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Miki Kiyoshi
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702 Miki Kiyoshi 三木 清 (1897–1945) Miki Kiyoshi is a tragic figure among the Kyoto School philosophers. He studied under Nishida Kitarō* and Tanabe Hajime* in Kyoto and then under Martin Heidegger in Freiburg. He was gifted with both keen philosophical insight and superior writing skills. In 1930 he lost his job as a lecturer at Hōsei University and was imprisoned on the trumped-up charge that he actively supported the Communist party. Shortly after his release in the same year, his wife passed away. Unable to resume his teaching duties, he began to work as a journalist. In 1942, he was sent against his will to the Philippines as a military reporter. He died of kidney failure in Tokyo’s Toyotama prison shortly after the end of the war. Miki’s writings are, by Kyoto School standards, extremely clear and accessible. He stands out among his Kyoto School peers as the first who tried to give Nishida’s philosophy social and political relevance. In some sense, Miki combined Nishida’s nondual paradigm with Tanabe Hajime’s critiques of Nishida’s philosophy as a whole, to argue that Nishida’s writings were too ethereal and, ultimately, ahistorical. In particular, he was unhappy with Nishida’s notion of the “eternal present” because of its focus on the transcendent reality and what he perceived as the reduction of the “historical world” to an abstract and largely empty concept. Miki’s own thought emphasized his conviction that human existence is not only worldly, as Heidegger would say, but inherently social. This insight became an important building block in his greatest philosophical achievements: his philosophical anthropology and humanism, and his logic of imagination. The two essays extracted in part below stress his twofold conviction that human existence is ultimately an ambiguous mixture of subjectivity and objectivity, interiority and exteriority, pathos and logos; and that to be relevant, any social and political philosophy must take this into account. [gk] The study of the human Miki Kiyoshi 1936, 127–9, 147, 167, 170–2 First, even if one were to decide on “the study of human beings” as a satisfactory definition for philosophical anthropology, the object of study to which the term itself points cannot in fact be defined like other things. To define something one needs to come up with a generic idea and specific differences. Textbooks of logic tell us that a definition is produced by fixing the specific to the closest approximating generic idea. But the “human being” referred to in “the study of human beings” does not meet these formal requirements. Might m i k i k i yo s h i | 703 we not say, then, that the very fact that it cannot be defined by ordinary methods applied to other objects constitutes the first definition of the “human being” indicated in “the study of human beings”? This paradox harbors a fundamental law of human nature. Of course, it is not completely impossible to define human beings by means of generic concepts and specific differences. But inquiries adopting this approach do not represent the study of the human in the sense I intend here; they are closer to scientific disciplines like anthropology, which, as is well known, treat the human like any other object of science. The fact that real human beings can never simply be defined in such a way provides the raison d’être for a different way to study the human. Both the study of the human race and the study of the human being can be called “anthropology,” but if the former is properly termed a scientific anthropology, then the latter is best referred to as philosophical anthropology. The fact that “human being” does not fit the pattern of definition taught in traditional logic shows such logic to be objective, or rather a logic of objects that can treat human beings objectively but not subjectively. Therein lies the fundamental difference that sets off the standpoint of philosophical anthropology from other sciences like physical anthropology, biology, psychology, and the like.… The reason we cannot define human beings is not to be found in arguments about humans being the crown of the natural world. If we were to follow Linnaeus in placing human beings at the apex of vertebrates and mammals, and hence of all life forms, “vertebrates and mammals” would become a human category since an apex must belong to that of which it is said to be the apex. The ability to walk upright and the development...