Steve G. Lofts - Miki Kiyoshi and Cassirer: The Logic of the Imagination and the Critique of Culture

ENOJP4 Hildesheim 2018
Panel 12: Miki Kiyoshi and Cassirer/Ricœur

Miki Kiyoshi and Ernst Cassirer: The Logic of the Imagination and the Critique of Culture

Setev G. Lofts (King‘s University College, Canada)

Abstract: In his Logic of the Imagination, Miki Kiyoshi states: “We can say that the logic of imagination is the logic of symbols (shōchō 象徴 ). What Cassirer refers to as ‘the philosophy of symbolic forms’ needs to be rewritten in accordance with the logic of the imagination.” Beginning for this quote, this paper will explore a number of parallels in the thought of Miki and Cassirer in order to speculate on what this “rewriting” might in tale. For both it is in and through the imagination as the fluid creative production of images and forms that the human being spins their socio-cultural life-worlds out of themselves and themselves into their socio-cultural life-worlds. The paper will examine how both understand the fluid logic of the imagination as the logic of images and forms; the role of the productive imagination as the ground of radical creativity and by extension that of all human as well as natural existence; and the parallel between Miki’s concept of the imagination as the “formless” source of creation and Cassirer’s concept of “sheer possibility.” For both, the logic of the imagination (symbolic) is a logic of historical forms: the paper will thus also explore the relation between myth, the pathos of a people, history, and the production of images of the future by the productive imagination. It is here that we find the theme of “transition” or Übergang most clearly articulated. Cassirer, in particular, takes up the idea from Hegel. Mythical consciousness is constantly involved in the performance of transitions in which oppositions transition into to their opposites to form an identity: a merging of being into magical-mythical action, as well as the immediate repercussion of this action on being that occurs in both the subjective as well as the objective sense: a μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος—a transition to a new form of reflection. For Miki and Cassirer, there is originally no separation between the real and the ideal, between the domain of “existence” and that of “signification.” The transition (Übergang) between the two domains is continuously at play, not only in the representing and believing but in the doing of the human. This fluidity of being is the logic of the imagination at work. Finally, the paper will consider their respective critiques of the mythologization of the Modern State as forms of fascist totalizing of a world that attempt to subvert the fluid creative character of the imagination—what Cassirer calls in The Myth of the State a “technique of myth”—and the importance of what they say for our own historical situation.

This talk took place at the fourth annual conference of the European Network of Japanese Philosophy [ENOJP], 5 – 8 September 2018, Universität Hildesheim, Kulturcampus Domäne Marienburg, Germany.

More informations:
http://enojp.org/
http://chisokudopublications.blogspot.com/
https://enojp4.wordpress.com/

Art Direction: Robin Alberding & Jerome Ebeling (CC-BY 3.0)

Видео Steve G. Lofts - Miki Kiyoshi and Cassirer: The Logic of the Imagination and the Critique of Culture канала European Network of Japanese Philosophy