Re-Politicising the Kyoto School as Philosophy (Routledge Leiden Series in Modern East Asian Politics and History)

Re-Politicising the Kyoto School as Philosophy This is a fresh and highly sophisticated collection that will assist in...

Author: Christopher Goto-Jones

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Re-Politicising the Kyoto School as Philosophy

This is a fresh and highly sophisticated collection that will assist in the urgent task of opening Western eyes to the complexities of non-Western political thinking. It employs great ﬁnesse in analysing the important Kyoto School of political thought from Japan, while concurrently marshalling the arguments and tools through which the international canon of political thinking may be broadened. At a methodological level it constitutes an emphatic and persuasive step in the direction of redressing geographical and cultural balances and developing a genuine comparative approach to political thought. Michael Freeden, Professor of Politics at Oxford University, and author of Ideologies and Political Theory In Re-Politicising the Kyoto School as Philosophy Christopher Goto-Jones contends that existing approaches to the controversial Kyoto School fail to take it seriously as a school of philosophy, instead focusing on historical debates about the alleged complicity of the School’s members with the imperialist regime in Japan. The essays in this book take a new approach to the subject, engaging substantially with the philosophical texts of members of the Kyoto School, and demonstrating that the School developed serious and sophisticated positions on many of the perennial questions that lie at the heart of political philosophy. These positions are innovative and fresh, and are of value to political philosophy today, as well as to intellectual historians of Japan. In particular, the book is structured around the various ways in which we might locate the Kyoto School in mainstream traditions of political thought, and the insights offered by the School about core concepts in political philosophy. In this way the book re-politicises the Kyoto School. With chapters written by many leading scholars in the ﬁeld, and representing a contribution to political thought as well as the intellectual history of Japan, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Japanese studies, philosophy and political thought. Christopher Goto-Jones is Professor of Modern Japan Studies and Director of the Modern East Asia Research Centre at Leiden University. He has written widely on issues of the location of the non-European in political thought and philosophy, and is the author of Political Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School and Co-Prosperity (Routledge, 2005).

Routledge/Leiden Series in Modern East Asian Politics and History Series editor: Rikki Kersten

Through addressing ideas about history and politics in the modern period, and by encouraging comparative and inter-disciplinary work amongst East Asian specialists, the Leiden Series on Modern East Asian History and Politics seeks to combine Area Studies’ focus on primary sources in the vernacular, with a distinct disciplinary edge. The Leiden Series focuses on philosophy, politics, political thought, history, the history of ideas and foreign policy as they relate to modern East Asia, and will emphasise theoretical approaches in all of these ﬁelds. As well as single-authored volumes, edited or multi-authored submissions that bring together a range of country specialisations and disciplines are welcome. 1

Political Philosophy in Japan Nishida, the Kyoto School and co-prosperity Christopher Goto-Jones

2 The Left in the Shaping of Japanese Democracy Essays in honour of J. A. A. Stockwin Edited by Rikki Kersten and David Williams 3

Re-Politicising the Kyoto School as Philosophy Christopher Goto-Jones

Re-Politicising the Kyoto School as Philosophy

Edited by Christopher Goto-Jones

First published 2008 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2008 Christopher Goto-Jones, selection and editorial matter; the contributors, their own chapters All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Re-politicising the Kyoto school as philosophy / Christopher Goto-Jones. p. cm. – (Routledge/Leiden series in modern East Asian politics and history; 3) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Philosophy, Japanese – 20th century. 2. Political science – Japan – Philosophy – History – 20th century. I. Goto-Jones, Christopher S. II. Title. B5241.R47 2007 181 .12–dc22

ISBN 0-203-09932-X Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0–415–37237–2 (Print Edition) ISBN13: 978–0–415–37237–4

2007010926

For pretty close, just because.

Contents

Notes on contributors Foreword by James W. Heisig Introduction and acknowledgements PART I

Framing the political philosophy of the Kyoto School 1

The Kyoto School and the history of political philosophy: reconsidering the methodological dominance of the Cambridge School

ix xi xvi

1

3

CH RI STOP HER GOTO- JONE S

2

Turns to and from political philosophy: the case of Nishitani Keiji

26

BRET W. DAVI S

PART II

Political concepts in the philosophy of the Kyoto School

47

3

49

The individual and individualism in Nishida and Tanabe MATTEO CESTAR I

4

Constituting aesthetic/moral national space: the Kyoto School and the place of nation

75

YU MI KO I I DA

5

Time, everydayness and the specter of fascism: Tosaka Jun and philosophy’s new vocation H ARRY D. HA ROOT UNI AN

96

viii 6

Contents What was the ‘Japanese philosophy of history’? An inquiry into the dynamics of the ‘world-historical standpoint’ of the Kyoto School

113

CHRI S TI A N UHL

PART III

The Kyoto School and traditions of political philosophy 7

Romanticism, conservatism and the Kyoto School of philosophy

135 137

KEVI N M. D OAK

8

The deﬁnite internationalism of the Kyoto School: changing attitudes in the contemporary academy

161

GRA HA M PAR KE S

9

Resistance to conclusion: the Kyoto School philosophy under the Pax Americana

183

NAOK I S AK AI

Index

199

Contributors

Matteo Cestari is Lecturer at the University of Turin, where he teaches Far Eastern religions and philosophies. He has published numerous essays on contemporary Japanese thought, among them are ‘The Knowing Body: Nishida’s Philosophy of Active Intuition’, The Eastern Buddhist (1998). He has also published a book-length translation of Nishida’s essays in Italian. Bret W. Davis is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Loyola College in Maryland, USA. He is the author of Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit (2007), and the co-editor of Sekai no naka no Nihon no tetsugaku (Japanese Philosophy in the World, 2004). He has published numerous articles in English and Japanese on Continental and Japanese philosophy, including an article on the Kyoto School for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Kevin M. Doak holds the Nippon Foundation Chair at Georgetown University in Washington DC. Amongst his many publications in the ﬁeld of the history of ideas and modern nationalism in Japan are two monographs: Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity (1994) and A History of Nationalism in Modern Japan: Placing the People (2006). Christopher Goto-Jones is Professor of Modern Japan Studies and Director of the Modern East Asia Research Centre at Leiden University. He has written widely on issues of the location of the non-European in political thought and philosophy, and is the author of Political Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School and Co-Prosperity (2005). He is currently working on a monograph for Cambridge University Press entitled Warrior Ethics in Japan: Bushido as Intellectual History. Harry D. Harootunian is Professor of History and Director of the East Asian Studies Program at NewYork University. Among Harootunian’s many acclaimed books are History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice and the Question of Everyday Life (2000) and Overcome by Modernity: Commodity Form, Culture and Community in Interwar Japan (2000). James W. Heisig is Permanent Research Fellow of the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture and Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Letters, Nanzan

x

Contributors University. He has written widely on the Kyoto School and, as the general editor of the Nanzan Studies in Religion and Culture, he has overseen a number of translation and editorial projects. Amongst these many publications are: Philosophers of Nothingness – An Essay on the Kyoto School (2001) and (edited with John C. Maraldo) RudeAwakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, & the Question of Nationalism (1995).

Yumiko Iida is presently a researcher at the Asian Institute, University of Toronto, Canada. She has published a number of articles on issues in modern Japanese intellectual and cultural history, as well as a monograph: Rethinking Identity in Modern Japan: Nationalism as Aesthetics (2002). Graham Parkes is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawaii. Among his publications are Heidegger and Asian Thought (1987), Nietzsche and Asian Thought (1991), and translations of Nishitani Keiji’s The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism (1990), Reinhard May’s Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East-Asian Inﬂuences on his Work (1996), François Berthier’s Reading Zen in the Rocks (2000) and Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2005). Naoki Sakai is Professor in the Departments of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature, Cornell University. He has written widely on questions of intellectual history, philosophy and comparative literature, in both Japanese and English. In addition to many articles and edited volumes, two major publications include: Translation and Subjectivity: On ‘Japan’ and Cultural Nationalism (1997) and Nihon shis¯o toiu mondai: honyaku to shutai (The Problem called Japanese Thought, 1997). Christian Uhl is a post-doctoral research fellow and lecturer at Leiden University. He has published a number of articles on the philosophy of the Kyoto School and a monograph: Wer warTakeuchiYoshimis Lu Xun? EinAnnäherungsversuch an ein Monument der Japanischen Sinologie (Who Was Takeuchi Yoshimi’s Lu Xun? Approaching a Monument of Japanese China Studies, 2003).

Foreword

To approach the writings of the Kyoto School, a loosely deﬁned circle of philosophers more or less centred on the ﬁgure of Nishida Kitarõ (1870–1945), is to be impaled on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, we want to let them be philosophers in their own way and not inﬂict on them our own current conventions about what counts as properly critical thinking and what does not. The background of resources on which they drew contains too many things too different from those of Europe, the New World and the Mediterranean basin to allow a simple transfer of standards. On the other hand, we are uncomfortable with the moral climate in which they did their thinking and have a hard time reading their works as if none of that mattered to us any more. Ideas are rarely if ever politically innocent. Not even the noblest of philosophic ideals are immune from contamination by the prevailing dogmas that tether us to the injustices and violence of the way things are. The discomfort has been hard won, and we are not about to let go of it simply because of cultural differences. As a result, the whole corpus of Kyoto philosophy has become a kind of double entendre. It never means only what it says on the surface, and the onus is on the reader to enter into that other world between the lines, to decide how much is altered because it is bred in a different vernacular and how much is outright alien to values with which we do not wish to part. The crucial factor, of course, is that the formative years of the Kyoto School coincided with the formative years of Japan’s militaristic ideology and its practical execution in the East Asian region. On the whole, the disastrous effects of Japan’s colonial escapades and its wartime aggressions leave little room for debate, except perhaps for a small and intellectually uninteresting cadre of local historians who resist what the rest of the world has come to take for granted. In particular, things are not so simple. The wartime writings of the Kyoto School are a case in point. Because so much of what they had to say was listened to seriously, it is only natural for historians of ideas to sniff through their works in search of anything that smells of militaristic ideology and assign it a place on a moral spectrum marked off at one end by open complicity with the powers that be, and at the other by open rebellion against them. For quite a few historians, the further away a particular text is from the pole of rebelliousness and the more cautious its phrasing, the more likely it can be catalogued as an instance of tacit consent to the events taking place. With the

xii

Foreword

question posed in those terms, it is not hard to see how we ended up with two opposing camps of opinion: the one bent on exposing the political naiveté and wickedness at work in the Kyoto School, the other doing all they can to parry the blows and keep the non-political core of its philosophical tradition in the forefront. Whatever else one may say of the rivalry, it is in no sense a rehearsal of the situation in which the Kyoto School thinkers found themselves. The arguments and texts thrown back and forth among academics about what Japan’s leading philosophical minds were writing while its government was leading the country to war pose no threat to life and limb for anyone. There is no censorship of expression, no fear of imprisonment or of harm coming to one’s family or friends. The debate has been free to exhaust itself in public, and there is every indication that this is just what it has done. Today, after more than 25 years, the focus of the discussion has begun to shift to larger and more widely engaging problems. It is not that the rivals have laid down their pens, stepped back and come to a more or less balanced judgement about the deeds and misdeeds of those under the looking glass. Opinions are as divided as ever. But the amount of attention the debate commands and the importance given to where one stands on the question is being overtaken by other questions that had been ripening in the shadows. The present volume seems to me to reﬂect this change. There is no question that the critique of critical thinking in general, and in modern Japan in particular, has been enhanced by taking social and political factors into account. The history of philosophy and the archaeology of ideas can no longer be carried out within parameters that would have satisﬁed the nineteenth century. The regress to deeper and subtler levels of criticism has redeﬁned the traditional levels of abstraction, and in the process immeasurably complicated our evaluation of philosophical systems. A broad, encyclopaedic glance at history would no doubt see in all of this a change of emphasis rather than the utter novelty it is sometimes made out to be; but for those who have rolled up their sleeves to sweat their way through the rethinking, the revolution is real enough. True, the fact that it took students of the Kyoto School at home and abroad so long to recognise the turn has itself become a target of the same complaints lodged against the texts they are studying. That said, the ground has shifted and the simple choice of standing up for or against the political views of Nishida and his circle, or of assigning them varying degrees of blame, ﬁnds itself in new surroundings that are shaking the foundations of the choice. To put it simply, the fact that more and more of the Kyoto School philosophers have been welcomed into the philosophical forum and their works included in the canon of twentieth-century philosophy is one of the strongest indications that the inveterate parochialism of Western philosophy is beginning to break down. Never mind that the critics of their alleged collaboration with the military ideology of the day often used their writings selectively in the attempt to piece together an alleged political theory, all but eclipsing their major philosophical achievements. Never mind, too, the distortions introduced in the effort to represent them as a clear voice of sanity in the midst of the madness. Whatever the blame or credit apportioned to them in the matters political – a judgement that future historians of philosophy will

Foreword

xiii

probably accept in its current chiaroscuro – ﬁgures like Nishida, Tanabe Hajime, Nishitani Keiji, Kuki Sh¯uz¯o, Tosaka Jun, Miki Kiyoshi and Watsuji Tetsur¯o are by and large seen to stand shoulder to shoulder with philosophers of their day like James, Bergson, Husserl and Heidegger. The frame of mind within which the Kyoto philosophers thought and wrote was never closed in on Japan. It may have taken academia in Europe and the Americas a long time to begin acknowledging them as intellectual colleagues worthy of attention, and those who do so may still be in an absolute minority, but once that step had been taken, the bald logic of measuring them according to simple moral categories applied in hindsight was bound to ﬁnd its proper place within a broader horizon of criticism. In other words, in the same measure that we insist on full awareness of the context within which the Kyoto School thinkers composed their philosophies as essential to our reading and evaluating them, the context within which we do our reading and evaluating needs to be transparent to us. The prevalent bias has long been that Japan, and indeed the Far East as a whole, has yet to produce philosophy worthy of the name. If there is anything that does merit the name, it is by virtue of its association with deﬁnitions of philosophy from abroad. Since even Japanese academics specialising in the ﬁeld have tended to deﬁne their work in terms of imported writings, the challenge that Nishida and his circle raised against this belief was barely more acceptable at home than outside Japan. The younger generation of students of philosophy, however, seem to have less difﬁculty breaking with that belief. The persona of Nishida is losing its mystique as a pioneering genius and being rediscovered as a model to be imitated in delving deeper into the intellectual history of Japan and its Asian neighbours. In retrospect much of the debate over the wartime behaviour of the Kyoto philosophers has been taken up with slaying paper dragons, each side shifting the weight of its argument from anecdote to over-generalisation with little to show in the way of constructive discussion. Meantime, the campaign to measure the relative political virtues of the key personalities on a single yardstick has more or less run its course. It is time to start thinking about what comes next. Again, if the essays in this volume are any indication, the original framing of the problem has been reﬁned into identifying speciﬁc philosophical questions and within a broader context of textual evidence. As it happens, this development is supported by another, unexpected turn of events. As representative samplings of Kyoto School writings have become available in greater quantity and in more languages, the readership has increased, and this has had its effect on the way those writings are read. For many years, devotees of the Kyoto School in the West have concentrated their efforts on producing accurate translations, rendering technical terms intelligible, commenting on the key ideas, clarifying Buddhist and literary inﬂuences and occasionally pursuing comparison with a Western philosopher or current of ideas. As this work goes on, more and more effort has been exerted to put the ideas of the Kyoto School to use in rephrasing a range of traditional philosophical questions. This, in turn, has led to a creative rethinking of some of their core ideas in order to accommodate them to new modes of thought and problems speciﬁc to our own times. Although

xiv

Foreword

these adventures are not the subject of the present volume, they bear clear witness to a surer foothold on the world philosophical forum than Japanese philosophy has ever had in the past. No more than one needs to be educated in the German language in order to develop Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics, or in English in order to apply Pierce’s ideas to multi-valued logics, does one need to be Japanese in order to philosophise in the idiom of the Kyoto School. The perils of rushing ahead too quickly are obvious, but for many upcoming scholars the rewards are too large not to risk them. What Nishida and those closest to him had most wanted, but what was not in their power to achieve on their own or even to properly voice, seems to be taking its ﬁrst infant steps: the full right to be heard on the strength of one’s ideas rather than on the basis of one’s passport and native language. Far from sweeping the socio-political critique under the carpet, this change of ground has brought critics of non-Western philosophy face to face with their own latent assumptions about being in possession of ‘universal values’ that give them the right to police the logic and the morals of other intellectual traditions with the same vigour and conﬁdence with which they police their own. Or, to turn the meaning of that statement inside out, it has toppled the self-ordained priesthood of specialists who turn their noses up at criticisms thrown up by those who have not struggled through all the relevant textual data in the original language. Having one’s habits of thought torn away to reveal the naked assumptions beneath them is sobering and puts things in perspective. What at ﬁrst feels like being skinned alive often turns out, on reﬂection, to be a needed change of clothes. This I gather, is something that both sides of the debate on which this book is premised have come to understand over their years of engagement in it. The reason that interest in the Kyoto School thinkers has survived, even as the political storm around them calms down, is that the ‘perspective’ that this rude awakening puts things in, is what most interested them. The tools of political analysis and the critique of social institutions are useful to understand the way ideas wield their power outside the control of individual conscience at the same time as they batten and grow strong through blind complicity. Yet these tools are themselves an abstraction from the Lebenswelt in which all of us, whatever our profession or education need, to eat and toil and talk to one another, at the same time as we struggle with the ineluctable problems of suffering and death, of unquenchable desires that both deﬁne our humanity and seem to condemn it to ﬁnal dissatisfaction. The simple separation of unphilosophical sheep, which on the one side, who think by reacting to the options thrown up to them, and on the other, an enlightened elite of shepherds who are able to see through the prevailing spirit of the age, is out of touch with the full reach of human experience. Nevertheless, try as one might to offer a philosophical vision that gives voice to our deepest human questions, these questions themselves are always epoch-speciﬁc. Their posing is determined by the way language is used and the conversations and ideas that are in the air that one breathes. The search for a perspective broad enough to encompass all of these elements – call it a locus of absolute nothingness, a standpoint of emptiness, a metanoetics – is what the principal ﬁgures of the Kyoto School shared in common. They called it

Foreword xv ‘self-awareness’ and around it revolved the rest of their thought like planets around the sun. However transcendental and ‘religious’ this may sound, there is no greater offence against self-awareness than deliberately to restrict its reach, for whatever reason. Insofar as such failure of attentiveness took place under the pressures of a military government and the threat of punishment, one may want to seek grounds for leniency and be wary of demanding Herculean virtues of others from a position that is happily exempt from those conditions. Nonetheless, for these philosophers self-awareness is intended as a moral yardstick that aims to be every bit as ‘universal’ as the principles on which their wartime opinions have been chastised. Here again, one hears echoes in the present volume of turning the philosophy of the Kyoto School on itself as a way to cleanse it of the stains that the conditions of its birth left upon it. If they offer a different way of seeing, as I believe they do, then it is also a different way of seeing the way they carried out their project. In the end, I am persuaded that nothing is gained by lightening the weight of criticism against the texts and what they contain. By the same token, nothing is gained by dimming the light they shed on the way we perform philosophy, apply morality, and propose values that supersede differences of time, place and culture. It is only in posing questions to the Kyoto School that they did not ask themselves, and in accepting the questions they ask of us that we have not asked of ourselves, that the debate under discussion in these pages can be fair to itself and promise something more than a ﬁnal verdict about who was victorious and who defeated. On this ‘more’ hangs an important chapter in the story of philosophy in the twenty-ﬁrst century. James W. Heisig

Introduction and acknowledgements

Since the end of the Second World War, the Kyoto School of philosophy has excited a great deal of interest (and considerable emotion) across a range of academic ﬁelds, both within Japan and (perhaps especially) outside. As Jim Heisig observes in his elegant preface to this volume, there has been a tendency towards confrontationalism in the literature, with two ‘opposing camps of opinion: the one bent on exposing the political naiveté and wickedness at work in the Kyoto School, the other doing all that they can to parry the blows and keep the non-political core of its philosophical tradition in the forefront’. The chief purpose of the current volume is to move beyond this kind of adversarialism by changing the nature of the questions asked of the philosophers of the Kyoto School. Rather than being concerned with the complicity (or otherwise) of the various members of the Kyoto School with the ultra-nationalist regime of imperial Japan, the contributors here are primarily concerned with interrogating the texts of the Kyoto School philosophers in order to ascertain their potential contributions to the ﬁeld of political philosophy itself. Of course, this approach does not dissolve the ‘camps’ of opposing opinion, but it displaces them from their current centrality in the discourse about the Kyoto School, pushing them out of the limelight and into the shadows. Hence, this book, which deliberately and enthusiastically hosts voices from across and between the various ‘camps’, is structured around technical issues in political thought rather than around individual thinkers or their ostensible ideological afﬁliations. In general, the essays here seek neither to condemn nor to vindicate, but rather to explore and explain the way that the philosophers of the Kyoto School employed and conceptualised core political categories (such as the individual (Cestari), the nation (Iida), time (Harootunian) and history (Uhl)), or the way in which the various political visions of the Kyoto School thinkers might contribute to major currents of mainstream political thought (such as romanticism and conservatism (Doak) or internationalism (Parkes)). These chapters are framed by two pieces: one that seeks to deﬁne a place for the Kyoto School within the existing, conventional (Euro-American) canon of political philosophy (Goto-Jones), and one that aims to outline the contours of the way in which a major Kyoto School philosopher conceived of politics in the ﬁrst place (Davis).

Introduction and acknowledgements

xvii

Of course, this shift in the emphasis and purpose of inquiry into the work of the Kyoto School – what I call the search for the politics of the Kyoto School qua philosophy – makes some important methodological and theoretical demands on the contributors. As Sakai points out in his ‘resistance to conclusion’ at the end of this volume, shifting scholarly priorities away from ‘historical evaluation and assessment of socio-political implications’at a speciﬁc point in history and towards the quest to ‘apprehend philosophical architectonic and conceptual coherence’ in philosophical texts, requires different types of knowledge and training. For Sakai, ‘so-called Japan specialists’ (whom he considers to have dominated the ﬁeld until now) have generally been diligent about the former task (historical evaluation) and ‘not necessarily diligent’ about the latter (philosophical analysis). Indeed, he goes so far as to talk of a ‘lack of disciplinary preparedness’ in the ﬁeld. I hope that the structure and rationale of the current volume as well as the disciplinary approach of the contributors goes some way towards addressing this shortfall in preparedness. This volume has beneﬁted tremendously from the help of a number of people. Most obviously, I am grateful to the contributors themselves for their patience, dedication and persistence. Each of them took to their tasks with energy and seriousness, and their various different backgrounds and orientations added tremendously to the scope and viability of the project as a whole. No editor could have asked for a better or more varied team of scholars. I am also grateful to Stephanie Rogers at Routledge, who was incredibly patient as I missed each successive deadline, despite the unfailing diligence of the contributors. Second, I would like to thank my colleagues here at the Modern East Asia Research Centre in Leiden, especially Axel Schneider and Rikki Kersten, without whose support and encouragement this project would have withered away long ago. A special word of thanks is due to Richard Calichman, who indulged my Kyoto School-tortured mind for longer than I had thought humanly possible. Many other scholars have lent their ears and their support to this project at various times, including Livia Monnet, Tom Lamarre and Yoko Arisaka. Finally, I would like to thank Chiara Brivio for her invaluable assistance with the ﬁnal manuscript, and for her sage advice throughout the process. Christopher Goto-Jones, Leiden

Part I

Framing the political philosophy of the Kyoto School

1

The Kyoto School and the history of political philosophy Reconsidering the methodological dominance of the Cambridge School1 Christopher Goto-Jones

Introduction The history of political philosophy is a singularly self-defensive sub-ﬁeld. It is, perhaps, even more defensive than the history of philosophy as a whole, within which it occupies such an important and central location. As in the wider ﬁeld, one of the central dilemmas of the history of political philosophy concerns the signiﬁcance and meaning of context. However, in the case of political thought in particular, the stakes in this debate are rather more politicized, as you might expect. Since the end of the Second World War, and particularly since the 1960s and the appearance of the so-called New Historians in Cambridge, the major disciplinary debate has concerned the relative importance of textual meaning and historical context in the history of ideas.2 Recent, inﬂuential accounts of the ‘state of the discipline’ have suggested that this pivotal debate ‘seems to have run out of steam over the last decade’ because ‘the case against contextual readings in the history of political thought is increasingly hard to make’ (Runciman 2001: 84). However, even if we are to accept that the Cambridge School has effectively won this debate, it is far from clear that the ﬁeld has really come to grips with the political implications of its own conclusions. In particular, the acceptable parameters of ‘context’ have remained strictly delimited by the whispered yet pervasive identity politics of the ﬁeld itself. Despite its ostensibly inclusive tone, ‘context’ has unfortunately become a buzzword for intellectual conservatism and ethnocentricity in the history of political thought. To borrow a phrase from Suzuki Shigetaka, context appears to have become a strategic defence against a European ‘sense of crisis’ concerning Europe’s place in the world. Historians of political thought in non-Euro-American contexts ﬁnd themselves in a contradictory relationship with this mainstream debate. Prima facie, the ascendancy of ‘context’ should provide a discursive space for the non-Western in the history of philosophy. However, it is not at all clear that this is the kind of site that ‘context’ has served to open up; historical context does not appear to overlap with spatio-cultural context. The ‘geo-historical’ standpoint called for by Nishitani Keiji in has not materialized. The main problem appears to be the persistent (and occasionally even explicit) assumption that ‘the history of ideas can teach us something about our own intellectual, philosophical, moral or political predicament’,

4

Christopher Goto-Jones

where we are deﬁned almost exclusively as ‘dead, white and male’ (Runciman 2001: 89; 96–emphasis added). Despite some successful efforts to broaden these contextual parameters, particularly to include dead, white females,3 it remains the case that of all the possible historical contexts that might be of interest to historians of political philosophy none of them appear to be found outside the geo-historical spaces of Europe and the USA. It is for this reason (amongst others) that the Kyoto School of Philosophy presents a special challenge to historians of political thought. Interestingly enough, the question of inclusivity was also one of the central problematics that deﬁned the Kyoto School’s philosophy of history. The political philosophy of the wartime Kyoto School has, in fact, been victim of a double marginalization. In the ﬁrst place, it has been excluded from mainstream histories of political thought because of this defensive ethnocentricity in the discipline, despite the ostensible victory of ‘context’ in recent years. Second, it has also been demonized even within the allied (albeit rather more niche) discipline of Japanese intellectual history because of its association with (or ‘context’ in) the war itself, which appears to imply that the School is somehow ‘anti-Western’ rather than a possible strand in an aspirant universalist history of political philosophy.4 In fact, these two marginalizations are aspects of the same methodological problem – the selective and inconsistent application of the insights of the triumphant Cambridge School to non-European contexts.5 In this chapter I hope to explore some of the strategies that have been employed (deliberately or inadvertently) in the history of political thought to marginalize or even exclude the non-European. It will be seen that a number of these strategies were already identiﬁed and critiqued by the wartime Kyoto School, particularly in their political writings of the early’s. Hence, this chapter represents a ﬁrst attempt at a resurrection of the Kyoto School’s philosophy of history as applied to the history of political thought in particular – the other contributions to this book take the second step of engaging directly with the political ideas of the Kyoto School itself. One of the most striking conclusions here is that the defeat of Japan in and the subsequent discrediting of Kyoto School philosophy has enabled historians of political thought to persist in their conservatism, rendering the discipline almost static in regard to its perspective on the non-European in the second half of the twentieth century. The various defences of the Cambridge School against charges of antiquarianism and conservatism, even within the European tradition, have actually served to bolster the Euro-centricity of the discipline. Because of this, the Kyoto School’s critique of Europe’s ‘sense of crisis’ remains as relevant and potent today as it was during the wartime period. Somewhat ironically, attempts to discredit the philosophy of the wartime Kyoto School through appeals to its wartime ‘context’ (i.e. to its allegedly aggressive anti-Westernism during a war ‘against the West’) have recently been undermined in the discipline of the history of political thought by its attempts to rejuvenate itself through recourse to early twentieth century ﬁgures of dubious political orientation in Europe, especially Nazis. If, for example, Carl Schmitt can ﬁnd a place in the mainstream narrative, it would be ridiculous to exclude the Kyoto School on the grounds of its (much more contested) association with Japanese imperialism.

The Kyoto School

5

If it is excluded, the logic of this exclusion must tend towards parochialism or ethnocentricity. In fact, it is precisely the Kyoto School’s opposition to the dominance of European historical method that makes such a valuable addition to the history of political thought.

The highways and byways of ‘our own’ predicaments One of the most durable and long-lasting critiques of the Cambridge School’s emphasis on understanding historical context as the key to understanding the meaning of a philosophical text has been that such a method renders the history of political thought into a self-referential and inward-looking discipline. To phrase the rejoinder in slightly different terms: rather than being concerned with the wisdom of past thinkers concerning timeless questions of morality and politics, the emphasis on context risks transforming the subject of the discipline into the past itself, thus making it less relevant (or perhaps even irrelevant) to the moral and political predicaments of the present. The effect of this powerful (and rather political) criticism on the ﬁeld has been substantial. However, in some ways, it is the responses to this criticism that have caused the problems of ethnocentricity that concern me here; by rallying to the defence of the relevance of contextual readings, a number of high proﬁle thinkers have adopted strategies that effectively (and perhaps inadvertently) reduce extraEuropean pasts into irrelevance. In most cases this appears to be an accidental consequence of their arguments, but this in itself is indicative of the lack of regard afforded to the non-European in the mainstream. David Runciman, currently based in Cambridge himself, provides an interesting example of the defensive strategy in question. He concedes, quite reasonably, that the charge of antiquarianism is not wholly without teeth. Quite rightly, he does not concede that such a criticism is a necessary consequence of the method per se, but he suggests, in fact, that certain tendencies in the literature of the history of political thought since the 1960s have actually encouraged this particular criticism. Plotting the growth of the ﬁeld, and arguing sensibly that such rapid and healthy growth would naturally lead to the development of increasingly specialized scholarship, Runciman goes on to observe that some of this very specialized work even addresses ‘authors from outside the familiar canon of western ideas’. Whilst he is happy to admit that some of this work is ‘extremely thorough’, he is also careful to note that much of it is also ‘quite obscure’. He explains that ‘to outsiders, and to many insiders, it can sometimes seem rather inward-looking, following . . . through the byways rather than the highways of intellectual history’ (Runciman 2001: 86). Whilst I am reasonably sure that this was not his intention, a clear implication of Runicman’s depiction of the ﬁeld is that the history of non-Western political thought is, if it is anything at all, no more than a byway – it is certainly not part of any of the major highways of the discipline. In fact, he implies that devoting time and energy to these byways is giving the discipline a bad name; it gives the critics space to charge the Cambridge School’s approach to the history of political thought with irrelevance. Nonetheless, Runciman generously suggests that ‘any ﬂourishing

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ﬁeld of professional historical inquiry should expect to produce a considerable amount of specialist research, and to ﬁnd room for those practitioners who are uninterested in, or at least untroubled by, questions of contemporary relevance’ (Runciman 2001: 86). Clearly, this is not good enough. The real issue for historians of non-European political thought, then, concerns the parameters and location of these mysterious disciplinary ‘highways’. Thankfully, Runciman is quite clear about where these highways might be: The dominant arguments in the history of political thought are currently those which seek to emphasise the ways in which past texts in the history of ideas can teach us something about our own intellectual, philosophical, moral or political predicament. It remains true that most current readings in the history of political thought take it for granted that there is no necessary correlation between the concerns of past political thinkers and the anxieties of the present – their problems, by deﬁnition, are not our problems. But it does not have to follow from this that our problems might not be recognisable in theirs. (Runciman 2001: 89) At ﬁrst glance, this categorization of the disciplinary highway seems promisingly inclusive. It appears to concede that ‘the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there’ (Hartley 1953/2004) and that consequently non-European pasts might be only as alien as past contexts within Europe’s own historical narratives.6 That is to say, if we can concede that political thinkers from the European past may have relevance to our present, then we must logically concede that the same might be true of ﬁgures from non-European pasts: all of these pasts are foreign countries. Indeed, Runciman’s solution to the problem of the disputed relevance of even European pasts to Euro-American presents appears to open the door still more widely for the non-European: he suggests that we no longer have to ﬁnd carbon copies of our own predicaments in the work of past thinkers for them to be relevant, but rather we must merely be able to ﬁnd our problems recognizable in theirs. This ‘recognition’ seems to be the central criteria for travellers along the main disciplinary highways. If Runciman’s characterization of the highways is accurate, then it should represent a great step away from ethnocentricity. After all, it would be quite incredible for anyone to argue seriously that texts from non-European historical contexts are so alien to the mainstream discipline that it cannot even ﬁnd anything recognizable in the intellectual, philosophical, moral or political predicaments discussed therein. Indeed, the discipline’s own aspirations towards universalism would be contradicted by this sort of parochialism: the assumption that historians of political thought currently working in non-European contexts should be interested in the ‘history of political thought’ (in Europe) rests fundamentally upon the notion that thinkers do not have to be European to recognize something of their own politico-moral predicaments in the central canon of European political thought. Japan’s Kyoto School, for example, clearly recognized a number of modern Japan’s predicaments in the work of (amongst many others) Kant, Hegel, Marx,

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and Heidegger. It is ethnocentric to be blind to the logical necessity of the reverse process. As we will see later, for the Kyoto School such ethnocentricity is also ahistorical in several important ways, most signiﬁcantly because it denies the historical character of the twentieth century, which is categorized as ‘worldly’ (sekaisei), at least in Europe and East Asia. For the wartime Kyoto School, the fact that they (as Japanese philosophers) were willing to accept the emergence of a historical period in which European thought was relevant (and accessible) to them, whilst European thinkers remained blind to the relevance of Japanese thought, demonstrated that Europe was conscious of a crisis in the present and that Japan had progressed beyond the conﬁnes of nationalist historical narratives. As we will see, the various gymnastics required to sustain the central position of Europe in the discipline in the post-war period do indeed suggest the anxieties of an identity crisis.

How ‘we’ recognize ourselves and ‘our’ predicaments A number of leading thinkers in the history of political thought have been very clear that they are not interested in non-European contexts. The point of contention effectively revolves around the meaning of the term ‘recognizable’. For some, such as Alisdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor, ‘recognizable’ appears to be informed historically rather than merely philosophically. That is to say, it is not enough to identify a similar political predicament (say, the problem of popular representation) in just any past; rather, the phrasing of that predicament must form part of the narrative history of ‘our own’phrasing of it now. In Taylor’s words, ‘we need to give an account of the origins of our present thoughts, beliefs, assumptions, actions’ (Taylor 1984/98: 18). MacIntyre also emphasizes the importance of a historical and genealogical thread linking ‘recognizable’ predicaments together through history. He argues that it is only within the framework of an overarching national narrative or Weltanschauung that we can recognize the ways in which past positions competed with each other (in the formation of the present) rather than simply existed as disconnected alternatives in different contexts (MacIntyre 1984/98: 41– 42). In other words, there is an important sense in which the history of political thought as expounded by Taylor and MacIntyre is deliberately, self-consciously, and even necessarily a history of European political thought. It is concerned with explaining the origins of modern Euro-American thought on politics, and this is the basis of its claim to being a branch of the discipline of history. To this extent, the discipline of the history of political thought is largely concerned with tracing historical continuities – and it is congruence with these highways of continuity that deﬁnes how ‘recognizable’ a past position or predicament might be. The position of Taylor and MacIntyre on this question is clear and well articulated: it is a statement of the history of political thought as the history of European political thought as part of the grand narrative of European history. This is a legitimate and interesting enterprise in itself, of course. However, it is not the same enterprise as the one tantalizingly hinted at in Runciman’s characterization of the discipline, which does not restrict itself to this kind of particularism.

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Indeed, contrary to Runciman’s concerns about the detrimental effects on the discipline of studying the non-European byways, which he claims might lead to charges of antiquarianism (i.e. to charges that it is the past rather than the ideas that become the subject of study), it seems here that a stronger case could be made that it is the focus of the discipline on European history that renders it antiquarian (and even anachronistic). In other words, it is the highways not the byways that appear to be the problem. The insistence on Europe’s centrality looks increasingly like a conservative reaction to the emergence of a world in which Europe is no longer the centre.7 An additional problem for the history of political thought is that the pursuit of a recognizably European history of thought is not the same enterprise as is implied by the titles of the works produced by Taylor and MacIntrye, nor by the title of the seminal work by one of the Cambridge School’s leading lights, Quentin Skinner’s The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. The aspiration here is clearly universal – there is no European in sight. Hence, there appears to be a tension in the ﬁeld of the history of political philosophy between the particularist and narrative tendencies of history on the one hand, and philosophy’s aspirations towards universalism on the other. To the extent that thinkers such as Taylor, MacIntyre, and Skinner conﬂate the particular and the universal in their presentation of the discipline, they not only risk charges of antiquarianism but they also risk perpetrating a kind of imperialism; antiquarianism here slips into ethnocentricity. It would be unimaginable (at least in today’s geo-historical context) if, say, Tetsuo Najita’s important book, Japan: The Intellectual Foundations of Modern Japanese Politics, were reprinted as The Intellectual Foundations of Modern Politics.8 Of course, Najita is not nearly so ambitious about the achievements of his work. It is fascinating to reﬂect that the parameters of this situation were pre-empted rather crisply by the wartime Kyoto School. In the now infamous Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron debates of 16 November,9 four members of the School discussed the ‘study of world history and the philosophy of world history’. In an extract in which all four participants speak, their feelings on the state of the discipline are made very clear: Nishitani: Kosaka: K¯oyama: Suzuki:

. . . I think that, in general, Europeans have still not shaken the habit of looking at world affairs from a European perspective . . . It’s because they think of everything from the standpoint of European expansion! That’s the European crisis! Rather than having a world-consciousness (sekaishi’ishiki) in accord with its true meaning, isn’t it the case that Europeans are conscious of a sense of crisis (kikikannen).10 (CK: 153)

The wartime Kyoto School was acutely conscious of the imperialist contradictions of the universalist aspirations of a particularly European history of philosophy. (They were not always so aware of similar contradictions in their own thought.)

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Problems of the method and philosophy of worldly history In defence of the ethnocentric presentation of the history of political philosophy, it remains true that it is merely reﬂecting the ethnocentricity of the disciplines of both philosophy and political philosophy, neither of which has successfully or substantially opened their doors to the non-Western. In other words, this blindness to non-European thinkers in the history of political thought is a genuine historical phenomenon in the discipline. It is simply true that non-Western thinkers are largely absent from the conventional canon of political philosophy. History is merely reproducing the parochialism of its subject matter – if it did anything else, it would arguably risk ceasing to be history at all. It is for reasons such as this that the historian Suzuki Shigetaka thought that ‘to truly grasp this problem, the old [discipline of] Western history (seiy¯oshigaku) is of no practical use; it is not a question of knowledge but of standpoint’ (CK: 152).11 K¯oyama Iwao concurs: ‘I wonder whether the positive method of history that has been used up until now can really enable a discipline of ‘world history’ (sekaishigaku)? And also, I wonder whether a philosophy of world history (sekaishi no tetsugaku) could arise from the kind of meanings of philosophy common up until today? (CK: 152) What it means to be engaged in the history philosophy is a complicated and difﬁcult question; the discipline has always existed in an uncomfortable and ambiguous space on the cusp of both (and neither) of history and philosophy. On the one hand, it has been seen as committed to documenting the history of the discipline of philosophy12 (i.e. it is part of the narrative of European identity). On the other hand, it has been seen as instrumental in the process of innovation in the discipline of philosophy as it uncovers and reveals lost or alternative articulations of current problems in the past, rejuvenating them as resources in the present. It is this second identity that provides hope of escape from parochialism, since the ﬁrst merely documents it. This second enterprise is responsive, destructive, creative, and of course political. It involves creating ‘new’ histories for political philosophy by searching back through time and space and selecting different texts to form a canon more suitable to the present – a canon in which today’s world can recognize its own predicaments. Of course, ‘today’s world’ is a continuously dynamic, historical entity, and consequently the content of its own predicaments shifts all the time – we might (optimistically) presume that these predicaments would no longer be exclusively European in the twenty-ﬁrst century. In this way, the history of political philosophy exists as the guardian of the continuing relevance of political philosophy itself. In some ways, it reverses the traditional disciplinary hierarchy and renders philosophy into a sub-ﬁeld of the history of philosophy. The history of philosophy retains the power to set agendas for research, hence it becomes an ethical nonsense to argue that historians of political thought have no choice but to reﬂect the parochialism of philosophy itself. They have a responsibility to explode it.

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Interestingly, as we have seen, the need for a new type of history of philosophy along these lines was readily apparent to the thinkers of the wartime Kyoto School. In his most notorious essay, Sekai shinchitsujo no genri, Nishida Kitar¯o (1870– 1945) argued that the mid-twentieth century should be considered as a ‘period of world self-consciousness’ (sekaiteki jikaku) in which there should (with moral force) be an awareness of a world-historical world (sekaishiteki sekai).13 He places this in juxtaposition with the nineteenth century (which was a period of national self-consciousness (kokkateki jikaku) characterized by imperialism) and the eighteenth century (which was a period of individual self-consciousness (kojinteki jikaku) characterized by individualism and liberalism). Nishida’s protégé Nishitani Keiji would phrase the periodization slightly differently, in terms of the shift from a Mediterranean period to an Atlantic period and into an emerging Paciﬁc period.14 Nishitani suggests that the Paciﬁc period should witness the development of a ‘self-consciousness of worldhood’ (sekaisei no jikaku) (NKC IV: 300). The implication in both of these typologies is that attempts to maintain Euro-centricity in the history of philosophy beﬁts the nineteenth century, making it an (immoral) anachronism by the early 1940s. It is a type of national self-consciousness – it is an imperialism. Just like the second generation of the Kyoto School, who argued that ‘what we call true world history began with the twentieth century; this means that the world outside Europe also became part of the twentieth century’, (K¯oyama, CK: 152) Nishida explains why this is the case through recourse to material and technological change: modernity has effectively made the world smaller and brought East Asia into dialogue with Europe. He describes the emerging world order as an ‘intimate, single world-space’ (kinmitsunaru hitotsu no sekaitekik¯ukan) (NKZ XII: 428).15 Along similar lines, but appealing to his own geographical sense of historical periodization, Nishitani Keiji argues that the historical world is actually a geohistorical (rekishichiriteki) world (NKC IV: 298). Nishida is not claiming that East Asia had no history of its own before the twentieth century; he is asserting that this history could only become worldly in the twentieth century. This is also true of European history, although the wartime Kyoto School thinkers are clear that Europe is deliberately holding itself in the past because of the sense of crisis that this transition engenders.16 In the words of Nishitani Keiji, Europe is attempting to ignore the ‘meteorological sign’ (kish¯ogakuteki ch¯ok¯o) of a ‘vital discontinuity in the depths of history’.17 One of the crucial questions regarding this ‘worldly’ approach to the history of philosophy and political thought is how this new method of history will arise. Nishida and Nishitani are rather vague on this issue, and they seem rather naïve about the likelihood that European historians of political thought will surrender the imperialisms of their discipline (including exclusive control over the canon and the notion of ‘recognition’) just because history itself seems to indicate that they have a moral obligation to do so. Nishida’s eminent junior college Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962) comes closest to theorizing the emergence of world history. Like Nishitani, who was clear that the history of ideas and politics were becoming ‘world-political (sekaiseijiteki) in the true meaning’ (NKC IV: 297) Tanabe is

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unambiguous about the political nature of the history of philosophy. In an important series of lectures in, Tanabe explains that we must accept the political nature of history and consequently concede that ‘history must have the meaning of construction (kensetsu)’.18 We make history in the present.19 Hence, Tanabe objects to the presentation of history as development (hatten) or as a simple linear narrative of a developing identity. Construction, he says, ‘can never be thought of as a linear, one-dimensional continuity’ (THZ VIII: 161). Instead, he argues that under certain conditions a historical period will become unable to maintain its integrity or unity, at which point a ‘structure of discontinuity’ (hi-renzokuteki na k¯oz¯o) will arise. This structure functions to replace the old unity with a new one, not by rejecting it but by encompassing it. Rather than being a linear development, then, history might better be described as a series of increasingly wide concentric circles, gradually and seamlessly expanding into a worldly envelope. In this way, we should consider history as a ‘unity of continuity and discontinuity’, as a ﬂow of ‘discontinuously uniﬁed’ and self-sufﬁcient historical periods (THZ VIII: 161; 162). The worldly twentieth century should absorb, build upon and transform the nineteenth. Accordingly, ‘the present is always placed at the centre of history’, which means that the meaning and signiﬁcance of the past changes continuously as the future is drawn into the present – ‘as a new age arrives, the meaning of the past changes with it’ (THZ VIII: 162). Like Nishida and Nishitani, Tanabe is careful not to claim that previous presents are simply discarded or overwritten by the current present; rather he argues that the construction of the present involves a return to, and a reinvigoration of the old pasts, transforming them into the pasts of a new present. In the absence of this process of incorporation, history would cease to exist; it is the unity of continuity and discontinuity, not simply discontinuity. When it comes to the present of wartime Japan, Tanabe argues that it is still meaningful to talk of dividing history into ancient, medieval and modern periods, following the European convention. However, Tanabe’s construction of this periodization is far from conventional. He is quick to divorce the periods from the ‘arbitrary incidents’ (g¯uzenteki na jijitsu) conventionally employed to demarcate them.20 Instead, he renders these periods elastically: ‘the classiﬁcation of historical periods is not ﬁxed once and for all. If a new age begins, so there will be a new periodization (jidaikubun), and the writing of history must be re-examined’ (THZ VIII: 163). But he is not merely objecting to the utilization of events in Europe to demarcate historical periods, he is objecting to the use of events at all.21 Instead, he thinks that the parameters of these periods must be drawn by the intellectual requirements of history in the present. In particular, he sees the Medieval period as literally the middle age – an elastic period linking the ancient world (which is hardly recognizable to us in the present) with the modern world (which is the present): The classiﬁcations of world history today are calculated with western Europe at the centre. If we consider that a young, new age is being born (an East Asiacentred age) then we must ask the question of whether or not the established

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Christopher Goto-Jones classiﬁcations of ancient, medieval, and modern can still meaningfully apply in their current form. If we call this current age . . . the [new] modern age, then we shouldn’t be impeded from lumping the middle and modern eras of Europe together and calling them the [new] middle ages. (THZ VIII: 163)

Tanabe is not satisﬁed with merely observing the nature and meaning of history in the modern period. Rather, he ﬁnds within it an ethical imperative (t¯oi) to transform the discipline of history, with the history of philosophy and political thought a central pivot. Indeed, he talks of an obligation and mission in the present to achieve this world-historical standpoint (sekaishiteki tachiba). He protests that he is not simply criticizing the West as an outsider from ‘an unsympathetic standpoint’(d¯oj¯o no nai tachiba), because Western philosophy has already penetrated into the core of Japanese being (THZ VIII: 164). Japanese thinkers, having opened themselves to the West and to the new worldly-world simultaneously, must return to and reinvigorate the conventions of Western history of philosophy as a means to understand themselves in the new present. Such a process of rediscovery will naturally involve a cross-fertilization with ideas previously thought of as ‘Japanese’. Tanabe was more than happy to acknowledge that he (and the rest of the Kyoto School) could ‘recognize’ himself and his problems in the once alien history of philosophy in Europe. If Europe was going to get out of the ‘middle ages,’ historians of political thought there would have to be similarly open to ideas from the history of Japan and East Asia more widely.

How to recognize a discontinuity This creative and ethically driven approach to the history of political thought seeks to revitalize the present by revisiting and reinvigorating the past, by giving voices back to those who have been forgotten, or to those whose voices were never heard on the highways of the discipline at all. In other words, if we were to apply the method to Europe itself, the purpose would not be to document and re-document stories of continuities in the intellectual history of Europe qua the history of political philosophy. Rather, the ﬁeld should be interested principally in ﬁgures that do not ﬁt the established ethnocentric narratives, but ﬁgures in whom the predicaments of the present resonate. David Runciman is upbeat about the fact that this is indeed an increasing tendency in the ﬁeld: ‘there has also been an increasing emphasis on the instructive value to be derived from the discontinuities in the history of ideas’ (Runciman 2001: 90). In Taylor’s words, the quest for these discontinuities requires ‘recovering previous articulations which have been lost’ (Taylor 1984/98: 18). Runciman concurs that these discontinuities represent ‘the discarded options in the history of political thought, the forgotten periods during which people in whom we can recognize something of ourselves construed the predicament in which they found themselves quite differently from the way we construe ours’ (Runciman 2001: 90).

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However, once again, this ostensibly clear opening for the embrace of the non-European in the history of political thought is almost instantly (and apparently inadvertently) trampled by a number of the most eminent thinkers in the ﬁeld. Just like the question of ‘recognition’, the problem here seems to pivot around the meaning of ‘discontinuity’, Both of these seemingly inclusive terms appear to have become enwrapped in a monological safety-blanket. In the same way that Taylor appears to have argued for the necessary geohistorical contingency of the qualiﬁcation ‘recognizable’, so he has also suggested that the kind of discontinuities in which historians of political thought should be interested lie within European history rather than without it. In particular, he argues that there are two important ways in which a philosopher can be innovative: the ﬁrst is within the dominant philosophical schema of the day (he suggests that in the modern period this should be characterized as the ‘epistemological model’, following Descartes), while the second is outside this hegemonic system – it is a discontinuity. Taylor is clear that it is the latter type of innovation that marks out the greatest and most signiﬁcant thinkers – he sites Hegel and Heidegger as examples in modern times – these are Nishitani’s ‘vital discontinuities’. However, he stops short of suggesting that innovation from outside the narrative of European history should count as innovative or discontinuous with it. Indeed, he states quite emphatically that immersion in the European tradition (i.e. a knowledge of the history of European philosophy) is necessary for innovation of this second type; without such a grounding in the history of philosophy, new ideas (no matter how innovative they may seem) are not discontinuous but merely disconnected (Taylor 1984/98: 18). In other words, Taylor’s sense of discontinuity requires (or privileges) an existing, continuous, and essentially static historical narrative from which the discontinuity can diverge. The existing (European) narrative itself is assumed rather than challenged. Taylor is certainly not alone in this interpretation; indeed it deﬁnes the highway of the history of political thought. For example, Lorenz Krüger utilizes the same meaning of ‘discontinuity’ to explain the innovations of Heidegger, who searched back through the history of (European) philosophy in his quest to ﬁnd thinkers who could support his endeavours to overthrow the conventions of Western metaphysics. Krüger stresses the importance of Heidegger’s immersion in the history of philosophy (in Europe), arguing that it is only there that genuine ‘discontinuities’ can be found. This is why Heidegger ‘does not turn to extra-scientiﬁc wisdom of just any kind, say Buddhism, but to the Pre-Socratics’ (Krüger 1984/98: 97). Leaving aside the question of whether Krüger is actually right about the sources of Heidegger’s innovations,22 it is obviously sensible to assert that a thinker will only be aware of the signiﬁcance of his/her own discontinuities if he/she is already aware of the narrative from which they diverge. However, awareness of innovation and innovation itself are not the same thing. In any case, it is nonsense to suggest that thinkers versed in the history of political thought would be unable to recognize the potential discontinuities represented by ideas from outside that historical narrative: such thinkers would not spontaneously forget the dominant narrative just because they started to read, say, Buddhist texts.

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The problem, then, with this interpretation of the meaning of ‘discontinuity’ is that it is rooted in a particularistic history, rather than in the aspirant universalism of philosophy itself. This highway begins to look increasingly like an antiquarian byway in Nishida’s nineteenth century or Tanabe’s ‘middle ages’. The real object of Krüger’s lament appears to be the inability of (European) historians of political thought to place non-European ideas into the European narrative, but this is both a symptom of Tanabe’s ‘middle ages’ as well as a cause: the Kyoto School themselves were fully able to recognize the signiﬁcance of ‘discontinuities’ presented by (in particular) Zen Buddhist ideas within the (European) history of political thought precisely because they attempted to make themselves familiar with both from a world-historical standpoint. Privileging European history in the history of political thought prevents historians from being aware of the innovations promised outside that narrative – it does not eradicate the ‘vital discontinuities’ (NKC IV: 297) themselves. This attitude reﬂects the ‘national self-consciousness’ of Nishida’s nineteenth century – the rest of the world exists, but particular nations are uninterested in it and unwilling to risk their own unities through dialogue with it.

The martians are coming! There is a second, allied strategy of exclusion that is employed against nonEuropean texts. Even if Krüger and Taylor could be convinced that extra-European discontinuities might be interesting and signiﬁcant on the ostensible highways of the history of political thought, it seems unlikely that they would concede that such texts would actually be comprehensible to ‘us’ as historians of political philosophy.23 Taylor, for example, points to the complicated problematics of language as a virtually insurmountable barrier between ‘East and West’ in philosophy. In a passage that would not be unrecognizable to Kipling, he argues that languages East and West are so radically different that there is no commonality between them, which means that ‘we set off without the remotest idea of how even to go about arbitrating’ between them (Taylor 1984/98: 30). He continues to explain that an alien from another planet would simply give up and go home if asked to engage simultaneously with both a Western conception of personality and a Buddhist view of the self. Whilst it seems to me absurd to imply that philosophical positions expressed in Japanese, Chinese, Hindi or whatever are somehow more impenetrable to modern historians of philosophy than Ancient Greek or Latin, the main problem with Taylor’s assertion is that it is contradicted most persuasively by the history of philosophy itself: Nishida Kitar¯o and his Kyoto School affected a very interesting (and discontinuous) synthesis of Western personality and Buddhist selfhood in the early twentieth century. As far as I am aware, all the members of the Kyoto School were from Japan, not from Sirius or Mars. An implication of both Krüger’s position on narrative and Taylor’s position on language is that ‘we can recognise something of ourselves’ in Ancient Greece but not in, say, early Sh¯owa Japan, and that consequently insights from Japanese thinkers (even from Japanese thinkers who engaged creatively with the canon of European philosophy, like the Kyoto School) cannot constitute genuine

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innovations in the history of philosophy or political thought. This is despite the fact that it seems entirely plausible that Sh¯owa thinkers (for example) ‘construed the predicament in which they found themselves quite differently from the way we construe ours’, and therefore they are perfect candidates as relevant discontinuities in the history of political thought. Thankfully, the Cambridge School also seems to open another possible sliproad onto the highways of the history of political thought. After all of the effort expounded in explaining why ‘we’ cannot recognize ourselves in people who are not European, it is a relief to see that David Runciman does not conclude that it is ﬁnally necessary to ﬁnd ourselves in the work of historical ﬁgures for them to be of interest to the history of political thought. He notes that ‘there are the lessons to be learned from seeing people clearly not ourselves grappling with a predicament that we can recognise’ (Runciman 2001: 90–91, emphasis added). Leaving aside the slightly distasteful idea that there are actually a class of people who are ‘clearly not ourselves’, this type of discontinuity does at least seem to sidestep the importance of European identity in the history of political thought (even though it retains the category of a primary European ‘we’):24 even people who are clearly not European should be able to gain access to the highway through this portal. The privileged element starts to swing from being European history to being political thought itself. There is, of course, an immediate logical roadblock in the form of the ‘predicament that we can recognize’, but this has already been discussed (above). In any case, the real opening provided by this concession is rather more dramatic, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is not an opening explored by Runciman. If the Cambridge historians are happy to incorporate into the history of political thought both people in whom we recognize something of ourselves dealing with predicaments different from our own, and people in whom we recognize nothing of ourselves dealing with predicaments similar to our own, then they must logically also concede that there are lessons to be learned from seeing people clearly not ourselves grappling with a recognizable predicament (which may seem quite different from the way that we construe our own). Suspending for the moment the distasteful ‘them and us’ implied here, such phrasing would force even the most ethnocentric of historians of political thought to deal with the non-European.25 In fact, this kind of language might effectively represent the mediational role envisioned by the Kyoto School for ‘nations’ and then ‘particular uniﬁed spheres’ (tokushuteki t¯oitsuken), as stepping-stones on the way to a world-historical standpoint. In any case, the priority here is not ‘us’ but rather the predicaments in which we ﬁnd ourselves; the highway is travelled by political ideas, not by wanderers on the European tour. In fact, Quentin Skinner, one of the fathers of the so-called New Historians, has long held the view that the history of political thought should be about uncovering the ‘range of options lying behind a given philosophical or political predicament’. (Runciman 2001: 91). In other words, the history of political thought should be organized around competing explanations of particular problems, not around national or regional identities. It doesn’t matter who thought of the explanations,

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what matters is that they were thought of and that they are interesting/relevant. Hence, the history of political thought should be a quest for intellectual discomfort, for alternatives and discontinuities that make us reconsider and think critically about our responses to the predicaments of the present. Given this thematic orientation to the discipline, is there any reason why nonEuropean sources should be excluded from it? Is this a sensible principle for a worldly history of political thought? Why can the history of political obligations not encompass Chinese Confucian texts as well as the Greeks and Germans? Why can the history of subjectivity not include Japanese Buddhist texts as well as French? There appears to be no logical necessity for any such exclusion. MacIntyre’s insistence that we have no means of judging alternatives from different cultural traditions because of the absence of an overarching framework (or unifying narrative) and Taylor’s assertions about the absence of a point of contact between ‘East and West’ seem rather Orientalist (‘nineteenth century’ or ‘Middle-aged’) in this context. In fact, Taylor suggests that the problem of comprehensibility could be solved but that East and West ‘would have to grow together as civilizations’ ﬁrst (Taylor 1984/98: 30). As we saw in the last section, the Kyoto School certainly felt that this condition had been met by the early 1940s.26 The real casualty in this re-orientation appears to be the idea of progress along a central disciplinary highway. To the extent that the history of political thought rests upon pretensions of progress in the discipline, the involvement of extra-European ﬁgures causes some angst. Richard Rorty is perhaps one of the most eminent proponents of the notion of progress in philosophy. He argues, for example, that the idea of progress permits us to dismiss Leibniz as wrong about the existence of god, or Aristotle as confused about the existence of real essences, and he suggests that we are only reticent about saying so because we have colleagues who work on these ‘different philosophical perspectives’ today (Rorty 1984/98: 49–50). If Rorty is right and historians of political thought do really believe in progress, then the admixture of alternative views that have not been ‘overcome’ on the way to the European present raises some problems – not to mention the political and ethical problems of a Western historian asserting that non-European perspectives are/were wrong or confused. That Said, Tanabe Hajime was certainly not convinced that the inclusion of the non-European need destroy the idea of progress in the history of political philosophy – it merely required a re-orientation of the meaning of progress, transforming it from developmental to constructive. Of course, it seems very likely that Tanabe’s constructivist approach to historical progress would destroy a great many of the criteria currently employed to judge it; it may turn out that Leibniz was right about the existence of god or that Aristotle was rather passé in his ideas about essences. To conclude this section, it seems somewhat ironic that leading ﬁgures in the history of political thought have attempted to defend the discipline against charges of antiquarianism by effectively (and perhaps unconsciously) excluding the non-European from the disciplinary highway and relegating it to the byways of political philosophy. In fact, it seems that it is exactly this strategy that lays the ﬁeld open to charges of antiquarianism and ethnocentricity since it roots the

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discipline in a particularist (European, Middle-aged/nineteenth century) past and shows no awareness of the contradictions between this and its own aspirant universalism. In addition to risking parochialism, such exclusionism also demonstrates an absence of political and ethical awareness on the part of historians of political thought living in today’s world, which is an increasingly ‘intimate, single world-space’. To borrow Richard Rorty’s words, the stubborn perpetuation of a (European) canon in this context, risks making the discipline look ‘quainter and more factitious as the decades pass’ (Rorty 1984/98: 70). Roadworks or New Road Networks – On the Utility of Repairing the Existing Highways Now historians of political thought are increasingly looking to their subject to ﬁll in some of the gaping holes in the thinking that has been done on our behalf by the current generation of moral and political philosophers. (Runciman 2001: 94) It was not uncommon at the close of the twentieth century to ﬁnd historians and political theorists expressing some disillusionment about the so-called ‘renaissance in our political thinking that began with Rawls’. The result was an increased interest in the question of the composition of the core canon of political philosophy. It seemed to some thinkers that the existing canon was lacking in various important respects. In other words, there were gaping holes in contemporary political thought that could not be ﬁlled by ideas drawn from the existing canon. However, the search for recognizable discontinuities in the history of political thought has heretofore been typiﬁed by the uncovering of gaps and structural weaknesses along the highways of European history. A nice illustration of this tendency is the much celebrated Cambridge University Press ‘blue’ series, Texts in the History of Political Thought, which contained one hundred and seventy two titles at the last count – none of which could be considered a ‘non-Western’ text, despite the assumption of universalism in the series title.27 David Runciman is right when he applauds the inclusion of lesser-known names in this important series, such as Baxter, Fletcher, Loyseau and Stirner. He is also right when he calls a halt to any premature tendencies towards self-congratulation in the ﬁeld. He quotes Siep Stuurman approvingly when he complains that ‘historians of political thought are still too reluctant to seek out non-male, non-white, nonWestern perspectives, and equally reluctant to comment on the absence of such perspectives in the major texts’(Runciman 2001: 95).28 However, whilst Runciman does point out that the Cambridge series omits all references to the non-white, he proceeds to restrict his own comments to the limited success with which nonmale positions have been incorporated into the discipline. Presumably the nonWestern omissions from the ﬁeld still constitute irrelevant, less important (or more embarrassing) or unrecognizable byways in comparison with the European non-male. Even less satisfactory for historians of political thought who were hoping that the ‘gaping holes’ in the contemporary ﬁeld might be ﬁlled from non-Western sources,

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Runciman notes a slightly disturbing tendency in the mainstream of the discipline. As part of the general atmosphere of disillusionment with Rawls, Runciman suggests that historians in the ﬁeld have increasingly turned their attention back to the early years of the twentieth century when ‘political philosophy was supposed to be dead’. As the other contributors to this book ably demonstrate, this is also the period in which the Kyoto School was most active and innovative in political philosophy and exactly the period in which the wartime Kyoto School were working on their philosophy of history. However, Runciman notes that: It is one of the ironies of the recent history of the subject that the author whose work has come closest to breaching the conﬁnes of the familiar canon of political ideas belongs to an excluded group whose representatives are not normally considered in need of additional exposure – that is, card-carrying Nazis. (Runciman 2001: 96) In particular, there has been a surge of interest in Carl Schmitt (who was a member of the Nazi party, 1933–36). In a similar manner, we might also note the rollercoaster of interest in Heidegger’s political thought. Articles from journals and books tackling the political thought of ﬁgures from Nazi Germany have become increasingly numerous since the late 1990s. As a phenomenon in the history of the history of political thought, such a turn to early twentieth century Europe is quite revealing. The implication is that the discipline is still more comfortable attempting to ﬁll the ‘gaping holes’ in contemporary thought with the ideas of a dead, white, male Nazi (from Europe) than with attempting to grapple with the ideas of a non-Western text in any form. I do not challenge the intrinsic interest of Schmitt’s work, but it seems that the myopic logic of the European narrative of the history of political thought can lead historians into rather dubious places in the quest for ‘discontinuities’, despite the existence of vast numbers of far less dubious alternatives elsewhere. Conceivably, this is a symptom of an ongoing conservative reaction to the ‘sense of crisis’ in the history of philosophy, as observed by Suzuki in 1941 (CK: 153). Runciman himself phrases the interest in Schmitt in terms of a general return to the early twentieth century as an under-researched period in the history of political thought. He is clear that ‘interest in the political thought of the 20th century has never been greater’ (Runciman 2001: 99). There are two key observations to be made about this tendency in the ﬁeld: the ﬁrst and most obvious is that a return to the early twentieth century (unless it is explicitly a return to twentieth century Europe) should include rather than exclude eminent, inﬂuential, recognizable and discontinuous ideas from outside Europe. In particular, we might point to the father of Japanese philosophy and the progenitor of Japan’s ﬁrst (and greatest) modern school of philosophy, Nishida Kitar¯o. He was active at exactly the same time as Schmitt and the wartime Heidegger, and he is unquestionably a more innovative and important philosopher than the former, arguably even on par with the latter.29 The second observation reinforces the

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ﬁrst: one of the most striking and interesting things about the early twentieth century in both Germany and Japan is the extent of philosophical dialogue that existed between philosophers and political thinkers ‘West and East’. Indeed, it is not wholly inconceivable that part of the reason for the current interest in the ‘discontinuities’ represented by German thinkers from that period stems from the fact that they were themselves interested in the non-European.30 In a very meaningful sense, the early years of the twentieth century represent a pivotal opportunity for the discovery of a genuinely world-historical discontinuity in the history of political thought. However, rather than throwing resources and effort into uncovering the nature and meaning of this discontinuity, the ﬁeld has almost uniformly failed to notice its existence, has deliberately ignored it, or has marginalized it into the ‘byways of the discipline’. Even worse, in some cases, such as in the case of Heidegger, the nature of the discontinuity has been deliberately misrepresented; whilst it may remain politically controversial to argue that Heidegger was exposed to and inﬂuenced by Chinese and Japanese philosophy because it upsets the settled complacency of the European narrative of the history of philosophy, it would be intellectually disingenuous and even dishonest to claim that he wasn’t so inﬂuenced.31 This is not to say that he was solely inﬂuenced by non-white, non-Western sources, but it does mean that Krüger’s attempts to pull him full-square into a European narrative (Heidegger ‘does not turn to extrascientiﬁc wisdom of just any kind, say Buddhism, but to the Pre-Socratics’) look naïve or politically motivated (albeit as much by the momentum of the discipline as by Krüger himself).32 In other words, increased interest in the early twentieth century should provide the perfect impetus for historians of political thought to begin the process of incorporating the non-Western into the disciplinary highways, perhaps starting with the wartime Kyoto School and their attempts to deﬁne a world-historical standpoint. After all, for Nishida, this should have been exactly the moral and historical nature of the twentieth century.

Building new highways – the Kyoto School and the construction of a responsible and inclusive history of political philosophy The wartime Kyoto School occupies a complicated position in the history of philosophy in general, and in the history of political thought in particular. This chapter has not concerned itself with the content and form of the political thought of the Kyoto School themselves (such concerns are the subjects of the following chapters), but rather with the politics of their vision of the history of political philosophy. The dominance of the Cambridge School in the discipline since the 1960s has inadvertently led to an inward-looking and defensive posture, which has perpetuated the marginalized status of the non-European. In Nishida’s terms, the discipline has been held in a kind of ‘nineteenth century’ stasis, characterized by a concern for the narration of national monologues. This ‘nineteenth century standpoint’ on the non-European, approximates the Orientalism of Edward Said, for whom,

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following Michel Foucault’s theories of power and knowledge, images of the Orient in the West constitute a type of colonizing knowledge.33 A symptom of this exclusionary standpoint has been the refusal of the discipline to engage with non-European innovations in political thought, or even to acknowledge that non-Western ideas can ﬁnd a place in the history of political thought at all. This situation is mirrored, to some extent, by the circumstances of the natural sciences. As Joseph Needham has persuasively demonstrated, there is a distinct possibility that many scientiﬁc achievements attributed to Europe in the age of scientiﬁc revolution can actually ﬁnd their origins in Chinese developments. Needham goes so far as to argue that Chinese innovations constituted ‘important inﬂuences on nascent modern science’ in Europe (Needham 1969: 57). There is a marked reluctance to extend this insight into the ﬁeld of philosophy – the very possibility appears to create a ‘sense of crisis’ in the discipline of the history of philosophy. A particular moment in this crisis is represented by the early twentieth century and, in particular, by the wartime period. In Japan, the philosophers of the Kyoto School were self-consciously engaged in attempts to innovate within the established (European) parameters of the history of philosophy, whilst simultaneously challenging the suitability of those parameters in the twentieth century. At the same time in Europe, a number of high proﬁle thinkers, including Heidegger, were being inﬂuenced by non-European ideas – effectively incorporating non-European sources into the history of philosophy, but, unlike the Kyoto School, the Europeans were less willing to acknowledge (i.e. they were and remain chronically insecure about) this decentering. Whilst the Japanese had been forced (by the fabled Black Ships) to incorporate the conventional (European) history of political thought into their own present, no such coercion had succeeded in the opposite direction; it is at least debatable that this is what the wartime Kyoto School thought the war was all about. In other words, in the European context, there was no imperative (other than an unacknowledged ethical one) to acknowledge the non-European within the discipline. The disincentive was plain enough: incorporation of the non-European threatened the integrity of the discipline’s contradictory claims to a universalism rooted in the European particular. Hence, the wartime Kyoto School remains unfamiliar on the highways of the history of political thought. Because of their engagement with that history, however, they are also an uncomfortable presence in the monological narrative of the history of ideas in Japan. As James Heisig astutely observes, ‘the question of locating them [in the history of philosophy] in effect questions the way that we have located philosophies east and west. In this context, theirs is not a derivative contribution but something original and revolutionary’ (Heisig 2001: 260).34 The great contribution of the wartime Kyoto School to the history of political philosophy is to call attention to the need for an awareness of them in the history of philosophy. The School’s philosophy of history demands that the present is constructive and creative, and that the past is reinvigorated and transformed continuously to match the circumstances and needs of the present. The world of the present is no longer characterized by the dominance of Europe, and so the

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history of political thought should also be liberated from that dominance, despite the resistance of European conservatives. If we assume, at least for the sake of argument, that philosophy needs a world forum in which Europe and the Americas do not enjoy privilege of place; that the time has come for the west to accept as part of its philosophical inheritance ideas that have ﬂourished in non-western cultures but foundered in the west; that the age of isolating eastern thought from the full weight of western criticism is drawing to an end; and that these were precisely the working assumptions of the Kyoto-school thinkers; then one has to conclude that they belong to that tradition of philosophy in-the-making more properly than any leading movement in western or eastern philosophy of our day. (Heisig 2001: 260–61) In other words, if Runciman is right and the discipline of the history of political thought is now turning its attention to the early years of the twentieth century as a source of recognizable innovation and discontinuity, it will ﬁnd one of the most useful ‘vital discontinuities’ in the form of the wartime Kyoto School’s philosophy of history. The standpoint of the Cambridge School still holds promise as an appropriate method to uncover the worldly perspective of the Kyoto School and to reveal the early twentieth century as a key opportunity to construct a worldly history of political thought. Defences of the Cambridge School against charges of antiquarianism and conservatism have been incidentally rather than necessarily ethnocentric and conservative themselves. Even if ‘we’ failed in the twentieth century, in the twenty-ﬁrst ‘we’ should become able to ‘recognize ourselves and our predicaments’ in non-European contexts.

