Phenomenology East and West: On the Horizon of Intersubjectivity (original) (raw)

In this essay, I wish to examine contemporary Japanese philosopher Hiroshi Kojima's ideas concerning the monad and intersubjectivity and to show how these ideas can be brought to bear on issues concerning the human relationship to the environment and, in particular, to non-human animals. Kojima, in his book Monad and Thou, proposes to reconcile the notion of 'individuality' and the notion of 'community' by redefining the I-Thou relation, first extensively investigated by Martin Buber, in terms of his new phenomenological ontology of the human being as monad. Kojima's conception of the human subject as monad is a resolution to the radical disagreement between Husserl's conception of the human subject as a pure consciousness and Heidegger's conception of the subject as Dasein, pure individuality. Kojima finds the contact point between these two radically distinct conceptions in the Being of the human body as Being seen from the inside and Being seen from the outside, or in the structure of the human body as Leib-Körper. He argues that this new conception of the human being brings into focus the 2 second person dimension (Thou) for the image of the human being as the center of life and that, therefore, life is tu-centric, rather than egocentric, as in Husserl and Heidegger, or relational, as in Buber. Ultimately, Kojima seeks to reinsert the body, as the intentional center of the monad, into our philosophical understanding of the subject, into our understanding of what constitutes intersubjective encounters and, ultimately, into our understanding of the ethical and spiritual life. Since Kojima's critiques of Husserl and Buber are central to the development of his own theories of subjectivity and of I-Thou relations, I will concentrate on these in this paper. First, I will discuss Kojima's response to some crucial problems that he identifies in Husserl's conception of the subject as 'consciousness'. I will, then, very briefly examine Kojima's response to Heidegger's notion of Dasein as Being-in-the-world. After this, I will discuss how Kojima successfully reconciles the two opposing notions of 'consciousness' and 'Being'. This will be followed by a brief account of Buber's conception of I-Thou relations, by a detailed discussion of Kojima's critique of Buber, and by an examination of how Kojima's own conception of I-Thou relations emerges from this critique and from his reconception of the subject as monad. Lastly, I will argue that Kojima's novel conception of I-Thou relations permits us to develop an account, more satisfactory than Buber's, of the possibility and nature of I-Thou relations between human beings and nonhuman beings. I conclude by examining the ethical implications of the above discussion, by examining how social spaces affect both the possibility of and our capacity for having I-Thou relations, and by discussing some of the ontological and ethical implications of constructing increasingly alienating spaces.