Kyoto School

= "a group of 20th century Japanese thinkers who developed original philosophies by creatively drawing on the intellectual and spiritual traditions of East Asia, those of Mahāyāna Buddhism in particular". [1]

Description

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

"The Kyoto School (Kyōto-gakuha) is a group of 20th century Japanese thinkers who developed original philosophies by creatively drawing on the intellectual and spiritual traditions of East Asia, those of Mahāyāna Buddhism in particular, as well as on the methods and content of Western philosophy.

...

The unintentional founder of the Kyoto School is Nishida Kitarō[1] (1870–1945). In the Meiji period (1868–1912), when Japan reopened to the rest of the world after more than two centuries of national isolation, a generation of scholars devoted themselves to importing Western academic fields of inquiry, including “philosophy.” After many years of studying Western philosophy and Eastern classics, alongside a dedicated practice of Zen Buddhism, Nishida was the first major modern Japanese thinker to successfully go beyond learning from the West to construct his own original system of thought. This he began to do in his maiden work, An Inquiry into the Good, published in 1911 (Nishida 1990). On the basis of this work he obtained a position in the Philosophy Department of Kyoto University, where he went on to ceaselessly develop his thought and to decisively influence subsequent generations of original philosophers, including the two other most prominent members of the Kyoto School, Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962) and Nishitani Keiji (1900–1990).

As is reflected in the name of the School, its founding members were associated with Kyoto University, the most prestigious university in Japan next to Tokyo University. It is perhaps no coincidence that the School formed in Kyoto, the ancient capital and center of traditional Japanese culture, rather than Tokyo, the new capital and center of modernization, which also meant, Westernization. While the Kyoto School philosophers all devoted themselves to the study of Western philosophy (indeed they made lasting contributions to the introduction of Western philosophy into Japan), they also kept one foot firmly planted in their native traditions of thought. One scholar of the Kyoto School writes in this regard: “The keynote of the Kyoto school, as persons educated in the traditions of the East despite all they have learned from the West, has been the attempt to bring the possibilities latent in traditional culture into encounter with Western culture” (Minamoto 1994, 217).

It would be misleading, however, if we were to think of the Kyoto School as merely putting a Western rational mask over Eastern intuitive wisdom. Nor would it be entirely accurate to think of them as simply using Western philosophical idioms and modes of thought to give modern expression to East Asian Buddhist thought. For not only is the Western influence on their thought more than skin deep, their philosophies are far too original to be straightforwardly equated with preexisting Eastern thought. Insofar as they can be identified as East Asian or Mahāyāna Buddhist thinkers, this must be understood in the sense of having critically and creatively developed these traditions in philosophical dialogue with Western thought. It should be kept in mind that their primary commitment is not to a cultural self-expression, or even to a dialogue between world religions, but rather to a genuinely philosophical search for truth.

The Kyoto School has become most well known, especially in the West, for its philosophies of religion. Indeed the initial reception of the Kyoto School in North America in particular took place in university departments of Religious Studies, where their philosophies of religion have frequently been viewed as representative of Mahāyāna Buddhism, specifically of the latter’s Zen and Shin (True Pure Land) schools.[2] While the exchange on these terms has been fruitful, this view can be misleading in two respects. First of all, even if, for most of the Kyoto School thinkers, a philosophy of religion is the ultimate arche and telos of their thought, it is hardly their sole concern. They address a full array of philosophical issues: metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, logic, philosophical anthropology, philosophy of history, philosophy of culture, philosophy of language, ethics, political theory, philosophy of art, etc.

Secondly, even when their focus is on the philosophy of religion, they approach this topic in a non-dogmatic and often surprisingly non-sectarian manner, drawing on and reinterpreting, for example, Christian sources along with Buddhist ones. Even Nishitani, who did in fact come to identify his thought with “the standpoint of Zen,” adamantly refused the label of a “natural theologian of Zen.” He claimed that: “If I have frequently had occasion to deal with the standpoints of Buddhism, and particularly Zen Buddhism, the fundamental reason is that [the original form of reality and the original countenance of human being] seem to me to appear there most plainly and unmistakably” (NKC X, 288; Nishitani 1982, 261).

