Kyoto School and Watsuji Tetsuro
Lectures 15 and 16:
The Kyoto School and Ethics:
Watsuji Tetsuro (1889- 1960)
Dr. Geoffrey Roche
Lakeland College, Wisconsin (Tokyo Campus)
Fall Semester 2007
unblinkinggaze@hotmail.com
15.1 Preliminary Questions
15.2. Introduction: The Kyoto School.
The Kyoto School was an early 20th Century Japanese philosophy group, originating at Kyoto University. Their project, broadly construed, was to integrate traditional Japanese thought and Buddhist (in particular Mahâyâna Buddhist and Zen) concepts with Western (typically German) philosophical language and concepts.
The first, and unintentional, founder of the Kyoto School was Kitarô Nishida (1870-1945), widely regarded as Japan’s greatest thinker. Although Japanese philosophers had been studying Western thought (‘tetsugaku’) since the Meiji period, Nishida was the first to attempt to formulate his own theory. He studied at Tokyo Imperial University, reading Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer under the first philosophy professors in Japan. He graduated in 1884 with a thesis on Hume on causation.
Nishida’s first text, An Inquiry into the Good (1911), earned him a position at the Philosophy Department at the University of Kyoto. It was here that Nishida inspired the principal Kyoto School members Hajime Tanabe (1885- 1962) (who Nishida met for the first time in 1918, and considered the co-founder of the Kyoto School), and Keiji Nishitani (1900- 1990). The following generation of Kyoto school members comprised Kôsaka Masaaki (1900- 1969), Shimomura Toratarô (1900-1995), Kôyama Iwao (1905-1993), and Suzuki Shigetaka (1907-1988). I will give an outline of the school before discussing Tetsurô Watsuji (1889- 1960). Also associated with the group (although not an actual member) is Suzuki Daisetsu, famous for introducing Zen Buddhism to the West.
Classifying the group is not straightforward. Writes Bret Davis:
The […] Kyoto School should be understood neither as Buddhist thought forced into Western garb, nor as universal discourse (with the West happened to have invented or discovered) dressed up in Japanese garb. Rather, it is best understood as a set of unique contributions determined by its historical layers of traditional culture at the same time as being essentially conditioned by its most recent layer of contact with the West- to a nascent worldwide dialogue of cross- cultural philosophy.
15.3 Main Themes:
The Kyoto School philosophers were preoccupied with a broad range of philosophical themes, including metaphysics, ontology (theory of what exists), cultural criticism, political theory, and aesthetics. They are most well known for their religious thought (in fact, the Kyoto school is typically only discussed in religious studies departments in the USA, rather than in philosophy departments). Here we will be concerned with ethical thought, in particular that of Keiji Nishitani.
15.4 Absolute Nothingness (Zettai- mu).
The Kyoto philosophers had in common a preoccupation with the idea of nothingness, rather than being, as their primary focus and ground for theorizing. This is a difficult idea, so we will not dwell on it for too long.
In short, the first real face- to –face contact that any Japanese philosophers had with Western philosophers was when Hajime Tanabe, Kôichi Tsujimura and Nishitani went to study philosophy in Germany (Tanabe returning to Japan in 1924). While there, their principal philosophy teacher was Martin Heidegger. (Tanabe was in fact the first person to publish an article on Heidegger; Nishitani studied with Heidegger between 1937 and 1939, when Heidegger gave his famous lectures on Nietzsche, and in turn taught Heidegger Zen thought).
I will quote Bret W. Davis:
“First philosophy” in the Western tradition is ontology, which asks the question of “being qua being,” and tends to answer this question either in terms of the most universal “being-ness” or in terms of the “highest being.” For Aristotle, the essence of being was “substance,” ambiguously thought either as the particular (Socrates) or the concrete universal form (human being), and the highest being was the “unmoved mover.” Greek ontology later influenced the Christian theological tradition to think of God as the “highest being,” such that the dual threads of the Western tradition as a whole took shape as what Heidegger calls “onto-theology.” Hence, the fundamental philosophical question of the onto-theological mainstream of the West is, “What is being?” On the other hand, the counter-question which the Kyoto School finds in the East is, “What is Nothingness?” In place of an ontology, first philosophy in the East is more often a “meontology”: a philosophy of non-being or Nothingness.
In short: for Western thinkers, the very first question of philosophy- the answer to which is the beginning of all other philosophy, is “what is being?” that is, what is the basic substratum of existence? What is the ‘thing’ behind existence? The Kyoto school philosophers, on the other hand, believed that the real ‘ground of being’ is Nothingness, an idea with its origins in Buddhist thought (although, as the Kyoto school thinkers knew, also occur in the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770- 1831) and the mystic Meister Eckhart [1260–c.1328]). The Kyoto school philosophers explicitly associated the idea of Nothingness with the Sanskrit term śûnyatâ, (kû in Japanese), which means ‘emptiness.’ Later Kyoto school thought preferred the Chinese term mu (“Nothingness”; wu in Chinese), the term that appears in Zen thought.
Nishitani considered the ‘question of nothing’ as the defining distinction between Western and Eastern thought. (Another distinction he made was between the ‘Logic of Things,’ and the Eastern “Logic of Heart- Mind” (kokoro). In the essay “ The Types of Culture of the Classical Periods of East and West Seen from a Metaphysical Perspective,” he wrote
How then are we to distinguish between the types of culture of the West and East from a metaphysical point of view? I think we can do this by dividing them into that [i.e. the culture of the West] which considers the ground of reality to be being, and that [i.e. the culture of the East] which considers this ground to be Nothingness.
Tanabe did not think of philosophy as being an open inquiry into ethics, law, science, or the nature of truth; he considered all true philosophy to be preoccupied with a single question:
All science needs to take some entity or other as its object of study. The point of contact is always in being, not in nothing. The discipline that has to do with Nothingness is philosophy.
Why this distinction is so crucial is not clearly addressed, however. Nishida’s own reasoning tends towards ancestor- veneration or perhaps even mysticism rather than philosophical analysis proper (a criticism that can be leveled at the entire Kyoto School tradition). As James Heisig puts it, the Kyoto school thinkers, unlike Western thinkers, lack “a clear delineation between philosophy and religion.” From the 1926 text From That Which Acts to That Which Sees, Nishida states:
It goes without saying that there is much to admire, and much to learn from, the impressive achievements of Western culture, which thought from being and the giving of form as good. However, does there not lie hidden at the base of our Eastern culture, preserved and passed down by our ancestors for several thousand years, something which sees the form of the formless and hears the voice of the voiceless? Our hearts and minds endlessly seek this something; and it is my wish to provide this quest with a philosophical foundation.
Yet, as Robert Carter notes, there is a real question “whether this insistence on nothingness as the primary and most basic focus in philosophy is intelligible and justified”. Three questions come to mind here: a). what does it mean to say that ‘nothingness is the ground of being?’ b). how do we know that ‘nothing is the ground of being?’ and c). insofar as this is a description of how things are, how does this relate to ethics, which is prescriptive? Put more simply: in all of the ethical discussions that we have had this semester, how relevant are questions of ‘fundamental ontology’ to these discussions?
The standard (‘Western’) philosophical assumption here is that the naturalistic fallacy has been committed. We will come to this question when we discuss the specific ethical ideas of the Kyoto school.
15.5 The Influence of Esoteric Buddhism on Japanese Modes of Thought
A second dominant theme in Japanese thought is the assumption that all parts (in particular the individuals of a society) constitute the whole, whereas Western thought tends to think of the whole as being the sum of its parts. This idea, arguably, originates in the Esoteric Buddhist thought that was introduced to Japan by Japan’s first true philosopher, Kūkai (空海) (or also known posthumously as Kōbō-Daishi (弘法大師). Thomas P. Kasulis outlines the significance of this idea for later Japanese thought:
[…] Esotericism has a distinctive view of the relation between part and whole. The whole is recursively manifest or reflected in the part. It is not that the parts constitute the whole nor that the whole is more than the sum of its parts; rather, since the part is what it is by virtue of the whole, if we truly understand the part, we find the whole imprinted on it. In Shingon [Buddhism’s] case [the sect founded by Kūkai], for example, since any individual thing is an expression of the cosmos as Dainichi, when we truly understand the part (the individual thing), we encounter the whole (Dainichi) [that is, the Universe] as well.
With this orientation as a cultural preposition, later Japanese philosophers would seldom endorse either atomistic analysis or individualism […] Individualism, with its attendant theories of social contract [that is, Hobbes, Rousseau etc.]. entered Japan via the West only in the late nineteenth century. Since it viewed the social whole as constituted by the parts, it ran counter to the esoteric assumption. Not surprisingly, individualism has never taken hold in Japan for social, ethical or political theory.
The writings of Kitaro Nishida, founder of the Kyoto School, also express this idea. His 1921 work Zen no Kenkyu (translated as An Enquiry into the Good), the first Kyoto School text, emphasizes the idea that subject and object are one, that God and the Universe is one entity, and that ethics is a matter of understanding ultimate reality: all ideas that can be traced back to Kukai.
15.6 The Kyoto School and The Greater East Asian War / World War II.
When we think about the relationship between philosophers and politics, it is important to keep in mind that philosophers do not exist in some other realm up in the clouds, separated off from the rest of humanity. Being a philosopher, as such, does not excuse one for the political implications of one’s ideas, unless one wishes to admit that their ideas are too obscure or too meaningless to have any persuasive force.
