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.