Kyoto School Philosophy in Comparative Perspective: Ideology, Ontology, Modernity 9781666920482, 9781666920499, 1666920487

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Kyoto School Philosophy in Comparative Perspective

Kyoto School Philosophy in Comparative Perspective Ideology, Ontology, Modernity Bernard Stevens

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 9781666920482 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781666920499 (ebook) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Abbreviations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction

1

Chapter 1: A Few Observations on Maruyama Masao



25

Chapter 2: Arendt and Maruyama: Two Complementary Approaches to Totalitarianism

41

Chapter 3: Modernity and Its Overcoming

57



Chapter 4: Political Engagement and Political Judgment in the Thought of Nishitani Keiji

73

Chapter 5: The Dimensions of Time Reflected in the Thought of Nishitani Keiji

89

Chapter 6: Reflections on the Notion of Reality in the Thought of Nishida and Nishitani

101

Chapter 7: Nishida Kitarō and Michel Henry: Philosophers of Life

113

Chapter 8: Self in Space: Nishida, Merleau-Ponty, and Michel Henry

123

Chapter 9: The Intercultural and Daseinsanalytical Psychiatry of Kimura Bin

133

Conclusion: The Pine Tree

141



v

vi

Contents

Bibliography Index

151

163

About the Author



171

Abbreviations

AR NKZ OT RN

SZ TB

TR. III

Aristotle. The Physics (with an English translation by Philip H. Wicksteed). London: William Heinemann Ltd; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1929. Nishida Kitarō ZenshÛ 西田幾多郎全集 (“Complete Works of Nishida Kitarō”). 19 volumes. Tokyo: Iwanami, 4th ed., 1987–1989. Hannah Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarinism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1951, 1973. Nishitani Keiji. Religion and Nothingness. Translated with an introduction by Jan van Bragt. Foreword by Winston L. King. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982; original: 西谷啓治、宗教とは何か、創 文社 1961. Martin Heidegger. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1977. Maruyama Masao 丸山真男. Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanses Politics. Edited by Ivan Morris. London; Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press 1963; expanded edition 1969. Paul Ricœur. Temps et récit III: Le temps raconté. Paris: Seuil, 1985.

vii

Acknowledgments

Most of these essays have been previously published in the following volumes. They have all been revised, sometimes considerably, in order to fit into the present book. Sometimes the title itself has been modified. Hereafter, the original titles. • Chapter 1: “A Few Observations on Maruyama Masao,” English version of an article published in French as “Un regard japonais sur la modernité: La pensée politique de Maruyama.” Du bon usage des droits de l’homme, Esprit No. 312, 117–33. Paris: Février 2005. • Chapter 2: “Arendt and Maruyama: Two Complementary Approaches to Totalitarianism.” In Critical Perspectives on Japanese Philosophy, edited by Takeshi Morisato, 148–69. Nagoya: Chisokudō Publications, 2016. • Chapter 3: “Overcoming Modernity: A Critical Response to the Kyoto School.” In Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School, edited by Bret W. Davis, Brian Schroeder, and Jason M. Wirth, 229–46. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. • Chapter 4: “Political Engagement and Political Judgment in the Thought of Nishitani Keiji.” In Religion and the Contemporary World in Light of Nishitani Keiji’s Thought. In Zen Buddhism Today, Annual Report of the Kyoto Zen Symposium, no. 14 (November 1997): 33–56. • Chapter 6: “Reflections on the Notion of Reality in the Thought of Nishida and Nishitani.” In Nishida’s Philosophy, Nishitani’s Philosophy, and Zen. In Zen Buddhism Today, annual Report of the Kyoto Zen Symposium, no. 15 (November 1998): 1–14. • Chapter 8: “Self in Space: Nishida Philosophy and Phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.” In Merleau-Ponty and Buddhism, edited by Jin Y. Park and Gereon Kopf, 133–40. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009. • Chapter 9: “The Intercultural and Daseinsanalytical Psychiatry of Kimura Bin.” In The Roar of Awakening: A Whiteheadian Dialogue ix

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between Western Psychotherapies and Eastern Worldviews, 193–99. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2009. • Conclusion: English version of an article published as “La notion de nihilisme dans la pensée de l’école de Kyoto.” In Philosophie de la religion et spiritualité japonaise, 217–29. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2019.

Introduction

This book is an essay on the Kyoto School seen in the wider perspective of contemporary philosophical and ideological issues. The Kyoto School is not studied in full, but the chapters focus on Nishida, the founder, and on his most faithful disciple, Nishitani (with also brief mentions of some more peripheral figures: Watsuji Tetsurô and Kimura Bin). The perspectives under which the school is studied are essentially two: (1) an attempt to clarify the ideological controversy that surrounds it; (2) an attempt to decrypt the sometimes enigmatic thought of Nishida by comparing it with better known European philosophers (essentially Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricœur, and Michel Henry). Nishida Kitarō 西田幾多郎 (1870–1945), the unintentional founder of the Kyoto School, can be characterized as a paradigmatic product of the Meiji period (1868–1912), when Japan reopened itself to the world after almost three centuries of isolation. He was the “unintentional founder” because he had obviously no intention of starting a school. The reality is that students from all over the country simply gathered around him after he had published his first great work, An Inquiry into the Good, in 1911, and soon afterward started teaching at Kyoto University. Following a generation of scholars who had devoted themselves to importing Western academic fields of inquiry, including “philosophy” (for which a new word had been created, tetsugaku 哲学), Nishida was the first major modern Japanese thinker to successfully go beyond learning from the West and to construct his own original system of thought. His disciples continued this task, sometimes in the same vein, sometimes in opposition to it, but always under its inspiration. So he decisively influenced subsequent generations of original philosophers, including the two other most prominent members of the Kyoto School, Tanabe Hajime 田辺元 (1885–1962) and Nishitani Keiji 西谷啓治 (1900–1990).1 Kyoto University was then the most prestigious University in Japan next to Tokyo University, but maybe less possessed by Western-style modernization and more impregnated with traditional Japanese culture and thought. This explains the fact that the members of the school clearly belonged to both the Eastern and Western worlds of thought. Insofar as they can be identified as 1

2

Introduction

Neo-Confucian and Buddhist thinkers, this must be understood in the sense of having creatively developed these traditions in philosophical dialogue with Western philosophy, mainly German idealism. While doing so, their primary commitment was not to a cultural self-expression, or even to a dialogue between world religions, but rather to a genuinely philosophical search for truth and universality. As we shall see, their intuition and effort were in many ways comparable to contemporary ones in Continental Europe, mainly in the field of hermeneutic phenomenology, such as Husserl or Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, or Michel Henry. This comparative presentation of Nishida and Kyoto School philosophy will be the main perspective under which we will examine it. The Kyoto School thinkers address a full array of philosophical issues, but essentially in the metaphysical or cognitive domains: philosophy of religion, ontology, epistemology, logic, philosophical anthropology, philosophy of culture. They have achieved all this quite successfully, developing, among other achievements, a considerable ontological significance to the notion of nothingness, understood in contrast to “Western being.” However, the area where their contribution is, for a few of them, much more problematic is in the field of history, ideology, and politics, particularly during the Japanese ultra-nationalistic period of the years 1930 and 1940. And we will quite extensively comment on this point in the first four chapters of the book: this will be the other main perspective under which we examine the Kyoto School. But first, we would now like to address the question of translating Nishida philosophy (presenting, mediating, and transmitting it). We will use this opportunity to also specify the methodological nature of our own approach: hermeneutic phenomenology. JAPANESE PHILOSOPHY AND THE PROBLEM OF ITS TRANSLATION The work of Nishida Kitarō, the most famous philosopher of modern Japan,2 reveals emblematically for the language of his country the full extent of the problem of translation. And it does so in a two-way movement: from the West toward Japan, when he and the Meiji thinkers had to translate into Japanese Western philosophical terminology and conceptuality; and from Japan toward the West when it was about rendering in our European languages the new conceptual input that such a change of scenery had produced. How are we to apply here the still imprecise discipline of traductology,3 at the confluence of two quite separate domains, philosophy, and linguistics? We all know that traduttore traditore, “to translate is to betray.” And yet, in philosophy, the requirement to manage a faithful translation affirms itself

Introduction

3

more than elsewhere. The reason is that philosophical thought is not satisfied with idiomatic specificities, and it generally claims to reach conceptual universality. There is indeed, within the prevailing philosophical practice, a more or less implicit presupposition: that philosophic language, as such, is rational, logical, and, ideally, transposable in the crystalline clarity of formal logic (this was the position of Bertrand Russell, the early Wittgenstein, and the movement of analytic philosophy). And therefore in philosophy, more than elsewhere, one strives to exempt the reader from the original text. There should be, ideally, a universal philosophic lexicon, possessing equivalents in each particular language. This lexicon, or terminology, would belong to a sort of meta-language insofar as it aims at phenomena, notions, and behaviors, expressing the universality of the human condition and of the human apprehension of the world. However, there also exists a rather antithetic position within linguistics and philosophy: inspired by Wilhelm von Humboldt, we have the influential Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Based on a much more empirical stand (in particular his study of Native American languages), Sapir tended to consider that a language constitutes an actual interpretation of experience, a specific Weltanschauung so to say, providing its speakers a sort of prism, transposing for them the social reality proper to their culture. In brief: the world can only exist through the vision given to us by the language we speak. Whorf then continued the work of his mentor and radicalized his position into a “principal of linguistic relativity.” Rather than choosing between the two extremes of the ideal language assumption and the hypothesis of linguistic relativism, one can develop a middle-way. When we are tackling two cultures that are different and mutually foreign to each other (such as, for example, Western versus traditional African or Chinese), a possible solution is to refer to intermediate notions, such as “family resemblances” (among conceptual schemes, for example) or “forms of life” (while comparing traditions), notions suggested by the empirical attitude of the later Wittgenstein, and from there we can work on constructing an intercultural dialogue. This is the enterprise suggested by Lin Ma and Jaap Van Brakel in Fundamentals of Comparative and Intercultural Philosophy.4 However, more philosophically suited, there exists another middle position: the hermeneutic approach that stresses both the belonging to a cultural particularity and the aim of a common dialogic understanding. Moreover, in the case of the Kyoto School, we can use the various tools that classical hermeneutics and philology have to offer, since we are dealing with a movement of thought that, although belonging to the Asian world, has clearly decided to be at the same time heir of Western philosophy (thus the “Greco-European” tradition). So the hermeneutic tools put into place

4

Introduction

for our own Western self-understanding can be applied here, although some adaptations will have to be found for extending them to the Eastern traditions and finding a solution for the linguistic distance. Let us now recall the main features of hermeneutics and how they can be adapted to our present issue. While doing so, we will actually realize that Kyoto School philosophers have implicitly adopted a hermeneutic attitude. Considering that the source of hermeneutics in the exegesis of sacred and classical texts includes a form of demythification (Entmythologisierung), it is indeed impressive to see that the same consciousness of interpretation can be found in Buddhist tradition: “The dynamic of demythification in this sense has been at work throughout the history of Buddhism,”5 says Nishitani. Hermeneutics Originally hermeneutics designated the art of interpreting Biblical or classical texts of Antiquity. Philology and exegesis have thus always been its main tools in order to interpret a text or an author: translate it, explain it, understand it, and express its meaning in contemporary and profane words. The need for interpretation stems from the consciousness of the relativity and perspectivism of the intellectual expressions of any culture—far from any ideal language. As early as the Renaissance the two main pillars of hermeneutics are linguistics (philological studies) and the hermeneutic circle (the whole can only be understood by the study of its parts and vice versa). And as early as the seventeenth century, the notion of hermeneutic interpretation is extended not only from Biblical and mythological texts to literary and philosophical texts but also to the domain of law. The further extension of hermeneutics to historical texts and to the Geisteswissenschaften in general in the nineteenth century (with Dilthey) and to human existence as such, including its affective dimension, in the twentieth century (with Heidegger) gives it its full breadth. While Dilthey provides its greater extension to all of the disciplines to which the interpretative approach need to be applied, Heidegger pursues a radicalization process initiated by Schleiermacher: dissatisfied with the object of interpretation (the various texts), the hermeneut must also question himself as the interpretative subject and operate a self-interpretation in a transcendental (Kantian) sense. The art of understanding (Kunstlehre des Verstehens) must start with the interpretans himself, before tackling the interpretandum: what are the subjective conditions of interpretation? The techniques for explaining a text (reconstructing its origin through grammatical, stylistic, and psychological research) must become tools for a more fundamental understanding of human being in general, not just the meaning of the particular texts, in their specific field, but the human spirit (Geist) they reveal. All this genealogical

Introduction

5

effort should enable the interpreter “to understand the author better than he understood himself.” Within all this process, the psychological description of consciousness becomes essential. It can be, for some, more vitalistic (Dilthey insisting on the Erlebnis, lived feeling, that has to be aimed at within its Ausdruck, its expression) and, for others, more ontological (Heidegger’s Auslegung, the laying out, or interpretation of Dasein as the being that is characterized, in its everydayness, by an implicit, pre-ontological, understanding of being), or both (as with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and of flesh). In any case, this psychological description is probably the dimension of hermeneutics to which Nishida comes nearer in his maiden work, An Inquiry into the Good, where he takes pure experience—a phrase inspired by William James but clearly understood as Erlebnis—as the foundation of his thought and the introducer to reality. He then puts it in historical perspective in relation both to Indian antiquity and European classical tradition. With Gadamer, the hermeneutic discipline seems to have reached its strongest position. In Wahrheit und Methode (1960), Gadamer continues Heidegger’s interpretation of facticity, but rather than gravitating around the question of Being, he reconnects with Dilthey’s interest in the Geisteswissenschaften (literally “sciences of the spirit”: historical and social sciences). However he has no intention of improving the methodological considerations of social sciences in confrontation with the supposed higher discipline of exact sciences. Beyond technics and methods, the Geisteswissenschaften need to develop their self-understanding, in its own specificity: rather than endeavoring to found sciences on some objective methodology, establishing an objectifying distance and excluding all signs of the interpretative subjectivity, it is on the contrary the latter that needs to be taken into account, clarifying its own circular structure of belonging (Zugehörigkeit), in the sense of Heidegger’s self-interpretation of Dasein, of Husserl’s description of the “life-world” (Lebenswelt), and of the rooting of both in Dilthey’s sense of historicity. Being conscious of our history and of our particular and limited belonging to the world is a precondition to be able to reach a proper philosophic universality. Understanding doesn’t start with some Cartesian type cogito but is rooted in an existential and historical past, in a narration and a tradition that need to be brought to consciousness. We need to develop and understand the “consciousness of the effectivity of history” (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein). Such an understanding of our historical identity can then be applied to the present situation and to the discovery of new situations or textual realities—such as, among others, the Oriental world that Western philosophy is encountering in our contemporary times. This implies the capacity to relativize one’s own horizon and practice

6

Introduction

a Horizontverschmelzung, a fusion of horizons. Such a fusion presupposes the supportive concord (tragendes Einverständnis) of a common belonging together that can be actualized by dialogue. Let us note here straight away that one of the remarkable things about the Kyoto School philosophers is that they were quite unique in being heir to their own Oriental tradition and, at the same time, to the Western philosophic tradition as a consequence of the process of Westernization during the Meiji period. They thus possessed the two Zugehörigkeiten of both Western and Eastern thought; they could therefore apply the wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein to both and practice quite pragmatically and paradigmatically the Horizontverschmelzung. And, as this quote from Nishitani testifies, they were quite conscious of the fact: We Japanese have fallen heir to two completely different cultures. . . . This is a privilege that Westerners do not share in . . . but at the same time this puts a heavy responsibility on our shoulders: to lay the foundation of thought for a world in the making, for a new world united beyond differences of East and West.6

Now, we might mention a final significant mutation of hermeneutics. Although Gadamer’s contribution has to some extent influenced positively the critique of ideology of the Frankfurt School, it has been considered by the latter as being excessively traditionalistic and anti-modern. In Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik,7 Habermas attacks Gadamer’s provocative rehabilitation of prejudice, authority, and tradition, which the Aufklärung had previously so vehemently criticized against the romantic movement. To Gadamer’s valorization of prejudice, authority, and tradition (with their paralyzing weight of the past), Habermas opposes an interest for emancipation (and its preoccupation for an open future), and he opposes the struggle against ideological distortion (due to illusion or censorship, two concepts common to Freudianism and to the political liberation from domination). And very significantly he sees concord not as preceding our dialogue with others but as a sort of Kantian regulatory idea that is the horizon of an unbounded communication. Habermas indeed always keeps in mind this Marxian motto: “philosophers have interpreted the world; it is now time to change it.” Following the Gadamer-Habermas polemic, many, such as Paul Ricœur, have tried to find an intermediate position. The philosophical gesture, says Ricœur,8 needs to find a middle way or an oscillation between, on the one hand, simply inheriting its finite historical situation and, on the other, hang on the position of constantly criticizing the “false consciousness” (which is at the basis of social or class domination and violence). We will see that in the case of Nishida and his disciples, it is indeed vital to keep in mind an ideological critic in front

Introduction

7

of the traditionalistic and conservative trend of the greater part of the Kyoto School. Understanding in a comprehensive way cannot exempt from explaining in a rigorous and impartial judgment. Beyond the Habermasian argument with Gadamer, there exists a proper hermeneutic critique of prejudice that actually reaches back to Heidegger: the “destruction” or deconstruction of Western metaphysics. The situation of belonging to an inherited tradition contains its own self-critique and distancing precisely in the gesture of appropriating what is the most original and authentic within the tradition, what is “forgotten,” while uncovering what is derivative and alienating. Concerning this issue, we would now like to raise a dimension of the deconstruction of ontology that Heidegger himself didn’t develop to such an extent but that might be illuminating for our purpose of introducing to the Kyoto School. The Plurivocity of Being There exists an essay on the question of categories by the French linguist Emile Benveniste that puts him in tune with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, while appearing altogether as a Gadamerian hermeneut and a Habermasian critic of ideology, at least to some extent. The title is Catégories de pensée et categories de langue,9 and it questions the Aristotelian plurivocity of being— to on pollachôs legetai—that Heidegger has so emphatically mentioned.10 As Jacques Derrida insists in his comment on the article,11 Benveniste is not the first to tackle this issue (Trendelenburg, W. von Humboldt, Nietzsche, Cassirer, and Brunschvicg all paved the way). Nevertheless Benveniste gives it an expression that suits our purpose. He starts by asserting that in our profuse mind activity, there is an intense role of language that remains generally unconscious. The habitual assumption is that thinking and talking are two essentially separate activities and that language is just a tool for our thinking. It serves for the expression of our thoughts. But, claims Benveniste, thinking cannot be separated from language and the latter is like the mold of the former. The complex structure of language gives its form to the content of thought. Apart from that, we would just have formless impulses. “Linguistic form is thus not just the condition of transmissibility, but before that the condition for achieving thought.”12 It is possible to describe a language, but is it possible to describe thought apart from its linguistic expression? asks Benveniste. Maybe the notion of category can help us clarify the issue: tradition tells us that there are categories of thought that are universal and categories of language that belong to a particular idiom. Let us examine here the most classical and best-known example: the categories of Aristotle that enumerate all the possible kinds of things (beings) that can be the subject or the predicate of a proposition. Presenting the inventory of the properties that

8

Introduction

could be said of an object, they have traditionally been seen as the list of the a priori concepts that organize experience. The most extensive list of categories (ten in total) is to be found in chapter IV of Aristotle’s Categories. In this short text Aristotle displays the totality of the predicates that can be asserted of beings, and he aims at giving its logical status to each. However, claims Benveniste, these distinctions are primarily linguistic; and Aristotle, while reasoning as if in the absolute, simply retrieves most of the fundamental categories of the Greek language in which he thinks. The first concept, ousia (“substance” or “essence”), is the linguistic category of nouns, indicating objects, whether conceptual or individual. The two following ones, poson and poion, indicate respectively anything that can be measured (thus “quantity”), and the type of nature it has (“quality”); they both belong to the class of adjectives, as well as the following one, pros ti, (“relative to”). Benveniste goes on with the rest of the list, always showing that these categories correspond to grammatical classifications present in the spoken language before being attributes discovered within things. And Aristotle’s enumeration clearly follows the syntactical structure of language: nominal forms, then adverbs, then verbal forms (active, passive, middle voice), and so on. So while he believed he was defining the attributes of objects, he was actually laying down linguistic classes. And the universality of the philosophical concepts is thus reduced to the particularity of the Greek language. And since the notion of “being” (on) is the condition of all predicates (all the categories are different ways of saying something about being), the plurivocity of being is no absolute ontological reality but just the thematization of the various uses of the Greek verb for “to be” (einai). The fact that this verb has singular uses in Greek—in addition to its predicative use, it can be substantivized and it can have the logical function of the copula—makes it a very particular verb indeed. And since most European languages have inherited the same syntactic functions and richness in their own correspondent to the verb “to be,” it suggests wrongly that Aristotelian ontology, and its plurivocity of being, is universal. But things are different once we examine languages outside the Indo-European group. Benveniste examines the Ewe language, from Togo, where the Greek notion of “being” is distributed in a number of different verbs: nyé, a verb signifying the identity of subject and predicate, yet functioning in an attributive way; le, a verb indicating existence, “to be,” but also “to have,” when associated with a locative adverb; wo or du, verbs indicating a state; di, indicating a quality. So the Ewe language has five different verbs corresponding approximately to the functions of our verb “to be.” Those are five semantically separate verbs and not a distribution of one same verb in different functions. Having proven that thought cannot be independent from the language that expresses it, Benveniste’s conclusion however is not that language totally

Introduction

9

gives thought its logic (Sapir-Whorf to the extreme), but that the two are inseparable. And one can only suppose they have constituted each other together. It might be possible to express the thought of one language (for example Marxist dialectic) into another language and thought (for example modern Chinese), but it will require some extensive explanation: one can thus keep in mind, if not an ideal language, at least a common dialogic understanding as a regulatory horizon for a supportive concord (Gadamer’s tragendes Einverständnis). Benveniste does not examine the Japanese language within his theory on the categories of being, but we can briefly do the job for him. We know that there is no single verb corresponding to our “to be” in Japanese. There are two main verbs used to translate the European “einai, Sein, être, to be”: u 有 and sonzai 存在,13 both having been used, by different authors, to translate Heidegger’s notion of Sein. Both can be read as substantives. The term sonzai 存在 (composed of son 存 “to be alive, existing” and zai 在 “to be located, to dwell”) possesses the nuance of “existence,” and will sometimes be translated as such, although we have another word that clearly means existence: jitsuzon 実存. On the other hand, u 有 (sometimes pronounced û), also used to form the verb aru 有る(ある) or de aru で有る(である), “to be” in the copulative or predicative sense, will spontanuously have a more verbal meaning and it will be more difficult to translate it as “existence.” Now “being” in the sense of the Greek on or the German Seiende, can be rendered by different words or expressions: it can be again u 有, or else mono (a “thing”), writtenもの or 物. And finally “essence” (ousia, essentia, Wesen) is translated by honshitsu 本質 (hon 本 “true,” shitsu 質 “quality”). In conclusion, being can be said in a multiple way in Japanese, but it is not the plurivocity of one same term: it is the multiplicity of semantically separate words. The unity of Aristotelian-Western ontology is therefore broken and can only be quite approximately reconstructed in a linguistically and conceptually different context. All these new philosophic expressions (or sometimes new philosophical usages of old Confucian or Buddhist expressions), which are used to render the European verb “to be,” are the result of a massive effort of translation reaching back to the Meiji era (1868–1912). The Translation of Western Philosophical Concepts into Japanese The effort of the Meiji period in literally transplanting massively Western thought into Japan, through translating its major scientific and philosophical concepts as well as the most significant among its works, has become

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Introduction

paradigmatic for the whole Far-East until the recent radical transformations of the Chinese world inclusively. The Meiji period, during which Nishida started his carrier, might be compared to Renaissance Europe, when the Western world rediscovered the Greco-Roman literature through an intensive philological activity and extensive translations. Moreover, since the Japanese intellectuals were trying to establish a link between the civilizations of the Occident and of the Orient, their action acquires a signification that can in some way be likened to that of the Church Fathers who developed the basic concepts of a civilization that was constructed at the junction of the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman traditions. Nishida, the best-known Japanese philosopher, is also the iconic example of this extraordinarily ambitious and complex project. The context within which Nishida’s work appeared is the period of modernization of Japan. And, concerning more precisely scientific matters, it is the movement of linguistic reform that had been initiated during the nineteenth century around the usage of the kango 漢語 (Chinese-Japanese terms) and around the creation of a modern Japanese language that, while utilizing the resources of the spoken language, is not meant to be limited to the elite, so that bookish knowledge and high culture becomes accessible to all: it is the genbun itchi undô言文一致運動 (“the movement of unification of the spoken and written language”). Following in the footsteps of the pioneering effort of Nishi Amane西周 (1829–1897), the most significant terminological originator of Meiji, Nishida’s work opens the problematic of the renewed usage of ancient kango (of Confucianist and Buddhist origin) and the creation of new ones (in a way comparable to the formation of compound words in the German language), in order to render the imported Western philosophical concepts. Nishida, while trained to read kanbun 漢文 (classical Chinese), both inherited the pioneering work of his predecessors and adds his own contribution, especially by integrating forms transposed from the Western philosophic language and from the linguistic structure of Western languages. He proceeds like other Japanese translators who acclimatize, within an eclectic writing, a series of stylistic techniques such as punctuation, the passive voice, the abstract noun, the usage of conjunctions, and so on. Using spoken Japanese as a support, while reusing classical terms, Nishida actually creates a new way of practicing his language at the meeting point of various Oriental and Western idioms, both elitist and ordinary. Nishida, like most of his contemporaries, reads a considerable amount of books in foreign languages: in English and German, with ease; with a little more difficulty in French; still more laboriously in Latin and Greek; and, at the same time, he reads Chinese fluently since his school years. And in his effort to render in Japanese the philosophical content of Western texts he carries out implicitly a massif task of translation—to the point of being

Introduction

11

qualified, in the same movement, as the “translator-thinker.” While doing so, he pragmatically readjusts techniques developed by his predecessors (Nishi Amane in particular) in order to create—by trial and error—a new language and a new philosophical lexicon, reworking the classical Sino-Japanese literary style, utilizing the new Japanese standard, and allowing influences from the logical structure, thought, and vocabulary of the West. His philosophical work thus witnesses the reception of a multilayered culture while, within the same gesture, recreating a new language by conceptual hybridization. This complex phenomenon opens an extremely dynamic dimension, consisting both of a spatial translation, from Western thought to the Orient, and of a temporal translation of past traditions (such as Mahāyāna Buddhism or Confucianism) toward the site of its own living thought, Nishida philosophy, understood as the new driving force of what the philosopher himself named “a creative tradition” (sôzôtekina dentô 創造的な伝統): altogether heir of received traditions and productive of an unforeseen future. This is hermeneutics in action: a concrete example of the “consciousness of the effectivity of history” (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein) at the crossroad of two civilizations. Philosophizing is then practiced in a pragmatic way, by means of an idiom put into place as an instrument of thought, within the complex phenomenon of intercultural intertextuality. Considered more analytically, what Nishida creates in doing so is first of all a series of neologisms, serving to render Western philosophical concepts in Japanese; it is then, but sometimes simultaneously, the creation of new philosophical concepts, born from cultural hybridization as much as from personal conceptual creativity; and it is finally a new usage of the age-old Sino-Japanese language, trying to get closer, at the same time, to modern spoken Japanese, to the logical structure of Western philosophy and to the syntactical structure of European languages. One of the main difficulties in the reverse path of translating Nishida into a Western language will consist in the trouble to render, not just the novelty of the Nishidian terms (or the new philosophical usage that Nishida proposes for old or colloquial Japanese terms), but also the new content of classical Western philosophical terms, after their passage through the Sino-Japanese thought regime—with their unheard-of semantic thickness, stemming from either the sole Japanese language, or a Japanese word already weighted with Chinese signification, or else a word comprising henceforth a constellation of meanings borrowed jointly from the Japanese, Chinese, Sanskrit, and European languages. Such difficulties, proper to the semantic and conceptual content of the Nishidian text, are far more considerable than the usual difficulties of translating from Japanese to English (such as the absence of article or comparable problems).14

12

Introduction

Some Philosophical Terms In the following, we would like to mention a few Nishidian terminological productions destined to render Western philosophical notions. And we would also like to reflect briefly about what Western philosophic thought itself could learn from this transit through the East. We will examine the notions of philosophy, subject, consciousness, place, and nature. The Word for Philosophy The issue for Nishida is thus clearly that of a linguistic creativity in order to render a new conceptuality. The very word to indicate the new discipline of “philosophy” already contains a whole history. The term was invented by Nishi Amane. But one can say that it is Nishida who actualized it in his own work. So, for naming the new discipline, Nishi Amane had created successively the notions of seirigaku 生理学 (“science of the nature of things”), rigaku 理学 (“science of reason”), kitetsugaku 季 哲学(“science of the love of wisdon”), and finally tetsugaku 哲学 (“study of wisdom”). In parallel, it can be interesting to note the evolution in the idea that Nishi was getting about philosophical activity. In the year 1860, he first sees it, in an eminently Confucianist mode, as a discipline enabling its practitioner to understand “the Way of Heaven and the Way of Man” (tendô jindô 天道人道); it then becomes the rational knowledge of nature (under the influence of Auguste Comte, which he discovers in the 1870s), before finally being presented as the discipline able to harmonize all the sciences and to determine human conduct. Ethics here clearly frees itself from its submission to the neo-Confucianist Ri 理 (“principle” or “natural order”). And as soon as the mid-1870s, it becomes obvious for Nishi that, unlike religion that is founded on belief, philosophy takes root in reason, is based on logic and contains, beyond its epistemic ambition, a horizon of wisdom. It is the moment when the word testugaku is adopted. Nishida will then later reinvest the term and will contribute to normalizing its usage. But inside this new discipline, as we shall see, each word, so to speak, is again a new conquest, an unheard-of linguistic creation. Subjectivity Within this new discipline and while creating a new linguistic medium, Nishida also fights another struggle: the absorption of (Western) objective knowledge, while integrating it in the (Oriental) tradition of Zen meditation (heir to Indian and Chinese thought) and centered on the spiritual experience of self-control (inherited from Confucianism). This tension between objectivity and subjectivity reflects in the plurality of the terms used by Nishida for,

Introduction

13

on the one hand, a single word for “object,” kyaku 客, and, on the other hand, a semantic diffraction of the subject expressing the different registers of subjectivity in the Japanese language (jiko, jiga, jibun, and then shugo, shutai, shukan, not to mention the more deictic indicators such as watashi, boku, atashi, etc.). Such an instruction already suggests to us in what way Nishida’s philosophy will be one of subjectivity and consciousness, heir to a long tradition going back, beyond the Mahāyāna Buddhist “School of consciousness” (Vijñānavāda), to the brahmanical investigation of the atman (the self): actually the Nishidian system of thought will construct a junction between modern European transcendental philosophy (the post-Cartesian tradition) and the secular Indian investigation of the atman. And we will therefore better understand that, after having been tempted by empirical psychologism, he will aim at situating his own philosophical position in the track of Kantian and Husserlian transcendentalism. The issue of consciousness and of life will progressively occupy a central position, following a constant effort to abolish the distinction between object and subject. It is thus with such preoccupations in mind that Nishida will develop, in a first attempt, his psychologistic notion of “pure experience” (junsui keiken 純粋経験) and, later on, his famous thematic of “place” (basho 場所), which concerns the transcendental question of the conditions of possibility of the unifying act of consciousness and, at the same time, consists in the arrangement of a conceptual site to express the secular oriental experience of “self-awakening” (jikaku 自覚). Before tackling the famous notion of basho, let us try and clarify the plurivocity of the Japanese notion of “subject” to the regularity of which Nishida decisively contributed. The most habitual Japanese term that corresponds today to the Western philosophical “subject” (subjectum, sujet, Subjekt) is shutai 主体, together with the concomitant notions of “subjectivity” (shutaisei 主体性) and “subjective” (shutaiteki 主体的). This term is properly a Nishidian invention in order to express, with the help of a newly composed kango, a concept which didn’t exist as such in Japanese. The word shutai is composed of two ideograms: the first one, shu 主, signifies originally “the owner of a house” and, by extension, the “master,” the “most important,” what conducts and supports an entity; and the second ideogram, tai 体, means “body” and, by extension, “thing,” “substance.” So shutai is the substantial element that supports an entity. In sum it is the Greek hupokeimenon, the Latin subjectum in the sense of “what lies beneath” a being, following Heidegger’s explanations. It is thus clearly, in Aristotelian logic, the substantial subject to which predicates can be attached. Nishida seems to be the first one to have used this newly composed term for the translation of the Western subject. And since then, in Japan, this usage has become standard. Given the polysemy of the term “subject” in European languages (not just

14

Introduction

its plurivocity, but its equivocity: which sometimes reaches absurdity since, for example, the “subject” for an artist is quite often an “object” for the physicist), the distinctions proposed by Nishida by creating a number of other Japanese terms to distinguish the various meanings could help us clarify the whole issue of subjectivity. Indeed, Nishida introduces different words in order to express different functions of the word “subject” (shugo, shukan), and he also reintroduces classical words (such as jiko, jiga, jibun, etc.), giving them a new usage. So, after shutai (the substantial subject), the term shugo 主語 specifies, with the help of the ideogram go 語, “word” (language, speech), that we are here in a linguistic register: it is thus the subject of a sentence, the grammatical subject to which can be added predicates with the help of a copula. And finally shukan 主観 with the ideogram kan 観, meaning “vision” (sight, appearance), indicates the conscious activity of a subject in his grasp of the world: it is the knowing subject or, in Kantian terms, the transcendental subject. In conclusion we have three quite distinct concepts and yet all rendered in English, indifferently, by the single word “subject.” To this, we can now add the Nishidian updating of other more ancient terms expressing various aspects of subjectivity: jibun自分, composed of ji 自, meaning reflexivity, self-referentiality, and bun 分, meaning “part,” indicating thus the individual understood as a partition of society as a whole. Now jiga 自我 is the self-reflexive “I” or “me” (ga 我); it is modern subjectivity, the Cartesian “ego,” of which one actually needs to get rid of, following Buddhism, in order to reach, after having gone through the negation of the ego (muga 無我, “non-ego,” an-atman), the more authentic “self” (jiko 自 己), which is an avatar of the Sanskrit atman.15 Thereby the subject, in Japanese, is expressed in a plurality of ways, in a regulated plurivocity of which Nishida contributed to clarify the stakes. All these nuances of subjectivity can be rendered in English only with the help of footnotes. We therefore might have here an opportunity to enrich our philosophical vocabulary, in a way reciprocal to what the Japanese did when they introduced Western concepts into their philosophical terminology. Consciousness These various modes of subjectivity, for Nishida, were destined to better identify the manifold qualities of the activity of consciousness. Buddhist terms like ishiki 意識 (generally translated as “consciousness”) and of jikaku 自覚 (“self-awareness” or “self-awakening”), serve to render a Western philosophic notion, “self-consciousness,” while granting it a new semantic richness through adapting oriental notions such as the “awakening” to one’s true nature. The word ishiki 意識 (consciousness) places indeed this expression

Introduction

15

in the register of the modern thematic of consciousness and its activity, while enriching it with verbal inflections (ishiki suru 意識する “become aware of”), which orients it toward the process of the self-awakening of consciousness to its true and more profound self, such as it has been explored, among others, by the Indian School of consciousness, Vijñānavāda. This is still reinforced by the usage of the notion of jikaku 自覚 (“self-awakening”) that serves to render a mechanism of consciousness that is altogether reflexive, unifying, and self-transforming, by contrast to the constancy of self-identity expressed by the notion of “self-consciousness” (Selbstbewusstsein) of the Kantian and Husserlian tradition, translated by Nishida as jiko ishiki 自己意 識. In that way the modern Western thematic of transcendental consciousness is thus deepened, from its narrow epistemic and theoretic dimension, in the direction of a reappropriation of the more practical dimension of the authenticity of the self. Place The most famous term in Nishidian philosophy is basho 場所 (“place,” “receptacle,” “site,” “field,” “locus”). It was taken from ordinary language to be utilized in the context of Nishida’s “logic of the predicate” (justugo no ronri 術後の論理). The notion of basho aims at determining a structure of consciousness, that is linked to this so-called logic of the predicate as being founded on a new interpretation of what the Aristotelian tradition had named the predicative proposition: subject+verb+predicate (SVP). More precisely it is aimed at overturning the judgment of subsumption so that it is no more the predicate that is related to the subject, but the subject that is included within the predicate. Basho thus becomes the predicative universal that envelops the subjective individual that it modifies. One will therefore be tempted to translate basho by “field,” rather than “place,” so as to better grasp it’s dimension of structure: it is a structure of consciousness, animated by a relational dynamic of predicates, serving to determine what is being talked about. However, such an overturning of the usage of the standard proposition rests, it seems, on the importance of the predicate in the Japanese language. If we follow the explanations of the linguist Tokieda Motoki,16 the syntax of the Japanese language presents combinatory units that associate themselves in a structure of “nesting” where the predicative case nests or includes the subjective case, rather than being related to it as in the Indo-European structure “S verb P.” The subject is not opposed to the predicate but is extracted from it. The subject thus does not play the main role, it is not there to rule the verb and to attribute the predicate to itself, but on the contrary, it is just one of the elements that determine the predicative set, which constitutes the base of the sentence. And if, in Japanese, the descriptive attributive proposition can

16

Introduction

occasionally fit into the mold “S verb P,” as is actually often the case with Nishida (with de aru で有るclearly expressing “to be”), it is not the same with the factual descriptive proposition that can even do without the subject. Now, if we analyze the structure of the standard sentence in Nishida, it is very interesting to note that Nishida actually didn’t seem to care so much about linguistic constructions. So, if the Nishidian logic of the predicate seems indeed to be a consequence or an application of the syntactic structure of the Japanese language (just as Aristotelian ontology seems to be a result of the linguistic structure of the Greek language and categories), it is not the only factor: it is also a reinterpretation of the a priori structure of the Kantian transcendental. Nature Among the terms employed by Nishida to express Western notions, we would finally like to comment the semantically rich word shizen 自然, the Japanese term used to express the modern Western notion of “nature.” This testifies to an entirely new usage of an ancient Daoist word: jinen 自然, written with the same ideograms. The expression jinen or shizen has thus been borrowed during Meiji to translate the Western notion of nature, understood as objective nature, environment, object of observation. Otherwise in order to express nature, in the sense of what is devoid of humanity, of spirit, selfless, there is no proper word in Chinese. That is the reason why it has been necessary to use jinen, a preexisting word, while giving it a meaning it did not have beforehand: “nature.” The notion of jinen arises from an oriental conception according to which humans and nature are tied by an essential co-belonging. But in what sense? The expression originally has the meaning of “to be by oneself” or “to be as oneself,” evoking the spontaneity of a person or of its own being. From there comes the great difficulty that the Japanese experienced in order to understand the Western notion of nature understood as a sphere of inert objectivity, facing a human subjectivity, that is foreign to it: the Cartesian res extensa, object of science, of technical manipulation and exploitation. But in return the translation of “nature” by jinen, if we meditate the meaning of the sinogram, could give a new semantic richness to the Western usage. Further, it could bring about a new relationship with nature. The Western word “nature,” which, being pure objectivity, contains no trace of any subjective meaning. But by the Chinese-Japanese transcription into jinen, it could acquire such a meaning and thereafter grant the thought of nature a salutary dimension of reflexivity, self-reference, subjectivity, in short, a human proximity, that it precisely does not have in the West.