Philosophers frequently have quite a lot of popular respect and influence (though of course not all the time), and their opinions can often shape, or give legitimacy, to official policy or ideas that might otherwise appear merely foolish, brutal or immoral. When the Nazis used Nietzsche’s ideas they were appealing to the authority of a very famous and respected writer; when animal rights people argue their case they will point out the cogent arguments of Peter Singer. In the same way, The Kyoto School philosophers were hardly obscure writers, and as such had enough respect to be influential. Nishida, for example, gave well received public lectures; his 1940 text “The Problem of Japanese Culture” appeared it sold 40,000 copies. When his completed works appeared in 1947, people camped out all night long to receive the first copies.
The Kyoto School have been criticized for contributing to the political ideology of the Imperialist period (interestingly, the most important Western thinker for the school, Martin Heidegger, was also implicated in Nazism and was himself a member of the Nazi party). Some Japanese intellectuals (‘left wing’ Kyoto school members Jun Tosaka and Kiyoshi Miki, for example) were imprisoned and died in prison for their anti- militaristic stance; Mitsuo Taketani [1911-], a philosopher of science, was imprisoned for his anti- Fascist activities). The rest of the Kyoto school, however, cooperated with the authorities, applying what they termed “cooperative resistance” (hantaiseiteki kyôryoku). This cooperation is highly ambivalent, however (see Davis pp. 30-32 for discussion). On the one hand, the Kyoto School apparently opposed the war. They had discussions on how to avoid it, and, once the war had begun, had secret talks with the Imperial Navy to discuss ways of steering public opinion against the more aggressive Land Army. On the other, comments made by Kyoto School members suggest a certain complicity with the ideologies behind the war. Hajime Tanabe, for example, in his 1940 text Rekishiteki Genjitsu (Historical Reality), argued in favour of “training for death,” and inspired many students, including future Tokko (suicide) pilots, to go to war. Tetsuro Watsuji (who we will look at in more detail in the next lecture) argued for the superiority of Japanese theories of human nature and ethics, and argued for the negation of the self; views that were compatible with nationalist and militaristic ideologies.
In November 1941 Masaaki Kosaka, Keiji Nishitani. Iwao Koyama and Naritaka Suzuki participated in a round –table discussion entitled The World’ Historical Standpoint and Japan, organized by the staff of the philosophy journal Chūōkōron.
The discussions are interesting in that they express the Kyoto school’s preoccupation with the problem of modernity and of Japanese national identity, along with their thoughts on war, history and the role of philosophy. More troubling are, in particular, Nishitani’s views on the ‘moral energy’ of the Japanese, and the Japanese state’s obligation to control other nations. For Nishitani, the Japanese, a Herrenvolk (Master- Race), are morally obliged by historical necessity to assist in shaping the character of all East Asia.
I would like to return to the question of moral energy. The primary issue is the concrete form that the ethical or moral dimension (moral energy) takes in East Asia. This is fundamental, and is also, I think, tied to the resolution of the China incident. I mean, the most basic issue is the “China Consciousness” of the Chinese, the consciousness of always being the centre of East Asia, and of Japan as having been educated through the grace of Chinese culture. In such a situation, the main thing is somehow to make them see and to realize that Japan is now the leader in the construction of the Greater East Asia of today, and must be the leader as a matter of historical necessity…. […] [China] must call its people to an awareness of world history, to make them leave aside their Middle Kingdom consciousness and cooperate with Japan in the construction of Greater East Asia. This would make it possible to think of a kind of manifestation of moral energy in Greater East Asia. Because Japan’s contemporary role of leadership relies basically on Japan’s moral energy. It was Japan’s moral energy that prevented the colonization of China. (Chuokoron p. 26).
Hence the root of the ethics of the Greater East Asian sphere consists in transmitting Japan’s moral energy to each of the races, and elevating them to a high spiritual level where they can cooperate with Japan and where upright inter- racial relations can be constructed (ibid p. 34).
Nishitani goes on to argue that ‘race’ is in fact a moral concept (an idea adopted from historian Leopold Von Ranke, 1795-1886).
[…] for a race to be able to step anew into the midst of the established world order and assert the continuation [of] its own existence positively, it must have moral energy. Only then can a nation be shaped that is grounded on race as such. In such a race, nation can be said to signify the manifestation of the moral energy of the race itself. Thus, as bad as the terms racialism or nationalism sound to democracy, these terms really contain great moral significance. However, it is morality as moral energy, not formal morality as such. Furthermore, such a moral quality becomes visible only when it can uphold a nation within history. If it is grasped merely as a pure legal concept or in some other “academic” form, the moral energy is drained. (ibid p.29).
Nishitani’s 1940 text Shukyo to Bunka (Religion and Culture), another problematic work is also noteworthy. In a section entitled “Hittora undo no seishin” (“ The Spirit of the Hitler Movement”), Nishitani favorably compares Hitler’s ideology with that of Nietzsche (whom he had studied under Heidegger), and discusses Hitler’s rejection of egoism and his exhortations to individuals to sacrifice themselves for the good of the nation.
Ishikawa: Nishida Kitaro Museum of Philosophy
At left, a German edition of “Ethics as a Science of Man.” At right, Watsuji’s grave in Kamakura (Tokeiji Temple, near Kita Kamakura Station).
Keiji Nishitani. Nishida Kitarô, in Paris, 1940.
Tanabe Hajime, co- founder of the Kyoto School. At left: in 1930.
Lecture 16: Watsuji Tetsurô (和辻 哲郎) (1889- 1960).
16.1 Preliminary Questions.
a). What is ethics?
b). What is the biggest problem with Utilitarianism?
c). Why is respect for the individual in law and ethics important, do you think?
d). Do you think that climate influences a culture’s ethics? If so, are there some basic ethical principles that ought to be universal, regardless of the climate?
e). What is the Naturalistic Fallacy? And why is it fallacious to use this argument?
f). What is argumentum ad Antiquitatem? Why is it a fallacy? Can you think of an example that relates to ethics?
g). What is argumentum ad populum? Why is it fallacious? Can you think of an example that relates to ethics?
16.1 Watsuji Tetsurô: Biographical Outline.
Tetsuro Watsuji was a moral philosopher, cultural historian, translator and historian of ideas. He was born in Himeji, Hyogo prefecture. When he was young he read Western literature and poetry. He discovered philosophy whilst at the First Higher School (later renamed Tokyo University), graduating in 1909, and in 1912 completed a thesis on Schopenhauer (his first thesis was on Nietzsche, but was rejected by the board as it was deemed unsuitable, Nietzsche deemed a mere ‘philosopher- poet.’). Both theses were later published, and Watsuji became instrumental in introducing the work of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard to Japan. After 1918 he experienced what commentators have called a reorientation (tenko), apparently inspired by the lectures of Natsumi Soseki. Watsuji turned against Western philosophy and culture, in particular what he felt to be an excessive emphasis on individualism, and its negative impact on Japanese life. (Nietzsche in particular is extremely individualistic, to the point of rejecting all Jewish and Christian morality). By contrast, ethics, according to Watsuji, should emphasize social interconnectedness. This turning away from the West led to Watsuji’s investigations into Japanese thought, in particular that of the mediaeval Zen Buddhist philosopher Dogen.
In 1925, after a number of less prestigious teaching posts, Watsuji became professor of ethics at Kyoto University. He went to Germany to study for fourteen months in 1927-1928, and upon return went back to Kyoto Imperial University. He received his PhD (for a thesis on Buddhism) in 1932, and moved to Tokyo Imperial University in 1934. He completed his key text Ethics as the Study of Man (Porisuteki Ningen no Rinrigaku) in 1935, followed by his three volume study on ethics, Rinrigaku, which appeared in three installments in 1937, 1942, and 1949, the year he retired.
16.2 Watsuji’s Philosophy: Introduction.
Watsuji’s earlier writings (in particular Climate and Culture/ Fudo Ningen- gakuteki kosatsu), concern the interrelatedness of environment on the development of culture, although it is not clear how such descriptions constitute or are relevant to an ethics.
Robert Carter sums up the link between ethics and culture as follows: “ Climate serves as the always present background to what becomes the foreground focus for Watsuji, the study of Japanese ethics in practice and in theory. Ethics is the study of the ways in which men and women, adults and children, the rulers and those ruled, have come to deal with each other in their specific climatic conditions. Ethics is the pattern of proper and effective social interaction.” This principle is called Fudo (‘climaticity’).
16.3 The Rinrigaku (1937-1949) (倫理学)
The Rinrigaku has been celebrated as “the definitive study of Japanese ethics” and “a study of Japanese ethical thought and practice that is still unequaled.” Kazuhiko Okuda, of the International University of Japan in Niigata, writes that The Rinrigaku “a major critique of and challenge to modern (Western) philosophical anthropology […] and continues to generate considerable interest and even controversy.” A partial English translation first appeared in 1996.
16.3.1 The Falsity of Individualism.
Watsuji asserts that a). individuality is central to every Western moral theory, and b). this assumption that people are individuals is essentially false. The Western idea of individuality (quoting Robert Carter) “loses touch with the vast network of interconnections that serves to make us human. We are individuals inescapably immersed in the space/ time world, together with others. Individual persons, if conceived of in isolation from their various social contexts, do not and cannot exist except as abstractions.” Philosophers who discuss the rights of the individual can do so, reasons Watsuji, because they ignore the ‘spaciality’ (in- space- ness) of the ningen (person).
Why does Watsuji think that individuals do not exist? He offers three arguments, which I will term a). the Robinson Crusoe Argument b). The argument from Etymology, and c). The argument from authenticity.
