E-Journal of Philosophy of Education:
International Yearbook of the Philosophy of Education Society of Japan, Vol. 8, 2023

Life and Culture as Support for Education
Hiromoto MAKABE
Keio University
Hasegawa Nyozekan (1875-1969), born in Fukagawa, Tokyo in 1875, was aprogressive journalist and thinker who maintained an anti-authority and anti-fascist
stance throughout the Meiji, Taisho, and Showa periods. He developed a unique"philosophy of common sense" based on the ethos of the craftsmen's world of downtown
Edo, while also learning from British empiricism and American pragmatism (Hasegawa,1987). In a series of lectures given on NHK after World War II, he discussed culture,philosophy, democracy, ethics, entertainment, religion, and education in the crisp
downtown Edo dialect of rakugo. Even today, when the media environment has changed
drastically, he seems to have included some thoughts on "culture and education," thetheme of this research discussion, that are worth listening to.
According to Nyozekan, there are two types of education. One is "verbal education,"
which is provided by educators through educational institutions, and the other is"education of life", which is provided in daily life between people and between people
and things. For the former to function, he says, the latter must be strongly alive.
This educational theory is easy to understand at first, but as one reads further, it
begins to take on a more complex aspect. In other words, even in school education, whichmainly focuses on "language education," "life education" through mutualcommunication by means of the teacher's facial expressions, actions, movements, andvocal sounds is also at work, and "language education" also exists in "life education. Forexample, the latter is said to be "education through language or action in literature, drama,storytelling, rakugo, and other forms of education" (Ibid., p. 245). He places particularemphasis on drama.
As I mentioned earlier, seeing with the eyes and hearing with the ears all thephenomena and forms of human life that come into contact with the sense of sight andhearing, this is the education of life. It is not life itself, but the art of living, which is alsoa kind of life education. These are not literature of written language, but literature ofCorrespondence:
Hiromoto MAKABE, Keio University. Email: hmakabe@keio.jp

