Deux concepts pour «Penser la différence» entre Eux et Nous
L'inventaire des catégories et les pensées de l'âge axial

Francis Zimmermann

séminaire du 4 novembre 2008

Je vais essayer de présenter deux outils conceptuels (parmi d'autres) qui personnellement me sont utiles pour «Penser la différence», en me servant des textes que nous avons mis en lecture, sans m'interdire d'ajouter des références bibliographiques qui devraient légitimement trouver place dans notre bibliothèque numérique si nous voulons la pérenniser et augmenter sa pertinence. Mais avant d'en venir à la présentation de ces outils, un rappel s'impose sur l'histoire contemporaine du Comparatisme et de l'Orientalisme.

Tout notre travail dans le domaine AMO, quelle que soit notre discipline, s'inscrit dans le cadre d'une déconstruction, en cours depuis maintenant trente ans, du paradigme du Grand Partage entre Eux et Nous. Il faudrait lire Ernst Gellner qui analysa le premier ce qu'il appelle le “Great Divide,” et quelques déconstructionnistes des années quatre-vingt qui ont mis en évidence, dans la pensée des anthropologues et des historiens de la génération précédente (années soixante), le lien qui associait la dichotomie du Grand Partage (entre l'exotique et le proche) et la dialectique entre Tradition et Changement. Ce n'est pas notre propos d'aujourd'hui, mais ce paradigme peut se lire en filigrane dans le texte de Robert Bellah servant d'introduction à Imagining Japan, qui en trace l'origine chez Max Weber:

“It would not be an exaggeration to say that sociology began as an effort to explain modernity to itself. In so doing it was necessary for the founders of sociology—certainly for Marx, Weber, and Durkheim—to think systematically about what came before modernity in order to understand how modern societies are different from all preceding ones. Weber's notion of a development from societies based on kinship and neighborhood, through societies organized by bureaucracy or feudalism, to modern capitalism was a version of a story told in different ways by Marx and Durkheim as well” (Bellah, Imagining Japan, p.  5).

Les lecteurs les plus avancés, pour mettre en perspective la dichotomie du Grand Partage et la dialectique entre Tradition et Changement et articuler l'une par rapport à l'autre deux époques (années soixante et années quatre-vingt) dans notre Pensée de la différence, devraient lire ce beau texte de Bellah sur le Japon en parallèle avec le texte de Gyan Prakash sur l'Inde que je viens de joindre au dossier 'Différence' de la bibliothèque numérique:

prakash_postoriental.pdf — Gyan Prakash, Writing post-Orientalist histories of the Third World: Indian historiography is good to think (1990), revised in Nicholas B. Dirks, Ed., Colonialism and Culture, Ann Arbor, Univ. of Michigan Press, 1992, pp. 353–388.

J'en viens aux outils comparatifs qui sont plus particulièrement les miens.

1 / Les catégories de pensée et de langue spécifiques
d'une culture et d'une société données

L'une des spécificités du domaine AMO et des méthodes de travail que nous partageons quelles que soient nos disciplines, c'est l'accent mis sur l'apprentissage des langues locales, qu'elles soient savantes ou vernaculaires. A mon sens, en décidant de penser les choses de l'Inde dans les langues de l'Inde ou, pour le dire autrement, en récusant la pertinence de toute recherche sur la Chine, la Corée ou le Japon qui se ferait sur traductions et sans accès direct au chinois, au coréen ou au japonais, nous décidons tous implicitement — principe de méthode — d'étudier la culture et la société concernée in its own terms, à partir de ses propres catégories de pensée et de langue.

Cette méthode et ce concept de catégories (qui nous vient de Marcel Mauss) sont cependant équivoques et biaisés par des présupposés philosophiques, religieux et politiques, comme on le voit déjà dans le texte de Louis Dumont mis en lecture:

“Conscious of being heir to the classical trinity of Greco—Roman—Judeo-Christian civilization, we can choose one of two strategies. Either we can remain purely and simply within this established configuration and go on looking at all other civilizations as strange entities, which can nevertheless be approximately described by reference to our configurational coordinates, or we can try and transcend this limitation…, considering each of the civilizations in question in its own right” (Dumont, article de Daedalus, p. 154).

Mais étudier chaque civilisation pour elle-même et dans ses propres termes n'est pas une démarche innocente. Les traditions religieuses et les structures politiques dominantes (où que nous croyons telles) viennent s'inscrire dans les mots de la langue locale, et par un glissement de sens spontané nous infusons dans la comparaison entre Eux et Nous des frontières religieuses et politiques au tracé discutable. Exemple ici: suivant quelle idéologie Dumont se dit-il l'héritier d'une «trinité classique» (la Grèce, Rome, et le mixte judéo-chrétien), là où légitimement d'autres auront à cœur de distinguer l'une de l'autres la tradition juive et la tradition chrétienne? En regard, les indianistes des années soixante faisaient une confusion analogue lorqu'ils prétendaient «voir l'Inde à travers les catégories hindoues» (McKim Marriott) ou lorsqu'ils accordaient une sorte d'exclusivité à la tradition hindoue (les Epopées, les Purânas) dans l'étude des choses de l'Inde en occultant l'Islam?

