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- Convenor:
-
Francesco Campagnola
(University of Lisbon)
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- Section:
- Intellectual History and Philosophy
- Sessions:
- Friday 27 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
The present panel analyses how important Japanese public intellectuals and philosophers (Tosaka Jun, Watsuji Tetsurō, Miki Kiyoshi and Shimizu Ikutarō) analysed the relationship between nature and technology within the human world. It focuses on the different systems of coexistence they ideated.
Long Abstract:
The present panel takes into consideration the relationship between nature and technology and the place human beings and human history hold in it. On the one hand, it surveys different and conflicting representations of technology, depicting a range of diverging positions towards human beings' efficacy in shaping their own environment and history. On the other, it explores a debate on the nature of the human being and of its place in nature. This double inquiry spans several decades, from the 1930s, through the 1940s and 1950s (Hoshino and Inutsuka), to the 1960s and 1970s (Campagnola).
An interest in natural-ness and life, in a philosophy capable of grasping the actuality of everyday existence, was at the core of the interest of all the thinkers this panel examines. However, what strongly distinguishes them the one from the other is the way in which they conceptualised such living experience they wanted to study. They wanted to know, in other words, if and how the human beings could give form to history and the environment or if, vice versa, the latter naturally moulded the destiny of humanity. In such interrogation on the meaning of history and nature, they afforded different values and uses to technology as, for example, a radical and practical alternative to the imaginary worlds created by hermeneutic and philology (Tosaka), a concept abstracted from social acts (Watsuji), the mark of human subjectivity in a process of autonomisation and adaptation to the surrounding environment (Miki), or the product of life's irrational tendency to crystallise itself into close and operable worlds (Shimizu). Whatever the differences, they all confronted and analysed the idea that technology itself is somehow nature or its product or bears to it a close relation.
Eventually, in their work, all those different interpretations of technology's meaning and role offered different models for socialisation, political organisation and environmental coexistence that will dialogue in this panel.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 27 August, 2021, -Futoshi Hoshino (University of Tokyo)
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on the view of "secret" and "translation" by Tosaka Jun. The Kyoto School philosopher elaborated his philosophy of technology in the early 1930s. However, by putting these terms forward, I would reveal its hidden development in the writing of the late 1930s and early 40s.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on the view of "secret" and "translation" by Tosaka Jun (1900-45). These might be uncommon topics in the previous studies on the Kyoto School philosopher. However, I would like to emphasize the terms to reveal an important aspect of his philosophy of technology.
First of all, it should be pointed out that research on the philosopher has been divided into two camps. On the one hand, Tosaka has been regarded to be one of the philosophers who introduced Marxist philosophy in Japan through his activities in Yuibutsuron Kenkyukai (Materialist Study Group). He elaborated his philosophy of science based on historical materialism in the late 1920s and early 30s, especially in Philosophy of Technology (1933). Some would find his philosophy of technology to be limited in this period (Kimoto 2009). On the other hand, the critical essays on "everydayness" by Tosaka in the late 1930s became of interest in the last two decades among the East-Asian studies (Harootunian 2000). Some would find Tosaka's interest in the philosophy of technology to have disappeared in the period of political repression.
One might wonder how these arguments were compatible in this Kyoto School philosopher. I would like to put a hypothesis that Tosaka's philosophy of technology flourished at the very epoch of the late 1930s and early 40s. He no longer discussed the science nor technology at that time, but instead how to find the "actuality" from everyday life. What he calls "technical spirit" is essential for revealing or "translating" the "secret" of history. These terminologies would remind us of his criticism of the conventional philosophy, i.e., "philological philosophy" according to him. Tosaka considered this to be a "dead translation," while he insists on the necessity of finding the actuality—which, I assume, would be a "living translation" made possible only through the "technical spirit."
Yu Inutsuka (Nagoya Institute of Technology)
Paper short abstract:
The aim of this paper is to show two different understandings of "nature" in Kyoto school philosophers in the early Showa Japan: Watsuji Tetsurō's "nature" which is included in human world and Nishida Kitarō and Miki Kiyoshi's "nature" which includes human beings.
