Stéphane Lupasco
Encyclopedia
Stéphane Lupasco
Stéphane Lupasco (born Ştefan Lupaşcu; (1900–1988) was a Romania
n philosopher who developed Non-Aristotelian logic
.
on 11 August 1900. His family belonged to the old Moldavia
n aristocracy
. His father was a lawyer and politician, but it was his mother, a pianist and student of César Franck
, who established the family in Paris
in 1916. After high school at the Lycée Buffon
, he studied philosophy
, biology
and physics
at the Sorbonne
and, briefly, law
. He participated fully in the artistic and intellectual life of Paris in the 20’s and 30’s and defended his State Doctoral Thesis in 1935.
, a new Bergson, etc. He continued to publish books in the 70’s and 80’s, the last being L’Homme et ses Trois Ethiques in 1986, two years before his death on October 7, 1988 in Paris. An Award of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
in 1984 was among the few honors that came to Lupasco during his lifetime. Lupasco was one of the founding members of the International Center for Transdisciplinary Research (Centre International de Recherches et Etudes Transdisciplinaires (CIRET)), founded in Paris in 1987 by Basarab Nicolescu
, Edgar Morin
, René Berger
, Michel Random and other key figures of the French intelligentsia. As Nicolescu has recalled, Lupasco was deeply affected by the stubborn resistance of the academic community to honest debate and discussion of his new principles and postulates, and it is with an understandable bitterness that Lupasco saw in this resistance another example of the operation of his principles.
and Bateson
, close in spirit to his work, are to be found.) A recent study by Brenner (2008) up-dates Lupasco’s work and shows its relevance to current issues in science and philosophy, as well as logic.
, dating from 1944 (just prior to his deportation and death) and published in 1998, discusses the limitations of Lupasco’s view of affectivity and ontology
. A book by an obscure English artist, George Melhuish, uses Lupasco’s ideas to develop his own concept of the structure of the universe, a sympathetic but not very rigorous reading of his work. The author of this article is indebted to Nicolescu for access to these and several other texts in his personal library that are otherwise totally unavailable. A complete understanding of, for example, Lupasco’s analysis of those precursors that André Glucksmann
has called “Les Maîtres Penseurs” – Kant
, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Marx – must be sought in several different books. The attention of the reader is rewarded, however, by Lupasco’s regular restatements of his basic theses, often in a way that is more economic, meaningful and coherent.
In his introduction to Lupasco’s The Principle of Antagonism and the Logic of Energy, Nicolescu points out that once the reader gets beyond the (relatively few) mathematical formulas in this book, Lupasco’s language is perfectly accessible. “It exemplifies, in a self-referential manner, the ternary aspects of actualization, potentialization and included middle which give it the charm and the privilege of incantations that are at the same time scientific, philosophical and poetic.”
Summarizing briefly, stimulated by Einstein's works and quantum
theory, Lupasco founded a new logic
, questioning the tertium non datur principle of classical logic. He introduced a third state, going beyond the duality
principle, the T-state. The T-state is neither 'actual', nor 'potential' (categories replacing in Lupasco's system the 'true' or 'false' values of standard bivalent logic), but a resolution of the two contradictory elements at a higher level of reality or complexity. Lupasco generalised his logic to physics
and epistemology and above all to a new theory of consciousness
.
Stéphane Lupasco (born Ştefan Lupaşcu; (1900–1988) was a Romania
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
n philosopher who developed Non-Aristotelian logic
Non-Aristotelian logic
The term non-Aristotelian logic, sometimes shortened to null-A, means any non-classical system of logic which rejects one of Aristotle's premises .-History:...
.
Early years
Stéphane Lupasco was born in BucharestBucharest
Bucharest is the capital municipality, cultural, industrial, and financial centre of Romania. It is the largest city in Romania, located in the southeast of the country, at , and lies on the banks of the Dâmbovița River....
on 11 August 1900. His family belonged to the old Moldavia
Moldavia
Moldavia is a geographic and historical region and former principality in Eastern Europe, corresponding to the territory between the Eastern Carpathians and the Dniester river...
n aristocracy
Aristocracy
Aristocracy , is a form of government in which a few elite citizens rule. The term derives from the Greek aristokratia, meaning "rule of the best". In origin in Ancient Greece, it was conceived of as rule by the best qualified citizens, and contrasted with monarchy...
. His father was a lawyer and politician, but it was his mother, a pianist and student of César Franck
César Franck
César-Auguste-Jean-Guillaume-Hubert Franck was a composer, pianist, organist, and music teacher who worked in Paris during his adult life....