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spoken language. (Ibid., p. 245)
For Nyozekan, the basis of school education is the "education of life" in the worldof action, but art, which looks back on that world and expresses it in a fictional way, also
plays an important role. It seems that Nyozekan considers the two together as "culture"and considers them to support education. So, what does he mean by "culture"? Let us
take a closer look. In his lecture, Nyozekan, first and foremost, bitterly criticizes thecultural philosophy influenced by German philosophy (probably the neo-Kantian school)that dominated prewar Japan, especially during the Taisho Democracy period. They saythat the culture they refer to means the idea of pure and absolute beauty that is far awayfrom our daily lives, and high art as the embodiment of such beauty, and that this is aperversion of the true meaning of the word. They counterpoint this with the British wayof seeing culture.
Culture, however, is the form of our human life. Form is to the mind as it is to objects.
[...omitted...].
In other words, according to empirical thinking, it comes from the relationshipbetween man and man, and from the relationship between man and nature, and it is not a"idea" that comes first and foremost, but a form of human behavior.
Actions, in other words, are the things we do daily, such as eating, exercising,playing games, and various occupational tasks. While you do these things, you will
naturally develop a form of behavior. That is culture. (Ibid., pp. 47-48)
The interaction between people and between people and nature and the environment
creates "feel-good forms," sharpening the senses and developing culture. Thus, whilebased on the everyday world, the culture of form develops in a complex and specific way
along all aspects of professional life, and the culture of objects and the culture of mind of
carpenters, peasants, scientists, philosophers, and religious people, respectively, develop.
And all of them were born and developed to enhance everyday life, not for the sake ofbeauty per se, or for the sake of a priori ideas.
As he himself noted, his understanding of culture, based on British empiricism,recalls the aesthetic empiricism of pragmatism. However, we must not forget that
Nyozekan's family was the master carpenter who led the construction of Edo Castle.
Although not preserved in written form and therefore out of our sight, Edo thoughtprobably included not only the Confucian and Buddhist ideas of the samurai andSymposium: Orality, Image, Memory and Bildung: Toward the Possibility of Educational Study Based on
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educated people, but also a kind of rational and ethical life philosophy, or ethos, that wasnurtured in the lives of merchants and craftsmen and supported their education andlivelihood. I believe that this ethos was still alive in Nyozakan, who was born in the early
Meiji period, and as a result, he was attracted to and studied British empiricism andAmerican pragmatism, which were similar, and developed a language to discuss modernsociety. For Nyoseki, culture is the totality of the forms of things and minds with a kindof ethics, which are created through the interaction between human beings in their daily
lives, and between human beings and nature and the environment, and which have beenrefined and developed into art, thought, and religion.
By the way, the idea of insisting on the close relationship between life and culture
has something in common with Muneyoshi Yanagi (1889-1961), who led the folk-art
movement, “Mingei movement”, in the Taisho era (1912-1926), although it was still
before World War II. As is well known, Yanagi was a contributor to "Shirakaba," areligious philosopher, a William Blake scholar, and an introducer of modern European
art such as Rodin's. He was also deeply interested in local cultures and made efforts tointroduce and preserve them, sometimes in opposition to the state power. He was a person
who devoted himself to the introduction and preservation of local cultures including
Korean Peninsula, Okinawa, Ainu, and Tohoku. Moreover, he paid attention not to theworks of famous artists, but to vessels, kimonos, and tools made by nameless craftsmen.
In the Buddhist aesthetics based on the Pure Land philosophy that Yanagi developed afterWorld War II, he saw in these works a beauty that transcended the dualism of beauty andugliness, the "beauty of the indivisible," and criticized such a thought which says that thebeauty is the result of skillful workmanship and the ugliness fails to attain that level ofperfection. We see beauty in the work of the "Myokonin" (uneducated pious believers of
the Jodo Shinshu sect), which is born out of a desire to make something beautiful, andwhich, while aiming for practical use, is the result of the potential of the object itself("jinenhoni"). Fearing the collapse of this world, he developed the Mingei (folk art)
movement. At first glance, this may appear to be a restoration of the past, but in fact, it
was a cultural editorial effort to create a new culture.
About one hundred years after Nyozekan criticized the cultural philosophy of theneo-Kantian philosophy, Kulturwissenschaften (cultural science), a cross-disciplinary
cultural study that transcends the boundaries of the humanities and sciences, is flourishingin Germany, and the traditional German concept of culture that Nyozekan had criticizedis being substantially modified. This is characterized by the shocking title of Friedrich
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Kittler's collection of essays, "Die Austreibung des Geistes aus denGeisteswissenschaften" (1980), which was one of the leading exponents of culturalscience. Banish the spirit and study culture. What does it mean? His main work, "Writing
Systems (Aufschreibesysteme) 1800-1900" (originally published in 1985, translated into
Japanese in 2021), is a media-historical cultural study that exposes how our perceptionof the world changes when the tools of writing change. Kittler's position criticizes theview that culture is an externalization of spirit, a basic assumption from Hegel toGeisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik and perhaps the Frankfurt School, and argues thatthe objects and media, although being considered mere tools of the spirit, are the main
subject of the discussion of people and culture. That is, the cultural technology, which is
the way of handling objects and media (letters, paper, printing technology, typewriters,
phonographs, canvases, boards, films, etc.), must be studied as main theme, Theemphasis has shifted from subjects and spirit to objects and media. This is a way oflooking at culture based on the same concept as the "Actor Network Theory (ANT)" ofLatour, who studies scientific anthropology in France.
There, the psyche or the spirit as an entity and the human being as a reflective andconscious person of life, in other words, as a subject, is also not assumed. This idea is said
to be already recognized in Cassirer's "philosophy of symbolic forms," which is also
considered one of the origins of the cultural studies. Cassirer himself began his work as aneo-Kantian in Marburg, but in his interactions at the University of Hamburg withanother source of cultural science, Aby Warburg, who pursued cross-disciplinary
iconography as a matter of cultural memory while evading the scrutiny of the "borderguards", Cassirer underwent a departure from transcendental philosophy, in which thespirit plays a leading role, to symbol philosophy, in which the symbolic form seems to be
the subject. According to Cassirer, culture is nothing more than a network of various
symbolic forms in tension with each other, behind which one cannot find a unified spirit
or thought (see Makabe 2022).
In this way, culture is no longer the totality of classical works and texts created by
the spirit, but the totality of cultural technologies carried out in daily life and produced asa result, and human beings are merely the performers of these practical acts. For example,
Hans Belting's image anthropology (Bildanthropologie) and Horst Bredekamp's"Imageology (Bildwissenschaft)" are not interpretations of the spiritual meaning ofpaintings and sculptures that are considered masterpieces, but rather the previously
neglected illustrations, notated the "Imageology (Bildwissenschaft)" focuses on therelationship between the image (Bild) and its material support (media), as well as its
practical use. It is a pragmatics, not a semantics, of the icon. The focus is on how images
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are used in everyday life and in ritual practice, what meaning emerges from thisperformative process, and what kind of world emerges.
Thus, contemporary German cultural science seems to be changing the traditional
concept of culture. Culture is no longer spoken of in the singular, but in the plural. Thelogic behind the practical acts (Praktiken) of using objects, media, and cultural
technologies is explored, and changes in perception of the world through media, identity
transformation of ethnicity groups, and cultural memory are considered.
But how does this redefinition of the concept of culture by the cultural studies affectpedagogy? This may already be seen in the historical anthropological research of
Christoph Wulff and his colleagues, who consider culture as rituals and performative acts
based on the concept of mimesis. In Japan, I think we can feel some of this influence inthe studies of Shoko Suzuki and Yasuo Imai, as well as in the presentations by thespeakers.
There are two questions I would like to ask you all in common here.
(i) Is a "cultural scientific pedagogy" possible? Can we really talk about culture
and education without the "spirit"? Pedagogy has so far taken subject formation,
autonomy or freedom, culture, humanity, and nation-building as its main concepts when
discussing the relationship between education and culture. However, cultural scienceobserves cultural issues from the opposite direction as described above, from thestandpoint of the post-human, and perhaps describes education in this direction as well.
We can already see this in the study of "fusion of humanities, arts, and sciences". However,I believe that this trend and "pedagogy" will eventually separate. We cannot think of"pedagogy" without the main axis concept as described above. Or are we witnessing the"end of pedagogy"?
(ii) Although I have said that the cultural concept of cultural science is coming closer
to the cultural concept of Nyozekan and Yanagi, it is also true that there is a significant
difference that cannot be overlooked. The culture of food, clothing, and house that makeup our lives have already become entangled in the culture industry, the massive
information industry, and the global economy, and the ethos that has been cultivated in
tradition and has ethical implications has already been lost. Nyozekan and Yanagi hopedthat the practical acts and behaviors of daily life and physical and performative culture
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H. MAKABE