Kyoto School philosophy, therefore, should be understood neither as Buddhist thought forced into Western garb, nor as universal discourse (which the West happened to have invented or discovered) dressed up in Japanese garb. Rather, it is best understood as a set of unique contributions from the perspective of modern Japan—that is, from a Japan that remains substantially determined by its historical layers of traditional culture at the same time as being decisively conditioned by its most recent layer of contact with the West—to a nascent worldwide dialogue of cross-cultural philosophy.

This article will proceed as follows. In the following section, I will consider the preliminary issues of how to define the Kyoto School and who to include as its members. The name “Kyoto School” has been used in the past, in some cases rather loosely, to refer to a variety of sets of thinkers. It is therefore necessary to begin by discussing the question: Just who belongs to exactly what? The third and central section of this article will treat what is generally considered to be the central philosophical concept and contribution of the Kyoto School, namely, its ideas of “absolute nothingness.” After discussing the ostensible contrast between “Western being” and “Eastern nothingness,” and after looking at some of the Eastern sources of the idea of absolute nothingness, I will discuss the topological, dialectical, phenomenological, and existential philosophies of absolute nothingness developed by Nishida Kitarō, Tanabe Hajime, Nishitani Keiji, and the central figure of the third generation of the Kyoto School, Ueda Shizuteru (b. 1926). The fourth section will address the political controversy surrounding the wartime writings and activities of the Kyoto School. The first wave of attention paid to the Kyoto School in the West in the 1980s largely ignored the political debate that had long surrounded the School in Japan. While this lacuna in Western scholarship was amended in the 1990s, notably with the publication of Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School and the Question of Nationalism (Heisig & Maraldo 1994), the political ventures and misadventures of the Kyoto School remain a highly contentious subject (see Maraldo 2006 and Goto-Jones 2008). In the final section of this article I will return to the question of the cross-cultural legacy of the Kyoto School as a group of thinkers that stood between—or perhaps moved beyond—East and West."

(https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/)

Discussion

The Kyoto School as anticipating multipolarity in international relations

Alain de Benoist:

"In the 1930s and 40s, the Kyoto School, formed around Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945) and Tanabe Hajime, was undoubtedly the first—well before all the decolonization movements—to develop the idea of a multipolar world, divided into distinct large spaces considered as the many crucibles of culture and civilization, and to critique, in defense of the plurality of cultures characteristic of the “real world” (sekaiteki sekai), the abstract principles of Western universalism based on capitalism and scientism.

The principal representatives of this School were above all philosophers, such as Kōsaka Masaaki, Kōyama Iwao, Nishitani Keiji, and Suzuki Shigetaka. The European thinkers who seem to have influenced them the most were Johann Gottfried von Herder and Leopold von Ranke. Recently, the ideas of members of the Kyoto School have also been brought closer to those of communitarian authors such as Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre.

It was in this inner circle that the idea of a “greater East Asian co-prosperity sphere” was developed, associating several countries on the basis of shared values and respect for their autonomy, an idea that should neither be confused with the “Japanocentrism” of the nationalist right nor with the Japanese imperialism of the same period. As early as June 1943, in fact, Japan’s official censorship body ordered that the School's publications be kept silent, reproaching it precisely for wanting to assign to Japanese power a mission that must not be confounded with simple imperialist expansion."

(https://www.agonmag.com/p/the-dawn-of-civilizational-states?)

Mesology: The relational view of human-nature connections

A summary of the authors that developed meso-logical approaches, from the reading notes of Michel Bauwens:

Modern dualism separates the human from nature, even though the two are inextricably linked: the human lives in full connection with an environment AND is constituted by it.

