Kyoto School
= "a group of 20th century Japanese thinkers who developed original philosophies by creatively drawing on the intellectual and spiritual traditions of East Asia, those of Mahāyāna Buddhism in particular". [1]
Description
From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
"The Kyoto School (Kyōto-gakuha) is a group of 20th century Japanese thinkers who developed original philosophies by creatively drawing on the intellectual and spiritual traditions of East Asia, those of Mahāyāna Buddhism in particular, as well as on the methods and content of Western philosophy.
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The unintentional founder of the Kyoto School is Nishida Kitarō[1] (1870–1945). In the Meiji period (1868–1912), when Japan reopened to the rest of the world after more than two centuries of national isolation, a generation of scholars devoted themselves to importing Western academic fields of inquiry, including “philosophy.” After many years of studying Western philosophy and Eastern classics, alongside a dedicated practice of Zen Buddhism, Nishida was the first major modern Japanese thinker to successfully go beyond learning from the West to construct his own original system of thought. This he began to do in his maiden work, An Inquiry into the Good, published in 1911 (Nishida 1990). On the basis of this work he obtained a position in the Philosophy Department of Kyoto University, where he went on to ceaselessly develop his thought and to decisively influence subsequent generations of original philosophers, including the two other most prominent members of the Kyoto School, Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962) and Nishitani Keiji (1900–1990).
As is reflected in the name of the School, its founding members were associated with Kyoto University, the most prestigious university in Japan next to Tokyo University. It is perhaps no coincidence that the School formed in Kyoto, the ancient capital and center of traditional Japanese culture, rather than Tokyo, the new capital and center of modernization, which also meant, Westernization. While the Kyoto School philosophers all devoted themselves to the study of Western philosophy (indeed they made lasting contributions to the introduction of Western philosophy into Japan), they also kept one foot firmly planted in their native traditions of thought. One scholar of the Kyoto School writes in this regard: “The keynote of the Kyoto school, as persons educated in the traditions of the East despite all they have learned from the West, has been the attempt to bring the possibilities latent in traditional culture into encounter with Western culture” (Minamoto 1994, 217).
It would be misleading, however, if we were to think of the Kyoto School as merely putting a Western rational mask over Eastern intuitive wisdom. Nor would it be entirely accurate to think of them as simply using Western philosophical idioms and modes of thought to give modern expression to East Asian Buddhist thought. For not only is the Western influence on their thought more than skin deep, their philosophies are far too original to be straightforwardly equated with preexisting Eastern thought. Insofar as they can be identified as East Asian or Mahāyāna Buddhist thinkers, this must be understood in the sense of having critically and creatively developed these traditions in philosophical dialogue with Western thought. It should be kept in mind that their primary commitment is not to a cultural self-expression, or even to a dialogue between world religions, but rather to a genuinely philosophical search for truth.
The Kyoto School has become most well known, especially in the West, for its philosophies of religion. Indeed the initial reception of the Kyoto School in North America in particular took place in university departments of Religious Studies, where their philosophies of religion have frequently been viewed as representative of Mahāyāna Buddhism, specifically of the latter’s Zen and Shin (True Pure Land) schools.[2] While the exchange on these terms has been fruitful, this view can be misleading in two respects. First of all, even if, for most of the Kyoto School thinkers, a philosophy of religion is the ultimate arche and telos of their thought, it is hardly their sole concern. They address a full array of philosophical issues: metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, logic, philosophical anthropology, philosophy of history, philosophy of culture, philosophy of language, ethics, political theory, philosophy of art, etc.
Secondly, even when their focus is on the philosophy of religion, they approach this topic in a non-dogmatic and often surprisingly non-sectarian manner, drawing on and reinterpreting, for example, Christian sources along with Buddhist ones. Even Nishitani, who did in fact come to identify his thought with “the standpoint of Zen,” adamantly refused the label of a “natural theologian of Zen.” He claimed that: “If I have frequently had occasion to deal with the standpoints of Buddhism, and particularly Zen Buddhism, the fundamental reason is that [the original form of reality and the original countenance of human being] seem to me to appear there most plainly and unmistakably” (NKC X, 288; Nishitani 1982, 261).
Kyoto School philosophy, therefore, should be understood neither as Buddhist thought forced into Western garb, nor as universal discourse (which the West happened to have invented or discovered) dressed up in Japanese garb. Rather, it is best understood as a set of unique contributions from the perspective of modern Japan—that is, from a Japan that remains substantially determined by its historical layers of traditional culture at the same time as being decisively conditioned by its most recent layer of contact with the West—to a nascent worldwide dialogue of cross-cultural philosophy.
