John Krummel

Abstract: The symposium on overcoming modernity (kindai no chokoku) that took place in Tokyo in 1942 has been much commented upon, but later critics have tended to over-emphasize the wartime political context and the ideological connection to Japanese ultra-nationalism. Closer examination shows that the background and the actual content of the discussion were more complicated. The idea of overcoming modernity had already appeared in debates among Japanese intellectuals before the war, and was always open to different interpretations; it could indicate Japanese ambitions to move beyond Western paradigms of modernity, but in other cases it referred to more radical visions of alternatives to modernity as such. Some versions linked up with Western critiques of existing modernity, including traditionalist as well as more future-oriented ones. These differentiations are evident in the symposium, and associated with diverse schools of thought. An important input came from representatives of the Kyoto school, the most distinctive current in twentieth-century Japanese philosophy. Despite the suppression of Marxist thought, the background influence of the unorthodox Marxist thinker Miki Kiyoshi was significant. Another major contribution came from the group known as the Japan Romantic School, active in literature and literary criticism. Other intellectuals of widely varying persuasions, from outspoken nationalists to Catholic theologians, also participated. The result was a rich but also thoroughly inconclusive discussion, from which no consensus on roads beyond modernity could emerge. Keywords: Modernity; Westernization; nationalism; war; Kyoto School; Japanese Romanticism.

This dissertation looks at Heidegger's phenomenological interpretation of the notion of imagination in Kant's epistemology. Heidegger in his early works on Kant broadens Kant's meaning of imagination to mean something more than a cognitive or mental faculty engaged in the formation of intuition or the synthesis of sensible intuitions and conceptual categories for the sake of cognition. For Kant imagination's activity involves the formation or determination of time, so that concepts can be applied to temporal objects, thus enabling the cognition of an object. Heidegger broadens this time-forming activity of imagination to the ontological and precognitive, namely the openness or "transcendence" of human existence to the world. one's initial encounter with the world or with being occurs prior to the cognitive act, prior to the constitution of objects, prior to the objectification of being. This openness for Heidegger is ultimately founded upon the ontological condition of human temporality or mortality. It is through the horizon of time that being, for Heidegger, unfolds. By interpreting Kantian imagination in this way, Heidegger wants to confirm his own theory concerning being, that the sense or meaning of being is time. The purpose of this dissertation is to discern whether this reading of Kantian imagination makes sense even for a phenomenology of being. The broadening of the imagination beyond the cognitive to the ontological and its identification with Dasein's temporal opening to the world, are to be questioned. This will lead to the further questioning concerning Heidegger's prioritization of time over space, temporality over spatiality, in his discussions of being's unfolding. These issues will also be related to Heidegger's neglect of the imagination in his later works on Kant as well as his downplaying of it in some of his later writings, and his eventual move away from his earlier temporo-centrism

The paper explicates what the World War 2 era Japanese philosopher, Miki Kiyoshi, of the Kyoto School, called the logic of imagination and of forms as an ontology. I understand this ontology as ultimately an “anontology”, where novelty and creativity are predicated upon the pathos of singularity and contingency that Miki calls “the nothing” (mu). Its productive function that is technological vis-à-vis the environment involves an embodied praxis that Miki, borrowing the terms of his mentor, Nishida Kitarō, calls “enactive intuition”. This productivity unfolds the historical world, on the basis of that deep pathos within us in synthesis with logos, as what can be characterized as the auto-determination of the indeterminate. But the advance of technology today takes this unfolding of the world perhaps beyond what Miki anticipated with his self-professed humanism. To make these points, the paper, for the most part, focuses on the last and longest chapter in Miki’s Logic of Imagination, where Miki discusses and appropriates Kant’s concept of imagination and its schematism from both the first and third Critiques while also showing the influences of Heidegger along with Nishida. But the originality in Miki takes his philosophy of imagination beyond these predecessors while also raising questions as to the relationship between human beings and nature and to the very meaning of “nature” (shizen) in Miki. I will also discuss post-war theories of imagination and technology coming after Miki that respond to the more recent digitization and virtualization of the real.