• Uexkull called this ‘Gegengefuge’ (contre-assemblage – fr).
• Watsuji Tetsure called it fudosei (mediance – fr), in his book Fudo (Le milieu humain, CNRS, 2011) the dynamic coupling of the human with its environment.

In this relation, nature is not an object, we can not exist outside of it. It’s also not subjective but trajective, i.e. both at the same time. In this sense, ecology as a science is insufficient, as it sees nature as an object, so what we need is ‘mesology’, interpreted as a ‘trans-modern paradigm’. It’s main axiom is that things are produced by relations, they are not substantive existing ‘by themselves’. Mesology comes from the Latin word ‘medietas’, meaning ‘half’, and implies that without our relation, we do not fully exist. Being is only exercised through this ‘mediance’.

To replace Aristotelian substantivism and its ‘third-excluding logic’, Berque found

• Nishida, and his predicate logic (jutsugo no ronri) and tried to synthesize both (refusing to absolutize the predicate as well).

In Yamauchi Tokuryu he found the new logic of the included middle, ( >< the excluded middle from aristetolian logic), in order to develop a meso-logy. Berque says the Buddhist of the Great Vehicle have developed this the best.

• Fukuoka Masanobu and his natural agriculture also influenced Berque, and he mentions

• Imanishi and his theory of life.

Trajecting refers to ex-isting from the point of view of another. Grass is food for the cow, but an obstacle for the human hand, and a roof for insects to hide from the rain.

Source: La catastrophe ecologique moderne. Entretien avec Augustin Berque. Krisis, 2018 – 2 – No. 49, “Nature ?”

Western Being vs. Eastern Nothingness? Ontology vs. Meontology?

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

"Nishitani wrote the following with regard to Nishida and Tanabe: “[Their] philosophies share a distinctive and common basis that sets them apart from traditional Western philosophy: absolute nothingness. … Clearly the idea of absolute nothingness came to awareness in the spirituality of the East; but the fact that it has also been posited as a foundation for philosophical thought represents a new step virtually without counterpart in the history of Western philosophy” (NKC IX, 225–26; Nishitani 1991, 161).

“First philosophy” in the Western tradition is ontology, which asks the question of “being qua being,” and tends to answer this question either in terms of the most universal “being-ness” or in terms of the “highest being.” For Aristotle, the primary category of being is “substance,” ambiguously thought in its primary sense as the particular entity (e.g. Socrates) and in its secondary sense the universal that makes that entity what it is (e.g. human being), and the highest being was the “unmoved mover.” Greek ontology later influenced the Christian theological tradition to think of God as the “highest being,” such that the dual threads of the Western tradition as a whole took shape as what Heidegger calls “onto-theology.” Hence, the fundamental philosophical question of the onto-theological mainstream of the West is, “What is being?” On the other hand, the counter-question which the Kyoto School finds in the East is, “What is nothingness?” In place of an ontology, first philosophy in the East is more often a “meontology”: a philosophy of non-being or nothingness.

Perhaps we should say “mu-logy” rather than “meontology”; for, strictly speaking, the Greek meon, “non-being,” should be translated into Japanese as hi-u. What I am translating as “nothingnesss,” mu, is written with a single character rather than as a negation (hi) of being (u). This is crucial since the nothingness with which they are concerned is not the simple negation or privation of being. It is closer to what Heidegger means by “being.” Attentive to what he calls the “ontological difference” between being (das Sein) and beings (das Seiende), Heidegger notes that with respect to beings, understood as determinate things, being can only appear as “no-thing.” We fail to attend to the no-thing of being when we think only of things, and especially when we think of thinking as a mere calculation of predetermined beings. Heidegger thus calls “the nothing” (das Nichts) the “veil of being.” Being cannot but appear to us as nothing, insofar as we know only of beings. Yet it is das Sein or das Nichts which grants an open place, a clearing (Lichtung), for beings to show themselves in the first place. But this clearing lets beings be by withdrawing itself from view. Just as “nature (phusis) loves to hide” (Heraclitus), being lets determinate beings come to presence by withdrawing its indeterminate abundance into absence or self-concealment (see Heidegger 1975, Vol. 9, 103–22; and Vol. 65, 246–47).