Introduction

17

Indeed, the ji 自 of jinen 自然 is clearly, in Japanese as much as in Chinese, one form or another of self-referentiality: it is the “self,” that can be found in just about all the ancient words used to express the “I,” the individual subject (jibun 自分, jiga 自我, jiko 自己, mizukara 自から, etc.). With jinen or shizen, of Daoist origin, Chinese thought wanted to express, without negating any such self-reference, the notion of natural spontaneity—as if, instead of reducing humans to the impersonality of a supposedly unconscious nature, it contrariwise granted nature a sort of human subjectivity. Or as if, rather than consisting in an impediment, an obstacle, human subjectivity turned into the privileged access road to the totality of nature. Clearly jinen is the “selfhood” inherent in man as much as in nature and not some selfless impersonality, totally lacking any spirituality. It is the self understood maybe as some sort of anima, a “soul” animating the human body as much as it animates the whole reality of the encompassing nature. We can try and specify all this with the help of Kimura Bin 木村敏, a contemporary Japanese Daseinsanalyst.17 Kimura explains that the signification of the ji 自 of jinen expresses a surprising ambiguity within the self. In the kunyomi pronunciation (Japanese reading of a sinogram), the original onyomi (Chinese reading) gets separated in two expressions: mizukara 自か ら and onozukara 自ずから. Mizukara is clearly the individual self, linked to the reality of the bodily person. And onozukara is, in a more impersonal way, natural spontaneity. On the one side, we have the relation with jiko 自 己 (“by myself”) and on the other side with jinen 自然: “by itself.” To pass from mizukara to onozukara is to pass from the individual self to the essential or universal self. And in reverse motion, it is to pass from outside nature to inside nature. Kimura feeds his reflection on Nishidian thought. The common origin of onozukara and mizukara doesn’t obliterate but conversely confirms their essential diffraction. The interesting thing is that the common, unsurpassable point, is precisely this ji 自. A notion closer to the human subject than to the presence of some non-human ontological nature. This is confirmed by Kimura when he speaks of jinen as the interiority common to everything, including man. It is about “drawing within the proper-self (mizukara) the undeterminated by-itself (onozukara) and determines it as the self.” The subject that is present here is not negated but, on the contrary, affirmed in that it finds it source in a more original self. The movement that has inspired Kimura is the Nishidian movement by which—reinterpreting the Indian meditation on brahman-atman—the Japanese philosopher aimed at radicalizing the post-Kantian transcendental and by such a radicalization aimed at re-rooting it within its source: natural spontaneity. Nature (shizen 自然, natural spontaneity) is not facing man, but it lives within him as he lives in it. Suzuki Daisetz writes, “It is probable

18

Introduction

that the most characteristic thing in the temperament of Oriental people is the aptitude to grasp life from the inside rather than from the outside.”18 The Japanese aesthetic philosopher Imamichi Tomonobu confirms this in his “canonology” when he speaks of the oriental aesthetic phenomenon of “expression” (hyōgen 表現), not as the exteriorization of some simply subjective interiority, but as the intimate participation of the artist to the living rhythms of nature. It is about expressing the dimension of a cosmic intimacy, beyond the observable level of a phenomenon, at a depth where the interiority of the artist is in unison with the interiority of things.19 It is like a sketch of what Nishida calls the “formless” beyond form. We will develop some of these reflections within the chapters of this book. But before we can learn more about the genuinely philosophical aspect of Kyoto School philosophy, there is another problem to tackle: the ideological one, which will also occupy a significant number of chapters. Let us thus take a glimpse of what will be discussed in the book as a whole. BALANCING A HERMENEUTIC OF TRADITION WITH A CRITIQUE OF IDEOLOGY Very often when the Kyoto School is mentioned in a discussion, written or spoken, the first topic on which people comment is the political controversy (a recent example, Osaki 2019): indeed some of the Kyoto School philosophers are suspected of having supported the ultra-nationalistic regime in the 1930s and 1940s. So, instead of trying to avoid the question or settle it in an expeditious way, I have decided to tackle it abreast. The fact is that I find the controversy both embarrassing and intellectually challenging. It actually concerns a serious yet recurrent problem in the history of philosophy: the fact that “the attraction to the tyrannical can be demonstrated in many of the great thinkers” (Hannah Arendt). Moreover, to comment on this controversy helps us understand the historical and ideological context in which the philosophy of the Kyoto School appeared. My main guide here is the impressive postwar political historian and thinker, Maruyama Masao 丸山眞男 (1914–1996), whose analyses on the Japanese militaristic regime are remarkably complementary to those of Hannah Arendt on the two most significant European totalitarianisms: Stalinism and Nazism. The whole thematic will irresistibly lead us toward a reflection on the problematic issue of modernity, essential for both Maruyama and Kyoto School philosophers (their relation being actually quite comparable to that between Habermas and Gadamerian hermeneutics). As we will rapidly notice, the connection to modernity, this multilayered phenomenon—perceived as desirable or threatening, Western or indigenous,

Introduction

19

yet to be achieved or already to be overcome—is most significant for clarifying the whole question. Chapter 1, “A Few Observations on Maruyama Masao,” endeavors to give a general portrait of this impressive historian and political thinker who, while situated clearly outside the Kyoto School, can give us some novel and illuminating understanding of the ideological issues we are trying to clarify. Following briefly Maruyama’s most significant studies on various periods of Japanese history, the chapter can also serve to remind the reader of some of the main stages in the recent past of Japan. It thus broadly introduces the whole thematic of the modernization of Japan and the ambivalent position of a number of Kyoto School philosophers toward it. Chapter 2, “Arendt and Maruyama: Two Complementary Approaches to Totalitarianism,” shows how Arendt’s description of Stalinist and Nazi totalitarianisms can be extended to the Japanese militaristic case. This should open new insights on a number of issues: the dimensions of modernization that can favor the rise of fascist-totalitarian regimes, the warning we can grasp from these examples to better approach comparable situations today, and the conditions of possibility of a truly democratic society in the light of both Western and Asian humanistic thought. Chapter 3, “Modernity and Its Overcoming,” while bringing the criticism of the “overcoming modernity” ideology to its highest, the chapter also tries to lead the reflection on modernity to its fullest, in order to clarify the various levels of meaning of this notion and to better understand what should remain and what can be criticized and possibly “overcome” within the project of modernity. We operate here a sort of reversal, within this chapter, when the political criticism of the Kyoto School can finally be left behind and the more promising ontological and religious dimensions can at last be taken more freely into account. Chapter 4, “Political Engagement and Political Judgment in the Thought of Nishitani Keiji,” applies the whole analysis of the Kyoto School political erring to the case of Nishitani. It tries to understand it and get a more precise picture of how to discern the genuinely philosophical from the ideological distortion. The chapter focuses on Nishitani because his case is more obvious than that of Nishida whose implication with the regime is not at all that clear. But, as the reader can quickly observe, it is the whole book that gives some importance to Nishitani. The reason for this is that Nishitani, among Nishida’s disciples is obviously the most faithful, and he actually brings about a better understanding of the philosophical significance of his mentor. Offering a remarkable continuation of Nishida philosophy, he also makes it more accessible to Western readers and sometimes even more thought provoking, as the following chapter might illustrate.

20

Introduction

Chapter 5, “The Dimensions of Time Reflected in the Thought of Nishitani Keiji,” enables us to leave aside the ideological aspect of Nishitani’s reflection on history and have access to its properly philosophical dimension. In the concluding chapters of Religion and Nothingness (Shūkyō to wa nanika 宗教とは何か),20 Nishitani stresses that one of the most significant events of our time is the meeting of the Western and Far Eastern traditions. The future of humankind—not only in economic matters but also, and more profoundly, in cultural and philosophical matters—resides in the way we will be able to tackle this historical event, which is an actual ontological confrontation, comparable to the meeting of Greek and Hebraic traditions some two thousand years ago within early Christian thought. More precisely, the great confrontation of our time is not that of communism and capitalism, nor even that of Islam and the Western world: it is—as Arnold Toynbee noted21—that of the Western Judaic world (including the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic civilizations) and the Eastern Buddhaic world (including the Hindu, Chinese, and Japanese civilizations). One aspect of this confrontation resides in the understanding of time and history: in Buddhaic thought, time, the movements of nature, and the cosmos are held to be circular, eternally recurrent (the universal kalpa of Buddhist scriptures) and to be ruled by some impersonal and all-encompassing order (the Sanskrit Dharma or the Chinese Dao); in Western Judaic thought, cosmic time is understood from the point of view of historical time, which is linear and anthropocentric, the whole process being traditionally ruled by a personal Being. Now, in order to revisit this gigantic confrontation around the notion of time, we have chosen three contemporary philosophers: Heidegger, Ricœur, and Nishitani himself. Heidegger has transformed twentieth-century philosophy by recalling concealed elements of its origin in Greek thought: to reawaken the Hellenic intuition of Being was the central purpose of Heidegger’s quest in his major work Being and Time (Sein und Zeit). On the other hand, the renewal of the question of time, which also appears in this book, is probably one of the most novel events in contemporary continental philosophy. Heidegger has shown how time is the horizon of the understanding of Being. Now, in a complementary way, Ricœur’s analysis in Time and Narrative (Temps et récit) has shown that Heidegger’s concept of time is insufficient to bridge the gap between the phenomenological opening to time and the cosmological encircling by time. Heidegger’s solution in Being and Time was to emphasize the phenomenological perspective and to consider the cosmological perspective as a mere deterioration of the former. Ricœur’s solution is to emphasize the mediation that narrative time operates (though imperfectly) between phenomenology and cosmology. Narration, however, cannot be understood solely by reference to Greek thought: it must reach back to its origin in the Hebraic tradition.

Introduction

21

The renewed joining of the Greek source and the Hebraic source by Ricœur’s hermeneutics appears as a reappropriation of the foundational moment of our Western spiritual identity. In this way it is a preparation to the dialogue, “in the making,” with Far Eastern thought. This dialogue will thus take place, among other topics, along an exploration of our understanding of time. However, the Buddhaic notion of kalpa (kō 刧) will not manifest itself, as might appear at first sight, as a mere reevaluation of the antique cosmological and mythical image of a cyclical time but as a new opening to some more encompassing intuition where the Western historical and the Eastern cosmic notion of time will be conceivable together and not at the exclusion of each other: on the level of what Nishitani calls the “infinite openness beyond all time,” at “the home-ground of the present.”22 Moreover, time will not simply appear as the horizon of being, but also of nothingness—or rather “emptiness” (śūnyatā, kū 空)—which are the ontological intuitions out of which the prolifically rich thought of the Far Eastern philosophical tradition has originally emerged. And, not the least, the philosophy of Nishida. Chapter 6, “Reflections on the Notion of Reality in the Thought of Nishida and Nishitani,” suggests that the philosophical intuition of both philosophers is basically similar. But whereas Nishida expressed himself in a more neo-Kantian and almost Husserlian way of thinking, Nishitani is clearly more existential and hermeneutic. With the help of the latter, the historical origins of Nishida philosophy in the early twentieth century are clarified through a comparison with Husserl, himself struggling at the heart of the confrontation between the exact sciences and the Geisteswissenschaften. Nishitani also helps us understand the historical significance of Nishida’s metaphysics, offering a rediscussion of the fundamentals of both ontology (the Aristotelian plurivocity of being is shaken by the renewed role of dynamis within the substantialistic totality of ousia) and theology (the universe is grasped as a manifestion of a God, rather than his creation). With Chapter 7, “Nishida and Michel Henry: Philosophers of Life,” I suggest a comparison that might ease the approach to Nishida for Western philosophers. Indeed among the few contemporary philosophers to which Nishida is often compared, Michel Henry, although he is not the one most often referred to, seems to me the thinker whose fundamental intuition is the closest: a philosophy of life (la vie), where individual existence is the most intimate experience of consciousness and also the source whose ultimate origin is to be found in some almost mystic experience of Absolute Life. The main difference is the context: whereas Michel Henry is comfortably installed in the phenomenological and Christian traditions, Nishida is struggling to construct a philosophical position at the junction of East and West.

22

Introduction

Chapter 8, “Self in Space: Nishida, Merleau-Ponty, and Michel Henry,” confirms the proximity with Michel Henry at the level of Nishida’s search for an ultimate archè, a primordial source from which springs the life of consciousness. But the later Nishida, after the topological turn (developed mainly in “The Intelligible World”: Eichiteki sekai 叡智的世界), seems to prefigure some of Merleau-Ponty’s intuition: the bodily and chiasmatic dimension of the human subject (le corps, le chiasme) finds a counterpart in the notion of “active intuition,” kōiteki chokkan 行為的直観. Lastly, chapter 9, “The Intercultural and Daseinsanalytical Psychiatry of Kimura Bin,” evokes one of the very few Japanese scholars to have had a real influence in European intellectual life: the transcultural dimension of Kimura Bin’s Daseinsanalysis. It is also for us an opportunity to bring to light some specifically Japanese elements in our philosophical reflections, before our concluding remarks on “the pine tree.” NOTES 1. For an introduction to the Kyoto School, see Heisig, Philosophers of Nothingness (2001). This excellent book by one of the leading scholars of twentieth-century Japanese philosophy makes us understand in what sense Nishida, Tanabe, and Nishitani constitute the three pillars (the founding triangle) of the Kyoto Scool. In addition to a number of studies, James Heisig has also been quite productive in contributing to the translation of the major representatives of the Kyoto School. He has also considerably encouraged the international collaboration in the study of this movement. 2. For a more specific introduction to Nishida’s significance within the philosophical discussions of our time, see Maraldo, Japanese Philosophy in the Making 1. Crossing Path with Nishida (2017). Among the many North American scholars of Kyoto School philosophy, John C. Maraldo—who was educated in the United States, in Germany, and in Japan—is probably one of the most familiar, not just with Far Eastern traditions but also with the European continental philosophy with which the Kyoto School has so consistently fed itself. This makes him particularly well suited to evaluate this school in its relationship to phenomenology, more specifically, and to significant contemporary philosophers of the West. 3. Ladmiral, 1994. According to Ladmiral, translation of philosophy leads to a philosophy of translation, close to linguistics—yet marginal both to philosophy and to linguistics. Traductology, in philosophy, must find a middle ground between the position of the “dowsers” (sourciers) and the “targeters” (ciblistes). The former, in the manner of Walter Benjamin, try to decipher the ineffable within the source language and the latter try making a text more readable in the target language. The former are more easily tempted by the poetic seductions of literalism, and the latter are more conducted by the demands of reason. More precisely, philosophic translation is a hybrid exercice between literary translation (it must be a literary work) and technical

Introduction

23

translation (it must describe facts)—the literary side leaving more room for interpretation, and the technical side refering more to a clearly defined terminology. 4. Lin Ma and Van Brakel 2016. 5. RN, p. 174. 6. Nishitani, quoted by Jan Van Bragt 1971, 278. 7. Habermas 1973. 8. Ricœur 1986, 333. 9. Benveniste 1966. 10. Heidegger 1981. 11. In “Le supplément de copule,” Derrida proves himself to be quite critical of Benveniste. He doesn’t utterly refute the conclusions but suggests a more nuanced position. Philosophical thought indeed uses language as a necessary tool, but it is not entirely conditioned by it. For example, a number of philosophical notions are not simply linguistic categories but proper conceptual constructs. And the categories are not simply different inflexions of the verb “to be,” they are also ways for language to indicate the world outside the enclosure of words (Derrida 1972, 209–46). 12. Benveniste 1966, 64. 13. Letter to the author by Professor Sugimura Yasuhiko (May 2, 1997). 14. The difficulties in translating any Japanese text generally arise from the following facts, mainly due to the “deictic” dimension of this language (the fact that the identification of the agents of a sentence is often contextual): the absence of articles; the absence of distinction between singular and plural for substantives; the frequent absence of a grammatical subject; the fact that the Japanese verb does not vary according to the person; the rarity of the use of personal pronouns; and the fact that there is a poverty of verbal tenses (being limited to the perfect and imperfect). 15. In Ancient India already, Nāgārjuna’s thought, articulated around the notion of emptiness, negated the subject as a stable substance, in the same way as it was negating any substantiality for any being in general. However, with the exploration of the notion of atman, the subject exists indeed in India, in a clear proclamation. In Vedic India, starting with the interpretation and commentary of the Upanishads (which will also influence Buddhist thinking), there exists an actual hypertrophy of subjectivity within a thought that is entirely organized around the notion of atman (the self) and concerning the methods for rooting atman within brahman (the cosmic becoming). No spiritual tradition has, as much as Brahmanism, put subjectivity at the center of its preoccupations, a subjectivity understood as interiority, at the expense of a look turned toward external natural reality, such as for example the Greek physis or the Chinese triad Tien-Ti-Ren 天地人 (sky, earth, humanity): various cosmic ways of thinking, where humanity is simply part of a greater whole. For Buddhism, the question of the “self” will also be at the center of the system of thought, even where (and particularly where) it will proclaim the non-ego, an-atman, 無我 muga. 16. We depend here on the summary made by Uehara Mayuko, in Uehara 2004. 17. Kimura 1992. 18. Suzuki 1988, 24. 19. Imamichi 1974.

24

20. RN, p. 201 ff. 21. Toynbee 1956. 22. RN, p. 244.

Introduction

Chapter 1

A Few Observations on Maruyama Masao

While the names of Nishida and of his disciples of the Kyoto School are well known today in Western countries, the more recent Japanese philosophical scene remains widely ignored. What do we know about the success of Marxist thought in the postwar period, when the Kyoto School was on the decline? What do we know about the Japanese existentialists belonging to the Sartrian sphere of influence during the 1950s and 1960s? What do we know about the huge productiveness of Japanese commentaries in just about all the most innovative Western philosophical currents? If we want to simplify a situation that is obviously more complex, one could say that after the Kyoto School (Kyotogakuha 京都学派), dominating the philosophical scene before the war, we can observe the influence of the Nihon Tetsugakukai 日本哲学会 (“Philosophical Society of Japan”), mainly around the University of Tokyo, and greatly influenced by a Marxist movement that was being gloriously restored after the persecutions endured during the dark times of militarism, and expressing a total freedom of thought within a new Japan, that was reconstructing itself on a strong democratic basis. The Japanese Marxist current after 1945, exercising a true fascination on almost all the intellectuals, is then much more open to Sovietic works than is European Marxism, locked up by the cold war, or the United States, totally prey to McCarthyism. Its evolution, however, proves it to be willing to overcome the ideological rigidity of orthodox Marxism-Leninism and to reevaluate the humanistic dimension of historical materialism, witnessed by the writings of the younger Marx. It is within such a context that we can observe a reflection on modernism and on the problematic relation that Japan might have had with it during the preceding decades. Among the most original thinkers of this current, one might remember, in order of their growing distance from Marxist orthodoxy, Hiromatsu Wataru, Yoshimi Takeuchi, and Mutai Risaku. 25

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Far behind the Marxist sphere of influence one can mark, starting during the mid-1950s, an interest for analytic philosophy, mainly American studies on epistemology, on ethics, as well as a considerable number of specialized works on the history of Western philosophy—particularly on Greek Antiquity and Medieval Europe (the Sophia University of Tokyo playing here a decisive role). None of these works has yet seriously interested anybody outside Japan. However there has been some positive reception, particularly in the United States, for the researches on the history of religious thought in Asia, by Nakamura Hajime; studies on mysticism and Islam, by Izutsu Toshihiko; on the history of Japanese literature, by Kato Shuichi; the literary criticism of Kobayashi Hideo; and also (closer to the modernist movement) the ideological analyses of Japan by Maruyama Masao—of which we will say a few words in the present chapter. More recently, a few publications on the cultural dimension of psychology or psychopathology have aroused some interest outside the archipelago: the works by Yuasa Yasuo in depth psychology, those of the psychoanalyst Doi Takeo concerning the Japanese notion of amae 甘え(infantile attachment) or the conceptual binomial omote-ura 表—裏 (the front and the back of the social facade), the Daseinsanalytical contributions of Kimura Bin on the notion of aida 間 (“betweenness”) or jikaku 自覚(“self-awareness”). . . . Two unclassifiable authors, if they are indeed known to the Japanologists, should be better introduced in the philosophical circles: Nakamura Yûjiro, with his original research on the notion of sensus communis and Sakabe Megumi, who studied the semantic richness of the Japanese classical idiom. . . . The fertility of Japanese thought for European philosophical reflection is obvious, as we can already see, for example, with the works by Augustin Berque, drawing, with equal ease, from the Oriental and Occidental sources of contemporary thought. Of this vast picture, I would like to retain here the figure of Maruyama Masao (1914–1996) and, in the following lines, touch on his exceptional intellectual stature: altogether historian, political analyst, and sociologist of contemporary Japan. Moreover, the depth of his views, the perspicacity and originality of his interpretations, convey to their author a caliber that can be considered as authentically philosophical. Compared sometimes to Sartre, for his impact on the political positions of his contemporaries, sometimes to Arendt or even Habermas, for the type of concern that was his in his analyses of totalitarianism in regard to democracy, Maruyama is probably the most impressive philosophical thinker of the second half of twentieth-century Japan. Besides, he is an appropriate parallel to the equally exceptional caliber of Nishida Kitarō (1874–1945) who dominated, as for himself, the philosophy of the first half of the same century. If Nishida, the founder of the famous “Kyoto School,” was a deeply original thinker on the level of cognitive,



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religious, and metaphysical research, one knows that he was quite controversial for his ambiguous political stance during the militaristic regime. What has worsened the regrettable reputation of the philosopher is the participation of some of his disciples of the Kyoto School to the sadly famous symposium of 1942 on “Overcoming Modernity” (kindai no chōkuko 近代の超克)— which has been interpreted by some critics as a rallying to the regime. The fact that the most famous philosopher of contemporary Japan, as well as the school he has founded, could have had such a bad reputation weighs heavily on the reception of Japanese thought in the West. In front of this state of affairs, the discovery of a way of thinking so ideologically healthy and balanced as that of Maruyama appears to us, in a way, as an occasion to save the lost honor. Indeed, Maruyama isn’t the only intellectual to have returned some authentic political respectability to postwar Japanese thought—one could also name Nakamura Hajime and Kato Shuichi, as well as, more recently, Karatani Kōjin, Nakamura Yujirō, Kimura Bin, Ueda Shizuteru, and a number of others—but he is the only one to have brought his reflection to the core of the most difficult ideological questions of his times and this with an acute sense of the responsibility of the intellectual. One of the paradoxes, and not the least, that characterizes the complementarity that we are establishing between Nishida and Maruyama resides in the fact that the former, aiming a universally valid discourse, expressed, to some extent, positions marked by the cultural particularity of Japan, while the latter, spending a great effort studying Japanese intellectual history, has a way of thinking that is more clearly universal. The work of Maruyama, far from being limited to a regional interest, questions us by showing what the ideal of democracy and of modernity become when they are taken over within a Far Eastern context. The universal dimension of modernity appears thus more clearly—without however concealing its problematic character in a time, like ours, when cultural identity and unicity are being underlined in an unprecedented provocative manner all over the globe. BIOGRAPHICAL LANDMARKS Maruyama Masao was born in Osaka on March 22, 1914. His father was a liberal political journalist and one can guess that this is where we are to find the sensitivity of this great thinker for political matters and for questions concerning current events, together with the boldness to express his thoughts in a context where liberalism was considered to be leftist ideology. He was still in high school at the time of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the Nazi takeover in Germany. . . . During the war he had been mobilized in the imperial army and sent to Hiroshima where he witnessed the

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nuclear bombing of the city1—an experience he will always find difficult to talk about (actually regretting that he never managed to use this experience as a tool in order to add moral strength to his work in favor of peace). During the 1930s he witnessed the repression of the leftist intellectuals. Since he had participated himself in a study group on Marxism, he was arrested and interrogated by the tokkō 特高 (the secret service police). Thereafter he was put on the blacklist, and he remained under police surveillance, which did not hold him back from buying a copy of The Communist Manifesto, among other forbidden Western books. This experience of police questioning left him with the bitter feeling that “the state had penetrated into his soul with boots.”2 However his resistance to the regime remained discrete (a few subtly critical writings), and the whole situation made him conscious of the difficulty for an individual to oppose an authoritarian regime (others, more extreme in their resistance, died in prison). After the war, his engagement in favor of democracy and pacifism will be more radical, including the times when political power will seem to lean again toward authoritarianism: in particular, when American pressure will push the Japanese government to take undemocratic measures against communism, the new enemy during the cold war. He studied the history of ideas at the University of Tokyo from 1933 to 1937, and then, after the war, continued in this field under the direction of Professor Nanbara Shigeru. He himself became professor at the University of Tokyo, where he taught until his resignation in 1971, for health reasons: he had tuberculosis and was often hospitalized during his carrier. In 1973 Maruyama got appointed professor honoris causa at the Universities of Princeton and of Harvard. He died in 1996, leaving behind him, on the Japanese intellectual scene, a vacuum that is not about to be filled. MODERNITY IN THE RECENT INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF JAPAN Rather than writing ambitious systematic treaties, Maruyama is the author of a number of essays that he then joins together in a volume, following a common theme. The centers of interest of his thought, concentrating on a few hinge periods of recent Japanese history, can be presented in a series that follows historical chronology: the Tokugawa period, the Meiji era, the militaristic crisis, the contemporary period. Each of these periods of time corresponds to a significant publication.



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The Modernity of the Edo Period Thus, the Tokugawa or Edo period (1603–1868) is tackled in an impressive study realized in his early years: Nihon seiji shisōshi kenkyū日本政治思想 史研究 or “Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan.”3 The hypothesis of a proper Japanese modernity, before any European influence, is probably the most significant component of this study. The book was written from 1940 to 1942 and published in 1952. In his foreword to the English translation, in 1974, Maruyama informs the Western reader on the intellectual context of the agitated times during which it was written. Indeed, during those days, the major current in Japanese studies was based on the “theories of national morality” (kokumin dōtoku ron 国民道徳論), in other words theories that were trying to rebuild a social morality that, while including a limited number of non-subversive Western ideas (such as civic consciousness), was allowed to remain consistent with imperial ideology and with the traditional elements that sustained it (Confucianism in particular, but also Buddhism and Shinto). The philosopher Inoue Tetsujirō belonged to this current. Ideologically conservative, with a clear nationalistic trend, this movement instigated some reactions in favor of a more rigorous scientificity. A second current, partially in reaction to the first one, was that of “cultural history” (inspired by the German Kulturgeschichte, in the style of Böckh and Dilthey). This current, characterized in sum by a hermeneutic approach, included Muraoka (studies on nativism) and Watsuji (studies on the history of Japanese thought). Although Maruyama doesn’t mention it, the Kyoto School could also be included here. In contrast with the declared conservatism of the first current and with the historical materialism of Marxism, this current was apolitical. A third position, also in reaction against the current of national morality, was that of the historian Tsuda Sōkichi. The interest of this approach was to leave aside all the elitist intellectual currents such as Confucianism or Buddhism in favor of the study of ideas among ordinary people, engaged in “real life” and witnessed by popular literature. And finally the last important current was Marxism, very influential during the 1920s, for which the socioeconomic structures are meant to determine the whole development of the history of ideas, without the slightest autonomy of the latter. Facing these various currents, all in some way or another too ideological, Maruyama, rather than to side under one particular banner, adopted a methodological approach that used the categories developed by Karl Mannheim. The latter had proposed the notion of “model of thought” (Denkmodelle), understood as structures playing a mediating role between social infrastructures (considered exclusively by the Marxists) and individual

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sociopolitical ideas (proper to conservatives and spiritualists). Consequently the neo-Confucianism that Maruyama intends to study is not grasped from the doctrines of the various Confucianist thinkers nor from an analysis of the social structure of the times, but as a “neo-Confucianist mode of thinking,” which will go through a number of historical tribulations until its dissolution under the joined attacks of the Sorai School and the National Learning (or “Nativist”) School. Following this preface, we have the main part of the study. It consists of an analysis of the evolution of political thought in Japan during the Edo period, thus long before the westernization of the Meiji era. By studying mainly two authors, Ogyū Sorai and Motoori Norinaga, Maruyama shows how these two thinkers, through their criticism of the neo-Confucianist ideology that was dominating those years (essentially the Chu Hsi 朱熹 school), disclose the elements of a genuinely modern thought. Such an observation should allow us to believe that the modernization of Japan is not a purely heterogeneous phenomenon but comprises indigenous elements. Modernity, that Maruyama sees as a positive phenomenon, is thus not be a narrowly European specificity but a characteristic that can be also found in the Far East, and which is probably universal. As early as this first chapter, we can thus note the central interrogation in the work of Maruyama: the question of modernity. To what degree is Japan capable of modernity? The origin of this preoccupation is to be found in Maruyama’s reaction against a prewar ideological movement we have already mentioned: that of “overcoming modernity” (kindai no chōkoku 近 代の超克). This movement considered that Meiji modernization had gone too far and that it was time to reject all ideologies that were modern (i.e., Western) and pernicious, such as Marxism and liberalism. It was imperative to return toward traditional doctrines but within a social context marked by tennō-centrism (centralization around the 天皇 tennō, the emperor). Japan had to become the standard-bearer of Asian resistance against Western modernity. Even if it was not necessarily the intention of all its members, this current was objectively a significant support for the ultranationalistic regime and it only reinforced the latter in its authoritarian, reactionary, and expansionist politics. It strengthened it in a line that progressively suffocated all freedom of thought and all democratic aspiration. So, from the time of his earliest work, Maruyama is concerned with showing that the Japan of the twentieth century has in fact not been sufficiently modernized to be able to really ask the question of a possible “overcoming” of modernity. In addition, he will try to prove in parallel that modernity is not just a purely European import but that within Japanese tradition, some premodern native elements prove that an aspiration toward modernity corresponds to Japanese tradition itself. An aspiration toward modernity to



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which, paradoxically, the Meiji restoration did not fully satisfy. The book on the Tokugawa era shows that within this period there was a continuous evolution toward modernity, a historical dynamic that contributed to it. So the Western-style modernization was just, to some extent, the acceleration of an autonomous logic. And to another extent, it suffocated indigenous potentialities. The question remains open as to knowing if some of the modern potentialities of traditional Japan might suggest dimensions of modernity that the West has until now remained unaware of. Meiji Restoration In later years, Muryama did a study on the period that followed the Tokugawa, the Meiji era (1866–1912), throwing some light on that other pivotal period: Chūsei to hangyaku 忠誠と反逆, “Loyalty and rebellion,” in 1992 (a German translation was published in 1996).4 The book describes the surprising reversals to which were subjected the notions of loyalty and of rebellion during the upheavals of the Meiji restoration. And it constitutes a good anchor to try a clarification of the terminology describing this most complex period. The study endeavors to grasp the repercussions of the political and socioeconomic upheavals of Meiji Japan on the mentalities of the people. Basing himself on texts written by politicians, writers, and thinkers of the time, Maruyama aims at delimiting the renewed significance and evaluations that can take traditionally important notions such as loyalty (chūsei 忠誠) and rebellion (hangyaku 反逆). It thus concerns the relationship of an individual with the social environment with which he has a feeling of belonging. Loyalty and rebellion are two notions that are contrary (opposed) to each other but not contradictory (conflicting): to possess one of them does not necessarily mean to be dispossessed of the other. There is a whole subtle interaction between the two that Maruyama describes finely in suggestive analyses that we can only roughly mention here. The more the cohesion of a group is high, and its common values reliable, the more a lack of loyalty tends to identify with rebellion. But when cohesion dislocates and values start to waver, the respective poles of loyalty and rebellion become blurred. Because the individual might feel himself torn between various requirements of loyalty, he will be forced to choose one loyalty (toward a group, a value, a person) over another. It is indeed such a crisis of loyalty feelings that appear with the political, ideological, social, and philosophical changes of Meiji. The Tokugawa era had inherited from the feudal mentality the very affective notion of personal loyalty toward a suzerain which, in exchange, offered land and protection. Loyalty and duty toward the suzerain and toward the clan he symbolizes are then, just as they are in feudal Europe, an eminently

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positive value, strongly opposed to the notion of rebellion, which is synonymous with treason. Such a vision, notes Maruyama, reveals a striking contrast with the positive meaning of rebellion in the modern West, and notably in the United States, where the founding moment of the nation is precisely that of a rebellion against the British crown (the independence war of 1776). One could say the same about contemporary France where the founding moment is, with the revolution of 1789, a rebellion against the monarchy. Now the negative meaning of rebellion in feudal Japanese mentality is precisely what is going to evolve from Meiji onward. With the Meiji restoration, power tries to transpose the feeling of loyalty from the suzerain (or the plurality of suzerains) toward the singleness of the emperor. What depends on it is the unity and the cohesion of the nation in the face of outside threats: there must be loyalty toward the emperor of Japan. But then the traditionally negative notion of rebellion (or treason) is progressively going to take a positive meaning in the minds of those who—like the democrats, the socialists, or the Christians—will oppose themselves to the autocratic turn of the imperial system, in the name of a loyalty directed toward not a person but a principle, an ideology, a faith in favor of the people. So this is how a shift occurs within the notion of loyalty that, instead of some blind submission, now means active engagement, and which ceases to articulate itself around a personal vassalic bond and concentrate rather on an ideological engagement. One is no more loyal toward the suzerain (daimyō) or the souverain (tennō) but toward the ideal that one’s group is meant to defend. If the head of the group (suzerain or souverain) is not good enough for the ideal, it becomes a duty to recall him his obligations or else revolt against him. At least such was the attitude of the supporters of the movement for peace and for the rights of the people, concerned with introducing inside the Meiji regime the emancipatory elements of democratic humanism. This does not signify that there was an opposition between “Japanese traditionalistic autocratism” and “Western modernist emancipation.” Rather, it was in the name of a rather Confucianistic (and thus traditional) concern for the common good and out of loyalty for Japan that the supporters of freedom and popular rights rebelled against the excesses of imperial authoritarianism. It is thus less because of Western-style modernism or individualism than because of fidelity toward a certain disinterested duty toward the nation (the feudal clan enlarged to the whole nation) that the emancipatory political ideas of Europe entered Japan. The interest of the Japanese nation was the goal of both the Meiji regime and its opponents. However, the Meiji regime indeed exalted the nation but was crystallizing it on the person of the emperor. Loyalty to the nation was also the feeling that the most radical opponents to the regime tried to develop, but they crystallized it on political ideals. All in all, the question



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was for everybody to know how to be loyal to Japan: on the one side it was by serving the emperor, on the other it was by serving the people. No need to say that the latter appeared to be rebels and traitors to the nation on the eyes of the unconditional supporters of the imperial way. It is thus within this ambiguous and complex climate that the Japanese intellectuals were turning themselves toward Western thought. The relationship to the latter will also be variously valued by the power: when a subject was criticizing the emperor system, he wasn’t considered loyal to the nation; but those who practiced such a criticism considered themselves loyal to the people and, therefore, to the nation. The Ultranationalist and Militaristic Period The ultranationalist and militaristic period (1930–1945) is tackled in a work that will rapidly acquire some fame: Gendai seiji no shisō to kōdō 現代政治 の思想と行動: “Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics,” published in 1956 and translated into English in 1963.5 This volume gathers a number of essays that endeavor to explain the deeper origins and the internal logic of the Japanese fascism of the years 1930 to 1940. Maruyama shows how the political system established by Meiji included the seeds of some authoritarian and expansionistic nationalism, in contradiction with the modernistic logic of the Edo or Tokugawa period. He demonstrates how, under the militaristic regime, the system developed while following a logic of generalized irresponsibility where nobody had a sufficient personal consistency to be able to assume an accountable attitude. When one glances through the significant moments of prewar Japanese philosophical thought, one cannot avoid being impressed by the important recurrence of the nationalistic fiber within the very core of philosophical reflection. Indeed, as just one example, if the labor of Nishida and his disciples indicate some degree of philosophical maturity, it is not on all levels: the cognitive and metaphysical dimensions, religious also, occasionally esthetic, and more rarely ethical, are tackled in a generally successful way. But it is obvious that on the level of political thought, reflection is not mature. This problematic of the political immaturity of Japanese intelligentsia is, among other things, one of the preoccupations of Maruyama Masao in his numerous studies on the evolution of political thought in the recent history of Japan. However, Maruyama does not limit himself to analyzing the different forms of political thought in Japan from the Edo period until the end of the twentieth century: his own work is an accomplished example of a political reflection that is well informed, responsible, and mature. After the latent anxiety that often accompanies us during our reading of the prewar philosophers, the discovery of Maruyama Masao becomes the opportunity of a deep relief. We realize it was not without reason that he has been qualified as the

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founder of political thought in Japan and that he has rapidly been recognized as the most significant Japanese political commentator, both at home and in the West. The Contemporary Period Finally, the fourth most significant work of Maruyama, Nihon no shisō 日本 の思想 (1961, translated into German in 1988: Denken in Japan),6 describes more generally the characteristics and weaknesses of Japanese thought in general. Maruyama emphasizes the absence of a universal and unified intellectual system that, like Christianity or humanism in Europe, enables to have a sense of universality, to structure the various domains of existence and to have therefore some landmarks that are sufficiently stable to avoid the enthusiastic and unreflected adoption of eccentric and potentially disastrous ideologies, such as ultranationalism. He gets more specific in this matter by showing how the absence of any proper philosophic tradition had rendered the Japanese incapable of receiving in a well-thought-out manner the new ideas stemming from the West, and it had rendered them particularly vulnerable, for example, to the simplistic slogans of tennō-centrism, with a Weltanschauung based more on emotion than on reason. This lack of intellectual foundation, like Confucianism in China or classical humanism in Europe, was partially responsible for the absence of any sense of universality in the Japanese mind, the absence of the sense of transcendent values and the difficulty in understanding abstract concepts. Rather than universal values, valid for all humans, the Japanese tended to believe in the ethnic and cultural specificity of values, either moral, political, or religious. Consequently the ideals of democracy and humanism, or of universality, were often perceived like Western peculiarities to which one was to oppose the Japanese specificity together with its supposed superior “moral energy” (the participants to the symposium on “overcomng modernity” used the German expression: moralische Energie). And finally, all that could simply be reduced to a balance of power. Maruyama underlines that it is that absence of a universal and unified intellectual system that made it difficult to structure the various realms of existence and to form landmarks sufficiently stable to avoid the enthusiastic and unreflected adoption of irrational ideologies. Instead of assimilating foreign influences or the successive cultural contributions of history, Japanese thought has always tended to overlay them—leaving untouched an unquestioned and unexplored foundation of archaic substructure (a basso ostinato) whose resurgence can happen in an unexpected and uncontrolled manner.7



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It is in sum with the intention to remedy this state of affairs that Maruyama undertakes then to truly constitute a critical and methodological political science in Japan. THE FOUNDATION OF POLITICAL SCIENCE IN JAPAN What impresses one most when reading Maruyama is indeed the quality of his critical sense and his concern for methodology in intellectual work: a truly scientific approach of the sources, a careful examination of the latter before venturing to conclusions—contrasting with the surprising off-handedness with which prewar philosophers generally approached the historical and political material of their study. Such a scientificity will be one of Maruyama’s main weapons to fight on the double front of the economic reductionism specific to Marxism and the conservative nationalism specific to most non-Marxist historians of ideas in Japan. Besides, among the authors that have impressed Maruyama the most, he appreciates Fukuzawa Yukichi in particular for his sense of critical method. And it is indeed Fukuzawa Yukichi, the thinker of Japanese “Enlightement,” that constantly remains Maruyama’s primary intellectual model.8 On the Western side, the Marxist and neo-Kantian concern for scientific rigor will strongly influence him, but without the economic reduction of the former nor the epistemological reduction of the latter. He will also be influenced by the research of Karl Mannheim on Ideology and Utopia—in particular the attempt to distinguish the essence of sociological phenomena from their historical genesis. The studies of Max Weber on the development of capitalism will be among his formative readings. On the more strictly philosophical level, it is probably the reading of Hegel, the historian of philosophy and the thinker of law, that will stimulate him the most. Maruyama Masao belongs, together with Yoshimi Takeuchi and a few others, to the significant movement of “modernism” (kindaishugi 近代主 義), proper to the immediate postwar Japan. It is undeniably he who brought reflection the farthest on the level of political philosophy. Like Habermas who, in front of diverse critics of modernity or postmodern projects, Maruyama intends to underline the ineptitude of any claim to “overcome modernity” where modernity remains to a large extent unaccomplished. All the notions involved here need to be clarified. If one does not want to swing into a contextual relativism of values, it is necessary to maintain validity criteria as well as an aspiration to universality. Referring here mainly to Fukuzawa Yukichi, Maruyama seeks a better definition of such notions as political conscience, autonomous personality and subjectivity (shutaisei 主体 性) that the dominant Japanese ideology until 1945 tended to choke.

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Indeed, after the fall of tennō-centrism and the establishment of full academic freedom, Maruyama endeavors to truly found political science in Japan. Such a science, that until then was properly nonexistent, was rendered at last possible by the paradoxical phenomenon of a forced democratization— a democratization whose incomplete character he kept denouncing, while trying to reinforce its effectiveness. For Maruyama, it is necessary to put an end to a situation that contributed to make impossible any true political science before the war and which is probably responsible for the engagement of the most prominent intellectuals of the time in favor of the “overcoming of modernity” ideology and its nationalistic delirium. The prewar situation, Maruyama underlines, was directly heir to the absolutism of the Tokugawa era and the enlightened despotism of the Meiji period. In that way the political structure of Japan left no space for the development of a representative political plurality and an effective civil freedom, a space essential for the flourishing of a responsible political conscience, that is anchored in social reality and capable of an autonomous subjectivity. And consequently: if there existed, to some extent, a political science, it was in a purely academic sense; it was about the bookish study of European political theories but without any capacity to apply these theories to the concrete Japanese situation. It is indeed this divorce between political theory and practice that Maruyama intends to overcome. Just as the significant stages of European political thought were linked to key eras in the effective advance of the democratic and humanistic ideal (the Greek politeia, the Italian Renaissance, British parliamentarianism, French enlightenment), in the same way Japan has to contribute to the progress of science by being capable of apprehending in a manner that is reflexive and critical, documented and engaged, the actual political reality. Maruyama writes, We must do as Aristotle did with the ancient polis, as Machiavelli did with Renaissance Italy, as Hobbes and Locke did with seventeenth-century England, as Marx did with the Revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune, as Bryce did with the democracies, as Beard, Merriam, Laski, and Siegfried did in the twenties and thirties. By analyzing the complicated trends that underlie Japanese politics, we must elicit the laws of political process and behaviour, constantly trying to verify in the actual political situation the propositions and categories thus acquired.9

And during all his endeavors, Maruyama never loses sight of the following fact: if it is true that Japan has imported its contemporary political ideas and institutions from the West, one has to note however that its political systems, although formally similar, are animated by a different spirit, given that the



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history and fundamental national structure of Japan have been radically different from those of Europe. Maruyama’s deep faith is the following. The day Japanese political reality, with a concern for existential and moral engagement (the sense of Seinsgebundenheit according to Mannheim and the Sein-sollen according to Kant), will be submitted to public debate as much as to scientific reflection, and when moreover it will be illuminated by the related realities of economics, of the legal sphere and of history, only then will it be possible to appreciate a true Japanese contribution to universal political thought because, lucidly and in a responsible way, it is “rooted in Japanese soil.” This being posed, Maruyama owes to Fukuzawa the belief in some relativity of value judgements. This means that values, rather than being in themselves absolute and abstract, are relative to each other, conditional and situational, and they need, in order to be established, an argumentative basis or, in other words, a communicational reason. The latter, in its turn, in order to avoid the pitfall of relativism, must aim at a “principle of truth” on which can be build the independence of judgment. Such a principle cannot be based on a metaphysical system of essential and objective truth because it can only be shaped in a particular situation, on the basis of empirical argumentation and a given practical motivation. But furthermore, the quality of such an argumentation depends on the consistency of the subjectivity endeavoring to elaborate its own judgments. In parallel to the abstention of any formalist and rigid fixation to a single absolutized perspective (what Fukuzawa called “fetishism,” and was one of the sources of the fascist attitude), one must be able to gauge each particular situation, in its living and changing sociohistorical concreteness, and judge flexibly in consequence (in a sort of reminiscence of Aristotelian phronesis). However such a flexibility of subjective judgment is only possible in a social context that favors it: an open society in which power, rather than being exclusively substantialized and reduced to a legal structure (as in the Hegelian-Marxist tradition, encouraging interventionist regimes such as Soviet Russia, post-Bismarkian Germany, or post-Meiji Japan) allows, on the contrary, to preserve a functional and relational dynamic (as in the pluralistic, liberal, and constitutional tradition where, at least in principle, power results from the interaction between different groups or subgroups). Whereas a closed society tends to fetishism, to rigid normativity and even absolutistic centralization, an open and plural society on the other hand favors autonomous personalities that possess a flexible judgment. An open society enables discussion about the constant reevaluation of behaviors, and it enables a plurality of perspectives. Only such an argumentative and plural dynamic enables a real social progress, as long as it can counter the pression exerted by the various unofficial powers (especially the financial powers).

