“Common Sense” and Encounters after the “Capital-Nation-State” in the Digital Age: Nakamura Yūjirō vs. Karatani Kōjin in their Philosophies of Imagination

抄録

This paper picks up the philosophies of Nakamura Yūjirō (1925-2017) and Karatani Kōjin (1941-), both of whom are known as prominent thinkers in contemporary Japan, although each of them seems to show us quite different philosophical viewpoints. Although Karatani once inexorably criticized Nakamura’s interpretation concerning Nishida Kitarō’s philosophy, their seemingly opposite, but meaningful views never entered into the dialogical phase. In this paper, we examine the significance of a possible viewpoint that we could have otherwise gained from this unperformed dialogue, if these two philosophers had actually had some philosophical discussions over Nishida’s philosophy. In doing so, this paper tries to establish that we can elicit a critical viewpoint of capitalism in terms of “common sense” as one of the main issues of Nakamura’s philosophy through revisiting his argument and grasping its meaning beyond the communally bordered implications of the concept. Furthermore, this paper emphasizes the nature of our “imagination” composed of encounters with differences, and this sense of imagination is now in crisis in the age of digitalization. In this sense, we can see the validity of Nakamura’s philosophy of “common sense” in contemporary capitalism.