Tanabe studied with Heidegger in the early 1920s. (In fact, upon returning to Japan in 1924, Tanabe was the first scholar in the world to write an article on Heidegger’s thought.) When he later wrote the following, Tanabe no doubt had Heidegger’s 1929 “What is Metaphysics?” lecture in mind: “All science needs to take some entity or other as its object of study. The point of contact is always in being, not in nothing. The discipline that has to do with nothingness is philosophy” (THZ VI, 156; see Heisig 2001, 121).

Heidegger was of course not the first Western philosopher to ask after that which is radically other than beings or “beyond being” as such.[5] For example, Tanabe could have also found support for the idea that philosophy investigates nothingness in the following passage from Hegel: “Das Erste der Philosophie aber ist, das absolute Nichts zu erdenken” [Yet the first task of philosophy is to conceive of absolute nothingness] (quoted from Hegel’s “Glauben und Wissen” in Ōhashi 1984, 203). The Kyoto School might even be thought of as recovering a suggestion from one of the first Presocratic philosophers, Anaximander: namely, to think finite beings as determinations, or delimitations, of “the indefinite” or “the unlimited” (to apeiron).

Moreover, as Kyoto School thinkers frequently do point out, Christian negative theologians and mystics, most notably Meister Eckhart, at times make use of the notion of “the nothing” to refer to that which transcends all concepts and all oppositions. For Eckhart, “nothing” (niht) was one way of indicating the “Godhead” (gōtheit) beyond “God” delimited as a personal being (see Eckehart 1963, 328). Niht here is an expression, at the limits of language, which attempts to indicate “the nothingness of indistinct fullness from which flow … all oppositions and relations” (Schürmann 1978, 168). Eckhart speaks of a breakthrough, not only beyond the ego, but also beyond God Himself, a breakthrough, that is, to an abyssal Godhead understood as “the silent desert into which no distinction ever gazed, of Father, Son, or Holy Ghost” (Eckehart 1963, 316). Analogously, Nishida writes that “when we truly enter thoroughly into the consciousness of absolute nothingness, there is neither I nor God” (NKZ V, 182; see Nishida 1958, 137).

Nishitani affirms Eckhart’s intimations of a Godhead of absolute nothingness, even though he notes that this is “markedly distant from orthodox Christian faith,” which limits the concept of nothingness to the relative nothingness expressed in the nihilum of creatio ex nihilo, that is, to the absolute privation of being out of which the highest being creates lesser beings (NKC X, 75; Nishitani 1982, 66; also see NKC VII). Yet Nishitani’s student and Eckhart scholar Ueda Shizuteru, despite profound appreciation for Eckhart’s thought and its nearness to Zen, argues in the end that Eckhart’s nothingness, like that of negative theology in general, still points to an inexpressibly higher being (see USS VIII, 146). Critically adapting Heidegger’s expression, we might say that the nothing is still understood as “the veil” of this inexpressibly higher being. Both Nishitani and Ueda ultimately look to Zen for a nothingness so absolute that, in thoroughly negating any traces of opposition to beings (i.e., as a higher being transcending worldly beings), it is paradoxically found fully in the concrete facts and activities of the here and now (see USS VIII, 5ff.).

Ōhashi stresses, however, that neither the Buddhist tradition nor the Kyoto School should be thought of as having a patent on the radical “thinking of nothingness.” In fact, he argues, “this thought slowly came to the fore within Western philosophy itself,” a process that indeed set the stage for Kyoto School contributions to contemporary philosophy (Ōhashi 2004, 12–13). Nishitani had already explored a number of resonant notions of nothingness, not only in the Neoplatonic and Christian mystical traditions, but also in 19th and 20th century Western philosophers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger (see NKC VIII; Nishitani 1990). And yet, here again Nishitani finds residues of an ontological bias, where a kind of “relative nothingness” is posited as either a simple negation of or as a veil for being. Nishitani ultimately concludes that Nietzsche succeeded only in expressing a “standpoint of relative absolute nothingness”; and even in Heidegger, he critically suggests, “traces of the representation of nothingness as some ‘thing’ that is nothingness still remain” (NKC X, 75 and 108; Nishitani 1982, 66 and 96).

