Accueil
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jun_Tosaka
"Tosaka Jun (1900–1945) was one of the boldest, most creative theoreticians to come out of modern Japan. His critique of Japanism, The Japanese Ideology (Nippon ideorogīron, 1935), remains one of the most original theorizations of fascism ever written, certainly in the case of modern Japan. Yet despite this significant work, Tosaka has been almost completely ignored in Japanese studies and philosophy in the West. To date, the few pieces that have appeared in translation pigeonhole Tosaka as a minor materialist corrective to some of the more religious and idealist aspects of the Kyoto School of Japanese philosophy. In direct contrast to this approach, the essays and translations here demonstrate that Tosaka’s critique of Japan and Japanism in the 1930s was not the work of a mere materialist tarrying around the edges of Japanese thought and society: It was total. His project—at once a philosophy of science, a philosophy of history, and a cultural critique—not only explodes the traditional view of prewar Japanese thought, but also continues to shed light on the most urgent and persistent problems in philosophy and politics, especially the deep relationships between capitalism, nationalism, liberalism, fascism, and everyday life." (p.VII)
"Originally a philosopher of science, Tosaka’s melding of neo- Kantianism and Marxism led him to analyze the political and philosophical meanings of technology that went beyond mechanistic interpretations of the “mode of production,” thereby anticipating contemporary theorizations of technology by Negri, Virno, and others on “general intellect.” And with Tosaka’s theorization of concepts such as “technical standards,” he also prefigures many contemporary theorists in science and technology studies working on techno-politics. Most enduringly, however, Tosaka’s understanding of what he called “cultural liberalism” and its relation to fascist ideology places him in the company of a line of anticapitalist thinkers from the past and the present—from Walter Benjamin to Gramsci to more contemporary thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek—who have tried to supplement Marxism’s original critiques of classical political economy with a methodical critique of cultural production in the present." (p.VIII)
"In the case of the immediate postwar world Tosaka’s critique was marginalized, indeed completely ignored, by the nation- bound thinking on both left and right.
On the left, Tosaka’s critique ran afoul of the Japanese Communist Party’s (JCP) allegiance to a Moscow- inspired Japan policy of two- stage revolution—one that must start with a bourgeois, national revolution. Partly a continuation of the legendary and epic debate on Japanese capitalism of the 1920s–1930s (Nihon shihonshugi ronsō), the JCP held that the Meiji Restoration of 1868 had retained too many feudal elements and thus failed to establish a properly bourgeois state. Moscow and the JCP could thus explain away Japanese fascism as a consequence of lingering Japanese feudalism. It followed from this thesis that the immediate post-war political task of the JCP had to be the completion of a Japanese bourgeois revolution." (p.IX)
"Tosaka saw ways in which the feudal past, far from being a barrier to a fully realized, modern capitalism, could in fact support, and even augment, capitalist development. In this theory, the imagined ethnic community of the Japanese past was detached from its socioeconomic base, becoming a free- floating cultural form grafted onto class antagonisms in the present and veiling these antagonisms behind a harmonious folkic capitalism." (p.X)
"The translations and essays in this volume come from the critical period in Japanese history from the Manchurian Incident in 1931 to the outbreak of total war in 1937. This period matches roughly the years Tosaka was active as the editor of, and frequent contributor to, the influential materialism journal Yuibutsuron kenkyū (Studies in Materialism), which was published from 1932 to 1938, when it disbanded due to increasing police harassment. That same year Tosaka was arrested and imprisoned, largely ending his publishing career. In and out of prison between 1938 and 1944, Tosaka died in his cell in Nagano on August 9, 1945, the day the Japanese high command met to discuss surrender." (p.XII)
"The proscription against reading and writing had started earlier, before his final imprisonment, when in 1937 he was forced to stop writing and then a year later, when he and the group at the Society for the Study of Materialism (Yuibutsuron kenkyūkai) were arrested and found guilty of violating the Peace Preservation Laws. Tosaka’s prison history recalls the example of Antonio Gramsci rotting in an Italian fascist jail. But Gramsci was permitted to read and write, which he did prodigiously and for which the posthumously published Prison Notebooks remains a monument to his spirit and intelligence.
Still, perhaps owing to the late development in politics and economy experienced by Japan and Italy, Tosaka and Gramsci shared a kinship in two respects: Both were unable to escape the preoccupation with culture that had further narrowed Marxism in the 1930s to its Western horizon, prompting both to search for a broader, global perspective ; and both privileged what Gramsci named praxis and Tosaka called actualization—immediacy, immanence of the moment, and the necessity for action. Since it was already evident he would not recant like so many of his contemporaries, Tosaka was put in an airless cell not much larger than a cigar box, his inhuman internment designed to silence him completely. The state’s aim was to obliterate his memory altogether from the past he had lived as present—and which his work constitutes a painful but indelible record of struggle. In the end, Tosaka saw his fate resembling Rosa Luxemburg’s, as indicated by his decision to name his place of final detention after her." (p.XVII)
"As early as 1927, Tosaka, responding to an economic recession in
Japan that prefigured the final collapse into a world depression, was already turning away from the attractions of Miki Kiyoshi’s humanistic
Marxism and its Hegelian dimension mediated by Georg Lukacs’ History
and Class Consciousness (which informed Miki’s Marxian forays). In a
later essay on Miki, who was his senior (senpai) and remained his friend
and mentor, Tosaka proposed that Miki’s Marxism never aspired to materialist philosophy but rather to a “materialist view of history,” driven by a
concern for meaning and hermeneutics. At this time Tosaka began to
move toward the materiality that clearly was driving modern life into the
depths of financial failure. Shortly after, this perception was reinforced by
his reaction to Japan’s decision to send a military force to Shandong.
