Abstract
In the past three decades in the West, literature about the Kyoto School and translations of its writings have proliferated. Yet the very scholarship that perpetuates the name has also created confusion about its reference. Which thinkers belong to the “Kyoto School”? What do they have in common? Do they represent something we can call Eastern philosophy, which pursues a way of thinking fundamentally different from that of the West? Is the core of that alternative philosophy, or alternative rationality, a notion of absolute nothingness with roots in Buddhism?
An abbreviated version of the first part of this article appeared as “The Kyoto School: Overview” in Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, eds. James W. Heisig, Thomas P. Kasulis, & John C. Maraldo (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011), 639–645.
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- 1.
Recent collections with commentary include the section on the Kyoto School in Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook; Die Philosophie der Kyoto-Schule: Texte und Einführung, ed. Ryōsuke Ōhashi (Freiburg & München: Karl Alber Verlag, 1990, 2nd edition 2011); Textos de la filosofía japonesa moderna, vol. I, translated and edited by Agustín Jacinto Z. (Zamora, Mexico: El Colegio de Michoacán, 1995); and Sourcebook For Modern Japanese Philosophy: Selected Documents, translated and edited by David A. Dilworth & Valdo H. Viglielmo, with Agustin Jacinto Zavala (Westport, Connecticut & London: Greenwood Press, 1998). Recent monograph studies and translations of Kyoto School philosophers in Spanish, German, English, French and Italian are too numerous to be listed here. For an excellent survey and analysis, see Bret W. Davis, “The Kyoto School”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2010/entries/kyoto-school/>.
- 2.
“Kyōto gakuha no tetsugaku” [The Philosophy of the Kyoto School], in Tosaka Jun Zenshū [『戸坂潤全集』Collected Works of Tosaka Jun] III (Tokyo: Keisō shobō, 1966), pp. 171–176.
- 3.
Several key ideas in Watsuji’s books on ethics bear the unmistakable influence of Nishida and a deep affinity with the ideas of other recognized Kyoto School philosophers. We find in Watsuji’s ethics the ideas that the truly Absolute cannot exclude the relative, that Buddhist emptiness applies to social realities as well as to individual entities; that self-negation defines the nature of the self; that factors which define entities come in contradictory pairs such as “independent and at the same time not independent” (reminiscent of the so-called logic of soku-hi), and that to be human means to be a unity of contradictories between self and other, reminiscent of Nishida’s “contradictory self-identity”.
- 4.
Ōhashi Ryōsuke explicitly excludes Miki because of his conversion to Marxism; see Die Philosophie der Kyoto-Schule, 1990, p. 12, note 5. For an exposition that differentiates Miki’s position and criticizes other Kyoto School thinkers, see Najita, Tetsuo & H.D. Harootunian, “Japanese revolt against the West: political and cultural criticism in the twentieth century,” in Peter Duus, ed., The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 6 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 740ff.
- 5.
See for example chapter four of Nishida’s “The Logic of Topos and the Religious Worldview,” trans. Michiko Yusa, The Eastern Buddhist 19(2): 1–29 & 20(1): 81–119; and Nishitani Keiji, Religion and Nothingness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 261–262.
- 6.
Kirisutokyō no benshō[『キリスト教の弁証』 Dialectics of Christianity], Tanabe Hajime Zenshū [『田辺元全集』 Complete Works of Tanabe Hajime] X (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1963), p. 261.
- 7.
Martin Heidegger, “Was ist Metaphysik?” in Gesamtausgabe Band 9: Wegmarken (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976), p. 103. Attempts to maintain the distinct notion of absolute nothingness in Zen and Nishida, while fully acknowledging Heidegger’s ontological difference, can be seen in essays by Tsujimura Kōichi: “Die Seinsfrage und das absolute Nichts - Erwachen,” in Transzendenz und Immanenz, ed. D. Papenfuß & J. Söring (Stuttgart, 1977); and “Die Wahrheit des Seins und das absolute Nichts,” in Die Philosophie der Kyoto-Schule, pp. 441–454. John C. Maraldo, “Rethinking God: Heidegger in the Light of Absolute Nothing, Nishida in the Shadow of Onto-Theology, in Religious Experience and the End of Metaphysics, Jeffrey Bloechl, ed. (Indiana University Press, 2003), pp. 31–49, contrasts Heidegger’s and Nishida’s notions of nothingness.
- 8.
See Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken, pp. 68–77.
- 9.
See John C. Maraldo, “Metanoetics and the Crisis of Reason: Tanabe, Nishida, and Contemporary Philosophy” in The Religious Philosophy of Tanabe Hajime: The Metanoetic Imperative. Taitetsu Unno & James W. Heisig, eds. (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1990), pp. 235–255.
- 10.
Ueda Shizuteru, “The Zen Buddhist Experience of the Truly Beautiful,” The Eastern Buddhist XXII, 1 (Spring 1989), pp. 1–36.
- 11.
Hisamatsu’s essay has been translated into English as “The Characteristics of Oriental Nothingness” in Philosophical Studies of Japan 2 (1960), pp. 65–97; and into German as Die Fülle des Nichts. Vom Wesen des Zen (Stuttgart: Neske, 1994).
- 12.
Abe has published and written for several volumes on interreligious dialogue, including The Emptying God: A Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation, eds. John B. Cobb, Jr. & Christopher Ives (New York, 1990); Buddhism and Interfaith Dialogue (Honolulu, 1995); and Divine Emptiness and Historical Fullness: A Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation With Masao Abe (Trinity Press International, 1995).
- 13.
See two articles by Robert Sharf, “Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience,” Numen vol. 42 (1995), and “Experience” In Critical Terms for Religious Studies, Mark C. Taylor, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
- 14.
