura Universităţii “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” Iaşi – 2012

Editorial Office Address: Department of Interdisciplinary Research in Social-Human Sciences, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iaşi,

Lascăr Catargi, nr. 54, 700107, Iaşi, Romania

© Editura Universităţii „Alexandru Ioan Cuza” 700109 – Iaşi, str. Pinului, nr. 1A, tel./fax: (0232) 314947

http://www.editura.uaic.ro e-mail: [email protected]

CONTENT HSS I.1 (2012) EDITORIALTiberiu Brăilean Knowledge for Life

7 IDEAS in AGORA Basarab Nicolescu Transdisciplinarity: the Hidden Third, Between the Subject and the Object

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Geoffrey R. SkollEthnography and Psychoanalysis

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Anda BrăileanEU’s Post-national Stake. Nationalism vs. Multiculturalism

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SIGNS and MEANINGS Jean-Jacques Nattiez Is the Search for Universals Incompatible with the Study of Cultural Specificity?

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Alina-Mihaela BursucSome Reflections on the Lexical Meaning

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JACOB’s LADDER Thierry Magnin Incompleteness and the Meaning of Mystery for Scientist and Theologian

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Christian TămaşPatterns of Modernity: Christianity, Occidentalism and Islam

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BOOK REVIEWS and PRESENTATIONS

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EDITORIAL HSS I.1 (2012) Knowledge for Life Tiberiu Brăilean Editor in Chief “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iasi, Romania [email protected]

This is a journal of ideas. It is extremely important to have our own ideas and to share them with other people. Consequently, this journal aims to be an open space that shelters fruitful exchanges of ideas and imparts forms of living knowledge (Indwelling). There are four paths towards knowledge: religion, philosophy, science and art, and we intend to welcome the “pilgrims” wandering on each of them, as the essential thing is to be on the way. Then, the path comes along with our steps while we walk. That is why we set up thematic structures for each path, besides authors’ presentations, reviews and cordial polemics.

But, as we conceived it, the journal may have special issues, directed by invited personalities and wholly devoted to special subjects. Although we prefer papers written in English, responding to ISI (Thomson-Reuters) requirements, we shall also accept papers written in other languages and even in Romanian, when there are prevailing arguments: for instance, specialized linguistic studies on a certain language, like French, or a personality-author who carries out a special issue on a philosophical topic, in German, for example.

The journal is like a baby, able to teach us again the innocence of being, after we have fumbled in the darkness of spiritual night, full of fears and extorted from the peace of unity, in search of the sense of life. The deep sight of the whole demarche is the intuition of unity, one that we lost in illo tempore, but that we can rediscover or at least approach, beyond the infinite multiplicity of exterior forms: we are built of the same DNA and we belong to the same Being. We aim at a superior knowledge, able to go beyond the “phenomenal” world and the modern epoch, trying to reunite with existence and eliminating contrasts between

Tiberiu Brăilean, Knowledge for Life HSS, vol. I, no. 1 (2012): 7-9

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subject and object, between Ego and non-Ego. These re-identifications should be experienced at all the conscience levels, from the pure thinking to the blind earthly limit, our ideal being to serve the virtues implied by the divine attributes: Good, Truth, Beauty, Justice etc.

We shall deeply encourage the papers that express an ethical concern. Preference will also be given to epistemological, ontological and gnoseological inter- and transdisciplinary approaches. The mental mechanisms that have reigned during the latest centuries are dying out, and our society has reached a critical threshold of representation. We are undergoing a metamorphosis, a passage to a new Weltanschauung, to a new type of civilization, that implies a Spirit regeneration, including a human spirit, under the power of the Absolute’s game. As “god alone can recognize a god”, like a Vedic saying asserts. In order to do this, new methods are also required, able to outrun the present plots and hyperspecializations, granting equal pertinence to man and to the community, trying to completely integrate the Man into a coherent representation of the world.

The journal appears under the honourable aegis of the “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iaşi, and we are grateful to its leaders. We also wish to thank the distinguished personalities who accepted to be part of the scientific board, or to become referents, and all the present or future collaborators, who honour us with papers, coming from distant countries, universities or research centres. As the journal belongs to the Social-Human Interdisciplinary Department of the University, professors and researchers from here are invited to publish. But the journal has a good international reputation and circulation, being diffused to all the partner universities and research centres, as well as to libraries and databases known all over the world. Last but not least, we thank our readers, whom we address with love into knowledge, for life, “from God, into God and God”, as beautifully preached Meister Eckhart.

Fulfilling success to everybody!

Biographical Note Tiberiu Brăilean is an essayist, writer and professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iasi, Romania, where he teaches various courses such as

Tiberiu Brăilean, Knowledge for Life HSS, vol. I, no. 1 (2012): 7-9

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Political Economy, Economical Philosophy, Globalization and Regionalization, Development Politics, Economic Systems. His main area of interest is centered on a holistical approach of different sciences and religions, towards the recovery of unity beyond the fragmentary appearance. Author of several national economic and social development strategies, he wrote over 800 articles, 18 books as author and 10 as co-author. Among his most recent books are Teoeconomia/Theoeconomy (2011), Political economy (2012), and Omeconomia/Humaneconomy (2012).

IDEAS in AGORA

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HSS I.1 (2012) Transdisciplinarity: the Hidden Third, Between the Subject and the Object Basarab Nicolescu International Center of Transdisciplinary Studies (CIRET), Paris, France [email protected]

In the introduction we explain why the relation between the Object and the Subject is a crucial problem of philosophy. The key point in understanding the Object-Subject relation is the vision on Reality that humans shared in different periods of the historical time. We next describe some historical as-pects concerning the transdisciplinary concept of “level of Reality”, namely in relation with the work of John of the Ladder (c. 525–606), Nicolai Hart-mann (1882-1950) and especially Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976). We final-ly analyze a unified theory of levels of Reality – the transdisciplinary ap-proach, with its three axioms: levels of Reality, logic of included middle and complexity. We describe an important consequence of the transdisciplinary approach: the existence of a zone of non-resistance, which plays the role of a third between the Subject and the Object. This Hidden Third is an interac-tion term which allows the unification of the transdisciplinary Subject and the transdisciplinary Object while preserving their difference. Keywords Subject- Object relation, levels of Reality, Hidden Third, transdisciplinarity, reduc-tionism, non-reductionism, trans-reductionism.

1. Introduction The relation between the Subject and the Object is a crucial problem

of philosophy. This relation varied in the different periods of human culture. In the pre-modern world, the Subject was immersed in the Ob-ject. In the modern world, the Object and the Subject were supposed to be totally separated, while in our post-modern era the Subject becomes predominant as compared with the Object (see figures 1-3).

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Of course, the key point in understanding the Object-Subject relation is the vision on Reality that humans shared in different periods of the historical time.

Fig. 1. The relation between Subject and Object in pre-modernity. Here S means “Subject” and O means “Object”.

“When the layman says ‘reality’, he thinks that this is something obvi-

ous. But, for me, the formulation of a new idea of reality is the most im-portant and the hardest task of our times”, wrote Wolfgang Pauli, Nobel Prize of Physics, more than 60 years ago (Pauli, 1948). The prophetic words of Pauli are still valid today.

Fig. 2. The relation between Subject and Object in modernity. Here S means “Subject” and O means “Object”.

Dictionaries tell us that “reality” means: 1. the state or quality of being

real; 2. resemblance to what is real; 3. a real thing or fact; 4. something that constitutes a real or actual thing, as distinguished from something that is merely apparent (http://dictionary.reference.com). These are


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clearly not definitions but descriptions in a vicious circle: “reality” is de-fined in terms of what is “real”.

In order to avoid any ambiguity, I will define “reality” in a sense which is used by scientists, namely in terms of “resistance” (Nicolescu, 1985, 2000).

Fig. 3. The relation between Subject and Object in post-modernity. Here S means “Subject” and O means “Object”.

By “reality” we intend first of all to designate that which resists our ex-

periences, representations, descriptions, images, or even mathematical formulations. It puts the accent on a relational view of what “reality” could mean.

In so far as reality participates in the being of the world, one has to assign also an ontological dimension to this concept. Reality is not mere-ly a social construction, the consensus of a collectivity, or some inter-subjective agreement. It also has a trans-subjective dimension: for exam-ple, experimental data can ruin the most beautiful scientific theory.

The meaning we give to the word “Reality” is therefore pragmatic and ontological at the same time. I will consequently denote by a capital letter this word.

We have to distinguish, in order to avoid further ambiguities, the words “Real” and “Reality”. Real designates that which is, while Reality is connected to resistance in our human experience. The “Real” is, by defi-nition, veiled for ever (it does not tolerate any further qualifications) while “Reality” is accessible to our knowledge. Real involves non-resistance while Reality involves resistance.

I will now describe some historical aspects concerning the transdisci-plinary concept of “level of Reality”.


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2. Levels of Reality - Historical aspects: John of the Ladder (c. 525–606), Nicolai Hartmann (1882-1950) and Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976)

The idea of “levels of Reality” is not, in fact, completely new. The human being felt, from the beginnings of its existence, that there are at least two realms of reality – one visible, the other invisible.

In a more elaborate way, the theological literature expressed the idea of a “scale of being”, which corresponds, of course, to a scale of Reality. The scale of Jacob (Genesis, 28: 10-12) is one famous example, so nicely illustrated in the Christian Orthodox iconography. There are several vari-ants of the scale of being. The most famous one is found in the book Climax or Ladder of Divine Ascent of Saint John Climacus (c. 525–606). The author, also known as John of the Ladder, was a monk at the mon-astery on Mount Sinai. There are thirty steps of the ladder, describing the process of theosis. Resistance and non-resistance is nicely illustrated in the scale of John of the Ladder: the human being climbs the steps, which denote the effort of the human being to evolve from spiritual point of view through the resistance to his or her habits and thoughts, but the angels, these messengers of God, helps him or her to jump through the intervals of non-resistance between the steps of the ladder.

In the second part of the 20th century, two important thinkers on the problem of levels of Reality are Nicolai Hartmann and Werner Heisen-berg.

Nicolai Hartmann (1882-1950) is a somewhat forgotten philosopher, who had Hans-Georg Gadamer as student and Martin Heidegger as his successor at the University of Marburg, in Germany. He elaborated an ontology based on the theory of categories. He distinguishes four levels of Reality: inorganic, organic, emotional and intellectual (Poli, 2001; 2007). In 1940 he postulated four laws of the levels of Reality: the law of recurrence, the law of modification, the law of the novum and the law of distance between levels (Hartmann, 1940). The last law, postulating that the different levels do not develop continuously, but in leaps, is particu-larly interesting in the context of our discussion.

Almost simultaneously with Hartmann, in 1942, the Nobel Prize of Physics Werner Heisenberg elaborated a very important model of levels


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of reality in his Manuscript of 1942, which was published only in 1984 (Hartmann, 1998).

The philosophical thinking of Heisenberg is structured by “two direc-tory principles: the first one is that of the division in levels of Reality, corresponding to different objectivity modes depending on the incidence of the knowledge process, and the second one is that of the progressive erasure of the role played by the ordinary concepts of space and time” (Heisenberg, 1998: 240).

For Heisenberg, reality is “the continuous fluctuation of the experi-ence as gathered by the conscience. In this respect, it is never wholly identifiable to an isolated system” (Heisenberg, 1998: 166). Reality could not be reduced to substance. For the physicists of today this fact is obvi-ous: the matter is the complexus substance-energy-space-time-information.

As written by Catherine Chevalley, who wrote the Introduction to the French translation of Heisenberg’s book, “the semantic field of the word reality included for him everything given to us by the experience taken in its largest meaning, from the experience of the world to that of the souls modifications or of the autonomous signification of the symbols” (Heisenberg, 1998: 145).

Heisenberg states ceaselessly, in agreement with Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer and Cassirer (whom he knew personally), that one has to sup-press any rigid distinction between Subject and Object. He also states that one has to end with the privileged reference on the outer material world and that the only approaching manner for the sense of reality is to accept its division in regions and levels.

Heisenberg distinguishes regions of reality (der Bereich der Wirklichkeit) and levels of reality (die Schicht der Wirklichkeit).

“We understand by “regions of reality”, writes Heisenberg, “[...] an ensemble of nomological connections. These regions are generated by groups of relations. They overlap, adjust, cross, always respecting the principle of non-contradiction.” The regions of reality are, in fact, strictly equivalent to the levels of organization of the systemic thinking.

Heisenberg is conscious that the simple consideration of the existence of regions of reality is not satisfactory because they will put on the same plane classical and quantum mechanics. It is for this essential reason that he was regrouping these reality regions into different levels of Reality.


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Heisenberg regroups the numerous regions of reality in three distinct levels.

It is clear that the ordering of the regions has to substitute the gross division of world into a subjective reality and an objective one and to stretch itself between these poles of subject and object in such a manner that at its infe-rior limit are the regions where we can completely objectify. In continua-tion, one has to join regions where the states of things could not be com-pletely separated from the knowledge process during which we are identify-ing them. Finally, on the top, have to be the levels of Reality where the states of things are created only in connexion with the knowledge process. (Heisenberg, 1998: 372)

The first level of Reality, in the Heisenberg model, corresponds to the

states of things, which are objectified independently of the knowledge process. He situates at this first level classical mechanics, electromag-netism and the two relativity theories of Einstein, in other words classical physics.

The second level of Reality corresponds to the states of things insepa-rable from the knowledge process. He situates here quantum mechanics, biology and the consciousness sciences.

Finally, the third level of Reality corresponds to the states of things created in connexion with the knowledge process. He situates on this level of Reality philosophy, art, politics, ‘God’ metaphors, religious expe-rience and inspiration experience.

One has to note that the religious experience and the inspiration expe-rience are difficult to assimilate to a level of Reality. They rather corre-spond to the passage between different levels of Reality in the non-resistance zone.

We have to underline, in this context, that Heisenberg proves a high respect for religion. In relation with the problem of God‘s existence, he wrote:

This belief is not at all an illusion, but is only the conscious acceptance of a tension never realised in reality, tension which is objective and which ad-vances in an independent way of the humans, that we are, and which is yet


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at its turn nothing but the content of our soul, transformed by our soul. (Heisenberg, 1998: 235)

The expression used by Heisenberg “a tension never realised in reali-

ty” is particularly significant in the context of our discussion. It evokes what we called “Real” as distinct from “Reality”.

For Heisenberg, world and God are indissolubly linked: “this opening to the world which is at the same time the ‘world of God’, finally also remains the highest happiness that the world could offer us: the con-science of being home” (Heisenberg, 1998: 387). He remarks that the Middle Age made the choice of religion and the 17th century made the choice of science, but today any choice or criteria for values vanished.

Heisenberg also insists on the role of intuition: “Only the intuitive thinking can pass over the abyss that exists between the concepts system already known and the new concepts system; the formal deduction is helpless on throwing a bridge over this abyss.” (Heisenberg, 1998: 261) But Heisenberg doesn‘t draw the logical conclusion that is imposed by the helplessness of the formal thinking: only the non-resistance of our experiences, representations, descriptions, images or mathematical for-malisations could bring a bridge over the abyss between two zones of resistance. The non-resistance is, in fact, the key of understanding the discontinuity between two immediately neighbour levels of Reality.

Now, I will describe the relation between Object and Subject in the transdisciplinary approach.

3. Towards a Unified Theory of Levels of Reality – The Transdiscipli-

nary Approach Transdisciplinarity is founded upon three axioms (Nicolescu, 1996): i. The ontological axiom: There are different levels of Reality of the Object

and, correspondingly, different levels of Reality of the Subject. ii. The logical axiom: The passage from one level of Reality to another is in-

sured by the logic of the included middle. iii. The epistemological axiom: The structure of the totality of levels of Reality

appears, in our knowledge of nature, of society and of ourselves, as a complex struc-ture: every level is what it is because all the levels exist at the same time.


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The key concept of the transdisciplinarity is the concept of levels of Re-ality, which I introduced in 1982, independently of Heisenberg (Nicolescu, 1982).

By “level of Reality”, we designate a set of systems which are invariant under certain general laws: for example, quantum entities are subordinate to quantum laws, which depart radically from the laws of the macrophys-ical world. That is to say that two levels of Reality are different if, while passing from one to the other, there is a break in the applicable laws and a break in fundamental concepts (like, for example, causality). Therefore there is a discontinuity in the structure of levels of Reality. Every level of Reality is associated with its own space-time.

The introduction of the levels of Reality induces a multidimensional and multi-referential structure of Reality. Both the notions of the “Real” and “levels of Reality” relate to what is considered to be the “natural” and the “social” and is therefore applicable to the study of nature and society (Nicolescu, 2008).

Every level is characterized by its incompleteness: the laws governing this level are just a part of the totality of laws governing all levels. And even the totality of laws does not exhaust the entirety of Reality: we have also to consider the Subject and its interaction with the Object. Knowledge is forever open.

The zone between two different levels and beyond all levels is a zone of non-resistance to our experiences, representations, descriptions, images, and mathematical formulations. Quite simply, the transparence of this zone is due to the limitations of our bodies and of our sense organs, limitations which apply regardless of what measuring tools – internal or external – are used to extend these sense organs. We therefore have to conclude that the topological distance between levels is finite. However this finite distance does not mean a finite knowledge. Take, as an image, a segment of a straight line – it contains an infinite number of points. In a similar manner, a finite topological distance could contain an infinite number of levels of Reality.

The unity of levels of Reality of the Object and its complementary zone of non-resistance constitutes what we call the transdisciplinary Object.

Inspired by the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, we assert that the different levels of Reality of the Object are accessible to our


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knowledge thanks to the different levels of perception which are poten-tially present in our being (Husserl, 1966). These levels of perception permit an increasingly general, unifying, encompassing vision of Reality, without ever entirely exhausting it. In a rigorous way, these levels of per-ception are, in fact, levels of Reality of the Subject.

As in the case of levels of Reality of the Object, the coherence of lev-els of Reality of the Subject presupposes a zone of non-resistance to per-ception.

The unity of levels of levels of Reality of the Subject and this com-plementary zone of non-resistance constitutes what we call the transdisci-plinary Subject.

The two zones of non-resistance of transdisciplinary Object and Sub-ject must be identical for the transdisciplinary Subject to communicate with the transdisciplinary Object. A flow of consciousness that coherent-ly cuts across different levels of Reality of the Subject must correspond to the flow of information coherently cutting across different levels of Reality of the Object. The two flows are interrelated because they share the same zone of non-resistance.

Knowledge is neither exterior nor interior: it is simultaneously exterior and interior. The studies of the universe and of the human being sustain one another.

The zone of non-resistance plays the role of a third between the Sub-ject and the Object, an Interaction term which allows the unification of the transdisciplinary Subject and the transdisciplinary Object while pre-serving their difference. In the following we will call this Interaction term the Hidden Third.

Our ternary partition {Subject, Object, Hidden Third} is, of course, different from the binary partition {Subject vs. Object} of classical, modern metaphysics.

Transdisciplinarity leads to a new understanding of the relation be-tween Subject and Object, which is illustrated in the Fig. 4.

In the transdisciplinary approach, the Subject and the Object are im-mersed in the Hidden Third.


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Fig. 4. The relation between Subject and Object in cosmodernity, founded on the transdisciplinary approach. Here S means “Subject”, O means “Object” and HT means “Hidden Third”. The radius of the sphere tends to infinity.

The transdisciplinary Object and its levels, the transdisciplinary Sub-

ject and its levels and the Hidden Third define the transdisciplinary Real-ity or trans-Reality (see Fig. 5).

The incompleteness of the general laws governing a given level of Re-ality signifies that, at a given moment of time, one necessarily discovers contradictions in the theory describing the respective level: one has to assert A and non-A at the same time.

It is the included middle logic which allows us to jump from one level of Reality to another level of Reality (Lupasco, 1951; Badescu and Nicolescu, 1999; Brenner, 2008).

Our understanding of the axiom of the included middle – there exists a third term T which is at the same time A and non-A – is completely clarified once the notion of “levels of Reality” is introduced.

In order to obtain a clear image of the meaning of the included mid-dle, let us represent the three terms of the new logic – A, non-A, and T – and the dynamics associated with them by a triangle in which one of the vertices is situated at one level of Reality and the two other vertices at another level of Reality (see Fig. 6). The included middle is in fact an included third. If one remains at a single level of Reality, all manifestation


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appears as a struggle between two contradictory elements. The third dy-namic, that of the T-state, is exercised at another level of Reality, where that which appears to be disunited is in fact united, and that which ap-pears contradictory is perceived as non-contradictory. In other words, the action of the logic of the included middle on the different levels of Reality is able to explore the open structure of the unity of levels of Real-ity.

Fig. 5. Trans- Reality.

All levels of Reality are interconnected through complexity. From a transdisciplinary point of view, complexity is a modern form of the very ancient principle of universal interdependence. The principle of universal interdependence entails the maximum possible simplicity that the human mind could imagine, the simplicity of the interaction of all levels of reali-ty. This simplicity can not be captured by mathematical language, but only by symbolic language.

The transdisciplinary theory of levels of Reality appears as conciliating reductionism and non-reductionism (Nicolescu, 2008). It is, in some as-pects, a multi-reductionist theory, via the existence of multiple, discon-tinuous levels of Reality. However, it is also a non-reductionist theory, via the Hidden Third, which restores the continuous interconnectedness of Reality. The reductionism/non-reductionism opposition is, in fact, a re-sult of binary thinking, based upon the excluded middle logic. The trans-disciplinary theory of levels of Reality allows us to define, in such a way, a new view on Reality, which can be called trans-reductionism.


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Fig. 6. Symbolic representation of the action of the included middle logic.

The transdisciplinary notion of levels of Reality is incompatible with reduction of the spiritual level to the psychical level, of the psychical lev-el to the biological level, and of the biological level to the physical level. Still these four levels are united through the Hidden Third. However, this unification can not be described by a scientific theory. By definition, science excludes non-resistance. Science, as is defined today, is limited by its own methodology.

The transdisciplinary notion of levels of Reality leads also to a new vi-sion of Personhood, based upon the inclusion of the Hidden Third. The unification of the Subject is performed by the action of the Hidden Third, which transforms knowledge in understanding. “Understanding” means fusion of knowledge and being.

In the transdisciplinary approach, the Hidden Third appears as the source of knowledge but, in its turn, needs the Subject in order to know the world: the Subject, the Object and the Hidden Third are inter-related. This view is perfectly compatible with the incarnational approach developed by Christopher C. Knight in his book The God of Nature – In-carnation and Contemporary Science (Knight, 2007).

The human person appears as an interface between the Hidden Third and the world. The erasing of the Hidden Third in knowledge signifies a one-dimensional human being, reduced to its cells, neurons, quarks and elementary particles.

4. Concluding remarks It is obvious that a huge work remains to be performed in order to

formulate a unified theory of levels of Reality, valid in all fields of


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knowledge, which involve, at the beginning of the 21st century, more than 8,000 academic disciplines, every discipline claiming its own truths and having its laws, norms and terminology.

I believe that the transdisciplinary theory of levels of Reality is a good starting point in erasing the fragmentation of knowledge, and therefore the fragmentation of the human being. We badly need a transdisciplinary hermeneutics (van Breda, 2007). This is a really big question.

In this context, the dialogue of transdisciplinarity with the patristic thinking, and in particular with the apophatic thinking, will be, of course, very useful. The Hidden Third is a basic apophatic feature of the future unified knowledge (Nicolescu, 2006).

I have very much hope for the potential contribution to a unified the-ory of levels of reality of a new branch of knowledge - biosemiotics, as exposed for example, in the stimulating book Signs of Meaning in the Uni-verse of Jesper Hoffmeyer (Hoffmeyer, 1996). Biosemiotics is transdisci-plinary by its very nature (Witzany, 2007). We live in semiosphere, as much we live in atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere. The human being is the unique being in the universe able to conceive an infinite wealth of possible worlds. These “possible worlds” are certainly corresponding to different levels of Reality. Powerful concepts elaborated by biosemioti-cians, like semiotic freedom, could lead us to understand what “person-hood” could mean. “The human being is the most perfect sign”, says Peirce.

Biosemiotics is based upon the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), a great philosopher, logician, mathematician of the begin-ning of the 20th century (See, e. g., Hartshorne, 1931-1958; Peirce, 1966). For Peirce, Reality has a ternary structure. All our ideas about Re-ality belong to three classes: Firtstness, Secondness and Thirdness. These classes have trans-categorial properties, through the way in which Peirce defines what Firstness is. There is a powerful theorem in graph theory established by Peirce, stating that each polyad superior to a triad can be analyzed in terms of triads, but triads could not be analyzed in terms of dyads. This leads him to think about three modes of being, manifesta-tions of three universes of experience. The correspondence of Peirce’s ternary dynamics with the transdisciplinary ternary dynamics of Reality


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{Subject, Object, Hidden Third} is striking and has to be further ex-plored.

“What is Reality?” – asks Peirce (Peirce, 1976, vol. IV: 383-384). He tells us that maybe there is nothing at all which corresponds to Reality. It may be just a working assumption in our desperate tentative in knowing. But if there is a Reality – tells us Peirce – it has to consist in the fact that the world lives, moves and has in itself a logic of events, which corresponds to our rea-son. Peirce’s view on Reality totally corresponds to the transdisciplinary view on Reality.

Let me finally note that a unified theory of levels of Reality is crucial in building sustainable development and sustainable futures. The consid-erations made till now in these matters are based upon reductionist and binary thinking: everything is reduced to society, economy and environ-ment. The individual level of Reality, the spiritual level of Reality and the cosmic level of Reality are completely ignored. Sustainable futures, so necessary for our survival, can only be based on a unified theory of levels of Reality. We are part of the ordered movement of Reality. Our free-dom consists in entering into the movement or perturbing it. Reality de-pends on us. Reality is plastic. We can respond to the movement or im-pose our will of power and domination. Our responsibility is to build sustainable futures in agreement with the overall movement of Reality.

References

Badescu, H., and B. Nicolescu, eds. Stéphane Lupasco - L'homme et l'oeuvre. Mona-co: Rocher, 1999.

Hartmann, N. Der Aufbau der realen Welt. Grundriss der allgemeinen Kategorienlehre. Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 1940.

Heisenberg, W. Philosophie - Le manuscrit de 1942. Trans. Catherine Chevalley. Paris: Seuil, 1998.

Heisenberg, W. Reality and its Order. Trans. M.B. Rumscheidt and N. Lukens http://werner-heisenberg.unh.edu/t-OdW-english.htm#seg01.

Hoffmeyer, J. Signs of Meaning in the Universe. Bloomington, Indianopolis: Indi-ana University Press, 1993.

Husserl, E. Méditations cartésiennes. Trans. Gabrielle Peiffer and Emmanuel Levi-nas Paris: Vrin. 1966.

Knight, Ch. C. The God of Nature – Incarnation and Contemporary Science. Minnea-polis: Fortress Press, 2007.


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Lupasco, St. Le principe d’antagonisme et la logique de l’énergie - Prolégomènes à une science de la contradiction. 1951. 2nd ed. Monaco: Rocher, 1987.

Basarab Nicolescu, B. “Sociologie et mécanique quantiqueǁ.” 3e Millénaire. 1 (March-April 1982).

Nicolescu, B. Nous, la particule et le monde. Paris: Le Mail. 1985. Nicolescu, B. Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity. 1996. Trans. Karen-Claire Voss.

New York: SUNY Press, 2002. Nicolescu, B. “Hylemorphism, Quantum Physics and Levels of Reality.” Aristo-

tle and Contemporary Science. Ed. Demetra Sfendoni-Mentzou. Vol. I. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. 173-184.

Nicolescu, B. “Towards an apophatic methodology of the dialogue between science and religion.” Science and Orthodoxy, a necessary dialogue. Eds. B. Ni-colescu and M. Stavinschi. Bucureşti: Curtea Veche, 2006. 19-29.

Nicolescu B., ed. Transdisciplinarity – Theory and Practice. Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2008.

Pauli, W. “Letter of Pauli to Fierz.” August 12, 1948. Wolfgang Pauli. Wissenchaft-licher Briefwechsel, Band 1V, Teil I: 1940-1949. K. von Meyenn, Berlin: Spring-er, 1993. 559.

Peirce, Ch. S. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. 8 vols. Eds. Charles Harts-horne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur Burks. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1931-1958.

Peirce, Ch. S. Selected Writings (Values in a Universe of Chance). Ed. Philip P. Wie-ner. New York: Dover Publications, 1966.

Peirce, Ch. S. The New Elements of Mathematics. 4 vols. Ed. C. Eisele. The Hague: Mouton Humanities Press, 1976.

Poli, R. “The Basic Problem of the Theory of Levels of Reality.” Axiomathes. 12 (2001): 261-283.

Poli, R. “Three Obstructions: Forms of Causation, Chronotopoids, and Levels of Reality.” Axiomathes. 1 (2007): 1-18.

van Breda, J. “Towards a Transdisciplinary Hermeneutics – A New Way of Going beyond the Science/Religion Debate.” Transdisciplinarity in Science and Religion. 2 (2007): 103-156.

Witzany G., ed. Biosemiotics in Transdisciplinary Contexts. Proceedings of the Gathering in Biosmiotics 6. Finland: UMWEB Publications, 2007.

Biographical Note Basarab Nicolescu is an honorary theoretical physicist at the Centre Nation-al de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) Paris, Professor at the “Babeş-Bolyai University”, Cluj-Napoca, and member of the Romanian Academy.


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He is the president and founder of the International Center for Transdisci-plinary Research and Studies (CIRET), co-founder, with René Berger, of the Study Group on Transdisciplinarity at UNESCO (1992) and founder and Director of the “Transdisciplinarity” Series, Rocher Editions, Monaco and of the “Romanians of Paris”, Piktos/Oxus Editions, Paris. As a major advocate of the transdisciplinary reconciliation between science and the humanities, he has published many articles and books, among which: La Transdisciplinarité, manifeste (Rocher, 1996), Physique quantiqueetréenchantement du monde (Lazaret Ollandini, 2007), Qu’est-ce que la réalité (Liber, 2009).

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HSS I.1 (2012)

Ethnography and Psychoanalysis Geoffrey R. Skoll Criminal Justice Department, Buffalo State College, Buffalo NY 14222 [email protected]

This methodological essay describes and advocates using certain psychoana-lytic techniques for ethnography. It focuses on the self analysis of the eth-nographer using evenly hovering attention, dream analysis, and free associa-tion. It presents an argument that using those techniques enhances the goal of ethnography as a human science and of social research. Fear of crime serves as a point of departure for the methodological argument. Finally, it links psychoanalytic ethnography to a fractal model of society and the self with reference to C. S. Peirce’s theory of semiotics as a link between the in-dividual and society. Keywords ethnography, psychoanalysis, fear of crime, fractals, semiotics, urban

1. Introduction This is a methodological inquiry into reflexive ethnography. It ex-

plores a particular technique based on that in classical psychoanalysis. It treats research on fear of crime. In Britain and the United States fear of crime became a minor industry in social science research during the last decades of the twentieth century. For present purposes, fear of crime is not the object of study. It serves as a heuristic device for methodological disquisition. My essay is informed by Jennifer Hunt’s study of Psychoana-lytic Aspects of Fieldwork (1989), but without any attribution of errors or misinterpretations to her.

In their methodological monograph, Wendy Hollway and Tony Jef-ferson (2000) advocated a life history approach to interviewing inform-ants about fear of crime. Further, they favored encouraging interviewees

Geoffrey R. Skoll, Ethnography and Psychoanalysis HSS, vol. I, no. 1 (2012): 29-50

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to free associate in the psychoanalytic manner. For their psychoanalytic foundation they built on the so-called Kleinian school derived from the work of Melanie Klein (1975, 1984) and others, especially WillfredBion (1967, 1977). This essay takes a different theoretical turn, or perhaps turns, as it diverges along several different paths.

First, this essay concentrates on the researcher instead of the inform-ant. Second, it examines the material context of the interview, specifically the surrounding social milieu or neighborhood. Finally, it uses the classi-cal psychoanalytic technique and its theoretical underpinning rather than the Kleinian approach. Classical psychoanalysis differs from the Kleini-an, but also the French Lacanian, and American self psychology inaugu-rated by Heinz Kohut. All these psychoanalytic schools proclaim adher-ence to the theories and technical recommendations of Sigmund Freud. In Britain, the Kleinian school differed from the Freudian school, but the latter referred to followers of Anna Freud, not Sigmund Freud. Anna was Sigmund’s daughter. With these differences, what remains the same is the examination of fear and idea of danger in a neighborhood setting.

Hollway and Jefferson used the life history interview to research fear of crime. Most of the findings by them and many other researches on the topic have focused on fear of crime in a neighborhood. The present proposal also focuses on fear inspiring neighborhoods, but advocates researchers to examine their own fear reactions. It is probably safe to say that most urban ethnographers are themselves urbanites. Doubtless many have relatively broad experience with urban settings. As such, they often know when they have entered a dangerous neighborhood, by what might be called intuition or instinct. Instead of submerging this reaction, one that has much affective content, I propose that researchers examine it as a principal source of data about the neighborhood in question. This introspection, self examination, or self analysis would be similar to what psychoanalysts do regarding their reactions to their analysands’ discours-es in analytic sessions.

