Ever since the GASC meeting in Tokyo two years ago, I have been thinking about the possibility of expanding the scope of GA beyond the Judeo-Christian culture of the West. Having learned that Sartre’s foundational idea of nothingness/le néant as the bearer of the freedom of the human “for-itself” or self-consciousness—different indeed from the simple concept of negation—could be traced to his conversations with Japanese philosopher Shuzo Kuki during his formative years in Paris, it has seemed to me that this encounter could become the point of departure for a broad-based comparison and synthesis of the world’s two most substantial cultural families. Indeed, the contrast between the purely negative emptiness of Sartre’s néant and the infinite potential that he nevertheless attributes to it—very much as understood in the Buddhist tradition—sums up in a neat schematism the contrast between the West’s focus on the need to negate and transcend what René Girard called mimetic desire and the East’s contrasting effort to dissipate desire in the infinite plurality of the real, as exemplified by the contrast between the two cultures’ approaches to avoiding mimetic conflict: in the West, the enforcement of interdiction; in the East, demystification of the mimetic sacralization of the desire-object.
Thus where Sartre emphasizes the “nothingness” of the pour-soi (Hegel’s für-sich), which he associates with freedom—yet not with language!—in opposition to the unfree en-soi/An-sich, Buddhist culture sees the void not as the blankness of empty space offering freedom from desire, but as the terrain of desire’s infinite possibilities. And Sartre’s idea of freedom is itself made far more explicit by the relationship insisted on by GA between this freedom and the endless possibilities of language than by the mere negativity of the néant. That human language, along with the sacred focus on significance that accompanies it, is the anthropological source of the infinite resourcefulness Sartre finds in the néant is at the root of our originary anthropology.
Not being fanatically Hegelian enough to make of this East-West opposition one of those dialectical triads of which Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit is constructed, I will nonetheless go so far as to claim that the apparent debt of Sartre’s idea of the potentially infinite productivity of le néant to his conversations with Kuki in 1928 offers a persuasive explanation of the paradoxically both empty yet infinitely rich characterization of le néant in Sartre’s philosophical masterpiece that would otherwise appear anomalous, as well as providing an explanation for his failure to address the possible relationship between the freedom the néant provides the human pour-soi and our unique possession of language. It is as though for Sartre humanity derives its capacity for transcendence from the mere absence of constraint by the “clutter” he describes in the realm of the en-soi rather than from our unique capacity to formulate, beyond the Pavlovian world of reflex, the deferred perception of reality that we find embodied in both sacred contemplation and linguistic designation.
No doubt, given the potential richness of the domain I am here proposing for reflection and potential research, this subject deserves a more substantial introduction. My justification for the present Chronicle is that, being now in my 85th year, I think it best to propose it as a question more than as an answer—as a point of departure for unlimited future reflections.
The affinity between GA and Japanese culture has become clear to me since the 2024 conference partly focused on philosopher Kitano Nishida. Starting in 2012, the GASC has now met in Japan three times (2012, 2016, 2024), more than in any other foreign country, with the real possibility of another meeting in the next year or two.
And whereas Sartre “Westernized” the notion of nothingness by emptying it of all conceivable content, to revisit his néant from a Buddhist perspective would be to relieve it of this need for utter austerity—in effect tempering rather than simply denying the for-itself’s mimetic temptation—and instead accepting the East’s refusal to draw a sharp binary contrast between the apparent freedom of Girard’s mediator of desire and the passive dependency of the mediated desiring subject.
In short, the Western/Hegelian dialectic of being and nothingness, desire and indifference, demands a transcendental resolution or Aufhebung of desire, whereas the Eastern perspective—as made clear in the West’s ever-popular Buddhist-inspired “mindfulness” training—is one of negotiation and compromise. The popularity in the West of such techniques is a sign that the binary sin-vs-salvation mode of Western religion must of necessity adapt in everyday life to its “Eastern” limits. For to model our lives on the—mostly tragic—exemplary figures of our culture would be inevitably to court grief.
How these narrative patterns are reflected in the history of the nations that view the sacred in either the Western or the Eastern pattern is a subject I have not even begun to explore, yet merely to encounter the possibility of a less binary interaction between “true” and “false” desire seems to me to open up a whole range of new research possibilities, as well as being a precious source of potential insights into our own life-projects.
And to return to the originary subject-matter of GA—the emergence of language as the privileged locus of humanity’s articulation of the sacred’s deferral/différance of desire with the realities and needs of the profane world—we must first of all ask what was the underlying motivation of the evolution of postwar thought that led to the European-American movement that came to be summed up (by Americans) as “French theory,” and in which can be found, on the one hand, Girard’s theorizing of mimetic desire and Derrida’s suspensive concept of différance, and on the other, a new focus on semiology and linguistics that replaced the language-blind vision of human consciousness in Western philosophy that led to Sartre’s paradoxically empty néant—also putting an end to the existentialist perspective that had dominated Western philosophy during the war and immediate postwar years.
These are but preliminary suggestions, but whose serious exploration as potential paths of anthropological (self-)understanding strikes me as full of promise.