pdf version of the entry
The Kyoto School
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2023/entries/kyoto-school/
from the Winter 2023 Edition of the
Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy
Co-Principal Editors:
Associate Editors:
Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman
Colin Allen, Hannah Kim, & Paul Oppenheimer
Faculty Sponsors:
Editorial Board:
R. Lanier Anderson & Thomas Icard
https://plato.stanford.edu/board.html
Library of Congress ISSN: 1095-5054
Notice: This PDF version was distributed by request to members of the Friends of the SEP Society and by courtesy to SEP
content contributors. It is solely for their fair use. Unauthorized
distribution is prohibited. To learn how to join the Friends of the
SEP Society and obtain authorized PDF versions of SEP entries,
please visit https://leibniz.stanford.edu/friends/ .
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Copyright © 2023 by the publisher
The Metaphysics Research Lab
Department of Philosophy
Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
The Kyoto School
Copyright © 2023 by the author
Bret W. Davis
All rights reserved.
The Kyoto School
First published Mon Feb 27, 2006; substantive revision Sat Dec 9, 2023
The Kyoto School (Kyōto-gakuha) is a group of 20th century Japanese
philosophers who drew on the intellectual and spiritual traditions of East
Asia, those of Mahāyāna Buddhism in particular, as well as on the
methods and content of Western philosophy.
After an introductory section, this article will focus on four questions:
How should the Kyoto School be defined? What is meant by its central
philosophical concept of “absolute nothingness,” and how did the Kyoto
School philosophers variously develop this Eastern inspired idea in
dialogue and debate with Western thought and with one another? What are
the basics of their political writings, and the basis of the controversy
surrounding them? What is the legacy of the Kyoto School for crosscultural thinking or “world philosophy”?
1. Introduction
2. Identity and Membership: Who Belongs to What?
2.1 A History of External Naming
2.2 The Question of Definition
2.3 Members and Associates
3. Absolute Nothingness: Giving Philosophical Form to the Formless
3.1 Western Being vs. Eastern Nothingness? Ontology vs.
Meontology?
3.2 The Buddhist and Daoist Background for the Idea of
Absolute Nothingness
3.3 Nishida’s Topology of Absolute Nothingness
3.4 Tanabe’s Absolute Nothingness as the Other-Power of
Absolute Mediation
Copyright policy: https://leibniz.stanford.edu/friends/info/copyright/
1
The Kyoto School
3.5 Nishitani’s Three-field Topology: Being, Nihility, and
Emptiness
3.6 Ueda’s Two-layered World: Linguistic Horizons within the
Empty-Expanse
3.7 The “Self that is not a Self” and the Nothingness of Radical
Subjectivity
4. Political Ventures and Misadventures
4.1 The Razor’s Edge of “Cooperative Resistance”
4.2 Nishida’s Reluctant “War over Words” and his Ambivalent
Universalism
4.3 Controversial Wartime Symposia, and Nishitani’s Nation of
Non-Ego
4.4 The “Ōshima Memos”: Record of a Think Tank for Navy
Moderates
4.5 After the War: Tanabe’s Metanoetic Turn and Nishitani’s
Other Cheek
5. The Cross-Cultural Legacy of the Kyoto School
5.1 Between and Beyond East and West
5.2 Japanese Philosophy in the World
Bibliography
Works by the Kyoto School
Works on the Kyoto School
Other Cited Sources
Academic Tools
Other Internet Resources
Related Entries
2
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
1. Introduction
The progenitor of the Kyoto School is Nishida Kitarō[1] (1870–1945). In
the Meiji period (1868–1912), when Japan reopened to the rest of the
world after more than two centuries of national isolation, a generation of
scholars devoted themselves to importing Western academic fields of
inquiry, including “philosophy.” After many years of studying Western
philosophy and Eastern classics, alongside a dedicated practice of Zen
Buddhism, Nishida was the first major modern Japanese thinker to
successfully go beyond learning from the West to construct an original and
abidingly influential system of thought. This he began to do in his maiden
work, An Inquiry into the Good, published in 1911 (Nishida 1990). On the
basis of this work Nishida obtained a position in the Philosophy
Department of Kyoto University, where he went on to ceaselessly develop
his thought and to inspire subsequent generations of original philosophers,
including the two other most prominent members of the Kyoto School:
Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962) and Nishitani Keiji (1900–1990).
As is reflected in the name of the School, its founding members were
associated with Kyoto University, the most prestigious university in Japan
next to Tokyo University. It is perhaps no coincidence that the School
formed in Kyoto, the ancient capital and center of traditional Japanese
culture, rather than Tokyo, the new capital and center of modernizationvia-Westernization. While the Kyoto School philosophers all devoted
themselves to the study of Western philosophy (indeed they made lasting
contributions to the introduction of Western philosophy into Japan), they
also kept one foot firmly planted in their native traditions of thought. One
Japanese scholar of the Kyoto School writes in this regard: “The keynote
of the Kyoto school, as persons educated in the traditions of the East
despite all they have learned from the West, has been the attempt to bring
the possibilities latent in traditional culture into encounter with Western
culture” (Minamoto 1994, 217).
Winter 2023 Edition
3
The Kyoto School
It would be misleading, however, if we were to think of the Kyoto School
as merely putting a Western rational mask over Eastern intuitive wisdom.
Nor would it be entirely accurate to think of them as simply using Western
philosophical idioms and modes of thought to give modern expression to
East Asian Buddhist thought. For not only is the Western influence on
their thought more than skin deep, their philosophies are far too original to
be straightforwardly equated with preexisting Asian thought. Insofar as
they can be identified as East Asian or Mahāyāna Buddhist thinkers, this
must be understood in the sense of having critically and creatively
developed these traditions in philosophical dialogue with Western thought.
It should be kept in mind that their primary commitment is not to a
cultural self-expression, or even to a dialogue between world religions, but
rather to a genuinely philosophical search for truth.
The Kyoto School has become most well known, especially in the West,
for its philosophies of religion. Indeed the initial reception of the Kyoto
School in North America took place in university departments of
Religious Studies, where their philosophies of religion have frequently
been viewed as representative of East Asian Mahāyāna Buddhism,
specifically of the latter’s Zen and Shin (True Pure Land) schools.[2]
While the exchange on these terms has been fruitful, this view can be
misleading in two respects. First of all, even if, for most of the Kyoto
School thinkers, a philosophy of religion is the ultimate arche and telos of
their thought, it is hardly their sole concern. They address a full array of
philosophical issues: metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, logic,
philosophical anthropology, philosophy of history, philosophy of culture,
philosophy of language, ethics, political theory, philosophy of art, etc.
Secondly, even when their focus is on the philosophy of religion, they
approach this topic in a non-dogmatic and often surprisingly non-sectarian
manner, drawing on and reinterpreting, for example, Christian sources
along with Buddhist ones. Even Nishitani, who did in fact come to identify
4
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
his thought with “the standpoint of Zen,” adamantly refused the label of a
“natural theologian of Zen.” He claimed: “If I have frequently had
occasion to deal with the standpoints of Buddhism, and particularly Zen
Buddhism, the fundamental reason is that [the original form of reality and
the original countenance of human being] seem to me to appear there most
plainly and unmistakably” (NKC X, 288; Nishitani 1982, 261).
Kyoto School philosophy, therefore, should be understood neither as a
body of Buddhist thought forced into the form of Western garb, nor as
universal discourse (which the West is supposed to have invented or
discovered) dressed up in Japanese garb. Rather, it is best understood as a
set of unique contributions from the perspective of modern Japan—that is,
from a Japan that remains substantially undergirded by its historical layers
of traditional culture at the same time as being thoroughly remodeled by
its most recent layer of modernization via appropriation of Western culture
—to a nascent worldwide dialogue of cross-cultural philosophy.
This article will proceed as follows. In the following section, I will
consider the preliminary issues of how to define the Kyoto School and
who to include as its members. The name “Kyoto School” has been used
in the past, in some cases rather loosely, to refer to a variety of sets of
thinkers. It is therefore necessary to begin by discussing the question: Just
who belongs to exactly what? The third and central section of this article
will treat what is generally considered to be the central philosophical
concept and contribution of the Kyoto School, namely, its ideas of
“absolute nothingness.” After discussing the ostensible contrast between
“Western being” and “Eastern nothingness,” and after looking at some of
the Buddhist and Daoist sources of the idea of absolute nothingness, I will
discuss the topological, dialectical, phenomenological, and existential
philosophies of absolute nothingness developed by Nishida Kitarō, Tanabe
Hajime, Nishitani Keiji, and the central figure of the third generation of
the Kyoto School, Ueda Shizuteru (1926–2019). The fourth section will
Winter 2023 Edition
5
The Kyoto School
address the political controversy surrounding the wartime writings and
activities of the Kyoto School. The first wave of attention paid to the
Kyoto School in the West in the 1980s largely ignored the political debate
that had long surrounded the School in Japan. While this lacuna in
Western scholarship was amended in the 1990s, notably with the
publication of Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School and the Question
of Nationalism (Heisig & Maraldo 1994), the political ventures and
misadventures of the Kyoto School remain a highly contentious subject
(see Maraldo 2006 and Goto-Jones 2008). In the final section of this
article I will return to the question of the cross-cultural legacy of the
Kyoto School as a group of thinkers that stood between—and even moved
beyond—“East and West.”
2. Identity and Membership: Who Belongs to What?
2.1 A History of External Naming
There has been considerable discussion surrounding the question of how
to define the Kyoto School, and who to include as its members. By all
accounts Nishida Kitarō is the School’s originator. (See the entry on
Nishida Kitarō.) Yet it was never his intention to institute a “school” based
on his own thought; in fact he is reported to have always encouraged
independent thinking in his students. Moreover, unlike Plato’s Academy or
the Frankfurt School’s Institute for Social Research, the Kyoto School
thinkers never founded an academic institution or formed an official
organization (at least until The Nishida Philosophy Association was
founded in 2003; see the website listed below). Their association was
initially based merely on the fact that they studied and taught at Kyoto
University and developed their thinking under the influence of Nishida as
well as in dialogue and debate with him and with one another. Indeed the
name “Kyoto School” only came into use by the “members” themselves
much later, when at all.
