Miki Kiyoshi | Archive 00001 | Philosophy | Shard 00002

Excerpt | The Crisis of Critical Consciousness | December 1928

Translated from the Japanese by Christopher Southward | 2024*

Now more than ever, the problem of thought appears as a problem of the crisis of thought, and everywhere we turn we find people clamoring for chances to wax erudite about it while themselves neither thinking nor desiring to think, ignorant as to what all the fuss is about. In fact, one of the hallmarks of this crisis lies precisely in our collective tendency to lambast thinking, and we often hear amid the hubbub the voices of critics decrying the spread of what they call by turns the “poverty of theory” and the “impoverishment of thought,” yet I gather that rather than thinking through the essence of things it is the exact opposite of this work in idleness and indifference that they seek to promote, and it is precisely the tendency of the mob to shout down, threaten and intimidate proponents of genuine thinking to this end that threatens critical consciousness today and urges us to come to terms with this its most fundamental crisis.

We can basically say terms that crisis arises for thought as its dialectical conversion from the stable and given to the shaky and indeterminate; this conversion is essential to thought’s crisis. When thought attempts to take its apparent givenness as truth, always and everywhere insisting upon its self-identical, self-referential and self-evident appearances as its validating conditions, such insistence leads directly to the reduction and restriction of the self’s established processes of self-identification to a single dimension of experience. In other words, thought becomes rigid personal bias. But let us bear in mind that this one-dimensional reduction of the self is the very content of false consciousness—a misrepresentation of the true self and of true self-identity—so that the apparent truth of rigid personal bias shows itself to be a lie. As crisis, then, self-criticism, self-doubt, results in the conversion of established thought into its opposite. To the degree that this conversion or passage arises as a matter of crisis for thought, self-criticism and outer crisis show their unicity and, as such, outer crisis becomes an invaluable moment for thought in that crisis animates thought; in fact, it is precisely in moments of crisis that thought manages to develop. The very passage by which objective crisis negates thought is the same passage by which the self sheds its reductive one-dimensionality and becomes the true, multidimensional self. Here, the abstract becomes the material, and it is through this process that we first grasp the object of thought in its entirety and discover the invigorating force and boon that crisis is for thought; indeed, all would be stagnant and lifeless without it.

*Previously published and currently archived by Binghamton University Libraries, The Open Repository @ Binghamton (The ORB): https://orb.binghamton.edu/comparative_literature_fac/53. © 2024, Christopher Southward; All Rights Reserved.