批判精神の連続と不連続 -小林秀雄の戦前と戦後-

Abstract

Critic Hideo Kobayashi, who started his career under the overwhelming influence of French symbols and poets, opened a new era in Japanese critical literature by writing many Western and Japanese writers' theories. Critical literature does not perform an explanatory function for creative literature, but has an equal expression function. If it is true to say "There were many critics before Sainte-Beuve, but there was no critique." a famous epigram about in French literature history, the same can be said to Japanese literature history. "There were many critics before Kobayashi, but there was no critique." Later, with the outbreak of the Pacific War, Hideo Kobayashi's critical literature began to change little by little. Apart from his previous theory of authors and the theory of literary work, the key changes include the fundamental thoughts on literature and art, new critical attempts at Japanese classical literature, and the theory of poetry where Hideo Kobayashi expressed his views on the war he was experiencing at the time. With these changes, Kobayashi was able to create new territories and an established methodology within his literature. The most fundamental thing in the deepening and writing of such a methodology was thoughts on language. Language was a topic that had already been deeply embedded in Hideo Kobayashi's literature by the influence of French symbolic poets. In particular, the proposition advanced by Schopenhauer and Walter Pater's theory of the relationship between music and other art areas, that all art admires music, formed the foundation of Hideo Kobayashi's thinking, upon which he built a materialistic view of language. It was again transformed into a methodology to exclude all ideological thinking and see objects directly by intuition. This method was very stoic, resulting in the complete exclusion of aesthetic thinking even when addressing the meaning of pure art. Even in works dealing with Japanese classical literature and Japanese Buddhist art, we encounter the same kind of Kobayashi Hideo's methodological thinking. However, such a method cannot be found in Hideo Kobayashi's critical works opposing the war that Japan was engaged in at the time. Hideo Kobayashi was taking a neutral stance that did not praise or criticize Japan's war, but his sentences that developed the logic did not have the same depth of insight and thinking he demonstrated when discussing literature and art. Here, we can confirm the discontinuity of Kobayashi Hideo’s literature. Discontinuity is a not phenomenon that occurs when the methodology of art critique is not applied to political critique. This happens Hideo Kobayashi's literature did not pursue another methodology that avoids a rift between art and political critique. This paper thus specifically examines Hideo Kobayashi's methodological reflection and discontinuity in his works.