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Abstract
This paper compares the ideas of Japanese philosophers Karatani Kōjin 1 (1941–) and Nakamura Yūjirō (1925–2017) on the role of “force” in shaping imagination. This idea of “force” will be examined. Notably, Karatani criticized Nakamura for trying to combine the idea of the “place of nothingness” initially introduced by Nishida Kitarō with the distinctive logic of the Japanese language, which seemed to be insular nationalism. However, this paper argues that we can shed new light on their differences regarding imagination and the idea of “force.” “Force” is the repressed impersonal that returns to the social reality, requiring us to go beyond the existing code of order. Indeed, Nakamura and Karatani explore the possibility of reconstructing the power of imagination after the end of the “grand narrative” and in the postmodern age. This paper emphasizes the role of “nothingness” and different approaches to reformulating it into the field of “force,” finding a new horizon of justice along the way. In doing so, this paper will argue that while Nakamura developed his philosophy of creative imagination in the field of “force” as the surrounding environment, Karatani limited “force” to the plane of social exchange. This comparative view can be more interactive in the age of economic and climate risks if we focus more on the philosophical genealogy of “nothingness.”
Abstract
How do scientific research methods circulate? 1 Why do they acquire, at a given moment, such dynamism and fecundity in various disciplines? How did the comparative fervor catch on in the social sciences of the 19th and 20th centuries, resulting in comparative history and global history in the Annales project? The field of transfers through which the comparative method circulated between Victorian anthropology, Durkheimian sociology and the linguistics associated with it and history, through the pen of French-speaking medievalists, explains the dynamism of transmissions and contagions, of crossed, filtered or direct influences. This interplay of exchanges between disciplines, authors and books represents a moment in the history of the comparative method, in which it was considered a paradigm of renewal in the disciplines in which it was practiced, as well as for the social sciences of its time.
Within the French methodological tradition, the relations between comparative history and global history are close. The scales of comparison make it possible to characterize civilizations, societies and economies, and to measure their dimensions in different times and spaces. But the latter corresponds to differences of social milieu and historical peculiarities, which are an original innovation, the result of historians’ borrowings from and rejections of other social scientists. In this comparative fervour the games of intellectual exchange defined comparative history as the history of civilizations considered in the long term.