6
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
Names do not only tell us who or what something is; they also tell us who
or what something is not. Definitions not only seek to reveal an internal
essence; they also draw a line of demarcation between inside and outside.
It is thus not surprising that names and definitions often have their origin
in labels appended from without. These labels may subsequently
degenerate into stereotypes; or, conversely, they may be positively
appropriated and redefined by the group itself. Both of these processes can
be seen in the history of the “Kyoto School.”
The name “Kyoto School,” in fact, originated from without; or, more
precisely speaking, it originated from the fringes of the School itself.
Tosaka Jun (1900–1945), a student of Nishida and Tanabe, coined the
expression in 1932 in reference to Nishida, Tanabe and Miki Kiyoshi
(1897–1945) as purportedly representative of the epitome of “bourgeois
philosophy in Japan” (see Heisig 2001, 4). Tosaka’s own developing
thought had an explicitly materialist and Marxist orientation (see Tosaka
2014), and in his article he criticized the School as promulgating a
bourgeois idealism that ignores material historical conditions and issues of
social praxis. Tosaka’s critique had an impact on the subsequent
development of the Kyoto School’s philosophies, and ironically Tosaka
himself is today considered by some to belong, together with Miki, to the
“left wing” of the Kyoto School (see Hattori 2004).
The second significant moment in the naming (or “labeling”) of the Kyoto
School came more clearly from without, and in an even more politically
charged context. As Nishitani was to recollect years later: “The name
‘Kyoto School’ is a name journalists used in connection with discussions
that friends of mine and I held immediately before and during the war”
(NKC XI, 207; see Heisig 2001, 277). Nishitani is referring here to a
series of symposia that addressed the question of the meaning and
direction of the Pacific War and another symposium on the question of
“overcoming modernity.” These controversial symposia will be discussed
Winter 2023 Edition
7
The Kyoto School
in subsection 4.3 of this article. In his retrospective comments, penned in
1977, Nishitani goes on to say that by that time the name “Kyoto School”
had come to be used by Americans and others to “indicate purely a school
of thought.”
Since the 1970s the name “Kyoto School” has gradually recovered its
underlying philosophical ring, which for several decades in Japan
(especially outside of Kyoto) had been drowned out by its political
overtones. This recovery happened first of all in the West, where scholars
neglected the political controversies in their enthusiastic reception of the
School’s philosophies of religion. While the political controversies
returned with a vengeance to Western academia a couple of decades later,
in a kind of pendulum swing to the hypercritical, the initial positive
attention from the West had by then helped to rehabilitate the image of the
Kyoto School back home in Japan.
Fujita Masakatsu suggests that the question of defining the identity of the
Kyoto School has often been a more pressing issue for Western scholars
than for the Japanese themselves. He speculates that there are two reasons
for this. One is that the Kyoto School never really had any noteworthy
competing schools of original thought within Japan with which to contrast
itself, and over against which to explicitly define its own identity. The
second reason is that, while Westerners tend to draw out and focus on the
shared general characteristics of the School’s thinkers, usually in contrast
with the general characteristics of Western thought, for Japanese scholars
of the Kyoto School the differences between the various thinkers often
appear in sharper relief than do their shared commonalities (Fujita 2001,
ii).
In any case, just as the formation of the Kyoto School’s ideas took place
between Western and East Asian horizons of thought, so has the scholarly
study and, to some extent, even the defining of the Kyoto School taken
8
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
place between scholars in Japan on the one hand and those in Europe and
North America on the other. Since one of the common characteristics of
the Kyoto School philosophers is their attempt to set Japan and their own
thought in the context of the wider world, it is fitting that, with the
increasingly international study of the Kyoto School, their thought is
finally becoming what it always intended to be, namely, “Japanese
philosophy in the world” (see Heisig 2004; Fujita & Davis 2005; Davis &
Schroeder & Wirth 2011).
2.2 The Question of Definition
At the start of the twenty-first century, two important volumes appeared in
Japanese with the name “Kyoto School” in their titles: The Philosophy of
the Kyoto School, edited by Fujita Masakatsu (2001; translated into
English as Fujita 2018), which consists of an anthology of texts by eight
Kyoto School thinkers together with an essay on each one by a
contemporary scholar; and The Thought of the Kyoto School, edited by
Ōhashi Ryōsuke (2004), which contains five essays detailing the
controversial history of the name “Kyoto School” as well as seven essays
on potential contributions of their thought to various fields of
contemporary philosophy. While the two books complement one other in
many respects, they nevertheless suggest somewhat different approaches
to defining the school.
Fujita agrees with Takeda Atsushi’s working definition of the Kyoto
School as: “the intellectual network that was centered on Nishida and
Tanabe, and mutually formed by those who were directly influenced in
both a personal and scholarly manner by them” (Fujita 2001, ii and 234–
35). Accordingly, Fujita’s book features such thinkers as Tosaka and Miki,
as well as unanimously accepted figures such as Hisamatsu Shinichi
(1889–1980) and Nishitani. As Fujita points out, the relatively open
definition of the Kyoto School as such a scholarly and interpersonal
Winter 2023 Edition
9
The Kyoto School
“network” has the advantage of highlighting the mutuality of the flow of
influence between its members, as well as the fact that “membership” in
the unofficial group did not preclude serious disagreement with the
thought of Nishida or Tanabe. While critical exchanges did sometimes
lead to severed personal relations (e.g., Nishida and Tanabe infamously
stopped speaking to one another), this was not always the case (e.g.,
Nishitani and Tosaka remained on good personal terms despite their
political and philosophical differences). In either case mutual criticism
was philosophically taken seriously, and it frequently provided impetus to
further developments in each member’s thought. In this sense, according
to Fujita, an acceptance of mutual criticism could well be considered one
of the defining characteristics of the School.
One point made by Tosaka early on, a point often repeated today, is that
without Tanabe’s critical appropriation of Nishida’s thought there would
be no tradition of the Kyoto School; we would have only successors of
“Nishidian Philosophy” and not a genuine school of mutually related yet
independent thinkers. The question remains, however, just how
independent a thinker can be with respect to Nishida’s thought and still be
considered a member of the School. For even when subsequent figures in
the School sharply questioned certain aspects of Nishida’s thought, they
tended at the same time to appropriate and creatively develop other shared
concepts and motifs. A movement of self-critical development can in fact
be seen in the ceaseless progression of Nishida’s own thinking. Nishida
considered himself to be a “miner of ore” who never managed to stay put
in one stage of development long enough to refine the ideas he had
unearthed (Nishida 1958, vii; on the development of Nishida’s thought,
see Fujita 2020 and the entry on Nishida Kitarō).
Hence the Kyoto School, like many other vibrant schools of thought,
should be seen as a cluster of original thinkers who, while not uncritically
subscribing to any prescribed dogma, nevertheless came to share, and
10
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
debate, a number of common motifs as well as basic concepts and
terminology. As we shall see, the most fundamental of their shared and
disputed concepts is that of “absolute nothingness,” a concept that has, in
fact, most often been used as a thematic axis for defining the School.
In contrast to Fujita, Ōhashi explicitly questions the appropriateness of
defining the Kyoto School merely in terms of a network of personal and
scholarly relations. According to Ōhashi, in order for a group of thinkers
to form a genuine “school” of philosophy, “there must be the common
possession or formation of a thought” (Ōhashi 2004, 9). For Ōhashi, this
common thought of the Kyoto School is that of absolute nothingness, and
he accordingly suggests the following as a definition of the School: “a
group of philosophers spanning several generations who developed their
thought in several areas of philosophy with the idea of ‘nothingness’ as a
basis” (ibid., 10; see Ōhashi 2001, 13). While he does include Hattori
Kenji’s essay on the “left wing of the Kyoto School” as the opening
chapter of his The Thought of the Kyoto School, previously Ōhashi
explicitly excluded Miki from the School on account of his principally
Marxists orientations (Ōhashi 1990, 12). However, we should note that
while Miki did not maintain a strict adherence to Marxism (see Curley
2020 and Krummel’s introduction to Miki 2024), he did maintain a close
relationship with Nishida, with whom he published several dialogues in
the 1930s. Not only was Miki one of the former students who inspired
Nishida to take an interest in Marxism during this period, but Miki’s own
mature philosophical anthropology and philosophy of society and history
remained influenced by Nishida. Indeed, in his unfinished magnum opus,
The Logic of Imagination (Miki 2024), while explicitly engaging with the
texts of Dewey, Hume, and especially Kant, Miki sets forth the Nishidainspired idea that a creative “nothingness is what transcends the subjective
and the objective and envelopes them” (quoted in Fujita 2011, 315).
Winter 2023 Edition
11
The Kyoto School
Among Western scholars, John Maraldo has most thoroughly probed the
question of Kyoto School identity and membership. He isolates six criteria
that scholars have used to include and exclude thinkers from the Kyoto
School: (1) connection with Nishida; (2) association with Kyoto
University; (3) stance toward Japanese and Eastern intellectual traditions;
(4) stance toward the interrelated matters of Marxism, the nation state, and
the Pacific War; (5) stance toward Buddhism and toward religion in
general; and (6) stance toward the notion of absolute nothingness. Maraldo
shows how each one of these criteria have been used in various ways,
consciously or unconsciously, since the 1930s to either promote the
philosophical significance or disparage the political ideology of the Kyoto
School (Maraldo 2005, 33–38).
I would add two more related and interrelated criteria. One is an
essentially ambivalent stance (i.e., neither simple rejection nor simple
acceptance) toward Western philosophy and the West in general. For
example, Nishida and others undertake a critical reception of Western
ontology in order to develop an Eastern meontology or “logic of
nothingness,” and attempt to combine a Western “logic of things” with an
Eastern “logic of heart-mind.” I will discuss such issues in section 3 of this
article.
