The Human and the Absolute in the Writings of Kuki Shūzō

The Human and the Absolute in the Writings of Kuki Shūzō[pic 2]

Saitō Takako

Among the metaphysical themes that  interested  Kuki  Shūzō 九鬼周造 (1888–1941), the idea of the human  person and its relation to a metaphysical absolute would seem to constitute the keystone of his phil­ osophical system. He dedicated  several texts to this theme,  in particular: Contingency 『(  偶然性』, his 1932 doctoral  thesis), The Problem of Contin-

gency 『(

偶然性の問題』, 1935), “The  Philosophy  of Authentic  Existence”

『(  実存哲学』, 1933), and “Metaphysical Time”(「形而上學的時間」, 1931). Kuki elaborated  his ideas in studies of Kant, Schelling, Hegel,  Heideg­

ger, and Husserl, as well as in the light of a sizeable number  of Chinese and Japanese texts. Any of these sources would provide interesting leads,1 but in what follows I have limited myself to elucidating the notion  of the human and its relation to the metaphysical absolute by examining Kuki’s own terms and analyzing “The  Philosophy  of Authentic  Existence”  as

* The author  wishes to express her gratitude  to Helen  Shall for preparing  this

English translation  from the French original.

1. Fujita (2002,  117–38) explores Kuki’s investigation  and critique  of Husserl’s method. For a comparison of Kuki’s three categories of contingency  with Windelband and Rickert’s ideas, see Maeda 2008.

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well as the two texts on contingency  mentioned above. We shall also refer to one of Kant’s ideas of formal logic that Kuki took as a starting point.[pic 4]

The notion of the hum an in kuki’s  works

The Human Being and “Disjunctive” Contingency

In his doctoral  thesis and its subsequently  expanded  book,  The Problem of Contingency, Kuki undertakes  an exhaustive treatment of the notion  of contingency. To understand the notion  of the human  that Kuki explains in the last part of his two texts on contingency, we begin by summarizing  those texts.

Kuki opens his doctoral  thesis by defining three  kinds of necessity: logical, empirical, and metaphysical.  Logical necessity appears in the relationship  between  a concept  and its essential characteristics. Empiri- cal necessity is to  be found  in the  empirical relations  of cause and effect. Metaphysical necessity characterizes absolute  metaphysical being

(keijijōteki zettaisha 形而上的絶對者, ksz 2: 272). In The Problem of Con-

tingency, published  three years later, Kuki replaces this terminology to accommodate to the vocabular y of classical formal logic. He cites the forms of relationship between subject and predicate set out by Hermann Lotze in his Logik (1843, 65). According to Lotze,  there are only three types of judgemental relations that contribute to necessary knowledge: general judgement (generalle Urtheile: s is P), hypothetical  judgement (hypothetische Urtheile: on condition X, P becomes  s), and disjunctive judgement (disjunctive Urtheile: a part of the whole, either P, or Q, con­ stitutes a predicate of s). For Kuki, these refer respectively to the rela­ tionship  between  a concept  and its essential characteristics, between  a necessary cause and its effect, and between the whole and any of its parts. Kuki terms these three forms categorical necessity, hypothetical necessity, and disjunctive necessity.

Following  on from this, Kuki identifies three  forms of contingency that negate these three relationships of necessity, categorical contingency, hypothetical contingency  and disjunctive contingency  (ksz  2: 15). He devotes separate parts to examining each of these. The first part considers

judgements between  s and  P in which the  predicates  are not  always necessar y (categorical contingency). The second part is devoted  to the analysis of the empirical events considered  contingent, chance, acciden­ tal. Kuki terms this type of contingency  hypothetical, because it requires both  a condition and a consequence. In the third  and final part, Kuki puts forward his thoughts on disjunctive contingency,  (risetsuteki gūzen 離接的偶然）, exploring specific existential situations from the perspective of the whole. He also refers to this type of contingency  as metaphysical (keijijōteki gūzen 形而上的偶然).[pic 5]

This third part seems to me the most important for elucidating  Kuki’s definition  of the human  person. In it he situates human  beings within a wider whole to define them as beings that are simultaneously separate (ri 離) and in touch (setsu 接). This term “separate  and in touch” is Kuki’s way of rendering  into Japanese the term disjunctive taken from formal logic.2

To better  understand this term,  it is useful to refer to the definition found  in Kant’s Logik, which was H.  Lotze’s main point  of reference. Judgement is there said to be disjunctive when “the parts of a given con­ ceptual sphere are mutually determined as a whole or complement each other to form the whole.” These judgements “are mutually exclusive and complement each other  as members  of the whole sphere of knowledge that has been divided.”3