We know that the high watermark of the contemporary crisis was the
proliferation of discourse on culture (art) that sought constantly to reshape
its relationship to politics in such a way as to displace the figure of the
masses altogether for the folk. It was also at this juncture that Tosaka
turned to ideological critique and the promise of practice. These cultural
discourses sought to white-out the complex differentiations that were already showing signs of social conflict for the implantation of an image of
a more culturally unified and integrated social order no longer divided by
class, gender, sexual differences, and such. They aimed at those temporal
and spatial zones where the lived contradictions seemed to be more
sharply etched into the fabric of Japanese life. So much of Tosaka’s critical practice showed awareness of this heightened turn toward cultural discourse and how it had failed to conceal its grounding in an ontological
view of the world. In this conceptualization of culture, existence was replaced by its derivatives and ontology stood in for philosophy.9
By the
early 1930s, Tosaka had already designated a new vocation for philosophic reflection as the recovery of the everyday as it was being lived in
capitalist Japan rather than transcendental preoccupations that bracketed
social reality. The critical program he envisaged concentrated on explaining the forms of ideological mediation inscribed in the evidence and experience of everyday life. Ideological critique corresponded only to Marxism, he insisted, which was dedicated to grasping ideology as idealist
forms, not to the application of social scientific formulae that was implicated in producing ideology. This meant that critique elucidated the ideological character of thought and logic at its deepest internal and abstract
level. This explanation was concerned with showing how “historical and
social existence determined logic,” constituting its reality, the “process of
extracting historical and social existence” that would ultimately disclose
the social form of class consciousness. What Tosaka recognized was the
way ideological “truth character” appeared as a “fictional character.”10 It
first grasped “truth” in relationship to “form and content” and subordinated content as raw material to its shaping, which made it—the content—a “formalized fiction.” Tosaka considered “form” to be that which
“grasped and unified the content as content.” The reason for this is that a
form/shape (keitai) filled with content differs from form as such (keishiki)
that excludes content because it (keitai) is weighted by a “realistic, substantive principle,” which is the character of content.11 Accordingly, this
standpoint determines the adequacy of logic by placing the motivation for
it in “sentiment or faith,” in what is its “characteristic logic.” Hence, the
reality of logic in this way mediates the idea of practice down to the “political” character as a “realization of historical movement.” Thus Tosaka
argued, a logic based on a historical and social ground is situated as a true
logic from one separated from this basis, which makes it a “fictional form”
by way of a “a stagnant logic.” Eventually, a logic not grounded in history, indifferent to “historical necessity,” is one that possesses, in principle, a
“fixed fictional form.”
Here, Tosaka unfolded his critique of a conception of the world
founded on the search for fixed meaning, which always comes last
(saigo), and consciousness that sought to identify life with a sense of
interiority (seimei), with “a conscience that must not be doubted, indeed
a freedom from all other things.”12 Why this sense of interiority comes
last and itself constitutes the character of existence stems from the human
capacity to “symbolize the autonomy of such things as self (ego), speculation, conceptions of consciousness according to an interior life. Humans become aware of a truly lived interior life within the autonomous,
free, and absolute activity of consciousness. These are unavoidably the
last reality.”13 In other words, “existence is consciousness.” This life philosophy (vitalism), whereby existence—Being—is produced by consciousness, pursues the last guarantee of existence, which is found in
feeling (kanjō) or clear reason. For Tosaka, this privileging of emotion
and universal reason was nothing more than the substance of phenomenology, Bergson’s intuitionism, the “universal pertinence of Kant.” But
reality cannot be explained without proof and surely not by positing it
within the clarity of an interiorized life or “consciousness.” Here, Tosaka’s distrust of interiority and consciousness resembled the Soviet thinkers Bakhtin’s and Volosinov’s dismissal of the autonomy of consciousness for a conception of interior speech and conduct rooted in external
social relations.14
The reality that produces the character of Being shows itself within
the material substance, the matter of existence itself, which is its historical
character. In this regard, Tosaka proposed that for history’s character, historical time is the last principle beyond which there are no other principles
to rely on. Time can only rely on history itself and not on any other principle of temporality such as the eternal, which comes from nowhere. History is its own time and cannot employ the time of phenomenology, metaphysics, or even science. In another text, later on, Tosaka named thiprinciple of historical time the everyday.15 Hence, the principle of history
itself is the character of the real. Reality is not the expression of the law
of identity (if a, not b) but rather the way the ultimate totality of the concrete is connected. But the material substance forms the ultimate principle
and history must avoid any dependence on principles outside of it. The
historical principle imparts history itself. The representative work of
actual ideological criticism, where Tosaka appealed to the materiality of
historical and social grounding, is the The Japanese Ideology (Nihon
ideorogīron), which disclosed the substance of “Japanism” and “liberalism” tout court—the central ideology of the “golden age of fascism before
the war.”16 In actuality, bourgeois liberalism formed the “foundation of
society’s common sense” in Japan, whereby the philosophy of liberalism
produced the ideology of Japanism as a “Japan-style fascism” through the
instrumentality of a hermeneutic method that identified fixed meaning." (pp.XX-XXIII)
"In Tosaka’s reckoning, hermeneutics, in its search for the source of ultimate meaning,
avoided the encounter with the earthly order and its materiality for an illusory reunion with a transtemporal realm. Its most prominent result was
to accord privilege to what he called “literary liberalism” or a form of
“literary-ism” in its apprehension of social reality. In this regard, Tosaka
linked the formation of hermeneutics with the cultural freedom liberalism
had embraced after its abandonment of political economy. The most notable methodological production of hermeneutic philosophy was found in
its disciplinizing of philology as the principal instrument for the extraction of meaning and the interpretative enterprise it was made to serve.
This servitude of philology to hermeneutics constituted a form of colonization. “If the principle of the literary [bunkashugi] is the hermeneutic
method, which adopts literary categories based on the real, philology is
based only on literary-like interpretations and the study of the origins of
languages, derived from old texts and documents.”24 Tailoring the ideal of
method to explicating words and their etymologies, Tosaka reasoned that
its explanatory results were invariably constrained by a reliance on old
textual materials, namely the classics.