, who established the family in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
in 1916. After high school at the Lycée Buffon
Lycée Buffon
The lycée Buffon is a secondary school in the XVe arrondissement of Paris, bordered by boulevard Pasteur, the rue de Vaugirard and the rue de Staël. Its nearest métro station is Pasteur. Jean-Claude Durand is its current proviseur....
, he studied philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
, biology
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...
and physics
Physics
Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...
at the Sorbonne
Sorbonne
The Sorbonne is an edifice of the Latin Quarter, in Paris, France, which has been the historical house of the former University of Paris...
and, briefly, law
Law
Law is a system of rules and guidelines which are enforced through social institutions to govern behavior, wherever possible. It shapes politics, economics and society in numerous ways and serves as a social mediator of relations between people. Contract law regulates everything from buying a bus...
. He participated fully in the artistic and intellectual life of Paris in the 20’s and 30’s and defended his State Doctoral Thesis in 1935.
Academic career
In 1946, he was named Research Assistant at the French National Science Research Centre, a post he was obliged to leave ten years later because of the inability of the Centre to decide in which Scientific Section his work belonged! The next ten or fifteen years were those of greatest acceptance of his work by the public and other thinkers, but unfortunately not by main-stream logicians and philosophers. His Trois Matières, published in 1960 was a bestseller, and people began calling Lupasco the Descartes, the Leibniz, the Hegel of the 20th Century, a new Claude BernardClaude Bernard
Claude Bernard was a French physiologist. He was the first to define the term milieu intérieur . Historian of science I. Bernard Cohen of Harvard University called Bernard "one of the greatest of all men of science"...
, a new Bergson, etc. He continued to publish books in the 70’s and 80’s, the last being L’Homme et ses Trois Ethiques in 1986, two years before his death on October 7, 1988 in Paris. An Award of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
in 1984 was among the few honors that came to Lupasco during his lifetime. Lupasco was one of the founding members of the International Center for Transdisciplinary Research (Centre International de Recherches et Etudes Transdisciplinaires (CIRET)), founded in Paris in 1987 by Basarab Nicolescu
Basarab Nicolescu
Basarab Eftimie Nicolescu is a theoretical physicist at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique , Laboratoire de Physique Nucléaire et de Hautes Énergies, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris...
, Edgar Morin
Edgar Morin
Edgar Morin is a French philosopher and sociologist born Edgar Nahoum in Paris on July 8, 1921. He is of Judeo-Spanish origin. He is known for the transdisciplinarity of his works.- Biography :...
, René Berger
René Berger
René Berger was a Swiss writer, philosopher and a historian of art.- Titles :"Docteur ès lettres" of the University of Paris...
, Michel Random and other key figures of the French intelligentsia. As Nicolescu has recalled, Lupasco was deeply affected by the stubborn resistance of the academic community to honest debate and discussion of his new principles and postulates, and it is with an understandable bitterness that Lupasco saw in this resistance another example of the operation of his principles.
Summary of work
Lupasco’s style as an author is not an easy one, and requires the uninterrupted attention of the reader. It is not infrequent to find sentences of almost a page in length, containing multiply nested clauses. His writing is extremely dense in terms of the ideas and meaning of each successive phrase, with only occasional illustrative examples. Lupasco makes many references to his prior publications, unfortunately, often without adequate indexation. As Nicolescu has remarked, Lupasco’s exclusion from French academic life had both advantages and disadvantages: Lupasco was freed from the constraints of teaching and publication of research papers in a rigid format, and he obviously did not find it necessary to apply the discipline of providing references to his sources. In the Psychic Universe, published when Lupasco was seventy-nine, one sees nothing about current work in psychiatry. (Lupasco unfortunately did not read English well, and hence no references to the “anti”-psychiatry of LaingLaing
Laing is a surname of Scottish extraction, commonly found in countries settled by Scots, such as Canada and New Zealand. It is a descriptive surname, cognate with the English surname Long, meaning "tall"...
and Bateson
Bateson
Bateson is an English language patronymic surname meaning "son of Batte", a medieval diminutive of Bartholomew. It is rare as a given name. People with the surname Bateson include:* Frank Bateson , New Zealand astronomer...
, close in spirit to his work, are to be found.) A recent study by Brenner (2008) up-dates Lupasco’s work and shows its relevance to current issues in science and philosophy, as well as logic.
Influence
Lupasco was not well served by the (few) exegetes that had looked closely at his work. Only one book, by the sociologist Marc Beigbeder, presents both a substantial description of Lupasco’s theory and development of it as a “logic of society”. A brief monograph by the philosopher Benjamin FondaneBenjamin Fondane
Benjamin Fondane or Benjamin Fundoianu was a Romanian and French poet, critic and existentialist philosopher, also noted for his work in film and theater. Known from his Romanian youth as a Symbolist poet and columnist, he alternated Neoromantic and Expressionist themes with echoes from Tudor...
