Philosophy beyond Mechanization: Critiquing economic liberalism through Nishitani Keiji’s critique of modernity

Abstract

Nishitani Keiji critiques both scientism and liberalism as standpoints that fail to overcome the nihilism underlying modernity. In his stance against scientism, Nishitani claims that the idealized discourses of scientific rationality has reduced subjectivity to thinking and acting in mechanistic ways. As the world progressively mechanizes, there is a reversal of the controller becoming the controlled, where the laws of nature and the technological machine reassume control over humanity. By being an object of mechanization, subjectivity becomes an object of domination and thus surrenders its own natural propensity for absolute freedom.