Political Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School and Co-Prosperity, and: Le néant évidé: Ontologie et politique chez Keiji Nishitani: Une tentative d'interprétation (review)

Despite my reservations about many of the philosophical and political arguments put forth in these two books, it seems important, as a reviewer, to first ask why these authors are led to make the arguments and articulate the positions they do. In other words, one must understand as fully as possible the philosophical and historico-political contexts to which their works attempt to respond. Although these works emerge from very different settings, linguistic and otherwise, they share more than a similar intent to think through the enormously difficult question of the relation between the philosophy and politics of some of the central figures of the Kyoto School, with particular attention to the wartime texts. Beyond this thematic commonality, these works are motivated by a sustained concern for ethics, which takes the form here, just as it did with the Kyoto School more than a half-century ago, of redressing the historical imbalance in the power relations between Asia and the West. This concern is an admirable one, and all the more so in that it finds itself expressed in a field or discipline—that of Asian studies, although these works also belong to other fields—which has traditionally given greater priority to the dimension of knowledge, in the specific sense of accumulating vaster amounts of empirical information about Asia, than that of ethics. Nevertheless, such ethical concern must be judged, at least partly, by the concrete manner in which it intervenes and makes its effects felt in the existing scholarly discourse. In this sense, Goto-Jones signals what is at stake in his book quite clearly. It is a question of waging battle on two fronts, as it were: reading the political thought of Nishida Kitarō as representative of a marked dissent or resistance against Japan's wartime regime on the one hand, and, on the other, repeating Nishida's challenge to both the political and philosophical hegemony of the West in the context of the present, as an attempt "to dislodge the European tradition of political philosophy from its position as the exclusive corpus of wisdom about moral and political goods" (p. 132) in order to grant "recognition [to] non-European traditions of thought about morality and politics" (p. 126). For Stevens, the task at hand is to grasp the philosophy of Nishitani Keiji in such a way as to better understand the limits of Western thought, in for example its traditional appeal to abstractions such as subjective reason and individualism, and thereby attain a more authentic or broadened notion of universality with the aid of certain insights from Asian thought. Or as Stevens himself puts it in the final lines of his provocative book, "The task for a thought which would seek to carry on Nishitani's effort would be to better determine how his ontological-religious thought and its sense of the common good, of social ethics, can harbor the moral interiorization of ethical consciousness and then, enriched by this East-Asian 'spiritual' substance, newly take up the aim of universality . . . while maintaining the diversity of levels of experience and registers of thought signaled by [G. W. F.] Hegel" (p. 188).

What is required, then, is an overcoming of Western ethnocentrism through a recognition of the non-West in view of a greater globality and universality. It must be pointed out here that the two thinkers examined in these texts, Nishida and Nishitani, would have fully endorsed this standpoint and, moreover, rightly conceived of this work as a continuation of their own respective projects. For both Goto-Jones and Stevens, following in the footsteps of the Kyoto School, world history or sekaishi is viewed as the ever-globalizing process...