Notes 1 A version of this paper was prepared as a special edition of Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, edited by Richard Calichman (forthcoming), based on a paper written for the Political Ideologies Seminar Series, 20th Century Political Thought in Asia and Africa, held at the University of Oxford, Centre for Political Ideologies, May 2005. The following abbreviations have been used in the references: NKZ – Nishida Kitar¯o Zensh¯u, 19 vols, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1965–66; THZ – Tanabe Hajime Zensh¯u, 15 vols, Tokyo: Chikuma Shob¯o, 1963–64; NKC – Nishitani Keiji Chosakush¯u, 26 vols, Tokyo: S¯obunsha, 1986–95; CK – ‘Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nippon’, in Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron, January 1942, pp. 150–92. 2 The Cambridge School is usually associated with Quentin Skinner, John Dunn and J.G.A. Pocock, and sometimes with Richard Tuck and Anthony Pagden. The most inﬂuential, positioning texts from the 1960s are probably Quentin Skinner (1969), ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, pp. 199–215, and John Dunn (1980), ‘The Identity of the History of Ideas’, pp. 13–28. The central contention of the school is that the meaning of historical texts cannot be understood in isolation from their historical contexts. In this way, the school opposes ‘text only’ approaches which claim to be able to interrogate long dead thinkers with contemporary questions. For example, we might ask Kant about the ethical implications of the internet. For the Cambridge

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5 6 7

8 9

10 11

12 13 14 15

Christopher Goto-Jones School, it is simply ridiculous to ask Kant about the internet because the question would have made no sense in his historical context. ‘Few university courses in the history of political thought would now exclude the works of Mary Wollstonecraft, and there is increasing interest in the political ideas of and about women in revolutionary Europe more generally’ (Runciman 2001: 96). The content and form of the political thought of the Kyoto School is not what concerns me in this article. The relationship between the meaning and context of Kyoto School political thought has been explored elsewhere, utilizing an approach based loosely on that of the Cambridge School. See Goto-Jones 2005a. It is this methodological inconsistency that effectively renders Japanese intellectual history into an ‘allied discipline’ rather than a sub-discipline of the history of political thought. For a development of this idea see Goto-Jones 2005b. In many ways, this is a continuation of the nineteenth and even twentieth century tendency for European intellectuals to frown upon North American cultural and intellectual achievements – insisting that the history of philosophy is a European story and that contributions from America are superﬁcial or faddish at best. By the second half of the twentieth century, when the USA had clearly overtaken Europe as a military and economic power, this kind of intellectual Euro-centricity had even made its way into the wider social discourse in Europe. Indeed, the wartime Kyoto School were not insensitive to the ongoing nature of this European ‘crisis’. As Suzuki Shigetaka observes during the Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nippon debates, the Japanese should be careful not to dismiss America as superﬁcial just because Europeans had done so for decades. He states clearly that the tendency to dismiss it in this way has been inherited from European views (which insist on the centrality of Europe in history). He adds that ‘it is invariably not the case that we have judged it to be superﬁcial from what we have seen with our own eyes’ (CK: 189). An implication of Suzuki’s position here is that Japan shared with America the realization that Europe was no longer the centre of the world, but the tone of the debates go even further to suggest that whilst Europe has failed even to recognize the historical importance of the USA (morally and intellectually), the USA has also failed to recognize that even it is no longer at the heart of the world. I note that Najita’s translation of works by Ogy¯u Sorai is one of the only representatives of a non-European text in the prestigious Cambridge University Press series, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. CK: 150–92. An interesting discussion in English is Horio 1995. CK is also discussed in the context of the associated Kindai no ch¯okoku debates in Harry Harootunian’s ambitious book, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan. See also chapter 5 of Goto-Jones 2005a. The subsection of the CK debate was titled, sekaishi no tetsugaku to sekaishigaku. The participants are Nishitani Keiji (1900–90), Kosaka Masa’aki (1900–69), K¯oyama Iwao (1905–93), and Suzuki Shigetaka (1907–88). Suzuki goes on to point out that the discipline of Eastern history (t¯oy¯oshigaku) is similarly inadequate. This is not a call for displacing Europe with Japan, but rather a call for innovation and progress in historical method to reﬂect the needs of a ‘worldly world’. The discipline of philosophy itself being deﬁned, self-referentially, in terms of the ideas and techniques of inquiry developed in Europe. Nishida Kitar¯o, Sekai shinchitsujo no genri, 1943, reprinted in NKZ XII: 427. Nishitani Keiji, Sekaikan to kokkakan, 1941, reprinted in NKC IV: 298. Nishida does not assert that this single world-space is already uniﬁed or complete. He argues that the mid-twentieth century brings Europe and East Asia into a uniﬁed discursive space, and implies that other regions and nations will join it as their level of technology develops sufﬁciently to permit them to do so. It is the nature of the twentieth century to tend towards this unity: he does not state that it is empirically extant.

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16 Despite some assertions to the contrary, Nishida’s position here is far from simply imperialistic. There is a sense in which he is pursuing a universal history in the present, but he does not maintain that this should replace national narratives (i.e. Europe’s ‘crisis’ involves a crucial misperception about the nature of history). Instead, national narratives should be maintained whilst being transcended. The universal ‘worldly’ history will be mediated through the nation to the individual. Similarly, Nishitani is clear that the movement from Mediterranean to Atlantic to Paciﬁc does not require the subordination of the previous periods of geo-history, rather he talks about the expansive intermixing of their waters until they become a single ocean (NKC IV: 298). 17 Nishitani Keiji, Sekaikan to kokkakan, 1941, reprinted in NKC IV: 297. 18 Tanabe Hajime, Rekishiteki genjitsu, 1940 (based on lectures from 1939), reprinted in THZ VIII: 159. 19 In an attempt to thwart the exploitation of his conception of ‘construction’, Tanabe gives it parameters, suggesting that the construction of history is subject to the laws of history in the same way that the construction of a building is subject to the laws of gravity and physics – to attempt to ignore these laws will lead to disaster and the collapse of the construction: ‘even if we say that politics is construction, we must accept the direction of reality which makes any construction possible’ (THZ VIII: 160–61). Of course, this is not a very good safety check for those who might exploit this constructionism, since the moral test occurs only after attempts at construction have been made: if you make a mistake, your construction will fail sooner rather than later. This is not much of a disincentive to try! 20 Tanabe claims that the fall of the western Roman empire has traditionally been seen as the dividing line between Ancient and Medieval and that the fall of the Eastern Roman empire has divided the Medieval from the Modern. This dismissal of apparently epochal events as historically transformative is simultaneously effectively a dismissal of the Great East Asian war as a world-historical venture. 21 The use of events in this way would constitute an investment in the Western ‘positivist method of history’ that K¯oyama rejected as inappropriate to the twentieth century (CK:152). 22 The controversy over Heidegger’s sources was triggered by Reinhard May, Ex oriente lux: Heideggers Werk unter ostasiatischem Einﬂuβ. 23 I am sure that both Krüger and Taylor would concede the intrinsic interest of many nonEuropean ideas – indeed, Taylor makes use of Buddhist ideas in his work. The question here, however, is whether they would allow these ideas a place in the history of political thought. 24 At ﬁrst glance, this position appears to be somewhat less than a genuinely worldhistorical standpoint. However, neither Nishida, Nishitani nor Tanabe advocated the eradication of national identiﬁcations as mechanisms of mediation within the worldlyworld. Runciman’s language here might be considered an example of what that could mean for the history of political thought. 25 Runciman himself (Runciman 2001: 91) does not make the leap to this type of wording: ‘To put it simply, historians of political thought are increasingly vocal about the ways in which their discipline can help us imagine what it would be like to face our problems differently, and what it would be like if different people faced our problems.’ Both these intellectual exercises are consistent with the view that we are still ‘us’, with our problems to think about, and they were still ‘them’, with ‘theirs’. 26 In this regard, James Heisig notes that ‘one may also conclude that [the Kyoto School] demonstrated that it is too early to think in terms of a world philosophy except as a general ideal to be aimed at in the future’ (Heisig 2001: 261). 27 I note that Tetsuo Najita’s translation of selections from Ogy¯u Sorai appears in the sister series, Cambridge Texts in Modern Politics, as Tokugawa Political Writings, 1998. I note further that this series is explicitly and self-consciously separate from the more established Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought; presumably

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Christopher Goto-Jones inclusion in the former list does not qualify Sorai as a signiﬁcant ﬁgure in the discipline of the History of Political Thought itself. The Texts in Modern Politics state that they are designed to cover ‘texts which have been important in the politics of Latin America, Africa and Asia’. The politics of this division is as unfortunate as it is obvious. See Stuurman 2000: 147–66. Stuurman is also not centrally concerned with the question of the non-Western. A recent treatment of Nishida’s political thought is Goto-Jones 2005a. J.J. Clarke suggests that European fascists were at the forefront of interest in Asian thought in the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century (Clarke 1997: 194–97). Graham Parkes (Parkes 1987: 7) relates a conversation with Gadamer about Heidegger’s reluctance to reveal his EastAsian sources. Parkes notes a ‘subtle smile’from the eminent professor as he answered: ‘You have to understand that a scholar of the generation to which Heidegger belongs would be very reluctant to say anything in print about a philosophy if he were himself unable to read and understand the relevant texts in the original language.’ Elsewhere, Parkes calls this response ‘disingenuous’ – (Parkes 1987: 106). One potential source of interest here, for example, is the suggestion that the nonWestern sources consulted by Heidegger might be recognizable to the Pre-Socratics, which might render them innovative in Taylor’s most profound sense – as discontinuous with the dominant, modern ‘epistemological model’. Said 1985. I note that Said is not explicitly concerned with East Asia. Indeed, the case of Japan presents particular problems for him since it was not actually colonized by European powers in the nineteenth century. However, it is interesting to reﬂect that it was occupied 1945–52, during which time the Allied (American) forces explicitly sought to impose a type of ‘colonizing knowledge’. To the extent that we are concerned with the post-war history of political thought here, this seems signiﬁcant. Heisig argues that the Kyoto School’s contribution to the history of Western philosophy is ‘derivative’, and he notes that very little work has been done on locating them within Asian traditions of thought.

References Clarke, J.J. (1997), Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter between Asian and Western Thought, London: Routledge. Dunn, John (1980), ‘The Identity of the History of Ideas’, in Dunn, John (ed.) Political Obligation in its Historical Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 13–28. Goto-Jones, Christopher (2005a), Political Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School, and Co-Prosperity, London: Routledge. Goto-Jones, Christopher (2005b), ‘If the Past is a Different Country, are Different Countries in the Past: On the Place of the Non-European in the History of Philosophy’, Philosophy, 80:311, pp. 29–51. Harootunian, Harry D. (2000), Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hartley, Leslie P. (1953/2004), The Go-Between, London: Penguin. Heisig, James W. (2001), Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Horio Tsutomo (1995), ‘The Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron Discussions, their Background and Meaning’, in Heisig, James W. and Maraldo, John C. (eds) Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Questions of Nationalism, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 289–315.

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Krüger, Lorentz (1984/98), ‘Why do we Study the History of Philosophy’, in Rorty, Richard, Schneewind, J. B., Skinner, Quentin (eds) Philosophy in History: Ideas in Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 77–102. MacIntyre, Alisdair (1984/98), ‘The Relationship of Philosophy to its Past’, in Rorty, Richard, Schneewind, J.B., Skinner, Quentin (eds) Philosophy in History: Ideas in Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 31–48. May, Reinhard (1997), Ex oriente lux: Heideggers Werk unter ostasiatischem Einﬂuβ, Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden. Najita Tetsuo (1974), Japan: The Intellectual Foundations of Modern Japanese Politics, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Najita Tetsuo (1998), Tokugawa Political Writings-Ogy¯u Sorai, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Needham, Joseph (1969), The Grand Titration: Science and Society East and West, London: George Allen and Unwin. Parkes, Graham (ed.) (1987), Heidegger andAsianThought, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Parkes, Graham (1996), Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East Asian Inﬂuences on His Work, London: Routledge. Rorty, Richard (1984/98), ‘The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres’, in Rorty, Richard, Schneewind, J.B., Skinner, Quentin (eds) Philosophy in History: Ideas in Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 49–76. Runciman, David (2001), ‘History of Political Thought: The state of the discipline’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 3:1 (4), pp. 84–104. Said, Edward (1985), Orientalism, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Skinner, Quentin (1969) ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,’ History and Theory, 8, pp. 199–215. Skinner, Quentin (1978), The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stuurman, Siep (2000), ‘The Canon of the History of Political Thought: Its Critique and a Proposed Alternative’, History and Theory, 39/2, pp. 147–66. Taylor, Charles (1984/98), ‘Philosophy and its History’, in Rorty, Richard, Schneewind, J.B., Skinner, Quentin (eds) Philosophy in History: Ideas in Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 17–30.

2

Turns to and from political philosophy The case of Nishitani Keiji1 Bret W. Davis

In contemporary Western academia, broadly speaking, there are two prominent approaches to modern Japanese philosophy in general, and to the Kyoto School in particular.2 On the one hand, there are the Western scholars of Japanese intellectual history who have concluded that many Japanese thinkers, including those associated with the Kyoto School, were ‘overcome by modernity’rather than successfully carrying out an ‘overcoming of modernity’.3 For this group, the Kyoto School is more pre- than postmodern, and its reformulation of Eastern ways of thinking is less a viable alternative to Eurocentric modernity than an assertion of ‘reverse Orientalism’ (Faure 1995).4 On the other hand, there are the Western philosophers and scholars of religion who primarily view the Kyoto School thinkers as dialogue partners who are capable of signiﬁcant and novel contributions to the theoretical and existential aporias of the present.5 This group anticipates that those Japanese philosophers, who are not only intimately familiar with Western philosophy, but also able to freely draw on Buddhist, East Asian, and traditional Japanese ways of thinking, might be capable of offering fresh insights for addressing the now global problems of (Western) modernity. Nishitani Keiji’s thought has frequently become the subject matter of both types of Western scholarship. On the one hand, in part echoing earlier postwar critiques in Japan, a number of Western scholars have censured Nishitani – especially his political writings in the ﬁrst half of the 1940s – on charges of ‘collaboration in the war’ (sens¯o ky¯oryoku). On the other hand, Nishitani’s philosophy of Zen continues to gain wide recognition for its unique contributions to existentialist phenomenology and the philosophy of religion. Elsewhere I have discussed some central themes in Nishitani’s philosophy of Zen.6 In this essay I shall examine Nishitani’s political writings and their place in his overall path of thought. My analysis here aims to be both critical and sympathetic, that is to say, I wish both to throw out the bath water and yet preserve the baby of his thought. I believe that, when discussing the ventures and misadventures of the Kyoto School’s political thought, one must remain committed to steering a critical yet non-polemical course through the standoff between what James Heisig has aptly labeled ‘the side-steppers and the side-swipers’ (Heisig 1990: 14). In other words, one must seek neither to whitewash nor to vilify. As we shall see, no simple verdict is possible with regard to Nishitani’s political thought; rather,

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we must take pains to understand it in its profound, often troubling and always thought-provoking ambiguities. My primary focus in this chapter will be on the ambiguities and tensions within Nishitani’s wartime political thought, including his critique of imperialism and his ideas on the relation between politics and religion. I will also consider his postwar critique of certain problems that beset a democratic politics based solely on human rights. In the end I will remark on how after the war Nishitani returns from his problematical political response to the problem of Eurocentric modernity, to a more fundamental engagement with the existential and interpersonal problems that beset the modern age.

The consistent trajectory of Nishitani’s thought Nishitani retrospectively characterized the central task of his life and work as ‘the overcoming of nihilism by way of passing through nihilism’ (NKC XX: 192).7 According to Nishitani, ‘nihilism is the reappearance of nihility [i.e. a vacuous meaninglessness] at the dimension of religion, that is to say, at a level as high (or as deep) as that dimension where nihility would normally be overcome’ (NKC XX: 189). Nihilism has both a trans-historical and a historical dimension for Nishitani. It is ‘a problem that transcends time and space and is rooted in the essence of human being, an existential problem in which the being of the self is revealed to the self as something groundless’(NKC VIII: 7).8 Yet, in a historically speciﬁc sense, nihilism refers to a cultural phenomenon that arose ‘in the location of Europe, and in the age modernity’ (NKC VIII: 5). In this historically speciﬁc sense, nihilism arose in modern Europe with the ‘death of God’ and the self-assertion of the human ego. The self-assertive ego ultimately ﬁnds itself lost in a meaningless world, as the ground of being gives way to an abyss of nihility. At a time when the Japanese were enthusiastically and often uncritically importing the surface of Western modernity, Nishitani was one of the ﬁrst to see that the West was itself undergoing, in its depths, a period of crisis.9 Together with the fruits of Western modernity, Japan had also unwittingly imported the seeds of Western nihilism. Unlike certain reactionary romantics and traditionalists, however, Nishitani’s response to this situation was not to call for a simple retreat to an idealized haven of premodern Japanese culture. Rather, he thought that there was no turning back from modernization, and, moreover, that the crisis of nihilism could even serve the positive role that the ‘Great Doubt’ does in the course of Zen practice (NKC XI: 185). According to Nishitani, a creative reappropriation and rearticulation of Mah¯ay¯ana Buddhist and East Asian philosophy and religion could assist in steering a path through the impasses of Western modernity and its crisis of nihilism. In some respects even the modern Western ego can be seen, he suggests, as a step on the way to a breakthrough to a postmodern ‘radical subjectivity’ (kongenteki shutaisei) that would resonate with the non-ego (muga) of Zen (NKC I: 88). He claims that contemporary Europe itself is searching for a kind of ‘subjective nothingness’, a non-egoistic sense of self which is intimated in Meister Eckhart and

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in Nietzsche, but which he says is ‘already alive from early on in the tradition of our own country’ (NKC I: 4). In the Japanese tradition Nishitani thus ﬁnds the seeds for an answer to a modern problem, or indeed to the problem of modernity itself. Yet his aim is not to retreat from the modern age, but rather to help bring about an ‘overcoming of the modern age by way of radicalising its own standpoint’ (NKC IV: 228). He therefore often stresses that this overcoming is not a matter of a simple return or repetition of Japan’s past; Japan must go through Westernization/modernization, and its traditional cultural resources must have the ‘elasticity’ to develop into new forms. Japan must learn to rediscover its traditions, not as a ‘renewal of the past’, but as ‘the end point of Westernization, and indeed, of Western culture itself ’ (NKC VIII: 183).10 Thus, Nishitani’s project of overcoming nihilism by way of passing through nihilism is at the same time an overcoming of Western modernity by way of passing through Western modernity. Already in 1935 Nishitani had written the following programmatic lines for his path of thought: If we in our country can, by means of the ethos which is the heritage of our ancestors, overcome the various aspects of the crisis of European civilization (which is at the same time modern world-civilization), the Japanese spirit can become for the ﬁrst time an active moment in world history, and may thus come to have world signiﬁcance. (NKC I: 150) In many ways, Nishitani’s path of thought remains, from beginning to end, deﬁned by this attempt to effect an overcoming of modernity/nihilism by way of passing through modernity/nihilism, doing this by reappropriating and rearticulating the ‘standpoint of Zen’ in dialogue with Western philosophy and religion.

Nishitani’s turns to and from political philosophy And yet, there did occur at least one major ‘turn’and then ‘return’in Nishitani’s path of thought, namely, a turn to and then back away from a speciﬁc politicization of this project of overcoming modernity/nihilism. The assertion of a world-historical political role for the Japanese state is grafted onto his original idea of a worldhistorical spiritual role for the Japanese ethos. This assertion of a world-historical mission for the Japanese state, which does not appear until 1941, and which no longer appears after 1944, occupies a central place in Nishitani’s thought during these turbulent years of the Paciﬁc War. After the end of the war Nishitani wrote that, ‘together with the end of the war, Japanese history underwent a severance’ and must begin again from this severance. In a certain sense, this severance also implied a rupture and the need for a restart in his own path of thought. To be sure, Nishitani was sharply critical of the many opportunistic intellectuals who, with the changing political tides, enacted a simple ‘conversion’ or ‘turnabout’ (tenk¯o) in their intellectual and political stance. Nevertheless, Nishitani did announce the need to ‘apply the surgeon’s scalpel to one’s own roots’ (NKC IV: 453–63).

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I will argue below that the main root to which Nishitani self-critically applied the surgeon’s scalpel was his wartime thesis of a special world-historical political role for the Japanese state. Nishitani’s wartime political thought can be found chieﬂy in the following texts: Nishitani’s monograph, published in 1941, Sekaikan to kokkakan (View of the World, View of the Nation);11 his contributions to the 1941–43 roundtable discussions, published in the pages of the journal Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron and later as a monograph, Sekaishi-teki tachiba to Nihon (The World-Historical Standpoint and Japan);12 his contributions to the Literary World’s 1942 symposium on ‘Overcoming Modernity’, which include his essay ‘Kindai no ch¯okoku’ shikan’ (My View of ‘Overcoming Modernity’);13 and his 1944 essay, ‘Sekaishi no tetsugaku’ (The Philosophy of World History) (NKC IV: 219–58). As can be seen in the numerous postwar essays (written between 1945 and 1951) on social and political philosophy that make up the rest of volume IV of his Collected Works, Nishitani did not suddenly cease to write on such themes with the end of the war.14 And yet, not only did he steadily retreat from many of the problematic elements of his wartime political theory, but also increasingly undertook a more radical step back to what he saw as the more fundamental and also more historically decisive – in the sense of overcoming the nihilism of Western and now global modernity – ﬁeld of an existentially oriented philosophy of religion.15 For our purposes Nishitani’s path of thought can thus be divided into three broad periods: (1) an early period (–1941) during which his study of Western philosophy and religion led him back to his Eastern roots in search of resources for contributing to an overcoming of modernity/nihilism; (2) a relatively brief middle period during the war (1941–44) when he overtly politicized his project so as to assert a special world-historical mission for the Japanese state; and (3) a mature postwar period (1945–) in which (especially after 1951) he turned the focus of his attention away from political theory and back to the philosophy of religion.

The general question of cultural nationalism Before we examine in some detail the explicitly political thought of Nishitani’s middle period, let us brieﬂy consider a more general charge of ‘cultural nationalism’ that would apply to all the stages in Nishitani’s thought. When Nishitani asserts that a philosophy of Zen Buddhism can provide a key for overcoming the worldwide problem of nihilism, does this necessarily betray an ethnocentric arrogance? (Maraldo 1995: 246–48). In responding to this suspicion, we should ﬁrst of all bear in mind that Buddhism, often in contrast to (ideological reconstructions of) the native Japanese tradition of Shint¯o, has generally played an international role in the constitution of Japan’s cultural identity. In the process of the importation and appropriation of Buddhism, Japanese culture was enriched by Indian, Chinese, and Korean cultural threads. In times of reactionary conservatism, Buddhism was rejected by xenophobic factions of Native Studies (kokugaku) and State Shint¯o (kokkashint¯o); at times this rejection

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even gave way to persecution, as in the Meiji haibutsu-kishaku movement. Hence, within the Japanese context Nishitani’s philosophy of Zen Buddhism could hardly be understood as the assertion of a cultural purism. Moreover, I would argue that the fact that Nishitani ﬁnds key sources for his philosophy in a Japanese tradition (or, more precisely speaking, in a Japanese adoption and adaptation of a tradition with a diverse Eastern pedigree) does not necessarily condemn that philosophy to a pernicious cultural nationalism. I take it that the crucial question here is whether, in the end, the tradition of Zen Buddhism is deemed valuable because it is Japanese, or whether it is deemed valuable and just happens to be Japanese. Of course, separating these two is never a simple matter, and the inclination to uncritically afﬁrm one’s native tradition is a persistent temptation for philosophers, Nishitani included. Yet surely we would not want to ban philosophers from drawing on their native traditions as they grapple with universal problems, anymore than we would want to inhibit them from also drawing on non-native traditions. There are indeed many past and present ethnocentric Japanese thinkers who pride themselves on the purported uniqueness and superiority of things Japanese. But, ironically, it is also the Eurocentrism of many postwar Japanese intellectuals that calls for critical scrutiny; after all, what we might call a ‘deferred ethnocentrism’ is no genuine alternative to the straightforward variety. The extreme Japanese proponents of Westernization, who simplistically equate an importation and imitation of Western culture with progress, no less than their rivals, the reactionary traditionalists, who long for a retreat to an idealized bygone age, lose the philosophical ability to ‘think for themselves’ (Fujita 1999: 32–33). At the end of the day the proof lies in the philosophical pudding, not on the national label of the container from which it is drawn. And in our search for the best ingredients for thought, no container should be arbitrarily excluded from offering its contents. In this regard, and especially in the context of an increasingly Euro-Americanocentric world, is there not something commendable rather than reprehensible in Nishitani’s endeavor – following that of his teacher Nishida – to make an Eastern and Japanese contribution to a global philosophical dialogue?16

Cooperative resistance: between imperialism and its critique Nevertheless, the fact remains that, in his wartime political writings, Nishitani did claim a special world-historical role for the Japanese state, and also made a number of statements, particularly in the Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron discussions, that betray elements of a much more problematic breed of nationalism. To some extent like Japan’s Paciﬁc War itself, the Kyoto School’s Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron discussions were inherently torn between a double agenda. As Takeuchi Yoshimi pointed out, ‘the Paciﬁc War had a dual character of being, on the one hand, an Asian/Japanese resistance to the Western imperialistic powers, and, on the other hand, a Japanese imperialistic invasion of Asia’.17 While attempting to reform Japan’s imperialistic ideology from within, Nishitani and the other Kyoto School

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participants in the Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron discussions were also themselves infected by and complicit in its paradoxes. By attempting to open up and think from a genuinely ‘world-historical standpoint’,18 the Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron discussionists sought to critique the discrepancies between Western democratic ideals and colonizing practices.19 For example, Nishitani stated: On the one hand, under the façade of democracy they claim to offer support until [a colonized nation] is able to achieve independence; but, on the other hand, while continuing their exploitation, they ceaselessly undertake covert strategies to prevent the achievement of such independence. Here we ﬁnd the hypocrisy contained within the English and American standpoint of democracy. (Nishitani et al. 1943: 351) Here Nishitani sharply exposes the hypocrisies taking place under the banner of ‘the spread of freedom and democracy’, hypocrisies that continue to haunt us today. More problematic, however, is Nishitani’s attempt to give theoretical justiﬁcation to Japan’s self-proclaimed leadership role in the creation of a so-called ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ (dait¯oaky¯oeiken). In what is certainly one of his most scandalous comments, Nishitani proposes that, in order to create the Co-Prosperity Sphere, certain other ethnic groups with ‘exceptional potential’ could be ‘Japanized’ or ‘half-Japanized’ (Nishitani et al. 1943: 262–63; 337).20 Such a proposal can hardly be defended from charges of ethnocentric cultural imperialism, and is refuted by Nishitani’s own contemporaneous warnings against ‘imposing’ Japanese culture on the world (see below). To be sure, Nishitani and the other Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron participants clearly did labor to differentiate the idea of Japan’s ‘leadership’ role in the creation of a ‘Co-Prosperity Sphere’ from the Western imperialist model of ruling over a network of colonies. Nishitani was acutely aware that maintaining this distinction was crucial, and he explicitly warned imperialistically minded Japanese that ‘the establishment of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere must not mean the securing of colonies for our country’(Kawakami et al. 1979: 32).21 But there was nevertheless a marked gap between Nishitani’s idealistic vision of a non-imperialistic Co-Prosperity Sphere and the brutal reality of Japan’s imperialistic actions across Asia; and this gap itself calls for critical examination. According to Nishitani himself, this gap was precisely the space of immanent critique. After the war he wrote in retrospect: 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)

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¯ Nishitani thus saw himself as attempting to walk the razor’s edge of what Ohashi Ry¯osuke has called ‘oppositional collaboration’ or ‘resistance in cooperation’ ¯ (hantaisei-teki ky¯oryoku) (Ohashi 2001: 20ff.). Part of Nishitani’s strategy was to engage in a ‘war over words’, or what Ueda Shizuteru has called, in his analysis of Nishida’s political thought, a ‘tug-of-war over meaning’ (Ueda 1995: 97).22 Although Nishitani was less concerned with the role of the emperor and the ‘imperial way’ than was Nishida, he did afﬁrmatively appropriate such current phrases as the ‘Co-Prosperity Sphere’ and ‘self-sacriﬁce and public service’ (messhi-h¯ok¯o; literally ‘extinguishing the self and serving the public’), and labor to give them a non-imperialistic and non-totalitarian interpretation. Even though Nishitani, like Nishida, ultimately lost this semantic struggle over catchwords and phrases, and even though his own interpretations should not be exempted from critical scrutiny in their own right, his attempt to reform reality by way of articulating a theoretical ideality can at least be seen as a legitimate endeavor of political philosophy. However, even if Nishitani’s intentions were to reform Japan’s ideology from within, the de facto result of his wartime writings was to encourage his students and readers to dedicate themselves to Japan’s war and its de facto imperialistic response to the threat of imperialism. And, by utilitarian standards at least, a political philosophy must be judged not just on its intentions but also on its effects.

Polemical hindsight: slaps on the other cheek Nishitani’s ambivalent wartime stance between supporting the nationalistic ideology and subjecting it to a cosmopolitan critique – in other words, his attempt to walk a razor’s edge of ‘cooperative resistance’ – ended up earning him a suspect reputation in Japan both before and after the end of the war. As he later commented: ‘During the war we were struck on the cheek from the right; after the war we were struck on the cheek from the left’ (Horio 1995: 291). After the war, the Kyoto School’s compromised attempts to impart meaning and direction to Japan’s ‘world historical mission’ were simply seen – especially by the emerging Left that had at long last been freed from repression and persecution – as support for its militaristic fascism. Nishitani and others were purged for several years from their university positions. Even when they were later reinstated, the stigma of the Kyoto School as having ‘collaborated in the war’ lingered on. Slapping Nishitani’s cheek from the left has belatedly come into vogue in the West. One would expect intellectual historians and Japanologists to be most sensitive to shifting textual and historical contexts; and yet several scholars have managed to exaggerate and distort the culpability of Nishitani’s wartime political thought. Before moving on with my own critical analysis, let me brieﬂy respond to some of these misconceptions. During the war Nishitani warned that Japanese cultural contributions to the world must not take the form of political impositions. In 1941 Nishitani wrote, in

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no uncertain terms, that, if one tried to directly ascertain a worldly character within traditional [Japanese] spirit and thought, and then sought to impose that spirit and thought on the world, one would be overlooking or slighting the ﬁssure that does exist between what is Japanese and what is worldly. That kind of imposition [of traditional Japanese spirit and thought onto the world] would be rejected by the world, with the predictable result that Japan would be pushed back within itself where it could not help but fall into a self-intoxicated ultranationalism [jiko t¯osui no kokusuishugi]. (NKC IV: 353)23 In such passages Nishitani was directly challenging – with a considerable degree of professional and even personal risk – the ultraconservative and imperialistic ideologues of wartime Japan. Here as elsewhere we ﬁnd that it is highly misleading to refer to Nishitani’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’ than did Nishitani and the other members of the ‘Kyoto faction’ (Najita and Harootunian 1998: 238–39). The latter dishonor, namely that of attempting to give quasi-philosophical expression to Japanese fascism, surely goes to the proponents of ‘Imperial Way Philosophy’ (k¯od¯o no tetsugaku), who in fact harshly attacked the ‘world-historical philosophy’ of the Kyoto School for being insufﬁciently Japanocentric. The Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron discussions were branded by the Imperial Way ideologues as ‘ivory-tower speculations that risked reducing the Empire to simply one more category of world history’, and further printings of Sekaishi-teki tachiba to Nihon (The World-historical Standpoint and Japan) were reportedly stopped by the government censors (Horio 1995: ¯ 291; Ohashi 2001: 71–72). It is also rather misleading to simply claim that Nishitani offered up his philosophy of religion in ‘support for and justiﬁcation of a totalitarian absorption of the individual by the state’ (Kambartel 1989: 72). First of all, as does Nishida, Nishitani consistently and explicitly rejects ‘totalitarianism’ or ‘totalism’ (zentaishugi) as one of the political pitfalls to be avoided. Rather, in the Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron discussions he states: What is really called for, both in case of Japan and in the case of Greater East Asia, is an ethics which is neither simply that of isolated individuals nor that of totalism, but one which, in a certain sense, sublates both. (Nishitani et al. 1943: 213)24 Nishitani’s dialectical attempt to navigate beyond these extremes resembles, in certain respects, contemporary efforts to move beyond the standoff between liberal

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individualism and communitarianism, rather than any ideological justiﬁcation of a ‘totalitarian absorption of the individual by the state’.

An enigmatic intertwining of religion and politics Moreover, it is not the case that Nishitani simply offered up his philosophy of religion in uncritical service to the totalitarian state. This important matter is far more complicated, and deserves more careful interpretation. In Sekaikan to kokkakan (View of the World, View of the Nation), Nishitani critically calls into question the traditional Japanese notion of the ‘oneness of religion and politics’ (saisei-icchi) which had been reconstructed in the guise of State Shint¯o. He writes: In its deepest foundations, religion does not directly connect even with the public life of a nation. . . . This relation does not permit any simple politicization of religion or religionisation of politics. . . . If religion were to be treated as a kind of means for politics, its true efﬁcacy would disappear, and it would thus fail to even be an effective means. (NKC IV: 369)25 Yet we may question whether Nishitani managed to ever fully clarify what he spoke of as the ‘subtle complexity’ of the relation between politics and religion. While on the one hand he clearly dismisses the reduction of religion to a means for political ends, he does suggest that: on the other hand, it is the duty of religionists to teach the people the true meaning of non-egoistic existence [‘shi’naki ky¯ochi] and to invigorate their spirit of public service [h¯ok¯o], as well as to go further and instruct the state with regard to the proper ethical principles [d¯onen]. (NKC IV: 374)26 Hence, while refusing any ‘direct relation’ between politics and religion, Nishitani does suggest a dual role for religion with regard to the state: religion can spiritually prepare the people for public service and it can serve as an ethical guide to the state. In hindsight we may regret that, in comparison to the emphasis placed on the aspect of ‘self-sacriﬁce and public service’ in Nishitani’s text, the aspect of ‘instructing the state with regard to the proper ethical principles’was not developed so far as to emphasize the possibility – and indeed the responsibility – of religious leaders and philosophers to openly criticize the state when its policies and actions are unethical. It is not enough for the emperor to smile at the priest over a mutual understanding of the ‘inseparability and yet non-identity’ of politics and religion (NKC IV: 375);27 at times the priest must boldly speak out against the injustices of the empire. How exactly, in Nishitani’s vision of ‘the mutual interpenetration of worldly religiosity and national ethics’ (Kawakami et al. 1979: 29), is a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King to draw religious inspiration for resistance, not servitude, to the unjust state? It must be said that in Nishitani’s enigmatic intertwining of

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religion and politics, the potential for religious cooperation with the state is made clearer than is the potential for critical resistance.

The ideal nation of non-ego Nevertheless, as a philosopher of religion Nishitani did attempt to offer ethical instruction to the state, albeit in the form of ‘cooperative’ rather than confrontational resistance. He did this by way of offering a vision of what the Japanese state should strive to be, namely, a ‘nation of non-ego’ (muga no kokka) rather than an egoistic empire.28 The core of Nishitani’s political theory was the idea that the nation must incorporate a religious principle of ‘self-negation’ (jiko-hiteisei). In order to overcome ‘the contradiction between freedom and authority’, in order to serve as ‘leader’of the Co-Prosperity Sphere without succumbing to the temptation of imperialism, and in order to open up within itself a ‘trans-national worldliness’, the nation ‘must come to include within itself a religious horizon’ (NKC IV: 289). Nishitani’s ideal was that Japan would become a religious and cosmopolitan (‘worldly’) nation of non-ego, rather than a self-centred empire of ego (NKC IV: 285–86). It is precisely this ideal of a ‘nation of non-ego’, inspired by the religious practice of ‘self-negation’, that Nishitani points to in his 1946 epilogue to Sekaikan to kokkakan as his attempt to resist and change from within Japan’s wartime politics (NKC IV: 381). Nishitani continued to express this ideal after the end of the war, in passages such as the following: Just as the fundamental problem of individual human existence cannot be resolved without a shift from the ‘egoistic’ way of being to the ‘non-egoistic’ way of being, the horizon for genuine world peace cannot be opened up without a shift from today’s ‘egoistic’ way of being a nation to a ‘non-egoistic’ way of being a nation. (NKC IV: 69) This notion of a ‘nation of non-ego’ had been the guiding ideal of Nishitani’s political philosophy already in 1941, and it was with this ideal that he carried out his immanent critique of the political reality of wartime Japan. Several years after the war Nishitani continued to promote this vision of a ‘nation of non-ego’ as the key to resolving the tension in the relations between the three terms: the individual, the nation, and the world (NKC IV: 56). Yet the concrete details of this political vision are never made entirely clear. Moreover, perhaps a crucial problem with this vision was not simply that it was vague, and not only that it was unduly idealistic and underestimated the totalitarian and imperialistic quality of Japan’s family-state nationalism (kokkashugi), but rather that it ended up doing what Nishitani himself had claimed should not be done; namely the direct linking of politics and religion. This linking was not, to be sure, a matter of reducing religion to a servant of politics; it was more a matter of attempting to base politics on a religious principle of self-negation. From beginning

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to end Nishitani was fundamentally a religious thinker, and, as with other spheres of life, including art, ethics, and philosophy, he thought that ‘world politics must be deeply rooted in the ground of religiosity’ (NKC IV: 69). In any case, while in his later philosophy of religion Nishitani certainly continued to write of an existential conversion from the ‘egoistic’ way of being to the ‘nonegoistic’ way of being, after 1951 he no longer attempted to develop an explicitly political philosophy based on this religious motif.

The purported world-historical mission of the Japanese State There is another element of Nishitani’s wartime political thought that gets even more decisively severed and left behind. During the war Nishitani asserted that the Weltgeist had called upon the Japanese state to carry out a non-imperialistic uniﬁcation of the world, starting with the creation and leadership of the so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. According to Nishitani’s wartime ‘philosophy of world history’, it was ‘Europe that, by exerting its power around the entire globe in modern times, had ﬁrst opened up the world into a uniﬁed totality’. And yet, this one world had ‘yet to been freed of its European bias’. Thus far we can agree with Nishitani, and indeed the European/American bias of the globalizing world is a problem that has only worsened since that time. Next, Nishitani claims that, ‘as a result of Japan’s becoming a powerful nation, the European world was broken, in other words, the conﬂation of Europe and the world was pealed apart’. Although perhaps somewhat overstated, historians may in fact look back at Japan’s ability to resist colonization as a certain turning point in the history of the West’s relation with the rest of the world. The crucial problem in Nishitani’s discourse arises with the following quite astonishing claim: that Japan alone ‘is able to purely and neutrally observe the facts of world history “just as they are” ’ (NKC IV: 222–23). This breathtaking conﬁdence in the objectivity of Japan’s worldview in 1944 betrays, despite all his attempts at immanent critique from a world-historical standpoint, an unacknowledged Japanese bias of Nishitani’s wartime political theory. Moreover, Nishitani did not merely hold a naïve belief in Japan’s neutral objectivity; for, according to his political theory, the ‘life of the Japanese state’ had become ‘the pulse of world history’, (Kawakami et al. 1979: 35)29 and it was destined to succeed the Roman Empire and the British Empire as the ‘third focal point of world history’ (NKC IV: 298).30 He even went along with the Hegelian reasoning of the Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron discussions31 to claim that the Japanese state had assumed the historical mission of the Weltgeist, and to assert that past ‘actions against China’ (such as the Manchurian Incident) could be ‘justiﬁed’ as part of the process of the establishment of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Nishitani et al. 1943: 171–72; 395). At the same time, Nishitani argued that, unlike former world-historical empires, Japan’s special mission was to bring about a world that has ‘no speciﬁc center’, but rather consists of various ‘politically and culturally uniﬁed spheres’(NKC IV: 298– 300).32 He thought that the Japanese state would be able to carry out this mission,

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as we have seen, only if it incorporated a religious moment of self-negation, thus becoming a ‘nation of non-ego’ rather than a self-centred and exploitative empire. In this idealistic vision, which unfortunately had little to do with the cruel realities of Japanese militaristic expansionism, Japan was called on to be an altogether new kind of international leader, a self-negating and compassionate one that would help other nations to cooperatively form their own identities, rather than an aggressively imperialistic one that would remold others into inferior replicas of itself. In the end, the Japanese Empire fell into the trap of becoming a decidedly imperialistic response to the threat of Western imperialism, and Nishitani’s political discourse effectively served to legitimate the Empire at least as much as to transparently submit it to an immanent critique. Not surprisingly, it was ﬁrst and foremost his thesis of a world-historical political role for the Japanese state that Nishitani cut out from his thought and left behind after the war; this was the main ‘root’ to which he had to ‘put the scalpel’. To be sure, Japan’s defeat in the war was the external occasion for this severance; and one wonders how long it would have otherwise taken Nishitani to realize that imperial Japan had failed to heed his ethical instructions and become a ‘nation of non-ego’. In any case, during the ﬁve or six years immediately following the end of the war, Nishitani thoughtfully gathered what he still found valuable in the remnants of his political detour while steadily turning back toward his own home-ground of an existential philosophy of religion.

Human rights: respect for the other or self-assertion of the ego? However, even after 1951, it is not accurate to simply label Nishitani’s thought as ‘apolitical’, or to claim, as some critics have, that he simply ﬂed from politics to the innocuous realm of religion. Rather, John Maraldo is right to claim that: ‘Just as there is a religious undercurrent to his explicitly political thought, there is from early on a political dimension to his philosophy of religion’ (Maraldo 1998: 101). We have already examined the religious undercurrent (which in fact ﬂowed explicitly on the surface) of his wartime political thought. In what follows I would like to consider a rather controversial political aspect of his philosophy of religion. Specifically, I would like to examine Nishitani’s lifelong suspicion of ‘human rights’. Nishitani’s qualms concerning the politics of human rights have been the subject of some criticism (Little 1989; Van Bragt 1998: 82–83). Let us begin to examine this issue by looking directly at some passages from Nishitani’s texts on the subject. The gist of Nishitani’s critique of the ethics (or ethos) of human rights is succinctly given on the ﬁnal page of his 1961 magnum opus, Sh¯uky¯o to wa nanika (What is Religion? translated as Religion and Nothingness), a text which in general hardly deals with themes that are overtly ‘political’. There he writes: True equality is not simply a matter of an equality of human rights and the ownership of property. Such equality concerns man as the subject of desires and claims and is ultimately based on the self-centered mode of human being. In other words, it has basically not freed itself from the principle of self-love. (NKC X: 315)33

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Even more provocatively, a similar point had been made in the Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron discussions as a general critique of the standpoint of ‘liberal democracy’ as such: The standpoint of modern democracy is after all centered on the arbitrary liberties of the individual. Hence, however much mutual recognition of equality or a [social] contract is spoken of, this refers merely to putting a restriction on the unlimited expression of willfulness and desire, and not a negation of the standpoint of willfulness and desire as such. (Nishitani et al. 1943: 354) And in a late text we ﬁnd Nishitani still harshly critical of the notion of human rights as the ‘basis of modern democracy’, claiming that behind such a standpoint lurks a fundamental attitude which ‘inﬂates the petty ego and reinforces self-assertion’ (NKC XVIII: 27; NKC XVII: 22–26). As shocking as these ideas may appear to contemporary Westerners, accustomed as we are to think of democracy founded on human rights as the unquestionably ideal form of government, Nishitani’s critique is not without its point. We might recall that the ﬁrst great (though certainly controversial) Western text of political philosophy, Plato’s Republic, raised similar concerns. For Plato too, the problem was that democracy tends to cater to the least common denominator of ourselves, the basest part of the tripartite soul, namely appetitive desire; and, moreover, it encourages politicians to pursue their lust for power by means of sophistical manipulation of egoistic desires. One need only turn on the television today to recognize that much of our pleasure, wealth and power oriented society is driven by ‘the standpoint of willfulness and desire’. Our society (especially America) is also a litigious one, where a culture of claiming ‘my rights’ at times has more to do with egoistic self-assertion than with a genuine plea for humane treatment. Nevertheless, for those who live in today’s metropolitan and multicultural societies and who are no longer able to rely on the shared moral sentiment of a traditional community (Gemeinschaft), is not the political institution of ‘human rights’ a necessary, even if not sufﬁcient, condition for peaceful coexistence? The need for a mutual self-assertion of rights may be a symptom of a lack of natural and spontaneous compassion in our societies, but without it would not the battle of egos go unchecked? Furthermore, as Jan Van Bragt objects to Nishitani, ‘why cannot human rights be seen . . . as ﬁrst of all stressing the rights of the Other?’ (Van Bragt 1995: 254). At the very least, it would seem that the rights of other persons are to be put on par with the rights of the self. This is clear in Kant’s deontology, an ethical theory which is often used to support the idea that each individual person is endowed with inalienable rights. According to the second formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative, you must ‘act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only’ (Kant 1949: 87). Despite Kant’s emphasis on autonomy (self-legislation), the categorical imperative can hardly be characterized as a principle of self-assertion. On the contrary, it is

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an inner command that negates the willfulness of the desiring ego in the name of a non-egocentric respect for all persons as ends in themselves. Van Bragt goes a step further to question what he sees as the ethically dangerous implications of Nishitani’s allegedly ‘symmetrical negation of the I and the Thou’. He refers to the fact that Nishitani speaks not only of ‘killing the self ’, but also of doing this by way of ‘killing every “other” ’ (NKC X: 290).34 This attitude would seem to contrast sharply with, for example, Levinas’ call for a radically ‘asymmetrical’ ethical relation, a relation of responsibility to the Other who can never be reduced to ‘the Same’, in other words, to the immanent domain of the ego (Levinas 1969). And yet, Nishitani would no doubt respond that the ‘other’ that is to be ‘killed’ is not the truly interpersonal other, but rather that conception of the ‘other’ which is projected and manipulated by the ego. It is in this context that Nishitani writes that one ‘must kill all [so-called] “others” and thus the [so-called] “self ” ’ (NKC X: 290). By killing off such ego-projections, one can return to the ‘true self ’, which is not a subjective ego at war with others, but rather a ‘self that is not a self ’ (jiko narazaru jiko) which is essentially open to compassionate engagement with others. According to Nishitani, a true human relation is one in which the other is neither absolutely alien to the self nor simply absorbed within the self. Rather, being nondualistically ‘not one and not two’, the self and other are in a ‘circuminsessional’ relation of identity-in-difference and difference-in-identity (NKC XII: 276ff.).35 Nevertheless, even granted the profundity of Nishitani’s account of a true interpersonal relation, a crucial question remains. What about those all too frequent situations where we fail to achieve such an originary human relation, or where relations break down into violence? Is there not a vital role played by the institution of human rights in a world of genocide, exploitation, terrorism, and torture? In fact, despite his reservations, Nishitani does explicitly recognize a place for the assertion of human rights. In a late essay he writes: The signiﬁcance of human rights [kenri] and authoritative power [kenryoku] cannot be denied. There is a need for individuals to assert their rights . . .. In what is broadly speaking called the political realm, in other words where humans must act communally, there is no getting around the need for authoritative power. In this sense authoritative power and human rights are deﬁnitely necessary. (NKC XX: 82) It is clear from this passage that Nishitani does not wholly dismiss the value of the institution of human rights. What he ﬁnds problematic is rather the following situation: But in the contemporary world [authoritative power and human rights] are cut off and separated from the other aspects of human being; they are abstracted

40

Bret W. Davis and forcefully asserted. It is as if human rights and authoritative power have come to deﬁne the entirety and central characteristic of human being. (NKC XX: 82)

The modern reduction of human beings to competing rights claims and to relations of power is unable, says Nishitani elsewhere, to reveal the true essence of human freedom and existence (Nishitani and Yagi 1989: 192). Indeed, this reduction has alienated us from our most originary relation with one another. He writes that ‘although such things as fundamental human rights have a certain signiﬁcance, no matter how much one advances them, the problem of what it means for one human being to encounter another remains unresolved’ (NKC XII: 277).36 According to Nishitani, when such an originary encounter between human beings takes place as a matter of ‘circuminsessional interpenetration’ (egoteki s¯ony¯u) (NKC X: 166– 67),37 I and Thou dialogically intermingle without collapsing into a monological one. When and only when this relation is realized, he suggests, ‘absolute opposition is at the same time absolute harmony’. Such harmony can take place among persons only when ‘the other is at the center of the self, and where the existence of each one is “other-centered” ’ (NKC XII: 285). According to Nishitani, unless we learn to ‘step back’ to this originary relation, that is, ‘unless the relations between individual and individual, between nation and nation, between all groups, return to this condition, we remain stuck with a [Hobbesian] battle between wolves in the wild’ (NKC XII: 286).38

In the end: a radical step back Shortly after the war, Nishitani reiterated his critical stance not only toward fascist totalitarianism, but also toward ‘democracy centered on the individual [ego]’, ‘ethnocentrism centered on the nation’ and ‘communism under the banner of world revolution’ (NKC IV: 56). Although he claimed then that ‘the task for us today is to seek a new fundamental standpoint that can simultaneously enable [the coexistence of] the standpoints of the individual, the nation, and the world’ (NKC IV: 56), shortly thereafter he turned the focus of his attention away from a direct engagement in political philosophy per se. To the question of what type of political system would be most appropriate for passing through an age of nihilism, the later Nishitani might have sympathized with a comment made by the later Heidegger: ‘I don’t have an answer to that question, but I am not convinced that it is democracy’, (Neske, Günter and Kettering, Emil 1988: 96) at least, Nishitani would presumably add, not in its current state of consumerism, sophistry, and litigiousness.39 It may be tempting for critics to see this confession of ignorance and skepticism with regard to political theory on the part of Heidegger and perhaps Nishitani as, at best, proof of the impotence of their political thinking, or, at worst, as the unexpunged remains of their political misadventures. And yet, self-critically, we might also take such hesitancy to wholeheartedly endorse current forms of democracy as indications that the fundamental existential and interpersonal problems of the contemporary world cannot be

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solved by means of a political system of human rights alone. Liberal proceduralism can regulate the ‘battle between wolves’, but it cannot free us from this state of war itself. That being said, I do believe that democracy in general, and the ‘negative freedom’ guaranteed by the institution of human rights in particular, provide us with certain indispensable prerequisites for individually and collectively grappling with the fundamental questions of humanity. As we have seen, the later Nishitani at least would agree with this. Yet his own thinking aimed deeper. His mature philosophy of Zen intimates the possibility of a radical step back to the ‘ﬁeld of emptiness’, wherein one’s true self, as a ‘non-ego’, ecstatically dwells with others in a non-dual relation of mutual compassion. Although this philosophy of religion is no longer ‘political’ in the narrow sense of proffering a raison d’État, it does offer to lead us back to the most originary dimension of our interpersonal being-with-others-in-the-world. Nishitani’s turn away from political philosophy in the narrow sense was thus ultimately a return to the most radical personal and interpersonal questions. He attempted to step back beneath systems of ethics and politics to the simple question of what Heidegger would call the ‘fundamental attunement’ (Grundstimmung) of our existence. Nishitani writes: When we try to think about the various problems of our contemporary life, in the end this always comes down to the question of the basic way of being or attitude of human being, that is, to the question of the fundamental way in which human beings envision themselves. (NKC XVII: 21–22) It is with regard to such elemental questions of personal and interpersonal existence that Nishitani’s writings most compellingly continue to speak to us today.

Notes 1 This chapter was developed out of an earlier article written and published in Japanese as ‘Sh¯uky¯o kara seiji e, seiji kara sh¯uky¯o e: Nishitani Keiji no tenkai’ (From Religion to Politics, and from Politics to Religion: Nishitani Keiji’s Turn), in Fujita Masakatsu et al. (2003). Another version has appeared in Chinese translation as a chapter in Bian Chongdao et al. (2002). 2 For a general introduction to the Kyoto School, see Davis 2006. Section 4 of this article gives an overview of the debate surrounding the political thought of the Kyoto School. 3 For a voluminous example of this approach, see Harootunian 2000, esp. Chapter 3. 4 For a stern rebuttal to the polemical excesses of Faure and other critics of the Kyoto School’s politics, see Parkes 1997. 5 In addition to the numerous works on the Kyoto School’s philosophies of religion that belong to this category, for a provocative new interpretation of Nishida’s political thought, which argues that it should be understood neither in terms of Japanese ultranationalism, nor in terms of Western liberalism, but rather as a modern development of Eastern and in particular Mah¯ay¯ana Buddhist thought, see Goto-Jones 2005. For a ground-breaking and well-balanced collection of articles on the question of nationalism

42

6 7 8 9

10 11 12

13 14

15

Bret W. Davis and the Kyoto School, see Heisig and Maraldo 1995. Also see the illuminating article by Stevens 1997, which situates what he calls the ‘political misjudgments’ of Nishitani in the context of a general critique of ‘the paradoxical and obscure link between philosophers of religious ontology and nationalistic-totalitarian politics’, but which also afﬁrms in the end that ‘Nishitani’s religious ontology undoubtedly contains elements that can contribute to the renewal and deepening of authentic humanism and democracy.’ See Davis 2004 a, b; and Davis 2005. Translations from Nishitani’s Collected Works (Nishitani Keiji Chosakush¯u) and from other Japanese sources will generally be my own, though in footnotes I will refer to corresponding pages of existing translations. See Nishitani 1990: 3. Karl Löwith, who spent several years in Japan during the 1930s, remarked: ‘When in the latter half of the previous century Japan came into contact with us and took over our advances with admirable effort and feverish rapidity, our culture was already in decline, even though on the surface it was advancing and conquering the entire earth. But in contrast to the Russians of the nineteenth century, at that time the Japanese did not open themselves critically to us; instead they ﬁrst of all took over, naively and without critique, everything in the face of which our best minds, from Baudelaire to Nietzsche, experienced dread because as Europeans they could see through themselves and Europe. Japan came to know us only after it was too late, after we ourselves lost faith in our civilization and the best we had to offer was a self-critique of which Japan took no notice.’ (Löwith 1995: 229). Nishitani responds to Löwith’s critique by attempting to critically think through both European and Japanese nihilism (NKC VIII: 178ff.; Nishitani 1990: 176ff.). Nishitani 1990: 179. Sekaikan to kokkakan was originally published in 1941 and reprinted in volume IV of Nishitani’s Collected Works. Translations of parts of Sekaikan to kokkakan are included in Dilworth et al. 1998. Nishitani et al. 1943. It has recently been made evident that the political activities of Nishitani and other members of the Kyoto School during the war were even more involved – and even more ﬁlled with ambiguity – than was previously thought. In ¯ ¯ 2001 Ohashi Ry¯osuke published some wartime notebooks of Oshima Yasuma, which document in detail secret meetings regularly held by Kyoto School members at the bequest of a moderate faction of the Japanese navy (as opposed to the bellicose army) between February 1942 and just before the end of the war. As the politically more powerful army was thrusting the nation headlong into war, some reticent navy ofﬁcials evidently petitioned the Kyoto School to shed light on the political situation from their ‘world-historical standpoint’, presumably in order to sway public sentiment in a more ¯ prudent direction. See Ohashi 2001. Reprinted in Kawakami et al. 1979. As we shall see below in the discussion of human rights, the later Nishitani did at times address certain political themes. In his participation in a series of roundtable discussions published in 1961, Nishitani reﬂected on such themes as the symbolic signiﬁcance of the emperor for the Japanese people (Nishitani Keiji and Kuyama Yasushi 1961: 51, 69). On the one hand, in these discussions Nishitani remains critical of the one-sided ‘victor’s justice’ after the war, and he suggests that both sides should ultimately feel a religious sense of guilt for engaging in war (Nishitani Keiji and Kuyama Yasushi 1961: 93–94). On the other hand, Nishitani afﬁrms the need to reform education in Japan in order to let democracy take root (Nishitani Keiji and Kuyama Yasushi 1961: 255–57). On the latter point, see notes 24 and 39 below. The two major works that can be seen as inaugurating this return to an existential philosophy of religion are the 1948 Kami to zettai-mu (God and Absolute Nothingness) (NKC VII) and the 1949 Nihirizumu (translated as The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism)

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16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39

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(NKC VIII). This attempt to bring the radical mysticism of Meister Eckhart and the atheistic existentialism of Nietzsche into dialogue with one another and with Zen, picks back up with a theme from an important 1938 essay, ‘Niiche no Tsuaratosutora to Maisut¯a Ekkuharuto’ (Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and Meister Eckhart), which Nishitani placed at the beginning of his ﬁrst book, Kongen-teki shutaisei no tetsugaku (The Philosophy of Radical Subjectivity) (NKC I). NKZ XIV: 402–46. Also see the ﬁnal section of Davis 2006: chap. 5. Quoted from Matsumoto Kenichi’s preface to Kawakami et al. 1979: viii–ix. Also see the opening section to Ueda 1995. Japan’s imperialistic invasion of Asia had, of course, begun much earlier with its colonization of Korea and Taiwan, and with its aggressive military actions in China, since 1931. The term ‘Paciﬁc War’ is problematic in this regard, inasmuch as it would divert our attention from this history. With this cautionary note in mind, however, since Nishitani’s overtly political writings began in 1941, I have used the term ‘Paciﬁc War’ in this chapter. On the signiﬁcance and, at the time, controversial nature of the Kyoto School’s attempt to understand Japan’s situation from a ‘world-historical standpoint’, see Horio 1995 and Mori 1995. On the history of Western imperialistic domination of Asia, see Panikkar 1969. It is indeed instructive to self-critically compare this statement with recent statements by Western, and particularly American, proponents of the ‘globalisation’ and ‘democratisation’ of other parts of the world (see Maraldo 1995: 354–55). Also see Nishitani et al. 1943: 205 and 229. Also see Yusa 1995: 131. See Dilworth et al. 1998: 390. See also NKC IV: 279; Dilworth et al. 1998: 289. There can be no doubt that Nishitani supported democracy over any totalism or totalitarianism after the war, as can be seen from his contributions, such as the following comments, to a discussion of how to reform education in Japan so as to allow for a ﬂourishing of democracy: ‘For democracy to function as a viable system, education must focus on personal participation in public life so that the individual is not treated as merely a unit or element of society but as an individual person in his or her own right’ (Nishitani Keiji and Kuyama Yasushi 1961/1981: 257; 166). See Dilworth et al. 1998: 393. See Dilworth et al. 1998: 393. See Dilworth et al. 1998: 397. It is worth noting that, while the idea of ‘non-ego’ (in Japanese muga; in Sanskrit anatman) is clearly rooted in Buddhist thought, both during and after the war Nishitani also uses Christian sources to develop the idea (see, for example, NKC IV: 380). Also see Nishitani et al. 1943: 380–81. See Dilworth et al. 1998: 382. See Hiromatsu 1989: 173–74. See Dilworth et al. 1998: 383–84. See Nishitani 1982: 285. See Nishitani 1982: 263. It should be born in mind that the language of self- and othernegation is used to refer to an existential conversion to a religious standpoint, and not on the level of ethical relations between subjects. In an essay entitled ‘That which is Beyond Ethics’, Nishitani speaks of both the danger and the necessity of passing through and beyond the ethical to the religious dimension (NKC VI: 308). See Nishitani 1991. See Nishitani 1991: 48–49. See Nishitani 1982: 148. See Nishitani 1991: 57. That Nishitani nevertheless did support the ﬂourishing of democracy in postwar Japan is clear from his contributions to a roundtable discussion on the subject. One of his

44

Bret W. Davis expressed concerns was that democracy not simply be imported and handed down from above as a ready-made system of rights, but rather that the Japanese people be reeducated so as to be able to take part in democracy as a living historical process that is ‘always directed toward improvement’ (Nishitani Keiji and KuyamaYasushi 1961/1981: 255; 166–67).

References Bian Chongdao et al. (eds) (2002), D¯ongyà jìndàzhéxué de yìyì. Shenyang. Davis, Bret (2004a), ‘The Step BackThrough Nihilism: The Radical Orientation of Nishitani Keiji’s Philosophy of Zen’, Synthesis Philosophica, 37, pp. 139–59. Davis, Bret (2004b), ‘Zen after Zarathustra: The Problem of the Will in the Confrontation between Nietzsche and Buddhism’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 28, pp. 89–138. Davis, Bret (2005), ‘Kami no shi kara ishi no daishi e: Posuto-Niiche no tetsugakusha toshite no Nishitani Keiji’, in Fujita Masakatsu and Davis, Bret (eds) Sekai no naka no nihon no tetsugaku, Kyoto: Sh¯owad¯o, pp. 198–224. Davis, Bret (2006), ‘The Kyoto School’, in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2006 Edition), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2006/entries/ kyoto-school/. Dilworth, David D., Viglielmo, Valdo H. and Jacinto, Agustin Z. (eds) (1998), Sourcebook for Modern Japanese Philosophy: Selected Documents, Westport: Greenwood Press. Faure, Bernard (1995), ‘The Kyoto School and Reverse Orientalism’, in Wei-Hsun Fu, Charles and Heine, Steven (eds) Japan in Traditional and Postmodern Perspectives, New York: SUNY Press, pp. 245–81. Fujita, Masakatsu (1999), ‘Kindai no ch¯okoku o megutte’, in Aoki Mamoru (ed.) (1999), Nihonjin no jikoninshiki, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Fujita, Masakatsu et al. (eds) (2003), Higashiajia to tetsuyaku, Kyoto: Nakanishiya Press. Goto-Jones, Christopher (2005), Political Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School, and Co-Prosperity, London: Routledge. Harootunian, Harry D. (2000), Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Heisig, James W. (1990), ‘The Religious Philosophy of the Kyoto School’, in Unno Taitetsu and Heisig, James W. (eds) The Religious Philosophy of Tanabe Hajime, Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, pp. 12–42. Heisig, James W. and Maraldo, John C. (eds) (1995), Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Hiromatsu Wataru (1989), ‘Kindai no ch¯okoku’-ron, Tokyo: K¯odansha. Horio Tsutomo (1995), ‘The Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron Discussions: Their Background and Meaning’, in Heisig, James W. and Maraldo, John C. (eds) Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 289–315. Kambartel, Ruth (1989), ‘Religion als Hilfsmittel für die Rechtfertigung einer totalitärian Staatideologie in Nishitani Keijis Sekaikan to kokkakan’, Japanstudien, 1, pp. 71–88. Kant, Immanuel (1949), Immanuel Kant: Critique of Practical Reason and OtherWritings in Moral Philosophy, Lewis W. Black (trans. and ed), Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kawakami Tetsutar¯o, Takeuchi Toshimi et al. (1979), Kindai no ch¯okoku, Sendai: Fuzanb¯o. Levinas, Emmanuel (1969), Totality and Inﬁnity, Alphonso Lingis (trans.), Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

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Little, David (1989), ‘The Problem of Ethics in Nishitani’s Religion and Nothingness’, in Unno Taitetsu and Heisig, James W. (eds) The Religious Philosophy of Nishitani Keiji, Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, pp. 181–87. Löwith, Karl (1995), Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, Wolin, Richard (ed) and Steiner, Gary (trans), New York: Columbia University Press. Maraldo, John C. (1995), ‘Questioning Nationalism Now and Then: A Critical Approach to Zen and the Kyoto School’, in Heisig, James W. and Maraldo, John C. (eds) Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 333–62. Maraldo, John C. (1998), ‘Emptiness, History, Accountability: A Critical Examination of Nishitani Keiji’s Standpoint’, Zen Buddhism Today, 15, pp. 97–117. Mori Tetsur¯o (1995), ‘Nishitani Keiji and the Question of Nationalism’, in Heisig, James W. and Maraldo, John C. (eds) Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 316–32. Neske, Günter and Kettering, Emil (eds) (1988), Antwort. Heidegger im Gespräch, Pfullingen: Neske. Najita Tetsuo and Harootunian, Harry D. (1998), ‘Japan’s Revolt against the West’, in Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (ed) Modern Japanese Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 207–72. Nishida Kitar¯o (1987–89), Nishida Kitar¯o Zensh¯u, 19 vols, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Nishitani Keiji (1982), Religion and Nothingness, Van Bragt, Jan (trans), Los Angeles: University of California Press. Nishitani Keiji (1986–95), Nishitani Keiji Chosakush¯u, 26 vols, Tokyo: S¯obunsha. Nishitani Keiji (1990), The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, Parkes, Graham and Aihara Setsuo (trans), Albany: SUNY Press. Nishitani Keiji (1991), ‘The I-Thou Relation in Zen Buddhism’, in Frank, Frederick (ed) The Buddha Eye: An Anthology of the Kyoto School, New York: Crossroad, pp. 47–60. Nishitani Keiji and Yagi Seiichi (1989), Chokusetsu keiken, Tokyo: Shunj¯usha. Nishitani Keiji and KuyamaYasushi (eds) (1961), Sengo nihon seishinshi, Tokyo: S¯obunsha; translated as: ‘Postwar Japanese Thought: 1945–1960’, The Japan Christian Quarterly XLVII/3 (1981), pp. 132–78. Nishitani Keiji, K¯osaka Masaaki, K¯oyama Iwao, Suzuki Shigetaka (1943), Sekaishiteki tachiba to nihon, Tokyo: Ch¯uo¯ k¯oronsha. ¯ Ohashi Ry¯osuke (2001), Ky¯otogakuha to nihon-kaigun, Kyoto: PHP Shinsho. Panikkar, K.N. (1969), Asia and Western Dominance, Collier Books. Parkes, Graham (1997), ‘The Putative Fascism of the Kyoto School and the Political Correctness of the Modern Academy’, Philosophy East and West, 47/3, pp. 305–36. Stevens, Bernard (1997), ‘Political Engagement and Political Judgment in the Thought of Nishitani Keiji’, Zen Buddhism Today, 14, pp. 33–56. Ueda Shizuteru (1995), ‘Nishida, Nationalism, and the War in Question’, in Heisig, James W. and Maraldo, John C. (eds) Rude Awakenings:Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 77–106. Van Bragt, Jan (1995), ‘Kyoto Philosophy- Intrinsically Nationalistic?’, in Heisig, James W. and Maraldo, John C. (eds) Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 233–54. Van Bragt, Jan (1998), ‘Nishitani Revisited’, Zen Buddhism Today, 15, 77–95. Yusa Michiko (1995), ‘Nishida and Totalitarianism: A Philosopher’s Resistance’, in Heisig, James W. and Maraldo, John C. (eds) Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 107–31.