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The humanism of autonomous subjectivity, which Maruyama endeavors to elaborate along with his reading of Fukuzawa, is animated, one can say, by a subtle dialectic between the spirit of play and the spirit of seriousness. Play has to break the spirit of seriousness that founds traditional Japanese fetishism as it founds Western structural centralization of subjectivity (Hegeliantype statism). But in return, the playful aspect of flexibility and freedom, which are proper to the simple pleasure of sociality as they are necessary to a movable and unmanageable political life, must yet be compensated by a sense of the seriousness of the matter, risking otherwise to slip into an aimless opportunism, a nihilistic hedonism, or else a religious escape. So Maruyama develops a specific modernism, looking for the middle ground between the totalizing ambition of modern Western subjectivism and the engulfing of the person in fascistic fetishism. He thus fights on two fronts. If it is indeed fascistic fetishism that is the main target of his attacks (in particular the premodern social determinism and conformism, together with their alleged rooting in natural or divine laws), he nevertheless remains concerned with avoiding a Hegelian-Marxist type of absolutism, based on a hypertrophy and hardening of formalized subjectivism. In this double requirement that reminds us to some degree of Takeuchi but with the help of finer and less ideologized analyses, there is indeed, as suggested by J. Victor Koschmann, an invitation to continue the project of a yet unaccomplished modernity, beyond the often regressive hints of contemporary “postmodernism.”10 NOTES 1. At the moment of the explosion, he was separated from it by a distance of four kilometers and protected by a wall of bricks. He will never forget the moaning of the wounded nor the vision of the corpses “heaped up like tuna fish in the market place.” He expressed himself about this matter during an interview for the Chugoku Shinbun on August 5 and 6, 1969, for the commemoration of the twenty-five years of the bomb. 2. Quoted by Kersten 2000, 9. 3. Maruyama 1952. 4. Maruyama 1992. 5. Maruyama 1956. 6. Maruyama 1961. 7. See also Heisig, Kasulis, and Maraldo 2011, 922. 8. Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901) is considered to be one of the most significant thinkers of the Japanese enlightenment. He is the initiator of a considerable number of reforms that were introduced during the process of modernization of the country. He worked on liberating Japanese society from the feudal straitjacket. Having studied Western sciences (mainly through the only accessible texts, then in Dutch), he went



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three times for a trip to the West (twice in North America and once in Europe), as a participant in missions organized by the Tokugawa government. Back from his first trip to America, he was employed by the shogunate and wrote a book on The State of the West, which was an immediate success and started his career as a prolific writer. He tried to encourage the European spirit of the enlightenment as well as its scientific methodology. He endeavored to help them overcome the thoughtless adoption (or rejection) of some Western novelties. He kept repeating that one has to develop the intellect not just moral obligation. He also wrote a number of texts on women’s empowerment in relation to Confucianist social regulations. He is also famous for having written The Advancement of Science (Gakumon no susume 学問の勧め). The book, also a great success, is composed of seventeen essays published separately during a period of five years. In opposition to feudalism, Fukuzawa encourages egalitarianism, independence of thought, and an enlightened individualism (notably through education). He considers study to be the best factor of promotion in a society. Moreover he believes that a society whose members are well instructed will climb on the international scene and enable it to be treated equally with other nations (Western among others). However knowledge must not remain theoretical but must also be practical and applied to everyday activities. He considers natural sciences, politics, economics, or ethics more important than the traditional Confucianist philological studies. 9. TB 233–34. 10. Koschmann 1989.

Chapter 2

Arendt and Maruyama Two Complementary Approaches to Totalitarianism

In presenting the views of Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) and Maruyama Masao 丸山眞男 (1914–1996) on fascism and totalitarianism, I will not be speaking as a “specialist” of Japanese thought, nor even as a professional philosopher. My voice is rather that of an ordinary intellectual living in the early years of the twenty-first century when we seem to have reentered those “dark times” (finsteren Zeiten) of which Arendt spoke. As new forms of fascism take place even here in Europe, there are reasons to believe that totalitarian methods and solutions could fall upon us unexpectedly at any time. As intellectuals we must not only be alert to this possibility but must work to protect the spirit of democratic civilization against it. We need to safeguard humanism against the destruction of the human that totalitarian systems bring. My suggestion is that Arendt and Maruyama can serve us as guides in that effort. Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism is well known. One aspect of its relevance for us is the way she managed to combine into a single typology two ideologically antithetic political regimes, namely, Hitlerism and Stalinism. I would like to complement her analysis with a number of remarks from Maruyama Masao concerning the Japanese version of the totalitarian phenomenon, the tennō-centrism that flourished during the ultranationalistic and militaristic regimes of the 1930s and 1940s. No author today can seriously deny the fascist character of this regime;1 the reality of its totalitarian proportions emerges clearly from a comparison between Arendt’s and Maruyama’s analyses.2 The interest of joining the attribute “totalitarian” to the description of Japanese fascism doesn’t lie in the formulation of a new grievance against a regime that has been universality condemned for decades, but rather in giving a new proof of the eminently “modern” character of the Japan of the twentieth century—taking into account here the fact that totalitarianism, as 41

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Arendt has shown, is a product of modernity (and, to some extent, a reaction against it, which confirms its dependence on it). Now it seems to me that Japanese modernity, which some people still contest, forces us to take into account the Japanese cultural phenomenon within all discussion concerning modernity and it’s critique—considering also the fact that, if Japan is modern to the same extent as the West, it is so according to its own proper cultural heritage, the acknowledgement of which should be able to enrich the present day discussions on modernity in Europe and it would enable us to overcome the extremely iterative character of the arguments that we keep hearing within them. HANNAH ARENDT’S ANALYSIS AND THE CASE OF JAPAN In The Origins of Totalitarianism3 Hannah Arendt proposed to begin with a joint examination of Bolshevism and Nazism as a basis for a factual typology of totalitarianism. At first sight, one may regret that her analysis was not enriched with precisions from Japanese ultranationalism. The defect works to our advantage once we see how it enables us better to identify the remarkable relevance of her typology: we discover that the scheme she has elaborated by focusing on Stalinism and Hitlerism also applies to the militaristic tennô-centric system. As we shall see, this is particularly true for the comparison of German National Socialism with Japanese ultranationalism. Ultranationalistic Japan did not turn fiercely against any particular nation or ethnic group—certainly not the Jewish people—as the Nazis did. What it did manage to do though was to create a cohesion among its own people through a mixture of chauvinism and xenophobia. Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910 led it to treat its own Korean population as second-class citizens whose proper identity was actively suppressed. This in itself suggests some similarity to the treatment of the Jews in Germany, though obviously much more temperate and with no genocidal intent.4 In any case, the question is too serious and far-reaching to be treated here. What is clear is that by exalting the nation with its ideology of ethnic identity, the Shinto mythology of the divine origin of the Japanese race stands shoulder to shoulder with the Nazi mythology of a superior Aryan race. Both relied heavily on a xenophobia fueled by every means at the disposal of the ruling powers. On this score, the account of the genealogy of European antisemitism in the first volume of Arendt’s Origins sheds some light on the study of Japanese nationalism. But it is especially with her analysis of imperialism in the second volume that the typological and structural analogies prove most illuminating.



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Beginning in the Meiji era (1868–1912), the Japanese nation modeled its construction on a heterogeneous Western model. It conjoined the economic nationalism and enlightened despotism of Bismarckian Prussia to the imperialistic colonialism of the Atlantic capitalistic powers, Britain and France. During the first half of the Shōwa era, from 1926 to 1945, imperial Japan was less preoccupied with the democratic pretext and the legislative framework of the countries it sought to emulate. Its commitment to militaristic expansion merged the colonial logic of advanced industrialized nations (France, Britain, The Netherlands, and Belgium) with the annexationist logic of the continental European powers (the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian empires).5 It showed no scruples when it came to applying the same principles: unlimited economic growth became the stimulus to and final end of expansion; colonial administration created a bureaucracy whose principles of governance were based not on law but on decree or statutory order, and whose executive action included state-sponsored violence; social cohesion at home was cemented by diverting class consciousness and conflicts of the national scale into the cultivation of ethnic consciousness bound to the Empire, with the result that tribal unity among members of the dominant nation, viewed as more civilized or even ethnically superior, was pitted against dominated nations viewed as backward or inferior. These phenomena, which Arendt analyzes in the context of the European imperialistic powers at the end of the nineteenth century, are all to be found in Japanese imperialism at the beginning of the twentieth. Both helped, in comparable ways, to pave the way to World War I, a war between rival imperialistic powers if ever there was one. Both helped, too, lay the groundwork for fascist ideology and its totalitarian institutionalization by highlighting the hypocrisy of capitalistic democracies, which are at the same time unequal and imperialistic exploiters, by fueling contempt for human rights and discrediting democratic ideals, and by exposing colonial bureaucracy as a contradiction to the principles underlying the rule of law—and thus ironically prefiguring a totalitarian conduct. Finally, in Europe as in Japan, the ascent of Soviet power during the 1920s came to be felt more and more as a threat against which fascism presented itself as the strongest possible defense. Totalitarian systems were established differently in Russia, Germany, and Japan, the first by violent revolution (1917), the second by free elections (1933), and the last by a progressive militarization of the regime that began slowly in 1912 and picked up the pace after 1936.6 Once established, however, they functioned and intensified according to the same logic: the massification and atomization of social classes, the suppression of rights and liberties, the establishment of a police state, and the introduction of a reign of terror aimed at total domination of the populace. In each case ideological fictions were introduced to fill the vacuum of meaning created by the rigidity of

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the new social atomization (masses composed of isolated atoms) and by the destruction of the old familiar world. Monolithic mass movements replaced multi-party systems. While the international consensus juris was discarded, there was a militarization of the regimes with foreign policies aiming ever more openly for world domination. At home, concentration camps spread fear among the general public, even as the powers pursued their ends with ever greater suicidal fever and hastened the way to their own collapse. Throughout it all, the ruling ideological fiction was crucial in channeling and sublimating the frustration of the masses, endemic in capitalistic society, but also in rallying the intelligentsia to the surprising phenomena of what Arendt terms “the temporary alliance between the mob and the elite.”7 To be sure, the frustration of the masses stems from a loss of meaning whose origins are complex but linked, in any case, to the social upheavals associated with the hasty adaptation of industrial capitalism (what Heidegger, in simpler terms, referred to as the “age of technology”). Among other things, we see the sudden uprooting of rural populations from traditional cottage-industry production with its reliance on individual craft and its setting in communities organized according to class, corporations, or guilds. These workers suddenly found themselves transplanted in the production line of the industrialized exploitation with no chance to band together for common interests. This social atomization with its loss of social anchoring forced workers into social isolation or, at best, refuge in the family cell. The complementary phenomena of massification and atomization signaled the disappearance of the very web of human relations that constitute a public space. Not surprisingly, it went hand in hand with the disappearance of traditional popular culture even as an “avant-garde” urban culture stepped in to alienate more and more the bourgeois public from their past and repackage their own nostalgia for sheer consumption. Uprooted rural people and bourgeois circles both suffer from a lack of meaning, even an existential vacuum. Expectations of change, vague but powerful, rush in to fill the void, only to make them ever more vulnerable to the ideological fictions of the totalitarian discourse. As for the intellectuals of the time, in Europe as in Japan, some were driven by a strong contempt for the bourgeois liberalism undergirding the capitalistic system that had led to the social conflicts that sparked the Russian revolution as much as it had led toward the imperialistic rivalries that lay behind World War I. Behind a facade of liberal respectability, the capitalistic bourgeoisie were behaving around the world like a gang of thieves, motivated only by the lure of financial gain. Liberalism’s loss of credit in the eyes of the intelligentsia explains to some extent the support a few of them gave to the fascist discourse, which at least had the honesty to raise an audible voice against



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the hypocritical logic of imperialistic capitalism and its competitive rush for global domination. Looking at the actual content of the ideological fictions at work in particular totalitarian movements, we note considerable differences: in Russia, a schematization of Marxist philosophy of history, with a local adaptation to a Panslavonic messianism; in Germany, a Nietzschean-style vulgarization of Darwinian evolutionary theory; and in Japan, a simplification, politicization, and militarization of the Shinto beliefs. Whatever their differences, the ideological fictions play fundamentally the same role, namely, to intoxicate the masses and legitimize power by means of unassailable “laws,” which—be they historical, natural, or divine—are meant to be in essence “superior” to human laws and superior to the consensus juris in effect between nations. The German situation, during the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), is quite comparable to that of Japan during the Taishō era (1912–1926) when Marxists and conservative nationalists, though ideologically opposites, were in fact objectively working together at the disintegration of a rule of law (which was nevertheless less pronounced in the archipelago than it was in Germany). During the first part of the Shōwa era (1926–1945), when militarization of the regime became solidified and was taking an ever more nationalistic and totalitarian turn, intellectuals on the left were being forcibly silenced while the conservative intellectuals wavered between keeping silent (the strategy of the more moderate among them) or supporting openly the regime (that of the more opportunistic). As a result, there was little open resistance in Japan except for the rare committed Christians or Buddhists, or the handful of Marxists who held their own and did not change sides. The question we are left with concerns what it was in the Japanese situation that prompted the conversion of such a significant number of the intellectuals to the ideology of the day. THE CONTRIBUTION OF MARUYAMA MASAO This is where Maruyama Masao’s contribution shows itself to be most valuable in his endeavor to clarify two main questions: How could fascism develop on the political foundations laid by Meiji Japan? And how could Japanese intellectuals shaped for decades by Western rationalism have fallen prey so easily to the irrational mythology of the imperial way? I base myself here on a collection of essays, now a classic, translated into English as Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics.8 Keeping his distance from the Marxism of a number of his colleagues during the 1950s and 1960s, Maruyama sought to explain not only the conscious ideology of Japan’s ultranationalism but also the often unconscious values

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and prejudices that underlay it. The question for him was to show that the fascist period was not, as often presented, a simple deviation, in response to external circumstances in the world at large, from the fundamental impulse toward democratization that allegedly characterized contemporary Japan. It was rather the expression of tacit elements harbored deep within the cultural sensibilities of the Japanese. Never having been taken seriously, let alone properly assimilated, once these elements reached the surface, they were bound to assert themselves in exaggerated form. Consequently, while Maruyama recognizes certain parallels with Nazism and a common logic underlining them (which puts him squarely in line with Hannah Arendt), he is at pains to spell out the specificity of Japanese fascism. At the same time, a close study of Hegel and Marx having made him distrustful of their philosophical views on historical necessity, he maintains throughout his faith in a history understood as the “progress towards consciousness and freedom.” Here he shows his debt to the Enlightenment and its modern champions such as Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, Fukuzawa Yukichi, and Nakae Chomin.9 The first difficulty in identifying the specificity of Japanese nationalism, explains Maruyama, lies in its mixed nature. On the one hand, it belongs to the logic of modern European nationalism, after which it tried to model itself. On the other, it resembles Asian nationalism, to which it belongs historically. Asian nationalism (as seen in China, India, the nations of Southeast Asia) reached its high point in the period immediately following the war, manifesting itself in the form of revolutionary and anti-colonial nationalism, that is, as a struggle to liberate Asia from Western imperialism and from the local ruling classes collaborating with the latter. Although Japan shared the Asian ideal of an anti-imperialistic struggle, it distinguished itself from the other Asian nations on three grounds. First, it had not been colonized in the strict sense by any Western power but had maintained its economic and political sovereignty. Second, its nationalistic struggle for independence had been led by the ruling elite rather than by the people or the bourgeoisie. Finally, it had tried to ensure its own autonomy by producing a superior brand of European nationalism. This led it to colonial expansionism, notably, in the direction of its Asian neighbors. So it was, Maruyama argues, that Japanese nationalism “lost its virginity,”10 and even if it no longer needed to measure itself against Western standards, it ended up repeating the same abuses. Moreover, since Japan’s nationalism had not fermented among the general populations but was a child of the ruling elite, it was quick to reproduce the capitalistic exploitation and authoritarianism that is the natural result of extreme government control. Compared to the West, however, Japanese nationalism was an ambiguous adventure. To be sure, the national consciousness of the nation-states of Europe was shaped against the background of a common belonging together,



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a common civilization that reached back to the universal ambitions of the Catholic Church and the Roman Empire. This commonality in turn shaped the implicit consciousness of a formal “League of Nations,” the godchild of a commitment to universality shared by all the nations that made it up. In contrast, each of the great nations of Asia—India, China and Japan—made up a relatively autonomous civilization of its own which, throughout all its mutual influences, represented each time a relatively closed, ethnocentric domain that had been forced to open up to the rest of the world because of its often-confrontational encounters with the West. Japan thus exposed itself to modern national consciousness not just in the hope of liberating itself from the Western ascendancy (as had the other Asian nations) but also in its distinctive desire to be assimilated into the society of nations that was forming in the Western world. Accordingly, if Japanese nationalism was at first something it shared in effect with its Asian neighbors, the will to “expel the Barbarians” (尊王攘夷 sonnô-jôi) in order to avoid being overrun by them; and if, for that reason, it had built up its own power on the principle of “Western science, Japanese soul” (和魂洋才 wakon yōsai) and “prosperous nation, strong army” (富国 強兵 fukoku kyōhei), it had changed radically in the process. In order to earn recognition on an equal footing with Western nations, it had to adopt not just the material and technical know-how of Western powers but some elements of the consensus juris that govern the relations between nations—at least in its first stages. By the dawn of the twentieth century, Japan had reached economic and industrial parity with Western nations. But the social tensions caused by a toorapid industrialization had the effect not of leading it toward the progressive emancipation and sovereignty of the people, as had been the case in Europe, but rather of being dragged into reactionary and nationalistic policies imitating the methods of Western colonial imperialism and its proto-totalitarian tendencies. The contradiction in the West between capitalistic expansion, which led to exploitation, colonial imperialism, and massification of the people, and democratization, which led to emancipation and the equal right in their homelands, was resolved in Japan by an initial flirtation with political liberalism during the Taishō era, followed by a wholesale commitment to the former, imperialism. This orientation took Japan down the slope we know all too well, bringing out its isolation from the international community to which it had originally aspired, as witnessed in its symbolic withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933. The fascist transformation of Japan implied, as it had in Germany, a forced national cohesion that impeded popular aspirations to emancipation. Such cohesion was secured not merely through popular enthusiasm for expansion by way of colonization, annexations, and war abroad, all of which made

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people forget about tensions and repressions within the country, but also through a program of education and propaganda extolling the person of the emperor as a concrete manifestation of the Japanese nation. As Maruyama is quick to point out, such a tendency was already in place from the time of the Meiji restoration and was simply radicalized during the fascist period. We have to, therefore, resist the temptation of some historians to depict a one-sided view of the Meiji era as if it represented Japan’s period of Enlightenment and the force behind the movement toward democratization, liberalization, emancipation, and rationalization of which ultranationalism would be no more than a temporary aberration. In reality, interventionist and nationalist tendencies were already in place in the background of the drive to “modernization,” which in part explains the ease with which fascism was able to take root. In sum, what needs to be understood better is the nature of this predisposition to fascism that reaches back to Meiji and perhaps earlier. To this end, it is first of all necessary to get a better sense of the psychology of a movement that Maruyama insists had no clear ideological structure of the sort we find in Nazism. Its doctrine was shrouded in a series of slogans—“Eight corners, one roof,” “Spread the imperial way to all corners of the earth,” “Establish the sphere of Co-prosperity for Greater East Asia,” and so forth—and yet the effect was a working ideology with a remarkable psychological and persuasive efficiency.11 The fact is, a largely unexpressed logic, spirit, and strength drove the ideology of Japanese fascism from behind and gave it a surprising cohesion capable of guiding the country with resolve despite a lack of clear will among the ruling class. Indeed, governments and cabinets resigned one after the other at a surprising pace as rival factions contested for political power among the politicians as well as among the military. Maruyama has this to say: Looking at the developments from a wide-range or macroscopic point of view, we can, to be sure, discover a consistent sequence of cause and effect in the development of Japanese imperialism during this decade. Viewed microscopically, however, it appears rather as the result of a vast accumulation of illogical decisions.

It is precisely because plans for the country were so badly conceived that Japanese decision makers ended up being guided by events that seemed to be dictated from outside the government. At this point the role of the state, whose functioning Maruyama traces back to the Meiji restoration, stands out in clear relief. The axiological neutrality of the liberal states of Europe left questions of ethical or confessional choice to the private sphere and restricted its public function in such matters to arbitration among individuals. The Japanese state, in contrast, had made



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concerted efforts since the Meiji era to control subjective moral values to the same extent as they controlled the external and objective laws of society. Consequently, little room was left for moral or civic conscience or for democratization. On the contrary, people were predisposed to submit to “fascism from above” during the 1930s and 1940s and thus to acquiesce to the total mobilization of the minds undertaken during those years. Personal or private questions were not to be recognized as such but always made it into a public affair; the private lives of citizens were reduced to civic duty. Not in the least did the Japanese state encourage the internalization of a private space for the exercise of individual freedom. Rather, it strove to preserve the social values of Confucian ethics (filial piety and loyalty toward the sovereign and toward the group), politicized the sacred values of Shinto, and it integrated them into a system increasingly subject to government control in which the emperor signified the union of spiritual and political authority. A state control of subjective values, moral, spiritual, political, and aesthetic battered and grew stronger, intellectual freedom as well as scientific and philosophical research was obliged first and foremost to contribute to “the good of the nation.” In this way, we see that the essentially Western training of Japanese intellectuals, from Meiji to Shōwa, was precisely exclusively “intellectual” and did little to transform internally their ethical and political perception of the world about them into a solid civic consciousness or sense of personal responsibility. A cloud of reproach hung over everything of a private nature, not simply for matters of romantic love but also on the level of private enrichment. This meant that Japanese capitalism was only able to develop within the framework of the service to the state, predisposing the country to nationalistic interventionism along the lines of Friedrich List rather than the liberal capitalism of Adam Smith.12 This type of interventionism, in which there was no authority higher than the state, may evoke the absolutism of Hobbes, but in fact it is more radical still in that the latter is based on a pure pragmatism or on the arbitrary will of the sovereign, whereas the Japanese imperial system claimed to embody absolutely normative values inherited from an age-old and indisputable tradition reaching back to the gods who founded the country. These values were embodied in an emperor considered to be, literally, the essence of the kokutai 国体 (“national body”) and “the eternal culmination of the true, the good and the beautiful for all times and all places” (Araki Sadao13). This is why, in such a context, national policy—that is to say, imperial policy—had to be in itself good, just, and true. Any dispute of that belief in the name of values external to official policy could only mean significant political conflict. At this stage, the identification of morality with power went so far as to measure the criteria of morality in terms of the degree of power. Because citizens obviously had no access to the power of the state, the state naturally

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became the undisputed locus of all possible moral or legal values. This was to become truer as the state became stronger and also more triumphant in terms of political achievements both at home in Japan and abroad. This is also why, in the arena of international relations, imperial Japan tended to create alliances with the strongest countries, independently of any moral concerns. At last, during the fascist period, when the Japanese state felt itself sufficiently powerful, it was able to adopt a politics of fait accompli and have no scruples about exiting from the moral and legal consensus of a League of Nations, which it openly despised in favor of its own adherence to the law of the strongest. Thus, even before the emergence of fascism, and hence thus also before the rise of Nazi Germany, the assumption was that it is strength that creates the laws, not principles. However, unlike Nazi-style Machiavellianism, which took a satanic delight in trampling openly “bourgeois morality,” Japanese national policy was never fully conscious of its own lack of morality. Quite the contrary, national policy at all levels was carried out in the name of a supreme morality and a particularly scrupulous sense of duty. In the end, the Japanese demagogues of the imperial way actually believed their own slogans. Indeed, this is precisely what they maintained for their defense in the postwar trials: “They did wrong truly believing they were doing right.” Furthermore, whereas Nazis leaders were in general dropouts from the mob, the top echelons of the Japanese hierarchy were surrounded by an aura of respectability while the true rōnins 浪人, the thugs operating in the shadow outside the law, created the faits accomplis that the leaders then had to ratify into official policy. It was easier to appeal to personal responsibility during the Nuremberg trials than it was during the Tokyo trials. The difference between the two cultural contexts, writes Maruyama, is that moral appropriation (Hegel’s Moralität) had never really been developed in Japan, whereas in Germany it had needed to be actively and intentionally destroyed so that Nazi cynicism might flood in unimpeded. Within the imperial system, the Japanese individual was not a free subject but a subject of the emperor. Inflexibility in behavior often masked a profound weakness of character or personality. The social role of imperial subjects, as well as their moral behavior, were conditioned by their place within a hierarchy, which in turn was determined by their relative proximity to the emperor, the supreme seat of legitimacy and power. Therefore it was the imperial army, “the essence of the nation,” that represented the most advance form of “vertical” duty, along together with the typical morality and pride that accompany it. Hierarchically closer to the emperor than ordinary civilians, members of the armed forces looked down on civilians with a feeling of contempt, which they, in turn, transferred to representatives of other nations.



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Here we have a clear instance of the “onion structure” that Arendt attributes to the totalitarian organization. Stalinism, Hitlerism, and tennō-centrism all have in common the establishment of a hierarchy in which the leader serves as a blind center from which all authority flows, drop by drop, so that no level in the system, bureaucratic or military, should feel itself responsible but rather, as Maruyama points out, simply transfers the oppression to the level just below. Paradoxically, the more efficiently the system works the more likely it is to be turned on its head so that, in the Japanese case, “the bottom governs the top.” That is to say, frustrations felt at the base implicitly require higher-ups to take tougher and tougher positions toward those on whom the base must transfer those frustrations. Thus, for example, military expansionist adventures grant legitimacy to a more radicalized activism at the lower levels. Throughout it all, the “system of irresponsibility” and the “transfer of oppression” remain intact and are reinforced. In the case of Europe, dictatorship was the price to be paid for this kind of hierarchical organization, and that meant a calculated blend of a conscious despotism, the destruction of civil society, a smothering of private morality and of political responsibility. In Japan such a strategy would not only have been foreign to traditional social order, it would have been unnecessary. There was nothing to be destroyed. Rather than behave like responsible individuals, the chief political decision makers, ministers, and members of the military-industrial oligarchy considered themselves obliged to laws of which they were merely the vehicles. The historical mission of the nation, indebtedness to the ancestors, the demands of the base, the atrocities carried out by the rōnins—all these pressured any sense of civic responsibility into irrelevance. The actual role of the emperor was more like that of a constitutional monarch. He did not so much really concentrate effective power in his own person as symbolize a center and summit of power that was in itself empty. It was a pretext for the whole hierarchy, not its regent. In the end, since the emperor was a descendant of the gods, the heir of an ancestral tradition, and an incarnation of eternal values, he was the medium of a higher dimension. Far from generating the norms, he was merely their instrument. The very term “Meiji restoration” signals the commitment to return to an older order of things from time immemorial, an order from which shogunal power was a temporary deviation. The absoluteness of the emperor set the same scale as Japan’s vocation: to submit the whole planet to a hierarchy of nations not unlike to the feudal relationship of suzerainty, the place of each nation being determined by its relative proximity to Japan. For these reasons Maruyama concludes that the Japanese state since the Meiji era was predisposed to fascism. The fascist period in Japan, running roughly from 1935 to 1945, is characterized by the radicalization of

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a government control that had already been in place for half a century. Maruyama concludes, From the time of the Pacific War, the Tojo dictatorship reduced political freedom as far as possible, in fact almost to the zero point. Yet the essential conditions for such a state of affairs had all existed previously; so far as fascist evolution is concerned, this period was simply a development in volume and did not differ in quality from the previous period.

LESSONS TO BE LEARNED FROM MARUYAMA’S ANALYSIS It is not possible here to line up all of the conclusions of Maruyama’s analyses of Japanese fascism, but simply to underline some of the many perspectives it opens up. 1.  Maruyama shows how Japanese ultranationalism is also, to some extent, a result of the Western-oriented modernization of Japan since Meiji. Japan seems thus to have taken more from the totalitarian potential of European modernity, so forcefully described by Arendt, than from its properly humanistic and emancipatory potential. In doing so, we are invited to rethink the unpleasant aspects of European modernity instead of focusing only on its progressive achievements. 2.  This paradoxical conclusion of Maruyama’s work on Japanese fascism recalls the paradox of an important earlier study of his on the neo-Confucianism of the Tokugawa period.14 In that work, Maruyama describes the beginnings of a truly progressive and humanistic style of modern political consciousness, notably the distinction between the private and the public and the promotion of the individual, that the Meiji era had swiped away. Such native political consciousness, shaped independently of any European influence, seems to suggest the need for further inquiry into these unexploited dimensions of modernity in Japan as a way to enrich the often problematic debates still going on today regarding modernity and its possible overcoming. The development of humanism to which Maruyama draws our attention focuses on the progressive distinction between the private and the public sphere, but it also entails a disruption of the natural-ethical continuum that grounded neo-Confucianist models of social hierarchy. Another aspect of this Asian humanism can be found in Watsuji Tetsuro’s interpretation of ningen 人間 or “human being” as composed of two kanji, “person” (nin 人) and “relationship” between persons (gen



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間). Human being, he argues, is fundamentally a communal or group reality (a Mitsein: a being-with-others). The individual, driven to isolation in the massification of society, is thus seen as an abstraction of this essential togetherness. Might this not shed some light on what Arendt means when she speaks of the common world of human actions as the basis for any free political life? 3.  My allusion to Watsuji suggests another consequence of Arendt’s and Maruyama’s analyses of totalitarianism. Even my brief summary of their views seems to offer fresh insight into the “participation” of the Kyoto-School philosophers on Japan’s wartime regime. We know that the navy, which was far less radical than the army and sought more acceptable solution to the impending war against the United States, contacted a number of philosophers associated with the Kyoto School to organize discussions that they hoped would have favorable influence on the fate of Japan.15 The results were the famous symposium on Overcoming modernity and the discussions on Japan and the Standpoint of World History published in the pages of the Chūōkoron magazine. I do not wish to engage in the arguments over who was a sympathizer and who was a fighter, or to what extent they held to their positions. I would only stress that the Kyoto School philosophers, whatever they said, while representing a hope for some, were much more a serious threat to the regime, for the simple reason that they were thinking freely. What is more, they drew on both Western and Buddhist modes of thought, both of which were most unwelcome to the ruling powers. In this context I recall Arendt’s remark: “[U]nder totalitarian conditions . . . ; every thought that deviates from the officially prescribed and permanently changing line is already suspect, no matter in which field of human activity it occurs. Simply because of their capacity to think, human beings are suspect by definition (OT 430).” Ideology is designed to destroy the freedom of thought that defines our very humanity, and the totalitarian system of terror is meant to radicalize that destruction to the point of doing away with individuals as legal, moral, and finally even physical persons. Thinking freely is the first line of resistance against a totalitarian movement, and this is precisely what the Kyoto School philosophers did.  4.  I would further suggest that extending the analysis of totalitarianism from Stalinism and Hitlerism to tennō-centrism can help us understand events we are witnessing today such as the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, particularly as we can see it in the Islamic State in Syria or Iraq, not to mention the recent developments of state capitalism in contemporary China.

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5.  These concerns are not restricted to the fascism and totalitarianism of Islamic fundamentalism. There is also the danger that a strong counterreaction within our own nation-states, still run by the rule of law, might lead to a progressive debilitating of the very legal framework that protects our rights and liberties. Maruyama saw this danger in the McCarthy witch-hunts during the 1950s in the United States.16 More recently, people in the United States have been troubled over the Patriot Act enacted after 9/11. Nor is Europe today immune from risk—far from it. As intellectuals, we must therefore be wary and remain on watch. Scrutinize, try to understand, and prevent. Or as Buddhism tells us: Be aware, be ever mindful. NOTES 1. The fascist nature of imperial Japan in the 1930s and 1940s is obvious from the ideology it openly claimed. Maruyama notes that all fascist movements share a “rejection of the world view of individualistic liberalism, opposition to parliamentary politics, which is the political expression of liberalism, insistence on foreign expansion, a tendency to glorify military build-up and war, a strong emphasis on racial myths and the national essence, a rejection of class warfare . . . , and the struggle against Marxism” (TB 35). Fascist regimes reject both capitalism and socialism because both appear to be a form of materialism that denies all idealistic motivation. In practice, as we know, all the fascist states will eventually ally themselves with the capitalistic plutocracy. Japanese fascism shows a number of distinctive traits. Foremost is the insistence on family structure, which was extended to the nation as a whole so that it could be seen as a single extended family united around the imperial family. This insistence not only confirmed the fusion of the private and the public, it reinforced the conviction of belonging to a same blood, equated loyalty to societal leaders with filial piety, and facilitated the amalgamation of the rural populations, still numerous at the time, in which the family cell was essential. These rural communities, heirs to a long tradition of peasant uprisings, were worried about an industrial and urban development that would not favor them. The fascist movement in Japan cleverly managed to seduce the provinces with traditionalistic agrarian clichés like the glorification of the family, and a host of promises—all of them to be broken—having to do with the decentralization of government and a greater autonomy for rural communities. Agrarianism is probably the main difference between Japan’s ultranationalism and German Nazism, which was more preoccupied with restoring the working class. Furthermore, unlike Hitlerism, there is an element that brought Japanese fascism into close alignment with Stalinism: it is Japan’s explicit ambition to liberate Asia from Western imperialism. This was to take place through the creation of a Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere (Daitōa kyōeiken大東亜共栄圏), which we now know was no more than a pretext for Japanese imperialism.



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2. It is not always easy to distinguish fascism from totalitarianism. In general, we may say that fascism remains within the constitutional system established by the rule of law, except that the entire party system has been usurped by a single party, which progressively imposes an authoritarian regime and suppresses all political opposition. A totalitarian system goes a step further in order to keep radicalizing itself: governance is executed through secret police rather than through the open, official channels. In this way it aims at a gradual dismantling of the rule of law and is animated by the will to global domination both abroad (through wars of expansion) and within the country (through a reign of terror and a gradual robotization and dehumanization of the general population). The creation of concentration camps, where these goals are experimented with before being applied to the whole population, is the clearest sign that a regime has turned totalitarian. 3. OT, volume 3. 4. This historic situation might actually be more comparable to the attitude of Britain toward Ireland during the long centuries of English occupation until the Irish independence of 1916. 5. Arendt doesn’t mention here Spanish and Portuguese colonialism, which belongs to an older age of European expansionism, both of which were on the decline during the nineteenth century of (mainly British and French) industrial imperialism. 6. Maruyama distinguishes three phases in the development of the Japanese fascist movement. (1) The “preparatory period,” which extended from about 1919 just after World War I until the Manchurian incident of 1931, when after a number of failed military coups d’état (notably against Prime Minister Hamaguchi), the army decided to invade Manchuria and establish a puppet state (Mandchukuo). The civil government, forced to retrospectively recognize what had happened, had obviously already lost its authority in favor of the military. Yet a number of civilian right-wing movements were being created, thus paving the way to the civil acceptance of a militaristic regime. (2) The second stage, or “period of maturity,” during which the military became openly the driving force of the fascist movement, rallying most of the civilian right-wing organizations. This period is also marked out by a series of failed military coup, establishing a permanent state of terror, thus a terrorism, until the February 26 Incident, in 1936, which shook the entire nation. (3) The third stage, the “consummation period” that goes from the army purge, where the actors of the coup were only mildly condemned by the civil power, until the Pacific war, with the Tojo dictatorship, ending on August 15, 1945. During this period, says Maruyama, “the military, now the open supporters of fascism from above, fashioned an unstable ruling structure in coalition with the semi-feudal power of the bureaucracy and the Senior Retainers on the one hand, and with monopoly capital and the political parties on the other” (TB 27). 7. OT 326. 8. TB. 9. Maruyama shares in particular Weber’s non-ideological sociological look on capitalism, he shares Mannheim’s rationalistic approach to ideology and his faith in the role of the intellectuals, he shares Fukuzawa’s interest in learning from modern Western science, and with Nakae Chomin he shares the conviction that a proper

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parliamentary system, defending the rights of the people, can function within Japanese society. 10. TB 137. 11. The main theorist of Japanese fascism is probably Kita Ikki (1883–1937) with his book, published in 1919, on General Outlines of Measures for the Reconstruction of Japan. The program was anti-communist while including at the same time a project for “the emancipation of the Asian Peoples.” He thus didn’t just defend a Japanese nationalism but an Asian nationalism led by Japan. 12. Concerning the role played by Friedrich List in Asian capitalism, see Stevens 1997. 13. Quoted by Maruyama (TB 8). Araki Sadao (1877–1966) was a military and right-wing extremist. During the 1945 trials he was first condemned to life imprisonment, then forgiven in 1955. 14. Maruyama 1952. 15. See Ôhashi 2001. 16. Notably in an article titled “Fascism—Some Problems: A Consideration of its Political Dynamics” (TB 157–76).