This procedure inevitably resulted in reworking the content of national history (and indeed became indistinguishable from it) according to
the classical templates since its aim was to replace the way contemporary
problems were understood and resolved under the authoritative imperative of philological interpretations derived from explicating the textual
traces of antiquity.25 In this way, a philologically based philosophic hermeneutics was reduced to a preoccupation with securing access to, and
scouring the recesses of, a hidden order of meaning rather than engaging
the immediate requirements of contemporary material reality. With this
shifting of domains of discourse, the interpretative impulse meant moving
away from the temporal demands of the present to an atemporal and indeterminate zone of archaism—Tosaka’s analogue to Marx’s “ghostly” non-place or “spiritual history” rooted in heaven rather than earth. “That philosophy,” Tosaka stated, referring to hermeneutics, “became the perfect instrument of Japanism the moment it was applied to national history.”." (pp.XXVI)
"Philology’s defects were multiple: The effort to explain words for things eliminated the necessary space between them, making the referent and the referred one and the same thing. This identification was made possible by removing philology from the historico-linguistic substance of language, whereby etymology becomes a poor and inadequate example of historical investigation. Tosaka insisted that the classics could not perform as a substitute for history and offered no basis for determining the problems of the present-day. The disjuncture between classical categories and current logic has meant only that the ethics of an earlier time cannot be resituated in the present. Here, he was clearly targeting Watsuji Tetsurō and indeed the whole structure of morality in contemporary Japan, which had been invested in installing the contradictory claims of a timeless ethics exempted from history to curb the social excesses of capitalist modernization." (pp.XXVII-XVIII)
" In Tosaka’s understanding, archaism, spiritualism,
mysticism have all been colored by the tint of Japanism, just as contemporary forms of Asianism, Orientalism, and Imperial Wayism (ōdōron)
reflected the imperative of spirit. Its absolutism is nothing more than the
application of a hermeneutic method employing the instrumentality of
philology to establish the dominion of a spiritual national history that observes no real temporal break between past and present. Even though Japanism and its authorizing archaism revealed nuanced differences from
European versions of fascism, qualifying it as the cultural expression of a
“Japanese type,” it still constituted an inflection of the form of fascism
itself. If, as Tosaka suggested, its content actually emerged from the
humus of an archaic native history and the philological ideology serving
it, its archaic form and its rejection of time for duration shared a family
resemblance with cultural fascism and the “logic of a holistic society” in
Italy, Germany, Romania, and elsewhere in the world of the 1930s. But by
the same token, Tosaka recognized how hermeneutics had opened the way
to securing a broader-based kinship between diverse national fascisms to
constitute a representative philosophy of the times, as affirmed by the
“undisguised philologism of Martin Heidegger.”34
Hence, archaism, driven by the principle of primitivism, emerged
from the social contradictions of capitalism. For Tosaka its appearance
signified a moment of crisis when capitalism sought to think itself explicitly as transhistorical to overcome the contradictions it had produced in
the crucial interwar period. The way out it offered was to eternalize the
past into an eternal duration that no longer observed the markers of historical division—the “mincing of time” Tosaka elsewhere described as the
condition of history. By superimposing a timeless archaic presence on the
present, capital and its state sponsor had found a way to regulate contemporary society. However, there was nothing uniquely Japanese about this
“solution,” according to Tosaka, which in the interwar conjuncture was
clearly visible throughout the industrial and industrializing world in the
conduct of many other nation-states. Even though there was a sharing of
this kind of nation-state form on an international scale, Tosaka warned of its “chauvinistic” and exceptionalist excesses: “A number of people have
seen that the archaic phenomenon in contemporary Japan is connected to
various chauvinistic attitudes.” But, he continued, it was impossible to
separate the requirements of contemporary imperialism from those animating the “primitivistic ideal” fueling this “archaic phenomenon.” It was this fearful imagery of the worst impulses of nationalistic exceptionalism and its imperial aspirations in the world of the 1930s that prompted him elsewhere to call for a true “universalism,” by which he meant a form of thinking and culture that “cannot do without translating on a worldly scale in the broadest sense of meaning." (pp.XXIX-XXX)
"While the Japanese bourgeosie was probably more evolved than
its German counterpart in the mid-nineteenth century, it had never really
been given the opportunity to carry out its supposed historical task and
achieve its own political revolution. Its historical task was easily transferred to the world of philosophic idealism, which, for Tosaka, embodied
the ideology of contemporary bourgeois society represented best by thinkers like Watsuji Tetsurō and his teachers, Tanabe Hajime and especially
Nishida Kitarō.37
Even though Nishida’s philosophy gestured toward mysticism and religiosity, it was less the sign of a feudal mentality or an atavistic Orientalism since his philosophy was modern.38 While Tosaka acknowledged that
mysticism belongs to German romantic thought and reflects the historical
circumstances of backwardness, it is, nevertheless, still linked to “what
today must be called the ‘religious situation,’” which is possible to detect
in the content of Nishida’s philosophy.39 Tosaka agreed that Nishida’s philosophy was not cloaked in religion and mysticism in the usual sense, but
rather its traces were manifestly inscribed in his method—especially in
the way he justified even those who opposed it. “The method rested on the
standpoint of nothingness” as against a philosophy of being, even though
Tosaka rejected this claim. Despite attempts to associate Nishida’s philosophy with the “new theology” that had contributed to uniting fascist
ideology in Germany and elsewhere, Tosaka was persuaded that no evidence demonstrated a direct relationship. Nishida’s philosophy was nothing more than a proper academic philosophy of a bourgeois society with
an explicit method arising from a concentration on the determination of
particular epistemological goals it seeks to employ.40 The connection he
wanted to make was between class and politics (i.e., fascism) and this
explains why he argued so strenuously to show how Nishida’s philosophy
(and Kyoto by propinquity) represented a proper academic bourgeois philosophy. In this regard, there is more than an echo of Marx’s attack on
Stirner and Bauer as spokesmen for the German petit bourgeoisie. Yet inscribed in the methodological rigor of Nishida’s philosophy lurked a
nagging romantic impulse, consciously directed to resolving the problem
of how to know, order, and systematize in thought the diverse categories
and the fundamental ideas related to existence.
