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936 Ōmori Shōzō 大森荘蔵 (1921–1997 ) Ōmori Shōzō graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1944 with a degree in physics, but in order to grasp theoretical issues related to science, he gradually became interested in philosophy. After the war, in 1949, he received a degree in philosophy from Tokyo University. Initially he studied phenomenology, but he was unsatisfied with this and went to the United States to study Wittgenstein and Anglo-American analytical philosophy of language. In 1966, he became a professor of philosophy at Tokyo University. Throughout his philosophical career, Ōmori focused on questioning conventional views of science and metaphysics, which he considered so focused on objective facts that they overlooked the ways in which subjective frameworks influence the construction of objects. The first of the following selections shows this general emphasis on construction as he develops a theme from Michael Dummet’s famous essay, “Bringing about the Past.” Following Dummet, Ōmori cautions against reifying the past and adds to Dummet’s position by stressing the importance of narrative in the formulation of the past. Ōmori begins with our lived relation to the past, focusing on the way in which we act towards the past, and then goes on to philosophize about what our practices presuppose concerning the nature of the past. The second selection offers a modern interpretation of the classical notion of źkotodamaŻ or the “spirit of words.” Resisting the temptation to mystify language, as has so often been the case in the past, Ōmori locates kotodama in the everyday ambiguities and layers of meaning and meaninglessness in words. [vm] Ti m e d oe s n ot f l ow Ōmori Shōzō 1995, 45–9 In the world of European and American philosophy, the well-known thinker Michael Dummet has posed the riddle of the “tribal chief’s dance.” In a certain tribe, when young men become adults, they go lion hunting to show their strength. It takes two days to arrive and two days afterwards to return. The tribal chief prays for their success and dances during this period. The problem is that he continues to dance even when the young people have finished hunting and are on their way back. Dummet’s question is the following: Why does the chief continue to pray for their good fortune at a time when the success or failure of the hunt has already been determined? As modern people we find it hard to laugh at the chief. Even after we hear the news of a plane crash or a train collision , might we not still pray that family members on board are unharmed? Or ō m o r i s h ō z ō | 937 even when we know the results of an entrance exam have already been decided, might we not pray for some slim chance of success? It is not that any of us think we can change a past that has already been determined . My point is rather that deep inside of us, both the chief and those of us who live in Tokyo, there is room to hope that the past is not yet fixed, and thus to pray for a desirable past and to dread an unhappy one. Does this not show a crack in our staunch belief in “the reality of a past that has already been decided?” At the bottom of this belief lies an idea, ingrained in all human beings, that one cannot reach “the past-in-itself” from the present. This “past-in-itself” may be like the “thing-in-itself (Ding an sich)” that Kant thoroughly criticized; at least the two concepts belong to the same genus. Modern people who agree with Kant’s critique would, as a matter of course, criticize the idea of a “past-in-itself,” but in fact the question itself has been neglected. The small chink in our heedlessness caused by the earthquake of the lion hunt draws our attention to a crack that can bring down the towering building of the “past-in-itself.” And once this building has been dismantled, what type of barracks can we construct? We are reaffirming something here that human beings have practiced in the course of their daily lives, down a road that reaches back to the stone age. At the final stage of that road we have become caught in the illusion of a “past-initself ” and a “thing-in-itself.” My strategy is to reaffirm and revive that road by paring away the stage...

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