Japanese Literature Tradition of Grasping the Intangible Experience between Enlightenment and Romantic Legacy: Kato Shuichi’s Unique Contribution on Linguistic Sensibility in Society

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This article is an attempt to review the contribution of Kato Shuichi (1919-2008), who was one of the prominent literary critics in post-war Japan. Today, his various works covering broad spheres such as literature, history, cultural comparison, politics and so on are regarded as representing the quite classic and enlightenment modes of an elitist intellectual. This article attempts to reevaluate his thought in terms of his thinking on human universality based on our sensibility to the intangible and linguistic expressions of it. The intangible means here trans-linguistic experiences or breaks of linguistically ordinary order, and for him sensibility to it means empathy or affection to these experiences, never illogical in the sense of anti-linguistic order. In post-war Japan, Kato continued to express this sense of the intangible as trans-linguistic experiences through his thinking on ‘love, death, and beauty’ which were, for him, the foundation of the ability to discern between truth and fallacy in the political landscapes in his time. In so doing, it is concluded that the importance of Kato’s thinking is found in the fact that his way of criticism sought the way to universality in postwar Japan, where having a sense of the intangible based on the experience of the absurdity of the war was quite important. Human universality for Kato was not captured in rationalist or Enlightenment discourse, but it was universality through sensibility which is embedded and disembedded at the same time in particular situations. In Kato’s thinking, solidarity based on cultural activities does not depend on cultural cohesion centered on a unifying symbol like the Emperor in Japan, rather, universal solidarity can be fully maintained by the diversification of ways to express the intangible and a common sense to the expressions which is opened to the future by the very nature of the intangible.

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