Another criterion that could be used to define the School is an essentially
ambivalent attitude toward Western modernity (or toward modernization
as Westernization). A critical stance toward a unilateral globalization of
Western modernity, a stance which at the same time accepts in part its
unavoidability and in some respects even affirms its necessity, was
expressed with the idea being discussed at the time of “overcoming
modernity.”According to Kyoto School philosophers, this overcoming
would take place not by retreating from Western modernity (as some
romantic and conservative thinkers asserted), but rather by going through
and beyond it. This going through and beyond, moreover, would not
12
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
simply be a matter of going further down the road of linear progress; it
would entail a hermeneutical as well as ultimately a (me)ontological and
existential re-gress, a radical “step back.” For Kyoto School philosophers
such as Nishitani, a critical and creative retrieval of the traditions of East
Asia, those of East Asian Mahāyāna Buddhism in particular, is thought to
enable the radical religious and philosophical “trans-descendence”
necessary to move through and beyond the limits and problems of Western
modernity (see Nishitani 2008; Nishitani 1990, 173–81; Davis 2004).
This idea of “overcoming modernity” has proven to be both one of the
more provocative and controversial aspects of their thought. For some it
promises to contribute an important East Asian perspective to debates over
postmodernism in philosophy and postcolonialism in culture studies. Yet
because the Kyoto School’s ideas of “overcoming modernity” developed
in conjunction with their wartime political theories, theories which
typically saw the nation of Japan as playing a key role in the historical
movement through and beyond Western modernity, it has also proven to
be one of the most criticized aspects of their thought. (It is noteworthy in
this regard that many postwar Japanese proponents of [Western]
postmodernism eschewed making the connection between their adoption
of recent Western self-criticism of modernity/Eurocentrism and the Kyoto
School’s earlier critique of these. A noteworthy exceptions is Nakamura
Yūjirō, and the neo-Marxist phenomenologist Hiromatsu Wataru also
surprised Japanese academia by reviving interest in this aspect of the
Kyoto School’s legacy.) In any case, it is true that even after the Kyoto
School ceased formulating the idea of overcoming modernity in political
terms, elements of the idea live on in their postwar philosophies of
religion and culture. Hence, a radical problematization of Western
modernity can be considered an important aspect of their identity as a
school of thought.
Winter 2023 Edition
13
The Kyoto School
Another significant Western contributor to the question of the Kyoto
School’s identity is James Heisig, who succeeded Jan Van Bragt as the
head of the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture in Nagoya, an
institute which has for several decades now been at the center of
international research on the Kyoto School. In his book, Philosophers of
Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School, Heisig suggests that we
follow the lead of Takeuchi Yoshinori (1913–2002) and define the School
by “triangulating” it around the three leading figures of Nishida, Tanabe,
and Nishitani (Heisig 2001, 3–7 and 275–78).
It is indeed these three figures that form the core of what has become
known as the Kyoto School, and in this article I will accordingly focus my
attention primarily on them, as well as at times on Ueda Shizuteru, the
leading figure of the third generation of the School. It should nevertheless
be kept in mind that these are only four of a much wider group of original
thinkers, some squarely within and some more or less on the periphery of
the Kyoto School.
2.3 Members and Associates
Ōhashi Ryōsuke’s thesis, advanced already in his landmark German
anthology, Die Philosophie der Kyōto-Schule (1990, revised edition 2012;
see also Ōhashi and Akitomi 2018), is that the Kyoto School should be
understood as a group of thinkers involved in a pluralistic yet cooperative
and sustained attempt to think on the basis of an idea of “nothingness” or
“absolute nothingness.” This distinguishes their thought from that of
traditional Western onto-logy based on the concept of “being.” With this
definition in mind, Ōhashi lists the central members of the Kyoto School
according to generation as follows: Nishida and Tanabe make up the first
generation; Hisamatsu, Nishitani, Kōsaka Masaaki (1900–1969),
Shimomura Toratarō (1900–1995), Kōyama Iwao (1905–1993), and
Suzuki Shigetaka (1907–1988) make up the second generation; and
14
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
Takeuchi Yoshinori (1913–2002), Tsujimura Kōichi (1922–2010), and
Ueda Shizuteru make up the third generation. Elsewhere he also suggests
that the psychologist Kimura Bin (b. 1931) could be considered part of the
third generation of the School, particularly if we shift the criterion of
definition from interpersonal relations to a genealogy of thought (Ōhashi
2004, 9).
Ueda developed an original philosophy of Zen in relation to Meister
Eckhart and Nishida. Takeuchi wrote important works on the philosophy
of religion from a Shin Buddhist perspective. Tsujimura, who studied
under Heidegger as well as under Hisamatsu and Nishitani, has
provocatively and influentially written on Heidegger’s thought from a Zen
and Kyoto School perspective. Abe Masao (1915–2006), a former student
of Hisamatsu’s, was an important representative of the Kyoto School and
contributor to inter-religious dialogue in North America, although he is
somewhat less well known in Japan itself. If we were to view the Kyoto
School as living past its third generation, Ōhashi Ryōsuke (b. 1944), a
prolific philosopher in his own right, whose works in both Japanese and
German address a broad range of philosophical issues, would undoubtedly
count as a central figure of its fourth generation. Other recent affiliates of
the School, who could be seen as belonging to its fourth generation,
include Hase Shōtō, Horio Tsutomu, Ōmine Akira, Fujita Masakatsu, Mori
Tetsurō, Hanaoka (Kawamura) Eiko, Matsumura Hideo, Nakaoka
Narifumi, Okada Katsuaki, and Keta Masako. If the School shows promise
of living on to future generations, it is with currently active Japanese
scholars such as Akitomi Katsuya, Minobe Hitoshi, Itabashi Yūjin, Uehara
Mayuko, Inoue Katsuhito, Mine Hideki, Kosaka Kunitsugu, Tanaka Yū,
and Tanaka Kyūbun, and as well as with a number of Japanese and nonJapanese philosophers living outside of Japan, some of whom have studied
and worked extensively with members of the third and fourth generations
of the School.
Winter 2023 Edition
15
The Kyoto School
We appear to be at a turning point in the history of the Kyoto School, as is
reflected in current retrospective attempts to define it. With Ueda’s and
then Hase’s retirements from Kyoto University, on the one hand, and with
the creation in 1996 of a Department of the History of Japanese
Philosophy at Kyoto University (see the website listed below) under the
head of Fujita Masakatsu and now Uehara Mayuko on the other, the Kyoto
School is becoming as much an object of scholarship as it is a living
tradition. However, as with most schools of philosophy, the line between
critical scholarship and creative development is hardly a clear one, and in
practice the retrospective study of the Kyoto School often blends together
with its further unfolding as a still vibrant school of thought.
It is also important to point out that today in Japan the Kyoto School is not
only studied in Kyoto. Since the appearance of Tokyo-based philosopher
Nakamura Yūjiō’s first book on Nishida in 1983, Nishida and the Kyoto
School have increasingly received attention from scholars and students in
areas of Japan beyond Kyoto. Worth special mention in this regard is
Kosaka Kunitsugu, whose lucid and prolific scholarship on Nishida and
others has done a great deal for the sympathetic yet sober textual analysis
of the Kyoto School. The creation of the Nishida Philosophy Association
in 2003 (see the website listed below) has helped inaugurate a new era of
cooperative exchange between scholars from various areas of Japan as
well as from abroad.
One final point on the question of membership: consideration should also
be given to those who could be referred to as “related thinkers” or
“associate members” of the Kyoto School. The widest understandings (or
misunderstandings[3]) of the Kyoto School include in it a number of
thinkers who have a more or less peripheral relation to the inner circle of
the School. For example, there is the case of the well-known Zen scholar
and thinker, D. T. Suzuki (Suzuki Daisetsu) (1870–1966). Suzuki
maintained a long personal relationship with Nishida since their days as
16
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
schoolmates. He not only helped introduce the young Nishida to the
practice of Zen, his articulation of Mahāyāna Buddhist thought is also
acknowledged by Nishida as having influenced the formation of certain
key ideas in his last essay on the philosophy of religion (see Nishida 1987,
70, 85–86, 108, 122–23). But Suzuki—who is justifiably famous in his
own right for, among other things, helping introduce Zen to the West—
was neither trained as an academic philosopher nor associated with Kyoto
University; and thus he is perhaps best thought of as a “closely related
thinker” to the School.
There are also the noteworthy cases of Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960) and
Kuki Shūzō (1888–1941). Both of these philosophers were brought to
Kyoto University by Nishida, and both developed philosophies which
were more or less influenced by Nishida’s thought (see Maraldo 2005, 34
and 52). And yet, both their ideas and their activities remained too
independent to count them among the inner circle of the School. It should
be kept in mind, however, that these two “associates” in particular are first
rate philosophers in their own right, whose original work outshines that of
many of the less original though full-fledged members of the School.
Watsuji’s novel theory of “culture and climate” (fūdo), together with his
major work on the ethics of “betweenness” (aidagara), and Kuki’s
combination of logical rigor and existential insight in his major writings
on the problem of contingency, together with his provocative works on
Japanese aesthetics (notably his hermeneutical phenomenology of “iki”),
have each made lasting contributions to philosophy and are worthy of
international scholarly attention (see the entry on Watsuji Tetsurō;
McCarthy 2020; Mayeda 2020).
Finally, there is the matter of thinkers who have developed their ideas
more or less under the influence of Nishida and other members of the
Kyoto School. A complete list of this group of “influenced thinkers”
would be long, but it would include such names as Takahashi Satomi,
Winter 2023 Edition
17
The Kyoto School
Takizawa Katsumi, Mutai Risaku, Yuasa Yasuo, Kimura Bin, Sakabe
Megumi, Nakamura Yūjirō, and Noe Keiichi. A number of nonphilosophers, such as the world-famous architect Andō Tadao (Tadao
Ando), who designed the Ishikawa Nishida Kitaro Museum of Philosophy
(see the website listed below), have also been influenced by Nishida and
the Kyoto School.
