Abstract
In postwar Japan, the significance of Nakamura Yujiro (1925-2017) is underexplored domestically and internationally although he is a well-known philosopher in his unique arguments such as the “common sense”, “rhythm”, “oscillation” and so on. This paper attempts to clarify his significance in the context of philosophical and theoretical history over the relation between “institution” and “liberty”. What a series of his works reveals is that institution is not sharply opposed to liberty, and rather, institutionalized realities concretize our liberties in parallel in terms of a system of unconsciously creative acts. Based on this view, this paper tries to define the implication of this insight from Nakamura’s philosophy as the social philosophy of the post-excluded middle. That is to say, western philosophies of institution and liberty based on Hegel have their axis on the paradigm of contradiction and negativity, which makes institution and liberty opposed to each other. However, this opposition can be radically reconsidered from Nakamura’s view of the duality of institution and liberty.
