According to the various cultures of the East and the West, and even more so if we consider their history, there are dozens of possible answers. In the Middle Ages, the expression ex Oriente lux, 'the light comes from the East', meant finding the texts of Greek philosophy through their translation into Arabic, because Europe had lost them; but seen from China, there is nothing oriental about Islam. Today, "the West" means something where Christianity and modern civilization are linked, and "the East" means something that goes from Buddhism to Shinto animism. Both are very diverse. I will therefore limit myself here to a caricature of Japan and France. The Cartesian cogito, the paragon of the modern subject, proclaims that it "needs no place to be" (Discourse on Method). It is the absolute, self-sufficient subject. It follows that everything else (apart from its fellow human beings) is a mechanical object. This is the essence of dualism: the cut between the human and the rest. The Japanese human is the opposite: its expression in all respects is relational, and Buddhism goes so far as to proclaim that all beings in the natural world embody Buddhahood (busshô 佛性), while the cogito takes from the Bible the conviction that he, and he alone, was created in the image of God.