Homage to the Apple Tree

Abstract

Forty years ago, Roger Caillois approached the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Sciences and proposed that the Council establish a most unusual journal. At the request of UNESCO, the council had brought together a number of learned organizations in the realm of the humanities; Jacques Rueff had just assumed the presidency. In Caillois's mind, the objective was to put an end to the isolation enjoyed by most disciplines, which jealously guarded their prestige and authority and cared little to have their neighbors meddle in their affairs. For Caillois, the musicologist needed the classicist, the prehistorian the philosopher and, of course, the religious historian the linguist and the economist. The interdisciplinarian, at that time, attracted a fair amount of attention. But Caillois was not satisfied. Too often, it seemed to him, the interdisciplinarian was content with arbitrary and superficial juxtapositions. Caillois wanted to raise the transdisciplinary to the level of a methodology, and he wanted to try to draw together the different scholarly sectors reluctant to step beyond historical boundaries all too often frozen by time. Haunted by the theme of the chess board at least as much as by the medusa or by fulgora lantern flies, he coined a term of his own for all this, a term destined to a brilliant future: the lateral sciences.