Evolving Postwar Japanese Philosophy: Odyssey towards a Contemporary Cosmology through the Human Body,
Technology, and Ecology (WIRTZ)

BOOK REVIEW

Evolving Postwar Japanese Philosophy: Odyssey Towards
a Contemporary Cosmology through the Human Body,
Technology, and Ecology
By MATSUI Nobuyuki, Kyoto: Ritsumeikan University Asia-Japan
Research Institute, 2023*
Fernando WIRTZ**
The literature on postwar Japanese philosophy in English is very scarce. Many of the most
relevant postwar Japanese philosophers, with the exception of Karatani Kōjin, remain largely
untranslated into European languages. Matsui Nobuyuki’s latest book offers not only a scholarly
approach to some crucial philosophical problems of postwar philosophy, but also a criticalinvestigation of what the postwar period meant and an attempt to highlight its relevance forunderstanding today’s post-industrial societies.
World War II and the defeat of Japan were historical events of not only political and social
importance, but also of intellectual and cultural importance. Postwar philosophy defined itself inopposition to wartime philosophy, especially in contrast to the philosophers of the Kyoto School.
This constellation of philosophers, which included Nishida Kitarō, Tanabe Hajime, Nishitani Keiji,
Miki Kiyoshi, and Kōsaka Masaaki, represented for postwar philosophers the failure of reason in
the face of sentimentalist patriotism. Indeed, many of the philosophers of the Kyoto School tried
to interpret philosophically the historical moment in which they lived. This was often expressed indefense of Japan’s leadership as the guide of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Of course,
this heroic voluntarism was shattered with the Allied victory as a result of the horrendous attacks
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Matsui’s book investigates the echoes of the tension between prewar and postwar in theform of different aspects; the main one being the tension between pathos and logos. According
to Nishida’s disciple, Miki Kiyoshi, who had also been an intellectual and political personality ofgreat importance during the 1930s and 1940s, human existence is characterized by the dialecticalstruggle between pathos and logos, between embodied subjectivity and the objectivity of reason.
The “rift” — as Matsui (7) calls it — between pathos and logos is the conceptual mark of thehistorical tension between wartime and postwar philosophy. Even if it deals mainly with authors ofthe postwar period, the specters of the Kyoto School are still present throughout the book.
* 241pages, ISBN: 9784910550442** Assistant Professor, Department of Japanese Philosophy, Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University, Japan
Email: wirtz.fernando.5c@kyoto-u.ac.jp
Published online: April 18, 2024
©Asia-Japan Research Institute of Ritsumeikan University:
Asia-Japan Research Academic Bulletin, 2024
ONLINE ISSN 2435-306X, Vol.5, 711Asia-Japan Research Academic Bulletin

