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  • Kyōto In Davos. The Question Of The Human From A Cross-Cultural Vantage Point
  • Ralf Müller

The conference in a nutshell: philosophy in times of crises returned to a crisis in philosophy. The pandemic throws us back on our feet and makes us rethink the question raised at the Davos Disputation between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer in 1929: "What is a human being?" While both had agreed that the initial question was the crucial question to tackle, neither of them could put forth a solution to the question given that their own thought paths proved to have led them into a dead end and to the necessity to turn in a new direction in order to overcome a philosophical crisis. So, in 2020, why not move beyond the scope of this German– German disputation in Davos, and even beyond the horizon of Europe to look for new pathways of thought?

Reconsidering Davos from Kyōto

This is what the international conference Kyōto in Davos did in lively discussions. The overwhelming number of papers presented engaged in discussions working with but also questioning boundaries set along the lines of "Germany" and "Japan" or "East" and "West." In fact, the discussions established a realm in which no one was labeled as one or the other, whereas everybody could perform the role he or she wanted to—bracketing all pre-established categories. The intellectual engagement went on in a conciliatory atmosphere, while undoubtedly pursuing questions that needed to be talked through persistently and critically.

The discussions returned, repeatedly, to the factual encounter and historical date, 1929, the encounter of Heidegger and Cassirer, which then became the starting point of a counterfactual reconsideration inviting Nishida Kitarō into the debate, no matter whether Cassirer or Heidegger would have considered his own philosophical approach to pave the way into [End Page 117] a cross-cultural exchange. This engagement with a historical event invited us to deconstruct Davos, playing out the historiography of philosophy in between actual and idealistic history (Realgeschichte vs. Idealgeschichte). Deconstructing Davos meant to overcome fixed ideas about the meeting as its true form and content, ideas which took precedence over the actual appearance. However, the deconstructing went on without resorting to mere context and hermeneutic attrition.

Rather, apparent contradictions between content and form, namely the universal question regarding human nature and the particular linguistic and cultural locale of Davos, thwarted the immediate response to the question and redirected the movement of thinking in multiple and opposite directions. This was done based on recorded talks and asynchronous board discussions over two weeks before moving on to the synchronous exchange. This synchronous exchange took place live for three hours in the Americas' morning hours, Europe's afternoon hours, and East Asia's night hours, on September 10 to 12, 2020 via Zoom video. Originally planned as an in-person conference to be held at the Department of Philosophy at Hildesheim University, Kyōto in Davos was carried out online because of the pandemic. And the conference emerged as a joint project of Hildesheim University, the Technical University of Braunschweig, and the European Network of Japanese Philosophy, organized by Ralf Müller, Tobias Endres, and Domenico Schneider.

The Cassirer Bias

With over eighty-five people who signed up for the online discussions and twenty-five speakers from North and South America, Europe, China, and Japan, the conference attracted attention beyond the field of Japanese philosophy and helped to foster exchange between specialists from this and other fields. More importantly, it looked for new pathways to the long-standing tradition, but somewhat unidirectional dialogue between Heidegger (or his thought) and Japan.

This seemed timely, given that the philosophical discourse has become global. The challenge, then, was to strike a balance between linguistic and cultural nationalism on the one side, and Western uniformity, on the other. In particular, as organizers ourselves being steeped in Cassirer's philosophy, we were convinced of the importance of seeing the specialists of Cassirer newly arrive at the now global discourse of philosophy. Hence, among one question that drove us was whether Cassirer has a base for [End Page 118] intercultural philosophy. And whether Cassirer is not, in fact...

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