Shimomura Torataro (下村 寅太郎) – The Course of Overcoming Modernity

Shimomura Torataro (1902-1995) was one of the representatives of the Kyoto School at the Overcoming Modernity summit. He submitted an article prior to the meeting on what he saw as the answer to overcoming modernity. He had as a second-generation representative of the Kyoto School studied under Nishida Kitaro and Tanabe Haijme.1 In his essay “The Course of Overcoming Modernity” the focus is on the soul or the spirit and how to interpret it in contrast to the new machines is key to understanding modernity.

“Modernity” grew out of Europe and it has since become an integral part of Japan as it has in Europe. Thus “Modernity is to overcome ourselves”2 . The Japanese can not overcome modernity by rejecting Europe. Only by negating themselves as can they negate modernity. The spirit is the key to the self, but modernity has changed it.

Shimomura sees modernity as the creator of the external machine civilization.3 Shimomura describes the renaissances as the opposite of the medieval period. The renaissance is not a destruction of a unity between spirit and nature, because there never was a true unity.  The development of the external nature has its roots in the ideas negated by force during the medieval period. It is merely a continuation of the same kinds of slavery to labour that man has been restricted to since the beginning of time.  Ultimately this slavery is rooted in the spirit. But machines have fundamentally changed the dynamic between spirit and the physical as its only advancing the external physical “civilization, not the internal spiritual “culture”. While the “old soul” has only been internal, the new “spirit” must be external. Modern science has redefined the understanding of the body as a machine and it requires a new spirit to be found with new interpretive methods that can aligned with this new physical reality. This must be done with a new theology.

Thus, the spiritual imbalance in modernity as Shimomura sees it is not rooted in a corruption of past beliefs, but a changing in the fundamental way we view the body. As the world has changed because of science so must our theological understanding of it. The new understanding of the self in comparison with our contemporary world is the only way to truly overcome modernity as modernity itself is the understanding of our spirit.

Biblography:

Richard Calichman, Overcoming Modernity, Columbia University Press, (New York, 2008)

 

  1. Calichman, Overcoming Moderntity, p. 212 []
  2. Calichman, Overcoming Modernity, p.111 []
  3. Calichman, Overcoming Modernity, p.111 []