Volume 5, 71. April 2024

The book is divided into four chapters. The first one is focused on exploring the tension
between pathos and logos in the realm of literary thought, especially in the figure of Katō Shūichi.
Katō was aware of the limits of sensibility in expressing the unspeakable nature of death andthe horror of death. It was a time to reflect on the atrocities of the war, not to anesthetize them.
However, Katō also understood the importance of sensibility and his harsh criticism of the workof Mishima Yukio can be read in this sense. According to Katō, Mishima felt he was a continuatorof the legacy of the Japanese Romantic School, led in no small measure by the figure of Yasuda
Yojūrō. However, according to Katō, Mishima was a “restorationist, without a past to restore” (55).
Added to this was the fact that Mishima’s idealization of death diminished his creative force (56).
As Matsui explains, this is not merely a criticism of Mishima’s irrationalism. On the contrary,
given that “our language is always intertwined with trans-linguistic intangibility” (58), the problem
seems to be rather that for Mishima, this language of the unattainable is reduced to a monologuethat rejects all dialogic instances. Thus, Matsui suggests that Katō is not merely an enlightened
critic of militarist pathos; on the contrary, Katō appears characterized by his quest for universality
through translinguistic sensibility (59). Katō’s notion of “subtle language,” which is borrowed from
Earl Wasserman and Charles Taylor, is then, according to Matsui, an open language, a languagethat does not abandon the communicative urge, without becoming declarative in the romantic
mode, but recognizing its own limits. However, there are also limits to Katō’s thought. Matsui
explores these limits using the reflections of another literary critic, Katō Norihito. It seems thatthe problem lies here: while Katō Shūichi saw Mishima as a “restorationist without a past,” Katō
Norihito recognized that in fact there was a past, but it is impossible to connect with it. Mishima
was not merely delusional; rather Mishima tried to move between both eras. In a sense, he wasan inhabitant of different synchronicities. For Matsui, it seems that Katō Shūichi’s “universalismthrough-sensibility” did not recognize the true nature of the discontinuity. In other words, the subtle
language “cannot and should not fully recover the continuity between the prewar and postwar
periods” (69). Recognizing this discontinuity is, according to Matsui, accepting the contingency ofcontinuity.
The question of contingency is continued in the next chapter, in the context of Nakamura
Yūjirō’s philosophy of institutions. If we understand contingency as “it is possible that [something]is so and not so (at the same time)” (68), then tensions or contradictions can be assumed to be formsof contingency. The tension between the self and the institution is one of these contingencies (see91). Institutions are objectifications, that is, limitations of some kind. Normally, they are thoughtof as rigid structures, which expel and normalize the contingent. The law is an institution, and toexist it requires the limitation of the freedom of the individual. But Nakamura tries to avoid theincompatibility between institutions and freedom by recurring to the concept of “place” (場所).
This concept belongs to the philosophical terminology of Nishida Kitarō but is used by Nakamura
in the context of institutional relations. Instead of reducing the formation of an institution to somemechanistic causality, the idea of a polycentric place enables us to think of multicausality, notgrounded in energetic causation (97-98). Here, Matsui makes reference to the controversial theories
of Rupert Sheldrake and to some ideas of David Bohm. Since Sheldrake’s ideas are essential tounderstanding Matsui’s reconstruction of Nakamura, I will say more about this when dealing withChapter 4.
In any case, the non-linearity contained in the idea of “place” undermines the idea of“institutions vs individual,” but also some kind of “mutualism.” The whole point of this chapter is toshow that it is possible to think about institutions as closed systems beyond the “internal-external”
framework.
Even if Chapter 3 does not mention institutions, it could be seen as a further reflection on2

Evolving Postwar Japanese Philosophy: Odyssey towards a Contemporary Cosmology through the Human Body,Technology, and Ecology (WIRTZ)