Ethnographers’ self examination serves as more than additional data; it can provide a corrective to the discourses of informants. For example, if an informant reports a continuous anxiety, heightened when outside his or her own abode, the ethnographer can use self examination to judge the accuracy of the informant’s reportage. In short, the ethnog-


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rapher uses introspection to judge whether the neighborhood is in fact dangerous, and opens inquiry into why informants think it is.

The introspective process is neither simple nor superficial. It requires an objective dissection of the ethnographer’s reactions, some of which may be unconscious. Rather than writing them off as intuition, this kind of introspection assumes that there are objective reasons for the ethnog-rapher’s reactions, and requires that they be identified. An analogy is found in the research on kinesics by Ray L. Birdwhistell and his associ-ates. They found that hundreds, possibly thousands, of communicative bits or cues passed between two people in an 18 second interchange. These communicative cues allowed the interaction to occur smoothly: that is, a man lighting a cigarette for a woman (Birdwhistell, 1970: 288-317). Largely unconscious to the interlocutors, such cues not only enable short behavioral sequences, such as cigarette lighting; they also shape affective reactions to situations such as fear in a neighborhood. What the ethnographers must do is identify those cues in the surroundings that shape their fear reactions.

2. Psychoanalysis and Ethnography In his 1912 paper on psychoanalytic technique, Sigmund Freud rec-

ommended that the analyst adopt an evenly hovering or evenly suspend-ed attention. In effect, this attitude mirrors what the analyst and does in free association. It “simply consists in making no effort to concentrate on anything in particular and in maintaining in regard to all that one hears the same measure of calm, quiet attentiveness of ‘evenly – hover-ing attention’” (Freud, 1912: 111). The objective is for the analyst to “bend his own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the emerging unconscious of the patient” (Freud, 1912: 113).

Ethnographic interviews and participant observer interaction differ, of course, from analytic sessions. Informants have not agreed to the analyt-ic contract of free association, and ethnographers must attend far more consciously to their interactions. Even so, the kind of observation and analysis they pursue bear resemblance to the psychoanalytic encounter. In both, the ideal of evenly hovering attention can apply to perceptions of environments and situations. Indeed it would be difficult to attend to


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surrounding environments with studied attention, and at the same time carry on interviews and conversations with informants.

Psychoanalysis and ethnography touch at two other consequential points. Ethnographers, especially anthropologists in the United States, sought out psychoanalysis as an interpretive aid almost as soon as psy-choanalysis gained notoriety from Freud’s American lectures at Clark University in 1909. Leading anthropologists went into analysis and ap-plied psychoanalytic insights to their field work. Hortense Powder maker (1966: 132-133) is but one, albeit revealing, example. Also, American ethnology often sought unconscious foundations for observed behavior including rituals, myths, and reported dreams exemplified by George Devereux, Alan Dundess, Weston La Barre, Géza Róheim, and others.

Sociology has less direct ties to psychoanalysis. Nonetheless, several sociologists have availed themselves of psychoanalytic training – for ex-ample, William Ogburn, Talcott Parsons, Jeffrey Prager, Nancy Chodor-ow, and Neil Smelser (Manning, 2005). Recently, Jennifer C. Hunt (1989) advocated its use in sociological fieldwork. The early Chicago School sociologists went into the city of Chicago to experience and observe people in their social lives in such settings as saloons, department stores, tenements, and other places of leisure, employment, and abodes. Their work grew from the theoretical insights of Georg Simmel and George Herbert Mead, along with European social theorists.

Chicago School sociology and American Boasian anthropology used direct observation and the researchers’ experiences of milieux to examine and report on the human condition. In most cases the ethnographic re-ports did not dwell on the researchers’ self analysis, but neither do most case reports by psychoanalysts. The techniques of self analysis bore fruit in the final product, rarely in the reportage of the investigation, whether case reports or ethnographies. More recently, under the impact of what some methodologists put under the general rubric of postmodernism (Atkinson et al., 2003; Davies, 1999), self examination and self disclosure appears increasingly in ethnographic publications. Researchers may or may not choose to make public the results of their self analysis, but the techniques themselves could be useful at any and all stages of the re-search process.


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3. Techniques of Self Analysis More specific than evenly hovering attention, researchers may use a

number of techniques to examine their reactions to social milieux. Be-fore discussing those specifics, a bit needs saying about their use in psy-choanalysis.

Before psychoanalysis became institutionalized and bureaucratized, its methods did not involve years of training in institutes. Any intelligent person could use them. Sigmund Freud himself, as the first analyst, ana-lyzed his own dreams and other psychological material. Subsequent ana-lysts, the second generation, spent relatively short times in training anal-yses. Training analyses aimed at familiarizing the analyst with the work-ings of the unconscious. While today’s lengthy and demanding training regimen might produce better analyses, the point is debatable. Nonethe-less, ethnographers usually have no therapeutic aims, or if they do, they do not charge their informants for the privilege of being investigated. If therapeutic benefits accrue to informants, and some researchers have reported that result (Ortiz, 2001; Coles, 2002), the goal remains social research, not individual treatment. Still, psychoanalysis and ethnography meet in a territory of difference (Churchill, 2007). Moreover, and this may be the most important point, the kinds of unconscious forces exam-ined in psychoanalysis obtain in any social situation. They need examin-ing, and doing so adds to the fund of social scientific knowledge.

By way of illustration, I offer dream analysis as part of this ethno-graphic technique. Dreams remain the royal road to the unconscious. Freud described dream analysis in his Interpretation of Dreams (1900). The procedure is simple. He adjured the dreamer to record the dream in writ-ing, identify elements or sections of it, and then free associate to each of those elements, writing the associations as notes. Today, researchers can use a less restrictive tool. Instead of writing the dream, which by its na-ture potentiates much greater ego control and therefore censorship, eth-nographers can use voice recorders to capture their own thoughts. Re-viewing the recorded dream text and associations to it, the researcher can analyze their unconscious memories, fantasies, and ideas. Free associa-tion remains the hallmark of psychoanalytic technique as analysands free associate during their sessions. To free associate simply means to say whatever comes to mind, without the usual censorship so necessary for


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social civility. Self analysis of dreams as a regular part of field work inevi-tably draws on the field experiences as the day residue, the waking stimu-li, for the dream. For example, walking alone in a neighborhood at night, approached by a stranger, might relate to dreams based on childhood fears of say primal scene observations, to use a classic psychoanalytic example. If the stranger on the street aroused anxiety, the researcher can better distinguish personal, childhood anxieties from realistic fears of possible assault.

The foregoing is a grossly over simplified example, of course. It mere-ly illustrates the advantage of gaining access to unconscious ideas and memories that influence researchers. Once identified, those unconscious, largely infantile based reactions can be parsed from the researchers’ own field experience narratives. Such infantile ideation is only one part of the unconscious material that grounds researchers’ affective responses to field experiences. The other part comes from the social unconscious. Discriminating between the personal unconscious of the ethnographer and the social unconscious opens the way to a more realist or naturalist understanding of social conditions, which after all is the goal of ethnog-raphy and all social research (Bhaskar, 1979; Davies, 1999).

4. Applications to Fear of Crime Researchers’ status as outsiders, albeit usually not naïve outsiders as

they are in exotic social situations, aids their appreciation through the social unconscious. The social unconscious reflects the background of social milieux, the taken for granted mise-en-scène. Two ethnographies refer to neighborhood based crime fears. Sally Engle Merry investigated crime fear among residents of a low income housing project in the Bos-ton metropolitan area in the mid 1970s (Merry, 1981). Philippe Bourgois commented on the issue in his ethnography of crack dealers in East Har-lem in the mid 1980s (Bourgois, 2002). Both relied on versions of the social disorganization idea derived from Chicago School sociology. That is, urban fears and fear of crime specifically grow in conditions of rela-tive social estrangement where neighbors are not positively connected. They may fear each other or at least believe they cannot rely on each other for solidarity and ultimately protection. Both also noted that fear


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of crime does not correlate with actual crime or violence. Merry worked in a comparatively low crime neighborhood. She observed that:

Contrary to frequent claims by researchers and law enforcement personnel, this study suggests that a moderate reduction in the crime rate will not re-duce fear of crime. Only changes that alter the nature of relations between the small social worlds that constitute the city, that improve communication between these worlds, that refine cognitive categories, and that decrease an-onymity will reduce the uncertainty urbanites feel in coping with individuals outside their own social enclave (Merry, 1981: 239-240) In contrast, Bourgois worked in an extremely high crime neighbor-

hood with a high level of violence in which shootings, fire bombings, and severe beatings were not rare events and were visible. Nonetheless, Bourgois lived in the neighborhood for years with his wife and infant child, although she and the children departed leaving Philippe behind. Neither she nor the child ever experienced violence from other denizens of the neighborhood. Bourgois himself reported being mugged only once, when he and a number of other customers were in a convenience store robbery at 2 am (Bourgois, 2003: 33). Bourgois compared the situa-tion to what Michael Taussig (1987) characterized as a culture of terror with reference to Nazi Germany and colonial South America.

In contemporary Spanish Harlem one of the consequences of the cul-ture of Terror” dynamic is to silence the peaceful majority of the popula-tion who reside in the neighborhood. They isolate themselves from the community and grow to hate those who participate in street culture – sometimes internalizing racist stereotypes in the process. A profound ideological dynamic mandates distrust of one’s neighbors. Conversely, mainstream society unconsciously uses the images of a culture of terror to dehumanize the victims and perpetrators and to justify its unwilling-ness to confront segregation, economic marginalization, and public sec-tor breakdown (Bourgois, 2003: 34).

Despite dangerous neighbors, Bourgois’ main threats came from po-lice who typically treated him as someone out of place – as dirt in Mary Douglas’ (1966) famous concept – specifically a White drug addict. Addi-tionally, Bourgois’ informants did not so much fear police as the risks of short term incarceration stemming from arrests for small amounts of


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drugs. The informants feared other inmates in New York’s holding pens (Bourgois, 2003:37). Bourgois sums up the problem: “Both criminals and police play by the rules of the culture of terror” (2003: 35). Bourgois and Taussig’s culture of terror is what I would attribute to ghettoization – the construction of communities of apartheid not unlike the ghettos the Na-zis constructed in Poland, Lithuania and the conquered territories of their Drangnach Osten, the drive to the east. The objective for the Nazis was control, control of an undesirable population, Jews, and control of the Gentile majority of Poles, Lithuanians, and so on through a culture of terror (cf. Parenti, 2000; Wacquant, 1994, 2008). The difference be-tween the Nazi ghettos and contemporary American ghettos is that the Nazis did not try to repress their goal of social control. In contrast, the structure, function, and origins of American ghettos remain largely oc-cluded, repressed from social consciousness. Christian Parenti offered another perspective, arguing that crime itself operated as social control: “crime and fear of crime are forms of social control (. . .) these acts drive victims of capitalism, racism, and sexism into the arms of the racist, pro-business, sexist state. In short, crime justifies state violence and even creates popular demand for state repression” (2000: 44).

Following the logic of Bourgois, Wacquant, and Parenti implies that the state plays a central, organizing role, along with other actors such as businesses and market interests generally, in producing social conditions that have earned the name ‘ghettos’. Moreover, those ghettoized social conditions encourage certain kinds of interpersonal crime and fear of crime. With Merry’s interpretation in mind, these repressed social and political forces also hide the process that weakens social bonds among neighbors and induces fear of them. The ethnographer’s job is inter alia to undo the repression, and bring into social consciousness what has been repressed. Using the psychoanalytic techniques of evenly hovering attention coupled with self analysis aids in meeting the challenge.

Psychoanalysts match the relaxed ego controls entailed by free associ-ation with evenly hovering attention to engage their unconscious with that of analysands. Analysts also move back and forth between the somewhat regressed state and fully attentive ego engagement when they analyze the transference of the analysands and their own counter trans-ference. Counter transference analysis corrects for the distortion of the


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analyst’s own unconscious and thereby clarifies the transference so that analysts can offer useful interpretations. Ethnographers can do the same. As in the example given above where an ethnographer fears an ap-proaching stranger, the personal part of the ethnographer’s fear – the primal scene dream – becomes entangled with the social fear. The eth-nographer’s self analysis can disentangle unconscious motives for per-sonal fears from socially unconscious motives for fears. That is, in this example, assume that fearing an approaching stranger is the social norm. The self analytic ethnographer is better able to investigate why it is the norm. What sorts of objective conditions underlie the norm? What cul-turally constrained and motivated signs and symbols index a fearful re-sponse?

5. Social Repression and Psychoanalysis Hollway and Jefferson began their methodological argument with

what should be an obvious starting point. “In researching any topic, there are two overarching questions that have to be addressed: what is the object of inquiry and howcan it be enquired into?” (2000: 7). The first question is a major stumbling block with respect to fear of crime, as they acknowledge. The problem is that the ontological status of fear of crime is shaky at best. Part of that shakiness derives from the ontological status of crime. On the one hand the affect, fear of crime, remains vague, but so does crime. The first is an abstract social affect; the second is an ab-stract social category. The connection between these two abstractions is not only vague, but may be downright imaginary.

Start with crime. Here are some crimes not usually included in the category, except by a few students and researchers: white collar crimes ranging from fraud to negligent homicide and crimes of the state includ-ing war crimes, false imprisonment, torture, and the like. Toxic waste dumping as in the Love Canal scandal or product defects as in the mur-derous design of Ford Pintos both could qualify as violent crimes that produced death, illness, and injury. But when asked about what crimes people fear, these do not even rate a category in survey research on fear of crime, and for good reason. They are not treated as crimes. So what does qualify?


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On the surface, fear of crime appeared as interpersonal street crimes, mainly muggings, rapes, robberies, and burglaries with the occasional homicide thrown in for good measure. “The explosion of fear of crime stories can be easily traced to around 1965. By as early as 1964 it was reported that Manhattan’s Upper West Side had become a ‘fortress of fear,’ (. . .) By 1966 ‘the No.1 worry in Washington is crime’ (Lee 2007: 51 citing Washington Post October 2, 1966: 1). Despite such claims about public sentiment, there is reason to believe that both the putative crime wave of the 1960s and fear of it came from inventive public relations campaigns and not objective conditions. That is, there was no crime wave, and people did not fear it. Dennis Loo has shown as false that “the prevailing view [that], the ‘law ‘n order issue originated within the public and precipitated a major shift in US public policy.” Instead, Loo argued that” (. . .) the consensus about crime fear “lacked a genuine popular component. It was, rather, the representation of a popular consen-sus” (2009: 12-13). Moreover, as a number of scholars have shown, there was no rise in street crimes in the period. That too was manufactured. The fear of crime was not fear of interpersonal assault, but fear of social unrest mainly civil rights and anti-war movements (Beckett, 1997; Beck-ett, and Sasson, 2004; Rosch, 1985; Skoll, 2009, 2010).

All this history of crime and fears of it could be simplified, or even written off, as just an example of the Thomas theorem: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” (Thomas,and Thomas, 1928: 572). Could be, were it not for the many layers of repres-sion at every step, even about the Thomas theorem itself. Robert Merton found two instances of repression. First, the theorem is attributed to only one Thomas, William I., and not to him and his wife, Dorothy Swain. Second, Merton noted the fate of its negative corollary.

In his lecture course at the University of Chicago, W.I. Thomas’s col-league George H. Mead had observed in distinctly sociological terms that “If a thing is not recognized as true, then it does not function as true in the community.” But the Thomas theorem and the Mead theorem expe-rienced notably different cognitive fates. In virtually self-exemplifying style, the Mead theorem dropped into permanent oblivion even after its posthumous transition from “oral publication” in lectures to publication


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in print (Mead, 1936:29). Not so with the Thomas theorem (Merton, 1995: 383).

To complicate matters even more, the question about the Thomas theorem – namely, why do people believe in imaginary things of their own invention? – gets coupled with the ‘effects’ part of the theorem. Why should people act in accordance with imaginary things. This prob-lem has two relevant discussants – Freud and Nietzsche – and of course their pairing is not happenstance. Begin with Freud. His great discoveries linking dreams and neuroses depend on a still highly controversial no-tion: imagined, wished for, or fantasized memories have the same psy-chic effect as real ones. Hence, the symptoms of hysterical neuroses could come from real seductions or those that are imagined. Previously, Nietzsche weighed in. Richard Shweder wrote that Nietzsche offered an aphorism by way of explanation for neurotic symptoms and other behav-ior. “Nietzsche’s answer to the question is given in one of his famous aphorisms: ‘being moral means being highly accessible to fear’” (Shweder, 1992: 45). Shweder elucidated on what he termed Nietzsche’s null reference argument about God, witches, and other imaginary ob-jects. What we know by science are things we experience through our senses. “The rest is miscarriage and not-yet-science – in other words, metaphysics, theology, psychology, epistemology – or formal science, a doctrine of signs such as logic and that applied logic which is called mathematics. In them reality is represented not at all (. . .)” (Shweder, 1992: 48 quoting Nietzsche 1878/1982: 481). Shweder was troubled by what he saw as a disjuncture. How could the content of not discerned objects, that is, mental objects, affect discernible behavior? His answer was that “The terms and concepts [mental objects] we use to describe the world take account of our needs and desires” (1992: 56). According-ly, and in agreement with Freud, the effect of fantasies is the same as the effect of real events, at least in what Freud termed the primary process, the wish dominated, largely unconscious part of human beings.

6. Integrated Model of Repression These insights combine with social forces. In psychoanalysis analy-

sands seek to undo repression to gain greater conscious control of their lives through liberation from unconscious impulses. The analysts assist


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by helping them to overcome their own unconscious resistance against the analytic process. Those resistances come from fear, fear of what analysis might reveal about them. Fears embed themselves in human psyches largely because those fears take root in infantile experiences and understandings of the world.

Just as a part of every analysand fears analysis and resists it, mature adults in contemporary societies fear losing the securities of hierarchical control. It is safer to keep things as they are. It is safer not to know how elites control people to extract wealth. It is safer not to take responsibil-ity for their own lives but to hand it over to someone else whom they can blame if things go wrong. Wilhelm Reich (1946) and Erich Fromm (1941, 1980) made parallel points in describing the populist acceptance and complicity in Nazism. Resistance in psychoanalysis remains mostly a personal, individual matter. Unconscious fears, memories, and fantasies at the individual level manifest at the societal level as concerted and de-liberate manipulation through hegemonic control.

Investigations about the belief that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks revealed the social psychological mechanism of inferred justification. Inferred justification is a form of motivated reasoning, a form of cognitive dissonance theory (Prasad et at., 2009, citing Festinger, and Carlsmith, 1959). At the societal level, forces arrayed against free-dom and equality do not operate from infantile motives or ego defenses. Their motives are wealth and power. The analogy between psychoanalyt-ically defined repression and societal level political repression is not just simile or metaphor. Despite psychoanalytic concentration on the person-al and psychological, much if not all psychological repression finds rein-forcement and often even its origins in massive, orchestrated social, cul-tural, and political repression.

Apparatuses of the state spearhead social repression. A case study of a drug abuse treatment center for criminalized adults revealed the process. The center dealt with impoverished and criminalized drug addicts in a long-term, residential setting. Coffee drinking practices illustrate the mechanism of repression in that social micro-system. The administration of the facility repressed the drug aspects of coffee and the fact that the residents paid for the coffee through their food stamps. They repressed the economic and pharmacological facts by forbidding them from con-


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versation. As Freud (1923) explained, consciousness relies on putting thoughts into words. Without verbalization, they remain unconscious. When forces, psychological or political, forbid verbalization, the thoughts enter the dynamic unconscious – that is, they are repressed.

Repression of the economic facts of food stamps is effective because it is associated with repressing the drug attribute of coffee, and both of these aspects of coffee are associated with the overall economic, political, and legal oppression of the residents. Moreover, by breaking coffee-drinking rules, residents become subject to demotion in the status hierar-chy, and thus affirm the imposed micro-social structure. The net effect of the repressions, displacements, and even oppositions is to support the pattern of power relations within this social establishment. Furthermore, the very existence of the institution supports the oppression of the resi-dents, who are members of the underclass in the wider society (Skoll, 1991: 7).

A popular folksong exemplifies the same principle in a far wider set-ting. Woody Guthrie wrote This Land Is Your Land in 1940 as a rebellious answer to Irving Berlin’s God Bless America. Although most people know, or at least have heard the first few verses, they remain ignorant of the song’s most pithy lyrics. Usually omitted from performances are the fol-lowing:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me; Sign was painted, it said – private property; But on the back side it didn't say nothing; That side was made for you and me. Nobody living can ever stop me, As I go walking that freedom highway; Nobody living can ever make me turn back This land was made for you and me. In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple; By the relief office, I'd seen my people. As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking, Is this land made for you and me? (Partridge, 2002: 85).


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Bruce Springsteen and Pete Seeger performed the more complete ver-sion at Barack Obama’s inauguration. Subsequent events have shown this return of the repressed as nothing more than cooptative showman-ship by Barack Obama, a master manipulator, a “star of decision” in Guy Debord’s terms (1967: 39). In the end, most people still do not know; much less care about the significance of the most poignant lyrics.

In keeping with a fractal view of social structure, discussed below; pat-terns of repression, oppression, and hegemonic ideological control in social micro-systems such as the drug treatment center replicate patterns within US society, and ultimately at a global level. The observations of the drug center took place in the mid-1980s at the height of the war on drugs under the Reagan regime. The practices of the drug center carry out hegemonic patterns on individuals, mainly the residents, but also the staff. Micro-social control through repression replicates and effectuates control exerted through courts, penal systems, and welfare agencies. The center helps ensure conformity with the pharmaceutical industry that relies on such facilities and attendant legal and welfare policies to regu-late the drug market. At the highest level, facilities such as this one are part of US policies that use the international drug trade to facilitate for-eign policy. In the end, social control has to employ means to control individuals, but that control always follows systemic patterns, and always serves interests of the ruling class.

7. Self-Analysis and Ethnography In addition to dream analysis, the ethnographic process has other

moments that lend themselves to self-analysis by ethnographic research-ers. Most researchers record their observations and reactions in a journal. Whatever the particular method, whether bound notebooks, laptop computers, or voice recordings; the recording process can function al-most like a session of free association. The researcher may slip into a kind of reverie similar to that of evenly hovering attention. The text of the journal record can serve the same function as the text of a recalled dream, discussed above. It may also include a series of free associations, which in turn provide more grist for the analytic mill. These daily record-ings, therefore, do not just record the scientific, ethnographic self, but the personal with all its unconscious wishes, fantasies, desires, and fears


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albeit in relative disguise – just like the text and imagery of a recalled dream. Also just like the ethnographer’s own dreams, the journal, or more exactly, the process of recording in the journal, can reveal the eth-nographer’s counter-transference, the personal and mainly unconscious distortions of observations. At the same time, the journal recordings can illuminate unnoticed parts of the social unconscious, perhaps those that the ethnographer glossed over because of counter-transference.

Journal recordings generally consist of three types: recordings of in-formants’ conversations, recordings of observed behavior and milieus, and the ethnographers’ reactions to the former two. Compare that to psychoanalysts’ observational technique. As two training analysts, Jacob Spencer and Leon Balter explain, psychoanalysts rely on two types of observations that are common in all the human sciences: introspective observation and behavioral observation. Psychoanalysts operate within a framework of psychic determinism – meaning that psychological and behavioral phenomena are caused – and the assumption that uncon-scious mental processes exert dynamic effects of on ideas, feelings, and behavior. Most importantly,” (...)the patient’s free association and the analyst’s evenly suspended attention exert an ongoing influence on what psychoanalysts are able to observe; they function together as an instru-ment which extends the observed field in a unique manner” (1990: 397). Spencer and Balter go on to stress that analysts observe and analyze not just the analysands’ discourses and the analysts reactions to them, but also the observed behavior in the analytic situation – the equivalent of the ethnographer’s observations of social milieux. Therefore, ethnog-raphers can use their journal recordings to inform both empathy and observation; they can use them to explore their own counter-transference to the field work experience, and they can use them to dis-entangle their personal unconscious from the social unconscious of the field work milieux.

While almost all ethnographers keep journals, some also produce what might be called artistic or creative works – fiction, paintings, sculptures, music, and so on. Ethnographic journals and the self-analytic uses to which they may be put also differ from a recently popular ethnographic genre, auto ethnography. Despite their differences, all these forms can be subject to and benefit from self-analysis. Here, I am painting with a wide


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brush. For instance, the technique of ethnographic self-analysis overlaps with the methodological concept of crystallization. Briefly, crystallization is a term coined by Laurel Richardson (2000) and explored by Laura El-lingson (2009), among others. Crystallization uses the processes of writ-ing, painting, composing music and similar creative activities as products leading to understanding. They bear a functional similarity to a remem-bered dream. By crystallizing, putting one’s experiences, feelings, thoughts, and so on into words, pictures, or sounds can lead to greater understanding as the process actually crystallizes what ethnographers have learned through research. In general agreement with that notion, self-analysis applies a particular way of gaining the knowledge through the crystallizations.

Analyzing such creative products serves a dual role, because of the way they are produced. They are produced by a person, the ethnog-rapher, and they are produced by a particular, enculturated member of a society – also the ethnographer. Weston La Barre critiqued what certain-ly qualifies as abstracted empiricism (Mills, 1959).The researcher

sets out to collect his data (...) next he brings heaps of protocols, puts them on punch cards, and lays them at the foot of the Truth Machine untouched by human mind. Finally, he pushes a button and science emerges. (...) But he does not seem to realize that his results have already been programmed by a far more sophisticated (or sophistic) computer, his mind – the unex-amined, motivated, enculturated, time-serving human mind. (LaBarre, 1978: 260)

Recognizing the programming by the ethnographer, analyzing it, sepa-

rating the personal unconscious from the social unconscious permits a more realistic ethnographic text.

The ethnographers’ crystallizations provide embodiment by giving material form, and this applies to words on a page as much as paint on a canvas or sound waves moving through air interpreted as musical notes and other such aural phenomena. Once materialized, they contain the personal unconscious of ethnographers and the social unconscious of their milieux. Pertinently, they are susceptible to analysis, both the kind of analysis proffered by literature and art critics – that is, cultural criti-cism – but also psychoanalytic self-analysis by the ethnographers them-


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selves. A further gain resides in such materialized products. Tapping into a current social unconscious, the arts represent social trends even as they contribute to shaping them. Historically, the arts have represented social trends before sociological discourses have reported them (Best, and-Kellner, 1997 citing Shlain, 1991; Jameson, 1981). Consider Kafka’s prescience about the next fifty years or so of European history in his 1914 book, The Trial.

8. Conclusion: Fractal Patterns; The Personal and Social; Macro and

Micro Sociology Methodology should relate to theories about its subject matter. In the

present case, an intrapsychic method and its theories stemming from psychoanalysis are applied to sociological studies, particularly those on fear of crime. The political scientist Wesley Skogan described fear of crime as an intrapsychic, subjective phenomenon: “(...) a diffuse psycho-logical construct affected by a number of aspects of urban life” (Skogan, 1976: 14 quoted in Lee, 2009: 33). Skogan subsequently studied some of those aspects of urban life and their relation to public policies (Skogan, 1990; Skogan, and Maxfield, 1981). Nonetheless, fear of crime had al-ready become a social, political, and public policy phenomenon by 1968 (Harris, 1969). Two problems arise. First, how do intrapsychic phenom-ena become social and vice versa? Second, how can one method of study designed for the intrapsychic serve social inquiry, and also vice versa? At a theoretical level, the questions find their problematization in Talcott Parsons’ structural social theories according to Niklas Luhmann (1982: 47-68). Philip Manning recounted Luhmann’s critique by arguing that Parson’s four system model of the social, the cultural, the personality, and the behavioral organism interpenetrate and are interdependent in a way to produce analytic infinite regress (Manning, 2005: 108). More em-pirically, George Devereux (1961) noted the phenomenon of the intra-psychic and social, the micro and macro sociological in his report about refugees from the 1956 Hungarian revolt. He found that those who par-ticipated in the revolt, a wide spread social movement, had a variety of personal motives for joining, many of which were unrelated to the move-ment’s political aims. Nevertheless, they engaged in communal action.


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One solution to the conundrum combines the mathematical model of fractals with the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. Fractals are forms with the same structural pattern regardless of their size. For example, a one-meter stretch of the coastline of Britain has the same structure as the coast’s entire length. Benoit Mandelbrot (1982) discovered the math-ematical description of fractals originally in 1960 – about the same time Edward N. Lorenz (1963) discovered attractors in non-linear systems. Mandelbrot found recurring patterns at every scale in data on cotton prices. In 1967, Mandelbrot showed that a coastline’s length varies with the scale of the measuring instrument, resembles itself at all scales, and is infinite in length for an infinitesimally small measuring device. An object whose irregularity is constant over different scales, “self-similarity,” is a fractal. Fractal theory contributes to chaos theory in showing the replica-tion of small variations according to regularities or structural patterns. The mechanisms by which the different levels of coastlines, cotton mar-kets, or societies recursively show similar patterns at every level are signs. Peircean semiotics does not require consciousness, in contrast to Saus-sure’s semiology, and it does not even require the assumption of living organisms. Signs interpenetrate and are interdependent across multiple systems carrying and creating information with the potential of organiz-ing system dynamics (Deledalle, 2000; Sebeok, 1991).

By assuming society has fractal patterns, one would expect to find re-cursive patterning in repression at the intrapsychic level and every higher level of abstraction studied by the human sciences. The same applies to emotional patterns of fear. Therefore, fear of crime shows fractal pat-terning at every level, from the intrapsychic to the societal. And, it shows the same fractal patterning of the reasons for the fear at every level, alt-hough the motivations for the fear may differ at each level. Hence, Skogan’s intrapsychic phenomenon has the same structural pattern as the phenomenon between individuals and in small groups like families (the micro social) through neighborhoods to the whole of American society (the macro social). Therefore, psychoanalytic techniques applied in eth-nographic studies can capture the recursive patterns.

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Skogan, W.G., and M.G. Maxfield. Coping with crime: individual and neighborhood reactions. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1981.

Skoll, G.R. “Power and Repression.” The American Journal of Semiotics 8.3 (1991): 5-29.

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Washington Post. (1966, October 2). The No.1 Worry in Washington is Crime. 1. Biographical Note Geoffrey Skoll is an associate professor at Buffalo State, State University of New York, USA. His interests include ethnography, the dynamic be-tween macro and micro sociality, and the analysis of social origins of fear. He is currently working on a book that examines dialectical logic in the recent history of social thought. Published books include Social Theory of Fear (2010), Contemporary Criminology (2009), and Walk the Walk and Talk the Talk (1992).

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HSS I.1 (2012)

EU’s Post-national Stake. Nationalism vs. Multiculturalism

Anda Brăilean “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iasi, Romania [email protected]

How to reconcile a European identity that is still quite indefinite with the national identities that have been engines of development, but failed to re-solve the issue of ensuring peace and eliminating war as a way of settling differences? Solving the problem of European identity vs. national state identity is the cornerstone for the development of new European institu-tional architecture. The more the future vision of Europe promotes a deep-er integration of the current European nation states, the greater is the fear of the latter to the “danger” of losing its identity. What is, in fact, this iden-tity and would be its disappearance a great disaster? How can be lost the na-tional identity and how it could be replaced by a European identity? Here are just some troubling questions that Europeans today consciences. Keywords multiculturalism, European, nation-state, culture, stability, security, diversity, identity, globalization

1. Introduction European Union appears as a configuration in which national gov-

ernments, community institutions, informal networks constantly interact. Not being a state, Europe lacks coercive power of socialization and therefore is unable to achieve this cultural homogenization that many states have worked at tirelessly. Clear majority support enjoyed by Euro-pean unification should not be subject to misinterpretation. It even comes from a “European consciousness” or of post-national identifica-tion, but is explained by a handful of strictly national interests. Nothing guarantees that the establishment of a communicative space in Europe

Anda Brăilean, EU’s Post-National Stake. Nationalism vs. Multiculturalism HSS, vol. I, no. 1 (2012): 51-64

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will take delivery of the European people. However, even if a more con-sistent European power would see the light of day, it was reckoned it would face a problem: what will be the basis of this European culture? The familiar Triptych – the Greek logos, Roman law, Judeo Christian ethics – is frequently cited as forming the foundation of European cul-ture. We might add here emerged from Renaissance humanism, Enlight-enment rationalism, romanticism, without forgetting the core values (fundamental rights, democracy, etc.). All this is both more and less. Much as it is a rich and impressive heritage, just a such legacy is in itself insufficient to make a living culture. Beyond a patrimonial conception, the shaping of a genuine European culture was imperative. The task is overwhelming. It involves the development of European mass-media, the systematic promotion of multilingualism, the total transformation of education systems, within the meaning of their Europeanization. In short, this represents a formidable challenge for European culture (Dieckhoff, 2000).