Part II

Political concepts in the philosophy of the Kyoto School

3

The individual and individualism in Nishida and Tanabe Matteo Cestari

The logic of place and the problem of the individual The theme of the individual is an important key in the understanding of Nishida Kitar¯o and Tanabe Hajime’s philosophical theories. In fact, it exposes their intrinsically modern nature, which brings them to inquire the philosophical and/or religious dimensions of the individual. Politics becomes part of this picture in different ways. Some rudiments of political individualism can be found in Nishida, but with limited results. In particular, he develops individualism theoretically, without really being able to acquire a political dimension. On the contrary, a developed political philosophy was at the core of Tanabe’s thinking in the 1930s. However, although political in its articulation, Tanabe’s position resembles a religious way of salvation, in which the confrontation between individual and society is at the center of the philosopher’s concern. In this chapter, my aim is to summarize their fundamental thinking on this theme and their attitudes toward individualism. I have chosen to start from the crucial period of their diatribe about the Logic of Place (basho no ronri), from 1927 on. This theoretical output by Nishida marks the beginning of a philosophical querelle with Tanabe about the relationship between the individual and the universal. Starting from this period, they both modify their thought in quite different directions. Therefore, it seems to me particularly suited to underline their different approaches to the theme in question. After brieﬂy recalling the fundamental meaning of the Logic of Place, I will deepen the problem of the individual and individualism in their wartime philosophies. In the Logic of Place, Nishida ﬁnds in the search for the True Subject an important source of philosophical inspiration. In fact, as stated in the work Hataraku mono kara miru mono e (From the Acting to the Seeing, 1924–27),1 it is in the name of the true face of individual things that he refuses the Aristotelian and Kantian philosophies, reading them as representatives of respectively the irrational and the rational approaches to Reality. This interpretation leads him to radically reconsider the way of sublating things in the universals: as it is known, the philosopher builds a new logical-ontological theory, called ‘Logic of Place’, in which the universal, or Place, of Judgment – very similar to the Kantian notion of Transcendental Apperception, or ‘I-think’ – disappears in a Place of Absolute Nothingness

50

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(zettai mu no basho), in order to let the things appear in their suchness (ari no mama).2 Nishida’s anti-subjectivist tendency to dismiss consciousness as a theoretical reference point brings him to deﬁne the True Subject as ‘the Predicate that cannot become Subject’, this Predicate being the extreme limit of universal: the Place (or universal) of Absolute Nothingness, being Nothingness, is actually identical with the True Individual Thing, disappearing in it. This approach to the problem, though an internal movement of consciousness, is already opened to the world of things. However, the Logic of Place is still belonging to the realm of interiority, of consciousness. This is exactly the aspect that leads Tosaka Jun to criticize Nishida’s Logic, accusing him of lacking dialectical character.3 From a slightly different standpoint, but equally eager to stress the importance of the dimension of the relative, Tanabe Hajime objects that the Logic of Place is a mystic emanationism (hasshutsuron), in which all things appear as direct selfdeterminations of the universal, whereas this lack of mediation is unacceptable, because it mortiﬁes the relative (e.g. THZ IV: 305–28). These critical stances by Tanabe, Tosaka and others stimulate Nishida to focus on the world of things, even if still on the basis of the ontology of the Logic of Place. The subsequent historicism focuses especially on the problem of knowledge-asaction (the dimension of ‘Active Intuition’, or k¯oiteki chokkan); on the dialectical, Historical World (rekishiteki sekai) and the historical bodily self (rekishiteki shintaiteki jiko); and ﬁnally on the functioning principles of the interrelated, dialectical world. This is the conception of absolutely contradictory self-identity (zettai mujunteki jikod¯oitsu) (K¯osaka 1949: 163ff.). On the contrary, Tanabe tries to elaborate a logic, which may overcome this supposed emanationism, reconsidering the relationship between universal and individual, in light of the (logical and historical) particular, or species/speciﬁc. This orientation will give birth to the Logic of Species (shu no ronri). In this chapter, I will ﬁrst consider the problem of the individual in the last Nishida and then I will treat the same question in Tanabe’s coeval philosophy. While in Nishida the political dimension of this theme is minimal, given that the philosopher concentrated almost exclusively on a more theoretical level, in Tanabe, politics is apparently crucial, even if, more than a really political philosophy, it is a religious, moral and existential way of self-realization.

The ontological dimension of the individual in Nishida’s historicism With the work Watakushi to nanji (I and Thou, 1932)4 Nishida begins to focus on the objective and inter-subjective side of the world, focusing more on the interrelated nature of a human being, than on its consciousness. However, it is only in Nishida’s ﬁnal thinking, from about 1934 on, that the self-sufﬁcient, balanced relationship among the Two is broken through by the relationship with the Third, so that the Other comes to be explicitly considered as such. This new perspective is generally addressed to as the ‘dialectical world’ (bensh¯oh¯oteki sekai), in which the individuals interact with each other and with the world. In historicism,

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Nishida shows interest in the problem of the historical, and also political, world.5 Before deepening the theme in question, I would ﬁrst clarify those terms adopted by Nishida to indicate the ‘individual’. Kobutsu is used in a metaphysical context, and is by far the most common word in his writings; ko especially if juxtaposed with shu (species) and rui (gender), generally appears in a logical context; kotai has the practical meaning of an ‘individual (kobutsu) that has a body’ (e.g. NKZ XII: 312); and ﬁnally kojin has a more political and less metaphysical connotation, as with the compound kojinshugi (individualism). The spread of this lexical geography reveals the degree of Nishida’s different interests. Certainly, we can say that the prevailing orientation is much more metaphysical than political. In fact, since the beginning, the main interest of our philosopher is oriented to the problem of the ontological structure of knowledge, to the structure of the world and the self. I will try to summarize Nishida’s conception of the individual in the historicist period. However, it must be preliminarily observed that since the turn to historicism does not occur suddenly, and it takes some years to modify in a consistent way the previous philosophical direction, the notion of individual, too, is subject to some changes. In fact, at the beginning of the so-called historicism, for example in the text of a conference held at the Shinano Philosophical Society in 1935,6 Nishida approaches the individual in terms of interiority, even if already within the general logical structure of ‘unity of contradictions’ (mujun no t¯oitsu), a concept which will be better speciﬁed later as the ‘absolutely contradictory self-identity’ (zettai mujunteki jiko d¯oitsu), that would allow the foundation of all the oppositions, interiority/exteriority included. However, in an essay dated only a few years later, Nishida clearly states that the True individual is not a matter of thinking (interiority), but of action (exteriority).7 This shift is essential to discuss the theme of individualism, as well as some aspects of Nishida’s philosophy, such as the problem of anthropocentrism, recently raised by James Heisig (Heisig 2001: 265–67), upon which I will brieﬂy touch later. In the Shinano conference of 1935, Nishida thinks that, in the history of philosophy, two ways of conceiving the individual are particularly signiﬁcant: the Aristotelian conception of hypokeìmenon (the substrate-subject that cannot become predicate) and Leibniz’s idea of monad.8 In the ﬁrst notion, the individual is thought of as the extreme limit of the universal. In the second, the individuals (monads) are considered as absolutely independent, having ‘neither doors nor windows’. Hence, these two positions are interpreted to be opposite: in Aristotle, the individual is interrelated but not independent; in Leibniz, the individual is independent but not interrelated (NKZ XIV: 225–26). However, since the individual should be considered both in its objective (Aristotle’s individual as the limit of the universal) and subjective (Leibniz’s individual as self determining) aspects, this partiality is unacceptable. In fact: ‘it could be said that, thinking at one part from the opposite side, we unavoidably disregard the character of one part and the concrete world is not thought of, but it becomes an abstract [object]’ (NKZ XIV: 241). This rejection of partiality is at work also in the analysis of the two possible relationships, inner or outer, of the individual. In the inner relationship, as with thinking about oneself, the temporal relationship is particularly relevant: it

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consists of an internal movement that allows the individual’s continuity between its past, present and future. In the internal relationship between individuals, the materialistic explanation is insufﬁcient: when, for example, the same idea appears both in the writer and the reader, this relationship cannot be explained simply in materialistic terms. On the contrary, a universal individual (a self that expands and becomes universally understandable) appears, something that is not ‘only me’ anymore, but it reduces the gap between the Thou and the I, as well as between the ‘I of yesterday’ and the ‘I of today’ (NKZ XIV: 245–47). An outer relationship implies that the individual is reduced to a universal common to other individuals. Here, the outer relationship cancels the individual as such, which becomes part of the external world, as with scientiﬁc laws. In both inner and outer relationships, the individual is reduced to universal, be it a universal individual, or a universal common to other individuals. Because of such a partiality, these conceptions are both wrong. In fact, coherently with the Logic of Place, they are both universals, and thus they cannot ultimately express the individual as such (NKZ XIV: 230). The widest position is the dialectical structure of unity and opposition, here addressed to as ‘unity of contradictions’ (mujun no t¯oitsu), and later called ‘contradictory self-identity’ (mujunteki jikod¯oitsu). This structure is said to be dialectical, but not in the sense of Marx, who according to Nishida considers only the universal, disregarding the individual and its complexity (NKZ XIV: 230; 241–42). Since the world is multi-layered, its attributes are the opposite and yet coexistent characteristics of time (the order of unity) and space (the order of differentiation), hence the individual, too, must reﬂect this structure. In fact, even if it is profoundly linked to time and consciousness, this does not imply, as with Spiritualism, to consider only the ‘vertical line’ of time/subject/consciousness/individual, disregarding the ‘horizontal line’ of space/object/external world/universal. Of course it does not imply adherance to the opposite direction of Materialism either. In fact, if Spiritualism negates the objective, external dimension of the world, Materialism negates consciousness and the individual, since it reduces it to the objective universal (NKZ XIV: 241 ff.). The individual is part of the world, that is it belongs to its temporal aspect, as opposed (and complementary) to the spatial aspect. This means that consciousness and the individual are but one aspect of the world, not the only one, as Idealism and Spiritualism generally afﬁrm. Here, it must be noted that even if the structure of the world is not reducible to any single dimension whatsoever, the individual is said to belong to the ‘vertical line’, together with time, subjectivity and consciousness. This quite traditional notion of the ‘interior individual’ – similar to the Augustinian conception of time as distensio animi – is innovated by Nishida in that this Spiritualist ‘vertical line’ is complementary to the Materialist ‘horizontal line’. In other words, the individual is inscribed in a wider world, which is both vertical and horizontal. The distance from the Logic of Place is all in this shift to open philosophy to the dimension of the dialectical/complex world. However, in the position of later historicism, another shift is evident in that the individual seems much less dependent on interiority. In the introductory remarks of the essay Rekishiteki sekai

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ni oite no kobutsu no tachiba (The Place of the Individual in the Historical World, 1938), Nishida seems to go straight in the opposite direction of his own thesis of some years before: Through introspection (naisei) in ourselves, we think to know the self that directly acts, starting from ourselves; we think to exert our free will. Thinking that what exists by itself, what acts by itself, is the individual (kobutsu), which entirely determines itself, [then] there is no individual, starting from our self. We can know the True Individual, through our self-introspection. However, to consider the acting (hataraku) self only through introspection is but a totally subjective [matter]; [in this context,] free will too is perhaps a hallucination (sakkaku). It could also be said that Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum may have various meanings. When it is stated that there must be a dreaming self, even if what is seen in the present is a dream; or that what doubts of the self ’s existence is still the self, this [way of thinking] could already be said to be logic, as far as it is dialectic. However, this is a conscious self and not an acting self. Consequently, it is not really individual. (NKZ IX: 69, emphasis added) This passage is telling in many respects, especially if we confront it with Nishida’s position of only a few years before, where, as we already saw, even in the historicist perspective, the individual is squarely considered to be part of the dimension of interiority within the world (e.g. NKZ XIV: 241). From this point of view, Nishida’s shift is impressive: here he fundamentally recants his same previous afﬁrmations, especially those of the so-called logicistic period. In brief, if the title of the inaugurating collection of essays of that period was, as said before, ‘From the Acting to the Seeing’, here this motto could be reversed into the opposite: ‘From the Seeing to the Acting’. Accordingly, for Nishida the conception of human being as historical body (rekishiteki shintai) can be interpreted also as a way to overcome the predominance of Pure Consciousness within his own philosophy, thanks to a reﬂection on the relationship that human beings have with and within the world. In sum, the shift from logicism to historicism, from an interiority-centered theory (homo interior) to an exteriority-centered one (homo exterior) (e.g. NKZ XII: 18–30) is signiﬁcant also in the context of the theory of the individual. These considerations can help introduce the characteristics that the last Nishida ascribes to it. At least three important aspects can be detected: a) independence, b) self-determination, c) self-expression and creativity. The ﬁrst two features are directly drawn by Leibniz’s monadology and chronologically emerge sooner. The third one appears later, but, once emerged, it seems to be considered as the most characterizing aspect of the individual. First of all, the individual must be independent (dokuritsu), but not in the sense of being grounded on something of its own (dokuji). This independence therefore is not opposed to the relationship with the others (e.g. NKZ XIV: 214; 223). Although independent, the individual is related to other individuals. In fact, a lone

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individual cannot simply exist. It has a grounding relationship with others, since, for example, it is born from them (its parents) and so on. This makes it impossible to consider the individual as absolute (NKZ XIV: 227; 245–46). I am I in front of Thou and without the Thou there is no I (NKZ XIV: 247). This feature could be in tune with the idea of ‘Discontinuous Continuity’ (hirenzoku no renzoku): the individual is at the same time completely independent and completely dependent. Hence, an individual is never isolated, as with many important thinkers of classical individualism. Secondly, the individual must act by itself (jibun). It must determine itself by itself and it must not depend on others. In other words, it must be autonomous (e.g. NKZ XIV: 225). Just like the ﬁrst feature, this characteristic can work both as internal and external dimensions. On the contrary, the third quality – self-expression – is explicitly linked to the horizon of praxis and creativity, namely of the Historical World and its dialectical structure. In his mature historicism, Nishida speciﬁcally insists on this character of the individual, which is said to be radically creative, and to form history, to the point that the true problem of the individual can be summarized in that of its concrete action. Hence, the individual is not a problem of interiority (consciousness) anymore, but of action, namely of exteriority.9 In the world of absolutely contradictory self-identity, each individual determines itself through expressive action, which does not belong to the world of physics, where the individuals are thought of as simple points. Nor can it be accomplished in the world of life, where the individual expresses its form with no individual creation. Only in the world of human history the individual determines itself with expressive action (NKZ IX: 171ff.). In expression, it possesses itself in the very fact of negating itself and it is part of the world that forms itself. Hence, the individual brings with itself the transformation of the world (NKZ IX: 175–76). This expressive character is somehow already present among animals, according to their degree of consciousness. Only if there is a conscious/critical attitude, true expression is present. Hence, only in the Historical World there is a movement from the Created to the Creating, and not simply a movement from a Created to another Created (NKZ IX: 176). While the biological world is only partially subjective (NKZ IX: 177), the individuals in their bodily dimensions (kotai) are characterized by a ‘desire of production’ (seisaku no yokky¯u) (NKZ IX: 178–79). This formative activity through expression is equivalent to our self-formation as parts of the world and to the self-formation of the world as negative uniﬁcation of the individual’s multiplicity. It becomes the most advanced edge of the world’s process of self-transformation. In fact, the world determines itself in the direction of the individual, that is by becoming the individual, while the individual becomes the world about which it is thinking.10 In this process, the historical body functions as a principle of individuation.11 This means that Nishida’s position considers the human world as the most human – and at the same time most natural – world. While Nishida’s discourse about the individual is for the most part essentially ontological, here and there other important aspects can be sporadically isolated. For example, in one section of the essay Zettai mujunteki jikod¯oitsu

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1938),12

(The absolutely Contradictory Self-Identity, Nishida concentrates on the religious-existential meaning of the individual: the individual is such in the confrontation with the absolute, which requires its life and death. In the process of active intuition, that is of creatively knowing the world, we face the absolute. If we do not face it, we lose our individuality, being reduced to mechanistic or teleological elements (NKZ IX: 188ff.). The individual is such because it faces absolutely contradictory self-identity. Since it is a being that lives and dies, the individual must confront Absolute Nothingness in its own death and birth (NKZ IX: 190–91). What urges us in such an inescapable way is not a logical, but an existential absolute (NKZ IX: 190–91); it is the One World. The more our self is an individual (and the present is Absolute), the more our knowledge is objective (NKZ IX: 196–97). In this confrontation with the Absolute World, our very soul (tamashii), not only our existence, is negated. In fact, the world makes our lives possible, and yet it kills our souls (NKZ IX: 201). Some commentators think that Nishida’s philosophy, as well as the entire Kyoto School, is dominated by the theme of consciousness. This was the opinion by Nishida’s direct disciples such as Tosaka Jun, as well as today’s critics (see e.g. Heisig 2001). This problem implies the question of anthropocentrism, which Heisig ﬁnds as one possible and fatal pitfall of the Kyoto School’s philosophical conception (Heisig 2001: 263–69). This criticism is certainly right in indicating anthropocentrism as an unexpected and ironic result of the Kyoto critique of the Western conception of Subject. In fact, even if criticizing it, the Kyoto School does not entirely break free from its dependence on pure, non-subjective but ﬁrmly human consciousness, which becomes the unconfessed center of their philosophy (Heisig 2001: 266). Consequently, the ethical problem of the Other, the metaphysical and practical problem of the ‘outer world’ would be considered on the basis of this predominance of Self-Identity. This critical position catches some important aspects of the thought of Nishida and Tanabe. It has the advantage to ﬁnd a theoretically strong interpretation for the weakness of these philosophies toward the dimensions that go beyond consciousness; politics and morality included. However, it is highly dubious that we can consider Nishida’s philosophy as irremediably tainted with anthropocentrism, as Heisig is saying: this criticism is partially true, as far as the ﬁrst periods are concerned, but it is not completely valid for the last period. More than anthropocentrism, I think that Nishida’s real problem is his logicism, that is his way of looking at the world from an abstractly symmetrical point of view, through which he blurs the dimensions of Finite and Inﬁnite, as Suzuki T¯oru correctly stigmatizes (Suzuki 1977: 147–48).

The political individualism in the last Nishida Before dealing with political individualism, it is important to remember that Nishida has brieﬂy discussed the individual according to many viewpoints: psychological, anthropological and, although rarely, also legal and economical perspectives.13 For example, in a psychological context, the individual is considered especially for its links with self-consciousness. As a result, the individual can

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critically look at its own past and future: ‘I can judge myself and critically think, putting myself in front of myself ’ (NKZ XIV: 246). This, in other words, implies a critical stance toward oneself and, ultimately, freedom. From the point of view of sociology and anthropology, the philosopher thinks that human societies, unlike other non-human groups, must contain the individual, however primitive the individual may be. Hence, the individual in the human race is not only submitted to the group, but it can also rise against the group. As with Malinowski, Nishida assumes that since their beginnings primitive societies included the individual (kojin), for example, as consciousness of sin (NKZ IX: 181–82). As a consequence, being individual is part of human nature and not a matter of historical contingency. It is worth noting however that Nishida’s position about individual freedom has much to do with ontology, religion and psychology, and much less with politics and morality. In a sense, the orientation toward the outer world, shown in the historicism, becomes a kind of metaphysical viewpoint of the world outside, and it does not really imply a change from metaphysics to practical philosophy. This prevailing interest in metaphysics explains also why Nishida is so deeply concerned with the philosophical dimension of individualism, while remaining almost silent on its political side. This could also make more understandable the evident hiatus between the importance given by the philosopher to intellectual freedom, on the one hand, and the critical stance toward ethical and political individualism, on the other. As a typical case of this ‘attitude gap’ between intellectual freedom and political individualism, I shall quote the essay Gakumonteki h¯oh¯o (The Scholarly Method, 1937–40),14 allegedly written as an apology of freedom in scholarly research during the climax of ultra-nationalist censorship in Japan. Here, Nishida insists on the importance of critical consciousness, trying to differentiate it from individualism: Today, there is often the tendency to reject theoretical thinking as if it were individualism and liberalism, but without actually understanding it. Of course, ideas such as a nation’s society (kokka shakai) based on mere individual freedom must be rejected. However, a simple negation of the individual, of freedom and so forth is nothing but tyranny. Rationalism too is superﬁcially rejected. Those who simply reject it are merely irrationalists. If individual freedom disappears, there is no creation. A concrete principle of lively development must contain [these ideas] (in research, freedom must be assured; whenever a certain thesis is imposed from the beginning, there is no research). Today in the intellectual milieu few will vindicate ideas such as rationalism, individualism and liberalism as they were thought of at the end of the eighteenth century. Furthermore Marxism very radically rejects these ideas. (NKZ XII: 393–94) This quotation is very representative of Nishida’s twofold attitude toward the individual: on the one side, he discards individualism and Liberalism, or better

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political, social and ethical emancipation. On the other, he highly evaluates critical attitude and intellectual freedom, since this is an essential aspect of effective creation. I think that here Nishida shows all his limitations in dealing with the political side of the individual. It is clear that he undervalues the importance of political individualism, which is certainly not an essential part of his thinking: he simply discards it without articulated reason: individualism is liquidated only invoking a generic Zeitgeist (i.e. ‘individualism is outdated’), with no serious criticism, as it can be read wherever he speaks about it. His main interest in the individual lies in metaphysics; the political aspect remains marginal. Even if other social and political themes, such as the nation, or Japanese culture, are more or less extensively considered in some essays, we hardly ﬁnd a treatise about political individualism. Generally, we must be satisﬁed with some vague hints in several more or less ‘political’ writings. One of them is the famous lesson held in front of the emperor in 1941,15 in which, after having expressed his idea that the nation has a world nature,16 he condenses his conceptions about the relationship between the nation and the individual as follows: I think that a deﬁnition of the meaning of what is the world-historical character of one nation would be a radical totalitarianism without being at the same time a simple negation of the individual, but it would take the individual’s creation as the medium (baikai). Today it can be considered that individualism and totalitarianism oppose each other, but it goes without saying that individualism is outdated; however, a simple totalitarianism that negates the individual is but a part of the past, as well. The individual is generated from a historical society, but the historical society in turn, as long as it takes the individual creation as the medium, has an eternal life, [being part of] the world history. This is precisely what happens with biological life that lives, taking the cellular function as the medium. (NKZ XII: 271) The philosopher is evidently searching for a point of balance between the state and the individual, trying to avoid a mere clash. The core of Nishida’s ideas on the relationship between the nation and the individual is, simply put, that the former must involve the latter, since, as said before, it is the source of creativity and a nation without creativity is pure oppression. In this process, the individual cannot be simply negated. These afﬁrmations are directly linked to Nishida’s Logic of Place, which aims to include the true individual in the universal. Accordingly, he refuses partiality of both totalitarianism and individualism, being aware that Modernity is the scenario for the dialectical ﬁght between the state and the individual. However, strictly following his logic, Nishida’s only sketched solution seems misplaced: why must a nation use the individual creation as the medium, if in Nishida’s logic the medium cannot be identiﬁed with anything in particular, but it must be Absolute Nothingness (e.g. NKZ XI: 382)? Besides, the comparison with biology that appears in the quotation above is problematic, in the light of

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Nishida’s philosophical demand for individual irreducibility. In fact, it seems to imply that the philosopher adheres to the organicist theories of the nation as a living being, which uses individuals as tools for its own purposes, something in complete contrast to Nishida’s philosophical positions: if the individual were used as a tool, its self-determination would necessarily disappear. Moreover, in the following, Nishida considers the imperial household17 as the guarantee of the correct relationship between the individual and the nation: I think that in the history of Our Country, totality was not opposed to the individual, nor the individual to totality, but in the mutual negation of the individual and totality, Our Country came to develop itself brightly, ﬁnding its own center in the Imperial Household (k¯oshitsu). Now and then, there were moments in which a totalitarian power came to be the center, but we always returned to the spirit of the Original Country (ch¯okoku) and, grounded on the Imperial Family, we went further, creating a new era. (NKZ XII: 271–72) It is well known that Nishida faithfully supported the emperor. Hence, it is no surprise that he considered it as the guarantee for the individual against the danger of totalitarianism. Even if the importance given to the imperial household in early Sh¯owa Japan does not represent a direct evidence of being chauvinist or militarist,18 certainly the use of metaphors, which recall an immemorial, semimythical past to support a collective national identity, helps strengthen a sense of afﬁnity with, if not correspondence to, nationalist propaganda of the time. However, Nishida is clearly looking for a defense of the individual. This passage tells us that he is trying to defend it not through a democratic division of powers, but through the hierarchical symbol par excellence of Modern Japan: the imperial household. In the essay Kokka riy¯u no mondai (The Question of the State Reason, 1941),19 written during the very same year as the lesson to the emperor, Nishida considers the problem of the theoretical foundation of the nation. This essay can be useful for our discourse because it displays some rudiments of a political approach to the individual, especially in its relationship with the state-nation (kokka).20 In this perspective, on the one side, the nation is the rationalization of the society. In fact, it regulates human societies with laws and institutions. On the other side, however, it is not only rational: thanks to the inﬂuence of Leopold von Ranke’s political conceptions, Nishida grants the nation a kind of individuality – it is a living individual and hence, it is historically irreducible (NKZ X: 310–11; 327). Accordingly, Nishida extensively applies his idea of the dialectical world which forms itself through the individuals to the political conception of the nation, considered not only as the self-determination of the historical world, but also one of its individual lives (koseiteki seimei) (NKZ X: 312–13). The nation is part of the process of individualization of the world: determining itself in the temporal dimension, the world engenders the nations. Expressing itself in the spatial aspect, it gives rise to the historical periods (jidai) (NKZ X: 328).

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The individual (kojin) is closely bound to the nation, since the nation must be considered as the way of existence of the individual self. The individual can become ‘global’ (sekaiteki), only if she or he is part of the nation (kokkateki), and not isolating her or himself from it (NKZ X: 327). Morality too is closely connected to the nation: it does not originate from the interiority of the individual self, as with individualistic conceptions. On the contrary, its derivation is from a position in which the self is an ‘object of the nation, as a subject-qua-world’ (shutai soku sekai toshite no kokka no mono) (NKZ X: 330). Morality does not abstractly derive from humanity, but it is the Oughtness (t o¯ i) of a nation’s people and it is the self-expression of the Absolute. In other words, it is unique, being a historical individual and it is bound to a particular time and some particular circumstances (NKZ X: 331). At the end of the same essay, we ﬁnd an interesting sketch of the cultural history of the last three Modern periods. Accordingly, the eighteenth century should be considered as the age of the individual, the nineteenth century, as the epoch of nations and the consequent imperialism (teikokushugi), and ﬁnally the twentieth century, as the period of the World. In this period, the nations must not be oppositional (tairitsuteki kokka) anymore, but creative. Imperialism, founded as it is on ethnical nations, belongs to the past (NKZ X: 337). What is most ambiguous however is that these quite enlightened statements follow four pages of (more or less theoretically ennobled) nationalist slogans, which make Nishida’s discourse very similar to the regime’s propaganda. In these pages, he depicts the Japanese kokutai21 with a religiously inspired tone, justifying the political conception of saisei itchi, or the ‘unity between religious and political power’, and considering the Japanese Sovereignty (shuken) as intimately bound to religion, namely to the imperial household (NKZ X: 333–34). In this context, at best we must say that Nishida was ingenuous enough to run the risk of using the opponent’s words to afﬁrm one’s own thesis, in the effort to ‘redeﬁne expressions created by the ultranationalists or used as slogans by militarists’ as a way to ‘present an alternative to the nationalism of his days. As a philosopher he sought to give different, more reﬂective meaning to words and ideas that had been expropriated by the right’ (Yusa 1994: 126). Still, his political words remain all too dependent on the propagandistic words and metaphors of those years and his texts often end up being practically indistinguishable from the ofﬁcial propaganda. In the light of these last considerations, we could ask if in our time Nishida’s political pages about the individual may have a philosophical-political meaning. Because of many ambiguities in considering the political power of his times, it is highly doubtful that Nishida’s political essays be immediately useful in contemporary debates. If we want to get our way through these pages, we must interpret his political ideas as if there were a (potentially) democratic content poured into nationalistic moulds. However, this is not a simple task, since his political vision often seems too embryonic to be anything other than a more or less sophisticated slogan. This is exactly the case, for example, of his negative attitude about classical eighteenth century individualism, which is almost always rejected with generic

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reasons: we could probably say that the hidden reason is its partiality, but this is seldom clearly stated. Most common is the rejection of individualism, because of its supposed distance from the present intellectual Zeitgeist (e.g. NKZ XII: 271; 393–94). I do not think however that Nishida’s philosophy is unable to inspire mature political thinking. Simply it cannot be accomplished in Nishida’s terms. Hence, a step back is needed to recover his fundamental intuitions, in order to reorganize an up-to-date political thought. Nishida does not accomplish this. In this regard, I can only agree with James Heisig who afﬁrms that Nishida’s political theories ‘are not signiﬁcant either for the development of his ideas nor for the history of political philosophy as such’ (Heisig 2001: 99). However, it cannot be ignored that more relevant results may emerge from a creative reprise of Nishida’s ontology. Of course, accepting this view means Nishida’s political philosophy is judged as a failure.

Tanabe’s dialectics between species and individual How is the individual considered in Tanabe’s thinking? As already said, Tanabe’s philosophy begins to diverge from Nishida’s when the Logic of Place appears. In fact, Tanabe considers it as a kind of immediate union with the Absolute, that implies to decay into mysticism. Accusing Nishida of undervaluing the importance of the Middle Term in the logical relationship between the universal (ippansha) and the individual (kobutsu), Tanabe thinks it essential to face the problem of the particular (tokushu), or species/speciﬁc (shu), which according to him is often a hindrance in this relationship. Tanabe’s discourse has both a logical-theoretical and a practical-political side: on the one hand, he thinks that the particular has been fundamentally neglected by philosophers, and that Nishida is by no means an exception. On the other, he inextricably binds this highly theoretical theme to the socio-political and ethical dimension of cultural and ethnical speciﬁcity. The main purpose of Tanabe’s metaphysics is to ﬁnd through logic an ethical ground for individual action and a rational foundation for the nation. This effort concretizes in the Logic of Species (shu no ronri) (e.g. THZ VI: 449; 453). Hence, the problem of species becomes an essential reference to understand Tanabe’s concept of individual. According to Tanabe, in a classical syllogism, the Middle Term is traditionally left almost unconsidered, even if it is only through its mediation that the relationship between the universal and the individual is made possible. The medium is never considered as an autonomous existence, but always as a speciﬁcation of the universal or a universalization of the individual. It is thought of as a simply self-negating moment, destined to be solved in the universal, or in the individual. However, if the medium disappears, the distinction between universal and individual becomes problematic: the universal becomes merely a generalized individual, and the individual just a particularized universal. The only solution is to grant the particular an independent existence (see K¯osaka 1949: 99–100). In Tanabe’s philosophy, the three logical elements of syllogism – the universal, the particular, or species, and the individual – have a socio-political dimension as

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well. This aspect is particularly evident in the need to ﬁnd a solution for the ﬁght between the particular society and the individual. On the one side, the particular has the power to conform the individual to itself, to the point of taking its life; it is the irrational immediacy (chokusetsutai) that negates logic. On the other, the individual acts against the species, trying to subjugate it. In this view, lightning of irrational forces sheds sinister shadows upon history: the Schopenhauerian ‘Will to Survive’ (seizon ishi) of the species crushes against the Nietzschean ‘Will to Power’ (kenryoku ishi) of the individual.22 Nonetheless, the individual is grounded in species, namely, it has no direct access to universal (rationality), but it is necessarily mediated by the species, which therefore exerts a very strong pressure on it. Under this menace, individuals cannot take any practical or ethical decisions. Because of such a situation, a method must be found to overcome this pressure due to the closed society, and rational foundations must be laid for the nation (THZ VI: 449, 453). Taking inspiration from Bergsonian philosophy, as well as from Tönnies’ sociological studies,23 Tanabe interprets Japan as a closed and totemic society, which needs to be opened. However, unlike Bergson, he does not think that the new moral order may be immediately created by the action of one single individual, whether or not a genius. On the contrary, a solution could be found only after a careful analysis of the logic inherent in such a closed society. This investigation would be important for the nation too, in so far as it is dependent on society. In restricted groups, Tanabe continues, the prevailing logic seems to be similar to Levy-Bruhl’s pre-logic of participation (bun’y¯u no zenronri), in which the individuals identify themselves with totem, lacking true personal consciousness. Far from being limited to primitive groups, this logic is also at work in more advanced societies. Or, more radically, the logic of participation exempliﬁes the irrational character of social existence. Tanabe’s analysis is clearly very far from Tönnies’, who conceives communality positively, as the place of ancestral values and familiar intimacy, and large society negatively, as a place dominated by impersonal and potentially hostile relationships. In Tanabe, the local/global distinction no longer expresses the confrontation between the values of communality and the impersonal relationships of the society at large, but the conﬂict between two ultimately blind and irrational elements; with the same rationale that the individual is not an instrument of agreement, or criticism, but only a tool of domination. In fact, opposed to the ‘logic of participation’ of the society, the individual (kotai) is free, autonomous. Tanabe says that the individual is that which can choose nonexistence (suicide), that is it is free to choose among existence and non-existence (K¯osaka 1949: 107). The individual is free from species – i.e. it is a counterdetermination against the Will to Life of the species – but at the same time it is free toward species – i.e. it adopts the ‘logic of severance’ (bunritsu no ronri), which, although rational, is used to subjugate and dominate others, to exploit them as tools (K¯osaka 1949: 108–09). It is dubious that, as with both Tönnies and Tanabe, the distinction between local and global social relationship may directly lead to a speciﬁc value judgment, since a restricted social relationship is not necessarily more (or less) rational and positive than a global one. However, the lack of a teleological cause in Tanabe’s conception of history must be carefully taken into account: rejecting Hegelian providence in the historical process, as well as

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the Marxist idea of immanent salvation, Tanabe’s view of history excludes any transcendent Reason that may guide humanity to a better future. Only the dialectical ﬁght remains among society and individuals. The particular, being irrational, does not persuade the individual, which is rational and moral. At the same time, the individual is not able to transform the species with its morality. According to Tanabe, all the classical theories about the state fail to deal with this unbearable oppression by society over the individual: contractualism, the I-Thou relationship and Hegelian Objective Spirit cannot ultimately explain the irrational character of human groups (K¯osaka 1949: 93ff.). How to overcome the cul-de-sac of this juxtaposition between society and the individual? Tanabe’s solution to this clash of social forces is the ‘Logic ofAbsolute Mediation’(zettai baikai no ronri), otherwise known as Absolute Dialectics’ (zettai bensh¯oh¯o).

The logic of absolute mediation In order to understand this point, we must go back again to Tanabe’s criticism of Nishida, accused of having created an emanationist system (THZ VI: 467–69), in which Absolute Nothingness, instead of really being Nothingness, is still Being, because it directly determines itself in things and it is not dialectical in itself: Nishida’s Place of Absolute Nothingness is but a ‘positive, non-dialectical afﬁrmation of dialectics’ (THZ VI: 473; 478). Dialectics in itself is directly afﬁrmed. Hence, it is not involved within dialectical relationship, becoming a Being, not a nothingness. In order to be really dialectical, true dialectics must negatively mediate Absolute Nothingness as well. In this way, everything, the Absolute too, is processural and relative. Hence, in syllogism, universal, particular and individual are all reciprocally mediating and mediated in turn. Each moment, including the moment of mediation, is reciprocally mediated, i.e. there is no absolute mediation in itself, rather mediation is absolute because the universal does not act immediately upon the relative, but only through the action of other relatives. In other words, this absolute dialectics is possible, conceiving Nothingness as an ‘activity of absolute negation’ (zettai hitei no say¯o), being mediated by negation. Absolute Nothingness must be activity, not a transcendent existence. Nominally, this logic could represent a strong afﬁrmation of the individual. Actually, in Tanabe’s philosophy, this rather implies an afﬁrmation of species and de facto of the nation. Unlike Nishida, whose interest in politics never reached the core of his thought, Tanabe’s logic is structurally linked to politics. In fact, according to the philosopher, the immediacy which negatively mediates this Absolute Nothingness is species, or the people (minzoku). This particular substrate (kitaiteki shu) is considered as the moment of self-alienation (jiko sogai) of absolute mediation (the rational, the universal) and as such it is opposed to the individual, which is the moment in which the universal returns to itself (jiko fukki). This return to itself, being in turn the negation of self-alienation, is identical with absolute negation. Accordingly, staying-with-itself (jika shij¯u, German: Bei-sich-sein) is at the same time goingoutside-of-itself (THZ VI: 473–74). To consider the Logic of Species as the self-negating moment of the Logic of Absolute Mediation clearly means that Tanabe aims to reintegrate species within

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thought, theoretically explaining its existence (THZ VI: 473–74). More radically, the Logic of Species represents the political side of the Logic of Absolute Mediation, whose fundamental principle – i.e. the intermediation among all factors – is maintained: the species mediates the universal for the individual and also the individual for the universal, while the individual mediates the universal for the species. The name ‘Logic of Species’ comes from the species being central in this action of mediation among universal and individual. This same logic, if considered from the point of view of the individual, is called ‘Logic of Action’ (k¯oi no ronri), since Absolute Nothingness (the universal) is realized through the individual subjective praxis. Tanabe himself recognizes an evolution in his conception of the individual within the Logic of Species: At that time, I was pessimistic about the strength of egoism, namely about the violence of the desire of honors and power that dominates us intellectuals, who nevertheless know and discuss about the squalor of egocentricity and especially about the value of the lack of ego, just the opposite of the thoughts we actually harbor; moreover, while I was worried with the foundation of my pessimism, which laid exactly in the difﬁculty to rid myself from my egoism, I spoke about the egoism of the individual, and discussed its negative opposition to the social substrate. Consequently, at that time and in my way of thinking about the individual I did not hitherto develop a dialectics according to which the True Self had to be recovered through [the action of] losing the self, namely, [a dialectics according to which] the True Self had to reach existence only with absolute negation; on the contrary, I was limited to [consider] the egoism of the direct individual self having to be negated dialectically. I can only say that this [conception] can only be one-sided, and I considered society exclusively from the side of the limitation of the individual. Accordingly, after a while I added a correction which conﬁrmed that the individual, in order to become really individual, must be negated-qua-afﬁrmed in absolute negation and the True Individual becomes individual for the ﬁrst time within totality, being mediated by the universal. (THZ VI: 450–51) This quotation indicates that the initial stimulus to build the Logic of Species for Tanabe was fundamentally ethical and religious and the individual (himself included) was at the center of his concern. The confrontational character ofTanabe’s thinking gradually fades in a more conciliatory conception of dialectics between individual, universal and species, which ends with a religious self-realization of the individual in the nation. The ambiguously religious nature of this process of self-discovery by the individual in the nation must also be remarked.

The nation and the individual Tanabe considers the nation as the universalized species. It is a synthesis in which the subjective individual and species negate each other. It has cultural and ethnic

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(shuzoku) implications, being an entity uniﬁed by one language and one culture (THZ VI: 449), while at the same time it is the mediated form of the manifested universal. Without it, society would decay into a closed society. During the ﬁrst formulations of the Logic, we can ﬁnd quasi-democratic deﬁnitions of the nation: The nation on the one side, makes the people’s speciﬁc substrate as one moment [of the process] and it expects a uniﬁcation of the social community, while, on the other side, it acknowledges the initiative (hatsui) of the individual, which negatively opposes it, and its need for independence; [the nation] is a uniﬁcation of negation-qua-afﬁrmation which mediates the uniﬁcation of the people with the individuals’ consensus of opinion (sh¯ugi k¯oron). (THZ VI: 231) However, K¯osaka Masaaki opportunely remembers that there is an evolution in the Logic of Species on this aspect: in early essays such as Shakai sonzai no ronri, The Logic of Social Existence, 1934–35 (THZ VI: 51–168), the Species is simply the negative moment, the immediate uniﬁcation, opposed to subjectivity; later on, in Shu no ronri o akiraka ni su, An Explanation of the Logic of Species, 1937 (THZ VI: 447–521), it becomes the principle of self-alienation, which further deepens the meaning of the negative within this logical structure. Finally, in essays such as Kokkateki sonzai no ronri, The Logic of National Existence, 1939 (THZ VII: 27–53), Tanabe’s discourse becomes closer and closer to ultra-nationalist propaganda, elevating the Nation to the center of the Logic of the Species (K¯osaka 1949: 111–12). According to Tanabe, both species and the individual are negatively mediated, being universalized thanks to the ‘absolute mediativity’ (zettai baikaitai) of the Absolute Nothingness, which is thought of as the activity of negative mediation, and which concretizes as the totality of negative-qua-positive uniﬁcation between species and individual. If species is the self-alienation of the medium, the individual, too, is a simple abstraction of this medium. How can the species get free from its self-alienation and the individual from its abstraction? The key of the process, according to Tanabe, resides in the individual action, through which the individual ﬁrst subjugates the other, and then, through this negation of the other, it negates itself, provided that its afﬁrmation is only possible through the opposition to the other. When opposition disappears, the self negates itself too. The open society of the gender is then realized in this double negation: All the direct uniﬁcations are immediately negated by the separation of the individual consciousness and they are dissolved. Moreover, the I, which maintains only itself that is dissolvable, can only dissolve in that way; [the I] which rejects the other and usurps everything for itself; [this I] on the contrary becomes fully aware of its own ﬁnitude, in which it depends on its opposite, and, together with the negation of the Thou, it anxiously observes the extinction of the I; and the true I once dies in the Thou and at the same time

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the Thou dissolves when the opposing I disappears; both are reborn together in absolute uniﬁcation, which overcomes both of them and for the ﬁrst time, through this conversion, the uniﬁcation of the absolute negation is actualized. This is the open society of the gender (rui). (Tanabe in K¯osaka 1949: 117) In the logic of Absolute Mediation, the individual is opposed to the species and negating it, and it is negated in turn. In fact, the individual is ‘a subject that, instead of being only the extreme limit of the species’scission, negates-qua-afﬁrms species; through this mediation of the individual’s subjective praxis, [species] is negated-qua-afﬁrmed in its direct irrationality and it is universalized’ (THZ VI: 199). The content of the individual self-negation is existential: it becomes aware of its own contradiction, of its own nothingness, namely of its being totally dependent on species. The extreme limit of absolute mediation is the individual awareness of one’s own inner void and one’s being dependent on the other. Accordingly, the individual’s nothing is transformed into being, while it originally depends on the other and the Specie’s being, which is self-sufﬁcient, is transformed into nothing (see K¯osaka 1949: 117ff.). Echoes of the Hegelian conception of Objective Spirit can be heard in the idea of the state as a manifestation of the universal. It is quite possible to interpret Tanabe’s position to be that he is advocating the moralizing effect of laws and institutions over a closed society and that this effect can only be accomplished by single geniuses, whose moral and rational activity can carve the apparently immutable social status quo; a position similar to Bergson’s. However, things are not so simple. There are two main problems with this interpretation which can be summed up in two words: logicism and religion. These two aspects are structurally relevant within the Logic of Species and they cannot be separated without radically transforming the overall meaning of Tanabe’s philosophy. Let us begin with indicating these elements in the conception of the individual. The negation of the other by the individual does not simply occur by the individual’s means, but takes its origins outside the dimension of rationality. It is not simply irrational, but trans-rational. In fact, through the individual rational mediation, Absolute Nothingness acts indirectly, and rationality becomes but one moment of the process: ‘My actions which depend on myself (jirikiteki naru k¯oi) are expressions of the absolutely negative totality and, as far as this is concerned, they are an expression of the Other-Power (tariki)’ (THZ VI: 222). In this quotation, Tanabe patently uses religious metaphors coming from the Japanese Amidist tradition,24 something he does quite often. In fact, explaining the way through which a nation absorbs the individuals, Tanabe does not stress the importance of the objective side of the process, as with for example the nation’s laws and institutions to regulate the closed society and hence guarantee a balance between individual freedom and social needs (in other words, rights and duties). Starting from his viewpoint, this position seems plausible. However, ultimately, he emphasizes the importance of the subjective dimension of the individual in the process, in a way that it is clearly

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more religious than political. In Tanabe’s nation, the individual does not only limit its Will to Power, but it must sacriﬁce itself and in this very act it ﬁnds its own self-realization. Tanabe for example often uses the formula: ‘self-sacriﬁce qua self-realization’ (jiko gisei soku jiko jitsugen) (e.g. THZ VI: 452), whose religious characterization is beyond dispute. Also, the ﬁnal synthesis of the nation – logically considered as the position of the gender in which both rationality (individual) and irrationality (particular) are mediated – has a deeply religious nature. In the gender, the individual loses itself and acquires the True Self, which in turn is welcomed by the species, while at the same time this one is voided. The gender is able to reconcile the species and the individual, through their mutual negation. The absolute negation of the gender works in two ways: through the action of the individual, which negates the species – while in so doing the same individual is negated – and through a manifestation (¯ogen) of the gender itself, which is however mediated by the relative, not representing the Absolute in itself. The nation (kokka) is such a manifestation of the Absolute. The term o¯ gen is another example of Tanabe’s mark of mingling together religion and politics. According to the thinker, it is the nation that, mediating the species and the individual, takes away (aufheben) their contradictions and makes them exist. In this way, the nation, thanks to its ‘Will to Salvation’ (ky¯usai ishi) or ‘Will to Liberation’ (gedatsu ishi) – other religiously connoted formulas – would concretize the individual and rationalize the species. Tanabe’s political vision of the nation, too, has a religiously inspired tone: The gender makes the species a substrate and on the contrary, thanks to the reﬂection of the individual, negates and breaks it down, and at the same time it is the uniﬁcation of the Void (k¯u) in which the individual too is negated and the I loses itself. In this way, the opposition-separation of the individual is subsumed and the awareness of ﬁnitude on the contrary mediates the subsumption toward the gender and [the individuals] enter the Absolute Salvational Reception (zettai sesshu) of Compassion (jihi), in which, since “all sentient beings are sinners” (issai shuj¯o kai zainin), they practice mutual mercy and compassion. In such an Absolute Mediation, the country formed by Bodhisattvas, who are individuals that live and die, once again afﬁrms the ethnic species in its negation and transforms the control by the species into free cooperation. If we think that this is the essential function of the nation, it should really be the realization of the gender and its concretization. If we consider that humanity is an open society of individuals, the nation, formed by individuals who can become members of humanity, is the Nation of Mankind (jinruiteki kokka), which is the gender’s existence.25 (Tanabe in K¯osaka 1949: 118) This religious tone is not limited to rhetorical devices and images, but it affects the very deﬁnition of the nation: instead of being the guarantor of a legal balance between society and the individual – a possible outcome, starting from Tanabe’s premises – the nation is religiously venerated. In fact, he tends to hypostatize the

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nation, conceding it the traditional metaphysical privileges once deserved to the religious objects of worship. He rationalizes, or better ‘immanentizes’, religious symbols and deities in order to use them for the sake of a kind of cult of the nation, which is thought of as the foundations of religion, to the point of afﬁrming that not only ‘the Nation is the only absolute thing on this earth’ (THZ VI: 145), but that there is the need ‘to free Christianity from myth and place the Nation instead of Christ. The Nation is the absolute manifestation of Buddha’s incarnation’ (THZ VII: 30–32).26 The contamination of religion and politics affects the political couple of concepts limitation/freedom, too: What converts into afﬁrmation of the absolutely negative subject the conﬂict between the speciﬁc substrate and the individual, which face each other negatively in this way, as the extreme of reciprocal negation of both, is the identiﬁcation (s¯osoku) between the nation which is the subjective totality and the individual. In this context, the conversion (tenkan) of the speciﬁc subject is realized and the organization of the totality-qua-individual (zentai soku kotai) is born. The nation, as long as it depends on the principle of mediation synthesis in this sense, is a totality beyond the contract among individuals, and consequently it exerts coercion on them, and yet at the same time this coercion is immediately changed to freedom and the individual in this, while it remains a negation is on the contrary afﬁrmed and [the nation] must be an organization in which the self-sacriﬁce qua self-realization takes place. Such an [organization] is a concrete structure of social existence which is a rational reality. It is something that is realized in the position of praxis which makes the negative union between the rational and the real exist; it is the incarnation of the dialectics of the active subject. Consequently, it must necessarily be rational. . . . If this is recognized, my viewpoint, which at ﬁrst sight appears to be extremely nationalistic, is never the irrational totalitarianism of a simply direct nationalism (minzokushugi), but is a self-sacriﬁce qua self-realization and a limitation qua freedom and so I think that it is clear to see that I try to build the nation as the subjective self-realization of the totality, which depends on the spontaneous cooperation of all the members. (THZ VI: 452) What does it mean to consider individual freedom (jiy¯u) as dialectically related to its limitation (ky¯osei), as stated in this passage? I do not think that this doctrine necessarily has an anti-democratic outcome. In fact, it could be possible to interpret this fundamental idea as the regulation of freedom, essential to every democratic institution: through law, freedom for all members must be preserved. Hence, freedom cannot be absolute, if it must coexist with other freedoms. However, this is not the ﬁnal result of Tanabe’s philosophy, which ends with the religious ideology of self-sacriﬁce and the exaltation of the nation as the fulﬁllment of logical, necessary process.

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In many respects, the Logic of Species seems abstract, especially if we confront the theoretical results of this logic with its preliminary hypothesis. First of all, even if the initial aim is admittedly to unmask the mechanism of Japanese closed society and eventually open it, thanks to the inﬂuence of Bergson, in Tanabe this critical program is de facto limited to its mere enunciation. Surprisingly enough, there is neither a critical analysis of Japanese society to denounce its problems, nor any discourse which may formulate any proposal of reformation, or clarify the process to open society, except what is layed on the shoulders of the individual and its self-sacriﬁce. Moreover, Tanabe does not exemplify the mechanisms of a closed society through concrete anthropological observations. Therefore, his critical effort is abstract and fragmentary: his research has nothing to do with sociological data or parameters. Only a logical-philosophical approach is used to explore this problem. Concrete references to Japanese society are almost absent and everything is conﬁned to a logical and very abstract reasoning. From the standpoint of logic, as already stated, Tanabe considers the nation as the mediated form of the gender, which is concretized in the speciﬁc ethnic and cultural community, and becomes a Körperschaft.27 This abstract approach however causes an improper use of logical categories to describe social phenomena: the same identiﬁcation of species with society and universal/gender with mankind/rationality ends with blurring logical and social properties and determinations. Hence, a social problem surreptitiously becomes a logical antinomy, since the very start of the Logic of Species: it is the very coexistence of both logical and practical patterns in the initial stimulus of the Logic of Species that is a strong logicist presupposition. Also, the use of syllogism to describe society is a patent misuse of philosophical categories. As Karl Popper has explained in his Poverty of Historicism, the determinist temptation to ﬁnd a logical formula to understand and predict history can lead to anti-democratic consequences. Similarly, interpreting historical events in terms of logical schemes can engender the risk of eternalizing and substantializing the historical factors, de-historicizing them. This goes exactly in the same direction of the Modernist strategies of absolutization of the nation, with which, willy-nilly, the Logic of Species mingles. In his pages, no concrete obstacle to overcome, no process to be undergone is depicted, that may indicate a temporal or procedural step. Moreover, the nation is regarded as the solution for the lack of freedom, which Tanabe quite arbitrarily thinks to be caused only by society. Consequently, one could wonder if Tanabe really believes that all the unacceptable limitations to individual freedom can only derive from species and not from the nation, or better that the nation cannot be unjust, and its limitations to individual freedom is necessarily positive. This would be a grotesque conclusion, considering the times in which the philosopher was living. However, if this were the case, it would probably be ascribed to Tanabe’s logicist faith in the rationality of the real. In fact, notwithstanding his anti-Hegelism,28 he is ﬁrmly convinced of the Hegelian identity of the Real and the Ideal: if the nation is the actualization of the universal, it can only be fundamentally rational, or at least a kind of ‘the best possible nation’. In fact: ‘For me, who cannot

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help believing (shinzezaru o enai) in the rationality (g¯orisei) of the Real, the very constraint of the nation’s society can but be transformed into the autonomy of the reason’ (THZ VI: 450). How should we interpret this absolutization of the nation? Was it intentionally planned to philosophically strengthen the Japanese national identity? Can we interpret Tanabe’s Logic of Species as a kind of failure to rigorously apply the Logic of Absolute Mediation, as James Heisig suggests? According to the critic, in fact, the philosopher seems to have not taken seriously some intuitions present in the idea of Absolute Dialectics (Heisig 1995: 288). In Tanabe, this logic is used as a conceptual reference point for a political theory that questionably interprets the nation as the religious manifestation (¯ogen) of the Absolute.29 The difference between this position of Tanabe and a blunt exaltation of the nation as the Absolute is really minimal. It is true that the Logic of Mediation could have a different conclusion: for example, instead of helping to strengthen the religious nature of the nation, it could have been used as a way of showing the impartial nature of the state, whose task would have been considered that of making laws (and making them respect), ensuring the democratic principles to be followed in everyday life. Hence, the religious and absolutist connotations seem all but appropriate. According to Himi Kiyoshi, the failure of the Logic of Species, which eventually supports exactly the closed society it was supposed to criticize, can be explained as the failure of a good intention, ‘a narrowing of consciousness that is not uncommon among the Japanese, pushing sound reason to one side and putting logic at the service of unquestioned bias’ (Himi 1990: 311). As already stated, I think that this failure is due to the mixture of politics with logical and religiousexistential factors. Accordingly, the nation and society becomes the religious place, in which the individuals sacriﬁcing themselves would attain self-realization. But why did Tanabe mix these different dimensions? I suspect that Tanabe’s deiﬁcation of the nation, although having clearly ideological effects, could be fundamentally religious and metaphysical in nature. If we consider the dark premises of his philosophical quests, we could read the Logic of Species as a way of religious self-realization in the times of Nihilism. In fact, what else could be the junglelaw-like ﬁght between species and individual if not the social and practical effects of Nihilism? Tanabe seems to feel that in this era the conﬂicts between individualism and totalitarianism threaten to destroy humanity. Hence, he infers, the only possible salvation lies in the nation, which could reconcile the oppositions, thus avoiding reciprocal destruction. This could represent the solution to the clash of external impositions and internal egoism. In this context, the (Modern) nation seems to acquire for Tanabe the status of religious salvation within Modern times, in which relativization of values and individualization of society on the one hand, and the rise of totalitarian power, on the other, become more and more dangerous. His answer to this pessimistic analysis of our times is, however, more religious, moral and existential, than really political or sociological. The ﬁnal result is a kind of ‘ontotheology of the nation’, which becomes the last absolute in which to believe, representing the only possibility of salvation, in the era of individualism and brutal oppression of totalitarianism. If this hypothesis is correct, it would

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explain the patent religious and logicistic character of Tanabe’s philosophy. From this point of view, Tanabe is anti-individualistic, in a way that Nishida is not. In fact, his negative attitude toward the individual is not only limited to politics, as with Nishida, but it is tightly intertwined with ontology as well. However, Tanabe’s solution of taking refuge in the nation can only be considered as tragically and ironically wrong, since, during the twentieth century in general and in early Sh¯owa Japan in particular, the nation has proven to be one of the chief receptacles for the rise of totalitarianism, irrational ideologies and violent repression of the individual’s fundamental freedom.

Conclusion In this brief conclusion, I seek to summarize Nishida’s and Tanabe’s similarities and differences in their conceptions of the individual. In Nishida’s philosophy, the individual is certainly essential. He conceives it as an integral part of the world, its main characteristic being existence, that is the fact that it is in the world, as an active part of the world. This fundamental relationship includes conscience and consciousness. On the contrary, Tanabe seems to consider the individual as a fundamentally moral and intellectual force, in dialectical confrontation with species. Existence, instead of being what unites the universal and the individual, is fundamentally attributed to species, or better it is reciprocally mediated in the mirror game of Absolute Mediation. Consequently, the individual is problematic from the beginning. Nishida however takes for granted the relationship between universal and individual: the relationship is dialectical, but immediate in its being there. This represents the real difference between Nishida andTanabe, which affects their way of considering the individual and the nation: according to Nishida, both nations and individuals are products of the expressive self-individualization of the world. In Tanabe, they have an originally confrontational nature, which requires mediation. Moreover, in Tanabe the individual is mostly considered as ethical and critical, being opposed to the world. Consequently, this perspective produces a much more subjective, or at least anthropocentric view than Nishida’s. The relationship between nation and individual is to some degree similar in Nishida and Tanabe. Whilst it is essential for both, in Tanabe it has a stronger religious character, representing the dimension in which the individual attains its moral and religious salvation. But although Nishida too uses religious images and concepts to depict this relationship, he clearly states that the nation has no soteriological value: ‘The nation – he writes – is the source of morality, but it cannot be said that it is the source of religion. . . . The nation does not save our souls’ (NKZ XI: 463). This is due to the deep link between religion and existence, which characterizes Nishida’s approach. Actually, it may probably be said that there is a deep difference in the way of conceiving religion: in Nishida, it is an existential dimension, which acquires a cosmic resonance, in that the individual is always intertwined with the world. In Tanabe, religion is connected to the moral and intellectual subject, which is originally opposed to the world and demands a social and political mediation.

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This difference in the way of conceiving religion may also have brought different conclusions to its the relationship with politics. Nevertheless, a deep link between religion and politics is present in both thinkers, with one remarkable difference: in Tanabe, the nation has a religious nature. In Nishida, this religious feature is granted to the imperial household. This is not a subtle difference, because the imperial household is neither the executive, nor the legislative power. It is the symbol of the cultural and political identity of Modern Japan. This enables Nishida to describe it as the guarantee of the individual freedom, a task that Tanabe directly ascribes to the nation. What is then the meaning of individual freedom in both thinkers? In Nishida, as already indicated, it is mainly intellectual freedom, while political and moral freedom are negated. In Tanabe, individual freedom is de facto negated, as far as it is assimilated within the religiously conciliatory dialectics of control-quafreedom, self-sacriﬁce-qua-self-realization. In conclusion, we can say that while both Nishida and Tanabe refuse the political and ethical implications of individualism, Nishida maintains a strong individualist orientation in metaphysics, while Tanabe seems to negate this orientation too, ﬁnding in the nation a religious-moral way to the individual’s self-realization in the time of Nihilism.

Notes 1 Now in NKZ IV. References to the Complete Works by Nishida Kitar¯o and Tanabe Hajime have been indicated in the text respectively with the abbreviations: NKZ and THZ, followed by the Roman number of the volume and the Arabic number of the pages. 2 See e.g. NKZ IV: 221. I discussed these themes in the essay Cestari (forthcoming). 3 Tosaka Jun criticizes the philosophy of Nishida for being dialectical only in the sense of a ‘consciousness of dialectics’ and not of a ‘dialectics itself’, i.e. of real world. ‘. . . In Nishida philosophy only the question of how one becomes conscious of the dialectic – how one is able to think of it – becomes a problem; the dialectic itself is not thematized’. (TJZ II: 340–49. Translation by D. Dilworth and V. Viglielmo in Tosaka 1998: 368). NOTE: Except where differently indicated, the translations from Japanese are mine. 4 Now in NKZ VI: 321–27. 5 The movement towards historicism is well explained by Huh 1990, who clearly speaks of a historicist turn in the development of the Japanese philosopher. This reading is convergent with some classical interpretations of Nishida, such as K¯osaka 1947. Recently, Heisig 2001: 104 admittedly does not recognize any stage of development in Nishida’s intellectual history, but his thesis is quite controversial (see e.g. Davis 2002: 160–64). 6 The conference, entitled Genjitsu no sekai no ronriteki k¯oz¯o (The Logical Structure of the World of Reality, NKZ XIV: 214–64) has the same content (just simpliﬁed) of an essay, of the same title, contained in Tetsugaku no konpon mondai zokuhen (1934), now in NKZ VII: 217–304. Another cycle of ﬁve conferences (same title and similar content) ¯ was held by Nishida at Otani University in 1932 (now in NKZ XIV: 419–505). 7 The essay in question is Rekishiteki sekai ni oite no kobutsu no tachiba (The Position of the Individual in the Historical World, 1938), now in NKZ IX: 69–146. 8 NKZ XIV: 223ff. In this context, the founders of liberal individualism – such as Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, Smith, Stuart Mill, Tocqueville, etc. – are not considered and I think that this is a choice, not a lacuna. Certainly, Nishida’s intellectual background has more links with Idealism and Spiritualism in general, than with English and French liberal

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Matteo Cestari thinking. However, it should be noted that here the context is more theoretical than political. Moreover, there is a structural meaning in this choice: Aristotle and Leibniz are clearly used to theoretically justifying the need for a medium (baikaisha), as a ground for the independent individuals, upon which their individuality be maintained as is, without being reduced to any universal (NKZ XIV: 227). NKZ IX: 151ff. See many writings from his Philosophical Essays (Tetsugaku ronbunsh¯u), such as Zettai mujunteki jikod¯oitsu (Absolutely Contradictory Self-identity, 1939) (NKZ IX: 147–222), as well as the above cited essay Rekishiteki sekai ni oite no kobutsu no tachiba. This concept is expressed by the idea of k¯oiteki chokkan or ‘Active Intuition’ (see e.g. NKZ XI: 381). For an analysis of this concept, see Cestari 1998. In fact, Active Intuition is a praxis (jissen), because it creates things outside the body and at the same time it is an extension of bodily movement (See NKZ VIII: 550). Now in NKZ IX: 147–222. For example, in NKZ IX: 184, Nishida sketchily indicates a legal and economic meaning of being individual: forming the world and itself, the individual possesses itself objectively and this property (zaisan) must be recognized in legal terms. However, these traces of economic interest in his philosophy remain marginal. Now in NKZ XII: 385–94. Goshink¯o s¯oan. Rekishi tetsugaku ni tsuite (About the Philosophy of History. Trace of the Lesson Held in Front of the Emperor. The text of the lesson (NKZ XII: 267– 72), originally held in 1941, was published in the collection of essays ‘Zoku shisaku to taiken’ igo (After ‘Thinking and Experience. Part II’), published posthumously in 1948. ‘Today, because of the development of communication, the entire world has become one world. Today’s nationalism must be thought of from this standpoint. It is not a nationalism in which each country must return to itself, but a nationalism in which each country holds its own position inside this world. In other terms, I think that it is a nationalism in which every country must be global (sekaiteki)’ (NKZ XII: 270–71). According to Jacinto-Zavala 1994: 143, Nishida considers the imperial throne as the founding moment of the Japanese nation. Thanks to its self-negation, Japan’s own identity overcomes the centuries. It is not a particular individual, or group of individuals, but it is a microcosm that mediates the macrocosm. Accordingly, the mythical and religious sense of his discourse is stressed more than the political and social dimensions. Therefore, the term k¯oshitsu in Nishida would be better translated as ‘Imperial Throne’ than ‘Imperial Household’. However, to this probably correct textual remark it should be added that, even if in Nishida the term should be considered more cultural and religious than political, a Japanese reader of his times would feel an intimate link with the political, nationalistic sense of the word. Therefore, I translate it as ‘Imperial Household’. In fact, the support to the imperial family was very common in this period. Almost only Christians and Marxists were discordant (Heisig 2001: 306). Now in NKZ X: 265–337. As is known, in Japanese, there is no clear distinction between the two words. In the Kyoto School discourse, the Modern conception of the nation is quite often projected on to the past. This however occurs less in Nishida than in Tanabe. As is known, this word has been variously translated as: ‘Essence of the Nation’, ‘National Polity’ or ‘Body of the Nation’. It represented one of the most important keyterms of ultra-nationalistic propaganda of the regime in the ﬁrst Sh¯owa period. Notwithstanding his use of the Nietzschean term, Tanabe later severed any relationship with the German philosopher and his ‘negative overcome’ (hitei ch¯okoku), considering the idea of Will to Power only in the moral and religious sense of ‘direct egotism’ (chokusetsu no gasei), or egocentricity (gash¯u) (THZ VI: 451).

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23 The reference is to Bergson’s essay Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion (1932), where the French philosopher identiﬁes two types of morality and religion: the ﬁrst is stiffened in stereotypes and taboos; the second is human and adaptable. The ﬁrst is very common among human societies. The second is inspired by great personalities who sweep away all the usual habits and in their impulse they renew the moral and religious status quo. Tönnies inspires Tanabe with his distinction between the narrow communality (Gemeinschaft) and large society (Gesellschaft) (THZ VI: 451). 24 As is known, the opposition jiriki/tariki implies that the believer must discard her or his self-conﬁdence in attaining salvation (jiriki or self-power), in order to open oneself to the action of the Absolute (tariki or Other-Power), which is the only one that can save. 25 Note that the term sesshu means the Buddha who receives and hence brings to salvation all the sentient beings. 26 Himi 1990 gives a good indication of these problems from the point of view of religion. 27 See K¯osaka 1949: 123–24. Incidentally, it is worth noting that Tönnies uses the term Genossenschaft (community), while the use by Tanabe of the organicist term Körperschaft recalls the above mentioned word kokutai (see note 16). 28 The anti-Hegel tendencies of his philosophy are particularly evident in the work Hegel’s Philosophy and Dialectics, (Hçgeru tetsugaku to bensh¯oh¯o, 1932), now in THZ III: 73–233. 29 It should be noted that after the war, the nation, instead of o¯ gen sonzai (existencemanifestation), becomes h¯oben sonzai (existence-means). See also Himi 1990: 312ff.

References Arisaka Y¯oko (1996), ‘The Nishida Enigma. “The Principle of the New World Order”’, Monumenta Nipponica, 51:1, pp. 81–105. Arisaka Y¯oko (1997), ‘Beyond “East and West”: Nishida’s universalism and Postcolonial Critique’, The Review of Politics, 59:3, pp. 541–60. Cestari, Matteo (1998), ‘The Knowing Body. Nishida’s Philosophy of Active Intuition (k¯oiteki chokkan)’, The Eastern Buddhist, 31:2, pp. 179–208. Cestari, Matteo (forthcoming), ‘Beyond Oppositions. Negation and Modernity in Nishida’s Logic of Place’, in Arisaka Y¯oko, Berque, Augustine & Feenberg, Andrew (eds), Nishida and the Question of Modernity, Albany: State University of New York Press. Davis, Bret W. (2002), ‘Introducing the Kyoto School as World Philosophy. Reﬂections on James W. Heisig’s Philosophers of Nothingness’, The Eastern Buddhist, 34: 2, pp. 142–70. Heisig, James W. (2001), Philosophers of Nothingness. An Essay on the Kyoto School, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Heisig, James W. and Maraldo, John C. (eds) (1995), Rude Awakenings. Zen, the Ky¯oto School & the Question of Nationalism, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Himi Kiyoshi (1990), Tanabe tetsugaku kenky¯u, Tokyo: Hokuju Shuppan. Huh, Woo-Sung (1990), ‘The Philosophy of History in the “Later” Nishida: a Philosophic Turn’, Philosophy East and West, 40:3, pp. 343–74. Jacinto-Zavala, Augustín (1994), ‘The Return of the Past: Tradition and the Political Microcosm in the Later Nishida’, in Heisig, James W. and Maraldo, John C. (eds) (1995), Rude Awakenings. Zen, the Ky¯oto School & the Question of Nationalism, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 132–148. K¯osaka Masaaki (1947), Nishida Kitar¯o sensei no sh¯ogai to shis¯o, Tokyo: S¯obunsha. K¯osaka Masaaki (1949), Nishida tetsugaku to Tanabe tetsugaku, Nagoya: Reimei Shob¯o. Nishida Kitar¯o (1965–66), Nishida Kitar¯o Zensh¯u, 19 vols, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.

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Tanabe Hajime (1963–66), Tanabe Hajime Zensh¯u, 15 vols, Tokyo: Chikuma Shob¯o. Tosaka Jun (1998), ‘Is the “Logic of Nothingness” Logic?: On the Method of Nishida Philosophy’, in Dilworth, David, Viglielmo, Valdo and Augustin, Jacinto (eds) (1998), Sourcebook for Modern Japanese Philosophy. Selected Documents, Westport-London: Greenwood Press, pp. 362–71. Yusa Michiko (1994), ‘Nishida and Totalitarianism. A Philosopher’s Resistance’, in Heisig, James W. and Maraldo, John C. (eds) (1995), Rude Awakenings. Zen, the Ky¯oto School & the Question of Nationalism, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 107–31.

