PHILOSOPHERS OF NOTHINGNESS James W. Heisig philosophers of nothingness NANZAN LIBRARY OF ASIAN RELIGION AND CULTURE editorial advisory board James W. Heisig Robert Kisala Okuyama Michiaki Paul L. Swanson Watanabe Manabu Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture Hayashi Makoto Aichi Gakuin University Thomas Kasulis Ohio State University James W. Heisig & John Maraldo, eds., Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, & the Question of Nationalism (1995) Jamie Hubbard & Paul L. Swanson, eds., Pruning the Bodhi Tree: The Storm over Critical Buddhism (1997) Mark R. Mullins, Christianity Made in Japan: A Study of Indigenous Move- ments (1998) Jamie Hubbard, Absolute Delusion, Perfect Buddhahood: The Rise and Fall of a Chinese Heresy (2001) James W. Heisig, Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School (2001) Philosophers of Nothingness An Essay on the Kyoto School James W. Heisig University of Hawai‘i Press honolulu English translation © 2001 University of Hawai‘i Press Originally published in Spanish as Filósofos de la nada: Un ensayo sobre la escuela de Kioto, 2001 All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 06 05 04 03 02 01 6 5 4 3 2 1 University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Camera-ready copy for this book was prepared by the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture Contents Preface to the English Edition . ix Orientation 1 The Kyoto School . 3 2 Japanese Philosophy as World Philosophy . 7 3 The Background of Western Philosophy in Japan . 9 4 Working Assumptions of the Kyoto Philosophers . 13 5 The Matter of Language . 17 6 The Study of the Kyoto School in the West . 21 7 Arrangement of the Material . 23 Nishida Kitarõ (1870–1945) 8 Nishida’s Life and Career . 29 9 Nishida’s Philosophical Style . 32 10 An Adventure of Ideas . 36 11 The Quest of the Absolute . 39 12 The Absolute as Pure Experience . 42 13 The Absolute as Will . 47 14 Self-Awareness . 49 15 Active Intuition, Knowing by Becoming . 53 16 Art and Morality as Self-Expression . 56 17 Absolute Nothingness . 61 18 Identity and Opposition . 64 19 The Historical World . 68 20 The Logic of Locus . 72 21 Subject, Predicate, and Universal . 75 22 Self and Other . 79 23 Love and Responsibility . 83 24 Japanese Culture, World Culture . 86 25 The Turn to Political Philosophy . 90 v vi Philosophers of Nothingness 26 Rudiments of a Political Philosophy . 95 27 Religion, God, and Inverse Correlation . 99 Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962) 28 Tanabe’s Life and Career . 107 29 Tanabe’s Philosophical Style . 110 30 Pure Experience, Objective Knowledge, Morality . 113 31 Pure Relationship, Absolute Mediation . 116 32 A Reinterpretation of Absolute Nothingness . 118 33 The Origins of the Logic of the Specific . 122 34 The Specific and the Sociocultural World . 125 35 The Specific and the Nation . 130 36 An Ambivalent Nationalism . 134 37 Critiques of Tanabe’s Nationalism . 139 38 Critiques of Tanabe’s Political Naïveté . 143 39 Response to the Criticisms . 146 40 Repentance . 151 41 Philosophizing the Repentance . 154 42 The Logic of Absolute Critique . 157 43 Religious Act, Religious Witness . 162 44 Self and Self-Awareness . 165 45 A Synthesis of Religions . 171 46 A Dialectics of Death . 175 Nishitani Keiji (1900–1990) 47 Nishitani’s Life and Career . 183 48 Nishitani’s Philosophical Style . 187 49 A Starting Point in Nihilism . 191 50 Elemental Subjectivity . 193 51 A Philosophy for Nationalism . 195 52 Historical Necessity . 200 53 Moral Energy and All-Out War . 204 54 Overcoming Modernity . 208 55 The Religious Dimension of the Political . 211 56 Overcoming Nihilism . 215 57 From Nihilism to Emptiness . 217 58 Emptiness as a Standpoint . 222 59 Emptiness as the Homeground of Being . 224 60 Ego and Self . 228 61 Self, Other, and Ethics . 233 contents vii 62 Science and Nature . 238 63 Time and History . 242 64 God . .245 65 The Embodiment of Awareness . 249 66 The Critique of Religion . 252 Prospectus 67 Placing the Kyoto School . 259 68 Studying the Kyoto School . 261 69 Questions for World Philosophy . 263 70 The Encounter between Buddhism and Christianity . 267 71 Philosophy and Religion, East and West . 269 Notes . 275 Bibliography . 345 Index . 