2. Strengthening Europe In parallel with the creation of a common cultural substrate, “nation-

alization” of Europe would also involve an imaginary break of specifical-ly European. But if Europe has a history, she has no memory, that mix-ture of history and romance, of remembering and forgetting that a hu-man community groups around the great achievements of the past and the common desire to achieve more in the future. Creating a shared memory will be tricky because the reasons for the division are at least as numerous as those for the unit. A European collective identity will not arise until the end of a long historical process, of persevering socializa-tion and building a political center.

Strengthening Europe should therefore lead to double the nation-state depreciation, eroded political “to top” and cultural “to bottom”. But post-national perspective will not lead to the disappearance of the na-tional challenge of pluralism. Rather, it will further enhance acuity (Poledna, 2002).

As things currently stand, it can be said that “enlargement”, which I can speak as a “positive Western imperialism”, has a pseudo or quasi globalized nature – obviously keeping us on the European continent


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scale. This is because the European Union integration design exclusively as a transfer of its model – community acquis – the Central and Eastern European countries. Rather, the integrative movement which is moving from East to West – “expansionism Oriental disorder” featuring a simi-lar protean barbarian migrations that destroyed more than a millennium ago the Western Roman Empire – has an obvious global nature. In fact it tends - even if work is not always aware of and intent, most often, is declared to a Western model Synthesis traditions, experiences, values and skills that characterize European life has been and continues to exist out-side the Union. From the western European perspective is limited to an extension, which focuses on the quantitative aspect of the problem. From the Eastern perspective aimed at achieving a synthesis of identity which moves the emphasis on the qualitative side, to devote the final re-sult will change in all components of the new Union. The question is which of these two attempts will succeed?

The problem is that the EU currently has the capacity nor the will nor the effort to impose the model outside its borders although its security in a changing world in the process of globalization, requires more than ever such an extension. Capacity will involves giving up comfort and the feel-ing of superiority that characterizes nowadays Western Europe to make European integration a political process designed primarily to lead to a Mainland entity endowed with unitary structure of political institutions. Exercise capacity refers to the mobilization of financial resources able to strengthen economic and political unity by balancing regional develop-ment in its internal social and economic disparities between the liquida-tion of European nations that would feed into the united Europe.

3. Stability by multiculturalism Not being able to combine security through integration with devel-

opment security, the EU will inevitably be in the situation to determine not only that can not establish its identity as such in the eastern half of the continent but also that the strength of its defense against invasion which threaten the current “mess” Eastern power of attraction is over-come by its standards of living. Pushed to desperation by prolonged in-security and poverty and without feeding them a perspective on the one hand, and seduced by Western civilization, on the other hand, Eastern


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Europeans will find certainly the power to tear down the walls of protec-tion that the West has replaced the Berlin Wall with. From this perspec-tive the EU is much more entitled to think the “danger” that his identity from action to change the extension. In fact it won`t be a about a larger Union but about another Union. The question is not enlargement, but the unification of Europe.

In order to meet East, West and their synthesis in the process of Eu-ropean integration does not have to lead to seizures, to anarchy and in-stability, or so to not generate harmful phenomena such as those result-ing from crossing culture (identity) of clan culture (identity) nation-state in some parts of the world and even in Europe (the Balkans – particular-ly in Kosovo and Macedonia, Sicily, the Basque Country, Corsica and the Near East and Central Asia), will need tomorrow’s vision of a united Eu-rope should be developed jointly by all Europeans, from both West and East. EU can not be solely responsible for running the European pro-cess. And this process can not and should not be a transfer of identity but a synthesis of identity. Cultural impact of the unification of Europe should be accepted and assumed by all participants in the process. For now it seems that Central and Eastern Europe is more inclined to it.

After the collapse of the bipolar world, mankind lives, in the process of globalization, the effects on the contradiction between political inte-gration and disintegration of solidarity of interests on the basis of identi-ty, of cultural homogenization and economic spraying. Globalization of the free and open society model facilitated intimate contact of different cultures. Crossing has generated sometimes dangerous phenomena such as organized crime, religious fundamentalism or terrorism. They now bring into question the entire system of world security and stability.

It is easy to see that ethno-cultural conflict management arrangements are similar in the fact that, in assessing the various regulatory options, stability criterion is implicitly considered more important than justice and equity. More specifically, the requirement of justice or the rule in ques-tion did not enter the choice and use different methods of managing ethno-politic conflicts. Most times, the goal is to maintain stability and hence the status quo’s, which contribute to empowering those who are in power, without taking into account how that power is qualified in terms of equity.


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In his theory of multiculturalism, Will Kymlicka starts precisely from this state of affairs. In his opinion, the main difficulty in the theoretical evaluation and practical solving of ethno-politic conflicts must be seen in the fact that this form of governance that tends to generalize in the whole world, the representative or parliamentary democracy, based on the principles of universal human rights and the effectiveness of the ma-jority, does not provide satisfactory answers to any questions that arise in many places and increasingly more often. What language can be used in state institutions, in the processes of the courts, in parliaments? You can claim or accept that in the schools of different ethno-cultural communi-ties the teaching language to be your mother tongue? Is it justified to claim that the boundaries of administrative subdivisions are drawn so as to be a majority of minorities within the various sub-units? Is it a wise decision the division of powers between the center and the territorial subdivisions so that minorities receive certain decision-making and legis-lative powers in what concerns vital matters to them, areas that may af-fect their cultural sensitivity, such as education, use of mother tongue or ethnic appearance retention of the territory in which they live?

In the spirit of parliamentary democracies based on the principle of majority, there aren’t, at the present, clear answers to these questions to satisfy all parties involved. In Kymlicka’s opinion, the substantive issue is that in the international community there isn’t a broad consensus on the solutions acceptable to all parties interested in fair treatment of such problems. For example, in guaranteeing the right to freedom of expres-sion it can not be deducted any limitation on the language in which it can resort to using this law, as neither the right to elect and be elected is not able to solve controversial issues of internal borders and the division of powers between ethno-cultural groups, who feel threatened by each oth-er’s existence (Salat, 2001).

In the absence of general principles and a normative basis of ethno-cultural equity accepted by the international community, often happens that the answers to the mentioned questions to be made by the majority nations, according to their own interests, in the institutional framework of representative democracy based on the principle of majority, which is considered by minorities a social injustice against the democratic spirit.


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Kymlicka concludes that to meet the challenges of our times, we need a new paradigm shift in the international community’s vision. For equally full affirmation - not just declarative – of human rights to become a reali-ty, including members of ethno-cultural communities in a minority, is essential to use collective rights, in a cautious, careful, selective and adapted to the particular circumstances of each situation.

Completing the traditional human rights with minority rights is, in my opin-ion, legitimate and, ultimately, inevitable. In a multicultural state, we need a complete theory of justice, including both human rights that must be pro-vided to each individual, regardless of affiliation to one group or another, and the specific rights or a form of special status reserved for minority cul-tures. (Kymlicka, 1995: 6)

Until such a theory is not accepted based on broad international con-

sensus, we can not hope for effective prevention and a lasting settlement of the ethno-politic conflicts. The implications of the international community will be doomed to further inefficiencies and the parties in-volved in controversial situations will be found in front of strategic di-lemmas with no prospect of reconciliation and will accuse each other to create or sustain unsolvable conflicts.

4. Virtual nations Multiculturalism and the increased attention to national minorities of

any kind – the term “minority” with a wide range and somewhat poorly defined, the ethnic origin of sexual preferences – dramatically recasts the concept of national unitary state, with all the medium and long term con-sequences.

So-called virtual nations arise from communication between individu-als, who beyond nationality or geographic area in which they live and/or operates any type of activity, share the same set of values (not necessarily professional) knowledge, beliefs and way of seeing, essentially, the world. Gay rights organizations, for instance, consider their involvement be-yond the normal boundaries of a nation or another, when the rights, considered legitimate, of any member of this “virtual nation” are in-fringed. Even hackers around the world can form a “virtual nation” (Vir-tual Nation. Essay on Globalisation, 2001).


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But beyond these “transnational nation”, in the nation states are born the breaches of multiculturalism and minority nations. Scots regain their autonomy and are rediscovering the Celtic language, are increasingly making reference to their Celtic past – as well as Irish, whose dances with reference to a folk vanished in ages conquer the world. Fairies and elves arise its head more often in books and movies of international suc-cess and a recent poll conducted in Britain revealed an absolutely surpris-ing fact: many English attributes to themselves, without any real base, an Irish ancestry – is cool to be Celtic in origin, while in the `60-`70 were still regarded as a terrorist suspect on the streets of London if you were talking with the Dublin accent.

In Italy the Northern League said that the rich and “hardworking” provinces had enough paying taxes for Southern “lazy” poor, which re-calls the glories of medieval Lombard bankers and sometimes openly calls for secession.

In a country rich and relatively free from social problems, Canada, suddenly is born a secessionist movement of the French speakers in Quebec, ready to tear the nation in two. Basques in Spain suddenly dis-cover Celtic origins using the latest advances in genetics to add scientific basis for their separatist aspirations.

The obsession of cutting a nation in all sorts of slices, because of his-torical reasons often falsified or at best uncertain, can lead to a situation where the whole becomes weaker than the sum of its parts, and not vice versa, that is the whole nation-state.

National culture is the place of the contested meanings, in which the more powerful groups succeed to define national identities and to shape national regulatory bodies, which means that national identity is closely linked to the notion of cultural identity. When someone tries to under-stand the habits, sounds or images from other places in the world, one of the most common tactics is to assign an identity in terms of national specificity.

When comparing results for the citizens of each state, one can see a unique cultural identity. The peoples of Eastern Europe, for example, value hierarchy and formality, but these values of power distance are al-most irrelevant to citizens of Scandinavian countries. But those averages


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for each country, resulting from research, fail to capture context or the fluidity of identity.

In terms of linking national and cultural identity, authenticity is often associated with a mythological past, a legacy built, surrounded by nostal-gia. In the U.S., people of Scottish origin or alleged Scottish origin can be found at Scottish festivals. The need felt by some American citizens to claim a genuine legacy from another region of the world may be due to belief, common in Europe, that United States is a country too young to have an own authentic culture. As in the case of many postcolonial societies, seeking cultural identity comes to rest on the combined identi-ties such as Irish American, Italian American, Asian American and Afri-can American (Curtin, Gaither, 2008).

In a globalized world, the geographic location can not provide a clear picture of cultural identity and cultural unification of the national identity becomes problematic. For example, the second Spanish-speaking popu-lation, by size, is living in Los Angeles, California. And what is the cam-paign “Buy American” when cars are produced by companies in the U.S., but which belong to Japanese companies and are using parts manu-factured in Latin America? To this geographical displacement joins the flow of ideas through new communication technologies, forming a new geography of the communication which highlights the problems of cul-ture and identity. When cultural communication is no longer based on a history or a common space, defined by regimes is difficult to say who are “the others” in linked societies.

The term multicultural has acquired a wide range of meanings. It has become synonymous with “diversity”, as developed countries are in-creasingly identified in terms of specialized niche markets, but also with “identification” while emerges a single global culture and global market segments. For those who cling to nostalgic notions of authenticity, all these are terrifying, for others it is a wonderful new world of hybrid identities, about to be born. Either way, it remains true that Bob Marley’s music lovers form a global culture that is more tangible, from certain points of view than any national culture. Marley has become more than a Jamaican reggae singer, a living symbol of Pan-African unity.


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5. Global vs. local In the midst of these contradictory discourses on multiculturalism, is

the report between global and local. Globality was traditionally regarded as being the more power pole from the bipolar pair, the local exiting in-evitable loser from any confrontation. Following the reductionist logic specific to the construction of the national brand, the concept of globali-zation has been reduced to Westernization, which was eventually re-duced to Americanization and the fear that a monolithic country, cultur-ally rudimentary, materialist defined by fast food, take over the world in coca colonization process.

These concerns have given rise to the theory that states that the West-ern influence and media, especially the American ones, destroy local cul-tures. But the development of Japanese popular culture and its influence, first in Asia and then in the West, put them also into question the idea of a strictly Western domination.

Instead of global imperialism, cultural circuit suggests that what hap-pens is a simultaneous development of an identity Transglobal and a re-sistance to it, which reinforces localized identities.

As consumers adopt the global culture in global shapes, identity does not arise under certain national groups, but in the relationship between culture and identity, creating an infinite variety of hybrid identities. Geo-graphical space is no longer the defining element, which raises the ques-tion of difference and how we define our identity without returning to national borders or to one constructed dichotomy such as East versus West.

The emergence of modern nations is the result of geopolitical devel-opments, whether of a cultural one. In the first case it is a common ex-perience gained by the population living on a territory that is subject to state sovereignty. In the second case the reference is made to build a cer-tain kind of life, of reporting to the outside creative world, common to persons for who, as a group, the contact with a territory of the state has no relevance.

Nationalism was, undoubtedly, the engine, the dynamic factor of pro-gress in the past centuries. His most important perennial work, if not eternal, was the “nation”, concept and reality that today occupies a cen-tral place in the world characterization.


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The nation-state – although at the moment of his birth was a break-through – has not managed to fully solve the problem of development, the problem of peace, nor, especially, the problem of inter ethnic har-mony and solidarity. Identity crises and conflicts that seem inherent shortcomings of nationalism, have made this concept, and also the polit-ical practice, be subject to severe criticism.

Those criticisms have led to the destruction of any national idea of the state or nation. What happened, to a large extent, what happens next, is the modernization of old concepts that gave rise to a unitary national state, in light of opportunities, threats and challenges seen already on the horizon of the globalized world. Basically, the concept of nation state lost the meaning of ethnic while unitary state lost the meaning of central-ized.

Societies today live under the pressure of the two attributes that are a normal part of international law and, on the other hand, the practical re-ality of the national state. To the extent that international post Cold War law guarantees – at a principle level – individual rights and freedoms and these include the principles of equality and non discrimination, then the people who now have self-determination rights are conceived as com-posed of citizens free and equal among themselves.

The rule of international law works, therefore, with an abstract con-cept of society in which community solidarity should be based, some-how, in the sense of Habermas’ constitutional patriotism.

Reality is obviously different. It reflects not only that the current states were formed (most of history) as a manifestation of the national ethos, but also that practically the language and the culture of the majori-ty provide an ancestor from the other ethnic cultural identity. This dif-ference is now balanced by another part of international law, which codi-fied the rights of national minorities and protection of minority cultural identities. Countries where non-discrimination principle is consistently applied together with other instruments for the protection of national minorities were able to “pay” rule of law with the practical reality of the ancestors of the majority culture. The frontier of existing national states “cut” a territory which, on one hand, is resulting in a certain national ma-jority and some minority, on the other hand, establishes the jurisdiction of public authorities obliged to preserve the principles of a civic state.


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There has been much talk about the stability/security through devel-opment, through integration and cooperation. It is time to recognize the validity of a new concept: security/stability by multiculturalism. On the one hand we are talking about multiculturalism done at national level (more accurate the nation-state evolved to the civic state phase) and on the other hand, about global multiculturalism.

In such a context, it is necessary to distinguish between related cul-tures (Catholicism, Protestantism, Orthodoxy, etc.), family cultures and unrelated cultures. Although politically it does not seem very fair, in terms of an objective analysis we can say that we have to do with com-patible cultures and incompatible cultures. The first cultures are sisters. The latter cultures are completely alien to one lineage or another. Multi-culturalism in the sister cultures can be achieved by “the strategy of joint projects”, meaning bringing representatives of those cultures to identify common interests in the extra-cultural spheres through incentives for constructive joint effort to reach understanding, acceptance and mutual respect.

In the case of unrelated cultures or cultures of no genetic link the construction of stability must begin from intercultural dialogue aimed to ensure mutual understanding. In such a framework of understanding and accommodation we can proceed to build the compatible institutions. In this sense, for Europe it will be crucial to observe that the problem is not that of transferring it`s model, once found in the eastern half of the con-tinent and other parts of the world, but to assist partner countries or companies out there in building compatible institutions based on a shared set of values and executed with “the bricks of national traditions”.

Multicultural dialogue is therefore an instrument of stability. Ecumen-ism – religious but also secular – would seem to be so absolutely neces-sary to avoid the globalization of enmity to create the foundations for a national and/or global society, associating the right to solidarity with the right to diversity.

That being said, we should also note which are the main dangers of multicultural policies. First, they relate to the use of protection of cultur-al communities as a means for achieving geo political objectives. Second-ly, there is the danger to avoid cultural assimilation by (self-)isolation.


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Both can be overcome by creating links/union between multiculturalism and civic.

Civic state is the opposite of ethnic state. In this regard, it should be noted that the so-called multinational state is also an ethnic state, but a state which recognizes the existence of several ethnic groups. Therefore, it is not an other state than that created on an ethnic basis and it pro-motes intercultural relations of same quality. Rather, the civic state achieves the solidarity of individuals (personalities) beyond the borders of culture (cultural groups). Although stability can be undermined by the pride of identity that could lead to frustrations, ambitions and specific applications, often inspired or encouraged by the so-called “mother na-tion”(nation state assumes the role of cultural integration and protection of all national minorities living abroad who have the same ethnic origin with the majority ethnic/cultural group) which in turn often acted against the objectives of international politics or the inclination to export their internal affairs through nationalism. Therefore, the state must ac-cept the diversity of citizenship and thus become multicultural, by multi-culturalism meaning coexistence of cultural communities (different cul-tural groups live a normal life) and not just a cultural cohabitation (dif-ferent cultural groups living together in the same state, but live sepa-rately).

6. Conclusions What guarantees could exist for the normal functioning of a multicul-

tural state civic? First, we must note in the most realistic manner that multicultural policies should not ignore the majority ethnic community pride and ambitions. They do not disappear just because the society goes global. We can not imagine an unstructured global society. Consequently, the system of global society will further have subsystems among which we can find an ethnic majority and ethnic minorities. Their relations should be guided by the spirit of cooperation and coexistence that eve-ryone pool their strengths together to achieve specific common project, not a spirit of commerce and haggling, that the parties are involved in a game zero sum, each trying to ask for more and hoping to make as little. To achieve these goals the national majorities should be prepared (who at a global level will themselves be minorities) to understand and accept


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the concept of “cosmopolitan nation”. This will ask for a long and inten-sive effort of public education and the development of civic solidarity.

Secondly, other guarantee lies in the combination between state/national and international protection of cultural model. Meaning that at this stage, each state should be responsible, as the main actor of its territorial jurisdiction, of maintaining civic multiculturalism. If it fails, it should be recognized the right of action of the international communi-ty as an alternative actor. This would mean international development, an effective alternative system for the protection of minority rights/civic culture in the true spirit of multiculturalism. In this way, we can eliminate as much as possible direct involvement of a particular state (“mother na-tion”) which could have biased interest in protecting a particular cultural group/ethnicity. Of course, as European integration and global society will evolve, the more it will be a division of labor between state entities and federal entities/regional/global. The first will deal with (at least in principle) the civic aspects of the problem, and the latter will deal with the cultural aspects of the problem. This means spiritualized borders that are no longer separating cultural groups in majority and minority.

For European democracies, with a national history shaped in the dawn of modernity, the problem of political multiculturalism appears un-settling and even threatening. Will Kymlicka notes that “there are con-cerns that, while minority rights can be harmless or even beneficial, they may nevertheless constitute the first step on a slippery slope towards a more dangerous form of minority rights, which involves separatism, seg-regation and oppression” (Kymlicka, 2001: 15). The Canadian philoso-pher immediate explanation is that “most people do not have a clear un-derstanding of the limits of multiculturalism and minority rights. People are not opposed to minority rights within certain limits, but they want to know that there really limits” (Kymlicka, 2001: 15).

Cultural diversity is wealth. It should be preserved exactly. But this di-versity must note undermine the chances of civic life in the coherent civilization strengthened by the solidarity of its members. Multicultural-ism citizenship could provide the desired stability of Europe, allowing everyone and every individual to achieve full satisfaction to be able to live at the same time, within a few hundreds civilizations and cultures.


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References Chirovici, O. E. Naţiunea virtual. Eseu despre globalizare. Iaşi: Polirom, 2001. Curtin, A., G. Patricia, and T. Kenn. Relaţii publice internaţionale. Negocierea culturii,

a identităţii şi a puterii. Bucureşti: Curtea Veche, 2008. Dieckhoff, Al. La nation dans tous ses Etats. Les identités nationales en mouvement.

Paris: Flammarion, 2000. Kymlicka, W. Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizen-

ship. Oxford University Press, 2001. Kymlicka, W. Multicultural Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Poledna, R., Fr. Ruegg, and C. Rus. Interculturalitate. Cercetări şi perspective

româneşti. Cluj: Editura Presa Universitara Clujeană. 2002. Salat, L. Multiculturalism liberal. Iaşi: Polirom, 2001. Biographical Note Anda Brăilean is a post graduate student in Internatonal Relations and European Studies at the “Al.I. Cuza” University of Iasi, the Faculty of Philosophy, Social and Political Sciences. She has studied European Law and Regional Development in Nancy (France) and has a master degree with a thesis on Cultural Security and the Islamic Revolution of 2011. Currently, she is in an internship at Foreign Policy Magazine Romania.

SIGNS and MEANINGS

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HSS I.1 (2012)

Is the Search for Universals Incompatible with the Study of Cultural Specificity?1

Jean-Jacques Nattiez Université de Montréal [email protected]

What it was called “the anthropology of music” finds its roots in two found-ing papers: The Anthropology of Music by Alan Merriam (1964) and How Musical is Man? by John Blacking (1973). In these two books, the musical structures are designed as a product of the culture. The methodological consequence is: the ethnomusicological investigation should begin from the study of the cul-tural context. The consequence of this position, quite widely used in the field, was to emphasize the music environment, rather than analyse its structure, with a few notable exceptions (the work of Simha Arom and his team). A for-tiori, the research of universals, considered ethnocentric, was regarded in the field as inadmissible. After having proposed a setting up of this situation, the author examines the manner in which the issue of Blacking approaches the link between culture and musical structures, then reconsiders his positions with regard to universals, and possible biological foundations of music. The article ends with a plea for reconciliation, with a view to the ethnomusicology of tomorrow, from the point of view of the anthropology, taking into ac-count the cultural determinations, the comparative study of the musical struc-tures, and the search for universal Keywords Ethnomusicologty, Anthropology of music, Music universals, Blacking

It might seem surprising to have written this paper in the context of an

hommage to John Blacking, one of the leading figures of the anthropolog-ical approach to music, since I have long been considered a structuralist or formalist, as one who leaves by the wayside the cultural dimension of the music studied by ethnomusicology. In point of fact, I have never ceased to

Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Search of Universals HSS, vol. I, no. 1 (2012): 67-94

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reflect on the relationship between music and culture, and as such, Black-ing’s book, How Musical is Man (Blacking, 1973), has always been useful to me, perhaps not as a reference book whose orientation had to be adopted to the letter, but rather as a constant subject of reflection and discussion. It is no doubt for this reason that I did not hesitate, when the possibility arose, to have it published in French (Blacking, 1980). What’s more, one may found in Blacking’s writings contain some positions which are a di-rect or indirect response to my own (cf. Blacking, 1995, chap. V). It might then seem like a provocation on my part, or worse, to present a paper on the subject of universals that pays tribute to someone who wrote the fol-lowing: “Unless the formal analysis begins as an analysis of the social situa-tion that generates the music, it is meaningless” (Blacking, 1973: 71).

This methodological proposition was an extension of Alan Merriam’s, which is the basis of the anthropological approach to music:

Music is a product of man and has structure, but its structure cannot have an existence of its own divorced from the behavior which produces it. In order to understand why a music structure exists as it does, we must also understand how and why the behavior which produces it is as it is, and how and why the concepts which underlie that behavior are ordered in such a way as to produce the particularly desired form of organized sound. (Merriam, 1964: 7) Why, under these conditions, would an ethnomusicologist be interested

in universals? Throughout the twentieth century, there has been no shortage of ar-

guments against the very idea of searching for universals. Here is a short-list of them, which I owe to my friend and colleague Jean Molino, with whom I have written an article precisely on the subject of universals (Mo-lino-Nattiez, 2007).

How can anyone make a claim to have discovered universals when no one has or will ever have complete, detailed knowledge of the five-thousand-odd distinct musical cultures known to exist today? Isn’t it obvi-ous that each time that we make an attempt at formulating a universal trait, a counterexample will pop up somewhere? Moreover, as Merriam states in the passage that I just read, since any particular music is the prod-uct of a specific culture, what use is it to look for universals in order to understand it? What’s more, when we examine the lists of universals com-


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piled by certain researchers, it dawns on us that we could just as easily have found them in verbal language, narrative or theatre. How are they then going to help us to understand the musical phenomenon? Lastly, how can we speak of universals in music when it is not certain that what we, as Westerners, call music is a universal phenomenon? This reminds me of an observation that Kenneth Gourlay made. Quoting a Nigerian musicologist about Igbo culture who stated that the “concept of music nkwa combines singing, playing musical instruments and dancing into one act” (Nwachukwu, 1981: 59), Gourlay exclaims ironically: “How different things would have happened if the Igbo tongue had attained the same ‘universality’ as English!” (1984: 35) And this same Gourlay goes on to plead for the “the Non-Universality of Music and the Universality of Non-Music”! There’s no way to look for universals in “music” when nine-ty percent of the world’s cultures do not even have a word for “music”! The quest for universals is apparently one of the most common and most perverse manifestations of ethnocentrism. For all of these reasons, “mu-sics” are apparently incommensurable, and the search for universals, a politically incorrect lost cause.

* Allow me to confess that I am not convinced by any of these argu-

ments. And paradoxically, it is the work and thought of John Blacking which reassures me in my opinion. I would like to offer here, as a way to begin, a kind of posthumous dialogue with him. Let’s consider first of all the title of his most famous book. When he asks, “How Musical is Man?”, is he not trying to find how it is that all human beings are potentially musi-cal? Of course, we know his answer expressed in 1971 to this question, which is that of a ‘social anthropologist’: “My theme is that music express-es aspects of the experience of individuals in society” (Blacking, 1995: 32).

One then has the urge to find out just which aspects of music are ex-plained through their links to culture in the work of John Blacking, through the use of various methods which I won’t go into here. I would say that there are essentially three of them. First of all, those aspects situ-ated on the level of the meta-language: the terminology of genres accord-ing to socio-religious categories, the titles of the pieces and the vernacular categories used to designate certain aspects of the music. Secondly, Black-ing also lists aspects which, although not having to do with the sounds


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themselves, are still fundamental, culturally speaking, to the explanation of the form which any give music takes: instrumental techniques, metrical beats, counting (in the specific genre of the counting song or ‘comptine’), the speech intonation in cultures which use languages with tones, and the influence of words. Lastly, the link between music and culture is estab-lished on the level of what he terms, alluding explicitly to Chomsky, ‘deep’, or underlying structures, structures which are of a social nature, because “the function of music is to reinforce, or relate people more closely to, certain experiences which have to come to have meaning in their social life.” (Chomsky, 1973: 99 )

These three families of ties between music and culture demonstrate right from the start that not all aspects of music are explained by culture. Let take the example of musical scales. It goes without saying that Black-ing does not neglect them, but what he focuses on, in terms of cultural explanation, was the reasons why one social group borrowed a given scale from another, rather than examining the reasons for its particular form or structure.“The selection and use of scales may be the product of social and cultural processes that are not necessarily related to the acoustical properties of sound” (Blacking, 1973: 73).

And then he goes on to criticize Max Weber, who “rationalized the Eu-ropean musical system from within the tone system” (Blacking, 1973: 73).

Another question immediately springs to mind: Can the sum total of all aspects of the music of a particular group be explained by its social under-pinnings? Consider a single example. In Venda Children’s Songs, Blacking brilliantly noted that twenty-six of the children’s songs derived from the pattern of the tsikona, the national dance of the Venda, but he goes on to generalize his observation: “The thematic relationships express the rela-tionships of the social groups who make the music, particularly with re-gard to the overriding concept of Venda solidarity” (Blacking 1967: 196).

If we examine this book closely, we see that, in fact, only twenty-six of the songs are related to the national dance, out of a total of fifty-nine that he recorded and transcribed: twenty-one others come from the pentatonic schemas of “reed-pipe music”, and twelve derive from scales or modes of which several are taken from songs for adults which are distinct from the national dance (Blacking, 1967: 194, 195). Given this, is it possible to maintain, as he does in How Musical is Man?, that “The thematic relation-


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ships of tsikona and the Venda children’s songs express corresponding social relationships”? (Blacking, 1973: 101).

This position, at once deterministic and functionalist, is the strength as well as the key to the success of Blacking’s work. I just explained, howev-er, why this position fails to convince me. But I would go so far as to say that Blacking himself sensed the difficulties inherent to his position. In order to prepare for this paper, I re-read his three books, and although I didn’t go through all 191 of his published papers (cf. his list of works in Blacking, 1995: 247-252), I did go through those collected in Music, Culture, and Experience (1995), and a few others as well. I was struck by two things. First, from his very first important texts, Blacking explicitly recognizes the existence of universals. I consider it highly symbolic that his last two pa-pers, published after his death, deal with what he calls “The Biology of Music-Making”. The first was published in Italy thanks to the efforts of Raffaelle Pozzi (Blacking, 1990) in the collected papers from a conference on the perennial problem of “la musica come linguaggio universale”; the second is accessible in an ethnomusicological handbook edited by Helen Myers (Blacking, 1992). The evolution of Blacking’s work seems to me to parallel in every way that of Alan Merriam, who, also in his last article, published after his untimely death, firmly rehabilitated the comparative approach in ethnomusicology, in a text entitled “On Objections to Com-parison in Ethnomusicology” (1982).

My purpose is to remind us that structural studies clearly do have their place in ethnomusicology, that such studies lead naturally and inevitably to compar-isons of structures, and that such comparisons can, under specific circum-stances, lead to new and broadened knowledge of music. (Merriam, 1982: 175) In truth, there’s nothing surprising about the fact that the two scholars

who contributed the most to focussing ethnomusicological research to-wards the specificity of cultures both ended up returning to research top-ics which their general viewpoints helped to shun, because it is impossible, in any scientific activity, to at once embrace a deterministic as well as a reductionistic point of view.


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I would like then, first of all, to examine a certain number of Blacking’s statements which seem to demonstrate the need for the ethnomusicologist to be concerned about universals and to set out to find them.

* Blacking’s interest in universals is in fact derived from his vision of mu-

sic as a force of social cohesion. For this reason, in the period leading up to How musical is man?, pre-1973, the contribution of communication to societal cohesion occupies a non-negligible place in his approach, as can be seen in the first chapter of Music, Culture, and Experience (1995), which dates from 1971. In order for there to be communication between human beings, not only within a culture, but also between different cultures – and this preoccupation remains present in all of his writings – there must be musical universals. In an article entitled “Can Musical Universals Be Heard?”, which was written in 1977, he reflects on what he considers to be the universality of the British composer Elgar’s musical message. In so doing, he was revisiting a problem which he had put forward in a more timid form in How musical is man?, when he stated that: “Perhaps there is a hope of cross-cultural understanding after all” (1973: 111)

Four years later, he writes: “The conviction that music can transform experience, heighten consciousness, induce ecstasy, or even cure sickness, is perhaps universally held, and is a stimulus to countless musical perfor-mances.” (1977: 14, 16). However, he adds that

The power of music is due not only to its acoustical properties, but also to the social experience that its performance generates, in creating a quasi-ritual association and concentration of human bodies in time and space. (…) If people are turned on by either music or a social situation, what happens to them is possible only through some kind of spontaneous collective aware-ness, which has not been, and cannot easily be, proved.” (1977: 16)

The possibility of this special kind of communication [i.e., the musical and the social] is in fact the only real basis for a useful theory of musical univer-sals. If human beings can never share feelings, the discovery of universal mu-sical traits would not reveal much about the nature of music” (1977: 16-18) Therefore, the potentially universal traits of music can only be consid-

ered as such by taking into account their expressive dimension, on condi-


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tion that we consider only those connotations which are shared not just by a single community, but transculturally. In his last essay, which, as it hap-pens, does not figure in the bibliography of his writings (1990: 247-252), and which is significantly entitled “Transcultural Communication and the Biological Foundations of Music”, he states that:

Transcultural communication is possible not because of the ways in which individuals make sense of it. The only area in which significant universals may be found is the biological foundations of music-making, the cognitive and af-fective processes by which people make sense of musical sound. (1990: 180) In reality, this position is not surprising, since, even though Blacking

worked so hard, on the heels of Merriam, to get us to study the specificity of each musical culture, he never lost sight of the fact that every individual belongs to the universal community of all human beings, and he hoped that music would contribute to the development of a sense of human brotherhood. Let me remind of the moving final paragraph of How musical is man?:

In a world such as ours, in this world of cruelty and exploitation in which the tawdry and the mediocre are proliferated endlessly for the sake of financial profit, it is necessary to understand why a madrigal by Gesualdo or a Bach Passion, a sitar melody from India or a song from Africa, Berg’s Wozzeck or Britten’s Requiem, a Balinese gamelan or a Cantonese opera, or a symphony by Mozart, Beethoven, or Mahler, may be profoundly necessary for human sur-vival. (Blacking, 1973: 116) The consequences of these affirmations are strong because they lead us

to advance the idea that there must exist emotional or affective universals in music, and an identical emotional response to a given music, within a culture as well as from one culture to the next. If indeed a universal di-mension exists, it must not depend on any particular social or cultural conventions, or on the idiosyncrasies of individuals. How then can we find a basis for the existence of these universals? Blacking’s statement on this point are radical. I quote an article from 1977:


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Musicians reared in mutually incomprehensible cultural traditions may use a common device which, because it is based on a universal mental structure, may resonate with listeners unfamiliar with the cultural or musical idiom. To do this, they must reach beyond the conventions of their particular society to the universal mental processes of the species.(…) This is how the most indi-vidual composer can have the most universal appeal : he communicates to others at the level of the innate ; he begins with cultural conventions, but transcends them by reorganizing his sound structures in a personal, but basi-cally universal, way, rather than slavishly following culturally given rules. (Blacking, 1977: 19) What Blacking is admitting here is the existence of identical processes

among all humans, which are at work whatever the cultural context, and which underlie different musical phenomena. This leads him to ask the following two questions: “What innate capabilities, if any, are commonly required for all known traditions of music-making? And which of these are peculiar to only certain traditions?” (ibid., 21; my emphasis).