Paper long abstract:
This paper aims at showing two different understandings of "nature" within the early Showa Kyoto School: in Watsuji Tetsurō's philosophy on the one hand and in Nishida Kitarō and Miki Kiyoshi's on the other. While several prior studies have examined the conceptions of fūdo (climate) and nature in these philosophers (Berque 1986, Tsuda 2007, Matsuoka 2013), their reciprocal differences have not yet been the object of a comprehensive study. Exploring them, this paper offers a new perspective on the relationship between "nature" and "technology"—an issue of great importance in today's world.
Watsuji's nature is situated in the human world. Under the influence of Kant, Watsuji thinks that subjective human existence is the foundation of everything. Mountains and rivers are culturally situated in a certain human society and play as an integral part of human relationships. Nothing is outside human interpretation. In that sense, there is no external "environment" from human existence. According to Watsuji, "technology" is a concept abstracted from human actions in social contexts like "hunting."
Contrarily, Nishida considers "nature" as what contains human beings as a part of itself. From an evolutionist perspective, Nishida thinks that nature is creative and has produced human beings. When individuals get apart from an existing society and unite with this creative nature, they become able to transform a society.
Miki's nature contains human beings, like Nishida's, but Miki further theorizes it in reference to "technology." Not by including "nature" in the sphere of subjective human existence like Watsuji, but only by acknowledging the opposition between a subject and its environment, we can theorize "technology" as the adaptation of a subject to its environment.
Are we an existence which includes nature or which is included by nature? As Watsuji says, when we perceive nature, cultural interpretation inevitably plays the part of perception. It is also true, however, that there are phenomena outside contexts, such as impulses or disasters, which destroy existing forms of human society. Showing these two types of relationships between human and nature, this paper will finally propose a novel perspective for today's environmental issues.
Francesco Campagnola (University of Lisbon)
Paper short abstract:
I explore the consequences of Shimizu's late reconsideration of the relationship between life and abstraction, in which he pits technique against the direct relationship to nature and experience of traditional communities and knowledge, and I offer a tentative rebuke to his nationalistic conclusions
Paper long abstract:
The present paper analyses the controversial postwar Japanese public intellectuals, Shimizu Ikutarō (1907-1988). Shimizu is remembered as the author of a spectacular about turn (self-styled tenkō), in which he repudiated his own (supposedly) progressive faith and embraced rightwing nationalism. In this paper, I explore how Shimizu's turn, rather than just a change in political allegiance, was based on the extremisation of his thought on nature in its relation to technique and culture and how it entailed a troubling evolution in his thought on the commoners (shomin) and the elite.
During the late 1960s and the 1970s, Shimizu revisited his opposition towards what he called the schematisations of history, such as historical materialism, by focusing on the concept of life (seimei). In his 1966 work, Gendai Shisō, Shimizu re-narrated the history of civilisation—ironically, from a quite Eurocentric perspective—in the light of this opposition between life and abstraction/technique. This exploration he pursued in his later works, notably in Rinri Noto and the late Watashi no shakaigakushatachi.
In this opposition between life and technique—which he put in relation to the open and imprecise (aimai) world of the empiric, symbolic and pragmatist tradition on the one hand, and the close, limited but clear and distinct one of the mainstream modernity of the exact sciences applied to nature on the other—a question arises concerning the status afforded to nature. As a longtime reader of Dewey, Shimizu thought nature, namely human nature, as plastic and determined by the vital force of culture. At the same time, in his later ruminations, Shimizu developed an increasingly deterministic representation of culture in its relation to nature, which led to what could be described as a form of anti-modernist elitism.
The aim of this paper is to cast light on how: 1) such late and problematic perspective is linked to Shimizu's longstanding fraught relationship to subjectivity and its social incarnation, the (modern) elite. 2) how his nationalistic rhetorical turn was the problematic surface of his dissatisfaction towards what he thought was the abandonment of nature and community by the common man.