歴史に於ける行為と反省 (承前完)

Abstract

As Plato says, human conduct is essentially motivated by passions such as desire and anger, and, unless guided by reason, is liable to fail to be right. The author tries to bring out the structure of the reciprocal relations between reason and passion in human conduct. In order to fulfil this task, he adopts a historical method and makes a comparative research upon the development of the moral ideas in various nations. In the first place, however, the author propounds his own view of historism, and tries to meet the criticism raised by Kant against it. Kant distinguishes ethics form history, in so far as the former is based upon a priori knowledge and the latter is concerned with empirical facts. As a matter of fact, he excludes all the empirical elements from a priori moral law, and this leads his ethics to the dualism of moral and nature. Kant himself is aware of this defect, so that he tries to eliminate this by adopting teleology of nature as a connecting link between liberty and nature. His attempt, however, remains still unsatisfactory, because the teleological principle in terms of Kant's philosophy is only subjective or reflective and has no full objective validity. According to Troeltsch, historism also contains in itself many difficulties such as relativism, nihilism and realism, all of which will endanger moral idealism. He, therefore, endeavours to define the historism in its true meaning by interpreting history as a synthesis of universal value and temporal change. The author's position is that such a synthesis would be possible, only if value in history be not only universal but also individual and flexible to the changes in the style of human life, and that the synthesis, in this case, would describe the dynamic process of transcendence from the temporal to the eternal. To depict this process clearly, the author gives some sketches of the development of moral reflection in Greek tragedies and in Japanese premodern society, which will reveal the several common ways of conduct and reflection contained in the historical and individually different solutions of moral problems.