Crisis and World Temporality: The Post-Fukushima Binary of the Everyday

Abstract

Various elements of the everyday have been suspended, interrogated, and redefined in the estranged experience of the crisis that occurred in Japan shortly after March 2011. This complex transformation of quotidian consciousness gives renewed meaning to Miki Kiyoshi's philosophy of history, especially his interrogations of human temporality in the 1930s. Miki's idea of the binary of genzai (the present) and gendai (the modern) that he developed during wartime resembles the duality of everyday experience in the postearthquake nuclear crisis of the current century. Simultaneously, this recognition of the binary gives the biosemiological notion Umwelt (Uexküll) a new definition. Namely, despite the modern's tendency to quantify its temporality, human Umwelt retained its singularity of the present in these circumstances. Another similarity between these two historical circumstances is awareness of world temporality and its presumed universality. The publication of Karatani Kōjin's Reading “The Structure of World History” (2011), which is his self-commentaries on The Structure of World History (2010), signals an elevated awareness of world history in the current century. It is possible to compare this contemporary discourse on world history to the wartime debates on world history: The Standpoint of World History and Japan (1943). However, contrary to Miki's in-depth examinations of the quotidian, neither Structure nor Standpoint shows analogous commitments to their respective everyday. Miki's binary of everydayness remains self-contradictory between the singularity of the quotidian and the universal of world temporality without collapsing to one or the other. Since this binary essentially characterizes his philosophical anthropology (ningengaku), his thought involves the redefinition of the idea of the human, the concept that fundamentally characterizes present civilizations.