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.