369 Preface to the English Edition The idea of writing a book about the leading ³gures of the Kyoto school has been in the back of my mind longer than I care to remember. What kept it from moving forward, more than anything else, was the expectation that someone quali³ed would soon be taking the project up and perhaps even asking for assistance. As expectations go, it was not unreasonable. There are any number of people well suited to the task, and there were many others like me willing to help out where we could. The years went on, and while the amount of specialized and more narrowly focused research on the Kyoto school increased, the challenge of producing a general overview went unan- swered both in Japan and abroad. A number of circumstances then came together that persuaded me to take the matter in hand myself. In 1999 we invited a young scholar from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Raquel Bouso, to join us at the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture in Nagoya, Japan, to complete her Spanish translation of Nishitani Keiji’s Religion and Nothingness. She came accompanied by Professors Amador Vega and Victoria Cirlot, and the four of us collaborated for six intense weeks on the ³nal editing and revision of the work, which was published later that year. I was subsequently offered a visiting profes- sorship at Pompeu Fabra, and the staff of the Nanzan Institute encouraged me to accept the position, offering to take over my duties for the year. A generous grant from the Itõ Scholarship Foundation enabled me to pur- chase the sizable collection of resource materials needed to undertake the work away from Japan. This collection has since been donated in its entirety to Pompeu Fabra, where it will be available to other scholars in Europe interested in the Kyoto school. So it happened that I came to Barcelona, where ideal working condi- tions made it possible for me to complete the book you now have in your hands. Despite the simple organization of the chapters, and the style in which I have presented them, I have to admit that the work of condensing the data and ideas often got the better of me. As I look back over the results, ix x Philosophers of Nothingness I can still see the tight pleats where pages of writing have been squeezed into a single paragraph, and the seams where whole bolts of material have simply been cut. For a general audience interested in twentieth-century Japanese philosophy, it may be a tight ³t; for the more specialized reader already familiar with the subject, I am afraid it may still be too loose. At least part of the reason for the ambivalence is that the project was tailored to my personal investment in the subject matter. From the outset, I wanted to take the opportunity to sort out what I understood about the Kyoto school from what I only thought I had. In reviewing the notes and translations I had compiled over the years, I soon realized that there was a lot less to lift from them—and indeed from my precious publications on the subject—than I had anticipated. Too much of it was cavalier or misleading. I also realized that there were large amounts of secondary literature that deserved more careful attention, and fairer judgment, than I had given them in the past. In any case, my main concern throughout the body of the text was to make sense, to my own satisfaction, of the three major ³gures of the Kyoto school, Nishida, Tanabe, and Nishitani. Wherever I could, I found sense in their own explanations or in that of their principal commentators; where I could not ³nd it, I made it. In the notes I have turned the lining inside out to show not only the sources I consulted and my reactions to many of them, but also the tangle of threads and loose ends hidden by the abbreviated accounts and cleaner patterns I have labored to present on the surface. I had thought at ³rst to wait for reactions to the original Spanish edi- tion of the book before preparing an English translation, reckoning that more criticism and a little distance would make for improving the text. On further reµection, I realized that the most ef³cient course of action would be to make the rendition while everything was still fresh in my mind. Accordingly, there is very little here that differs from the original Spanish. Questions of composition and technicalities aside, I remain as con- vinced as ever that there is a wisdom to be discovered in philosophies of nothingness like that of the Kyoto school. Like all awakening, it comes in sparks, only to be swallowed up again in the ordinary conventionalities of thought. It is when those sparks µicker closer together and for longer peri- ods that the darkness of philosophical jargon begins to yield something of its secret. My only excuse for inµicting a résumé so long and winding as this one has turned out to be is the hope of communicating something of the illumination these philosophers have brought me. There are so many people to thank, I hardly know where to start. Ueda Shizuteru and Horio Tsutomu were most unsel³sh in answering my many preface xi questions, usually in much more detail than I had asked for.