Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook

Overview

639 The Kyoto School Overview Because of the important place it is recognized to have in the intellectual history of Japan, the Kyoto School has been extracted from the rest of twentieth-century philosophy for special treatment. Nishida Kitarō* and the circle of thinkers he inspired at the University of Kyoto are often considered Japan’s first original philosophers in the modern sense of the term, and have become known as a bridge between East and West. While their originality and their faithfulness to disparate traditions remain matters of dispute, their impact on philosophical discussions within Japan and outside the country is unquestioned . Kyoto School thought most closely resembles what is called “speculative philosophy” in the West, but with a significant difference from the usual characterization of that type of thinking. Like speculative philosophers in the West, Kyoto School thinkers commonly seek an account of the whole of experience and reality that unifies its various aspects—such as nature, culture, morality, art, mind, and conceptions of the absolute—and that privileges universality and totality over the particularities of the concrete natural and social world. Unlike western speculative philosophy, however, the Kyoto School typically defines any systematic principle of unification in negative terms, indeed in a manner that undermines the notion of a grounding principle, as we shall see. Less clear are the factors that otherwise distinguish the Kyoto School as a distinct group of thinkers. The criteria of membership are often conflicting and there is little agreement in the vast secondary literature on just how to group the several subcurrents within the School. In general, political critics tend to classify members according to their degree of collaboration, or at least perceived collaboration, with the military ideology of the Pacific War. Historians who stress their place within the general history of philosophy draw the lines quite differently. In order to preserve this diversity of opinion, it seems best to consider the Kyoto School as a kind of “fuzzy set” with fluid boundaries and varying degrees of association. Surely the single feature common to all the thinkers associated with the Kyoto School is their connection to Nishida, the reputed “founder” who had no 640 | t h e k yo t o s c h o o l intention himself of founding a “school.” On the one hand, Nishida’s philosophy stands on its own as a towering achievement, and can be understood and interpreted independently of almost all work by others aligned with the School. The one exception is the work of Tanabe Hajime*, whose criticisms so influenced Nishida’s development that their respective philosophies can be said in part to have grown in reaction to one another. On the other hand, Tanabe and Nishida initiated a new direction in philosophy that characterizes four generations of thinkers in the loosely defined tradition represented here. If we count Nishida and Tanabe as the first generation of the School, Nishida’s students Mutai Risaku*, Miki Kiyoshi*, Nishitani Keiji*, Shimomura Toratarō*, Kōyama Iwao*, and Kōsaka Masaaki* make up a second generation who may be said to have consolidated it as a School with its own tradition. Tanabe’s students Takeuchi Yoshinori* and Tsujimura Kōichi*, Nishitani’s student Ueda Shizuteru*, and Abe Masao*, who was closer to Nishitani in his own thinking, make up a third generation that revitalized the School particularly by spreading it abroad. Hase Shōtō* and Ōhashi Ryōsuke*, whose initial training was in French and German philosophy respectively, represent a fourth generation that is drawing inspiration from Nishida and Nishitani as well as from European philosophers. A number of thinkers who appropriated Nishida’s ideas or defined themselves in reaction to them, are taken up elsewhere in this volume. Some, like Kuki Shūzō*, Watsuji Tetsurō*, and Tosaka Jun*, pursued a relatively independent direction in their philosophies. Others, like D.T. Suzuki*, Hisamatsu Shin’ichi*, and Karaki Junzō*, were engaged more as philosophically minded Buddhists than as philosophy professors. Given all this ambiguity over defining the membership of the Kyoto School, we may nevertheless identify five interlacing factors that define its philosophical direction and help place individual thinkers. First, Kyoto School philosophers have shown a deep if critical appreciation of the value of both Asian and western sources for doing philosophy. Unlike most other professional philosophers in Japan, who until recently eschewed Japanese traditions and devoted themselves entirely to philosophies imported from the West, from the beginning those associated with the Kyoto School appropriated ideas from East Asian...