According to Tosaka, there was a genealogy for this effort to interpret
the world as a categorical system, beginning with Fichte and threading its
way through Schelling to Hegel: It was a genealogy that represented nothing more than the life and death process of German romantic philosophy.
In Tosaka’s judgment, Nishida completed this philosophic trajectory
(whose lesser acolytes Marx had already demolished), taking it as far as it
could go, “down to its purest and most self-conscious form.”41 This “completing” was the characteristic standpoint of Nishida’s philosophy, inasmuch as it, like one of the earlier stages in the itinerary completed by
Hegel, was “a natural phenomenon issuing from the self-conscious goal
of the romantic categorical systematization of the world.” As a result of
the “completion” of the philosophical genealogical tableau, Tosaka conceded that Nishida’s philosophy must become the problem and advised
turning attention, once again, to explaining its construction of a methodology committed to grasping existence. The resolution of the problem at
hand, he warned, was not easily captured by simply determining whether
existence is substantial (material) or spiritual. Rather the resolution must
distinguish between the category of existence and existence itself and understand how the idea is completed.
Tosaka wondered how a philosophical method, founded on the logic
of nothingness and that therefore presumed the operation of a dialectical
law, resulted only in “clarifying meaning of that which had become
dialectical.”42 In spite of operating under the sign of the dialectic, he was
convinced that the method never really employed it. Instead, the method
was driven by a logic concerned only with “interpreting how to consider
the meaning of dialectics (itself).” Even though it appeared to be concerned with apprehending the meaning of what calls itself dialectics, it
has never managed to rise above the act of fixing meaning to actually
consider it dialectically. Whether it was addressing the dilemma of “continuity of discontinuity” or the “rationality of unrationality,” the method has never passed beyond revealing its reliance on “one kind of transdialectical mysticism.” Apart from employing the “logic of nothingness,”
Tosaka charged, “it was nothing but a denial of the dialectic of existence”
that resulted in a “dialectics of nothing” for its failure to “treat existence.”
“The logic of nothingness was nothing more than a deformation [waikyoku], which exchanged the management of things [jibutsu] for the
meaning elicited by the facts.”43 Tosaka reasoned that Nishida’s logic,
with its momentous exchanging of things for interpretation, was actually
undermined by virtue of the impossibility involved in “sufficiently managing the meaning brought to facts, because it is not possible to manage
things themselves.” But the real question relates only to how meaning is
made independently from these facts and things. Specifically, the predicament he discerned was deciding not what things are in actuality but rather
determining how what conveys meaning is “valued in the name of these
things.”44 It is important to recognize in this move the inversion demanded
by commodity exchange of an exchange of the concrete—the thing for an
abstraction, undoubtedly calling attention to the operation of commodity
exchange. Yet it revealed in condensed form the whole inversion from
material life to spiritual existence, which, according to Tosaka, was initiated the moment liberalism abandoned politics and economics for religion
and culture. The most important consequence of this inversion was to replace a history of the present—a history responsive to the immediacies of
contemporary social reality—with the history of an indeterminate past, a
bad history for a good one. Moreover, he continued, it is not what society,
history, and nature are but what meaning the idea of society, history, and
nature possess, what position they occupy in the categorical system of
meaning. As an example, Tosaka offered the following: “Society doesn’t
only possess meaning for the I-and-thou relationship.” When you begin to
pick out and choose words and phrases from within the capacious “selfconscious determination of nothingness,” it is no different for countless
readers who will invest diverse meanings with their own usage. The point
he wished to emphasize is that the presumed authority claimed for the
archaic precedent could offer no ground for fixing a singular meaning for
all times. Hence, the “logic of nothingness” has made only the “‘logical significance’ of things and facts the problem.”45 With its method, steeped
in a hermeneutic philosophy dedicated to illuminating meaning, it is impossible to escape the approach to being and existence as if it were simply
an idea." (pp.XXXI-XXXIV)
"Tosaka reported that Nishida’s great colleague at Kyoto, Tanabe Hajime, resembled Hegel insofar as both were idealists who shared a rigorous antimaterialism, a description Tanabe might have welcomed. But
Nishida, he continued, inverted this position and made it into a negative
logic. Why the theory of nothingness fails as a logic is because it has no
capacity to think through existence, which, for Tosaka and materialism,
started with the production of material life and the satisfaction of needs. It
was always stopping short of taking this step to remain captive to the endless search for “logical meaning.” Owing to this pursuit, Tanabe was emboldened to portray Nishida’s philosophy as a “gothic temple” and withheld “prais(ing) this attitude because it had failed to consider that late
romanticism had retreated to the darkness of the middle ages.”46 Yet, Tosaka concluded, Nishida had no taste for the feudal, it was not his style.
His thinking rather produced a modern philosophy that supplied a “thankful spiritual offering to the bourgeoisie.”47 As for the cultivated contemporaries (gendaijin) of modern capitalism in Japan, it was now possible to
discover in the precincts of Nishida’s philosophy a habitat for the homeless, culturally free consciousness of the bourgeois self. But we must remember that the cost for this cultural freedom was enabled by the flight of
political liberalism, which had opened its doors to welcome a diversity of
ideas, often clashing with each other. Such a veritable witches’ brew of
ideologies made possible its fateful encounter with the religious and
hermeneutics that prepared the way for fascism in the form of an archaism
empowered to replace the exemplars of national history with a new spiritual history called Japanism. “It was for this reason that (Nishida’s philosophy) became the representative of cultural liberalism (as opposed to
economic, political liberalism)” and explains its “popularity” with a
class—the bourgeoisie—that fought for self-definition through cultural
authority and won." (p.XXXIV)
-Ken C. Kawashima, Fabian Schäfer, Robert Stolz (eds.), Tosaka Jun. A Critical Reader, Cornell University East Asia Program, USA, 2013, 313 pages.