Chapter 3

Modernity and Its Overcoming

The fundamental intention of this chapter is the clarification of what is meant by the philosophical concept of modernity and what it can possibly mean to speak of “postmodernism,” or even to attempt the “overcoming” of modernity, as a number of Japanese thinkers sought to do in the early 1940s. Indeed, in this context it is extremely important to revive the memory of the ideological disaster that the project of “overcoming modernity” caused in the Japanese tennō-centric regime at the time of the Fifteen Year War. My aim is not to perversely reawaken extinguished passions and old controversies. On the contrary, my concern here is twofold: first, to “save,” so to speak, the remarkable philosophical and humanistic message of the Kyoto School by extricating it from its political misadventures; and second, to resist what is happening today in both the West as much as in the East, namely, a progressive erosion of the commitment to democracy and the resurgence—sometimes obvious, sometimes hidden—of what can only be called: “neo-fascism.” Whether it is in the neo-liberal scheme in the Atlantic style (the heritage of Adam Smith) or in the state interventionism of the East-Asian style (the combined heritage of Friedrich List and of Neo-Confucianism),1 not to mention the various forms of fundamentalism of which Islamism is only the most spectacular, the global triumph of capitalism (asserted far more today than it was at the beginning of the twentieth century) is once again (just as it did some eighty years ago) generating various symptoms of an ideological and pathological syndrome. Any intellectual who has a modicum of civic consciousness has no other choice but to resolutely oppose this—maybe not, principally, through any militancy, but at least by actively seeking to clarify the ideas at stake. Such is the primary objective of the present chapter. Under the general expression “modernity and its overcoming,” we actually have an extremely vast subject matter within which I propose to distinguish three great thematic blocks. These blocks are linked by the common project of criticizing modernity, but they are separated by the particular context within which each of these critiques developed, as well as by their respective 57

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forms and by the ideological stakes. These thematic blocks are (1) the original Japanese project of “overcoming modernity”; (2) the more recent cultural movement of “postmodernism”; and (3) the still present conceptual phenomenon of “postmodernity.” The first theme—“the overcoming of modernity” (kindai no chōkoku 近代の超克)—covers the subject of the notorious Tokyo symposium of 1942: the monumental ambition of surmounting modern Western civilization. As has become customary since the publication of a famous article by Takeuchi Yoshimi,2 I associate the symposium in question with the so-called Chūōkoron discussions of the same period, in which some representatives of the Kyoto School who were also present at the symposium participated. These forums debated many of the same problems (more cultural in the case of the symposium, more political in the case of the discussions). The question of “overcoming modernity” primarily concerns ultranationalistic Japan in its confrontation with Europe and the United States. But today more than ever, it can also be related to other civilizations—China for example—in their problematic relations to the West and finally, in certain respects, it can be linked to the Nietzschean-style genealogical critique of modernity within Europe itself. One could believe, at first sight, that the criticism of the modern, contained in the Japanese ambition of “overcoming modernity,” is basically similar to that of René Guénon, when he (for example in La crise du monde moderne) attacks Western modernity on behalf of Oriental tradition. For Guénon it would simply mean terminating all those technical and juridical novelties that originated in the West but which are destroying the ancient values and ways of living of the East. If, however, there actually is a traditionalistic dimension in the ideology of overcoming modernity, then the latter, in a typically Japanese mode, is not insensitive to the seduction of the new—proper to modernity—and its relation to such a modernity will thus be fundamentally ambiguous. The traditionalism of the upholders of “overcoming modernity” is therefore not exclusively nostalgic and includes, one could say, “the tradition of new” (Rosenberg), which implies a take on the course and meaning of history. This characteristic conjunction of traditionalism and modernism, moreover, is quite comparable to the mindset of the “conservative revolution” in Germany during that same period. A comparison between the two movements would certainly prove most fruitful. The second theme, more specifically Western, concerns the opposition between modernism and postmodernism. The academic dimension of the modernist movement developed most conspicuously in a specific field: the postwar American art criticism (notably with Clement Greenberg).3 The discussions around modernism and postmodernism can clarify the ideological implications of the initial theme of overcoming modernity. They demonstrate in particular the reasons behind the ideologically reactionary dimension of all

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attitudes that go under the label anti-modern or post-modernist criticism, in spite of their claim to radical novelty. In the eyes of art criticism, the formal aesthetic research of architectural and pictorial European modernism from the 1920s to the 1960s4 were accompanied by an emancipatory and progressive ideal. The American postmodernism of the 1980s and 1990s abandoned this, not for aggressively reactionary reasons but rather in favor of an accommodating submission to the demands of the market and to the ever more anti-aesthetic and anti-humanistic values of a triumphant and uncontested capitalism. It is within such a context that there reappears some shady nostalgia for Einfühlung aesthetics of which the fascist styles (Mussolinian, Hitlerian, and Stalinistic) have been, in the past, the most extreme examples.5 All this simply confirms what was obvious during the first appearance of the word “modernism” within the doctrinal debates of the nineteenth-century Catholic church. It is indeed well known that, in those debates, the emancipatory modernism of political liberalism appeared as a threat for the theocentric authority of tradition. Not unlike what is happening in the contemporary Islamic world, liberalism created a reaction—at first anti-modernistic, and then bluntly fundamentalistic—which led to highly suspect political compromises. Finally, the third great theme is that of postmodernity such as it has appeared first in France in the 1970s, with Jean-François Lyotard and the post-structuralists, and which, via an American detour, has had a considerable impact in Japan in the 1980s, notably with Karatani Kôjin. This phenomenon has since then fostered at-times ambiguous relations with the thematic of postmodernism as well as with that of overcoming modernity. This is due, among other things, to the perpetuation or rediscovery of Nishida philosophy by Ôhashi Ryōsuke and Nakamura Yūjirō,6 among others. Here again, without showing any obvious longings for any type of neofascism, it is the accommodating submission to a capitalistic ideology, wherein the political emancipatory intention is silenced in favor of the exclusively economic dimension of indefinite growth. This growth generates a state of mind that surreptitiously allows for the erosion of the democratic commitments and simply abandons the critical and subversive role of the intellectual in front of the mainstream of consumer society. It is this complex triangulation that I would wish to clarify by means of an investigation developed along two distinct registers: (1) ontological and topological (or theoretic and cognitivist); and (2) political (or practical and ideological). On the horizon of this entire investigation, after having gone through these multiple problematics, one could attempt to redefine the project of overcoming modernity under the form of a “self-subversion of modernity”: some type of “subversive rationalism” that would be reminiscent, but in a

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self-critical mode, of what Nishitani Keiji had in mind when he called for a “self-overcoming of nihilism.”7 I therefore propose, if only approximately at first, two clearly distinct definitions of modernity, directly linked to the difference of register that I insist on establishing between the practical-political dimension and the ontological-topological dimension of thought. This will be followed by a few precise observations concerning this distinction in the context of an examination of the ideology inherent to the original project of overcoming modernity. In that original project such a difference is precisely not taken into account, and this, I believe, is the very reason, or at least one of the main reasons, of the well-known political missteps of the Kyoto School. It is important to make this point since there is no guarantee that such missteps will not reappear today under one guise or another in the East and/or the West. This appears to be a distinct possibility when one considers, among other things, the regularity with which the claim is repeated, in Far-East Asia in particular, that the questions of the 1942 symposium, if not its solutions, still apply to the world today. ONTOLOGICAL MODERNITY AND POLITICAL MODERNITY The field within which the problematic of “place” (basho 場所) is developed, as well as the major part of Nishida philosophy that generated from it, is typically ontological-topological and resolutely unpolitical. The philosophy of Nishida, as well as that of the major part of the Kyoto School (with a few notable exceptions, such as Tanabe’s “logic of species”), is basically unpolitical and clearly metaphysical, even though it is a metaphysics that endeavors to be non-idealistic and, after the fashion of Husserlian phenomenology, close to “the things themselves,” to the concreteness of the “life world” (Lebenswelt), of lived body (corps propre), of existential time, and so forth. One can say much the same about Watsuji, who in a less speculative and more descriptive manner, develops, as Augustin Berque has written,8 a true phenomenological geography, a phenomenology of lived space and environment (fūdosei 風土性). For Nishida, the problematic of place is a stage, probably the most decisive, in the path along which the Japanese thinker tries to find a Western philosophic expression for an ontological intuition that is fundamental in the East, though it is “rhizomatic” or manifold: the intuition of emptiness (kū 空), of Indian origin; the more specifically Sino-Japanese intuition of inner nature (shizen 自然); and also the intuition of nothingness (mu 無), which is omnipresent in Far-Eastern metaphysics. These three notions are distinct and yet

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they contribute jointly to expressing the fundamental relation of traditional Oriental humanity to being. If for Nishida the natural or environmental dimension is not foreign to his intention, it is clearly the notion of nothingness that is questioned most insistently along his path, from the investigation of “pure experience” through that of the “historical world,” to that of “place” (Nishida’s conception of basho draws near to the Platonic concept of khōra, in a sense that seems to announce Derrida’s reinterpretation of the same concept). This insistence on the concept of nothingness is such that Nishida’s thought has occasionally been called a “topology of nothingness,” an attempt at defining the topos, the place, the site of nothingness. This Oriental “nothingness” is explicitly put in an oppositional relation to Western “being.” Nishida tries to overcome this opposition by criticizing the Western commitment to an ousiological or substantialistic ground, reaching back to the Scholastic interpretation of Aristotle. He also (and chiefly) attempted to overcome it because of its anthropological or subjectivistic (or transcendental) founding of modern ontology. Nishida’s ontological critic of modernity stands in basic agreement with the related one made by Watsuji, as well as with Heidegger’s position. If we reduce these three thinkers to what they have in common on this topic, modernity is understood here as the period of the history of metaphysics during which occur two fundamental interpretations of the being of beings (Sein des Seinde). First, the being of beings is interpreted from the perspective of the abstract categories of cognitive human reason and not from the concrete way of being of beings themselves. The second interpretation is that beings in general are reduced to objects, not only of observation for a subject that masters them rationally, but also for a casual handling by a humanity that has become estranged from its own environment, which it subjugates materially and, by so doing, destroys an essential dimension of its own relation to things and its own being-in-the-world. Modernity, in the ontological sense, is thus the age in which the being of beings is deprived of its own essence in order to be submitted to a cognitive and objectifying reason, inherent to the post-Cartesian ego, which in this manner becomes the site of the substantialistic foundation of beings. In such a perspective, to overcome modernity would mean, with the help of a new paradigm, to reinvent a relationship to the environment that would be the occasion of the reunion of humanity with its own vital milieu as well as with its own essence. To return today to the project of such an overcoming, considering in particular the renewed environmental concerns of our time, would reveal itself to be of a striking topicality, if not a true urgency. And this—I wish to emphasize—is what should be kept in mind and considered foremost as part of the positive message of the Kyoto school.

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Considering now the practical-political definition of modernity, during both the symposium on “overcoming modernity” and the connected Chūō Kōron discussions, we notice a jumble of ideas surrounding the ontologicalcognitive dimension. This is an explicitly and massively political dimension, in which modernity is identified with Western ideology and Western colonial imperialism, and the overcoming of modernity signifies the military overthrow of Western hegemony in favor of a Japanese hegemony that would reestablish the ancient order of things and would give back to the peoples of Asia their despoiled identity. All this would be relatively justifiable if, effectively, the political notion of modernity met perfectly with the ontological notion: overcoming modernity, in that case, would mean all together to overthrow an oppressive Western imperialism and a perverted relation to the world, that results from Western imperialism. But reality is more complex. In the register of political philosophy, the notion of modernity covers something quite different, and it is important to recall its significance. Although such a meaning is obvious for whoever has a shred of political consciousness, it went dramatically unrecognized by the Kyoto philosophers and also by a great many of the European and American philosophical heirs of the genealogical critic of modern rationality in the Nietzschean-Heideggerian style, as well as by a number of those who would like to revive the project of overcoming modernity. As Maruyama and Habermas have stressed, political modernity, stemming from the French Enlightenment, is an incomplete project—not in terms of subjecting nature to a cognitive-instrumental reason, cut off from its roots, but rather of emancipating humans from a socioeconomic and politico-juridical order that is obscurantist and oppressive, linked to the ancien régime and to its avatars in the contemporary capitalistic system of profit and exploitation. Such a modernity is not founded on a Cartesian, rationalistic, and objectifying subject that would be the ontological and a priori foundation of being but on a plurality of socialized subjects that are the elements of a communicational and praxis-oriented reason in the constant process of becoming. In short, modernity in the political sense is the still-incomplete effort to emancipate humanity from what oppresses it, including Western imperialism. This kind of modernity allows one to grant meaning to expressions like “progress,” “humanism,” “democracy,” “rule of law,” and “human rights.” These are all positive and desirable ideas, and they justify considering modernity as a project that, far from having to be overcome, has yet to be achieved both in the West as in the East. It is obvious that such a distinction is not made within the ideology of overcoming modernity and that, as a result of an ignorance of the specificity of the political, the confusion of the ontological-cognitive and the juridical-political is carried on to the point of aiming explicitly at overthrowing every aspect of

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Western modernity, including its sense of progress, humanism, democracy, and of the rule of law. Moreover, this overthrow problematically excludes the militaristic and economic means of modern industrial national power. In their rejection of modernity, this bracketing of the “military industrial complex” is symptomatic of the second great weakness of the ideologists of overcoming modernity: in addition to the confusion of the ontological and the political, there is, linked to the ignorance of the specificity of the political, a total lack of knowledge of the socioeconomic conditions that help determine the historical and cultural development of nations. It is no coincidence that, among the many authors of the German idealistic and post-idealistic tradition that the Kyoto philosophers so carefully examine, Marx is conspicuously absent.9 Consequently, we end up with a paradoxical situation in which the only aspect of modernity that they should have seriously disputed—the capitalistic system of profit, growth, and exploitation (which were, in turn, the chief mechanisms of Western imperialism)—is the only one that the Kyoto philosophers pass over in silence in their generalized criticism of modernity. Not only do they pass over it in silence, but they actively collaborate with a regime that, in proper fascist fashion, pushes toward the systematic development of the military industrial complex, thereby fostering an expansion of the most harmful aspect of that modernity against which they wanted to oppose themselves. The flaw is all the more serious because, as Maruyama, Arendt, and Habermas have understood it, we are presented with the only possible link between ontological modernity and political modernity.10 THE “FASCIST PREDISPOSITION” OF THE JAPANESE INTELLECTUALS OF THE PREWAR PERIOD It is important to understand better what, in the intellectual, social, and cultural context of the decades prior to the start of World War II, might have predisposed these philosophers to have missed such a distinction between registers discussed above and to have allowed themselves to be so easily seduced by the ideological fiction of tennocentrism. This distinction between the ontological and the political—to be reflected on at the intersection of similar distinctions, one made by Paul Ricœur, between the rational and the reasonable, and another by Jürgen Habermas, between objectifying transcendentalism and communicative action—is perhaps most clearly formulated by Hannah Arendt. What she says about it can be directly applied to our topic. At the risk of being overly schematic, I will refer to the manner in which Arendt has rethought the ancient Aristotelian distinction between contemplative life (bios theōretikos) and active life (bios politikos),11 as a tension between the literal singularity of philosophical

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existence (heir of the ideal of sophia, wisdom, that was Plato’s main concern) and the plurality of life within the city (heir of the specifically Greek experience of politeia). The political ideal corresponds to praxis, that is, action within the polis, in the common world of plurality. It requires the virtue of phronesis (prudential judgment within a given situation) and the faculty of logos, understood literally as the “spoken word” (dialogue, communication, rhetoric, dialectic, persuasion, argumentation, demonstration, etc.). As for the contemplative ideal, it corresponds to theōria, the intellectual vision of being and of the divine. It also requires a higher and rare intuition, the noūs, pure thought, that is in itself aneu logou (beyond words) and capable of perceiving the primary ontological principles. However, in order to be expressed in a discursive way, the contemplative ideal uses a logos that is extricated from its insertion in communicative relation: it is the solitary dialogue of the self with itself that is at the foundation of metaphysical speculation. Whereas the logos of political praxis is at the source of what will be called later, and notably with Kant, “practical reason,” and, later still, “communicative reason,” the logos of speculative contemplation will be at the source of “theoretical reason” or “cognitive reason.” There are thus two clearly distinct usages of logos or reason to be applied to two clearly distinct fields of human activity—precisely those I intended to identify under the notions of the political-practical and the topological-ontological. The political perversion, typically speculative (found among the Kyoto philosophers and Heidegger alike), is to treat the questions relative to praxis, the active life within the world of plurality, which is also the world of common sense, with a terminology and a conceptuality adapted to theōria or, in our case, to the grasp of “absolute nothingness” (zettai mu) which, according to Nishida and his disciples, is enabled by Zen thought thanks to a superior intuition, beyond language. Plato inaugurated this typical speculative perversion when he favored theoretical knowledge over practical action, endeavoring to submit the latter to the former under the form of a science that only the contemplator of ideas would possess. This perversion even blunts the capacity to distinguish good from evil. Indeed, retiring from the world of action, the thinker atrophies her or his power to judge (since judging implies the capacity to share the point of view of others). Such a thinker therefore tends to lose the power to judge the difference between good and evil. This is enhanced by the fact that the thinker erodes the capacity to perceive the evil or pain that others can feel, and he forfeits the ability to see their own action from the perspective of others. Moreover, since the submission of politics to theory signifies, at the same time, the submission of will to thought, the prospective attitude of the will, turned toward the future of uncontrollable

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action, is no more determined by the necessity of following the dictates of one’s conscience, distinguishing in each present situation between good and evil. Rather, it is determined by the programmatic calculation of thought, nourished by the retrospective look at the past and turned toward the mastery of the world of action within the timelessness of a knowledge that aspires to be absolute. Such an attitude has the tendency to dictate action by rules that are beyond good and evil—evil being no more than a detail within the greater vision of the progress of history. The Platonic preference of theōria to the detriment, not of “life,” as Nietzsche would have it, but of praxis, as both Arendt and Habermas observe, has resulted in the déformation professionnelle of philosophers throughout the history of Western metaphysics, including its adoption by the so-called Oriental philosophy of the Kyoto School. The fact is, on the occasion of the numerous and generally unfortunate usurpations of practical reason by theoretical reason, the submission of the first to the second was the rule (notably in Hegel and Marx) rather than the exception (as in Aristotle and Kant). In fact, during the greater part of its history, philosophy, which merges with what Heidegger has called metaphysics or ontotheology, has constantly been tempted by a totalizing view of human activity in which justice was not meted to the specificity of action—its factual finitude, its communicative dimension, its uncertain and intotalizable plurality. It knew nothing of the intrinsic conflict of a praxis-oriented situation whose ambiguity and unpredictability is forever impossible to master. Faced with the intrinsic imperfection of praxis, one finds here indeed the hubris, the arrogance and impatience of the human mind that would like to subjugate events to the perfection of a disembodied vision, an arrogance that Greek tragedy has always emphatically condemned. Does one not recognize such hubris and impatience not only in Plato and Heidegger but also among the philosophers of the Kyoto School? This is indeed my conviction. And I agree here with the interpretation by the Japanologist Robert H. Sharf who, without developing it further, has glimpsed the issue. He writes, Impatience with plurality and uncertainty in the intellectual realm can lead all too readily to impatience with plurality and uncertainty in the realm of politics. It may not be mere coincidence that a surprising number of those who saw Zen as a solution to spiritual anxiety were drawn to authoritarian or totalitarian solutions to social and political unrest. In a similar vein, Hannah Arendt has commented on the “exasperation” we sometimes feel when confronted with the fact that Plato and Heidegger were drawn to “tyrants and Führers.” Arendt suggests that this may be more than happenstance; it might in fact attest to a déformation professionnelle. . . . It may well be that the apostles of “pure Zen,” accepting wondering as their abode, fell prey to this déformation professionnelle: they

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yearned to realize in the world of human affairs the “perfection” they found in their Zen.12

This déformation professionnelle of the speculative philosopher, denounced by Arendt, combines furthermore, among the Kyoto philosopher, with a cultural predisposition whose general characteristics Maruyama Masao, Nakamura Hajime, and Ichikawa Hakugen,13 among others, have explained. Sparing the details, I would just like to recall here the general ideas they develop. Maruyama demonstrates how, from the Meiji era on, the ambition of the new Japanese state, constructed to a great extent after the example of the enlightened despotism of Prussia, intended to catch up with and overtake the West in order to protect itself from the imperialistic designs of the latter. This ambition encouraged an economic and political interventionism that put its mark on all aspects of social and cultural life. To limit ourselves to the political question, the decision to submit the private sphere to the public dimension of state authority smothered the development of what Hegel used to call Moralität, that is, the moral internalization necessary for the creation of a political judgment and for the sense of a civic responsibility. Now if Hegel is right in saying that there is no true Sittlichkeit (objective morality, internally diversified) without the mediation of a Moralität (subjective morality), it was not just the foundations for a true rule of law that were lacking in prewar Japan but also for an actual political consciousness. In addition to this absence of political consciousness there is, through the imposition of state Shinto, the systematization of a whole series of cultural attitudes that tend to predispose individuals to the ideological fiction of tennô-centrism. Here the analyses of Nakamura Hajime prove to be the most revealing and penetrating. These cultural attitudes, which are of the register of affect more than conscious thought, converge toward a feeling of non-differentiation between the sacred and the secular realms, that is, a feeling of symbiosis with the elements of nature and of social communion with the enlarged group. When the emperor is construed to embody such a non-differentiation, symbiosis, and communion, one then understands the fact that there is no individual responsible subject, but only a collection of the emperor’s subjects, and that all morality will be a social ethics of conformity with the group and of submission to authority, something to which Confucianism, the other great ethical tradition of Japan, also contributed. Finally, we need to consider the tradition of Zen, which more directly inspired the Kyoto thinkers. Zen shares with Shinto the feeling of a presence of the absolute within the concrete phenomenality of things rather than in transcendent and universal ideals. It also shares the feeling of a spirituality that is intimately linked to one’s own cultural specificity, which would be like the quintessence of all human spirituality—that is, some sort of

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cultural nationalism. But moreover—and this is what Ichikawa Hakugen has denounced—Zen has accumulated in its history a series of shortcomings that go against the fundamentally nonviolent, anti-nationalist, and compassionate message of its origins in ancient Buddhism. Specifically, in abandoning the supranationalist universality of the Dharma, Zen (pursuing the examples of Chinese Chan) has often opted without hesitation for temporal power. In the past, it also chose to become an integral part of the military training of the samouraïs. Furthermore, in creating a distinction between “secular freedom” and “absolute freedom” (purely ontological), and by stressing (in a very Platonic way) the superiority of the latter over the former, it has suppressed all possibility for the Zen practitioner to foster any awareness of a social or political mode. For Zen, the issue is to cultivate ontological freedom in an intuitive dimension of spiritual awakening—that is, not just “beyond words,” but also “beyond good or evil,” free from distinctions or discriminations of an “all-too-human” consciousness. The disposition also fosters the acceptance of the political circumstances of the moment—including militarism. Since such affairs are all too human, they are not worthy of being taken into account. It is toward all this that the fundamentally nonpolitical or apolitical thought of Nishida converges. Indeed, according to a paradox that is only apparent, it is his apolitical stand (his lack of political sense and reflection) that is to a great extent responsible for his more than ambiguous political choice when, driven by circumstances, he had to engage himself politically. The same is true for most of the Kyoto School philosophers. The attitude of the speculative thinker is apolitical—concerned with ontology but ignorant of common affairs linked to human plurality. The attitude of the Japanese prewar intellectual is apolitical, theoretically educated in Western culture but without sharing the internalization of its ethical-juridical sense. The attitude of the Shinto subject, for whom the highest virtue is the devotion to the emperor, symbol of the vital cosmos and social harmony, is apolitical. The attitude of the Zen practitioner, devoted to mystical contemplation but contemptuous of the socioeconomic condition of his fellow men, is also apolitical. From An Inquiry into the Good, until the “logic of place,” the whole of Nishida’s thought is marked by an ontological monism that blurs the distinctions of register and that blinds one to the communicational and noncognitive dimensions of philosophical thought. This goes to the point where the Hegelian influence, determinative for Nishida as for the Kyoto school as a whole, will go massively in the direction of its monistic tendency, ontologically totalizing and politically totalitarian, to which this philosophy is vulnerable when the (necessary) stages and mediations are neglected, progressing then toward a culmination in the chimera of an absolute knowledge that could identity itself with the immediacy of pure experience.

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For Nishida as for Zen, it is a matter of becoming one with the absolute that is present in the locus where one dwells, be it the immediacy of “pure experience” or the space-time of the “historical world.” In accordance with the paradoxical logic of Zen, it is a matter of finding the “self-identical contradiction” that exists between the individual and the universal, the self and the historical world, the totality of the brute facts and the absolute. In each case it is a monism, a systematized non-duality that leads, among other things, to a non-distinction between being and “ought,” between what is and what ought to be. As Ichikawa has stressed, Nishida’s philosophy of self is an undifferentiated monism where the autonomy of the modern subject is not yet acquired, where the inner space necessary for a moral consciousness and a civic and critical responsibility is not developed, and where the presupposed ontological harmony blinds one to the conflicts and contradictions intrinsic to reality—notably, the socioeconomic reality about which Nishida was silent. Prospective Remarks The question at hand is not a determination of the degree or exact nature of the relationship between Nishida, his disciples, and the tennō-centric regime. Rather, it is to understand—on the level of a whole attitude that is jointly existential and professional—the reasons and conditions for such obviously disreputable arrangements, not to institute once again proceedings against Nishida and the Kyoto School, and even less with the intention of rejecting their teaching. On the contrary, it is to resume on a new basis the Kyoto School’s prodigiously daring project of a philosophical thought that is built at the meeting point of the cultures of the East and of the West, and that can, on such an enlarged foundation, confront the current global problems with which the whole of humanity is confronted, including, most notably, the environmental crisis. In brief, then, it is to resume the project that the Kyoto School missed on the political level, even though it had sketched it remarkably well on the ontological level—namely, the project of a thought that is concretely universal because it is effectively cosmopolitan. As this would imply a number of things, I will limit myself to three considerations. First of all, this would imply a vast mediation between all that the thought of the Kyoto School ignored and what some of its postwar critics have tried to rectify: (a) the communicative dimension of modern reason and its emancipatory project; (b) the internal diversification of Hegelian philosophy, notably its philosophy of law, and more specifically its reintroduction of subjective morality; and (c) the taking into account of the socioeconomic questions in the philosophy of history, and so on. Second, it would imply continuing the political watchfulness of the immediate postwar critics of which the present fashion of postmodernity might

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not be capable. My repeated warning does not concern, then, the obvious ideological misadventure of a political choice in favor of any particular rise of neo-nationalism, but rather the inadvertent perpetuation of the défaut professionnel denounced by Arendt. Inasmuch as such watchfulness necessitates a clear distinction between the theoretical register and practical registers, as well as other sub-registers within these, it is extremely important to know at which level we are when we speak of modernity and its connected notions (the subject, place, humanism, etc.). This discernment does not aim to sequester one type of discourse from another type of discourse, but rather to be better equipped this time around if we want to realize their desirable intersections. I know also that few are interested in Zen today,14 so no one risks inheriting its ontological monism (partially responsible, let us recall, for many disastrous confusions and the leveling of basic conceptual distinctions). But monism can reappear under other forms in postmodern thought: for example, within the one-dimensionality that was once denounced by Herbert Marcuse but is present more than ever; in the incapacity of thinking in a dialectic and subversive way; and in the acceptance, both unconditionally and playfully, of the status quo that is called today, in a most ambiguous way, “global triumph of democratic liberalism,” but which is really a global pervasiveness of late capitalism. It is indeed under the moniker of the capitalistic triumph that the thematic of “postmodernity” develops today. Appearing first in France in the structuralist movement, and then becoming fashionable in American literary circles, the notion of postmodernity has also known a considerable success in Japan, likewise within circles linked essentially to academic literary criticism, where people enjoyed considering the Japan of the 1980s as the embodiment par excellence of postmodern society. Ideologically very ambiguous, postmodernity presents itself as a fact peculiar to advanced industrial societies, independent of political options. A whole series of elements that the anticapitalism of yesteryear, from right to left, tried to put into question are now being accepted as being part of an undisputed environment. The paradoxical situation today is then that the thematic of postmodernity, originating with thinkers who are generally from a politically correct left, becomes the pretext to an unconditional acceptance of triumphant capitalism. This can be seen, for example, in the thinking of Gianni Vattimo, who tries to reconcile the discourse of postmodernity with that of Nietzschean-Heideggerian genealogy, taking advantage of the notions of post-history or “end of history” while avoiding a deeper socioeconomic reflection on the present situation. In light of such a situation, many former anti-capitalistic themes, notably those linked to the Frankfurt school (Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse), regain their timeliness and judiciousness—yet also a paradoxical proximity to some

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of the legitimate ambitions among Japanese proponents of the overcoming modernity ideology. It is an ideologically delicate situation, originating in our current crises, that pushes us to re-question the global significance of the criticism of modernity and of modernism. While doing so, we also should maintain our commitment to, as Habermas says, the modern “project” from the perspective of its completion, which should bring us then ultimately to propose a still-hypothetical formulation of a self-subversion of modernity. Briefly stated, what should ideally be included here is another immense essay: what has to be subverted, in the main, is the way in which the triumph of capitalism is savagely destroying the natural environment that is the very condition for human life on earth. The third consideration aims to detect everything that, in the Japanese cultural tradition and more generally in the Asian tradition, can feed the communicative reason specific to the political modernity that is still to be achieved, in order to establish the latter on the “concrete universality” of which the Kyoto philosophers discuss with such insistence. To give an example, the reflections of Watsuji and Kimura move in this direction when they concern the notion of “human being” understood here not in a solipsistic manner (as in transcendental philosophy or even phenomenology) but rather in terms of social relationships. This is evident when they stress that the expression ningen 人間 (human being) includes the sign for aida 間 (what is “between” humans: their relations).15 One also finds Maruyama moving in a similar direction when he attempts to bring to the fore, among the thinkers of the Tokugawa era, and notably with Ogyû Soraï, embryonic elements of a modern political consciousness (the freeing of the political from the moral, the distinction between private and public, etc.).16 The Tokugawa era as announcing a not yet accomplished modernity, and not a regressive postmodernity, would be one of the research programs. The eminently modernist predisposition of traditional Japanese aesthetics—essentially the classicism of the Kamakura period—also serves as a confirmation and guide here. NOTES 1. See the writings of Karel Van Wolferen, Chalmers Johnson, James Fallows, or David Williams 1994. Also Stevens 2009. 2. Yoshinori Takeuchi, quoted in Rude Awakenings, edited by Heisig and Maraldo 1994, 194). This book is my main source concerning the Tokyo symposium and the Chūōkoron discussions. 3. Greenberg 1961.

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4. There is of course no question here of negating the dogmatic turn that modernism has too often taken, particularly in architecture, nor to negate the numerous catastrophic urbanistic realizations where the most extreme doctrines of the so-called “international style” were applied literally. What I would like to reevaluate—but this would need some further developments—is the fundamental intention of modernism that, aesthetically, means a purification of language and means, ideologically, an emancipatory ideal. 5. I use the expression Einfühlung in the sense developed by Worringer: figurative representation where the spectator can identify himself emotionally, in an almost cinematographic manner, to the figures represented. Malraux is probably one of the first authors to have shown how hypertrophied Einfühlung (what he calls “the art of assuaging”) is utilized by totalitarian states, from fascism to sovietism (Malraux 1951, 541). 6. On the transmission of the Kyoto School philosophy, see the remarkable book by Ôhashi 1990. 7. Nishitani 1949 and 1961. 8. Augustin Berque 1994, 495–507. 9. At least among the greater part of the school. Indeed one should not forget that among the disciples of Nishida there were clearly a few Marxists, in particular Tosaka Jun and Miki Kyoshi. But with extremes going from right to left, this leaves us with no satisfactory reply to our ascertainment that a proper reflection on democracy remains wanting in the school. 10. What I am expressing here in a condensed way has been developed in a number of other articles and books, among which are Stevens 2018. 11. Each type of life should, again, be subdivided: the contemplative ideal divides in religious and metaphysical contemplation, whereas active life divides in three great fields (political action, human creative work, and the ever-recurring productivity of labor). But the limited dimensions of our article force on us an impoverishing schematization. We can refer here to Hannah Arendt’s major book: Arendt 1958. 12. In Heisig and Maraldo 1994, 50. 13. A number of studies, including Maruyama 1952 and Nakamura 1964. 14. And this fact is most unfortunate since Zen thought remains inescapable in order to understand the ontological reach of Nishida’s philosophy. Moreover, beyond all the deviations that a particular institutional Zen has inflicted upon the Dharma, it would be important to see to what extent Zen might remain—as some have suggested (Suzuki 1988)—the best access road for an opening of Western consciousness to the fundamental message of Buddhism. 15. See, among others, Watsuji 1937 and Kimura 1972. 16. Maruyama 1952.

Chapter 4

Political Engagement and Political Judgment in the Thought of Nishitani Keiji

What I will present here is only an attempt to interpret a very delicate issue. It is, so to speak, a hypothesis concerning what I believe to be Nishitani’s political misjudgment. However for me the question is not just “How is it that Nishitani succumbed to the nationalism of the 1930s and 1940s?” but rather “Why does a certain type of philosopher, dedicated to religious ontology or to speculative philosophy, so often fall prey to national-totalitarian ideologies?” Indeed, it was not only Nishitani who believed in the philosophical justification of political nationalism and war but the greater part of the Kyoto School. Moreover, the case of the Kyoto School, as we all know, is very similar to the case of Heidegger and to a number of other philosophers who believed, to a certain degree, in the value of nationalism and even fascism. These included Graf Dürkheim, Giovanni Gentile, Mircea Eliade, and the young Maurice Blanchot, to name just a few of Nishitani’s contemporaries. Communist totalitarianism has also been supported by a number of famous names: Antonio Gramsci, Jean-Paul Sartre, and how many others? But the list could go back in time at least as far as Plato, whose Republic seems to be much more a prophecy of the communist totalitarian state than an illustration of Greek democracy. Of course, one could ask why it is so important to aim at a universal humanism beyond the dimension of national particularity. I will answer by quoting André Malraux’s concise response to the question of why he was studying non-Western cultures: We are entitled to wonder whether human beings from various cultural backgrounds have more in common than just hunger, aggressiveness, sex, and death, and if something more deeply human unites them on a more noble level.1 73

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Hunger, aggressiveness, sex, and death are things that humans have in common with animals. And humans reduce themselves to such bestiality when they reduce themselves to the brutality (bestialitas) of fascism, which is the final result of unbridled nationalism. The quest of philosophy, in contrast, is the search for the more noble level that Malraux was speaking of. And it is this more noble level that we call universal humanism, which encompasses both the essence of man and the human condition. The essence of man is what contemplative philosophy, ontological or religious, sets out to discover (as in the thought of Heidegger or Nishitani); the human condition—that which all humans share simply because they live in an organized society—is, as thinkers like Aristotle or Hannah Arendt have shown, the object of political philosophy. So the question becomes all the more crucial: “Why is it that philosophers dedicated to religious ontology so often fall prey to national-totalitarian ideologies?” THE EXPERIENCE OF NATIONALISM IN EUROPE Before tackling the paradoxical and obscure link between philosophers of religious ontology and nationalistic-totalitarian politics, I would like to make a relatively long remark concerning the reasons for the severity in Western countries toward the political stance of Nishitani and the Kyoto School.2 What explains such a strong opposition, in Western countries, to the type of ideology seen in the ultranationalist politics and emperor system of the 1930s and 1940s in Japan? Of course, it is not just because Imperial Japan was at war with the Western allies. It is, much more essentially, a matter of ethical and ideological conviction that regards nationalism in general as a misleading foundation for a political system—even when such a nationalism interprets its own imperial maneuvers as a means for liberating other countries from a foreign oppression. First of all, the history of modern Europe is a history of nationalistic wars (a series of genuine fratricides): the long French-British rivalry, World War I (a combined result of various European nationalist and capitalist rivalries put together), World War II (with its underlying German nationalism and imperialism), and, finally, the recent civil war in Yugoslavia. All of these conflicts have given Europeans sufficient opportunity to think about the absurdity of nationalism, the logic of which, when developed until its ultimate consequences, almost inevitably leads to fascism and war. Moreover, the very idea of war—which until the nineteenth century had a heroic dimension about it, involving the bravery of soldiers fighting hand to hand—has become utterly

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abhorrent, since war has become something exclusively technological that victimizes mainly defenseless civilians. As we see in the case of Yugoslavia (and this is what makes European intellectuals so nervous today), a new tide of nationalism seems to be rising in Europe as well as in many other parts of the world. Most European countries today know the phenomenon of extreme right-wing political parties that garner more new votes with each election. Such nationalism is either those of the traditional big nations (France with the Front National, Austria with its Neo-Nazi Party, etc.) or, more often, those of smaller regions (Catalonia, Scotland, Flanders, etc.) in which ethnic groups are demanding independence from larger states. In such a perspective, the Yugoslav civil war of 1991–1996 composes a warning of what could happen on a larger scale (including Russia), much as the Spanish civil war of 1936–1939 formed an actual preparation for World War II. In both cases a fascist ideology threatened democracy.3 Of course, as is always the case with fascism, there has been in all these conflicts a self-congratulatory discourse of collective egocentrism and a romantic rhetoric about protecting high cultural values against barbaric foreigners. And always, hidden behind the pseudo-aesthetic rhetoric of higher human values lay the horrifying reality of hatred and animal brutality that forms the true face of fascist totalitarianism. Postwar political analysts such as Hannah Arendt have shown that the two extreme types of European totalitarianism (Hitlerism and Stalinism), although almost antithetical in their ideological propaganda and mythology, shared fundamentally the same historical causes, the same coercive structure, and the same self-destructive logic.4 Let us mention just a few elements of Arendt’s explanation of the historical causes. The excessively rapid access to industrialization in such countries as Germany and Russia at the beginning of the century engendered a massification and atomization of society in which individuals lost their traditional points of reference, felt increasingly alienated, and at the same time were unable to discover new meanings for life, society, and history.5 One element of this uprooting process was the loss of a common social community (as for the peasantry, which was removed from the land and literally forced into urban industrial labor, and also as for the aristocracy, which was uprooted socially through its loss of position in favor of the bourgeois industrialists and capitalists). And that is where the ideology of fascist or communist propaganda came in, by responding to the people’s nostalgia for social communion and their need for a new meaning with the help of a myth of common national (or class) destiny, described in terms of a great romantic epic that caught people’s imagination and overpowered their sense of reality. An additional element of fascist thought was the way it skillfully responded to the religious

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frustration of secularized industrial society by sacralizing the nation and the state, creating a sort of mystic euphoria that weakened people’s sense of critical and ethical judgment. Before turning to the case of Japan, I would like to note a final element of Arendt’s analysis of the origins of totalitarianism in Europe. Interestingly, she shows how the phenomena of nineteenth-century European capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism constituted a relatively direct preparation for the advent of totalitarianism. Indeed, it was the expansive logic of capitalistic growth that led not just to the inter-European rivalries that caused World War I but also to the extra-European imperialism that led to the colonization of America, Africa, and Asia. And it is within the process of colonization that pretotalitarian tendencies appeared. The expansionist logic of colonial imperialism paved the way for the annexationist imperialism of the totalitarian systems; the lawlessness and brutality of colonial administration paved the way for the totalitarian negation of human rights and of the rule of law; the status differences between the European colonizers and the non-European colonized peoples paved the way for the racist ideology shared by all fascist totalitarian regime; the colonizer’s rationalization regarding their responsibility to civilize the “undeveloped” people prepared the way for the fascist epic rhetoric about its historical mission, and so forth. Thus behind the principles of democracy and humanism that the Western European countries applied to their own citizens at home, there lurked a hypocrisy with regard to applying these same principles to non-European peoples and countries.6 So one is tempted to say that the only difference between colonial policy and fascist policy was that the latter abandoned hypocrisy and practiced openly what Western capitalistic and colonial imperialism had practiced tacitly. But there were, of course, other more fundamental differences. The first difference was one of degree: fascism brought racist logic to its extreme when it declared that its own people and the so-called inferior races were basically different in nature, thus opening the door to unrestricted massacre and even systematic genocide. The second difference was one of essence: fascism was able to go to such extremes only after destroying the last remnants of the rule of law, which, in democratic countries, had the effect of restraining the fascist logic implicit in colonial policy—the colonized people still had recourse to the principles of a democratic legal system to defend their rights (as did Gandhi in South Africa and India). Thus the British could be openly challenged through the utilization of their own humanistic and legal principles but the Nazis could not, since they had no such principles and ruled only through the brutal and arbitrary principle of coercion. The symbolic event that demonstrated this essential difference between the democratic powers and the Nazi regime was the official withdrawal of Germany from the League of Nations in 1934, an act that signified the open

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rejection of the consensus juris, the common acceptance of a rule of law necessary if people are to act in a civilized way toward each other. Once a nation decides to become a literal “outlaw,” the only logic it can still understand is the logic of force. The victory over Nazism in 1945 meant a victory of democratic values over fascist totalitarianism. The creation of the United Nations and the European Community, along with the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, were aimed at establishing a world wherein the rule of law would prevail over the rule of coercion, where each individual (whatever his origin, sex, nationality, or religion) would be protected against political oppression and economic poverty, where violence would no longer be a way of settling conflicts among people. This was a time of great hope for humanism and for liberalism in its political sense. It was the expression of an archetype that is very strong in the European political psyche: the victory of freedom over tyranny, like the triumph of the Greeks over the Persians in Antiquity. And it seemed to make possible the Kantian hope of a true League of Nations capable of overcoming the Hegelian principle of the rule of the strongest and the law of war. If so many European intellectuals are anxious today, it is because capitalism, in Asia as well as in the West, seems to be developing in a way that neglects humanistic principles in favor of the increasingly exclusive law of economic growth. In other words, economic liberalism (which follows the logic of capitalistic expansion) seems to be growing at the expense of political liberalism (which follows the logic of democratization). The progressive erosion of the welfare state in the United States and to some degree in Europe is a telling sign of this phenomenon. There seems to be a global tendency to achieve economic growth with little concern for democratic principles. And the increasing globalization of economy during the past decade has meant the growth of capitalistic rivalry on a planetary scale and an erosion in our sense of political and ethical meaning. Such a loss of meaning, as we have mentioned earlier, is one of the conditions that favors the rise of fascist-oriented nationalism. There are thus reasons for concern that democracy is seriously threatened. Concerning the Far East, the hope of Western European democrats is that the rise of Japan to the status of an economic superpower will be accompanied by a sense of moral-political responsibility to contribute to the reinforcement of democracy or, even better, to improve the democratic ideal itself. And thus concern rises when neo-nationalistic ideologies occasionally seem to return to the stage. The ambiguity of our interest in the Kyoto School, which itself has shown a good deal of ambiguity, is a direct reflection of this equivocal state of affairs.

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JAPANESE NATIONALISM Many observers have stressed that Japan, during the ultranationalistic period, showed a tension between two separate driving forces or logics.7 The first such force involved the search for a national power capable of resisting Western imperialism and liberating Asia from Western colonialism; the second involved the mimetic adoption of the combined phenomenon of Western-type capitalism, expansionism, and colonial imperialism. I believe that it was the first type of logic, the logic of resistance, that inspired the Meiji Restoration and the early stages of Japanese Western-style modernization. I also believe it was this resistance logic that first motivated Nishitani and the philosophers of the Kyoto School to adopt a stance of cooperation with Japan’s imperialistic policy. And to this extent it is understandable.8 But on the other hand, I am convinced that the resistance logic of nationalistic Japan was rapidly overcome by the logic of capitalistic expansionism, which was in turn rapidly overcome by the fascist-totalitarian logic that fundamentally drives the latter. This happened at least as early as 1933, when Japan decided to leave the League of Nations, or even as early as 1929, when the Japanese government embarked upon its policy of thought control, putting an end to the Taishō liberal democracy. And all of the subsequent rhetoric about the historical and spiritual world-mission of Japan was progressively reduced to the aesthetic, romantic, and self-flattering discourse typical of the fascist (and communist) propaganda, a discourse aimed at hiding the system’s crude militaristic drive, its will to power, its fascination with oppression and destruction, and its final disrespect of human dignity. Indeed, when closely examined, militaristic Japan clearly shows all of the characteristics of fascist totalitarianism mentioned above: the expansionist and pretotalitarian logic inherent in capitalistic growth; the excessively rapid industrialization, with the consequent social uprooting and loss of meaning; the search for new meaning and the all-too-willing acceptance of some epic and irrational fascist myths; the suppression of civil rights and rule of law in favor of coercion, terror, and the absolute authority of the leader; the development of a police state with no freedom of thought or action; the sacralization of the nation through state religion; the imperialistic logic that inevitably leads to war; and the brutal submission of supposedly inferior people (or “younger brothers”). But I need not belabor the point since it is quite well known.