3. Absolute Nothingness: Giving Philosophical Form
to the Formless
Having discussed issues of definition and membership of the Kyoto
School, we are now prepared to pursue the question of what unifies their
thought as a school of philosophy. I will here follow the suggestion of
Ōhashi, Nishitani, and other representatives of the Kyoto School itself,
and focus on the shared—and at times disputed—idea of “absolute
nothingness” (zettai-mu).[4]
3.1 Western Being vs. Eastern Nothingness? Ontology vs.
Meontology?
Nishitani wrote the following with regard to Nishida and Tanabe: “[Their]
philosophies share a distinctive and common basis that sets them apart
from traditional Western philosophy: absolute nothingness. … Clearly the
idea of absolute nothingness came to awareness in the spirituality of the
East; but the fact that it has also been posited as a foundation for
philosophical thought represents a new step virtually without counterpart
in the history of Western philosophy” (NKC IX, 225–26; Nishitani 1991,
161).
“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
18
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
being.” For Aristotle, the primary category of being is “substance,”
ambiguously thought in its primary sense as the particular entity (e.g.
Socrates) and in its secondary sense the universal that makes that entity
what it is (e.g. human being), and the highest being was thought to be 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 were woven together 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 nonbeing or nothingness.
Perhaps we should say “mu-logy” rather than “meontology”; for, strictly
speaking, the Greek meon, “non-being,” should be translated into Japanese
as hi-u. What I am translating as “nothingnesss,” mu, is written with a
single character rather than as a negation (hi) of being (u). This is crucial
since the nothingness with which they are concerned is not the simple
negation or privation of being. It is closer to what Heidegger means by
“being.” Attentive to what he calls the “ontological difference” between
being (das Sein) and beings (das Seiende), Heidegger notes that with
respect to beings, understood as determinate things, being can only appear
as “no-thing.” We fail to attend to the no-thing of being when we think
only of things, and especially when we think of thinking as a mere
calculation of predetermined beings. Heidegger thus calls “the nothing”
(das Nichts) the “veil of being.” Being cannot but appear to us as nothing,
insofar as we know only of beings. Yet it is das Sein or das Nichts which
grants an open place, a clearing (Lichtung), for beings to show themselves
in the first place. But this clearing lets beings be by withdrawing itself
from view. Just as “nature (phusis) loves to hide” (Heraclitus), being lets
determinate beings come to presence by withdrawing its indeterminate
Winter 2023 Edition
19
The Kyoto School
abundance into absence or self-concealment (see Heidegger 1975, Vol. 9,
103–22; and Vol. 65, 246–47).
Tanabe studied with Heidegger in the early 1920s. (In fact, upon returning
to Japan in 1924, Tanabe was the first scholar in the world to write an
article on Heidegger’s thought.) When he later wrote the following,
Tanabe no doubt had Heidegger’s 1929 “What is Metaphysics?” lecture in
mind: “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” (THZ VI, 156; see Heisig 2001,
121).
Heidegger was of course not the first Western philosopher to ask after that
which is radically other than beings or “beyond being” as such.[5] For
example, Tanabe could have also found support for the idea that
philosophy investigates nothingness in the following passage from Hegel:
“Das Erste der Philosophie aber ist, das absolute Nichts zu erdenken” [Yet
the first task of philosophy is to conceive of absolute nothingness] (quoted
from Hegel’s “Glauben und Wissen” in Ōhashi 1984, 203). The Kyoto
School might even be thought of as recovering a suggestion from one of
the first Presocratic philosophers, Anaximander: namely, to think finite
beings as determinations, or delimitations, of “the indefinite” or “the
unlimited” (to apeiron).
Moreover, as Kyoto School thinkers frequently do point out, Christian
negative theologians and mystics, most notably Meister Eckhart, at times
make use of the notion of “the nothing” to refer to that which transcends
all concepts and all oppositions. For Eckhart, “nothing” (niht) was one
way of indicating the “Godhead” (gōtheit) beyond “God” delimited as a
personal being (see Eckehart 1963, 328). Niht here is an expression, at the
limits of language, which attempts to indicate “the nothingness of
indistinct fullness from which flow … all oppositions and relations”
20
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
(Schürmann 1978, 168). Eckhart speaks of a breakthrough, not only
beyond the ego, but also beyond God Himself, a breakthrough, that is, to
an abyssal Godhead understood as “the silent desert into which no
distinction ever gazed, of Father, Son, or Holy Ghost” (Eckehart 1963,
316). Analogously, Nishida writes that “when we truly enter thoroughly
into the consciousness of absolute nothingness, there is neither I nor God”
(NKZ V, 182; see Nishida 1958, 137).
Nishitani affirms Eckhart’s intimations of a Godhead of absolute
nothingness, even though he notes that this is “markedly distant from
orthodox Christian faith,” which limits the concept of nothingness to the
relative nothingness expressed in the nihilum of creatio ex nihilo, that is,
to the absolute privation of being out of which the highest being creates
lesser beings (NKC X, 75; Nishitani 1982, 66; also see NKC VII). Yet
Nishitani’s student and Eckhart scholar Ueda Shizuteru, despite profound
appreciation for Eckhart’s thought and its nearness to Zen, argues in the
end that Eckhart’s nothingness, like that of negative theology in general,
still points to an inexpressibly higher being (see USS VIII, 146). Critically
adapting Heidegger’s expression, we might say that the nothing is still
understood as “the veil” of this inexpressibly higher being. Both Nishitani
and Ueda ultimately look to Zen for a nothingness so absolute that, in
thoroughly negating any traces of opposition to beings (i.e., as a higher
being transcending worldly beings), it is paradoxically found fully in the
concrete facts and activities of the here and now (see USS VIII, 5ff.).
Ōhashi stresses, however, that neither the Buddhist tradition nor the Kyoto
School should be thought of as having a patent on the radical “thinking of
nothingness.” In fact, he argues, “this thought slowly came to the fore
within Western philosophy itself,” a process that indeed set the stage for
Kyoto School contributions to contemporary philosophy (Ōhashi 2004,
12–13). Nishitani had already explored a number of resonant notions of
nothingness, not only in the Neoplatonic and Christian mystical traditions,
Winter 2023 Edition
21
The Kyoto School
but also in 19th and 20th century Western philosophers such as Nietzsche
and Heidegger (see NKC VIII; Nishitani 1990). And yet, here again
Nishitani finds residues of an ontological bias, where a kind of “relative
nothingness” is posited as either a simple negation of or as a veil for
being. Nishitani ultimately concludes that Nietzsche succeeded only in
expressing a “standpoint of relative absolute nothingness”; and even in
Heidegger, he critically suggests, “traces of the representation of
nothingness as some ‘thing’ that is nothingness still remain” (NKC X, 75
and 108; Nishitani 1982, 66 and 96).[6]
In any case, it is fair to say that the Kyoto School thinkers generally
consider the purest sources for the idea of absolute nothingness to lie in
the traditions of Asia. Hisamatsu went so far as to speak of absolute
nothingness as “oriental nothingness” (Hisamatsu 1960); though it is
important to bear in mind that his claim is that this idea was first clearly
discovered in the traditions of Asia. Absolute nothingness is by no means
only relevant to Asian cultures, anymore than in 1500 CE the earth was
only round in the West. Moreover, if the idea of absolute nothingness
“came to awareness in the spirituality of the East,” as Nishitani says, the
philosophy of absolute nothingness is generally considered to be the Kyoto
School’s own contribution to the contemporary world of thought opened
up by the meeting of Eastern and Western traditions.
Nishida—who could hardly be accused of underestimating what Japan had
to learn from Western philosophy—also spoke at times in very general
terms of Eastern nothingness in contrast with Western being. In his 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
22
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
nothingness.” In Greek philosophy, he goes on to say, “that which has
form and determination was regarded as the real”; or even, as in Plato,
reality, that which has true being, was understood as the Forms. JudeoChristian culture, however radically different in various ways it was from
Greek culture, and despite negative theology’s indications of a Deus
absconditus as a kind of nothingness, nevertheless primarily considered
the person of God as “the most perfect being” to be the basis of reality. In
radical contrast to both the Greek and Judeo-Christian origins of Western
culture, Indian culture, like that of China and Japan, took “the profoundest
idea of nothingness as its basis” (NKZ VII, 429–33; see Nishida 1970,
237–40).
In the closing lines of the preface to his 1926 book, From That Which Acts
to That Which Sees, a book many scholars view as the beginning of
“Nishida Philosophy” proper, we find the following famous and
programmatic lines: “It goes without saying that there is much to admire,
and much to learn from, in the impressive achievements of Western
culture, which thought form as 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” (NKZ IV,
6).
3.2 The Buddhist and Daoist Background for the Idea of
Absolute Nothingness
Before looking more specifically at how Nishida and other members of the
Kyoto School attempt to give philosophical form to the formless, it will be
helpful to look at some of the threads in Eastern traditions on which the
Winter 2023 Edition
23
The Kyoto School
Kyoto School thinkers are explicitly and implicitly drawing as they weave
their texts on absolute nothingness.
Their explicit references are primarily to Mahāyāna Buddhism, especially
to the East Asian Buddhist schools of Zen (predominantly the Rinzai
tradition but also notably Dōgen of Sōtō) and Pure Land (predominantly
Shinran’s Shin) Buddhism. The key Sanskrit term in Mahāyāna Buddhism
here is śūnyatā (“emptiness”; kū in Japanese). With the noteworthy
exception of the later Nishitani, however, the Kyoto School tends to favor
the Chinese glyph mu (“nothingness”; wu in Chinese), which is found
predominantly in Zen, and which reflects the early attempt to “match
terms” with Daoism in the translation and interpretive development of
Buddhism in China. Let us briefly examine both of these Asian sources for
the Kyoto School’s philosophies of absolute nothingness, śūnyatā and
wu/mu.[7]
In Mahāyāna Buddhism śūnyatā refers first of all to the fact that all things
come into being in “interdependent origination” (Sanskrit: pratītyasamutpāda; Japanese: engi), and they are therefore “empty” of any
independent substantial self-nature or “own-being” (Sanskrit: svabhāva).