16.4 Ningen sonzai (人間存在)
16.4.1 The ‘Robinson Crusoe’ Argument.
Recall Hobbes’s description of the State of Nature: isolated individuals, without an overruling authority to maintain control, will have no choice but to compete with each other. According to Watsuji, this description of human nature is basically flawed. Watsuji holds that we are not naturally isolated and selfish; that we are born into social relationships, beginning with one’s immediate family. From the beginning of our lives we are shaped and influenced by our teachers, friends, and communities. Watsuji tries to illustrate this fact by referring to the story of Robinson Crusoe, from the Daniel Defoe novel of 1719. Crusoe, trapped on a deserted island, behaved as if he was around other people: he spoke in his own language, built a hut, and made food and clothes based on what others had taught him. Further, he always hoped that other people would come to rescue him. Therefore, Watsuji argues, the radically individual person is a myth.
16.4.2. The Argument from Etymology.
Watsuji insists that ethics is the study of the human person, in Japanese, ningen. Yet his study is not grounded on anthropological, psychological or sociological studies, but on etymology, that is, the study of the origin of words. As such, he analyses the origins of the word ningen to support his theory. He notes that the term ‘ningen’ is made up of two characters, ‘nin,’ meaning ‘person’ or ‘human being,’ and ‘gen,’ meaning ‘space’ or ‘between.’ As such, he argues that a person is not merely an individual but is connected with various social connections. Watsuji here presupposes that the Japanese language contains within its ideograms metaphysical truths about human nature. (Note also that Watsuji’s argument implies that only Japanese language carries this truth).
16.4.3. The Argument from Authenticity.
Writes Robert Carter,
One expresses one's individuality by negating the social group or by rebelling against various social expectations or requirements. To be an individual demands that one negate the supremacy of the group. On the other hand, to envision oneself as a member of a group is to negate one's individuality. But is this an instance of poor logic? One can remain an individual and as such join as many groups as one wishes. Or one can think of oneself as an individual and yet as a parent, a worker, an artist, a theatre goer, and so forth. Watsuji understood this, but his argument is that it is possible to think in such ways only if one has already granted logical priority to the individual qua individual. Whatever group one belongs to, one belongs to it as an individual, and this individuality is not quenchable, except through death, or inauthenticity. Nevertheless, Watsuji's conception of what he calls the ‘negation of negation’ has a quite different, and perhaps deeper emphasis. To extricate ourselves from one or another socio-cultural inheritance, perhaps the acceptance of the Shinto faith, one has to rebel against this socio-cultural form by affirming one's individuality in such a way as to negate its overt influence on oneself. This is to negate an aspect of one's history by affirming one's individuality. But the second negation occurs when one become a truly ethical human being, and one negates one's individual separateness by abandoning one's individual independence from others. What we have now is a forgetting of the self, as Dôgen urged (“to study the way is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self, to forget the self is to become enlightened by all things”), which yields a ‘selfless’ morality. To be truly human is not the asserting of one's individuality, but an annihilation of self-centeredness such that one is now identified with others in a nondualistic merging of self and others. Benevolence or compassion results from this selfless identification. This is our authentic ‘home ground,’ and it rekindles our awareness of our true and original nature. This home ground he calls ‘nothingness,’ about which more will be said below.
Carter’s explanation here clarifies several points:
a). Watsuji presupposes a particular description of human nature, according to which our true nature is to be dependent on other people, and to have no self- centred nature. Yet Watsuji also argues that we should follow this ‘essential nature.’ But if being ego-less and dependent on others is our true nature, how could anyone stay from this ‘innate nature’? There is some sort of confusion of description and prescription here. That is, one cannot go from a description of people to an ethics explaining how they should be. Watsuji appears to be committing a naturalistic fallacy.
b). Note the contrast with Western thought. Western ethicists, in particular deontologists, assume that the individual cannot be used as a means to an end; that no individual can be sacrificed for the good of the community. Watsuji, on the other hand, argues that the community is prior to the individual, and that the individual’s sense of self should be annihilated.
c). Watsuji assumes that we must destroy our sense of being individuals (our ‘egoism’) in order to be good people, that is, to be compassionate. Is this necessarily true? Could the opposite not be true: that being truly ethical requires that we retain a sense of individuality?
16.5 Aidagara (間柄 ‘betweeness’) and Ningen sonzai (人間存在 ‘human existence’)
Watsuji traces the term ‘gen’ (space, or ‘betweenenss’) back to the term aidagara which refers to the location of people, in particular the space in which people interact with one another. Watsuji’s student Yuasa Yasuo puts this idea in the following terms:
This betweeness consists of the various human relationships of our life- world. To put it simply, it is the network which provides humanity with a social meaning, for example, one’s being an inhabitant of this or that town or a member of a certain business firm. To live as a person means… to exist in such betweeness.
Ethics is the study of these relational patterns between individuals. Watsuji uses the term Ningen sonzai (人間存在) to describe ‘human existence.’ I will quote again Carter’s summary of this position:
Watsuji usually writes of ningen sonzai, and sonzai (existence) is composed of two characters, son (which means to preserve, to sustain over time), and zai (to stay in place, and in this case, to persevere in one's relationships). Ningen sonzai, then, refers to human nature as individual yet social, private as well as public, with our coming together in relationship occurring in the betweenness between us, which relationships we preserve and nourish to the fullest. Ethics has to do with the ways in which we, as human beings, respect, preserve, and persevere in the vast complexity of interconnections which etch themselves upon us as individuals, thereby forming our natures as social selves, and providing the necessary foundation for the creation of cooperative and workable societies.
The Japanese word for ethics is rinri, which is composed of two characters, rin and ri. Rin means ‘fellows,’ ‘company,’ [nakama] and specifically refers to a system of relations guiding human association. Ri means ‘reason,’ or ‘principle,’ the rational ordering of human relationships. These principles are what make it possible for human beings to live in a cooperative community. Watsuji refers to the ancient Confucian patterns of human interaction as between parent and child, lord and vassal, husband and wife, young and old, and friend and friend. Presumably, one also acquires a sense of the appropriate and ethical in all other relationships as one grows to maturity in society. If enacted properly these relationships, which occur in the betweenness between us, serve as the oil which lubricates interaction with others in such a way as to minimize abrasive occurrences, and to maximize smooth and positive relationships. One can think of the betweenness between each of us as a basho, an empty space, in which we can either reach out to the other in order to create a relationship of positive value, or to shrink back, or to lash out, making a bad situation worse. The space is pure potential, and what we do with it depends on the degree to which we can encounter the other in a fruitful and appropriate manner in that betweenness. Nevertheless, every encounter is already etched with the cultural traditions of genuine encounter; ideally positive expectation, good will, open-heartedness, cheerfulness, sincerity, fellow-feeling, and availability. Ethics “consists of the laws of social existence” writes Watsuji (Watsuji 1996, 11).
A quote from Watsuji clarifies this last point: Rin means nakama, which “signifies a body or a system of relations, which a definite group of persons have with respect to each other, and at the same time signifies individual persons as determined by this system.” He also takes these ideas to be peculiarly Japanese: “we Japanese have produced a distinctive conception of human being. According to it, ningen is the public and, at the same time, the individual human beings living in it.”
Again, we can make the following points:
a). Ethics is reduced to harmonious living with other people.
b). Ethics is defined as ‘the laws of social existence.’
Question: is anything missing from this definition of philosophy? That is, if Watsuji was teaching this course, would he teach it in the same way?
16.6. Nothingness.
Carter again:
The annihilation of the self, as the negation of negation “constitutes the basis of every selfless morality since ancient times,” asserts Watsuji (Watsuji 1996, 225). The negating of the group or society, and the emptying of the individual in Watsuji's sense of the negation of each by the other pole of ningen, makes evident that both are ultimately ‘empty,’ causing one to reflect upon that which is ultimate, and at the base of both one's individuality and the groups with which one associates. The losing of self is a returning to one's authenticity, to one's home ground as that source from which all things derive, and by which they are sustained. It is the abandonment of the self as independent which paves the way for the non-dual relation between the self and others that terminates in the activity of benevolence and compassion through a unification of minds. The ethics of benevolence is the development of the capacity to embrace others as oneself or, more precisely, to forget one's self such that the distinction between the self and other does not arise in this nondualistic awareness. One has now abandoned one's self, one's individuality, and become the authentic ground of the self and the other as the realization of absolute totality. Ethics is now a matter of spontaneous compassion, spontaneous caring, and concern for the whole.
Note the continuity between Watsuji’s thought and that of the Kyoto school philosophers: an absolute reality (as ‘Nothingness’) is prior to all other philosophy, including ethics. Also note the similarity with Esoteric Buddhistic thought: all dualities are in fact incorrect, and conceal from us the truth that all people are in fact one. Finally, note how radically anti- intellectual this doctrine is: ethics is not a matter of calculating utility (as for Utilitarianism) or using pure reason (as with Kant) but ‘spontaneous compassion.’ Whereas Western ethics emphasizes individual rights, for Watsuji, the individual does not exist: “Hence, individuality itself does not have an independent existence. Its essence is negation, that is, emptiness” (Rinrigaku: 80).