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THE QUESTION OF PHILOSOPHIC POLITICAL MISJUDGMENT Now let us return to our leading question. Why were philosophers such as Nishitani so easily deceived and seduced by the fascist ideological fiction, and why did they lack the clarity of political judgment that would have allowed them to see the actual political reality of their time? My conviction is that Nishitani’s cooperation with the regime was caused by a political naivety or lack of understanding that blinded him to the reality of things. Moreover, I consider his political involvement to be in contradiction with the ethical implications of his own religious ontology as it has been developed in Religion and Nothingness. And I consider his case to be generally similar to that of comparable intellectuals such as Heidegger. It might be illuminating here to recall briefly a few elements of Heidegger’s case, which has been thoroughly debated in France.9 Many observers have stressed that if Heidegger was easily seduced by the romantic ideological myth of Nazism, it was precisely because of his fundamentally nonpolitical stand. Heidegger’s philosophy is so extremely ontological that it has no room for political thought, and the result was that he totally misunderstood the complexities and hidden forces of political issues. What Heidegger did have was a sense of history, but it was on such an abstract level—the history of Being—that he failed to grasp the concrete level of political history where complex socioeconomic factors are more determinative than ontological ones. It now seems to me that the political vision of Nishitani was also based on an abstract, speculative philosophy of history that missed the complex concreteness of political reality. My proposal is that this “nonpolitical political” stance has two sources: (1) the long Western philosophical tradition of theoretical misreading of political affairs, and (2) the more specific Japanese (Zen) tradition of trying to grasp the absolute within the relative. “Theōria” and “Praxis” The Western philosophical tradition of the theoretical misreading of political affairs reaches back as far as the Greeks, where it has been expressed in the Aristotelian distinction between political life (bios politikos) and contemplative life (bios theōretikos), the two existential ideals for man, both clearly superior to the hedonistic search of material pleasure (see, for example, Aristotle, Nicomacean Ethic, 1:5). These two different life ideals, though not mutually exclusive, belong to two different realms, two different dimensions of human existence.

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Political life is proper to all humans since by necessity they all live in an organized society; it relates to what Arendt (as well as Sartre and Malraux) called “the human condition,” and it must accept the imperfections and limitations of ordinary human beings.10 Contemplative life is accessible only to a few rare individuals who are motivated by a search for pure knowledge or a search for the Absolute, a search that involves the highest potentials of mankind. It relates to what Heidegger called the human “essence” (menschliches Wesen), and it generally necessitates that one retire from the imperfections of human affairs.11 It seems clear that the contemplative life is in nature the same as the age-old Eastern search for the “true self” (atman). The two famous Aristotelian definitions of man as the zōon logon ekhon (speaking animal) and as zōon politikon (political animal) refer to essentially equivalent things, since the main characteristic of political life (bios politikos) is that decisions concerning the common social good are arrived at through logos, that is, through speech (dialogue, argument, persuasion, logical demonstration, etc.).12 This political existence, called praxis, was highly regarded by the Greeks, since for them public speaking was a noble art, and since the political system that such speaking was meant to perpetuate was one in which citizens were part of the law-making process and were thus not subject to a superior authority (in contrast to the Persian imperial system). Such political freedom (eleutheria) was a point of pride with the Greeks when they compared themselves to foreigners. The capacity to participate in public life was considered a sign of intelligence and status, whereas to remain exclusively concerned with private matters, leaving political decisions to higher authorities, was a sign of mediocrity and “idiocy” (idioteia: an idiotes was someone busy only with his personal interests). The art of politics was not restricted to the art of good speaking but also necessitated a particular talent or virtue called phronesis, a word difficult to translate in any language. It means something like the capacity to make the right decision, to act in each particular situation with prudence, wisdom, and a sense of human limitations, and not just to rely on general principles or social customs. In sum, phronesis could be described as the art of creative thinking and prudential acting at a given moment, particularly in unpredictable political situations. It is the art of grasping the right time (kairos) for proper action (eu praxis). Aristotle’s other existential ideal for man, paralleling the political existence with its focus on the human condition, was the contemplative existence (bios theōretikos), concerned with human essence. Indeed, the Greek word theōria originally meant contemplation (the verb theōrein indicates the act of seeing, of observing and contemplating what is far way, such as the divine constellations of the cosmos, or what is nearby but beyond phenomenal appearance). Such contemplation could take either a more religious form with the divine

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as its aim (this is the origin of the medieval notion of the vita contemplativa) or it could take a more ontological and speculative form with the aim of understanding the fundamental principles of being (this is the origin both of Western metaphysics and of “theory” in its usual sense of theoretical or rational knowledge). Religious contemplation necessitated a higher type of wisdom (sophia) and involved the faculty of noūs, intuitive understanding, which went beyond mere words—it was ultimately “without speech” (aneu logou). Ontological speculation, on the other hand, necessitated logos, speech in the sense of expressing metaphysical principles in logical discourse. The concept of logos later developed to mean the faculty of logical reasoning (ratio, reason, raison, Vernunft) and was no longer concerned with the logos of political life, within the entirely different realm of praxis. The logos of theoretical metaphysics lies at the origin of rationalistic thought (which Kant studied as “pure reason,” reine Vernunft), whereas the logos of political life lies at the origin of ethical, juridical, and political thought (which Kant studied as “practical reason,” praktische Vernunft, and which Habermas has recently been considering under the notion of communicational action, kommunikatives Handeln). The first type of reason is what Ricœur calls le rationnel (the “rational,” namely, that which is accessible to abstract or formal theory), and the second is what he calls le raisonnable (the “reasonable,” i.e., that which is related to common sense and concrete social experience).13 The Western philosophical tradition of misreading political affairs reaches back, I believe, to a confusion between these two different types of intellectual activity. The theoretical reason of metaphysical thought has its own logic that can be highly speculative, abstract, and formal, and that very often remains linked to the search for the purity and perfection of the Absolute proper to religious contemplation. Moreover, it can be pursued by the solitary philosopher who has decided to retire from human affairs (a retirement, incidentally, that can occasionally become indistinguishable from the idioteia of the citizen who gives up public affairs in favor of his own private interests). Political thought and action, on the other hand, are not accessible to theoretical reason or solitary speculation, but emerge through dialogical communication (logos in its original sense) between various individual points of view on the same issue. Moreover, such thought and action must accept the constant limitations and imperfections of ordinary relative human reality, and function via the compromises that are indissolubly linked to collective decision making. A typical misuse of philosophical thought is to treat political affairs with the same absolutist turn of mind that characterizes religious contemplation, or with the rational tools meant for the theoretical-speculative work of metaphysics and ontology. What happens then is that the qualities of

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theoretical reason (abstract rationality, the purity of the Absolute, the clarity of the contemplative overview, and so on) are forced onto the practical realm of communicative reason, where the rule is concreteness (not abstraction), compromise (not purity), human finiteness (not divine absoluteness), and prudential action (not rational programming). This type of misuse of philosophy is first seen in Plato’s Republic, where the state is governed by a philosopher since he alone is considered capable of contemplating the world of Ideas and of knowing Absolute truth. This entitles him to impose his views on the relative realm of the ordinary citizen’s life. In such a vision, the individual citizen’s point of view is simply not taken into account, and everybody must accept the coercive rule of the philosopher. Plato’s republic was actually an authoritarian state (almost totalitarian), a negation of the principles of Greek democracy that Aristotle, on the contrary, had understood so well. We encounter this type of philosophical perversion throughout the Western metaphysical tradition. Hegel and Marx are two interesting examples because, though they succeeded in shedding light on certain aspects of political and economic reality, they nullified their insights by relegating them to subordinate positions within their absolutist philosophical theories. Hegel, for example, skillfully demonstrates the different factors within the structure of a constitutional state; but then he relativizes and flattens his analysis by subjugating these factors to the absolute law of history understood as the self-unfolding of Reason (Ricœur comments that Hegel remains interesting only if we can reintroduce a sense of human finitude, such as Kant was capable of; his term for the resulting standpoint is “post-Hegelian Kantianism”). Marx too is illuminating in his analysis of the socioeconomic factors of political reality, but again he loses the whole point when he subordinates these factors to the absolute necessity of Marxian historical progress (a “post-Marxist Marxism” would learn from Marx’s criticism of capitalism without sharing his solutions nor his positivistic-sociological vision of man and history). In both cases the final absolutization of history through some theoretical vision of human destiny blinds these philosophers to the concrete richness of their earlier insights into the realities of political life and renders them indifferent to the experience of ordinary people. Indeed, ordinary experience, including the suffering of other people, becomes an insignificant detail in comparison to the actualization of the “Truth of History.” With Heidegger, the so-called “Truth of History” is reduced to the History of Being, and this exclusively ontological dimension completely obliterates the political dimension of the human condition. With Nishitani and the Kyoto School the historical dimension is slightly richer than in Heidegger, while incorporating some elements of the Hegelian view of history (in a way comparable to Giovanni Gentile). But again there are the same failings: history is

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understood as the unfolding of some higher Truth or Destiny, and everything must be subjugated to the latter.14 “Saṃsāra” as “Nirvāṇa “ Combined with this Western philosophical misreading of political reality, there is a more specifically Japanese tradition of grasping the absolute within the relative, a tradition that, when applied to political realities, leads to exactly the same erroneous results. This tendency has its roots in the Mahāyāna Buddhist doctrine of nirvāṇaas-saṃsāra.15 I do not wish to deny the profoundity of this doctrine when applied to the idea that nirvāṇa is separate neither from tathātā, the “suchness” of things (nyojitsu 如実), nor from everyday existence (saṃsāra), when the latter is lived on an authentic level of awareness or self-awakening (jikaku 自覚)—in such circumstances the nirvāṇa-as-saṃsāra doctrine is a variation of Aristotle’s bios theōretikos (contemplative life) in its religious dimension. What I am concerned with here is the danger of losing sight of the fundamental Buddhist conviction that the Dharma is of an essentially different nature than secular truth. In other words, when the nirvāṇa-as-saṃsāra doctrine is applied to secular and political reality it opens the door to any number of ideologically dishonest compromises that can eventually go against such fundamental principles of Buddhist ethics as universal compassion (karuṇā) and nonviolence (ahimsa). This is precisely what happened during the long history of Zen’s compromise with worldly power (in a way remarkably similar to the case of the Catholic Church in Europe). This compromise started with the identification of Buddhist law and imperial law under the Chinese Sung dynasty, continued with the misusage of Zen discipline for the training of the warrior class in the Kamakura period, and lead to the cooperation with the militaristic regime during the Fifteen-Year War.16 Nishitani and the Kyoto School followed in this tradition, and while sacralizing the state and viewing politics from a religious perspective, they were actually mixing two different realms and logics—the contemplative-religious logic and the social-political logic—in a way comparable to Plato.17 By subjugating the sociopolitical realm to the contemplative-religious one, they ended up losing the essence of the latter, which, as a search for the Absolute, can only be lived in separation from the relative, imperfect reality of the human social condition.18 Nishitani all too clearly believed in the possibility of imposing the religious-ontological level of absolute truth on the finite political level of a particular, and thus relative, state. He believed, in other words, in Plato’s rule of the philosopher, at the expense of what the ordinary people might think, feel, need, and suffer.

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It seems to me that other elements of the Japanese cultural context might also have contributed to the weakness of Nishitani’s political judgment. Shinto, though admirable in many aspects (as in its respect for nature, beauty, and the harmony of the community), tends to foster group conformity and unconditional respect for authority that can only diminish each individual’s ethical and political consciousness.19 This lack of civic consciousness was further encouraged by the educational system, which since Meiji times had attempted to counter Western imperialism by developing a nationalistic feeling that left little room for individual moral and civic judgment.20 All this may have contributed to Nishitani’s all-too-ready compliance with the ideology of the day. Nishitani at the Crossroads of East and West, for Better or for Worse Thus, in my interpretation, the combination of these two traditions of philosophical “déformation professionnelle,” Eastern and Western, led Nishitani almost inevitably to a political engagement that was at once authentic (in that he deeply believed in it) and at the same time mistaken (in that it was based on political misjudgments). Nishitani, a philosopher of great stature in the realm of contemplative religious ontology, fell into philosophical error when he applied his thought to a realm that was not his: the political. Believing that one could identity the Absolute of religious ontology with the political reality of the state, he repeated Plato and Heidegger’s misdirected effort to understand the logic of praxis through the logic of theōria. Moreover, his absolute faith in the belief that the moment had come for Japan to fulfill its historical and spiritual destiny by overthrowing Western imperialism and materialism led him to believe any means were justified for achieving this goal—even cooperation with a ruthless militaristic regime that brought his country to violence and total war. He also believed, quite naively, that the military authorities would listen to his advice and understand his views, and he thus failed to see the true nature of fascism, which in its concern for power is impervious to any type of spiritual or intellectual argumentation.21 He lost sight of the fact that history is determined not so much by spiritual ideals as by socioeconomic factors and that any attempt to spiritually influence the course of history must start with the unexciting but necessary task of tackling these socioeconomic and juridical factors on their own ground.

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THE POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF NISHITANI’S RELIGIOUS ONTOLOGY. Just as the individual ego manifests itself in its true form at the point of self-negation or no-self (that is, at the point of transcending the ordinary natural-rational mode of existence), so, too, the national attains its true form only when it has transcended its ordinary mode of being and has discovered a new mode of being centered on self-negation.22

Despite all the reservations discussed above, Nishitani’s religious ontology undoubtedly contains elements that can contribute to the renewal and deepening of authentic humanism and democracy. I will mention here only a few possibilities, as a full analysis is clearly beyond the scope of this paper. Once one has unmasked the true nature of fascism as the radicalization of the very nihilism it was meant to overthrow, one is left with an intensified sense of nihility (kyomu 虚無). In both his books on nihilism (Nishitani 1949) and on religion (Nishitani 1961), Nishitani brillantly describes the rise of this sense of nihility in European post-idealistic philosophy, from Nietzsche and Dostoevsky to Heidegger and Sartre. Nishitani shows that this consciousness of nihility, although ontologically unsatisfying, has a positive significance as well. The sense of nihility implies first of all an awareness of the loss of meaning in the modern world, of its lack of religious or spiritual dimension, of its intrinsic nothingness. But it also opens the way to the freedom of the “creative nothingness” developed by such “active” nihilists as Nietzsche, Stirner, and Sartre, a freedom that becomes possible once one has been delivered from the “passive nihilism” of dethroned values like the Platonic over-world and the Christian God. But more fundamentally, as Heidegger already sensed, the consciousness of nihility provides an occasion to realize a greater dimension of ontological awareness: nothingness as the truth of being as such (Wahrheit des Seins). Nihility then opens the way to the “great doubt” (taigi 大儀) of Buddhism, through which the self-centered ego (jiga 自我) may be transcended to reach the dimension of the authentic self (jiko 自己) via a process of negating (or, stated more positively, of emptying) the ego. What this implies is the negation of nihility (kyomu) by emptiness (kū 空, śūnyatā). Once emptied of the ego, one can become receptive to the higher wisdom (daichi 大智, maha-prajnā) and compassion (daihi 大悲, maha-karuṇā) of the authentic “selfless self.” From this standpoint it becomes possible to realize the “suchness” of the world and of every being within it. One perceives that all beings are mutually dependent upon one another and that indeed it is because of this very interdependence that self and other exist. The self-emptying of the one makes it a servant of the other, and the self-emptying of the other makes it a servant

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of the one. This is what Nishitani calls the circumincessional interpenetration of every being. Such is the standpoint of emptiness, where egocentrism—be it the metaphysical egocentrism of modern Cartesian-theoretical subjectivity or the political egocentrism of collective ethnocentrism (nationalistic or religious)— is finally overcome. In this stress on the transcendence of egocentrism, Nishitani offers an implicit criticism of the theoretical speculation that has dominated modern ontology (up to the point of political misjudgment) and of all types of nationalism and imperialism, fascism included. Compassion is thus extended to the degree where absolute respect for the other (individually or collectively) becomes fundamental, which is the meaning of authentic humanism23 and the first step toward the democratic ideal. Nishitani writes, In the circumincessional relationship a field can be opened on which contradictory standpoints—where the other is seen as telos, and where the self is seen as telos; where the self serves others and makes itself a nothingness, and where the self remains forever the self itself—are both radicalized precisely by virtue of their being totally one. It is the field of the “knowing of non-knowing” that we spoke of as no different from the “being” itself of things themselves. It is also the field of absolute freedom.24

NOTES 1. Malraux 1951. 2. When I talk of “nationalism” here, I mean a political ideology where national or patriotic feelings, which as such are normal components of civic consciousness, become the central political force and are magnified to the point where they engender an irrational and xenophobic collective egotism. Nationalism turns into fascism when these irrational and xenophobic tendencies are encouraged by a propaganda that distorts the true perception of reality in favor of a national historical fiction or myth in which collective egocentrism is directed toward the sacralization of the state and in which xenophobia is directed toward the development of militarism. A regime is openly fascist when it is ruled by a one-party system organized around an authoritarian leader. Such regimes undertake the progressive suppression of intellectual freedom, basic individual rights, political plurality, parliamentary representation, and the rule of law. Fascism presupposes the rejection of the international juridic consensus that international organizations and treaties are meant to guarantee, though it retains strong bonds with traditional capitalism in order to insure its own economic strength. When all these goals are achieved—when the rule of coercion and terror is the reigning force in domestic relations and when the logic of ideological confrontation is the reigning force in relations with the outside democratic world—then the system has become totalitarian. Totalitarianism is the logical outcome of fascism.

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What I call “democracy” is first of all the ancient Greek ideal of the politeia (political organization) in which all citizens participate in public affairs and contribute to decisions relating to law and to the common good (such participation can never be direct when a large number of people are involved, so the principles of collective representation, publicity, and public debate become significant).The modern variant of democracy, which can be called “political liberalism,” is distinct from the Greek ideal in many aspects: in the priority of the private sphere over the public sphere, in the priority of the individual over the group, in the importance of social equality, and in the importance of the economic dimension in public life. Because of this last factor, political liberalism is often identified with economic liberalism, which actually means market economics and capitalism. I disagree with this type of identification, since capitalism can easily forget the political ideals of liberalism and take the road that leads to one party systems (like in today’s China), to fascism and totalitarianism. 3. The comparison of the Spanish and the Yugoslav civil wars is not as exaggerated as it might appear. It is not so much that, following the Yugoslav conflict, we might have large-scale violence and war in Europe aimed at achieving nationalistic goals (such goals can actually be achieved by other means), but that nationalism as such (be it based on ethnic, linguistic, or religious pretexts) will increasingly become the main political force in the consciousness of the ordinary people, to the exclusion of more noble (and more demanding) political and ethical ideals. And this is where the ideological aspect of the problem of nationalism has to be clarified. Why did so many European intellectuals go and fight in Spain in 1936–1939 to defend the Spanish Republic against the Nazi-supported Franquist rebellion? It was because they feared that the winner of the Spanish Civil War would be the winner of the impending European war, and that this winner would impose its principles on the European continent. The Republic was a legally elected government defending the rule of law and the principles of democracy, plurality, equality, and humanism, whereas the Franquist rebellion had all the most obvious characteristics of fascism: violent aggression (in this case against the Republic and against all the humanistic values that the Republic strived to defend); rule by military force and coercion; leadership by a head of state possessing absolute authority; and a total commitment to the “nation.” The fascist flavor was increased by the sacralization of the nation, since, at that time, the Franquist movement had the benediction of the Spanish Catholic Church. So it was, of course, not just their love of Spain that drove the intellectuals to fight against fascism, but their faith in democracy. In Yugoslavia, if European intellectuals such as Bernard-Henry Levy and a few others (including myself) tried to do something in order to defend Sarajevo (the only remnant of the legal Bosnian Republic) against the Bosnian Serb aggressors, it was not because they had arbitrarily chosen the side of the Bosnian against the Serbs. It was because the Bosnian government represented a legal democracy and a tolerant multicultural society whereas the Bosnian Serbs espoused the fascist principle of ethnic purity and practiced a brutal ethnic cleansing upon the civil population, on a scale that almost amounted to genocide. 4. OT.

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5. The loss of meaning referred to by Arendt can be equated to Nishitani’s description of the sociohistorical dimension of nihilism: The phenomenon of nihilism shows that our historical life has lost its ground as objective spirit, that the value system which supports this life has broken down, and that the entirety of social and historical life has loosened itself from its foundations. Nihilism is a sign of the collapse of the social order externally and of the spiritual decay internally—and as such it signifies a time of great upheaval. (Nishitani [1949] 1990, 3)

6. Such hypocrisy was clearly denounced in the Chūō Kōron discussions. See, among others, Horio 1994, 313. 7. See, in particular, the illuminating essay by Ueda Shizuteru (Ueda 1994). Although in a quite different vein, we find a comparable analysis in Maruyama 1956. 8. Illuminating in this regard is Mori 1994. 9. See especially Aubenque 1989, Derrida 1987, Fédier 1995, Ferry and Renaud 1988, and Taminiaux 1992. 10. Arendt 1958. 11. See, for example, the contrast, established by Heidegger between “authentic existence” and “existence dominated by the ‘They’” (das Man) (Heidegger 1927, §. 25 ff.). The necessity to leave or renounce the ordinary human condition in order to practice the contemplative life has its Buddhist equivalent; see, for example, Dhammapada 373 and 395, or Shôbôgenzô 75 (Shukke, “Renunciation of the world”). 12. See Vernant 1962. 13. See Ricœur 1986, 237, and Ricœur 1955. 14. The essentially historical dimension of Nishitani’s political thought (together with its religious-contemplative inspiration) appears throughout his writings. But it is particularly obvious in the very title of the Chūō Kōron discussions: “The World-Historical Standpoint and Japan.” 15. I share here Jan Van Bragt’s position in his penetrating analysis, Kyoto Philosophy: Intrinsically Nationalistic? (Van Bragt 1994). 16. See Hirata 1994. 17. The religious inspiration of Nishitani’s ethical and political thought is obvious in nearly all of his political statements. See, in particular, Heisig and Maraldo 1994, 218, 234, 244. 18. Ichikawa Hakugen’s analysis would seem to confirm my view. See Ives 1994. 19. Nakamura 1964. 20. Maruyama TB. 21. After the war, Nishitani repeatedly made declarations such as “I tried to open up a path in thought that might overcome from within the ideas of extreme nationalism that were taking control at the time” (quoted by Maraldo 1994, 351). 22. Quoted by Mori 1994, 325. 23. I would agree, however, that the classical definition of humanism is not sufficient. One step in the direction of a deeper and richer concept of humanism would be to clarify our very understanding of human existence with the help of the Sino-Japanese notion of ningen 人間, such as that proposed by Watsuji 1937. 24. Nishitani RN, 284.

Chapter 5

The Dimensions of Time Reflected in the Thought of Nishitani Keiji

Western philosophy, in its thematization of time, has always oscillated between two irreconcilable approaches: on the one hand, the subjective or phenomenological time (such as Augustin’s time of the soul or Heidegger’s existential temporality) and on the other hand, the objective or cosmological time (such as Aristotle’s cosmic time or the time of modern physics). So, because of this irreducible discrepancy, all philosophical reflection on time is aporetic (this is one of the main points of Paul Ricœur’s analysis in the three volumes of his Temps et récit). And this is probably one of the reasons why imagination has so often resorted to another type of discourse, that of narration (mythical, legendary, historical), to be able to describe the unfolding of time, without having to explain it thematically. So Western thought oscillates, not just between a subjectivistic and an objectivistic reflection on time but also between a properly philosophical approach (of which the subjective and objective are the two modes) and an approach that we can refer to as “poetic” (to use Paul Ricœur’s characterization): narration (historical or fictional), which is the temporal dimension that we find ultimately in the Biblical narrative and which “responds or corresponds to the aporia of time.”1 It does not resolve them, but it works on them, creatively, proposing to reconfigure what remains scattered within abstract reflection. Now, in Nishitani’s opus magnum—Shūkyo to wa nanika 宗教とは何 か—we encounter an approach to time where the three dimensions seem to be blended but within a specific intonation, which is inspired by the Buddhistic notions of karma, gō 業 (for subjective time) and kalpa, kō 刧 (for objective time), while binding the whole to the narrative-historic dimension. So let us make a quick survey, ranging here from Western antiquity until Japanese modernity.

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COSMIC TIME AND LIVED TIME When he states his definition of time in book IV of his Physics, Aristotle is heir to more ancient Greek expressions describing phusis (notably Anaximander saying that Time encircles us under its “fixed order” or Plato, in Timaeus, saying that time was born together with heaven). In this respect, the Greek vision is very close to Oriental cyclical time. For Aristotle himself, time is “something of motion” (ti tes kineseōs): it is “the calculable measure or dimension of motion with respect to before-and-after.”2 There is thus a sort of priority of motion or movement over time. And most of the later physical notions about temporality will share such a concept of the explanation of time by the movements of nature. Succession exists among things before mind can grasp it, let alone construct it by the determination or calculation of the moment. Aristotle takes into account the fact that a soul has to be there in order to count the measure of time and grasp the instant, but nevertheless physical time remains first and not derivative. Augustin, in book XI of the Confessions, didn’t succeed, for his part, in substituting a psychological conception of time to the cosmological one: he describes lived time (the distentio animi toward the three ekstasis and the intensio, the tension toward memory, expectation, and the present, with a priority of the lived present in contrast to Aristotle’s measurable instant). But this lived time, born from Christian interiority, simply adds itself to the objective time of nature and it cannot generate it. There is eventually a mutual occultation of cosmic and of subjective time, even though they presuppose each other. Moreover the lived time of the soul, confronted with divine Eternity, puts into relief the properly human experience of finitude—on which Nishitani will later abundantly comment. Augustinian time will experience a number of reinterpretations, among others the Bergsonian durée and the Husserlian inneres Zeitbewusstsein, but it is Heidegger who will retain here all our attention, in particular because it is he who will influence Nishitani the most. Heidegger: The Three Levels of Temporality Heidegger doesn’t speak of the soul, or of consciousness, but he speaks about Dasein (being-there), the being for which “in its very being, . . . being is an issue”3. Dasein doesn’t perceive the world as a simple oppositional vis-à-vis but as a moment that belongs to his own constitution: being-in-the-world. It is remarkable that if temporality will become the crucial question of ontology, the spatiality of the world is previously discussed significantly as an inalienable structure of being-there. We have progressed from a phenomenology of time,

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the Augustin-Husserl tradition, toward a hermeneutic of being-in-the-world. However, if this enables a more continuous passage from subjective time to objective time, it will not enable us to consider the soul-world opposition or consciousness-nature opposition as obsolete: there remains a hiatus between them. As two opposed perceptions of time, they remain unsurpassed. It is Nishitani who will suggest an amazing way of merging them together. The totality of time is unfolded within the fundamental structure of care (Sorge), which unifies and articulates the main existentials (project, thrownness, etc.). The description of care is done in terms of the possibility of “being-a-whole” (Ganzsein), following the articulation of the three temporal moments. Far from giving a privilege to the present (which brings Dasein closer to beings present-at-hand, das Vorhandene), the first temporal implication is, following the potential dimension of Dasein, being-ahead-ofoneself (Sichvorwegsein). And it is from there that can be drawn a notion of being-toward-the-end (zum-Ende-sein), which will, by its inner closure, constitute the totality of Dasein. Being-toward-the-end will find in death its radicality and in resoluteness (Entschlossenheit): its authenticity. More precisely, what enables care to recover the structural totality of being-there is anxiety as a fundamental mode of affectivity that reveals, in parallel to the nothingness that causes anxiety, the proper and indivisible authenticity of human condition. It is indeed within anxiety that one can hear the call of conscience (Ruf des Gewissens), within the resolve of being-toward-death (Sein zum Tode): when Dasein’s fundamental feeling of being-in-the-world becomes the anxiety of its own totality and end in death, then it discovers its most proper potentiality, which is to topple into nothingness. And within the unsettling silence of such an anxiety, one can then hear the voice of conscience, whose call doesn’t properly say anything but brings Dasein back to himself, beyond the “they,” and makes him understand something: guilt or indebtedness (Schuld). The latter is the feeling of being the cause of a deficiency, within a having-to-be that it will never be able to satisfy and whose horizon is ultimately transferred to the nothingness of death. To assume this Schuld, this original deficiency in the horizon of death, is what produces authentic resolve. And it is from there that temporality deploys itself: authentic resolve toward one’s most proper being-for, originating in one’s essential guilt, is what founds zukommen, the “to be” of future, coming back on its “having been” (Vergangenheit, past), which enables him to (Gegenwärtigen) presentify the surrounding being.4 This is the crucial locus of fundamental ontology, where original temporality is founded in the neighborhood of the resolve in front of the nothingness of death. And it is on this crucial locus that Nishitani will articulate his own thought inspired by the Buddhist notion of karma (業gō), within the context of what he calls the conversion of nihility (虚無kyomu) into emptiness (空kū).

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But let us first take a few more steps with Heidegger. After the description of original temporality focused on death, historicity is introduced as that which explains the stretching along between birth and death, as a “connectedness of life” oriented toward the coming to be of care. So historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) is derived from original temporality, while enriching it with the dimensions of existential connectedness, plot, and self-identity. Then, based on this primacy of individual historicity, one can ask the question of public history. History enables the impulse toward the future to return toward what has already been, notably the received heritage (Erbe) that has to be taken in charge. When taking in charge the inheritance received from others, the individual fate (Schicksal) becomes a common destiny (Geschick), a common becoming (Mitgeschehen), and a history (Geschichte). This is where the repetition or recapitulation (Wiederholung) enables to reorient the reception of the past through a creativity directed toward the future. Now, just as historicity proceeds from temporality, in the same way, intra-temporality proceeds from historicity. This starts when Dasein has to organize its time (rechnen mit), causing a leveling of time through evaluation, measurement, calculation, enabling datability, extension, and the public or universal character of objective time. This emphasizes world time, cosmic time, while one concentrates on the things encountered “inside” the world. This temporality, that Heidegger characterizes as “ordinary,” is the time of Aristotelian physics and science in general: it is the infinite, universal time of objective calculus. Here the focus, after having been on the future of resolve and on the past of inheritance, is now on the presenting of the instant within the objective world. The present was Augustin’s starting point; it now becomes Heidegger’s end point, far away from authentic being. We will see how Nishitani reinjects into such a present all the ontological significance of which Heidegger had deprived it. Cosmic Time All this process of derivation eventually leads to an objective cosmic time that cannot be reduced to the temporality of Dasein but indicates an all-encompassing phusis—that humans can contemplate with wonder or dread but that they cannot generate. If we now examine cosmic time beyond what Heidegger says about it, we can note that it is not reducible to Aristotle’s physics. And it brings along considerations that amplify the significance of objective time: there isn’t just the extension of the scale of time from the Biblical 6,000 years of Creation to the 6 billion years of the universe, but a growing differentiation of temporal properties specific to each region of nature. There is now a multilayered

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history: the geological history of the earth, the zoological history of the evolution of species, the genealogical history of life, but also the material history of thermodynamics, the subatomic history of quantum theory, and that of astronomical evolution of the stars. But there remains a hiatus between, on the one hand, human history, always linked to a subjectively lived present, and, on the other hand, natural history, whose time is exclusively physical, made of a neutral succession of measurable instants but with no subjective present. NARRATION When trying to conclude these remarks on the philosophical speculation on time, we have noted that there remains a hiatus between Dasein’s temporality and cosmic time—history playing the role of an intermediary: not just a middle position but a true function of mediation: a bridge between being-toward death and the time of physics. History, telling the story of the past through the representation of human actions (mimesis praxeōs), belongs to the register of narration. By developing a plot (muthos) that joins past events under the temporal unity of a coherent action, it enables to give a meaning to the human experience of time: as if narration enabled to resolve, by human configuration or plot what seems to remain inextricable aporias on the level of speculation. In the West, the configuration by a plot (Aristotle’s muthos) is, in addition, energized by “the sense of an ending” (stressed by Frank Kermode). The latter’s source is to be found in the messianic and apocalyptic telos of Jewish tradition (of which Heidegger’s resolution toward death might be a late avatar). It is also Hebraic tradition that goes the farthest in the constitution of a narrative identity—allowing a respond to the question “who?”—“who is the author of these actions,” stressed by Hannah Arendt. The answer isn’t to be found in some firm substance, with its predicates, but in the selfhood of an individual life with its proper cohesion or the story of a people with its episodes. In the Bible we observe the constitution of a collective narrative identity by means of the cercle between the reception and constant reworking of the stories and texts that the Jewish people have tirelessly produced about themselves over the millennia. In addition to that, the Biblical narrative harmonizes with the Augustinian grasp of human time in contrast with divine Eternity. Hebraic eternity, before becoming the ontotheological Being of metaphysics, is a reminder of the dimension of loyalty between a nation and its God, between a people and its ideal. If the Bible is a Testament, one could say, it is “the testament of Time in its relation to divine Eternity.”5 Yahve is perceived as the great Actor in a story of covenant and deliverance and not as the primal

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motionless Act of a moving cosmos: praxis takes precedence here over ontology in the fundamental grasp of temporality. The Biblical narrative will remain, within Western history, as the source not just of the kerygmatic proclamation of Christianity but of the modern sense of progress. Western sense of history gives time a teleology that is in sharp contrast to the eternal circularity of cosmic time, such as in Buddhism or Greek thought, with the endless repetition of birth and death and the awe-inspiring contemplation of the stars. NISHITANI ON TIME From History to Cosmic Time Let us now turn to Nishitani. For him, following the reflections of the historian Arnold Toynbee, there is little doubt that historical consciousness as such was born with the Hebrew people and that it then influenced, over the history of the West, the most historical of all civilizations. In the Jewish and Western vision, the history of the world is understood, not following the rhythm of nature (as in the cyclical visions of the East),but as a reflection of the rhythms of human life and human action, in terms of what the Aristotelian inspired poetic calls muthos, plot, with its beginning and its end. And the author of the story, the one who governs all this narrative action is God, or divine will, in interaction with human freedom. So the human adventure draws its meaning from the acting of God, that gives history a transhistorical purpose, between the Fall of Adam and the Parousia of Christ. Nishitani underlines the fact that in this conception of things, which all monotheistic religions share, self-centeredness and voluntarism can be found everywhere: at the level of a Supreme Being, conceived in the image of man, at the subjective level of the individual searching for a meaning to his own private existence within the collective story, and at the collective level of the narration (Jewish, Christian, or Muslim), granting itself a unique significance within universal history. The prototypical model of the collective egocentrism, or ethnocentrism, is the conviction Israel forged of itself as being God-chosen, giving itself a unique importance in front of the nations, a conviction that will be inherited by the Christians first and the Muslims later. In that way, the necessary religious humility of the ego is turned, on the collective level, into its opposite: the arrogant affirmation of one’s superiority over the other humans. All this voluntarism and egocentrism is in contradiction with the deeper meaning of the Christian message: agape or love of the neighbor—which is consonant with Buddhist compassion (karuṇā, jihi 慈悲), notably that of the Bodhisattva, trying to save all the others before saving himself.

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With modern secularization, the idea of a definitive achievement of history in a transhistoric event cannot hold any more, although we can see an avatar of it in the Hegelian notion of the end of history. But the sense of history has been secularized in the form of the ideology of progress, reinforcing the anthropocentrism of history. Now Nishitani states that in all this the roots of egocentrism and ethnocentrism remain unexplored. The self remains opaque to itself. It is subject to the absurdity of avidyā (無明 mumyō), which is ignorance and the lack of discernment. When it is organized around egocentrism, all history, individual or collective, is covered with the veil of mumyō, avidyā. It is therefore maintained on the level of karma (業 gô), that is, entanglement in inauthentic existence, constantly revived by will and thirst, incapable of seeing the way out toward authenticity and salvation—a salvation, however, which isn’t in some distant future but in the here and now, where the lived present identifies itself with the instant that constitutes cosmic time, thanks to the conversion of nihility into emptiness. Time is inextricably linked to all beings, everything existing in the world, encompassing both its being and its nothingness in the profoundest of enigmas. The question of the proper ground of all being and, in particular, of the interrogating being, Dasein (現存在gensonzai), the question of its origin remains obscure, disorienting, and abysmal. This is the case in the context where Nishitani stands, in Buddhism. Time is perceived here like a process without beginning or end. The origin of my own existence can be traced back, beyond generations and ages, until the infinity of time that precedes the formation of the galactic system. And, comparably, its becoming goes on progressing toward a future without end. To this “verticality” of time within infinity can be joined the relations between people and things in a simultaneity and a “horizontality” of all eventful relations within the infinity of space. The question of the source of the existence of all this—within this infinite spatio-temporal nexus, or “circumincessional interpenetration” (回互的相 入egoteki sōnyū)—remains without an answer. And yet, undoubtedly, I exist here and now. “This present existence is there.”6 And it is the place where—stemming from this consciousness of existing in the present—opens up an infinite openness that appears like the inexhaustible source of time. That is the reason why, although the question of the beginning and the end of time, as well as the question of the origin of our existence within time, is vain and without a reply. Inside a temporality that is defined by its infinity, the beginning and end of time in itself can be searched for in this actual present, at a more elemental level, close to the essence and the home-ground of the self. Now, says Nishitani, poetically, this present itself implies something that is out of reach, as far as we can go ahead or back in time, something of another dimension (as different as three-dimensionality

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is to bi-dimensionality), something like a true infinity but forever unattainable, a non-temporal infinity. The beginning and the end of time are to be looked for underneath this present in order to find the site of the simultaneity of the kalpas, the simultaneity of the past and the future within the dhāraṇī, the holding together of the present. To dig into the home-ground of the present in order to “become” the instant puts us effectively on a plane of absolute transcendence in relation to the time of the world, with its own causality: it places us in the trans-temporality of eternity—where simultaneity, succession, and duration are united. Each instant of the time can be called here a “monad of eternity”; each instant of the infinite past as much as the infinite future is simultaneous with the present moment. The latter manifests itself exclusively like something that reflects in itself all possible past and all possible future. The instant occurs like a now, holding past and future together within the home-ground of the present. It is because of this simultaneity of past and future instants together with the present instant that the latter “maintains together” (dhāraṇī) all the ekstases of time; including the moments that could have been and could still happen to be, in inexhaustible possibilities. It is, as the Zen saying has it, “the inexhaustible storehouse that doesn’t contain one single thing.” Constantly, time starts in the present. We need to reconquer time as the identification of the objective instant with the lived present. Within Christianity, such an identification has been sensed in the union of time and Eternity: each moment is created by divine Eternity. In the horizon of Eternity everything that occurs before or after within time is projected toward the home-ground of the present. This is what enables us to understand the sin of Adam, at “the beginning” of history, as being simultaneously the sin of each person during history. And similarly, each day is perceived in the light of the last day, that of Judgment. From the point of view of the creature, each moment is always new; but from the viewpoint of the Creator the whole happens all at once. “In a sense, the totality of time can only exist in one single instant.”7 In Bouddhism, the simultaneity of time and of Eternity is that of dhāraṇī, i.e., the collective and present now, maintaining all things under its status, its order, not only contemporary, but equally past and future. Each moment of timeless time is a supreme, of an infinite solemnity—and not just, as in Christianity, a few privileged moments of the history of salvation. The self realizes the solemnity of the present as a monad of Eternity and thus realizes all times in their true solemnity. Such is the place of the suchness of self. From Cosmic Time to Lived Time All these remarks on historicity, on the source of time and on the temporality of the self, are introduced by Nishitani in the context of his—slightly mythological, rather poetic, almost mystical, and yet deeply philosophical—reflections

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on the conversion of nihility (虚無kyomu) into emptiness (空kū). And in this context, the transformation of the burden of guilt or debt (the Heideggerian Schuld) into creative freedom is a crucial factor. Let us see. In Mahāyāna, karma (業 gō, the action that conditions, that puts one into “debt” and perpetuates existence) is inseparable from saṃsāra, the wheel (輪廻 rinne) of “birth and death” (生死shōji). The latter is inserted in a Weltanschaung (世界観 sekaikan) where the forms of life and of existence, proper to every sensitive being, transmigrate, alternating between birth and death, in an endless wheel turning without stop, calling to mind irresistibly the dimension of gravity of Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence. Saṃsāra refers to a being-in-the-world proper to all sentient beings, and it is described in strong existential terms such as “a sea of samsaric suffrance.” This reminds us of the distressing view of life in existentialism. Now this individual consciousness of sufferance, Buddhism amplifies it unto the dimensions of a “universal sufferance,” expressed in the first of the Four Noble Truth: all existence is duḥkha (sufferance, unsatisfaction, pain). To be conscious of that is to become conscious of an unfathomable nihility. The wheel of saṃsāra is moreover presented as the consequence of our own voluntary actions (of body, speech, and mind) and the passion that accompany them. Our present actions occur against the background of an infinite causality and an infinite destiny: the infinity of our past actions and the endless continuation of our future ones. This is precisely karma. What can be perceived as a fatality is presented as the fruit of our own passed actions (be it in our present life or in some hypothetical previous life). Our present existence is the payment of the debt of our previous actions. Each action revives existence, indefinitely. Such is the finiteness of our being-in-the-world: infinite. It is in short a “bad infinite,” in the Hegelian sense: incomprehensible for our understanding. It can only acquire meaning on the level of existential experience. The latter perceives finitude as radical and, in a sense, as infinite. And an end of that finitude could only be a theoretical representation. Infinite finitude, Nishitani tells us, has two aspects: that of the endless wheel of birthand-death (a lived time, analogous to the existential dimension of Eternal Recurrence) and the perspective that encompasses man and other species in a nexus of actions (a time of the world, analogous to the cosmic dimension of Eternal Recurrence). But on the level of original existentiality, they are mutually blended. If the infinite finitude constitutes the “temporal” aspect of the essence of birth-and-death within being-in-the-world, the total horizon forms the “spatial” aspect. The universality of the pain of the world must be understood within this larger spatio-temporal dimension. But the analysis of guilt (Schuld and karma) will now concentrate on the existential-temporal

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dimension, converting the ego into a non-ego, capable of grasping the cosmic instant within the present moment. So that is how Nishitani articulates, reciprocally, the two great perspectives, subjective and objective, on time, while keeping an eye on the narrative dimension of history and mythological fiction. At the existential level, the one developed by Heidegger, time manifests a double ambiguity: on the field of novelty (every moment is new) and on the field of its impermanence (every moment passes away). Now this ambiguity is the locus of the possible conversion of nihility into emptiness. It is first on the field of the novelty of time that Nishitani stresses this ambiguity. Such a novelty signifies indeed, on the one hand, the field of an infinite possibility, proper to a creative freedom of the project that we are (what Heidegger named Entwurf); but on the other hand, it represents a burden, because of being constantly pushed ahead in the obligation to indefinitely pay back the “being-indebted” (Schuldigsein), which is the prime essence of karmic existence as much as the Christian condition of the sinner. So being and time take for us the aspect of a responsibility and a constant commitment. And it is constantly revived when the engagement is, yet only partially, fulfilled. The dissolution of one debt becomes the seed of another. The infinity of this burden, this unending causality, appears to be the conscience of Dasein (現存在 gensonzai) as a constant push forward, a drive to be and an impulsion to constantly fill in being by some action, by one’s endless repayment of the debt. The infinite pulsion had once been called “greed” or “desire” (taṇhā); but, in a more fundamental way, and in connection with its aspect of endless causality, it is at the source of the theory of karma: the incessant causation of existence. Karma is thus another word to describe the consciousness of the essence of time. To be in infinite time thus signifies an inexhaustible task that is always imposed. But the ambiguity of time is also to be found in its impermanence. On the one hand, this means the transitory character of time: every moment comes to be, arising from the infinite openness, and disappears again into nothingness, giving to all being the most extreme fragility. But on the other hand, impermanence is the negation of permanence, that is the negation of all lasting burden, of all substantialistic obstacle that could bind a human being to an immutable identity as well as to the conditioning of the past that would prevent him from being free to choose himself anew. Impermanence is thus a letting-be through which the enfranchisement from karma will be able to slip into life. There is thus like an infinite openness within time that contains its own ambiguity, potentially signifying both nihility and emptiness. The true form of original time—in its existential dimension as well as in the greater

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horizon of its cosmic horizon—lies in the simultaneity of these opposite possibilities. This place (場所 basho), this locus of time, because of its essential ambiguity, is the field where “perversion” can undergo an “inversion” and become a “conversion” (転換 tenkan). It is the site of the existential conversion where nihility can change into emptiness. How does Nishitani try and make us have a glimpse of the evanescent moment that is the locus of such a conversion? It happens in the letting-go of being: when being is no longer the object of greed, nourished by the infinite drive. The letting-go is a true extrication from karma, it is the moment of a conversion through which the field of karma can be abandoned for the point of view of emptiness. At this level, the daily toil can become the occasion for absolute truth to appear (aletheia). At this level, all that has been said from the point of view of karma can be converted by an absolute negation and acquire a new life. Here is the locus of radical liberation from self-centeredness. In the joint gesture of letting-go of being, of extrication from karmic causation and of conversion from nihility into emptiness, there is an abandonment of the infinite drive and, in a sense, an abandonment of the fundamental will that bases all possible self-centeredness and attachment to the ego. . . . The field of emptiness is constituted on a bottomless ground that is beyond determination by the will. Because it is an existence where the ego has been overcome. Non-ego means not only that the self isn’t the ego: it also signifies that the non-ego is the self. All this is about reaching a self-consciousness that derives paradoxically from the negation of the self. In order to fully reach the standpoint of the true self, one needs to grasp the turn through which “the self is not the self (the self is no-self), therefore it is the self.” Such a turn is the existential self-consciousness in which the self is realized as an emergence from the non-ego toward its own nature. This is the existence that Dōgen describes as “dropping off body and mind.” Here the doing emerges at every moment, stemming from the origin of time that it itself makes to be. We have something like a moment of eternity appearing at the source of time. Here too life manifests itself like an endless becoming over an endless doing, a being through doing, that emerges and goes again at every moment. But here the work isn’t an infinite repayment of the debt. Existence isn’t a burden; it doesn’t surge from the obscurity of ignorance, proper to the ego with its infinite drive. In short it is no more the karma in the field of nihility but the negation of the ego, of the doing and of the temporal becoming, in the field of emptiness. All acting becomes non-acting. Toil becomes a game. When existence and work, doing and acting, emerging from their own nature, arising out of the most extreme strangeness of this nature, where the non-ego is the ego, they are already released from all “why” (warum) of which the modern principle of reason (Satz vom Grund) is constantly in search of:

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they are without reason (ohne Grund); they become truly free. In its foundation, existence has no reason for its being, even less a usefulness. Everything exists for itself, freely, playfully; everything is its own purpose—it has no cause. The game is inseparably work and creativity. Work takes on the gratuitousness of game. Work and game become the original doing. All doing is a non-doing. Henceforth doing which, in the field of karma, reinforces debt, here undoes it. Doing liberates itself from its indebtedness; the debt is totally repaid and to carry it becomes a game. The forced labor is accomplished as the free spontaneity of a game. The spontaneity of non-doing, of “no-will.” The debt, imposed to the self but repaid by the self, is nothing else than a freely chosen responsibility, really taken in charge by the self. It becomes the task, the calling of the self, freely assumed. But moreover—in conformity with the relational ontology underlying the Middle Way—such a responsibility of the self, freed from the debt, is now turned toward others, toward each and every person, toward the neighbor. Non-ego is the self in the non-duality of the self and the other. NOTES 1. TR III, 11. 2. AR, 219a 34–35. 3. SZ 12. 4. SZ 326. 5. TR III 389. 6. RN 245 7. RN 297.

