ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces two philosophers of existentialism in Japan and Germany, who developed their philosophies at almost the same time, in the interwar period – Martin Heidegger and Nishida Kitaro – to clarify the problem of writing about the indescribable. It introduces works of Miki Kyoshi by particularly focusing upon Miki's philosophy of history. Nishida argues that individual existences are different from each other, but this illumination of individuals is itself standardised. This is exactly the factor that Nishida's philosophy is criticised as idealism. For Miki, in the case of ‘myth' and ‘institution', the imaginative faculty is used in a rather receptive way, which only promotes the reproduction of society. However, unlike myth or institution, the imagination used in technology is productive, by which new inventions become possible. The sentence ‘staying in the turbulence is actually more meaningful' represents Miki's determination for criticism.
