Miki's Ethics of Singularity

Miki Kiyoshi's Philosophical Anthropology was written probably between 1933 and 1937, shortly after Philosophy of History (1931–1932) and prior to Philosophy of Technology (1942). Resonating with these major texts, this unfinished work represents Miki's interest in Kantian Anthropologie as well as his own views of the human. This study examines singularity, contingency, and poiesis as key ideas for understanding Miki's anthropology. Singularity of an event is defined by the binary of the present ex ante facto (before-the-fact) and ex post facto (after-the-fact). Contingency of an event is defined by not having a sufficient ground within itself. An important thesis of Miki's anthropology is that an action is an event, singular and contingent by these definitions; it is poiesis (not praxis) irreducible to one's historical agency. This idea of singularity, with the self-contradictory binary of action-intuition ex ante facto and ex post facto, has ethical significance for debates on human cloning and global crisis today.