Abstract
Transformation studies should be a key topic for the comparative analysis of civilizations. Their most important task is to deal with the changes to world-views and cultural semantics inherited from axial traditions, changes resulting from the emergence of modern society and its radically innovative normative turn. To put it another way, the question relates to modern discursive reworkings of path-dependent figures of thought. In the context of such processes, discourses on identity intertwine with more or less critically oriented discourses on culture and society. For non-European countries, and very emphatically for Japan, Northwestern Europe is an almost exclusive domain of reference, notwithstanding eventual condemnations of European “decadence” or – as the case may be – capitalist contradictions. But when some critical distance from Europe is achieved, it combines easily with returns to a supposedly primordial native legacy, even with the illusory belief that this legacy can inspire a transformative creation of something new in human history. Such intellectual phenomena occur, with significant variations, across a broad political spectrum. This essay discusses a few exemplary Japanese cases.
Highlights
Transformation studies should be a key topic for the comparative analysis of civilizations
Path-dependent changes of premodern societies into radically new formations with new normative claims – in other words: the normative turn to modernity – raise provocative questions when the civilizational horizon expands beyond the Occidental line of development; this applies to the level of historical inquiry as well as that of philosophical reconstruction
As for the study of the abovementioned interferences, it is tempting to focus on the field where discourses on identity meet the problems of orientation arising from perceived deformations of modernity, social or cultural
Summary
On 11 February 1946, i.e. on the day when the so-called foundation of the realm was celebrated, the newly appointed rector of the Imperial Tokyo University (as it was still called), Nanbara Shigeru (1889–1974) gave a speech in the main aula of the university. Its title was “On the creation of a new Japanese culture” (or, as we can translate the Japanese original, “On the creation of culture for a new Japan”). The business goes on functioning.The three authors see this as a non-individualist, contextualist version of modernity, fundamental to Japan’s success; all the more so since Western societies find themselves in a blind alley, due to modes of thought rooted in the polarization of subject and object, as well as to their vision of domination over nature and their ideal of a social state This is an important theoretical premise of the book, but little is done to substantiate it. More generally, a shift of focus from the history of culture and religion to the forms of social and political organization, supposedly still at work in modern institutions Despite these differences, surely related to the progress from a landscape of ruins to a prosperous export-centred economy, there are noticeable affinities between all these self-proclaimed spiritual leaders of the nation.
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