4

Constituting aesthetic/moral national space The Kyoto School and the place of nation Yumiko Iida

This chapter discusses the basic argument and signiﬁcance of the Kyoto School’s notion of ‘nation’, whose original archetype was formulated by Nishida Kitar¯o (1870–1945), the founder of the School, and was subsequently developed by his successors Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962) and Nishitani Keiji (1900–90). I hope to demonstrate how the theorization of nation by Japan’s leading philosophical school from the 1910s to the 1930s served as an intellectual vehicle where the essentials of modern Western metaphysics – such as notions of transcendental reason and morality, a linear progressive notion of history, and modern political and existential subjectivity – were internalized in Japanese discourse. As part of a broader process of modernization that involved a wholesale reorientation of society and the subject, conceptualizing nation in philosophical terms played an essential role in the formation of the modern Japanese nation-state by constituting the frame of consciousness, in which the subject is informed of particular images, expectations and obligations about nation and his/her relation to it. As exempliﬁed in the modernly coined yet ‘primordial’ Japanese word kokka – simultaneously designating the state and nation with two Chinese characters meaning ‘country’ (kuni) and ‘family’ (i.e.) – the conceptual parameters set in early modern Japanese discourse to discuss nation in political and institutional terms were insufﬁciently developed at best. This apolitical conception of nation is immediately reﬂective of the orientation of discourse at the time, whose temporal and spatial scheme largely remained outside of the modern modality. By the end of the two imperial wars (the Sino-Japanese war (1894–95) and the Russo-Japanese war (1904–95)) however, the effect of modernization and the accompanying intrusion of the dualistic epistemology of modern/Western scientiﬁc knowledge came to be felt acutely, giving rise to a nation-wide intellectual trend in favour of aesthetically inclined knowledge, where aspects of experience thrown beyond modern scientiﬁc representation could regain their legitimate place. When Nishida conceptualized an alternate metaphysical framework inclusive of what lies at the bottom of Eastern culture – ‘an attitude that sees the formless and hears the voiceless’ – he too stepped outside the cognitive terrain deﬁned by the dualistic epistemology of modern and Western metaphysics and created a unique philosophy of his own based on an experiential ontology.1 His initial idealistic formulation of a Japanese national archetype – nation as an embodiment

76 Yumiko Iida of harmonious social relations among ethically oriented subjects – was a heuristic ethical theory conceptualized as a critique of the universality of modern scientiﬁc epistemology and its effects. Although Nishida himself remained critical of ideological orthodoxy until his very last years, his idealistically conceived archetype of the Japanese nation offered a rich reservoir for imagining about the ‘Japanese nation’, in which, what used to be vaguely felt as the content of ‘Japanese culture’ was elevated to the national spiritual/cultural essence in a modern philosophical language. At stake here is not an ‘ideology’ inherent in Nishida’s philosophy as such, but the nature of an aesthetically and experientially oriented theorization of nation that cannot escape having political implications beyond the philosopher’s intent. By giving expression to his religiously derived experience and elevating that into a form of modern philosophy, Nishida’s intellectual endeavour weaved a modern Japanese worldview, Weltanschauung, where those aspects excluded from modern/Western discourse could ﬁnd aesthetic and/or spiritual articulations supposedly representing that which lies at the core of Japanese spirit, as powerfully demonstrated in his students’ fully modernized theorization of the Japanese nation. As the core modern political institution representing the collective life of its people, as well as an ontological foundation of the modern subject, nation became a socio-political and discursive battle-ﬁeld, where conﬂicting temporalities, political positions, values and subjectivities uneasily co-existed side-by-side, especially after the introduction of modern notions of dialectical history and political subject in the 1920s that virtually transformed the political landscape of Japanese society thereafter. Writing in a rapidly transforming and politically charged discourse of the 1930s, Nishida found himself in an awkward position of contradicting his earlier articulations by somewhat inevitably adapting to the rising modern philosophical parameters and an increasingly synchronized and transparent discourse governed by a singular transcendental perspective. Younger generations of scholars of the Kyoto School, including Tanabe and Nishitani, were more adaptable to changes. On returning from studying in Germany with leading continental philosophers of the time, such as Husserl and Heidegger, they began actively incorporating aspects of the cutting-edge philosophy into their theories of nation. Tanabe, for one, in his celebrated ‘Logic of the Speciﬁc’, a historically grounded theory of nation published in the mid-1930s, and Nishitani, for another, in his exploration into the ontological status of nation and the subject, reconﬁgured the archetypical notion of ethical nation into thoroughly modern forms by unhesitatingly transposing their teacher’s philosophical achievements onto concrete socio-historical and political settings. In their inﬂuential accounts of nation, Nishida’s ‘primordial’ worldview and heterogeneous philosophical concepts – such as nothingness and contradictory self-identity – are appropriated as reiﬁed signiﬁers designating the spiritual essence of a timeless Japan and incorporated into their otherwise thoroughly modernized theories of nation, each in their own way. Out of these modern philosophical endeavours emerged the absolute moral nation, whose authoritative voice urges its subjects to fulﬁll their moral duty of spontaneously sacriﬁcing themselves.

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In the following, I ﬁrst brieﬂy lay out Nishida’s archetype notion of ethical nation, and then discuss its subsequent transformation as a result of various philosophical additions to it – most importantly, the ‘historicization’ of the archetype in his 1941 ‘Kokka riy¯u no mondai’. The second section then discuss Tanabe’s theory of nation presented in his 1934 ‘Shakai sonzai no ronri’ as the ‘Logic of the Speciﬁc’, in which he aimed to overcome the ambiguities he saw in Nishida’s notion of nation, primarily with his core theoretical instrument of ‘absolute mediation’; a version of idealist historical dialectic. The last section looks at Nishitani’s ontotheological theory of nation as exempliﬁed in his 1941 ‘Sekaikan to kokkakan’, in which he sees the transcendental moral authority of nation as a knot which ties together the political authority of the state and the spiritual locus of community. As a way of concluding, I critically discuss the signiﬁcance of the Kyoto School’s philosophical contribution to modern theories of nation, which goes much beyond their philosophical insight into the status of nation, and which has substantially affected Japanese intellectual discourse.

Nishida’s archetypical notion of ‘ethical nation’ – transformations and ambiguities Although Nishida’s notion of nation was most explicitly thematized in his later works, a view of nation in its archetypical form is found in his earliest major work Zen no kenky¯u (Inquiry into the Good, 1911), where he laid out the basic ethical relation between the individual and society. In this philosophical exposition, Nishida ﬁnds ethical principles of subjective practice in an alternate way of cognizing and experiencing the world where the individual’s ego and his/her selfcentered perspective are transcended. Nishida calls this state of subjectivity ‘pure experience’ (junsui keiken) – a state of ‘becoming one’ with the world that results from an overcoming of dualistic epistemology and attaining the state ‘prior to’ the work of consciousness that marks the divide between the subject of experience and the experienced object. For Nishida, the ground for a truly moral action is where true insight and spontaneous action are united – what he later described in terms of ‘action intuition’ (k¯oiteki chokkan) – and thus the subject of true knowledge is spontaneously led to conduct moral action without recourse to reasoned judgment (Goto-Jones 2005: 54). Nishida understands that the conduct of moral action and the role human will plays in it is central to personal satisfaction as one demands, to borrow Christopher Goto-Jones’ words, ‘the fundamental unifying activity of consciousness’ and ‘when such uniﬁcation is brought to completion – in other words, when ideals are realized – we feel satisfaction’ (Goto-Jones 2005: 58). In what Goto-Jones sees as Nishida’s transcendental energetism, the good designates ‘the realization of our internal demands’ the completion of what man naturally desires to accomplish, that is, a satisfaction of a desire to be good (Goto-Jones 2005: 58). On this account, the good is spontaneously realized as one encounters true reality revealed in pure experience, in which existence and value are uniﬁed and one naturally desires to realize ones personality by doing good guided by a harmonizing principle (Goto-Jones 2005: 59–61).

78 Yumiko Iida Unlike the tripartite segregation in the Kantian system among the cognitive, normative and aesthetic, Nishida’s notion of the good substantially overlaps with the realm of aesthetics. Achieving a harmonious development in cultivating various abilities in each person is the highest form of good, a condition one is supposed to obtain in the true ‘reality’ of pure experience. Nishida then extends this ontologically integrated notion of the good to society as a whole in an analogous way. He assumes individual consciousness as a part of greater ‘social consciousness’ (shakaiteki ishiki), and one’s personal well-being is largely dependent upon the fulﬁllment of the desire to serve others, especially those who one loves (NKZ I: 161; Goto-Jones 2005: 61–62). In his view, the family is the smallest unit of social good (shakaiteki zen), and nation is a greater unit that likewise constitutes the cognitive and experiential foundation of individuals. Going a step further than this, however, Nishida conceives nation as a uniﬁed personality (jinkaku), manifesting its collective consciousness (ky¯od¯o ishiki) and collective will expressed in the form of its legal and institutional system (NKZ I: 162). In Nishida’s conception, this national personhood is ultimately embraced by the transcendental absolute that uniﬁes the ‘true world’ of pure experience – where the consciousness of the individual and society are integrated – as a guarantor of the existence of the world itself. Accordingly, nation for Nishida cannot be an ultimate end-point of personal desire, since this desire aspires to express itself as a part of humanity as a whole, while he also sees the actual limitation of his contemporary world where only partial and conditional peace – which he calls ‘armed peace’ – is achieved (NKZ I: 167). In short, the vision of nation Nishida presents in his early work is an ideal one where each individual and the society as a whole is spontaneously motivated to realize the good and the principle of harmony. This ideal picture of ethical nation provided an archetype notion of Japanese nation, not only for those afﬁliated to the Kyoto School but for the entire Japanese intellectual discourse. It is possible to argue that this archetypical notion of nation is ‘grounded upon’ a metaphysically conceived ‘place of nothingness’, a predicative topos where the collective consciousness of nation manifests itself. While largely focused on the work of consciousness later in the 1910s and 1920s, Nishida increasingly came to shift his attention from the operation of subjective consciousness, will, and action (hataraku mono) to the role played by the predicate itself (miru mono), in favour of the primacy of the latter – the so-called ‘turn towards place’ (bashoteki tenkai). It deserves particular attention that Nishida employed a topographic metaphor to describe the operative ground of nothingness as ‘place’ (basho), that designates a metaphysical non-being enveloping all beings and non-beings in itself. As Sakai Naoki has argued, basho designates an enabling ground for judgment, will and historical praxis; ‘ “the place of predicative determination” on or against which the subject (or shugo in the sense of propositional subject) is posited’, while itself remaining unthematized or ‘not modeled into a subject’ (Sakai 1997: 198). Simultaneously, however, this topographic category (which Nishida himself referred to as inﬂuenced by Plato’s ‘khora’ and Aristotle’s hypokeimenon) is more than a passive receptacle. An active feature is ascribed to this ‘universal non-being’ that sees manifestations of itself in existing objects and functions within itself, that

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is, the active operative characteristic as ‘that which sees’ (miru mono) (Kosaka 1997: 104–05). Moreover, since Nishida also sees the predicate/place as where the self-actualization of universal predicate takes place, he makes it connote something of a generative ground for creative activities (Kosaka 1997: 109–12). With this active characterization of the predicate/place as a universal ‘gaze’ and a regenerative place, a ground for all human and non-human activities, and supposedly constituting a socio-cultural foundation of a nation, it comes to be endowed with certain ‘subjective features’, especially when seen in light of the above discussed personiﬁed conception of ethical nation as collective consciousness. Even with these ‘subjective features’, however, Nishida’s notion of nation at this stage is yet a metaphysical, relatively static and utopian conception, not to be seen as a form of being in any straight-forward sense and, as such, it has little to do with the actually existing Japanese nation. Under a strong current to ‘historicize philosophy’, however, especially with the introduction of a dialectical view of history with Marx and Hegel that swept across the Japanese intellectual discourse of the 1920s, Nishida himself came to strongly feel the necessity of closing the gap between the world of his logical construction and the ‘world of everyday experience’.2 Viewing this as a task for himself, Nishida began theorizing the world in a more ‘historical’ manner in the 1930s – as clearly demonstrated in his work published later in the decade (such as ‘Ronri to seimei’, ‘Jissen to taisho ninshiki’, and ‘Shu no seisei hatten no mondai’) in which he conceives social/national space as a historical product of the on-going dialectical relation between the particular (subject) and the universal (social/natural environment) (Nishida 1935–46 II).3 Referring to Leopold von Ranke’s notion of the ‘eternal present’ (zettai genzai), Nishida characterizes the dialectical terrain of mutual constitution between the subject and the world in terms of the regeneration of tradition in the present, where the future aspirations are enmeshed with the past tradition in such a way as to realize the contradictory self-identity in the present.4 More speciﬁcally, this dialectical recreation of history operates as follows: on one side of this dialectic – which Nishida calls the transcendental pole as it represents the spatial and material – the creative function of the universal world determines itself by giving objective forms to particular empirical objects, including human beings, whose material existence is dependent upon the environment; on another side of the dialectic – the immanent pole representing the temporal and teleological – history is regenerated by means of the subject’s poietic practice through which the universal world expresses its form in each material object mediated by his/her artistic imagination (NKZ X: 280). These two-way dialectical processes make a constant mutual regeneration of the universal in the particular, the past tradition in the present, while constituting a harmonious state of nation at each given historical time. In this historical dialectic of the predicate/place, the individual subject is seen as a ‘productive element’ (s¯oz¯oteki y¯oso) of the world as its part. Nishida, however, does not reduce the individual to a passive being, but instead emphasizes him/her as a free being with ‘demonic’ will power capable of reaching the deepest depths of the world, which can only appear as nothingness (Kosaka 1995: 192–93). This productive and historical notion of nation adds an active, ‘bodily’ historical component of

80 Yumiko Iida nation as a terrain of poietic practice to the above described metaphysical and static notion of nation as predicate/place, while it remains to be characterized by the same governing principles of harmony and spontaneous ethical action (Kosaka 1995: 53). It was in his 1941 ‘Kokka riy¯u no mondai’ (The Problem of the Raison d’état) where Nishida most explicitly thematized nation (kokka), adding another dimension to his notion of ethical nation. In this work, Nishida presents a vision of nation as a rationalized form of society that is given shape by a historical process of externalizing its internal principles as the law, which is broadly in accord with Tanabe’s inﬂuential ‘logic of the speciﬁc’ formulated earlier. In evaluating this work, one has to keep in mind that Nishida, a ‘liberal philosopher’ writing at this time, was subject to strict censorship by the state, and this would demand of us the dual task of reading him as explicitly expressed in the text, and reading him less directly by taking into an account the likely negotiations he had to make in the given discursive and political climate of the time.5 Keeping this dual task in mind, two features are particularly noteworthy in this text which have added a ‘modern philosophical aspect’ to his historicized notion of ethical nation: one is the elaboration of an essential and teleological notion of an ‘original form’ of nation; and the other, the assumption of a large-scale, linear and progressive notion of history. A discussion of an ‘original form’ of society in Nishida appears as early as his 1911 Zen no kenky¯u that is discussed in terms of ‘historical species’ (rekishiteki shu), an archetype form of nation to be unfolded in its historical evolutionary process (Goto-Jones 2005: 86). In light of the complete absence of contradictions as productive historical forces in his historical dialectic, it is not surprising that Nishida ﬁnds the source of the driving force of history in the unfolding of an essential form of the national archetype in history. Nishida indeed sees such an essential ‘life force’ at the core of nation as ‘historical species’, which he describes with a number of related phrases such as rekishiteki shu (historical species), shuteki seimei (life of species) and minzoku seishin (spirit of species), in which a motivation and a teleological ‘guiding principle’ that ‘contain[s] the world in itself and aspired to become itself the world’ is assumed (NKZ X: 284).6 Accordingly, each society is grounded upon its unique form of ‘spirit of species’ (minzoku seishin), and nation evolves in such a way to realize its unique ‘life of species’, in turn generating a ‘historical-bodily society’ (rekishiteki shintaiteki shakai). This overlaps with an argument Nishida makes elsewhere that social and historical existence cannot be reduced to the concrete, but must contain mythos, an inner life that is motivated to exceed itself by negating its present state, which is eventually to be overcome in the process of maturing into nation as it becomes aware of its internal constitutive principles and gradually objectiﬁes them as the law (NKZ IX: 133; NKZ X: 294). Another modern philosophical aspect present in his 1941 work is a conception of large-scale teleological and progressive time of the world-historical underlying the rationalization process of nation, which is not compatible with his more phenomenologically conceived temporality of the eternal present, although an adaptation of the former may have been inevitable at this point. This long-spanning historical temporality is clearly manifest in his discussion of the absoluteness of

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the law in which one can detect an echo of Hegel. Viewing the form of each social organization as a ‘sacred and indestructible law’ whose shape is given by the historical evolution of a people themselves in a similar way to language and customs, Nishida argues that the law is an objective form of a people’s will for selfrealization, an expression of the ‘spirit of species’ (minzoku seishin) inherent in society/people (NKZ X: 296; 299). This historical notion of law immediately poses a challenge to the abstract and rational notion of the law in the political philosophical tradition of the West grounded on enlightenment reason, from which, according to Nishida, a ground for the ‘absolute objectivity of the law’ (h¯o no zettai kyakkansei) cannot emerge (NKZ X: 300–01; 294–96; 299–300).7 Nishida argues that the law is a historically determined moral guiding principle that simultaneously manifests the internal structure of nation and the ‘concrete logic’ (gutaiteki ronri) of the world, and this conditions the subject’s consciousness as a concrete historical being who expresses the ‘voice of god that arises from the bottom of the world itself ’ (NKZ X: 301–02).8 While arguing for the absoluteness of national law, however, Nishida repeatedly argues that the law must embody the absolutely contradictory self-identity of the world (sekai no zettai mujunteki jiko d¯oitsu) – suggesting that the law is derived not from the relation between nation and national subjects but from the world itself – in which the speciﬁcity of people/nation each gains unique expression by being mediated by the universality of the world (NKZ X: 301). Likewise, while he depicts the individual subject as having rights only as ‘creative elements’ (s¯oz¯oteki y¯oso) to regenerate the world in response to the ‘absolute order of absolute will’ (zettai ishi no zettai meirei), this absolute will refers to the universal law of the world, not that of nation, as many of his contemporary ideologues insisted (NKZ X: 301). It is indeed difﬁcult for one to determine to what extent Nishida’s philosophical formulation in this work is a product of the political pressures of the time, and how such pressures may have affected his overall argument. Regardless of that, Nishida’s notion of the ethical nation at this point is thoroughly mediated by the objective law of the world-historical, sounding rather contradictory to his previous conceptualisations of the ethical nation. With those newly added modern philosophical aspects in place, Nishida’s theory of nation came to contain different notions of the dialectic, conﬂicting modes of temporality, unclear status on the absolute law of nation, and some teleological and essentialist notions of nation co-existing side-by-side, all the while being enveloped by the underlying assumption of heterogeneity, the indeterminate notion of contradictory self-identity, and an ethical ontology of pure experience and harmony. When coming across passages that appear contradictory with other parts of his argument, such as the following, our task of making a double reading of Nishida demands harder work. Identifying in national/state sovereignty (kokka no shuken) a locus (ch¯ushin) of contradictory self-identity where its historical, generative forces are concentrated and self-consciously uniﬁed, Nishida, drawing from Jean Bodin, claims that this absolute and eternal authority of nation is what is expressed in Latin as ‘the highest authority to citizens and subjects unconstrained by the law’ – Summa in cives ac subditos legibusque soluta potestas – which ‘must be

82 Yumiko Iida equivalent to god on the earth’ (NKZ X: 305). Moreover, drawing from Hegel, he describes a rationalized form of the national subject as the ‘embodiment of ethical human relations’ (jinrinteki jittai), and further suggests that nation is both the purpose and the result of the individual’s moral action, as well as a cause of ‘substantive freedom’ (jittaiteki jiy¯u): ‘Der Staat ist die selbstbewuβte sittliche Substanz’ (NKZ X: 306). While nominally maintaining the notion of the ethical nation, this formulation betrays Nishida’s initial intent to elevate the spontaneity of moral action grounded in personality and will. Here, the notion of ethical nation is not simply mediated by rationalization, but sounds much like a product of reason and/or a telos of grand historical narrative. To be sure, however, Nishida is ultimately critical of Hegel’s notion of nation and law, arguing that his abstract universal reason cannot justify the moral characteristic of nation. For Nishida, nation is both a teleological idea and a poietic historical practice, simultaneously possessing the transcendental absolute and historically concrete/immanent, neither of which can be reduced to the other, and he criticizes Hegel’s lack of the latter element, arguing that it results in the absolutization of the abstract Idea, above and beyond the historically existing nation (NKZ X: 331). He argues that nation is a ‘form of historical practice’ (rekishiteki jissen no keishiki), in which people realize themselves through poietic practice that in turn generates the nation as a ‘historical body’ (rekishiteki shintai), while simultaneously guided by the spirit of species and the ‘voice of god’ arising from the bottom of the worldhistorical (NKZ X: 308). Elsewhere, referring to Ranke, he argues that the subject encounters a moment of morality where the transcendental meets the immanent; for him, one’s moral awareness must be sought in the encounter with the absolute on a concrete historical ground, rather than in the absolute itself. In this sense, to be moral is ‘to return to the historical roots of mankind’ and ‘encounter the absolute’ on that very ground (NKZ XII: 406–07).9 As late as 1941, Nishida had not lost such a sense of openness, neither reducing the absolute to nation, nor attributing one’s historical roots to national cultural tradition, which would not have been easy positions to sustain at the dawn of the Paciﬁc War. Beneath the modern and historical modiﬁcations, moreover, one can still recognize aspects of the attributes of his original ethical nation, which are not explicitly argued but consistently present in his text. Overall, however, it appears that Nishida’s attempt to ‘historicize’ his metaphysically conceived notion of ethical nation in the 1930s saw him launch an impossible task of incorporating what his philosophical framework was not designed for. In the end, Nishida’s notion of nation came to contain at least three quite different elements: a metaphysically conceived, timeless and harmonious nation as an ethical ideal; a dialectically conceived nation as a form of historical practice; and a worldhistorical nation as a rationalizing process of society and realization of its spirit. By grafting a topographically conceived notion of nothingness where his version of the historical dialectic operates upon an idealistically and heuristically conceived national archetype, Nishida’s ethical nation came to be located somewhere half-way between the metaphysical and the historical. With these ambiguities in place, his 1941 work added a hint of a tyrannical modernist tone, although this is

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substantially mitigated by his repeated suggestion of contradictory self-identity, conveying a sense of indeterminacy and heterogeneity contained in an ideal vision of harmonious nation.10

Tanabe’s ‘logic of the speciﬁc’ and the absolute moral nation If one is to discuss the Kyoto School’s theory of nation, few would disagree that the most lucid and inﬂuential account was articulated by Tanabe Hajime, a representative of the right-wing faction of the School who came to be seen as the successor of Nishida. Unsatisﬁed with his teacher’s metaphysically conceived notion of nation, Tanabe attempted to add a socio-historical frame to better ground it on the actual historical situation. After publishing a series of works on Hegel’s dialectic from the late 1920s to the early 1930s, Tanabe’s work came to be recognized as a category of its own – so-called Tanabe tetsugaku – with the core of his thought based on what he called the ‘dialectic of absolute mediation’ (zettai baikai no bensh¯oh¯o), which immediately challenged Nishida’s notion of ‘place of nothingness’. Tanabe’s criticism concerns the core of Nishida’s philosophy which can be summarized in the following three points.11 First, Tanabe argues that the topographic metaphor of ‘place’ makes Nishida implicitly assume an unmediated ontological ground of the place of nothingness as a topos enveloping everything, which cannot then be appropriately considered as nothingness as such, but turns into just another logic of existence (y¯u no ronri). When this is located in a longer-span historical perspective, the self-determination of the ‘predicate/place = nation’ cannot but become an evolutionary theory of itself that ultimately betrays the notion of dialectic. Secondly, Tanabe problematized Nishida’s notion of ‘absolutely contradictory self-identity’, which has strong built-in inclinations to constitute a harmonious identity, not sufﬁciently mediated by the notion of absolute negation. On this account, Tanabe ironically suggested that the concept should be denoted the ‘selfidentity of absolute contradiction’ (zettai mujun no jiko d¯oitsu), rather than the ‘absolutely contradictory self-identity’ as such. Reﬂecting Tanabe’s criticisms, one may argue that Nishida’s notion of the dialectic is unable to ﬁnd a historical driving force in history itself, as tensions and conﬂicts are not seen as productive forces to move history forward but instantly harmonized in his static system. This leads him to ﬁnd the cause of the dynamic force in the spirit of nation which unfolds itself in history in a monistic manner. Thirdly, for Tanabe, Nishida’s notion of pure experience and ‘intuitive action’ as an ethical principle of the subject is overly metaphysical and introspective and is not applicable to the existing nation as a rational political and historical being. Tanabe’s criticisms fundamentally put the status of Nishida’s notion of ethical nation into question: can it still be treated as a historical being or by itself sufﬁciently mediated by negation to be considered as a pure ‘function’ of absolute negation? Tanabe attempted to overcome the problems he saw in Nishida’s thought by employing his version of the dialectic, the ‘dialectic of absolute mediation’ as a core ‘analytical device’in his theory of nation. Nishida, on the other hand, was troubled by Tanabe’s tendencies towards transparency and transcendental singularity,

84 Yumiko Iida which he saw as Tanabe’s ‘inability’ to ‘escape from the position of rationalist idealism’ (Yamada 1975: 55). For Nishida, the place of nothingness is both an ‘ontological’ foundation and a function, and this dual-structure is fundamental.12 It is obvious, however, that Nishida took Tanabe’s critique seriously, as his theory of nation in 1941 ‘Kokka riy¯u no mondai’ reveals many inﬂuences from Tanabe. Tanabe was also unsatisﬁed with neo-Kantian ‘transcendental subjectivism,’ a dominant philosophical trend during the Taisho era (1912–25), which tended to deﬁne desirable visions of culture and society with a set of universal values. From Tanabe’s point of view, this position bypasses the culturally speciﬁc social base and assumes the idealized notion of universal mankind (genera) and thereby, simply neglects the category of nation in which the individual is placed in a concrete socio-cultural and historical context. With this in mind Tanabe, in a series of articles (1934, 1935, 1936) developed a concept of the ‘speciﬁc’ (shu) – an archetype of nation as a historical being that is grounded upon the common ethno-cultural heritage such as a shared lifestyle, common language, cultural practices and beliefs – as an intermediary category between universal mankind and the individual (Heisig 1995: 280). Drawing from Bergson’s notions of open and closed societies, Tanabe argues that the ‘speciﬁc’ as a ‘naturally’ derived human organization has certain inclinations towards ‘irrationality’ or ‘unconscious ﬁction’, which needs to be thoroughly mediated by universal rationality if it is to become an ‘open society’ exposed to the universal frame of reference (THZ VI: 74–89).13 Unlike Nishida’s euphorically harmonious notion, Tanabe conceives nation as a place prone to conﬂicts and power struggles among individuals, where each has a natural and selﬁsh ‘will’ to pursue one’s own ends and determines one’s place vis-à-vis others, while society as a whole evolves through this conﬂictive relation.14 Tanabe basically saw society as a historical product of dialectical negotiation between the ‘life will’ (seimei ishi) of primitive society aiming to maintain its order by imposing certain rules on the individual to preserve itself, and the ‘will to power’ (kenryoku ishi) of the individual aspiring to take control on the collective human organization. It is this notion of structurally mediated human relations among individuals and between the individual and nation – which he refers to as the ‘logic of absolute mediation’ – that yields the dynamic historical forces to make the nation develop. Referring to Hegel, Tanabe extends the same logic of absolute mediation to the relation between the speciﬁc and universal mankind, arguing that nation obtains its ‘objective spirit’ (kyakkan seishin) only by being mediated by the universal reason of mankind external to itself: it is this mediation that leads the nation to a higher synthesis between the natural will of primitive society and the social contract among pragmatic individuals (THZ VI: 136–39). In this mutually deﬁning process of negation, the ‘speciﬁc’ becomes as much a ‘function’ as an outcome that drives the nation towards a greater rationalization and universality as a form of higher synthesis, by virtue of which, the nation attains its legitimate status as a sovereign subject, while the individual becomes both a rational subject of the nation and a part of universal mankind mediated by nation (Himi 1990: 101). While conceiving nation as a complex amalgamation of

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the social, legal and political, Tanabe, again referring to Hegel, argues that the morality of the individual mediated by the realm of the absolute/eternal is what ultimately provides the unifying forces for the nation, and this bonding power of morality is what constitutes a historically and scientiﬁcally mediated form of the religious absolute manifesting in nation (THZ VI 152–55; 164). This last component was further developed in his later work, especially in his notorious 1941 work ‘Kokka no d¯ogisei’, that made a major contribution to strengthening the state ideology of kokutai at this critical time. With numerous references to and critical engagement with the European academic literature of his time, Tanabe’s theory of the speciﬁc appears to be a fully modernized and highly international text with a demonstrated simultaneity and relevance to European academic discourse beyond the immediate Japanese context. Although often considered an ‘ultra-nationalist’, Tanabe is a thorough-going rationalist who was critical of the ‘closed societies’ that he found in nativist ideologies, which justiﬁed ‘natural’ inclinations against reason’s call to open its channel up to universal rationality. This was, for him, nothing but a regression and reiﬁcation of nation alienated from universal mankind. On the other hand, nation, for Tanabe is ‘the most concrete historical subject’ and an ‘archetype of being’, and to understand history one must understand the birth and evolution of nation as the point where a people’s collective being is historicized and regenerated into a concrete form (THZ VI: 27–28). Tanabe’s philosophical endeavour to historicize nation successfully yields his anti-materialist version of the historical dialectic, although he was also critical of the idealist dialectic of Hegel; while agreeing on his conceptualization of nation as the realization of ‘god’s will on earth’, Tanabe (in his 1939 ‘Kokkateki sonzai no ronri’) criticizes Hegel for his abstract notion of nation that departs from the concrete historical base by conveniently discarding the mediation of objective spirit, and conceiving ‘absolute spirit’ in terms of subjective spirit alone (THZ VII: 35). It has been argued that Tanabe also intended to criticize Heidegger and create an ontology of nation that overcomes what he saw as the limitation of Heidegger’s Being and Time. For Tanabe, nation is not only a collective subject that expresses the culturally speciﬁc identity of a people (which Heidegger focused upon), but also the subject that mirrors the universality of ideal mankind precisely in its alienated cultural speciﬁcity (Himi 1990: 107–08). Tanabe also sees individuals as beings directly exposed to the universal, and by following a Buddhist notion of ‘trust’ (shin), he thinks that one must believe that his/her rational and moral action is supported by the ‘transcendental Other’ (ch¯oetsu-teki tariki no ky¯od¯o ni taisuru shinrai no nen). In this realm of trust, the opposite ends of the dialectic (such as individual vs. nation, subject vs. object, life vs. death and so on) are simultaneously afﬁrmed by the logic of afﬁrmation-in-negation, a paradoxical realization of contradictory elements by means of absolute negation (Himi 1990: 111–12; THZ VI: 221–23). Tanabe formulates this relation between the individual and the absolute as a vehicle to develop something not far from what one may call a theory of absolute moral nation, in which he immediately links, or even identiﬁes, nation with the transcendental absolute (Himi 1990: 112).

86 Yumiko Iida Viewing nation as a concrete manifestation of an absolute being of nothingness, Tanabe claims that such ‘religious trust’ is to be sought in national sovereignty. Although this argument is not new at all in his work, it was in his 1941 ‘Kokka no d¯ogisei’ – a text written in a more popularly accessible and ideologically inclined language – where Tanabe explicitly and repeatedly emphasizes nation as an absolute moral being possessing the ‘original source of morality’, which must be actualized by the ‘people’s coming to an awareness that devotion to their own nation is the primary moral act’ (THZ VIII: 204). While viewing nation as the ‘highest being in the real world’ endowed with unassailable sovereign authority, Tanabe is equally emphatic that this absoluteness of nation is only relative (s¯otaiteki zettai) and it demands people’s awareness of the moral order of nation and their moral action to actualize its absoluteness (THZ VIII: 205). Tanabe goes on to suggest that it is a duty and the highest form of moral practice of the national subject to devote his/her life to the nation, and this act of sacriﬁce satisﬁes the deepest human desire for the absolute, something that is only attained by means of negating oneself (THZ VIII: 206–07). By mediating the fundamental desire of mankind with highly rationalized and unfailingly modern conceptions of the absolute nation and the moral duty of the subject, Tanabe’s dialectical logic of afﬁrmation-in-negation becomes readily applicable to ideological formulations such as ‘self-realization-in-self-sacriﬁce’(jikogisei-sokujikojitsugen) or ‘freedom-in-submission’ (t¯osei-soku-jiy¯u). At this point, Tanabe’s theory of nation becomes a moral teaching of self-sacriﬁce in the service of the military state, as if manifesting where the self-actualizing spirit of nation ultimately reaches, and expressing its absolute reason and morality in a nationally speciﬁc form. It was Tanabe’s novel contribution to convert Nishida’s metaphysical archetype of the ethical nation and his phenomenologically conceptualized dialectic into thoroughly modern rationalist forms, while tacitly excluding material and institutional aspects of nation from his socio-philosophical scope. It is noteworthy that the telos of modern metaphysics in Tanabe’s notion of absolute nation arose in his intellectual effort to locate philosophy on a concrete historical ground, which he did largely by ﬁlling in the socio-historical lacuna that Nishida had hesitantly left out with more thorough adaptations of the rational and progressive notion of history and transcendental reason/morality. In the rapidly modernizing historical and discursive context of the time, politics came to be brought into the intellectual discourse and popular consciousness of the 1920s and the 1930s – largely ‘coinciding with’ the above discussed trend of the ‘historicization of philosophy’. Simultaneously, the Kyoto School itself came to be divided into three factions – the right-wing, the centre and the left-wing. Under these turbulent discursive and political transformations, ‘nation’ literally became a battle-ﬁeld both as an intellectual discourse and as a ﬁeld of political practice, manifesting the delayed arrival of modern political subjectivity in Japan that in effect introduced a barrage of confusions with differing temporalities, epistemologies and modes of thinking/being, as well as conﬂicting political positions to the point where the discourse as a whole became nearly dysfunctional.15

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According to Tosaka Jun (1900–45), a leading materialist philosopher and leftwing critic of the Kyoto School, what was referred to as the crisis of culture in the 1930s was primarily the problem of the loss of ‘objectivity’ in philosophical categories which could no longer sustain their social relevance as they typically fail to grasp the uniﬁed structural order of the material world, and instead, substitute it with hermaneutic interpretations (TJZ III). Tosaka criticized Tanabe’s idealist dialectic as a device that reduces the objective social world to its subjective reﬂections, and creates a false dialectic that opposes this subjectivized object (from which ‘real, concrete and commonsensical materiality is stripped off ’) and the reﬂective awareness of the subject (TJZ III: 177–84). In Tosaka’s view, this false idealist dialectic depoliticizes knowledge not simply by eliminating the presence of the objective from the conscious horizon, but also by transforming it into its subjectivized form and molding it into an instrument to elevate the subjective moral reﬂection (TJZ III: 181–82). Once again, this absorption of the material into subjective consciousness in Tanabe was the ultimate result of his aspiration to overcome the fundamental dilemma of philosophy, the inability to ﬁll in the gap between ‘life’and ‘logic’, an attempt to close it by historically grounding the nation and identifying the people’s moral action as the ultimate source of national power. On this account, the modern notion of nation as an elastic aesthetic category is worth particular attention. Not only does it successfully represent the irreducibleness of concrete human life and the locus of one’s sources of identity and desire for collectivity, it is also capable of elevating itself to the position of the transcendental absolute by evoking powerful aesthetic images and gathering one’s deepest existential/spiritual desire towards its symbolic centre. With this built-in imaginative aesthetic power for transcendence in nation and the modern lacuna between ‘logic’ and ‘life’ – a product of the modern bifurcation of ontology together with other sets of binaries such as individual vs. collective, transcendental vs. immanent, metaphysical vs. historical and so on – the nation functions as a ‘hinge’ to mediate various contradictions arising in the modernly constituted world. It is more than a mere coincidence that the notion of the absolute moral nation emerged on both the discursive and political terrains of the 1930s where it indeed served to ‘resolve’ the modernly generated philosophical confusion, discursive fragmentation, and political conﬂicts by reinstalling the lost symbolic gravity at the level of discourse, at the expense of subordinating the empirical life and pragmatic concerns of the individual to the abstract conception of nation and its absolute moral principle.

Nishitani’s onto-theological nation and the world-historical project of Japan While Tanabe developed Nishida’s achievement into a modern socio-historical philosophy of nation, it can be argued that Nishida’s early archetypical notion of the ethical nation found a better modern politico-historical expression in Nishitani’s notion of the Japanese nation, rather than Nishida’s late formulation of nation itself. In contrast to Nishida and Tanabe, who both became heavily inﬂuenced by Hegelian historical dialectics, Nishitani primarily explores an ontology of nation

88 Yumiko Iida from his religious/existential perspective. In his 1941 ‘Sekaikan to kokkakan,’ Nishitani depicts nation as an enabling foundation of the freedom of the subject, because one’s immediate existence as being-in-the world (sekai nai sonzai) and as worldview, Weltanschauung (which integrates morality, philosophy, religion and other universal human values) are derivative of the national communal space (NKC IV: 282). Nishitani opens his discussion by pointing out the limitation of the liberal notion of nation (which he sees as solely focused on the internal demand of democratic society) that he sees as no longer capable of understanding the conﬂict-ridden post-WWI international environment. Referring to the work of Rudolf Kjéllen, who (in his Der Staat als Lebensform) conceived the modern nation-state as much as an empirical as a rational being, Nishitani endorses an aspect of nation as a corporeal political body with a ‘life of its own’, endowed with its ‘natural dimensions’ (i.e. land and people) beyond the legal ones that constitute the foundation for its political and authoritative power (NKC IV: 266–67). Likewise, referring to Otto Koellreuter’s notion of state as an ‘organized bio-power’ (soshikika sereta seikenryoku) and a ‘community of destiny’ (unmei ky¯od¯otai) grounded on ‘blood and soil’ and common culture, Nishitani emphasizes the inescapability of the political and historical dimension of the nation in the world. This inescapability comes to reveal a new horizon in its ontology, where people’s moral orientation, philosophical /religious worldview, and existential awareness as being-in-the-world substantially determine the existential mode of nation itself (NKC IV: 267–69). Nishitani sees this ‘politicization of nation’ as a historical necessity in the growth of the modern nation-state, an outcome produced when it reaches the point of maturity where people as a uniﬁed community desire to express themselves, through a popular national movement, as a unique life-form vis-à-vis other nations in the universalized terrain of the world-historical (NKC IV: 271).16 Nation, in this sense, is an ontological foundation and enabling vehicle for the modern subject, whose being is seen as grounded upon his/her historical and cultural speciﬁcity arising simultaneous to an awareness of the universality of mankind, to satisfy his/her existential desire for self-realization (NKC IV: 292–93). There is a fundamental paradox, therefore, underlying in this ontological relation between nation and the modern subject, that is a paradox between the authoritative control of nation and the freedom of the national subject, in which, to borrow Mori Tetsur¯o’s words, ‘the source of the very movement to curb freedom carries within itself the seeds of a new freedom’ (Mori 1995: 321). On the one hand, the nation aims to control its population in order to consolidate its internal unity as a ‘singular life-body’ (hitotsu no seikatsutai) and elevate itself to a rational political organization and a competitive actor in the world-historical stage, which in turn demands subordination from its subjects, or what Nishitani calls ‘substrating (or grounding) of the subject’ (shutai no kitaika) to the national community (Mori 1995: 321; NKC IV: 278–79). On the other hand, the wilful consent to such control is quite opposite to a blind submission to power, but instead designates an establishment of individual subjectivity as the national subject, or the ‘subjectivizing of the substrate’ (kitai no shutaika), in which Nishitani aims to locate subjective freedom (NKC IV: 278–79). In this dynamic feedback relation between the two,

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argues Nishitani, nation and the national subject mutually constitute themselves as one unity in a concrete process of self-realization of the moral community. It is in this moral community that national will is actively pursued by the voluntary participation of the national subjects beyond mere submission to abstract law (NKC IV: 278–79). Detecting the troubling tendency that the democratic societies of his time were increasingly gaining aspects of authoritarian and/or totalitarian features, Nishitani intended to formulate a non-authoritarian notion of nation by incorporating a transcendental ethical responsibility of the nation as a central part of his theory. Although Nishitani thought that the moral principle of nation must have an open channel to link itself to the transcendental absolute at its core, he, unlike Tanabe, did not equate national authority with the transcendental absolute, nor did he make the subject’s moral duty appear obligatory. Instead, in a manner reminiscent of Nishida’s early archetypical notion of nation, Nishitani emphasized the ethical nature of a nation that must assure a place for subjective freedom as an essential enabling ground, out of which subjects’ spontaneous ‘love for nation’ (kokka ai) can, and should, emerge. Although in part he draws this ‘love’ from an analogy of the relation between father and child, a more signiﬁcant role is given to the nature of the spiritual experience itself (i.e. an encountering with the absolute in one’s concrete everyday cultural life) as Nishida envisaged the moment of ethics within the transcendental immanence. Nishitani argues that individual subjects, as members of the nation (as an ethical community), must elevate themselves from the position of legal to ethical subjects or, more precisely, to religious subjects with an awareness of this transcendental absolute representing the moral authority of the nation. Nation, on the other hand, owes a task of combining its ‘total spiritual power’ (seishinteki na s¯oryoku) by providing its subjects an ethical ontological ground for self-afﬁrmation. This in turn demands the nation to internalize to its core the perspective of ‘transnational universality’ (ch¯okokkateki na sekaisei) – an awareness of the ethics of universal mankind beyond national interests which must be reﬂected in its governance (NKC IV: 284). These two-way moral movements then dialectically establish a link between the nation’s political action and the spiritual support given by the individual subjects through the dynamic relation between the above argued ‘substrating of the subject’ and the ‘subjectivizing of the substrate’, constituting, at least theoretically speaking, an ethically acting nation (NKC IV: 283–84). Nishitani is quick to point out, however, that this reciprocal ethical relation alone is insufﬁcient to prevent the state’s abuse of political power. Instead, the nation must have at its centre the transcendental moral absolute as the source of greater moral authority that unites and supercedes the political power of the state and the spiritual locus of national community (NKC IV: 287). In this conjunction, Nishitani elevates nothingness and self-negation as ideal cultural principles for the nation to embody as they allow the formation of selﬂess national subjectivity (NKC IV: 381–82). According to him, it is a unique advantage of the Japanese nation that it combines in its structure the transcendental centre of political power, law and morality with the religious/spiritual locus of community in the manner of

90 Yumiko Iida contradictory self-identity, in which nothingness as the cultural/spiritual essence of the Japanese nation is realized. Rather obviously, this ‘uniquely Japanese’ cultural principle that transcends the contradiction between national authority and subjective freedom can be used for ideological purposes, by virtue of which the aspect of brute political power could be subsumed beneath an all-embracing, harmonious vision of the world in the gaze of transcendental nothingness. Moreover, what Nishitani identiﬁes as the sources of national power and unity – i.e. ‘affectionate forces’ such as ethical awareness, religiosity and love – are likely to operate as elastic aesthetic categories that transcend reason, in the manner of a ‘transcendental signiﬁer’ that unites words with meanings by overthrowing discursive mediation, and thereby adding powerful aesthetically inclined gravity to the discourse. By inseparably enmeshing the subject’s sense of self with that of nation, and promoting the fulﬁllment of one’s moral duty to nation through voluntary submission so as to afﬁrm one’s aesthetic/spiritual desire, Nishitani’s notion of the ethical/religious nation offers an attractive conceptual repertoire that could powerfully enrich the rhetorical formulation of ideological orthodoxy. If Tanabe’s notion of the moral nation absolutizes national power and the moral duty of the subject, Nishitani’s theory of the moral nation makes its subjects act ethically spontaneously, and even offer themselves, if necessary, in the name of love for their nation. This last point on the ideological implication his notion of nation becomes manifest in Nishitani’s contribution to the 1942 symposium, ‘Overcoming Modernity’, in which he urged his fellow Japanese to gather together the moral energy necessary for carrying out the word-historical task of the nation in the coming war. Lamenting the loss of spirituality in a modern age brought in by the permeation of natural scientiﬁc metaphysics centred upon transcendental/instrumental reason, Nishitani was particularly concerned about the effect of modern dualistic epistemology that segregates the sphere of religion, science and humanity into distinct realms, and thereby subjugates the integrated existence of a person to an analytical gaze by which she/he is reduced to a physical body and consciousness (Nishitani 1979: 20–23). According to him, what lay at the core of the state of crisis at the time was the worldwide spiritual crisis triggered by the loss of ‘religiosity’. In Japan too, the intrusion of scientiﬁc knowledge into the sphere of everyday life resulted in the destruction of traditional lifestyles and values, as exempliﬁed in the failure of core cultural concepts, such as soul (tamashii), heart (kokoro) and life (seimei), which had lost their rich spiritual connotations (Nishitani 1979: 23–25). As Nishitani saw an inseparable connection between individual and national identity, his subsequent call for the recovery of religiosity is unsurprising. But his call was made, somewhat tactfully and conveniently, in terms of the necessity to stand on the ‘subjective position of nothingness’ (shutaiteki mu no tachiba), a position that transcends one’s ego in the visible material world, and to devote one’s ‘moral energy’ to the nation to support its world-historical task of realizing its ‘spirit’ (kokka no seishin) in the coming war (Nishitani 1979: 28). What may sound like a typical formulation by a religious philosopher gains additional political implications when seen in combination with his more historically and politically based analysis of the structural transformation of the world.

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In his ‘Sekai tenkanki toshite no gendai’ (1941), for example, Nishitani diagnoses the crisis-ridden situation of the world in terms of the difﬁculties involved in the self-determination of nation. Rather than viewing it in terms of ‘spiritual crisis’ as such, he sees each nation as having the task of becoming a unique/particular subject in the ontologically uniﬁed universalized space (NKC IV: 300). Operating in a long-term evolutionary view of world history, Nishitani argues that it is only at the turn of century that the world began making a transition from a Euro-centric hegemonic system to a truly universal and pluralistic space – which he calls the Paciﬁc age, as opposed to the previous Atlantic age – a transition he sees as having been caused by the ascent of Japan as a non-white nation to the world-historical stage. According to him, it was especially after Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War that Europeans came to recognize the partiality of their hegemonic perspective and realize too that what used to be thought of as universal was derivative of European cultural particularity (NKC IV: 303–04). This appreciation of the role the Japanese nation played in the word-historical stage allows Nishitani, in his ‘T o¯ a to sekaishi’ (1941), to afﬁrm its leadership role in establishing a new order in East Asia as a historical necessity for the Japanese, as the only non-European nation that had successfully modernized itself. Moreover, in a manner typical of civilization theory, Nishitani emphasizes the unique cultural ability of the Japanese to integrate the spiritual heritage of other civilizations, such as Indian, Chinese and most recently European, into itself, making Japanese culture a ‘chaotic mix of world cultures’(NKC IV: 331).17 It is these unique, heterogeneous cultural attributes (such as rigorously combining the cultures of the East and the West) that makes Nishitani optimistically assume Japan’s entitlement to construct a new order in East Asia. On the other hand, echoing Nishida, he emphasizes the necessity of embodying an ethical order in the new East Asia that must reﬂect the universal ethics of mankind – although his argument for the ethical order is rationalized in language ﬂattering to the discourse of state power. For example, he claims that the establishment of a new East Asian order is not only signiﬁcant in bringing the region onto the mainstream historical stage, but it also means taking up the challenge given to the Japanese of demonstrating a superior order based on its cultural principles as part of the task of opening up a new historical epoch in the face of the declining European civilization (NKC IV: 336).18 The same taxonomical and typological understanding of the world both in temporal and spatial terms – presented in the form of a grand historical narrative of pluralistic cultures from a civilizational point of view – are manifest in ‘Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon’, a well-known series of discussions held in 1942 among prominent members of the School (including Nishitani, Suzuki Shigetaka, K¯oyama Iwao, and K¯osaka Masaaki) in which the wartime Kyoto School’s interpretation of Japan’s word-historical project in the coming war was most lucidly laid out. The strength of Nishitani’s argument, however, is not in this familiar argumentative line (which is similar to the ideological orthodoxy), rather it lies in his ontology of the national subject, whose sense of self is inseparably enmeshed with the historicocultural fabric of nation, which makes national mobilization equivalent to personal self-realization on the world-historical stage.

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Conclusion In this chapter, I have described notions of nation articulated by three major Kyoto School philosophers: Nishida’s idealistically conceived archetypical notion of the ethical nation that gradually incorporated historical aspects; Tanabe’s modernist, social scientiﬁc and idealistic formulation of an absolute moral nation centring on transcendental nothingness; and Nishitani’s onto-theological theory of nation uniﬁed by transcendental morality and spiritual centre, which strives to deﬁne itself in the world-historical stage. By drawing such a broad picture of their philosophical engagements, I have intended to demonstrate how the ‘problem of nation’ is immediately derived from, and inseparably mingled with, the internalization of a modern perspective itself. In the context of changes brought on by modernization (such as fundamental transformations in the parameters of cognition and discussion, rising awareness of subjectivity, and institutional and material changes), the expectations that the modernly constituted subject and society have upon knowledge were also changed dramatically, as exempliﬁed in the demand of the ‘historicization of philosophy’ that swept across the Japan of the 1920s and 1930s. As argued above, Nishida himself felt compelled to bridge the gap between metaphysics and everyday experience, and transformed his archetypical conception into a semi-historical category of nation as a historically evolving body progressing towards its rational expression. Incorporating more rigorously modern philosophical methods and concepts, Tanabe and Nishitani virtually abandoned the attempt to adapt Nishida’s non-dualistic epistemology for their own theoretical foundations, resulting in the construction of thoroughly modern theories of nation that integrated reiﬁed images of Japanese spirituality. It is not surprising at all, therefore, that Nishida’s initial criticism of the modern transcendental subject/perspective (as embodied in his initial archetype) ended up offering a site where another transcendental subjectivity could emerge in the work of his students in a ‘Japanese form’ – i.e. the absolute moral nation centred upon a transcendental spirituality superior to its modern/Western counterpart. In reviewing the developmental path of the discourse of nation from Nishida’s early conceptualization of ‘place’, through Tanabe’s theory of absolute moral nation, and to Nishitani’s notion of nation as an onto-theological foundation, one can see the gradual ascent of the telos of transcendental reason and morality that increasingly objectiﬁes its ‘empirical base’ – people – beneath its gaze. While it is grounded on the principle of self-negation, all embracing nothingness and contradictory identity, the objectifying gaze of the modern subject is yet powerfully present in its collective form, actively advocating the nulliﬁcation of the subjective-ego to achieve greater self-realization by means of devotion and sacriﬁce for nation. This is nothing less than the rise of an absolute, modern, transcendental subject in an aesthetic form, in which aspects of politics engaged by subjective agency are completely transcended into the images of the national archetype – the archetype not as a heuristic ideal to strive for, but as an ideological force to make people realize it, in a manner that typiﬁes the way that the modern telos instrumentalizes its subject. This is exempliﬁed in Tanabe’s idealistic

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and abstract moral national subject (who aspires to vertically elevate him/herself to be uniﬁed with the transcendental absolute), as well as in Nishitani’s existentially and spiritually inclined subject (who wishes to be horizontally integrated into his/her concrete roots). In these instances, Nishida’s initial intent (to conceptualize the ‘Japanese nation’ outside modern metaphysics) is completely betrayed, effectively giving expression to something he aimed to protest in the ﬁrst place. His core philosophical concepts (such as nothingness and contradictory identity) were made into something resembling ‘transcendental signiﬁers’ that embodied a ‘Japanese spiritual essence’, deﬁning what ‘Japan’ should designate in the modern world. In addition, they provided the locus for aesthetic desire that was made untenable by the thoroughly modernized discourse.

Notes 1 On Nishida’s experiential ontology, see Feenberg and Arisaka 1990. 2 See for example, ‘rekishiteki shintai’, a part of the lecture series ‘Shinano tetsugaku kai no tame no kouen’, in NKZ XIV. 3 On the inﬂuence of Marxism in Nishida’s thought, see, for example, Yamada 1975. 4 Jacinto provides a cogent analysis of temporalities in Nishida’s philosophy and his notion of tradition. See Jacinto 1995: 135–37. 5 I should indicate here my debt to Goto-Jones’ perceptive reading of Nishida’s late texts, which skillfully demonstrates this type of ‘double-reading’in engaging with texts written in a highly politicized environment. 6 Nishida Kitar¯o, Kokka riy¯u no mondai, now in NKZ X. 7 See those pages for Nishida’s criticism of Rousseau, Hobbes and Kant on this point. 8 Also see Kume 1999: 123–24. 9 Nishida Kitar¯o, Tetsugaku ronbunsh¯u daiyon hook, now in NKZ XII. 10 Goto-Jones characterizes Nishida as ‘an ineffective dissident intellectual’ and a ‘partial intellectual exile’, who did his best in issuing a voice of dissent under the given conditions, while his philosophy was extensively misused and manipulated by state ideologues and other members of the Kyoto School (Goto-Jones 2005: 2; 19–24). 11 My argument in this paragraph owes much to Kosaka Kunitsugu’s insightful summary and analysis provided in Kosaka 1995: 175–76, and in Kosaka 1997: 112–13; 131–32. 12 See Kosaka 1995, especially pp. 264–75, for an excellent reading of Nishida-Tanabe debate. 13 Tanabe Hajime, Shakai sonzai no ronri, now in THZ VI. 14 Recognizing the necessity of integrating social scientiﬁc work into the theorization of nation, Tanabe extensively refers to, for example, the work of Emile Durkheim, Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Scheler, Ernst Horneffer among others (THZ VI: 74–89). 15 See, for example, Harootunian 2000 for an elaborate account on this point, in which the author demonstrates how the fragmentation and confusion generated in discourse by the intrusion of modernity prepared for the subsequent rise of fascism as its political solution. 16 I owe this to Mori Tetsur¯o’s insight provided in Mori 1995: 320–21. 17 The earlier account of the same argument was made by Nishida in his 1938 ‘Nihon bunka no mondai’, in NKZ XIV: 416–17. 18 In his ‘Testugaku ronbunshu dai-yon hokou’, Nishida also rationalizes Japan’s leading role in establishing a new order in Asia, emphasizing a necessity of embodying all embracing and harmonious moral principle of nothingness. See NKZ XII: 417–19.

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References Feenberg, Andrew (1995), ‘The Problem of Modernity in the Philosophy of Nishida’ in Heisig, James W. and Maraldo, John C. (eds) Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 151–73. Feenberg, Andrew and Arisaka Y¯oko (1990), ‘Experiential Ontology: The Origins of the Nishida Philosophy in the Doctrine of Pure Experience,’ International Philosophical Quarterly, XXX/2 (118), pp. 173–204. Goto-Jones, Christopher (2005), Political Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School, and Co-Prosperity, London: Routledge. Harootunian, Harry D. (2000), Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Heisig, James W. (1995), ‘Tanabe’s Logic of the Speciﬁc and the Spirit of Nationalism,’ in Heisig, James W. and Maraldo, John C. (eds) Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 255–88. Heisig, James W. and Maraldo, John C. (eds) (1995), Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Himi Kiyoshi (1990), Tanabe tetsugaku kenky¯u: sh¯uky¯o tetsugaku no shiten kara, Tokyo: Hokuju Shuppan. Jacinto, Agustin Z. (1995), ‘The Return of the Past: Tradition and the Political Microcosm in the Later Nishida,’ in Heisig, James W. and Maraldo, John C. (eds) Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 132–50. Kosaka Kunitsugu (1991), Nishida Tetsugaku no kenky¯u: basho no ronri no seisei to k¯oz¯o, Tokyo: Minerva Shob¯o. Kosaka Kunitsugu (1995), Nishida Kitar¯o: sono shis¯o to gendai, Tokyo: Minerva Shob¯o. Kosaka Kunitsugu (1997), Nishida Kitar¯o wo meguru tetsugakusha gunz¯o, Tokyo: Minerva Shob¯o. Kume Yasuhiro (1999), Nishida tetsugaku: sono seiritsu to kansei, Tokyo: N¯osan gyoson bunka ky¯okai. Maraldo, John C. (1995), ‘Quesitoning Nationalism Now and Then: A Critical Approach to Zen and the Kyoto School,’ in Heisig, James W. and Maraldo, John C. (eds) Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 333–62. Miyakawa T¯oru (1967), Nishida, Miki, Tosaka no Tetsugaku: shis¯oshi 100-nen no isan, Tokyo: Kodansha. Mori Tetsur¯o (1995), ‘Nihitani Keiji and the Question of Nationalism,’ in Heisig, James W. and Maraldo, John C. (eds) Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 316–32. Nishida Kitar¯o (1935–46), Tetsugaku Ronbunsh¯u, 6 vols, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Nishida Kitar¯o (1965–66), Nishida Kitar¯o Zensh¯u, 19 vols, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Nishitani Keiji (1979), ‘Kindai no ch¯okoku’ shiron’, in Kawakami Tetsutar¯o, Takeuchi Toshimi et al. Kindai no ch¯okoku, Tokyo: Fuzanb¯o, pp. 18–37. Nishitani Keiji (1986–95), Nishitani Keiji Chosakush¯u, 26 vols, Tokyo: S¯obunsha. Ohashi Ry¯osuke (1995), Nishida tetsugaku no sekai: aruiha tetsugaku no tenkai, Tokyo: Chikuma Shob¯o.

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Sakai, Naoki (1997), Translation & Subjectivity: On ‘Japan’ and Cultural Nationalism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Suzuki T¯oru (1977), Nishida Kitar¯o no sekai, Tokyo: Keis¯o Shob¯o. Tanabe Hajime (1963–64), Tanabe Hajime Zensh¯u, 15 vols, Tokyo: Chikuma Shob¯o. Tosaka Jun (1966–79), Tosaka Jun Zensh¯u, 6 vols, Tokyo: Keis¯o Shob¯o. Yamada Munemutsu (1975), Sh¯owa no seishinshi: Kyoto gakuha no tetsugaku, Kyoto: Jinbun Shoin.

5

Time, everydayness and the specter of fascism Tosaka Jun and philosophy’s new vocation Harry D. Harootunian

Modernity’s time In the interwar conjuncture (1918–40) throughout the industrializing world of Euro-American, the Soviet Union and Japan, and their colonial possessions, no philosophic concept proved more urgently demanding and less tractable to resolution than the question of time. By the same measure, no category of the social formation since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1918 loomed as importantly as the status of the everyday and its transformative powers to trouble the precinct of social theory. The Bolshevik revolution dramatized the agency of the masses and their capacity to make and write their own history of the everyday at precisely the same moment capitalist modernization was installing consumer culture structured by the commodity form. What the everyday came to signify more than mere ‘dailyness’ was the social space occupied by mass industrial workers denoting the site where the contradiction between value and social life was sharpest and the effort to overcome it most intense. At the heart of this emergent conﬁguration was the formation of new social space signifying the lived everyday in the expanding industrialized sites and new temporalities demanded by the establishment of the working day and capital accumulation, manifest in the co-existence of world standard time and countless local times, representing diverse forms of social existence and their pasts, people continued to live in the modern present. The nation state, with its own national narrative and linear temporal trajectory, authorized calendars that ﬁxed days of memory, observances and duties that required repeating every year. This confrontation of temporalities, attesting to the immense unevenness people lived and negotiated daily, was frequently condensed into a competition of claims and even conﬂicts, especially in colonial domains and in the industrial cities that were already embodying the co-existence of different lived presents. These confrontations were often displaced in more general and formal discussions between the claims of experience and memory and historical knowledge which, in keeping with the new regimes of time shaped by science, led to establishing disciplines based on objective inquiry and the need to verify facticity over subjective intimations derived from sensory impressions. If experience proved to be only immediate, transitory and memory temporally imprecise, history’s knowledge could claim superior status owing to its

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correspondence to measurable time which constituted one of its principal assertions of empirical certainty. The competition between conﬂicting regimes of time was relayed through the categories of history and the everyday, knowledge and experience and became one of the deﬁning tropes of Japan’s modernity in the interwar period. In the 1930s this discussion acquired a special urgency to resolve the conﬂict as history was identiﬁed increasingly with the nation-state and the everyday with a temporal reality that had not been entirely assimilated to it. The way to resolving this struggle turned toward rethinking through both the status of the historical and its temporality in order to counter the nation-state’s monopolization of both. The implications of this intellectual shift required philosophy to acquire a new vocation devoted to the subject of the everyday, whereas its political connotations insisted on an open confrontation with fascism and its cultural ideology. With capitalist modernization and urban industrialization, history became its own time, what Hegel earlier named ‘history, itself ’, as if it were now appointed to chart the momentous changes unleashed and measure their velocity toward the future. But this discovery of an autonomous historical time marked the appearance of an ‘internal time’ which presupposed and incorporated a complex discussion on the status of temporality that generated a philosophic assault on both the domain of quantitative time and the ambition of the new science to measure all things objectively in order to classify them. What this critique revealed was a desire for a truer, qualitative time, ultimately expressed in knowledge derived from experience, removed from the external world of things. Despite its unease with the external world of scientiﬁc measurement, philosophic critique was as much directed at capitalism’s commitment to quantitative and measurable time, abstract time, paradigmatically inscribed in the calculation of surplus value and labor time. The familiar guideposts of this discussion were surely Henri Bergson, who probably inaugurated it; Georg Simmel, who explicitly linked the new urban metropolis to the interiorization of time; Georg Lukacs, whose powerful critique politicized a philosophy devoted to the exemplars of science that were now made to disclose how social life had become objectiﬁed and reiﬁed; Edmund Husserl, who bracketed the external world to gain access to the state of pure, psychological experience and Martin Heidegger, who temporalized existence and ontologized Being’s ‘historiality’. But what seemed to hold the diverse strands together was the effort to rescue the loss of qualitative time and to restore immediate subjective experience discounted by both science and capital as a form of knowledge, a lived time at the level of the everyday now removed from the structure of clock and calendar. This move was inﬂected in Japan, as well, with Nishida Kitar¯o’s early Zen no kenky¯u devoted to plumbing the precincts of ‘pure experience’ underlying the everyday and absolutizing eternal values, Abe Jiro’s solipsistic self, Watsuji Tetsur¯o’s valorization of cultural form and other formulations which, regardless of place, would lead to internalization, dematerialization and dehistoricization of time and the imposition of an everyday delegated to serve as the reservoir of interior, immediate experience no longer mediated by the external world of things. In Japan, this world was ampliﬁed by the shi sh¯osetsu, especially, the turn to a philosophy of cultural form free from historical determination and the ﬁguration

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of a folkic everydayness whose countenance remained unchanged throughout time (Harootunian 2000: 202–357). What this particular convergence between a critique of quantitative time and the search for what Lukacs identiﬁed as ‘a reality more real . . . than isolated facts and tendencies’ (Lucacs 1997: 18) produced was a conception of eternality (once the vocation of religion) offering the illusory promise with which to secure unity. Throughout the industrializing world of the 1920s and 1930s this impulse toward the idea of the eternal was manifest in the certainty of a continuing folkic community, as manifest in the eternal and unchanging everyday of Yanagita Kunio, and diverse forms of what Max Horkheimer had called ‘sublime self-deception’ projected by idealist philosophy and its conviction in the transhistorical capacity of ideas and values (Horkheimer 2005: 14). Whereas in Japan the custodians of this metaphysical tradition were Nishida, Watsuji, Kuki Sh¯uz¯o and their followers, who provided the philosophical grounding for the virtual dematerialization of experience and the detemporalization of the everyday, it was Tosaka Jun who sought to restore to the everyday the rhythms of its uneven but co-existing temporalities and rematerialize the claims of cultural form.

Tosaka’s Kyoto It is interesting to note that Tosaka Jun was one of the principal philosophical adversaries of what in the interwar period was known as ‘Kyoto Philosophy’. The paradox of his commitment to putting into question with a penetrating critique the philosophic presuppositions of the Kyoto school, against such luminaries as Nishida Kitar¯o, Watsuji Tetsur¯o, Tanabe Hajime and Miki Kiyoshi, lies in the obvious fact that he was a product of this intellectual tradition, a student of Nishida and Tanabe and intimate with many of its proponents like Nishitani Keiji. No greater tribute to both his brilliance and his decency as friend and the tragedy of his short life was offered than in the honest recollection of Tanabe Hajime, whose principal theorization on ‘species’ (shu) Tosaka had sharply criticized. For me Tosaka Jun was in reality a friend difﬁcult to forget. As is well known there was an intellectual opposition between him and myself. Not only did we meet and engage in mutually violent argumentation, from him I often received pointed criticism (printed in journals) that added ﬁerce stimulation. But when meeting with him, he was unfailingly (kiwamete) friendly. Even though he was violently disputatious, he never left either improper ill-feeling or feelings of estrangement. I had come to be the target of a left wing attack but in spite of the intellectual fury of Tosaka’s assault, his way of presenting things was not simply . . . niggardly offensive dislike and indirectly cutting. On this point I could not but acknowledge a character in Tosaka that should be extraordinarily respected . . . He did not have the common, indecisive nervousness (found) among men who present philosophy but (showed) a rarely seen manliness with generosity. Tosaka was a person who in reality had to be respected and revered as a man. Above all else, my grieving heart focuses on this point. (Tanabe 1976: 3–4)

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Tanabe’s grief was real enough, as was his conviction that Tosaka, in the end, was ‘a natural leader who was able to gather in his person the respect and reverence of people drawn by the charm of his character’, a truly precious human being. The Kyoto aesthetician Nakai Masakazu also reported on Tosaka’s disputatious but generous character. Nakai’s non-Marxian socialism was probably closer to Tosaka’s politics but his insistent Neo-Kantianism too often clashed with his effort to read Marx’s materialism through the same Neo-Kantian optic. Despite the arguments they had while on long walks in Kyoto, the two were not as far apart as it seemed. Both shared an earlier socialization in Neo-Kantian philosophy, which prompted Tosaka to move to considerations of science and its methods and Nakai to art and representation. What linked them together was a shared interest in the status of space and its structuring and enframing aptitudes. Both, moreover, were committed to enlightenment ideals and the necessity of working for the dissemination of scientiﬁc knowledge among the masses: Tosaka with his abortive scheme to compile an encyclopedia for such purposes, and Nakai with his promotion of a weekly newspaper called Doyobi (‘Saturday’) for and by the masses. They also momentarily shared the politics of the popular front against fascism, willing to suspend their ideological differences (Tosaka’s Marxism and Nakai’s non-Marxian socialism). Tosaka was born in Tokyo in 1900 and attended the Seinan Lower School and the Keisei Middle School and the elite First Higher School in Tokyo (Dai Ichik¯o). In 1924 he graduated from the philosophy faculty of Kyoto Imperial University and immediately volunteered for military service in a ﬁeld artillery brigade stationed in Chiba Prefecture. He was discharged in the following year as a cadet. From roughly 1926 to 1931 he taught as an instructor in colleges in Kyoto and K¯obe and in 1931 obtained a post at H¯osei University in Tokyo. The circumstances of this appointment resulted from H¯osei’s decision to release Miki Kiyoshi who apparently had earlier run afoul of the Peace Preservation Law. Tosaka’s return to Tokyo was thus as Miki’s successor, not a surprising move since he – Tosaka – had already been intellectually bonded to the elder Miki in Kyoto and his momentary but momentous embracing of Marxism after his study tour in Germany. During these early years in the Kyoto area, Tosaka wrote a number of articles based on his graduation thesis on space, as well as the seminal ‘On Scientiﬁc Method’ and ‘The Logic of Ideology’. He also began to move steadily away from Neo-Kantianism toward Marxism. While still in Kyoto he became involved in a Marxism study group and became a member of the ‘Proletarian Scientiﬁc Research Institute’ (1929) and was arrested as a sympathizer of the Communist Party. The axis of his Marxian work on scientiﬁc method and ideology revolves around his seminal thesis on space. In 1927, for example, he produced an essay, titled ‘Space as Characteristic’ (Seikaku to shite no k¯ukan), in which he ﬁrst formulated the idea that space constituted a characteristic of nature at the same time that it presented a ‘dynamic confrontation’ with it (Tosaka 2001: 295). He later reﬁned this ‘confrontation’ by re-presenting the dyad as a ‘dialectical’ method and ‘object’ in learning, guiding the ‘superiority of method’ by way of a ‘solution of the problem’. Once situated in the itinerary of a dialectical method (more Kantian than Hegelian), Tosaka moved rapidly to embrace materialism with the

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publication of Ideorogi no ronrigaku (1930), which developed further the role played by ‘object’ and ‘method’ and its ﬁnal transformation into the categories of ‘position(ality)’ and ‘problem’ (Tosaka 2001: 295). Here, he concluded that the dialectical structure of ‘historical and social existence’, founded on the predominance of the ‘problem’ over ‘positionality’, is grasped through a ‘reﬂecting on the theoretical structure of the characteristic logic’. What Tosaka apparently aimed to elucidate was the ideological character of theory and logic. The subsequent drift to war and fascism, after the army’s seizure of Manchuria in 1931, paralleled Tosaka’s reorientation toward materialism (a move Tanabe associated with his talent for science rather than philosophy) and the establishment of the Society for the Study of Materialism (Yuibutsuron kenky¯ukai), after the abolition of the Japan Communist Party. The ‘Society’ was active until 1938, when it was shut down by the state, whose activities combined a sustained and (what seems now as an unparalleled) rigorous exposition of questions related to philosophic materialism and explicit anti-fascist activity and struggle at the cultural level. Its journal, ‘Studies in Materialism’, published seventy-four numbers, in addition to the Yuibutsuron zensh¯u (66 volumes) to momentarily become the intense fulcrum of ‘enlightenment’ thinking in a dark time of trouble. The intellectual excitement it generated was matched by penetrating political criticism in articles that invariably showed the telltale signs of state censorship. Tosaka, who was at the center of this intellectual whirlwind, directed his attentions, on the one hand, to envisaging a comprehensive theory of science (Kagakuron, 1935) and, on the other, to mounting a powerful assault on liberalism and capitalist cultural ideology under fascism (Nihon ideorogiron, 1935). At the same time, he opened up a critical front against fascism as it had permeated everyday life in the 1930s through the publication of works like Shis¯o to fuzoku (1936) and Sekai no ittan to shite no Nippon (1937) that sought to clarify the conditions of contemporary Japan. In this regard, some of his most striking work addressed the logic of journalistic presentation and its unacknowledged reliance on hermeneutic philosophy (in newspapers and radio) and the representation of events. But it was precisely for this reason and the power of fascism that ultimately forced him to succumb, ﬁrst in 1937 when he was prohibited from writing and, then, a year later, when he and the group around him were arrested and found guilty for having violated the Peace Preservation Laws. He was sentenced to three years of penal servitude for his leadership role. He was ﬁrst incarcerated in the police prison in Suginami Ward and then later in 1944 sentenced to the Tokyo Penitentiary. A year later he was transferred to a facility in Nagano, to escape air raids. Tosaka died of malnutrition and impossibly cramped quarters after three months, on August 9, a week before the war ended. Unlike Antonio Gramsci, he was not permitted to have books, paper or pen in his prison conﬁnement. His friend and intellectual guide Miki Kiyoshi died in prison a month later, after the war’s end.