Chapter 6

Reflections on the Notion of Reality in the Thought of Nishida and Nishitani

At first glance, Zen no kenkyū 善の研究 (“An Inquiry into the Good”) may seem somewhat disappointing, despite the fact that in many ways it constitutes the fountainhead of Kyoto-school philosophy. It can appear to be a kind of schematization and flattening of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes,1 with a few colorful references to non-Western thought thrown in to lend it some apparent originality. It can be regarded as moving in the realm of the obvious and seen as the result of an adequate but average understanding of Western philosophy. It does not strike one immediately as being a milestone in the history of philosophical thought. And I must admit that my first reading of the book left me with an impression close to this. However, after becoming better acquainted with the philosophy of the Kyoto school as well as with its Japanese and Asian cultural background, I have gradually changed my view and have recently rediscovered this book in a new light. Zen no kenkyū does indeed appear to be a relatively simple work. But it is, I believe, the type of simplicity Heidegger told us we must try to regain: not the simplicity of simple-mindedness, nor the simplicity of the infancy of the Spirit, but the simplicity of das Anfänglich, “the beginning,” or das Ursprünliche, “originality.” The very simplicity of this book makes for its difficulty, in a way comparable to the way that archaic Greek thought, in its embryonic form, contains too much conceptual richness and too many levels of meaning to be easily transcribed into the more “scholastic” discourse of the conventional academia. This book contains—and this might also be linked to the semantic structure of the Japanese language—a type of “plurivocity” that cannot be exhausted by the “univocity” aimed at by modern philosophy with its scientific and rational ambitions.

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Such an “archaism” of Zen no kenkyū contributes to its perfection. Nishida himself declared that although he felt unsatisfied with the book in his later years, he couldn’t change it because “one’s thoughts have a living integrity at each point of time.”2 He also added that “what lay deep in my thought” while writing the book was not limited to its apparent “psychologism,” but already contained what was to develop into such later notions as “absolute will” (zettai ishi 絶対意志), “place” (basho 場所), “dialectical universal” (benshôhôteki ippansha 弁証法的一般車), “acting intuition” (kōiteki chokkan 行為的 直観), and “historical reality” (rekishiteki jitsuzai 歴史的実在). Thus the notion of “pure experience” (junsui keiken 純粋経験) that forms the core of Zen no kenkyū is not “overcome” in Nishida’s later philosophy but it is continued, with its various seminal potentialities progressively explored and new viewpoints opened, new concepts discovered, and new possibilities enabled that in no way negate the original ones. And I believe it is not just the later philosophy of Nishida that is seminally contained in Zen no kenkyū, but also the various aspects of the philosophy of the Kyoto School as a whole. Moreover—although this might sound somewhat like an overstatement—it is not just the philosophy of the Kyoto School philosophers that was affected but also that of people who, like us today, took Nishida’s endeavour seriously and attempted to follow the path of thought he opened for future generations. It seems to me that some of the most thought-provoking notions of Zen no kenkyū in this respect are Nishida’s notion of reality (jitsuzai 実在) and the universe as a “manifestation of God” (kami no hyōgen 神の表現). The following pages do not offer an explanation of these notions but just a few hints at some of the steps that can lead in their direction. THE GROUND COMMON TO NISHITANI AND NISHIDA The author who has probably influenced me the most in my new estimation of Nishida’s philosophy is his disciple Nishitani Keiji, whose writings, being more accessible to Western ways of thought than those of his mentor, often prove more appealing to the Western reader. Two books of Nishitani in particular have clarified my understanding of Nishida: his main work Shūkyō to wa nanika 宗教とは何か (1961) and Nishida Kitarō: Sono hito to shisô 西 田幾多郎－その人と思想 (1985), his monograph on Nishida. When, for example, Nishitani states in his introduction to Shūkyō to wa nanika that “the inquiry into religion attempted here proceeds by the way of problems judged to lay hidden at the ground of the historical frontier we call ‘the modern world,’ with the aim of delving into the ground of human

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existence and, at the same time, searching anew for the wellsprings of reality itself,”3 I personally understand this statement as a perfect continuation of what Nishida was attempting to do through his notion of “pure experience.” Indeed, pure experience—a concept that is meant, among other things, to counter the obliterating preeminence of the intellectual over the volitional in modern thought—is precisely “the ground of human existence” and the “wellsprings of reality itself,” since Nishida saw in it the main access to “the problem of human life” (jinsei no mondai 人生の問題) as well as to the “unconscious unifying force” (muishiki tōitsu ryoku 無意識統一力) that functions both at the heart of human consciousness and at the heart of reality as a whole. Although Nishida’s approach to the religious problem in Zen no kenkyū is psychological and epistemological as opposed to the existential approach of Nishitani, the “immanentist realistic” standpoint (or “radical realist” standpoint) constructed in Zen no kenkyū still remains the basis without which Nishitani’s impressive intercultural enterprise might not have been possible. This appears clearly when Nishitani speaks of religion “as the self-awareness of reality,” or, more correctly, “the real self-awareness of reality” (jitsuzai no jitsuzaitekina jikaku 実在の実在的な自覚). Nishitani explains further that by the self-awareness of reality I mean both our becoming aware of reality and, at the same time, the reality realizing itself in our awareness. . . . In this sense, the realness of our existence, as the appropriation of reality, belongs to reality itself as the self-realization of reality itself.4

This question of “reality,” which Nishitani views here from an existentialreligious standpoint, had been considered by Nishida from an epistemological perspective. Indeed, it is Nishida who opened the path to grasping reality beyond the subject-object dichotomy, before “the standpoint of separation of subject and object, or opposition between within and without, what we call the field of consciousless.”5 So if Nishitani makes a more extensive use of the theological terminology of religion and the ontological terminology of existential thought, with clearly readable references to famous texts of the Christian and Buddhist literatures, it is from a standpoint that had previously been defined by Nishida on the level of pure experience. This appears more specifically in Nishitani’s book Nishida Kitarō, which I would now like to look at more closely. Nishitani’s study on Nishida is instructive on many levels, but there are three aspects of the book that have struck me as particularly thought-provoking: (1) the relationship Nishitani identifies between Nishida’s work and the European intellectual context of the late nineteenth century; (2) the link he establishes between Nishida’s ontological “principle” (ri 理) and the Aristotelian notion

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of “power” or “potentiality” (dynamis), together with the Leibnizian notion of “force” (vis); (3) his explanation of Nishida’s concept of God. THE HISTORICAL SITUATION OF NISHIDA In part 2 of Nishida Kitarō, Nishitani has a chapter titled “Nishida’s Place in Philosophy.” Here Nishitani shows how Nishida’s thought can be seen as an attempt to respond to the crisis in European philosophy at the turn of the century. It is an attempt comparable in many ways to that of Husserl, although Nishitani, unfortunately, does not establish this comparison himself. One of the interesting things about Nishida’s description is its proximity to Heidegger’s positon regarding the state of philosophy at the time Husserl wrote his Logische Untersuchungen. Indeed, in his lectures on the concept of time, Heidegger shows how Husserl’s phenomenology was an attempt to respond to the decline of philosophy in the face of the rise of positivism.6 I do not know whether Nishitani was acquainted with Heidegger’s lectures, but if he wasn’t the similarities are all the more striking and point to a correspondance between Nishida’s and Husserl’s respective enterprises that demands further examination. Here I will only offer a brief sketch of the view offered by Nishitani and Heidegger of the state of European philosophy at the beginning of Nishida’s and Husserl’s careers. During the last years of the ninteenth century, Western philosophy had just experienced the overthrow of the idealistic systems. The end of Hegelian-type metaphysics was thus the context within which the philosophical activity of those days tried to find a new configuration. Such a situation opened the path for the rise of positivistic thought. The humanities attempted to emulate the exactness of natural sciences, so that philosophy was forced to redefine itself according to the empirical standards of the scientific method. And thus appeared philosophy’s ambition to become a “rigourous science,” based on the “facts” of experience rather than on the “empty concepts” of metaphysical speculation. One result was that psychology separated itself from the field of philosophy in order to become a completely empirical science, a physiology of the “psyche” investigating “internal sensations” and the life of the mind through methods of experimental observation defined according to “objective realities.” Then, through an inversion of the traditional hierarchy, scientific psychology attempted to recreate philosophy as one of its applications. Logic also had to be explained in terms of psychological processes. Attempting to balance the imperialism of speculative objectivism and the positivistic sciences, there were a number of initiatives such as Neo-Kantian antipsychologism, Dilthey’s formulation of an autonomous understanding of

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life, and Kierkegaard’s affirmation of subjectivistic existence. One issue in particular tended to take an increasingly central position: the status of consciousness, a phenomenon common to the natural sciences, human sciences, and metaphysical speculation. Such was the historical situation of philosophy at the turn of the century. And, following Nishitani’s interpretation, Nishida’s contribution to philosophy must be seen in relation to it. Husserlian phenomenology, born in exactly the same context, is similarly oriented: in both cases there is an attempt to find a unity of consciousness preceding the specification of knowledge into particular sciences, an attempt to find a level of experience that is pretheoretical because it is foundational to the theoretical. The problem is to overcome the “crisis of European sciences” by discovering that which is prior to the various methods of investigation, using an approach that redefines their presuppositions in order to uncover their foundational dimension. In both cases the problem is to go back to “the things themselves.” This implies an attempt to find a level of consciousness that is still undifferentiated from the reality to which it endeavors to find access. But whereas Husserl sought to establish a phenomenology capable of founding both natural sciences and human sciences (by uncovering a more original level of access to reality, which he called “intentionality”), Nishida, with his notion of junsui keiken, attempted to establish an experience that is still undifferentiated and thus capable of founding not only the sciences but also the traditional disciplines of metaphysics and religion. Moreover, Nishida’s thought, in comparison with the logicism of the early Husserl, is not totally opposed to psychologism. In Nishida’s view there were reasons for the establishment of psychology as an empirical science, just as there were for the appearance of the notion of “pure experience.” Nishida, as we know, borrowed this latter concept from the psychologism of William James, but with the intention of liberating it from the antimetaphysical attitude that psychologism shared with logicism, and then using it to investigate the secular questions of metaphysics. Indeed, aside from his discussion on psychologism, Nishida’s thought is essentially concerned with the fundamental questions of the German idealists (Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Fichte), which he tries to reappropriate from the ruins of speculative metaphysics. The positivistic context—which Nishitani describes elsewhere as a major aspect of modern nihilism—meant the total rejection of any metaphysics, any transcendance, be it in the form of Kantian a priori categories, of Hegelian conceptualism, of the Platonic intelligible world, or of the religious belief in some other dimension. As Nishitani clearly explains, positivism emphasized observable facts to the exclusion of any other reality. The access to the metaphysical dimension was thus closed. Such a dichotomy seemed to put an

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end to traditional philosophy’s capacity to offer a unified vision of man and the world. Thus, in Nishitani’s eyes, the task of the philosopher was to overcome the opposition between positivism (psychologism, scientism, and scientific socialism) and metaphysics (idealism, existentialism, and the religious attitude). The state of the Zeitgeist needed a philosophy capable of standing solidly on the ground of pure experience while offering new answers to the fundamental questions of metaphysics, religion, and human existence in general, and doing this without falling back into traditional scholastic metaphysics. So—as Nishitani puts it—since philosophy was incapable of responding to the positivistic challenge and positivism was incapable of thinking philosophically, Nishida wished to establish a metaphysically oriented standpoint that at the same time would maintain a footing in experience and facticity. Nishitani writes, “A standpoint that was metaphysical and yet empiricist, that maintained ties with God without departing from the actual world of facts, was almost unthinkable in the West.”7 And that is precisely what Nishida endeavored to create as early as Zen no kenkyū, where he strove to do justice to both the contemplative life of religious ontology and the positive facts of empirical sciences. Such an attitude was bold in its novelty and yet at the same time it was in accordance with ancient Buddhist tradition, since Buddhism offers an individual morality and spirituality based on facts of self-experience, and free from any type of scholastic metaphysical speculation or rigidified religious dogma.8 Thus the point of Nishida’s philosophy that was most novel vis-à-vis modern Western thought was the same point that linked it with the most profound tradition of the East. It was also the point at which Nishida, perhaps unconsciously, practiced what Nishitani describes elsewhere as “the self-overcoming of nihilism.” Indeed, if the positivistic spiritual void is a major aspect of contemporary nihilism, standing on the ground of this void (the positivistic notion of pure experience itself) in order to transcend it and uncover the ontological principle of true reality (be it called “the unconscious unifying force,” “the place of nothingness,” or “emptiness”) appears to be what Nishitani is referring to when he speaks of “overcoming nihilism through nihility” so that one might reach the emptiness that transcends it and rediscover the suchness of reality. THE ONTOLOGICAL LEVEL However, it is not only Nishida’s work on consciousness, experience, and reality on the epistemological, psychological, and transcendantal levels that is of particular significance but also his contributions in the area of fundamental ontology.

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Nishida defines the “principle” (ri 理) common to consciousness and reality as an “unconscious unifying force” (muishiki tōitsu ryoku 無意識統一 力). This principle—which in later works of Nishida related to the notion of nothingness and basho—is the ontological background that enables the union of the self with the absolute, which is the ultimate goal of religious experience. The manner in which Nishida expresses the nature of ri reveals his thought to be a late heir of the traditional Eastern search for such a religious union (the classical example of which is the union of atman and brahman in ancient Vedantic spirituality). Furthermore, Nishida’s discourse enables the reader to establish a relation between two ontological philosophers whose significance Heidegger has shown to be decisive in the historical (geschichtlich) becoming of Western ontology: Aristotle and Leibniz.9 By establishing in this way a possible relationship between the spiritual tradition of the East and the ontological tradition of the West, Nishida makes possible what one might call a reactualization of the antique “giant’s battle for being” (gigantomachia peri tes ousias). Indeed “the giant’s battle for being,” to which Plato refers in The Sophist, concerned the definition of the “beingness” (ousia) of nature (physis). The “foreigner” in Plato’s dialogue realizes that the concept of being (on) is not so easy to define once one accepts the fact that a “non being” (me on) of some type must be posited if one is to explain the ontological defect of a pseudo-being (such as, for example, the discourse of the sophist himself). Thus in attempting, with the aid of some historical retrospection, to go a step further in defining being, he realizes that there is a type of intellectual “battle” between those who, like the Ionians, view being as something that is “becoming” (genesis) and “moving” (kinesis), and those who, like the Parmenidians, view it as a kind of immutable “essential beingness” (ousia). And both sides claim that the ontological principle (genesis, kinesis or ousia) “is.” So, asks the foreigner, what is the meaning of this “is” (estin)? What is the being (einai) that it expresses? Is it an additional principle of some kind? Does it precede all other types of ontological principles, or perhaps include them? Actually, concludes the foreigner, we thought we knew the meaning of being, but we realize that in fact we do not and “we now become perplexed.” This sentence in Plato’s The Sophist (244a) is quoted by Heidegger in the famous opening paragraph of Sein und Zeit.10 Heidegger’s effort can be seen as an effort to reopen the “battle” (i.e., the discussion) on the question of being after about two millenia of ontotheological substantialistic speculation (since, in Heidegger’s view, Western metaphysics as a whole has developped the meaning of being as ousia, understood by means of the Aristotelian hupokeimenon, thus giving it a substantialistic dimension that obliterates

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its “dynamic” essence). In his Nietzsche, Heidegger explicitly speaks of the urgent necessity of reactualizing such a gigantomachia peri tes ousias in light of the invading nihilism of the times. This growing nihilism is, indeed, partly due to the incapacity to conceptualize being as such, the understanding of which presupposes an experience of nothingness (das Nichts). In his own effort to rethink the essential meaning of being in relationship with the experience of nothingness, Heidegger stresses the necessity of reaching beyond the traditional substantialistic interpretation of Aristotle’s ousia and thus uncovering the basic meaning of being as dynamis (power, force, or potentiality to become)—which is the fundamental meaning of physis, the initial site of the ontological questioning of the Greeks. In his effort to reappropriate Aristotle’s “dynamic” ontology, Heidegger underlines the importance of a mediation through the Leibnizian notion of “force” (vis). And this is where Nishida’s “unconscious unifying force” comes into the picture. Nishida explains that this force is that by which consciousness comprises a manifestation of reality in general. This unifying force, which expresses, altogether, the activity of consciousness and the fundamental essence of the universe, is explicitly compared to Leibniz’s monad, while the Aristotelian “dynamic” background is also hinted at (and clearly emphasized in Nishitani’s interpretation of Nishida).11 At the same time Nishida links it to the Buddhist and pre-Buddhist concepts of atman and anatman and their relation to brahman. So, when seen from the perspective of the Kyoto school, Heidegger’s effort to overcome the substantialistic interpretation of Aristotelian ontology in favor of a more dynamic one was not simply a way to favor the Ionian (Heraclitean) interpretation of physis over the Parmenidian ousia. Its significance was that it enabled a dialogue between Western metaphysics and the relational ontology of Eastern spirituality (particularly Madhyamika thought), where substance is reduced to relations between elements whose very existence depends on such a relational situation. And when, later, Nishida saw Leibniz’s “force” as mediating this reappropriation of the dynamic dimension of being, he also underlined the “willing” or “desiring” aspect of this force (its appetitio). Attempts to uncover the metaphysical principle of any Buddhist-inspired Weltanschaung (or even pre-Buddhist Weltanschauung, since the principle reaches back to the Vedanta and can be found in the Vedantic-inspired philosophy of Schopenhauer as much as in Nishida) invariably rediscover the same characteristics: that consciousness (ishiki 意識) is will (ishi 意思), that will is pulsional, and that this pulsion is to be found at the heart of reality (jitsuzai 実在).12 Concerning this dimension of will, desire, or pulsion in original being (“original” in the sense both of “fundamental” and “initial”), I cannot resist

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quoting this beautiful passage of the Rigveda13 where archaic Indian thought seems to have expressed in one pure intuition what we are now trying to rediscover quite clumsily through our commentary on Nishida, Heidegger, and the Greeks: 1.  Not non-existent was it nor existent was it at that time: there was not atmosphere nor the heavens which are beyond. What existed? Where? In whose care? An abyss unfathomable? 2.  Neither mortal was there nor immortal then; not of night, of day was there distinction: that alone breathed windless through inherent power. Other than That indeed was naught else. 3.  Darkness it was, by darkness hidden in the beginning: an undistinguished sea was all this. The germ of all things which was enveloped in void, That alone through the power of brooding thought was born. 4.  Upon that in the beginning arose desire, which was the first offshoot of that thought. This desire sages found out (to be) the link between the existent and the non-existent, after searching with the wisdom in their heart. 5.  Straight across was extended their line of vision: was That below, was That above? Seedplacers there were, powers there were: potential energy below, impulse above. 6.  Who, after all, knows? Who here will declare—arose whence this world? Subsequent are the gods to the creation of this world. Who, then, knows whence it came into being? 7.  This world—whence it came into being, whether it was made or whether not—He who is its overseer in the highest heavens surely knows—or perhaps He knows not! THE MANIFESTATION OF GOD. It would necessitate a long study to clearly establish the links between the Sanskrit notion of brahman and the Greek notion of physis. There is an etymological link that Heidegger suggested14 and that people like Heinrich Zimmer, Emile Benveniste, and Pierre Aubenque have proven. But to prove the philosophical link on the level of ontological meaning is a much more difficult task. And this is where Nishida provides an interesting possibility: his notion of God, which, as indicated by the previous ontological considerations, is closer to the Greek notions of physis and dynamis than to the Christian notion of a personal and transcendent God. Nishida describes God as an Absolute that is immanent to the reality of the universe as a whole; God

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is defined as the “foundation of the universe” (uchū no konpon 宇宙の根本), and the universe is described as the “manifestation of God” (kami no hyōgen 神の表現) rather than the creation of God. Furthermore, the relation of man to God is not described as some face-to-face interpersonal dialogue, but as a reappropriation by man of his essential divine nature: God is perceived at the most profound level of the true self. To determine the extent to which this notion is a continuation of the antique search for authentic atman would require extensive research, as would the question of the extent to which the Buddhist ethical quest is a continuation of its predecessor in the Vedantic tradition. But Nishida gives clear indications that he saw his own thought to be a continuation of such a spiritual quest and, moreover, to be in deep communion with Christian spirituality (particularly as it was expressed by the mystics of the Renaissance): There is a fundamental spiritual principle at the base of reality, and this principle is God. This idea accords with the fundamental truth of Indian religion: Atman and Brahman are identical. God is the great Spirit of the universe. . . . An infinite power is hidden even in our small chests that are restricted by time and space; the infinite unifying power of reality is latent in us. Possessing this power, we can search the truth of the universe in learning, we can express the true meaning of reality in art, and we can know the foundation of reality that forms the universe in the depth of our hearts—we can grasp the true face of God. The infinitely free activity of the human heart proves God directly. As Jakob Boehme said, we see God with a “reversed eye” (umgewandtes Auge). . . . The religion of India of the distant past and the mysticism that flourished in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries sought God in intuition realized in the inner soul, and this I consider to be the deepest knowledge of God. In what form does God exist? From one perspective, taken by such thinkers as Nicholas of Cusa, God is all negation, whereas that which can be affirmed or grasped is not God.15

So, although Nishida’s notion of God seems far removed from the Christian notion of a transcendent and personal Creator of the universe, it is in Nishida’s view quite close to that of some great Christian mystics. He also describes God as “the great personality at the base of the universe.”16 This, of course, depends on the understanding one has of “personality.” In this case, it is something that reveals itself when the ego-centered person (jiga 自我) is itself negated (muga 無我) in a way to uncover the true selfless self (jiko 自己), thus revealing what Nishitani refers to as “the real self-awareness of reality” (jitsuzai no jitsuzaitekina jikaku 実在の実在的 な自覚). The personality of God is thus the “self” of the universe. It is—as stressed by Nishitani17—the dimension of spirituality (intellectual intuition, freedom, and love) that unfolds from the standpoint of the true self in pure experience. In order to have a clear grasp of this notion of personality one

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has to stand at the point where the ground of “pure experience” coincides with the ontological dimension of the “unconscious unifying force.” Such a personality is (in a concept developed later by Nishitani) an “impersonal personality,” that enables the “egoless” person to express the basic universal virtues of agape and karuṇā. NOTES 1. Pörtner and Heise 1995, 336–38. 2. Nishida 1911, 6. 3. Nishitani 1961, 2. 4. Op. cit., 8. 5. Nishida 1911, 14. 6. Heidegger 1924. 7. Nishitani 1985, 71. 8. Radakrishnan 1941, 342. 9. See Heidegger 1981. 10. Heidegger 1927, 1. 11. Nishitani 1985, 35ff, 86 ff, 130. 12. Nishida 1911, 19. 13. Quoted by Kalupahana 1992, 4. 14. Heidegger 1935. 15. Nishida 1990 (the Japanese original [1911] is quoted here), 120. 16. Op. cit., 225. 17. Nishitani 1985, 154.

Chapter 7

Nishida Kitarō and Michel Henry Philosophers of Life

The philosophy of Nishida is close to the phenomenology of Michel Henry in its attempt to go back to the most immediate facts of lived consciousness. While achieving that, the latter tries to overcome the metaphysics of representation together with its egologic subjectivity. Henry puts into place his own phenomenology, establishing a clear distinction between what shows itself (what appears) and the fact of appearing (the appearance as such). He then aims at the self-appearing of appearance, which is prior to such a distinction and which is constantly at work in every form of appearance. Beyond the constituting subjectivity, he is aiming at the self-appearance of true reality, at the level of the bodily and the affective. Within this endeavor the elucidation of the notion of life (la vie) is essential in a way that brings Henry’s work close to one of the central concerns of the later Nishida. However Nishida describes life, more precisely, as “historical” (rekishiteki 歴史的), which means it takes place within the self-formative becoming of that which is. In the self-forming world, the phenomenon of life expresses the world from a viewpoint that is each time determined within this world. Human reality allows the world to appear to itself, awakening to itself within an individual, under a particular form. This individual self-awakening of the universal world is an element that is both “formed” (tsukurareta mono 作られたもの), a constituted part of the world, and “formative” (tsukuru mono 作るもの), capable of giving some new form within the world. And this is what creates its historicity. THE SEARCH FOR THE BEGINNING Michel Henry tells us, “A radical and initial philosophy is the search for the beginning.”1 Don’t we have here the exact definition of Nishida philosophy? Such a search for the beginning, started afresh again and again, and 113

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the way it has been accomplished by Nishida establishes him within the line of Cartesianism and transcendentalism. In this regression to the initial beginning and first appearance, the Cartesian cogito is the paradigm. But it isn’t its only possible occurrence. The cogito is reformulated by a number of authors: by Kant, by Husserl . . . and by Nishida himself, where we note the untiring search for the locus “where everything comes from and where everything returns.” The philosophy of Nishida, in its development, covers a number of phases, each one being an attempt to grasp, in a new approach, the “beginning” of philosophy. Various notions are proposed in order to try and delimit this beginning: pure experience, self-awakening, place, and active intuition. In each case it is a matter of returning to the most initial moment of the beginning, where the beginning goes on beginning, while being the locus of the initial self-appearing of appearance. During his first period Nishida calls this locus “pure experience.” The expression designates the original and pre-reflexive life that takes place at the source of the most immediate act of consciousness, before the subject-object dichotomy. Before any reflection, before any judgement, before any thought of a thinking self, it is the intuitive and spontaneous consciousness, previous to the distinction between that what knows and that which is known. It is, for example, the initial moment of sensation: immediate experience, purely present, sheer lived experience. It is a knowledge without any distance, a self-givenness that is lost as soon as it becomes an object of thought. It is not something the philosopher needs to investigate about: it is the beginning that joins the initial philosophizing itself to reality itself, enabling it to know its own self. From there on, the world of experience will be able to develop in its diversity. But how can this experience be something else than just an unconscious sensation? This is the question to which Nishida tries to answer during the remainder of his itinerary, notably with the notion of jikaku 自覚 (self-awareness or, better said: self-awakening). The notion of self-awakening intends to join intuition (the consciousness of the initial unity of subject and object, i.e., pure experience) and reflection (the consciousness that thinks out this unity). Within self-consciousness, there is a self-projecting of the self, which means that “the self sees itself within the self.” It is a ternary structure—noetic self, noematic self, and topological self—that constitutes the fundamental structure of consciousness, at work at the source of intentionality. In order to get a better grasp of the specificity of this ternary structure of self-awakening, Nishida introduces the notion of “locus” (basho 場所). This notion names the “topological” dimension of a consciousness understood as an articulated (logos) self-determination of locus (topos), which is the locus of nothingness, the non-being place where all beings appear, the place where all acts of consciousness take place. Later,

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the awakening will be expanded from the “self to the world,” the self becoming an expressive element of the world and a co-creator of the world. Indeed, according to the ternary structure of self-awakening, the noetic self is the self that sees itself and the self that is seen by the former is the noematic self—the two of them forming one. Being itself a nothingness, the noetic self makes the noematic self appear to him, and thus constitutes itself as an oppositional (or relative) nothingness—a new formulation of the intentionality that constitutes transcendental subjectivity. Digging deeper at the source of the latter, Nishida tries to delimit where the noematic self appears to the noetic one. It is within the self itself. The self as a topological self is thus the receptacle of oppositional nothingness; it is the creative site that gives birth to the fact that the self appears to itself. This basho, this topological self, is pure nothingness, non-substance, from where arises the self-revelation of the noetico-noematic self. This initial place is called the “basho of absolute nothingness.” It is at the creative source of the moving and self-forming reality of the world. The world, the Nishida of maturity will qualify it as a “historical life.” And he will therefore also develop the idea of a self-awakening of the historical world. Nishida, in his last period, underlines indeed that philosophy “begins with the self-awakening of the historical life.” Philosophy thus starts in the self-appearing of life, in the self-awakening of life on the level of its radical immanence within temporality. This self-awakening of life is a self-expression of life as self-determination—an infinite process through which, at each moment, it gives itself a form, never crystallizing in some intemporal substance. All this lines in an attempt—close to Husserlian phenomenology—to rethink in a more radical way the Cartesian beginning, because the latter ends in an impasse, that of the substantialization of the self. For Nishida, the object of philosophy is true reality, which is an unobjectifiable subject that lies at the bottom of the self. It characterizes itself by its self-understanding and its self-determination, but also by the absence of substance, the fact of not being a foundation, while being an origin. Existing by itself in a non-substantial way, it integrates self-negation, including the other in its self, because it is laying out the place where the other appears. True reality as such is an acting reality, and this is what makes its effectivity. The effectivity of that which exists by itself is impermanent and differentiated, in constant becoming, infinitely varied. It is within this context that it can be a self-objectification and a self-expression. And because it includes selfnegation, it is also a self-contradiction. It is thus a “self-contradictory identity.” Self-awakening is experienced in radical self-negation: the Nishidian self is characterized by an infinite self-negation that enables, among other things, to welcome alterity. And it is under this angle that it is a position

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of the self-expression of true reality, meaning the world in historical life. Self-awakening, interpreting reality, becomes an intuition of the world and because it is also creative, it is active: it as an active-intuition within the historical life. EVOLUTION OF THE NISHIDIAN NOTION OF LIFE: FROM PURE EXPERIENCE TO ACTIVE-INTUITION Already in An Inquiry into the Good (1990; Japanese original 1911), organized around “pure experience,” the notion of life plays a central role: what Nishida endeavors to elucidate through his analysis of pure experience, is life. He writes, “The problem of human life is the central concern running throughout the book.”2 The concern to elucidate this notion follows him until one of the last essays published in his lifetime and titled, precisely, “Life” (1944 [NKZ 10]). Concerning this evolution, Kuroda Akinobu (2004) writes the following: The itinerary of the philosophy of Nishida takes its start in pure experience and goes toward historical life, and the latter is nothing else but the form of the former, a form that has been reached at through a number of stages of transformation. Within this perspective, one can say that the notion of life constitutes the alpha and the omega of the philosophy of Nishida.3

At the stage of Intuition and Reflexion in Self-Consciousness (1917 [NKZ 2]), Nishida specifies that true life includes cultural consciousness. While insisting on the tight link between life and will, he specifies further that he sees in life the unity of the concrete totality of reality. When Nishida constructs a notion of life that is rooted in the will, that he identifies with reality, including cultural life, this foreshadows his later conception of historical life. It is in his essay I and Thou of 1932 (NKZ 5) that, on the occasion of a criticism of the Bergsonian notion of life as a continuous inner development, he stresses that life unfurls itself in a discontinuous way. And he takes as an example the succession of generations where infinite life perpetuates itself through individuals who are finite. And what is allowed to transcend biological mortality is practical action. However it is the organicism of Haldane that will thereafter inspire him the most. This vision stresses that, in the relationship between an organism and its environment, the one and the other maintain each other actively, being part of a same normative structure—like in breathing where the oxygen is essential as much for life as for the environment. Life is the self-expression of nature. The individual organism isn’t terminated at its spatial limit: it continues itself

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in the living environment of which it is a portion. The living is thus composed of its form but also its function. Avoiding mechanism just as much as vitalism, who both substantialize life, Nishida tries to grasp life as a relationship between the organism and its environment, the intimacy of the former and the exteriority of the latter. Form is what informs, structures, and organizes this interaction. And this form is in constant self-formation and constant self-decomposition. It is while following this process that life affirms its identity in accordance with the logic of the contradictory self-identity. And this process, both factual and creative, is continuously at work. It is the self-determination of the absolute present, that constitutes historical life. When Nishida speaks of the historical life, he does not aim at a discipline among the human sciences, but he means the universal becoming that encompasses all phenomena. It is the site of the expression of life, the medium of its self-determination, through which it produces forms that are always new. The process of continuous formation constitutes a history. Life is what Nishida means by “the truly real” (shin jitsuzai 真実在). It is what acts by itself in a unified way, while differentiating itself in the three temporal ekstases and in the exteriority of the portions of space. And the “true” life is that of the human being, the only being capable of self-awakening. Life encompasses its own negation that is death—life and death constitute “the self contradictory identity” of life. The social and cultural world is the environment where human life expresses itself, its milieu, its site. Being human, this environment is an expressive world. Life is dependent on the bio-social milieu, but without being reduced to it: it is an advent out of this milieu. Life is the self-expression of its own environment. Such an “expression” (hyōgen 表現) deploys itself as a biological world and, in a more and more encompassing way, as a historical life. Life self-determines itself indefinitely, in its universal globality and in the multiplicity of the individuals that compose it. The world of historical life is self-formative, creator of forms (things, structures, intentionnalities, etc.). And this self-formation is a self-determination of the present. In it, nature forms itself, giving form to expressions of the self, to things. This formation is produced moment after moment, punctuating the continuous becoming of historical life. Because he masters logos, the human self is truly creative of new forms. The bodies within the world are “expressive,” they display a form, and our own body interacts on this expressive level. Such a process of self-determination of the world, which is that of self-awakening, needs a more incarnate notion. In order to grasp historical life in the concreteness of its interaction with the human, it is indeed necessary to resort to the notion of “active-intuition” (kōiteki chokkan 行為的直観). The core of active intuition is the bodily self

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that puts its activity in play within the creative world. As for Merleau-Ponty, the lived body is an effective element of the creative world, receiving a form, and it is at the same time what gives form to this very world, through action. It is through active intuition that the lived body is the site of the dialectic between the reception of forms and their recreation. NISHIDA AND HENRY: SIMILAR YET DIFFERENT. The Nishidian way of studying the problematic of consciousness brings his system of thought close to phenomenology. And the way his investigation of consciousness orients him toward the problematic of life brings him close in particular to Michel Henry. The affinities between the philosopher of “self-awakening” and the philosopher of “self-affection” can be found at the level of a phenomenology of life. For Michel Henry, life is, first of all, the fact of “feeling one’s own self”: to feel oneself within oneself is the precondition for everything that will affect it. The foundational intuition of his thought is that the essence of subjectivity is life feeling itself—preceding any cogito. He tries, from there, to develop a phenomenology that can grasp the essence of life as the original appearing that manifests itself where it is within us. The self-revelation of life is drawn phenomenologically within its most interior possibility, within the suffering body, within its flesh: la chair. The blind intuition of affectivity constitutes the first coming to self of appearance. For Henry, phenomenology consists, not in the study of a phenomenon in its objectivity but in the examination of its phenomenality as such. Thereafter a distinction is drawn between the phenomenon considered in its particular content (what shows itself) and its phenomenality (the pure fact of appearing)—a distinction, in a way, comparable to Heidegger’s difference between the true (what is uncovered) and truth (the uncovering). Now, appearing is considered more essential than being in the sense that it is the fact of appearing that, phenomenologically, makes a thing be. Michel Henry stresses the fact that it is because appearing appears to itself that something can show itself. “The original self-appearing of appearing” is what precedes any appearance in the world. But how does phenomenality phenomenalize itself? According to Henry, phenomenality does not limit itself to the perceptive appearing of the world. For Nishida as well, self-awakening (the pure self appearing) is different from active intuition (the medium of the appearing of the world). The latter grasps the world externally in the multiplicity of its forms, whereas the former knows itself internally in the originality of its appearing.

