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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: joff@main.teikyo-u.ac.jp
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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

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