This thought is closely tied to the basic Buddhist thesis of “no-ego”
(Sanskrit: anātman; Japanese: muga). All beings, including the ego, are
interconnected and in flux. Psychologically, śūnyatā refers also to the
releasement from all attachment to beings, from all reification and willful
appropriation of them. Such attachments are both based on and in turn
support the primary attachment to the fabricated ego, since the ego both
strives to possess and is unwittingly possessed by its reification of beings.
To awaken to the emptiness of all things, to their lack of substantial ownbeing or egoity (Japanese: shogyōmuga), therefore, is to free oneself from
both an ego-centered and reified view of things as well as from the illusion
of the substantial ego itself.
24
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
Yet, if the movement of negation stops here at a one-sided negation of
being (i.e., at negation of the illusory independent substantial reality of
things and the ego), then the idea of “emptiness” is not itself emptied.[8]
That would leave us with either a pessimistic nihilism or, ironically, a
reified view of emptiness itself. These are what the Buddhist tradition calls
“emptiness-sickness” (Japanese: kūbyō). True emptiness must be
understood to dynamically negate the very opposition of being and
(relative) nothingness (see Nakamura 1975, Vol. 1, 278). Hence, in
Mahāyāna we find an explicit return—through a “great negation” of a
reified misunderstanding of being—to a “great affirmation” of a nonreified understanding of being. Emptiness thoroughly understood is
nothing separate from or opposed to “being” properly understood. As the
often chanted lines of the Heart Sutra put it: “[phenomenal] form is
emptiness; emptiness is also [phenomenal] form; emptiness is no other
than form; form is no other than emptiness” (see Bercholz & Kohn 1993,
155). The famous Mahāyāna Buddhist philosopher of śūnyatā Nāgārjuna
(ca. 150–250 CE) went so far as to provocatively state: “The limits (i.e.,
realm) of nirvāna are the limits of samsāra. Between the two, also, there is
not the slightest difference whatsoever” (Inada 1993, 158). In other words,
nirvāna is neither a nihilistic extinction of nor a transcendent escape from
the phenomenal world (samsāra); it is rather an enlightened manner of
being-in-the-world here and now (see Garfield 1995, 332). This radical
reaffirmation of the phenomenal world was particularly stressed in East
Asian developments of Mahāyāna Buddhism, where we find such
remarkably affirmative phrases as: “true emptiness, marvelous being”
(Japanese: shinkū-myōu).
Even though he never disavows the term Nishida coined, “absolute
nothingness” (zettai-mu), in his mature writings Nishitani explicitly
employs the Mahāyāna term “emptiness” (śūnyatā, kū) in his attempt to
think a way beyond both the exacerbated attachment to being and the
reactive nihilism that together plague the modern world (see Ueda 2011a).
Winter 2023 Edition
25
The Kyoto School
Nishitani writes as follows: On the one hand, emptiness can be termed “an
absolute negativity, inasmuch as it is a standpoint that has negated and
thereby transcended nihility, which was itself the transcendence-throughnegation of all being.” In this sense, “emptiness can well be described as
‘outside’ of and absolutely ‘other’ than the standpoint shackled to being,
provided we avoid the misconception that emptiness is some ‘thing’
distinct from being and subsisting ‘outside’ it.” On the other hand, then,
emptiness is truly emptiness “only when it empties itself even of the
standpoint that represents it as some ‘thing’ that is emptiness. … [True
emptiness] is to be realized as something united to and self-identical with
being” (NKC X, 109–10; Nishitani 1982, 97). Following in the wake of
Nishida’s topological thinking of absolute nothingness (see subsection 3.3
below), Nishitani also thinks of emptiness as a “place” or “field” (ba)
wherein beings can appear as they truly are in their proper basis or “homeground” (moto).
The idea of a nothingness that radically transcends, or underlies, both
being and its simple negation can also be traced back to pre-Buddhist
Chinese thought. A Chinese scholar laments the philosophical ambiguity
inherent in the Chinese character wu (nothingness). He writes that “in
Chinese ‘wu’ can mean both the contrasting pair of ‘you’ [i.e., ‘being’]
and the metaphysical source of both ‘you’ and ‘wu’” (Zhang 2002, 150).
In the terminology of the Kyoto School, the former sense of wu (mu in
Japanese) is a matter of “relative nothingness,” while the latter sense is
akin to what they call “absolute nothingness.” The latter sense of wu is
expressed in chapter 40 of the Daodejing as follows: “The myriad things
under heaven are generated from being. Being is generated from
nothingness (wu).” This unnamable non-dualistic source of all being and
relative non-being is also referred to as the Way (dao). Of the latter it is
said, in chapter 14 of the Daodejing: “It is called the shapeless shape, the
image of no-thing” (see Izutsu 2001, 50–51 and 104). It is not hard to link
this thought with Nishida’s professed intention of giving philosophical
26
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
foundation to the “form of the formless” that he maintained lies at the
heart of the traditions of the East.
In the Daoist tradition we also find an idea of nothingness used in the
context of radically emptying the mind in order to attune the finite self to
the in-finite[9] rhythm of the Way. The Zhuangzi speaks in this regard of
the practice of “sitting down and forgetting everything” and of “being
empty like a mirror” (see Watson 1968, 90 and 97). When Zen talks of
returning to one’s “original face before one’s parents were born,” we find
the Daoist ideas of “forgetting the ego” and “returning to the root”
combined with the Mahāyāna Buddhist notion of the “original purity of
the mind.” The original brightness and purity of the mind, which lies
hidden beneath the clouds of defiling passion, is also frequently expressed
in Mahāyāna texts with the analogy of a mirror that is able to
spontaneously reflect the world without egoistic discriminations.
Zen presumably inherits this analogy of the original mind as mirror from
both Mahāyāna and Daoist sources. In the traditional edition of The
Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, however, all residues of dualistic
discrimination—including those that remain even in the notion of a mirror
that needs to be continually wiped clean of impurities—are swept away in
the famous lines: “Originally there is not a single thing” (Chinese: benlai
wu-yi-wu; Japanese: honrai mu-ichi-motsu). In this quintessential Zen
expression are wedded together the meontological and psychological
senses of wu/mu: a rejection of an ontology of independent substances, a
declaration of an originary (self-negating) nothingness, and an expression
of a radical freedom from egoistic attachment as well as freedom for
spontaneous creativity and compassion.
In Zen we find the Mahāyāna Buddhist notion of emptiness and the Daoist
notion of nothingness fully intertwined and developed into a practice of
living both completely unattached and completely engaged in the world of
Winter 2023 Edition
27
The Kyoto School
“true emptiness, marvelous being.” In the famous wu or mu kōan that
opens the Gateless Barrier, Wumen (Mumon) urges those who wish to
reach enlightenment, that is, those who wish to pass through the “barrier
of the gate of nothingness,” to concentrate their entire life force on this wu
(mu), taking care to understand it neither as “nihilistic nothingness” nor
“in terms of being and non-being” (Nishimura 1994, 22; see Cleary 1999,
71). This was the kōan that Nishida finally passed after nearly a decade of
intense practice of Zen (see Yusa 2002, 45ff.). And as Nishida confided
many years later to Nishitani, it was from early on his “impossible desire”
to somehow bring Zen and philosophy together (NKZ XIX, 224–25). Even
more than did Nishida, several subsequent Kyoto School philosophers,
most notably Nishitani, Hisamatsu, Abe, and Ueda, explicitly endeavored
to bring the practice as well as the thought of Zen into relation with
philosophy (see Davis 2021; 2022, 275–89).
3.3 Nishida’s Topology of Absolute Nothingness
Besides contrasting Western being with Eastern nothingness, in his later
writings Nishida also at times makes a broad distinction between a
Western “logic of things” and an Eastern “logic of the heart-mind
(kokoro).” While Western thought tends to begin with an objective logic of
substances (be these physical or mental), he claims that in Buddhism one
can find the germ of a logic of the heart-mind, even if traditionally this
remained largely at the level of an expression of personal experience
rather than being fully developed into a genuinely philosophical logic (see
Nishida 1964, 356). Scholars of Buddhism may object that it was
Nishida’s own knowledge of Buddhism that remained too much at the
level of personal experience, rather than the sophisticated discourses of
Abhidharma, Mādhyamaka, Yogācāra, Tiantai, and Huayan traditions of
Buddhist philosophy themselves.
28
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
In any case, in the development of Nishida’s thought, “being” is thought of
in terms of the objectivity of determinate things, “relative nothingness” is
understood as a mere privation or simple negation of being, and an
enveloping sense of “nothingness” is provisionally associated with a kind
of transcendental subjectivity of consciousness or the heart-mind.
Ultimately, however, Nishida comes to posit absolute nothingness as the
“place” (basho) that embraces both subjective (noetic) and objective
(noematic) dimensions of reality. Thus, he relegates not only privation of
being but also subjective nothingness, in the sense of the “field of
consciousness,” to a type of “relative nothingness.”[10]
In 1934 Nishida writes: “Reality is being and at the same time
nothingness; it is being-and-nothingness [u-soku-mu], nothingness-andbeing; it is both subjective and objective, noetic and noematic. Reality is
the unity of subjectivity and objectivity, and thus the self-identity of what
is absolutely contradictory. Or rather, it is not that [the separate spheres of]
subjectivity and objectivity come to unite, and then we first have reality.
[The opposition of] subjectivity and objectivity must instead be thought
from out of a dynamically dialectical reality that is self-determining”
(NKZ VII, 441; see Nishida 1970, 29). Reality, as the dialectical “selfdetermination of absolute nothingness,” is in Nishida’s later works
understood as a dynamic “identity of the absolute contradiction” between
subjective (relative) nothingness and objective being. Absolute
nothingness is the temporal and spatial “place” wherein individual persons
and things determine one another in their mutual interactions.