16.7 The State.
In the Rinrigaku, Watsuji Tetsuro explicitly rejects the individual’s role as a moral agent. One must abandon one’s independence in order to authentically unite with one’s social group. But in order to achieve ‘totality,’ moving beyond all of one’s specific groups, one must turn to the State. Watsuji refers to the State as the ethical community of all ethical communities. What he means by this is that the State eliminates all forms of egoism, something, he thinks, that other, smaller communities (families, clans, local communities etc.) cannot accomplish. As such, the State is the ultimate ethical community. By defining the State (in particular the Japanese Imperial State) as the ultimate ethical state, Watsuji sees it as transcendent, as above all communities, and the guarantor of the ethical character of all communities. As such, the State alone can define ethics, being both the source of morality and beyond morality. By definition, the Japanese Imperial State is the origin of morality. In the passage below, Carter outlines Watsuji’s thinking here.
In America's National Character (1944), [Watsuji] contrasted this willingness to an assumed selfishness or egocentrism found in the West, together with a utilitarian ethic of expediency, which he felt was rarely able to commit to self-surrender in aid of the state. What he saw as most exemplary in the Japanese way of life was the Bushido ideal of “the absolute negativity of the subject” (Odin 1996, 67), through which the totality of the whole is able to be achieved. There is no doubt that Watsuji's position could easily be interpreted as a totalitarian state ethics. Yet, insofar as Watsuji's analysis of Japanese ethics is an account of how the Japanese do actually act in the world, then it is little surprise that the Japanese errors of excess which culminated in the fascism of the Second World War period should be found somehow implicit and possible in Watsuji's acute presentation of Japanese cultural history. Perhaps the fault to be found lies not in his analysis per se, but rather in his all too sanguine collapsing of the descriptive and the prescriptive. That the Japanese way-in-the-world might include a totalitarian seed is something which demands a normative warning. Surely this is not what should be applauded as an aspect of the alleged superiority of Japanese culture, nor should Bushido in and of itself be taken as a blameless path to the highest of ethical achievements. The willingness to be loyal, whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation might be, in order to remain loyal to one's Lord, however evil or foolhardy he might be, is not an adequate or rational position, and it is surely not laudable ethically. It is, perhaps, the way the samurai saw themselves, as martial servants loyal to death. But the ‘is’ here is clearly not a moral ‘ought’.
In arguing that “the state subsumes within itself all […] forms of private life and continually turns them into the form of the public domain,” Writes Carter, “in attempting to move away from the selfishness of egoistic action, Watsuji has given primacy to the state over individual and group rights.” Wu’s summary is similar:
“In short, in Watsuji’s dialectic, moral goodness lies with the negation of the individual in selfless return to wholeness” (Wu: 99).
Morally worthless in and of itself, the individual functions as a formal category whose value is derived solely from its own negation. In this sense, value is externalized; the locus of value lies outside of the individual, who must relinquish the self to embrace what is outside of oneself. Watsuji’s individual, then, clearly lacks […] value autonomy…Morality compels the individual to embrace the whole, yet the latter is not bound by a similar ethical imperative.” (Wu: 100).
Wu adds:
“Since Watsuji’s idea of morality demands self- sacrifice, selves must exist, even if only to be sacrificed.” (Wu: 100).
Watsuji was not, argues Carter, necessarily arguing in favor of a fascist state. Yet Watsuji’s intentions here are not really relevant to assessment of his ethics or its underlying assumptions. Jeffrey Wu expresses the main problem: Watsuji’s philosophy is of a piece with the view that “ the nation is equated with value, not subject to any moral code that supercedes itself.”
16.8. The Philosophy of As- Is: Jeffrey Wu’s Objection
Jeffrey Wu puts the basic problem of the Rinrigaku in these terms: “The bulk of Watsuji’s ethical thought was composed during the Fifteen Year’s War [that is, Japan’s ‘long’ World War II] [volumes appearing in 1934, 1937, 1942, and 1949]. […] crucial here is the historical context of Watsuji’s ethical system. Was there anything in Watsuji’s ethical philosophy that would have sanctioned resistance against a state that was committing aggression and murder in the name of emperor and nation?” More generally, Wu notes that Watsuji’s schema prioritizes what is over what ought to be (Wu: 99). As such, he asks, “How, then, does one distinguish between the ethically good and the ethically bad?”
Discussion.
In his Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Watsuji, Robert Carter concludes with the following assessment:
By reintroducing a vivial sense of our communitarian interconnectedness, and our spatial and bodily place in the betweenness between us, where we meet, love, and strive to live ethical lives together, Watsuji provides an ethical and political theory which might well prove to be helpful both to non-Japanese societies, and to a modern Japan itself which is torn between what it was, and what it is becoming.
Jeffrey Wu, on the other hand, concludes with the following note:
All in all, the ethical choice that Watsuji offered was one of choosing what already exists as the social totality. The question is whether that is really a choice at all. (Wu: 101).
Discussion.
a). What is Watsuji’s theory, summarized in a few sentences?
b). Would such a theory be useful to “non- Japanese societies?” That is, does it contribute anything that we haven’t found in Western ethical theory so far?
c). Do you think Watsuji’s theory is relevant today, or is it simply an artifact of an earlier age?
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
You need to be able to explain Tatsuro Watsuji’s ethical theory (if you don’t think it is really an ethical theory, you need to be able to explain why).
You should be able to articulate an answer to the following question: who has the more plausible assessment of Watsuji’s ethics: Jeffrey Wu, or Robert Carter? (To write an essay on this you should print off copies of both essays; the links are below).
16.x Bibliography
Thanks to Erik Schinkentanz (Department of Religious Studies, Tokyo University) for advice on Kyoto School references.
Carter, Robert. “Watsuji Tetsurô” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. First
published 11 November 2004. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/watsuji-tetsuro/
www.stanford.edu/group/sjeaa/journal1/japan2.pdf
Davis, Bret W. “The Kyoto School” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
First published Mon 27 Feb, 2006 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/
Heisig, James W. “The Religious Philosophy of the Kyoto School.” Japanese Journal
of Religious Studies, 1990 17/1. Pp. 51- 81.
Hubbard, Jamie. Review: “James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo, eds., Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, & the Question of Nationalism.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies (Spring 1996,23/1–2): 179-185. JSTOR link: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0095-6848(199724)23%3A1%3C214%3ARAZTKS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-T
Heisig, James W. Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School (Nanzan Library of Asian Religion and Culture). Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002.
Heisig, James W., ed. Frontiers of Japanese Philosophy. Nagoya: Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture, 2006.
Kasulis, Thomas P. (1998). “Japanese philosophy.” In E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge. Retrieved August 12, 2007, from http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/G100
McGill University. The Kyoto School: Neglected Themes and Hidden Variations. Seminar Abstracts. March 9-10, 2007 McGill University”. Revised 4th August. http://ara.mcgill.ca/events/kyotoabstracts.pdf.
Mori, Tetsuro. “Nishitani Keiji and the Question of Nationalism,” in James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo, eds Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, & the Question of Nationalism (Nanzen Studies in Religion and Culture) (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995) pp. 316- 332.http://www.nanzan-u.ac.jp/SHUBUNKEN/publications/nlarc/pdf/Rude%20awakenings/Mori.pdf, Accessed August 2007.
Nishida, Kitaro. An Inquiry into the Good. Trans. Masao Abe and Christopher Ives.
New Haven and London: Yale University press, 1990.
Nishitani, Keiji et. al. The World’ Historical Standpoint and Japan.
Tokyo, Chūōkōronsha, 25 March 1943). Trans. J.W. Heisig, 1994. (draft)
http://www.nanzan- u.ac.jp/SHUBUNKEN/publications/nlarc/pdf/Rude%20awakenings/Chuokoron%20(Nishitani).pdf (accessed August 2007).
Nishitani, Keiji. The Self- Overcoming of Nihilism. Trans. Graham Parkes and Setsuko Aihara. New York: State University of New York, 1990.
Okuda, Kazuhiko. “Watsuji Tetsuro’s Contributions to Political Philosophy.” (presented at the XVIIth World Congress of International Political Science Association (IPSA), Seoul, South Korea, August 17-1, 1997. International University of Japan Research Institute.
http://www.iuj.ac.jp/research/wpir001.htm (accessed August 2007).
Parkes, Graham. “The putative fascism of the Kyoto School and the political.” Philosophy East and West Vol. 47 No. 3(August 1997) Pp.305-336. http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-PHIL/graham.htm
Tu, Xiaofei. “The Fascist Next Door? Nishitani Keiji and the Chūōkōron Discussions in Perspective” in Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies 27 July 2006
http://www.japanesestudies.org.uk/discussionpapers/2006/Tu.html
Wakabayashi, Bob Tadashi. Modern Japanese Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Wargo, Robert J.J. The Logic of Nothingnesss: A Study of Nishida Kitaro. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005.
Watsuji, Tetsuro, Watsuji Tetsuro’ Rinrigaku: Ethics in Japan trans. Yamamoto
Seisaku, Robert Edgar Carter. (New York: State University of New York, 1996).
William, David. “In Defense of the Kyoto School: reflections on philosophy, the
Pacific War and the making of a post- White world.” Japan Forum. Volume 12,
Issue 2 (September 2000): 143-156.
Williams, David. Defending Japan’s Pacific War: The Kyoto Philosophers and Post-
White Power. London: Routledge, 2004.
Wu, Jeffrey. “The Philosophy of As- Is: The Ethics of Watsuji Tetsuro.” Stanford
Journal of East Asian Affairs. Spring 2001, Vol. 1: 96-102.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/sjeaa/journal1/japan2.pdf
Jones, Christopher S. “Ethics and Politics in the Early Nishida: Reconsidering "Zen
no Kenkyu. " Philosophy East and West, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Oct., 2003), pp. 514-536.
