Tetsunori Koizumi has written a thought proboking and rather irritating book. It is thought provoking because it deals with a series of highly relevant questions regarding individual autonomy and identity as well as the maintenance of societal coherence and viability in unstable settings. These themes are dealt with from a wide variety of perspectives; philosophy of sciece, cybernetics, economics, law, polity, spirituality and art. The author is highly ambitious, deomonstrates an impressive synthetic intellect, and draws upon a wide variety of sources of inspiration and frames of reference. For example, the very first page introduces a well-written and concise set-theoretic formalization linking concepts of reality, perception and action. And this frame of reference for reflecting upon various ways of theorizing about reality is followed by a brief chapter dealing with Zen and the aesthetics of no-action "which has to do with the working of the mind in the state of mindlessness". Included her are discussions of intuitive modes of comprehending reality via becoming one with reality, Japenese Noh plays, where existential anxiety is created by the tension between the pain of life and the stillness of death, and non-linguistic modes of representing reality since "The aesthetics of noaction ... explicitly recognizes the importance of comprehending reality in toto, which is beyond the cardinality of any language". Such a variety of approaches to the concepts of individual autonomy and social viability is, at first glance, challenging.
This very brief characterization of the book's first themes applies for the rest of the book as well. It is divided into 6 parts: 1)Knowledge acauisition and human development 2)Individual autonomy and social order, 3) Balance and coherence in social development, 4) The world in transition, 5) Coordination and harmonization, and 6) Cultivating global awareness.
And herein lies the source of the irritation I felt. Although the author presents his work as a systematic analysis of the question of what global interdependence means for the individual and society, it is more like a series of 18 brief essays (chapters), each dealing with a monumental theme. A result is excitement - and frustration. Most of the analyses are challenging - and superficial and highly postulative. It is difficult to use the author's sweeping generalizations as a mirror for reflecting on on's own analyses and syntheses and to judge the validity of the author's conclusions and perscriptions. This is particularly the case towards the end of the book, e.g. the chapters "History as a systems science" and "Global interdependence and the ecology of social ethics". These difficulties are amplified by the rather abrupt changes in the semantic and analytical approaches employed: set-theoretic (developed in chapter one byt referred to from time to time in later chapters, e.g. chapter 5 on "culture and social order"), artistic and spiritual (chapter 2 on Zen), political philosophy (chapter 10 on "cultural diffusion, economic integration and the sovereignty of the nation-state) - and so on. Perhaps too much is attempted in too brief and exposition. And perhaps the author is not sufficiently aware of his own characterization of great historians as practing their trade with care and deliberation "as they try to balance between fact and hearsay, between observation and speculation" (p. 101).
Despite these criticisms I can recommend the book, which I enjoyed reading, as a well written attempt to explore and reflect upon the problematique of cultural, egonomic and political interdependence in a world where "the nation state has become too large for cultural life and too small for economic life" (p. 89).
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