"Tosaka Jun (1900–1945) was one of the boldest, most creative theoreticians to come out of modern Japan. His critique of Japanism, The Japanese Ideology (Nippon ideorogīron, 1935), remains one of the most original theorizations of fascism ever written, certainly in the case of modern Japan. Yet despite this significant work, Tosaka has been almost completely ignored in Japanese studies and philosophy in the West. To date, the few pieces that have appeared in translation pigeonhole Tosaka as a minor materialist corrective to some of the more religious and idealist aspects of the Kyoto School of Japanese philosophy. In direct contrast to this approach, the essays and translations here demonstrate that Tosaka’s critique of Japan and Japanism in the 1930s was not the work of a mere materialist tarrying around the edges of Japanese thought and society: It was total. His project—at once a philosophy of science, a philosophy of history, and a cultural critique—not only explodes the traditional view of prewar Japanese thought, but also continues to shed light on the most urgent and persistent problems in philosophy and politics, especially the deep relationships between capitalism, nationalism, liberalism, fascism, and everyday life." (p.VII)
"Originally a philosopher of science, Tosaka’s melding of neo- Kantianism and Marxism led him to analyze the political and philosophical meanings of technology that went beyond mechanistic interpretations of the “mode of production,” thereby anticipating contemporary theorizations of technology by Negri, Virno, and others on “general intellect.” And with Tosaka’s theorization of concepts such as “technical standards,” he also prefigures many contemporary theorists in science and technology studies working on techno-politics. Most enduringly, however, Tosaka’s understanding of what he called “cultural liberalism” and its relation to fascist ideology places him in the company of a line of anticapitalist thinkers from the past and the present—from Walter Benjamin to Gramsci to more contemporary thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek—who have tried to supplement Marxism’s original critiques of classical political economy with a methodical critique of cultural production in the present." (p.VIII)
"In the case of the immediate postwar world Tosaka’s critique was marginalized, indeed completely ignored, by the nation- bound thinking on both left and right.
On the left, Tosaka’s critique ran afoul of the Japanese Communist Party’s (JCP) allegiance to a Moscow- inspired Japan policy of two- stage revolution—one that must start with a bourgeois, national revolution. Partly a continuation of the legendary and epic debate on Japanese capitalism of the 1920s–1930s (Nihon shihonshugi ronsō), the JCP held that the Meiji Restoration of 1868 had retained too many feudal elements and thus failed to establish a properly bourgeois state. Moscow and the JCP could thus explain away Japanese fascism as a consequence of lingering Japanese feudalism. It followed from this thesis that the immediate post-war political task of the JCP had to be the completion of a Japanese bourgeois revolution." (p.IX)
"Tosaka saw ways in which the feudal past, far from being a barrier to a fully realized, modern capitalism, could in fact support, and even augment, capitalist development. In this theory, the imagined ethnic community of the Japanese past was detached from its socioeconomic base, becoming a free- floating cultural form grafted onto class antagonisms in the present and veiling these antagonisms behind a harmonious folkic capitalism." (p.X)
"The translations and essays in this volume come from the critical period in Japanese history from the Manchurian Incident in 1931 to the outbreak of total war in 1937. This period matches roughly the years Tosaka was active as the editor of, and frequent contributor to, the influential materialism journal Yuibutsuron kenkyū (Studies in Materialism), which was published from 1932 to 1938, when it disbanded due to increasing police harassment. That same year Tosaka was arrested and imprisoned, largely ending his publishing career. In and out of prison between 1938 and 1944, Tosaka died in his cell in Nagano on August 9, 1945, the day the Japanese high command met to discuss surrender." (p.XII)
"The proscription against reading and writing had started earlier, before his final imprisonment, when in 1937 he was forced to stop writing and then a year later, when he and the group at the Society for the Study of Materialism (Yuibutsuron kenkyūkai) were arrested and found guilty of violating the Peace Preservation Laws. Tosaka’s prison history recalls the example of Antonio Gramsci rotting in an Italian fascist jail. But Gramsci was permitted to read and write, which he did prodigiously and for which the posthumously published Prison Notebooks remains a monument to his spirit and intelligence.
Still, perhaps owing to the late development in politics and economy experienced by Japan and Italy, Tosaka and Gramsci shared a kinship in two respects: Both were unable to escape the preoccupation with culture that had further narrowed Marxism in the 1930s to its Western horizon, prompting both to search for a broader, global perspective ; and both privileged what Gramsci named praxis and Tosaka called actualization—immediacy, immanence of the moment, and the necessity for action. Since it was already evident he would not recant like so many of his contemporaries, Tosaka was put in an airless cell not much larger than a cigar box, his inhuman internment designed to silence him completely. The state’s aim was to obliterate his memory altogether from the past he had lived as present—and which his work constitutes a painful but indelible record of struggle. In the end, Tosaka saw his fate resembling Rosa Luxemburg’s, as indicated by his decision to name his place of final detention after her." (p.XVII)
"As early as 1927, Tosaka, responding to an economic recession in
Japan that prefigured the final collapse into a world depression, was already turning away from the attractions of Miki Kiyoshi’s humanistic
Marxism and its Hegelian dimension mediated by Georg Lukacs’ History
and Class Consciousness (which informed Miki’s Marxian forays). In a
later essay on Miki, who was his senior (senpai) and remained his friend
and mentor, Tosaka proposed that Miki’s Marxism never aspired to materialist philosophy but rather to a “materialist view of history,” driven by a
concern for meaning and hermeneutics. At this time Tosaka began to
move toward the materiality that clearly was driving modern life into the
depths of financial failure. Shortly after, this perception was reinforced by
his reaction to Japan’s decision to send a military force to Shandong.