Online Resources:
Nihon Testugaku http://www.japanese-philosophy.org/
The Kyoto School and Ethics:
Watsuji Tetsuro (1889- 1960)
Dr. Geoffrey Roche
Lakeland College, Wisconsin (Tokyo Campus)
Fall Semester 2007
unblinkinggaze@hotmail.com
15.1 Preliminary Questions
15.2. Introduction: The Kyoto School.
The Kyoto School was an early 20th Century Japanese philosophy group, originating at Kyoto University. Their project, broadly construed, was to integrate traditional Japanese thought and Buddhist (in particular Mahâyâna Buddhist and Zen) concepts with Western (typically German) philosophical language and concepts.
The first, and unintentional, founder of the Kyoto School was Kitarô Nishida (1870-1945), widely regarded as Japan’s greatest thinker. Although Japanese philosophers had been studying Western thought (‘tetsugaku’) since the Meiji period, Nishida was the first to attempt to formulate his own theory. He studied at Tokyo Imperial University, reading Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer under the first philosophy professors in Japan. He graduated in 1884 with a thesis on Hume on causation.
Nishida’s first text, An Inquiry into the Good (1911), earned him a position at the Philosophy Department at the University of Kyoto. It was here that Nishida inspired the principal Kyoto School members Hajime Tanabe (1885- 1962) (who Nishida met for the first time in 1918, and considered the co-founder of the Kyoto School), and Keiji Nishitani (1900- 1990). The following generation of Kyoto school members comprised Kôsaka Masaaki (1900- 1969), Shimomura Toratarô (1900-1995), Kôyama Iwao (1905-1993), and Suzuki Shigetaka (1907-1988). I will give an outline of the school before discussing Tetsurô Watsuji (1889- 1960). Also associated with the group (although not an actual member) is Suzuki Daisetsu, famous for introducing Zen Buddhism to the West.
Classifying the group is not straightforward. Writes Bret Davis:
The […] Kyoto School should be understood neither as Buddhist thought forced into Western garb, nor as universal discourse (with the West happened to have invented or discovered) dressed up in Japanese garb. Rather, it is best understood as a set of unique contributions determined by its historical layers of traditional culture at the same time as being essentially conditioned by its most recent layer of contact with the West- to a nascent worldwide dialogue of cross- cultural philosophy.
15.3 Main Themes:
The Kyoto School philosophers were preoccupied with a broad range of philosophical themes, including metaphysics, ontology (theory of what exists), cultural criticism, political theory, and aesthetics. They are most well known for their religious thought (in fact, the Kyoto school is typically only discussed in religious studies departments in the USA, rather than in philosophy departments). Here we will be concerned with ethical thought, in particular that of Keiji Nishitani.
15.4 Absolute Nothingness (Zettai- mu).
The Kyoto philosophers had in common a preoccupation with the idea of nothingness, rather than being, as their primary focus and ground for theorizing. This is a difficult idea, so we will not dwell on it for too long.
In short, the first real face- to –face contact that any Japanese philosophers had with Western philosophers was when Hajime Tanabe, Kôichi Tsujimura and Nishitani went to study philosophy in Germany (Tanabe returning to Japan in 1924). While there, their principal philosophy teacher was Martin Heidegger. (Tanabe was in fact the first person to publish an article on Heidegger; Nishitani studied with Heidegger between 1937 and 1939, when Heidegger gave his famous lectures on Nietzsche, and in turn taught Heidegger Zen thought).
I will quote Bret W. Davis:
“First philosophy” in the Western tradition is ontology, which asks the question of “being qua being,” and tends to answer this question either in terms of the most universal “being-ness” or in terms of the “highest being.” For Aristotle, the essence of being was “substance,” ambiguously thought either as the particular (Socrates) or the concrete universal form (human being), and the highest being was the “unmoved mover.” Greek ontology later influenced the Christian theological tradition to think of God as the “highest being,” such that the dual threads of the Western tradition as a whole took shape as what Heidegger calls “onto-theology.” Hence, the fundamental philosophical question of the onto-theological mainstream of the West is, “What is being?” On the other hand, the counter-question which the Kyoto School finds in the East is, “What is Nothingness?” In place of an ontology, first philosophy in the East is more often a “meontology”: a philosophy of non-being or Nothingness.
In short: for Western thinkers, the very first question of philosophy- the answer to which is the beginning of all other philosophy, is “what is being?” that is, what is the basic substratum of existence? What is the ‘thing’ behind existence? The Kyoto school philosophers, on the other hand, believed that the real ‘ground of being’ is Nothingness, an idea with its origins in Buddhist thought (although, as the Kyoto school thinkers knew, also occur in the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770- 1831) and the mystic Meister Eckhart [1260–c.1328]). The Kyoto school philosophers explicitly associated the idea of Nothingness with the Sanskrit term śûnyatâ, (kû in Japanese), which means ‘emptiness.’ Later Kyoto school thought preferred the Chinese term mu (“Nothingness”; wu in Chinese), the term that appears in Zen thought.
Nishitani considered the ‘question of nothing’ as the defining distinction between Western and Eastern thought. (Another distinction he made was between the ‘Logic of Things,’ and the Eastern “Logic of Heart- Mind” (kokoro). In the essay “ The Types of Culture of the Classical Periods of East and West Seen from a Metaphysical Perspective,” he wrote
How then are we to distinguish between the types of culture of the West and East from a metaphysical point of view? I think we can do this by dividing them into that [i.e. the culture of the West] which considers the ground of reality to be being, and that [i.e. the culture of the East] which considers this ground to be Nothingness.
Tanabe did not think of philosophy as being an open inquiry into ethics, law, science, or the nature of truth; he considered all true philosophy to be preoccupied with a single question:
All science needs to take some entity or other as its object of study. The point of contact is always in being, not in nothing. The discipline that has to do with Nothingness is philosophy.
Why this distinction is so crucial is not clearly addressed, however. Nishida’s own reasoning tends towards ancestor- veneration or perhaps even mysticism rather than philosophical analysis proper (a criticism that can be leveled at the entire Kyoto School tradition). As James Heisig puts it, the Kyoto school thinkers, unlike Western thinkers, lack “a clear delineation between philosophy and religion.” From the 1926 text From That Which Acts to That Which Sees, Nishida states:
It goes without saying that there is much to admire, and much to learn from, the impressive achievements of Western culture, which thought from being and the giving of form as good. However, does there not lie hidden at the base of our Eastern culture, preserved and passed down by our ancestors for several thousand years, something which sees the form of the formless and hears the voice of the voiceless? Our hearts and minds endlessly seek this something; and it is my wish to provide this quest with a philosophical foundation.
Yet, as Robert Carter notes, there is a real question “whether this insistence on nothingness as the primary and most basic focus in philosophy is intelligible and justified”. Three questions come to mind here: a). what does it mean to say that ‘nothingness is the ground of being?’ b). how do we know that ‘nothing is the ground of being?’ and c). insofar as this is a description of how things are, how does this relate to ethics, which is prescriptive? Put more simply: in all of the ethical discussions that we have had this semester, how relevant are questions of ‘fundamental ontology’ to these discussions?
The standard (‘Western’) philosophical assumption here is that the naturalistic fallacy has been committed. We will come to this question when we discuss the specific ethical ideas of the Kyoto school.
15.5 The Influence of Esoteric Buddhism on Japanese Modes of Thought
A second dominant theme in Japanese thought is the assumption that all parts (in particular the individuals of a society) constitute the whole, whereas Western thought tends to think of the whole as being the sum of its parts. This idea, arguably, originates in the Esoteric Buddhist thought that was introduced to Japan by Japan’s first true philosopher, Kūkai (空海) (or also known posthumously as Kōbō-Daishi (弘法大師). Thomas P. Kasulis outlines the significance of this idea for later Japanese thought:
[…] Esotericism has a distinctive view of the relation between part and whole. The whole is recursively manifest or reflected in the part. It is not that the parts constitute the whole nor that the whole is more than the sum of its parts; rather, since the part is what it is by virtue of the whole, if we truly understand the part, we find the whole imprinted on it. In Shingon [Buddhism’s] case [the sect founded by Kūkai], for example, since any individual thing is an expression of the cosmos as Dainichi, when we truly understand the part (the individual thing), we encounter the whole (Dainichi) [that is, the Universe] as well.
With this orientation as a cultural preposition, later Japanese philosophers would seldom endorse either atomistic analysis or individualism […] Individualism, with its attendant theories of social contract [that is, Hobbes, Rousseau etc.]. entered Japan via the West only in the late nineteenth century. Since it viewed the social whole as constituted by the parts, it ran counter to the esoteric assumption. Not surprisingly, individualism has never taken hold in Japan for social, ethical or political theory.
The writings of Kitaro Nishida, founder of the Kyoto School, also express this idea. His 1921 work Zen no Kenkyu (translated as An Enquiry into the Good), the first Kyoto School text, emphasizes the idea that subject and object are one, that God and the Universe is one entity, and that ethics is a matter of understanding ultimate reality: all ideas that can be traced back to Kukai.
15.6 The Kyoto School and The Greater East Asian War / World War II.
When we think about the relationship between philosophers and politics, it is important to keep in mind that philosophers do not exist in some other realm up in the clouds, separated off from the rest of humanity. Being a philosopher, as such, does not excuse one for the political implications of one’s ideas, unless one wishes to admit that their ideas are too obscure or too meaningless to have any persuasive force.