In any case, it is fair to say that the Kyoto School thinkers generally consider the purest sources for the idea of absolute nothingness to lie in the traditions of the East. Hisamatsu went so far as to speak of absolute nothingness as “oriental nothingness” (Hisamatsu 1960); though it is important to bear in mind that his claim is that this idea was first clearly discovered in the traditions of East. Absolute nothingness is by no means only relevant to Eastern cultures, anymore than in 1500 CE the earth was only round in the West. Moreover, if the idea of absolute nothingness “came to awareness in the spirituality of the East,” as Nishitani says, the philosophy of absolute nothingness is generally considered to be the Kyoto School’s own contribution to the contemporary world of thought opened up by the meeting of East and West.

Nishida—who could hardly be accused of underestimating what Japan had to learn from Western philosophy—also spoke at times in very general terms of Eastern nothingness in contrast with Western being. In his essay, “The Types of Culture of the Classical Periods of East and West Seen from a Metaphysical Perspective,” he wrote: “How then are we to distinguish between the types of culture of the West and East from a metaphysical point of view? I think we can do this by dividing them into that [i.e., the culture of the West] which considers the ground of reality to be being, and that [i.e., the culture of the East] which considers this ground to be nothingness.” In Greek philosophy, he goes on to say, “that which has form and determination was regarded as the real”; or even, as in Plato, reality, that which has true being, was understood as the Forms. Judeo-Christian culture, however radically different in various ways it was from Greek culture, and despite negative theology’s indications of a Deus absconditus as a kind of nothingness, nevertheless primarily considered the person of God as “the most perfect being” to be the basis of reality. In radical contrast to both the Greek and Judeo-Christian origins of Western culture, Indian culture, like that of China and Japan, took “the profoundest idea of nothingness as its basis” (NKZ VII, 429–33; see Nishida 1970, 237–40).

In the closing lines of the preface to his 1926 book, From That Which Acts to That Which Sees, a book many scholars view as the beginning of “Nishidan Philosophy” proper, we find the following famous and programmatic lines: “It goes without saying that there is much to admire, and much to learn from, in the impressive achievements of Western culture, which thought form as being and the giving of form as good. However, does there not lie hidden at the base of our Eastern culture, preserved and passed down by our ancestors for several thousand years, something which sees the form of the formless and hears the voice of the voiceless? Our hearts and minds endlessly seek this something; and it is my wish to provide this quest with a philosophical foundation” (NKZ IV, 6)."

(https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/)

The controversy around the role of the Kyoto School vis a vis Japanese Imperialism

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

("The Razor’s Edge of “Cooperative Resistance”)

"The political ventures and misadventures of philosophers — from Socrates and Plato to Marx and Heidegger in the West, and from Confucius and Hanfeizi to Gandhi and Nishida in the East—represent an often enduring though hardly always endearing aspect of their legacies. Relating the “ideal” world of philosophy to the “real” world of political action is a perilous, if arguably obligatory, undertaking.

The pitfalls of political intervention are particularly deep when philosophers find themselves in a nation headed down a road toward injustice and disaster. What is a philosopher to do in such a situation? Barring straightforward complicity, there appear to be three choices: withdraw into reclusion, stand up in overt resistance, or attempt to negotiate a reorientation by means of immanent critique or cooperative correction. While many intellectuals in wartime Japan took the first course, some courageous Leftists braved the second course. Both Tosaka Jun and Miki Kiyoshi, the key figures of what is sometimes called the “left wing of the Kyoto School,” died in prison in 1945 as a result of their intellectual resistance. The majority of the Kyoto School thinkers, however, including Nishida, Tanabe, and Nishitani, took the third course of action.

