Toward a Critical Non-Humanism in Postwar Japan

In this article, I argue that the infamous discussions around “overcoming modernity” that occurred in Japan in 1942 shared Michel Foucault’s conceptual conflation between humanism and modernism. That is, these discussions were not only declarations—in line with other postcolonial struggles of the time—against the dominance of the West politically and culturally. Philosophically, the programme of overcoming modernity can be understood as a set of discourses on anti-humanism that, in some ways, foreshadow those we find in Europe two decades later. In the case of the Kyoto School, the anti-humanist standpoint arose quite naturally from the particular philosophical history of Japan, combined with the fact that the philosophers in this school were close readers of Nietzsche and Heidegger, anti-humanists avant la lettre. For Sakaguchi Ango, whose ideas were very much opposed to the Kyoto School, a critique of the human was developed from his enthusiastic embrace of Jean-Paul Sartre. Ultimately, I argue, we need both the Kyoto School and Sakaguchi in order to understand the theoretical foundation for the various forms of critical non-humanism we find in contemporary Japanese art, philosophy, and culture.