ブックタイトルRILAS 早稲田大学総合人文科学研究センター研究誌

概要

RILAS 早稲田大学総合人文科学研究センター研究誌

WASEDA RILAS JOURNALbecause, for him, humans could only act under conditionsof obedience to the laws of nature in order tohave any practical effect on the external world.Bacon’s understanding rested on the premise that itwas impossible to manage, rule, and govern nature byforce or to act contrary to nature. We might posit theimage of an absolute, unwavering terra, a GreatMother who generously embraces her little demon ofa child, no matter what he does with technology,behind which might be an overmastering confidencein the Creation and Acts of God. At least, the power oftechnology was not so big that it could destroy theworld.“All this has decisively changed. Modern technologyhas introduced actions of such novel scale,objects, and consequences that the framework of formerethics can no longer contain them.”?New concepts of“Globalization”and“Ethics”From now on, we must change or extend the conceptof globalization. Globalization does not meanonly the economic and political movement of expansionall over the world, but also the technologicalmovement that tends to encompass all beings, all lives,all generations, and all species. We must now call thisall-inclusive movement or tendency“globalization.”Above all, we need to recognize and emphasize itsdiachronic dimension in relation to its synchronicdimension. Globalization should not be reduced to asimple geographical concept of the world. Moreexactly, the planet’s existence has to be considered orreflected as a continuum or a node, an extension fromthe past into the future, that is to say, a process of eternalbecoming. Living in and reflecting on the presentworld cannot be done properly without this diachronicdimension of the world, without, so to speak, this“worldization”(this becoming of the world, worldgeneration, world formation), another aspect (precisely,the other aspect) of“globalization.”It reflects acertain“Genesis”without which we will lose ourfuture generations and the significance or worth of ourpresent world.From this point of view, a new ethics will requirefollowing extensive turns:1. From Presentism to Futurism (consideration ofthe world to come)2. Form restrictive consideration for Humanity togeneral consideration for all lives or all beings3. From individual subject to collective subject inresponsibilityWhen scientific technology encompassed nuclearenergy (nuclear power generation, atomic bomb),humans possessed (or have been possessed by) apower huge enough to destroy the planet. What is atstake is the very existence of all beings, the dilemmaof whether“to be or not to be,”in a very basic ontologicalsense, an elementary, physical ontology farbeyond a metaphysical ontology like Heidegger’s.Today, we find an ontological question directly relatedto physics as well as ethics, as in Spinoza’s philosophy.We are on the verge of the ontological possibilityof the world. What we are faced with is the possibilityor rights of our future world, of future generations.Ultimately, this means the possibility itself of possibility,the generation of generation. Being is precisely thepossibility of a world to come; in other words, thebecoming of a world to come. We living humans inthe present world must be responsible for the generationof our future generations, those who are not yetpresent. These generations do not exist in presentspace and time, nor can they make any response to ourinquiry or call, much less have any right to do so. Ofcourse, it is always possible that they will never evercome into being. What is threatened today, however, isthe impossibility of their coming into being, the possibilityitself of impossibility. Thus, even impossibilityis on the verge of extinction. It is our ethical duty toprotect and hand over at least this possibility of impossibilityfor generations to come. We are responsiblefor the beings who/which are incapable of responding.We are responsible for leaving open the possibilityitself for future generations to respond to“us,”to otherbeings, to the world. Giving the responsibility (thepossibility of response) to those beings yet to come, tothe becoming (a present to the future, of the future, forthe future) is a new ethics, an extended, generic ethics.This is a kind of present, a donation of what we cannothave, what is outside of our property (because thispresent is theirs, their possibility/responsibility, notours). Once, the existence of the world“had been afirst and unquestionable given, from which all idea ofobligation in human conduct started out. Now it hasitself become an object of obligation; the obligationnamely to ensure the very premise of all obligation,that is, the foothold for a moral universe in the physicalworld?the existence of mere candidates for a168