We know that the high watermark of the contemporary crisis was the
proliferation of discourse on culture (art) that sought constantly to reshape
its relationship to politics in such a way as to displace the figure of the
masses altogether for the folk. It was also at this juncture that Tosaka
turned to ideological critique and the promise of practice. These cultural
discourses sought to white-out the complex differentiations that were already showing signs of social conflict for the implantation of an image of
a more culturally unified and integrated social order no longer divided by
class, gender, sexual differences, and such. They aimed at those temporal
and spatial zones where the lived contradictions seemed to be more
sharply etched into the fabric of Japanese life. So much of Tosaka’s critical practice showed awareness of this heightened turn toward cultural discourse and how it had failed to conceal its grounding in an ontological
view of the world. In this conceptualization of culture, existence was replaced by its derivatives and ontology stood in for philosophy.9
By the
early 1930s, Tosaka had already designated a new vocation for philosophic reflection as the recovery of the everyday as it was being lived in
capitalist Japan rather than transcendental preoccupations that bracketed
social reality. The critical program he envisaged concentrated on explaining the forms of ideological mediation inscribed in the evidence and experience of everyday life. Ideological critique corresponded only to Marxism, he insisted, which was dedicated to grasping ideology as idealist
forms, not to the application of social scientific formulae that was implicated in producing ideology. This meant that critique elucidated the ideological character of thought and logic at its deepest internal and abstract
level. This explanation was concerned with showing how “historical and
social existence determined logic,” constituting its reality, the “process of
extracting historical and social existence” that would ultimately disclose
the social form of class consciousness. What Tosaka recognized was the
way ideological “truth character” appeared as a “fictional character.”10 It
first grasped “truth” in relationship to “form and content” and subordinated content as raw material to its shaping, which made it—the content—a “formalized fiction.” Tosaka considered “form” to be that which
“grasped and unified the content as content.” The reason for this is that a
form/shape (keitai) filled with content differs from form as such (keishiki)
that excludes content because it (keitai) is weighted by a “realistic, substantive principle,” which is the character of content.11 Accordingly, this
standpoint determines the adequacy of logic by placing the motivation for
it in “sentiment or faith,” in what is its “characteristic logic.” Hence, the
reality of logic in this way mediates the idea of practice down to the “political” character as a “realization of historical movement.” Thus Tosaka
argued, a logic based on a historical and social ground is situated as a true
logic from one separated from this basis, which makes it a “fictional form”
by way of a “a stagnant logic.” Eventually, a logic not grounded in history, indifferent to “historical necessity,” is one that possesses, in principle, a
“fixed fictional form.”
Here, Tosaka unfolded his critique of a conception of the world
founded on the search for fixed meaning, which always comes last
(saigo), and consciousness that sought to identify life with a sense of
interiority (seimei), with “a conscience that must not be doubted, indeed
a freedom from all other things.”12 Why this sense of interiority comes
last and itself constitutes the character of existence stems from the human
capacity to “symbolize the autonomy of such things as self (ego), speculation, conceptions of consciousness according to an interior life. Humans become aware of a truly lived interior life within the autonomous,
free, and absolute activity of consciousness. These are unavoidably the
last reality.”13 In other words, “existence is consciousness.” This life philosophy (vitalism), whereby existence—Being—is produced by consciousness, pursues the last guarantee of existence, which is found in
feeling (kanjō) or clear reason. For Tosaka, this privileging of emotion
and universal reason was nothing more than the substance of phenomenology, Bergson’s intuitionism, the “universal pertinence of Kant.” But
reality cannot be explained without proof and surely not by positing it
within the clarity of an interiorized life or “consciousness.” Here, Tosaka’s distrust of interiority and consciousness resembled the Soviet thinkers Bakhtin’s and Volosinov’s dismissal of the autonomy of consciousness for a conception of interior speech and conduct rooted in external
social relations.14
The reality that produces the character of Being shows itself within
the material substance, the matter of existence itself, which is its historical
character. In this regard, Tosaka proposed that for history’s character, historical time is the last principle beyond which there are no other principles
to rely on. Time can only rely on history itself and not on any other principle of temporality such as the eternal, which comes from nowhere. History is its own time and cannot employ the time of phenomenology, metaphysics, or even science. In another text, later on, Tosaka named thiprinciple of historical time the everyday.15 Hence, the principle of history
itself is the character of the real. Reality is not the expression of the law
of identity (if a, not b) but rather the way the ultimate totality of the concrete is connected. But the material substance forms the ultimate principle
and history must avoid any dependence on principles outside of it. The
historical principle imparts history itself. The representative work of
actual ideological criticism, where Tosaka appealed to the materiality of
historical and social grounding, is the The Japanese Ideology (Nihon
ideorogīron), which disclosed the substance of “Japanism” and “liberalism” tout court—the central ideology of the “golden age of fascism before
the war.”16 In actuality, bourgeois liberalism formed the “foundation of
society’s common sense” in Japan, whereby the philosophy of liberalism
produced the ideology of Japanism as a “Japan-style fascism” through the
instrumentality of a hermeneutic method that identified fixed meaning." (pp.XX-XXIII)
"In Tosaka’s reckoning, hermeneutics, in its search for the source of ultimate meaning,
avoided the encounter with the earthly order and its materiality for an illusory reunion with a transtemporal realm. Its most prominent result was
to accord privilege to what he called “literary liberalism” or a form of
“literary-ism” in its apprehension of social reality. In this regard, Tosaka
linked the formation of hermeneutics with the cultural freedom liberalism
had embraced after its abandonment of political economy. The most notable methodological production of hermeneutic philosophy was found in
its disciplinizing of philology as the principal instrument for the extraction of meaning and the interpretative enterprise it was made to serve.
This servitude of philology to hermeneutics constituted a form of colonization. “If the principle of the literary [bunkashugi] is the hermeneutic
method, which adopts literary categories based on the real, philology is
based only on literary-like interpretations and the study of the origins of
languages, derived from old texts and documents.”24 Tailoring the ideal of
method to explicating words and their etymologies, Tosaka reasoned that
its explanatory results were invariably constrained by a reliance on old
textual materials, namely the classics.