In retrospect Nishitani wrote: “My attempt was, on the one hand, to explain where Japan was situated within the world to those intellectuals remaining on the sidelines [of politics]; and, on the other hand, with respect to the extremely nationalistic thought that was becoming increasingly prevalent at the time, I attempted from within to open up a path for overcoming this extreme nationalism” (NKC IV, 384). Rather than either stand up and die, or sit out and wait, Nishitani and other members of the Kyoto School attempted to walk the razor’s edge of what Ōhashi Ryōsuke has called “anti-establishment cooperation” or “cooperative resistance” (hantaiseiteki kyōryoku) (see Ōhashi 2001, 20ff.).

To be sure, the question of how successfully the Kyoto School managed to carry out this “cooperative resistance” (and the question of whether they cooperated more than resisted, or vice versa) is debatable, especially given the fact that they hardly succeeded in altering the disastrous orientation of the regime. Their intentions of cooperative resistance notwithstanding, the fact is that their political writings were more or less successfully co-opted by the extreme nationalism that they were trying to reorient or overcome from within. Nevertheless, we must take care to separate their ideals from the reality they were attempting to influence, and bear in mind the constraints of their chosen path of immanent critique.

Whatever the political failings of the Kyoto School thinkers may be, it is clear that certain crudely one-sided condemnations are at least as simplistic and misleading as are the occasional attempts of overzealous acolytes to whitewash everything they ever said or wrote. It is, for example, highly misleading to refer to the Kyoto School’s philosophy of history as “a thinly disguised justification … for Japanese aggression and continuing imperialism,” or to claim that “no group helped defend the state more consistently and enthusiastically … and none came closer … to defining the philosophic contours of Japanese fascism” (Najita & Harootunian 1998, 238–39; for a severe critique of such polemical claims, see Parkes 1997 and 2011). The latter dishonor, namely that of attempting to give quasi-philosophical expression to Japanese fascism, surely goes to the proponents of “Imperial Way Philosophy,” who in fact harshly attacked the “world-historical philosophy” of the Kyoto School for being insufficiently Japan-centric (see Ōhashi 2001, 71–72).

Judicious critics of the wartime political writings of the Kyoto School must surely try to steer a middle course between and beyond what James Heisig aptly calls the “side-steppers and the side-swipers” (see Heisig 1990, 14). With this balance in mind, in the following sections let me highlight some of the key points and episodes of the Kyoto School’s wartime political ventures and misadventures."

(https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/)

More information

• "After an introductory section, this article will focus on four questions:

1. How should the Kyoto School be defined? What is meant by its central philosophical concept of “absolute nothingness,” and
2. how did the Kyoto School philosophers variously develop this Eastern inspired idea in dialogue and debate with Western thought and with one another?
3. What are the basics of their political writings, and the basis of the controversy surrounding them?
4. What is the legacy of the Kyoto School for cross-cultural thinking?"

URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/

Bibliography

Iwata, Keiji.1989. “In Search for the Cosmos: Its Essence and Expression.” In Asian Cosmic Perspectives. Edited by Keiji Iwata and Kohei Sugiura. Tokyo: Kodansha, 8–39. 岩田慶治

Kinji Imanishi

Imanishi, Kinji. (1941) 2002. A Japanese View of Nature: The World of Living Things. Translated by Pamela Asquith, Heita Kawakatsu, Shusuke Yagi, and Hiroyuki Takasaki. London: Routledge.

Imanishi, Kinji. 1983. “A Proposal for Shizengaku: The Conclusion to My Study of Evolutionary Th e o r y.” Anthropology Quarterly 14 (3): 3–18. [Japanese publication].

Imanishi, Kinji. 1984. “A Proposal for Shizengaku: The Conclusion to My Study of Evolutionary Theory.” Translated by Rick Davis. Journal for Social and Biological Structures 7, no. 4 (October): 351–368.