1. Negativity and Historicist Time: Facticity and Intellectual History of the 1930s

Chapter Summary

Many of the leading intellectuals of 1930s and early 1940s, particularly those philosophers and intellectual historians discussed in this chapter, are hardly free of the lure of universalism that attempted to transcend civilizational particularities. This aspect of their intellectual history, in which some fundamental dislocation took place, has been long overlooked, but how one speaks, whom one addresses, and with whom one discusses are not something accidental to the genre of intellectual history. It is well known that Immanuel Kant introduced the concept of schema in modern philosophy in order to elucidate the problem of temporality. In this chapter, periodizing scheme of antiquity and the Christian era is directly applied to Japanese national history. Just like the world according to Occasionalism, it is not enough to say that God creates the world once; the world must be continually, and in every moment, created by God.

Keywords: facticity; Immanuel Kant; intellectual history; modernity