This procedure inevitably resulted in reworking the content of national history (and indeed became indistinguishable from it) according to
the classical templates since its aim was to replace the way contemporary
problems were understood and resolved under the authoritative imperative of philological interpretations derived from explicating the textual
traces of antiquity.25 In this way, a philologically based philosophic hermeneutics was reduced to a preoccupation with securing access to, and
scouring the recesses of, a hidden order of meaning rather than engaging
the immediate requirements of contemporary material reality. With this
shifting of domains of discourse, the interpretative impulse meant moving
away from the temporal demands of the present to an atemporal and indeterminate zone of archaism—Tosaka’s analogue to Marx’s “ghostly” non-place or “spiritual history” rooted in heaven rather than earth. “That philosophy,” Tosaka stated, referring to hermeneutics, “became the perfect instrument of Japanism the moment it was applied to national history.”." (pp.XXVI)
"Philology’s defects were multiple: The effort to explain words for things eliminated the necessary space between them, making the referent and the referred one and the same thing. This identification was made possible by removing philology from the historico-linguistic substance of language, whereby etymology becomes a poor and inadequate example of historical investigation. Tosaka insisted that the classics could not perform as a substitute for history and offered no basis for determining the problems of the present-day. The disjuncture between classical categories and current logic has meant only that the ethics of an earlier time cannot be resituated in the present. Here, he was clearly targeting Watsuji Tetsurō and indeed the whole structure of morality in contemporary Japan, which had been invested in installing the contradictory claims of a timeless ethics exempted from history to curb the social excesses of capitalist modernization." (pp.XXVII-XVIII)
" In Tosaka’s understanding, archaism, spiritualism,
mysticism have all been colored by the tint of Japanism, just as contemporary forms of Asianism, Orientalism, and Imperial Wayism (ōdōron)
reflected the imperative of spirit. Its absolutism is nothing more than the
application of a hermeneutic method employing the instrumentality of
philology to establish the dominion of a spiritual national history that observes no real temporal break between past and present. Even though Japanism and its authorizing archaism revealed nuanced differences from
European versions of fascism, qualifying it as the cultural expression of a
“Japanese type,” it still constituted an inflection of the form of fascism
itself. If, as Tosaka suggested, its content actually emerged from the
humus of an archaic native history and the philological ideology serving
it, its archaic form and its rejection of time for duration shared a family
resemblance with cultural fascism and the “logic of a holistic society” in
Italy, Germany, Romania, and elsewhere in the world of the 1930s. But by
the same token, Tosaka recognized how hermeneutics had opened the way
to securing a broader-based kinship between diverse national fascisms to
constitute a representative philosophy of the times, as affirmed by the
“undisguised philologism of Martin Heidegger.”34
Hence, archaism, driven by the principle of primitivism, emerged
from the social contradictions of capitalism. For Tosaka its appearance
signified a moment of crisis when capitalism sought to think itself explicitly as transhistorical to overcome the contradictions it had produced in
the crucial interwar period. The way out it offered was to eternalize the
past into an eternal duration that no longer observed the markers of historical division—the “mincing of time” Tosaka elsewhere described as the
condition of history. By superimposing a timeless archaic presence on the
present, capital and its state sponsor had found a way to regulate contemporary society. However, there was nothing uniquely Japanese about this
“solution,” according to Tosaka, which in the interwar conjuncture was
clearly visible throughout the industrial and industrializing world in the
conduct of many other nation-states. Even though there was a sharing of
this kind of nation-state form on an international scale, Tosaka warned of its “chauvinistic” and exceptionalist excesses: “A number of people have
seen that the archaic phenomenon in contemporary Japan is connected to
various chauvinistic attitudes.” But, he continued, it was impossible to
separate the requirements of contemporary imperialism from those animating the “primitivistic ideal” fueling this “archaic phenomenon.” It was this fearful imagery of the worst impulses of nationalistic exceptionalism and its imperial aspirations in the world of the 1930s that prompted him elsewhere to call for a true “universalism,” by which he meant a form of thinking and culture that “cannot do without translating on a worldly scale in the broadest sense of meaning." (pp.XXIX-XXX)
"While the Japanese bourgeosie was probably more evolved than
its German counterpart in the mid-nineteenth century, it had never really
been given the opportunity to carry out its supposed historical task and
achieve its own political revolution. Its historical task was easily transferred to the world of philosophic idealism, which, for Tosaka, embodied
the ideology of contemporary bourgeois society represented best by thinkers like Watsuji Tetsurō and his teachers, Tanabe Hajime and especially
Nishida Kitarō.37
Even though Nishida’s philosophy gestured toward mysticism and religiosity, it was less the sign of a feudal mentality or an atavistic Orientalism since his philosophy was modern.38 While Tosaka acknowledged that
mysticism belongs to German romantic thought and reflects the historical
circumstances of backwardness, it is, nevertheless, still linked to “what
today must be called the ‘religious situation,’” which is possible to detect
in the content of Nishida’s philosophy.39 Tosaka agreed that Nishida’s philosophy was not cloaked in religion and mysticism in the usual sense, but
rather its traces were manifestly inscribed in his method—especially in
the way he justified even those who opposed it. “The method rested on the
standpoint of nothingness” as against a philosophy of being, even though
Tosaka rejected this claim. Despite attempts to associate Nishida’s philosophy with the “new theology” that had contributed to uniting fascist
ideology in Germany and elsewhere, Tosaka was persuaded that no evidence demonstrated a direct relationship. Nishida’s philosophy was nothing more than a proper academic philosophy of a bourgeois society with
an explicit method arising from a concentration on the determination of
particular epistemological goals it seeks to employ.40 The connection he
wanted to make was between class and politics (i.e., fascism) and this
explains why he argued so strenuously to show how Nishida’s philosophy
(and Kyoto by propinquity) represented a proper academic bourgeois philosophy. In this regard, there is more than an echo of Marx’s attack on
Stirner and Bauer as spokesmen for the German petit bourgeoisie. Yet inscribed in the methodological rigor of Nishida’s philosophy lurked a
nagging romantic impulse, consciously directed to resolving the problem
of how to know, order, and systematize in thought the diverse categories
and the fundamental ideas related to existence.
