種の論理とグローバル・ヴィレッジの批判

Abstract

The philosophy of Tanabe Hajime is a world-class philosophy--both in the sense that it presents Japanese intellectual tradition at its best, and in the sense that it needs to be liberated from the confines of the culture and language that gave it birth in order to execute its full potential. In this essay I take up Tanabe's logic of the specific as a standpoint from which to consider the consequences of twentieth-century Japanese thought stepping out onto the world forum. Tanabe himself did not make the connection between his logic and Japanese thought explicit; on the contrary, he even speculated that Japan's specificity could provide a universal matrix for the other cultures of Asia----an error of judgment in part softened by his later reassessment of the role of philosophy. It is in the spirit of that later "metanoetics" that I offer my own reading of the originality and applicability of Tanabe's logic of the specific. The first half of the essay sets out four interlinking propositions that describe the logic of the specific as a critical perspective from which to frame questions about the world: (1) The logic of the specific marks a shift from the formal, syllogistic function of species to an ontological description of absolute mediation; (2) specificity is defined primarily as the socio-cultural substratum of historical peoples; (3) socio-cultural specificity is defined as a nonrationality that lies at the base of every human attempt to ground social existence rationally; and (4) specificity's ultimate foundation is not the being of historical relativity, but absolute nothingness. The second half of the essay takes up the idea of the "global village" and suggests that Tanabe's logic of the specific reinforces the suspicion that the village is not global at all but hopelessly parochial. The originator of the idea, Marshall McLuhan, though exuberant at the possibility of an electronically connected human community, was wary of the danger of falling half-consciously into a virtual reality. Like McLuhan, Tanabe had a distrust of any universal, categorical "moral law within" as a foundation for ethical decisions. Instead he placed an unrelenting stress on the need for selfawareness of the concrete foundations of the social world. From this standpoint, we can see that as a universal ideal, the global village redefines the parameters of freedom of knowledge and expression for individual members of a society, but at the same time tends to expropriate or at least greatly devalue the local, vernacular culture in whose specificity these freedoms find themselves incorporated. In depreciating locality, the ideal of globality implies that certain relationships are more important and more universal, because less bound to specific cultural conditions, than others. The result is the creation of a cross-local, because translocal, aristocracy. Tanabe's perspective questions electronic technology's claim to true universality by alerting us to the negative aspect of the specific, the underlying substrate of specific cultural and social biases that the new technologies are said to be forming into a worldwide community. Furthermore, this new universality functions like a principle of absolute mediation, taking over the role of God or Absolute Nothingness. For the individual participating in the global village, the glut of apparently neutral, value-free data works to anaesthetize social conscience, which in turn creates the need for a priesthood of specialists to sort out the information and determine what is relevant to the problems of the day. This is contrasted with Tanabe's ideal of the role of religion in society. The essay closes with a few brief remarks about the consequences of Japan's accepting its place in the world philosophical forum.