would play a role in supporting education through letters and books, but this may be adifficult assumption to make in the present age.
At the same time, however, I also believe this. No matter how much we havechanged, we must live with our children, who will be responsible for the future, bysharing food, clothing, and house with them. Even if the family and lifestyle no longer
have the form envisioned by Nyozekan and Yanagi, we must still live a life in which we
can feel joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure with them. If this is the case, then we need toconsider a new form of life and culture that will support education. And this is first andforemost a problem for us as adults ourselves.
So, I ask you all. Is it possible to conceive of a new life and culture that supports
education today? If so, what will be important in doing so? Ms. Mishiro's klezmer music
revival movement sounds like a promising example. Ms. Komatsu's ABR experiment as"activation of internal images" seems to me to provide an opportunity to create a newculture by rethinking our lives in a reflective way. In addition, Mr. Yamana's position ofseeking a new metaphor of memory between the human metaphor of memory and thenetwork metaphor of memory, I sense a "pedagogical" attitude that is different from thetrends in cultural science. I would be happy to hear from you about this part of yourresearch, which is out of the scope of cultural science trends.

References
Assmann, Aleida, Einführung in die Kulturwissenschaft. Grundbegriffe, Themen,
Fragestellung, Berlin, 2017.
Belting, Hans, Image jinruigaku (Heibonsha, translated by Yuko Nakama, 2014) =Belting, Hans, Bild-Anthropologie, München, 2001.
Bredekamp, Horst, Monado no mado (Sangyo Tosho, translated by Kenji Hara, 2010)= Bredekamp, Horst, Die Fenster der Monade, Berlin, 2008.
Erll, Astrid, Shugotekikioku to sokibunka (= Memory in Culture: An Introduction toMemory Studies) (Suiseisha, translated by Jun Yamana, 2022).
Hasegawa, Nyozekan, Watashi no josikitetugaku (= My Philosophy of Common
Sense) (Kodansha, 1987).
Kittler, Friedrich, Kakitorisisutemu (=The Writing System) 1800-1900 (Inscript,2021).
Makabe, Hiromoto, Hamburg no Genius Loki wo sokisuru (=Remembering GeniusLoki in Hamburg: A Bildung Topography on the Aby Warburg's Library ofCultural Sciences",) in Kioku to soki no kyoikugaku (=Pedagogy of Memory andSymposium: Orality, Image, Memory and Bildung: Toward the Possibility of Educational Study Based onKulturwissenschaft

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Remembering), edited by Jun Yamana (Keiso Shobo, 2022).
Nawata, Yuji (ed.), Mono to baitai no Jinbungaku (=The Humanities of Objects andMedia: Cultural Studies in Contemporary Germany) (Iwanami Shoten, 2022).
Yanagi, Muneyoshi (supervised by the Japan Folk Art Museum), Yanagi Muneyoshi
Collection 3 Kokoro (Chikuma Shobo, 2011)

E-Journal of Philosophy of Education: International Yearbook of the Philosophy of Education Society of Japan, Vol. 8, 2023