The separation of art and life At the center of the philosophic quest for the ‘eternal’ in the interwar period was the conviction that life had been severed from art and this dangerous separation

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preﬁgured a crisis of spirit – seishin (geist) which threatened the domain of culture and its dominance over everyday life. It should also be noted that culture had already been deployed to replace labor power and its capacity to create value. Speciﬁcally, this reﬂected the perception that culture – form – had once dominated everyday life but with the establishment of the system of bourgeois production, and the transformation of society into a vast social mechanism, which meant the installation of an objective world determined by clock, calculation and calendar – rational efﬁciency – everyday life fell sway to a new social discipline devoted to producing objects, whereby all activity was subordinated to the routines of an industrial regime. Marx, of course, had seen this immense switchover in the nineteenth century in his observation of the objectiﬁcation of social relations and the separation of worker from capital demanded by the sale of labor power for wages. Georg Simmel was one of the earliest to have recognized the growing distance between subject and object world in metropolitan life and sought to show how art – form – would remain impervious to life and history; ‘greater than life’ (mehr-leben) as he described it in his writings on the philosophy of history and his last major text on historical time. Continuing this precedent, his student Georg Lukacs earlier made an heroic effort to return form to its privileged status but when he turned toward Marxism he re-coded the classic split between cultural form and everyday life by appealing to a theory of reiﬁcation which demonstrated how worker’s consciousness revealed the very divisions between subject and object worlds required by capitalist production. In a sense his effort to demonstrate the process of realizing subject/object identity in the proletariat echoed this earlier romantic impulse to reunite art – form – and life. In Japan, this concern for the role played by form and its direction of everyday life was revealed early in Nishida’s texts that appealed to a realm of eternal values such as the good, true and beauty, which subsequently was reinforced and expanded by a rigorous philosophic discourse that aimed to show the autonomy of art (‘pure literature’), the eternality of form, not so much memory as ‘recollections of the present’, and the identiﬁcation of cultural essence – cultural value – that exceeded mere history – production – to constitute unchanging principles capable of stabilizing national life for all times and organizing everyday life according to their exemplars. Early on, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro melancholically complained about the separation of art and life in In’ei raisan but this culturalism and its efforts to control the present with the example of a completed and unchanging past became a modernist absolute in the decade of 1930s, and clashed with all of those attempts, principally coming from Marxists, which sought to demonstrate how the present still reﬂected determinations of an older, absolutist order that now had to be surpassed. We can see in this struggle the silhouette of a more fundamental conﬂict of claims between the ﬁxed spatial countenance upheld by culture (and its metabolizing of psychological time and experience) and the primacy of temporality and the pressure of the future on the present. The antagonism was over determining whether everydayness was a ﬁxed space embodying the unchanging principles of national formation or rather a temporal unity constituted of repetitious routine on the surface but hiding the co-existence of immense contradictions produced by history that

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corresponded to uneven temporalities imminently ready to explode into difference. It was at this juncture that thinkers began to envisage a division between high culture and its dilution into mass consumption and align themselves with their respective claims and their political associations. In response to this crisis of politics and culture, displacing the irreparable cleft between art and life, much of Tosaka’s program in the 1930s drew upon a prior and ﬁrm grasp of a philosophy of science that had already absolutized the ‘scientiﬁc method’ as the sole validation of veriﬁable knowledge. This meant dismissing claims to knowledge that had failed to satisfy the test of the natural and physical sciences, compelling a prevailing Neo-Kantianism to resort to constructing a ‘science of spirit’ that valorized subjective experience and promised to anchor knowability to a method based on the logic of culture rather than nature. Yet it was precisely this mimicking of natural science that condemned its metaphysics to inadvertently supporting (or supplementing) the very claims associated with an external world dominated by quantiﬁcation, objectivity and the rule of abstraction removed from considerations of common or collective social interest. With Tosaka, it is important to recognize that his thinking never went so far to the opposite extreme as to embrace metaphysics, even though he strove to address questions of knowledge science had left behind or had even discounted as unworthy forms of experience. Instead, Tosaka began with addressing the current situation and the corresponding political observation of how the emergence of fascism had relied on seizing the advantage offered by exploiting the separation between the unbridled development of capitalist economy and human needs which liberalism had always overlooked and undoubtedly sanctioned, as it still does in its new avatar. By the same measure he correctly saw how liberalism’s penchant for plural interests had openly invited precisely those ideological dangers implicated in a metaphysics of ideal cultural forms (sculpted by its hermeneutic method devoted to meaning) and their entitlement to eternality. At the heart of this cultural turn was the role played by the subject whose experience created enduring forms. In this way, Tosaka was able to detect in fascism a constitutive partnership of economics and culture that resulted in displacing a concern for social and human needs, allowing him, like Horkheimer at the same historical moment, to identify its claims as the true and legitimate heir of liberalism. Tosaka consistently endeavored to explain how what was happening in Japan during his short lifetime was actually no different from what was occurring elsewhere in the capitalist world. While acknowledging that fascism would invariably acquire different content mediated by local historical and cultural conditions, he was, nonetheless, persuaded that its appearance was not simply linked to the moment, as such, but rather to the epoch of capital, regardless of how advanced or delayed, and would remain indelibly inscribed in its interstice. It was the ghost in the machine. But the ghost was no metaphor. Fascism, it should be recalled, eschewed all forms of political representation, calling for a moratorium on them, in the interest of saving capitalism from itself, by eliminating the excesses of civil society and the spectacle of social (class) conﬂict.

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At the same time, fascism had successfully managed to transmute the subject of class into a communal or collective subject of the folk who created enduring cultural forms by rearticulating ideological components like the democratic national popular. In this way fascism actually appeared to banish precisely those aspects of liberalism that could solidify the people at the same time as it removed them from conﬂict producing identities. In his time, Tosaka recognized the relationship between a capitalist imperial chain and its diverse national links (ikkan) with Japan as simply a connecting rod in the formation of the sequence in a global network. Moreover, he recognized the importance of the role played by ideology (rather than merely economics) in the conﬁguration of this imperial chain and its relationship to uneven development. This was the principal purpose of his book on the Japan ideology which raised not simply the question of the manifest content fascism aimed to project (Japanism, Asianism, archaism) but also the mystery of its latent form itself and how it behaved like the commodity (TJZ III: 215–18). In Shis¯o to fuzoku (1936) he explained how ‘thought is able to acquire the (visage) of bodily reality in society by grasping the form of custom’, which conceals its presence. Custom’s ‘special characteristic’, he observed, resembles the ‘skin of society’ and thought is buried deeply within it (TJZ IV: 271). We must, I believe, pay close attention to this privileging of form, as against simply content like social structure or organization, as an obvious conjugation of the value form that had already constituted global capital’s self-mediating ground of the social to provide the optic through we grasp the world. Such a move enables us to recognize the structuring capacity of the social formation by the value or commodity form, with its enormous aptitude for supplying a matrix empowering the production of all other forms of the ‘fetishistic inversion’. In Tosaka’s conception of fascism, the inversion took the form of thought which lay beneath its bodily representation in timeless custom, and which worked to conceal the historical conditions of its own production, much like the commodity obscured the scandal of surplus value in order to enable unequal exchange between capital and labor and afﬁrm its claim to second nature. Hence the invocation of custom commanded subservience for no other reason than its own that would lead to the fetishistic disavowal of knowledge: ‘I know . . . but all the same’. In Japan, the emperor – not the system (tenn¯osei) ruling in his name – has signiﬁed this imperative, as he still does, and satisﬁes an arrangement that conforms precisely to Tosaka’s conception of custom functioning to conceal the mystery of its form.

Everydayness and ‘history’s mystery’ Nowhere was the aporetic relationship between the surface appearance of phenomena and what lay beneath or behind better illustrated than in Tosaka’s meditations on custom and the everyday. In the case of the former, there is formal appearance, which claims a timelessness made possible by the repression of the historical conditions of its productions; with the latter, the specularity of routinized repetition of daily life, where today promises to look like yesterday and tomorrow

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but which, like custom, manages to mask its historicality, what Tosaka called its ‘actuality’. Both custom and everyday intermingle incessantly to present the ﬁgure of an interchangeable and interactive countenance. Yet both played the role of stand-ins for the commodity form which had already permeated the recesses of daily life and to whose ‘behavior’ custom was now being assimilated. In Tosaka’s reckoning, the commodity form was the socially structuring agent of society’s relationships, whose condition of effectivity demanded the effacement of signs of historical production and time. What interested him most, and perhaps disclosed an unacknowledged residue of Kyoto philosophical idealism, was the conviction that surface phenomena – appearance – required investigations for traces of earlier forms of social custom and socialization received from the past. Pure phenomena merely called attention to an unevenness between the immediate presence of custom in the present, claiming the authority of timeless morality, and the vanished past that inaugurally produced it, between what now presupposed externality and a historicized interiority. In this connection, Tosaka summoned the example of Thomas Carlyle’s Sarter Resartus, which had put into question the relationship between outer clothing and the ‘concealed body’, between the mundane world and philosophy which ‘is less in view than daily clothing’ (TJZ IV: 272–73). The relationship between clothing, and what it hid, which Carlyle had failed to make a principle of philosophic speculation, constituted a trope that juxtaposed the everyday world of appearances and what its surface concealed. But Tosaka was quick to assert that clothing, by the same measure, changes over time to represent an historical index, even though it has come to resemble timeless custom because of the inattentiveness of philosophic idealism and its quest for ‘pure reason’. In a sense, Tosaka was pointing to the ‘other’ in the repetition of the same, what Gilles DeLeuze, elsewhere, referred to as the ‘secret’. ‘The most profound repetition: it alone provides the principle of the other one, the reason for the blockage of concepts. In this domain, as in Sarter Resartus, it is the masked, disguised or the costume which turns out to be the truth uncovered’ (DeLeuze 1994: 24; 70–71). For Tosaka, the model for this form of masking was custom itself, standing-in for the commodity, which disguises its repetition by constantly appealing to the new as difference (even though it is the same). But it is only through its manifest repetition that the commodity is able to call attention to what is not apparently visible in appearance, its underside, so to speak, which is the side of its production, its having been made in a determinate moment and by speciﬁed labor power now lost to time. This difference is already preﬁgured by the commodity’s (or custom’s) unveiled outside and its unseen inside. Because Tosaka had designated the quotidian and its materiality as philosophy’s vocation, he was able to claim the everyday in the present as the proper category of philosophic reﬂection. Its materiality demanded an abandonment of diverse forms of transcendental speculation, which invariably bracketed both its empirical and historical dimensions. This move away from reﬂection founded on the passage of time, a philosophic intervention that always comes too late (like Hegel’s Owl of Minerva) meant engaging the immediacy of the phenomenal present ﬁlled with unrealized meaning capable of giving direction to history. What this entailed was

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acknowledging the present itself as the site in which time is deployed, and the connection of successive instants into one another to constitute the lived every day. People associate the everyday with a variety of things, he wrote, but rarely envisage it as a problematic principle (TJZ III: 95). It is simply taken for granted, like habit. What is overlooked is how the everyday is related to the ‘structures of history’, and its capacity to illuminate the principle informing the historical. The identiﬁcation of everydayness with history meant returning to the question of time and historical temporality. To grasp history’s time, Tosaka reasoned, requires investigating the existence of the principle of everydayness, whose contours will reveal the hidden recesses of history’s precinct. Why the everyday was so important is that it housed the principle of historical time and no longer needed to rely on temporal markers derived from outside history. If history was its own time, as Tosaka insisted, now liberated from borrowing from a phenomenological time of consciousness and natural science, with its presumption of ‘homogenous time’ that is constantly ‘minced’, divided, or a pure temporality ultimately promoting an eternal time or an ‘eternal recurrence’, it is the principle of everydayness, which, because it is the same as the ‘principle of presentness’, constitutes the habitat of historical time (TJZ III: 96–98). It was, thus, at the level of the everyday where Tosaka perceived the structuring force of the commodity form – custom – in shaping both the experience of the present and lived reality of the ‘masses’ and the moment of ‘possibility’ (kan¯osei) for realizing difference vested in the capacity of everydayness to break loose from ceaseless daily routine. ‘In the principle of the day to day’, he wrote, ‘in the constant repetition of the same act, even though it is a different day, in the common activity of drinking tea, in the absolute inevitability of the principle of the everyday – in these things resides the crystallized kernel of historical time, here lies the secret of history’ (TJZ III: 101). Tosaka located this ‘secret’ in the existence of character, which referred to politics mediated by social relationships and the ‘material forces of production’, which qualitatively stamps its imprint upon experience to create history’s difference, its ‘heterogeneity’, as he put it (TJZ III: 98–99). By the same token, he advised that ‘character’ differs from individuality. In an era when other voices were stridently appealing to the largeness of Japan’s ‘world historical mission’, Tosaka’s designation of the everyday – the smallest unity of modern society – underscored the importance of temporality and the time of the present and how it – the everyday – is always momentarily poised to write its own history because it was history, itself. As a minimal temporal unity, the everyday was still able to preserve the kernel of history since it was here (and now) that history was lived and where it changed, rather than in the individual and its consciousness as ‘recorded’ in narratives reﬂecting the unfolding of historical consciousness. Here, it is important to contrast Tosaka’s conceptualization of historical time to Miki Kiyoshi’s ‘philosophy of history’ rooted in narrative progression and thus based on a conception of time borrowed from outside of history. With Tosaka, history is rooted in a perspective that follows the movement of one day to another, exempliﬁed in a parallelism that held that just as one person is a member of a class,

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a single day is a day in world history (TJZ III: 102). For this reason, Tosaka was encouraged to propose the everyday as philosophy’s true vocation and recommend a return to its materiality as a necessary countermove to offset the baneful effects of metaphysics and its appeal to the transcendent and eternal. Even though philosophy had begun to turn to the question of everydayness, Nishida, like Husserl, had made the bracketing of the outside world a condition for ﬁguring it. With the production of literature, especially the process of novelization expressed in formalizing the sh¯osetsu, we can observe the ﬁrst attempts to focus content almost wholly on the experience of the new everydayness as it was being lived as a solitary, individual existence in the interwar period. Virtually everywhere one turns it is possible to see that the subject of the sh¯osetsu was invariably embedded in the details of the present, the everyday life of the moment, the now time of experience. This sense of presentness – the now – Tosaka’s ima – was so prepossessing that writers like Tokuda Shusei, who concentrated on the vital division of city and countryside, employed prolepsis in order to secure the effect of a future that has already happened in the narrator’s present (Fujii 1993: 151–96). The important question forTosaka is why historical time had become such a compelling question in the present. Aware of a prior philosophic discourse focused on the status of time, he was convinced of the necessity of rescuing historical knowledge from both scientiﬁc dismissal and metaphysical (and idealist) transcendentalism. The motive prompting this preoccupation was the recognition of the ‘reality people were living in this historical time’. In other words, the problem for him was the present and the imperative to see how it is situated in ‘our historical time’. The sense of vision that comes from the presentness of today, from the character of the now, ‘constructs an independent order of values’. More importantly, it is not permissible to ‘measure the value system embedded in the reality of today with the categories of tomorrow’ (TJZ III: 102). The present announced its kinship with a period’s ‘character’ (seikaku), invariably a political marker, and thus called attention to a relationship between part and whole. The work of today must be done today, as tomorrow’s work corresponds to tomorrow’s necessity (TJZ III: 101). From this observation, Tosaka was convinced he had found the proper ‘law of perspective’ for planning work since the present determines what must and can be done before and what comes later (TJZ III: 102). What Tosaka was proposing was a conception of the historical present (echoing Miki Kiyoshi) that would effectively replace the domination of phenomenological time based on consciousness, a borrowed time, so to speak, enlisted from the domain of experience, as such, with one founded on the lived reality of a bodily temporality, since life, living, always takes place in the present. In this way, the present, containing the ‘kernel of the crystal’, embodied the condensed meaning of historical time: it was both the site of ‘necessity’ and ‘ﬂexibility’, encapsulated in the ‘today’ and made ‘visible’ in now-time (TJZ III: 101). A today that epitomized the present and shared with it the concealed principle of historical understanding constituted the ‘everyday’. If, as Tosaka believed, the present appears as the ‘time of our life’, a timeless duration of endless routine and repetition necessitated by work, the everyday

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also furnished the location of ‘history’s mystery’. Here was an obvious appeal to the model of the commodity form (custom), whose mysterious form managed to conceal from view the principle of historical production whereby labor as value was transmuted into the operation of surplus value that now appeared as natural and timeless. A deeply embedded, non-historical everyday life – what Marx referred to as the ‘religion of the everyday’ – thus housed the kernel of history that now demanded to be drawn out. The present stands apart from the past precisely because it constitutes an accent of historical time as a whole and shows itself as an ‘intense’ condensation of its totality. In fact, the present shows itself as the ‘kernel of the crystal’, now seeking to convey the association of Marx’s description of the commodity form, and is capable of disclosing the secret of a prior, hidden history remaining in concealment. The reason for this, Tosaka explained, lies in the fact that the ‘solidity of history is congealed in these places’. In fact, he saw the present manifestly miniaturized in the today (konnichi) and showing its shape in the ‘now’ (ima). Hence, the present, reminding contemporaries of the ‘realm of necessity’, must be the starting point for rehistoricization and actualization, the site of planning and organization of what comes before and what follows. Yet in spite of the regularity of routine, common experiences, and the same thing happening everyday, Tosaka insisted on separating one day from another, distinguishing each day from another, while recognizing their inescapable dailyness, because the everyday still ‘housed the . . . kernel of historical time in such things’, and disclosed the mystery of time’s difference. What made the everyday so crucial in Tosaka’s consideration was the recognition that for most people it was the site of work, which never waits, because they must work today in fear that tomorrow may be worse if they do not. The present is always today and history must always be practical, the time and place of praxis, as well, capable of realizing ‘possibility’ but not utopian anticipation and expectation (TJZ III: 103). In Tosaka’s theorization, historical time was compelled to conform to an order that permitted no exchanging of today for tomorrow or yesterday. Unless this mixing is avoided, he warned, the present will be confused with a possibility belonging elsewhere and forfeit the promise of ‘actualization’ in the now (ima). Again, Tosaka’s complaint targeted a formal theory impelled by the law of noncontradiction that would not tolerate the spectacle of non-identity and difference and insisted on arranging (mediating) things by lining them up on the same plane in a linear series. In its place, he proposed a conﬁguration that distributed things among other levels, rather than constraining them to a singular, linear plane that would open the way for possibility and difference capable of exceeding ﬁxed identity and the rule of sameness. The argument was based on a logic that presumed that even though a thing with one identity existed on one level, it was still possible for it to become something else and acquire another identity once transposed to another level. Implied in this equation was the possibility of envisaging differing but co-existing rhythms of time within the same social space, which would account for the possibility of different identiﬁcations. It was reinscription in a different register. Allowing for at least two levels of lived reality invalidated the law of non-contradiction and its

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indentitarian impulse and introduced into the everyday the multi-dimensionality of time and space (TJZ III: 103). What, for me, seems particularly important in this new conﬁguration is how the everyday now signaled the intersection of co-existing but different temporalities requiring an accounting (resembling the concourse of different speeds and velocities in the physical world not visible to the naked eye) rather than merely a single temporal linearity claiming sameness and simple repetition. With this perspective it would become possible for the everyday to produce a history that is never completed or closed. But even in Tosaka’s time, others were already working to eternalize the everyday, and demonstrate its completion and place it beyond the bounds of history and time. This was particularly true of folklorists, who had already eschewed history and the historical for an unchanging everyday existence (seikatsu), a folkic narrative lived enduringly by the folk, condensed in the residue of surviving customs and religious practices providing the anchor of authentic life. The impulse was also observable in the ‘static history’ of Kobayashi Hideo who envisaged an endless everyday as an alternative to historical narrative, what he designated as historical excess, Marxian and non-Marxian. The content of Kobayashi’s conceptualization of the everyday was based on a sense of commonness inscribed in the literary classics and religious art of Japan and available to every age as a guide to living in the present and living as if present was past. In Kobayashi’s reckoning, the social experience produced by modernity demanded a form of involuntary forgetting that required repressing a truer history submerged in the humus of contemporary, commodiﬁed materiality. This quest for resuscitating a truer history resembles the operation of recollecting a past that had become uncanny, strange and consisted of the continuity of ‘commonness’ in the historical and cultural unconscious of the folk. In one sense Kobayashi shared with Tosaka a desire to unveil what lay hidden. But whereas Tosaka was concerned with revealing the mysterious side of commodity form and the contradictions it sheltered, Kobayashi departed from his contemporary by ﬁguring a scenario capable of distancing or removing the everyday from the historical dominant of a developmental schema for the recovery of a timeless heritage. Its aim was to invert a history that might reveal how work created value rather for one whereby value – cultural value – produces life. When asked during the symposium on the overcoming of modernity how he was able to perceive the unchanging in the movement of a changeable history, he replied that time was not development. To grasp history not as time bound determination but as a timeless classic meant understanding the position of the artist in the continuum of creativity. Hence, the act of appreciating a classic, even for the ordinary person, is found ‘in the experience of the everyday’ (Kawakami Tetsutar¯o and Takeuchi Yoshimi 1979: 231). The effort to deprive the everyday of a politics of time and the possibility of actualization in the present drew the attention of Tosaka’s friend Miki Kiyoshi. For a moment Miki tried to devise a Marxian philosophical anthropology in the 1930s that might incorporate the everyday and contain its ‘possibility’. But in the end he turned to envisioning an all-encompassing philosophical history that

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tried desperately, and failed, to bring together Hegel’s earlier (in the Aesthetics) recommendations for a total history based on the everyday and his subsequent decision to lodge reason and history in the fully-formed nation-state. Where Miki sought to depart from Tosaka’s powerful intervention was in his effort to yoke the everyday (which he also saw as the ‘grounding’ of history) to the mission of world history. What this meant was emploting the everyday within the framework of world history signifying the status of an achieved nation-state. But he could only accomplish this conjuration by taking on the additional risk of making the everyday complicit in Japan’s vocation of fascism at home and imperialism abroad in Asia. The aporetic nature of this problem between everydayness and world history (the calling and domain of the nation-state) was manifest in the desire to fuse differing temporalities that would bring the now of everyday existence into alignment with the more abstract principle of Japan’s world historical mission. In many ways, this desperate bonding of the everyday to a larger world history worked ﬁrst to incorporate its unassimilated remainder and residue into the framework of the nation-state; at another level it attempted to efface the frictions of noncontemporaneous contemporaneity by subordinating the everyday to the larger spatio/temporal chronotope provided by Japan’s world historical mission. While acknowledging that the everyday was the principal site of action, it was a lesser principle of actualizing which he reserved for the larger stage of world history. The everyday remained outside the historical, as such, but gained its meaning from world history to form a unity with it. The implication of this move resulted in thoroughly spatializing everydayness and extending it to empire. Like so many of his contemporaries, Miki was drawn into discussions engaged in determining what constituted concrete ‘reality’ in a world already dominated by the commodity form and abstract exchange. He was convinced that the answer to the question was to be found in ‘historicality’ (rekishisei), echoing prior and parallel debates still taking place in Europe, notably Bergson and Lukacs, which had expressed, as Heidegger demonstrated, in Sein und Zeit (1927) a growing impatience with and even rejection of a regime based on quantitative, measurable time (clock time, the time of science) for forms of interior experience and psychological time. In Heidegger’s powerful account this misrecognition of the nature of temporality led fatefully to historicism and the establishment of a world dominated by the They (das Man). The logic of Miki’s intervention was driven by a conviction that the real referred to the realm of ‘actuality’ (jissaiteki), implying action (koiteki) (Miki 2000: 210). In this formulation, the actual would thus signify the meaning of everydayness, and speciﬁcally the situation humans ﬁnd themselves living in the everyday. But Miki’s construction failed to conceal an unease with the contradictory claims of historical representation and the presentation of everydayness, especially the potential conﬂict between history made to progressively reveal meaning and reason and an everyday dominated by endless repetition. To ﬁnesse the separation between two domains he recommended situating action, history’s vocation, in the everyday, even though he recognized the distance between the routines of everyday living and the activity of people on the stage of world history, the latter constituting

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the precinct of eventfulness, the former a realm spare in events and ﬁxed on the repetition of custom. There would be no contradiction, he declared conﬁdently, between an ‘actual standpoint’ and a historical one (Miki 2000: 211). Accordingly, the aporia surfaces when the original standpoint of anthropology, which seeks to emphasize everydayness, will be seen to be incompatible with an historical anthropology. History, Miki observed, was invariably understood as opposed to the everyday and concerned principally with events, the great and extraordinary who act on the stage of world history. The question he posed, but never really answered, was how to move from the eventless world of everydayness to the register of an event-ﬁlled world history, from experience to non-experience, a temporality of the present, mixed and entangled to a linear trajectory heading for a speciﬁc destination. Miki plainly grasped history as national narrative, whose content differed signiﬁcantly from the mundane experience of time in the everyday present. Moreover, history pointed to the singular and unique, while everydayness was the context of averaging and the commonplace, routine and repetition. For this reason, the everyday could never be seen as identical with history, which presumably occurred elsewhere and in a different zone of temporality. How Miki sought to resolve this knotted contradiction was to link the everyday and world history to a ground called ‘originary historicality’, which authorized the procession of a steady evolution progressing from the ﬁrst to the third level (Miki 2000: 215–16). The different and mixed temporalities signaled by the everyday and world history were restructured and smoothened into a narrative succession supposedly illustrating the inevitable maturation of time, its ‘ripening’ (zeitigen, kairos) (Miki 2000: 229–30). In other words, Miki sacriﬁced the temporality associated with the sentient claims of everyday life – experience and memory – to the higher necessity and abstraction of narrative movement and the ﬁnal (Hegelian) revelation of history’s meaning. Regardless of his decision to emplot the unity of the three categories in a linear progression representing the achieved ‘ripening’ (jijuku, jukusuru jikan) of history’s reason – the world historical – he, nevertheless, opened the path to recognizing the aporia of differing and distinct temporalities belonging to the separate spheres of everydayness and world history and the necessity of pursuing historicality from within the precinct of the everyday.

‘Matsuzakaya joins culture and life together’ In the postwar, and especially after 1960, the everyday has largely been succeeded by space-bound categories like public realm, publicity – the triumph of liberalism and its transmutation of civil society into a public sphere, marked by public opinion and the quest for greater communication, reﬂecting still the primacy of individual interests. But even before the installation of postwar society, we can recognize the attempt to relocate the everyday outside of the historical and detemporalize it by subordinating it to the space of nation form and its world historical mission. This spatialization effected in a number of discourses effectively emptied the everydayness of its crucial temporal dimension and robbed it of its capacity

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to foster a politics of actualization. Moreover, the drive to spatialize the everyday ultimately preﬁgured the later move to restructure it in such a way as to remove its capacity for producing dangerous and unanticipated excess. The postwar state ﬁnally secured the promise of dominating it, as Max Weber had once observed. We can see the beginnings of this arrangement with the attenuation of everydayness announced in the ﬁlms of Ozu Yasujir¯o described by Gilles DeLeuze as the ‘banalization’ or trivialization of everyday life and the determined effort to physically and materially resituate everyday life from the streets (where it was lived in the 1920s and 1930s) to the suburbs through the public implementation of housing policies and the construction of danchi targeting the middle class. But where the prewar perceived the everyday as the site of the subaltern masses who had made the modern everyday in the ﬁrst place and thus remained ever ready and positioned to rewrite it, if necessary, the postwar saw it as the habitus of the middle class and a category now more spatial than timeful, more rooted in consumption than production, and unavoidably more committed to culture’s incorporation of the political. What postwar planners learned from the prewar experience was to identify everyday life with space – often diminishing its temporal force – thereby restructuring the crucial chronotopic relationship between time and space and the possibility of actualization in the now. In this way, postwar state and society were thus able to recognize the organizational necessity of routinizing and standardizing it in order to assimilate the dangerous residues of the everyday to a new conception of civil order variously called the public sphere or civil society. In the end, Tosaka’s struggle to redeﬁne the relationship between culture and politics and avoid the incorporation of the latter into the former, which was at the heart of fascism and the Japan ideology, was transmuted into an advertisement found on delivery trucks of the large department store Matsuzakaya, which promised to fuse culture and life through the mediation of the commodity consumption. But this promise already reﬂects the establishment of the ‘endless everyday’ (owaranai nichij¯o) of ‘our future’, observed by the pop sociologist Miyadai Shinji, and now marks the dominant rhythm of Japanese life. What Miyadai is referring to is an endless everyday occupied by a body navigating its way through it with ceaseless consumption that provides ‘the means to live daily life’ (Miyadai Shinji, Fujii Yoshiaki and Nakamori Akio 1997: 147–57).

References DeLeuze, Gilles (1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, NewYork: Columbia University Press. Fujii, James (1993), Complicit Fictions, Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 151–96. Harootunian, Harry (2000), Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 202–357. Horkheimer, Max (2005), ‘On Bergson’s Metaphysics ofTime’, trans. PeterThomas, revised by Stewart Martin, Radical Philosophy, 131 (May/June), pp. 9–19. Kawakami Tetsutar¯o and Takeuchi Yoshimi (1979), Kindai no ch¯okoku, Tokyo: Fuzanb¯o.

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Lukacs, Georg (1997), Lenin, Norman Jacobs (trans), London: Verso. Miki Kiyoshi (2000), Miki Kiyoshi essensu, Uchida Hiroshi (ed.), Tokyo: Kobushi Shob¯o. Miyadai Shinji, Fujii Yoshiaki and Nakamori Akio (1997), Shinseki no reaeu, Tokyo: Hicho Shinsha, pp. 147–57. Tanabe Hajime (1976), Kais¯o no Tosaka Jun, Tokyo: Keikusa Shob¯o. Tosaka Jun (1977), Tosaka Jun Zensh¯u, 5 vols, Tokyo: Keikusa Shob¯o. Tosaka Jun (2001), Tosaka Jun no tetsugaku, Yoshida Masatoshi (ed.), Tokyo: Kobushi Shob¯o.

6

What was the ‘Japanese philosophy of history’? An inquiry into the dynamics of the ‘world-historical standpoint’ of the Kyoto School Christian Uhl

Between November 1941 and November 1942 the philosophers Nishitani Keiji, K¯oyama Iwao, and K¯osaka Masaaki, along with the historian Suzuki Shigetaka, held a series of three round-table discussions. The four participants belonged to the ‘second generation’ of the Kyoto School of philosophy, a group of thinkers around Japan’s pre-eminent philosopher Nishida Kitar¯o. The transcripts of these symposia were published in the journal Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron. The ﬁrst transcript appeared under the title ‘The World-Historical Standpoint and Japan’ in the January edition of 1942. The transcripts of the subsequent symposia – ‘The Ethical Nature and Historicity of the Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere’, and ‘The Philosophy of Total War’ – were published in April 1942, and in January 1943 respectively.1 In the same year, 1943, these ‘Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron-discussions’ were republished as a book (K¯oyama et al. 1943). Almost from the start, the ‘world-historical standpoint’provoked harsh criticism; during the war from the right wing and after the war from the leftist and liberal camps. Until today the Kyoto School is one of the most controversial issues within the debate about intellectuals’ collaboration with the war-time regime in Japan, and philosophy’s contamination by politics.2 However, I do not intend to make this debate the starting point of this chapter. Instead, I would ﬁrst like to turn back to the transcripts of the Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron-discussions, and leave it to its four participants to give the note and beat the time of my inquiry. My point of departure shall be the statement by which K¯osaka Masaaki opened the ﬁrst of the three symposia – or, more accurately, my own wondering about this ﬁrst, introductory statement.

Exposition of the question Recently I was asked what actually is: the ‘Japanese philosophy of history’. In the ﬁrst instance I was at a loss for an answer. But thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that the development of [the Japanese philosophy of history] on the whole passed through three stages. At the beginning an epistemology of history was ﬂourishing, which was inspired by Rickert – a phase which had already passed quite a while ago. It was followed by a phase in which one attempted to think of the philosophy of history in light of the

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Christian Uhl Diltheyan philosophy of life and hermeneutics; we can call this the second phase. Today, however, we make a further step forward, and become aware that the philosophy of history has to be concretely the philosophy of world history. This consciousness, in my view, marks the third stage . . . There is no doubt that we learned a lot from the thoughts of Ranke, or Hegel here. But it is at this point where we see ourselves confronted with the question . . . what is Japan’s task in world history? At this point no Western thinker can give us any answers. Here the Japanese have to rack their own brains. This is the reason why today, particularly in Japan, the call for a philosophy of history is raised. (CK I: 150)

This statement seems remarkable to me. At ﬁrst because the philosophical coordinates of K¯osaka’s narrative – from Rickert’s ‘epistemology of history’, via Dilthey and the philosophy of life, towards Ranke and Hegel – resonate strangely with the development of the philosophical discourse in Germany from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century. I say ‘strangely’, because K¯osaka seems to re-narrate the history of this discourse, but backwards, and from behind. I wonder, what this twisted re-narration means. And I wonder even more when I think about the last chapter of this twisted narrative: ‘There is no doubt, that we learned a lot from the thought of Ranke or Hegel here’, K¯osaka concedes. A central momentum of the German discourse about history in the early nineteenth century was the opposition between Ranke and the Historical School on the one hand, and Hegelian philosophy of history on the other. At the end of K¯osaka’s narrative, however, these two oppositional stances seem to coincide. What is the moral of K¯osaka’s tale? Rickert represents the Southern German School of Neo-Kantianism, a current in philosophy that was pre-dominant in Germany until, let us say, 1918. In the early twentieth century Kantianism had an eminent inﬂuence also on Japanese philosophers, as the earlier writings of Nishida, or those of Tanabe Hajime, the ‘second father’ of the Kyoto School, testify. The foundation of Neo-Kantianism was the Kantian critique of reason, especially its ‘negative’ impetus, as a destruction of naïve ontology and metaphysics. Primarily concerned with the inquiry into problems of scientiﬁc knowledge, NeoKantianism attempted also a rational explanation of the phenomena of history and culture. This ‘new beginning’ stood in explicit opposition against any kind of philosophy of life (Leben),3 including Dilthey’s attempt to base the historical disciplines on the concept of ‘Erleben’ (experience), the subject of which was no longer the merely rational, but the whole ‘willing, feeling, and thinking’ human being (Dilthey 1990: XVIII). The concept of ‘life’, which overshadowed the thinking of the whole period, appeared to be the only concept of totality, which had remained after metaphysics had done its ﬁnal, fatal somersault with Hegel, as Dilthey contended. In a nutshell: in contrast to the Neo-Kantian program of a ‘return to Kant’ (Rickert 1924–25: 163), the moral of K¯osaka’s narrative can be expressed as follows: away from Kantianism, and mere ‘epistemology of history’, and back to metaphysics and religion, and to concrete history itself – to world-history, to be precise (Hegel and Ranke).

‘Japanese philosophy of history’ 115 Indeed, such a moral is in fact symptomatic of the intellectual atmosphere in Japan at that time, an atmosphere that was increasingly charged by ‘the confrontation between Kantianism and Hegelianism . . . ’ (K¯oyama 1963–64: 537). And this confrontation is again in accordance with developments in Germany, where after the First World War Kantianism became the main target of philosophical critique. The Southern German School itself, namely Rickert’s former student R. Kroner, initiated a Hegel-renaissance (Holzey 1991: 307–25; Levy 1927: 58ff). Heidegger distanced himself from his teachers Rickert and Husserl by basing his analysis of the ‘Seinsfrage’ on the human being’s concrete In-der-Welt-Sein. The emergence of a philosophy of existence, of dialectical theology, or of philosophical anthropology are altogether results of a general turn away from the Kantian transcendental subject towards a philosophy of the concrete human being. This general tendency manifests itself also in a model of historical change, which was presented at that time by K¯osaka’s teacher Nishida, and thus it is probably not by coincidence that the three chapters of K¯osaka’s narrative strongly resonate with the three stages of Nishida‘s model. According to this model, after the eighteenth century as a period of ‘individual self-consciousness’ and liberalism, when the states did not yet stand in opposition against each other, and the nineteenth century as the period of ‘national self-consciousness’ and mere opposition of the nation states, now in the twentieth century we witness the beginning of a new worldhistorical era, in which this mere opposition has to be overcome and a new step of world formation has to be taken (NKZ X: 336)4 Here, as Nishida writes, ‘each State and each people live their individual, historical life, and at the same time, due to the realization of their particular world-historical missions, they unify and form a world-of-worlds’ (NKZ XII: 430).5 Nishida is eager to distinguish this idea from Wilson’s League of Nations. According to Nishida the League was unable to solve the problems of the day, as the outbreak of the Second World War made clear. The failure of the League was inevitable, because it was based on the antiquated ‘world-idea of the eighteenth century’ (NKZ XII: 429) – i.e. the ‘world-idea’ of Kant, to which the League’s preamble refers: here the political signiﬁcance of the moral of K¯osaka’s narrative may come to the fore as well. On the remaining pages I will use K¯osaka’s narrative as a readers’ guide to the Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron-discussions. I contend that K¯osaka provides a roadmap, which on a reduced scale shows the following stretches: (a) the overcoming of Kant (the world-idea of the eighteenth century) with Hegel; (b) the overcoming of Hegel with Ranke and the Historical School (the world-idea of the nineteenth century); (c) the overcoming of the ‘crisis of historicism’ (the crisis of modernity and the twentieth century) by transcending the standpoints of both Ranke and Hegel. This main road ramiﬁes into a number of byways, on which the discussants explore questions of Japanese, Chinese, or European history and politics, or competing political and philosophical concepts. Amongst these ramiﬁcations I will only touch upon some statements about China, and about war. As a rule I will stay on the main road, and, by doing so, make an attempt to discover the underlying structure and inner dynamics of the ‘world-historical standpoint’. With my conclusion I then hope to identify the pivotal point of the ‘Japanese philosophy

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of history’, and to shed light again on what I previously called the moral of K¯osaka’s narrative.

The dynamics of the ‘Japanese philosophy of history’ The overcoming of Kant by means of Hegel The ‘world-idea of the eighteenth century’ – i.e. the ‘ideology’ of the League of Nations [Nishida] – should be seen in the tradition of earlier concepts, namely Kant’s idea of a ‘peaceful . . . continuous community of all peoples on earth’ with the aim to ensure an ‘everlasting peace’ (KW VIII: 474f; KW XI: 195ff).6 Hegel could never be comfortable with this plan for peace. The reason for Hegel’s animosity is his disagreement with Kant’s moral philosophy in general. This moral philosophy subscribes to the Enlightenment principle that practical reason shouldn’t accept any exterior authority and has to decide everything autonomously and independently within itself. For that reason Kant builds up his ethics on a purely formal, abstract criterion comprehensible for any sensible man: a maxim of action which does not contradict itself. No maxim is acceptable, if general adherence to it would extinguish the reality upon which it relies (KW VII: 154f).7 For example: generalized theft would be incompatible with the requirement that private property shall exist (KW VII: 49ff).8 This is immediately intelligible. But at a second glance it becomes obvious that it remains unclear whether we should deputize for the preservation of private property or sanction general theft. According to Hegel such ethics must remain an ‘empty formalism’ (HW VII: 252).9 Which of the two alternatives would we choose if we had been brought up by pirates on a desert island? Our ethics become a distinct content only within a community, which is the concrete place of our morality. Such a community is a nation, a state, and that is in the full peculiarity of its individual historical life. We ﬁnd similar arguments in the Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron-discussions. K¯osaka argues: Because they are essentially transcendental ethics, the morality of Kant, too, is without any connection to history. But the nations and states, which are moving amidst history, are in fact deeply related to history. Because this has been forgotten, a kind of ethics, which have separated themselves from history, became thinkable. (CK II: 121)10 Nishitani is working along the same lines when he attacks the idea of the state as a union of free and equal individuals, and likewise of a union of equal, autonomous nations. Such an order, so Nishitani complains, relies only on the ‘mutual limitations’ of ‘the freedom of the passions and of selﬁshness, whether that be of the individuals or the states’ (CK III: 84). Yet, again according to Hegel: The passions, the objectives of the particular interests, the satisfaction of selﬁshness are the mightiest powers; they are mighty, because they don’t

‘Japanese philosophy of history’ 117 respect any limit, which law or morality want to impose upon them, and because those natural powers are much closer to man than the artiﬁcial and tiresome cultivation of discipline and moderation, law and morality.11 (Hegel XII: 34) The ideal of a unity of individuals or nation-states respecting each other in their freedom and equality must necessarily become undermined by those natural powers, and Nishitani therefore calls this ideal ‘dubious’. It is by just this ‘reciprocal limitation . . . of the freedom of passions and of selﬁshness’that it wants to preserve that same dubious freedom. ‘The recognition of the freedom of the other’, says Nishitani, has in view only the empty, abstract ‘human being’, respectively the empty, abstract ‘nation/people’. . . Accordingly any such order of freedom and equality must remain merely formal. So under the surface of this formal freedom and equality, the unlimited excesses of passion and the exploitation of the weak will take place in an even more perﬁdious way. . . . This is, what I called the deceitful nature of democracy. (CK III: 84) The bourgeois-liberal concept of ‘freedom’, which Nishitani is contesting here, indeed inspired Kant’s understanding of the state. For Kant a state is an instrument to beneﬁt the well-being of equal individuals aspiring to realize their personal objectives, and law and morality serve to keep those aspirations within reasonable bounds. A world-federation is the higher form of that, and therefore Kant pleads for this idea. But according to Hegel, a state is an entity overﬂowing from an organic, public life with which the individual identiﬁes itself, and that is why a state must be an individual thing vis-à-vis others. Moreover, as a community, within which the individual identiﬁes itself, the state and not the individual is the higher purpose. If a state is healthy, it has the power to amalgamate its parts into the whole of itself, or if necessary to sacriﬁce them for the sake of the whole. This happens especially in times of emergency, when the unity of the state is endangered and the individuals are called upon to lay down their life for the state. Consequentially war is for Hegel a moment of truth: in war the true ‘substantial relationship’ between state and individual becomes apparent (HW VII: 494–95). We ﬁnd a similar insight in the Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron-discussions, particularly in the discussant’s diagnosis of the ailments of modernity, and the idea that war is an effective medication to treat these ailments; in modern, liberal societies a deep rift separated the ‘atomised’individual from state and society, the ‘private’from the ‘public’ (CK I: 166; 169). According to this view, modern society lacked a centre of gravity, a centripetal force to counteract the centrifugal forces exercised by the particular, private interests of the individuals. The fragmentation of the whole, the disintegration of unity in a multitude of realms of values, becoming more and more autonomous and absolute, was the fate of modern society: ‘The entrepreneur thinks about economy, the lawyer about law etc., but thinking about things in isolated

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realms has now reached its limitations’, contended Suzuki. A ‘true renewal’ had to put an end to the ‘rampant spreading of such narrow subjectivity’ and the task of philosophy was to ‘tear down these borders’ (CK I: 181). Precisely for that reason, ‘total war’ was deﬁned as a ‘philosophical war’ (CK III: 56). The very demand for the breakdown of borders, the reuniﬁcation of the disintegrating areas of the military, art, economy, politics, thinking, and so on, and the re-transformation of the modern ‘homo oeconomicus’ into an ‘original human being’ was fulﬁlled by war in an extraordinarily effective way (CK III: 73). War, as Nishitani argues, compels the concentration of forces – i.e. the conversion of the modern state into a ‘national defence state’ (CK III: 99; 108n) – and educates the individuals towards ‘asceticism’, that is to say, to the subordination of their ‘selﬁsh’ private interests for the sake of public wealth (CK III: 86n). Elsewhere Nishitani circumscribes this ‘asceticism’ as messhi h¯ok¯o, ‘extinct the self, and serve the public’ (Nishitani 1979: 26). In times of peace, Hegel argues, ‘the civil life expands, every sphere retires into its shell, and in the long run this is a transformation of society into a quagmire; the particularities of men are becoming more and more inﬂexible and ossiﬁed.’ But ‘the unity of the body’is a precondition for good health, and war has the power to restore this unity by preventing the individuals from becoming engulfed in the morass of their ‘selﬁsh’ interests. ‘The moral health of the peoples/nations . . . is maintained by war just like the motion of the winds preserves the sea from putrefaction, which an enduring stillness, if not to say an enduring peace would cause’ – thus one of Hegel’s polemics against Kant (HW VII: 492–94). Similar polemics can be found especially in the third Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron-discussion: Koyama: The so-called paciﬁsts must inevitably sink into frustration when they collide with the reality of war. Thus they imagine an eternal peace outside of history, at the end of history. . . . This fantastic idea is a breech birth, it is not real at all and cannot steer reality. (CK III: 65; 67) Kosaka:

As the idea of an eternal peace is mere fantasy, the idea of an eternal war opposes the nature of humankind. But . . . how do things look if – as said above by Suzuki – the bare opposition between war and peace is neutralised, and if we formulate the idea of a creative, a constructive war? (CK III: 61; 65)

Suzuki:

It is undoubtedly true that history always evolves from war and, as Mr. Kosaka says in his ‘Metaphysics of War’, it cannot be denied that war is the dynamics of history. War is the most vital power of history. . . . war and history progress together inﬁnitely. War is the dynamics of history, and anything like a period of time without war – from a realistic point of view – is absolutely unthinkable. . . . War is not only a necessity. War is eternal. . . . War is truth; war unveils the truth of history. (CK III: 55; 64–65)

‘Japanese philosophy of history’ 119 In other words, war is much more than just a healthy refreshment. Hegel would agree: ‘The state ultimately has to be the immediate reality . . . of a people. As a particular, individual entity it is exclusive of other, similar individuals’, and for that reason, Hegel continues, ‘the conﬂict between them becomes a relationship of violence, a state of war . . . ’ (HW VIII: 345–46).12 Kant, as Hegel argues elsewhere, has suggested a confederation, ‘. . . which was to settle conﬂicts between the states . . . But the state is an individual and in individuality negation is inherent. Consequently if a number of states build a family, then this confederacy has to create an antithesis and has to produce an enemy’ (HW VII: 494). The assertion that negation is inherent in individuality has to be seen against the backdrop of Hegel’s dialectics, according to which ‘negation’ does not only mean the drawing of a borderline, but the production of (an ontologically necessary) contradiction: It is as particular entities that states enter into relations with one another. Hence their relations are, on the largest scale, a maelstrom of external contingency and the inner particularity of passions, private interests and selﬁsh ends, abilities and virtues, vices, force, and wrong. All whirl together, and in their vortex of the ethical whole itself, the autonomy of the state is exposed to contingency. The principles of the national minds are wholly restricted on account of their particularity, for it is in this particularity that, as existent individuals, they have their objective actuality and their self-consciousness. Their deeds and destinies in their reciprocal relations to one another are the dialectics of the ﬁnitude of these minds, and out of it arises the universal mind, the mind of the world, free from all restriction, producing itself as that which exercises its right – and its right is the highest right of all – over these ﬁnite minds in the ‘history of the world which is the world’s court of judgement’. (Hegel VII: 503)13 According to Hegel, history is the dialectical process in which the ‘mind of the world’ realises itself. This process comprises several stages, which are represented by the ‘national minds’ in which the ‘mind of the world’ objectiﬁes itself, ﬁrstly in the ‘world-historical individuals’, under the banner of which a people uniﬁes, then in the trans-individual orders and institutions of the state that these peoples form, to ﬁnally complete itself in art, religion and philosophy. Once this ﬁnal stage of self-reﬂection has been reached, and a people has fulﬁlled its world-historical task to realise the idea of its era, then the individuals turn away from the state to which they had been loyal. They begin to dream of different things, ‘every sphere retires into its shell’ and their ‘particularities become inﬂexible and ossiﬁed’, as Hegel said above. And even if the state may persist for a while, it ultimately has to break into pieces and perish. Because then another people, which bears in itself the idea of a new era, is already ascending. Hegel deﬁnes the succession of ‘worldhistorical peoples’, out of which the ‘mind of the world’ procreates itself, as ‘the development of the mind’s consciousness of its freedom’ (HW XII: 67nn). The ‘end of history’is reached in Hegel’s philosophy and its historical reality, i.e. in the Prussian state. The universal mind’s ﬁrst steps up to this point are represented

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in Hegel’s system by the great peoples of the Oriental world: China, followed by India and Persia. There, according to Hegel a self-consciousness of thinking did not yet exist. True history therefore begins in Europe, with the Greeks, unfolds in the Roman world and completes itself in the German world. In a nutshell: worldhistory ‘moves from East to West, because Europe is the end of world-history and Asia is the beginning’ (HW XII: 134). It is precisely at this point that Hegel, who served so far as a comrade in arms against the Kantian ‘world-idea of the eighteenth century’, ﬁnally becomes a burden, even to K¯osaka, who writes: The East has been the pre-history of world-history, but it has been the latter’s fundament as well. Precisely for this reason . . . it did not appear at the surface of world-history. But now the world shall no longer be the West alone, but simultaneously the East as well. . . . We have reached the stage at which the world shall come into existence concretely as a world [a unity of parts]. So the East – as if it had stood still for too long, but then had broken through a dam – becomes the tidal stream of history. And the task of Japan is to become the principle cause of such world-historical order. (Hiromatsu 1989: 49)14 The overcoming of Hegel by means of Ranke ‘Although the earth is a globe’, Hegel teaches, ‘history does not circle around it, but has a distinct East, and this is Asia’ (HW XII: 137). K¯osaka obviously contradicts this teaching. Suzuki does the same: According to Hegel, it was the Roman and German people who carried the destiny of world-history on their backs, but today it is Japan, which has become conscious of such a world-historical destiny. Here indeed the one or the other aspect may resemble Hegel, but isn’t there a difference? The reason why Japan possesses leadership in East-Asia lies with the fact that Japan is conscious of its world-historical destiny, which actually is this consciousness. This destiny is not saddled on Japan objectively, but Japan makes it subjectively conscious to itself. (CK II: 127)15 The concept of ‘world-historical people’ is borrowed from Hegel, as Suzuki concedes. But despite such borrowings, a Hegelian philosophy of history is not yet what the discussants really have in mind: ‘There is an a priori, the framework of an a priori logic has been constructed, on which a philosophy of world-history has been erected’, K¯osaka criticises (CK II: 126). Such a world-history still remains on the standpoint of positivity, of being. It binds everything and everybody to a single telos and gives no way to the peoples to unfold and develop freely from out of themselves. In Hegel’s system they are nothing more than the henchmen of the ‘mind of the world’, to whose jurisdiction they are subject. In addition they do not know the master-plan, instinctively they are unaware of the purpose

‘Japanese philosophy of history’ 121 they serve (HW XII: 45–49), or in Suzuki’s words: they are carrying their destiny unconsciously. The discussants’criticism of Hegel is generally directed against teleological conceptions of history under a criterion, which is beyond or outside of history. This attitude corresponds with the standpoint of Leopold von Ranke’s Historical School, which emerged within the horizon of the romantic reaction against Enlightened criticism of culture and tradition, and the Enlighteners’tendency to subsume everything human under invariant, universal principles of reason. The arch-enemy of the Historical School however, Ranke’s student Burckhardt, identiﬁes as follows: ‘. . . above all: no philosophy of history!’ (Burckhardt 1978: 4). The Historical School proclaimed that not any philosophical a priori construction of history can inform us about ourselves and our place in history, but only historical research considering the manifestations of cultural life in their uniqueness and singularity could achieve this task. The question of the meaning of historical eras, the rise and demise of peoples and states etc., should ﬁnd its answer precisely in the richness and diversity of historical life. The meaning and value of history is inherent in history itself. In the frailty and transitory nature of all temporal, human things lie the possibility of history, and the secret of its productivity. The new claim to understand and describe the individual historical phenomena in their singularity and uniqueness, does not release the historian from the necessity to produce or create coherence. The question is, as Droysen puts it, ‘how our daily business becomes history’ (Droysen 1977: 457–58). In other words, if every criterion beyond history has to be denied, how then can coherence of history emerge from the manifold manifestations of cultural life, the coherence, which alone justiﬁes the cognition of history? Ranke answers: Let us admit, that history can never have the consistency of a philosophical system; but without any inner coherence it does not exist. We see before us a series of events following and determining each other. If I say to determine, that does not mean through absolute necessity, of course. The great thing is that freedom is employed everywhere. Historiography observes scenes of freedom, which is its greatest allure. But freedom is accompanied by force . . . . Every moment something new may begin, which only can be traced back to this ﬁrst twofold offspring of all human activity . . . But at the same time a deep inner coherence of which nobody is completely independent and which intervenes everywhere, prevails. Necessity stands by freedom. That which has already evolved constitutes the coherence with that which is evolving. (Ranke 1888: XIII–XIV) That necessity ‘stands by’ freedom means that neither of the two exclude the other. Necessity here is not strict causality, which nulliﬁes freedom, but rather the resistance the ‘force’ joining ‘freedom’ is confronted with. This resistance is the counter-force exercised by that ‘which is already formed, which is irrefutable and forms the basis of any newly emerging activity’. That which is evolving is free, but its freedom is determined by that which has already evolved. The latter

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constitutes the necessary circumstances, within which alone free ‘forces’ can display their effects (Gadamer 1990: 210). It is ‘creative forces,’ spiritual potencies’, and ‘moral energies’ in which the secrets of history lie (Fridell 1979: 1082–83). The category of ‘force’ is given central importance in the thinking of the Historical School, just because it makes it possible to think of the coherence of history as a primary fact. Any force is only real through its expression within the interplay of force and counter-force, and history is the same type of play. Implicitly replying to Hegel (§340 of Philosophy of Right, above), Ranke declares: World history does not present such a chaotic tumult, warring, and planless succession of states and peoples . . . There are forces and indeed spiritual, lifegiving, creative forces, nay life itself, and there are moral energies, whose development we see . . . In their interaction and succession, in their life, in their decline and rejuvenation . . . lies the secret of history. (Ranke 1950: 181) The effects of Ranke’s ‘moral energies’ have, so to speak, replaced Hegel’s ‘mind of the world’. These effects, in which the ‘moral energies’ are recognisable, display the purpose of history, they are the links, which constitute historical coherence. Ranke refers to these constituting links as ‘scenes of freedom’, an expression which describes those historical moments, in which history is made, in which something gets decided. The only yardstick such an epochal action can be measured with is that of world-historical success. Success or failure do not only determine the signiﬁcance of the action itself, but decide about the signiﬁcance or insigniﬁcance of a whole nexus of actions and events. The elements of such a nexus do indeed determine each other in the sense of an ‘unconscious teleology, which binds them together and excludes the insigniﬁcant’. However, ‘this type of teleology does not make world history an a priori system’, in which ‘the actors are set as if in a mechanism steering them as merely unconscious agents’ (Gadamer 1990: 211). This is exactly the point of Suzuki’s above statement about Japan’s ‘world-historical destiny’. Expressions such as ‘world historical destiny’ or ‘historical necessity’ form an integral part of the Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron discussants’ argumentation. Indeed such expressions do not refer to any higher power, to universal laws of nature, or abstract moral laws beyond the individuals or peoples acting amidst history. They do not, as Nishitani says, signify ‘what is named fate’, but rather ‘task’ and ‘mission’, not fatalism or passivity is required here, but the guts to be the architect of one’s own fortune. ‘Historical necessity’, Nishitani insists, ‘is not a necessity being independent of the way we move’ (CK I: 190). K¯oyama expresses this idea in combination with a critique of Hegel: It is often said that world history is the world’s court of judgment, but that does not mean that perhaps a god is observing history from outside and then judging. People judge themselves, they pass sentence on themselves. That a

‘Japanese philosophy of history’ 123 country falls is not caused by any invasion, or any other such external cause. Calamities in foreign relations are not more than an occasion. That a country falls is in truth the result of the decay of moral energy. The downfall of a country is not caused from outside, but from inside. The same applies to economy, or culture; the primary reason for the downfall of a country is that its people have forfeited a healthy vital moral sense, its moral energy. (CK I: 184) The term ‘moral energy’ is introduced in the course of the ﬁrst Ch¯uo¯ k¯orondiscussion by K¯oyama. Moral energy, the ‘conceptual merger of kratos and ethos’ (Nishitani), is an obsession of the four participants. In his recent analysis of the Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron discussions Horio Tsutumu explains this obsession as follows: As a country that digested modern civilization while managing to hold on to a traditional culture of its own, quite different from that of the West, Japan was charged with the ‘world-historical task’ of using modernity to overcome modernity. Fully conscious of this task, Japan had therefore to muster its moralische Energie in the service of correcting its own imperialistic tendencies and breaking the unilateral world dominion of the imperialism of Europe and America. It had to exert itself in the construction of a new ‘pluralistic world order’ that would ‘have a place for each and every people’. The ‘truth of Japan’ lay precisely in the fulﬁllment of that task. (Horio 1995: 299) This is a nice comment. I have some doubts, however, whether it is appropriate when we consider the textual evidence. For example in CK II (pp. 128–31) we ﬁnd a dialogue which begins with Suzuki’s invitation to ﬁll the term ‘moral energy’with more substance, and to get to the bottom of the China-problem by discussing the quality (alias: superiority/inferiority, y¯uretsu) of Chinese and Japanese morality: Suzuki:

As I already said before: we must conclude that morality did exist in China, but no moral energy. (CK II: 129)

Koyama:

The result of the Sino-Japanese war [1894/95] revealed the difference right away. Thus, in Japan the vital force of moral energy does exist. This difference is ultimately the reason why China was continually devoured by Europe and was not able to develop a signiﬁcant power of resistance, whereas Japan, at today’s turn of the era, is ﬁnishing off both the USA and Great Britain at the same time. Nishitani: The Chinese probably imagine that Japan has become powerful because it has imported European culture and technology, and they may think that Japan’s power is ultimately the power of Europe. (CK II: 130) Koyama:

This is the Chinese people’s most fundamental misunderstanding . . . On China’s part, Japan’s approach was erroneously interpreted as

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But one does not reach a new stage of consciousness just for nothing. And so Nishitani ﬁnally impresses with a showpiece of applied philosophy of history, which nevertheless has a certain Hegelian charm: There was a kind of obscurity. But on that stage of historical development and in the situation of the world at that time this obscurity was unavoidable. Japan’s approach to China took on an exterior shape, which was misunderstood as an imperialist aggression, because the approach was hindered by the world order of that time. Today this approach is necessarily related to an activity such as the establishment of Greater East Asia, an activity which overcomes imperialism ideally. Now, in retrospect, it becomes clear that already within the approach of the past a meaning was hidden, which cannot be called imperialism. (CK II: 131) Minerva’s owl, Hegel said, never soars into the air until dusk has come. K¯osaka conceded at the beginning: ‘There is no doubt that we learned a lot from the thought of Ranke, or Hegel here.’ In fact, the discussants’ argumentation often seems to be nothing more than a crude mixture of both; for example, K¯oyama’s declaration that ‘leading is the natural activity of truth, and everything which does not display the power to lead is not true’ (CK III: 67). This is a variation of Hegel’s dictum that ‘what is real is reasonable, and what is reasonable is real.’ Hegel’s dictum, however, is a formulation of the truth of absolute idealism, that is of the identity of the identical and the non-identical, of Denken and Sein, reason and reality (and not, as is often argued, a conservative justiﬁcation of the status quo). K¯oyama’s version of Hegel’s dictum, on the other hand, is a Rankean formulation of the ‘truth of Japan’, that is to say of her entitlement to lead as it is veriﬁed by her historical success. But, as we already know, the ‘truth of Japan’ is also meant to transcend the ‘world-idea of the nineteenth century’. And therefore a frugal Hegelian-Rankean hodgepodge cannot be the last course on the discussants’ menu. The overcoming of both Hegel and Ranke by means of the Kyoto School In his book Philosophy of World History and Historical Consciousness, Nishitani writes: The world of today demands that a new relation between world-historical research and the philosophy of world-history is thought differently from

‘Japanese philosophy of history’ 125 Hegel’s philosophy of world-history, as well as from Ranke’s world-history. And, furthermore, it demands that Hegel’s reason of the state and rational idealism, and Ranke’s moralische Energie and historical idealism – by transcending the standpoints even of such great men – are reconsidered in a still more fundamental way. (NKC IV: 253)16 As K¯osaka initially declared, the call of the day, and the immediate expression of a new Japanese consciousness, was the call for a new philosophy of history. The slogan: ‘above all: no philosophy of history!’ could hardly satisfy this demand, and joining the Rankean opposition against Hegel could not be the end of our four discussants’wit. On the contrary, it was the historian’s positivist approach to history that had contributed signiﬁcantly to the creation of a need for a new philosophy of history, by fuelling a development which in Europe had ﬁnally culminated in a deep intellectual crisis. Spengler’s Decline of the West – ‘indeed another kind of Japanese innovative world-consciousness’, as Suzuki jokes at the ﬁrst discussion (CK I: 152) – is a well-known manifestation of this crisis. Another product of the same atmosphere is Ernst Troeltsch’s Die Krisis des Historismus. This book is an important source for our four discussants. I will therefore brieﬂy summarize the ﬁrst chapter ‘On the resurrection of philosophy of history’. According to Troeltsch the main cause of the crisis of the twentieth century is the ‘historicization’ (Historisierung) of our knowledge and worldviews. This historicization, he explains, began in the eighteenth century as a reaction against rationalist dogmatism, and as long as historical research served to contest ‘a merely mathematical-mechanical’ understanding of men and nature, it had a healthy, fertilizing effect. But the increasing material accumulated by this research has ﬁnally become a fatal burden. More and more ‘fragmented’ into academic disciplines, methodically almost as exact as the exact sciences, and pursued ‘technically’ by highly ‘specialized scholars’, historical research has become a ‘factory producing doctoral theses and textbooks’, which pile up to a permanently growing mountain of incoherent, jumbled facts. The increasing knowledge has no inner coherence any more, it is ‘lying’ shattered like a ‘huge torso’, and the youth is driven to despair, in regard of that amorphous ‘pulp’ through which it must ‘eat its way’. Moreover, the historical values of Europe have transformed themselves from within, liqueﬁed in theory by Marx, Nietzsche, Bergson, the cultural criticism in France, or that of Croce in Italy; and they were also proven practically futile following the experience of World War I and the Russian Revolution. The world is changing profoundly, Troeltsch writes, the ‘soil is trembling’. To a lesser degree in the Anglo-Saxon world, to a larger degree on the continent, and especially in Germany – ‘a country continuously buffeted by fate’ – Troeltsch observes a ‘crisis of the perception of historical values, on the basis of which the coherence of history would alone be thinkable’ (Troeltsch 1977: 1–27). This ‘crisis of the general philosophical basis and the basic elements of historical thinking’ is what Troeltsch calls ‘Historicism’. And in fact, it is Troeltsch to whom Suzuki explicitly refers when, besides the overcoming of the idea of ‘historical

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progress,’ he calls for an ‘overcoming of historicism’ (CK I: 150; 151). Elsewhere Suzuki writes: Within historiography, the overcoming of the ‘idea of progress’ as a question with extraordinarily eminent implications, becomes a problem. And furthermore, the overcoming of historicism as a particular difﬁculty of historiography has to become the greatest and most basic task. Because the overcoming of historicism is the overcoming of modernity within historiography. (Suzuki 1942: 43) Historicism, being a ‘particularly modern mode of thought’ (Troeltsch), has provoked a ‘shattering of the ethical system of values both in its justiﬁcation and in its content’ and has nourished a ‘relativism’, which signiﬁes a ‘political and social crisis’ as well as a ‘crisis within history itself right to its most inner structure’ (Troeltsch 1922: 582; 584). That is the reason why philosophy – ‘half dead or dead at all’ – began to engage itself with problems of history again (Troeltsch 1977: 10), ﬁrstly only ‘as logic or epistemology of history’, but than also by other new attempts such as that of Nietzsche’s philosophy of life, ‘Dilthey and hermeneutics’, or a ‘renaissance of Hegel’ (Troeltsch 1977: 27). Today, Troeltsch continues, the term ‘philosophy of history’ is strictly connected with Hegel, and completely discredited. But we shouldn’t apply this useful and necessary term only to Hegel’s outdated attempt. The call of the day, Troeltsch concludes, is the demand for a philosophy of history, which is able to give empirical historical research a philosophical foundation (Troeltsch 1977: 27). K¯oyama agrees: the schism triggered by historicism between ‘philosophy of history’ (Hegel), and a ‘positivistic historiography’ (Ranke) is no longer up to date (CK I: 152). A ‘new East Asian historicism’ has to overcome the European ‘historicism in the crisis’ (CK I: 180), that is the ‘crisis of modernity’. For K¯osaka: Today the understanding of a lot of things is changing signiﬁcantly. Thus philosophy becomes a knowledge (gakumon) to precisely deﬁne one’s position amidst historical change, and to point the way ahead. . . . Philosophy is no longer just a knowledge, which is grundlegend [foundational], by providing that, which exists, with a foundation. It makes a further step ahead, and becomes a knowledge which gives the historically changing things a direction. It becomes a landmark, a knowledge of Orientierung [orientation]. (CK I: 152) The unison of Troeltsch’s and the Japanese philosophers’ calls to overcome the incoherence and fragmentation of modern culture and society by a resurrection of philosophy of history is obvious. If there is dissonance in this unison this is because of different perspectives on the ‘European crisis’ (from within, from outside) – and because of a disagreement about the meaning of war. Seen from Troeltsch’s viewpoint the experience of war and defeat was a cause of the crisis, whereas to the philosophers of the Kyoto School, war appeared to be its solution. The war,

‘Japanese philosophy of history’ 127 according to Nishitani, is ‘the complete destruction of the modern state, society, economy, culture, and philosophy’, in other words, it is the ultimate ‘overcoming of modernity’itself (CK III: 111–12). Nishitani does not even hesitate to glorify the German submarine warfare against trading vessels as an overcoming of the modern separation between the realms of the military and the civil (CK III: 72). Facing such statements some later interpreters felt an urge to downplay the signiﬁcance of such political philosophizing, calling it a distraction from the ‘fundamental inspirations’ of the philosophers’ own genuinely apolitical, essentially religious philosophies (Van Bragt 1995: 99).17 I am not enough of a metaphysician to believe in such ‘fundamental inspirations’. What rather attracts my attention is the religious pathos of K¯osaka’s, or Nishitani’s actual vocabulary (war as ‘penitence’, as an ‘ascetic exercise’, world-history as the ‘purgatory of humankind,’ etc.), a pathos, in the heat of which a fusion of religion and politics takes place. And, in fact, it is particularly the disassociation of religion and politics that Nishitani contested explicitly: Today everybody notices that religion and politics have no relation with each other. And probably nobody thinks that religion and politics will establish a considerably deep relationship in future as well . . . The crucial question is, if it is just a matter of course – due to the essential nature of religion and politics – that they do not have any relation with each other, or if this is a peculiar phenomenon of a certain historical era. To say it roughly: that religion and politics have become dissociated from each other is a phenomenon of the era of modernity; before this era both were intimately associated in a variety of ways. (NKC IV: 11)18 Thus Nishitani identiﬁes the separation between religion and politics as an aspect of the disintegration of modern social and cultural life as a whole. The counter-model is in fact the catholic, ecclesiastical world of medieval Europe, where: on the standpoint of religion each and every aspect of secular life – may that be scholarship, or art, may that be education, or politics, economy, or whatever – were altogether uniﬁed, and something like a coherent culture could evolve. In the modern age this [coherent culture] has more and more fallen into pieces. (NKC IV: 31) In the same way K¯oyama too underlines the coherency of the medieval world of Europe, and explains this coherency as an effect of the gravitational force of religion, which prevented this world from falling apart. And K¯oyama too confronts this romanticist idea of a coherent, religious medieval life and culture with the image of an incoherent modern world (K¯oyama 2001: 278). Accordingly the dissociation of religion and politics is indeed much more than just one aspect amongst other aspects of that incoherency, such as the modern separation between the realms of the military and the civil. The modern soldier on the battleﬁeld signiﬁes the overcoming of modernity, precisely because he is the prototype, so to speak,

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of a modern professional and specialist, who – by permanently confronting himself with death – is always in immediate touch with the gods (Kawakami et al. 1979: 239).19 Here also lies the true signiﬁcance of Nishitani’s ‘asceticism’. ‘What kind of relation do religion and politics have to bear in future?’ (NKC IV: 11), he asks. The answer on this question is a ‘Japanese philosophy of history’ which has uniﬁed . . . ‘world’-history – representing the objectivity of worldhistorical consciousness – and the practical morality and religiosity of the subjects of this world, i.e. [a philosophy] which accordingly is the foundational self-awareness of a new standpoint, which has integrated both objectivity and subjectivity. . . . Such a standpoint can be called a standpoint of absolute nothingness. (NKC IV: 256–57)

Conclusion With the call for an overcoming of the disassociation of religion and politics, and with the introduction of the concept of ‘absolute nothingness’ – the core concept of ‘Nishida-Philosophy’ – we have ﬁnally reached the pivotal point of the ‘worldhistorical standpoint’, in which its dynamics gather and terminate. In conclusion I would like to make this pivot a starting-point for a recapitulation of these dynamics, or, more pointedly: after having described the way from ‘total war’ to ‘absolute nothingness’, I will now make a reverse attempt to get from ‘absolute nothingness’ back to ‘total war’. The concept of ‘absolute nothingness’ cannot be treated justly on the remaining pages. But for my purpose a simple outline might be sufﬁcient. In simple terms ‘absolute nothingness’ signiﬁes the ‘ground’ of the world, or better, the ultimate, logical ‘context’, in which all beings are embedded like the stones of a mosaic are embedded in the binding mortar. In the same way as we can argue that the binding mortar is not really a part of a mosaic, the ground of the world does not belong to the realm of the being and must not be understood as being something, a ﬁrst subject, a highest substance, or god, etc. It is a ‘nothingness’ – i.e. the negation of all being – in the sense in which we may call a genus, comprising families and species of lesser degrees of universality, the negation of everything it contains. ‘Absolute’ is this ‘nothingness’ insofar as it is related to the world only as the absolute in opposition to the relative (Heisig 2001: 62). The subject of knowledge too is grounded in ‘nothingness’. The ground, however, which makes all knowledge possible, can itself not become an object of knowledge, as Nishida argues (NKZ XIV: 307).20 From the ontological negativity of the subject of knowledge results its epistemological nullity. To ‘know’ one’s ‘true self ’ means to awake from the judging, Cartesian ego’s idle dream about this ego’s absoluteness, to gaze into the abyss beneath ones own feet, and to realize that against the bottomless depth of this abyss all beings are relative moments of the self-realization of an ‘absolute nothingness’.

