Paper short abstract:

Western Marxism was influential and controversial. It bacame the foundation of the Frankfurt School in Germany. Moreover, it brought Fukumotoism to Japan. In both cases, heated debates occurred over vanguardism. By examining them, this report discusses the class consciousness of intellectuals.

Paper long abstract:

Western Marxism, which originated in the early 1920s, was a critique of traditional Marxists such as Friedrich Engels and Karl Kautsky, and emphasized the cultural and philosophical aspects. Georg Lukács, one of its pioneers, attracted the intellectual youth both inside and outside Europe, who were at risk of falling into nihilism. Thus, for the youth, Western Marxism was a means of not only social reform but also overcoming their personal and internal troubles.

On account of this characteristic, Western Marxism, while certainly influential intellectually, was also controversial. One of the most contentious issues was the legitimacy of vanguardism, on which Marxists had been divided since Rosa Luxemburg's criticism of Lenin in 1917.

In Weimar-era Germany, Lukács was criticized by Siegfried Kracauer on the grounds that participation in the Marxist movement could be an escape from personal problems. On the contrary, Walter Benjamin saw Kracauer's attitude as a “bourgeois” deception that was unconscious of the social issues. The debate over the legitimacy of vanguardism was also developed in Japan during the Taisho Democracy. Fukumoto Kazuo, the most advanced Japanese Marxist Theorist of his time, was denounced as an “elitist” by Comintern. However, after the 1930s, when the Marxist movement in Japan lost the vigorous debate it had previously enjoyed, it entered a period of winter, with many converts, due in part to severe repression by the government authorities.

Despite the differences in social and cultural backgrounds between Germany and Japan, the commonality in both cases was the social role of the intellectuals; that is, in Marxism, where the subject of the movement is the proletariat, the question was what kind of practice should be carried out by intellectuals who are oriented toward social reform. To address a topic that is still of great importance in this time of ever-widening social disparity, this report first clarifies how these intellectuals perceived their own social position in their discourses. Then, by focusing on points that were blind spots, the significance and challenges of Western Marxism are highlighted.

Paper short abstract:

This paper compares the philosophical outlooks of Taisho-era anarchist Kaneko Fumiko and 19th-century German philosopher Max Stirner and argues that the former, through her rebellious activities and defiant acceptance of a death sentence, philosophically transcended the latter’s thought.

Paper long abstract:

Kaneko Fumiko (1903-1926) was an anarchist, nihilist and egoist active during the Taisho period of modern Japan. She had close ties with Korean liberation activists, particularly her partner Park Yeol (1902-1974). Kaneko became implicated in a plot to assassinate members of the imperial family and was eventually sentenced to death, although her sentence was soon commuted to life imprisonment. She died in prison, and the circumstances of her death have yet to be conclusively determined.

Kaneko is an under-researched figure of Japanese history, with most research, both in Japanese and English, focusing primarily on her life and referring to her thought and philosophy only when it is relevant to explain her actions. This is unfortunate, considering Kaneko herself rejected her actions being labelled as simple terrorism but stated that they have a philosophical foundation.

Therefore, this paper focuses primarily on Kaneko’s thought; particularly, it endeavours to explain her thought by referring to the egoist philosophy of Max Stirner (1806-1856), whom Kaneko holds in high esteem and considers her most significant influence. Stirner was the originator of egoism, a philosophy that the individual should be the ultimate authority over oneself and should never compromise one’s pursuit of self-interests.

However, this paper also argues that Kaneko’s thought was not just a carbon copy of Stirner’s philosophy but also deviates from it in some regards. A significant difference is in her utter rejection of expressing remorse and defiant attitude towards the court and interrogators in prison.One may argue that, from Stirner’s perspective, her defiant attitude was non-egoistic since she was actively working against her well-being. In other words, she had been possessed by a single passion and lost control over herself.

Against such a reading, this paper proposes that Kaneko’s defiant attitude, despite her lack of concern for her well-being, reflects fidelity to her innermost desire that is outside the scope of Stirner’s egoism. Kaneko’s fidelity to herself also reveals that Stirner’s egoism, despite its absolutisation of the individual, is inherently a classical Aristotelian ethic because of its emphasis on a balance of passions and desires.

Paper short abstract:

The article attempts to fathom the unmeasurable impact of Goethe on the Eastern and the Western philosophy, by consulting Cassirer and Nishida. Goethean morphology will explain the controversial views on the relation of individual life to the universal spirit, symbolic or purely experiential.

Paper long abstract:

This article aims to reduce to a simple formula the unfathomable influence of Goethe both on the German and on the Japanese philosophy, employing Cassirer and Nishida as pregnant points. Since some studies have already shown an implicit, but intimate interconnection between them, the following argument uses the mediating or conciliatory role of Goethe as catalysis to promote both debates: Goethe, Cassirer, and Nishida can together contribute to a better understanding of the fundamental philosophical problem, namely the relation of man and universe.

Goethe thought, in introducing his notion of last phenomenon (Urphänomen), to have earned the gratitude of philosophers. He seems to claim, being himself a non-philosopher, to possess the philosopher’s stone which lacks the philosopher or wisdom, like Mephistopheles ridicules in Faust Part II. This provocation has found resonance in the widest circle of academics. Goethe occupies this unique position where he represents the Occident and fascinates the Orient. Although Goethe himself intimates in his gingko poem that two cultures can be simultaneously one and double, questions remain: How can we, instead of aestheticizing, comprehend this intricate identity of dichotomy? In which respect is Goethe’s Weltanschauung so attractive?

Answers can be found in the morphological relation of ideal-universal spirit (Geist) and real-individual life, which is consciously thematized by Cassirer and Nishida with different accentuations, which correspond with a tension of Goethe’s universe. Cassirer’s “symbolic forms” conceptualize an everlasting type of man as cultural being, parallel to original plant / animal (Urpflanze / -tier) of Goethe; Nishida on the contrary wants to grasp in “pure experience” human life, whose form is ultimately formless, because, like Goethe underlines, flora and fauna undergo an incessant transformation (“ein fortwährendes Umbilden“). From the vantagepoint of metamorphosis, Cassirer and Nishida are investigating one and the same phenomena or Urphänomen called spiritual life of man. It is, like Goethe once admired the work of Nature, the eternal one that manifests itself in multiplicity. Cassirer’s idealism search for the paradigm of man in the universal spirit, while Nishida brings concrete life of individuals to the fore, that embodies the spirit and cultivates its earthly soil.