This article will proceed as follows. In the following section, I will consider the preliminary issues of how to define the Kyoto School and who to include as its members. The name “Kyoto School” has been used in the past, in some cases rather loosely, to refer to a variety of sets of thinkers. It is therefore necessary to begin by discussing the question: Just who belongs to exactly what? The third and central section of this article will treat what is generally considered to be the central philosophical concept and contribution of the Kyoto School, namely, its ideas of “absolute nothingness.” After discussing the ostensible contrast between “Western being” and “Eastern nothingness,” and after looking at some of the Eastern sources of the idea of absolute nothingness, I will discuss the topological, dialectical, phenomenological, and existential philosophies of absolute nothingness developed by Nishida Kitarō, Tanabe Hajime, Nishitani Keiji, and the central figure of the third generation of the Kyoto School, Ueda Shizuteru (b. 1926). The fourth section will address the political controversy surrounding the wartime writings and activities of the Kyoto School. The first wave of attention paid to the Kyoto School in the West in the 1980s largely ignored the political debate that had long surrounded the School in Japan. While this lacuna in Western scholarship was amended in the 1990s, notably with the publication of Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School and the Question of Nationalism (Heisig & Maraldo 1994), the political ventures and misadventures of the Kyoto School remain a highly contentious subject (see Maraldo 2006 and Goto-Jones 2008). In the final section of this article I will return to the question of the cross-cultural legacy of the Kyoto School as a group of thinkers that stood between—or perhaps moved beyond—East and West."
(https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/)
Discussion
The Kyoto School as anticipating multipolarity in international relations
Alain de Benoist:
"In the 1930s and 40s, the Kyoto School, formed around Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945) and Tanabe Hajime, was undoubtedly the first—well before all the decolonization movements—to develop the idea of a multipolar world, divided into distinct large spaces considered as the many crucibles of culture and civilization, and to critique, in defense of the plurality of cultures characteristic of the “real world” (sekaiteki sekai), the abstract principles of Western universalism based on capitalism and scientism.
The principal representatives of this School were above all philosophers, such as Kōsaka Masaaki, Kōyama Iwao, Nishitani Keiji, and Suzuki Shigetaka. The European thinkers who seem to have influenced them the most were Johann Gottfried von Herder and Leopold von Ranke. Recently, the ideas of members of the Kyoto School have also been brought closer to those of communitarian authors such as Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre.
It was in this inner circle that the idea of a “greater East Asian co-prosperity sphere” was developed, associating several countries on the basis of shared values and respect for their autonomy, an idea that should neither be confused with the “Japanocentrism” of the nationalist right nor with the Japanese imperialism of the same period. As early as June 1943, in fact, Japan’s official censorship body ordered that the School's publications be kept silent, reproaching it precisely for wanting to assign to Japanese power a mission that must not be confounded with simple imperialist expansion."
(https://www.agonmag.com/p/the-dawn-of-civilizational-states?)
The relational view of human-nature connections
A summary of the authors that developed meso-logical approaches, from the reading notes of Michel Bauwens:
Modern dualism separates the human from nature, even though the two are inextricably linked: the human lives in full connection with an environment AND is constituted by it.
- Uexkull called this ‘Gegengefuge’ (contre-assemblage – fr).
- Watsuji Tetsure called it fudosei (mediance – fr), in his book Fudo (Le milieu humain, CNRS, 2011) the dynamic coupling of the human with its environment.
In this relation, nature is not an object, we can not exist outside of it. It’s also not subjective but trajective, i.e. both at the same time. In this sense, ecology as a science is insufficient, as it sees nature as an object, so what we need is ‘mesology’, interpreted as a ‘trans-modern paradigm’. It’s main axiom is that things are produced by relations, they are not substantive existing ‘by themselves’. Mesology comes from the Latin word ‘medietas’, meaning ‘half’, and implies that without our relation, we do not fully exist. Being is only exercised through this ‘mediance’.
To replace Aristotelian substantivism and its ‘third-excluding logic’, Berque found
- Nishida, and his predicate logic (jutsugo no ronri) and tried to synthesize both (refusing to absolutize the predicate as well).
In Yamauchi Tokuryu he found the new logic of the included middle, ( >< the excluded middle from aristetolian logic), in order to develop a meso-logy. Berque says the Buddhist of the Great Vehicle have developed this the best.
- Fukuoka Masanobu and his natural agriculture also influenced Berque, and he mentions
- Imanishi and his theory of life.
Trajecting refers to ex-isting from the point of view of another. Grass is food for the cow, but an obstacle for the human hand, and a roof for insects to hide from the rain.
Source: La catastrophe ecologique moderne. Entretien avec Augustin Berque. Krisis, 2018 – 2 – No. 49, “Nature ?”
More information
- "After an introductory section, this article will focus on four questions:
- How should the Kyoto School be defined? What is meant by its central philosophical concept of “absolute nothingness,” and
- how did the Kyoto School philosophers variously develop this Eastern inspired idea in dialogue and debate with Western thought and with one another?
- What are the basics of their political writings, and the basis of the controversy surrounding them?
- What is the legacy of the Kyoto School for cross-cultural thinking?"