‘Japanese philosophy of history’ 129 This ‘self-realization’, from which, according to Nishitani, a ‘new practical morality’ of the ‘subjects of the world’, that is the ‘peoples’ (minzoku) (NKC IV: 253), shall arise, must in fact be called a religious, if not a mystical experience. Not by coincidence is the title of Nishida’s last writing ‘Logic of the Place and Religious Worldview’; and already Nishida’s ﬁrst work Inquiry into the Good ends with a chapter ‘On Religion’. There the primary phenomenon of ‘pure experience’ of the unity of subject and object appears as a reuniﬁcation with that creative force, the self-realization of which is the world, or, in other words, as a ‘religious awakening’, which is achieved by means of the complete objectiﬁcation of ourselves, that is the complete extinction of our ordinary subjectivity. As Nishida implies, this resembles the idea that we cannot live our true lives unless we have completely surrendered ourselves to God: It is a feeling like that of Paulus, when he said that he lives not within himself, but Jesus . . . True religion demands a transformation of the self; true religion demands a renewal of life. Anyone, who still bears within himself a tiny remainder of belief in his own self, is not yet inspired by the spirit of true religion. (NKZ I: 169)21 This religious experience is the ﬁnal destination of Nishida’s philosophizing, and thus, as Kracht writes, Nishida ﬁnally annuls the line between philosophical reﬂection and religious experience (Kracht 1997: 207). But what does Nishida actually mean when he speaks of ‘religion’? In his last writing, in conclusion of a brief discussion of the concepts of ‘original sin’ and ‘puriﬁcation’/‘awakening’ in Christianity and Buddhism, we ﬁnd the following lines: I say that the religious question is not a question of scientiﬁc, objective cognition; but neither is it a question involving the ethical imperative of the moral self. What is the self itself? Wherein is its existential nature to be located? Such questions pertaining to the self ’s very existence, to its bottomless existence, are the ones that bring the religious form of life into focus . . . What is it, that truly makes the self be the self? (NKZ XI: 412n)22 This passage is of interest, because Nishida here identiﬁes the motive for his neglect of the established border between ‘religion’ and ‘philosophy’. This motive we may call the concern about the self, and I think that this characteristic motive is immediately linked with what I previously called the moral of K¯osaka’s initial narrative, that is the turn away from Kant. However, in order to reveal this link, I need the help of Michel Foucault, and his concept of ‘spirituality’. Let us stand back a little and consider this: We will call, if you like, ‘philosophy’ the form of thought that asks, not of course what is true and what is false, but what determines that there is and can be truth and falsehood and whether

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On the basis of these deﬁnitions Foucault distinguishes two different orders of knowledge, in regard to the question of whether or not ‘spirituality’is a precondition for the access to truth, in regard to the conception of this access, and in regard to the concept of truth itself. The ﬁrst of these two orders we may call the ‘spiritual’ one. Here having access to truth means to have access to the Being in a way that the Being to which one has access at the same time causes the transformation of the one who gets this access (Foucault 2005: 191). The second order, on the other hand, is ‘the Cartesian type of knowledge’, which cannot be deﬁned as access to truth, but has to be deﬁned as knowledge of objects. Since Descartes, Western philosophy has developed the concept of a subject, which is able to know the truth a priori. This development completed itself with the supplementary twist in Kant, which consists in saying that what we cannot know is precisely the structure itself of the knowing subject. Consequently, the idea of a certain spiritual transformation of the subject, which ﬁnally gives him access to something, to which he precisely does not have access at the moment, becomes illusory: ‘So the liquidation of what could be called the condition of spirituality for access to the truth is produced with Descartes and Kant; Kant and Descartes seem to me to be the two major moments’ (Foucault 2005: 190; 191). Thus, in the history of philosophy the period from Descartes to Kant marks an epoch: If we deﬁne spirituality as being the form of practices which postulate that, such as he is, the subject is not capable of the truth, but that, such as it is, the truth can transﬁgure and save the subject, then we can say that the modern age of the relations between the subject and truth begin when it is postulated that, such as he is, the subject is capable of truth, but that, such as it is, the truth cannot save the subject. (Foucault 2005: 19) Foucault does not claim to consider the validity beyond the limits of Western philosophical tradition (Foucault 2005: 15). Nevertheless, I think that the name of Nishida – in so far as his afﬁnity to most of these philosophers, as well as his characteristic ‘animosity’, (Foucault), towards the philosophy of the eighteenth

‘Japanese philosophy of history’ 131 century, and towards Kant in particular – can be easily be added to Foucault’s list of philosophers after Kant who at least implicitly concerned themselves once again with the old question about the self – ‘Hegel for sure, Schelling . . . the Husserl of the Krisis, and Heidegger too’ (Foucault 2005: 15). True, Nishida’s attitude towards Kant was rather sympathetic. But this cannot lead us to ignore the fact that from a Kantian viewpoint Nishida-Philosophy (Nishida tetsugaku) can hardly be other than a kind of ‘bad metaphysics’. Conversely, Nishida points out that Kant completely missed the question of religion, because he was ignorant of the autonomy of religious consciousness (NKZ XI: 373f).23 Elsewhere Nishida writes: ‘Kant’s morals are bourgeois morals. The morals of historical creation, on the other hand, have to be a solemn oath (higan)’ (NKZ XI: 445).24 In Nishida’s disciples – for whom the concepts of metanoia, penitence and transformation of the ordinary (alias: the ‘modern’) self were main concerns as well – we also observed a similar attitude towards the question of religion (spirituality) and Kant in particular. In light of the ‘world-historical standpoint’, we may also understand how in a time of war the distance between religion and politics can in fact decrease to just a few letters. In conclusion, I call K¯osaka Masaaki into the witness box again. After K¯oyama has suggested an understanding of history that is a ‘puriﬁcation’ from the sins committed in the past, K¯osaka closes the ﬁrst Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron-discussion as follows: By the way, what shall we think about the idea of regarding the salvation of the small human being as something separated from the salvation of humankind as a whole? Nishida too recently said that world history is the purgatory of the soul of humankind, and that war too probably has this meaning. . . . Thus, the soul of humankind becomes puriﬁed. Therefore, all turning points of world history have been decided by war. Therefore, world history is the purgatory of humankind. (CK I: 192)

Notes 1 Subsequent quotations from: ‘Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon’, Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron (Jan. 1942): 150–92. Hereafter referred to as ‘CK I’. ‘T¯oa ky¯oeiken no rinrisei to rekishisei’, Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron (April 1942): 120–61. Hereafter ‘CK II’. ‘S¯oryokusen no tetsugaku’, Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron (Jan. 1943): 54–112. Hereafter ‘CK III’. 2 English sources on the ‘world-historical standpoint’: Horio 1995: 289–315; Takeuchi ¯ 2004: esp. pp. 126–37; see also: Harootunian 2000; Goto-Jones 2005: 109–15. Oshima 1965: 125–43; Hiromatsu 1989. 3 See for example Rickert 1920. 4 See Nishida Kitar¯o, Kokka riy¯u no mondai, now in NKZ X. 5 See Nishida Kitar¯o, Sekai shin chitsujo no genri, now in NKZ XII. 6 Immanuel Kant, ‘Die Metaphysik der Sitten’, Werkausgabe [hereafter: KW], VIII; ‘Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf’, KW XI. 7 Kant, ‘Kritic der praktischen Vernunft’, KW VII. 8 Kant, ‘Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten’, KW VII.

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9 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, ‘Grindlienien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse’, in Werke [hereafter: HW], VII. 10 Compare also CK III: 86–91. 11 Hegel, ‘Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte’, now in HW XII (1995). 12 Hegel, ‘Enzyklopädie’, HW VIII. 13 English quoted from Hegel 1997: 215–16. 14 Also in KMC I. 15 Compare also CK III: 91–97. 16 Nishitani Keiji, Sekaishi no tetsugaku to rekishiteki ishiki, now in NKC IV. 17 See also Heisig 2001: 99. 18 Nishitani Keiji, Gendai shakai no shomondai to sh¯uky¯o, now in NKC IV. 19 The idea is expressed by Kamei Katsuichir¯o. See NKC IV: 268–69. 20 Nishida Kitar¯o, Sh¯uky¯o no tachiba, now in NKZ XIV. 21 Nishida Kitar¯o, Zen no kenky¯u, now in NKZ I. 22 Nishida Kitar¯o, Bashoteki ronri to sh¯uky¯oteki sekaikan, now in NKZ XI. English quoted from Nishida 1987: 80n. 23 For a more subtle analysis of Nishida’s critique of Kant see David Dilworth’s introduction in Nishida 1987: 1–46. 24 Higan is the oath sworn by Buddha to redeem the faithful.

References Burckhardt, Jacob (1978), Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, Stuttgart: Kröner. Dilthey, Wilhelm (1990), Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften. Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studium der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. I, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Droysen, Johann G. (1977), ‘Erhebung der Geschichte zum Rang einer Wissenschaft’, in Droysen, Johann G., Historik, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog. Foucault, Michel (2005), The Hermeneutics of the Subject. Lectures at the Collège de France 1981-82, Burchell, Graham (trans), New York: Palgrave Mackmillian. Fridell, Egon (1979), Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit, München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. Gadamer, Hans Georg (1990), Wahrheit und Methode, vol. I: Hermeneutik: Wahrheit und Methode. – 1. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, Tübingen: Mohr. Goto-Jones, Christopher S. (2005), Political Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, The Ky¯oto School, and Co-Prosperity, London: Routledge, pp. 109–15. Harootunian, Harry D. (2000), Overcome by Modernity: History Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (2000), Werke, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Heisig, James W. (2001), Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Hiromatsu Wataru (1989), ‘Kindai no ch¯okoku’ron – sh¯owa shis¯oshi e no isshikaku, Tokyo: K¯odansha. Holzey, Helmut (1991), ‘Hegel im Neukantianismus. Maskerade und Diskurs’, Il Cannocchiale (1/2), pp. 9–27. Horio Tsutomo (1995), ‘The Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron discussions: Their Background and Meaning’, in Heisig, James W. and Maraldo, John C. (eds) (1995), Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School and the Question of Modernity, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 289–315. Kant, Immanuel (1974), Werkausgabe, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

‘Japanese philosophy of history’ 133 Kawakami Tetsutar¯o and Takeuchi Yoshimi (eds) (1979), Kindai no ch¯okoku, Tokyo: Fuzanb¯o. K¯osaka Masaaki (1964–70), K¯osaka Masaaki Chosakush¯u, 8 vols, Tokyo: Ris¯osha. K¯oyama Iwao (1963–64), ‘Kaisetsu’, in: Tanabe Hajime Zensh¯u, vol. III, Tokyo: Chikuma Shob¯o, pp. 523–37. K¯oyama Iwao (2001), Sekaishi no tetsugaku, Tokyo: Kobushi Shob¯o. K¯oyama Iwao, Nishitani Keiji, K¯osaka Masaaki and Suzuki Shigetaka (1943), Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon, Tokyo: Ch¯uo¯ k¯oronsha. Kracht, Klaus (1997), ‘”Zum Verständnis der, Nishida-Philosophie’ unter dem Aspekt des Verhältnisses von Form und Inhalt’, in: Japonica Humboldtiana. Mitteilungen der M¯ori¯ Ogai-Gedenkstätte Humboldt Universität Berlin, vol. I, Wiesbaden. Levy, Heinrich (1927), ‘Die Hegelrenaissance in der deutschen Philosophie mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Neukantianismus’, Philosophische Vorträge der Kantgesellschaft 30, Charlottenburg. Nishida Kitar¯o (1978–80), Nishida Kitar¯o Zensh¯u, 19 vols, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Nishida Kitar¯o (1987), Last Writings: Nothingness and Religious World-view, Dilworth, David (trans), Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Nishitani Keiji (1979), “‘Kindai no ch¯okoku” shiron’, in Kawakami Tetsutar¯o and Takeuchi Yoshimi (eds) (1979), Kindai no ch¯okoku, Tokyo: Fuzanb¯o, pp. 18–37. Nishitani Keiji (1986–95), Nishitani Keiji Chosakush¯u, 26 vols, Tokyo: S¯obunsha. ¯ Oshima Yasumasa (1965), ‘Dait¯oa sens¯o to Ky¯oto gakuha – chishikijin no seiji sanka ni tsuite, Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron, 8, pp. 125–43. Ranke, Leopold Von (1888), Weltgeschichte, Zweite Abteilung: Über die Epochen der Neueren Geschichte, Vorträge dem Könige Maximilian dem II. von Bayern gehalten, herausgegeben von Alfred Dove, Leipzig, vol. IX. Ranke, Leopold Von (1950), ‘Die Großen Mächte’, Theodor H. von Laue (trans), Leopold Ranke: The Formative Years, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rickert, Heinrich (1920), Die Philosophie des Lebens. Darstellung und Kritik der Philosophischen Modeströmungen unserer Zeit, Tübingen. Rickert, Heinrich (1924–25), ‘Alois Riehl’, in Logos 13, pp. 162–85. Suzuki Shigetaka (1942), ‘ “Kindai no ch¯okoku” oboegaki’, Bungakkai 9:10, pp. 41–43. Takeuchi Yoshimi (2004), ‘Overcoming Modernity’, in Calichman, Richard F. (trans. and ed) (2004), What is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 103–49. Troeltsch, Ernst (1922), ‘Die Krisis des Historismus’, Die Neue Rundschau. XXXIII, Jahrgang der freien Bühne 1, pp. 572–90. Troeltsch, Ernst (1977), ‘Die Krisis des Historismus’, in Der Historismus und seine Probleme: Erstes (einziges) Buch: Das logische Problem der Geschichtsphilosophie, Aelen: Scientia, pp. 1–27. Van Bragt, Jan (1995), ‘Kyoto Philosophy- Intrinsically Nationalistic?’, in Heisig, James W. and Maraldo, John C. (eds) (1995), Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 233–54.

Part III

The Kyoto School and traditions of political philosophy

7

Romanticism, conservatism and the Kyoto School of philosophy Kevin M. Doak

Before one can launch into a discussion that takes two highly unstable variables and applies them to a controversial group of philosophers, it might not be a bad idea to take a hint from philosophy itself and begin by deﬁning one’s terms. So let me state from the outset that by ‘conservatism’, I mean a basic orientation to society that takes morality seriously, that is to say, a belief that the right social and political institutions can limit the proclivities within a given society for doing bad, even if they cannot assure that everyone will do good. This approach to understanding what conservatism is comes from John Kekes, who has presented conservatism as much more complex and realistic than ‘a mindless defense of whatever happens to be the prevailing political arrangements by those who beneﬁt from them’ (Kekes 1998: 46). Although opponents of conservatives often like to portray conservatism in such a polemic fashion, conservatives themselves are likely to agree with Kekes that they are not blind followers of convention or authority, and they can point to authoritarian regimes founded on leftist ideologies (e.g. former Soviet Union, People’s Republic of China) as instances when it is those on the left who blindly defend existing political authority and those with conservative values who seek change. If an absolute aversion to change does not deﬁne the essence of conservatism, then what does? Ultimately, Kekes argues that conservatives are marked by a speciﬁc moral vision that takes political institutions seriously to the degree to which those institutions are seen as hindering or helping people lead good lives. Conservatives do not, therefore, dismiss the inﬂuence political institutions can have in shaping morality, as Marxists do; nor do they believe, as liberals do, that the right political institutions can engineer goodness in people. Rather conservatism as Kekes describes it (and as it will be employed here), is a political disposition that assesses political systems in terms of how well they allow a society to express those ‘various enduring traditions in which individuals participate because they conceive of good lives in terms of the beliefs, values, and practices that these traditions embody’ (Kekes 1998: 45). But at its core, conservatism is not just a political ideology, but also a moral philosophy, deeply concerned with the conditions that are more conducive to good behavior and the good life, and as such, it ceases to be recognizable once the distinction between moral and immoral is blurred or rejected as not essential to public policy.

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One useful way to situate the problem of conservatism as a moral philosophy within early twentieth century Japan is to begin with the cultural commentary of Tanaka K¯otar¯o. Tanaka is himself an intriguing ﬁgure in the ideas and politics of wartime Japan. At times called a conservative, at other times a liberal, he was in actuality an inﬂuential legal scholar, a professor of law at Tokyo Imperial University and a Catholic, who based his pluralism on a neo-Thomist defense of Natural Law. If conservatism were limited to traditionalism, a blind defense of whatever cultures and ideas were believed to be primordial to a given society, then Tanaka certainly was no conservative. His public defense of Christianity at a time when Shinto nationalism was growing increasingly loud and intolerant, his commitment to globalism and the rule of law in a period of narrow nationalism, and even his preference for Western clothes and fashions all suggest not a cultural traditionalist but ‘a modern man’. Yet, Tanaka may fall under the deﬁnition of conservatism as outlined above, and in fact he is included in a postwar anthology of conservative Japanese thinkers, even as the editor of that anthology admits that Tanaka himself would not accept the label ‘conservative’ (Hayashi 1963: 37).1 Of greater importance for our purposes than whether Tanaka was a ‘conservative’ or not is the fact that his intellectual maturity took place in the same milieu as many members of the Kyoto School. Born in 1890, Tanaka was only one year younger than Watsuji Tetsur¯o and ﬁve years older than Tanabe Hajime. He was not a student at Kyoto Imperial University, but graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1915, four years after Nishida Kitar¯o published his Inquiry into the Good. Tanaka is a useful guide to understanding how conservatism, romanticism and the Kyoto School intersected during the wartime. He experienced many of the same intellectual, social and political issues that confronted the Kyoto School and, while not a professional philosopher, he took philosophical issues seriously, especially in terms of their political impact. But what makes his perspective uniquely valuable is that, as a deeply religious intellectual during wartime Japan, he allows us to see the relationship of the Kyoto School, conservatism and romanticism in an important light: one that is both universalistic and critical of conservative parochialism but also appreciative of the moral possibilities of philosophy in modern Japan. In 1933 Tanaka published an article on ‘Our Contemporary Intellectual Anarchy and an Exploration into its Causes’ in the inﬂuential journal Kaiz¯o. This was a critical time for Japanese intellectuals. In the same year and the same journal, Miki Kiyoshi published ‘The Philosophy of Anxiety and its Transcendence’, in which he outlined the general sense of anxiety (fuan) that had infected the Japanese intellectual world, where a radical subjectivism had become widespread. Miki understood quite well that this ‘crisis’ or ‘anxiety’ in the intellectual world was an effect of a rejection of nature as an objective constraint and its replacement by a subjectivist, relativist concept of social science. Miki had been a leader in this movement, joining with Hani Gor¯o and Kobayashi Isamu in the founding of a new journal, Under the Banner of the New Science in 1928. Turning to a historicist philosophy, Miki and these practitioners of ‘new science’ argued that nature had been replaced by society as the ultimate context for what is real or true.

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As Miki phrased it, this was a move from Bacon’s natural science founded on the idea of Natura non vincitur nisi parendo to a new social science founded on the belief that Societas non vincitur nisi parendo (Doak 1998: 242). Miki accurately identiﬁed this ‘anxiety’ as a ‘spiritual’ crisis, but he thought its effect could be limited to spiritual matters (the ‘death of God’) and not to cultural issues. Miki’s optimism about the possibilities of containing the crisis to spiritual matters led him to conclude, mistakenly, that romanticism was not likely to emerge in the void left by the demotion of nature as a universal principle. Tanaka understood better than Miki the connection between the spiritual and cultural crisis, and his analysis was far more astute in terms of how this crisis would lead to romanticism and conservative nationalism. Tanaka began by placing the crisis of his day in the context of modern Japanese history, and especially how the importation of technology from the West during the Meiji years had ignored related cultural and spiritual issues. This argument was, of course, a direct refutation of Miki’s technological reductionism. Tanaka noted that when Western technology was separated from its broader cultural and spiritual context and brought into Japanese society, this over-emphasis had broad-ranging and negative implications for Japanese philosophy and spiritual values. He recognized Miki’s concerns that the initial reaction within Japan was an unhealthy emphasis on an organic social perspective that drew on natural science in promoting both a Darwinist evolutionary view of society and an atomistic contractual view of the state (Tanaka 1963: 237).2 This reliance on natural science without a universal moral principle (such as Tanaka found in Natural Law) meant that technological absolutism was the default position among the Meiji intellectual elite. This tendency toward the natural sciences in the ﬁelds of moral and social sciences appeared in the claims of positivism in those ﬁelds. First, the Natural Law school arose from within Enlightenment rationalism that insisted on the existence of a moral and legal principle that held universal validity for even the most minute of human and social acts. Then, the Romantic Historical school rose up in reaction. A second reaction happened when positivism disputed the metaphysical nature of both of these earlier positions. This was an enlightenment movement that was of a different meaning altogether from the eighteenth century Enlightenment. (Tanaka 1963: 247) In the early 1930s, it still was possible for Tanaka to place romanticism in such a light, because the romanticism Japan had experienced so far was one that, associated with Kitamura T¯okoku, was shaped by individualism and subjectivism, not to mention Christianity. By the early Sh¯owa period, however, the greatest threat to universalism and moral philosophy was Miki’s own technological positivism that eschewed both metaphysics and a religious outlook in favor of a socially deterministic ideology of technological positivism. As Tanaka astutely observed, such positivism led to the view that ‘there is no science other than the recognition of the conventional morals and laws (jittei-teki d¯otoku mata wa jitteih¯o) of a

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given society. This is a negation of the very ideas of ethics and jurisprudence’ (Tanaka 1963: 248). Tanaka saw such positivism as the greatest threat to the moral good of Japanese society, and he emphasized that this positivism informed movements on both wings of the political spectrum.

The moral foundations of Kyoto political philosophy Like Tanaka, Nishida Kitar¯o was deeply concerned with the inﬂuence of a positivist philosophy that claimed metaphysics reﬂected a pre-modern way of understanding the world. In his ﬁrst book, An Inquiry into the Good, Nishida defended metaphysics for modern intellectuals, arguing that the ultimate aim of philosophy was not merely an advance in epistemology, but a metaphysical orientation that would make Man a better person. Although this was a study in moral philosophy (it might be more accurate to say, ‘because’ it was a study in moral philosophy), Nishida did not ignore the political dimension. Under the section ‘The Goal of Good Acts (the Content of the Good)’, Nishida explicitly treats the question of the relationship of the individual to the state. He discounts both the argument that the state exists merely for material well-being and the view that the founding of a state stems from the character of individual members of the state. Instead he asserts that: [. . .] we individuals, conversely, have developed as cells within a single society. The substance of the state (kokka no hontai) is the expression of the communal consciousness that is the basis of our spirit. We can achieve signiﬁcant growth in character (jinkaku) within the state. The state is a single, uniﬁed character, and the system of laws of a given state is, in this way, the expression of the will of the collective consciousness. The reason we give our all to the state is to complete the development of this great character. And the reason the state punishes people is not revenge, nor for social tranquility. It is because it possesses a dignity whose character must not be violated.3 (Nishida 1921: 253) On the face of it, this passage from An Inquiry into the Good does seem to provide evidence to support Goto-Jones’s thesis that Nishida was centrally concerned with politics from the beginning of his career. An Inquiry into the Good is not only, or exclusively, a work of moral philosophy. But it is critically important to understand precisely the political lessons implicit in Nishida’s argument about the state and morality, before assessing whether these views were ‘conservative’ or not. It would be facile to apply Kekes’s formula and conclude that Nishida was a conservative simply for taking morality seriously and for realizing that a good society ultimately requires a moral arrangement of its political institutions. At the same time, Nishida’s priority on the state over the individual would seem to undermine the conservatism of his political philosophy, making him seem more in the line of certain kinds of liberalism or even modern totalitarianism. A closer look at the terms of Nishida’s political thought is needed before we leap to conclusions about whether he was conservative or not.

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It is most revealing that Nishida’s political philosophy emphasized the state (kokka) and not the nation (kokumin; minzoku). The distinction is essential to grasping what Nishida’s political thought would mean later, during the wartime, when nationalism (minzokushugi) was often used as a critique of the multi-ethnic imperial state. Goto-Jones has pointed out that Nishida used such concepts as state (kokka) and nation (kokumin), quite conscious of their difference (Goto-Jones 2005: 78–79).4 As a philosopher, Nishida chose his words carefully. His argument that the state captures the essence of the society, and that it has a privileged dignity to which the individual must defer, does not seem liberal, whether by ‘liberal’ we mean that the political institutions of the state must serve the people, or whether we mean that the state should not be involved in the business of morality. At the same time, this statement is inconclusive as evidence of Nishida’s conservatism. It is not clear whether he saw the state as the embodiment of traditional social mores and values, or whether the (Meiji) state is seen as the agent of a new social consensus that may well be formed on the basis of Western ideas, such as individualism, religion, and progress. If the former, then we might conclude he was conservative; if the latter, it might be more tempting to see him as a liberal or progressive. Historical context may provide some clues to the political signiﬁcance of Nishida’s argument about the state as the context for the moral development of individuals. Nishida presented this view when the 1910 High Treason Incident was still fresh in the public’s mind. This incident involved a group of anarchists who were convicted and executed for attempting to assassinate the monarch. Marxism, socialism and anarchism had combined into a witch’s brew of anti-state activism, and it was in this context that Vice-Minister for Home Affairs Tokonami Takejir¯o laid plans for the 1912 meeting with representatives of Buddhism, Shintoism and Christianity. Tokonami offered a new cooperative relationship between the major religions and the state, one in which their religious freedom would be respected in exchange for their cooperation with the state in ensuring domestic tranquility (Doak 1995: 180–81). This overture was revolutionary in church-state relations in Japan: it sought a new cooperation among major religions, putting behind them animosities that had begun with the persecution of Christians from the late sixteenth century, the attacks on Buddhists in the 1870s, the fracturing of Shintoism between traditionalists and state-Shintoists, and of course the attacks on Christians during the early 1890s, after Inoue Tetsujir¯o’s ‘Commentaries on the Imperial Rescript on Education.’ The new alliances were those among people of faith, on the one hand, and those among Marxists, atheists and secularists on the other. An Inquiry into the Good reﬂected this religious ecumenism (Nishida cited with equal authority Buddhist and Christian sources in this work), and its defense of religion as the ultimate goal of philosophy was a rejection of the materialist ideologies that were being mobilized against the state and social order. Nishida himself made it explicit that his philosophy was ultimately a moral philosophy. In his introduction to An Inquiry into the Good, he pointed out that ‘Chapter Four [“Religion”] relates my thoughts on religion which I have for some time believed to be the endpoint of philosophy’ (Nishida 1921: 4). It is no accident that a chapter on religion is placed at the conclusion of his study. Religion is the

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culmination of Nishida’s philosophy, a philosophy that seeks not to provide a new epistemology, or a technical breakthrough in synthesizing Western and Eastern philosophies, so much as to bring forth a new mode of being, one which places Man in a more self-aware relationship with the ultimate, the divine. Nor is Nishida primarily concerned with asserting a Japanese or Buddhist theology, as Goto-Jones seems to argue (Goto-Jones 2005: 46).5 The question has signiﬁcance beyond theological matters. If Nishida were simply defending Buddhism as a Japanese cultural form against the invasion of Western culture, then he might qualify as a conservative under Kekes’s deﬁnition. But what is startling about Nishida’s treatment of religion in this chapter is the universality of its terms, and the depth of his study and understanding of Christianity. If any religious bias can be found in An Inquiry into the Good, it would be one in favor of Western, Christian theology more so than traditional Japanese Buddhism.6 But Nishida was not taking sides on religious afﬁliation; he was defending, even asserting the importance of religion in the face of an assault on religion from materialist philosophies. What one called this ultimate, and the institutional practices within which one sought the divine, mattered much less to Nishida than whether one embraced the centrality of the divine in a fully human life. Consequently, much of the literature on Nishida, understandably, has emphasized that he was not a political thinker but a moral philosopher. Those who see him as a moral philosopher tend to emphasize him as a Buddhist thinker; those who see him as a political philosopher have stressed his latter works as revealing complicity with an indefensible wartime aggressive state.7 This is a false choice. James Schall has made a provocative and largely compelling case that political philosophy and theology, or reason and faith, need not, indeed cannot, be separated. Schall argues that the effort to make political and moral philosophy seem incompatible arises from a particularly modern conceit that Man is the end of all things. But when Man is seen as a creation of something larger than himself, when the divine is brought into the picture, then the limits of political philosophy become apparent. As Schall writes, ‘the limits of political philosophy lead us to the things that cannot be otherwise, to the things that simply are for their own sake’ (Schall 2004: xviii). If Schall is correct (and I think he is), then the binary opposition between religion and politics is as slippery as the false dichotomy between moral and political philosophy. And, as a consequence, efforts to pigeonhole Nishida as either a moral philosopher or a political thinker are equally dubious. Schall’s work, in conjunction with Tanaka’s morally informed legal philosophy, suggests that to understand Nishida’s politics we cannot overlook his moral thought. In other words, we need to understand what Nishida thought about that which ultimately is. And the best way to understand Nishida’s thoughts on the ultimate is through his engagement with neo-Kantianism. After the publication of An Inquiry into the Good, Nishida quickly turned to the rising philosophical interest in neo-Kantianism. How he and his students engaged with neo-Kantianism provides us with signiﬁcant clues as to the historical context of Nishida’s own philosophy and of the Kyoto School, as well as the political ¯ signiﬁcance of both. Onishi Hajime, a Protestant Christian and one of Japan’s early

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and leading philosophers, used the Kantian distinction between the noumenon and the phenomenon to counter Inoue Tetsujir¯o’s attack on Christians as disloyal to the moral monarch. It was, as Goto-Jones puts it, ‘at least partly thanks to ¯ Onishi [that] Kant and neo-Kantianism would form an important part of the Kyoto School’s political context’ (Goto-Jones 2005: 45). Neo-Kantianism’s own political signiﬁcance is multivalent, both in Japan and in the broader intellectual world. Generally associated with a rejection of materialism in the late nineteenth century, it can be seen as a conservative reaction to the rise of Marxism. But in Japan, both as part of the defense of Christianity against authoritarian state ideologues like Inoue, and as a key element in the general liberal tenor of Taish¯o intellectual and culture issues, neo-Kantianism often emphasized the freedom of the individual intellect against the constraints of social or natural claims to objectivity. In these cases, neo-Kantianism seems quite the opposite of political conservatism. Neo-Kantianism gained the ascendancy in Japanese intellectual circles around the opening of the Taish¯o period. The key event was the 1913 publication of Kuwaki Gen’yoku and Amano Teiy¯u’s ﬁrst translation of Kant into Japanese (prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik die als Wissenschaft auftreten können). As Robert Adams noted, ‘from then on, until the early years of Sh¯owa a signiﬁcant portion of the energy of academic philosophers in Japan was taken up with the translation and explication of Kantian and neo-Kantian critical philosophy’ (Adams 1991: 123–24). It was Hermann Cohen of the Marburg School of neoKantianism who was particularly inﬂuential on Nishida; the Southwest School was more inﬂuential on his student Tanabe Hajime. This distinction is signiﬁcant, as Cohen is most remembered for his efforts to promote a revised form of the Jewish religion through his use of neo-Kantianism. Religion, more than logical categories and the technicalities of epistemology, remained central to Nishida’s philosophical interests. Adams pointed out that the inﬂuence of the Marburg school on Nishida meant that his philosophy was less marked by the characteristic dualism of much of neo-Kantianism that came from the Southwest German School and its emphasis on matters of logic and science: The admixture of being and nothingness [in Nishida’s thought] did not and could not result in the type of dualism found within the Southwest German School’s explanatory strategy. Nishida adamantly maintained the notion that ‘genuine, concrete reality’ had to be singular (Einzelnes) and that that singularity had to be guaranteed not on the basis of knowledge but, conversely, from the hiatus up. Nishida sought to demonstrate that unity, even if as an unstable and self-contradictory one, should not be based on the strict demarcations of the rational but on the productive activity of the non-rational. Even the structures of science, he argued, had to be produced. (Adams 1991: 201–02) If Adams is correct that Nishida was able to avoid the dualism of noumena and phenomena that generally characterizes neo-Kantian philosophy, then he also was

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able to avoid some of the moral and political pitfalls that plagued neo-Kantianism and even Taish¯o liberalism. These pitfalls were clearly identiﬁed by Tanaka, who was able to show from the vantage point of the early 1930s how the Taish¯o dalliance with neo-Kantianism, albeit from a self-consciously liberal position, ironically led to a conservative conclusion, if by ‘conservative’ we mean permitting or promoting the continuation of existing relations of power. Tanaka’s analysis of the political implications of neoKantianism in Taish¯o-early-Sh¯owa Japan is magisterial, and deserves citation at length: In this way, the neo-Kantian school of legal philosophy or jurisprudence degenerated into formalism. As we see in the case of scholars like [Gustav] Radbruch [1878–1949], a member of the neo-Kantian school, they hold that there is an intimate connection between one’s worldview and legal principles. The interpretation of law and of the purpose of the state is held to change depending on one’s own worldview (e.g. liberalism, democracy, anarchism, conservatism), and this gives rise to different policies and institutions. For example, they argue that a liberalism that emphasizes the value of human dignity ﬁnds it cannot accept the institution of capital punishment, whereas a conservatism that recognizes the value of the group will come to regard the state as absolute and favor support for the family system and a decentralization of power. But when it comes to a question of which system one should choose, they only leave the matter to the individual’s own beliefs; it is not, for them, the duty of legal philosophy to decide. This is, in a nutshell, Radbruch’s legal philosophical relativism. This philosophy has much in common with other philosophies that accept the relativity of morals and law. In contrast to more common relativistic philosophies that assert the relativity of morals and law on the relativity of time or space, Radbruch’s relativism, while of course based on this philosophical relativism (he, like all neo-Kantians, rejects Natural Law) falls into the error of thinking that one’s worldview is merely a matter of individual, subjective beliefs. (Tanaka 1963: 249) Tanaka’s analysis revealed how neo-Kantianism, both in the speciﬁc case of legal theory as well as in its broader philosophical contours, led to a rejection of universal principles like Natural Law in favor of a presumption of the subjective determination of values and norms. But was this necessarily a conservative way of thinking? Clearly, a good part of what made neo-Kantianism attractive to Taish¯o democrats was the sense that it was a liberating, if not liberal, philosophy that allowed individuals to choose values rather than have those values dictated to them by social tradition or by the state. The key to understanding the political valence of neo-Kantianism was to understand that it was far more sophisticated a response to modernity than merely adopting a ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ position. It was a retreat, in a sense, to a hyper-technical effort to transcend substantive politics, a position that left it quite

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implicated in the dominant political system of its own time. Again, it is best to listen directly to Tanaka: Ultimately, this position (neo-Kantian moral relativism) makes it impossible for anyone to criticize another’s acts as fundamentally immoral or unjust. One can only afﬁrm or negate acts based on the established morals or established laws that a given society or state has enacted from necessities of social life in that society or state. As the place or time changes, what was unjust suddenly becomes just . . . this discovery of a causal relationship between the social and economic conditions of a given society and its normative morals or laws also means there can be no science outside the perception of the established morals and established laws of a given society. This is a rejection of the very idea of jurisprudence or of the ﬁeld of ethics. (Tanaka 1963: 248) Adams, although sympathetic to Nishida, came to a similar conclusion that ‘his relation to the modern forms of society likewise were [sic] not that simple. As with the concept of Natural Law, he accepted their rule but only to a certain degree. Nishida was, and it seems to me, always remained ﬁrstly concerned with existence at a level where he felt, to a degree, free of the constraints imposed by such regimes. Seeing them from the perspective of critical philosophy, Nishida accounted systems such as Natural Law to have been in some sense artiﬁcially constructed’ (Adams 1991: 203–04). Neo-Kantianism was no mere cultural relativism. The neo-Kantian distinction between substance and form (or noumenon and phenomenon) offered little more than a kind of escapism when confronted by real political choices. Once again, Tanaka: [Neo-Kantian thought] culminates in a rejection of the substantive absolutivity of morals and law and, avoiding a scientiﬁc decision about the most vital issues confronting state, society and humanity . . . it puts an attractive cover over the formal concepts of the established, fashionable ways of thinking, deliberately closes its eyes to the variety and concreteness of human life and society, devotes itself entirely to a self-centered composition of abstract concepts, satisfying its own pedantic demands, or simply arranges food someone else prepared without getting its own hands dirty, or ﬁnds satisfaction in deliberating on methodology from the most lofty of places. In any case, it holds out only a pseudo-scientiﬁc transcendentalism when confronted with the questions that today most urgently need answers. (Tanaka 1963: 250) It would seem that Tanaka considered neo-Kantianism a conservative philosophy insofar as it was no threat to the established order.Yet he ranked it alongside Marxist materialism as the most popular mode of thinking among Japanese social scientists, and for much the same reason. Both had surrendered moral and spiritual issues to the technical ﬁeld of material and (pseudo-) scientiﬁc method. To the extent that

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neo-Kantianism supplanted concerns with morality with technical adjustments in epistemology, it would not qualify as ‘conservative’ under Kekes’s deﬁnition. Nishida was deeply concerned with the neo-Kantian revision of moral philosophy, and whether he himself was ‘neo-Kantian’ is debatable. He ‘rejected the intellectual bifurcation of existence proferred by the neo Kantians’ (Adams 1991: 206–07). Rather than the binary opposition of noumen and phenomenon (an intellectual strategy that sought to preserve some core of philosophical truth, even if only as form, from the historicism of modernity) Nishida consistently sought a single, unifying reality to which all existence was subordinate. To that extent, he was safe from Tanaka’s criticism of the relativism inherent in the neo-Kantian mode of bifurcation. But he clearly was attracted to the subjectivism raised by neoKantianism’s critique of objective truth. In the end, as Adams concluded, Nishida arrived at a ‘concept of identity that was indicated by the notion of a personal self (watakushi) that was ultimately unknowable, thus differentiating it from the mere ‘I’ (ware)’ (Adams 1991: 216). Not only was this ‘personal self ’ a mysterious, nonbeing when approached from the perspective of epistemology, but as Adams noted, it played much the same role as God did for Max Stirner: the inexplicable, which is not to say, the unknown. To this extent, Nishida was a good neo-Kantian, reducing universal questions of morality to the personal consciousness of the private realm, a realm that could not be ‘knowable’ by, or at least explicated to, the public. At this level, there was no end to the possibilities of what might be considered ‘ethical’ or ‘moral’. As Tanaka had warned and Tanabe made explicit, Nishida’s privatization of God meant that ‘self-consciousness is an endless process, and so once one has become self-conscious there is no way to stop the demand for endless progress’ (THZ II: 190, Adams 1991: 220).8 The political signiﬁcance of Nishida’s dalliance with neo-Kantianism remained ambiguous through the 1920s. He himself had not clearly connected his philosophical project with a political subjectivity. However, the direction of his thought was clear. Adams concluded his study on Nishida’s philosophy during the Taish¯o period by pointing out that Nishida was moving towards an integration of the separate spheres that marked neo-Kantian philosophy. Yet, this effort at integration, as Adams astutely observed, ‘also contained implications for the particular society in which it was written. . . a call to incorporate a Japanese type of authenticity even while drastically transforming what it meant to be Japanese’ (Adams 1991: 222). Once truth has been made subject to the worldviews of those who articulate it, the context and formation of those worldviews became the crucial issue. And, as Tanaka could see by the 1930s, this challenge to universal norms like Natural Law or Truth meant that society rather than nature increasingly became the standard for establishing what was true. Yet, the political implications of this turn from nature to society could take one in radically different directions. During the late 1920s, it was mainly leftist intellectuals, especially Marxists, who embraced the replacement of nature with society in the belief that ‘agency’, or political activism, would be enhanced by the discrediting of universal principles as constraints. This movement reached its apogee in the movement associated with the journal Under the Banner of the New Science that called for an intellectual synthesis that would unite

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Marxist and non-Marxist alike in the rejection of nature as a constraint. By 1930, it was still not clear whether the social and political actions that would ﬂow from this emancipation from nature would tend toward conservative or liberal political agendas.

Sh¯owa romanticism and the ethnic nation: an interlude The important intermediary between Nishida philosophy’s neo-Kantian inﬂuences of the liberal Taish¯o period and the nationalism that engulfed Japan during wartime was the romanticism that swept over the Japanese intellectual world during the early Sh¯owa period. Sh¯owa romanticism was different from the romanticism of the late Meiji period in many ways, and its differences can be attributed largely to its speciﬁc focus on German, rather than English, romanticism. Sh¯owa romanticism grew out of a political consciousness that took culture to be the true mode of social rev¯ olution. As Okubo Tsuneo noted, Sh¯owa romanticism drew from the 1770s Sturm und Drang movement of German Romanticism, and its inﬂuence swept the proletariat literary movement. Nakano Shigeharu’s Fragment on Heinrich Heine (1927) ¯ was one of the earliest manifestations of this new romanticism (Okubo 1971: 11). But it was the founding of the Japan Romantic School by Yasuda Yoj¯ur¯o in 1935 that marked a watershed in Sh¯owa romanticism, as it drew inﬂuential proletarian writers like Kamei Katsuichir¯o and Hayashi Fusao away from Marxist politics and toward cultural nationalism. Thus Yanase Yoshiharu is quite right to remind us that Marxist romanticism and the Japan Romantic School shared a rejection of realism and an agenda that sought a new subjectivity in place of the modern ‘bourgeois’ individual (Yanase 2000: 51–55). This ‘apolitical’ romanticism had a political agenda, but Yanase leaves the precise nature of its politics unclear. For that, we may turn to Yada Toshitaka who was a young man during the height of Sh¯owa romanticism, and whose postwar reﬂections on the political agenda of romanticism are quite insightful. Yada notes that romanticism, which he also traces to the German Romantic movement, may be understood in two stages: the early romanticism of Novalis and the latter romanticism of Adam Müller that reasserted the prerogatives of the ‘feudal aristocracy’ after the threat of the Napoleonic invasion (Yada 1957: 58).9 Yada’s characterization of Novalis captures the essence of romanticism as a paradoxical form of politics: ‘what draws our attention is his indifference to political affairs, “a lofty disinterest in the particular forms of the life of the state,” and his grasp of the German Volk as an exclusively “cultural entity” ’ (Yada 1957: 56). Yada might as well have been describing Yasuda, who wrote a great deal on Novalis and for whom the Japanese state was a matter of great disinterest. Yasuda was the heart and soul of Sh¯owa romanticism, drawing scores of leading intellectuals toward the Japan Romantic School and inﬂuencing hundreds of other writers with his brand of romanticism. In spite of the explicit renunciation of ‘politics’ that Yasuda intoned, there was a political edge to his romanticism which can best be grasped by understanding Yasuda’s attitude toward the state. It is not easy to discern Yasuda’s political views, at least in part because his romanticism

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militated against any reductive political statement. He was particularly scathing of Marxist political platforms that reduced culture to instruments of a political determinism. But a careful reader can discern how Yasuda’s nationalism led him to the same political agency that Yada concluded German romanticism privileged: a sense of the people as a cultural Volk rather than as citizens of a modern political state. Here is a representative sampling of Yasuda’s romantic view of politics: If I were to say in a word what the foundation of our thinking is these days, I might say it can be framed as a question of ‘was it a Restoration or a Revolution?’ The point is that our objective is not a theory of statist reform [kokkashugi-teki kakushin ron] but the spirit of loyalty to the monarch [kinn¯o seishin] . . . Today especially, we must understand this point correctly. The fact that a statist reform theory may begin with good intentions but ultimately shifts into a thing like the bakufu is clear to anyone who reads the history of the developmental change of the Yoritomo bakufu. Reform theories offered from the perspective of statism [kokkashugi-teki kenchi no kakushin ron] generally cannot deny the thought and structure of Yoritomo, and there is ample evidence that Yoritomo himself started out with good intentions. To be sure, there have been some statist achievements. But today we must deeply reﬂect on this history, and ponder how some reformist good intentions have constructed what has been called a bakufu-type thing. (YYZ XIII: 489)10 Yasuda’s meaning may not be immediately obvious, and his indirect mode of writing may well have been a method of preserving his freedom to criticize the state. We know that he was considered a dangerous thinker by the government and was placed under surveillance. But his point was a simple one: the Meiji state had evolved away from representing the Japanese as an ethnic nation, had imprisoned their ethnic chieftain, the monarch, in modern Western institutions, and had pursued a modern multi-ethnic empire. All this was done by bureaucrats who, in the historical analogy, played the role of the H¯oj¯o clan that had taken over Yoritomo’s bakufu and ruled in their own interests instead of the monarch’s or the Japanese people’s. For our understanding of the politics of Sh¯owa romanticism, two aspects of Yasuda’s thinking are most important: one, the true agent of political and cultural legitimacy is the ethnic nation (minzoku) and not the political state; two, this political critique of the modern state drew from leftist movements but transcended the left in a shift toward a radical rightist rejection of modernity, the state, and foreign culture, thought and religion. Although it had sources in German thought (Marxism and Romanticism), Sh¯owa romanticism ultimately was an indigenous, populist revolutionary force, and one that continued to be a source of concern for the imperial state. Not all politically-active intellectuals in the early Sh¯owa period were as nuanced in their thinking and as reserved in their actions as Yasuda. While some Marxist adversaries ofYasuda called him a ‘fascist’, he rejected the characterization, pointing out that fascism was the apotheosis of the state, something he was far from

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193).11

tempted to do (YYZ VI: Real fascists were on the prowl in Japan during the 1930s and, like Yasuda, they often extolled the virtues of the Japanese minzoku (Volk, ethnic nation) as they attacked government ofﬁces and assassinated ofﬁcials. One of the ﬁrst to sense that the source of these dangers to the imperial state was a global shift toward ethnic nationalism was Imanaka Tsugimaru, a Christian political theorist who later served as a member of the Cabinet Planning Board at the height of the war. His magisterial Thesis on Ethnic-National Socialism (1932) drew from Carl Schmitt’s work and, while he did not speciﬁcally cite Schmitt’s 1919 Political Romanticism, he clearly was familiar with and shared Schmitt’s argument on political romanticism, especially the key role played by Adam Müller’s concept of the Volk in laying the foundations for fascism.12 Imanaka surveyed the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and contrasted it with the social meliorism of Friedrich Julius Stahl that retained a foundation in rationalism. He concluded that national socialism was not an especially conservative political ideology; like Schmitt, he traced its origins to romanticism, particularly the ‘conceptual dialectic’ that he found in Karl Barth and Friedrich Gogarten (Imanaka 1978: 248–49). Of course, Imanaka was not calling his fellow Japanese Christians fascist. But he was on to something that Tanaka had also discovered. The rise of ethnic nationalism, and in turn, revolutionary fascism, stemmed from romanticism’s rejection of the constraints of nature and what Tanaka insisted was the universal validity of a trans-cultural principle of natural law. For Tanaka and Imanaka, conservatives were left to defend the universality of reason and the state; radicals on the right and left were trying to overthrow the constitutional state in the name of the populist impulses embedded in the principles of ethnic nationalism.

The morality of the Minzoku and the politics of the state Nishida’s position during the heyday of Sh¯owa romanticism is an intriguing one. Like Yasuda, he was inﬂuenced by German romanticism, but this inﬂuence came during the early twentieth century when romanticism in Japan was connected to support for individualism. Nishida found in the romanticism of Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel a legitimization of an individual’s emotions (Gemüt) over abstract reason. In a memorable phrase, he described the romanticism of his day as ‘a romanticism that has passed through the purgatory of natural science, an idealism that has emerged from the depths of naturalism and positivism’ (Nishida in Kobayashi 2003: 87). This statement places Nishida alongside Yasuda in their common rejection of natural science and their celebration of emotion over reason; yet his critique of naturalism and positivism (and his defense of religion) places him alongside Tanaka in a critique of positivism for having deprived much of modern Japanese intellectual life of the power of transcendence, replacing it instead with a mundane, amoral technicalism. It does not seem as though Nishida turned to the concept of the Volk (minzoku) as a result of his romanticism. His interest in romanticism took place decades prior toYasuda’s formation of the Japan Romantic School and the use of German romanticism to provide a theoretical foundation for

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the notion of a Japanese Volk. Nonetheless, as Kobayashi Toshiaki’s careful study of Nishida’s writings has demonstrated, Nishida was unable to avoid the debate over ethnicity and nationalism that raged among Japanese intellectuals from around 1935 on. The direct impetus came not from the Japan Romantic School but especially from Tanabe Hajime, who tried to apply Nishida’s philosophy to the political questions confronting the multi-ethnic empire (Kobayashi 2003: 242–46). Tanabe believed that romanticism’s privileging of ethnic nationality as the core social identity needed to be challenged from a reasoned, philosophical standpoint. Consequently he devoted his own philosophical project from 1934 (the yearYasuda published an announcement for the new Japan Romantic School) until 1940 to an alternative foundation for social and political identity, which he called ‘the logic of species [shu no ronri]’. There has been much controversy over the meaning and signiﬁcance of Tanabe’s ‘logic of species’, so it might be best to start by listening to Tanabe’s own explanation of what he was about: From 1934 to 1940, I pursued research into the dialectical logic of what I termed the logic of species. Through this work, I sought to study logically the concrete structure of state-society (kokka shakai). My motivation was to treat, as a philosophical problem, the ethnic nationalism (minzokushugi) that had arisen in those days. I criticized the liberal thinking that had dominated us for some time. But I also and simultaneously rejected what was called the totalitarianism that grew out of a simplistic ethnic nationalism. By rejecting both the former [liberalism]’s concept of the individual as the subject and the latter [totalitarianism]’s fundamental concept of the ethnic-nation (minzoku), I tried to discover . . . a rational basis for the nation-state as the practical uniﬁcation of the real and the ideal. (THZ VII: 253)13 Surely, Tanabe thought he was following the lead of Nishida (even if he had never been one of Nishida’s students), and that he had not in any way deviated from Nishida’s emphasis on reasoned philosophical engagement with the world. Moreover, he clearly shared (or thought he did) Nishida’s own moderate politics that rejected the excesses of liberal individualism (including its extension into materialist Marxism) and the radical collectivism of totalitarianism. Yet, as Kobayashi’s research has shown, tensions were emerging between Nishida and Tanabe by the early 1930s, and Nishida did not accept Tanabe’s effort to displace ethnic national identity with the broader category of species. Kobayashi suggests that Nishida’s 1935 essay, ‘The Position of Active-Intuition’ was penned to refute Tanabe’s critique of ethnic nationality, and indeed it does seem to support the position of ethnic national identity. Nishida countered that: Ethnic nationality (minzoku) is a biological species in the historical world, the world that afﬁrms the absolute negation. But it does not yet have the signiﬁcance of the self-limited eternal now, so to that extent it is still a living

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thing. There must be the self-limitation of the eternal now at the bottom of the historical world. When it acquires the signiﬁcance of a self-limited eternal now, one ﬁnds the establishment of a gemeinschaft. What I mean by gemeinschaft is something that has the cultural signiﬁcance of ethnicity (minzoku no bunkateki igi o motta mono). (Nishida in Kobayashi 2003: 246) What were the political stakes of this philosophical debate? One way of coming to terms with the political differences that had emerged between Tanabe and Nishida is to recognize that Tanabe worried more than Nishida about the domestic implications of ethnic nationalism pulling apart Japanese society and undermining the multi-ethnic imperial state. Thus, he offered the alternative of ‘species’, which suggested there was a common biological foundation for Asians that was compatible with membership in the increasingly diverse Japanese empire. Nishida’s counter argument in favor of ethnic identity was not so much an attempt to reject the empire as it was a refusal to abandon the concept of ethnic culture that had been a key feature of Japanese liberal thought since the early twentieth century. Consistent with the arguments of many liberals, Nishida thought the problem was not ethnic identity itself, but the ability of institutional structures to tame ethnicity, to make it compatible with a global world. At the same time, he apparently worried that Tanabe had shifted dangerously close to biological or natural science in his celebration of ‘species’ (shu). Tanabe and Nishida were caught in a dilemma: should one support the autonomy of the state as the subject of modern politics (Nishida), even if this meant a withdrawal from imperial engagement with other nations and cultures (‘the self-limited eternal now’)? Or should one reject narrow, self-centered ethnic nationalism (Tanabe), even if it meant that doing so might lend support to the multi-ethnic empire that was currently at war? Prior to 8th December 1941, support for the war did not mean support for attacking Western cultural dominance as much as support for Japanese engagement in Asia. Tanabe was more inclined to give his support to this project, Nishida less so. But which one was more conservative, or more romantic, is a much more difﬁcult question to answer, particular at that point in time. What is clear is that after this engagement with Tanabe’s ‘logic of species’, Nishida and his students began to address more frequently and in greater speciﬁcity the problem of ethnic nationalism in the context of Japan’s effort to construct a ‘co-prosperity sphere’ in Asia. One of the most inﬂuential members of the Kyoto School philosophers in this regard was K¯osaka Masa’aki, whose 1942 The Philosophy of the Ethnic Nation presented a comprehensive study of the problem of ethnic nationality from the philosophical perspective of the Kyoto School. K¯osaka began by arguing that the ‘natural world’ of the Renaissance had given way to the ‘historical world’ of the present, and that a new metaphysics was required that would take this transformation into account. The question confronting philosophers was no longer ‘what are the principles that govern the world?’ but ‘what is it

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that ties together the deepest foundations of human history?’ His solution, which drew from both Nishida and Tanabe’s concepts, was what he called: the activist subject that can solve the problem of the historical world . . . [i.e.] the statist ethnic nation [kokka-teki minzoku], the world-historical ethnic nation. But it has not been clearly identiﬁed. From the beginning, the world was not mobilized solely in terms of the ethnic nation; it had to be mediated also by culture. But whether we think of the world itself as the negative universal [mu-teki fuhen], the historical world must have a species-subject [shu-teki shutai]. And that is the statist-ethnic nation.14 (K¯osaka 1942: 3–4) As this ‘philosophy of the ethnic nation’ unfolded, it became clear that K¯osaka was building it on a rejection of natural science and thus emphasizing the constructed nature of the ethnic nation. This was what he meant by the mediation of culture: ‘between the natural ethnic nation (shizen minzoku) and the statist ethnic nation lies the mediation of the cultural ethnic nation’ (K¯osaka 1942: 50). The mediation of culture was an important element in this philosophical conceit of a new postnatural world that was described as ‘world historical’. But a cultural nation needed to develop into a statist-ethnic nation to be truly capable of acting in a ‘world historical world’. This developmentalism meant that nations were not biologically ﬁxed but, through the mediation of culture, were always already ‘in process’[gen ni dekitsutsu aru] (K¯osaka 1942: 198–99). K¯osaka may have thought his conception of a ‘world historical world’ and his encapsulation of ethnic nations within a state was a faithful rendering of Nishida’s views, but it was not. The most stark difference is apparent in K¯osaka’s conclusion which apotheosized the historical ethnic nation: ‘as the manifestation of a world historical ethics’, he wrote, ‘the historical ethnic nation is itself an unfolding of God’s thought. In this sense, what tied together the deepest foundations of world history was the ethnic nation’ (K¯osaka 1942: 204). If K¯osaka’s Philosophy of the Ethnic Nation was the most sustained effort to bring Kyoto School philosophy to the current political interest in ethnicity, nationalism and the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, its readership was most likely limited to professional philosophers or academics. A more inﬂuential intersection of this philosophy with a broader public took place when K¯osaka, now joined by Suzuki Shigetaka, Nishitani Keiji and K¯oyama Iwao, carried this ‘philosophy of the ethnic nation’ into the pages of the prominent journal The Central Review. The occasion was a series of four roundtable discussions that were published in The Central Review between November 1941 and November 1942. In 1943, the transcripts were combined into a single monograph, The World Historical Standpoint and Japan, which immediately sold out all 15,000 copies of the ﬁrst printing (Horio 1995: 289–90). Most commentators have emphasized the concept of ‘world historical’ and its lineage in Nishida’s philosophy. And they are quite right to do so. This concept of ‘world historical’ was a key feature in Nishida’s historicist turn away from the de-contextual thinking of certain forms of idealist philosophy and an emblem in the cultural relativism of Kyoto School philosophy.

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But what I want to emphasize is how concerns with morality merged with minzoku to shape a particular understanding of what, ultimately, the subjectivity of what they called ‘the world historical’ was. For these purposes, the most important of the roundtable discussions was the second one that took up the topic of ‘The Ethicality and Historicity of the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’. The four Kyoto School philosophers began the discussion by exploring what ‘moral energy’ meant in the context of Japan’s war against the West. On the theme of ‘a world historical ethnic nation and ethicality’, Nishitani argued that ‘when we speak of a world historical ethnic nation, for example the case of Japan today, I think the fundamental characteristic is historical self-awareness’ (Nishitani et al. 1942: 127). He went on, with the support of his colleagues, to deﬁne this historical self-awareness as the will and effort to build a new world order. It was the very effort to build a new world order that proved Japan had risen to the status of a ‘world-historical ethnic nation’. Suzuki made a similar point with his rhetorical questions: The basis of Japan’s taking up leadership in East Asia and being self-aware of its world-historical mission, I believe lies in that self-awareness. It is not objectively given, but subjectively (shutai-teki) self-conceived. Is this not what we mean by ‘moral energy’? Is this not Japan’s historical ethical view, its moral vigor? (Nishitani et al. 1942: 127) Behind this journalistic description of the Kyoto School’s moral philosophy rests a subjectivist assumption about the ability of intellectuals to reshape the world by re-conceiving it anew. Tanaka had correctly perceived, and warned against, the neoKantian subjectivism that was shifting Japanese moral philosophy towards a radical relativism that replaced objective reality with subjective desires. But whereas the earlier philosophical relativism of the Taish¯o period often rested on the claims of individual epistemological preferences, the intervention of Sh¯owa romanticism had yielded a new subjectivism according to which the moral preferences that supplanted universal principles were rooted in the being of the ethnic nation itself.15 The individual was no longer morally free to come to his own conclusions, but could only think ‘authentically’ within the body of this ethnic nation to which he fully belonged. This was an argument aimed at the Japanese themselves, an effort to de-legitimize any moral principle that contested the primacy of Japanese ethnic cohesion, whether it had its sources in Marxism, Christianity or liberal cosmopolitanism. But it also had clear implications for non-Japanese living in East Asia. Japan’s world-historical mission was to construct a new world order in the region, and that construction was intrinsically bound up with the destiny of the Japanese ethnic nation. But what were the contours of this new world order? The Kyoto philosophers described it as ‘the Greater East Asian Sphere as a Sphere of Ethnic Nations’. As Suzuki explained, this ethnic national sphere was an effort to overcome the principle of ‘ethnic national self-determination’ that the Versailles Peace

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Talks had unleashed around the world, resulting in ‘atomistic ethnic nation-states’ that lacked any concrete grounding except in the abstractions of a vague belief in globalism. In its place, Suzuki outlined an alternative model of regional geopolitics, what he called the idea of a ‘broad regional sphere of ethnic nations’. This regional order would be based on a different approach to ethnic nationalities than evidenced in the American exploitation of the Philippines or the European approach that recognized a greater degree of equality in the development of neighboring ethnic nations. Japan, Suzuki noted, was the only developed ethnic nation in the region; at the same time, it was committed to the raising of the ethnic consciousness and autonomous abilities of the nations in its region. At the same time, Japan would retain its position of leadership in this new order (Nishitani et al. 1942: 143). And ultimately, in spite of gestures to raise ethnic national consciousness among Asian peoples, the Kyoto School philosophers concluded their discussion by suggesting that the demographics of Japan’s empire required consideration of methods of making other ethnic groups in the region into ‘half-Japanese’(Nishitani et al. 1942: 159–61). This roundtable discussion on ‘The Ethicality and Historicity of the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ was neither the ﬁrst nor the last instance of Kyoto School philosophers offering their ideas in support of the war. K¯oyama Iwao had just published a major essay the previous month in The Central Review on ‘Total War and Intellectual War’, and he had published a long essay on ‘History’s Propulsive Power and the Power of Moral Life’ in the same journal in October 1942. But Nishida himself had largely remained silent in the face of this increasing mobilization of his philosophy to justify the war. With his own students prominently applying philosophy in the defense of the war, Nishida was under increasing pressure to validate that project with his own contribution. He resisted. Finally in spring of 1943, Dr. Kanai Sh¯oji, a former Supreme Advisor to the Mongolian Government, presented Nishida with the Army’s request to hear his philosophical perspective on the war effort. Unable to resist any further, Nishida penned a controversial essay, ‘Principles of a New World Order’, that was widely circulated in private before it was ﬁnally published in Philosophical Researches in September 1944.16 These writings suggest that Nishida’s views were not entirely misrepresented by his students, although he never went as far as they did in expressing enthusiasm for the concrete events that took place under the state’s actual policies. Where his own views are most clear is in the notion that existence is historically determined and that the ethnic nation must be subordinated to the political state. Nishida argued that, precisely because the Self is historical and social by birth, the Self could not be conceived in natural terms. This opened the way for the ethnic nation to serve as the grounds for social action, as: what we call the ethnic nation [minzoku] is of course not merely a biological thing. It must be the formative power of the historical world; it must be the species [shu] of the historical world. Each carries with it its own historical world-forming mission. If it does not, then we cannot call it an ethnic nation. (NKZ XII: 397)

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Nishida was evidently still disputing with Tanabe Hajime over the differences between a species as a biological concept and the ethnic nation as a socio-historical concept. He favored the latter for its historical nature, but he did not share with the Sh¯owa romantics a privileging of the ethnic nation over and against the political state. Rather, Nishida argued that when an ethnic national society [minzoku shakai] becomes a state [kokka to naru] then and only then does the particular become a totality that is capable of serving as ‘creator of eternal value’. This, he concluded ‘is the distinction between a state and a simply ethnic national society’ (NKZ XII: 398). At the same time, the state is the guarantor of objectivity in the face of the ‘demonic’ force that ethnicity can unleash on the world. Here, Nishida was concerned about the use of ethnicity to develop a narrow, exclusivist ethnic nationalism (minzokushugi) and so he added that, given the speciﬁc qualities that he found within ethnicity as a principle unto itself, ethnicity needed to be contained in a form that had a greater universalizing power. This form was the state. Thus, he concluded ‘the state is the creative form, the self-formative body of historical life. Without the state form, those things we call objective values would not exist. This is why the state may be thought of as the objective spirit’ (NKZ XII: 421). The entire thrust of this argument was to defend the state against the forces of ethnic nationalism and those who would, like Yasuda and the romantics, pull Japan back into isolation from its region and from engagement with the world. Nishida’s argument in defense of the state can be seen as an extension of a liberal political philosophy that he outlined in An Inquiry into the Good. This is particularly so when he describes the state in universalistic terms. But what complicates an assessment of the politics of his writings is that this defense of the state over ethnic nationalism was, in practice, a defense of Japan against potential liberation movements in its colonies and among its subjugated peoples inAsia. Like his students, Nishida defended the theory of ‘hakk¯o ichiu’ or ‘the eight corners of the world make one house’. This was the only remaining universalizing, or ‘world historical world’ that Nishida could imagine, since he had already discounted the universal love of Christianity or the ‘kingly way’[¯od¯oshugi] of ancient China (NKZ XII: 428–29). These two poles of Christianity and the ‘kingly way’are the best hints at Nishida’s politics during the war. His assertion that world morality could not be based on Christian love was a considerable shift from his religious concerns in An Inquiry into the Good that seemed to ﬁnd much in Christianity worthy of respect. But what he found appealing in the Christian tradition was simply a repudiation of rationalism; the central Christian dogma of caritas held little appeal for him. His rejection of the ‘kingly way’ as merely an ancient Chinese philosophy can be seen as a rejection of China as backward. But it was more than that. Support for the ‘kingly way’, or an idealist commitment to Asian liberation regardless of the cost to Japan’s own national interest, was a theory closely connected to Minoda Muneki, the fanatical head of Genri Nippon, and Minoda had been attacking Nishida (along with a host of others, including Marxists like Sano Manabu and Christians like Tanaka) since the late 1920s (Kobayashi 2003: 251–53). Nishida rejected Minoda’s approach as insufﬁciently national, a fatal blow given that Nishida had determined that the universal could only be reached through the world historical form of

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the particular national state. Japan’s actions in Asia, or indeed elsewhere in the world, could not be judged from such external theories, but only evaluated on the basis of the values internal to ‘the world historical world’ that was constituted by the Japanese state itself. Particular actions could not be judged through putative universal moral systems, as universals were only produced in and through the particular (nations). If this philosophy was not completely amoral, it was at least an instance of moral relativism.

Conclusion How do we sum up Nishida’s politics? Did his moral relativism make him a liberal? Or did his repudiation of knowable universals render him a conservative nationalist? Was he a romantic in love with his own ethnic people? Or a hard-nosed realist, defending the constitutional state against emotional fanatics? Chris Goto-Jones argues that Nishida was not a liberal, but certainly was a politically minded philosopher. According to Goto-Jones, Nishida’s moral philosophy was never devoid of politics: ‘his work was explicitly political from the start . . . [because] the whole point of Nishida’s political project . . . was to relativize the political conceptions of Western philosophy and to demonstrate that other traditions (particularly the Mahâyâna tradition in Japan) could supply concepts of equal worth and utility’ (Goto-Jones 2005: 5). Goto-Jones is quite right to stress Nishida’s ‘cultural and political pluralism’ and to reject the notion that this pluralism somehow automatically makes Nishida a candidate for liberalism (Goto-Jones 2005: 5). In certain respects, Nishida’s philosophy seems to put him well within the framework of conservatism as outlined by Kekes above: a moral philosophy that seeks, through a commitment to pragmatic pluralism, to identify and defend those political institutions that will encourage the moral traditions that have proven capable of leading a speciﬁc people to the good life. But Nishida’s conservatism was markedly different from the anti-modern ethnic culturalism of the romantic writers, and neither was it the kind of ‘conservatism’ associated with T¯oj¯o Hideki and those defending authority during the late wartime years. Nishida himself tried to walk a ﬁne line, between the statism of Tanabe that sacriﬁced cultural pluralism in the empire in order to suppress ethnic nationalist attacks on the multi-ethnic state at home, and the more rabid celebrations of the moral state to which many of his students (not to mention fanatics like Minoda) succumbed. Nishida’s consistent concern with Man’s responsibility to an absolute, if ultimately unknowable, divinity, and his ultimate tendency to rest his rational philosophy within a religious sensibility that could not be subsumed completely within the political state begs comparison with the Catholic jurist Tanaka K¯otar¯o, who emphasized both Natural Law as the foundation for universal human rights and the Augustinian tradition of a separation between the ‘City of Man’ and ‘the City of God’. But in his intoxication with a ‘world historical world’, and the replacement of nature with socially constituted ‘history’, Nishida broke radically with the moral universalism of Tanaka, leaving him no other recourse than support for the state as a better alternative to ethnic nationalism.

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By all accounts, Nishida’s students fared even worse. ‘Kyoto philosophy’ during the war became more explicitly associated with them, especially K¯osaka, Suzuki, Nishitani and K¯oyama. They followed Nishida’s lead in deﬁning the modern, constructed state as the context for absorbing ethnic cultures and rejecting ethnic nationalism, but they collapsed Nishida’s emphasis on an absolute moral principle and the concrete situatedness of all human beings into the idea of the ‘moral energy’ of the state. This shift was not only one that reduced the critical negativity of the ultimate moral principle (the position of absolute nothingness); it erased the distinction between the institutions Man creates (e.g. the state) and the radical alterity of his Creator. Yet, at least in one essay on politics written at the height of the war, Nishida himself seems to have come to the same defense of the moral state as his students. Perhaps the difference was only that Nishida was somewhat ashamed of the position he found himself in, and only with the greatest reluctance allowed his philosophy to come to the service of the state. Even then, Nishida avoided blatant expressions of jingoism in favor of a highly abstract language that often masked his real intent. Were the politics of these Kyoto School philosophers ‘conservative’? An afﬁrmative answer will tempt those for whom the deﬁning factor in conservatism is its opposition to Marxism. But if opposition to Marxism ipso facto makes the Kyoto School philosophers ‘conservative’, then we would have to include a host of moderates, liberals, Christians and others in this portmanteau of ‘conservative’. The actual range and nuance in the political spectrum would be reduced to two positions, ‘Marxists’ and ‘conservatives’. From a broader perspective, the politics of the Kyoto School were not conservative, but radical or even ‘liberal’. Their philosophical defense of the state did not reﬂect a conservative agenda, because the Meiji state was a modern (and in a limited sense, a liberal) state, not a traditional one. Article 28 of the Meiji Constitution, which guaranteed freedom of religion, legally established the Meiji state as a secular state. And while it is true that Article 3 declared the monarch to be ‘sacred and inviolable’, this ‘sacredness’ did not extend to the state itself. The framers did not intend for the constitutional monarchy to be a moral state, and yet that was what the Kyoto School philosophers tried to engineer and what made their project so radical. However moralistic their concerns appeared to be, their political agenda is not conservative by Kekes’s deﬁnition. We must not forget Kekes’s reminder that support for whatever system of authority happens to be in place is not necessarily a conservative position. For Kekes, conservatives try to preserve and defend those institutions that time has shown are most likely to yield a greater propensity for moral behavior in a speciﬁc society. But conservatives recognize that morality’s foundation lies outside those institutions. Hence, conservatives worry more about the intrusion on human free will by such a designated ‘moral’ state, or a government that thinks it has a monopoly on morality. In this sense, Harootunian and Najita are quite right to conclude about the Kyoto School philosophers (if not Nishida himself) that ‘none came closer than they did to deﬁning the philosophic contours of Japanese fascism’ (Najita and Harootunian 1988: 741). This fascism was neither conservative nor romantic, but drew from modern and progressive beliefs about the ability to

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construct institutions that would be ‘good’ and would of themselves induce people to act morally. If ‘fascism’ has any explanatory power left today, perhaps it should be reserved for these cases where a romance of social engineering embraces the moral state as the midwife of a brave new order.

