In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

EIGHT The Space of Poetry The Kyoto School and Nishitani Keiji To appreciate the work of the philosopher Nishitani Keiji (1900–1990), we must understand the background of the philosophical school within which he operated. The Kyoto school developed in the department of philosophy and religion of Kyoto University around the figure of the leading Japanese philosopher, Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945). One of the major characteristics of the school was a direct engagement with Western epistemology in order to create a Japanese philosophical subjectivity that would incorporate traits of both the Western and the Eastern traditions. The conceptualization of the Kyoto school’s philosophical system, therefore, developed around definitions of two cultural blocs that were respectively centered on the German idealist tradition and the Buddhist notion of emptiness. The school’s search for a synthesis of the two blocs led to what has been called “a crude sort of syncretism.”1 In talking about aesthetics, the Kyoto school grounded the arts in a privileged space of “emptiness,” or “nothingness,” which was understood to provide man with a complement to the limited faculty of reason in grasping a complex reality to which logic alone could hardly do justice. This empty space of nothingness (mu) was seen by Nishida and his followers as a kind of metaphysical ground that is alleged to explain the specificity of Eastern culture and, consequently, its differences from Western thought. In one of his major essays on comparative cultures—“The Forms of Culture of the Classical Periods of East and West Seen from a Metaphysical Perspective” (Keijijōgakuteki Tachiba kara Mita Tōzai Kodai no Bunka Keitai)—Nishida Kitarō locates the central difference between Western and Eastern cultures in the space used by their respective metaphysical systems to ground, justify, and explain their notions of truth. Nishida argued 171 1. Jan Van Bragt, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. xxix. that while the West depended on a “strong” metaphysical apparatus that was based on the presence of “being” (yū), Japan, like China, rooted the explanation of reality in the formlessness of a less strong but otherwise effective notion of nothingness (mu).2 By taking the Greek world of art and philosophy to characterize the cultural roots of the West, Nishida reduced Western philosophy to a strong notion of presence: the ultimate Being of Parmenides, the discursive reality (logos) of Heraclitus, the plasticity of artistic intuition and expression. Nishida, however, did not deny that a philosophy of nothingness also developed in the West. He mentioned the tendency in Christian culture to depict the supreme Being as what because of the limitations of human knowledge cannot be named or fathomed. As an example, he pointed to the negative theology of Dionysius the Areopagite, according to whom God could only be described in negative terms, with the inevitable consequence that God could never become the object of scientific inquiry. According to Nishida, however, the Western idea of nothingness is still marred by the resilience of the concept of presence that simply refuses to die. The God of the Judeo-Christian tradition is still profoundly anchored by a strong concept of personhood, whose perfection requires the presence of a free will that works within a structure of self-conscious self-determination . As soon as the concept of nothingness is introduced in the West in the description of the idea of transcendence, the West celebrates its death by personalizing it into a concrete essence. Therefore, the West inevitably fails to achieve a true negation-qua-affirmation—the ideal paradigm of nothingness discovered by Mahāyāna Buddhist thinkers, who asserted the identity of being and nonbeing: “The phenomenal being is emptiness; emptiness is the phenomenal being” (shiki soku zekū, kū soku zeshiki). In Nishida’s opinion, China does not fare any better with regard to the metaphysics of nothingness. He noticed the stiffness that the concept of mu suffered at the hand of what he saw as an immanent metaphysics crystallizing in the Confucian notion of “heaven” and the Taoist idea of “nonbeing ,” or “the form of the formless.” The immanent aspect of Chinese metaphysics derives from the strong ethical connotation of the Chinese religio/ philosophical system that, no matter how negative in its definition of truth, undermines the credibility of the local notion of nothingness by underlining the centrality occupied by rites and ceremonial propriety. 172 Poetic Expression 2. The essay appears in Nishida Kitarō, Nishida Kitarō Zenshū, vol. 7 (Tokyo...

Share