Philosophers frequently have quite a lot of popular respect and influence (though of course not all the time), and their opinions can often shape, or give legitimacy, to official policy or ideas that might otherwise appear merely foolish, brutal or immoral. When the Nazis used Nietzsche’s ideas they were appealing to the authority of a very famous and respected writer; when animal rights people argue their case they will point out the cogent arguments of Peter Singer. In the same way, The Kyoto School philosophers were hardly obscure writers, and as such had enough respect to be influential. Nishida, for example, gave well received public lectures; his 1940 text “The Problem of Japanese Culture” appeared it sold 40,000 copies. When his completed works appeared in 1947, people camped out all night long to receive the first copies.
The Kyoto School have been criticized for contributing to the political ideology of the Imperialist period (interestingly, the most important Western thinker for the school, Martin Heidegger, was also implicated in Nazism and was himself a member of the Nazi party). Some Japanese intellectuals (‘left wing’ Kyoto school members Jun Tosaka and Kiyoshi Miki, for example) were imprisoned and died in prison for their anti- militaristic stance; Mitsuo Taketani [1911-], a philosopher of science, was imprisoned for his anti- Fascist activities). The rest of the Kyoto school, however, cooperated with the authorities, applying what they termed “cooperative resistance” (hantaiseiteki kyôryoku). This cooperation is highly ambivalent, however (see Davis pp. 30-32 for discussion). On the one hand, the Kyoto School apparently opposed the war. They had discussions on how to avoid it, and, once the war had begun, had secret talks with the Imperial Navy to discuss ways of steering public opinion against the more aggressive Land Army. On the other, comments made by Kyoto School members suggest a certain complicity with the ideologies behind the war. Hajime Tanabe, for example, in his 1940 text Rekishiteki Genjitsu (Historical Reality), argued in favour of “training for death,” and inspired many students, including future Tokko (suicide) pilots, to go to war. Tetsuro Watsuji (who we will look at in more detail in the next lecture) argued for the superiority of Japanese theories of human nature and ethics, and argued for the negation of the self; views that were compatible with nationalist and militaristic ideologies.
In November 1941 Masaaki Kosaka, Keiji Nishitani. Iwao Koyama and Naritaka Suzuki participated in a round –table discussion entitled The World’ Historical Standpoint and Japan, organized by the staff of the philosophy journal Chūōkōron.
The discussions are interesting in that they express the Kyoto school’s preoccupation with the problem of modernity and of Japanese national identity, along with their thoughts on war, history and the role of philosophy. More troubling are, in particular, Nishitani’s views on the ‘moral energy’ of the Japanese, and the Japanese state’s obligation to control other nations. For Nishitani, the Japanese, a Herrenvolk (Master- Race), are morally obliged by historical necessity to assist in shaping the character of all East Asia.
I would like to return to the question of moral energy. The primary issue is the concrete form that the ethical or moral dimension (moral energy) takes in East Asia. This is fundamental, and is also, I think, tied to the resolution of the China incident. I mean, the most basic issue is the “China Consciousness” of the Chinese, the consciousness of always being the centre of East Asia, and of Japan as having been educated through the grace of Chinese culture. In such a situation, the main thing is somehow to make them see and to realize that Japan is now the leader in the construction of the Greater East Asia of today, and must be the leader as a matter of historical necessity…. […] [China] must call its people to an awareness of world history, to make them leave aside their Middle Kingdom consciousness and cooperate with Japan in the construction of Greater East Asia. This would make it possible to think of a kind of manifestation of moral energy in Greater East Asia. Because Japan’s contemporary role of leadership relies basically on Japan’s moral energy. It was Japan’s moral energy that prevented the colonization of China. (Chuokoron p. 26).
Hence the root of the ethics of the Greater East Asian sphere consists in transmitting Japan’s moral energy to each of the races, and elevating them to a high spiritual level where they can cooperate with Japan and where upright inter- racial relations can be constructed (ibid p. 34).
Nishitani goes on to argue that ‘race’ is in fact a moral concept (an idea adopted from historian Leopold Von Ranke, 1795-1886).
[…] for a race to be able to step anew into the midst of the established world order and assert the continuation [of] its own existence positively, it must have moral energy. Only then can a nation be shaped that is grounded on race as such. In such a race, nation can be said to signify the manifestation of the moral energy of the race itself. Thus, as bad as the terms racialism or nationalism sound to democracy, these terms really contain great moral significance. However, it is morality as moral energy, not formal morality as such. Furthermore, such a moral quality becomes visible only when it can uphold a nation within history. If it is grasped merely as a pure legal concept or in some other “academic” form, the moral energy is drained. (ibid p.29).
Nishitani’s 1940 text Shukyo to Bunka (Religion and Culture), another problematic work is also noteworthy. In a section entitled “Hittora undo no seishin” (“ The Spirit of the Hitler Movement”), Nishitani favorably compares Hitler’s ideology with that of Nietzsche (whom he had studied under Heidegger), and discusses Hitler’s rejection of egoism and his exhortations to individuals to sacrifice themselves for the good of the nation.
Ishikawa: Nishida Kitaro Museum of Philosophy
At left, a German edition of “Ethics as a Science of Man.” At right, Watsuji’s grave in Kamakura (Tokeiji Temple, near Kita Kamakura Station).
Keiji Nishitani. Nishida Kitarô, in Paris, 1940.
Tanabe Hajime, co- founder of the Kyoto School. At left: in 1930.
Lecture 16: Watsuji Tetsurô (和辻 哲郎) (1889- 1960).
16.1 Preliminary Questions.
a). What is ethics?
b). What is the biggest problem with Utilitarianism?
c). Why is respect for the individual in law and ethics important, do you think?
d). Do you think that climate influences a culture’s ethics? If so, are there some basic ethical principles that ought to be universal, regardless of the climate?
e). What is the Naturalistic Fallacy? And why is it fallacious to use this argument?
f). What is argumentum ad Antiquitatem? Why is it a fallacy? Can you think of an example that relates to ethics?
g). What is argumentum ad populum? Why is it fallacious? Can you think of an example that relates to ethics?
16.1 Watsuji Tetsurô: Biographical Outline.
Tetsuro Watsuji was a moral philosopher, cultural historian, translator and historian of ideas. He was born in Himeji, Hyogo prefecture. When he was young he read Western literature and poetry. He discovered philosophy whilst at the First Higher School (later renamed Tokyo University), graduating in 1909, and in 1912 completed a thesis on Schopenhauer (his first thesis was on Nietzsche, but was rejected by the board as it was deemed unsuitable, Nietzsche deemed a mere ‘philosopher- poet.’). Both theses were later published, and Watsuji became instrumental in introducing the work of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard to Japan. After 1918 he experienced what commentators have called a reorientation (tenko), apparently inspired by the lectures of Natsumi Soseki. Watsuji turned against Western philosophy and culture, in particular what he felt to be an excessive emphasis on individualism, and its negative impact on Japanese life. (Nietzsche in particular is extremely individualistic, to the point of rejecting all Jewish and Christian morality). By contrast, ethics, according to Watsuji, should emphasize social interconnectedness. This turning away from the West led to Watsuji’s investigations into Japanese thought, in particular that of the mediaeval Zen Buddhist philosopher Dogen.
In 1925, after a number of less prestigious teaching posts, Watsuji became professor of ethics at Kyoto University. He went to Germany to study for fourteen months in 1927-1928, and upon return went back to Kyoto Imperial University. He received his PhD (for a thesis on Buddhism) in 1932, and moved to Tokyo Imperial University in 1934. He completed his key text Ethics as the Study of Man (Porisuteki Ningen no Rinrigaku) in 1935, followed by his three volume study on ethics, Rinrigaku, which appeared in three installments in 1937, 1942, and 1949, the year he retired.
16.2 Watsuji’s Philosophy: Introduction.
Watsuji’s earlier writings (in particular Climate and Culture/ Fudo Ningen- gakuteki kosatsu), concern the interrelatedness of environment on the development of culture, although it is not clear how such descriptions constitute or are relevant to an ethics.
Robert Carter sums up the link between ethics and culture as follows: “ Climate serves as the always present background to what becomes the foreground focus for Watsuji, the study of Japanese ethics in practice and in theory. Ethics is the study of the ways in which men and women, adults and children, the rulers and those ruled, have come to deal with each other in their specific climatic conditions. Ethics is the pattern of proper and effective social interaction.” This principle is called Fudo (‘climaticity’).
16.3 The Rinrigaku (1937-1949) (倫理学)
The Rinrigaku has been celebrated as “the definitive study of Japanese ethics” and “a study of Japanese ethical thought and practice that is still unequaled.” Kazuhiko Okuda, of the International University of Japan in Niigata, writes that The Rinrigaku “a major critique of and challenge to modern (Western) philosophical anthropology […] and continues to generate considerable interest and even controversy.” A partial English translation first appeared in 1996.
16.3.1 The Falsity of Individualism.
Watsuji asserts that a). individuality is central to every Western moral theory, and b). this assumption that people are individuals is essentially false. The Western idea of individuality (quoting Robert Carter) “loses touch with the vast network of interconnections that serves to make us human. We are individuals inescapably immersed in the space/ time world, together with others. Individual persons, if conceived of in isolation from their various social contexts, do not and cannot exist except as abstractions.” Philosophers who discuss the rights of the individual can do so, reasons Watsuji, because they ignore the ‘spaciality’ (in- space- ness) of the ningen (person).
Why does Watsuji think that individuals do not exist? He offers three arguments, which I will term a). the Robinson Crusoe Argument b). The argument from Etymology, and c). The argument from authenticity.