Notes 1 After calling Tanaka a conservative theorist, Hayashi immediately conceded that ‘of course, I do not know whether he would call himself a conservative.’ (37). At the time, Tanaka was alive and quite active, serving as a judge on the International Court of Justice in The Hague. 2 Originally published as: Tanaka K¯otar¯o, ‘Gendai no shis¯o-teki an¯ak¯ı to sono gen’in no kent¯o,’ Kaiz¯o (1933). Now Tanaka (1963). 3 This rather incisive analysis of the ‘substance of the state’ seems to belie Nishida’s comment to K¯osaka Masaaki more than twenty-ﬁve years later that ‘he had not previously had the time or inclination to consider the ‘essence of the state’ (kokka no honshitsu). Cited in Goto-Jones 2005: 48. Specialists may want to try to resolve this apparent contradiction by deﬁning with greater analytic precision the difference between ‘substance’ (honshitsu) and ‘essence’ (hontai). 4 Nishida’s acute sensitivity to the difference between ‘the state’ (kokka) and ‘the nation’ (kokumin) unfortunately is ignored, as in Masao Abe and Christopher Ives’s rendering of this passage cited above in their translation of Zen no kenky¯u as An Inquiry into the Good (New Haven and London: Yale University, 1990): 140–41. They translate state (kokka) as ‘nation’. Such a rendering is not only technically inaccurate, but it obscures the signiﬁcance of Nishida’s political philosophy in one of the few passages in this early work where he explicitly takes up political themes. Japanese political and moral philosophers who emphasized the primacy of the nation (kokumin) were often asserting the prerogatives of the people, and even tradition, against the intrusion of the modern state (kokka) into local life. Conversely, the Meiji oligarchs made a deliberate decision to reject the claims made in the name of a sovereign ‘nation’ (kokumin) when they instead established a constitutional state (kokka) centered on the sovereign monarch. 5 Cf. Goto-Jones’s statement that Nishida’s turn to metaphysics was merely an extension of ‘an indigenous Buddhist tradition of discussing the epistemological and ethical dimensions of the political.’ 6 The sense of a comparative religion approach, or assertion of Buddhism against Christianity, in Nishida’s philosophy is partly the result of Abe and Ives’s over-translation. For example, at the conclusion of their An Inquiry into the Good, they have Nishida saying ‘We can moreover know this absolute, inﬁnite God or Buddha only by loving God or Buddha; in other words to love God is to know God, to love Buddha is to know Buddha’ (Nishida 1990: 176). In the original, Nishida does not constantly juxtapose ‘God or Buddha’ but speaks mainly about ‘God’ (kami). When he does distinguish them, it is more in the vein of interchangeability of the divine (moshiku wa) rather than an emphasis on them as distinct beings. What Nishida actually said, at the conclusion of a long section on kami that drew more from Christian sources than from Buddhist ones (the Tannish¯o, yes, but also the New Testament, St. Augustine, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Erskine and Oscar Wilde) is this: ‘Thus, to know the absolute, inﬁnite Buddha or God (hotoke moshiku wa kami) is best done by loving Him (kore o aisuru ni yorite yoku suru no de aru), and to love Him is to know Him’ (Nishida 1911/1921: 313). 7 See the summary of this debate in Goto-Jones 2005: 3–5. An important anthology with representatives from both sides of the debate is James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo 1995. My own contribution to that volume was an effort to encourage participants to re-think the lines of division in the debate over Kyoto philosophy. It was not altogether

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successful, largely due to the entrenched nature of the ‘political’ and ‘philosophical’ positions in the debate and especially to a persistent tendency on both sides to ignore the speciﬁc nuances of key political concepts. Tanabe Hajime, Kagaku gairon, reprinted in THZ II. Yada’s essay was part of an effort by Marxist historians during the 1950s to retain the legitimacy of ethnic nationalism for anti-capitalist purposes, and that fact must be understood to appreciate his argument. His division of romanticism into an earlier ‘apolitical’ discovery of minzoku and that latter use of minzoku to resist Napoleon may also be seen as an interpretation of the Japan Romantic School during the wartime and the postwar Marxist turn to ethnic nationalism to resist American inﬂuence in Japan. This approach to romanticism and ethnic nationalism has been continued in contemporary Japan by New Left intellectuals such as Karatani K¯ojin. Yasuda Yoj¯ur¯o, Ishin to kakushin, reprinted in YYZ XIII. Of course, it also might be accurate to say that Yasuda was guilty of the apotheosis of the Japanese people as an ethnic Volk. Cf. ‘In Germany, Adam Müller’s political activity exhibits the picture that is typical of political romanticism. From this picture, we shall see how mistaken is the currently accepted account that places men such as Burke, de Maistre and Bonald in the same category of political intellectuality asAdam Müller and Friedrich Schlegel.’ Carl Schmitt 1986: 33. Cited in Doak 1995: 187. I have slightly revised my earlier translation of this passage from Tanabe. Here, I would like to record my gratitude to Paul Wijsman, Librarian of Leiden University’s Centre for Japanese and Korean Studies. His expert guidance of their unique collection led me to this rare item. As Nishitani put it, ‘an ethnic nation that rises anew in the established world order and strongly asserts its own existence has to be an ethnic nation with moral energy. And with such an ethnic nation, one expects to ﬁnd it was able to form a state on the basis of its own ethnic nation. For such an ethnic nation, the state may be called a manifestation of the ethnic nation’s own moral energy’ (Nishitani et al. 1942: 137). The point is that this ‘moral energy’ comes not from the state per se but from the ethnic nation, which is the subjective personality invested with moral ‘self-awareness,’ if not moral conscience. Some scholars have suggested the extant manuscript was edited heavily by Tanabe Suketoshi. There is a raging controversy over how much this essay reﬂects Nishida’s own beliefs. The controversy is nicely summarized in Kobayashi 2003: 258. Rather than try to ferret out where Nishida-the-person ends and Nishida-the-text begins, I will simply draw from the most authoritative version of the text, ‘Tetsugaku ronbunsh¯u daiyon hoi,’ in NKZ XII : 397–434. This text, originally called ‘Kokutai,’ includes the ‘Principles of a New World Order’ and other texts from that time period that deal with political themes. Those who wish to believe that either Nishida himself did not write the piece, or did not accept the views outlined in it, are free to do so. My own interest here is in delineating the public Nishida as known through his writings, as that is the Nishida who matters in terms of inﬂuence on the politics of the time.

References Adams, Robert William (1991), The Feasibility of the Philosophical in Early Taisho Japan: Nishida Kitar¯o and Tanabe Hajime, (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Chicago). Doak, Kevin M. (1995), ‘Nationalism as Dialectics: Ethnicity, Moralism and the State in Early Twentieth-Century Japan’, in Heisig, James W. and Maraldo, John C. (eds) Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 174–96.

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Doak, Kevin M. (1998), ‘Under the Banner of the New Science: History, Science, and the Problem of Particularity in Early Twentieth-Century Japan’, Philosophy East and West, 48:2 (4), pp. 232–56. Goto-Jones, Christopher (2005), Political Philosophy in Japan. Nishida, the Kyoto School, and Co-Prosperity, London: Routledge. Hayashi Kentar¯o (ed.) (1963), Shin hoshu shugi, Gendai nihon shis¯o taikei, 35 (Series), Tokyo: Chikuma Shob¯o. Heisig, James W. and Maraldo, John C. (eds) (1995), Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Horio Tsutomo (1995), ‘The Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron Discussions, their Background and Meaning’, in Heisig, James W. and Maraldo, John C. (eds) Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 289–315. Imanaka Tsugimaro (1978), ‘Minzokuteki shakaishugi ron’, in Tanaka Hiroshi et al. (eds) Imanaka Tsugimaro seijigaku ronsh¯u (Series), Tokyo: Ochanomizu Shob¯o. Kekes, Jones (1998), A Case for Conservatism, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Kobayashi Toshiaki (2003), Nishida Kitar¯o no y¯uutsu, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. K¯osaka Masaaki (1942), Minzoku no tetsugaku, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Najita, Tetsuo and Harootunian, Harry D. (1988), ‘Japanese Revolt against the West: Political and Cultural Criticism in the Twentieth Century’, in Duss, Peter (ed.) The Cambridge History of Japan volume 6: The Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 711–74. Nishida Kitar¯o (1911/1921), Zen no kenky¯u, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Nishida Kitar¯o (1990), An Inquiry into the Good, Masao Abe and Ives, Christopher (trans. and eds), New Haven: Yale University Press. Nishitani Keiji, K¯oyama Iwao, Suzuki Shigetaka, K¯osaka Masaaki (1942), ‘T¯oa ky¯oeiken no rinrisei to rekishisei (zadankai)’, Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron, 57:4 (4), pp. 120–61. ¯ Okubo Tsuneo (1971), ‘Sh¯owa romanshugi’, Kaishaku to Kansh¯o (11): 10–21. Schall, James V. (2004), Roman Catholic Political Philosophy, Oxford: Lexington Books. Schmitt, Carl (1986), Political Romanticism, trans. Guy Oakes, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Tanabe Hajime (1964), Tanabe Hajime Zensh¯u, 14 vols, Tokyo: Chikuma Shob¯o. Tanaka K¯otar¯o (1963), ‘Gendai no shis¯o-taikei an¯ak¯ı to sono gen’in no kent¯o’, in Hayashi Kentar¯o (ed.) Shin hoshu shugi, in Gendai nihon shis¯o taikei, 35 (Series), Tokyo, Chikuma Shob¯o, pp. 235–63. Yada Toshitaka (1957), ‘Romanshugi to minzoku kannen’, in Eguchi Bokur¯o (ed.) Iwanami k¯oza gendai shis¯o III: minzoku no shis¯o, Tokyo, Iwanami Shoten, pp. 51–71. Yanase Yoshiharu (2000), ‘Sh¯owa j¯unendai ni okeru “romanshugiteki genmei” no shos¯o’, in Bungaku shis¯o konwakai (ed.) Kindai no yume to chisei: bungaku shis¯o no Sh¯owa j¯unen zengo, Tokyo: Kanrin Shob¯o, pp. 51–55. Yasuda Yoj¯ur¯o (1985–89), Yasuda Yoj¯ur¯o Zensh¯u, 46 vols, Tokyo: K¯odansha.

8

The deﬁnite internationalism of the Kyoto School Changing attitudes in the contemporary academy1 Graham Parkes

Nationalism manifests itself along a spectrum of forms and a variety of contexts. When espoused by a people oppressed by a colonial power in the cause of achieving independence, it can surely be a good thing, whereas the form prosecuted by the National Socialists in 1930s Germany exempliﬁes the phenomenon at its most pernicious. Since the philosophy of the Kyoto School has been dismissed as ultranationalist ideology merely masquerading as philosophy, it is worth asking what kind of nationalism it advocates. If it turns out to be the kind that is compatible with, or even naturally leads to, internationalism, there may be little point in complaining about it. We may also ﬁnd that what the Kyoto School philosophers have to say about internationalism is relevant to issues that still confront us in the globalizing world of the early twenty-ﬁrst century. In his well-documented presentation of the School’s founder, Nishida Kitar¯o, as a signiﬁcant and decidedly un-nationalistic political thinker, Christopher GotoJones helpfully sketches some of the relevant sources for Nishida’s thinking in Neo-Confucianism and various schools of Japanese Buddhism (Goto-Jones 2005: 25–46).2 I shall begin by tracing some older and broader philosophical ideas from these traditions that naturally incline the Kyoto School philosophers away from nationalism, as background for an overview of internationalist ideas in the works of Nishida Kitar¯o and Kuki Sh¯uz¯o.3 Similar ideas are to be found in the work of Nishitani Keiji, but space permits only a brief account of his contribution rather than the longer treatment it deserves. Although scholars have explored the relations between nationalism and internationalism in Japan from the Meiji to early Sh¯owa periods, there has been little discussion of the contributions of the Kyoto School philosophers.4 With respect to Kuki in particular: since neo-Marxist portrayals of him as an ultranationalist have obscured the internationalist dimension of his thinking, that false picture will have to be corrected.

∼500 BCE The Kyoto philosophers belonged to one of the last generations of scholars to be raised on the classics of Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist philosophy – after which they went on to study Western thought. This already made them internationalist by comparison with their counterparts in the West, none of whom took the trouble to

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learn an East-Asian language. What the Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist schools of philosophy have in common, by contrast with Western thought, is a thoroughgoing relational (as opposed to a substance) ontology. The world is viewed not as an aggregate of substantial things, but as a ﬁeld of processes in dynamic interaction – a view that tends to stress the inter of the relations rather than the end-points of the relata. Once the ethnocentrism born of ignorance of the world beyond one’s own ethos is dissipated, a pluralist internationalism comes far more naturally than a monocentric nationalism. In the case of the human self in particular, there is a tendency in Western philosophy to think of it as some kind of mental substance (Descartes’ idea of res cogitans, a thinking thing, is paradigmatic), as something independently subsistent; whereas for the East-Asian traditions the self is regarded as empty of any inherent ‘nature’ and as relational through and through. An idea underlying much political theory in the West is that social groups are formed by autonomous individuals bringing themselves into association under some kind of social contract (as in Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau). In the East-Asian traditions social relations are primary, and so the basic ontological unit is not the individual human being but rather the family, as a paradigm of human beings in relation to each other. Thanks to a predilection for correlative thinking in terms of microcosm and macrocosm, Confucian thought moves from the family as microcosm to the Central Kingdom as macrocosm, such that the emperor is supposed to care for the people as a father does for his family, while the people are meant to show appropriate deference to the emperor as paterfamilias. The system is patriarchal but not necessarily authoritarian, since goodness in a ruler naturally elicits deference on the part of the ruled, while a bad ruler loses the ‘mandate of heaven’– just as a father who is bad will forfeit deference from his family. The system traditionally extends no farther than the borders of the Central Kingdom, since beyond those are the barbarians and the realm of the not-fully-human. But when barbarians are conquered they are drawn into the relational network through being assimilated. And so once Sinocentrism is overcome – as it had to be after the subjugation of parts of China at the hands of the colonialist powers of Europe – the relational understandings of individual, family, and people can be expanded to include other nations.5 This relational understanding of the world developed somewhat differently in Japan, which shares the tendency of island nations to be insular. The island situation allowed for independent development at ﬁrst, while proximity to the Asian mainland later exposed the islands to powerful inﬂuences. As Nishida puts it: ‘The Japanese people, who already had distinctive features, formed an original and independent culture through assimilation of Chinese and Indian cultures’(Dilworth et al. 1998: 28). By the time the Japanese relational understanding of the world came to be thematized in writing, the country’s insularity had already been undermined by assimilation of the ‘Other’ — insofar as much of Chinese thought and culture was imported when their writing system was adopted in the ﬁfth century CE. This established a pattern of assimilative relations between Japan and the world beyond its shores that has lasted (though interrupted by two centuries

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of sakoku, or ‘closed nation’ policy) to the present day. Through its tradition of cultivating relations with other cultures, Japan has distinguished itself as the nation most successful at assimilating features of the Other while remaining – at least until recently – distinctly Itself. When it comes to the politics of international relations, the Western tendency to think in terms of autonomous selves prompts a move from the idea of selfinterested individuals forming associations into nations, which will then compete against one another to further their self-interest, to that of self-interested nations entering into some kind of contract whereby they agree to cooperate, as with the League of Nations. On the East-Asian view, by contrast, one would expect a plurality of nations to behave more as different members of a family (which would by no means rule out competition and disputes between members) than as discrete units negotiating themselves into some sort of trans-social contract. In view of their background in traditions of relational philosophies, it would be surprising if the Kyoto School philosophers had in any way favoured nationalism over internationalism – and all the more so since they all undertook comprehensive studies of Western thought and culture in the original languages, and all except Nishida himself spent time in Europe. Nevertheless, Rolf Elberfeld has shown the extent to which Nishida’s philosophy is radically ‘intercultural’, and thereby prepares the ground for subsequent intercultural philosophizing (Elberfeld 1999).

1911 The important political dimension to Nishida’s ﬁrst book, Zen no kenky¯u (A study of the good) of 1911 has been recently pointed out by Goto-Jones (Goto-Jones 2005: 47–67). In chapter twenty-six of this seminal work Nishida argues for a relational understanding of the self insofar as ‘our individual consciousnesses emerge from and are nurtured by’ an antecedently existing ‘social consciousness’. This social consciousness, for Nishida, ‘consists of various levels’ ranging from the family to the nation (kokka), which he characterizes as ‘the expression of the communal consciousness that constitutes the foundation of our minds’ (Nishida 1911/1990: 138–40). In considering what ‘the purpose’ of the nation might be, he dismisses the Rousseauvian notion that the nation exists for the sake of ‘the harmonious development of individual personalities’, as well as the Hobbesian idea that its purpose is ‘to ward off enemies on the outside and protect life and property on the inside’. What Nishida proposes in place of these ideas is remarkable: At present, the nation is the expression of uniﬁed communal consciousness. But the expression of our personality cannot stop there – it demands something greater: the unity of a ‘human-society’ that includes all humanity . . . A meaningful purpose runs consistently throughout the development of humanity, and the nation appears to be something that rises and falls in order to fulﬁl part of humanity’s mission. (The history of nations is the development of Hegel’s so-called ‘world spirit’.) But genuine globalism (sekaishugi) does

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Already in 1911, Nishida sees the nation as only an intermediate phenomenon, a stage on the way to a future ‘genuine globalism’. The ﬁrst discussion of the nation in Kyoto School philosophy thus already signals the desirability of going beyond the nation, from nationalism to internationalism – and anticipates by eight years the establishment of the League of Nations.

1930a Most members of the Kyoto School traveled to Europe, and one of them, Kuki Sh¯uz¯o, stayed there for seven years. While he was in Paris, Kuki wrote an essay on the aesthetic idea of iki, which he completed in 1926. Two years later, Nishida recommended him for a teaching position at Kyoto Imperial University, which Kuki took up when he returned to Japan at the beginning of 1929. The following year he published an expanded version of his essay on iki, ‘Iki’ no k¯oz¯o (The structure of iki), which went on to establish itself as a classic of modern Japanese aesthetics. In the English-speaking world, by contrast, the reception of Kuki’s masterpiece got off to an inauspicious start with the rough treatment by Peter Dale in his book The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (1986). While Dale’s book skilfully exposes much of the silliness of Nihonjinron, understood as ‘theories of Japanese uniqueness’, its treatment of ‘Iki’ no k¯oz¯o is sloppy and infected by the author’s animus toward any Japanese who presumes to write about things Japanese.6 Dale also distinguishes himself by being the ﬁrst critic of the Kyoto School (he takes wild swipes at Nishida, Tanabe Hajime and Watsuji Tetsur¯o) to play the ‘guilty-by-association-with-Heidegger’ card. In his ﬁrst sentence on Kuki, Dale establishes him as having ‘studied under Martin Heidegger’ while in Marburg (Dale 1986: 68). This formulation seems to be generally accepted, but is actually misleading. Kuki was a year older than Heidegger and impressed the (admittedly more famous) German philosopher as brilliant and intellectually sophisticated. Kuki sat in on several of Heidegger’s lectures at Marburg, but nothing that either thinker says about the other suggests that either one thought of their relationship as one of student to teacher. It is good to resist the inclination to suppose that the non-white philosopher must have been intellectually subordinate to the Aryan genius. Dale then launches into a discussion of Heidegger’s ‘Conversation on Language between an Inquirer and a Japanese’, which he claims ‘ﬁctively recreates his discussions with Kuki’ (Dale 1986: 69). While there are a few references to Kuki in the conversation, no less reliable an authority than Heidegger himself notes that the ‘Conversation’ was ‘occasioned by a visit from Professor Tomio Tezuka of the Imperial University of Tokyo’ (Heidegger 1959: 269). There is no reason

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to disbelieve this, since we also have an account of the actual conversation from the hand of Professor Tezuka (May 1989/1996: chaps. 2 and 7). But so eager is Dale to damn Kuki through his association with Heidegger that he completely misreads and misrepresents Heidegger’s text: if we were to read the ‘Conversation’as ‘recreating’ the author’s discussions with Kuki, we would have to understand Kuki-as-theJapanese referring to himself-as-long-since-deceased whenever Tezuka refers to Kuki (whom Tezuka says he never even met). Dale goes on to recount how Kuki in ‘Iki’ no k¯oz¯o ﬁnds no exact equivalent to the idea of iki in several European languages. Then: Having summarily adjudged the elusive iki to be peculiar to the Japanese language (nothing remarkable since all words are by deﬁnition unique), Kuki feels justiﬁed in asserting that, ‘Nothing stands in the way of our considering iki as one of the conspicuous forms of self expression of the unique existential modes of Eastern culture, nay, rather of the Yamato race itself.’ Iki, being untranslatable, must refer to a ‘speciﬁc character of the race’. (Dale 1986: 70) But Kuki’s text is less racial than Dale’s translation makes it sound, which perversely renders minzoku as ‘race’ rather than ‘people’ or ‘ethnic group’. Dale is not alone in this emphasis on ‘race’. Leslie Pincus, in her book on Kuki titled Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan, has this to say about Kuki’s use of the term minzoku: The word means . . . variously or even simultaneously ‘race’, ‘people’, ‘nation’, and ‘ethnic group’. Kuki drew, no doubt, on the semantic resources of the German Volk – ‘folk’ in English – and as a translation, ‘folk’ would have the advantage of invoking the German fascist politics associated with the term. (Pincus 1996: 55) ‘No doubt’? Why should Kuki need to draw on the semantic resources of the German Volk in using the ordinary Japanese term minzoku? And ‘advantage’ to whom? Who could possibly ﬁnd such a bizarre-sounding translation as ‘folk’ to be an advantage, unless it were someone intent on forging a damning link between Kuki and German fascist politics (in the face of no evidence whatsoever concerning his attitude toward National Socialism)? Harry Harootunian is another ‘folk’ enthusiast, who presents an especially jingoistic Kuki through clever translations in his book Overcome by Modernity. Rendering the passage from near the beginning of ‘Iki’ no k¯oz¯o that we saw Dale discuss above, Harootunian has Kuki making the ‘conﬁdent boast’ that ‘he had “no trouble in thinking that iki is one of the most illustrious self-manifestations of the unique conditions of the life of the Yamato folk, nay in Oriental culture” ’ (Harootunian 2000: 234). But Kuki’s tone in this passage is not unduly conﬁdent or boastful: the term ‘illustrious’ comes from Harootunian, who for good measure

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transposes the priorities between the Yamato people and Oriental culture. Nara Hiroshi translates the passage accurately, with no trace of the illustrious, and the priorities between Oriental culture and the Yamato people the way they are in the original: ‘Iki can be safely considered to be a distinct self-expression of an oriental culture or, more precisely, a speciﬁc mode of the Yamato people’ (Nara et al. 2004: 17). If the ‘folk’s in Pincus’s and Harootunian’s renderings ring oddly, so they should. As David Williams has aptly asked in the case of the second great ﬁgure in the Kyoto School, Tanabe Hajime: ‘Why exploit the Nazi nuance of the word Volk in English when the words “nation”, “people” or “ethnic group” provide a sound rendering of the Japanese term in question [minzoku]?’ His answer: ‘To translate minzoku as Volk in English allows one to link Tanabe and Nishida, vaguely but damningly, to the horrors of the Third Reich’ (Williams 2004: 160). Kuki similarly needs to be saved from vague damnation at the hands of the morally superior. Dale’s accusation of nationalism appears to rest on the fact that Kuki chooses to write about a term in Japanese aesthetics, iki (urbane, plucky stylishness), which he thinks might be ‘a way of “life” that is particular to our people’ (Nara et al. 2004: 13).7 This seems at ﬁrst blush an unobjectionable strategy on Kuki’s part: he has lived in Europe for seven years, studying French and German philosophy and aesthetics. He realizes that certain terms, such as the French esprit or the German Sehnsucht, refer to ideas that are speciﬁc to certain peoples or ethnic groups, and so he begins to develop an aesthetics based on a Japanese term that refers to something speciﬁcally Japanese (Nara et al. 2004: 15). No one accuses Kant or Hegel of being nationalistic if they choose examples from the German tradition when they philosophize about art, or Benedetto Croce when he draws from the Italian tradition. Why shouldn’t Kuki discuss a distinctively Japanese aesthetic term with reference to examples drawn from Japanese culture, especially when he makes it clear from the outset that iki is no less translatable across cultures than certain European terms and ideas? At any rate, after showing that Kuki’s analysis in ‘Iki’no k¯oz¯o draws on a number of European sources, Dale reaches this ﬁnal judgement: Kuki’s book exploits the new rhetoric of existentialism and Husserl’s phenomenalism [phenomenology?] for nationalistic ends. Published around the time of the Manchurian ‘incident’ [actually the year before], it subtly clothes a spirit of reaction in the idiom of racial uniqueness. We remind ourselves of the intimate conjunction between Heidegger’s boldly obscurantist philosophy and the brash jargon of Nazi rhetoric. The cosy afﬁnity of this perplexing philosophy with völkisch thought suggests hints as to the character of Kuki’s own brand of aesthetic nationalism. (Dale 1986: 72) So: having provided minimal justiﬁcation for supposing ‘Iki’ no k¯oz¯o to have ‘nationalistic ends’, Dale resorts to the crassest innuendo in order to make his

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case. Unable to argue from a basis of textual evidence, he slyly relies on his readers’ reminding themselves of a certain ‘intimate conjunction’ for which he provides no evidence whatsoever – and indeed could provide none because the conjunction is non-existent. Even if we were to acknowledge the possibility of the ‘cosy afﬁnity’ alluded to in the last sentence, we would need to be told just what hints it suggests – since any hint of völkischness in Kuki’s book has been introduced through Dale’s biased mistranslation. The only grounds Dale has provided for his contention that ‘Iki’no k¯oz¯o is tainted by nationalism are Kuki’s discussions of an aesthetic idea that he thinks is peculiar to Japanese culture. Probably conscious at some level of their ﬂimsiness, Dale plays the Heidegger card again near the end of his book. It is disturbing to note that much of the conceptualisation of Japanese nationalism owes a deep debt to the inﬂuence exercised over Japanese scholars by both popular and sophisticated currents of German ultranationalism from late Weimar times through to Hitler’s exercise of power. In particular we might note the impact of Heidegger’s ideas on such men as Kuki Sh¯uz¯o and Watsuji Tetsur¯o. (Dale 1986: 215) It seems we know that Heidegger was an ultranationalist, and presumably, if we note his putative impact on Kuki, we will ﬁnd that this ultranationalism impelled the latter toward nationalism. But that would be plausible only if Dale had demonstrated which speciﬁcally political ideas of Heidegger’s had inﬂuenced Kuki, and in what ways. This he doesn’t even try to do – because there is absolutely no evidence of such inﬂuence. Nor could there be, since Heidegger didn’t publish (or even entertain, as far as we know) any kind of ultranationalist ideas before 1928, when Kuki left his sphere of inﬂuence by going back to Paris. (It’s hard to imagine that the single occurrence of the term Volk in Being and Time was sufﬁcient to stimulate paroxysms of nationalism in the even-tempered visitor from Japan.) In 1933, three years after the publication of ‘Iki’ no k¯oz¯o, Heidegger did indeed give voice to some nationalist ideas – and was immediately criticized by Kuki’s senior colleague at Kyoto University, Tanabe Hajime, for doing so.8 The larger context for such attacks by Dale (and other non-philosophers) on the Kyoto School philosophers is what David Williams has aptly called ‘Paciﬁc War orthodoxy’, which is based on the assumption that the Western imperialism that provoked the war is a noble enterprise, and that forceful resistance to it, especially if accompanied by nationalist aspirations or imperialist ambitions on the part of a non-white people, is morally reprehensible. Williams shows convincingly that ‘Paciﬁc War revisionism’, which exposes the orthodoxy for what it is, demands that we question the self-righteousness of passing moral judgement on the Kyoto School thinkers and instead take them seriously as political philosophers (Williams 2004: xxiv, passim).

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1930b Leslie Pincus’s Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Sh¯uz¯o and the Rise of National Aesthetics is the ﬁrst comprehensive study of Kuki in English. It is valuable in providing an informative account of Kuki’s years in Europe and the ﬁgures and ideas he encountered there, as well as of late Edo culture during the period known as ‘Kaiseki’. But the picture that Pincus’s book presents of Kuki’s philosophy is distorted, insofar as she continually associates her subject, as her subtitle indicates, with nationalism – and even with ultranationalism and fascism. Her treatment is far more extensive than Dale’s, but the evidence provided for the accusations of extreme political incorrectness is minimal.9 She has apparently decided in advance that Kuki simply must have been complicit in the Japanese fascism that came to prevail in the course of the 1930s, and so her narrative continually asseverates without argument or justiﬁcation. Pincus plays the Heidegger card for all its worth, suggesting that ‘the contrast between Heidegger and Kuki was not as great as many of Heidegger’s Japanese readers believed, especially when it came to the minzoku, the folk’ (Pincus 1996: 176). The grounds for the lack of contrast are apparently to be found in the penultimate chapter of Heidegger’s Being and Time, where ‘the hard-won authenticity of Dasein . . . is abruptly and somewhat mysteriously collectivized in the form of an “authentic folk” ’. The ‘collectivization’ of Dasein will seem abrupt or mysterious only to a reader who had neglected to read chapter four of Heidegger’s masterpiece, ‘Being-in-the-world as Being-with’, in which Being-with-others is said to be ‘equiprimordial with Being-in-the-world’ (Heidegger 1967: 114). But the real problem here is that the phrase ‘authentic folk’ (or its German equivalent – eigentlichesVolk?), the punctuation around which suggests a direct quotation from Heidegger’s text, doesn’t appear in Being and Time at all. In fact the word Volk occurs only once in that lengthy tome, at the point where Heidegger explains that because Dasein is always Being-with-others, its occurrence as historical (Geschehen) is always a cohistorical happening (Mitgeschehen) as destiny (Geschick): ‘By this we mean the occurrence of the community, of the people [des Volkes]’ (Heidegger 1967: 384). Perhaps sensing that her mention of the nonexistent ‘authentic folk’ may fail to convince, Pincus ends the paragraph with the ﬁnal ﬂourish: ‘In the early 1930s, Heidegger added further resolution to both the collective and the conservative dimensions of Dasein in his theoretical writings and in his more practical association with National Socialism’ (Pincus 1996: 176). Not a ﬂourish that will convince any but the already converted. In a similar fashion, Harootunian introduces Kuki into the discussion in Overcome by Modernity in the obligatory association with Heidegger, and describes him as ‘one of [Heidegger’s] principal students in Japan’ (Harootunian 2000: 222). What is so damning about this particular association we learn ﬁve pages later: ‘Germany was supplied with an ofﬁcial national narrative, based on an enduring “heritage”, by the National Socialists; Heidegger provided its philosophic possibility’ (Harootunian 2000: 227). And what evidence is provided for this generous provision on Heidegger’s part? None whatsoever. Harootunian

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the historian has apparently transcended such an old-fashioned requirement: just play the guilty-by-association-with-Heidegger card and, since we all know that Heidegger joined the Nazi party in 1933, that will trump any doubts we may have concerning the enabling relations of Heidegger’s pre-1933 writings to the National Socialist narrative and/or heritage. Following a strategy pioneered by Richard Wolin in his The Politics of Being, where he tries in vain to show that National Socialist ideas are to be found even in the early Heidegger of Being and Time, Pincus attempts to establish a continuity between putatively ‘ultranationalist’ ideas in Kuki’s writings from the late 1930s and similar ideas in the earlier ‘ “Iki” no k¯oz¯o. The index entries under “Iki” no k¯oz¯o and fascism’ make reference to ﬁve pages of the text, but neither there nor anywhere else in the book do we ﬁnd any actual evidence for this insalubrious conjunction. Pincus herself is eventually forced to acknowledge how poor in grist for the political mill that text really is: ‘Despite the very rare references to nation or state in “Iki” no k¯oz¯o, the cultural community that the text presupposes may in fact represent the preferred idiom for the expression of nationalism’ (Pincus 1996: 181). Given her prevarications concerning the ‘folk’ in ‘Iki’ no k¯oz¯o, one may justiﬁably wonder how much rhetorical weight this remarkable ‘may in fact’ is able to bear. One reason that painting Kuki as a fascist is a difﬁcult task is that it goes against the view of responsible scholarship on Kuki in Japan.10 Pincus cites Sakabe Megumi, one of the foremost contemporary Japanese philosophers and an expert on Kuki, as someone who distances him from emperor-system ideology, and claims that this is an illegitimate rescuing of Kuki from ‘embroilment in what is considered by a number of postwar Japanese thinkers to be a historical scandal – the complicity of prewar intellectuals with a family-state ideology that underwrote the repression and militarism of the 1930s and 1940s (Pincus 1996: 31–32)’. Such complicity may rightfully be considered a scandal, but Kuki will have to be shown to be embroiled in it before rescuing could be in order, and such embroilment is what Pincus absolutely fails to demonstrate. Once again, she eventually admits that ‘the culturescape in “Iki” no k¯oz¯o . . . did [not] resemble, at this stage, the kazoku kokka, the “family state” ideology systematically promulgated in national textbooks and public documents’ (Pincus 1996: 235). Did it then resemble it at a later stage? Well, in a manner of speaking: Despite the marked absence of the state on the surface of the text, ‘Iki’ no k¯oz¯o in fact represented the state in another form. I use the word ‘represent’ here in its complex sense, as both a political and a textual act, to suggest not only common interests with a state for which its author spoke but also the reconﬁguration of state in the medium of discourse. (Pincus 1996: 236) If this is ‘deconstructive’ reading, it is here taken to absurdity: because Kuki makes no mention of the state, his book is really about the state, of which its author was an

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advocate. The more obvious conclusion to be drawn from this ‘marked absence’ is that the text is more or less lacking in political implications. Indeed the prevailing view of Kuki in Japanese scholarship is summed up by Nara Hiroshi when he writes, after surveying Kuki’s papers and the correspondence with colleagues surrounding the publication of ‘Iki’ no k¯oz¯o: ‘Conspicuously absent in all this faded correspondence is any suggestion that The Structure was seen as a work with political aspirations of any kind.’ And about its author he concludes: ‘Like many aesthetes, Kuki was politically inert’ (Nara et al. 2004: 119; 123). In her epilogue Pincus cites the opinion of two prominent Japanese interpreters of Kuki on his use of minzoku in ‘Iki’ no k¯oz¯o (Pincus 1996: 213). Yasuda Takeshi says: ‘Even though he initiated the concept of minzoku, there’s not the slightest suspicion of fascism. It’s got nothing to do with the kind of fanaticism of people who invoked minzoku at every turn after 1931.’ Tada Michitar¯o agrees: ‘Anyway, at the stage of ‘Iki’ no k¯oz¯o, there’s none of that in Kuki.’ ‘To the contrary’, writes Pincus, ‘the theoretical framework elaborated in “Iki” no k¯oz¯o served as a ﬁrm foundation for the more militant pronouncements of the later texts’. Moreover, in these later essays, ‘Kuki enlisted the discursive tactics and objects ﬁrst deployed in “Iki” no k¯oz¯o in a widening movement to suppress pluralism at home and mobilize the Japanese populace for an expansionist war in Asia’(Pincus 1996: 214). We shall look at these more militant pronouncements shortly; but the immediate questions are: precisely which features of the theoretical framework elaborated in ‘Iki’ no k¯oz¯o ground the later militancy? And: which tactics and objects led to even grimmer consequences later? An examination of the ensuing thirty pages of epilogue turn up nothing in the way of an answer: we are left with mere assertion, without evidence or argument.

1934 As ultranationalist forces began to dominate Japanese politics in the early 1930s, steps were taken to make the educational system more appropriately nationalistic – much to the distress of Nishida Kitar¯o. The turn that events were taking in Japan and the world beyond prompted him to reinforce the internationalist stance he had taken in Zen no kenky¯u. At the conclusion of a lecture to an audience of schoolteachers in January of 1934, Nishida said that ‘Japan must consider its mission as a country in an international world, and educational goals must be set by taking in this vision of Japan’s role in the global world’ (Nishida in Yusa 2004: 258). Two months later he wrote in a letter to his friend Harada Kumao: For Japanese politicians to consider world affairs with the Japanese interest as the central concern certainly makes sense, but they have to think of Japan not as something that exists in itself but as a nation existing in the world. Otherwise a slogan like ‘Greater Asianism’ makes no sense. Contrary to some schools of thought that maintain the future of the world depends on independent countries permeated by nationalism, I rather think it will depend on global collaboration. (Nishida in Yusa 2004: 258)

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As international events in 1934 provoked Nishida to express his geopolitical views, he continued to promote the ‘genuine globalism’ he had so presciently championed in 1911, but now together with explicit criticism of the shortcomings of Japanocentric nationalism. That same year he applied his idea of globalism to the realm of culture, in the conclusion of an essay entitled ‘The Forms of Culture of the Classical Periods of East and West Seen from a Metaphysical Perspective’: The world’s cultures are, of course, essentially plural. They cannot be reduced to unity because when they lose their speciﬁcity they cease to be cultures . . . A true world culture will be formed only by various cultures preserving their own respective viewpoints but simultaneously developing themselves through the mediation of the world. In that respect . . . we must clarify on what basis and in what relations to other cultures each particular culture stands . . . We [Japanese] can learn the path along which we should advance only insofar as we deeply fathom our own depths and at the same time attain a profound understanding of other cultures. (Nishida in Dilworth et al. 1998: 36) If these ideas are nationalistic, they lack any trace of the chauvinism, jingoism, or imperialism to which an internationalist stance is opposed. In 1935 Nishida was asked to serve on a government committee for ‘the renewal of education and scholarship’, but he stopped attending after the ﬁrst meeting, having been alienated by the nationalism of the members of the Ministry of Education. In another letter to Harada he wrote: I think the nationalists in our country must deeply consider the fact that today nationalism is simultaneously globalism. It is no use thinking about their own country independently, rather we must think in a broader, global way. We cannot simply return to the past. (Nishida in Goto-Jones 2005: 72–73) Here Nishida makes it clear that nationalism without internationalism or globalism is unacceptable, just as a regressive return to the past is impracticable in the modern world. There is no contradiction in recommending, as Nishida and his colleagues do, that connections with one’s cultural traditions be maintained in the process of modernization. Yet a large part of the neo-Marxist animosity against Kyoto School philosophy is provoked by the latter’s emphasis on the importance of Japanese cultural traditions. Any thinker who fails to immediately embrace the rational modernism promoted by the West falls under suspicion of being a nationalist with fascistic tendencies. Or this seems at least to be the main principle on which Pincus condemns Kuki.

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1937 In a lengthy epilogue in Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan, Pincus discusses ‘those of Kuki’s later essays in which the afﬁnities with fascist cultural discourse stand out in clear relief ’. These essays are part of a larger discourse in the 1930s that served to veil but also to validate brutal forms of aggression within Japan and on the Asian continent . . . Kuki’s later essays presented Japanese readers with a cultural fait accompli, hailing them as involuntary members of an imaginary community rendered largely in ethical and spiritual terms. Brooking no deviation, this imaginary community served in turn to eliminate dissent and mobilize the populace for ‘total war’. (Pincus 1996: 220) A reader familiar with the reﬁned aestheticism of ‘Iki’ no k¯oz¯o will have to brace himself for the encounter with the brutal political animal into which its author has apparently been transformed during the intervening seven years. But what is the nature of the ‘cultural fait accompli’ that Kuki presents his readers with in these essays? And what speciﬁc passages hail them as ‘members of an imaginary community’? (One imagines this last is a version of Benedict Anderson’s nation as imagined community.) Pincus writes of the beginning of Kuki’s 1937 lecture ‘Nihonteki seikaku ni tsuite’ (On the Japanese character) the following: ‘The moderate tone of the opening rhetoric is belied by a vocabulary turned militantly nationalist, “Japan” having conspicuously yielded to “Japanism” ’ (Pincus 1996: 222). If one looks at the context in which Kuki talks of ‘Japanism’ (Nihonshugi) here, it is difﬁcult to discern any kind of ‘militantly nationalist’ turn in his language. Here is what Kuki actually writes: If one asks what globalism [sekaishugi] is, it is the view in which, rather than thinking in a self-centered way of one’s own country as the absolute standard of value, one recognizes the uniqueness and the positive aspects of countries other than one’s own, aiming at the co-existence of all human beings by respecting their legitimate rights . . . Furthermore, one can say that globalism is also internationalism [kokusaishugi]. Concerning, then, the question of how to understand the relationship between the Japanese character and world character, and so between Japanism and globalism, and more broadly between nationalism [kokuminshugi] and internationalism, one might say it comes down to the relationship between the particular and the general. And therefore these pairs are not mutually incompatible.11 (KNS III: 367–68) The kind of nationalism advocated here is not at all militant, but is rather to be cultivated together with globalism. Pincus appears to acknowledge this when

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she writes: ‘The binary opposition of particular/universal exposes itself in the less mediated form of Japanism/cosmopolitanism. This latter pair, claims Kuki, is in no way mutually incompatible’ (Pincus 1996: 222). But then, strangely, she reproaches Kuki by adducing passages from the Marxist Tosaka Jun that criticize unthinking adulation of ‘the Japanese spirit’, and concludes: While Kuki makes rhetorical gestures toward internationalism, those gestures hardly sustain Tosaka’s hopes for a materialist critique of Japanism. Kuki’s claim that Japanism is compatible with internationalism holds true only to the extent that the international is deprived of substance and reduced to a mental synthesis. (The precise nature of this synthesis . . . presumably could be mandated by the national culture that attains global hegemony.) (Pincus 1996: 223) On what grounds does Pincus reduce Kuki’s statements about internationalism to mere ‘rhetorical gestures’? And why should these gestures, if that is all they are, be expected to sustain Tosaka’s hopes for a materialist critique of Japanism, when Kuki – no Marxist – was poles apart from Tosaka as a thinker, and is here advocating a Japanism that is cultural, cross-cultural, and international in its orientation? Throughout Pincus’s book, whenever Kuki writes something that contradicts her understanding of him as an ultranationalist fascist, she either ignores it, dismisses it as a mere rhetorical gesture, or else drops in a neo-Marxist herring to throw the reader off the track. Kuki doesn’t simply assert that Japanism is compatible with internationalism: he argues the case over the course of his lecture. Nor is the international ‘deprived of substance and reduced to a mental synthesis’: he writes quite robustly of the necessity for the Japanese to develop ‘an open-minded interest that surveys the world’s cultures broadly and adopts their good features’ (KNS III: 398). And is the arch parenthesis at the end meant to suggest that Kuki is advocating the global hegemony of Japanese culture? His lecture contains no such idea, but rather advocates the development of national culture so that Japan can thereby make a genuine contribution to international or global culture. Nor is Japan unique in being considered unique: ‘The culture of the world as a whole is advanced through the exercise of each culture’s uniqueness. Through an emphasis on the particular the general can shine forth, and through an emphasis on the parts the whole will come to glow’ (KNS III: 370). Kuki characterizes the relations between the individual person (kojin), and the people or nation (kokumin), and the ‘world-person’ (sekaijin), by means of three concentric circles: the smallest representing the individual, the next largest the nation, and the largest the world. Explaining the coinage sekaijin, Kuki writes: ‘This world-person is precisely an international society constituted by each nation as a member, and is the largest circle which contains many circles representing the various nations in common and in solidarity’ (KNS III: 372; emphasis added). But Pincus dismisses this internationalism by citing the example that Kuki gives from

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the 1936 Olympic Games which shows, she claims, that ‘the middle circle – national culture – has expanded out of proportion and drawn both individual and world wholly into its orbit’ (Pincus 1996: 224). That would indeed be a distortion; but let us look at the story. A Japanese athlete at the awards ceremony looks up at the Japanese ﬂag while the national anthem is playing, and he weeps. A commentator in a publication of the German Olympic Committee explains this by invoking ‘the ethical-religious emotion of [the athlete’s] having done his duty to Japan’. Kuki endorses this explanation on the part of the Germans, saying that the incident truly reveals ‘the Japanese character’. And yet, he goes on, this does not mean that every Japanese athlete would weep like this: this athlete’s ‘particular mode of expression’ is seen here, and ‘his individual character is revealed’. And since non-Japanese have no trouble understanding this phenomenon: ‘In this explanation and the possibility of understanding we can see an international world citizen common to all nations . . . an event that transcends national borders . . . a world character.’ Kuki concludes that ‘Just as the individual and the Japanese character coexist, both the Japanese character and world character must coexist . . . [and] are formed in reciprocal relationship’ (KNS III: 373–74). The point of the story is that individual character, national character, and world character optimally coexist in one individual: Pincus’s claim that ‘national culture has expanded out of proportion and drawn both individual and world wholly into its orbit’ has no basis in the text whatsoever. Kuki is careful to distinguish his emphasis on the importance of Japanese culture from the concerns of the Nativist schools of the Tokugawa period, which insisted upon the uniqueness of Japanese culture by contrast with Indian culture as represented by Buddhism and Chinese as represented by Confucianism. He criticizes those who would adopt a Nativist-style nationalism on the grounds that Japanese culture is what it is precisely through its having integrated multiple inﬂuences from India and China. His concern in the contemporary historical situation is that Japanese culture is in danger of being effaced by an excessive absorption of Western inﬂuences. Himself an ardent admirer of European culture, Kuki also acknowledges the superiority of Western civilization as manifested in its ability to dominate the natural world by means of technology, as well as the beneﬁts to Japan’s growth that have accrued from transnational inﬂuences. But his admiration is not unconditional: ‘We respect Europe and America, and we should learn in a spirit of humility what we have to learn from the West, and we should be profoundly grateful for it. However, it is a mistake to take western civilization as an object of blind worship’ (KNS III: 376). He is by no means trumpeting the superiority of Japanese culture, but is simply advocating its development in the face of indiscriminate submission to the West. The conclusion of Kuki’s lecture reinforces this point, though without trying to resolve the tension between Japanism and globalism, since ‘nationalism and internationalism do not contradict one another’: The guiding principle for Japanese culture in the future has to be something apparently paradoxical, such as Japanese globalism or global Japanism.

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On one hand, as for the future of the Japanese character or the path taken by Japanism we must clearly follow the ideal that guides world history. On the other hand, we must clearly understand that the world-historical mission of the Japanese people cannot be fulﬁlled in the absence of national awareness of the Japanese character (KNS III: 398) The emphasis on world history is typical of Nishida and the other Kyoto School philosophers, and indeed Kuki’s overall position on internationalism and globalism reﬂects Nishida’s ideas (he refers to his ‘Forms of Culture’ essay), though with a greater emphasis on culture. In this respect, Nara Hiroshi is surely right to suggest, contra Leslie Pincus, that ‘Kuki’s agenda for the future of Japan was cultural, not political’ (Nara et al. 2004: 115).

1941 In 1941 Nishitani Keiji published a book entitled World-view and Nation-view (Sekaikan to kokkakan) – a title that already suggests that he is considering the nation in the context of the world. In characterizing the beginning of the 1940s as ‘a turning point in world history’, Nishitani writes that ‘politics itself has become world-political in the true sense’ (Dilworth et al. 1998: 381). ‘Of course’, he continues, ‘political developments in the past have also occurred within the framework of international relations, but such developments did not necessarily have what I am calling a world-political signiﬁcance’. In seeing Japan as a pivotal factor in a turn from what he calls the Atlantic to the Paciﬁc period of world history, by virtue of which ‘the Paciﬁc has now come on to the stage of world history’, he anticipates a shift toward what has since become known as the ‘Paciﬁc Rim’ – which demarcates an increasingly signiﬁcant arena in geopolitics. This is a case of what he calls ‘a tendency toward bloc formation’, something based on ‘a shared subjectivity [among groups of nations] that takes the world itself as their common foundation’ (Dilworth et al. 1998: 383). So, although Nishitani sees Japan as playing a pivotal role in the formation of a bloc in East-Asia, this is only within a development toward a radically polycentric world order: ‘The fact that the world, no longer having a speciﬁc center, . . . has come to have various geographical centers constitutes the simplest and, moreover, the most universal impetus for this new world order’ (Dilworth et al. 1998: 384). In a section of the book on ‘The Worldview of the New Japan’, Nishitani begins by expressing discomfort with the phrase ‘new Japan’, even as he writes of ‘the great tasks that face Japan in international relations’ (Dilworth et al. 1998: 385). In keeping with his Kyoto School colleagues, he sees an important role for Japan in the world of the near future: ‘The worldview of the new Japan . . . should have as its mission the transmission of the particular values that the traditional spirit of Japan possesses, thereby becoming a fundamental motivating force in the formation of a worldview for the global future of mankind’ (Dilworth et al. 1998: 390). This process is made possible by the structure of the state as Nishitani understands

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it, which has ‘globality immanent in its very existence’ insofar as it harbours an abyss of ‘free subjectivity’in its depths, which ‘represents the horizon of a globality opening up within the substrate of a citizenry’ (Mori 1995: 322).12 On 7 December 1941 the Japanese bombed the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii (just a few miles from where this sentence is being written), which had not at that time been claimed as American soil. The islands had merely been ‘annexed’ in 1898, ﬁve years after a gang of American colonialists backed by US marines had staged a coup and overthrown the Hawaiian monarchy. Nishitani has been severely criticized for ‘approving’ of the attack on Pearl Harbor in the course of the famous Ch¯uo¯ K¯oron symposia. But David Williams dissents: The Kyoto School was prepared to support the use of force to break the West’s colonial hegemony over Southeast Asia and the Western Paciﬁc. They viewed Pearl Harbor as an inevitable event because one day Western hegemony of the Paciﬁc had to be forced back. (Williams 2004: 72) Williams is surely right to maintain that the discussions by a group of Kyoto thinkers of the justiﬁcations for the attack is an epochal event insofar as it marks the beginning of a ‘non-White’ philosophy of global politics.

1942 In July of 1942 Nishitani participated in a symposium that was held in Tokyo under the auspices of the magazine Literary World and with the title ‘Overcoming Modernity’. His presentation understands the Paciﬁc War (then in its eighth month) as an opportunity for ‘the establishment of a new world order’ that could result from a successful Japanese challenge to ‘Anglo-Saxon domination in Asia’. Japan has the capacity for successful resistance thanks to its high level of ‘moral energy’ (a term derived from the German historian Leopold Ranke), but Nishitani emphasizes that this moral energy must be cultivated as something transnational: [If it is only a Japanese ethic] it has no connection to the ethics of the world, and in certain circumstances can be linked to injustices like making other peoples and nations objects of colonization. It can be put at the service of the personal grudges of a nation, as it were. In our country today the moral energy that is the driving force of national ethics must at the same time directly energize a world ethic. (Minamoto 1995: 219) Minamoto Ry¯oen describes the conclusive thrust of Nishitani’s contribution as follows: [Nishitani] expounded ‘a correlation between nation and world’ and argued that the nation must get beyond a standpoint centred on itself alone and direct

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itself to the establishment of international relations that open up into a ‘horizon of the communality of nations’ based on the nonduality of self and others (jita funi) and beneﬁting oneself in beneﬁting others (jiri rita). He concludes that the actual task of overcoming the spirit of modernity consists in securing an ethic of moral energy, based on a religion of subjective nothingness and infusing the individual, the nation, and the world. (Minamoto 1995: 220) Nishitani’s argument is complex but, simply put, it develops an analogy between the Buddhist negation of the ego-self (anatman, or muga) at the level of the individual, a realization of oneself as a network of relations in the ﬁeld of dependent co-arising, and a corresponding process on the level of the nation. As Nishitani describes it in a postscript he added a few years later: Finally I reached the standpoint of national non-ego, or a horizon of globality, that becomes immanent in the nation through a self-negation of the nation’s self-centredness. The basic point at which my thought broke with nationalism is that it regarded the global nature of the nation as a subjectivity of non-ego brought about through self-negation, and that this standpoint must somehow open up not only within Japan but within all nations. (Minamoto 1995: 322) Once again, we have a Japanese philosopher who is nationalistic in his support for the war against the powers of Western imperialism, but who is at the same time internationalist is encouraging Japan to contribute to ‘a world ethic’ and the establishment of a ‘communality of nations’.13

1943 In May 1943, some eighteen months into the Paciﬁc War, Nishida was invited to meet with a group of politicians and government ofﬁcials to discuss a draught of a document entitled ‘Proclamation of the Greater East Asiatic Nations’. At this meeting he criticized Japanese policy in Asia for being imperialistic and emphasized that Japan should not behave in a ‘colonialist’ way overseas. In response to a request to articulate what Japan’s role in the world should be, he wrote a short essay entitled ‘Fundamental Principles of a New World Order’ (Yusa 2004: 321).14 This piece has been criticized as nationalistic propaganda, but since Nishida very much wanted the government to take his views into account, he apparently felt obliged to make some concessions in terminology in order to get his main point across. At any rate, that main point is a logical extension and ﬁtting capstone to his previous ideas about internationalism. The essay begins by characterizing the nineteenth century as ‘an age of national self-awakening, an age of so-called imperialism’, in which nations fought each other for power and without any sense of a ‘world-historical mission’ beyond their nationalistic goals and aspirations. By contrast, Nishida sees the world of

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1943 as being in ‘an age of global self-awakening’ in which nations become aware of themselves as existing in a global world comprising a multiplicity of particular worlds. Anticipating the effects of rapid advances in the technologies of transportation and communication, he writes: Today, as a result of scientiﬁc, technological, and economic development, all nations and peoples have entered into one compact global space. Solving this problem lies in no way other than for each nation to awaken to its worldhistorical mission and for each to transcend itself while remaining thoroughly true to itself, and to construct one ‘multi-world’ (sekaiteki sekai). (Dilworth et al. 1998: 73) The force of calling the goal a ‘multi-world’, or ‘world-of-worlds’, is that the world of each nation will not simply merge into one undifferentiated totality, but rather ‘Each nation and people is established on its own historical foundation’ insofar as they will all ‘transcend themselves while remaining true to themselves’ (Dilworth et al. 1998: 74). In the context of the Paciﬁc War, Nishida supposes that in uniting against Western imperialism the nations of East Asia will ﬁrst form a ‘particular world’ (corresponding to a regional bloc in Nishitani) together on the way to a more comprehensive globalization, thereby achieving ‘their own world-historical missions as East-Asian peoples’. He goes on to suggest that the formation of this ‘particular world’, the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, will take place around a ‘core’ – namely, Japan, with its ‘national polity’. This move of Nishida’s has been especially criticized, but surely he makes it for diplomatic reasons, in order to retain the attention of his prospective readers in the government and the military. An obvious reason for taking Japan as the core is that it was the only country in East Asia not to have been ravaged by the Western colonial powers. But a core is not actually required by the logic of what Nishida calls ‘world-formation’, and is even contradicted by it: In historical world-formation each people must at every point be the centre. This is the basic motivating force of world-formation. Even if one speaks of a co-prosperity sphere, the peoples that become its constituents must be formed historically and not selected abstractly as in the League of Nations . . . However, a racialism that centres only on its own people and is devoid of true worldhood within itself – a racialism that merely thinks of the rest of the world only from its own perspective – is nothing but a racist egotism; and what emerges from that cannot but degenerate as a matter of course into aggression or imperialism. (Dilworth et al. 1998: 76) If the formation of a world-of-worlds takes place historically, with ‘each people must at every point be the centre’, the process of world-formation is – as it is for Nishitani – radically polycentric, and there is no need for Japan, or any other

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country, to be the ‘core’. The second part of the passage just quoted exposes the absurdity of the accusations against Nishida for complicity with Japanese aggression and imperialism. The emphasis on polycentricity also contradicts Nishida’s occasional claims for the centrality of the Japanese ‘national polity’ (kokutai), which can be seen in context as aberrations from the main line of his political thinking for diplomatic reasons.15

2006 This has by no means been a defence of the political philosophies in toto of these prominent Kyoto School thinkers: the precondition for such a formidable task – serious and detailed textual study of those philosophies in their historical context – has only recently begun to be met in the Anglophone academy. The aim has simply been to point out patterns and motifs in their writings, whereby a nationalism stimulated in part by Western imperialism in Asia develops into, and coexists with, an internationalist stance that anticipates and encourages a genuine globalism. In some respects Nishida and his colleagues were ahead of their time in anticipating a globalizing world when they did, though they were by no means the ﬁrst to assert the compatibility of nationalism with internationalism. They were probably familiar with Friedrich Meinecke’s classic work on cosmopolitanism and nationalism from 1907, Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat, which discusses the ideas of ﬁgures like Herder, Fichte, Humboldt, and Schlegel. With such thinkers, as Meinecke puts it, ‘Cosmopolitanism and nationalism stood side by side in a close, living relationship for a long time’ (Meinecke 1970: 94). They may also have been aware of the ideas of Giuseppi Mazzini, whose efﬁcacious Italian nationalism was always informed by a cosmopolitan perspective, as evidenced by his well-known exhortation to the Italian working man in 1844: ‘Your ﬁrst duties . . . are toward Humanity.You are men before you are either citizens or fathers’(Mazzini 1898: 57). In writing about Western inﬂuences on the Japanese character, Kuki was probably unaware that he was echoing John Stuart Mill’s famous dictum from 1848: ‘There is no nation that does not need to borrow from others, not merely particular arts or practices, but essential points of character in which its own type is inferior’ (Mill 1848: 119). If Japanese nationalism sometimes seems deeper than the German or Italian versions, that is perhaps because the Japanese had been assimilating aspects of Chinese, Korean, and Indian culture for well over a thousand years before they fully opened up to Western inﬂuences, thereby making the question of what is Japanese more pressing over a longer period of time. But it is important to distinguish between the particularistic nationalism of the Nihonjinron theorists (and reactionary right-wing movements in Japan today) and the internationalist stance of the Kyoto School thinkers. Indeed a signiﬁcant implication of Nishitani’s work on nihilism is that to ﬁnd the meaning of existence in one’s belonging to a particular nation is a symptom of a nihilism that is not even conscious of itself.16 When Nishida in 1934 exhorts Japanese politicians to reject their particularistic nationalism, acknowledge Japan’s interdependence with other nations, and work

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toward ‘global collaboration’, this sounds like eminently sensible advice for those responsible for conducting United States foreign policy in 2006. And when the same year he exhorts his compatriots to preserve their national viewpoints as they strive to understand other cultures, the relevance to the early twenty-ﬁrst century is again striking – as the countries of Europe struggle to maintain their cultural integrity within the context of the European Union, and many of the world’s cultures falter under the global-capitalism-powered onslaught of American ‘culture’. Similarly, Kuki’s internationalist attitude toward the development of Japanese culture serves as a salutary corrective to the nationalistic censoring of school history books that is again in vogue with a new regime in Japan, whose aim is to inculcate in the young ‘patriotism’ and ‘pride in their country’ – as if this could not be done more effectively by honestly acknowledging past crimes and atrocities (of the kind perpetrated by almost all nations of the world).17 That way, remembered nationally, they are less likely to be repeated. Of course, national self-gloriﬁcation is the norm in school textbooks, and the United States is no exception. American colonialist brutality and the lethal results of the Manifest Destiny doctrine are usually omitted or glossed over: the difference is simply that such censorship has not been the cause of long and bitter complaint on the part of the neighbours (as it has been for China and Korea).18 In many respects, then, Nishida, Kuki and Nishitani anticipate what Kwame Anthony Appiah has recently advocated as a ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’: the ideal of maintaining one’s ties to, and focusing one’s energies on, a certain geographical place and cultural space, while at the same time engaging in dialogue with others’ perspectives and values, with the idea of broadening one’s own toward a global horizon (Appiah 2005: chap. 6). Yet in many countries today, the situation is the same as it was for the Kyoto School thinkers: the ones who need to be persuaded, the politicians, are simply not listening.

Notes 1 Kuki Sh¯uz¯o, ‘Nihonteki seikaku ni tsuite’, in K¯uki Sh¯uz¯o Zensh¯u, vol. III, has been referred as KNS. I have made the very occasional, very slight modiﬁcation to others’ translations where I thought it appropriate. My thanks to colleagues at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO) who made helpful comments on the ﬁrst presentation of this paper, in Paris on 2 December 2006. 2 While it is not an explicitly elaborated theme in his study, Nishida’s internationalism is a topic that Goto-Jones discusses intelligently in several parts of his book, and I shall draw copiously from these discussions in what follows. 3 Kuki is regarded by some as a peripheral member of the Kyoto School, though he taught at Kyoto Imperial University from 1929 until his death in 1940. 4 See Stegewerns 2003, in which not one of the contributions mentions Nishida or any other member of the Kyoto School. 5 Tanabe Hajime, the second most prominent ﬁgure in the Kyoto School, develops a more complex and sophisticated model of the relations between the family and the state: see David Williams’s translation of his essay ‘On the Logic of Co-prosperity Spheres: Toward a Philosophy of Regional Blocs’, in Williams 2004: 188–99. 6 For a trenchant criticism of Dale’s mistreatment of Tanabe Hajime, see Williams 2004.

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7 Most scholars agree that the term iki is untranslatable, and so is best left untranslated. ‘Urbane, plucky stylishness’ is a gloss suggested by Nara (p. 1). 8 See David Williams’translation of Tanabe’s essay ‘The Philosophy of Crisis or a Crisis in Philosophy: Reﬂections on Heidegger’s Rectoral Address’, in Williams 2004: 181–87. 9 Pincus borrows the term ‘national aesthetics’ from Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, who uses it in connection with Heidegger in his Heidegger, Art, and Politics. See the substantial number of entries in the index under ‘Fascism’ and ‘Kuki’s fascist afﬁnities’ – under the latter heading are references to 25 of the book’s 250 pages. When Goto-Jones (2005) writes (in an endnote) that ‘Kuki is well served by Pincus’, one has to suspect a moment of mental aberration and beg to disagree, at least as far as nationalism is concerned (Goto-Jones 2005: 161). In fact Kuki’s ideas about internationalism turn out to be similar to, though less well elaborated than, the ideas that inform Nishida’s political thinking in this area. 10 The exception here is Karatani Kojin, who follows Dale in criticizing Kuki’s politics on the basis of an association with Heidegger, and who is followed in turn by Pincus. For a discussion of Karatani’s criticisms, see Parkes 1997. 11 My thanks to Setsuko Aihara for assistance with translations from the Japanese. 12 David Williams has intimated how important the idea of ‘subjectivity’ (shutaisei) is in the political philosophy of the Kyoto School, subjectivity understood as a combination of ‘national self-discipline and rational self-mastery’ (Williams 2004: 63). 13 For a nuanced and somewhat critical view of Nishitani as an internationalist thinker, see the section entitled ‘Nishitani Keiji’s Globalist Nationalism in John C. Maraldo’s ‘Questioning Nationalism Now and Then’ in Rude Awakenings, where he writes: ‘I suggest that in the 1940s Nishitani did not set himself up as an advocate of state or ethnic nationalism, but of a globalism that seriously mistook his nation’s capacity to negate itself and overcome self-centeredness’ (Maraldo 1995: 355). 14 Afraid that the military would ﬁnd Nishida’s rather dense text incomprehensible, the convener of the meeting had it revised to make it accessible to a non-philosophical audience. See the illuminating comparison of the two versions in Goto-Jones 2005: 75–80. 15 For a fuller account of the political signiﬁcance of Nishida’s late philosophy, see GotoJones 2005: 47–67, and on the notion of kokutai especially pp. 80–94. 16 Keiji Nishitani 1990: chap. 10. 17 See Faiola (2006). 18 Loewen (1996) provides, in spite of the hyperbolic subtitle, a valuable survey of the ﬁeld. Zinn (2005) is an exemplary presentation of complementary narratives.

References Appiah, Kwame Anthony (2005), The Ethics of Identity, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dale, Peter (1986), The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Dilworth, David, Viglielmo H., Valdo, Jacinto and Augustin Z. (transl. and eds) (1998), Sourcebook for Modern Japanese Philosophy: Selected documents, Westport: Greenwood Press. Elberfeld, Rolf (1999), Kitar¯o Nishida. Moderne japanische Philosophie und die Frage der Interkulturalität, Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodolpi. Faiola, Anthony (2006), ‘Japan’s Abe, Poised to Lead, Offers Nation Vision of Pride’, The Washington Post, September 19. Goto-Jones, Christopher (2005), Political Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School, and Co-Prosperity, London: Routledge.

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Harootunian, Harry (2000), Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in interwar Japan, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Heidegger, Martin (1959), Unterwegs zur Sprache, Pfullingen: Neske. Heidegger, Martin (1967), Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Nyemeyer. Kuki Sh¯uz¯o (1981), Kuki Sh¯uz¯o Zensh¯u, 11 vols, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Loewen, James W. (1996), Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, New York: Touchstone. Maraldo, John C. (1995), ‘Questioning Nationalism Now and Then: a critical approach to Zen and the Kyoto School’, in Heisig, James W. and Maraldo, John C. (eds) (1995), Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Ky¯oto School, and the Question of Nationalism, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 333–62. May, Reinhard (1989/1996), Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East Asian Inﬂuences on His Work, trans. Graham Parkes, London: Routledge. Mazzini, Giuseppe (1898), An Essay on the Duties of Man Addressed to Workingmen, New York: Funk & Wagnalls. Meinecke, Friederich (1970), Cosmopolitanism and the National State, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mill, John Stuart (1848), Principles of Political Economy, 2 vols, London. Minamoto Ry¯oen (1995), ‘The Symposium on ‘Overcoming Modernity’, in Heisig, James W. and Maraldo, John C. (eds) (1995), Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Ky¯oto School, and the Question of Nationalism, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 197–229. Mori Tetsur¯o (1995), ‘Nishitani and the Question of Nationalism’, in Heisig, James W. and Maraldo, John C. (eds) (1995), Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 316–32. Nara Hiroshi, Rimer, J. Thomas and Mikkelsen, Jon Mak (trans. and eds.) (2004), The Structure of Detachment : The aesthetic vision of Kuki Sh¯uz¯o, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Nishida Kitar¯o (1911/1990), An Inquiry into the Good, Masao Abe and Ives, Christopher (trans), New Haven: Yale University Press. Nishitani Keiji (1990), The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, Parkes, Graham and Aihara Setsuko (trans), Albany: State University of New York Press. Parkes, Graham (1997), ‘The Putative Fascism of the Kyoto School and the political Correctness of the modern Academy’, Philosophy East and West, 47:3 (7), pp. 305–36. Pincus, Leslie (1996), Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Sh¯uz¯o and the Rise of National Aesthetics, Berkeley: University of California Press. Stegewerns, Dick (ed.) (2003), Nationalism and Internationalism in Imperial Japan: Authonomy, Asian Brotherhood, or world citizenship?, London and New York: Routledge Curzon. Williams, David (2004), Defending Japan’s Paciﬁc War: The Kyoto School Philosophers and Post-White Power, London: Routledge Curzon. Yusa Michiko (2004), Zen and Philosophy: An Intellectual Biography of Nishida Kitar¯o, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Zinn, Howard (2005), A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present, New York: Harper.

