A Genealogy of the Development of the Clinical Theory of Human Becoming

This report surveys the theoretical genealogy of the Clinical Theory on Human Becoming. The emergence of this new discipline was within the Pedagogy of the Kyoto School. The Kyoto School was a local branch of the German philosophy and accepted the new ideas in their own way in their own Japanese context, where the traditional thought of Buddhism and the social hardships of poverty and illness prevailed. The Kyoto School itself became known as a factory of philosophical study, also produced the pedagogy, beginning with Motomori Kimura’s (1895–1946) ‘Ichida no Nomi’ (‘One Carving of a Chisel’) (1933) and culminating with Akira Mori’s (1915–1976) Theory of Seimei Tuzumihashi (the Human Lifecycle as an Arch Bridge) (1977). The Clinical Theory on Human Becoming was conceived in the context of the unfolding and eventual dissolution of the Pedagogy of the Kyoto School. This is one of the beams in Japan’s unique structure of educational theory—a beam which was chiseled out of native Japanese timber but lathed according to the templates of Europe and America.