16.4 Ningen sonzai (人間存在)
16.4.1 The ‘Robinson Crusoe’ Argument.
Recall Hobbes’s description of the State of Nature: isolated individuals, without an overruling authority to maintain control, will have no choice but to compete with each other. According to Watsuji, this description of human nature is basically flawed. Watsuji holds that we are not naturally isolated and selfish; that we are born into social relationships, beginning with one’s immediate family. From the beginning of our lives we are shaped and influenced by our teachers, friends, and communities. Watsuji tries to illustrate this fact by referring to the story of Robinson Crusoe, from the Daniel Defoe novel of 1719. Crusoe, trapped on a deserted island, behaved as if he was around other people: he spoke in his own language, built a hut, and made food and clothes based on what others had taught him. Further, he always hoped that other people would come to rescue him. Therefore, Watsuji argues, the radically individual person is a myth.
16.4.2. The Argument from Etymology.
Watsuji insists that ethics is the study of the human person, in Japanese, ningen. Yet his study is not grounded on anthropological, psychological or sociological studies, but on etymology, that is, the study of the origin of words. As such, he analyses the origins of the word ningen to support his theory. He notes that the term ‘ningen’ is made up of two characters, ‘nin,’ meaning ‘person’ or ‘human being,’ and ‘gen,’ meaning ‘space’ or ‘between.’ As such, he argues that a person is not merely an individual but is connected with various social connections. Watsuji here presupposes that the Japanese language contains within its ideograms metaphysical truths about human nature. (Note also that Watsuji’s argument implies that only Japanese language carries this truth).
16.4.3. The Argument from Authenticity.
Writes Robert Carter,
One expresses one's individuality by negating the social group or by rebelling against various social expectations or requirements. To be an individual demands that one negate the supremacy of the group. On the other hand, to envision oneself as a member of a group is to negate one's individuality. But is this an instance of poor logic? One can remain an individual and as such join as many groups as one wishes. Or one can think of oneself as an individual and yet as a parent, a worker, an artist, a theatre goer, and so forth. Watsuji understood this, but his argument is that it is possible to think in such ways only if one has already granted logical priority to the individual qua individual. Whatever group one belongs to, one belongs to it as an individual, and this individuality is not quenchable, except through death, or inauthenticity. Nevertheless, Watsuji's conception of what he calls the ‘negation of negation’ has a quite different, and perhaps deeper emphasis. To extricate ourselves from one or another socio-cultural inheritance, perhaps the acceptance of the Shinto faith, one has to rebel against this socio-cultural form by affirming one's individuality in such a way as to negate its overt influence on oneself. This is to negate an aspect of one's history by affirming one's individuality. But the second negation occurs when one become a truly ethical human being, and one negates one's individual separateness by abandoning one's individual independence from others. What we have now is a forgetting of the self, as Dôgen urged (“to study the way is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self, to forget the self is to become enlightened by all things”), which yields a ‘selfless’ morality. To be truly human is not the asserting of one's individuality, but an annihilation of self-centeredness such that one is now identified with others in a nondualistic merging of self and others. Benevolence or compassion results from this selfless identification. This is our authentic ‘home ground,’ and it rekindles our awareness of our true and original nature. This home ground he calls ‘nothingness,’ about which more will be said below.
Carter’s explanation here clarifies several points:
a). Watsuji presupposes a particular description of human nature, according to which our true nature is to be dependent on other people, and to have no self- centred nature. Yet Watsuji also argues that we should follow this ‘essential nature.’ But if being ego-less and dependent on others is our true nature, how could anyone stay from this ‘innate nature’? There is some sort of confusion of description and prescription here. That is, one cannot go from a description of people to an ethics explaining how they should be. Watsuji appears to be committing a naturalistic fallacy.
b). Note the contrast with Western thought. Western ethicists, in particular deontologists, assume that the individual cannot be used as a means to an end; that no individual can be sacrificed for the good of the community. Watsuji, on the other hand, argues that the community is prior to the individual, and that the individual’s sense of self should be annihilated.
c). Watsuji assumes that we must destroy our sense of being individuals (our ‘egoism’) in order to be good people, that is, to be compassionate. Is this necessarily true? Could the opposite not be true: that being truly ethical requires that we retain a sense of individuality?
16.5 Aidagara (間柄 ‘betweeness’) and Ningen sonzai (人間存在 ‘human existence’)
Watsuji traces the term ‘gen’ (space, or ‘betweenenss’) back to the term aidagara which refers to the location of people, in particular the space in which people interact with one another. Watsuji’s student Yuasa Yasuo puts this idea in the following terms:
This betweeness consists of the various human relationships of our life- world. To put it simply, it is the network which provides humanity with a social meaning, for example, one’s being an inhabitant of this or that town or a member of a certain business firm. To live as a person means… to exist in such betweeness.
Ethics is the study of these relational patterns between individuals. Watsuji uses the term Ningen sonzai (人間存在) to describe ‘human existence.’ I will quote again Carter’s summary of this position:
Watsuji usually writes of ningen sonzai, and sonzai (existence) is composed of two characters, son (which means to preserve, to sustain over time), and zai (to stay in place, and in this case, to persevere in one's relationships). Ningen sonzai, then, refers to human nature as individual yet social, private as well as public, with our coming together in relationship occurring in the betweenness between us, which relationships we preserve and nourish to the fullest. Ethics has to do with the ways in which we, as human beings, respect, preserve, and persevere in the vast complexity of interconnections which etch themselves upon us as individuals, thereby forming our natures as social selves, and providing the necessary foundation for the creation of cooperative and workable societies.
The Japanese word for ethics is rinri, which is composed of two characters, rin and ri. Rin means ‘fellows,’ ‘company,’ [nakama] and specifically refers to a system of relations guiding human association. Ri means ‘reason,’ or ‘principle,’ the rational ordering of human relationships. These principles are what make it possible for human beings to live in a cooperative community. Watsuji refers to the ancient Confucian patterns of human interaction as between parent and child, lord and vassal, husband and wife, young and old, and friend and friend. Presumably, one also acquires a sense of the appropriate and ethical in all other relationships as one grows to maturity in society. If enacted properly these relationships, which occur in the betweenness between us, serve as the oil which lubricates interaction with others in such a way as to minimize abrasive occurrences, and to maximize smooth and positive relationships. One can think of the betweenness between each of us as a basho, an empty space, in which we can either reach out to the other in order to create a relationship of positive value, or to shrink back, or to lash out, making a bad situation worse. The space is pure potential, and what we do with it depends on the degree to which we can encounter the other in a fruitful and appropriate manner in that betweenness. Nevertheless, every encounter is already etched with the cultural traditions of genuine encounter; ideally positive expectation, good will, open-heartedness, cheerfulness, sincerity, fellow-feeling, and availability. Ethics “consists of the laws of social existence” writes Watsuji (Watsuji 1996, 11).
A quote from Watsuji clarifies this last point: Rin means nakama, which “signifies a body or a system of relations, which a definite group of persons have with respect to each other, and at the same time signifies individual persons as determined by this system.” He also takes these ideas to be peculiarly Japanese: “we Japanese have produced a distinctive conception of human being. According to it, ningen is the public and, at the same time, the individual human beings living in it.”
Again, we can make the following points:
a). Ethics is reduced to harmonious living with other people.
b). Ethics is defined as ‘the laws of social existence.’
Question: is anything missing from this definition of philosophy? That is, if Watsuji was teaching this course, would he teach it in the same way?
16.6. Nothingness.
Carter again:
The annihilation of the self, as the negation of negation “constitutes the basis of every selfless morality since ancient times,” asserts Watsuji (Watsuji 1996, 225). The negating of the group or society, and the emptying of the individual in Watsuji's sense of the negation of each by the other pole of ningen, makes evident that both are ultimately ‘empty,’ causing one to reflect upon that which is ultimate, and at the base of both one's individuality and the groups with which one associates. The losing of self is a returning to one's authenticity, to one's home ground as that source from which all things derive, and by which they are sustained. It is the abandonment of the self as independent which paves the way for the non-dual relation between the self and others that terminates in the activity of benevolence and compassion through a unification of minds. The ethics of benevolence is the development of the capacity to embrace others as oneself or, more precisely, to forget one's self such that the distinction between the self and other does not arise in this nondualistic awareness. One has now abandoned one's self, one's individuality, and become the authentic ground of the self and the other as the realization of absolute totality. Ethics is now a matter of spontaneous compassion, spontaneous caring, and concern for the whole.
Note the continuity between Watsuji’s thought and that of the Kyoto school philosophers: an absolute reality (as ‘Nothingness’) is prior to all other philosophy, including ethics. Also note the similarity with Esoteric Buddhistic thought: all dualities are in fact incorrect, and conceal from us the truth that all people are in fact one. Finally, note how radically anti- intellectual this doctrine is: ethics is not a matter of calculating utility (as for Utilitarianism) or using pure reason (as with Kant) but ‘spontaneous compassion.’ Whereas Western ethics emphasizes individual rights, for Watsuji, the individual does not exist: “Hence, individuality itself does not have an independent existence. Its essence is negation, that is, emptiness” (Rinrigaku: 80).