In every culture we can observe the existence of what he calls in his ar-ticle “Towards a Theory of Musical Competence”, inspired by Chomsky, “musical ability”, that is, every culture puts into practice “musical compe-tence as composer or performer, or both, but most particularly as listener” (1971: 21). This ability depends at the same time on individual musical competence and on universal musical competence. By this, he means “the innate or learned capacity to hear and create patterns of sound which may be recognized as music in all cultural traditions.” (ibid., 21).

And by “music”, Blacking means “the patterns of humanly organized sound” (ibid., 24), an expression which he subsequently used in his most famous book. Also, “it is not unreasonable to suppose that most men could acquire particular musical competence under favourable cultural conditions, and that all may be born with certain capacities which consti-tute universal competence.” (ibid., 24)

The result? Suppose we look at the social, musical, economic, legal, and other subsystems of a culture as transformations of basic structures that are in the body, innate in man, part of his biological equipment. […] The following relationships may be transformations of a single structure: call/response, tone/companion tone,


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tonic/countertonic, individual/community, chief/subjects, theme/variation, male/female”. […] There seem to be universal structural principles in music, such as the use of mirror forms, theme and variation, repetition, and binary form. (Blacking, 1973: 112) If we compare this last quote with what he said about “innate capabili-

ties”, we are led to posit a distinction, even if it is not brought out by Blacking himself, between two possible types of universals: those which Jean Molino calls universals of strategy and universals of substance. The universals of strategy are cognitive in nature, and it is these which Blacking will ap-peal to when he asserts the legitimacy of searching for universals. The uni-versals of substance are found in characteristics inscribed in the musical material itself, that are constant from one culture to the next, such as a certain aspect of the musical form or of a particular rhythm. We will re-turn to these later on.

Of course, being the social anthropologist that he is, Blacking placed a great deal of emphasis on the fact that, for him, each culture draws on the natural givens in order to construct their own musical system, rather than claiming that the culture obeys the dictates of nature. But without positing a universal musical competence, he writes that “we cannot expect different musical systems to be mutually intelligible” (1971: 33), and his main pre-occupation in this text of 1971 is in fact the possibility of transcultural communication:

There is evidence, he adds, that the deep structures of music may be influ-enced by intellectual and interactional processes which are as fundamental to the nature of every man as are certain cultural processes to particular groups of men, and it is at this level of analysis that we must look for the facts which will lead us towards a theory of universal musical competence. (1971: 33) What is particularly interesting about this formulation is that Blacking

draws a parallel between the cognitive and the social foundations of this intercommunication. This explains why, already in the preface to How mu-sical is man?, Blacking speaks of “the biological and social origins of music” (1973: xi, my emphasis). “Essential physiological and cognitive processes that generate musical composition and performance may even be genetically inherited, and therefore present in almost every human being.” (1973: 7).


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Biology is a recurring theme of the book as a whole, placed on the same footing as culture as a foundation of music. I found no less than fourteen occurrences of the word ‘biological’ and references to innatism in How Musical is Man?. Also, in the final pages, after having reaffirmed that “some of the processes that generate [the musical systems] may be innate in all men and so species-specific” (1973: 115), Blacking expresses the hope that ethnomusicology would allow us to “learn more about the inner nature of man’s mind” (1973: 115). In his final paper, he adheres to the idea of “the psychic unity of mankind” (1992: 301), and I quote again from How Musical is Man?:

At some level of analysis, all musical behavior is structured, whether in rela-tion to biological, psychological, sociological, cultural, or purely musical processes; and it is the task of the ethnomusicologist to identify all processes that are rele-vant to an explanation of musical sound. (1973: 17)

In the remainder of this paper I will examine the consequences of the

task which John Blacking has assigned to us. *

I believe that ethnomusicology today could benefit from two broad mutations which, among other fields, have affected musicology in general since the publication of How Musical is Man?, forty years ago. First of all, music analysis has seen some new developments. In the years up to nine-teen-seventy-three, Blacking’s analytical references were essentially Adler, Sachs, Réti, Deryck Cooke and some statistical number-crunchers. Thanks to Leonard Meyer’s Explaining Music in particular, which was also pub-lished in 1973, theorists became aware that a musical piece is made up of parameters and constituent parts which, over the course of one and the same work, behave according to quasi-autonomous rules and functions. This is what I have called in some of my writings the parametric concep-tion of music. The second mutation was the development of the cognitive psychology of music. These two mutations are not without links which connect them, and both greatly bear on the question of musical universals.

As I hope to have shown at the beginning of this paper by listing the aspects of the musical fact which Blacking explains by culture, not all as-pects of music can be explained as a product of culture. In a book whose approach is unfortunately too positivist and formalist to have attracted


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much serious attention at the time of its publication, Jay Rahn supplied a nice reductio ad absurdum: “If culture caused music, one could dispense with studying music.” (1983:17).

It is unfortunate that this is in fact what too many ethnomusicologists of anthropological orientation, and no doubt influenced by the radical determinism of Merriam, which is clear from the quotation which I cited at the beginning of this talk. And it is probably this same conviction, that music is a product of culture, which led Blacking to write that “music con-firms what is already present in society and culture, and it adds nothing new except patterns of sound” (1973: 54). This amounts to attributing a rather weak form of specificity to the musical fact, in comparison to other symbolic forms. Moreover, I would be tempted to complete Rahn’s ob-servation in the following way: if culture really produced music, we would be able to insert all the cultural data into a machine and generate music from it. Clearly, this has never been possible, and never will be. This is not the place to discuss Rahn’s radical claim that “cultural values have been demonstrated to determine only a small, and relatively superficial portion of the musical observables in any given instance” (1983:19), even if a ‘Merriamian’ ethnomusicologist like Anthony Seeger has written that “most ethnomusicologists claim, somewhat as a matter of faith, that music is in some way related to the society that produces it” (1980: 8, my emphasis). Suffice it to say, and this should be acceptable to everyone, and Blacking, clearly would have agreed, that, given our present-day tools the aspects that the synchronic cultural context do not explain, must be explained by other means: by history, by influences and migrations, and also, no doubt, by human biological, neurological and psychological constants. By consid-ering a musical piece as a hierarchical combinatorial system of parameters and aspects identified by analysis, we obtain the means to explain it, not in a reductive sense, but according to a web of influence or causality of which it is, on several different levels, the result. This network of causes includes the innate and universal musical competence about which Black-ing speaks. But today, the appeal to competence is no longer only a theo-retical project, or a mere programmatic proclamation, as it was in 1971. We understand it much better today, thanks to the work of the cognitiv-ists.


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To these two mutations, I would add a third, which I don’t place on the same level as the others, because it would be at once pretentious and un-realistic to claim that my own work has had the same impact on musicolo-gy; in point of fact, I am following the fundamental tenets of Jean Molino, who in turn and in various ways, owes much to the legacy of Cassirer and Piaget. This factor is the need to consider music as a symbolic form with its own specific modes of operation.

Before I return to fleshing out Blacking’s observation on universals, and to the compatibility of research into universals and the study of the cultural specificity of a musical repertoire, I would like to refute the five arguments against universals which I summarized at the beginning of this talk, and to confront them with a few arguments in favour of looking for them. To this end, I will draw on the two broad mutations of which I just spoke, and on the notion of a symbolic form.

I’ll begin with the latter. Music is allegedly not a universal phenomenon because not all societies have a word for ‘music’. This puts us on firmly nominalist terrain! Must all societies have the word ‘religion’ – which is far from being the case – if we are to claim that religious belief is a phenome-non present in all cultures? The truth of the matter is that music, just like myth, religion, narrative and language, is a specific symbolic form. As was noted above, Gourlay reports that, according to one Nigerian musicolo-gist, the Igbo combine “singing, playing musical instruments and dancing into one act”. In order to arrive at this, he had to consider song, instrumen-tal practice and dance as autonomous forms of symbolic activity in and of themselves, and which, for the Igbo, merge together into a single entity, which is called nkwa. What’s more, the semantic surface of the word nkwa is exactly the same as that of the ancient Greek “mousikè”! This didn’t prevent Western science from defining a quasi-autonomous symbolic form, what we call ‘music’, and the same goes for the understanding of nkwa as a symbolic form having its own unity for the Igbo. Because in order to understand how they function, song, instrumental production and dance must be separated from each other; the reason for this is that each requires its own specific analytical tools, that is, simply put, a sound of singing voice is just not the same thing as a dance step, which has never discouraged an Igbo from considering that you can’t do one without the other. One cannot adequately analyze an opera, in our society, without


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relating the music to the text; to do this, one is obliged at a given moment to distinguish between the organization of the musical material and that of the libretto.

This position obviously requires us to supply a universal definition of the musical fact, but, building on an old suggestion by Jean Molino, I feel comfortable with the following one: “Music is sound that is organized and recognized by a culture.” Up to here, this is just as valid for music as it is for language. However, contrary to linguistic utterances, musical construc-tions do not aim at conveying messages whose semantic content are coor-dinated syntactically, because music is organized syntactically on the level of what music theory calls ‘notes’, the equivalent of phonemes, and not on the level of larger units such as motifs, the equivalents of the monemes which link signifiers to signifieds. If this is the case, and given that each culture possesses its own specific forms of musical organization – if we think of the calls of the muezzin, of Schönberg’s Sprechgesang, of the throat games of Inuit women, of ‘bel canto’ opera – the musical fact is certainly a universal phenomenon: for this reason, the search for universals in music is totally legitimate.

The two objections according to which one could never be familiar with all the musical cultures of the world, and that, each time that we at-tempted to discern a universal trait, a counter-example would pop up somewhere, are no longer valid when we search for the universals in the cognitive strategies and processes which are the basis for the production and the perception of substantial aspects of music. I’m not saying that that’s the only thing we have to do. I’m merely pointing out that if we suc-ceed in identifying the universals of strategy, we can, in a second stage of research, not busy ourselves with the impossible task of taking stock of all of the world’s musical cultures, but rather to verify if these universals of strategy are in fact at work behind any new musical culture which comes under our observation. In other words, following an inductive search for universals of strategy, we can proceed in a deductive manner. But in that case, we must take a closer look at the methodological path which we have taken, in order to work back from the observation of pieces and works, to the universals.

Leonard B. Meyer was already aware of the importance of universals of strategy in one of the first articles which was favorable to the search for


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universals, which was published in the journal Ethnomusicology in 1960. At that time, his text was not very influential because the only way that it could be fully understood was in light of Meyer’s general theory, which he only developed subsequently in his books which were to follow. Over and above the specificity with which we register our descriptions of melodies, modes, rhythms, forms, etc., he claimed that there existed “more general laws governing all human behavior” (Meyer, 1971: 271). Taking the exam-ple of melody, he wrote that it was comprised not only of a collection of particular sounds, but also “a set of subjectively felt tendencies among the tones” (1971: 271). “What we should ask,” he wrote, “is whether, beneath the profusion of diverse and divergent particulars, there are any universal principles functioning.” (ibid.; my emphasis).

Let’s look at the example of melody, for which he laid out a remarkable analytical model in his book of 1973, Explaining Music, and which, for this reason, should be of great interest to ethnomusicologists.

Take for example the melodic profile of the scherzo from Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony: it rises up from a low A, the tonic, all the way up to a high E in bar 6; but you have to wait until measure 252 for the melody to come back down to the initial low A (Meyer, 1973: 205). Conversely, in many of the songs of the Baganda in Uganda, all high notes are immediately followed by a drop back down to the tonal center. In the music of North American Indians, melodies often have a descending profile, but tend to be much longer than their Baganda counterparts, and, obviously, a good deal shorter than Bruckner. These three examples of melodies have appar-ently nothing in common, except that, after a rise, they all display a de-scending profile. What Meyer brings out here is the existence of a univer-sal principal which underlies these differences, and explains the melodic behaviour of each. At the heart of his analyses of melody, Meyer posits as a law, based on the principles of Gestalttheorie and recently re-examined by Fred Lerdahl (Lerdahl and Jackendoff, 1983: 40-43, 302-307), a leading cognitivist musicologist and theorist, that any melody which rises, that is to say which is characterized at a given moment by a leap to a higher pitch , tends to come back down towards a moment of rest. This observation is based on the Gestalt principle known as the law of complementarity and closure: every time a musical event is initiated, it must find a satisfying


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conclusion, from a psychological point of view. But, three consequences of this analysis must be taken into account:

1) Firstly, the reason that it is possible, starting from three melodies (and in fact from more than that), to derive what appears to be a law of universal scope (a universal of strategy), is because we were able, with our tools, to find something which the three had in common. In short, wheth-er explicitly or intuitively, we superimposed paradigmatically the music in such a way as to bring out the characteristics which recur from one culture to another. What we undertook then, is what I have always had the weak-ness for calling, following Molino’s parlance, an analysis of the neutral level of the three melodies that were under consideration. We found that the succession ‘rising/falling’ is the common trait that they all share. This is the descriptive stage. It would then seem that universals of substance do in fact exist (and I could give a few examples of them, in particular those which have been patiently enumerated by Bruno Nettl in an article of 1977).

2) Secondly, tracking down these intercultural recurrences is in fact a necessary step towards discovering universals of strategy. But when we make explicit what is common to all of them, we are leaving the descriptive stage, and are moving onto the explanatory stage: if we accept the validity of the Gestaltist approach – and that’s for psychologists to confirm (cf. Im-berty, 1990: 118-122) – then the laws of complementarity and closure do in fact explain the profiles of the melodies which were empirically exam-ined.

3) Thirdly, this whole process aims at rehabilitating the comparative perspective. If we move away from it, we are quite simply prohibiting our-selves from answering, on the level of sonic phenomena, the question: “How musical is man?”. And I am happy to read the following lines which Merriam wrote shortly before his death: “It is virtually impossible to con-ceive of a type of study that does not use comparison (…). Even descrip-tion is based upon implicit comparison.” (1982: 177).

Typologies and comparisons are absolutely necessary if we are to better understand how music works. George List (1977: 44, 46) criticized the psychologist Dane Harwood for having presented the perception of dis-crete pitches as a universal trait (Harwood, 1976: 525) by pointing to soci-eties in which, on the contrary, pitches are not discretized. List was right,


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but that only meant that we need to compile a typology of the different ways in which sound is used in different cultures, which would permit us to assimilate as music – because what reason would we have to exclude them? – Inuit throat games, the glissandi of the Formosans, the tumbling strains of which Sachs spoke, and electroacoustic music, but we would have to place them in a vast general category, distinct from those which rely on the discretization of pitches.

By taking the path of classification and typology, we offer a response to the other objections which have at times been used against the partisans of universals: the fact that certain universal traits are not to be found in all musics. Appealing to this argument is quite simply to forget that no cul-ture is under any obligation to use all the possibilities which the neuro-psychological apparatus offers it. In this perspective, it is legitimate to speak of ‘quasi-universals’, even if that expression might seem to be a con-tradiction in terms. On the contrary! It is inscribed in our bio-genetic code that human skin of all men and all women can have diverse forms of pig-mentation. And yet not all human beings have white skin, nor do all have black skin.

In order to undertake classifications – those of the different ways in which sound is used which I have just evoked, have much to teach us about the nature of music – it is necessary to employ comparisons. Even when typological work is not the explicit aim of the researcher, intuitions about the nature of music in general are indispensable. To cite Leonard B. Meyer’s brilliant formulation in his article from 1998 which, making full circle, he devotes to universals: “One cannot comprehend and explain the variability of human cultures unless one has some sense of the constancies involved in their shaping.” (Meyer, 2000: 281).

How in fact can we bring out the specificity of a musical culture if we don’t have a general framework available to us which would allow us to precisely define it and to give it its full meaning by comparing it to others? It was clear just a moment ago, with reference to the three types of melod-ic behaviour, each quite distinct from the other, but having in common an underlying universal Gestaltist law.

But what I have just tried to demonstrate could provoke two objec-tions.


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As I said at the beginning of this article, certain opponents of the search for universals have not failed to note that many of the cognitive strategies advanced by those who do adhere to them, are not exclusive to the domain of music, and by this they are trying to make a negative point. In reality, they didn’t understand that given that certain cognitive strategies are present in all human beings, there is no reason why these same strate-gies should not be at work behind other symbolic forms such as linguistic utterance or literary narrative. This observation has another consequence: it is no longer easy to assert that music is the exclusive domain of human beings. Since it is a phenomenon which is in part based in biology, there is no reason to think that we cannot find music among animals, as the so-called ‘zoo-musicologists’ have recently shown, and who have set up shop in the zoos of Berlin and Los Angeles. I won’t get into this here, but I re-fer you first of all to an article by Peter Marler (2004) and to that fascinat-ing book, The Origins of Music (Wallin et al., 2000), which is a collection of talks given at a colloquium that was held in Fiesole. The quest for musical universals is legitimate because it allows us to better understand not only human beings, but also, all living things.

The second possible objection to my previous analysis, and it is also the most common objection against the search for universals, is that since music is a product of culture, different musical cultures are incommen-surable. Because – not so fast – if you compare structures from culture to culture, while remaining only on the level of musical substance, you end up falling into the sort of ethnocentrism from which ethnomusicology has had so much trouble extricating itself since the nineteen-sixties!

My intention is not at all to advocate a return to an ethnomusicology which ignores the crucial role played by taking the culture into account in the production, the perception and the comprehension of musical phe-nomena which are present in it. But I believe that, in order to see things clearly, we must distinguish between two types of links between the musi-cal and the cultural.

Let me remind the crucial distinction between etic and emic points of view, as proposed by Kenneth Pike in 1954, and which has since penetrat-ed into linguistics, certainly, but also anthropology and, consequently, into ethnomusicology. To put it simply, and without going into a complex exe-gesis of these two categories, the etic point of view is that of the researcher


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who is outside of the culture; the emic point of view corresponds to the cognitive categories, whether verbalized or not, of the local inhabitants.

For this reason, and this is obvious, a typology of universals – and I found at least eight in the musicological literature –, or any other attempt at comparison of data borrowed from different cultures is by its nature etic. This is the case for the universal classification of the structures of lan-guages proposed by Claude Hagège (1982). But his classification is all the more convincing for the fact that it bases itself on a sampling of 754 pho-nological descriptions, that is, emic descriptions. In comparison, ethnomu-sicology is far from its goal, and has fallen behind considerably: how can we fail to be surprised that the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music pub-lished so few studies of musical scales? Granted, in the first stages of comparative ethnomusicology, researchers based themselves on etic de-scriptions of scales and their comparisons were doomed to failure. But since then, now that the etic/emic distinction is available to us, it is possible, by using the model of phonology as inspiration, as was done with brio by a disciple of Pike’s, Vida Chenoweth (1972, 1979), or by developing, in the field, techniques suitable to the investigation, to undertake an emic charac-terization of scales. Even if we had available to us only as few as a hun-dred odd descriptions obtained from methodological principles held con-stant, we could begin a classificatory comparison of scales. I would posit then that the comparative work which is the basis for the search for uni-versals can be founded on emic characterizations of musical phenomena, established before hand: I am thinking here of the work of Simha Arom on African rhythm and meter, or on more recent work conducted by his research team on the musical scales of the Ouldémé and the Bedzan of Cameroon: their emic nature is proven through recourse to veritable exper-iments conducted in the field.

But we encounter a second case which has to do with the relationship between music and culture: it is illustrated by Blacking in a Neo-Marxist vein and consists in proposing a hermeneutics of musical production in a functionalist perspective. It is not the object of this article to discuss this aspect of the anthropology of music. All that I wish to do here is to distin-guish between an emic characterization of the constituent aspects of a mu-sical system, and a cultural interpretation of them.


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A fine study by Nidaa Abou Mrad (2005) proves that, in the Arab world, certain choices of scales were made, in different eras, as a response to preoccupations about identity. This is what we could call an anthropo-logical approach to scales. However, this approach is not sufficient in the explanation of a musical scale’s structure and of how it is built up, and the strength of the author’s argument comes from the fact that it is based on a detailed analysis of the different types of structures which are observable in the scales of the Arabic Orient. It’s clear: emic description of scales and cultural interpretation of these phenomena are two distinct yet comple-mentary aspects, of one and the same object. And here I would endorse the position of Alan Merriam, presented in his very last essay:

If we are to learn as much as possible, in the most economical way, about music taken as a socio-cultural phenomenon, then we cannot cut ourselves off from any reasonable approach. Lest there be misunderstanding, I wish to reiterate that ethnomusicology for me is the study of music as culture, and that does not preclude the study of form; indeed we cannot proceed without it. (1982: 18, my emphasis)

And there is all the more need for these aspects to be distinguished

since we often encounter musical universals which cannot be linked to the corresponding musical structures. I am thinking in particular of an obser-vation which was put forward by David McAllester, in a symposium in 1970 devoted to our subject, and which made enough of an impression on those who heard it that it was later taken up again and discussed by several of his colleagues: “One of the most important of the universals, or near-universals, in music is that music transforms experience.(…) Music takes one away into another state of being” (1971: 380).

Now, it is, if not impossible, at the very least extremely difficult, in our present state of understanding, to establish a link of causality between a musical phenomenon and the transformation of consciousness that it provokes, but that doesn’t change the fact that we encounter this phe-nomenon in practically all cultures. In the same vein, the work of Gilbert Rouget shows clearly that although we encounter the phenomenon of trance in Africa just as we find it at the Paris opera or in Sicily (Rouget, 1990: 434-447), that does not mean that the link between music and trance is founded in a universal bi-univocal relationship. We are in the presence


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here of behaviors which are universally observable, related to music, but for which the only explanations accepted at present are of an anthropolog-ical or cultural character.

Lastly, there is a third case which is the opposite of the previous one: the one which says that we have the right to look for universals when the phenomena under examination cannot be explained through recourse to culture, for the simple reason that culture cannot explain everything about music. I will distinguish between two situations, depending on whether we’re talking about universals of strategy or universals of substance.

There is first of all the case of such and such a universal of strategy which governs musical phenomena which are of a totally heterogeneous nature from a cultural point of view. There is a very simple, yet fundamen-tal example of this: it lies in what we could call, if I can be forgiven for the pun, the ‘faculty of music’: the fact that, short of any coercive intervention by the State in places like Afghanistan or Iran, there is no culture without music, and there is one simple reason for this: as the psychologists remind us (Imberty, 2004), when a baby is between two and six months old, we can distinguish between the sounds it makes for the purpose of communi-cation, and which become verbal language, and others which are the product of play, notably those which make use of repetition, which as Gilbert Rouget (1990) has relevantly observed, is one of the universal traits of music.

After this, there follows the case of universals of substance which, once again, resist cultural explanation, and here, I would like to appeal to a deci-sive but little known argument in favor of universals by J.H. Kwabena Nketia, which appears in an article from 1984 where he speaks about so-called World Music, at a time when it was in its early stages.

The universality of music has been viewed from the perspective of the crea-tive process which selects and integrates variants and invariants from differ-ent sources. What unifies music wherever it is found is believed to be its basic forms which presuppose the use of common resources and techniques. (Nkteia, 1984: 4) For creative musicians, the universals of music are the materials and process-es of music capable of application or use outside particular societal or cultural boundaries, or capable of stimulating aesthetic response outside their original


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environment. The type and range of universals of music can expand as a re-sult of the processes of interculturation, for what is common or basic every-where is often not as exciting artistically as what is different and challenging but capable of being integrated into one’s universe of experience. (Nkteia, 1984: 6, my underlying) Of course, this text should not be interpreted as a function of World

Music as we know it today which is more often than not, synonymous with the hegemony of a certain industrial musical culture to the detriment of local musical ones. What is at issue here, on the one hand, is the possi-bility of musicians to enlarge their musical palettes by combining particular traits of different musical languages and styles, and on the other hand, the fact that the listener belonging to culture X can derive obvious satisfaction from listening to music which is born of a culture Y which is completely foreign to him or her. As we know since Brailoiu, aksak rhythms can be found in a great variety of world cultures, but also in the music of Dave Brubeck (in Take five) and in Ligeti’s piano Études. Is it unreasonable to think that the listener, whatever culture he or she may belong to, will be conscience, through the use of analogous cognitive strategies, of the typi-cal uneven beats of these limping rhythms? Isn’t the presence of a great number of CDs devoted to traditional music in our music stores indicative of the possibility of intercultural understanding? What we have to bring out here is the notion of ‘musical comprehension’, and to distinguish it from linguistic comprehension. When I travel to Tokyo, I am not able to understand a single sentence that is spoken in Japanese. On the other hand, if I go to a concert of traditional Japanese music or to Nô theatre, this music ‘speaks to me’ on a certain level. Otherwise, not only would the sale of traditional music CDs in the West be inexplicable, but also the ex-pansion of interest in World music today. If this is so, the reason is that, as the psychologist and musicologist Michel Imberty has aptly put it, “Tu peux décider de ne pas garder l’original français ou de mettre la traduction anglaise en note”.

The interpretation which the listener chooses can sometimes go beyond his or her cultural sphere, and be enriched by interpretive items, which, because of the structure or the geographical or cultural provenance of the music, the listener did not respond to at first. Universality here lies in the way that the in-


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terpretive procedures at a given moment can allow one to produce, under-stand or discover certain structural similarities. (Imberty, 1990: 127) This obviously does not mean that we understand the sum total of

whatever is connected to a specific musical universe. This is one aspect which Blacking does not take into consideration, because, as we saw, the notion of communication was central to his approach. In a paper pub-lished in 1990, “Transcultural communication and the biology of music”, he writes that:

There remain two basic explanations of transcultural musical communication and the diffusion of musical characteristics: 1) different individuals are happy to make sense of the same sounds according to their own, developed musical intuition, and 2) there are biologically based capabilities that enable people to make culture-free, aesthetic judgments. It is only in the second type of situa-tion that there is a possibility that two different individuals might experience the same musical sounds in exactly the same way. (Imberty, 1990: 185) Blacking admitted therefore the possibility of aesthetic judgments

which are independent of cultural conditioning and which, rooted in biol-ogy, could create an authentic communication link between individuals belonging to different cultures, even one’s which are very distant from each other. Here, as you can see, he was opening the Pandora’s Box which is the question of universals of the Beautiful, that I’m sure no one was expecting to hear from someone like Blacking. His position can be ex-plained by the fact that, since he was essentially preoccupied by the values and meanings shared inside a single social group, and also by the role of music in fostering a universal brotherhood and fellow feeling, there had to be, for Blacking, universals which would allow communication not only inside a single group, but also between different cultural communities. At the end of his life, he wrote the following:

I do not need any acquaintance with Austrian language and culture to enjoy the music of Mozart and Schubert, and even to be able to play it intelligently. Aes-thetic communication can therefore provide an alternative, non-rational, non-conceptual source of human sociability, which can have unexpected conse-quences for social action. (Imberty, 1990: 188)


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Therefore, he only considered profoundly universal, those traits which contribute to this intercultural communication. That being said, Blacking was a victim, like many musicologists, and many researchers in the human-ities generally, of what I like to call ‘the fallacy of communication’ which I have emphasized in my work, through recourse to the tripartite model of musical semiotics (cf. Nattiez, 1987, 1993).

From the moment that we consider a piece or a musical work, not as a monolithic block, but as an ensemble of parameters and constituent parts arranged in a hierarchy, and in which each has a certain autonomy of op-eration, the question of communication between producers of music from one culture, and receivers of the same music situated in another culture, can no longer be posed in the way that Blacking expresses it. What must be done is, for each of these parameters, to find out whether, yes or no, the strategies of reception are effectively analogous to the strategies of production. The reason that I am able to appreciate a piece of Javanese Gamelan music, or a piece played on the Shakuhachi, is probably that since it is made up of discrete pitches and rhythms which are not com-pletely foreign to me, I grasp something in these musics which is the same for me as for the performer. Naturally, at other levels, I don’t understand this music: for example, the relationship between the pitches in a penta-tonic system with which, Debussy notwithstanding, I am not terrible fa-miliar. The same is true when I listen to a disk of polyphonic or poly-rhythmic pieces of the Banda Linda or of the Baganda. While I am capable of appreciating them, I obviously do not hear the model which serves as the basis for what the musicians play, and which Simha Arom (1985) has taught us to discover and to analyse. But it would be an error to believe that in order to appreciate some musical output which sounds foreign to my ears, there must exist communication on all levels of musical structure, based on analogous emic categories, that is, which have the same cognitive resonance for me as for the indigenous performers or listeners. Precisely because, from the point of view of the relationship between producers and receivers of music, musical ‘communication’ functions in different ways, depending on which level and which constituent parts of a piece or a work we are talking about. To take a diametrically opposed position to Blacking, I would state that on the contrary, very often the pleasure we experience in listening to the music of a culture which is partially or totally


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foreign to us, is based on a misinterpretation. But there must be something which is being transmitted of their musical production to my ears, whereas, when I hear Japanese spoken, I understand nothing. On the other hand, if I hear a piece played on the shamisen, or a Bagandan drummer, I can be fascinated by the melodic modulations, the textures, the specific way in which time is treated, the virtuosic ability, the intensity of the sound, etc., and I can take pleasure in listening to it. What must be kept in mind is that, in a musical piece, not all of the component parts are transmitted from the producer to the listener of a different culture. Also, I agree totally with Mantle Hood when he writes:

Close observation of Western and non-Western students and many audienc-es, all of whom have been in contact with a number of different foreign mu-sical languages, has convinced me and a good many others that (…) persons of different ethnic backgrounds are able to perceive a given musical expres-sion at different levels; that some kind of “musical “meaning” seems not to de-pend on membership in the society carrying in the tradition; and that the de-grees and kind of “musical meaning” may be the same, may be similar, or may be different for members and nonmembers of that society. (1963: 288; my underlying) We all have experienced situations of this kind, and that is at least one

reason for which we should, with confidence, get back to searching for musical universals. There’s lots of work ahead. We could begin by devising tests which would verify, in the field, whether the universals put forward by musicologists and cognitive scientists as a result of their observation of tonal music, are relevant for non-European musics. I have in mind here the claim made by Lerdahl and Jackendorff according to whom only four-teen of the seventy-five rules for the perceptive analysis of tonal music are ‘idiom specific’ (1983: 345-352). I am also thinking of the rules describing the way in which melody functions, laid out in the third part of Baroni, Dalmonte and Jacoboni’s book, Le regole della musica (1999), also available in English. In this book, rules elaborated in the description of the melodic style of Legrenzi were tested against European music, from Gregorian chants all the way to Debussy. There’s no reason to stop in the middle of such a promising path. Ethnomusicology should try to test these rules in a gamelan piece or in a Pygmy song.


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* In closing, I would like to return to the question I asked in the title of

this article: “Is the search for universals incompatible with the study of cultural specificity?”. In order to do this, I’d like to begin by emphasizing that we shouldn’t put the emic and the etic approaches into opposition. Some etic approaches, in particular those which make use of the recogni-tion of universal cognitive mechanisms, are absolutely legitimate. We also need an etic framework of comparison in order to better grasp the specific-ity of musical cultures, and to compare them to the constitutive elements of music which are defined emically before-hand. There are cases, as we have seen, in which it is legitimate to search for universals while staying on the level of substance. Finally, we must underscore, and this is crucial, that there is no reason to think that the explanation by universals is incompati-ble with the cultural explanation. To be exact, the two explanations are only incompatible if, a priori, we consider them mutually exclusive. Black-ing observed in some of the music of the Nande a movement away from, and then towards a tonal centre (1973: 17). Culturally, this movement can be explained by the physical experience which consists in the stopping of holes on a flute with the fingers. Of course, Blacking is right to emphasize that, for this reason, the musician’s gestures have specific meanings, and the ethnomusicologist is obliged to record and to explain this phenome-non. But this does not prevent him in the slightest from considering that in acting this way, the Nande are obeying a universal Gestaltist law which governs the alternation of repose, tension, repose.