Dumont nous enseigne néanmoins comment faire «travailler» les catégories de pensée et de langue en confrontant nos langues européennes aux langues de l'Inde et de la Chine pour en extraire «des catégories qui résistent au feu de la comparaison»:

“But then, you will say, what remains of our language if we are asked not to use the categories through which we are wont to understand the world? The answer is simply that we should in the end and on the most general level rely only on categories that have withstood the fire of comparison” (p. 156).

 

2 / Un exemple: du «Renonçant» (Sanskrit samnyâsin) à l'«Individu»

«A l'intérieur des frontières de notre triangle classique» (Dumont, 169), la catégorie européenne de pensée et de langue que constitue l'Individu humain dans son autonomie et son intériorité, a deux sources traditionnelles: l'une judéo-chrétienne et l'autre stoïcienne. Je ne reviens pas (ce serait une longue histoire) sur l'idéologie que présuppose cette conception (réductrice) d'un triangle des traditions classiques européennes. Je reproduis, à titre d'exemple d'analyse comparative en termes de catégories, le passage du texte de Louis Dumont confrontant Stoïcisme et Hindouisme (p. 168):

It seems to be widely assumed that the other source of our modern conception, Stoic philosophy, discovered the individual as we know it, that is, at least implicitly, the (inworldly) Individual [l'Individu dans-le-monde]. I see a number of difficulties here. It was while studying the symbiosis between Christian and pagan tenets, namely the adoption by the Church Fathers (after Philo of Alexandria) of the Stoics' Law of Nature, that some of the difficulties appeared. That the adoption could take place implies that there was a general congruence between the two conceptions of man, the Judeo-Christian (for we cannot forget the Judaic element behind the teaching of Christ) and the Stoic. Were the Stoics in fact outworldly individuals [individus hors-du-monde], or simply taken as such? Their forebears, Epicureans and Cynics alike, can be so called without more ado, and the Stoics could perhaps be taken as having returned to the world, in a manner different from the Indian renouncers, without fundamentally modifying their outlook, juxtaposing, without welding together, outworldly values and social duties.

Another difficulty concerns the genesis of Hellenistic individualism. Textbooks explain this important transition in a quite unsatisfactory manner. We read that while for Aristotle self-sufficiency attached primarily to the polis as a whole, it came later to be an ideal attribute of the individual man and that this change was due to the ruin of the polis and the rise of the Macedonian empire. The effect seems to be out of proportion with the cause, and we may surmise that it would so appear to everybody, were it not that we find the individualist view so natural that we are prone to take its appearance as unproblematic. Even if it were shown that the view were earlier [même si l'on pouvait démontrer que cette concpetion serait de date plus ancienne], and only found in the changed circumstances an occasion to develop, the fact would remain that the accession is that of the outworldly individual, and the problem would remain of the origin of such a conception.

Now is this not a case where we should remember that our civilizations did not live in perfect isolation? It is not unlikely that Indian renouncers would have had imitators, if not representatives, in the Near East, and Plato's reference to Gymnosophists can be interpreted in that way. I do not mean to explain away the Greek development by influence or imitation; I mean that the Greeks may have found on some Eastern Mediterranean shores otherworldly individuals of perhaps remote Indian ancestry who would have helped them to develop a category they were striving toward (as such an encounter is generally at the root of any meaningful "borrowing"). In that case, the category might have been invented only once (but for the Judeo-Christian question) under conditions that are relatively clear to us, and the boundaries of our classical triangle would have been significantly penetrated at an early date.

 

3 / L'âge axial, le bouddhisme et sa subversion au Japon

Le second des deux outils que j'évoquerai pour Penser la différence est le concept d'Age axial, introduit dans le texte de Robert Bellah mis en lecture. Ces pages que je reproduis ci-dessous sont pour nous très pédagogiques, car elles font contrepoint à l'analyse de Dumont: le même processus historique de l'intériorisation des valeurs et de l'émergence d'une éthique comme pensée et volonté personnelles explique la naissance de l'individualisme et des «grandes religions» dans les civilisations axiales. En même temps, l'emploi de cet outil conceptuel par Bellah pour caractériser la Différence japonaise est paradoxal et nous invite à la discussion.

In searching for the root causes of modernity and why it arose first in the West, Weber embarked on the most ambitious set of comparative studies ever undertaken. In the course of his study of the great traditions he came to believe that religious events in the first millennium B.C. were of critical importance. Within each of the world religions that emerged at that time arose prophets or saviors who radically rationalized previous forms of what Weber tended to call "magical religion." In each case the emergent figure (Confucius, the Buddha, the Hebrew prophets, Socrates, Jesus) preached a systematic form of ethical conduct quite different from the diffuse ritual and sacramental practices that preceded them. By calling these new symbolic forms "rationalized" Weber was pointing to the fact that they were more coherent, more cognitively and ethically universalizing, more potentially self-critical (reflexive), and more disengaged from the existing society than what preceded them. Karl Jaspers, Weber's close friend and student, called the period of the emergence of these religions, the first millennium B.C., the "Axial Age." S. N. Eisenstadt speaks of the world religions as axial religions and of their related civilizations as axial civilizations. If one follows Weber's argument that religion is the indispensable catalyst for the emergence of modernity, as I do, then one can see that the axial religions, even though they emerged millennia before modernity, were its indispensable precondition. (Bellah, 5–6).

