Difference Modernity by Clammer

Author:Clammer [Clammer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Reference, General, Social Science, Sociology
ISBN: 9781136898211
Google: 6YBp6KSYW3IC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-05-13T04:42:46+00:00

Nature and the Debate on Modernity

Modernity effects nature through industrialization and urbanization: the roots of the present ecological crisis lie in modernity, in both its empirical processes and in its mind-set. This is as true in Japan as elsewhere and is reflected in the attempts that have been made to come to terms with or to characterize the transition from pre-modenrity to modernity (and subsequently to postmodemity. Here points of view range from the position of Maruyama Masao with his thesis that Japan is not yet even fully modem, let alone postmodern (Maruyama 1965, 1974) to that of Karatani Kojin (1985) who attempts to grasp and even celebrate the onset of postmodemity in Japan. Maruyama sees the failure to achieve genuine modernity partly as the result of the failure to achieve genuine individualism (defined as the creation of an autonomous self, one that is inner-directed) which he sees as the basis of democracy, but also as the failure to make the transition from nature (shizeri) to invention (sakui). Traditional societies are those still bound to hereditary status (de-arukoto) existing in a state of submission to the natural order. In Maruyama’s view it is necessary to transcend this relationship to nature to produce modernity – to move from necessity bound by nature to that freely accomplished (surukoto). Traditional gemeinschaft societies are those which have not yet made the transition to individualism and contract. The quintessentially modem mind is the one that denies the natural and replaces it with invention (Maruyama 1963, 257).

Karatani however not only criticizes Maruyama for his dualisms, but argues, correctly in my view, that nature and invention are not opposites, but exist in a dialectical relationship (Karatani 1979:187). Indeed the central thesis of this chapter is that Maruyama, perhaps because of the heavy influence of western political and philosophical views on his works, is, despite his huge influence, one of the least representative Japanese intellectuals when it comes to the question of nature and culture. His opposition between nature and invention is not only rarely encountered in Japanese aesthetics, philosophy, theology or cultural theory, but is intellectually unncessary. Succeeding epochs do of course conceputalize nature differently and modernity may have been characterizied by the attempt to grasp nature scientifically rather than aesthetically, but nature as the source and model of inventions persists. Maruyama’s fundamental conceptual flaw in this respect is not so much his binary opposition (which reappears again in Berque), but his failure to see that the achievement of modernity does not imply the negation of nature, indeed cannot imply this. Maruyama’s concept of individualism likewise, in seeing the ‘autonomous’ self as beyond rather than within nature, has not had much impact on the evolution of Japanese ideas of the person, violating as it does a basic meta-narrative that underlies all Japanese cultural discourse.

An important dimension of the current ecological movement is the attempt to not so much to understand as to achieve a reconciliation with nature: that man while historical is not singular (Paz 1990: 63).

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