For the ethnomusicologist of tomorrow, I would plead in favour of a well-thought-out reconciliation of the universal and the relative, of the innate and the acquired, of nature and culture, which is what Blacking, if we read him correctly, has in mind for us. However, will we all be capable of a similar ecumenism? If we are, we will have truly answered the ques-tion: “How Musical is Man?”.

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Arom, S. Polyphonies et polyrythmies instrumentales d’Afrique centrale. Structure et méthodo-logie. Paris: SELAF (Société d’études linguistiques et anthropologiques de France), 1985. 2 vols.

Baroni, M., R. Dalmonte, and C. Jacobini. Le regole della musica. Indagine sui mecca-nismi della communicazione. Torino: Edizioni di Torino, 1999.

Blacking, J. Venda Children’s Songs. A Study in Ethnomusicological Analysis. Johannes-burg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1967.

Blacking, J. “Towards a Theory of Musical Competence.” Man: Anthropological Essays in Honour of O.F. Raum. Ed. E.J. de Jager. Cape Town: Struik, 1971. 19-34.

Blacking, J. How Musical is Man? Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1973.

Blacking, J. “Can Musical Universals Be Heard?” The World of Music. XIX.1-2 (1977): 2-13.

Blacking, J. Le sens musical. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1980. Blacking, J. “Transcultural Communication and the Biological Foundation of

Music.” La musica come linguaggio universale. Genesi e storia di un’idea. Ed. R. Pozzi. Firenze: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1990. 179-188.

Blacking, J. “The Biology of Music Making.” Ethnomusicology. An Introduction. Ed. H. Meyers. London: Macmillan, 1992. 301-314.

Blacking, J. Music, Culture, Experience. Ed. R. Byron. Chicago-London: The Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 1995.

Chenoweth, V. Melodic Perception and Analysis. Ukarumpa: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1972.

Chenoweth, V. The Usarufas and their Music. Dallas: SIL Museum of Anthropolo-gy, 1979.

Gourlay, K.A. “The Non-Universality of Music and the Universality of Non-Music.” The World of Music. XXVI.2 (1984): 25-39.

Hagège, Cl. La structure des langues. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1982. Harwood, D.L. “Universals in Music: A Perspective from Cognitive Psycholo-

gy.” Ethnomusicology. XX.3 (1976): 521-533. Hood, M. “Music, the Unknown.” Musicology. Eds. F.L. Harrison, M. Hood, and

C. Palisca. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963. 217-239. Imberty, M. “La psychologie cognitive peut-elle contribuer au débat sur les uni-

versaux ?” La musica come linguaggio universale. Genesi e storia di un’idea. Ed. R. Pozzi. Firenze: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1990. 113-132.

Imberty, M. “Le bébé et le musical.” Musiques. Une Encyclopédie pour le XXIe siècle. Ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez. Vol. II. “Les savoirs musicaux.” Arles: Actes Sud – Cité de la musique, 2004. 506-526.


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Lerdah, F., and R. Jackendoff. A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. Cambridge – London: MIT Press, 1983.

List, G. “Concerning the Concept of the Universal and Music.” The World of Mu-sic. XXVI.2 (1977): 40-49.

Marler, P. “Les origines animales de la musique.” Musiques. Une Encyclopédie pour le XXIe siècle. Ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez. Vol. II. “Les savoirs musicaux.” Arles: Actes Sud – Cité de la musique, 2004. 495-505.

McAllester, D. “Some Thoughts on ‘Universals’ in World Music.” Ethnomusicolo-gy. XV.3 (1971): 379-380.

Merriam, A.P. The Anthropology of Music. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964.

Merriam, A.P. “On Objections to Comparisons in Ethnomusicology.” Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Music. Eds. R. Falck, and T. Rice. Toronto –Buffalo – London: University of Toronto Press, 1982. 174-187.

Meyer, L.B. “Universalism and Relativism in the Study of Ethnic Music.” Ethno-musicology. IV.1 (1960): 49-54. Reprinted in Readings in Ethnomusicology. Ed. D. McAllester. New York – London: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1971. 269-276.

Meyer, L.B. Explaining Music. Essays and Explorations. Berkeley – Los Angeles – London: University of California Press, 1973.

Meyer, L.B. “A Universe of Universals.” Journal of Musicology. XVI.1. 3-25. Re-printed in The Spheres of Music. A Gathering of Essays. Chicago – London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. 281-303.

Molino, J., and J.-J. Nattiez. “Typologies et universaux” Musiques. Une Encyclopédie pour le XXIe siècle. Ed. J.-J. Nattiez. Vol. V. “L’unité de la musique.” Arles: Actes Sud – Cité de la musique, 2007. 337-396.

Nattiez, J.-J. Musicologie générale et sémiologie. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1987. Nattiez, J.-J. Le Combat de Chronos et d’Orphée. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1993.

Nettl, B. “On the Question of Universals.” The World of Music. XIX.1-2 (1977): 2-13.

Nketia, J.H. K. “Universal Perspectives in Ethnomusicology.” The World of Music. XXVI.2 (1984): 3-24.

Nwachukwu, C. Taxonomy of Musical Instruments in Mbaise, Nigeria. Unpublished M.A. Thesis. The Queen’s University of Belfast, 1981.

Pike, K.L. Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Strucure of Human Behavior. 1954. The Hague: Mouton, 1967, 2nd revised ed.

Rahn, J. A Theory for All Music. Problems and Solutions in the Analysis of non-Western Forms. Toronto – Buffalo – London: University of Toronto Press, 1983.


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Rouget, G. La musique et la transe. Esquisse d’une théorie générale des relations de la mu-sique et de la possession. 1980. Paris: Gallimard, 1990.

Rouget, G. “La répétition comme universel du langage. À propos d’un chant initiatique béninois.” La musica come linguaggio universale. Genesi e storia di un’idea. Ed. R. Pozzi. Firenze: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1990. 189-202.

Seeger, A. “Sing for your Sister. The Structure an Performance of Suya Akia.” The Ethnography of Musical Performance. Eds. N. McLeod, and M. Herndon. Norwood: Norwood Editions, 1980 7-42.

Wallin, N., B. Merker, and S. Brown. The Origins of Music. Cambridge & London: The MIT Press, 2000.

1 This paper is a revised version of a lecture presented in Venice on October 2, 2004, as the John Blacking Memorial Lecture of the annual European Seminar in Ethnomusicology. I am grateful to Giovanni Giuriati, in the name of the organizing committee, to have invited me to present it and to Simona Modeanu and Tiberiu Brăilean to give me the opportunity to have it published in “Human and Social Studies”. The present paper owes a lot to Jean Molino with whom I discussed its topic. I also express my gratitude to my colleague Jonathan Goldman for his beautiful rendition of my text in English. Biographical Note Jean-Jacques Nattiez is a musical semiotician and professor of Musicology at the Université de Montréal and a prominent exponent of musical semiot-ics as a distinct discipline. In 2011, he was made Officer of the Order of Canada “for his contributions to the development of musicology as a researcher, professor and specialist of music semiotics”. In addition to his own thorough and characteristic development of semiotic theory, he has given the field substance through his influential teaching, organiza-tional, editorial, and bibliographic endeavors. It is due largely to his intel-lectual leadership that the semiotics of music is now sustained by a very diverse and productive community of scholars. His main works are: Fon-dements d'une sémiologie de la musique (1975), Proust as Musician (1989), Wagner Androgyne (1993), Musiques, une encyclopédie pour le XXIème siècle (2007).

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HSS I.1 (2012)

Some Reflections on the Lexical Meaning

Alina-Mihaela Bursuc “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iaşi, Romania [email protected]

The purpose of this article is to present some reflections on the problems and solutions concerning the lexical meaning determination. First, to determine the meaning of the words it is specified the status of conceptual layer in the semiot-ic triangle. According to the German linguist Jost Trier, it is emphasized that semantic changes concern not only the individual words but the whole lexical field to which they belong, and thus the entire vocabulary. Thus, the meaning of a word is a part of the language content and each language evaluates and or-ganizes the reality according to its own laws. Some examples compare the or-ganization of the language content in different languages. It is necessary to study the lexical meaning in relation with the language content.

Keywords lexical meaning, lexical field, semantic change, language content

1. Introduction

Establishing the meanings of individual words is a problem whose ideal solution doesn’t exist (cf. Reuning, 1973: 265). The problem in this general formulation and the ideas of certain German linguists indicate some diffi-culties and solutions in determining the meanings of words. The American linguist Karl Reuning advocates the idea that only from the context can be established the content of a word (Reuning, 1973: 265). The German lin-guist Leo Weisgerber believes that dictionaries are the most authoritative works in vocabulary analysis. He starts to look for a satisfactory solution to the problem of lexical meaning determination. Dictionaries are alphabetical ordered and present words-entries following phonetic criteria, supplement-ing them with meaning indications (germ. Bedeutungsangaben, cf. Weisgerber, 1973: 194). The meaning indications: how to use a word, paraphrases, defi-

Alina-Mihaela Bursuc, Some Reflections on the Lexical Meaning HSS, vol. I, no. 1 (2012): 95-106

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nitions, help only when the word is already known or when at least one meaning of a polysemous word is known (preferably the basic meaning). Without this prior knowledge, even the best dictionaries do not offer the best solution. These indications are generally the result of traditional re-search of the vocabulary, marked sometimes by a misunderstanding of the meaning. Meaning was commonly conceived as something outside lan-guage, being located somewhere in the human mind, something borrowed to language from outside. Only the linguistic sign, unilaterally seen as sound, belonged to language.

2. Lexical Meaning in the Semiotic Triangle The double semiotic schema contained only facts (extralinguistic) and

words (linguistic; cf. Weisgerber, 1973: 195). Although the facts had an ex-tralinguistic nature, the meaning, even wrong seen outside language, was not in semiotic schema. According to this schema, using a word, for example germ. Tisch, is considered and named a state of things. Each language would have such a word for the same state of things. The vocabulary would be only an amount, an inventory of labels. But naming a state of things as Tisch requires an understanding and evaluation of this state (Weisgerber, 1973: 196). This understanding is produced in a particular historical language, in this case German language.

From these reflections result that in the semiotic schema should be in-volved a third layer that provides understanding, evaluating and ordering the state of things – a conceptual layer (Weisgerber, 1973: 196). If a third layer exists, the concept, than words are not simple designations. The third component, the concept, was originally located in things, in nature, but one example can demonstrate this improper positioning. In German language, a true berry (example: orange – germ. Apfelsine, Orange) is not designated as a berry (Beere). But fruits that are not berries (ex. raspberries, strawberries) are designated Beere (germ. Himmelbeere, Erdbeere). This example shows that un-derstanding and evaluation are not from nature, from the extralinguistic re-ality. There is a clear separation between things and the conceptual layer.

If the concepts are not given from nature to man, than man himself un-derstands and evaluates the state of facts. It is interesting to see how man assesses and comes to concepts mastery. There are three possible answers: this evaluation belongs to individual man, to whole humanity or to linguistic


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community. Asking a man to determine the exact content of a word, he will not succeed in a satisfactory and sufficient way to explain ordinary words. Although he has an (innate) ability to explain in terms of proximate genus and specific differences, however he will hardly be able to determine the content. So although man has the ability to define, however he access with difficulty to the concept. However the analytical effort is big enough and means, from a lexicographical perspective, the difficulty of choosing (or searching, in the absence of variants) the proximate genus and specific dif-ferences. The speaker has the feeling of language, but the failure of aware-ness, of analytical experience. These difficulties can be overcome by the knowledge of the laws of language building. But these laws can become fa-miliar only to the lexicographer (linguist), but not to the ordinary speaker. On the opposite side is all the humanity, who could (theoretically) give an answer to this thorny problem by comparing languages. All languages have a variety of designations for things, almost parallel lists of words. However, there are not two words from two different languages to completely cover their content. As seen, the law of understanding, evaluation and ordering comes not from nature, neither from man (also he could determinate easily and accurately the lexical meaning). This law, that evaluates the reality, stays in language, the conceptual layer added to the semiotic schema is located in language, and the word belonging to language is not just a sign, but a sound conceptual whole.

The German word grau “gray” is correctly used by any native German speaker, but it cannot receive a clear definition. The word is perceived as sitting between weiss “white” and Schwarz “black”. From this point of view, the definition refers to these two words. Therefore, the lexical meaning is not an individual value, but a “positional value” (Weisgerber, 1973: 202). Thus the lexical meaning results from the whole, in relationship with his “neighbors” from the same lexical field. Inside the vocabulary, the configu-rations show the contents in relationship with the structured whole and the words are linked together through the content. Trier’s initial idea about presence of all members of a lexical field in the consciousness of the speak-er, generated by a word, has been criticized and then revised by the linguist himself. However another idea, belonging to Weisgerber, about positional value of the words in the field, confirms that the lexical meaning determina-tion requires the presence of at least some members of a lexical field.


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The idea that the meaning is a well defined layer of the linguistic content is then exploited by Coşeriu in some types of linguistic content (Coseriu, 1994: xxx). It is difficult to determine the meaning, or the content of a word, but it is more difficult to know how the content structures the worldview. The only solution of Weisgerber is to know the laws that organ-ize the language content (Weisgerber, 1973: 325). The theory of signs, through the attention given to the relationship between signifier and signi-fied, mediated the knowledge of the content, but not entirely.

3. Theory of Semantic Changes To see the changes of a field structure from one stage to another and

the changes of the meaning, it can be compiled the history of the meaning, if the research looks for the whole vocabulary. The questions that Trier ad-dresses to traditional Lexicology are about how the history of meaning con-ceived the semantic change, and how the abstract concepts were treated by the history of designation. Trier formulated quite clearly the idea of meaning change dependent on the structure change of lexical field. The question is if the previous German Lexicology was in the same time a history of meaning (Trier, 1973: 15). Also, Trier is interested if the traditional Lexicology stud-ied abstract concepts and what results got.

The concept of semantic change existed before, but it was created by analogy with the phonetic change, and it was appropriate only to the change of a single lexical meaning. It seems that traditional Lexicology (onomasio-logical Lexicology) studied the names of things rather than the meanings of these names. So the concrete concepts were privileged. Researching the des-ignations of concepts such as “hand”, while the thing is always the same, means to make the designations history of this concept. But it is difficult to research the designations of concepts as “intelligence”, since the thing does not exist and the concept is held only with the word (Trier, 1973: 16). Even more difficult is to talk about the history of designation in case of “intelli-gence”, when we must talk about the history of designation for the entire field circumscribed to this concept.

In traditional Lexicology, the concept of semantic change was justified only for an individual word, isolated from other words. There were linguists (such as Stöcklein and Sperber, cf. Reuning, 1973: 250), who argued that the meaning changes concern not the isolated word, but the word as part of a


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context (Reuning, 1973: 240). However this formulation would rather justify the idea of identity between meaning and word use in text, rather than the intuition of the lexical field.

4. Language Content and Lexical Meaning Both shortcomings of traditional Lexicology strengthened to Trier his

conviction that a theory of meaning is incomplete with the meaning change of an individual word or with the history of designation only for concrete concepts. A theory of meaning must provide that “any meaning is meaning in the field” (Trier, 1973: 19). But a field structure does not solve (is not a panacea to) all problems of the meaning. The old history of meaning, with the limited concept of semantic change, defined as history of words for cer-tain concepts, could be misunderstood as a history of concepts. Trier says that a true history of concepts can be extracted only from the history of fields division (Trier, 1973: 22). Given these considerations, the subject of the Lexicology research should be the structure of the lexical field and its change (from one language to another or from one language stage to anoth-er). The field of words should be considered in any lexicological study.

According to the series of the theories about the “internal form of lan-guage”, Trier says and shows that the study of the field structure is a con-siderably part in the study of the internal form of language (Trier, 1973: 19, 20). The words composition was Humboldt’s example for the analysis of the internal form of language (Humboldt, 2008: 87). Given the further con-tribution of Coşeriu concerning the language type, in particular the Roman type of Romanian language, every language is characterized by a certain in-ternal form, by a certain type of conceptual formation (Coşeriu, 1994: 88). Trier underlines the fact that it is not possible to identify the internal forms of two languages comparing individual words. Only the research of a field structure may be the basis to compare two languages or two stages of the same language.

The original theory of the “internal form of language” (in Humboldt’s formulation) stated that this form is independent of temporal changes and is valid for two languages comparison. Trier takes again the independence time issue, saying that once the field structure is an essential feature of the internal form of language, and if the structure changes, also the internal form changes (Trier, 1973: 21), and the worldview changes.


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Before Trier, the vocabulary research was limited to word, and the lin-guist proposes an exhaustive research, because the lexical meaning is only a part of the language content. For this purpose it is necessary to distinguish between lexical meaning research (germ. Bedeutungsforschung) and language content research (concept taken from Humboldt; germ. Sprachinhaltforschung) (Trier, 1973a: 116). There is a difference in value between the two types of research. If from the entire language content through division (structure) we arrive to word (individual item), from the amount of words meanings it is difficult to get the entire vocabulary content. So it is necessary to investigate the content by the algorithm: the whole before the parts and division before meaning.

Nineteenth century Linguistics conceived the language as a dynamic phenomenon, as becoming. Meaning research was identified with history of meaning through the theory of semantic changes (Trier, 1973a: 118). With Saussure, attention is paid to language state, and the word, as relationship between expression and content, is thought as a part of the language, as whole and structure. To see this it should be studied first the language being and then the language becoming. Humboldt’s concept of articulation is as-similated and rendered by Saussure’s idea of structure (cf. Trier, 1973a: 118; Wartburg, 1973: 162).

Saussure underlines the importance of synchronic Linguistics to recover what the diachronic Linguistics did not research (Saussure, 1998: 117). He distinguishes between two types of Linguistics without separating them, how Trier things (Trier, 1973a: 119; Wartburg, 1973: 163). To understand Trier’s position, it is necessary to see that Saussure conceives in theory the interdependence of two Linguistics, but he makes in practice synchronic Linguistics. Trier is probably looking at Saussure for the same interdepend-ence in practice between language becoming and being. Not finding them, he identifies two areas where this problem was solved: general Linguistics and vocabulary research (Trier, 1973a: 119). In the second area, vocabulary research, there are two directions: a “psycholinguistics” direction represent-ed by Wartburg and his additions to Gilliéron (Wartburg, 1973: 163), and a “historical-conceptual” direction represented by Trier (himself) and Weis-gerber (Trier 1934: 119).

The direction proposed by Wartburg represents, according Trier, an al-ternative to Saussurian separation. In an example there are alternate linguis-


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tic stages (corresponding to synchronic Linguistics) and language changes (corresponding to diachronic Linguistics). The vocabulary science (Lexicol-ogy) must be descriptive and historical in the same time to capture the uni-tary reality of the language (Trier, 1973a: 119). Thus, in French (specifically in the southern French dialects), is considered a state A in which there were the words: cattus “cat” and gallus “rooster” (Trier, 1973a: 119; Wartburg, 1973: 164). With a phonetic change, the passage of ll to t, results in stage B the following situation: gat “cat” < cattus and *gat “rooster” < gallus. The re-sult is an identical expression, an annoyng homonymy, because both words belong to the lexical field of animals and to the same part of speech. For their differentiation it was necessary to change *gat, and to replace it with the word vicarius from the series of expressive words for the content “roost-er”. This second change caused in stage C: “cat” gat < cattus and “rooster” bigey < vicarius. In conclusion, three stages of synchronic Linguistics were blending with two temporal changes: a phonetic change and an expression change. Wartburg intended to show the blending of the two types of Lin-guistics, he captured changes in lexical meaning, but no change in language content. It is changing the external substance (phonetic and expression), it can be identified some elements from the theory of meaning concerning vicarius (which changes its meaning, but it is only an individual semantic change) and from the theory of designaton, because “rooster” gains another designation. The piece of worldview (it is about only two contents) of the three stages is the same (Trier 1934: 122). Vocabulary research will be com-plete when it will be able to monitor how the linguistic community from stage C sees something else than she known or seen in stage A, and this can be achieved by history of structuring, and this is the purpose of the histori-cal-conceptual direction promoted by Trier and Weisgerber. The central point of this direction circumscribes concepts as: “field”, “field division (structuring)”, “change of the field structure” and “restructuring” (germ. Umgliederung; cf. Trier, 1973a: 119).

Wartburg sees tensions in a linguistic stage between gat and *gat, caused by the identical expression that embarrassed the content distinction. Trier notes tensions between old and new content of germ. list “intelligent” (Trier, 1973a: 124), solved by the field structure. Trier’s example and con-ception are opposite to Wartburg’s example. Trier makes history of mean-ing for the domain of “intelligence”. There are blended the historical with


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the descriptive (certain periods of the German: 12th and 13th centuries). There are changes in language content and in lexical meaning. Trier says that the language is an intermediary world between man and world (extralinguistic world), a world in which man has access to world being, but each language, as mother language, structures it in her way (Trier, 1973b: 129).

The essence of language is to structure (Trier, 1973b: 130). The essence of the word, (often) defined as an “inseparable unity” of expression (“body”) and content (“soul”), is to be member of the vocabulary. At this moment, the vocabulary cannot be considered as a treasure (stock, as often characterized; see the thesaurus dictionaries). The vocabulary is a configura-tion in which the whole and his parts have a mutual relationship. Words are delimited (germ. ergliedern) from vocabulary, and vocabulary delimites him-self (germ. ausgliedern) in words (Trier, 1973b: 131).

There are two Saussurian ideas to discuss: the idea of vocabulary struc-ture in which the word is seen as a part of the whole, and the idea of separa-tion between diachrony and synchrony. Wartburg sees a net Saussurian antynomy, that is half overcoming by Gilliéron (Wartburg, 1973: 163, 166) by the passages from a synchrony to diachrony and from diachrony to an-other synchrony. Wartburg sees necessary to complete the work of Gilliér-on, to highlight the first Saussurian idea and to analyse the relationship be-tween word and his “neighbors”. There are two types of neighbors: stylistic synonyms (neglected by Gilliéron) and the designations of concepts from the same semantic domain, words from the same field of meaning. Both classes of words are called to replace a “sick” word, to change the expres-sion with the same content. The replacement with a stylistic synonym has already been analyzed in the case of “rooster” (cf. Trier, 1973a: 119).

This time the subject of the discussion is an example involving both classes of words. Gilliéron explains unsatisfactory (cf. Wartburg, 1973: 169) the replacement of the word fr. clavel “nail” with clavellus. He argued that the second term was specifically created to avoid the phonetic homonymy, and is a materialization of the system possibilities, in Coserian terms. This clavel-lus was not only between the possibilities of the system, but this word exist-ed in language before the replacement. The word had a diminutive meaning, according to Wartburg, meaning disappeared from the linguistic community conscience under the replacement pressure. Therefore, it is not automatical-ly created another word thanks to the possibilities of the system, but other


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words from language serve to replace the “sick” words. Even before the crash of homonymous terms clavel, the term clavellus was already in the lexi-cal field clavus as change of the central concept. It designated a special type of nails, and in addition, as diminutive it occurred between clavel’s emotional synonyms. The importance of the “neighbors” for the expression change, in terms of Wartburg, to replace a “sick” word, demonstrates how important is to study words as parts of a whole through mediation of semantic groups (Wartburg, 1973: 173).

To underline how important is to study the meaning through the struc-ture of the whole and not from individual words, Trier suggestively com-pares the vocabulary with a house on the ground of the organization of components (Trier, 1973c: 185). Some parts of the house are fixed in time, ensure stability of the house, others are changing, but in permanent rela-tionship with the support elements and the decorations of the house. Vo-cabulary has fixed portions, stable over time and parts that are changing over time and space. Conceptual pairs such as “big”/“small”, “left”/“right” know changes over time or space, consisting, in analogy to a house parts, in replacing a stone with another, so in substance changes (Trier, 1973c: 185). The language says nothing new in those places, and the worldview is the same. But if the place of stones changes, changes the content form too, what prevails is the visible transformation of the parts, and not the stones replacement. There is an opposition between events characterizing changes, stones substitutions and events concerning the parts transformations (Trier, 1973c: 186). In the lexical field of intelligence in two different linguistic stages no term is the successor of other term, but the whole configuration of the second stage succeeds the first stage considered.

5. Structure of Reality and Linguistic Structuring Speaking of semantic groups and of the relationship between history of

things and history of designation, Wartburg distinguishes two groups of ex-tralinguistic reality. There are two groups with a different essence: natural given groups who are stable over time, such as human body parts, kinship, weather phenomena and daily human activities, and another groups of man-made things who change over time, such as clothing, public institutions, public transport (Wartburg, 1973: 173). As stable as can be the first group, it can register movements, while movements of the second group do not al-


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ways make linguistic changes. The classic example (later resumed by Coşeriu) of the relationship be-

tween linguistic structuring and structure of reality, concerns a section of the lexical field of kinship names in Latin and Romance languages (Coseriu, 1964: 162). Latin language distinguishes uncle and aunt from paternal and maternal line, while Romance languages have abandoned this distinction (Wartburg, 1973: 174). The group of reality is constant, the thing did not change, but the attitude changed and this is evident in the language. Romans made legal difference between relatives from the two lines (paternal and ma-ternal), but when legal difference disappears, disappears the linguistic differ-ence from the consciousness of the speakers. The comparison between two languages is illustrated by an example of Öhmann. So the content “playing hide-and-seek and chess” is expressed by one word in three languages: germ. spielen, fr. jouer, engl. to play. Swedish language expresses it by two words leka “to play hide-end-seek” and spela “playing chess” (Öhmann, 1973: 312). The two Swedish words differ on play and age dimension, one having the feature ‘child’ and the other the feature ‘adult’. The correspond-ing term to each of three languages has not only two meanings, but it covers an unstructured part of the field and only the contact with Swedish shows clearly the double meaning. One of the Trier’s postulates is the idea that there is a non-linguistic organization of human experience prior to linguistic structuring (cf. Germain, 1981: 42). From Heger and Baldinger are held a few examples for how a language expresses by a single term an unstructured reality, and another language gives mores terms to the same, but structured reality. The examples are: fr. raisin – engl. grape, raisin; fr. poisson – sp. pez “live fish”, pescado “fish for consumption”; fr. palmière – African languages with over 60 designations for palm (Germain, 1981: 51-52). But while both fr. poisson and sp. pez and pescado evaluate the state of the fish as a genre, African languages do not even have a term for “palm”, but have a lot of designa-tions of palm varieties. In the same situation can also find many designa-tions: varieties of horses in the Argentinean language, varieties of rice in Japanese (Copceag, 1998: 234). In another situation is the concept “snow”: fr. neige – in Eskimo there are more terms that evaluate different aspects of snow. The variety of experience (see the special relationship between Eski-mos and the snow) determines the variety of linguistic segmentation in rela-tion with the reality. Concerning palm, speaking by category and species, we


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can say: if the species are indifferent to a community, the name of the cate-gory it uses whenever it encounters a species. If species are important to a community, each species will have its own designation, without having a name for the category.

6. Conclusions If the word is considered as a part of a text, then the meaning indica-

tions in dictionaries, drawn from texts, should solve the problem of the lex-ical meaning determination. According to some German linguists, special-ists in lexical field theory, the word should be considered first as a part of the vocabulary. Therefore, in order to determine the lexical meaning, it is necessary to report it to the entire language.

Among the arguments supporting this report are: semiotic triangle, the-ory of semantic changes, distinction between lexical meaning and language content, differences between structure of reality and language structuring. The conceptual layer of the semiotic triangle indicates a law at the language level ordering and evaluating the reality. Semantic changes concern not only the individual words, but also the lexical fields and the whole vocabulary. Saussurian distinctions between synchrony and diachrony and between whole and part, and the difference between the structure of reality and the language structuring, require the distinction between lexical meaning and language content.

Acknowledgements. This study was funded by the project POSDRU/89/ 1.5/S/49944: “Development of the innovation capacity and increase of the research impact through postdoctoral programs”.

References

Copceag, D. Tipologia limbilor romanice (în comparaţie cu limbile germane şi slave) – şi alte studii lingvistice. Cluj-Napoca: Editura Clusium, 1998.

Coseriu, E. “Pour une sémantique diachronique structurale.” Travaux de linguistique et de littérature II.1. (1964): 139-186.

Coşeriu, E. Prelegeri şi conferinţe (1992-1993). Supliment – Anuar de lingvistică şi istorie literară, T.XXXIII.1992-1993, Seria A. Lingvistică. Iaşi: Editura Universităţii “Alexandru Ioan Cuza”, 1994.

Germain, Cl. La sémantique fonctionnelle. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981.


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Humboldt, W. von. Despre diversitatea structurală a limbilor şi influenţa ei asupra dezvoltării spirituale a umanităţii. 1836. Trans. Eugen Munteanu. Bucureşti: Editura Humanitas, 2008.

Öhmann, S. “Sprachliche Feldtheorie.” 1953. Wortfeldforschung. Zur Geschichte und Theorie des sprachlichen Feldes. Ed. Lothar Schmidt. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellscaft, 1973. 288-317.

Reuning, K. “Die Feldtheorie.” 1941. Wortfeldforschung. Zur Geschichte und Theorie des sprachlichen Feldes. Ed. Lothar Schmidt. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellscaft, 1973. 226-277.

Saussure, F. de. Curs de lingvistică generală. 1916. Eds. Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, and Albert Riedlinger. Trans. Irina Izverna Tarabac. Iaşi: Polirom, 1998.

Trier, J. “Über Wort- und Begriffsfelder.” 1931. Wortfeldforschung. Zur Geschichte und Theorie des sprachlichen Feldes. Ed. Lothar Schmidt, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellscaft, 1973. 1-38.

Trier, J. “Deutsche Bedeutungsforschung.” Wortfeldforschung. Zur Geschichte und Theorie des sprachlichen Feldes. 1934. Ed. Lothar Schmidt. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellscaft, 1973a. 116-128.

Trier, J. “Das sprachliche Feld.” 1934. Wortfeldforschung. Zur Geschichte und Theorie des sprachlichen Feldes. Ed. Lothar Schmidt. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellscaft, 1973, 1973b. 129-161.

Trier, J. “Über die Erforschung des menschlichenkundlichen Wortschatzes.” 1938. Wortfeldforschung. Zur Geschichte und Theorie des sprachlichen Feldes. Ed. Lothar Schmidt. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellscaft, 1973c. 185-192.

Wartburg, W. von. “Betrachtungen über Gliederung des Wortschatzes und die Gestaltung des Wörterbuchs.” 1937. Wortfeldforschung. Zur Geschichte und Theorie des sprachlichen Feldes. Ed. Lothar Schmidt. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellscaft, 1973. 162-184.

Weisgerber, L. “Vom inhaltlichen Aufbau des deutschen Wortschatzes.” 1939. Wortfeldforschung. Zur Geschichte und Theorie des sprachlichen Feldes. Ed. Lothar Schmidt. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellscaft, 1973. 193-225.

Biographical Note Alina Bursuc is Postdoctoral Researcher in the Project POSDRU/ 89/1.5/S/49944, and Research Assistant at the Humanities Research De-partment, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Iaşi. She receveid her Ph.D. in Philology in 2009 with a thesis investigating the lexical field of kinship names in Romanian. Her research interests center on Lexicology, Semantics, Lexicography, Romanian Language History.

JACOB’s LADDER

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HSS I.1 (2012)

Incompleteness and the Meaning of Mystery for Scientist and Theologian

Thierry Magnin L’Université Catholique Lyon [email protected]

1. The most incomprehensible thing would be for the world to be compre-hensible; 2. An initial decision regarding the scientific approach: the construc-tion of the meaning in the absence of it (d’in-sensé); 3. The condition and the elevation to the universal in E. Weil; 4. The initial tension of the identical and the other in E. Levinas; 5. Richness of the collective attitudes of those con-fronting with the mystery of knowledge; 6. The act of believing, another way to enter in the mystery of Believe for a Christian; 7. Knowledge through signs; 8. The theology in front of the mystery of God; 9. The negative way; 10. The eminence way; 11. The fascination of the Vatican II council for the unity of contraries.