According to Tosaka, there was a genealogy for this effort to interpret
the world as a categorical system, beginning with Fichte and threading its
way through Schelling to Hegel: It was a genealogy that represented nothing more than the life and death process of German romantic philosophy.
In Tosaka’s judgment, Nishida completed this philosophic trajectory
(whose lesser acolytes Marx had already demolished), taking it as far as it
could go, “down to its purest and most self-conscious form.”41 This “completing” was the characteristic standpoint of Nishida’s philosophy, inasmuch as it, like one of the earlier stages in the itinerary completed by
Hegel, was “a natural phenomenon issuing from the self-conscious goal
of the romantic categorical systematization of the world.” As a result of
the “completion” of the philosophical genealogical tableau, Tosaka conceded that Nishida’s philosophy must become the problem and advised
turning attention, once again, to explaining its construction of a methodology committed to grasping existence. The resolution of the problem at
hand, he warned, was not easily captured by simply determining whether
existence is substantial (material) or spiritual. Rather the resolution must
distinguish between the category of existence and existence itself and understand how the idea is completed.
Tosaka wondered how a philosophical method, founded on the logic
of nothingness and that therefore presumed the operation of a dialectical
law, resulted only in “clarifying meaning of that which had become
dialectical.”42 In spite of operating under the sign of the dialectic, he was
convinced that the method never really employed it. Instead, the method
was driven by a logic concerned only with “interpreting how to consider
the meaning of dialectics (itself).” Even though it appeared to be concerned with apprehending the meaning of what calls itself dialectics, it
has never managed to rise above the act of fixing meaning to actually
consider it dialectically. Whether it was addressing the dilemma of “continuity of discontinuity” or the “rationality of unrationality,” the method has never passed beyond revealing its reliance on “one kind of transdialectical mysticism.” Apart from employing the “logic of nothingness,”
Tosaka charged, “it was nothing but a denial of the dialectic of existence”
that resulted in a “dialectics of nothing” for its failure to “treat existence.”
“The logic of nothingness was nothing more than a deformation [waikyoku], which exchanged the management of things [jibutsu] for the
meaning elicited by the facts.”43 Tosaka reasoned that Nishida’s logic,
with its momentous exchanging of things for interpretation, was actually
undermined by virtue of the impossibility involved in “sufficiently managing the meaning brought to facts, because it is not possible to manage
things themselves.” But the real question relates only to how meaning is
made independently from these facts and things. Specifically, the predicament he discerned was deciding not what things are in actuality but rather
determining how what conveys meaning is “valued in the name of these
things.”44 It is important to recognize in this move the inversion demanded
by commodity exchange of an exchange of the concrete—the thing for an
abstraction, undoubtedly calling attention to the operation of commodity
exchange. Yet it revealed in condensed form the whole inversion from
material life to spiritual existence, which, according to Tosaka, was initiated the moment liberalism abandoned politics and economics for religion
and culture. The most important consequence of this inversion was to replace a history of the present—a history responsive to the immediacies of
contemporary social reality—with the history of an indeterminate past, a
bad history for a good one. Moreover, he continued, it is not what society,
history, and nature are but what meaning the idea of society, history, and
nature possess, what position they occupy in the categorical system of
meaning. As an example, Tosaka offered the following: “Society doesn’t
only possess meaning for the I-and-thou relationship.” When you begin to
pick out and choose words and phrases from within the capacious “selfconscious determination of nothingness,” it is no different for countless
readers who will invest diverse meanings with their own usage. The point
he wished to emphasize is that the presumed authority claimed for the
archaic precedent could offer no ground for fixing a singular meaning for
all times. Hence, the “logic of nothingness” has made only the “‘logical significance’ of things and facts the problem.”45 With its method, steeped
in a hermeneutic philosophy dedicated to illuminating meaning, it is impossible to escape the approach to being and existence as if it were simply
an idea." (pp.XXXI-XXXIV)
"Tosaka reported that Nishida’s great colleague at Kyoto, Tanabe Hajime, resembled Hegel insofar as both were idealists who shared a rigorous antimaterialism, a description Tanabe might have welcomed. But
Nishida, he continued, inverted this position and made it into a negative
logic. Why the theory of nothingness fails as a logic is because it has no
capacity to think through existence, which, for Tosaka and materialism,
started with the production of material life and the satisfaction of needs. It
was always stopping short of taking this step to remain captive to the endless search for “logical meaning.” Owing to this pursuit, Tanabe was emboldened to portray Nishida’s philosophy as a “gothic temple” and withheld “prais(ing) this attitude because it had failed to consider that late
romanticism had retreated to the darkness of the middle ages.”46 Yet, Tosaka concluded, Nishida had no taste for the feudal, it was not his style.
His thinking rather produced a modern philosophy that supplied a “thankful spiritual offering to the bourgeoisie.”47 As for the cultivated contemporaries (gendaijin) of modern capitalism in Japan, it was now possible to
discover in the precincts of Nishida’s philosophy a habitat for the homeless, culturally free consciousness of the bourgeois self. But we must remember that the cost for this cultural freedom was enabled by the flight of
political liberalism, which had opened its doors to welcome a diversity of
ideas, often clashing with each other. Such a veritable witches’ brew of
ideologies made possible its fateful encounter with the religious and
hermeneutics that prepared the way for fascism in the form of an archaism
empowered to replace the exemplars of national history with a new spiritual history called Japanism. “It was for this reason that (Nishida’s philosophy) became the representative of cultural liberalism (as opposed to
economic, political liberalism)” and explains its “popularity” with a
class—the bourgeoisie—that fought for self-definition through cultural
authority and won." (p.XXXIV)
-Ken C. Kawashima, Fabian Schäfer, Robert Stolz (eds.), Tosaka Jun. A Critical Reader, Cornell University East Asia Program, USA, 2013, 313 pages.