The “place of absolute nothingess” (zettai-mu no basho) first became the
central concept of Nishida’s thought in the mid-1920s, though he
continued to develop and rethink the idea up until his last completed essay
in 1945, “The Logic of Place and the Religious Worldview.” Nishida first
explicitly worked out an idea of absolute nothingness in his 1926 book,
From That Which Acts to That Which Sees (NKZ IV), a book which
Winter 2023 Edition
29
The Kyoto School
inaugurated his middle-period of thought. In this work, which includes an
important essay entitled “Place” (“Basho”), Nishida’s topological
reasoning develops in rough outline as follows[11]:
Just as all events must “take place” somewhere, all beings must be situated
in some place. Beings always exist in relation to other beings, and any
relation requires a third term, namely, the place or medium wherein they
are related. In other words, for A and B to be related, there must be some
place, C, in which their relation is situated. To begin with, we can
understand this C as the spatial “context” in which objects are situated in
relation to one another. But the context in which things are defined is more
than spatial; a thing is not only here as opposed to there. Things are
determined according to a number of criteria, each of which operates
within its own field of judgment. Hence, the place C can be further
understood as a “category” of judgment, such as the quality “color.” Red
and blue are revealed, and contrasted with one another, as colors within
the same color field.
In order to let concrete things reveal themselves yet more fully, however,
we should think of C as “consciousness.” Our minds are able to correlate
various categories of judgment, such as color, size, shape, location, etc.,
and therefore to perceive individual things as composed of unique
combinations of various qualities and relations. For example, we are
conscious of a certain thing as a round, soft, red, sweet, apple sitting on a
table. The field of consciousness is the field in which these different
categories are unified in the perception and judgment of the qualities of a
particular thing in relation to other particular things and their qualities.
Ultimately, however, there is a crucial limit to the subjective “field of
consciousness.” As Kant demonstrated, subjective consciousness cannot
reflect things as they are in themselves, but only as they appear when
schematized according to subjective categories. What, then, is the ultimate
30
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
place wherein the encounter between subjects and objects takes place,
wherein persons and things coexist? According to Nishida, this must be
the place wherein persons and things not only undergo changes in
accidental categorical qualities, but wherein they essentially and
existentially “come to be and pass away.” It is the place, not just of
intellectual judgments, but of birth and death. This ultimate “groundless
ground,” which “envelops” all beings, yet which does so in such a way
that lets them contain their own principle of self-determination, Nishida
calls “the place of true nothingness.” Although in no sense a determinate
being, neither is this place of true or absolute nothingness a mere static
vacuity. It must be thought of as both the epistemic source of
consciousness and the ontological origin of beings.
Although Nishida comes to the idea of the place of absolute nothingness
most directly through his confrontations with Kant and Neo-Kantianism,
he does not shy from thinking this place in metaphysical as well as
epistemological terms: nothingness is not merely a reflective, but is also a
creative principle (NKZ IV, 238–39). As he writes much later, “absolute
nothingness at once transcends everything and is that by which everything
is constituted” (NKZ IX, 6). And yet, Nishida repeatedly tells us that, as
no-thing outside of or other than the place of the coming to be and passing
away of truly individual beings, absolute nothingness is not to be thought
of as a “transcendent being.” Nor is it to be understood as the processional
unfolding of a “potential being,” that is to say, as a kind of Hegelian
“world Spirit” with its own cunning reason at work behind the scenes of
its historical march toward self-realization. The absolute, according to
Nishida, must be thought of as nothingness in order to distinguish it from
all ontologies that would reduce the uniqueness and autonomy of truly
individual beings either to a transcendent being or to an underlying
mechanical or teleological process.
Winter 2023 Edition
31
The Kyoto School
One of the driving concerns behind Nishida’s repeated insistence that the
absolute be thought of in the meontological terms of a formless,
indeterminate place of absolute nothingness, is that only therein can selfdetermining and irreducibly singular individuals be given their due. All
ontologies of universal being fail to allow for the existence of the “true
individual,” or for the genuine encounter between such individuals. Since
“there is no universal [of being] whatsoever that subsumes the I and the
thou” (NKZ VI, 381), the locus of genuine interpersonal encounter must
be thought of in terms of the place of absolute nothingness (see Davis
2014).
It should be pointed out that the Japanese term for “absolute,” zettai,
literally means a “severing of opposition,” which implies the sense of
“without an opposing other.” The contrasting term is sōtai, which indicates
“relativity” in the literal sense of “mutual opposition.” The true absolute
must embrace, rather than stand over against, the relative. The absolute,
therefore, must not oppose itself to relative beings; rather, its selfdetermination must be such as to allow their mutually autonomous
relations to take place. According to Nishida, it is only a philosophy of the
place of absolute nothingness that can do justice to the notion of the
absolute as well as account for both the autonomy and the mutual
relativity of individuals.
While on the one hand Nishida becomes increasingly concerned with
allowing for radical interpersonal alterity within the place of absolute
nothingness, on the other hand he also consistently argues from early on
that “consciousness” should not be thought to entail an unbridgeable
epistemological subject-object split. Although he initially adopted, and
adapted, the notion of “pure experience” from William James and others
to express this nondual basis of knowledge (see Nishida 1990), Nishida
later drops this expression in favor of the notion of “self-awareness”
(jikaku). According to Nishida, self-awareness can be defined as a “self
32
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
reflecting itself within itself” (NKZ IV, 215).[12] Since absolute
nothingness is not a “self” in the sense of a subject standing over against
an object, any more than it is an ego with its own interested categories of
perception, the self-awareness of absolute nothingness must be that of a
“seeing without a seer” or a “knowing without a knower.” “Since there is
no-thing that reflects, it is like a mirror reflecting the mirror itself” (ibid.,
181).
In Nishida’s middle period, the paradigm for knowing is a “pure seeing”
(tada miru) beyond all acting and volition. Nishida claims that as finite
individuals we can approach this ideal by way of thoroughly negating or
emptying the ego. “By truly emptying the self, the field of consciousness
can reflect an object just as it is” (NKZ IV, 221). The self reaches the place
of absolute nothingness, and therefore first truly comes into contact with
other beings, by way of thoroughly emptying itself in a movement of
“immanent transcendence” that takes it back through the depths of the
field of consciousness.
In his last completed text, “The Logic of Place and the Religious
Worldview,” Nishida most fully develops the religious implications of the
idea of absolute nothingness. There he suggests that absolute nothingness
is the best way to understand God or the absolute, which he defines as that
which “contains its own absolute self-negation within itself” (NKZ XI,
397). As absolute nothingness, God is the dynamic principle of affirmation
by way of absolute self-negation. The true absolute essentially negates its
transcendent divinity and expresses itself in the forms of the relative.[13]
Nishida insists that this idea of God can be understood no more in terms of
an immanent pantheism than in terms of a transcendent theism. It may
perhaps best be called “panentheism”; but for Nishida this too remains a
static term of “objective logic” and fails to capture the necessity of
thinking God as both irreducibly transcendent and thoroughly immanent.
Winter 2023 Edition
33
The Kyoto School
As Nishida is fond of saying, God or the Buddha is “immanently
transcendent.” It is the paradoxical logic one finds in the Prajñāpāramitā
Sutras of Mahāyāna Buddhism (i.e., what D. T. Suzuki called the “logic of
soku-hi,” a logic of “is and is not”) that Nishida thinks most profoundly
expresses the “absolute dialectic” of the divine as the dynamic principle of
absolute nothingness (NKZ XI, 399; see Nishida 1987, 69–71).
If we as finite relative beings can and do touch the infinite absolute, it is
only by way of a mutual self-negation. Nishida calls this mutual selfnegation “inverse correspondence” (gyakutaiō). By way of radically
emptying ourselves, we can touch that which is the radical origin of selfemptying, the absolute as an essentially self-negating absolute
nothingness. According to Nishida, an immanent principle of self-negation
is, in fact, the very essence of life. “True life (seimei) must contain within
itself an absolute nothingness, a [principle of] absolute negation” (NKZ
VIII, 341). It is such a life that can truly be self-determining as a “creative
element of a creative world.”
In his middle period, inaugurated by the first formulations of the idea of
“the place of absolute nothingness” in From That Which Acts to That
Which Sees, Nishida’s thought was characterized by a shift from his earlier
voluntarism to a kind of intuitionism of pure seeing without a seer (see
NKZ IV, 3–6). In his later period, however, Nishida’s epistemology
became much more dynamic and dialectical; rather than “pure seeing,” his
key epistemological phrase then became “action-intuition” (kōi-teki
chokkan). Although self-emptying still plays a vital role, this is understood
not as preparation for a passive intuition, but rather as an active process of
“seeing a thing by becoming it.” In other words, intuition happens only in
the midst of the dialectical process of acting upon and in turn being acted
upon by things.
34
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
In his later period, the place of absolute nothingness is accordingly
reconceived much more dynamically as the “self-determination of the
dialectical world,” a world which continually moves according to the
principle of “from created to creating.” The absolute finds expression only
in the midst of the mutual interaction of individuals and things, and true
individuals are both determined by and “counter-determine” (gyaku-gentei
suru) the movement of the dialectical world (see NKZ VII, 305ff.; VIII,
313–14). Although one can trace an immanent unfolding of Nishida’s
thought in this direction, it is also clear that a major impetus for his
dialectical development of the idea of absolute nothingness can be found
in the criticism he received from his junior colleague, Tanabe Hajime.
3.4 Tanabe’s Absolute Nothingness as the Other-Power of
Absolute Mediation
It is Tanabe’s declaration of partial independence from Nishida’s thought
in an essay written in 1930, “Requesting Instruction from Professor
Nishida” (THZ IV, 305–328), that many see as the origin of the Kyoto
School as more than a group of disciples of “Nishida Philosophy.” In this
essay Tanabe sharply criticizes Nishida’s middle-period philosophy of the
“place of absolute nothingness,” claiming that it falls into kind of Plotinian
“emanationism” that ultimately rests on a religious or mystical intuition.
For Tanabe, this posed two serious problems for a genuine philosophy of
absolute nothingness.