16.7 The State.
In the Rinrigaku, Watsuji Tetsuro explicitly rejects the individual’s role as a moral agent. One must abandon one’s independence in order to authentically unite with one’s social group. But in order to achieve ‘totality,’ moving beyond all of one’s specific groups, one must turn to the State. Watsuji refers to the State as the ethical community of all ethical communities. What he means by this is that the State eliminates all forms of egoism, something, he thinks, that other, smaller communities (families, clans, local communities etc.) cannot accomplish. As such, the State is the ultimate ethical community. By defining the State (in particular the Japanese Imperial State) as the ultimate ethical state, Watsuji sees it as transcendent, as above all communities, and the guarantor of the ethical character of all communities. As such, the State alone can define ethics, being both the source of morality and beyond morality. By definition, the Japanese Imperial State is the origin of morality. In the passage below, Carter outlines Watsuji’s thinking here.
In America's National Character (1944), [Watsuji] contrasted this willingness to an assumed selfishness or egocentrism found in the West, together with a utilitarian ethic of expediency, which he felt was rarely able to commit to self-surrender in aid of the state. What he saw as most exemplary in the Japanese way of life was the Bushido ideal of “the absolute negativity of the subject” (Odin 1996, 67), through which the totality of the whole is able to be achieved. There is no doubt that Watsuji's position could easily be interpreted as a totalitarian state ethics. Yet, insofar as Watsuji's analysis of Japanese ethics is an account of how the Japanese do actually act in the world, then it is little surprise that the Japanese errors of excess which culminated in the fascism of the Second World War period should be found somehow implicit and possible in Watsuji's acute presentation of Japanese cultural history. Perhaps the fault to be found lies not in his analysis per se, but rather in his all too sanguine collapsing of the descriptive and the prescriptive. That the Japanese way-in-the-world might include a totalitarian seed is something which demands a normative warning. Surely this is not what should be applauded as an aspect of the alleged superiority of Japanese culture, nor should Bushido in and of itself be taken as a blameless path to the highest of ethical achievements. The willingness to be loyal, whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation might be, in order to remain loyal to one's Lord, however evil or foolhardy he might be, is not an adequate or rational position, and it is surely not laudable ethically. It is, perhaps, the way the samurai saw themselves, as martial servants loyal to death. But the ‘is’ here is clearly not a moral ‘ought’.
In arguing that “the state subsumes within itself all […] forms of private life and continually turns them into the form of the public domain,” Writes Carter, “in attempting to move away from the selfishness of egoistic action, Watsuji has given primacy to the state over individual and group rights.” Wu’s summary is similar:
“In short, in Watsuji’s dialectic, moral goodness lies with the negation of the individual in selfless return to wholeness” (Wu: 99).
Morally worthless in and of itself, the individual functions as a formal category whose value is derived solely from its own negation. In this sense, value is externalized; the locus of value lies outside of the individual, who must relinquish the self to embrace what is outside of oneself. Watsuji’s individual, then, clearly lacks […] value autonomy…Morality compels the individual to embrace the whole, yet the latter is not bound by a similar ethical imperative.” (Wu: 100).
Wu adds:
“Since Watsuji’s idea of morality demands self- sacrifice, selves must exist, even if only to be sacrificed.” (Wu: 100).
Watsuji was not, argues Carter, necessarily arguing in favor of a fascist state. Yet Watsuji’s intentions here are not really relevant to assessment of his ethics or its underlying assumptions. Jeffrey Wu expresses the main problem: Watsuji’s philosophy is of a piece with the view that “ the nation is equated with value, not subject to any moral code that supercedes itself.”
16.8. The Philosophy of As- Is: Jeffrey Wu’s Objection
Jeffrey Wu puts the basic problem of the Rinrigaku in these terms: “The bulk of Watsuji’s ethical thought was composed during the Fifteen Year’s War [that is, Japan’s ‘long’ World War II] [volumes appearing in 1934, 1937, 1942, and 1949]. […] crucial here is the historical context of Watsuji’s ethical system. Was there anything in Watsuji’s ethical philosophy that would have sanctioned resistance against a state that was committing aggression and murder in the name of emperor and nation?” More generally, Wu notes that Watsuji’s schema prioritizes what is over what ought to be (Wu: 99). As such, he asks, “How, then, does one distinguish between the ethically good and the ethically bad?”
Discussion.
In his Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Watsuji, Robert Carter concludes with the following assessment:
By reintroducing a vivial sense of our communitarian interconnectedness, and our spatial and bodily place in the betweenness between us, where we meet, love, and strive to live ethical lives together, Watsuji provides an ethical and political theory which might well prove to be helpful both to non-Japanese societies, and to a modern Japan itself which is torn between what it was, and what it is becoming.
Jeffrey Wu, on the other hand, concludes with the following note:
All in all, the ethical choice that Watsuji offered was one of choosing what already exists as the social totality. The question is whether that is really a choice at all. (Wu: 101).
Discussion.
a). What is Watsuji’s theory, summarized in a few sentences?
b). Would such a theory be useful to “non- Japanese societies?” That is, does it contribute anything that we haven’t found in Western ethical theory so far?
c). Do you think Watsuji’s theory is relevant today, or is it simply an artifact of an earlier age?
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
You need to be able to explain Tatsuro Watsuji’s ethical theory (if you don’t think it is really an ethical theory, you need to be able to explain why).
You should be able to articulate an answer to the following question: who has the more plausible assessment of Watsuji’s ethics: Jeffrey Wu, or Robert Carter? (To write an essay on this you should print off copies of both essays; the links are below).
16.x Bibliography
Thanks to Erik Schinkentanz (Department of Religious Studies, Tokyo University) for advice on Kyoto School references.
Carter, Robert. “Watsuji Tetsurô” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. First
published 11 November 2004. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/watsuji-tetsuro/
www.stanford.edu/group/sjeaa/journal1/japan2.pdf
Davis, Bret W. “The Kyoto School” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
First published Mon 27 Feb, 2006 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/
Heisig, James W. “The Religious Philosophy of the Kyoto School.” Japanese Journal
of Religious Studies, 1990 17/1. Pp. 51- 81.
Hubbard, Jamie. Review: “James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo, eds., Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, & the Question of Nationalism.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies (Spring 1996,23/1–2): 179-185. JSTOR link: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0095-6848(199724)23%3A1%3C214%3ARAZTKS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-T
Heisig, James W. Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School (Nanzan Library of Asian Religion and Culture). Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002.
Heisig, James W., ed. Frontiers of Japanese Philosophy. Nagoya: Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture, 2006.
Kasulis, Thomas P. (1998). “Japanese philosophy.” In E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge. Retrieved August 12, 2007, from http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/G100
McGill University. The Kyoto School: Neglected Themes and Hidden Variations. Seminar Abstracts. March 9-10, 2007 McGill University”. Revised 4th August. http://ara.mcgill.ca/events/kyotoabstracts.pdf.
Mori, Tetsuro. “Nishitani Keiji and the Question of Nationalism,” in James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo, eds Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, & the Question of Nationalism (Nanzen Studies in Religion and Culture) (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995) pp. 316- 332.http://www.nanzan-u.ac.jp/SHUBUNKEN/publications/nlarc/pdf/Rude%20awakenings/Mori.pdf, Accessed August 2007.
Nishida, Kitaro. An Inquiry into the Good. Trans. Masao Abe and Christopher Ives.
New Haven and London: Yale University press, 1990.
Nishitani, Keiji et. al. The World’ Historical Standpoint and Japan.
Tokyo, Chūōkōronsha, 25 March 1943). Trans. J.W. Heisig, 1994. (draft)
http://www.nanzan- u.ac.jp/SHUBUNKEN/publications/nlarc/pdf/Rude%20awakenings/Chuokoron%20(Nishitani).pdf (accessed August 2007).
Nishitani, Keiji. The Self- Overcoming of Nihilism. Trans. Graham Parkes and Setsuko Aihara. New York: State University of New York, 1990.
Okuda, Kazuhiko. “Watsuji Tetsuro’s Contributions to Political Philosophy.” (presented at the XVIIth World Congress of International Political Science Association (IPSA), Seoul, South Korea, August 17-1, 1997. International University of Japan Research Institute.
http://www.iuj.ac.jp/research/wpir001.htm (accessed August 2007).
Parkes, Graham. “The putative fascism of the Kyoto School and the political.” Philosophy East and West Vol. 47 No. 3(August 1997) Pp.305-336. http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-PHIL/graham.htm
Tu, Xiaofei. “The Fascist Next Door? Nishitani Keiji and the Chūōkōron Discussions in Perspective” in Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies 27 July 2006
http://www.japanesestudies.org.uk/discussionpapers/2006/Tu.html
Wakabayashi, Bob Tadashi. Modern Japanese Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Wargo, Robert J.J. The Logic of Nothingnesss: A Study of Nishida Kitaro. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005.
Watsuji, Tetsuro, Watsuji Tetsuro’ Rinrigaku: Ethics in Japan trans. Yamamoto
Seisaku, Robert Edgar Carter. (New York: State University of New York, 1996).
William, David. “In Defense of the Kyoto School: reflections on philosophy, the
Pacific War and the making of a post- White world.” Japan Forum. Volume 12,
Issue 2 (September 2000): 143-156.
Williams, David. Defending Japan’s Pacific War: The Kyoto Philosophers and Post-
White Power. London: Routledge, 2004.
Wu, Jeffrey. “The Philosophy of As- Is: The Ethics of Watsuji Tetsuro.” Stanford
Journal of East Asian Affairs. Spring 2001, Vol. 1: 96-102.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/sjeaa/journal1/japan2.pdf
Jones, Christopher S. “Ethics and Politics in the Early Nishida: Reconsidering "Zen
no Kenkyu. " Philosophy East and West, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Oct., 2003), pp. 514-536.
Online Resources:
Nihon Testugaku http://www.japanese-philosophy.org/
posted by G. Roche at 11:16 PM
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