9

Resistance to conclusion The Kyoto School philosophy under the Pax Americana Naoki Sakai

It may not be as astounding today as it once was to say that one ought to recognize the formation of some fantastic realm in the postwar study of modern Japanese thought, particularly of Kyoto School philosophy. Here, one might as well be as sensitized as possible to various uses of genitive markers pertaining to national, regional, racial, and civilizational identities. Whereas I tentatively resort to the genitive ‘Japanese’ with regard to the identiﬁcation of primary sources in terms of nationality and ethnicity, I do not want to divide its secondary derivative (readings or studies of the primary sources in this case) into two distinct classes: the study of the Kyoto School philosophy by those scholars, often resident in Japan, who write in the medium of Japanese; the study of Kyoto School philosophy by those who write in European languages. However tempting it may be, I would not yield to this binarism that has operated compellingly, in particular in the face of the spectral nature of the one term of this opposition, ‘the West’. In spite of wide-ranging differences in geography, culture, tradition, the degree of modernization, and even religious afﬁliation, the West has, persistently and sometimes ﬁxatedly, been appealed to in order to distinguish the Western study of the Kyoto School from the Japanese one. At the same time, the opposition of the West and Japan displaces the broader opposition of the West and the Rest or the East. In a characteristic manner, Japan has been allowed to serve as the representative of the Rest or the East in opposition to the West, while simultaneously disallowing the Rest or the East from being discussed thematically. Do we need to consider how Japan was schematically constituted not only in relation to the West, but also to the Rest or Asia, in studying the philosophy of the Kyoto School? As an exemplary case for this fantastic distinction without which neither ‘the civilizational transference’ (mutual endorsement of the West and Japan) nor the projective structure for identity politics (regulated by the desire for self-fashioning as a Westerner in the Japanese gaze or as a Japanese in the Western gaze) would be effectual, I can refer to the postwar reading of Tanizaki Jun’ichir¯o that has been dominant among the Japanese as well as the North-Atlantic readership. Tanizaki made his literary debut in 1909, a year prior to Japan’s ofﬁcial annexation of Korea, with the brilliant fable entitled Tattoo [Shisei] about the colonial pathology of the civilizing mission and missionary positionality. Yet, after the demise of the Japanese Empire, he was enshrined as an icon of Japanese tradition and as a

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‘native’ writer representing the continuity of the Japanese literary tradition. While Tanizaki was known in the prewar period as an avant-garde writer who experimented with cinematic visuality and new narrative forms, in the postwar period he was mostly read in reference to ‘traditional’ Japanese culture or Japanese ‘classics’. After the war, however, he gradually became an international phenomenon both in North America and Western Europe, and entered the Euro-centric circuit of cultural commodities. The Japanese perception of Tanizaki also changed in response to his increasing fame in the trans-national cultural market. As he became known in Euro-American countries as one of Japan’s cultural symbols, like Ozu Yasujir¯o in cinema, not only the modernist aspect of his literary projects but also his inexhaustible yet often ironical curiosity about the conﬁguration of colonial power relations was habitually overlooked in the estimation of this writer. I cannot give much space to the substantiation of my reading here, but let me draw attention to two instances: his famous essay In’ei Raisan [In Praise of Shadows], and his engagement with the problem of tradition. Strangely enough, In Praise of Shadows has been appreciated as an outright endorsement of nostalgic culturalism. However, a careful reading will disclose this essay to be a farce at the expense of the culturalist adoration of Japanese tradition. By associating all the pious qualities expected of tradition with the dark and stinking part of an old Japanese style house, Tanizaki produced a sense of hilarious incongruity and mocked the exoticism of old things, of inconveniences and of the historical. As can be found in his other works in general, Tanizaki was a novelist with an exceptionally critical mind who could call into question such overarching binaries as the modern vs the traditional, and the West vs the East, often by allegorizing the functions of the binaries in terms of sexual positionality. Tanizaki was one of the few literary ﬁgures in prewar Japan who understood the extraordinary signiﬁcance of sexuality in power relations (Komori 1998: 214). In the 1930s Tanizaki wrote a series of short stories in reference to historical documents and classical episodes. It was Nakagami Kenji who saw the political importance of Tanizaki’s historical tales because of their implicit references to the origins of social discrimination (Nakagami 1978 – cited by Komori 1998: 199–204). First of all, tradition for Tanizaki was an issue of political legitimacy that was mostly fabricated by the victors. As Komori Y¯oichi argued persuasively, many of his historical tales of this period implicitly referred to the tradition of the Emperor System for this reason, and illustrated how historical storytelling itself produced the ‘tradition’ and so-called lineage of the Imperial Family (Komori 1998: 204–226). Of course, the legitimacy of the Emperor System was constantly appealed to not only by fascists but by the state bureaucracy, the military and the industrialists (and the US-occupation administration after the war), in order to oppress freedom of expression and political movements that supposedly denied the principle of private property during the period when Tanizaki wrote at his new Ashiya residence in the Kaisai area. However, the undeniably political aspect of Tanizaki’s literature was continually obscured by ascribing his attempt to deal with historical materials to his ‘return to the classics’.1 It goes without saying that the classics in Tanizaki’s alleged return to Japanese tradition were indisputably

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the Japanese classics of the pre-modern eras. Thus, it became commonsense to regard Tanizaki Jun’ichir¯o as a representative writer of Japanese tradition, totally overlooking the fact that he deliberately stressed the artiﬁcial and fabricated nature of tradition itself, including the lineage of the Imperial Family. What took place simultaneously with the emergence of Tanizaki Jun’ichir¯o as an international phenomenon after the Asia-Paciﬁc war was the re-conﬁguration not only of Japan’s territory but also of the alignment of the domestic and the international. I want to refer to the case of Tanizaki Jun’ichir¯o’s reception, because, as I will show here, a number of analogous things can be said about the postwar reception of the Kyoto School philosophy. In the postwar shaping of the ﬁgure of Tanizaki as a writer representative of Japanese culture and tradition, two directives for foreclosure are palpably decipherable. The ﬁrst directive concerns how to deal with the indecision and ambiguity in Tanizaki with regard to the binary oppositions: the West and the East (the Orient or Asia), the modern and the traditional, the innovative and the conservative. Excluded from the portraiture of this supposedly aesthetically conservative artist of an Oriental tradition were many aspects of Tanizaki’s texts that eluded easy accommodation within these binaries, such as his experimentation with narrative forms that borrowed elements from Japanese medieval tales and legends. His use of apparently old topics and styles could not easily be determined as either modernist (in the sense of sardonic modernity), or as anti-modern (in an uncomplicated recourse to the ancient conventions); his inquisitiveness about cinematography, which clearly indicated his curiosity about things new and innovative, deﬁnitely betrayed the characterization of his literature as a testimony to the continuity of Japanese tradition. It seems that, as soon as he was promoted to the rank of representative writer of Japan as part of the academic discourse on ‘the study of modern Japanese literature’, he was destined to be ‘distinguished’ clearly and unambiguously as the Eastern, the traditional, and the conservative writer in the practice of his art. All the auto-referential remarks, novelistic writings, ﬁlm scripts, and biographical events – including some, such as In Praise of Shadows, directly challenging the binary of the traditional vs the modern – which refused to be associated with ‘Eastern’, traditional or conservative terms in these binaries, were rendered somewhat insigniﬁcant. The second directive, which I have already touched on above, is about the perception of colonial power relations. Often Tanizaki described the subject positions actualized in colonial power through sexual relations. His perspective was principally that of a male character in a socially dominant position, and in this respect he was exceptional among the writers keenly interested in the everydayness of colonialism. He was obsessed with the dynamics of colonial power, but he viewed it mainly from the standpoint of the colonizer. This exceptional quality of his ‘postcolonial’ perspective made his literature unique and great. Unlike much of anti-colonial literature, Tanizaki described the implementation of the civilizing mission and missionary positionality as elements of allegorical scenarios between gendered characters. Sometimes he has been compared to the Marquis de Sade

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because, in his repeated attempts to depict the sado-masochistic interactions of the sexes, there can be found something like a relentless pursuit of the power play of homosociality in aesthetic perception that is somewhat equivalent to Sade’s metaphysical quest for the law of nature.2 After the demise of the Japanese empire, the basic positionality of the Japanese, particularly of Japanese men, was redeﬁned in many respects from that of the colonizer to that of the colonized.3 In this context, I suspect, a commentary focusing on this aspect of the Tanizaki literature could have succinctly illustrated the complicit and homosocial relationship between Japanese and American colonialisms in East Asia after Japan’s defeat and the installation of American hegemony, but, of course, such a reading would have been abhorred not only by the occupation administration of the Allied Powers but also by Japan’s government and mass media.4 Generally speaking, the enforced reading of Tanizaki’s texts in terms of the aforementioned binaries and the evasion of the topics related to colonial domination are characteristic of what is referred to as the discursive formation of Orientalism. Yet, it is important to note that the directives I outlined in the postwar reception of Tanizaki Jun’ichir¯o require much more than a denunciation of Orientalism, a disclosure of classical Orientalist strategy; the West represents on behalf of the East, thereby establishing hierarchical relationships between the West and the East. In a sense, it is important to keep in mind that a certain denunciation of Eurocentrism, particularly of white supremacy, was used to legitimate Japanese imperialist ventures in Asia before and during the Asia Paciﬁc War. A critique of the Orientalist depiction of Japanese literature and culture is far from sufﬁcient in this instance, for one ought to extend an inquiry, beyond the mere condemnation of Orientalism, into the structural complicity between the West and Japan. As a matter of fact, the simplistic application of anti-Orientalism rhetoric to the case of postwar Japan would instead draw our attention away from the historical conditions for which such unyielding directives had to be imposed in the ﬁrst place. It is utterly misleading to generalize about the academic and intellectual situation of Japan after the demise of her empire simply in terms of imposed Orientalism. What we must be aware of is the on-going presence of a peculiar, reciprocal connivance between the Orientalist exoticization of Japanese thought by Western scholars and the culturalist endorsement by Japanese intellectuals of such exoticism; this is something I have characterized elsewhere as the complicity of universalism and particularism (Sakai 1989). It is essential to critically expose the implicit involvement of civilizational transference in the Japanese critique of Eurocentrism. In spite of their often-voiced complaints, certain Japanese intellectuals themselves authorize some exotic portrait of Japanese culture from the viewpoint of the West. More than a half century after the ofﬁcial end of the Allied Occupation of Japan, many Japanese intellectuals were still willing to play the role of ‘the self-consolidating other’ vis-à-vis those scholars from North America and Western Europe who fashioned themselves as Westerners. Even though a comparatively large number of readers were attracted to the philosophical works of Nishida Kitar¯o after the war, Kyoto School philosophy could be no rival of Tanizaki in popularity, either in Japan or in the Euro-American

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worlds. Whereas many of Tanizaki’s texts were in novelistic genres, Kyoto School philosophy was principally in the academic discipline of philosophy within the modern university system. Readers were expected to be familiar both with classical texts of the philosophy of the past and many contemporary texts by philosophers working in Western Europe and North America. All the major scholars who were afﬁliated with the Kyoto School (Nishida Kitar¯o, Tanabe Hajime, and the colleagues and disciples of Nishida and Tanabe: Kuki Sh¯uz¯o, Miki Kiyoshi, Tosaka Jun, Nakai Masakazu, K¯oyama Iwao, Shimomura Toratar¯o, Nishitani Keiji, Funayama Shin’ichi, Mutai Risaku, K¯osaka Masaaki, and so forth – Watsuji Tetsur¯o and Hisamatsu Sen’ichi, whose works were probably better known outside philosophy, were sometimes included) wrote philosophy, and therefore, in due course, many readers who were either unfamiliar with the protocols of academic philosophy or equipped with too little knowledge of the classics of the discipline found it extremely difﬁcult to grasp their arguments. Japanese academic philosophy started as an importation of the discipline from Western Europe. Even during the period when the department of philosophy at the Imperial University of Kyoto attracted many outstanding students from many parts of the empire, it was the deliberate policy of the department’s senior faculty, including Nishida and Tanabe, to elaborate the disciplinary framework of modern philosophy as it had been institutionalized at universities in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century; they practiced ‘Western philosophy’, which they regarded as the form of intellectual inquiry that sought to be universal. In other words, in their understanding of philosophy as an academic discipline, the intellectual practice they committed themselves to ought to be open, at least in theory, to any person regardless of nationality, race, religion, social class, or location. In this respect, it was conceived of as a modern science. It was, of course, possible to call into question the claim for the putative universality of philosophy, yet, it was precisely in philosophy, a discipline regulated by the idea of universality, that such a question had to be posed and rigorously pursued. Just like their European counterparts, however, they wrote in their national language – the language of modern Japanese that was still in the process of initial formation at that time. In this sense, the discipline of philosophy that they pursued was essentially a national philosophy, in the particular sense of philosophy through the medium of a national language, just like French, English or German philosophy in contemporary Europe. One of the main tasks that the ﬁrst generation of modern philosophers in Japan undertook in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was to construct a new standard language for philosophical discussion not reliant upon literary Chinese. It goes without saying that both Nishida andTanabe inherited the task of inventing the modern national language for philosophy. They believed the universality of scientiﬁc knowledge to be compatible with the creation of a standard national language for such universal knowledge. The discipline of philosophy that was initially formed at universities in Western Europe in the nineteenth century was seen as the model for Japanese universities as well.5 Let me re-emphasize that the discipline to which the Kyoto School was committed was ‘Western philosophy’, and that it was neither ‘Japanese’, ‘Asian’ nor

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‘Buddhist’ philosophy, even though its medium was the language of the Japanese nation; it was unambiguously the universal philosophy, the universality of which could not be modiﬁed by any national, regional, civilizational, or religious particularity. Yet, this universality of the universal philosophy was marked by the genetive ‘Western’. The Kyoto School was one of many departments of philosophy that conceded to the momentary and adhoc arrangement of universality, so that the universal philosophy they accepted was temporarily and transitorily the philosophy of European origins. As goes without saying, it is a paradox that the academic discipline which claims to remain European or Western could ever be regarded as universal (and cosmopolitan by implication) rather than provincial, a paradox with which many European intellectuals also could not help being concerned at that time. Whereas some members of the Kyoto School were aware of this precariousness in the nature of their discipline, I am convinced that they never doubted the disciplinary formation of philosophy as a science of universal knowledge. In this discipline, Japanese students were – in the early twentieth century and even today – expected to read philosophical texts of ‘the West’. Essentially their cultural cosmos was (and is) similar to that of their contemporary intellectuals in Europe although, as can be observed in their various assessments of ‘the Crisis of Europe’, European intellectuals increasingly felt the lack of a common tradition of Europe, and hence the need for European uniﬁcation. When examining the range of books read by the members of the Kyoto School, one is struck by the fact that they were immersed in the cosmopolitan milieu of the planetary contemporaneity. Neither Chinese classics nor Buddhist texts were routinely taught in philosophy classes at Japanese universities and the students were not expected to be knowledgeable about Buddhist theories, Confucian doctrines, or Shintoist rituals. Few of the intellectual, religious or aesthetic traditions that one might customarily associate with ‘the Orient’ were included in the curriculum of philosophy. By and large, one would commit a typical culturalist mistake to assume the continuity of doctrinal, epistemic or canonical tradition beyond the generation where supporting pedagogical institutions were no longer viable. Modern Japan is a case in point. ‘Traditional’ facilities (such as literacy in literary Chinese) fast disappeared once modern national education was introduced. The modern nature of philosophy as an academic discipline was unambiguously corroborated by a number of members of the Kyoto School;6 just like any other modern academic discipline, philosophy was not accessible to those who were untrained in the discipline; it required a certain cultural capital on the part of students who wanted to seek knowledge there. Despite all the restrictive measures, however, it was supposedly open to any person who was willing to follow its protocols and modus operandi.7 In the pedagogical sense it was precisely a discipline that trained novices so as to cultivate them to operate within it. Nevertheless, it was never stabilized institutionally; it was supposed to be perpetually transformed through self-critical reﬂections; its rules of engagement were open to revision and never ﬁxed; these could be revised or replaced with other rules as new modes of inquiry and argumentation became prevalent. Consequently, it is very difﬁcult to view the discipline of philosophy differently from other academic disciplines such as physics, economics, or anthropology.

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Thus, regardless of whether each member’s accomplishments adhered to the stated idea or not, it is demanded of those of us who read the original texts of the Kyoto School of philosophy in the twenty-ﬁrst century to assume that the School was committed to the idea of universal knowledge production: this philosophy related to the production of knowledge reﬂectively, and attempted to set the new conditions of knowing, thereby transforming both the constitution of the object for knowledge-production and the subjective conditions of knowing; the idea clearly entailed a commitment to the project of changing and creating the means of knowing about humanity and the world. In this sense, I do not hesitate to admit that the Kyoto School was involved in the transcendental project of universal philosophy. Certainly, one may talk about Kyoto School philosophy as a part of Japanese philosophy, but Japanese philosophy in this context should imply no more than the discipline of philosophy instituted in the national education system of Japan. Moreover, we cannot pretend to be ignorant of the historical condition that the ‘Japanese’ philosophy (of which the Kyoto School of philosophy was part) was instituted as ‘Western’philosophy. In this instance, we are not dealing with a unique case but with a general feature of a modern academic discipline in non-Western countries. ‘Japanese’ philosophy adheres to the ‘universalistic’ premises of the discipline exactly because it is regarded as ‘Western’ in origin. From this cursory synopsis a number of consequences ensue. Due to limitations of space, I will concentrate on one of them, and leave the rest to other occasions. It goes without saying that the ‘Resistance to Conclusion’ that I present here does not profess to be conclusive at all. One consequence of the general historical observation of philosophy in Japan can be summed up as follows: as far as the internal formation of its disciplinarity is concerned, the dichotomy of the West and the Rest or Asia is utterly irrelevant to the comprehension, apprehension or critical evaluation of Japanese philosophy in general and of Kyoto School philosophy in particular. In order to read and comprehend ‘Japanese’ economics or mathematics, one is expected to have a proﬁciency in the Japanese language, to be familiar with the particular vocabulary (much of which consists of translation from Euro-American sources), and perhaps with those institutional routines particular to the Japanese discipline that have developed since its inception. Beyond these, one need not know more about Japan, Asia or ‘the Oriental mind’ in order to comprehend, appreciate and evaluate works in economics or mathematics. In the same way, ‘Japanese’ philosophy requires no more locally-speciﬁc preparation on the part of those who want to comprehend and evaluate it than American, German, French philosophies and so on. There are no grounds to claim that Japanese philosophy demands that students acquire some esoteric knowledge fundamentally different from the philosophy of ‘the West’. Regardless of whether students are from the so-called West or Japan, what makes it extremely difﬁcult for them to comprehend Kyoto School philosophy is their unfamiliarity with modern philosophical discussion and the broad social and critical debates of the interwar era. In too many instances, however, the binary of the West and Japan has served to displace perceived inadequacy about the general knowledge of philosophy

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and critical thinking on the part of an individual student with the unwarranted presumption of his or her cultural, racial or religious ‘origins’. As the passage in Heidegger’s dialogue with a Japanese exempliﬁes, the exoticizing projection of Asia, ‘the Oriental Mind’, or ‘the outside of Western metaphysics’ onto the texts of Japanese philosophy has made it impossible for students to work through the constraints of civilizational transference. To the extent that the sort of philosophy envisaged by the Kyoto School was decisively alienated from ‘native’ knowledge (although I am very suspicious of any notion of ‘native epistemology’to begin with), the ﬁrst task in the study of the Kyoto School of philosophy is to apprehend philosophical architectonic and conceptual coherence in its texts. It is only in the secondary task of historical evaluation and of the assessment of socio-political implications that some familiarity with contemporary Japanese society is at stake. It is certainly true that it is very difﬁcult to distinguish the domain of the ﬁrst task from that of the second. But, one cannot accomplish a reasonable study of the Kyoto School unless one is capable of the ﬁrst task. So-called Japan specialists are generally known to be good at the second task, but they are not necessarily diligent about the ﬁrst. This lack of disciplinary preparedness manifests in various ways. Not knowing the central issues of modern philosophy (such as the problems of transcendental apperception), many students fail to appreciate the thrust of discussion found in the texts of the leading ﬁgures of the Kyoto School. Let me stress, once again, that disciplinary unpreparedness has little to do with each student’s ethnic background or religious afﬁliation; neither can it be construed in terms of such binary oppositions as the West and the East or Asia, the modern and the traditional, the progressive and the conservative. Having been brought up in Japan does not guarantee the student immediate access to the texts of modern Japanese philosophy, just as so-called Western identity does not secure more access to ‘Western’ philosophy than the Asian background does. Today the overwhelming majority of Japanese college students would ﬁnd Nishida’s argument on syllogism or Tanabe’s on transcendental schematism utterly alien, incomprehensible or almost like Zen’s k¯oan. The dichotomy of the West and Japan has legitimated a certain division of labor in the institution of knowledge production not merely on Japan but also on the West. It is important to point out that, thanks to the historical formation of disciplines in the humanities, the binary of the West and the Rest appears to be least problematic to those who know little about the Rest. Let us keep in mind that, to this sort of audience who feels ignorant about the Rest, a simplistic reading of Kyoto School philosophy in terms of the binary of the West and the Rest is most tempting. Speaking from my personal experience in the classroom situation, I have observed time and again that some non-Japanese students could appreciate the conceptual sequence of their argument when guided to sit and read these texts closely and philosophically, even if their knowledge of ‘Japanese culture’ is very limited. What matters much more than some hazy familiarity with ‘local culture’ is how well one can consult dictionaries and pursue the coherence of an argument conceptually step by step. What is decisive in the critical appreciation of Kyoto

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School philosophy is the ability to discard some exotic fantasy about ‘the Oriental mind’, and relate what is talked about in their texts to intellectual problems that their contemporaries struggled with in Europe and elsewhere. Whereas an increasing number of studies on modern Japanese thought by young scholars indicate some awareness about how futile the dichotomy of the West and Japan is, there are not many who have successfully located themselves outside the discourse of the West and the Rest in their studies of Kyoto School philosophy. Despite the fact that the philosophers of the Kyoto School regarded their academic and intellectual practice as part of ‘Western’ philosophy, the postwar discussion of Kyoto School philosophy has repeatedly relocated it on the side of Japanese ‘culture’, Asian traditions and Oriental religions. Thus, we are reminded of the case of Tanizaki Jun’ichir¯o. Considering the obsessive persistence of this civilizational transference inherent in the discourse of the West and the Rest, I do not think the matter is entirely reducible to the individual choice of a student. When the binary of the West and Japan is evidently futile in our reading of modern Japanese philosophy, what is called for is some historical diagnosis of the insistent imposition of this binary on the reading of the philosophy of the Kyoto School. In undertaking a historical investigation, we must discern three different dimensions. The discourse of the West and the Rest is not exclusively a phenomenon of the period after World War II. Dividing the world into two contrasting areas, the West and the Rest of the world, has been an institutionalized practice widely accepted in academia since the late nineteenth century. This dichotomy may be traceable as far back as the seventeenth century when the system of international law was inaugurated with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. This peace treaty subsequent to the Thirty Year War established the division of two geopolitical areas, the ﬁrst, ‘the international world’, in which the four principles are observed (1. the sovereignty of the national state and its self-determination, (2. the legal equality among national states, (3. the reign of international laws among the states, and (4. the non-intervention of one state in the domestic affairs of another) and the second area in which these four principles including the reign of international law have no binding force. The ﬁrst area would later be called the West, while the second area would be excluded from ‘the international world’, and become literally ‘the Rest of the world’, with states and inhabitants subject to colonial violence. By the end of the nineteenth century, the majority of the second area was transformed into colonies belonging to a few super powers. Yet, this pseudo-geopolitical designation of the West gained currency towards the end of the nineteenth century when the international world had to expand to cover the entire surface of the world as a result of, ﬁrst, colonial competition among the imperial powers, second, the emergence of Japan and the United States as modern imperial powers, and third, the increasingly wide-spread anti-colonial struggles for national self-determination. In this historical determination of the West, the distinction of the West from the Rest of the world derived from the legacy of colonialisms. However, until the gradual disappearance of the distinction between the international world and its outside, the West was hardly in common parlance, as Christopher GoGwilt persuasively demonstrated in his study of Joseph Conrad (GoGwilt 1995).

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Retrospectively talking about his famous article, A Conquest by Method [Une conqu¯ete méthodique], in which he reﬂected upon the question of method in a manner that intimates his later discussion of the ‘Crisis of the European Spirit’, Paul Valéry disclosed that, until the Sino-Japanese war in the Far East (1894–95) and the Spanish-American war in the West Indies (1898), he had never seriously entertained the idea that Europe could exist as a unity (Valéry 1960: 914).8 For Valéry, prior to the last few years of the nineteenth century, Europe was no more than a geographic peninsula sticking out of the great expanse of the Eurasian continent. For him, Europe emerged for the ﬁrst time as internally uniﬁed only when its self-transcendence and coherence (or what he eventually yielded – in spite of himself – to the Hegelian naming, ‘Spirit’) was fundamentally threatened. As far as Valéry was concerned, Europe came into being simultaneously with the ‘crisis’ of its spirit. One may ﬁnd the resolute expression of the project of transcendental and universalistic thinking in his adoption of this term ‘Spirit’ as well as his idiosyncratic notion of the ‘method’. Valéry believed that Europe could ﬁnd its unity only in the essential openness and universality to which it is committed. Only through the continual transformation and innovation of itself in the project of selftranscendence could it remain identical as Europe. Let us note that the question of ‘Spirit’ in the Valérian sense loomed large in the philosophy of the Kyoto School. Its members, such as Miki Kiyoshi and Tanabe Hajime, clearly sought something like the transcendental project of universal philosophy, although it is doubtful that the ‘Spirit’ committed to by its members could be modiﬁed either by a genetive of ‘Europe’ or ‘the West’. Similar to Europe, ‘the West’ too came into the public consciousness, to follow the Valérian manner of speaking, almost simultaneously accompanied by talk of the ‘Crisis of the West’. Already in the 1920s, Antonio Gramsci pointed out that the West could not designate any geographic region unless in relation to the global hegemony of Great Britain (Gramsci 1971: 447). In the last 80 years, many shifts have taken place in the conﬁguration of the international world, and Great Britain is now a sort of satellite state or semi-colony subordinated to the global power, located off the western shore of the Eurasian continent. Nowadays it is even more appropriate than in the 1920s to say that the West is a historical construct with multiple determinations, which almost always contradict one another. Most important of all, it is imperative to keep in mind that the West is never simply a cartographic index. It cannot be deﬁned in terms of a single variable. It cannot be determined either by geography, state sovereignty, economic development, race, Christian heritage, scientiﬁc rationality, or the system of values particular to modernity, yet it is not unrelated to any one of them. In short, it is excessively over-determined, although I would never argue that it is merely an illusion.9 Despite all these contradictions, many including Valéry and Edmund Husserl were resolute in exclusively attributing ‘Spirit’ to Europe. Here, we are once again confronted with the paradox: a project that claims to unify Europe or the West could consistently be regarded not as provincial but as universal. How did the claim to openness and universality justify itself to be particularized by the genetive of Europe or the West? Similarly, how was the claim to openness and universality

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in the name of ‘Western’ philosophy in fact particularized by the genetive of Japan in the philosophy of the Kyoto School? Even during its heyday, it was difﬁcult to identify the characteristic of the philosophy of the Kyoto School in terms of the binary opposition of the West and the Rest. But, to my astonishment, the binarism became dominant in the study of Kyoto School philosophy after the Asia-Paciﬁc War. What followed the loss of the Japanese empire was more than merely a return of Orientalism and indulgence in civilizational transference.10 Under the political climate of intense anti-Communism in the 1950s and 1960s, some members of the Kyoto School who had been looked at with suspicion for their wartime collaboration with the totalitarian state, resorted to religion, most typically Buddhism, and emerged as conservative ideologues supporting a political alliance made between the United States occupation administration and the Japanese ruling class. They astutely observed that ‘religion’ was a magic word, the chanting of which would redeem suspects of war responsibility from political charges in regions like Western Europe and East Asia under the new Pax Americana. As to the post World War II arrangement concerning Japan, two conditions must be kept in mind. As we have come to know through the disclosure of a number of documents in the last few decades, the United States government pursued a policy of insulating emperor Hirohito from charges concerning his war responsibility, in view of his usefulness as a puppet for the Allied occupation of Japan after Japan’s defeat.11 As Takashi Fujitani demonstrated through his investigation of Edwin O. Reischauer’s 1942 memorandum to the Department of War, ‘Memorandum on Policy Towards Japan’, saving the Japanese emperor was closely related to issues concerning war propaganda, particularly how to present the position of the United States to the rest of the world with regard to her past and present racism inside as well as outside her territories. The so-called ideological warfare, in which many of the postwar ‘area experts’of the United States were initially involved, was launched in order to counteract Japan’s claim to have been aiming to liberate colonized peoples from the racist oppression of Anglo-American imperialisms, and reclaim the status of universalism from an apparent Japanese monopoly in the Asia-Paciﬁc theatre. Already during the war, it was acknowledged by United States policymakers that the way the war in Asia and the Paciﬁc was interpreted had become a decisive issue for the regional hegemony of the United States in East Asia. Even though the rhetoric of universalism employed by the United States ‘area experts’ was rather full of the legacies of pre-enlightenment and much less theoretically elaborate than Valéry’s or Husserl’s, the question of universalism was far from being merely a problem of logic or technicality (in the narrow sense of the word). As many members of the Kyoto School were no less aware of the signiﬁcance of universalism than their American counterparts, their project of transcendental and universal philosophy could only be related to the political and imperialist ventures of the times. As the United States ‘lost’ China or ‘Communism stole China from the United States’ in the late 1940s, its policy towards East Asia, and Japan in particular, took

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the well known ‘return course’. By the mid-1950s, the American attitude toward the conservatives in Japan had regressed to such an extent that the following words by Douglas MacArthur Jr., the then American ambassador to Japan, reﬂected the actuality of international politics quite accurately: ‘Nothing’, the ambassador stressed, ‘was wrong with the principle and the overall objective of the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere, just as there was nothing wrong with the idea of European uniﬁcation’. Washington only opposed ‘the method which Hitler and the Japanese militarists employed’.12 Of course, a more detailed explanation is called for, but this much is clear. A bilaterally complicit relationship between the United States and Japan was being established. It was complicit in the sense of (1) creating an international environment where the policies of the US and Japan were aligned on the basis of a shared disavowal, and (2) regulating the complicit relationship of domination/subjugation between these two supposedly sovereign nations. This represents a historically speciﬁc formation of what may be referred to as the complicity between universalism and particularism, as well as the formation of the overarching super-state. It is under such circumstances that the postwar study of Kyoto School philosophy was revived. In order to sustain the legitimacy of the Emperor System upon which the United States occupation administration tried to build its own legitimacy in Japan, and to appropriate the legacies of Japanese colonialism in East Asia into the American collective security system, a number of historical perspectives had to be repressed. Not only Japan’s relationship with Korea, Taiwan, China and other peoples in Asia but also the fact that the members of the Kyoto School clearly participated in the production of the legitimacy of Japanese colonial rule in Asia in universalistic philosophical terms have been persistently overlooked in the study of Kyoto School philosophy. Framing things within the binarism of the West and Japan has both impeded serious comparative study of universalism in Kyoto School philosophy and served to draw attention away from the historical fact that Japanese intellectuals unquestionably assumed a colonizing positionality in relation to peoples in Asia. What appears deliberately prohibited is to place the variety of philosophical projects launched and debated in the West and Japan in the same ﬁeld of inquiry in terms of their involvement in colonial power relations. As a matter of fact, this prohibition has less to do with the object than with the conditions surrounding the subject of inquiry. More often than not it derives from an exceptionalism implicitly adhered to by those who study Kyoto School philosophy. Postwar Japanese cultural nationalism is fairly well known for its tendencies towards ethnic exceptionalism, but we have not adequately historicized the exceptionalism inherent in Area Studies on Japan in the United States and Western Europe and in the institutional constraints within which the study of the Kyoto School is often conducted. Furthermore, it is imperative to note that what has not been thematized in the study of Kyoto School philosophy is the very relationship between the transcendental project of universal philosophy and imperial nationalism. It goes without

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saying that this problematic cannot and should not be separated from the paradox mentioned above: more than once the claim to openness and universality has justiﬁed itself to be particularized by the genetive of Europe, the West or Japan. In order to illustrate the signiﬁcance of this paradox in the problems about imperialisms and nationalisms, let me brieﬂy refer to the Husserlian teleology of reason, the historical mission of transcendental and universal philosophy against what Edmund Husserl perceived to be the crisis in the European sciences. There is little doubt that, by addressing the crisis of European sciences, Husserl was also deeply concerned with the onslaught of Nazism and extreme nationalist movements in Europe, just as many members of the Kyoto School were engaged in anti-fascist activities in Japan in the 1930s. By invoking the collective commitment to the historicist project of transcendental phenomenology, he sought to rescue the radical mission of universal theory from a positivist quagmire. But, in this critique of his contemporary political situation in Europe, he did not hesitate to particularize the universal project of transcendental phenomenology in terms of the ‘total unity of history’ that was nothing but ‘our history’ (Husserl 1970: 71). The genitive ‘our’ here signiﬁes ‘European humanity’, and Husserl attempted to endow European humanity with an exceptional mission: [European] humanity bears within itself an absolute idea, rather than merely an empirical anthropological type like ‘China’ or India’; it could be decided whether the spectacle of the Europeanization of all other civilizations bears witness to the rule of an absolute meaning, one which is proper to the sense, rather than to a historical non-sense, of the world. (Husserl 1970: 16) This way of particularizing universal philosophy is not unique to Edmund Husserl.13 Needless to say, it would be futile to treat Husserl’s Eurocentrism as his personal problem. What has been evaded in the study of Kyoto School philosophy because of the binarism of the West and Japan is an inquiry into the essential alliance between colonialism and the transcendental project of universal philosophy: has the same sort of particularization of the universal project of transcendental philosophy been committed by the members of the Kyoto School? What is at stake is a comparative study of universalism. By this comparative study of universalism, therefore, I mean an inquiry into how and why universal values are proposed for the sake of legitimacy in historically speciﬁc social formations. Inevitably this includes a reading of the philosophy of the Kyoto School as philosophical thought in relation to the social demands of the time. One of the common denominators in this comparison is the very ambiguous relationship between philosophy and politics. Taking into consideration the problematic of universalism that was a guiding principle of the Japanese empire in the 1930s and early 1940s, we cannot avoid the issues of colonialism and imperialism. And we must tackle these issues without succumbing to the exceptionalist temptation of a nationalism, civilizationalism or racism.

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Let me end this short ‘Resistance to Conclusion’ by opening up the two domains of inquiry that we cannot continue to put aside. 1

2

The issues of racism and universalism. During the interwar period, Japan and the United States often competed with one another over the universal claims of each imperial nationalism. It is imperative to address the question of how racism should be understood in relation to colonial violence. By conﬁning racism to the domain of particularism in the schematic opposition of universalism and particularism, we have been exempt from the task of examining whether or not the propagation of universalism was a response to and re-enforcement of colonial violence. How to control minorities within each imperial nation, and the issues of minorities’ subjectivity in an imperial nation. It was no accident that the problematic of national subjectivity was intensely pursued in the Kyoto School philosophy. Precisely because of the complicity of universalism and particularism, ‘area specialists’ in the United States and the scholars of national history in Japan have been allowed to assume a priori that Japanese nationalism was, is and will be of a particularistic type. Consequently, even leading ﬁgures such as Tanabe Hajime, Miki Kiyoshi and Takata Yasuma have been treated as ideologues for ethnic particularism! What they refuse to entertain is one of the crucial questions for the intellectual projects of transcendental and universal philosophy. And this is the very problem that was once posed in the contexts of the ‘Crisis of Europe’ and the East Asian Community, and continues to haunt us now.

Did the universalism of the ‘Spirit’ not harbor an implicit racism in its very integrationist claim to universality under imperial nationalism? Should we not investigate why colonial violence is most intensive in the medium of universalistic discourse?

Notes 1 Komori (1998: 220) says, ‘The academic discourse of “the Study of Modern Japanese Literature” has tirelessly applied the label of the “Return to the Classics” to Tanaizaki’s literary practice since his move to the Kansai area.’ 2 In Tanizaki, the naked body of the woman, particularly its surface, is a continuing theme in Tattoo [Shisei], Golden Death [Kin Iro no Shi], Ashikari and so forth. For Tanizaki, naked skin is a place for inscription. But it is a place of proscription and prescription as well. Legibility, visuality, and the legislation of imperatives are thus articulated to one another on the surface of a woman’s naked body. See Tsuboi Hideto, 2006: 137–70. 3 I have named this discourse, in which the relationship between the United States and Japan was newly-instituted, the ‘Discourse of the Postwar Emperor System’. See Sakai 2000a. 4 Except in the traditional trustees of Central America, Okinawa and some Paciﬁc Islands, the United States generally pursued a policy of anti-colonialism after WWII. However, US policy-makers systematically developed the strategies of regional control under which the legacies of Japanese colonialism were grafted to the system of collective security. Against the American claim of anti-colonialism, I recognize the continuity of

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6

7 8 9 10

11

12

13

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Japanese colonial rule and the new reign of the United States in East Asia. See Sakai 2006. Philosophy was introduced into the educational system in the late nineteenth century when, for the ﬁrst time, the nation-state of Japan was formed. Therefore, it is only in the symbolic sense that the ‘Japanese’ philosophy of pre-modern periods can be talked about. It is important to stress, however, that a knowledge of the Japanese language is far from sufﬁcient in reading the pre-modern philosophy of Japan. It sufﬁces to mention that the readers are required to be familiar with literary Chinese and other hybrid mediums in order to read such representative texts of Japanese philosophy as Prince Umayado’s Hokeky¯o gisho, Dogen’s Sh¯ob¯o genz¯o, and Ogy¯u Sorai’s Bend¯o. Tanabe Hajime’s critique of the Japanese Ministry of Education’s policies concerning science education is most typical in this respect. Kagaku-shigi no kakuj¯u (Promotion of the autonomy of science) (originally presented at the Ministry of Education sometime between 1935 and 1937, Tanabe Hajime Zensh¯u, vol. 8, Tokyo: Chikuma Shob¯o, 1964: 93–103) and Part IV ‘Kagaku seisaku no mujun (Contradiction in Science Policy)’ of Tetsugaku to kagaku no aida (Between Philosophy and Science) (originally published in 1936, Tanabe Hajime Zensh¯u, vol. 5, Tokyo: Chikuma Shob¯o, 1963: 248–65). However, pointing to the Kyoto School’s commitment to scientiﬁc spirit does not mean that I imply the endorsement of the School’s political innocence at all. This openness presupposed the existence of a nation-state, and in this respect was an unambiguously ‘modern’ value. It goes without saying that, today, this claim of and to openness must be critically examined. For an insightful analysis of the relationship among four terms, Japan, America, Germany, and Britain, see: Yamada, 2001. This is one of the topics thematically addressed by my project in progress ‘Dislocation of the West’. It is a continuation of my (1989) discussion of the problem of universalism and particularism, reprinted in Sakai 1997. See also Sakai 2000b. Let me issue a warning disclaimer. We must be sensitized to the vicissitude of Japanese nationality. I do not presume that the students of Kyoto School philosophy were all Japanese from Japan proper. Historically, Japanese identity was never immutable; it was polysemic. Some texts by the leading ﬁgures of the Kyoto School were widely read by ‘Japanese’ students in the annexed territories of the Empire. Edwin O. Reischauer, ‘Memorandum on Policy towards Japan’, 14 September 1942; with materials collected by War Department General Staff, Organization and Training Division, G-3. Concerning ‘Enlistment of loyal American citizens of Japanese descent into the Army and Navy’, 17 December 1942; 291.2, Army-AG Classiﬁed Decimal File 1940–42; Records of the Adjunct General’s Ofﬁce, 1917–, Record Group 407; Entry 360; Box 147; National Archives at College Park, MD. This memorandum is available at March, 2001 issue of Sekai at the Iwanami web site http://www.iwanami.co.jp/ sekai/. Memorandum of conversation between MacArthur and Kono, March 28, 1857, cited by Schaller 1997: 106. Incidentally, K¯oyama Iwao boasted of his farsightedness in saying that the United States’ policies in East Asia simply followed the idea of the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere. I do not think that either Paul Valéry or Martin Heidegger could evade this tendency. On the question of Martin Heidegger and the West, see: Lacoue-Labarthe, 1990.

References GoGwilt, Christopher (1995), The Invention of the West – Joseph Conrad and the DoubleMapping of Europe and the Empire, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gramsci, Antonio (1971), Selections from Prison Notebook of Antonio Gramsci, Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey N. Smith (eds and trans), New York: International Publishers.

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Husserl, Edmund (1970), The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, David Carr (trans), Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Komori, Y¯oichi (1998), ‘Yuragi’ no nakano Nihon bungaku (Japanese Literature in ‘Oscillation’), Tokyo: NHK Books. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe (1990), Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Nakagami, Kenji (1978), Kish¯u – Ki no kuni, ne no kuni monogatari (The domain of ki, a country of tree; a country of root - storytelling), Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha. Sakai, Naoki (1989), ‘Modernity and its Critique: The Problem of Universalism and Particularism’, in Masao Miyoshi & Harry D. Harootunian (eds), Postmodernism and Japan, Durham & London: Duke University Press, pp. 93–122. Sakai, Naoki (1997), Translation and Subjectivity, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Sakai, Naoki (2000a), ‘ “You Asians”: On the Historical Role of the West and Asia Binary’, in H. D. Harootunian & T. Yoda (eds), The South Atlantic Quarterly, 99:4, pp. 789–818. Sakai, Naoki (2000b), ‘The Dislocation of the West’ in TRACES, vol. 1, Ithaca: Trances, Inc., pp. 71–94. Sakai, Naoki (2006), ‘Tosakushita kokuminshugi to nihon-koku kenpo’ (Nationalism in Perversion and Japanese Constitution) in Gendai Shiso, 34:10 (September), pp. 202–45. Schaller, Michael (1997), Altered States: The United States since the Occupation, Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Tanabe, Hajime (1936/63), Tetsugaku to kagaku no aida (Between Philosophy and Science), in Tanabe Hajime Zensh¯u, vol. 5, Tokyo: Chikuma Shob¯o. Tanabe, Hajime (1964), Kagaku-shigi no kakuj¯u (Promotion of the autonomy of science), in Tanabe Hajime Zensh¯u, vol. 8, Tokyo: Chikuma Shob¯o. Tsuboi, Hideto (2006), ‘The Skin of Sebastian’ in Tsuboi Hideto, Kankaku no Kindai (Modernity of the Senses), Nagoya: Nagoya University Press, pp. 137–70. Valéry, Paul (1960), ‘Avant-Propos’ for ‘Regards sur le Monde Actuel’, in Paul Valéry Oeuvres II, Paris: Gallimard, pp. 913–28. Yamada, Hiroaki (2001), Santen kakuho, Tokyo: Shiny¯o-sha.

Index

absolute dialectics (zettai bensh¯oh¯o) see logic of absolute mediation (zettai baikai no ronri) absolutely contradictory self-identity (zettai mujunteki jikod o¯ itsu) 50, 51, 54–55, 81, 83 absolute nothingness (zettai mu no basho) 49–50, 55, 62, 128–29 action intuition (k o¯ iteki chokkan) 50, 55, 72n.11, 77, 83 actuality ( jissaiteki) 109–10 Adams, Robert 143, 146 Amano Teiy¯u 143 anthropocentrism 55 antiquarianism: charges against Cambridge School 5–6, 16–17 anxiety: Miki’s sense of 138–39 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 180 Aristotle 72n.8, 78; conception of hypoke`ımenon 51 art: separation of life and 100–03 Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan (Pincus) 165, 168, 172 Barth, Karl 149 Baxter, Richard 17 Being and Time (Heidegger) 85, 167, 168, 169 Bergson, Henri 61, 65, 68, 73n.23, 84, 97, 109, 125 Bodin, Jean 81 Bolshevik Revolution (1918) 96 Buddhism 29–30; see also Zen Buddhism Burckhardt, Jacob 121 Cambridge School: charges of antiquarianism and conservatism 4, 5–6, 16–17, 21; dominance of 19; ethnocentricity and 15; historical

context and 3, 5; opposition to text only approach 21n.2 Carlyle, Thomas 104 Christianity: Nishida’s views on 155 Ch¯uo¯ k o¯ ron discussions 8, 30, 38, 113, 152; diagnosis of ailments of modernity 117–18; on ethnic nation/nationalism 152–54; K¯osaka’s introductory statement 113–14; on moral energies 122–24, 153; on war 126–27 church-state relations: in Japan 141 Cohen, Hermann 143 colonial power relations: Tanizaki’s views on 185–86 communality 61, 73n.23 Confucian thought: relational understanding of the world 162 A Conquest by Method (Une conqu¯ete m¯ethodique) (Val¯ery) 192 Conrad, Joseph 191 consciousness 55; social 163 conservatism: Kekes understanding of 137; moral philosophy and 137–38; Nishida’s 156 contradictory self-identity (mujunteki jikod o¯ itsu) 52, 76, 79; absolutely 50, 54–55, 81, 83 ‘Conversation on Language between an Inquirer and a Japanese’ (Heidegger) 164–65 cooperative resistance 30–32 Co-Prosperity Sphere, Greater East Asia (dait o¯ akyo¯ eiken) 31, 32, 35, 36, 113, 151, 152, 153–54, 178, 194, 197n.12 cosmopolitanism 179; rooted 180 critical consciousness: vs. individualism 56–57 Croce, Benedetto 166

200

Index

cultural nationalism: Nishitani’s views on 29–30 culture, Japanese 29–30, 76, 91, 167; Kuki’s advocacy of 173, 174, 180 custom: Tosaka’s mediations on everyday and 103–08 Dale, Peter: criticism of Kuki 164, 166–67; criticism of Kuki on basis of association with Heidegger 164–65, 167 Decline of the West (Spengler) 125 DeLeuze, Gilles 104, 111 democracy: hypocrisies under the banner of 31; Nishitani’s views on 40–41, 43nn.24, 39; Plato’s views on 38 Descartes, Rene 130 dialectical world (bensh¯oh¯oteki sekai) 50, 58 dialectic of absolute mediation (zettai baikai no bensh¯osh¯o) 83 Die Krisis des Historismus (Troeltsch) 125 Dilthey, Wilhelm 114, 126 discontinuity 12–14, 17, 18–19 discontinuous continuity (hirenzoku no renzoku) 54 Doyobi (‘Saturday’) (newspaper) 99 Droysen, Johann G. 121 Dunn, John 21n.2 Eckhart, Meister 27, 42n.15 Elberfed, Rolf 163 Emperor System 184; legitimacy 194 ethical nation: Nishida’s 75–76, 77–83 ethics: Kantian 116 ethnic nation/nationalism 149, 159n.9; K¯osaka’s views on 151–52; Nishida’s vs. Tanabe’s views on 150–51, 154–55; Nishitani’s 159n.15 ethnocentricity 15; charges of 5–7, 16–17 Eurocentricity 7–8 Europe: Val¯ery on unity of 192 everydayness 97–98, 110–11; Kobayashi’s conceptualization of 108; Miki’s conceptualization of 108–10; Tosaka’s mediations on custom and 103–08 fascism 102–03, 148–49, 157–58; Kuki and 168, 169, 170 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 179 Fletcher, Andrew 17 ‘The Forms of Culture of the Classical Periods of East and West Seen from a Metaphysical Perspective’ (Nishida) 171

Foucault, Michael 20; concept of spirituality 129–30 Foundations of Modern Political Thought, The (Skinner) 8 Fragment on Heinrich Heine (Shigeharu) 147 freedom: necessity and 121–22; Nishitani’s conceptualization of 117; see also individual freedom ‘Fundamental Principles of a New World Order’ (Nishida) 177 Gakumonteki h¯oh¯o (The Scholarly Method) (Nishida) 56 gender (rui) 51; absolute negation 64–65, 66 globalism: Kuki’s 172, 174–75; Nishida’s 163–64, 170–71 Gogarten, Friedrich 149 GoGwilit, Christopher 191 good: Nishida’s notion of 77–78 Goto-Jones, Christopher 77, 143, 163; criticism of Nishida 93n.10, 140, 141, 142, 156, 161 Gramsci, Antonio 100, 192 Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (dait o¯ akyo¯ eiken) 31, 151, 178, 194 Hani Gor¯o 138 Harada Kumao 170, 171 Harootunian, Harry: criticism of Kuki 165–66, 168–69 Hataraku mono kara miru mono e (From the Acting to the Seeing) (Nishida) 49 Hayashi Fusao 147, 158n.1 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 6, 13, 79, 81, 83, 84, 97, 114, 115, 131, 163, 166; conceptualization of state 117; Nishida’s criticism of 82; overcoming of 120–24; philosophy of history 119–20; philosophy of history, criticism 120–21; Tanabe’s criticism of 85; views on war 117, 118, 119 Hegelianism: confrontation between Kantianism and 114–15 Heidegger, Martin 7, 13, 18, 19, 20, 97, 109, 115, 131, 181n.9; Dale on Kuki’s association with 164–65, 167; Pincus on Kuki’s association with 168; political thought of 40; reluctance to reveal East Asian sources 24n.31; Tanabe’s criticism of 85

Index Heisig, James 20, 23n.25, 26, 68; criticism of Kyoto School 55; criticism of Nishida 60 Herder, Johann Gottfried 179 High Treason Incident (1910) 141 Himi Kiyoshi 69 Hirohito, Emperor 193 historicality (rekishisei) 109; originary 110 historical periodization 10–12, 23n.20, 59 historical species (rekishiteki shu) 80 historical time 97; Tosaka’s conceptualization 105–08 historicism: crisis of 115, 125–26; ontological dimension of individual in Nishida’s 50–55 historicization 125; of philosophy 77, 86, 92 history: Hegelian philosophy of 119–20; Hegelian philosophy of, criticism 120–21; identiﬁcation of everydayness with 105; large-scale, linear and progressive notion of 80–81; Miki’s conception of 110; ‘static’ 108; temporality of 80–81, 97, 101–02, 105, 109, 110 history of political philosophy: contextual debate 3–4; in early twentieth century 18–19; Eurocentric view of 7–8; marginalization/exclusion of non-European sources 4, 15–16, 19–20; need for new method of 9–10; Runciman’s characterization 5–6, 7–8; worldly approach to 10–12 ‘History’s Propulsive Power and the Power of Moral Life’ (K¯oyama) 154 Hobbes, Thomas 162 Horio Tsutumu 123 Horkheimer, Max 98 human rights: Nishitani’s views on 37–40 Humboldt, Alexander 179 Husserl, Edmund 97, 115, 131, 166, 192, 195 Husserlian teleology of reason 195 hypoke`ımenon 51, 78 Ideorogi no ronrigaku (Tosaka) 100 iki 164–67, 169, 181n.7 ‘Iki’ no k o¯ z o¯ (The Structure of iki) (Kuki) 164–67, 169, 170, 172 Imanaka Tsugimaru 149 imperial household 58, 59, 71, 72n.17

201

imperialism 10; Kyoto School and 4–5; Nishida’s views on 59; Nishitani’s views on 27, 31–32, 33 Imperial University of Kyoto 187 Imperial Way Philosophy 33 independence: of an individual 53–54 individual: Aristotelian conception 51; legal and economic context 72n.13; Leibniz’ conception 51; national identity and 90; nation and 117; nation and, Nishida’s views on 57–59, 70, 79, 140; nation and, Tanabe’s views on 63–66, 70; ontological dimension of 49, 50–55; psychological context 55–56; religious-existential meaning of 55; social and anthropological context 56; Tanabe’s views on 49, 60–62; Tanabe’s vs. Nishida’s views on 70 individual freedom: Nishida’s views on 56, 71; Tanabe’s views on 67, 68, 71 individualism, political: of Nishida’s 49, 56–60 individuation, principle of 54 In’ei Raisan (In Praise of Shadows) (Tanizaki) 184, 185 Inoue Tetsujir¯o 141 Inquiry into the Good (Nishida) 129, 138, 140, 141–42, 158n.6; see also Zen no kenkyu¯ internationalism: East-Asian view 163; Kuki’s 172–74, 180; Kyoto School philosophers’ 161–63; Nishida’s 171, 177–80; Nishitani’s 176–77; Western tendency 163 interpersonal relations: Nishitani’s account of 39 I-Thou relationship 39, 40, 52, 54, 62, 64–65 Japan: assimilative relations between world and 162–63; church-state relations 141; dichotomy of West and 189–91; as nation of non-ego 35–36; United States policy towards 193–94; world-historical mission 28–29, 30–32, 36–37, 91, 93n.18, 120, 153 Japanese culture 29–30, 76, 91, 167; Kuki’s advocation of 173, 174, 180 Japanese nation 76, 93; archetype notion of 78; Nishitani’s 89–90 Japanese nationalism 179–80 ‘Japanese philosophy of history’ 113–16; overcoming of Hegel 120–24;

202

Index

‘Japanese philosophy of history’ (Continued) overcoming of Hegel and Ranke 124–28; overcoming of Kant 116–20 Japanism (Nihonshugi) 172 Japan Romantic School 147 Jiro, Abe 97 Jissen to taisho ninshiki (Nishida) 79 Kamei Katsuichir¯o 147 Kanai Sh¯oji 154 Kant, Immanuel 6, 38, 166; conceptualization of ethics 116; conceptualization of state 117; Nishida’s attitude towards 130–31; overcoming of 116–20 Kantianism: confrontation between Hegelianism and 114–15 Kekes, John: understanding of conservatism 137, 156, 157 Kiéllen, Rudolf 88 Kitamura T¯okoku 139 knowledge: Foucault’s orders of 130 Kobayashi Hideo 108 Kobayashi Isamu 138 Kobayashi Toshiaki 150 kobutsu (individual) 51, 53; see also individual Koellreuter, Otto 88 Kokka no d o¯ gisei (Tanabe) 85, 86 Kokka riyu¯ no mondai (The Question of the Reason of State) (Nishida) 58, 77, 80 Kokkateki sonzai no ronri (Tanabe) 85 Komori Y¯oichi 184 Körperschaft 68 K¯osaka Masaaki 64, 91, 113, 120, 131; views on ethnic nation 151–52; views on Japanese philosophy of history 113–14; views on war 118 K¯oyama Iwao 9, 23n.21, 91, 113, 152, 154, 197n.12; disassociation of religion and politics 127–28; views on historicism 126; views on moral energies 123–24; views on war 118 Kracht, Klaus 129 Kroner, R. 115 Krüger, Lorenz 23n.23; position on narratives 13–14, 19 Kuki Sh¯uz¯o 98, 161, 164, 180n.3; Dale’s criticism on basis of association with Heidegger 164–65, 166–67; globalism of 172–74, 180; Harootunian’s criticism of 165–66, 168–69; Pincus criticism

of 169–70, 172–74; Pincus criticism on usage of minzoku 165, 168, 170 Kuwaki Gen’yoku 143 law: Nishida’s notion of 81 League of Nations 163, 164; Nishida’s criticism of ideology of 115, 116 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von 72n.8; conception of monad 51, 53 Levy-Bruhl, Lucien 61 Locke, John 162 logicism: Nishida’s 55 logic of absolute mediation (zettai baikai no ronri) 62–63, 65, 70, 84 logic of action (k¯oi no ronri) 63 logic of participation (bun ’y¯u no zenronri) 61 logic of place (basho no ronri) 49–50, 52, 57, 60; Tanabe’s objection 50 logic of severance (bunritsu no ronri) 61 logic of species (shu no ronri) 50, 60, 69, 76, 77, 150, 151; logic of absolute mediation and 62–63; nation and 64, 68 ‘Logic of the Place and Religious Worldview’ (Nishida) 129 Löwith, Karl 42n.9 Loyseau, Charles 17 Lukacs, Georg 97, 98, 101, 109 MacArthur, Douglas, Jr. 194 MacIntyre, Alisdair 16; on recognizable predicaments 7–8 Malinowski, Bronislaw 56 Maraldo, John 37 Marx, Karl 6, 79, 101, 107, 125 Marxism 56, 157; Tosaka’s move towards 99 materialism 52; Tosaka’s reorientation towards 99–100 Matsuzakaya 111 Mazzini, Giuseppi 179 Meinecke, Friedrich 179 metaphysics: Nishida’s 140, 158n.5; Tanabe’s 60, 71; Western 75 Miki Kiyoshi 98, 99, 100, 105, 192, 196; conceptualization of everydayness 108–10; identiﬁcation of spiritual crisis 138–39; technological positivism of 139–40 Mill, James Stuart 179 Minamoto Ry¯oen 176–77 Minoda Muneki 155, 156 minzoku 165–66, 168, 170

Index monad 51, 53 moral energies 122–24, 153, 159n.15, 176 morality 59, 73n.23, 75; Nishida’s views on 140–42 Mori Tetsur¯o 88 Müller, Adam 147, 159n.12; concept of Volk 149 The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (Dale) 164 Najita Tetsuo 8 Nakagami Kenji 184 Nakai Masakazu 98 Nakano Shigeharu 147 Nara Hiroshi 166, 170 narratives 7; folkic 108 national identity 15, 23n.24 nationalism 41n.5, 179; cultural 29–30; Japanese 179–80; of Kuki 164–67, 172–73; of Kyoto School philosophers 161–63; of Nishida 59, 72n.16, 163–64, 170–71; of Nishitani 176–77 national subjectivity 196 nation-state 72n.20, 73n.29, 141; absolute moral nation of Tanabe 76, 77, 84–87, 92–93; archetypical notion of, Nishida’s 75–76, 77–83, 92; deiﬁcation of, Tanabe’s 66–70; ideal of unity of, Nishida’s rejection of 116–17; individual and, Nishida’s views on 57–59, 70; individual and, Tanabe’s views on 63–66, 70; Kiéllen’s notion of 88; Koellreuter’s notion of 88; onto-theological theory of, Nishitani’s 77, 87–92, 93; see also ethnic nation/nationalism Natural Law 144, 145, 156 Nazis 4, 18 necessity: freedom and 121–22; historical 122–23 Needham, Joseph 20 Neo-Kantianism 102, 114; in Japanese intellectual circles 142–43; Nishida’s engagement with 142, 143–44, 145; Nishida’s engagement with, political signiﬁcance of 146; political implications of, Tanaka’s analysis 144–45; Southern German School of 114, 115 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 28, 42n.15, 61, 72n.22, 125, 126 nihilism: Nishitani’s views on 27–28, 179

203

Nishida Kitar¯o 14, 18, 22nn.15–16, 23n.24, 71n.8, 75, 97, 98, 187; appeal to realm of eternal values 101; archetypical notion of ethical nation 75–76, 77–83, 92; attitude towards Kant 130–31; conservatism of 156; defence of metaphysics 140, 158n.5; engagement with neo-Kantianism 142, 143–44, 145; engagement with neo-Kantianism, political signiﬁcance of 146; genuine globalism of 163–64, 170–71; Goto-Jones’ criticism of 93n.10, 140, 141, 142, 156, 161; inﬂuence of Marburg School on 143; interest in romanticism 149–50; internationalism of 177–80; nationalism of 170–71; notion of individual 49, 50–55, 70, 71n.8, 72n.13; notion of law 81; political philosophy and moral philosophy of 140–42, 156–57; rejection of ‘kingly way’ 155; relational understanding of the self 163; sensitivity to the difference between nation and state 141, 158n.4; Tanabe’s criticism of 60, 62, 83–84; thinking on nationalism 59, 72n.16, 163–64; Tosaka’s criticism of 50, 55, 71n.3; views on Christianity 155; views on ethnic nation 150–51, 154–55; views on historical change 115; views on historical periodization 10; views on imperialism 59; views on League of Nations 115, 116; views on religion 129, 141–42, 158n.6 Nishitani Keiji 3, 23n.24, 42n.14, 75, 98, 113, 152, 161; intertwining of religion and politics 34; Japan as non-ego nation 35–36; lifelong suspicion of human rights 37–40; nationalism and internationalism of 176–77; onto-theological theory of nation 77, 87–92, 93; political thought of 26–27, 40–41; rejection of totalitarianism 33; suspect reputation in Japan 32; views on cultural nationalism 29–30; views on democracy 40–41, 43nn.24, 39; views on historical periodization 10; views on imperialism 31–32; views on interpersonal relations 39; views on Japan’s world-historical mission 28–29, 30–32, 36–37, 91, 93n.18, 175–76; views on moral energies 123,

204

Index

Nishitani Keiji (Continued) 159n.15, 176; views on nihilism 27–28, 179; views on war 118, 126–27; views on world history 124–25, 128; wartime political activities 42n.12; Western scholarship on 26 non-ego (muga) 27, 41, 43n.34 non-ego nation (muga no kokka); Japan as 35–36; national 177 objective spirit, Hegelian 62, 65, 84 ¯ Onishi Hajime 142–43 Orientalism 19–20, 186; reverse 26 ‘Our Contemporary Intellectual Anarchy and an Exploration into its Causes’ (Tanaka) 138 Overcome by Modernity (Harootunian) 165, 168 Ozu Yasujir¯o 111, 184 Pagden, Anthony 21n.2 Parkes, Graham 24n.31 ‘The Philosophy of Anxiety and its Transcendence’ (Miki) 138 philosophy of history 121–22; Hegelian 119–21; Japanese 113–15, 128; Japanese call for new 124–25 The Philosophy of the Ethnic Nation (K¯osaka) 151 Philosophy of World History and Historical Consciousness (Nishitani) 124–25 Pincus, Leslie 181n.9; criticism of Kuki 169–70, 172–74; on Kuki’s use of term minzoku 165, 168, 170 Plato 78; on democracy 38 Pocock, J.G.A. 21n.2 political individualism: Nishida’s 49, 56–60 Political Romanticism (Schmitt) 149 politics: religion and 142; religion and, disassociation of 127–28; religion and, Nishitani’s views 34, 127 The Politics of Being (Wolin) 169 Popper, Karl 68 ‘The Position of Active-Intuition’ (Nishida) 150 positivism, technological 139–40 Poverty of Historicism (Popper) 68 principle of individuation 54 ‘Principles of a New World Order’ (Nishida) 154, 159n.16 qualitative time 97

Radbruch, Gustav: legal philosophical relativism of 144 Ranke, Leopold von 58, 82, 114, 115, 121; overcoming of 124–28; on world history 122 reason: Husserlian teleology of 195 Reischauer, Edwin O. 193 Rekishiteki sekai ni oite no kobutsu no taachiba (The Place of the Individual in the Historical World) (Nishida) 52–53 relational philosophy 162–63 relativism 126, 153; Radbruch’s 144; Tanaka’s criticism 145, 146 religion 73n.23; individual and, Nishida’s views 55, 70; nation and, Tanabe’s views 66–70, 71; Nishida’s views on 129, 141–42, 158n.6; politics and 142; politics and, disassociation of 127–28; politics and, Nishitani’s views 34, 127 Republic (Plato) 38 Rickert, Heinrich 114, 115 romanticism 139; Nishida’s interest in 149–50; Sh¯owa 147–49; Yada’s views on 147 Ronri to seimei (Nishida) 79 rooted cosmopolitanism 180 Rorty, Richard 17; on progress in philosophy 16 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 162 Runciman, David 15, 18, 21, 23n.25; characterization of history of political thought 5–6, 7–8; on discontinuity in history of ideas 12 Sade, Marquis de 185 Said, Edward 19–20, 24n.33 Sakabe Megumi 169 Sakai Naoki 78 Sanu Manabu 155 Sarter Resartus (Carlyle) 104 Schall, James 142 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von 179 Schmitt, Carl 149; surge of interest in 4, 18 Sekaikan to kokkakan (View of the World, View of the Nation) (Nishitani) 29, 34, 77, 88 Sekai no ittan to shite no Nippon (Tosaka) 100 Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon 91 Sekai tenkanki toshite no gendai (Nishitani) 91

Index self: in East-Asian traditions 162; Nishida’s relational understanding of 163; in Western philosophy 162 self-consciousness: individual and 55–56 self-determination: of individual 53, 54; of nation 91 self-expression 53, 54 self-negation (jiko-hiteisei) 35, 89 self-realization 128–29; via self-sacriﬁce 66, 69, 86 self-sacriﬁce qua self-realization (jiko gisei soku jiko jitsugen) 66, 69, 86 Shakai sonzai no ronri (Tanabe) 77 Shinano Philosophical Society 51 Shis¯o to fuzoku (Tosaka) 100, 103 Sh¯owa romanticism 147–49 Sh¯owa thinkers 15 Sh¯uky¯o to wa nanika (What is Religion) (Nishitani) 37 Shu no seisei hatten no mondai (Nishida) 79 Simmel, Georg 97, 101 Skinner, Quentin 8, 15, 21n.2 social consciousness 78, 163 social meliorism 149 social relationship: local vs. global 61 social space 96 society: original form of 80; Tanabe’s notion of 84 Society for the Study of Materialism (Yuibutsuron kenky¯ukai) 100 species/speciﬁc (shu) 84–85, 150, 151; Tanabe’s views on individual and 60–62, 63–65 Spengler, Oswald 125 spirit: in Val¯erian sense 192 Spiritualism 52 spirituality: Foucault’s 129–30 Stahl, Friedrich Julius 149 Stirner, Max 17, 146 Stuurman, Siep 17 subjectivity 118, 181n.12; individual 88–89; national 196; Nishida’s pure experience 77; radical 27 Suzuki Shigetaka 3, 8, 9, 22nn.7, 11, 91, 113, 122, 125, 152; criticism of Hegelian philosophy of history 120–21; views on ailments of modernity 117–18; views on ethnic nation 153–54; views on moral energies 123, 153 Suzuki T¯oru 55

205

Tada Michitar¯o 170 Takashi Fujitani 193 Takata Yasuma 196 Takeuchi Yoshimi 30 Tanabe Hajime 23n.24, 75, 93n.14, 138, 143, 146, 156, 167, 180n.5, 187, 192, 196, 197n.6; absolute moral nation of 76, 77, 84–87, 92–93; construction of history 10–12, 16, 23n.19–20; criticism of Nishida 60, 62, 83–84; deiﬁcation of nation 66–70; notion of individual 49, 60–62, 70; notion of individual and nation 63–66, 70; on Tosaka 98–99; Tosaka’s criticism of 87; views on ethnic nation 150–51 Tanabe tetsugaku 83 Tanaka K¯otar¯o 156, 158n.1; analysis of the political implications of neo-Kantianism 144–45; as a conservative 138; views on technological positivism 139–40 Tanizaki Jun’ichiro 101, 183–84, 196n.2; Japanese perception of 184; vs. Kyoto School 186–87; views on colonial power relations 185–86; views on tradition 184–85 Tattoo (Shisei) (Tanizaki) 183 Taylor, Charles 16, 23n.23; views on discontinuity in history of ideas 12–13; views on languages 14; views on recognizable predicaments 7–8 teleology of reason, Husserlian 195 temporality of history 80–81, 97, 101–02, 105, 109, 110 Thesis on Ethnic-National Socialism (Imanaka) 149 T o¯ a to sekaishi (Nishitani) 91 T¯oj¯o Hideki 156 Tokonami Takejir¯o 141 Tokuda Shusei 106 Tomio Tezuka 164 Tönnies, Ferdinand 61, 73n.23 Tosaka Jun 173; biographical sketch 99–100; character 98–99; conceptualization of historical time 105–07; criticism of Nishida 50, 55, 71n.3, 98; criticism of Tanabe 87; mediations on custom and everyday 103–08; position on fascism 102–03 totalitarianism: individualism and 57–58, 69–70; Nishitani’s rejection of 33, 43n.24; Tanabe’s rejection of 150

206

Index

total war 118 ‘Total War and Intellectual War’ (K¯oyama) 154 tradition: Tanizaki’s views on 184–85 transcendental subjectivism 84 Troeltsch, Ernst 125–26 True Subject 49–50 Tuck, Richard 21n.2 Ueda Shizuteru 32 ultranationalism 167 United States of America: anti-colonialism policy 196n.4; European intellectuals disregard of 22n.7; ideological warfare 193; policy towards East Asia and Japan 193–94 unity of contradictions (mujun no t¯oitsu) 52 universal individual 52, 60–61 universalism 192–93, 196; Husserlian 195; racism and 196; study in Kyoto School 194 Val¯ery, Paul: on Europe 192 Van Bragt, Jan 38, 39 Volk 149, 165, 168 war: Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron discussions 117–18, 126–7; Hegel’s views on 117, 118, 119 Watakushi to nanji (I and Thou) (Nishida) 50 Watsuji Tetsur¯o 97, 98, 138 weltanschauung (national narrative) 7, 76, 88 Welthürgertum und Nationalstaat (Meinecke) 179 West, the 186; absence of point of contact between East and 16; crisis of 192; dichotomy of Japan and 189–91; modernity 27; Rest of the world and 36, 191; world history and 120

Western philosophy 130, 162; Japanese familiarity with 12, 26; as practised by Kyoto School 187–88, 191, 192–93 Westphalia, Treaty of (1648) 191 Williams, David 181n.12; defence of Kyoto School 167, 176; defence of minzoku 166 will to power (kenryoku ishi) 61, 66, 72n.22, 84 Wilson, Woodrow 115 Wolin, Richard 169 Wollstonecraft, Mary 22n.3 world-formation 178–79 The World Historical Standpoint and Japan 152 world history 114, 120; Ch¯uo¯ k¯oron discussions 8, 131; everydayness and 109–10; K¯oyama’s views on 122–23; Kyoto School’s emphasis on 175; Nishitani’s views on 124–25, 128; problems of method and philosophy of 9–12; Ranke’s views on 122 Yada Toshitaka 159n.9; romanticism of 147 Yanagita Kunio 98 Yanase Yoshiharu 147 Yasuda Takeshi 170 Yasuda Yoj¯ur¯o 147, 155; political views of 147–49 Yuibutsuron zenshu 100 Zen Buddhism: Nishitani’s philosophy of 29, 30 Zen no kenky¯u (Inquiry into the Good) (Nishida) 77, 97, 138, 140, 141–42, 163 Zettai mujunteki jikod¯outsu (The Absolutely Contradictory Self-Identity) 55

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