See especially his book in English, The Heart of Buddhism (New York: Crossroad, 1983, 2nd edition 1991).
- 15.
See particularly the discussions between Abe and Christian and Jewish theologians in the books edited by Abe mentioned above. Critical expositions of Nishitani and Tanabe in German also address this challenge: Hans Waldenfels, Absolutes Nichts. Zur Grundlegung des Dialoges zwischen Buddhismus und Christentum (Freiburg: Herder, 1976), translated into English by J. W. Heisig as Absolute Nothingness: Foundations for a Buddhist-Christian Dialogue (New York: Paulist Press, 1980); and Johannes Laube, Dialektik des absoluten Vermittlung. Hajime Tananbes Religonsphilosophie als Beitrag zum “Wettstreit der Liebe” zwischen Buddhismus und Christentum. (Freiburg: Herder, 1984). The problem of God is one of the major issues discussed in two volumes of critical essays, The Religious Philosophy of Nishitani Keiji, Taitetsu Unno, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); and The Religious Philosophy of Tanabe Hajime, Taitetsu Unno and James W. Heisig, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). For a philosopher’s attempt to relate Nishida to the question of God, see also Robert E. Carter’s book, The Nothingness Beyond God: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nishida Kitarō (New York, 1989, second edition 1998).
- 16.
Nihon idiorogi ron [『日本イデオロギー論』Japanese Ideology, 1935 and 1936], in Tosaka Jun Zenshū [『戸坂潤全集』Collected Works of Tosaka Jun] II.
- 17.
Two books in English have been particularly influential: D. T. Suzuki’s Zen and Japanese Culture, and Hisamatsu’s Zen and the Fine Arts. The more recent work of Ōhashi Ryōsuke, Nihon-tekina mono, Yôroppa-tekina mono [『日本的なもの、ヨーロッパ的なもの』Things Japanese, Things European] (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1992) continues this avocation.
- 18.
See, for example, the critique of Bernard Faure, “The Kyoto School and Reverse Orientalism, “in Japan in Traditional and Postmodern Perspectives, eds. Charles Wei-shun Fu & Steven Heine (Albany: State University of New York Press., 1995); Robert Sharf, “The Zen of Japanese Nationalism, “in Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism Under Colonialism, ed. Donald s. Lopez, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). These essays are relevant as well for the issue of the Kyoto School presentation of Buddhism.
- 19.
See, for example, Agustín Jacinto Zavala, “Lógica tópica y cultura occidental: Doce problemas en el estudio de una cultura diversa,” Relaciones 12, 48 (1991), pp. 137–155; Elmar Weinmayr, “Europäische Interkulturalität und japanische Zwischen-Kultur,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 100, 1 (1993); John C. Maraldo, “The Problem of World Culture: Towards an Appropriation of Nishida’s Philosophy of Nation and Culture,” The Eastern Buddhist 28/2 (Fall 1995), pp. 183–197; Yoko Arisaka, “Beyond’East and West’: Nishida’s Universalism and Postcolonial Critique,” The Review of Politics 59, 3 (summer 1997), pp. 541–560; and Rolf Elberfeld, Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945): Das Verstehen der Kulturen: Modern japanische Philosophie und die Frage nach der Interkulturalität (Amsterdam & Atlanta: Editions Rodopi, 1999).
- 20.
Nishida’s draft of 1943 on the principle of a new world order has also received attention for this advocacy; see the translation and commentary of Yoko Arisaka, The Nishida Enigma: ‘The Principle of the New World Order,’“Monumenta Nipponica 51, 1 (1996), pp. 81–105.
- 21.
See Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, 1059–1077, for a translation of excerpts of these roundtable talks, published in Chūōkōron[『中央公論』],
- 22.
For a range of differing judgments, see Christopher Goto-Jones, ed., Repoliticizing the Kyoto School as Philosophy (London & New York: Routledge, 2008); and James W. Heisig & John C. Maraldo, eds., Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1995). The literature on this topic is now quite extensive; some of it is listed in my review article: John C. Maraldo, “The War Over the Kyoto School,” Monumenta Nipponica 61, 3 (Autumn 2006), 375–406. Graham Parkes gives a spirited defense of Kyoto School Philosophers in “Heidegger and Japanese Fascism: An Unsubstantiated Connection,” in Japanese and Continental Philosophy” Conversations with the Kyoto School, Bret W. Davis, Brian Schroeder, & Jason W. Wirth, eds. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), pp. 247–265.
- 23.
As early as 1935, in the aforementioned essay on Japanese ideology, Tosaka made a distinction between the essence and the effect of an ideology, saying that although Nishida’s philosophy was not fascist in essence, it could have a fascist effect. See Tosaka Jun Zenshū II, p. 342.
- 24.
Much recent literature in Japanese re-assesses the July, 1942 colloquium on “overcoming modernity” in which Nishitani, Suzuki Shigetaka, and Shimomura took part. Excerpts from the text of the colloquium are translated in Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, pp. 1078–1084. Recent conferences have also revived the theme. For example, it was discussed as a current task at a January, 2000 symposium in Tokyo on “Japan with World History, 1850–2000, which also mentioned the Kyoto School. In October 1997, an international colloquium in Paris discussed the “logique de lieu et dépassement de la modernité.” For general discussions, see Postmodernism and Japan: Post-contemporary Interventions, eds. Masao Miyoshi & H. D. Harootunian (Durham, North Carolina, 1989); and Kōjin Karatani, “Wo liegt der Ursprung der Moderne—Interview von Steffi Richter,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 44,6 (1996), pp. 1007–1019.
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Maraldo, J.C. (2018). The Identity of the Kyoto School: A Critical Analysis. In: Fujita, M. (eds) The Philosophy of the Kyoto School. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8983-1_18
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