2016 Volume 56 Issue 1 Pages 60-69
Action research is often limited due to its value-oriented attitudes surrounding time, in particular, in its tendency to slight the lived-present while concentrating on a better future. This article considered ways to circumvent this problem, and to develop better practice for action research. Theoretically speaking, the merit of action research is in the subject’s otherness, from the level of physical experience up to that of language. Both exist in the internal world of the individual uponmeeting others in the social world. We conducted action research focusing on the 2004 Niigata Chuetsu earthquake, where the provenapproach adopted by action researchers was not the “Mezasu” approach, which tries to change the focus on the present state to a better future, but the “Sugosu” approach, featuring the value and indispensability of the survivors’ present existence. The difficulty of the Mezasu approach stems from the “nihilism of time,” which is a prevalent modern attitude, based on the instrumentalism of time. We clarified the generation processes leading to attitudes about instrumentalism of time, and suggested the potential of a consummatory sense of time, which enables evaluation of the present existence within the context of instrumentalism. We found that utilizing the consummatory sense of time was a superior way of conducting action research in modern society.
