Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T07:53:59.007Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Transcendental Monsters, Animism and the Critique of Hyperobjects

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2019

Joff P.N. Bradley Open the ORCID record for Joff P.N. Bradley [Opens in a new window]
Joff P.N. Bradley*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Foreign Languages, Teikyo University, Hachioji Campus, Tokyo, Japan
*
Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This transversal and transilient thought-experiment explores the application and significance of Japanese animism for environmental education and environmental philosophy. Through the exploration of indigenous knowledge found in Japanese folklore and Japanese Buddhism, the thought-experiment offers a critique of a certain strand of contemporary fatalistic and nihilistic thinking regarding the Anthropocene. At its simplest it questions the trend toward mysticism and obfuscation in environmental education and demands a response to the environmental crisis precisely through reason and rationality. How shall this be undertaken? On one level, the hauntings of 妖怪 (Yōkai) and 幽霊 (Yūrei) in Japanese folklore shall act as a prism through which to understand the impact of the fantastical on the contemporary imagination, and on another level, I shall critique the fantastical as such to question the so-called inaccessibility of the hyperobject (Morton, 2014), which in the end leaves us despairingly passive and without the possibility of response. It is in the work of the Japanese philosopher 井上円了 (Inoue Enryō) and especially his defence of Western Enlightenment beliefs during Japan’s modernisation period (1868–1912) that a curious method and heuristic tool is found that may be used to address not only the problem of mystification in Japanese philosophy but also the obfuscation of the ecological object of recent Western thought. Seemingly sacrilegiously, it is through reason and at the limits of the rational that one may approach the hyperobject-in-itself, which is to say, the unfathomable as such.

Keywords

Inoue EnryōanimismBuddhismYōkaihyperobjectMorton
Type
Article
Information
Australian Journal of Environmental Education , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , November 2019 , pp. 163 - 172
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2019. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Allison, D.B. (1977). The new Nietzsche contemporary styles of interpretation. New York, NY: Dell Publishing.Google Scholar
Benjamin, W., & Eiland, H. (2003). The arcades project. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Bookchin, M. (1995). Re-enchanting humanity: A defense of the human spirit against antihumanism, misanthropy, mysticism, and primitivism. London: Cassell.Google Scholar
Brassier, R. (2010). Nihil unbound: Enlightenment and extinction. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Bridges, J., Kucera, S., Swift, J., Sellers, P., Clark, W., Mlodinow, L., Morton, T., & Ciancia, K. (2018). Living in the future’s past: A documentary film. Rangeland Productions, LLC.Google Scholar
Baird Callicott, J., & McRae, J. (Eds.). (2016). Japanese environmental philosophy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Disch, L., & Hawkesworth, M.E. (2018). The Oxford handbook of feminist theory. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Figal, G.A. (2007). Civilization and monsters spirits of modernity in Meiji Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Foster, M.D. (2009). Pandemonium and parade Japanese monsters and the culture of Yōkai. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Harman, G. (2012). Weird realism: Lovecraft and philosophy. Ropley, UK: Zero Books.Google Scholar
Holbraad, M. (2009, 10). Ontology, ethnography, archaeology: An afterword on the ontography of things. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 19, 431–441.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Josephson, J.Ā. (2006). When Buddhism became a ‘religion’: Religion and superstition in the writings of Inoue Enryō. Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 33, 143–168.Google Scholar
Josephson, J.A. (2012). The invention of religion in Japan. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Josephson, J.A. (2018, September). Monsters of the Absolute: Inoue Enryō, the task of Buddhist philosophy, and the haunted borderlands of post-Kantian thought. Paper presented at the International Conference on Inoue Enryo, Toyo University, Tokyo.Google Scholar
Hörl, E., & Burton, J. (2017). General ecology: The new ecological paradigm. Bloomsbury Academic.Google Scholar
Jensen, C.B., Ishii, M., & Swift, P. (2016, 09). Attuning to the webs of en. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6, 149–172.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Komatsu, K., Yoda, H., & Alt, M. (2017). An introduction to Yōkai culture: Monsters, ghosts, and outsiders in Japanese history. Japan Publishing Industry Foundation for Culture.Google Scholar
Land, N., Mackay, R., & Brassier, R. (2018). Fanged Noumena: Collected writings 987–2007. Penzance, UK: Urbanomic.Google Scholar
Latour, B. (2018). An inquiry into modes of existence: An anthropology of the moderns. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Lyotard, J. (1988). The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Malone, K. (2018). Children in the Anthropocene: Rethinking sustainability and child friendliness in cities. London: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meillassoux, Q., Brassier, R., & Badiou, A. (2017). After finitude: An essay on the necessity of contingency. London: Bloomsbury Academic.Google Scholar
Meyer, M. (2015). The night parade of one hundred demons: A field guide to Japanese Yōkai. Japan: Author.Google Scholar
Morton, T. (2010). The ecological thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Morton, T. (2011). Zero landscapes in the time of hyperobjects. Graz Architectural Magazine, 7, 78–87.Google Scholar
Morton, T. (2014). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and ecology after the end of the world. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Morton, T. (2015). Nothing — Three inquiries in buddhism. Chicago, IL: The University Of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Morton, T. (2018). Dark ecology: For a logic of future coexistence. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Morton, T. (2019). Humankind: Solidarity with non-human people. Brooklyn, NY: Verso.Google Scholar
Schulzer, R. (2019). Inoue Enryō: A philosophical portrait. Albany, NY: Excelsior Editions.Google Scholar
Sartre, J., Richmond, S., & Moran, R. (2018). Being and nothingness: An essay in phenomenological ontology. New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
Schopenhauer, A. (1969). The world as will and representation: Volume 1. New York, NY: Dover Publications.Google Scholar
Souriau, E., Beranek, E., & Howles, T. (2015). The different modes of existence. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Staggs, K.M. (1983). Defend the nation and love the truth. Inoue Enryō and the revival of Meiji Buddhism. Monumenta Nipponica, 38, 251.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thacker, E. (2011). In the dust of this planet. Ropley, UK: Zero Books.Google Scholar