ラフカディオ・ハーンと「近代の超克」 : 幻想光学III

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The present article intentionally commits errors of "anachronism" and "categorical confusion": it tries to assess the literary works of Lafcadio Hearn through their "afterlife" after the author's death as it appeared to Kitaro Nishida and the Kyoto School intent on designing and justifying the future of the Japanese Empire with their philosophy of history. Irregular and even invalidated as it may seem, such "comparative study" can reveal various aspects of both the contents and methods of the same problematique facing both the writer and the philosopher: the overcoming of modernity.Hearn tried to overcome modernity - the 19th-century western civilization - retrospectively and centrifugally. An outcast from the western world, Hearn tried to reformulate the status of an outcast imposed upon himself into an effect of his own intentionally chosen act of self-exile. For the purpose, he directed his eyes away from the modern west backward to the past - Greece his motherland and its "pre-modern" state - as well as toward areas outside the west - his "eastern" world including Greece, the West Indies, and Japan. These historical and geographical Others to the modern west were what constituted "Asia" for him.Nishida shared Hearn's sense of threats of the modern west, but criticized his methods as effeminate and sentimental ones of a literary man. Instead, Nishida and th Kyoto School tried to overcome modernity - the 20th-century western imperialistic expansion into the East - prospectively and centripetally. They envisioned and justified with their philosophy of history a post-modern future for Japan and Asia supplanting the western modernity, and a non-western empire defeating the western imperialist powers - a vision of the creation of "the Co-Prosperous Eastern Sphere" with the "Divine Japan" at its center -.Similar alternations of acceptance and rejection, among the Japanese intellectuals in the 20th century, of both Hearn's and Nishida's visions and methods for the "overcoming of modernity" show that "Asia" should not be treated as an essence, simply because it has never been one, but always as a method, as Yoshimi Takeuchi argues. As Takeuchi concludes, once the distinction between essence and method is strictly maintained, then the problem of "the overcoming of modernity" remains still, and more than ever, an urgent problem facing us in the 21st century.Rephrased in the present article's terms, Takeuchi's distinction between essence and method would be one between reality and image. Hence, all the problems with and around "the overcoming of modernity" could be identified with the problems of the "images" of Asia as they are reflected upon the literary and philosophical retina of Hearn's and Nishida's eyes. Within a critical framework thus revised, then the "errors of anachronism and categorical confusion" would still pose the problem as a valid one at least in what the present article proposes to call "fantastic optics."

ラフカディオ・ハーンと「近代の超克」 : 幻想光学III

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