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The position that gives to things appearing in the world their weight of being is sensation, which is different from representation. Sensation is at the heart of subjectivity. But it doesn’t yet allow life to reveal itself to itself. There is in life a way of appearing that is radically dissimilar from that of the world. Life isn’t ontic: it is, as the locus of the subject, a pure kernel facing beings. The phenomenological transcendental life defines the original mode of the pure phenomenality as self-revelation. Thus, where the world unveils itself in its exteriority, alterity, and difference, the self-revelation of life carries in itself no distance and reveals nothing else but itself. So the opposition between appearing and what appears disappears in the self-revelation of life. The access to the revelation of life is life itself, in its own intimacy. It is an immediate entry into the invisible presence. This takes place within the most intimate subjectivity, within the access to ourselves. This relation to ourselves precedes us, we result from it, since it results from the eternal process within which absolute Life happens and comes to itself. Life, in its radical difference from the world, depends however on that “outside” in the sense that it needs it in order to exclude it as its other. Nishida agrees with this except that he underlines a dialectical dynamic that is at the source of a creative relation between the self and the other. In order to fully welcome the other in its own interiority, true reality exteriorizes itself fully—abolishing the distinction between inside and outside, the two terms being linked by contradictory self-identity. The mixture of proximity and distance between Nishida and Henry appears even more clearly at the occasion of the problematics of the body and in particular about the question of suffering. In the experience of suffering, of physical pain, for example, it is my pain itself that instructs me on the pain and not some intentional consciousness aiming at pain. It is a proper modality of life, in the absence of the exteriority of the world, making impossible any distance that could enable escape from it. And this also excludes the possibility of having a proper look at it: pain, like joy and anxiety, is invisible as it is uncommunicable. The phenomenality proper to affectivity cannot be seen. And because pain is the most intense modality of such a self-affection of life, Henry can say that “to live is to suffer one’s own self.” The relation of life to the living is a relation of immanence, indeed, and the “ipseity” (self-hood) within which our real life comes to be felt by itself is a true bond through which life, feeling itself, reveals itself to itself. Each individual, in his ipseity, becomes a self as a transcendental and living self, and absolute life comes to the self by feeling and suffering itself. Sufferance, because it doesn’t designate any specific sphere of our life, penetrates and founds as a last resort the whole domain of life. It is the domain of the original “passibility” (passivity, possibility, receptivity) where every self-feeling becomes possible. This original suffering is the essence of

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life, and it is the condition of any possible sufferance that would be felt as such within ourselves. But where does that affective tonality of sufferance come from if not from the events of the world? This is where the body plays a crucial role. The body takes its phenomenological properties from the exteriority of the world, but without reducing itself to such an exteriority: it has a number of sensitive qualities. The visible body, which is sensitive, can see, and at the same time it can feel: every sense is an intentionality and through it the transcendental body opens up to the world. But how does a body who knows a world know itself? This is only possible within an immanent self-givenness: that of pathos. This phenomenological disruption—through which it is no more the world that reveals itself, but life—is possible because the lived body differs from all other object of the universe: it isn’t itself just a “visible” object, but an “invisible” flesh. And since flesh has its phenomenological foundation in life, it finds in the latter the whole of its phenomenological properties and gets from it its aptitude to “pathetic self-affection.” It is within flesh that occurs the “archi-passibility” of absolute life conditioning the passibility of the body. Absolute life is indeed what lives in each of us. The portion of singularity of our body, its proper finitude, is what rejects it toward the world of bodies that is outside absolute life. The more we stop suffering our mundane body, the more we allow life to suffer itself within us and the more we receive the infinity of its immanent and invisible vitality. This Henrian mystic of life is dependent on the radical distinction he maintains between immanence and transcendence, interior and exterior. With Nishida the radical epistemological break of Henry doesn’t take place. The notions of basho and active intuition propose a common locus that is prior to such a mutual exclusion. The original body, kernel of active intuition, being altogether seer and seen, acting and passible, resists the ontological break by its fundamental irreducibility to pure interiority and exteriority. The body is prior to the subject-object division but yet makes it possible. The body is the site where interior and exterior can oppose themselves, in contradictory self-identity, which is constantly at work. Our body is in the world because the world is the prolongation of the body and because the body is an object of the world. Active intuition is the modality of opening of the body to the world. And in return, when the body suffers the world, it is the world that feels itself in the individual self. It is within our bodily self that the dimensions of life and world can be distinguished and can be seen as absolutely other, while being the same: it is a contradictory self-identity. Active intuition is for Nishida the foundation of the scientific method while self-awakening works as a method of philosophy that refuses any exterior identification and is simply a purely active self-formation. It is the self-feeling of life itself. The active intuition and the

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self-awakening, while being separate, are however inseparable. In the negating self-awakening, one is distinguished from all other in order to be able to feel oneself without any distance. This is accompanied by language, which is both a self-expression and an effective reality of the world. The world expresses itself in our individual self. And through self-awakening active intuition can be identified in our bodily self: the world appears to itself as a world of self-formative forms. The bodily self is therefore the intermediary space between the acting body seen from the outside and the self feeling itself as a self-awakened self in the interiority of flesh. The intimate space cannot be negatively distinguished between self-awakening and active intuition. Such are a few of the ideas that could be suggested for a comparison between Michel Henry and Nishida Kitarō. NOTES 1. Henry 1985, 17. 2. Nishida 1911 (Japanese original), 4; 1990 (English translation), xxx). 3. Kuroda 2004, 233.

Chapter 8

Self in Space Nishida, Merleau-Ponty, and Michel Henry

The philosophy of Nishida may appear enigmatic to the reader trained in the philosophical traditions of Europe and America because the style of his writing seems so idiosyncratic, and the expressions and phrases he uses often lack clarity. However, the correlations of Nishida’s thought to some themes central to French phenomenology may make his philosophy more accessible. In this chapter, I evoke affinities between Nishida Kitarō, Michel Henry, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Indeed, one can find in the Merleau-Pontian reflections on the notion of “flesh” (la chair) true similarities to Nishida’s notion of “active intuition” (kōiteki chokkan 行為的直観).1 Likewize, Michel Henry’s notions of immanence and life (la vie) reveal interesting affinities to Nishida’s conception of the locus, or place (basho 場所), and of self-awareness or, better said, “self-awakening” (jikaku 自覚). An exploration of Nishida’s research, especially in reference to the notion of non-ego (muga 無我), places him within the philosophical movement that Paul Ricœur calls “reflexive philosophy.” Ricœur uses this term to identify the post-Cartesian tradition, which, through its reflexive investigation of the self, defines the criteria for reflection as such. Reflexivity is the medium of reflection, and self-reflection the medium of the reflection on things. Nishida relentlessly questions the apodicticity of the Cartesian cogito, as well as the idealistic and phenomenological subjectivity that has stemmed from it. The reason for this concern lies in his conceptual proximity to such a philosophical approach and in his attempt to define the particularity of his own standpoint in relationship to the Cartesian project. By establishing nothingness as the foundation of the ego—and thus making himself the heir of the Buddhist non-ego—he endeavors to find a new standpoint, which is an unheard-of position for the philosophy of subjectivity. It is precisely because 123

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his is a philosophy of the non-ego that Nishida’s viewpoint constitutes one of subjectivity. This feature of Nishida’s thought is reminiscent of, for example, Heidegger, who tried to overcome the metaphysics of subjectivity through a complete reworking of it with the notion of Dasein, but also Merleau-Ponty, who aimed at giving back to the cogito its primordial incarnation in the lived body (corps vécu), or Michel Henry, who was concerned with rooting the constituting cogito back within the living and affective origin of its activity. SELF-AWAKENING THAT IS IMMANENT TO LIFE The self (jiko 自己), which has been untiringly explored by Nishida, using terms ranging from “pure experience” (junsui keiken 純粋経験) to “locus” (basho 場所), or “active intuition” (kōiteki chokkan 行為的直観), represents the idea not of knowing oneself but of experiencing oneself and feeling oneself. It comprises subjectivity not as the constitutive cogito but as the interiority that grounds the cogito. Within the experience of the self, subjectivity appears to itself as the field of appearance as such. Self-experience is the background against which the appearance of the world and of things can come to be. In his essay The Intelligible World, Nishida introduces a threefold topological model of being.2 Using this model, he locates the appearance of the world and of natural beings on the level of what he calls the “locus of beings” (yū no basho 有の場所). This comprises the level of reflection that is best illustrated by the Greek or Aristotelian type of thought—that is a logic that conceives of objects as substances. These objects are apprehended by the subsumptive judgement by means of the predicative proposition. This locus signifies the modality of being in which the self experiences the world. However, such an experience of the world, when limited to this dimension, happens at the expense of self-awareness of the self; such a “locus” is constituted at the price of bracketing the self in the form of an inverse phenomenological reduction. In contrast, the place where the self experiences itself as the condition of its encounters with the world constitutes the second locus; this is the place where reflection becomes self-reflection, while subjectivity performs a return to itself and arouses self-awakening (jikaku自覚). This comprises the standpoint that is inaugurated by transcendental philosophy, opening the field of consciousness that is capable of predicating reality. Nishida calls this locus “oppositional nothingness” (tairitsuteki mu no basho 対立的無の場所) because, if it is indeed the source of signification, within its very immediacy it is nothingness (mu 無) or non-being; as such it is “opposed to” (tairitsuteki 対立的) or relative to the being that it is going to signify.

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This locus is at first conquered by the Cartesian doubt, which reveals subjectivity. Nishida identifies it as the locus of non-being where the world emerges. However, the Cartesian position immediately loses the very fact that it brought to light, insofar as it begins to reify this subjectivity as the modality of a soul or “thinking thing” (res cogitans). Rather than asserting the self as the source of reality, the Cartesian position reduces the former to a mere portion of the latter in the sense that it objectifies the ego. The Kantian position further thematizes subjectivity as meaning bestowing agency, but the Kantian transcendental ego tires itself out in the endeavor to signify the transcendent object. Within its unfolding of the formal transcendental, it does not include any intuition of subjectivity as such, only the presupposition of an “Ich denke” that accompanies all representation. That is why the locus of oppositional nothingness cannot be satisfied with the transcendentalism indicative of the a priori conditions of possibility. It has to deepen itself through a self-intuition that tries to explore, in a Husserlian mode, the very life of noetic activity. Nishida is indeed parallel to Husserl in the manner in which he theorizes subjectivity in action. In phenomenological reduction, reflection turns away from the world (the world of the natural or Aristotelian attitude as well as the world of Galilean science: the locus of being) in order to turn itself toward the condition of its appearance within the noetico-noematic correlation, which is equivalent to Nishida’s locus of oppositional nothingness. In this way, phenomenology begins the exploration of noetic activity as the life of consciousness, that is, as the field of the “life-world” (Lebenswelt). This is the life of the mind as much as everyday life within its irreducibility and its ever-new singularity. For Nishida, as much as for the later Husserl, actual reality is not identical to the notion of nature of positive sciences but constitutes life from wherein consciousness arises as that which gives perspective to the world. Bestowing meaning to ideality and science, life is itself a subjective givenness that exists within the intuition and the experience of self-affection. Phenomenology rescues consciousness from its preoccupation with the beings of the world and with a naïve conception of a world existing as such; it thus calls the world back to the web of the subjective performances and to the universality of the subjective operations that are synthetically connected. In other words, the world is in the process of constantly being constituted as the correlation between these two operations. The movement that returns from the naïve scientific world to its foundation in the life-world is not complete unless this living-within is properly thematized in its very givenness. This shift in locus from the sphere of the world to the sphere of meaning, bestowing subjectivity in its very givenness, which was precipitated by transcendental philosophy and confirmed by the phenomenological reduction, opens a methodological space in which Western

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thought intersects with Eastern thought (essentially Buddhist), investigating the life of consciousness. It is this very space that Nishida has tried to map out with his “logic of locus” (basho no ronri 場所の論理), for it is here that the hidden depth of being is offered to our reflection. Husserl believed that he could grasp subjectivity in its proper vein in the lived intuition of its evidence. Did he succeed? The intuition of the world, which opens up an endless succession of new horizons, is always subject to reshaping; it tends to follow new perspectives, which are always fragmentary and partial in nature, and which reveal it. Self-intuition, on the contrary, claims to be apodictic and absolute. Yet the flux of consciousness, of which the constituting subjectivity is constructed, is always moving, wavering, indistinguishable, infinite, and fading away within its concrete mode. For Husserl, the only way of grasping it in its evidence is to reduce it to its typical structure, which is always identical to the same type of reality and for every consciousness. In this way, the emergence of consciousness is itself eidetized in the same mode as the beings of the world, to which it is brought down, even though it had first tried to free itself from this world through transcendental reduction. The irreducible concreteness of conscious reality is thus itself reduced to an eidetic dimension. In the process of thematic grasping of subjectivity, by means of the eidetic reduction, concrete reality is lost in favor of its ideatic representation, its ideal essence. In this way, the transcendental experience, immanent and indubitable, is paradoxically reduced to an experience that is intentional and thus transcendent. This is all the more so since the grasping of this intentionality takes place, as do the objects of the world, by the means of fulfilling that which is always partial and provisional. Thus the subjectivity that makes one see remains itself unseen in its very reality. It becomes obvious that, in the end, even Husserlian phenomenology cannot grasp the primordial source of the flux of consciousness in its ultimate origin, which thus cannot be grasped within the sphere of phenomenological construction. It appears that even the philosophy of Husserl did not escape the objectification of subjectivity to which the Cartesian cogito and the Kantian transcendental successively succumbed. Any self-reflection of subjectivity, including thinking and representing consciousness, inescapably ends up in its own decay to the ontic rank of an object of investigation, thereby obliterating its own origin. Any representational self-reflection rejects subjectivity in the exteriority of the world, using this external objectivity as the criterion of its own intimate constitution. The subject, when reduced to being the condition of the object, becomes itself an object, so to speak, and cannot be grasped in its pure subjectivity. Is it not in order to get free from such a destiny of reflexive subjectivity that Nishida postulates a third sphere, namely, the most intimate locus of

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absolute nothingness (zettai mu no basho 絶対無の場所)? From this place, self-awakening emerges as the locus of the oppositional nothingness that constituted the second sphere. This is the locus from which the constituting subjectivity and the world it constitutes can be mutually understood because this sphere transcends both. What is located in this place does not comprise the act of seeing and representing but rather the source of the one and of the other, while remaining unseen and unrepresented itself. The self, here, is no more understood as the condition of the object, but emptied of all objective content; it is radical nothingness. Reduced to its pure activity, the self is nothing but this activity beyond the limits of the individual self. The self is the field of the experience that precedes the experiencing subject, and the field is the locus of seeing, while itself invisible; it is the locus of seeing without a seeing subject. In sum, life as such precedes individual consciousness and gives birth to consciousness. This ultimate locus is accessed through a process of regression from cognitive activity to affective, aesthetic, and volitional activity. The self, taken in its ultimate origin, comprises affectivity, self-affection, pure (self) experience, and primordial pathos. It constitutes the locus where the most unshareable singularity of the self takes its roots in a dimension that comes before it and from which it emerges. It is living life. Thus, the Nishidian reflection ends up in a philosophy of immanence and of life, whose affinities with Husserlian phenomenology are less striking than with that of Michel Henry. The best introduction to Nishida philosophy may be the ideas of Michel Henry as represented in his L’essence de la manifestation. While Nishida’s philosophy shares deep similarities not only with Henrian phenomenology, but also with the Freudian unconscious and with the Schopenhauerian will, it nevertheless does not relinquish the subject to the blindness of primordial drives. On the contrary, Nishida calls this final sphere, which is the source of consciousness, the “intelligible world” (eichiteki sekai 叡智的世界). Intelligibility is here put into light. For the horizon of absolute nothingness, which constitutes the root of the self, is not just the source of the self’s vital singularity and primordial will but also of its spiritual attitude, which includes the religious, the volitional, the aesthetic, and only thereafter, the cognitive. Intelligibility indeed is always founded in affectivity before it becomes cognitive or categorical; that is, it exists in the aesthetic contemplation of beauty, the religious union with the sacred, and in the volitional action toward the good. Rooted in its most intimate nature in the innermost depth of reality, the no-self, which is also non-substantial, can then embark upon its dialectic relationship with the world by becoming an “active intuition”; it is thus engaged in society, culture, and in the various modes of being-in-the-world. The movement of the continuous deepening of self-awakening, which is

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suggested by Nishida’s threefold topology, is followed, in the philosopher’s itinerary, by the movement of the dialectic interaction of the self with the world. This interaction discloses the rhythm of the infinite variations of the “self-identity of absolute contradictories” (zettai mujunteki jiko dōitsu 絶対 矛盾的自己同一). It seems clear that Nishida’s thought reveals here a close proximity to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the lived body (corps vécu), while at the same time anchored in a position close to that of Michel Henry’s “self-affection of life” (l’auto-affection de la vie). ACTIVE INTUITION, INSCRIBED IN THE FLESH Merleau-Ponty developed a phenomenology that, while in agreement with the Husserlian criticism of objectivism and psychologism, refuses to withdraw to a transcendental egology that becomes forgetful of its origins. For Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenologist is not an “impartial spectator” who is capable of a pure eidetic glance. Instead, he finds himself bound to an irreducible facticity, which is not just that of a being-in-the-world, structured by “care” (Sorge), as for Heidegger, but that of a body carnally situated in the world. Existence enters reality through sensitivity and feeling, both of which are not merely transcendent to the world but rather constitute passivity to the world. Through the flesh, the fact of seeing also makes me visible. There is a reciprocity between the body and the environment. It is on this level of the phenomenology of the lived body, which, simultaneously, sees and is seen, touches and is touched, feels and is felt in its interactions with its environment, that we find an affinity with Nishida’s notion of active intuition.3 Nishida develops his concept of “active intuition” in the context of his reflection on the body and on the historical world (rekishiteki sekai 歴史 的世界). Nishida tackles the question of the body during his “turn” in the mid-1930; thus it is possible to call him a true forerunner of Merleau-Ponty. He questions the status of the acting body on the level of active intuition— that is, on the horizon of the world—as historical reality. Nishida strives to overcome the notion of consciousness as reflection delimited by intentionality in order to include the praxis of our historical self. Nishida’s philosophy thus overcomes the standpoint of representation in order to attain a concept that can theorize the self-determination of the world from the standpoint of self-awareness. The self-determination of the world on the level of active intuition signifies that the world constitutes dialectically what is formed as well as what is formative. Moreover, such a philosophy of active intuition overcomes the position of pure experience since the latter remains on the level of register of intellectual cognition, whereas the former evokes the practical and poetical dimension characteristic of an acting and producing body. The

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body precedes consciousness, and it is itself historically formed. Nishida’s emphasis on the historicity of the body suggests that the latter is not limited to its biological dimension but includes the factuality of conscious life. The life of consciousness finds its origin in the factuality of bodily existence. It does not exist apart from bodily activity. Every intuition is active; intelligibility roots itself in sensibility. Nishida, like Merleau-Ponty, brings to the fore the ambiguity of the body, which is reducible neither to interiority nor to exteriority and possesses both objectivity and subjectivity; it is constituted by means of the dialectical relations between the poles of donation and reception, vision and action, and so forth. Vision belongs to intuitive apperception and receives a form of a perceived object as well as that of one’s own body. This way, the body sees itself among the objects of world wherein it can act. In addition, action that belongs to praxis is itself formative. Acting, the body develops a configuration of things and opens a perspective within which it can itself appear to itself. It is simultaneously formed and forming, seeing and seen; the acting body thus finds its origin “in the relationship between that which creates and which is created in the form of a continuity of discontinuity.”4 Insofar as he proposes a notion of the body as that which is seeing as well as is seen, Nishida joins Merleau-Ponty, who says in L’œil et l’esprit, that “the enigma of the body holds in the fact that it is both seeing and visible.”5 For Nishida, the body is the instrument of the self-formation and self-expression of historical life. Beyond the perceptive and cognitive relation to things on the spatial axis of simultaneity, there is a poetic relation to them on the dynamic axis of time. The bodily insertion of the mind in a poetic rather than theoretic modality is, for the body, a way of inhabiting a world that is “made of the same material” (fait de la même étoffe), to use MerleauPonty’s expression. Being an expression of the world, it is also a speaking body. In addition, if one considers the fact that ours is a historical and not just a biological body, it is safe to say that speech can be called the body of the mind. By the same token, language is the incarnation of reason. Language is a tool for man, as is his body or the worldly instruments around him. Through language, the body is not solely the expression of a meaning-bestowing subject; it constitutes a self-formative and self-expressive act of the world. The fact that the body evolves on the level of active intuition suggests that the two moments of intuition and action are inseparable: one realizes itself as the other. Active intuition comprises the fundamental mode of the being of human beings in the world; it constitutes the very structure of our being-in-the-world. In Logic and Life (Ronri to semei 論理と生命),6 Nishida develops his notion of the body as the ambiguous reality of active intuition. He underlines the ambiguity of the body in its dual function as seer (subject) and seen (object). One’s body comprises the locus and the condition of such an ambiguity. What distinguishes Nishida’s notion of the body as

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active intuition from Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the lived body is that the latter essentially observes the way the body appears to itself in the sense that my body is visible to me. Because the body is mine, I grasp myself both as interior and exterior. The world appears here as the horizon of such a phenomenality. Nishida, on the other hand, underscores the exteriority of the visibility of the lived body. This means that the fact of seeing and being seen is what gives the body its exteriority. This fact is grasped independently of any consideration of the inner sense. The importance given to seeing diverts the attention from the inner feeling of bodily extension. It also signifies that the objectivity of the lived body implicitly suggests the existence of another seer. The visibility of the body is there for all. Nishida does not stress that the vision is mine, as Merleau-Ponty does, but rather emphasizes its neutral thingness: I see my body as others can see it, as an object of the exteriority of worldly space. I see myself as an object of the world. This is Nishida’s way of performing the inversion of the modern transparent and self-identical transcendental subject. Nishida’s inversion of the self goes still further. To Nishida, the body becomes the site of the self-appearance of the world itself to itself. The act of seeing what happens in the process of the self-appearance of the world is not just that of one individual subject. The corporeal self is a transitory modality of the self-revelation of the world. Thus the world constitutes that which sees itself within reflexive consciousness. The self-awakening of the world takes place in human consciousness, and consciousness marks the advent of the world. In it the world sees itself from the inside. The appearance of the world does not merely indicate a single moment of intentional consciousness but nothing less than the topological turning of the world. When consciousness experiences itself, the world experiences itself at the same time. The historical body constitutes the self-expression of the world itself. This self-expression or self-determination of the historical world is located in a particular human body; it individualizes itself and thereby becomes its own irreducible source of autonomy. The phenomenological interest of Nishida obviously does not limit itself to a prefiguration of the philosophy of Michel Henry and Merleau-Ponty. The two complementary movements that animate Nishida’s reflection—the deepening of self-awakening in the direction of the absolute nothingness of the intelligible world and the active intuition, which constitute the locus of the self-determination of the world—indicate a philosophical approach that locates consciousness in a source that is not simply preconscious but of a greater dimension than individual consciousness. This source can be understood as something that is superconscious and yet worldly. This immersion must not be understood as an eclipse of the individual in a dimension that precedes and dominates him, but rather—and this is more than once asserted

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by Nishida—as the condition necessary to establish more vividly its individuality through a better and truer way of grasping its very source. NOTES 1. Recently, a number of studies have tried to show the possible connections between Nishida and Merleau-Ponty. Particularly interesting is Loughnane 2019. As the author shows, despite their differences in civilizational context, the philosophies of Nishida and Merleau-Ponty have a lot in common. Both share an attempt to build alternatives to Western metaphysical dualism. Both explore this in the moving and perceiving body, particularly as it is expressed in art. Moreover the two philosophies culminate in an enigmatic concept of faith. The author intends to better understand how this whole undertaking enriches the notion of philosophy. Although Nishida’s concept of faith is more religious and Merleau-Ponty’s is more perceptual, they both present a provocative set of comparable challenges to philosophic methodology. In both cases, the issue of faith is not a subjectivistic approach: it is an orientation that negates the subject while affording a world beyond the sacred-secular opposition. In both cases, the religion-philosophy distinction becomes blurred and artistic creativity enables practices for enacting a version of faith that does not exist in philosophy. Seen from such a perspective, their whole writing reaches a more unifying picture. With the notion of “motor-perceptual faith,” the author proposes a concept that describes the relationship both philosophers have to art, in a way that is independent of the traditional divisions between East and West and between various philosophical disciplines. It is also an attempt to think beyond the boundaries these philosophers have endeavored to overcome. Although Merleau-Ponty is clearly less radical in this, they both tried to think beyond the boundaries of East and West. Even if Nishida hardly mentions any of his religious references, it is obvious that there is a strong Mahāyāna (particularly zen) influence in his thought; and in the same way, although Merleau-Ponty is not religious, he is interested in religious thought on art and his notion of “flesh” itself might have some Christian connotation. They both develop an ambiguous relation between philosophy and religion, between Flesh and Place, between East and West. To illustrate his notion of “motor–perceptual faith” the author takes the examples of Sesshu and Cézanne, commenting on both of them quite extensively, with the help of Nishida’s and Merleau-Ponty’s writings on aesthetics. Both artists thus give us examples of bodily non-theistic forms of faith within a motor-perceptual world. There is an attempt, through art (understood as a bodily interaction with the world), to clarify pre-reflexive meaning, where relationality is predominant, together with ambiguity and negation, beyond the subject-object dichotomy, and within a textual-like ontology. All this departs from the positivistic, substance-based ontology proper to the West, and it tends to favor a chiasmatic structure of perception and reality, around the notions of Flesh and Place. 2. See Nishida NKZ, volume 5.

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3. It is the unpublished thesis of Kuroda Akinobu, which we read for its viva voce examination at the University of Strasburg (May 20, 2003), that first drew our attention to this issue: “Enjeux, possibilités et limites d’une philosophie de la vie. Kitarō Nishida au miroir de quelques philosophes français” (Kuroda 2004). 4. NKZ 8, 547–48. 5. Merleau-Ponty1964, 18. 6. NKZ 8.

Chapter 9

The Intercultural and Daseinsanalytical Psychiatry of Kimura Bin

Kimura Bin 木村敏 (1931–2021) is a Japanese psychiatrist of the Daseinsanalytical movement. His work encompasses a therapeutic aspect and a philosophical reflection whose anthropological and ontological dimensions are greatly inspired by German and Japanese phenomenology. Through the latter, dimensions of Shintoism and Zen Buddhism are present in his work. Kimura became interested in the phenomenon of mental pathology after reading a book by the psychiatrist Murakami Masahashi on Schizophrenia wherein psychosis was being approached from the viewpoint of an interpretation strongly marked by the Daseinsanalytical theory. Kimura then immediately decided to study the works of Binswanger and of some other significant representatives of this movement. Quite rapidly, however, he became interested in the philosophical sources of the phenomenological anthropology that constitutes Daseinsanalysis, together with its more strictly therapeutic dimension. It was basically Heidegger’s book Being and Time, where the phenomenon of temporality throws a new light on different types of psychoses,1 that first attracted his attention. He meditated this book for many years with the help of its distinguished translator: Tsujimura Kôichi. Since Tsujimura, incidentally, had been a disciple of the famous philosopher Nishida Kitarō, founder of the Kyoto School, Kimura got initiated into the difficult thought of the latter. Nishida’s criticism of Western egological transcendentalism thus became, with the passing years, Kimura’s main philosophical source, notably in order to clarify the problematic notion of jikaku 自覚 (“self-awareness” or rather “self-awakening”). Besides Heidegger and Nishida, there is still a third philosopher that also has had a great impact on his research; it is the contemporary of Nishida, Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960),2 whose investigations are mainly related to the very fruitful notions of fūdo (風土 “environment “) and 133

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of aida 間 (“betweenness”)—concerning which Kimura has proposed some of his richest contributions to Daseinsanalysis.3 This triple philosophical heritage (Heidegger, Nishida, and Watsuji) clearly shows that we are, with Kimura, on a level of thinking that revolves around a phenomenological and hermeneutic approach to the topics under investigation. THE RELATION BETWEEN HUMANS To evoke here Kimura’s thought, I will limit myself to just one of his books, Hito to hito to no aida 人と人との間, a possible translation of which could be “The relation between humans.”4 This book, which is a fine example of cultural anthropology, shows interesting perspectives on the intercultural dimension of Kimura’s Daseinsanalytical approach. In his study Kimura presents “togetherness” or “betweenness” (aidagara 間柄) as the locus that founds collectively the existence of a community. It is the interrelation that founds the identity of all human being, but more characteristically so in Japan than in the individualistic West. Within this cultural context he shows, among other examples, that melancholia (with its existential feeling of irreparable loss) takes on a particular tonality, marked by the Japanese sense of giri 義理 (feeling of obligation). Indeed, melancholia, for which the Japanese appear to have a strong predisposition, is often encountered among people who worry about social rules and conventions. It finds in the sense of obligation toward others, proper to giri, a favorable ground: one acts toward others out of giri and not out of one’s own consent or out of real empathy (ninjô 人情). The feeling of irremediable wrongdoing of the melancholics, in Japan, does not so much find its origin in the sense of guilt (proper to the Western context of inner conscience) as in the sense of shame or of being indebted toward others (proper to a context marked by the more external “between” or “togetherness” of interpersonal links). For, instead of the verticality of divine commandment, we have the horizontality of interhuman relationships. Kimura adds that since the sense of being indebted, of existential failure, is felt by the melancholic as being too heavy, it cuts or holds back, by its burdensomeness, the existential surge toward the future. One can guess how Kimura intricately links the Heideggerian analytic of Schuldigsein (indebtedness) to his cultural considerations about the experience of melancholia. Continuing his comparative reflection on Europe and Japan, Kimura extends it to the relationship each of these two cultures have with their natural environment. Here it is the natural-climatic dimension of the “between” in

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Watsuji’s philosophy that sheds an interesting light on Kimura’s comments. Indeed the exteriority of the “between” goes beyond the social dimension of interhuman relations to encompass the dimension of nature: geographic and climatic dimensions, as well as the interaction between a social group and its natural environment. However, in Japanese thought, inspired by Shinto and Buddhism, nature is not some reality in front of man, confronting him from the outside, it is a dimension that incorporates both his innermost being and the innermost being of all living things; it is a cosmic and rhythmic dimension of which man is just an element. In Europe generally, man considers he can dominate rationally and master objectively a reified nature whose rhythms are regular. In Japan, man has the feeling he is dependent on a nature that is benevolent but also capricious, unpredictable—with changes that can be infinitely subtle and occasionally violent. As a result, European sociality is more distant and more rational; whereas Japanese sociality is altogether more fusional and more ambiguous. The extreme sensitivity of melancholia fits such a relationship to nature. The dimension of betweenness can also be found in linguistic expressions. For example, personal pronouns in Europe indicate a more obvious autonomous identity of the individual (“I,” “thou”), whereas in Japan, there is a sort of diffraction of personality in a series of words indicating the social relationship, the social position the protagonists have one toward the other, depending on each particular situation. It is not the identity of the subject that determines the use of appropriate pronouns but the particular and ever-changing social relationship of each given situation. Confirming this, the notion of amae 甘 え (fusion), expressing first the union of the child to its mother and then the union of the individual to the social group, indicates the extent to which the subject, in Japanese culture, is dependent on the larger unit of the group. The individual (jibun 自分) as a self (ji 自) is a portion (bun 分) of a larger whole. The notion of ki 気 (breath) also expresses the amalgamation of the individual to a larger reality, beyond social reality, but including it. It is the affective source of all conscious life. It takes its origin in a natural, cosmic atmosphere. Ki indicates the affective dependence of the self on an environmental atmosphere (both social and natural)—the great breathing of nature. In this context, Kimura mentions a few psychopathological symptoms that are stronger in Japan than in Europe, some social phobia in particular. In these, the patient suffers from the way others perceive him: afraid of blushing, afraid of being misshaped, afraid of having a bad smell, afraid of being unmasked in one’s own interiority. . . . Each time it is the fear that the feeling of weakness of one’s own ki will be disclosed to the sight of others. In conclusion, this book underlines the dimension of human betweenness and social spatiality, extended as far as to include the natural-climatic environment. This latter dimension appears to be more apparent in the Orient than

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in the West. Such a conclusion would necessitate the inclusion of a transcultural dimension in psychiatry. TOWARD A TRANSCULTURAL PSYCHIATRY To become psychologically ill is a possibility that resides in the very fact of being human. It is peculiar to man to be able to have a mental illness. And it exists in all civilizations and cultures. All of these, therefore, know one form or another of the art of “healing the soul.” Psychiatry is the form soul healing has taken in the context of Western scientific mentality. In this context the human mind became on object of observation. It is the expansion of Western civilization that has brought to the situation where, everywhere on the planet, including Japan, people have started practicing psychiatry. But the Western psychiatric way of naming and interpreting mental illness doesn’t impose itself as the only possible one. It is in fact a rediscovery, within the modern Western scientific manner (and applied to Western populations), of phenomena that, to some extent, have always been present in humankind. But the awareness of the fact that mental illnesses may take on particular forms, following the cultural context where they appear, is a recent thing. Comparative psychiatry, barely developed by Kraepelin at the beginning of the twentieth century, developed later in the United States on the basis of cultural anthropology and cultural sociology. These influenced the development of a Freudian “progressive” movement that contributed to the appearance of a “cultural psychiatry” that was going to study the influence of cultural environment on the psychopathology of the individual. All this was favored by the multicultural dimension of American society and the awareness of the cultural dimension of human personality. This gave birth to “transcultural psychiatry” (mainly with Eric D. Wittkower), endeavoring to enlarge cultural psychiatry from one cultural entity to another, rather than simply comparing cultural diversity within one same society (cross-cultural psychiatry). In this expression of “transculture,” the prefix “trans” has the meaning of a passage as in “transport,” to pass from one culture to another. However Kimura sees in this passage two additional significations: first, the fact of exceeding the level of particular cultures to reach the human level common to all; and second, the fact of exceeding scientific-biological or sociological psychiatry toward an inclusion of “climatic” phenomena. Concerning the first fact, Japanese characteristics (for example amae or giri) are not limited to the Japanese. However they may clarify phenomena that, although universal, are not noticed and interpreted as such in other cultures. The discovery of the “between” (aida) is done on the Japanese case

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because this phenomenon is more manifest there, but this doesn’t mean it plays no role elsewhere. It is simply human. It is a human possibility, present among all humans—even though it is more discreet in European cultures. And schizophrenia, for example, as Kimura has shown in numerous other writings, finds within the perspective of the “between” a new light. The examination of non-European cultures thus enables us to catch sight of dimensions of humanity that the culturally limited perspective of Europe couldn’t see. As for the second fact, it concerns the existential-ontological life of man in his relationship to the environment. Something of which neither anthropological nor sociological psychiatry take into account. It is a question of rediscovering nature, not in the sense of the science of nature, but in the sense of a “climatological” existential ontology. Culture finds its original source within fūdo 風土, “climate” (i.e., the environment in its wider spatiotemporal, natural-historical meaning). And human life, in its existential, not biological, meaning, belongs to nature in its climatic dimension. Climate is nature such as it is existentially lived by man. Man lives essentially in a climatic way. With the dimension of ki, such a climate is internalized. This ki is literally the most intimate nature of man. In order to further illustrate the influence of the climatic dimension on the being of man and on his mental life, Kimura gives an additional example within the field of psychiatry. Taking schizophrenia in its two fundamental forms, the paranoid and the catatonic, he proposes to see in which sense they can be linked to climate. Paranoia contains a greater content of delirium and is less apparent in outside behavior; catatonia, on the other hand, has a more dismembered behavior but the delirious representations remain fragmentary. Paranoid schizophrenia is statistically more present among men and within Western countries. Catatonia is found mainly among women and in third-world countries. But it is also to be found in Japan. It is thus not so much linked with underdevelopment as with a particular relationship to nature. Comparing once more Japan to Europe, Kimura suggests that a people whose individuals, in a state of crisis, react in an emotional and disorderly way, tend to create a culture where what is expected is self-control and politeness; whereas a people who, in a state of crisis, react in a way that is rationally delirious, develops a culture wherein what is expected from individuals is a more rational attitude. In the first case, the stress on the emotional side and, in the second case, on the rational side, is each time due to the climatic relationship of man with nature; it is a question of a difference of degree in the integration with nature. The emotional tonality of man is linked to the tonality of his relation to natural reality. And thus the ki of man is an expression of his relation to the

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ki of nature. This is less the case when the relation to nature is marked by an objectifying, rationalizing, and dominating distance. However, Kimura tends to stress that the further remote man is from his climatic or natural dimension, the more he tends to plunge into deep psychosis. These remarks are all suggestions going toward the inclusion of a dimension of “ki-healing” within the therapeutic dimension of psychiatry. With ki-healing we seem to be heading toward the reintegration of traditional pre-Western modes of cure (in this case, Shintoistic and Daoist practices). NOTES 1. Interesting in this respect is the selection of articles by Bouderlique and Pélicier, see Kimura 1992. 2. The thought of Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960) is obviously related to Nishida philosophy, although he cannot be considered to be part of the Kyoto school, stricto sensu. Among recent publications on his work, one of the most outstanding is the study by Johnson (2019). Although the book focuses on Watsuji’s philosophy of nature, centered around the notion of 風土 fūdo (often mistranslated as “climate”), it presents more globally the thought of the Japanese philosopher in its attempt to reinterpret the relations between selfhood (主体性 shutaisei), ethics (倫理学 rinrigaku), history (歴史 rekishi), and nature (自然 shizen), in the light of both Asian notions (mainly Confucianist and Mahāyāna Buddhist) and European concepts (drawn mostly from Hegelian dialectics, Husserlian phenomenology and Heideggerian hermeneutics). The author shows remarkably how Watsuji’s work is clearly situated within a hermeneutical tradition that includes Herder and Heidegger—to name just the two philosophers that have influenced him the most (Gadamer would also fit, if the Japanese philosopher had known him). “For Watsuji and other thinkers in this tradition, the intelligibility of nature, like the whole content of human experience, is disclosed and so mediated through our language, practices, and culture, and brought in this way to a kind of expressive articulation” (p. 5). For these thinkers, in order to fully understand a phenomenon, it must be put in relation to the things that surround it, while these, in turn, need to be situated in a still larger contextual field. All this is done through a usage of language as disclosive, rather than designative, and it operates at the point where separate domains of intelligibility intersect. This includes methods that enrich the phenomenological descriptions of intentionality with the hermeneutic usage of etymology and philology. Watsuji elaborates on the word fūdo through a reappropriation of Being and Time’s notion of “being-in-the-world” (in-der-Welt-sein), unveiling its spatial dimension that had been neglected by Heidegger’s stress on temporality. At the two poles of this phenomenological structure, (1) the individual eksistent Dasein becomes a social human being (人間存在 ningen sonzai) constituted by its relations to others, its “practical interconnection of acts” (実践的行為的連関 jissenteki kôiteki renkan), while (2) the world (Welt) incorporates nature (風土生fūdosei rather than 自然 shizen), as it

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is experienced and lived through by the self. Fūdo is a “moment” (契機 keiki) in the structure of human life. Nature is not just an objective reality facing a subjective cogito; it is part of the very structure of human existence. Human beings cannot exist without being part of nature and nature cannot be what it is without being disclosed by the world of human culture. This ontological interweaving is precisely what expresses the word 風土 fūdo, an ordinary Japanese saying out of which Watsuji develops a very rich philosophical significance. In sum, we have our self, not just in an individual and bodily subjectivity, but also “outside” of us in our other fellow humans and in our surroundings, which are altogether natural and cultural. A human (人間ningen: person+relation) is ontologically a relational structure (間柄aidagara: relation+quality). So the isolated individual is an abstraction from this more primordial relational human reality—a negation of it. The full human being is formed by the dialectic unity of the person and the group, giving an identity to both the individual and the whole, which otherwise are both “empty” (空 kara). And the group cannot be understood in its very identity apart from its integration in its surroundings—which is discovered through the combination of a practical disposition, an affective orientation, and a linguistic disclosive comportment. Watsuji’s reinterpretation of all the above-mentioned expressions is enriched by Asian notions about self and other (自他 jita), such as the Confucian description of human relations (aidagara) or the Buddhist metaphysics of non-dualism (不二 funi) and of conditioned co-production (因縁 innen). The most notable effort of David W. Johnson in this context lies in his effort to not just repeat and summarize Watsuji’s philosophy but to also show all the implications of his thinking, developing what remains unthought and finally proposing a speculative reconstruction of that which lies beyond what Watsuji actually said. So, for example, the “disenchanted” dualistic objectivism of modern scientific thought is dissected in order to have a better view of how hermeneutic phenomenology (from Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger to Watsuji and Berque) manage to overcome it; the hybrid nature of the self (individual and social) is illustrated by a number of concrete descriptions that make the point undisputable; and the same thing happens when this social space of the self is enlarged to its cultural, “atmospheric,” and natural dimensions (where a clear limit between the natural and the artificial cannot always be drawn). The author also shows how the profound logic of Watsuji’s thought is not compatible with the geographic determinism nor with the “national environmentalism” some critics have seen in occasional ambiguous aspects of his writings. After having developed and illustrated the rich consequences of Watsuji’s hermeneutics of fūdo, trying to make explicit what often remains unsaid in his philosophy of nature, giving both more weight and clarity to an often elliptical style, David W. Johnson shows us how the disclosive capacity of expressing the interweaving between man and nature, in all their liveliness, opens the horizon of a “re-enchantment” of nature. Beyond new developments in phenomenology, this includes new horizons in environmental ethics, which should help us address some of the specific ecological problems of our time. All this effort can contribute to “the promise of a reconciliation

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with the world” (p. 209) and to the hope of finding ourselves at home in nature once again. 3. Among other contributions, Kimura 1988. 4. Kimura 1972.