To begin with, in crossing the line between philosophical reason, based on
ordinary experience, and supra-rational intuition, based on extra-ordinary
religious experience, Nishida had purportedly committed a methodological
transgression. Here Tanabe poses a question that still resounds through
(some would say haunts) the halls of Kyoto School studies to this day. As
James Heisig puts it, the Kyoto School thinkers in general do not share an
important assumption of Western philosophy as a whole, namely, a “clear
Winter 2023 Edition
35
The Kyoto School
delineation between philosophy and religion” (Heisig 2001, 13–14). This
is a complex issue, since the Western concept of “religion” was just as
much an import to Japan as was “philosophy.” The problems faced and the
possibilities opened up by a Zen Buddhist “philosophy of religion” in
particular differ in significant ways from a Judeo-Christian one, insofar as
the former calls for extending rational thought in the direction of a
“practice of awakening” rather than in the direction of a leap of faith.
The provocative methodological issues involved in the relation between
the philosophical thinking and the Zen practice of some Kyoto School
philosophers deserves greater attention than can be given here (see Davis
2021; 2022a, 275–289). Let it suffice to point out here that Tanabe too
later crisscrosses the line between philosophy and religion as much as any
Kyoto School thinker, although his Shin Buddhist inclinations took him in
the direction of “faith” rather than “intuition.”[14] After this religious turn
in his thinking, Tanabe claimed that philosophy and faith must be
mediated by a personal act of metanoesis (Tanabe 2000, 34; Tanabe 1986,
29) and that, in order to develop a genuine philosophy of religion, “in the
end one must have faith and become self-aware by means of religious
faith” (Tanabe 2003, 27).
For his part, Nishida responded to Tanabe’s early critique by affirming that
his idea of the self-awareness of absolute nothingness does indeed entail
the profound significance of religious experience. Yet he claims that this is
neither mystical in the sense of “religious ecstasy” nor “is it thought in the
direction of substance, as is Plotinus’ One.” He denies the charge of
emanationism, claiming that in his thought “it is not a matter of the selfdetermination of being, but rather the self-determination of nothingness”
(NKZ VI, 154). For Nishida, only if the absolute is thought in terms of a
self-negating nothingness, rather than in terms of a transcendent plenum of
the One, is it possible to truly affirm the world of the many. The absolute
is found in the very midst of beings, not beyond them. It is “because this is
36
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
absolute nothingness,” Nishida writes in the parlance of Zen, “that the
mountain is mountain, the river is river, and all beings are just as they are”
(NKZ V, 182; see Nishida 1958, 137).
But the other major concern of Tanabe’s critique of Nishida was that,
insofar as absolute nothingness is made into an unchanging basis or
enveloping “place” of a system of reality, and insofar as it is seen as
transcending the dialectical interactions among beings, then such a
philosophy ends up falling back into a metaphysics of being after all. In
order to radically think the idea of absolute nothingness, Tanabe argues,
we must conceive of it rather in terms of “absolute mediation” or
“absolute dialectic.” Absolute nothingness must be thought, not as an
enveloping place, but as the very movement of “absolute negation,” a
movement which originates in the self-negation of absolute nothingness
itself. Tanabe writes: “Since the absolute, as nothingness, must act as an
absolute mediating force, it presupposes relative being as its medium. In
contrast with the doctrine of the creation of the world maintained by the
theist, or the theory of emanation propounded by the pantheist, [for]
historical thinking the absolute and the relative, nothingness and being, are
interrelated each with the other as indispensable elements of absolute
mediation” (Tanabe 2000, 27; Tanabe 1986, 23).
In this later text, Philosophy as Metanoetics, written around the same time
as Nishida was elaborating his own kenotic idea of a self-negating
absolute nothingness, Tanabe, in a putative critique of Nishida, also
writes: “Because the absolute subject of Other-power is absolute
nothingness … it must be thoroughly mediated by the relative self. In
contrast to a mere ‘self-identity of absolute contradictories’, only that
which entails the absolute existential mediation of the death and
resurrection of the self can be called absolute nothingness” (Tanabe 2000,
13; Tanabe 1986, 8). Tanabe’s passing dismissal of Nishida’s terminology
here is hardly convincing, since in fact Nishida too speaks of the absolute
Winter 2023 Edition
37
The Kyoto School
self-negation of absolute nothingness and of the existential death and
resurrection of the finite self. In any case, Tanabe’s philosophy as the “way
of metanoetics” (zangedō) entails a ceaseless movement of what he calls
“absolute critique,” where the self-power of finite reason again and again
runs up against antinomies, and is reborn only by way of absolute
nothingness as what he calls, in the parlance of Shinran’s Shin Buddhism,
the workings of Other-power (tariki).
As Nishitani and others have pointed out (see NKC IX, 212ff.; Nishitani
1991, 161ff.), Tanabe’s criticisms often fail to do justice to Nishida’s
thought, and we should not forget the impetuses Tanabe acknowledges
having received from his erstwhile mentor. Yet, on the other hand, his
criticisms were not without their point, and his provocations certainly did
serve as counter-impetuses that spurred Nishida on, not just to clarify, but
also to further develop his philosophy of absolute nothingness (see
Sugimoto 2011; Kopf 2004). No doubt in large part due to the persistent
attention given by Tanabe’s “logic of the specific” to the historical world,
to the irrational element of the specific through which the individual and
the universal must be mediated, and to the dialectical relations between
finite beings, Nishida gradually moved toward a much more dynamic
conception of absolute nothingness as the self-determination of the
dialectical world, a self-determination which takes place only by way of
the mutual interactions between individual persons, things, and their
social-historical contexts.
Bret W. Davis
philosophy of place, many subsequent Kyoto School figures have tended
to incorporate Tanabe’s dialectical thinking into, rather than seeing it as a
replacement for, Nishida’s topological thinking of absolute nothingness.
To be sure, such thinkers as Takeuchi Yoshinori and Hase Shōtō were
profoundly influenced by Tanabe who, inspired by Shin Buddhism,
understands absolute nothingness in terms of the absolute mediation of
Other-power. Yet many others received their primary impetus from
Nishida and from Zen. Although Nishida’s conception of a kenotic and
dialectical self-determination of the place of absolute nothingness was
inspired by Shin Buddhism and Christianity as well as Zen Buddhism,
later Kyoto philosophers such as Nishitani, Abe, and Ueda relates their
thought primarily to Zen even as they also continued to engage in dialogue
with Shin Buddhism and Christian theology and mysticism.
3.5 Nishitani’s Three-field Topology: Being, Nihility, and
Emptiness
Tanabe’s method of thinking, as we have seen, was intensely dialectical, a
method he developed through his prolonged study of Hegel. Nishitani, on
the other hand, began his study of Western thought by focusing on
Bergson, Schelling, Nietzsche and the German mystics. Between 1937 and
1939 Nishitani studied with Heidegger, who was at the time beginning to
grapple with the question of nihilism, and whose phenomenology had
developed into a thinking of the “clearing of being” or what he would later
characterize as a “topology of being” (Heidegger 1975, Vol. 15, 335).
Influenced no doubt in part by his contact with Heidegger (and evidently
in turn influencing Heidegger, who frequently invited him to his house to
learn about Zen), Nishitani developed, in his own highly original manner,
existential and phenomenological aspects of Nishida’s topology of
absolute nothingness.
In the tradition of the Kyoto School, Tanabe’s role has often been seen,
justly or unjustly, as more of a dialectical counterpoint than an
independent alternative to Nishida. Following the lead of Nishida’s own
creative appropriation of Tanabe’s critique of his middle-period
The problem of nihilism gradually became a major focus of Nishitani’s
personal and scholarly attention. Nishitani understood the historical
phenomenon of nihilism as a vacuous nothingness that assaults the modern
world, a world bereft of its ethical and religious moorings. Despite
38
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Winter 2023 Edition
39
The Kyoto School
Nishitani’s appreciation of the profundity of his mentor Nishida’s
philosophy, he thought it failed to adequately address this crucial modern
problem (see Ueda 2011a). According to Nishitani, Nishida’s philosophy,
whether it be his early thought of “pure experience” or his later notion of
“action-intuition,” begins already from a standpoint where the dualistic
consciousness of the ego has already been broken though (see NKC IX
247–48; Nishitani 1991, 184–85). For his part, Nishitani was concerned
with the question of how to think the topological pathway leading to such
a breakthrough to non-duality.
The question of how to open up an existential path to the place of absolute
nothingness was particularly acute given the prevalence of the pendulum
swing between two extremes endemic to modernity: on the one hand, an
extreme reification of the subjective ego together with a corresponding
objectification and technological manipulation of things; and, on the other
hand, a reactive nihilism which threatens to nullify the very reality of both
the self and things. For Nishitani, humanism and science were incapable
of overcoming this dilemma of reification vs. nullification; in fact, they
had helped create it. In an age of secular egoism and anti-religious
nihilism, how could an experience of the place of absolute nothingness
take place?
To begin with, Nishitani says we must heed the call of Nietzsche’s
madman and cease fleeing from the experience of nihilism. God as the
highest being is dead, and it remains an open question whether he can be
reborn as absolute nothingness. In any case, the venture of Nishitani’s
philosophy of Zen is more concerned with the existential imperative of
letting go of attachments than it is with immediately grasping hold of a
new concept for God. In order to finally free humans from their egoistic
obsessions and manipulative objectifications in the dualistic “field of
[reified] being and [dualistic] consciousness,” Nishitani argued for the
necessity of first boldly stepping back into the “field of nihility.”