Keywords incompleteness, the Other, belief, mystery, science

Incomplétude et sens du mystère

pour le scientifique et le théologien

1. Le plus incompréhensible, c’est que le monde soit compréhensible Les développements de l’idée de complémentarité précédemment évo-

qués peuvent être repris en termes de “dialectique du mystère”. La condi-tion d’incomplétude que rencontre le scientifique, non comme une défaite de la raison mais comme une chance pour progresser, l’introduit à la con-frontation au mystère. De quel mystère s’agit-il? C’est le “mystère du con-naître” que nous avons évoqué jusqu’ici, à partir d’une réflexion sur l’évolution de la connaissance en sciences. La formule d’Einstein, “le plus incompréhensible, c’est que le monde soit compréhensible”, et la mise en

Thierry Magnin, Incompleteness and the Meaning of Mystery HSS, vol. I, no. 1 (2012): 109-138

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évidence de “la fécondité” de l’incomplétude, sont comme deux “signes” du mystère du connaître dans la démarche scientifique moderne.

L’un des essais tes plus intéressants pour repenser l’idée de mystère a été, au 20ème siècle, celui de Gabriel Marcel (1949, 1935: 183, 1951: 69). Ce dernier reproche aux philosophes d’avoir “abandonné” le mystère aux théologiens d’une part, aux vulgarisateurs d’autre part. G. Marcel fait por-ter sa réflexion non seulement sur le mystère du connaître, mais aussi sur le mystère de l’union de l’âme et du corps, sur le mystère de l’amour, de l’espérance, de la présence et de l’être. Il combine l’aspect intellectuel et l’aspect existentiel du mystère.

L’aspect le plus intéressant pour les questions que nous traitons ici porte sur la distinction que G. Marcel fait entre le problème et le mystère. Le problème est une question que nous nous posons sur des éléments considérés comme étalés devant nous, hors de nous généralement. Certes, si nous réfléchissons, nous sommes bien obligés de reconnaître qu’il sub-siste toujours, entre eux et nous, le lien du connaître. Mais le propre de la pensée qui se pose des problèmes est de postuler implicitement que le fait de les connaître ne modifie pas les éléments de ce problème. De plus, à part l’intérêt purement intellectuel que nous pouvons leur porter, il n’y a pas de choc en retour sur nous. Le cas le plus clair est celui des problèmes mathématiques classiques.

Il y a mystère, au contraire, quand celui qui s’interroge appartient à ce sur quoi il s’interroge. C’est pourquoi l’être est mystère puisque je ne puis poser de question sur l’être que parce que je suis. “Un mystère, c’est un problème qui empiète sur ses propres données, qui les envahit et se dé-place par là même comme simple problème.... c’est un problème qui em-piète sur ses propres conditions immanentes de possibilité.”

Et encore:

le mystère est quelque chose dans lequel je me trouve engagé, et ajouterai-je, non pas engagé partiellement par quelque aspect déterminé et spécialisé de moi-même, mais au contraire engagé tout entier en tant que je réalise une uni-té qui d’ailleurs, par définition, ne peut jamais se saisir elle-même et ne saurait être qu’objet de création et de foi.

Le mystère abolit donc la frontière entre “l’en-moi” et “le devant moi”

qui caractérise le domaine du problématique, même si nous savons que


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l’acte de connaître est une intervention et que l’on atteint jamais un “en-soi”. Il y a un mystère de l’être qui est aussi “mystère de l’acte de pensée”, ce qui se traduit aussi par le fait suivant: “nous ne pouvons pas nous inter-roger sur l’être comme si la pensée qui s’interroge sur l’être était en dehors de l’être”. Il y a bien un mystère du connaître: “la connaissance se suspend à un mode de participation dont une épistémologie quelle qu’elle soit ne peut espérer rendre compte parce qu’elle même le suppose”.

Pour G. Marcel, le mystère n’est ni l’inconnaissable ni une sorte de pseudo-solution. Loin de désigner une “lacune du connaître”, le mystère est un appel à explorer. Cette réhabilitation du mystère sur le plan philo-sophique (G. Marcel emploiera le terme méta-problématique pour dési-gner le mystère) permet un pont intéressant avec la théologie, comme nous le verrons plus loin. Une telle approche n’est pas sans rappeler celle de Saint Augustin pour qui, dans un autre contexte, le mystère n’est pas ce que l’on ne peut pas comprendre mais ce que l’on n’aura jamais fini de comprendre.

Reprenons maintenant, à l’aide de l’apport de G. Marcel, notre propre réflexion sur l’incomplétude, la complémentarité et la logique d’antagonismes que nous avons développée précédemment. Il s’agit bien d’un exemple de “ mystère du connaître”. En science, on peut aussi parler d’une implication du sujet pensant (l’homme est un élément de la nature qu’il analyse), même si l’engagement du scientifique n’est pas aussi fort que celui du philosophe, tel que G. Marcel le décrit. De même on peut aussi parler de modification du réel par le sujet qui l’analyse, même si, une fois encore, la modification n’est pas aussi forte ou totale que dans la question philosophique de l’être décrite par G. Marcel (le sujet en physique n’est pas personnalisé, la modification du réel intervient par l’opération de me-sure, elle-même dépersonnalisée).

La question du connaître en science moderne renvoie le scientifique au mystère du connaître, si bien exprimé par Einstein. Ainsi, la recherche de l’unité d’antagonismes trouve son origine dans une “pratique première” qui est celle de l’articulation entre le sujet et le réel auquel appartient le sujet (articulation entre l’unicité du sujet et la multiplicité du réel dans le-quel agit le sujet). L’acceptation du mystère du connaître est une fois de plus liée à celui de la finitude de l’homme: elle relève d’un choix moral implicite ou explicite selon les scientifiques!


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Avec la complémentarité, l’incomplétude et la notion de niveau de réali-té, nous pouvons davantage parler de “dialectique du mystère” en sciences (nous verrons plus loin en quoi cette dialectique se différencie de celle de Hegel). Non seulement le parcours des niveaux de réalité n’est jamais achevé pour l’homme, mais encore il correspond à un antagonisme jamais résolu définitivement. Parler du réel pour le scientifique, c’est tenter de “produire” au grand jour ses composantes. Or ceci revient en quelque sorte à “trahir” le mystère de ce réel. Grâce aux notions de potentialisation et d’actualisation, le mystère du réel et la recherche constante de l’homme pour comprendre sont préservés. Nous sommes en pleine dialectique du mystère!

C’est cette dialectique que nous retrouverons dans l’approche théolo-gique, avec sa forme et ses contraintes propres. Ce sera l’objectif des cha-pitres suivants que de montrer, sous forme de pistes de recherches, les éventuelles analogies (similitudes et différences) entre la pratique de la dia-lectique du connaître en sciences et celle de la dialectique du mystère en théologie, sans confusion des domaines.

2. Une décision initiale dans la démarche scientifique: construire du

sens sur fond d’absence de sens (d’in-sensé) Le schéma gödelien que nous avons développé au sujet de la complé-

mentarité, avec une incessante ouverture à de nouveaux niveaux de com-préhension de la réalité, est une illustration du retrait du fondement dont nous avons déjà parlé avec J. Ladrière. Il y a de l’indécidable, la raison ne peut s’appuyer sur autre chose que sur elle-même et en même temps elle éprouve sa finitude: la raison ne peut se boucler sur elle-même. “Quelque chose échappe”.

D’où une décision initiale du sujet: construire du sens sur fond d’absence de sens. Nous en avons un bel exemple avec la complémentarité qui cherche à conjuguer les antagonismes en fonction des niveaux de réali-té. Cette décision est un point essentiel dans la démarche scientifique, bien illustrée par cette phrase d’Einstein (cité par son disciple Frank): “Recon-naissons qu’à la base de tout travail scientifique d’une certaine envergure se trouve une conviction bien comparable au sentiment religieux, celle que le monde est intelligible!”

Einstein parle bien d’une conviction qui nous situe dans le domaine de


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l’éthique, comme nous allons maintenant l’analyser plus en détails. En fait, comme indiqué précédemment, il faut bien distinguer les plans: la re-cherche de sens sur fond d’absence de sens correspond au plan général de la métaphysique. Mais la décision de construire du sens sur fond “d’in-sensé” peut conduire au plan de l’éthique selon l’intentionnalité (décision personnelle) qui lui correspond, selon l’engagement qui est lié à cette déci-sion.

C’est dans la recherche de vérité que les acteurs des différentes disci-plines (scientifiques, philosophes, artistes, théologiens...) se retrouvent engagés dans un choix moral qui consiste à trouver des possibilités de sens sur ce qui apparaît souvent comme un fond de non sens (exemple de la mise en évidence d’antagonismes). A chaque fois que la pensée bute sur le réel et met à nu sa finitude pour le représenter, surgit un dynamisme de base de cette raison qui la rend capable d’accueillir de nouvelles structures et de construire de nouveaux concepts susceptibles de favoriser une pro-gression dans l’intelligibilité du réel. Dans cette dynamique de la raison, le choix de l’intelligibilité du monde est central et moteur.

De plus, comme nous l’avons déjà indiqué, les moyens conceptuels choisis pour progresser dans l’intelligibilité correspondent eux aussi à un choix risqué (par exemple accepter positivement l’incomplétude alors que règne encore l’attrait de la certitude). Cette démarche n’est pas sans lien avec les notions de bien et de mal: prôner la certitude (ou, à l’opposé, l’incertitude) est vu comme positif ou négatif selon les individus. Il s’agit alors d’un engagement moral, de décisions d’ordre éthique. Du reste, les affrontements des différentes écoles de pensée, dans chaque discipline, sont là pour manifester des oppositions qui, en science par exemple, ne sont pas que d’ordre technique mais bien d’ordre éthique (par exemple, les débats sur le darwinisme et les théories de l’évolution).

Abordant cette “dynamique de la raison”, J. Ladrière (1993) montre qu’elle se fonde sur un souci éthique qui la précède. L’essentiel se définit par le mouvement de montée vers la vie morale, à partir de la recherche toujours en marche de nouvelles représentations du réel et l’accueil des manifestations de celui-ci. La dynamique de la raison se comprend donc comme une activité de mise en représentation, une fois accueilli le monde à analyser et à comprendre. Le point d’accueil nécessaire à cette démarche passe par la prise en compte d’une altérité fondamentale (l’autre), consti-


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tuée notamment par ce qui résiste à nos représentations. Il y a des mo-ments dans la recherche scientifique où le réel se manifeste dans des mo-dalités pour lesquelles nos modes de représentation s’avèrent insuffisants. Il nous faut donc accueillir cette “nouvelle manifestation”.

Cet “accueil” contribue à son tour à constituer le sujet connaissant, en tant que bon scientifique notamment. La constitution du sujet à partir de cet accueil est un élément capital dans le processus moral. C’est dans la réception de ce qui n’est pas moi que je me constitue comme sujet. Cette altérité n’est pas en soi une valeur morale, mais elle correspond à un pro-cessus de prise de décision dans lequel opère à la fois la reconnaissance de l’altérité et une tension vers l’unité. C’est l’ouverture à ce qui est autre (chose et personne) qui est de l’ordre de l’éthique. Un nouveau rapport à la totalité s’ouvre ainsi, une nouvelle interaction avec la totalité, ce qui en-gendre un processus créateur qui suppose une ouverture à l’universalité.

Non seulement chacun accueille, selon l’expression de J. Ladrière, la to-talité de l’univers, dans sa créativité personnelle, mais cette créativité pro-duit elle-même un nouvel espace de communication qui dépasse les con-tradictions antérieures. Tout domaine d’objectivité est donc la projection dans l’extériorité de ce qui s’effectue dans un champ pratique, et corrélati-vement tout champ pratique est lui- même traversé par l’exigence de sa propre extériorisation. Sur la base de la compréhension de cette articula-tion entre champ d’objectivité et champ pratique, la raison réfléchissante peut alors, en un troisième moment, découvrir d’une part que, dans toutes les objectivités constituées qu’elle croyait d’abord seulement reconnaître en leur contraignance d’extériorité, sa propre activité constituante est à l’œuvre, et d’autre part que cette activité même ne peut se découvrir elle même que sous le statut objectivité qu’elle se donne en se thématisant (Ladrière, 1993: 58).

Selon Ladrière, au lieu de considérer l’activité humaine pratique comme une simple résultante de processus infra-conscientiels appartenant à l’espace et au temps (cette activité est, du reste, déjà présente dans ces pro-cessus), on peut inverser l’analyse. Il s’agit alors de voir dans cette activité humaine la manifestation de ce qui fut à l’œuvre dans les processus infra-conscientiels eux-mêmes. On considère alors la morale comme un proces-sus, partant de l’altérité d’une totalité saisie comme extériorité, avec la-quelle le sujet se pose et devient créateur.


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Le développement de l’idée de complémentarité chez Bohr nous con-duit à souligner que la complémentarité des antagonismes repose sur une activité de l’esprit qui rend progressivement intelligible la complexité de la réalité, sur fond de tension entre l’identique et l’autre. Cette perspective de l’esprit en acte s’inscrit dans une perspective morale puisqu’elle décide de créer du sens sur fond de non sens, de créer du sens à partir de faits “ in-sensés”, de s’ouvrir à l’altérité et à l’universalité.

Bachelard avait inauguré un mouvement pour réconcilier l’esprit de la contradiction et la pensée scientifique. La pensée complémentaire élargit ce mouvement. Finalement, la formule suivante de Pascal résume bien la dynamique de cette pensée: les deux raisons contraires. Il faut commencer par là, sans cela on n’entend rien et tout est hérétique. Et même à la fin de chaque vérité il faut ajouter qu’on se souvient de la vérité opposée (Pascal, frag. 5,6,7).

Toutes ces visions de sens basées sur la reconnaissance de l’unité d’antagonismes (ou qui conduisent à cette reconnaissance) trouvent leur origine dans “une pratique première” qui est celle de l’articulation entre le sujet et le réel auquel appartient ce sujet, articulation entre l’unicité du sujet et la multiplicité du réel dans lequel agit le sujet. Tout ceci illustre bien le processus créateur dont parle J. Ladrière, ainsi que les positions de É. Weil sur “l’élévation vers l’universel” et celles de E. Levinas sur “le rôle de la tension initiale comme ouverture active à l’autre”. Nous pouvons mainte-nant aborder ces positions ; elles vont nous aider à découvrir encore les fondements de l’idée de complémentarité.

3. La condition et l’élévation à l’universel chez E. Weil On peut trouver chez E. Weil, un kantien imprégné de Hegel, de nom-

breux éléments de réflexion qui peuvent servir de fondements aux ingré-dients de la complémentarité (même si notre perspective n’est pas celle de Hegel, comme nous le verrons plus loin). Dans son ouvrage “Logique de la Philosophie” notamment les chapitres “Non Sens”, “Conditions”, “Ab-solu” et “Œuvre”, E. Weil montre que la philosophie vise la recherche personnelle de la vie sensée pour elle-même et identifie de ce fait les obs-tacles qui rendent difficile, voire impossible, cette vie sensée. Weil dis-tingue chez l’homme à la fois la finitude de l’être connaissant, incapable de comprendre la réalité sans la reconstruire artificiellement, et l’infini de sa


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liberté qui le conduit personnellement à créer du sens, par le refus de la violence identifiée comme refus d’un discours cohérent. Ainsi la philoso-phie consiste-t-elle en l’organisation d’un discours cohérent, faisant sens, et fondé sur la connaissance (historique, politique, économique...) des atti-tudes à partir desquelles l’homme a agi par le passé et agit dans le présent.

Le discours philosophique comme refus de la violence repose sur un domaine (la condition, notre situation au monde) qui peut apparaître lui-même in-sensé. Notons ici que Weil distingue le discours et le langage, en soulignant que ce dernier est dans “la condition” (au sens d’une irréduc-tible finitude). Il faut insister sur cette distinction essentielle chez Weil entre le langage et le discours. Quand l’homme utilise le langage, il utilise celui de la collectivité: le langage de l’homme de la condition ne lui appar-tient pas. Le discours, lui, est de l’ordre de la recherche de cohérence qui va permettre de redécouvrir une universalité perdue dans “la condition”. Notons qu’à travers cette notion de “condition”, on retrouve bien ici le problème de la démarche scientifique qui vise une réalité qu’elle ne peut pas atteindre totalement, avec un langage dit “classique” (pour la physique quantique par exemple) qui entraîne des contradictions.

Le discours philosophique repose, selon Weil, sur une vérité première de l’existence qui apparaît comme non-fondée elle-même, et donc in-sensée.

La réflexion montre que la vie de la conscience est entre le sens et le non-sens, et les deux sont constamment dans le discours... Pour le moment, il suf-fit de rappeler des polarités comme langage-condition, décision-situation, moi-monde... On peut dire que la vérité est le domaine, et que tout ce qui remplit ce domaine et qui nous en livre l’existence est le non-sens. (Weil, 1950: 95)

Le discours philosophique comme refus de la violence repose donc sur un domaine (condition, situation, monde) devenant lui-même insensé par l’acte selon lequel ce domaine est saisi. Mais avant même que ce non-sens du domaine puisse être pensé comme tel dans le discours philosophique, il est d’abord “vie reçue” comme un fait indémontrable.

L’universalité “perdue” ne pourra être retrouvée, atteinte, que dans l’intériorité, par une action effective. C’est par une telle action dans le monde historique que l’homme peut se comprendre, et, se comprenant,


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entrer dans la logique de la philosophie en cherchant dans l’action une cohérence totale avec les valeurs qu’il a reconnues par la pensée (on re-trouve ici quelque chose du processus créateur de J. Ladrière). C’est dans cette opération que se produit l’élévation à l’universel, car

l’universel, une fois que le choix s’est fait en faveur d’un discours cohérent, précède l’individuel, non seulement au sens transcendantal, mais aussi au sens historique le plus banal. L’homme ne commence pas par être un individu pour lui-même : il l’est d’abord pour les autres. (Weil, 1950: 68)

C’est cette élévation à l’universel qui confère de la valeur à toute action

personnelle et qui est le critère d’une véritable morale de l’humanité. Comme le souligne E. Weil, la raison ne se “boucle pas sur elle-même”. Elle s’éprouve elle- même dans l’absence de sens, signe d’une finitude de la connaissance humaine, d’une “incomplétude” dirait le scientifique d’aujourd’hui. C’est l’action qui accepte la finitude, la contingence de l’homme, qui ouvre à l’universel. A la base de ce processus, il y a le choix moral du discours cohérent (ici comme refus de la violence). Ce choix moral n’est pas sans rejoindre la conviction de Einstein et de bien d’autres: le monde est intelligible ! ...en même temps, il y toujours quelque chose qui échappe. Le sujet est amené à trouver du sens sur fond de non-sens... en acceptant les limites de la raison et en retrouvant l’universalité perdue par une action, un choix effectif: c’est bien ce qui est au fondement de la complémentarité telle que nous l’avons introduite avec Bohr, Nicolescu et la structure en niveaux de réalité. C’est cette élévation à l’universel qui con-fère de la validité à toute action personnelle et qui forme, selon Weil, le seul critère d’une véritable morale de l’humanité.

Avec cette pertinente analyse de Weil, on peut de nouveau retrouver la distinction des différents plans sur lesquels nous travaillons. C’est le refus de la violence qui permet ici de passer du plan de la métaphysique (re-cherche de sens sur fond de non sens) au plan de la morale (le sujet est amené à trouver du sens en retrouvant l’universalité perdue par une action, un choix effectif qui l’engage). Cette action, nous l’avons dit, contient une acceptation de la finitude, de la contingence de l’homme, de son incomplé-tude. Une telle “sagesse” (tirer la leçon de la contingence de l’homme) ouvre un espace privilégié pour le dialogue avec les théologiens qui eux-aussi sont en recherche du mystère de Dieu.


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4. La tension initiale de l’identique et de l’autre chez E. Levinas L’intuition centrale du livre de É. Levinas “Totalité et Infini” est que

l’ontologie au sens classique d’un “discours sur l’être” repose sur une ten-sion première entre l’identique et l’autre (l’autre chose et l’autre homme). L’extériorité, comme essence de l’être, signifie la résistance de la multiplici-té sociale à la logique qui totalise le multiple. Pour cette logique, la multi-plicité est une déchéance de l’Un ou de l’infini, une diminution dans l’être que chacun des êtres multiples aurait à surmonter pour revenir du multiple à l’Un, du fini à l’Infini. La métaphysique, le rapport avec l’extériorité – c’est à dire avec la supériorité – indique, par contre, que le rapport entre le fini et l’infini ne consiste pas, pour le fini, à s’absorber dans ce qui lui fait face, mais à demeurer dans son être propre, à s’y tenir, à agir ici-bas.... Po-ser l’être comme extériorité, c’est apercevoir l’infini comme le Désir de l’infini, et, par là, comprendre que la production de l’infini appelle la sépa-ration, la production de l’arbitraire absolu du moi ou de l’origine (Levinas, 1971: 324-325).

D’après l’auteur, l’aventure qu’ouvre la séparation est absolument nou-velle par rapport à la Béatitude de l’Un et à sa fameuse liberté qui consiste à nier ou à absorber l’Autre pour ne rien rencontrer. A l’idée de totalité où la philosophie ontologique réunit, ou comprend, véritablement le multiple, il s’agit de substituer l’idée d’une séparation résistante à la synthèse. Cela préserve la résistance des êtres à la totalisation d’une multiplicité sans total qu’ils constituent, de l’impossibilité de leur conciliation dans le Même. L’extériorité de l’être ne signifie pas, en effet, que la multiplicité soit sans rapport. Seulement le rapport qui relie cette multiplicité ne comble pas l’abîme de la séparation, il la confirme (Levinas, 1971: 328).

Voici la fameuse tension initiale entre l’identique et l’autre, avec le thème important chez Levinas du face à face et du “visage”. Il est clair qu’il s’agit surtout, chez Levinas, de “l’autre homme”, plus que de” l’autre chose”. Mais les deux ne doivent pas être séparés. A la pensée métaphy-sique où un fini a l’idée de l’infini – où se produisent la séparation radicale, et, simultanément, le rapport avec l’autre – nous avons réservé le terme d’intentionnalité, de conscience de... Elle est attention à la parole ou ac-cueil du visage, hospitalité et non pas thématisation (Levinas, 1971: 334).

La présence de l’extériorité dans le langage qui commence, pour Levi-nas, par la présence du visage, ne se produit pas comme affirmation dont


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le sens resterait sans développement.

La relation avec le visage se produit comme bonté. L’extériorité de l’être, c’est la moralité même. La liberté, évènement de séparation dans l’arbitraire, qui constitue le moi, maintient en même temps la relation avec l’extériorité qui ré-siste moralement à toute appropriation et à toute totalisation dans l’être. (Le-vinas, 1971: 337)

Du reste, si la liberté se posait en dehors de cette relation, tout rapport, au sein de la multiplicité, n’opérerait que la saisie d’un être par un autre ou leur participation commune à la raison où aucun être ne regarde le visage de l’autre, mais où tous les êtres se nient.

Que ce soit dans la pensée scientifique ou dans l’objet de la science, que ce soit enfin dans l’histoire comprise comme manifestation de la raison et où la violence se révèle elle-même comme raison, la philosophie se présente comme réalisation de l’être, c’est à dire comme sa libération par la suppres-sion de la multiplicité. La connaissance serait la suppression de l’Autre par la saisie, par la prise ou par la vision qui saisit avant la saisie. Dans cet ouvrage, la métaphysique a un sens tout à fait différent. Si son mouvement mène vers le transcendant comme tel, la transcendance ne signifie pas appropriation de ce qui est, mais son respect. La vérité comme respect de l’être, voilà le sens de la vérité métaphysique. (Levinas, 1971: 337-338)

Ce thème de l’extériorité, s’il déborde largement le cadre de la complé-

mentarité, n’en demeure pas moins central pour notre sujet. L’histoire du développement de l’idée de complémentarité nous a du reste permis de souligner à plusieurs reprises l’importance de la problématique développée par Levinas et de la tension initiale dont il parle, comme ouverture active à l’autre. L’articulation entre l’unicité du sujet et la multiplicité du réel dans lequel agit ce sujet, qui est au cœur de l’idée de complémentarité, est bien fondée sur cette tension première entre l’identique et l’autre. Ainsi, penser la différence à partir de la complémentarité en passant d’une pensée identi-taire duale à une pensée vraiment complémentaire est comme une explici-tation concrète de cette tension première, fondatrice.

Nous avons mis en évidence, avec Levinas, Weil et Ladrière, des fon-dements de la complémentarité qui s’écarte d’une vision purement dualiste


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pour chercher des chemins d’unité d’antagonismes. La complémentarité apparaît ainsi comme une illustration, parmi d’autres, de la problématique du Même et de l’Autre. Ce qui est particulièrement intéressant, c’est que notre démarche, qui avait comme point de départ une réflexion sur l’évolution des idées en science aujourd’hui, nous conduise en fait sur le terrain de la philosophie morale (éthique de la connaissance), via la méta-physique (trois plans à bien distinguer). Nous soulignons par cette dé-marche comment la philosophie morale peut constituer un pont pour un dialogue fécond entre scientifiques, philosophes, chercheurs de sens, et, nous allons le voir, théologiens.

5. Richesses des attitudes communes à ceux qui se confrontent au

mystère du connaître La première “valeur” sous jacente à la démarche scientifique est qui

conduit le chercheur à être un explorateur et non pas un répétiteur. Cette ouverture à la nouveauté, à partir des données du passé, est une magni-fique attitude de base: allier tradition et ouverture à la nouveauté radicale!

Des attitudes morales fondamentales sont comme appelées par toute recherche de vérité devant la complexité, comme c’est le cas pour la pra-tique de la complémentarité. Les voici en résumé:

1. Accueillir la réalité comme quelque chose qui résiste à nos représen-tations.

2. Accepter positivement l’incomplétude de notre compréhension de la réalité.

3. Chercher à construire du sens sur fond de non sens apparent 4. S’ouvrir à une altérité fondamentale 5. Se confronter au réel pour devenir un bon chercheur 6. S’ouvrir à l’universel 7. Entrer dans le sens du mystère La philosophie morale apparaît ainsi comme un lieu privilégié pour le

dialogue entre scientifiques et croyants, via l’homme qui peut expérimen-ter les mêmes attitudes dans sa vie de scientifique et dans sa vie de croyant, sans confusion des domaines.


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6. L’acte de croire, une autre manière d’entrer dans le mystère Croire, pour un chrétien

La foi naît d’une rencontre et y conduit. Croire en quelqu’un, c’est le rencontrer, s’en remettre à lui et lui faire confiance. Dans l’Évangile, les rencontres de Jésus avec les Zachée, Marie-Madeleine, Pierre..., avec les lépreux ou les malades, sont significatives du lien fondamental qui unit foi et rencontre. C’est la rencontre, à l’initiative de Dieu, qui transforme, gué-rit, fait “voir”, ouvrant à la relation et au chemin du salut: “ta foi t’a sau-vé”. Cette foi s’exprime certes dans des mots, mais elle a des gestes, des attitudes qui traduisent la “conversion” qu’entraîne la rencontre, la relation interpersonnelle.

En même temps, la foi naît aussi de la prise de conscience par l’homme de son impuissance à se réaliser lui-même. Cette idée d’un “manque fon-damental’ qu’éprouve l’homme en quête d’infini se situe dans la grande tradition philosophique et théologique portant sur la question du fini et de l’infini. Saint Augustin parle de “l’insatisfaction de l’âme humaine” qui traduit ce manque. D’une autre manière, Descartes dira que la présence en nous de l’idée de parfait est cette image en creux que Dieu a mise au cœur de l’homme “comme la marque de l’ouvrier empreinte sur son ouvrage”. Malebranche verra à son tour dans la volonté humaine, toujours en mou-vement pour aller plus loin, la marque de notre finitude en même temps que le signe de notre participation à l’infini.

Paul Tillich (1971) se situe dans la même tradition quand il dit que l’homme est conduit à la foi par la prise de conscience de l’infini auquel il appartient mais qu’il ne peut posséder en propre. Du coup, Tillich définit la foi comme le fait d’être saisi par ce qui nous importe de façon ultime (‘ultimate concern’, en anglais), c’est à dire l’absolu de l’être et du sens. “Toutes les fois que l’absolu, l’inconditionné, est recherché en quelque domaine que ce soit (esthétique, juridique, social), un chemin vers la foi est ouvert... la foi est le fait d’être saisi par la puissance de l’Etre même. ”

Où il y a foi, il y a tension entre la participation à l’absolu et la sépara-tion d’avec lui. Tout acte de foi présuppose une participation à ce qu’il vise: sans une participation à l’absolu, il ne peut y avoir de foi dans l’absolu. Sans la manifestation de Dieu dans l’homme, la question de Dieu et la foi en Dieu ne seraient pas possibles. Mais la foi cesserait d’être la foi sans cet élément opposé qu’est la séparation. Qui a la foi est aussi séparé


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de l’objet de foi. Autrement, il en serait le possesseur. La préoccupation de la foi est identique à l’intuition de l’amour: toutes deux expriment l’aspiration de l’homme à rejoindre ce à quoi il appartient et dont il est séparé. Le grand commandement d’amour de Jésus dans l’Évangile trace ce chemin. La foi implique l’amour, l’amour vivant dans les œuvres: en ce sens la foi se manifeste réellement dans les œuvres. Là, il y a désir passion-né de mettre en acte le chemin suscité par “l’ultimate concern” de Tillich.

De l’élément de participation résulte “la certitude de la foi”. De l’élément de séparation résulte “le doute de la foi’. Les deux interviennent dans l’acte de croire. Ce qui fonde la certitude du croyant, c’est que la foi est perçue comme adhésion à une Parole transmise par la tradition chré-tienne, Parole reconnue comme Révélation de Dieu. Il est clair que si, pour le croyant, c’est Dieu qui lui parle, la certitude de sa foi repose sur le plus solide fondement! Mais cette certitude n’est pas une certitude qui naît de l’évidence, comme pour une démonstration. Elle est de l’ordre de la connaissance qu’une personne a de l’autre, comme dans l’amour d’un homme et d’une femme. Il n’y a ni démonstration, ni “preuves intellec-tuelles” en amour, il y a des signes.

La foi est une manière de posséder déjà ce qu’on espère, un moyen de con-naître des réalités qu’on ne voit pas…Par la foi nous comprenons que les mondes ont été organisés par la Parole de Dieu. Il s’en suit que le monde vi-sible ne prend pas son origine en des apparences. (Lettre aux Hébreux, 11, 1-3) La foi naît d’une rencontre avec quelqu’un qui se manifeste par des

signes objectifs (refus du fidéisme qui retirerait à la foi tout support rationnel), signes que l’on peut (veut) ou ne peut (veut) pas lire. Cette connaissance par signes forme la trame de l’existence humaine: elle fonde les raisons de vivre et d’agir. Nous reviendrons au point suivant sur la connaissance par signes.

A quiconque veut trouver la vérité, des repères sont proposés (les signes objectifs que la théologie explicite). Mais pour découvrir quelqu’un, encore faut-il vouloir le rencontrer. Du coup, pas de certitude dans la foi sans désir sincère d’accueillir l’Autre, le Tout Autre. Cet accueil suppose que la certitude de la foi ouvre à l’accueil et ne renferme pas le croyant sur lui-même. C’est là le risque de la foi, qui comprend l’acceptation du doute de la foi et qui permet à l’homme de comprendre que la foi est donnée,


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que le salut est donné par un Autre. Adhérer au Christ, lui faire confiance, et, à travers lui, faire confiance au Père, dans la mouvance de l’Esprit, ce n’est pas en effet éliminer toute part de doute: c’est risquer, avec d’autres, l’aventure d’un amour, c’est oser miser sa vie sur la Parole de Dieu. Le doute peut certes conduire au scepticisme; il peut aussi permettre d’approfondir, au delà de la tentation des idoles, les fondements de la foi. Bien des saints et des mystiques ont connu cette épreuve et en sont sortis fortifiés et grandis dans leur amour de Dieu.

Une lecture rapide de l’enseignement de l’Église pourrait faire croire que tout est déjà joué dans la foi chrétienne: il y a une réalité, le salut. Ce salut a une origine, Jésus-Christ, un lieu social, l’Église, des moyens pour se répandre, les sacrements. Tout semble joué, le rôle de l’homme étant juste de s’approprier la Révélation, ce qu’il faut croire. Il n’en est rien: la foi conduit à vivre un chemin, une aventure d’alliance entre deux parte-naires, l’homme et Dieu, école de liberté et de responsabilité. La foi est en même temps certitude de Dieu, recherche de Dieu, et conscience que l’homme ne peut penser Dieu par ses propres forces. Là aussi “quelque chose échappe”, “Quelqu’un échappe”. Le croyant sait que toute représen-tation de Dieu est insuffisante, et que cette insuffisance radicale traduit l’impuissance radicale de l’homme à atteindre Dieu. La foi est ainsi attente de cette communion que seul Dieu donne, elle est réponse à l’appel de Dieu, dans un engagement à construire un monde digne de son amour.

