Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
and Toda, all of them, not surprisingly perhaps, gave up their beliefs, out-
wardly at least, to escape imprisonment by a fascist regime. Makiguchi and
Toda came to be seen as leaders who upheld the banner of justice even in the
face of threats to their lives by a fascist military regime. Because of the
experience of its founders, in the post-war movement the call for protecting
freedom of beliefs as foundational to protecting human rights stood strong as
the Soka Gakkai dictum as it emerged with an increasingly large following
out of the rubble of post-war Japan. This wider background is important to
consider so as to more poignantly assess Soka Gakkai
s entry into politics,
which intertwine with the use of such controversial terms as kokuritsu kaidan
and
-
butsumy
-
g
-
(the fusion of the Buddhist Law with the secular law), terms
that in their common understanding appear nationalistic.
Makiguchi
'
s critical engagement with the state ideology did not only begin
when he joined Nichiren Sh
-
sh
-
in 1928. For many years he had been a
promoter of change to the Japanese education system. Central to his peda-
gogy was a modi
'
cation of the then widely studied neo-Kantian value system
of truth-goodness-beauty. A keen reader of Kant, Makiguchi proposed the
formula beauty (bi)-gain (sen)-goodness
(shin)
(Makiguchi 1994, 1989).
Beauty referred to an individual
'
s aesthetic values, or subjective state; gain or
bene
t to the values of individuals as living in totalities (social reality of
interrelatedness); and goodness to the well-being of human society generally.
He stated:
'
Truth remains purely a concept, the true conception of some
object or of an interrelationship between objects. Value, on the other hand,
takes on the character of an emotional bond bringing the object into human
life
…
Human dignity arises from value creation
…
without sel
essly pro-
viding good for all, truth has no meaning
…
we cannot live truth; we must
live value
55, 59).
Makiguchi was in this way responsive to the new American philosophical
orientation of pragmatism, which sought to overcome the dualisms of Wes-
tern philosophy centred on
'
(Makiguchi 1994: 54
-
finding an objective
'
truth
'
. While value was a
popular concept in education from the Taish
-
26) onwards, Maki-
guchi was the only one who linked it to the idea of happiness (Sharma 2006),
and according to Bethel (Makiguchi 1994), he has something unique to con-
tribute both to social theory and to philosophy as a whole. That Makiguchi
also rejected the idea of
era (1912
-
as being a separate value pertinent to the
religious sphere underscores his consistent view of religion as a force that
should play out in the actual daily life of an individual and their community
(Makiguchi 1994). Like the US educationalist John Dewey (1859
'
holiness
'
-
1952),
although he was in
1911) and his
lebensphilosophi (Andrew Gibert personal communication), Makiguchi was
seeking a scheme of values in which the meaning of education ought to come
from
uenced at least as much by Dilthey (1833
-
'
what people themselves see as the purpose of human life [
…
and] must
coincide with the larger life purpose of those being educated
(Makiguchi
1989: 18). This was in stark contrast to the Imperial Rescript, which advo-
cated fostering obedient subjects of the Japanese state as the primary aim of
'
Search WWH ::
Custom Search