Let me try to place Japan within this evolutionary framework. In Japanese Civilization S. N. Eisenstadt speaks of Japan as a nonaxial civilization. It is not that Japan has not been exposed to axial religions and civilizations. Since at least the seventh century Japan has been deeply influenced by Buddhist and Confucian ideas, as well as by Indian and particularly Chinese civilization. And since the sixteenth century Japan has been influenced by Christianity and Western civilization. But in the face of these religious and civilizational influences the Japanese have not rejected their preaxial civilizational premises; instead they have continuously revised them without abandoning them. Outside cultural influences have been appreciated and
understood with intelligence and sensitivity, but then used to bolster [soutenir] the nonaxial premises of Japanese society rather than to challenge them (p. 7).

Bellah se donne à tâche de faire ressortir différents aspects de cette dialectique entre l'Ancien (preaxial) et le Nouveau (axial) à travers l'histoire du Japon. Je ne retiendrai pour faire court que ce qu'il dit du Bouddhisme.

Buddhism is indeed one of the great axial religions, emphasizing the tension between the existing world and ultimate reality, one of the key marks of axial religion, as strongly as any known religious tradition ever has, but we must not imagine that the statues, texts, and rituals that were being gradually introduced to Japan at this early period added up to any such entity as we would envisage with the modern term "Buddhism." Although the transcendental Buddhist beliefs may have been appreciated by some Japanese intellectuals, as the remark attributed to Shotoku that "the world is a lie; only the Buddha is true" would indicate, the primary meaning of Buddhist beliefs and practices in early Japan was not axial but archaic. It was the magical power associated with Buddhist artifacts and rituals that was most desired, and it was Buddhist devotion as providing good fortune for the ruling house and the aristocratic lineages that brought it into favor.

During the Nara period (roughly the eighth century) six schools or lineages of Mahayana teaching were established, each with one or more temple-monasteries devoted to its study. For a long time, these were referred to by scholars as the six Nara sects (shû). It is now generally accepted that shû cannot be translated as "sect" except perhaps in Tokugawa and recent times. The translation "schools" is not entirely adequate either, but at least it gives the notion that these were nonexclusive teaching traditions—a monk could be inducted into more than one—and being trained in one did not mean lack of knowledge and interest in others…

Early in the ninth century after the capital had been moved to Heian-kyo (present-day Kyoto), an entirely new form of Buddhism that would become pervasive for many centuries was introduced by the monk Kukai after he had returned from China in 806. In Japanese Buddhist studies this is called Esoteric Buddhism, but is also known as Vajrayana Buddhism or Tantric Buddhism, best known today from its Tibetan form. Ryuichi Abe in an important recent study has argued that Kukai should not be seen in the first instance as the "founder of the Shingon school," though he was later considered to be such, but as the person who introduced a whole new form of Buddhism, Esoteric Buddhism, which saw itself as a new "vehicle" (yana), that is, the Vajrayana, that included and superseded Mahayana, just as Mahayana had included and superseded Hinayana …

Kukai's teaching, as Abe has shown, brought a whole new level of Buddhist practice and embodiment into Japan. In this teaching Vairocana (Dainichi, "Great Sun") Buddha was the Buddha's dharma body. Unlike the
humanly incarnated Buddha, Sakyamuni, or the heavenly Buddhas such as Amida, Vairocana Buddha did not use "skillful means," or teachings adapted to the condition of the believers, but rather taught the unmediated truth through every element in the universe. Indeed the universe was seen as a form of writing, a supreme mantra, although it required the appropriate practice to be able to "read" it. Kukai's Esoteric Buddhism can be seen both as a new level of doctrinal sophistication and as a reappropriation of an archaic form of spirituality.

Thomas Kasulis has described Kukai as "philosophizing in the archaic." Kasulis's point is that while philosophy is usually seen as antithetical to myth, as holding up the mythical to critical inspection, Kukai used Buddhist philosophy to defend an archaic structure of thought. At one point Kasulis speaks of Kukai as engaging in the "philosophizing of the archaic," which seems to be a good description of a long line of Japanese thinkers. They have used the materials of an axial tradition (in this case Buddhist, but in many cases Confucian as well), to justify a nonaxial position, often in a way that shows them thoroughly at home in the axial way of thinking. This might be called using the axial to overcome the axial, just as some Japanese thinkers early in World War II sought to "overcome the modern." At the core of both Shingon and Tendai traditions is hongaku (original enlightenment) thought, namely, the idea that all beings are already enlightened and their only task is to realize it. This position was not an unusual one in the tradition of Mahayana Buddhism in China and it became even more widespread in Japan, but it is one that comes close to affirming the world as it is rather than holding it in tension with ultimate reality, thus undermining the axial core of Buddhist thought. As Ienaga Saburo puts it, the essential Buddhist logic of negation was overridden (pp. 11–13).