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14 Heidegger and Japanese Fascism: An Unsubstantiated Connection
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14 Heidegger and Japanese Fascism: An Unsubstantiated Connection Graham Parkes If one moves in academic circles having to do with modern Japanese political philosophy, it soon becomes clear that Japan’s most renowned thinkers of the twentieth century, members of the so-called Kyoto School, were primarily responsible for “defining the philosophic contours of Japanese fascism,” and that the major impetus for this nefarious project came from the German philosopher Martin Heidegger.1 This impression is given by a number of books, some of which are written by celebrated scholars and published by prestigious university presses.2 These texts criticize the most prominent figures in the Kyoto School—Nishida Kitarō, Tanabe Hajime, Kuki Shūzō, Nishitani Keiji, and Miki Kiyoshi—for promulgating fascistic and ultra-nationalistic ideas, usually by trying to establish “guilt by association” with Heidegger. But on closer examination, the scholarship turns out to be sadly short on facts and long on neo-Marxist jargon and deconstructionist rhetoric. Ideological concerns have stifled philosophical inquiry and are now promoting a kind of censorship that suggests, ironically, a fascism of the left. This would be of no great consequence if fascism had been eradicated after World War II; but since fascistic movements are still very much with us, scholarly discussions of the phenomenon have a responsibility to identify it properly. This essay engages several concerns. It extends the argument of an article of mine from 1997, “The Putative Fascism of the Kyoto School,” which shows neo-Marxist criticisms of the Kyoto philosophers to be unfounded, and which appears to have gone largely unnoticed in Europe.3 And since such criticisms of the Kyoto School continue, now on both sides of the Atlantic, it is worthwhile to keep showing how the critics’ ideology distorts the picture they present and ignores any studies that point this out. This exercise also serves to outline further, positive dimensions of the political philosophy of the Kyoto 248 | Graham Parkes School thinkers. Finally, the appearance of such neo-Marxist criticisms in the United Kingdom prompted an attempt at exchange and dialogue, the failure of which demonstrates how this kind of ideology extends to the politics of publishing in academic journals. 1 So what did the much-criticized Kyoto School philosophers say and write to deserve the moral censure they’ve been receiving in the Anglophone West? They certainly opposed British, Dutch, and American colonial expansion in East Asia—but only an unregenerate Western imperialist could find their grounds for that opposition invalid. They also venerated the nobler aspects of traditional Japanese culture, and lamented their dwindling vitality under the onrush of mass enthusiasm in Japan for the modern and the Western. Some of them even wrote kind words about the emperor system, and suggested that Japan could become a world power through leading the so-called Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere. For all of this they have been dismissed as fascistic ideologues—when in fact the fascism is being conjured up by projections on the part of morally superior commentators from the side of the victorious Americans. These dismissals have had the dismal effect of stunting the growth of English-language studies of the Kyoto School thinkers, as many potential students have been persuaded that those philosophers are promoters of fascism . Neo-Marxists love to hate the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere, denigrating it as “Japan’s colonial empire.” But if one looks at Nishida’s and Tanabe’s ideas about how the project should work, it is clear there is nothing fascistic or even imperialistic about them. And the nationalistic aspect of those ideas—since Japan is the only Asian nation not to have been colonized by the West, it is natural that it should play a leading role in the Co-prosperity Sphere—is balanced by a thoroughgoing internationalism. Christopher GotoJones has demonstrated the vacuity of the charges of fascism against Nishida’s political philosophy and shown the distinctly internationalist dimensions of his thinking.4 Tanabe’s ideas about individual freedom and the multi-ethnic state, and above all his relentless insistence throughout his career on the primacy of reason, definitively preclude his being a fascist philosopher in any sense of the word. This is made clear in a recent study by David Williams that demonstrates, among many other things, the flimsiness of the grounds for accusing Tanabe of fascist leanings.5 In essays written during the thirties, Kuki [54.165.122.173] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:52 GMT) Heidegger...