So You’ve Converged – Now What? The Convergence of Critique

Abstract

Given the clear convergence of practices of nature across the traditional East-West divide examined in these essays, it is not surprising to learn that the consequences of the particular practice of nature characteristic of industrial capitalism also converged around similar problems such as deforestation, smog, and water pollution, all with their attendant ill effects on health and prosperity. If we look at the key period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the West and in Japan we also find a vast, shared reaction to and critique of the destructive aspect of the great convergence. Here I will focus on a particular instance of this global critical movement found in anarchism, specifically the thought and practice of Ishikawa Sanshirō (1876–1956). Influenced by Edward Carpenter and the Reclus brothers, Elisée and Paul, Ishikawa did not privilege the newly emerging industrial proletariat as the revolutionary subject as did fellow anarchists Ōsugi Sakae and Kōtoku Shūsui. Instead he stayed in the countryside to focus on the separation of humans from nature as the greatest problem of modern societies, eventually developing a theory of ‘dynamic social aesthetics’ (dōtai shakai bigaku) critical of both the ‘cornucopianism’ of infinite exploitation and later the Japanization of nature during the war. In many ways Ishikawa anticipated the recent neo-Lamarckian ‘epigenetics revolution’ and the current call to consider humanity’s unprecedented ability to intervene in its environment a geological force that defines our age.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Duke University Press for allowing me to draw on Chapter 4 of my Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870-1950 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014) for some of the material in this essay.

Notes

¹ In fact Kantian separation of humans from nature both epistemologically and physically was one of the pillars upon which liberal political philosophy is built, making the mutual penetration of humans and nature such as environmental diseases a blind spot in liberal politics. See Stolz, Bad Water, chapter one. The tradition and literature on Japan’s ‘special relationship’ to nature is long and vast, from Shinto’s nature kami to the cult of ‘midori’ to the theories of Japanese uniqueness (Nihonjinron). See for example work by Motoori Norinaga, Watsuji Tetsurō, Sonoda Minoru, and Umehara Takeshi to name only a few. For recent work examining this relationship in English see Shirane, Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons.

² Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity, chapters 7–8.

³ For a discussion of the emergence of culture as a global concept see Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History, chapter two.

⁴ There are numerous examples of this standard of periodization. Conrad Totman’s textbook A History of Japan (2005) uses energy regimes to periodize Japanese history.

⁵ Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest.

⁶ On 22 June 1908 following a meeting celebrating the release of the socialist Yamaguchi Kōken, several attendees marched through the streets with red flags bearing the slogans ‘Anarchism’ and ‘Anarchist Communism’. They clashed with police and 14, including Sakai Toshihiko, Ōsugi Sakae, and Yamakawa Hitoshi, were arrested for violating the Peace Police Law.

⁷ See Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter, 348, and Nozawa, ‘Ishikawa Sanshirō ni okeru Erize Rukuryu no shisō’, 840.

⁸ See Carey, The Epigenetics Revolution.

⁹ Ishikawa, Ishikawa Sanshirō chosakushū, 3:20-21. Hereafter, ISC.

¹⁰ ‘Domin kurashi’ in Ishikawa, ISC, 2: 310. For a discussion of the many variations of the translation of demos see Brown, ‘We Are All Democrats Now’, 45–46.

¹¹ For more on this spelling and the movement in Japanese anarchism see Konishi, Anarchist Modernity, chapters 3–4, 6.

¹² Foster, Marx’s Ecology.

¹³ He often, but not always, included Bolshevism in this category as well.

¹⁴ See Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism.

¹⁵ Ibid., 142–43.

¹⁶ Darwin, The Origin of Species, chapter one.

¹⁷ Carpenter, Civilisation, 2. Put in Marxist terms (which Ishikawa did not), the new nature–society relation could be described as the real subsumption of nature under capital – a turning point in the form of capital accumulation that occurs when, with the aid of technological advances, capital extends into nature itself, remaking it into a resource more conducive to capitalist exploitation.

¹⁸ Carpenter, Civilisation, 17.

¹⁹ Quintonhealth.com, ‘History of Quinton’, http://www.quintonhealth.com/about/quinton-history-and-science/ (accessed 27 February 2014). ‘The works of Pasteur bring us a conscious conception of disease. Those of Quinton bring us a conception of health. What is Pasteur’s serum? It is a serum for and against a particular disease.’

²⁰ ‘Domin kurashi’, in Ishikawa, ISC, 2:315.

