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Paper short abstract:

This paper is on a Japanese intellectual stream in 1980s and 1990s. I will mainly focus on three figures and their relationships: Miki Shigeo, Yoshimoto Takaaki, and Nakamura Yūjirō. Through connecting them in a constellation, my paper will place them in a view of "organologic transcendentalism"

Paper long abstract:

This paper is about an alternative epistemological ground for humans through revisiting Japanese intellectual history in 1980s and 1990s. Some Japanese figures such as Miki Shigeo (anatomist; 1925~1987), Yoshimoto Takaaki (literature critic; 1924~2012), and Nakamura Yūjirō (philosopher; 1925~2017) among others showed idiosyncratic views on human beings based on their evolution. However, the intellectual tide and constellationthat they formed has less been studied down to the present.

First, Miki Shigeo offered his distinctive biological morphogenesis that humans evolved from the form of fish and human body potentially contains the memory of the gill respiration before evolutional advance to the land from the sea in the evolutional scale. He called this memory a “vital memory”. Second, Yohismoto Takaaki, who were influenced by Miki’s works, elaborated his view of an “African stage” as the alternative view of world history beyond Eurocentric universalism of history and the premodern staging of Asia in Hegelian and Marxist views. The “African phase” is the concept that explains the repetitive universality of “vital memory” in every historical society. Lastly, Nakamura Yūjirō, who were also influenced by Miki’s work and also Nishida Kitārō’s philosophy of “place of nothingness”, unfolded his philosophy of rhythm and cosmological philosophy. According to him, this planet fundamentally comprises the resonant phenomenon on the oscillating field in the sense of quantum physics, which is called rhythm, and Nakamura tried to reestablished philosophical issues such as consciousness, sociality, sublimity, and so on from this perspective.

In my paper, I will provide an integrative picture of these thinkers in a constellation as a post-humanist stream of "organologic transcendentalism", because they do not merely reduce humans to animals through their consideration on humans in terms of body and organs, but open them to the environment.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines a few representative literatures from Pedagogical Human Studies, a loosely organized field in Japanese education, to understand how they develop and apply the Kyoto School philosophy of jikaku or self-consciousness to help learners become agents of change.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines a few representative literatures from Pedagogical Human Studies, a loosely organized field in Japanese education, to understand how they develop and apply the Kyoto School philosophy of jikaku or self-consciousness to help learners become agents of change. In the sociological theories of agency, scholars had not paid much attention to the gap between the different ontological levels where agency is thought to emerge. For example, Archer’s (2003) subjective ontology maintains that agency emerges as and through a reflexively mediated inner conversation while Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) discursive ontology explains that agency emerges as and through articulation. Žižek calls the ontological gap between the symbolic and the real as ‘the absent center of political ontology,’ and describes its adverse psychological impact as ‘the passage through madness’ (2000, 34). This paper studies the centrality of ontological gap in Pedagogical Human Studies by discussing its scholarship from Kimura Motomori (1895-1946) to Ueda Kaoru (1920-2019). In particular, I examine the emphasis they place on the particularity of practice (jissen no gutai-sei) and its significance for transforming the absent center of political ontology to a critical realist learning environment.

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Paper short abstract:

This presentation focuses on Naniwada Haruo’s 5-volume-work "The State and the Economy" (1938-1942). It explores how he created his narrative of Japan's economic development as a triumphal story supported by the selfless contribution of rural Japan and the “ethical community” of the Japanese Volk.

Paper long abstract:

The state mobilization of the national economy and public intellectuals became increasingly pronounced in interwar Japan, which led to heated debates about the relationship of capitalism, the Kokutai (national body), and the economic responsibilities of enterprises and individuals among Japan’s professional economists. Naniwada Haruo, who was an Associate Professor of the Imperial University of Tokyo at the time, rose against the many chauvinistic advocates for the “Imperial Economics” (Kōkoku Keizaigaku). Combining Werner Sombart’s idealistic economics and Watsuji Tetsurō’s doctrines on the natural condition-determined national disposition, he introduced the scientific and systematic conception of a “new economic science” that predicted Japan’s “overcoming” of modern capitalism. This presentation focuses on Naniwada’s widely circulating 5-volume-masterwork "The State and the Economy," published between 1938 and 1942; it explores the ways in which Naniwada created his narrative of the modern Japanese economic development as a triumphal story, largely supported by the selfless contribution of rural Japan and the “ethical community” of the Japanese Volk. Naniwada believed that the triple structure of the Japanese Volk—the genetic and spiritual unity of Ie, the local community, and the Kokutai—fundamentally and eternally determined the way Japanese people lived, produced, and exchanged, which gave birth to a peculiar “Japanese economy.” Furthermore, he demonstrated that Japan’s characteristic climatic and spiritual conditions shaped the interpersonal relations within the rural ethical communities. This specific Japanese Volksgeist laid the foundation for the construction of the country’s “post-capitalist” political economy. This presentation analyzes Naniwada’s arguments in light of his contemporary institutional and intellectual context to understand how the state power, the remodeling of the economic system, and the ideological mobilization of intellectuals were interwoven in wartime Japan.

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Paper short abstract:

I examine the resonances between the work of architect Murano Tōgo and the writings of philosopher Tanaka Ōdō on William James' philosophy of pragmatism, in particular Murano's staging of promenades that intertwines his personal sensibilities with established cultural codes in Japan.

Paper long abstract:

In his response to a journal's questionnaire in 1957, the architect Murano Tōgo (1891-1984) cited the writings of the philosopher Tanaka Ōdō (1867–1932) as one of the literary sources that impressed him at the time of his graduation from college. Although Murano left behind only fragmentary comments on Ōdō, it is clear that the latter's essays had a profound impact on the architect. Having studied in the United States in the 1890s under the Chicago Pragmatists, Ōdō played a critical role in disseminating the philosophy of pragmatism in Japan, as filtered through his own reconfigurations. I will map out similarities between the thoughts of Murano and Ōdō on such issues as individualism, the role of art in society, and imitation as an artistic strategy, and explain how these came to be expressed in Murano's architecture throughout his career. Special attention will be given to the parallel between William James's idea of stream of thought as discussed by Ōdō and the way Murano dramatized the architectural promenade as a locus of communication between himself and the wider public in a design program that alternately deferred to and critiqued established cultural codes. Examples discussed include Osaka Panshon, Chiyoda Life Insurance Headquarters, and Shin-Takanawa Prince Hotel.

Murano is a controversial figure who garnered both deep respect and sharp criticism from his contemporaries in Japan but, curiously, remains little studied abroad. In associating his methods to the thought of Ōdō and James, I propose Murano to be a quintessentially modern architect who drew inspiration from international intellectual currents to create an architecture anchored in Japanese cultural practices, one that is at once legible in its intention and organization but also open and theatrical in the specificities of individual experience, embodying a mode of artistic production from which one can still learn in today's globalized world.