the role of institutions in the digital age. Here, Matsui compares Nakamura’s theory of commonsense with Karatani’s structure of world history. The capital-digital-state generates a new typeof institution that mediates the relation between state and capital, under the form of plunder,
appropriation, and commercialization of data. The non-linearity of the previous chapter appears
here serving a new form of alienation, based on the digitalization of imagination. For that reason,
Matsui argues that it is necessary to re-introduce the “physical integrity of senses” (147). Here, it
seems to me that Matsui attempts this by interpreting the concept of “place” as the intersection
between embodiment and ecology, as the field of creative co-generation. In doing so, he wants todemonstrate that — contrary to Karatani’s critique — Nakamura is not a completely “a-historical”
or “a-political” philosopher, since his notion of common sense offers a kind of political response to
the challenges of social life.
The fourth and closing chapter is perhaps the most challenging one. Here, Matsui synthesizes
information from different sources, including Kūkai’s tantrism and Yuk Hui’s discussion aboutcybernetics. There is a conceptual development in Nakamura that goes from the notion of “commonsense” to the notion of “rhythmic oscillation” (inspired by Sheldrake). Hence, the goal of this lastchapter is to use Nakamura’s late philosophy in order to formulate a non-substantialist ontology
based on rhythmic oscillation. Expanding on Nishida’s theory of the “place of absolute nothingness,”
Nakamura proposes an ontology of multiple “places” oscillating and resonating among themselves.
The ground of existence, the physical world, the symbolic world, and the logical world, none ofthem seem to have any fundamental priority. On the contrary, their communication is based on asort of contingency that enables a “system of infinitely possible recombination” (183).
Nakamura’s concept of rhythmic oscillation might sound mysterious to the reader if one
does not know about Sheldrake’s speculative theory of morphic resonance. In an article from 1994,
Sheldrake explained his theory as follows:In essence, I suggest that each kind of self-organizing system, be it a crystal, an atom, amolecule, a cell, an organism, or a society, has its own organizing field which makes the wholemore than the sum of the parts. I call it the morphic field — the field which gives it its formor shape, from the Greek word morphé for form. The morphic fields governing these systems
are what convey the habits of the system. For example, each baby giraffe embryo, as it grows
is shaped by an invisible morphogenetic or morphic field of the giraffe and that field takes
its form, not from some kind of Platonic archetype, or some kind of eternal mathematicalequation that was there at the time of or before the big bang, but rather from the actual forms
of previous giraffes. It tunes in, as it were, to all previous giraffes by a process I call morphic
resonance — the influence of like upon like through or across space and time from the past.
Each giraffe is then shaped by the morphic field, which contains a kind of collective memoryof the species. Each individual draws upon this collective memory and, in turn, contributes toit. (Sheldrake 1994, 53)
Instead of a hierarchical ontology based on eternal archetypes or deterministic natural laws,Sheldrake’s self-poietic worldview proposes a universe constituted by different — “resonating”—
fields. It is easy to see that this idea fascinated Nakamura, who saw in it its compatibility with
Nishida’s “place.”
With this “overlap” between contingency and nothingness (209), Matsui brings the different
reflections of his book to a conclusion. In fact, the dispute between Katō Shūichi and Katō Norihiroor Karatani and Nakamura could be summarized as a problem about the role of contingency, thediscontinuity between pathos and logos. It is also not surprising that contingency occupies such
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Volume 5, 71. April 2024

an important place in post-war Japanese philosophy. It could be said that after the nothingness ofthe Second War, what remained was a sense of contingency and chaos. This will be the ground forpostmodernism and the further development of Japanese thought in figures such as Asada Akira
and Azuma Hiroki.
Matsui’s concluding remarks about contingency as the principle that enables but also
destabilizes communication (209) should be taken seriously. Against the world of worlds (世界的世界) envisaged by Nishida Kitarō, in which each nation moves dialectically toward its own selfrealization, our postmodern world is a world of dissonances in which the nation has become amysterious (im)possibility (as in Karatani’s mode of exchange X). Matsui is not alone in thinking
that contingency represents some kind of creative hope. Azuma Hiroki, a successor of Karatani ina certain sense, in the age of post-grand-narratives, advocated reembracing the potentiality of (mis)communicating with strangers. The Japanese critic writes in a recent book:
It seems to me that this tactic of misdelivery is the necessary condition that must be put inplace as the basis of all realistic and sustainable resistance in this age of bifurcation between
nation state and Empire. In the twenty-first-century order, rhizomic mobilization without
misdelivery can only resemble the biopower of Empire. (Azuma 2023, 140)
But to what extent can we compare both projects? In his book, Philosophy of the Tourist,
published in Japanese in 2017, Azuma uses the word “rewiring” borrowed from network theory
to express the ability of nodes to be connected more or less randomly with other nodes at varying
distances. This idea is reminiscent of the idea of rhythmic oscillation. But is it the same thing? Itis clear that in the digital era, the promise of unexpected communications with distant strangers
as the basis of new social relationships is tempting. But it seems that Matsui — via Nakamura— is attempting something else, not only formal and technical resonance, but also a physical andsensorial resonance through the body. Rewiring is only possible where there is a previous structure.
For Matsui, this structure seems not to be necessary, as multiple autopoietic “somaesthetic”
structures are possible. Matsui’s brilliant and incisive work invites us to further investigate this idea
and revisit the inexhaustible material of Japanese philosophy.

References

Azuma, Hiroki. 2023. Philosophy of the Tourist. London: Urbanomic.
Sheldrake, Rupert. 1994. The Rebirth of Nature. RSA Journal, 142(5447), 46–58. <http://www.jstor.
org/stable/41376392>.

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