La foi vivante comporte donc certitude et doute, ensemble; elle sup-pose ce que Tillich appelle “le courage d’être”:

ce n’est pas la répression mais c’est le courage qui vainc le doute. Le courage ne nie pas l’existence du doute, mais il l’intègre en lui comme expression de sa propre finitude et il affirme, en dépit du doute, ce qui le préoccupe de ma-nière absolue. Le courage n’a pas besoin de la sécurité que donne une convic-tion inébranlable. Il porte en lui le risque sans lequel aucune vie créatrice n’est possible. Par exemple, si la foi de quelqu’un a pour contenu cette affirmation que Jésus est le Christ, une telle foi ne relève pas de la certitude indubitable mais d’un courage audacieux qui porte avec lui le risque de l’échec. Même si c’est d’une manière vigoureuse et positive que l’on confesse que Jésus est le Christ, le fait qu’il s’agisse d’une confession implique courage et risque.

Tillich ajoute que le chrétien sait que les déviations idolâtriques sont


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possibles et même inévitables, mais il sait aussi que pour juger les abus idolâtriques un critère lui est donné par la Croix du Christ. C’est à partir de ce critère que peut être annoncé aux hommes le message qui est au cœur même du christianisme et qui rend possible le courage de croire dans le Christ: ce message, c’est l’annonce que, en dépit de toutes les forces de destruction, la séparation entre Dieu et l’homme est surmontée de la part de Dieu.

Demeure ainsi cette certitude que même l’échec que comporte le risque de la foi ne peut séparer définitivement l’homme de Dieu. Tillich parle alors du fossé infini que la foi comble:

Dieu, dans la rencontre divino-humaine transcende l’homme inconditionnel-lement. En dépit du fossé, la puissance de l’être est présente, celui qui est sé-paré est accepté. La foi n’est pas une opinion, mais un état. Elle est l’état d’être saisi par la puissance de l’Etre qui transcende tout ce qui est et auquel participe tout ce qui est. Celui qui est saisi par cette puissance est capable de s’affirmer parce qu’il sait qu’il est affirmé par la puissance de l’Etre lui- même.

La foi marque ainsi la rencontre de l’impuissance de l’homme et de la

puissance de Dieu, et Jésus peut dire en même temps “tout est possible à Dieu” (Mc 10, 27) et “tout est possible à celui qui croit” (Mc 9, 23). Dans la foi, l’homme, prenant conscience de ses limitations, est touché, saisi, par l’absolu. En ce sens, l’homme de foi se sent proche de ceux qui ne savent pas grand chose de Dieu et cherchent à construire le monde. En même temps, il sait que Dieu a parlé en Jésus-Christ, il sait… grâce au Christ, que Dieu est un Père qui envoie l’Esprit pour aimer et vivre la liberté des en-fants de Dieu.

Avant d’aller plus loin, il faut ici introduire quelques remarques impor-tantes sur le mode de connaissance par signe qui intervient dans la dé-marche de foi.

7. Connaissance par signes En matière de foi, il est évident que la raison ne peut opérer exactement

comme dans la démonstration d’un théorème en mathématique. Ceci ex-clurait le rôle de la grâce de Dieu et de la volonté libre de l’homme dans son adhésion. Mais cela ne signifie pas que le rôle de la raison soit réduit ou inutile, bien au contraire. Dans l’adhésion de foi, ce qui va jouer,


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comme nous l’avons indiqué précédemment, c’est un mode de connais-sance par signe, relié bien sûr à une réflexion sur le contenu de la foi. No-tons au passage que ce mode de connaissance par signe joue également pour les relations interpersonnelles (avec les gestes et les regards par exemple) et aussi en science, comme cela est bien connu.

Dans un signe, il faut prendre en compte deux pôles: le signifiant et le si-gnifié. Comprendre le signe, ce sera découvrir le signifié à travers un phé-nomène sensible (Morren, 1975). Le signe unit toujours un fait à un sens. Si en science, le signifiant et le signifié restent du même ordre, en matière de foi, ils appartiennent à des ordres différents. Le signe joue alors de ma-nière forte: d’une part il devra faire partie du monde de l’expérience (comme phénomène sensible) et d’autre part, en tant qu’il est significatif, il devra soutenir une relation avec le monde spirituel qu’il manifeste.

Corrélativement, en raison de cette appartenance à deux mondes, le signe ne pourra être compris que par un sujet doué d’une faculté percevante double-ment accordée, c’est-à-dire accordée d’une part au signe comme phénomène de l’expérience, et d’autre part à l’univers supérieur signifié. C’est ainsi que ni un aveugle, ni un animal ne peuvent lire, l’un parce qu’il ne perçoit pas le signe, l’autre parce qu’il ne perçoit pas le sens... Puisque l’ordre surnaturel en lui-même déborde les prises de la connaissance humaine, il est clair qu’il ne peut être atteint que par une connaissance de type connaissance par signe, c’est à dire à travers un élément qui participe à la fois du monde naturel par son existence et du monde surnaturel par sa signification. (De La Bon-nardière, 1949: 48-49) Ce mode de connaissance par signe est essentiel pour situer le rôle de la

raison dans l’adhésion de foi. Il ne faut cependant pas “couper les deux mondes” (monde de l’expérience et monde spirituel) reliés par le signe et éviter un dualisme trompeur.

Il faut souligner ici une autre particularité de ce mode de connaissance. Dans la saisie du sens dans le signe, la grâce confère un nouveau regard. L’adhésion de foi correspond au oui de l’homme à l’appel de Dieu et de-mande, pour se vivre, une relation, une mutuelle attirance. La grâce de-vient réellement faculté “percevante” pour éclairer la raison sur le sens des signes. La réponse de l’homme éclairée par la grâce (Dieu est le premier à désirer la rencontre), nécessite qu’intervienne l’élan de sa propre volonté.


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Pour reprendre Thomas d’Aquin et Blondel, on dira que le désir de l’homme rencontre le désir de Dieu. Dans ce mouvement qui engage l’homme tout entier, la vérité aperçue oriente en retour la vie de l’homme, tant il est vrai que le sens est ici tout autant direction que signification. On peut parler d’une volonté qui fait voir et d’une vérité qui fait vivre. La vo-lonté qui fait voir n’est pas auto-suggestion, mais ouverture des yeux, et la vérité qui fait vivre manifeste que la lumière ainsi découverte n’est pas ex-térieure, mais est, du plus profond d’elle- même, animatrice.

On pourrait résumer en disant avec de nombreux théologiens, que grâce et volonté conjuguent leurs efforts pour donner à la raison les yeux qui font voir, tout en sachant que la grâce est déjà présente dans cette orientation de la volonté. Sous l’éclairage percevant de la grâce, c’est bien en définitive notre raison qui voit et qui choisit de dire oui et notre volon-té qui l’oriente dans sa quête du vrai. L’amour suscite la faculté de con-naître et la connaissance légitime à nos yeux l’amour. C’est ce que Thomas d’Aquin lui-même affirme vers la fin de sa vie lorsqu’il disait: “On n’aime que ce que l’on connaît et on ne connaît que ce que l’on aime.” En pleine recherche entre science et foi, ces quelques remarques sur le mode de connaissance par signe sont importantes, notamment pour mettre en évi-dence des similitudes et des différences dans l’articulation du donné et de la conceptualisation en science et en théologie.

8. La théologie devant le mystère de Dieu La théologie chrétienne s’intéresse au Mystère que nous appelons Dieu,

et sa relation avec nous, dans la mesure où nous la fait connaître la Révéla-tion de Dieu en Jésus-Christ. Ce mystère est le Mystère absolu. On parle ainsi du mystère de la Trinité, du mystère de l’Incarnation, du mystère de la Rédemption…et du mystère de l’homme, de ce qu’il est et de ce à quoi il est appelé!

La Parole, le Verbe de Dieu, qui s’est manifesté à nous dans l’Incarnation, est la Sagesse de Dieu, dont Il nous révèle le Mystère (dans lequel nous n’aurons jamais fini d’avancer). Cette Sagesse est amour, con-templation et adoration du Mystère.

La mystique est l’expression de l’expérience de la “saisie de l’être” dans l’unité-présence-communion avec Dieu, faisant échos à “l’ultimate con-cern” dont parlait Tillich (la foi est le fait d’être saisi par la Puissance de


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l’Etre). Cette expérience ne pourra s’exprimer que dans un langage qui tente de dire “l’indicible”, donc un langage qui procédera par négations successives comme approches du Mystère de l’Inconnaissable (on com-mence par dire ce que Dieu n’est pas). C’est ce qu’on appelle la “voie né-gative” (via negativa) en Occident, correspondant en Orient surtout à la théologie dite “apophatique”.

On ne sera pas étonné que les mystiques, pour tenter de dire l’indicible, utilisent des procédés linguistiques tels que le paradoxe ou l’oxymore (la mise en relation de deux termes contradictoires ou s’excluant mutuelle-ment). On ira jusqu’à utiliser la voie de la “coïncidence des opposés” (coïncidentia oppositorum), surtout avec Nicolas de Cuse, comme nous le verrons plus loin. Mais attention, il s’agit bien d’une théologie, dite mys-tique, qui est ici envisagée et pas seulement d’une expérience spirituelle.

9. La voie négative Le premier grand théologien chrétien à parler de théologie mystique fut

Denys l’Aéropagite, ou le “Pseudo-Denys (Vème- VIème siècle). Denys, marqué par le travail du néoplatonicien païen Proclus, conçoit deux voies théologiques possibles:

‐ La voie “cataphatique”ou positive, qui procède par affirmations et nous fait accéder à une certaine connaissance de Dieu. Cette voie est selon lui imparfaite.

‐ La voie “apophatique ou négative qui procède par négations et nous conduit à l’ignorance totale. Mais c’est par ce type d’ignorance que l’on peut connaître Celui qui est au dessus de tous les objets de connais-sances possibles. Cette voie est pour Denys la seule convenable à l’égard de Dieu, inconnaissable par nature. La seule approche est alors de nier tout ce qui lui est inférieur en quelque sorte. Par la négation on écarte pro-gressivement tout le connu pour s’approcher de l’Inconnu dans les té-nèbres de l’Ignorance (condition extrême d’incomplétude!).

Et Il (Dieu) n’a pas de force et Il n’est aucune force ni aucune lumière. Et Il ne vit pas et n’est pas non plus la vie. Et Il n’est pas l’être, ni l’éternité, ni le temps. Et Il n’est ni le savoir ni même la vérité, ni la seigneurie ni la sagesse, ni non plus l’Un ou l’unité, ni même la divinité…Parce qu’Il est totalement au-delà de tout et au-dessus de tout et de chacun…Il est Celui qui transcende toute affirmation…et toute négation. (Pseudo-Denys, 1943)


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On dit ce que Dieu n’est pas (l’être, la sagesse, l’Un, même la divini-té)… pour mieux entrer dans le Mystère de l’Etre, de la Sagesse…de Dieu ! Afin de saisir la vraie nature de l’apophatisme, il faut renoncer aux sens et à l’intelligence rationnelle (sans la négliger pour autant), à tout ce qui est et n’est pas. Ainsi seulement peut-on atteindre dans l’ignorance absolue l’union avec Celui qui surpasse tout être et toute science. Il y a là un chemin de purification (une catharsis), qui est nécessaire pour s’affranchir progressivement de l’emprise de tout ce qui peut-être connu, une sorte de chemin de sainteté, une voie vers l’union mystique avec Dieu dans laquelle on s’affranchit de ce qu’on voit (le sujet) et de ce qui est vu (l’objet). Denys compare cette voie à la montée de Moïse sur le Sinaï: re-nonçant à tout savoir positif, il pénètre dans les ténèbres de l’inconnaissance.

Notons au passage que pour Denys, Dieu étant inconnaissable par na-ture, il ne peut être le Dieu-unité primordial des néo-platoniciens. S’il est inconnaissable, ce n’est pas à cause de l’inintelligence de notre entende-ment qui n’arrive qu’à saisir du multiple dans la nature. C’est là que la théologie de Denys se démarque de celle de Plotin et de sa proposition de l’Un (que nous avons déjà évoqué dans la conversation avec Bernard d’Espagnat).

Selon Plotin, la nature de l’Un est génératrice de tout mais l’âme qui veut saisir cette unité s’en éloigne si elle le fait en utilisant la science ou l’intuition qui ne peuvent que saisir le multiple. Pour Plotin, il s’agit en fait de recourir à la voie extatique, c’est-à-dire à l’union où on est un avec son objet, où le sujet ne se distingue plus de son objet. Intervient alors une réduction de l’être à la simplicité absolue. L’union avec le Un est prise de conscience de l’unité ontologique de l’homme avec Dieu, ce qui engendre une mystique impersonnelle bien sûr.

Or chez Denys, Dieu n’est pas l’Un, ni l’Unité dans le sens indiqué par Plotin. Pour lui, le nom “le plus sublime” est celui de Trinité, qui nous apprend que Dieu n’est ni l’un ni le multiple, mais surpasse cette antino-mie (nous reprendrons plus loin, avec Nicolas de Cuse notamment, cette relation entre l’un et le multiple, pour mieux les relier). C’est la conscience de l’incognoscibilité foncière de Dieu qui marque la limite entre le Dieu des philosophes et le Dieu de la Révélation. Nous reviendrons à la fin du livre sur ce point en soulignant l’importance en christianisme de la notion


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de création à partir de rien, et le fait que la philosophie grecque ignore la différence entre le créé et l’incréé. Retenons que pour Denys, il y a un tel abîme entre la créature et le Créateur (même s’il y a alliance) que cet abîme creuse l’incognoscibilité de Dieu. L’extase chez Denys sera une “sortie de l’être comme tel”, un renoncement au domaine du créé pour accéder à l’incréé, ce qui nécessite une perpétuelle conversion et une prière qui de-vient un dialogue amoureux et qui se traduit en chant liturgique.

On peut dire que pour la théologie négative, Dieu réside là où nos con-cepts n’ont pas accès. Il n’y a qu’un seul nom pour exprimer la nature di-vine, c’est l’étonnement qui saisit l’âme quand elle pense à Dieu. Aucun concept philosophique n’est apte à rendre compte des profondeurs inson-dables de Dieu. Dans l’union mystique le sujet ne connait Dieu que comme inconnaissable, mais cette expérience permet, par grâce, une ren-contre avec le Dieu personnel de la Révélation, la Trinité. Le Cantique des Cantiques rend bien compte, pour Denys, de l’ascension spirituelle du sujet dans son union à Dieu : un amour qui n’atteint son Bien Aimé que dans la conscience que l’union n’aura pas de fin, l’ascension pas de terme. Dans ce contexte, il n’y pas de théologie possible en dehors de l’expérience de l’incognoscibilité de Dieu et de la rencontre avec le Dieu Trinité au cœur de cette “incomplétude fondamentale” dirons-nous! L’apophatisme des Pères de la tradition orientale permet de garder leur pensée sur le seuil du mystère et de ne pas remplacer Dieu par des con-cepts, voire des idoles. En rappelant que cette incognoscibilité n’est pas une fin en soi, mais le chemin qui permet l’union et la déification, dans une contemplation qui élève l’esprit et le cœur vers des réalités qui dépas-sent l’entendement.

Le pape Benoît XVI a récemment repris l’intérêt pour hier et au-jourd’hui de l’approche de Denys l’Aréopagite:

Et ainsi une grande et mystérieuse théologie devient en même temps une théologie très concrète, aussi bien quant à l’interprétation de la liturgie que dans le discours sur Jésus-Christ. Par tout cela, Denys l’Aréopagite exerça une grande influence sur toute la théologie médiévale, sur toute la théologie mys-tique de l’Orient comme de l’Occident, ayant été pour ainsi dire redécouvert au XIIIème siècle, en particulier par saint Bonaventure, le grand théologien franciscain qui trouva dans cette théologie mystique l’instrument conceptuel d’interprétation de l’héritage si simple et si profond de saint François : avec


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Denys, le “poverello” nous dit finalement que l’amour voit mieux que la rai-son. Où est la lumière de l’amour n’ont plus accès les ténèbres de la raison; l’amour voit, l’amour est un œil et l’expérience nous donne davantage que la réflexion. Ce qu’est cette expérience, Bonaventure le découvrit dans saint François: c’est l’expérience d’une voie très humble, très réaliste, jour après jour, c’est cela “aller avec le Christ” en acceptant sa croix. Dans cette pauvreté et cette humilité, dans l’humilité vécue aussi en Église, se fait une expérience de Dieu qui est plus haute que celle qui s’obtient par la réflexion: en elle nous touchons vraiment au cœur de Dieu.

Se présente encore de nos jours une nouvelle actualité de Denys l’Aréopagite: il apparaît comme un grand médiateur dans le dialogue moderne entre le christianisme et les théologies mystiques de l’Asie dont la caractéris-tique commune réside dans la conviction que l’on ne peut rien dire de Dieu; de lui, on ne peut parler que sous des formes négatives; de Dieu on ne peut parler qu’avec des négations, et ce n’est qu’en entrant dans cette expérience du non qu’on le rejoint. On reconnaît là quelque voisinage entre la pensée de l’Aréopagite et celle des religions asiatiques: il peut être aujourd’hui un média-teur, comme il le fut jadis entre l’esprit grec et l’Évangile.

On voit également que le dialogue n’accepte pas la superficialité. C’est pré-cisément quand on pénètre dans les profondeurs de la rencontre avec le Christ que s’ouvre aussi le vaste espace du dialogue. (Benoît XVI, 2008: 582) 10. La voie d’éminence Après Denys, les théologiens auront généralement tendance à considé-

rer la voie négative comme la moins imparfaite des deux voies: dire ce que Dieu n’est pas, c’est implicitement faire l’aveu de notre impuissance à l’englober sous un concept. C’est ce qui ressort du passage suivant extrait de la Somme contre les Gentils de Thomas d’Aquin:

Dans l’étude de la substance divine, il faut surtout recourir à la voie négative. Car la substance divine dépasse par son immensité toute forme que notre in-tellect atteint: nous ne pouvons donc pas l’appréhender en connaissant ce qu’elle est, et nous ne pouvons ainsi la saisir en connaissant ce qu’elle est. Mais nous en avons une certaine connaissance en connaissant ce qu’elle n’est pas. (d’Aquin, 1999: 176)

Thomas d’Aquin ne nie pas dans ce passage qu’il soit vrai de dire, par

exemple, que “Dieu est sage”, ce qu’il nie c’est que le concept “sage” dé-


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crive de façon adéquate ce qu’est la Sagesse divine. L’affirmation “Dieu est sage” est vraie, certes, mais sa vérité est pour nous chose mystérieuse; elle n’est ni objet d’intuition, ni objet de démonstration scientifique.

Thomas d’Aquin, au XIIIème siècle, cherchera à faire une synthèse entre la voie négative et la voie affirmative. Il proposera la “voie d’éminence” (via eminentiae), qui pousse les attributs que nous donnons à Dieu au-delà de ce que nous pouvons concevoir: Dieu est cela et n’est pas cela…Il est au-delà de cela! Les négations se rapportent à la limitation de nos moyens d’expression alors que les affirmations cherchent à se rapporter à la per-fection que l’on veut exprimer, qui est en Dieu autrement que dans les créatures.

C’est cette méthode qu’applique le jésuite F. Varillon pour présenter Dieu dans son livre L’Humilité de Dieu (1974).

La toile de fond à partir de laquelle l’auteur parle de l’humilité de Dieu (qui est pour l’auteur le secret le plus profond de son mystère) est, là aussi, la question du sens. L’auteur part du constat évident que l’expérience im-médiate est à la fois expérience de sens et de non-sens: “sens et non-sens sont mêlés comme le froment et l’ivraie de la parabole ... L’existence n’est pas absurde, elle est contradictoire”. A partir de ce constat, l’auteur pose la question de l’absolu,

source de tout sens et fondement dont la présence se fait justement sentir, en creux, dans la conjonction des sens, qui restent tous particuliers, et de la con-tingence qui est immédiatement non-sens. En d’autres termes, confesser la contingence et reconnaître l’absolu sont un seul et même acte indivisible de raison et de liberté.

Je ne puis rien affirmer de Dieu purement et simplement. La négation doit aussitôt traverser l’affirmation de part en part: Dieu est humble, Dieu n’est pas humble. Plus radicalement : Dieu est, Dieu n’est pas. Et l’auteur de montrer que la négation de l’affirmation Dieu est humble

est une sorte de mort que l’homme inflige au concept pour que, ressusci-tant autre qu’il n’était, il dise de Dieu quelque chose de vrai.

Varillon parle de mystère pascal de l’intelligence:

rien sans mort: l’intelligence n’échappe pas à cette loi de la vie. Mais la néga-tion qui traverse l’affirmation ne l’abolit pas... Dieu est humble, Dieu n’est pas


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humble; Dieu est éminemment humble. Ce mode éminent ne peut être dé-terminé: il nous échappe.

C’est donc au niveau du concept qu’il est important pour Varillon d’utiliser des formulations contradictoires quand on veut parler de Dieu, Celui qu’aucun concept ne peut représenter.

Dieu révèle ce qu’Il est par ce qu’il fait. Son dessein sur l’homme, réalisé en Jésus-Christ, dévoile son être intime. On ne peut disjoindre en Lui l’acte et l’être. Si l’Incarnation est acte d’humilité, c’est que Dieu est être d’humilité. “Qui m’a vu a vu le Père”, dit Jésus. Le voyant laver avec humilité des pieds d’hommes, je “vois” donc, s’il dit vrai, Dieu même éternellement , mystérieu-sement Serviteur avec humilité au plus profond de sa Gloire. L’humiliation du Christ n’est pas un avatar exceptionnel de la gloire. Elle manifeste dans le temps que l’humilité est au cœur de la gloire.

Comme le dit l’auteur lui-même, voici un paradoxe si fort que la raison vacille. Pourtant, accepter ce paradoxe, c’est déjà s’ouvrir à l’expérience d’un Dieu que l’homme a toujours tendance à chercher du côté de la puis-sance et qui pourtant se révèle dans l’amour. Si Dieu est Amour, Il est humble.

“Le Père Varillon utilise alors cette même méthode pour parler de la toute puissance de Dieu.” C’est la Toute – Impuissance du Calvaire qui révèle la vraie nature de la Toute-Puissance de Dieu. L’humilité de l’amour donne la clef. Il faut peu de puissance pour s’exhiber, il en faut beaucoup pour s’effacer. Dieu est Puissance illimitée d’effacement de soi ... Nous pardonnons malaisément à un homme de l’emporter sur nous en quelque domaine que ce soit, s’il n’est pas humble. S’il l’est, tout change: sa supé-riorité est à la fois annulée et confirmée. Annulée, en ce qu’elle ne risque pas de nous annuler. Confirmée, parce que l’humilité la marque de son sceau. “La toute puissance de Dieu se dit dans sa puissance d’accueillir et de donner, dans sa” pauvreté comme dit Varillon. La puissance de dieu est dans son Amour infini, dans sa volonté de dépendance car le plus aimant est le plus dépendant.

Dieu est souverainement indépendant, donc libre. Mais libre d’aimer et d’aller jusqu’au bout de l’amour. Le bout de l’amour, c’est le renoncement à


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l’indépendance... Dieu est tel que sa richesse, sa liberté, sa puissance – ri-chesse d’amour, liberté d’amour, puissance d’amour, ne peuvent être et ne sont en fait traduites, exprimées, révélées, que par la pauvreté, la dépendance et l’humilité de Jésus-Christ.

C’est dans cette perspective que nous pouvons parler du Dieu à la fois

Tout-“Autre et plus intime à moi-même que moi-même, du Dieu qui se fait tout proche de l’homme”. Dieu se suffit absolument à lui-même; indé-pendamment du monde, ll est Dieu. Il est pourtant vulnérable. Dieu n’est blessé de rien, mais on peut blesser Dieu. Deux propositions qui sont formellement contradictoires. En entrant dans cette contradiction, l’homme peut pressentir quelque chose de la Gratuité et de la Liberté de Dieu. De plus, en s’incarnant et en mourant, Dieu renonce à la gloire, mais révèle la Gloire qui est au-delà de la gloire. Alors Varillon parle de Dieu comme à la fois infiniment discret et infiniment audacieux, ce qui, là aussi, peut apparaître contradictoire. Il faut essayer de penser, à partir de nos moments fugitifs de sensibilité plus fine, la coexistence des contraires (pour parler de Dieu).

Le Père Varillon aborde enfin la Trinité, mystère essentiel à la foi chré-tienne: paradoxe du Dieu un et trine. L’amour veut à la fois la distinction et l’unité, l’altérité et l’identité. Dans la condition humaine, ce vœu profond: être non seulement uni à l’autre mais un avec lui tout en restant soi, est incoercible et irréalisable. C’est pourquoi nul n’entre sans souffrance dans le royaume de l’amour. Le mystère de la Trinité est l’exaucement éternel de ce vœu. Chacune des trois Personnes n’est pour elle-même qu’en étant pour les deux autres ... C’est la Toute-puissance d’un absolu renoncement à soi, lequel constitue Dieu en son être trinitaire. C’est l’expérience de l’amour que nous vivons, même imparfaitement, qui nous permet, avec Varillon, de percevoir combien bonheur et sacrifice, si opposés contradic-toirement dans nos mentalités modernes, sont vécus en unité par Jésus sur la croix. Ce n’est qu’au niveau du sacrifice consenti par amour que l’on peut expérimenter l’unité paradoxale de la souffrance et de la joie ... Dans la vie à son plus haut degré d’intensité, disait Cabasilas, vie et mort ne s’opposent plus, mais se composent dans la figure libératrice de la Croix ... La Croix est la figure centrale de la Révélation : un homme défiguré dévoile l’Être éternel sans figure.


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Nous verrons que les attitudes des auteurs comme Denys, Thomas d’Aquin (sur lequel Varillon s’appuie) et Nicolas de Cuse devant le Mys-tère de Dieu ne sont pas sans lien avec les attitudes que nous avons repé-rées pour l’homme confronté à l’incomplétude devant la complexité, même si les activités des scientifiques sont d’un ordre totalement différent. Cette voie de la théologie (apophatique, négative et d’éminence) peut pro-bablement rejoindre la recherche de scientifiques marqués par le “Réel voilé”et les “ouvertures à l’Un” (dans le sens que nous avons donné avec Bernard d’Espagnat et repris avec Denys en différence avec Plotin) et dé-sireux de chercher Dieu, le Tout-Autre. Nous verrons aussi comment l’approche par la complémentarité, adaptée au champ propre de la théolo-gie, peut être utile pour une présentation des grands mystères chrétiens aujourd’hui, respectant le mystère de l’Indicible qui se donne à connaître, sans bien sûr mettre sur le même plan l’objet de la physique et l’objet de la théologie !

Approche générale de la théologie en termes d’unité de contraires ou de contradictoires

Au centre du débat se trouve la notion d’un Dieu personnel, si difficile à appréhender (notamment pour certains scientifiques plutôt tentés par une sorte de Dieu-Nature ou par un monisme comme l’Un de Plotin, de type impersonnel). Il appartient à l’essence même du Dieu de la Bible de faire éclater toutes les catégories; on ne peut le présenter qu’à l’aide de paradoxes (de Lubac, 1955).

Ainsi le Dieu de la Bible n’est ni personnel ni impersonnel (selon notre langage) mais les deux à la fois, de même qu’Il est l’infini dans le fini, l’Etre-même dans ce qui est. Jésus Christ réalise l’unité des contradictoires. Vrai Homme et vrai Dieu, Il réalise par sa Pâque l’unité des antagonismes Toute-Puissance – Non Puissance de Dieu, nous révélant par là un visage de Dieu à la fois paradoxal et attrayant. En vivant l’unité des contradic-toires, Jésus nous révèle, par sa vie, sa mort et sa résurrection, à la fois Dieu et l’Homme. Le Christ nous dit en vivant jusqu’au bout le paradoxe que le mode de présence au monde du Créateur Tout- Puissant s’exprime pleinement à travers le visage de l’Agneau Pascal, Dieu livré dans la liberté et la gratuité totales.

C’est une véritable dynamique du contradictoire (ou de l’antagonisme) que le Christ nous révèle sur la Croix et dans laquelle il permet à ses dis-


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ciples d’entrer. Pour eux, s’abandonner à Dieu et devenir soi sont des con-tradictoires vérifiables mais pourtant unis à un certain niveau d’expérience (nous détaillerons ce point, au niveau de la méthode, plus loin). C’est ce qui leur ouvre la porte d’une vie nouvelle. A travers la vie des disciples du Christ, le droit au bonheur et la participation à la Croix, vécus de manière si contradictoires par beaucoup d’hommes, apparaissent à la fois difficiles à vivre ensemble et pourtant très unis expérimentalement. On comprend mieux à travers la vie nouvelle et la vie ecclésiale des disciples du Christ comment la présence au monde peut aller de pair avec la rupture d’avec le monde. Le déjà-là et le pas-encore-là sont intimement liés dès maintenant, comme l’alpha et l’oméga qui agissent en même temps. Le Christ nous ouvre la voie de l’unité des contradictoires pour un seuil, une pâque, un passage vers une vie nouvelle. Notons ici que seul le Christ réalise pleine-ment l’unité des contradictoires : ses disciples continuent, comme tout homme, d’expérimenter les paradoxes tout en entrant progressivement par Lui dans l’unité.

Les notions d’acte-puissance développées par Aristote peuvent être très utiles au niveau de la méthode d’analyse du théologien. Ainsi lorsque celui-ci s’intéresse à l’humanité du Christ (actualisation du Christ-Homme), il ne peut le faire pleinement qu’en ayant conscience que la dimension divine du Christ est “en puissance” dans son discours. Réciproquement, il en va de même lorsque le Christ-Dieu (Fils) est actualisé dans le discours du théo-logien: le Christ-Homme est alors “en puissance », de l’intérieur. En d’autres termes, le théologien affirme par là que nous ne pouvons décrire pleinement l’humanité du Christ qu’en ayant en mémoire sa divinité. Réci-proquement, nous ne pouvons parler de la divinité du Christ qu’en ayant en mémoire son humanité.

De même, le disciple de Jésus ne pourra évoquer le déjà-là qu’en poten-tialisant le pas-encore-là. Il ne peut de même envisager le pas-encore-là qu’en potentialisant le déjà-là. C’est, semble-t-il, dans une dynamique du contra-dictoire que le théologien peut lui aussi franchir des seuils de compréhen-sion.

11. L’attrait du concile Vatican II pour l’unité des contraires Dans son livre Les idées maîtresses de Vatican II, G. Martelet (1985) traite

de l’union paradoxale des contraires pour présenter le mystère du Seigneur


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tel que le Concile l’a repris. Après avoir défini le mot “contraire” (ce qui est directement opposé à quelque chose ou quelqu’un) afin de ne pas faire de confusion avec le mot “contradictoire” (incompatibilité d’une chose ou d’une personne avec une autre chose ou une autre personne, pour G. Mar-telet), l’auteur souligne que l’union des contraires, si elle joue un si grand rôle au Concile, c’est qu’elle est, à ses yeux, “un reflet positif du mystère du Christ” (Martelet, 1985: 70).

Dans le Christ, en effet, apparaît au grand jour... non pas la confusion ou le mélange, pas davantage la distance ou le conflit, mais bien l’union sublime des contraires, ou, selon l’expression liturgique de l’office de l’Octave de la Nati-vité, leur admirable commerce. (Martelet, 1985: 71)

Et G. Martelet ajoute:

Du point de vue qui nous occupe, nous pouvons donc bien l’affirmer : le mystère du Christ, c’est en l’unité de sa Personne cette paradoxale union et de l’homme et de Dieu dont les conséquences, comme union des contraires, vont se montrer, dans l’œuvre du Concile, inépuisables. (Martelet, 1985: 73)

Puis l’auteur souligne que l’unanimité recherchée au Concile ne fut obte-nue qu’au

prix d’un sacrifice continuel des points de vue inutilement exclusifs pour une mise en lumière du respect des contraires comme règle dans les rapports entre personnes. La haute règle des grands Conciles christologiques, synthéti-ser les contraires en les différenciant et les distinguer en vue de les unir, se trouve ici (Vatican II) mise en pleine lumière... Norme cachée mais toujours agissante, moins souvent évoquée que celle des Pères, mais encore plus cons-tamment présente qu’elle, l’union christologique des contraires a joué au Concile le rôle d’instinct spirituel et d’une régulation spontanée des esprits dans la foi. (Martelet, 1985: 75-76)

L’auteur précise bien qu’il ne faut pas confondre les contraires de struc-

ture, féconds et qui doivent durer, avec les contraires de rupture qui en-traînent des divisions (comme celle des chrétiens).