²¹ Reclus, Chijinron. By way of contrast, here is Reclus on the Franco-Prussian war (1870) in his essay ‘Progress’, the conclusion of L’homme et la terre, vol. 6 : ‘Various geographical names will be erased from maps, but despite such changes, the peoples encompassed by modern civilization … will certainly continue to participate in the material, intellectual, and moral progress of one another. They are in the era of mutual aid, and even when they engage in bloody conflicts with each other, they do not stop working in part for the common welfare. During the last great European war between France and Germany, hundreds of thousands of men perished, crops were devastated, and wealth was destroyed…. [But now] a thousand … new inventions have become the common heritage of the two neighboring nations… engage[d] relentlessly in broader work for the benefit of all men.’ Cited from Reclus, Anarchy, Geography, Modernity, 233. Perhaps it was the difference of the mechanized slaughter of World War I compared with the Franco-Prussian war that caused Ishikawa to consistently write out Reclus’s progressivism in favor of a bounded temporality of variation without upward development. It is also likely he had in mind Tanaka Shōzō’s linking of the environmental degradation of the Ashio Incident and the Russo-Japanese war (1904–05). In a 1905 pamphlet, Tanaka observed that more and more forests were being felled in service to the wartime state, and, like the deforestation of the Ashio hills in the 1880s, this caused erosion and flooding to increase. This connection allowed him to bring Meiji imperialism under the aegis of his environmental thought, creating an environmental rationale for pacifism. See Stolz, Bad Water, chapter 3. In contrast, Reclus lauded aspects of the Russo-Japanese war: ‘And in the Far East, one finds that the covert or overt war between Japan and Russia cannot stop the astonishing progress that is being accomplished in this part of the world through the sharing of human culture and ideals.’ Reclus, Anarchy, Geography, Modernity, 233.

²² ‘The nature-movement begun years ago in literature and art is now among the more advanced sections of the civilised world rapidly realising itself in actual life, going so far even as a denial, among some, of machinery and the complex products of Civilisation, and developing among others into a gospel of salvation by sandals and sunbaths!’ Carpenter, Civilisation, 49.

²³ See for example, Suzuki, Taishō seimeishugi to gendai and ‘Seimei’ de yomu Nihon no kindai.

²⁴ For the organism/milieu see Cheung, ‘How Humans Became Organisms’.

²⁵ For early materialist aesthetics see Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 31–69. See also, Stolz, Bad Water, chapter four.

²⁶ He did add: ‘were Marx alive today would not have stood for the way [these Marx Boys—marukusu boi] automatons [kikai ningen] had dirtied his name’. Ishikawa, ISC, 3:119.

²⁷ Ishikawa, ISC, 3: 97–98.

²⁸ Ibid., 3:117.

²⁹ Ibid., 3: 135–46. Ishikawa’s translation of ‘democracy’ as domin kurashi is his attempt to provide the breathing space for part-time work. Support for this can be found in Kropotkin’s ‘Anarchy: Its Philosophy, Its Ideal’ (1896) which begins, ‘That a society restored to possession of all of the accumulated wealth within it, can largely provide everyone with a guarantee of plenty, in return for four or five hours of effective, manual toil at production each day, all who have reflected upon the matter are unanimously agreed with us.’ Kropotkin, quoted in Guérin, No Gods, No Masters, 324.

³⁰ For the nationalization of nature in the twentieth century see Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity, chapters seven and eight.

³¹ In maintaining this materialist moment in judging society, he came much closer to the Marxists than he was perhaps aware. Tosaka Jun’s critique of Watsuji Tetsurō’s Fūdo began from the materiality of a world of nature outside consciousness and culture. For Tosaka it was Watsuji’s denial of the materiality of daily life that allowed him to fully Japanize his ethics. See Stolz, ‘Here, Now’, 143–44.

³² Discussion here of Ishikawa’s ‘One Hundred Lectures’ is based on Iwasaki, Nōhon shisō no shakaishi, 100–02.

³³ See ibid.

³⁴ Ishikawa, ISC, 3: 98.

³⁵ Ibid., 3: 67–70.

³⁶ Carpenter, Civilisation, 132–33.

³⁷ See ‘Gojūnengo no Nihon’ in Ishikawa, ISC, 4:87–117.

³⁸ Moore, Japanese Workers.

³⁹ Watsuji, ‘A Phenomenology of the Cold’.

⁴⁰ See for example Maruyama, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan and Thought and Behaviour. See also Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity.

⁴¹ See ‘Futatabi warera no kagaku ni tsuite’ in Ishikawa, ISC, 3: 230–40; also Tomba, Marx’s Temporalities, 14. While he had high praise for Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own, counting it as an anarchist text, Ishikawa’s dynamic social aesthetics insisted on placing the individual within a vibrating cosmos of other idées forces. He did not follow Stirner into the apotheosis of one’s own ego as the only one.

⁴² The taint of the right wing inflection of neo-Lamarckian ideas in liberalism and neo-liberalism is indeed a problem cropping up in well-meaning environmental thought from Deep Ecology to Gary Snyder (often, not coincidentally, after an appeal to Watsuji or Heidegger). ‘The trick is to trick ourselves into reenchantment… As [Alan] Watts says, “In the life of spontaneity, human consciousness shifts from the attitude of strained, willful attention to koan, the attitude of open attention or contemplation.” This is a key element in developing ecological consciousness.’ Devall and Sessions, Deep Ecology, 10.

⁴³ See Lukacs, The Destruction of Reason.

⁴⁴ For more on the blind spots of methodological individualism see Bensaid, Marx for Our Times, chapters five and six. For the concept of humans as a ‘species-being’ see Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844)’.

⁴⁵ Smith and Smith, Minamata, and Walker, Toxic Archipelago.

⁴⁶ Heidegger, ‘Why Do I Stay In The Provinces?’, 16–18.

⁴⁷ See Biehl and Bookchin, The Politics of Social Ecology.

⁴⁸ Marx quoted in Tomba, Marx’s Temporalities, 28. See also Lukacs, The Destruction of Reason, 201–202.