Conclusion The Pine Tree

When I started studying philosophy in the early 1980s, my training was in phenomenology, but my fundamental quest was actually for a dialogue between East and West: a philosophical thought that would be capable of blending European and Asian sources, on a level, however, that would go beyond the vulgarization of “New Age” literature, the level rather of proper academic philosophy—something never seriously attempted in the West, except maybe by Schopenhauer but based on outdated sources. Being born in Indonesia myself, but having had a European education, this position of double identity, so to speak, has always been intellectually my main concern. And, while I was in Taiwan in the early 1990s studying Heidegger and the possible links with Daoist thought, and not being very happy with the results, I went by chance to Japan, invited by a colleague and friend who lived in Kyoto. This friend happened to be a disciple of Professor Ueda, the dean of the Kyoto School. He made me visit the exquisite beauties of his hometown—temples, shrines, gardens, and the tetsugaku no mich 哲学の道, the “path of the philosophers”—and, at the end of the day, knowing my concern, he gave me a book, while simply telling me, “I believe you’ll find this interesting.” It was Religion and Nothingness by Nishitani. And indeed, I did find it interesting. I got the feeling of discovering at last what I had been looking for all these years. A philosophical work, nourished by the most inspiring core of Asian thought (mainly Mahāyāna Buddhism) and capable of expressing it with the help of the most significant notions of Western philosophy—reaching therewith a true actualization of the universalistic finality of the latter1 and at the same time trying to respond to the main aporias of the modern world. This was the beginning of my study of Kyoto School philosophy, and, beyond the Kyoto School, its sources in Indian Buddhism. I would like to say a few more words about the significance this has had to me. But I would first like to 141

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introduce this concluding chapter by recalling a relatively recent artistic event that has symbolized for me the creativity of the Japanese spirit. May 3, 2011, at the Mint Opera House in Brussels, was the world premiere of the opera Matsukaze 松風 by the young Japanese composer Hozokawa Toshio. The plot is taken from an ancient Noh play by Zeami. It is thus adapted to the European opera genre; the language of the singing is German and the music is some intermediary style between French impressionism and atonal music. There is also a choreography that runs through the whole opera, and one cannot really tell to what extent the dance is contemporary, Western, or classical Japanese. It is very pure, slow, a bit hieratic, enigmatic, and noble. Not to mention that it was the return of good taste; after years of theatrical kitsch and lack of vision, the experience was enthralling, religious, and genuinely cathartic. The story is set on a seashore, on some Japanese island. It is a story without real action. Like most Noh plays it is the Japanization of a Buddhist teaching—let us say, on impermanence. It is about two sisters: Matsukaze (which means “the wind in the pine tree”) and Murasame (“automn rain”). The two sisters fell in love, long ago, with a young man, a poet, Yukihira. After having seduced them, the young man leaves for the capital, Kyoto, promising to come back. But once in the capital, he falls ill and dies. So he never comes back. But the two sisters cannot give up their love. They keep waiting for the young man, wanting him, possessed by passion, their desire being constantly rekindled by old memories. And their passion is so strong that it imprisons them, life after life, for centuries, making them become like hungry ghosts, until they are driven near to madness. With the help a Buddhist monk who prays for them, they are finally delivered, losing the desire, letting go of their selves, through an ecstatic dance that dissolves them enigmatically into nature, leaving nothing behind them but a pine tree whose branches are endlessly moved by the wind coming from afar. The opera Matsukaze expresses a very specific mood, often to be experienced in Japanese aesthetics: the sadness of mujō 無常, impermanence, the melancholy of beauty passing away and the beauty of such a melancholy. The Buddhist word for impermanence, mujō, is formed by two characters: mu 無, expressing negation, suppression, nothingness in a way; and jō 常, expressing what is ordinary, usual, standing, constant. So mujō means the disappearance of what is constant. Nothing permanent can remain. And the sadness of such a loss is transmuted in the contemplation of its ephemeral beauty. Seen in the same perspective, the specifically Noh concept of yūgen 幽 玄 means something like an elegant simplicity, expressing mystery and a contained sadness; the famous notions of wabi 侘び and sabi 寂び are connected to the simplicity, rusticity, and loneliness of the poet’s existence, trying to live beyond worldly passions; representation here is abandoned in favor of

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suggestion, of the inner and hidden meaning of things. And the ancient Heian notion of mono no aware (物の哀れ) aims at expressing the emotional and aesthetic feeling of things passing away, loved people departing, the brief appearance of the cherry blossom, the autumn rain or the wind in the branches of the pine tree. . . . Such an aesthetic can also be found in haiku poetry, ikebana flower arrangement, gagaku music and dance, tea ceremony, and the art of gardens. Is it not also to be found, to some extent, in the thought of the Kyoto School philosophers? In connection to that, I would now like to talk about the notion of nihilism in the thought of Nishitani. The structure of my talk will be shaped by imitating, in a way, the structure of Nishitani’s main book, Religion and Nothingness. It is a spiral formed structure, where the whole idea is first suggested in broad outline, and then repeated at a level of greater significance, and then repeated again at its deeper level. Following this threefold structure, I will speak of the three main books of Nishitani—on subjectivity, on nihilism, and on religion—trying to follow the Japanese philosopher in the constant deepening of his own major intuition. For Nishitani, philosophy doesn’t start in the ancient Greek thaumazein (the marvel in front of the beauty of the cosmos) but in the very contemporary experience of lived nihilism (which is near to a destruction of that same cosmos)—a nihilism often identified by the young Nishitani both with the invasion of Japanese traditions by materialism and technology, and with the colonial imperialism of the modern West, before being understood later, as we shall see, in a more subtle and ontologically more profound interpretation. Just as Heidegger, who had proclaimed that the nuclear catastrophe was only the extreme consequence of a metaphysical catastrophe that had already taken place, that is, the rise of nihilism (which destroys the essence of things by their technical-industrial objectification), Nishitani describes the Japanese experience of this metaphysical catastrophe and gives a definition of its essence. Nihilism is the despair of the collapse of values and the loss of ethical and religious markers, the barrenness of a positivistic scientism that destroys all spirituality. Nihilism is the fact that the historical existence of a people and of each of its members has lost its spiritual foundation, that moral, metaphysical, and esthetic values are dethroned, and that the totality of social and historical life has detached itself from its foundations. The historical ground has been shaken, and it is now crumbling away under our feet, opening up on a huge abyss, creating disarray and anxiety. The self, history, the world and being itself have become an unfathomable question. The cosmos—a Greek notion meaning altogether the world, its order, and its beauty—is falling apart.

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So what have the philosophers of the Kyoto School to teach us about nihilism and it’s overcoming? Nishida himself doesn’t explicitly speak of the Nietzschean notion of nihilism, although his attitude toward metaphysical modernity is an essential instrument for the overcoming of nihilism that Nishitani will later try and clarify. By the deconstruction of the post-Cartesian and post-Kantian ego, first through an almost Schopenhauerian philosophy of the will (in the early 1900s), second through his own specific philosophy of place and the threefold division thereof (in the 1930s), Nishida created the transcendental structure within which Nishitani would then develop his own hermeneutic philosophy, including his thought about nihilism. Indeed, Nishitani, in his Philosophy of Radical Subjectivity (Kongenteki shutaisei no tetsugaku, 根源的主体性の哲学) of 1940, goes a step further than Nishida in arguing that the modern metaphysical ego has tried to find its foundation in God (as Descartes has it) or in its own transcendental structure (Kant), and then has built itself in an ontological isolation within which it believes to be free and from which it believes it can reach out to the world— and yet cannot because it has cut itself from the life and nature that originally nurtured it. Its relation to life and nature becomes therefore alienated and henceforth humanity, assuming to be the master and possessor of nature, dominates it, consumes it, instrumentalizes it, exploits it, and finally destroys it, annihilates it, man himself included, with nothing left but the wasteland announced by Nietzsche. Therefore it is necessary to deconstruct this egotistic foundation, to take on and accept the non-foundation that lies at its root, to open up to an original nature and life that can be found in one’s depth, once the idealistic ego has been undone. Then the awareness of subjecthood, when brought back to the root, opens to a non-substantialistic dimension that is without foundation. It opens to a new attitude where the self becomes immersed within what surpasses it, and it opens a new position from which the problems of human thought will be rediscovered, and a new, non-theistic, religious dimension will be disclosed, giving an unprecedented significance to human existence. For Nishitani the explicit interrogation about nihilism rises when the question of the subject meets the question of history. After the war years, during which Nishitani’s theory of history got astray in his voluntaristic political interpretation of overcoming modernity, he developed a progressively more ontological and religious reflection on the whole issue. His book on “Nihilism” (nihirizumu ニヒリズム), written in 1949, was published in 1966, translated into English in 1990 by Graham Parkes and Setsuko Aihara as The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism. Within this, pleasant to read, survey of the European literature on nihilism (Dostoievski, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and others), Nishitani stresses that with the decline of

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the systematic and speculative ambitions of rationalistic and metaphysical idealism, in post-Hegelian philosophy, the problem of nihilism has become central and he acknowledges the Nietzschean assertion that, in order to overcome nihilism, it is necessary to cover its whole area from one end to the other. Then the disclosure of a more authentic ontological dimension will enable not just a simple rediscovery of God or a proclamation of the “overman” (Übermensch) but the spiritual deepening of true self, which traditional Buddhism has explored with the help of the notions of nothingness (mu 無) and emptiness (kū 空 or śūnyatā). Once one has penetrated nihilism until the heart of its nihil, its nihility or nothingness, its most extreme finiteness, then the opening of emptiness can take place and it can rediscover creative life in the middle of the spiritual wilderness of the post-catastrophe times. In order to accomplish that, the “passive” nihilism that has been described until now will have to go through an “active” phase, a lucid suppression of the two worlds (both the ancient metaphysical one and the modern materialistic one). When Karl Marx, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, or Nietzsche advocate social praxis, blind will, existential individuality, or the overturn of values, each time against the idealistic system of Hegel, each time, they accentuate one portion of the lived reality that Hegel had crushed under his conceptual systematization. But at the same time each one of these portions, because it is asserting itself separately in a world that has lost its unifying structure, unveils the nihility against which it is build. The compact and opaque fullness of metaphysical being is cracked and, through the nihilistic cracks, a fraction of nothingness can be seen. In other words, once the inconsistency of our predicament has been lucidly glimpsed at, nothingness reveals itself. The pain and anxiety of this active nihilism, when lucidly accepted, becomes the first step of a new spiritual dimension. By intentionally rejecting the overworld of Platonic-Christian-Buddhist values together with the sensitive world of positivistic science, Nietzsche, more than any other, has lucidly accomplished this active nihilism. He remains confronted with the accepted nothingness of the loss of truth and value. He claims that, in such a predicament, one has to endure amor fati, the “love of fate.” Love of fate, moreover, is the only way to bear the “eternal recurrence” of the same. When the terrifying sight of the infinite repetition of the same is accepted and willed, with a Dionysiac joy, then one becomes capable of the pure openness, the consent to the world, to the way things are, without reason. The burden of the ordinary ego (jiga 自我), crushed by nihilism, is no more, says Nishitani; it has awakened from its samsaric nightmare, and a more primordial self (jiko 自己), rooted in life as it is, in the reality of earth, is ready to consent to the innocence of cosmic freedom. The weight of the eternal recurrence has been transmuted into the lightness of the eternal present. It is the moment when the self-overcoming of nihilism is at work.

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How are we to complete it? Nishitani’s masterpiece, What Is Religion? (Shūkyō to wa nanika? 宗教とは何か), is an endeavor to answer this question. The book, published in 1961, starts with an attempt to explain the basis of the religious attitude. It then goes on trying to specify the nature of religious experience, articulating it around the experience of nothingness. So the English translator, Jan Van Bragt, very interestingly translated the book as Religion and Nothingness. This translation was published in 1982 and it has become the origin of the international interest in the Kyoto School. We have already seen that nihilism had to do with the loss of the religious and that the overcoming of nihilism also meant a rediscovery of a new spiritual dimension. The need for religion, explains Nishitani, has nothing to do with usefulness in the utilitarian sense, but it has to do with the existential answer to the question “Why do I exist?” The question can often arise, collectively, in the awareness of the non-sense of nihilism and, individually, when we experience the so-called “limit situations” (the Grenz-Situationen, referred to by Karl Jaspers): illness, some existential tragedy, death in our surrounding, the consciousness of being sinful. We are then put face to face with “nihility” (kyomu 虚無), the “hollow nothingness,” that is actually always at the foundation of our being, without us usually being aware of it. When we do become aware of such a nihility at the ground of our existence, we then actually become truly aware of reality, we “appropriate” it, we go through a “self-actualization” (jiko jitsugen 自己実現) of reality (jitsuzai 実 在); this means that we become ourselves through an intimate realization (understanding) of reality and, by this very realization, reality itself actualizes itself within our understanding. Reality here is not what is understood in common sense experience (the things out there and the feelings in here), nor what is explained by science (the laws of physics) or by metaphysics (the world of ideas): reality, in the radical sense aimed at here, is not of the register of observable things, of existence or being (sonzai 存在), but rather of the register of non-being or nothingness (mu 無). And in such a perspective, ordinary or commonsense reality appears to be like an illusion. What is strongly negated by such an experience of nothingness, at the root of the self, is the modern, Cartesian ego, which is just a philosophical systematization of the commonsense belief in a firm and constant self, with its inner experiences, and set apart from the world, out there, with its objects that can be observed and manipulated. The ego (jiga 自我), itself objectified, produces a screen of representation between itself and the objective world, and it becomes a citadel of isolation in a world that has lost its vitality. The ego has made us lose our sense of belonging to the wider, living world surrounding us—where we are ourselves living souls (tamashii 魂), part of a broader life of kindred animated beings.

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The experience of kyomu (虚無), nihility or “hollow nothingness,” can set us free from the self-attachment of the modern objectifying ego, not in order to bring us back to some premodern animism, but in order to make us accomplish a step further toward the “radical” (kongenteki 根源的), the root of existence, both self and reality, that Nishida already had tried to uncover with his notion of “pure experience.” Then, methodic doubt, the “small doubt” of the Cartesian ego, can be transmuted into the “great doubt” (taigi 大義) of Zen experience, when one decides to establish one’s abode on the ground of nothingness. The great doubt or “great death” (dying to the ego) is the threshold to the rediscovery of the great reality, the rebirth or the awakening of the self to itself and to the world. The nothingness of nihility (kyomu 虚無) is the relative side of nothingness: it is the nihilistic negation of the truly human and of the spiritual fullness of premodern traditions. It is what is experienced when passive nihilism becomes active and when the need is felt for an overcoming of nihilism. Now, in order to complete the movement of overcoming nihilism, we have to deepen our experience of nothingness, go beyond the relative nothingness of nihility and reach the absolute nothingness that unfolds in emptiness (kū 空 or śūnyatā). In emptiness, a fresh assertion of Dasein and of the world will take place, but henceforth on the ground of their real suchness. So the overcoming of nihilistic inhumanity or impersonality toward a new spirituality is not the return to some premodern animistic or theistic personalism but, through a sublation, it is the opening of a third level, beyond the modern or premodern, a position that transcends the two while keeping them included, transmuting each other in some more mature dimension. What we now have to specify is how emptiness leads to nyojitsu 如実—tathātā, in Sanscrit, which means: the “suchness” of things. It is like a new birth, through the death of the old being within us. Life goes on as before and yet everything is seen under a new light, everything is transmuted through a sort of double exposure to life and death, a true intersection of the opposites (that Nishida had expressed speculatively with his notion of the “self-identity of absolute contradictories”). The absolute nothingness of emptiness, negating the relative nothingness of nihility (itself a negation of the being of ordinary experience), opens to a more essential appropriation or assimilation of the true being of beings. The skylike immensity of emptiness reveals itself to be like an abyss to the abyss of nihility. Through it we overcome the mutual exclusion of life and death, being and nothingness, the beyond and the here—all those oppositions being blended together. Matter becomes the locus, the place (basho) for the spirit. This happens when the ordinary ego has emptied itself from its egocentrism and greed in order to emerge onto its own authentic suchness, opened

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to the world and its inhabitants. When such an active self-emptying is radicalized to its most intimate depth, nothingness becoming absolute, then our inner awakening can take place, something close to what Meister Eckhart referred to when he spoke of the experience of our inner divinity. Then the disquieting strangeness of nihility transmutes itself into the most intimate nearness of emptiness. The self has regained its authenticity, its suchness, and it gets in tune, intimately, with the suchness of the world and of the beings that inhabit the world. When the self has reached its own suchness, it dwells in its own center, and from there it can reach the inner center of other things, beyond their substantial definition, at the more essential level of their original form, where self and things are the same. Things then emerge from their “middle,” their center (chû 中). From this center they establish themselves in their togetherness: which means that they are themselves integrated and that they share the integrated centrality of all other things. The field of emptiness, in a way, is where the center is no more within the ego representing its objects but within each existing entity, on equal terms with all other existing entities. Each and every thing is servant to all the others by its own self-emptying, while finding its own being in the reciprocal self-emptying of the others. No thing or person exists in itself but only by its self-emptying relation to the others. This dynamic reciprocity forms the very reality of things. So emptiness is a field of energy or force (chikara no ba 力の場) that opens up in every person that has unloaded his or her own ego and has opened him- or herself to the suchness of things. When thus residing in one’s own suchness, one develops a freer relation to time, emancipated from the fateful cycle of rinne 鈴絵 (saṃsāra), the endless well of suffering within birth and death that makes existence rely on a feeling of absurd and unfathomable nihility. In the field of emptiness, existence is no more the endless repayment of some karmic debt (or some Heideggerian Schuldigsein); since the unloading of the ego has taken place, together with its greed and self-attachment, the extinction thereof (nirvāṇa) creates a freer relationship to things, a more detached one, more playful, made of the acceptance of things as they are. In emptiness, one sees every being as an expression of the Dharma, the order of things. Things cease to be the objects of the ego’s greedy attachment, within an unending repetition of capturing, but they become the occasion of selfless and infinite openness to the unceasing beginning of being. The selfless self isn’t acting through its self-centered greed, its will and its ignorance; it is acted, so to say, from the constellation of the centers of the other beings. It is an acting within non-action. Kû 空 (emptiness) is therefore the field (basho 場所) of the suchness of self and of things, their intimate thusness. It gathers things together in their quintessential being, beyond form and non-form, where philosophy fails to

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explain conceptually and where one can only listen to the poet learning from the things themselves what they really are: 松のことは松にな習へ、 竹のことは竹に習へ Matsu no koto wa matsu ni narahe Take no koto wa take ni narahe “From the pine tree, learn what is a pine From the bambou, learn what is a bambou” Bashô 芭蕉

NOTE 1. The “concrete universal” hoped for by Ricœur in the initial epigraph of this book. Except for this specification: what was meant to happen in the West is today taking place in the East.

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Index

active intuition, 22, 114, 116–18, 120– 21, 123, 124, 127, 128–31 aida/aidagara (betweenness), 26, 70, 134, 136–37 amae (fusion), 26, 135, 136 analytic philosophy, 3, 26 Anaximander, 90 aneu logou (beyond words), 64, 81 aporetic reflection, 89, 93, 141 Arendt, Hannah, 51, 53, 55n5, 74, 80; déformation professionnelle, denouncing, 65–66, 69; Hilterism and Stalinism, on historical causes of, 75–76; Japan and Arendt’s analysis, 42–45; on loss of meaning, 44, 88n5; Masao, complementary views on military regimes, 18, 19, 26, 46, 52; ontological vs. political, on the distinction between, 63–64; totalitarianism as a product of modernity, 41–42; the tyrannical, on the attraction to, 18, 85 Aristotle, 2, 36, 61, 65, 74, 79, 82, 90, 93, 107; bios theōretikos, 80, 83; categories of, 7–8; on cosmic time, 89; ousia, substantialistic interpretation of, 108; predicative proposition in Aristotelian tradition, 15

Asian nationalism, 46, 56n11 atman (true self), 13, 14, 23n15, 80, 107, 108, 110 Aubenque, Pierre, 109 Augustinian tradition, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93 avidyā (ignorance), 95 basho (place), 60, 99, 102, 107, 114, 120, 123; absolute nothingness, basho as locus of, 115, 127; describing and defining, 15–16; emptiness as basho of the suchness of self, 148; The Intelligible World, threefold basho in, 124; khōra concept, drawing near to, 61; logic of locus, basho no ronri as, 126; matter as basho for the spirit, 147; selfawakening and, 13, 174 Being and Time (Heidegger), 20, 133, 138n2 being of beings, 61, 147 Benjamin, Walter, 22n3, 69 Benveniste, Emile, 7–9, 23n11, 109 Bergson, Henri, 90, 116 Berque, Augustin, 26, 60, 139n2 bios politikos (political life), 63–64, 79–80 Boehme, Jakob, 110 163

164

Index

brahman (absolute reality), 17, 23n15, 107, 108, 109 Buddhism, 4, 9, 10, 14, 45, 54, 85, 106, 126, 135, 142, 145; Buddhistinspired Weltanschaung, 108; imperial ideology, helping to sustain, 29; Kyoto School, influence on, 2, 53, 66, 141; Mahayana, 11, 13, 83, 97, 131n1, 138n2, 141; muga, nonego concept of, 23n15, 123; notion of karma in, 89, 91, 95, 97–100; sense of time in, 20, 94; Zen, 12, 64, 65–68, 69, 71n14, 79, 83, 96, 131n1, 133, 147 Categories (Aristotle), 8 Catégories de pensée et categories de langue (Benveniste), 7 la chair (flesh), 118, 123 Chu Hsi school, 30 Chūō Kōron discussions, 62, 88n6, 88n14 Chūōkoron (periodical), 53, 58, 70n2 Chūsei to hangyaku (Muruyama), 31 communicational action, 81 communism, 28, 73, 75, 78 Comte, Auguste, 12 concrete universality, 70, 149n1 Confessions (Augustine), 90 Confucianism, 9, 10, 32, 34, 66; national morality, as part of, 29; neo-Confucianism, 2, 12, 30, 52, 57; Nishida, Confucianist mode of, 11, 12; social values, Confucian ethics of, 49 contemplative life (bios theōretikos), 63–64, 79–80, 83 contemporary period in Japan, 28, 34–35 corps vécu (lived body), 124, 128 La crise du monde moderne (Guénon), 58 Dasein (being-there), 5, 90–91, 92, 93, 95, 98, 124, 138n2, 147

Daseinsanalytical approach, 17, 26, 133–34 déformation professionnelle, cognitive bias of, 65–66, 69, 84 demythification (Entmythologisierung), 4 Derrida, Jacques, 7, 23n11, 61 Descartes, René, 144 dhāraṇī (collective now), 96 dharma (cosmic order), 20, 67, 71n14, 83, 148 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 4–5, 29, 104–5 Dōgen Zenji, 99 Doi Takeo, 26 dynamis (potentiality), 21, 104, 108, 109 Edo Period, 29, 30, 33 eichiteki sekai (intelligible world), 22, 127 einai (to be), 8, 9, 107 einfühlung (figurative representation), 59, 71n5 eleutheria (political freedom), 80 Erlebnis (lived feeling), 5 Ewe language, 8 facticity, 5, 106, 128 fascism, 33, 44, 73, 74; Arendt on, 41, 43, 46, 75; fascist totalitarianism, 19, 75, 76, 77, 78, 86n2; fascistic fetishism, 37, 38; Maruyama on, 41, 45–52, 52–54; neofascism, 57, 59; Nishitani on, 79, 84, 85, 86; of prewar Japanese intellectuals, 63–68 fetishism, 37–38 Frankfurt School, 6, 69 fūdo (environment), 60, 133–34, 137, 138–39n2 Fukuzawa Yukichi, 35, 37, 38, 46, 55n9 Fundamentals of Comparative and Intercultural Philosophy (Ma/Van Brakel), 3 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 5–7, 9, 18, 138n2

Index

Geisteswissenschaften (sciences of the spirit), 4, 5, 21 genbun itchi undô movement, 10 gensonzai (Dasein), 95, 98 Gentile, Giovanni, 73, 82 gigantomachia peri tes ousias (giant’s battle for being), 107, 108 giri (obligation), 134, 136 gō (karma), 89, 91, 95, 97 Greenberg, Clement, 58 grenz-situationen (limit situations), 146 Guénon, René, 58 Habermas, Jürgen, 6–7, 18, 26, 35, 62, 63, 65, 70, 81 Haldame, J. B. S., 116 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 68, 77, 97, 104, 138n2, 145; HegelianMarxist tradition, 37, 38; on history, 82, 95; as an idealist, 105, 145; Kyoto School, Hegelian influence on, 65, 67; Maruyama as influenced by, 35, 46; Moralität, 50, 66; Phänomenologie des Geistes, 101 Heidegger, Martin, 4, 5, 7, 9, 13, 44, 62, 69, 74, 80, 88n11, 101, 118, 128, 141; brahman and physis, on etymological link between, 109; Dasein, interpretation of, 5, 90, 124; on Entwurf and creative freedom, 98; as a hermeneutical phenomenologist, 2, 138–39n2; Kimura as influenced by, 133–34; nihilism in philosophy of, 85, 98, 108, 143, 144; Nishida and, 1, 61; Nishitani, comparing to, 79, 82, 84, 90, 92, 98, 104; ousia, developing meaning of being as, 107–8; political perversion of, 64, 65, 73, 79; praxis, understanding via logic of theoria, 84; Schuld and notion of indebtedness, 97, 134, 148; Sein und Zeit as major work, 20, 107; telos and resolution toward death, 93; time, notion of, 20, 89, 90–92, 98, 104, 138n2

165

Henry, Michel, 2, 13, 128, 130; cogito and the origin of its activity, 124; la vie, notions of, 123; Nishida, comparing to, 1, 21–22, 118–21, 127 hermeneutics, 2, 3–4, 4–7, 11, 18, 21, 29, 134, 138–39n2 Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik (Habermas), 6 Hiroshima bombing, 27–28, 38n1 historicity, 5, 92, 96, 113, 129 Hitlerism, 41, 42, 51, 53, 54n1, 59, 75 Hito to hito to no aida (Kimura), 134 Hobbes, Thomas, 36, 49 Horizontverschmelzung (fusion of horizons), 6 Hozokawa Toshio, 142 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 3, 7 hupokeimenon (substratum), 13, 107–8 Husserl, Edmund, 2, 5, 13, 15, 114, 126, 128; Augustin-Husserl tradition, 90, 91; Husserlian phenomenology, 60, 105, 115, 127, 138n2; Logische Untersuchungen, 104; Nishida, comparing to, 1, 21, 125 hyōgen (expression), 18, 117 “I and Thou” (Nishida), 116 Ichikawa Hakugen, 66, 67, 68, 88n18 Ideology and Utopia (Mannheim), 35 Imamichi Tomonobu, 18 Inoue Tetsujirō, 29 An Inquiry into the Good (Nishida), 1, 5, 67, 101, 116 intelligible world, 105, 124, 127, 130 “The Intelligible World” (Nishida), 22, 105, 124 Intuition and Reflexion in SelfConsciousness (Nishida), 116 ipseity (self-hood), 119 ishiki (consciousness), 14–15, 108 Izutsu Toshihiko, 26 James, William, 5, 105 Japanese nationalism, 42, 46–57, 56n11, 78

166

Index

Jaspers, Karl, 146 jibun (subject), 13, 14, 17, 135 jiga (ordinary ego), 13, 14, 17, 85, 110, 145, 146 jikaku (self-awakening), 13, 14, 15, 26, 83, 114, 123, 124, 133 jiko (authentic self), 13, 14, 17, 85, 110, 124, 145 jiko jitsugen (self-actualization), 146 jinen (nature), 16–17 jitsuzai (reality), 102, 108, 146 jitsuzai no jitsuzaitekina jikaku (real self-awareness of reality), 103, 110 junsui keiken (pure experience), 13, 102, 105, 124 juridic consensus, 44, 45, 47, 77, 83n2 justugo no ronri (logic of the predicate), 15 Kamakura period, 70, 83 kami no hyōgen (manifestation of God), 102, 110 kango (Chinese-Japanese terms), 10, 13 Kant, Immanuel, 6, 15, 21, 35, 37, 64, 65, 77, 82; cogito as reformulated by, 114; neo-Kantian antipsychologism, 104; a priori categories, 16, 105; pure reason, on reine Vernunft as, 81; on subjectivity as bestowing agency, 125; transcendentalism of, 4, 13, 14, 17, 126, 144 Karatani Kōjin, 27, 59 karma (entanglement), 89, 91, 95, 97–100, 148 karuṇā (compassion), 83, 85, 94, 111 Kato Shuichi, 26, 27 Kermode, Frank, 93 ki (breath), 135, 137–38 Kierkegaard, Søren, 105, 144, 145 Kimura Bin, 1, 17, 22, 26, 27, 70, 133–35, 136–38 kindai no chōkoku (overcoming of modernity), 27, 30, 58 kō (objective time), 21, 89 Kobayashi Hideo, 26

kōiteki chokkan (active intuition), 22, 102, 117–18, 123, 124 kokumin dōtoku ron (theories of national morality), 29 kokutai (national body), 49 kommunikatives Handeln (communicational action), 81 Kongenteki shutaisei no tetsugaku (Nishitani), 144 Koschmann, J. Victor, 38 kû (emptiness), 21, 60, 85, 91, 97, 145, 147, 148 Kunstlehre des Verstehens (art of understanding), 4 Kuroda Akinobu, 116, 132n3 Kyoto School, 2, 4, 19, 22n1, 29, 53, 58, 61, 77, 141, 146; déformation professionnelle of, 66; Hegelian influence on, 67; Marxism neglected by, 63, 71n9; mono no aware aesthetic in, 143; nihilism, on its overcoming, 144–45; Nihon Tetsugakukai as following, 25; Nishida as founder of, 1, 26–27, 133; Nishitani as member of, 1, 6, 19, 22n1, 26–27, 82, 83; political stance, 18, 57, 60, 64, 67, 73, 74, 78; Western philosophy, in dialogue with, 3, 6, 22n2, 65, 68, 108; Zen no kenkyū and Kyoto-School philosophy, 101–2 League of Nations, 47, 50, 76–77, 78 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 104, 105, 107, 108 “Life” (Nishida), 116 life-world (Lebenswelt), 5, 60, 125 Lin Ma, 3 linguistic relativism, 3, 10 List, Friedrich, 49, 57 Logic and Life (Nishida), 129 logos (spoken word), 64, 80, 81, 114, 117 Loyalty and Rebellion (Murayama), 31 Lyotard, Jean-François, 59

Index

Machiavellianism, 36, 50 Malraux, André, 71n5, 73–74, 80 Mannheim, Karl, 29, 35, 37, 46, 55n9 Marcuse, Herbert, 69 Maruyama Masao, 26, 29, 30, 55n9, 62, 63, 66, 70; Arendt, complementary views on militaristic regimes, 18, 19, 41; biographical landmarks, 27–28; Japanese fascism, contribution to understanding of, 45–52, 55n6; lessons to be learned from analysis of, 52–54; on loyalty and rebellion, 31–32; political science in Japan, as part of foundation of, 35–35; on ultranationalist period in Japan, 33–34 Marxism, 6, 9, 25–26, 28–30, 35–38, 45–46, 54n1, 63, 65, 71n9, 82, 145 Matsukaze (opera), 142 Meiji era, 1, 2, 6, 9–10, 16, 31–33, 36, 37, 43, 45, 48–49, 51, 52, 66, 78, 84 Meister Eckhart, 148 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1, 2, 5, 22, 118, 123, 124, 128–30, 131n1, 139 mizukara (individual subject), 17 mono no aware, Heian notion of, 143 moralität (subjective morality), 50, 66 Motoori Norinaga, 30 mu (nothingness), 60, 124, 142, 145, 146 muga (non-ego), 14, 23n15, 110, 123 muishiki tōitsu ryoku (unconscious unifying force), 103, 107 mujō (impermanence), 142 mumyō (ignorance), 95 Murakami Masahashi, 133 muthos (plot), 93, 94 Nakae Chomin, 46, 55n9 Nakamura Hajime, 26, 27, 66 Nakamura Yūjiro, 26, 27, 59 Nanbara Shigeru, 28 nationalism, 35, 67, 69, 73, 86; Europe, experience of nationalism in, 74–78, 87n3; Japanese nationalism,

167

42–43, 46–47, 49, 56n11, 78, 84; in “overcoming of modernity” ideology, 36; ultranationalism, 2, 18, 30, 33–34, 41, 42, 45, 48, 52, 54, 58, 74, 78 Nazism, 18, 19, 27, 42, 46, 48, 50, 54n1, 75, 76–77, 79 Nicholas of Cusa, 110 Nietzsche (Heidegger), 108 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7, 45, 58, 62, 65, 69, 85, 97, 108, 144–45 nihilism, 38, 88n5, 105, 108, 143, 148; emptiness, nihility changing into, 98–99; kyomu as nihility, 85, 91, 95, 97, 146–47; self-overcoming of, 60, 106, 144–45 Nihon no shisō (Maruyama), 34 ningen (human being), 52–53, 70, 88n23, 139n2 nirvāṇa-as-saṃsāra concept, 83–84 Nishi Amane, 10, 11, 12 Nishida Kitarō, 25, 59, 64, 108, 125, 131, 133, 144; active intuition concept, 22, 114, 116–18, 120–21, 123, 128; on basho, 61, 107, 114–15, 126–27; European philosophers, comparing to, 1, 2, 21; God, notion of, 102, 104, 109–10; Henry, comparing to, 22, 118–21, 130; historical situation of, 104–6; historicity of the body, emphasis on, 113, 129; An Inquiry into the Good, 1, 5, 67, 101–2, 103, 116; Kyoto School, as founder of, 2, 26–27, 68, 133; Meiji period, as a product of, 1, 10; middle way, finding, 6–7; Nishitani, commonalities with, 21, 102–4, 108; philosophical terms used by, 12–18; political thought of, 33, 60; on pure experience, 5, 13, 61, 67–68, 102, 103, 105–6, 110–11, 114, 116–18, 124, 128, 147; translation concerns, 2, 11; Watsuji thought as related to Nishida philosophy, 133–34, 138n2

168

Index

Nishida Kitarō (Nishitani), 103–4 Nishitani Keiji, 4, 21, 83, 84, 88n21, 90, 92, 108; on circumincessional interpenetration, 86, 95; God, on the personality of, 110–11; kyomu into kū, on the conversion of, 91, 97; Kyoto School membership, 1, 6, 19, 22n1, 26–27, 82, 83; nihilism in the thought of, 60, 88n5, 143–46; Nishida, common ground with, 102–4; political stance, 73, 74, 78, 79, 84, 88n14; on positivism, 105–6; religious ontology, implications for, 85–86, 88n14; Shūkyo to wa nanika as masterpiece, 20, 89, 102–3, 146; time in the thought of, 20, 21, 94–100 noetic activity, 114, 115, 125 Noh plays, 142 noūs (pure/intuitive understanding), 64, 81 nyojitsu (suchness-of-things), 83, 147 Ogyû Soraï, 30, 70 Ôhashi Ryōsuke, 59, 71n6 onozukara (natural spontaneity), 17 oppositional nothingness, 115, 124–25, 127 Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt), 42 ousia (essence), 8, 9, 21, 107–8 overcoming modernity, 19, 27, 30, 34, 36, 53, 57–60, 61–63, 70, 144 Parkes, Graham, 144 Philosophy of Radical Subjectivity (Nishitani), 144 phronesis (prudential judgment), 37, 64, 80 phusis (growing), 90, 92 Physics (Aristotle), 90 physis (nature), 23n15, 107, 108, 109 Plato, 64–65, 73, 82, 83–84, 90, 107 plurivocity, 7–9, 13, 14, 21, 101 politeia (political organization), 36, 64, 87n2

political science in Japan, 35–38 postmodernism, 35, 38, 57, 58–59, 68–69, 70 praxis (active life), 62, 64–65, 80–81, 84, 94, 128–29 reflexive philosophy, 123 rekishi/rekishiteki (history/historical), 102, 113, 128, 138n2 Religion and Nothingness (Nishitani), 20, 79, 89, 102–3, 141, 143, 146 Republic (Plato), 73, 82 ri (natural order), 12, 103–4, 107 Ricœur, Paul, 1, 6, 20–21, 63, 81, 82, 89, 123, 149n1 Rigveda text, 109 rinne, cycle of, 97, 148 rōnins (strongmen), 50, 51 Ronri to semei (Nishida), 129 Russell, Bertrand, 3 Sakabe Megumi, 26 saṃsāra (wheel of birth and death), 83–84, 97, 148 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, 3, 7, 9 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 25, 26, 73, 80, 85 schizophrenia, 133, 137 Schizophrenia (Murakami), 133 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 4 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 108, 127, 141, 144, 145 Schuld/Schuldigsein (indebtedness), 91, 97–98, 134, 148 Sein des Seinde (being of beings), 61 The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism (Nishitani), 144–45 Setsuko Aihara, 144 Sharf, Robert H., 65–66 shin jitsuzai (the truly real), 117 Shintoism, 29, 42, 45, 49, 66, 67, 84, 133, 135, 138 shizen (nature), 16, 17, 60, 138–39n2 Shōwa era, 43, 45, 49 shutaisei (subjectivity), 13, 35, 138n2 Smith, Adam, 49, 57

Index

sonzai (being), 9, 138n2, 146 The Sophist (Plato), 107 Sorge (care), 91, 128 Spanish Civil War, 75, 87n3 Stalinism, 18, 19, 41, 42, 51, 53, 54n1, 59, 75 “Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan” (Maruyama), 29 subjectivity, defining, 12–14 śūnyatā (emptiness), 21, 85, 145, 147 Suzuki, Daisetz T., 17–18, 71n14 taigi (great doubt), 85, 147 Taishō era, 45, 47, 78 Takeuchi Yoshimi, 25, 35, 38, 58 Tanabe Hajime, 1, 22n1, 60 tathātā (suchness-of-things), 83, 147 Temps et récit (Ricœur), 20, 89 tennō-centrism, 30, 34, 36, 41, 42, 51, 53, 57, 63, 66, 68 tetsugaku (philosophy), 1, 12, 141 theōria (speculative contemplation), 64, 65, 79–83, 84 Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics (Maruyama), 33, 45–46 Timaeus (Plato), 90 time: Heidegger, temporality of, 20, 89, 90–92, 98, 104, 138n2; kalpa as Buddhistic, 20, 21, 89, 96; narrative, 93–94; Nishitani on, 94–100 Time and Narrative (Ricœur), 20 Tokieda Motoki, 15 Tokugawa era, 28, 29, 31, 33, 36, 52, 70 Tokyo symposium, 58, 60, 70n2 to on pollachôs legetai (plurivocity of being), 7 topos (place), 61, 114 totalitarianism, 45, 47, 55n2, 74, 82; Arendt on, 18, 19, 41–42, 42–44, 51, 52, 53, 76; fascist, 19, 75, 76, 77, 78, 86n2; Kyoto School as politically totalitarian, 65, 67, 73; Maruyama on, 26, 41, 52–54

169

Toynbee, Arnold, 20, 94 traductology, 2, 22n3 tragendes Einverständnis (fundamental agreement), 6, 9 transcultural psychiatry, 136–38 translation, problems with, 2–4 Tsuda Sōkichi, 29 Tsujimura Kôichi, 133 tsukuru mono (formative), 113 Ueda Shizuteru, 27, 88n7, 141 universal humanism, 73–74 Van Bragt, Jan, 88n15, 146 Van Brakel, Jaap, 3 Vattimo, Gianni, 69 la vie (life), 21, 113, 123, 128 Vijñānavāda (School of Consciousness), 13, 15 wabi-sabi worldview, 142 Wahrheit und Methode (Gadamer), 5 Watsuji Tetsurō, 1, 29, 52–53, 60, 61, 70, 133–34, 135, 138–40n2 Weber, Max, 35, 46, 55n9 Weltanschauung (worldview), 97, 108 Western philosophical concepts, translating into Japanese, 2, 9–11 wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein (“consciousness of the effectivity of history”), 5, 6, 11 Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann, 3 Wittkower, Eric D., 136 World War I, 43, 44, 55n6, 74, 76 World War II, 63, 74, 75 Yuasa Yasuo, 26 yūgen, concept of, 142 Yugoslavia, 74–75, 87n3 Zeami Motokiyo, 142 Zen no kenkyū (Nishida), 101– 2, 103, 106

170

zettai mu (absolute nothingness), 64, 127 Zimmer, Heinrich, 109

Index

Zugehörigkeiten (sense of belonging), 5, 6

About the Author

Bernard Stevens, born in Jakarta (Indonesia) in 1956, was educated at Trinity College Dublin, Freie Universität Berlin, and the Catholic University of Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium), of which he is now emeritus professor. He has been program director at the Collège International de Philosophie (Paris) and guest professor at various Asian universities among which are Fujen (Taiwan), Fūdan (Shanghai), Tokyo, and Dokkyo (Japan). He first specialized in continental European phenomenology (with a PhD thesis on Paul Ricœur) and later in contemporary Japanese philosophy, which he was the first to introduce into the French-speaking academia. He has translated into French a number of texts including Heidegger, Aristoteles, Métaphysik thêta 1–3; Watsuji, Introduction to Ethics; and Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness. His essays have appeared in numerous journals, including Zen Buddhism Today, Les Temps modernes, Esprit, Phenomenological Studies, Philosophie, La Revue Philosophique de Louvain, and La Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’étranger. His main books are as follows: • • • • • • • • •

L’apprentissage des signes: Lecture de Paul Ricœur (1990) Une introduction historique à la philosophie, two volumes (1990 and 1993) Topologie du néant: Une approche de l’école de Kyôto (2000) Le néant évidé: Ontologie et politique chez Keiji Nishitani (2003) Invitation à la philosophie japonaise: Autour de Nishida (2005) Le nouveau capitalisme asiatique: Le modèle japonais (2009) La communauté bouddhiste Triratna (2014) Maruyama Masao: Un regard japonais sur la modernité (2018) Heidegger et l’école de Kyôto (2020)

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