Pour distinguer les contraires vivifiants de ces contraires mortels, disons qu’il


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s’agit dans un cas pour l’Église d’accomplir une union des contraires qui doi-vent, tels quels, demeurer, et dans l’autre, d’une union aux contraires, je veux dire aux pécheurs que nous sommes. (Martelet, 1985: 91)

Revenant au Christ, G. Martelet ajoute:

Le Christ, en effet, n’est pas seulement, comme Homme- Dieu, le Médiateur filial des contraires intégrés, il est aussi comme Homme des douleurs, le ré-conciliateur des contraires disloqués par la faute de l’homme... celui qui unit les contraires dans la paix de la médiation réunie, agonise d’abord au pressoir, pour détruire nos péchés par sa propre Passion. Il y a donc bien dans le Christ un rapport crucifiant à des contraires mortels... le Christ, dans la sa-cramentalité de l’Église, se lie à tout jamais à la fragilité de ses contraires pour communiquer, par quelques uns, la Vie qui doit nous transfigurer tous. (Mar-telet, 1985: 92,101)

Le sens que G. Martelet donne ici à l’union des contraires est proche de

celui que nous avons défini sous le vocable “unité des antagonismes”. Nous soulignons ici encore les évolutions des définitions des mots con-traire et contradictoire. Il nous faudra donc revenir sans cesse au sept ca-ractéristiques de la complémentarité lorsque nous tenterons d’utiliser cette méthode pour rendre compte des paradoxes, antagonismes ou antinomies des grands mystères en christianisme. Mais avant cela, il nous est néces-saire de nous arrêter sur la notion de “coïncidence des opposés” dévelop-pée par Nicolas de Cuse en théologie. Elle est à la fois originale et signe de l’acceptation d’une “condition d’incomplétude” caractéristique du théolo-gien-chercheur de Dieu.

Bibliographie

Benoît XVI, La Documentation Catholique n 2404 du 15/06/2008. d’Aquin, Th. Somme contre les Gentils, I, 14. Trad. C. Michon. Paris: GF-

Flammarion, 1999. De La Bonnardière, X. Devoir de croire et sincérité intellectuelle. Aubier, 1949. 48- 49. de Lubac, H. Nouveaux Paradoxes. Paris: Seuil, 1955. de Lubac, H. Paradoxes. Ed. du Temps Présent. 2e éd. 1949. Ladrière, J. L'Éthique et la Dynamique de la Raison. Rue Descartes n°7, Logiques de

l'éthique, Albin Michel, 1993 Levinas, É. Totalité et Infini, Essai sur l'extériorité. Kluwer Academic, 1971 Marcel, G. Etre et Avoir. Paris: Aubier, 1935.


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Marcel, G. Les Hommes contre l'humain. Paris: La Colombe, 1951. Marcel, G. Positions et approches concrètes du Mystère ontologique. Nauwelaerts et Vrin,

1949. Martelet, G. Les idées maîtresses de Vatican 2. Cerf, 1985. Morren, L. Dieu est libre-lié. Lethielleux, 1975. Pascal, B. Pensées. Éd. Brunschvicg, 1897. Pseudo-Denys. Œuvres complètes du pseudo-Denys l’Aéropagite. Paris: Aubier, 1943. Tillich, P. Le courage d'être. Casterman, 1971. Varillon, F. L'humilité de Dieu. Paris: Le Centurion, 1974. Weil, É. Logique de la Philosophie. Vrin, 1950 Biographical Note Thierry Magnin is both Professor in Physics and a Catholic priest, pres-ently Rector of the Catholic University of Lyon, France. He has a Ph.D. in physics (solid state physics) and a PHD in theology (Moral philosophy as a ground for a new dialogue between science and religion). He has written about 200 papers in solid state physics and three books on the relation between science and religion: Quel Dieu pour un monde scientifique? (Nouvelle Cité, 1993); Entre science et religion (Le Rocher, 1998); Paraboles scientifiques (Nouvelle Cité, 2000). He received a prize from the academy of science in France, and is a member of the SSQII programme.

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HSS I.1 (2012)

Patterns of Modernity: Christianity, Occidentalism and Islam

Christian Tămaş “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University, Iasi, Romania [email protected]

The shift of interest from community to individuality and freedom brought by modernity challenged the central place once occupied by religion, pushing it to the outskirts of human life. All these led to an increased indifference towards any transcendental guarantor that could act in a neutral reason-governed space. In the case of Islam, such a situation is impossible to tolerate, because it would mean God’s desecration by reducing the Qur’an to the statute of a simple book like many others that offer an opinion on a Supreme Being who does not decide the destiny of humanity any more, but becomes a simple matter of opinion. While Western Christianity adjusted to modernity reaching even to justify the developments which led to a dissolution of sacred, stating that they were consistent with its essence, Islam accepted modernity only to the extent of this one’s capacity to verify the realities stated by the Qur’an.

Keywords Christianity, Islam, Islamism, Occidentalism, society

Any society and the relationships between its members can be

considered in the light of two traditions. The first states the pre-eminence of community as a place where the individual has no value outside the Aristotelian city-state ideal construction which represents a pre-condition of his becoming a social being.1 The second is based on the individualistic premises according to which society is a “contract” between individuals, bearers of inalienable rights.

In Islam, the community plays a protective matrix role, and the individual can fulfil himself only by belonging to it, because only the

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community can provide him his truth and freedom. Outside the community there is only desolation and death. Therefore, the individual has no alternative than to always act in line with the community, any disobedience meaning a break of ties with the immediate and historical reality to which he belongs, such a thing being inconceivable (Cf. Weil, 1984: 145). Any Muslim’s vocation is, therefore, to fully integrate into the community as the community, in turn, tends to perfectly integrate into the cosmic Qur’ran that contains it.

Instead, in the Western-type community, the pre-eminence given to the individual and to his rights tends to blur the antecedence and finality of community in relation to its members, making thus the Islamic model incompatible with the individualistic ideology of the Occident.2

In this context for the Western world, the freedom of conscience is an element that assigns relativity to the principles which legitimise the idea of community, because it fully grants to the individual the freedom to choose his own ways. Thus, although he may assume the interests of the community, nothing forces him to integrate into it. He is free to choose, on the very basis of his freedom of choice.

This shift of interest from community to individuality and freedom challenged the central place once occupied by religion, pushing it to the outskirts of human life and ensuring that no obstacle stands in the way of freedom whose practice is recognized by right. All these gave rise to an increased indifference towards any transcendental guarantor that could act in a reason-governed neutral space. Thus, the constant pushing of religion to the outskirts of society’s concerns leads to a lack of social or public presence of God, and to the transformation of the religious community in a tolerated entity similar to any cultural association, as far as it respects the social law and order.

But a religion that ceases to be the centre of public life inspires no more the society, it tends to become a club and its practice a simple hobby. In the case of Islam, such a situation is impossible to tolerate, because it would mean God’s desecration by reducing the Qur’an to the statute of a simple book like many others that offer a view on a Supreme Being who does not decide the destiny of humanity any more, but becomes a simple matter of opinion.


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Under the circumstances it becomes clearer that, in our times, the antagonisms that oppose Islam to Christianity seen as the social and cultural matrix of its world are not based on dogmatic topics any more, but they take into account in a larger extent the ethical and moral ones. In extenso, it is about the dichotomy that opposes religion to modernity. While Western Christianity adjusted to modernity reaching even to justify the developments which led to a dissolution of sacred, stating that they were consistent with its essence, Islam accepted modernity only to the extent of this one’s capacity to verify the realities stated by the Qur’an.

Thus, if Abrahamic monotheism introduced a new type of relationship between man and God, Christianity implied a split between immanent and transcendent, between the reign of God and the reign of man, which made possible man’s communion with God and gave rise to an institution (the Church) directed toward helping people in their personal searches. This structure gave man the possibility to choose either to place himself outside the ecclesiastical institution by establishing a more direct relationship with God or to deny in different degrees the idea of divinity. Using Castoriadis’ terminology (1987: 146) we assist therefore to a passage from a world of heteronomy to a world of autonomy, a world where people build their own rules ceasing to attribute their imaginaries to any entity or element outside the social authority. From this point of view, Christianity is “the religion of leaving religion”, which means not so much “leaving the religious faith, but leaving a world where religion is the structural element, where it commands the political shape of societies and defines the economy of the social bonds” (Gauchet, 1998: 13).

Modernity broke the monopoly of final truths, it became a key factor which relativize man’s ultimate options. Modernity has thus become both judge of conflicts and obstacle in the way of their degenerating in repetitive skirmishes or in incipient wars, it has become a hallmark in establishing a unique and tolerant relation between the different beliefs about God and man. Modernity brought forward a world where civil society is seen as a possible place for debate on ultimate issues as it lets the individual choose whether to relate to God or deny Him. It is an element that cannot be ignored as it stripped Christianity of its social and doctrinal hegemony and uses a similar strategy with regard to Islam.


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However, despite the fact that modernity has made its presence felt in Islam, causing a series of major changes, faced with a world that either it does not understand or does not accept, Islam tends to be close to a sectarian spirit, seeking to desperately cling to the ultimate meanings of the transcendental dimension, almost completely banished by the occidental reason.

And all this, because Islam refuses to dissociate the natural world from the supernatural world. Unlike Christianity, Islam does not believe in the original sin and accepts that man is good, as in the very moment of his creation, and that with God’s help, he can defeat evil (human passions and the devil). Islam believes that man must try to enjoy both the natural and supernatural life within the limits prescribed by the Qur’an. But as long as the two dimensions of existence are in conflict, the primacy will be given to the supernatural world. Although it recommends a certain asceticism, consisting of patience during the hardships sent by God, prayer and fasting, Islam is against a pronounced asceticism and pushes to heroic choices only in relation to what it considers as a threat directed against God or against His people.3

The concern of Islam to remain in tune with the realities of the natural world is manifest as well when promoting the idea of combat. The nationalist principles are recognized as righteous, but they are translated at the level of the entire Islamic community that must expand or at least, must not contract, fighting if necessary. If the social ideal of Islam is based on mutual assistance, hospitality, generosity and fairness among the members of the Islamic community, the moderation of aspirations, the combat and the sacrifice of his own life gives the individual the opportunity to go beyond his own limits.

Still deeply religious, Islam considers the sacred as an essential and absolute value, whose one and only source is God. In this respect, the Qur’an as God’s embodiment in the logos, and the Arabic language as the embodied God’s garment, motivate, so far, on the one hand, the refusal to widely apply to the Qur’an the research methods of modern historical criticism and, on the other hand, the reluctance toward all things considered capable of distorting God or his message, such as the translation of the Qur’an in the languages of the Muslim peoples and the use of translations or of the Arabic dialects in liturgy.


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Although a significant number of Muslims live the idea of God’s proximity promoted by the Islamic mysticism, the general feeling is that of respectful reserve towards Him. The believer takes from the cosmic sphere the images that help him talk about God, but images like those present in the Bible that show God as a Father, Pastor or Groom, as well as any reference to human psychology (except in the case of the divine attributes and of the Sufi mystical tradition) are avoided for fear not to “humanize” God, not to impose on him a relation considered contrary to the universal order he established.

The reserve of the Muslims occurs in other areas as well. Thus, they refuse to pronounce themselves on the value of the biblical texts, according to the principle that God knows better what is all about (Allahu a‘lam), as mentioned in a Tradition: “Don’t approve, nor reject them.” The basis of the Muslim’s faith is reason or, better said, what reason says about God’s oneness and unity in relation to the assertions of the Qur’an and of the Prophet on this matter. Unlike Christianity, where the basis of the relationship with God is the pure faith, unverifiable by human methods, the basic idea expressed in the Qur’an places reason as foundation of faith, in other words, to be confessed, God has to be demonstrated by the continuous monitoring of the Qur’anic “signs”, in order to recognize their truthfulness by observing the natural, cosmic signs.

Any vision of life is based on the mode of interpreting the relationship between world, man and God, as full equation of existence4, because the reason to be of humanity cannot be found, as an end in itself, within man who is subject to relativity and finity. In the absence of a de facto recognition of his transcendence, man remains only with the arrogance fed on its own affirmation, an arrogance transformed thus into a simple megalomaniac act, as stated by Millán-Puelles (1995), man becoming the prisoner of his immanent self-sufficiency, produced, in particular, by the modern technological advancements.

Together with the development of science and technology, human relations with God and, hence, with the world have dramatically changed. The lack of a well-defined transcendental feeling inevitably led and leads to important alterations of the relationship with the “other”, fact that turns out to have serious consequences for humanity as a whole, modern


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man becoming more and more the “slave” of his freedom considered the driving force of both individual and collective progress.

Modernity determined the access to the autonomy regarding the religious, philosophical, political, social and individual imperatives. Horatio’s sapere aude5 “Dare to think (for yourself)”, used by Immanuel Kant in his famous essay What is Enlightenment (1784) as a premise of argumentation, once unsettling for religions, is the one that allowed them to express their doubts and beliefs. Thus modernity became the background of contact of the more or less totalitarian and universalist potentialities of Christianity and Islam. To violently reject it means to confess an inner closure and the rejection of any attempt to dialogue. The still irresolute relations of Islam with modernity seem to be important for a unique and open relationship with Christianity.

In the light of the recent tendencies of finding a common way of understanding in a “common world”, the interfaith meetings that have been taken place after 2007 seem to clarify the western Christianity's positions towards Islam and the world generated by it, and partly the positions of Islam towards Christianity. But this type of contacts, focused on the idea of moderation, tolerance and mutual respect, follow more a religious perspective and have little chance to bring significant changes in the real situation where the social and economic dynamic tends to rapidly change the contemporary world’s configuration.

The events that oppose the Occidental and the Islamic worlds deepen a number of dilemmas, fuelling beyond the purely human interests a major confrontation more or less direct between the religious and the secular.

The era of communication and the migration prompted mainly by economic needs delete physical borders and remodel the inner and the outer worlds in this “world as a village” proposed by Marshall MacLuhan (1962), creating a macrocosm in constant motion, where each one seeks to find and to redefine himself either through a distancing from the origins, as it happens in the West, or through a constant return to them, as it happens in Islam.

Under the circumstances the problem is not reducing the antagonisms between Christianity and Islam, as the Western world remains Christian more in name given that Christianity does not represent the ideology of


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Western culture any more, but trying to reshape the role of religion in an almost completely secularized world.

Immediately after the World War II, many voices spoke about harmony and understanding but in reality these goals remained only figures of speech. Western countries unleashed an increasing individual and collective selfishness, fuelled by the consumerism generated by the economic development whose basic condition it was, doubled by an artificially inflated concept of freedom which emerged as mental attitude. The tacit alliance between permissivism as collective attitude and the relativism generated and crystallized at the beginning of the 20th century, and spread among all social strata, gave rise to a crisis of convictions and beliefs resulting into a profound crisis of values that has deeply affected the human person. Thus the much proclaimed end of the epoch of the antagonist Weltanschauungen and the so-called sunset of ideologies which followed the Second World War culminating with the collapse of ideologies in Eastern Europe in the ‘80s, proved to be mere illusions. Although it tried to ascertain the idea of a world deprived of dogmatisms as false generators of conflicts, Occidentalism as central concept, emerged in Western Europe at the end of 19th century (Bonnett, 2003) and disguised after the war under the global umbrella of a messianic-like liberalism, replaced and perpetrated ancient dichotomies, finding in Islam an almost natural opponent.

Even if there were a number of western authors like Fernando Coronil (1996) who opined that the Muslim world should not regard Occidentalism as a general and generalising pattern generator of polarized concepts about the Western and non-Western cultures and ideologies, the most important approach concerning Occidentalism belongs to a Muslim, the Egyptian leftist scholar Hasan Hanafi, who in his Introduction to the science of Occidentalism considers this concept a new science which he calls “a science of the West” (Kassab, 2010: 170). For him Occidentalism was a discipline built up in the Third World countries as a completion of the decolonization process. In his opinion, the objective study and understanding of the West was very important in order to identify a clearer feeling regarding an independent Islamic and Arab way. In this respect, modernity understood as Westernisation represented a menace for the Arab and Islamic identity. In the same line,


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he stressed that the roots of Islamism can be found in the very Occidentalism who constantly generates the counter-reactions of a world engaged in a post-colonial effort to redefine itself:

As the national costume became almost absent [...] reaction to its absence began with the Islamic dress, the beard and the jilbāb6 as forms of reclaiming Arabo-Islamic identity […]. The more Westernization took hold in lifestyles, the more attachment to national or Islamic dress increased as a reaction against it as has happened in the Islamic revolution in Iran and in the contemporary Islamic groups in Egypt. So did attachment to the Prophet’s natural medicine as a reaction against modern medicine, and to Quranic sciences in response to modern sciences. (Hanafi apud Sadiki 2004: 125)

Although Lash and others (1995) have tried to dissect the Occidental

modernity and to show its internal tensions and diversity in order to counter-balance the influence of this kind of ideas, the general image of Occidentalism is based on stereotypes more or less distorted, some self-created and other exaggerated, applied to the Western society. Any attempt to find the similarities that could offer a common ground for an inter-cultural understanding hasn’t led so far to a concrete answer as within such an approach there is a vision about the way people define themselves and others based on comparisons. Unfortunately until now the results have always been dialectical, perpetrating a more or less openly expressed mutual denial.

Beyond any scientific approach aimed at understanding contemporary man as individual and as part of his specific cultural pattern, the issues concerning the relations between sacred and profane, between religion and secularism prove themselves extremely complex and unpredictable in the current circumstances, when world speaks, more and more, about peace, freedom, collaboration, integration and globalization. Does the religious dimension represent a plus for these desiderata or is it an obstacle in the way of attaining them? Do these desiderata represent a plus or are they an impediment to the religious dimension as regulator instance of man’s relations with the transcendental reality? The secularist offensive which started more than two hundred years ago in the heart of the Christian European culture and civilization and the emergence of the


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impersonal and distant Architect of the new enlightened world governed by the cold reason of the square and compass, leave still open these interrogations.

References Stern, R. Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit. London: Routledge Philosophy

Guidebooks, Routledge, 2002. Weil, E. Philosophie politique. Paris: J. Vrin, 1984. Castoriadis, C. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge (Mass.): MIT Press,

1987. Gauchet, M. La religion dans la démocratie. Parcours de la laïcité. Paris: Gallimard,

1998. Horatius, Horati Flacci Opera. The Works of Horace. Edited, with Explanatory

Notes, Philadelphia: Eldredge & Brother, 1879. McLuhan, M. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto:

University of Toronto Press, 1962. Bonnett, A. “From white to Western: ‘racial decline’ and the idea of the West

in Britain, 1890-1930.” Journal of Historical Sociology 16.3 (2003): 320-348. Coronil, F. “Beyond occidentalism: toward nonimperial geohistorical

categories.” Cultural Anthropology 11.1 (1996): 51-87. Kassab, E. S. Contemporary Arab Thought. Cultural Critique in Comparative

Perspective. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Sadiki, L. The Search for Arab Democracy: Discourses and Counter-discourses. London:

C. Hurst & Co. Publishers, 2004. Lash, S., M. Featherstone, and R. Robertson, eds. Global Modernities. London:

Sage, 1995. Millán-Puelles, A. El valor de la libertad. Madrid: Rialp, 1995. 1 In the same line Hegel (apud Stern, 2002: 115) affirms that “the wisest men of antiquity have therefore declared that wisdom and virtue consist in living in accordance with the customs of one’s nation.” 2 That’s why the social integration of Muslim communities living in the Western world represents a constant challenge. 3 Cf. Al-Qur’an 61:4, 21: 190-193, etc. 4 It is, ultimately, about the connexion between the two key dimensions of the human person, the interiority – the relation with the self – and the exteriority – the relation with the world – and their relation with the transcendental dimension.


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5 Epistulae (Horati Flacci epistularum liber primus), I.2.40. 6 Traditional long dress worn in the Arab countries. Biographical Note Christian Tămaş, Orientalist and Middle Eastern Studies Researcher. His works include monographs, studies and essays on Islam and the philosophy of religions characterized by multidisciplinary approaches, among which Communication Strategies in the Qur'an (Ars Longa, 2007 – Romanian version; Lambert Academic Publishing, 2011 – English version), Contemporary Crises: The Dissolution of Sacred (Ars Longa, 2003), Contemporary Crises: The Offensive of Islam (Ars Longa, 2004), (E)L. The avatars of a definite article (Ars Longa, 2012). Also a professor of Arabic and translator of eight foreign languages.

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BOOK REVIEWS and PRESENTATIONS HSS I.1 (2012) Online Research: Old Debates and Contemporary Trends Jason Hughes, ed. Sage Internet Research Methods, 4 vols, Sage Publications Ltd., LA, London, New Del-hi, Singapore, Washington, 2012, ISBN-13: 978-1446241042. Camelia Grădinaru “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iaşi, Romania

Sage Internet Research Methods is a very recent – July 2012 – body of work, organized in four substantial volumes, which aim to offer both a panoramic and detailed view of the new technologies associated with the Internet and of the current state of the methodological research in this field. Having more than 1600 pages, this book is a praise-worthy effort of identifying the most relevant options in this theoretical area and of presenting them as an indispensable part of the key literature. This theoretical frame was particu-larly difficult to accomplish, especially when a certain ideal of scientific neu-trality is at stake; moreover, the editor tried to avoid extreme or uncritical positions and paradigms, having in mind the fact that, generally, the theories concerning New Media and the new communication technologies are polar-ized enough.

Also, even if Internet research is still perceived as a “new field”, the number of studies grows exponentially, thus making the choice issue (what are the most important and the most valuable studies that are to be included in such a book?) even more difficult. Last but not least, the technical aspects (copyright, for instance) of creating such a work were a tough task, the four volumes being a consistent collection of articles or chapters that had been already published in prestigious journals or books. Thus, we have to underline the quality of editing done by Jason Hughes. He is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Communica-tions at Brunel University, the main areas of interest being organization-al/industrial sociology, sociological theory, the sociology of emotions, the soci-

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ology of the body and health. He is the author of important journal papers, books (his first book, Learning to Smoke, Chicago Press, 2003, won the Norbert Elias prize in 2006) and the editor of significant studies.

Starting from the premise that the Internet fundamentally influenced the social research, in a rhythm that probably overtakes the influence of the previous technological developments, Sage Internet Research Methods tries to illustrate the depth and magnitude of these changes, focusing on the themes related to online methodology, but it also tackles subsequent issues. Thus, epistemological, ontological and ethical problems are constantly ap-proached, while New Media “classics” (identity, access, digital divide, social divisions, cultural artifacts, space and time etc.) are not left aside.

The book is structured using the following titles: Core Issues, Debates and Controversies in Internet Research, Taking Research Online – Internet Survey and Sam-pling, Taking Research Online – Qualitative Approaches and Research ‘On’ and ‘In’ the Internet – Investigating the Online World. The first volume presents the main subjects that will be discussed and detailed in the other sections, indicates the most powerful debates and offers a necessary overview of the landscape of Internet research. For instance, the subject of plural and multimodal ex-istence in the virtual worlds (embodied online worlds, distributed presence, avatars, anonymity, textual self, etc.) is approached by T. L. Taylor, who discusses some important theoretical issues in this form of research, involv-ing both new and old methodological devices. The problem of identity and authenticity in the virtual world is analyzed by Christine Hine, while Wendy Seymour shows some limitations of the traditional methods of qualitative data collection, focusing on studies concerning the ways in which people with disabilities use computer technologies. The methodological aspects are studied from an epistemological standpoint (Nalita James and Hugh Bush-er), but also from an ethical standpoint (Sarah Flicker, Dave Haans and Harvey Skinner – referring to Internet Communities, Susannah Stern – legal and ethical responsibilities, Clare Madge, Rebecca Enyon, Jenny Fry, Ralph Schroeder, Kate Orson-Johnson – ethic issues in Internet research) or a cultural one (the cultural dimensions of online communication investigated by Shani Orgad and Christine Hine). The intricate theme of displacement of time and space is, again, accurately discussed, and the same thing goes for themes like the digital divide or the use of the Internet by children and young people (Sonia Livingstone and Ellen Helsper).


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The second tome of the book is dedicated to problems relating to the use, access, and analysis of online data and resources. Advantages and dis-advantages of Internet research survey are synthesized by Ronald Fricker and Matthias Schonlau, the Internet Survey Design, writing of survey ques-tions and the development of survey instruments are followed by Samuel Best, Steven Brian Krueger, Valerie Sue, Lois Ritter, while sampling meth-ods for web, e-mail surveys, stratified samples, name-based cluster sampling are analyzed by Ronald Fricker, Jörg Blasius, Maurice Brandt, Cyprian Wejnert, Douglas Heckathorn and Douglas Ferguson.

The third volume is focused on conventional methods that have been ‘taken online’, and also on their transformation during this process. In the same manner as in the previous parts, the number of articles is almost overwhelming, but the theoretical construction is very well articulated, of-fering both a unitary structure and maintaining profound links with the oth-er volumes. Among the studies included here, we have to mention “Digital Ethnography” (Dhiraj Murthy), “The Method of Netnography” (Robert Kozinets), “Virtual Fieldwork Using Access Grid” (Nigel Fielding), “Dis-tributed Video Analysis in Social Research” (Jon Hindmarsh).

The last volume of this collection, Research ‘On’ and ‘In’ the Internet – Inves-tigating the Online World, investigates not only the way social research is done in the online environment using and adapting traditional methods, but also the new methodological possibilities that prove good enough to study “the online world as a sphere of human interaction”. Thus, we find here argu-ments and debates on subjects like the blogosphere, wikis, websites, Face-book, political participation, the linguistic perspective on Twitter, distribut-ed agency, online support groups, online friendship and relationships.

As a conclusion, we can safely assert that the richness of information, the clarity of the presentations, the very good structure of each volume and the coherence of the entire work strongly recommend it as a useful and necessary reading for social sciences researchers and, evidently, for anyone who is inter-ested in the Internet and in the scientific ways of studying and explaining it. Acknowledgements: This study is the result of a research activity financed by the pro-ject POSDRU/89/1.5/S/49944 („Developing the Innovation Capacity and Im-proving the Impact of Research through Post-doctoral Programmes”).


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Biographical Note Camelia Grădinaru, Ph. D. in Philosophy (2008). Currently, she is postdoc-toral researcher in Communication Sciences and she teaches seminars in Branding and New Media (“Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iasi). She has published several papers, introductory studies and reviews in Rhetoric, Post-modern Philosophy and Media Studies. She has translated in Romanian the books Les grandes notions philosophiques. 4. Métaphysique et religion (Yves Cattin) and Les formes élémentaires de la dialectique (Jean Piaget). She is the author of the book Discursul filosofic postmodern. Cazul Baudrillard (The Postmodern Philosophical Discourse. The Baudrillard Case) (2010).

Diana-Maria Cismaru, Social Media şi Managementul Reputaţiei. Bucureşti: EdituraTritonic, 2012. ISBN 978-606-8320-35-9,142p. Roxana-Petronela Bursuc National School of Political and Administrative Studies Bucureşti, Romania

Diana-Maria Cismaru is an associate Professor at the Faculty of Com-munication and Public Relations of the National School of Political and Administrative Studies, Bucharest. In academia, Diana-Maria Cismaru has made many connections between classical theories and methods of the So-ciology and public relations and communication practices. In teaching plan, she developed innovative teaching methods such as training firms or virtual simulations. Author’s areas of interest include: social media, organizational studies and internal communication, institutional and political communica-tion, public relations and sociological studies at macro level.

Social Media and Reputation Management has two parts: “Social media fea-tures”, and “Reputation management through social media.” The paper is opened by a brief introduction about what is mass communication in the


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online space. The first part exposes the role played by social media, online communication, both the political, business, and the related personal blogs. All aspects are presented both in terms of benefits categories involved and the issues raised in this environmental crisis and management. In the second part the author captures aspects of the trust required in any environment, how we built and maintain it, what strategies are necessary to build reputa-tion and what programs are implemented, what principles are formulated and what errors occur along the way. Reputation management is based on a positive image build through the social networks: Facebook, Twitter, blogs and specialized sites. Social media means the assembly of all types of com-munication and interaction achieved through the virtual environment. This book is about forums, blogs and social networks. Throughout the book it is clear that the online with links and articles that remain indexed and visible, with the possibilities of helping a company, but also with the ways to pre-sent negative parts and with the multitude of options for users to share in-teresting content, must be carefully treated by the communicators. Social media and reputation management consists in a synthesis paper for the areas of interest, communication. The book presents, according to the space availa-ble: mass communication in the online space; specialization of the Romani-an blogosphere: functional trends, marketing strategy blogosphere, the use of social networks to build political brands; social media like receptors: Final debate during the 2009 campaign, crisis management communication online and information about online reputation management in the creation and implementation of an appropriate program to address them. The book in-cludes in its structure figures and tables that can be used by those who read it, and helpful information, for new perspectives and new searches of data or knowledge.

Social Media and Reputation Management can be considered as an introducto-ry guide to the world of social media, a starting point for those interested in this field. However, given the speed with which it develops that part repre-sented by online communication, it is necessary that those responsible with social media to be always informed about all changes, to avoid mistakes and to not affect the reputation. Serious mistakes are possible, and it is advisable to know what is communicated and the content must be in full compliance with the company or person profile. The book presents over several years of the blogosphere and social networks involved, it is a brief presentation


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and for the most areas where are used this part of the communication, the online communication. Online communication officer must follow all the steps to find the individual development of the domain in which he sends messages. Biographical Note Roxana-Petronela Bursuc is a 2nd year MA student in Communication and Organizational Behavior at the National School of Political and Administra-tive Studies, Bucharest. In 2010, she participated in the National Confer-ence of Sociology, made in Iaşi, and she presented a paper entitled “Prob-lems encountered in EU funded Projects in Public Institutions”. Her research interests center on group psychology, online communication.

Tomas Sedlacek, Economia binelui şi a răului. În căutarea sensului economic, de la Ghilgameş la Wall Street. Trans. Smaranda Nistor. Publica, 2012, ISBN 978-973-1931-98-2, 566 p. Named one of the “Young Guns” and one of the “five hot minds in economics” by the Yale Economic Review, Tomas Sedlacek argues that economics is ultimately about good and evil and in his book he tries to change the way we see economic value.

Lucian Boia, Capcanele istoriei. Elita intelectuală românească între 1930 şi 1950. Bucureşti: Humanitas, 2011, ISBN 978-973-50-3196-1, 358 p. A captivating and detailed history about the Romanian intellectuals between 1930-1940, written by the Romanian historian Lucian Boia.


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Aldo Marroni, Ugo di Toro, eds. Muse ribelli. Complicità e conflitto nel sentire al femminile. Ombre Corte, 2012, ISBN 978-88-97522-09-6,139 p. Collective volume that brings together papers by Mario Perniola, Simona Mitroiu, Sergio Benvenuto, Franco Lolli, Nicolae Râmbu, Aldo Marroni, Enzo Neppi, Ugo di Toro, Patrick Amstutz.

Daniel Dăianu, Când finanţa subminează economia şi corodează democraţia. Polirom: Iaşi, 2012, ISBN 978-973-46-2547-5, 231 p. Writing about the evolution of the European Union and also of Romania, Daniel Dăianu offers an analysis of the relation betweeen the financial system and the democratic form of governing.

Mario Perniola,20th Century Aesthetics: Towards A Theory of Feeling (Philosophy and Cultural Theory). Trans. Massimo Verdicchio. Continuum, 2012, ISBN-13: 978-1441118509, 224 p. One of the major Italian contemporary thinkers, Mario Perniola explores five major themes that are considered by him to be central to European aesthetic theory: Life, Form, Consciousness, Action and Feeling.


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Umberto Eco, Construire il nemico. E altri scritti occasionali. Saggi Bompiani, 2011, ISBN-13: 978-8845265853, 336 p. The problem of the collective enemy is a good occasion for Umberto Eco to remember us how a society uses the image of the Other to define itself and to construct its own identity.

Tiberiu Brăilean, Teoeconomia. Religii economice. Junimea: Iaşi, 2011, ISBN 978-973-37-1541-2, 307 p. Analyzing different problems of the actual society, the author offers a new way of dealing with the economic aspects, defining a new science that could study the laws and the divine principles of governing the economics problems.

Tiberiu Brăilean, Omeconomia. Junimea: Iaşi, 2012, ISBN978-973-37-1631-0, 205 p. Being a pleading for the human economics, as the author chooses to define his work, Omeconomia offers different ways of defining and understanding the economic aspects and also suggestions of how to answer to the economic and spiritual crises.


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Rebecca Friedman, Marcus Thiel, eds. European Identity and Culture. Naratives of Transnational Belonging. Surrey & Burlington: Ashgate, 2012, ISBN9781409437147, 184 p. The volume is structured in two parts: European Integration and Political Cultures, and Cultural Practices in Everyday Life, that create a large perspective over the European identity.

Valeriu S. Ciucă, Euronomosofia. Vol. I. Prolegomene la o operă în eşafodaj. Iaşi: Editura Fundaţiei Axis,2012, ISBN 978-973-7742-94-0, 344 p. A book about the European identity writen from the perspective of the juridical science that can be an intersting lecture for those interested in the European laws.

Simona Mitroiu, Walter Benjamin. Memoria fragmentării. Iaşi: Editura Universităţii “Alexandru Ioan Cuza”, 2012, 166 p. Following the concept of memory, the author makes a large analysis to different aspects of Ben-jamin’s work: fragments, collections, ruins and also to representative processes of Benjamin’s life and work: writing, gathering, quoting, and remembering.

human and social studies

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