, dating from 1944 (just prior to his deportation and death) and published in 1998, discusses the limitations of Lupasco’s view of affectivity and ontology
Ontology
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...
. A book by an obscure English artist, George Melhuish, uses Lupasco’s ideas to develop his own concept of the structure of the universe, a sympathetic but not very rigorous reading of his work. The author of this article is indebted to Nicolescu for access to these and several other texts in his personal library that are otherwise totally unavailable. A complete understanding of, for example, Lupasco’s analysis of those precursors that André Glucksmann
André Glucksmann
André Glucksmann is a French philosopher and writer, and member of the French new philosophers.-Early years:André Glucksmann was born in 1937, in Boulogne-Billancourt, the son of Ashkenazi Jewish parents from Romania and Czechoslovakia. He studied in Lyon, and later enrolled at École normale...
has called “Les Maîtres Penseurs” – Kant
KANT
KANT is a computer algebra system for mathematicians interested in algebraic number theory, performing sophisticated computations in algebraic number fields, in global function fields, and in local fields. KASH is the associated command line interface...
, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Marx – must be sought in several different books. The attention of the reader is rewarded, however, by Lupasco’s regular restatements of his basic theses, often in a way that is more economic, meaningful and coherent.
In his introduction to Lupasco’s The Principle of Antagonism and the Logic of Energy, Nicolescu points out that once the reader gets beyond the (relatively few) mathematical formulas in this book, Lupasco’s language is perfectly accessible. “It exemplifies, in a self-referential manner, the ternary aspects of actualization, potentialization and included middle which give it the charm and the privilege of incantations that are at the same time scientific, philosophical and poetic.”
Summarizing briefly, stimulated by Einstein's works and quantum
Quantum
In physics, a quantum is the minimum amount of any physical entity involved in an interaction. Behind this, one finds the fundamental notion that a physical property may be "quantized," referred to as "the hypothesis of quantization". This means that the magnitude can take on only certain discrete...
theory, Lupasco founded a new logic
Logic
In philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...
, questioning the tertium non datur principle of classical logic. He introduced a third state, going beyond the duality
String duality
String duality is a class of symmetries in physics that link different string theories, theories which assume that the fundamental building blocks of the universe are strings instead of point particles....
principle, the T-state. The T-state is neither 'actual', nor 'potential' (categories replacing in Lupasco's system the 'true' or 'false' values of standard bivalent logic), but a resolution of the two contradictory elements at a higher level of reality or complexity. Lupasco generalised his logic to physics
Physics
Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...
and epistemology and above all to a new theory of consciousness
Consciousness
Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...
.
Recent Studies
A key reference in French is the compendium of 1999, "Stéphane Lupasco -The Man and the Work" by H. Badescu and B. Nicolescu. The first comprehensive up-date and comparision of Lupasco's thought in English is the 2008 book by J. E. Brenner, "Logic in Reality". Other useful new references are the combined papers of a Symposium on Lupasco in 2009 "At the Confluence of Two Cultures - Lupsasco Today, in French and a biographical paper by Brenner, The Philosophical Logic of Stéphane Lupasco (1900 - 1988) in English.Works
- Logique et contradiction, P. U. F., Paris, 1947.
- Le principe d'antagonisme et la logique de l'énergie. Prolégomènes à une science de la contradiction, Hermann & Co., Paris, 1951.
- Du devenir logique et de l’affectivité ; Vol. 1 : Le dualisme antagoniste ; Vol. 2 : Essai d’une nouvelle théorie de la connaissance. Paris : Vrin, 1935 ; 2nd edition 1973.
- Les trois matières. Paris : Julliard, 1960 (LTM)
- Qu’est-ce qu’une structure? Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1967
- La tragédie de l'énergie. Paris: Casterman, 1970
- L’univers psychique. Paris: Editions Denoël/Gonthier, 1979.
- L’énergie et la matière vivante. Monaco: Éditions du Rocher. (Originally published in Paris: Julliard, 1962.), 1986
- La topologie énergétique. In Pensées hors du Rond, La Liberté de l’esprit. 12: 13-30. Paris: Hachette, 1986
- L’Homme et ses trois éthiques. Paris: Editions du Rocher, 1986
- L’énergie et la matière psychique. Monaco: Éditions du Rocher. (Originally published in Paris: Julliard, 1974.), 1987.