40
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
Yet the real breakthrough to a non-dualistic reaffirmation of self and world
only occurs when the relative nothingness of nihility is in turn broken
through to a genuine experience of absolute nothingness or true emptiness
on the “field of emptiness.” Nishitani thus explained the personal
encounter with nihilism as an experience of the extreme relative
nothingness of “nihility” or “vacuous nothingness” (kyomu), and for him
the central task of “overcoming nihilism by way of passing through
nihilism” entailed transgressing beneath (i.e., “trans-descending”) the
“field of nihility” to the “field of emptiness” (see NKC X, 109 and 122ff.;
Nishitani 1986, 97 and 108ff.).[15] As mentioned earlier (subsection 3.2),
the “field of emptiness” is not a vacuum of relative nothingness that
assaults beings from without; it is an open clearing wherein beings are
neither nullified nor reified but rather let be in the mutual freedom of their
coming to be and passing away in unobstructed interrelation with one
another. It is also the place in which a genuine interpersonal encounter can
take place (Nishitani 2004; Davis 2017).
While Nishitani’s “field of emptiness” (kū no ba) corresponds in many
respects to what Nishida calls the “place of absolute nothingness” (zettaimu no basho), Nishitani takes the peculiar problems that beset the modern
secular and technological world, as well as postmodern critiques of
metaphysics and subjectivity (especially those of Nietzsche and
Heidegger), far more seriously than did Nishida. Nishitani also connects
his thought much more explicitly with the tradition of Mahāyāna
Buddhism than did Nishida, writing on, and writing from, what he calls
the “standpoint of Zen” (see NKC XI; and Nishitani 2009).
Winter 2023 Edition
41
The Kyoto School
3.6 Ueda’s Two-layered World: Linguistic Horizons within
the Empty-Expanse
Ueda Shizuteru was a student of Nishitani’s who became a renowned
Eckhart scholar as well as a scholar and lay master of Zen (see Müller et
al. 2022). For decades he was also at the center of the revival of Nishida
studies that began in the 1980s. Like Nishitani, Ueda explicitly orients
himself to and from the standpoint of Zen and takes a topological,
phenomenological, and existential approach to the idea of absolute
nothingness (Ueda 2011c). Following in the tradition of the Kyoto
School’s dialogue with Western philosophers, in one of his influential
works Ueda engages the work of Husserl, Heidegger and other
phenomenologists to articulate a religiously charged philosophy of what
he calls “twofold being-in-the-world” (nijūsekainaisonzai) (USS IX; see
also Döll 2011, 2020; Krummel 2022).
While the first layer in which the self is located is the historical horizon of
the everyday life-world, this horizon itself is ultimately found to rest in an
absolutely “empty-expanse,” a place of absolute nothingness that both
enfolds the everyday world as well as grounds the radical freedom of the
individual “self-negating self” (see USS IX, 22–24 and 324ff.). Ueda finds
this idea of returning, by way of absolute self-negation, to a primordial
wellspring of existence that is “empty and free” (ledig und frei) in Meister
Eckhart, and, in an even more rarified form, in Zen Buddhism (see Davis
2008a). It is from the latter that he borrows the term “empty-expanse”
(kokū) as a topological expression for śūnyatā.
For Ueda, then, the two-layered-world is inhabited by a two-layered-self.
This is how Ueda understands what Nishitani referred to as a “self that is
not a self.” The self, as being-in-the-world, ultimately realizes itself in a
moment of absolute self-negation where it dies to itself and stands as a
“non-ego” or “hollow-being” in the “hollow-expanse” which envelops the
42
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
horizonal life-world. The true self, as a self that becomes itself by passing
through the absolute negation of its ego, is thus a two-layered being-inand-beyond-the-world; it stands in the horizon of the world which, in turn,
rests in the empty-expanse of absolute nothingness.
This empty- or hollow-expanse is, to be sure, beyond conceptual
understanding, insofar as concepts have as their medium the world of
language and its determinations of meaning. Nevertheless, what lies
beyond the reach of language is not to be understood as an ineffable
mystical realm to which one ascends and remains, but rather is to be
experienced in extreme moments from the limits of language as that which
at once tears through and mends, exceeds and encompasses, transcends
and transforms our linguistic horizons of intelligibility. Insofar as we do
not close in on ourselves and rigidify our linguistic delimitations of the
world, we can open ourselves up to the silence of this surrounding expanse
of unlimited openness, which in turn allows us to speak and act more
freely and responsibly in our worlds of linguistic significance (see Ueda
2011b).
3.7 The “Self that is not a Self” and the Nothingness of
Radical Subjectivity
Ueda argues that both the ego of the Cartesian cogito, as well as the nonego (Sanskrit: anātman; Japanese: muga) of Buddhism, must ultimately be
comprehended on the basis of an understanding of the self as a repeated
movement through a radical self-negation to a genuine self-affirmation.
Ueda’s formula for this movement is: “I, not being I, am I.” Even when
one says “I am I,” if we listen closely there is a pause, a breath, between
the first and the second “I.” Precisely that opening—which necessarily
occurs as a moment in the ceaseless movement by which the identity of
the self is constituted—is the “ecstatic space” wherein an open encounter
with others is possible.
Winter 2023 Edition
43
The Kyoto School
A genuine encounter with another person no longer takes place simply
within my, or your, or even our world-horizon. Ueda uses the greeting of
the bow as a concrete example to illustrate how mutual self-negation—the
emptying of all ego-centered presumptions and agendas—returns us to a
communal place where we, paradoxically, share “nothing” in common.
“There, by way of making oneself into a nothingness, one returns into the
infinite depths of that ‘between’ where there is neither an I nor a you. …
Then, when we rise again so as to come back to life anew and face one
another, this becomes a matter of, as Dōgen puts it: thus am I; thus are
you” (Ueda 1991, 67; see USS X, 107ff.). Open to others, and to the
empty-expanse in which together we dwell, I am I (USS X, 23–24).
Nishitani had earlier used the expression “the self that is not a self” to
characterize the shared endeavor of Nishida and Tanabe as that of thinking
“a ‘self that is not a self’ turning on the axis of absolute nothingness”
(NKC IX, 238; Nishitani 1991, 175). The idea of the true self as a “self
that is not a self” expresses an essential aspect of what Nishida and other
Kyoto School thinkers call—following D. T. Suzuki, who in turn gleaned
the idea from the Diamond Sutra—the “logic of soku-hi,” a logic of “is
and is not” or affirmation by way of negation (see NKZ XI, 398–99;
Nishida 1987, 70; Akizuki 1996, 109–152; Yusa 2019). Nishida strikingly
claims that the self is, at bottom, a self-contradiction, and that it can truly
be itself only in the process of thoroughly negating and thus opening itself
(NKZ VI, 290, 377–78, 401). The self finds its most originary freedom,
and its most open engagement with others, through a radical self-negation
which returns it, not to a higher Will or encompassing Being, but to
kenotically self-negating absolute nothingness that, in turn, finds
expression only in the interaction of truly self-determining individuals. For
Nishida, the true individual is an interpersonal self-determining focal point
of the self-determination of absolute nothingness, in other words, an
interactive and creative element of a creative world (see NKZ VIII,
343ff.).
44
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
Nishitani’s first book, The Philosophy of Radical Subjectivity, sought a
more originary conception of the human subject than had been developed
in modern Western philosophy. In general, for Nishitani, modern
“subjectivity” remains bound by a reifying attachment to things and
ultimately to the ego. Nishitani did recognized certain advances in the
direction of a truly “radical subjectivity” in modern ideas such as that of
individual “autonomy.” For example, the Kantian idea of the ethical
“person,” which opens itself to a universal standpoint by way of a
negation of the self-will of the ego, suggested for Nishitani a “kind of
standpoint of ‘non-ego’” (see NKC I, 60). However, the autonomy of the
Kantian ethical subject can also be seen as asserting a sublated form of
self-will, namely in its will to form as well as to conform to the universal.
Nishitani finds profounder intimations of a truly radical subjectivity in
both Meister Eckhart’s mystical theology and Nietzsche’s radical atheism,
each of which in its own way goes beyond, or digs beneath, attachments to
and sublations of egoity. Ultimately Nishitani returns to the language of
Zen Buddhism to express his conception of the “radical subjectivity of
non-ego [muga]” as a “subjective nothingness” (shutai-teki mu) (NKC I,
88).
This radical subjective nothingness is not to be confused with the relative
nothingness of a “subjective consciousness” which sets itself over against,
and objectifies, the world. As with Zen’s kōan of nothingness (mu), a
realization of the radical subjectivity of non-ego (mu-ga) entails breaking
through the dualistic barrier that artificially separates self and world. For
Nishitani, this breakthrough is expressed as “the self-awareness of the
bottom dropping out” (NKC I, iii). It is a radical return, or “transdescendence,” to “the background of our own selves,” to the Ungrund on
which we originally possess “not a single thing” (mu-ichi-motsu) (NKC
XI, 243).
Winter 2023 Edition
45
The Kyoto School
With Nishitani’s conception of a radical “subjective nothingness,”
understood as a “standpoint of emptiness” realized on the “field of
emptiness,” we find an explicit appropriation of both the psychological
and the meontological (or mu-logical) paradigms of nothingness found in
the traditions of East Asia. The notions of non-ego (muga) and “no-mind”
or “mind of nothingness” (mushin) are thought in terms of the spontaneous
openness of the heart-mind that stands within the field of emptiness, an
open place which grants beings the free space needed for their
unobstructed (muge) interactivity.
As we have seen, Nishida, Nishitani, and Ueda each conceived of absolute
nothingness in both an existential and a topological sense. Although
Tanabe eschewed the topological conception of absolute nothingness,
nevertheless, by understanding both the relative self and the absolute in
terms of a ceaseless movement of affirmation by way of radical negation,
he too, in his own way, philosophically appropriated the East Asian
paradigms of psychological and meontological nothingness.
4. Political Ventures and Misadventures
It should be clear by this point that the philosophical stakes involved in the
Kyoto School’s thought are high—indeed they invite us to rethink many of
our most basic concepts and ways of experiencing the world and
ourselves. For this very reason Kyoto School thinkers promise to be
especially valuable partners in any post-Eurocentric forum of
philosophical dialogue. Genuine philosophy, after all, thrives on the
opportunity to call its fundamental presuppositions into question, even if
stubbornly Eurocentric philosophers fail to heed this crucial calling of
their discipline. Unfortunately, the world of politics tends to be a far less
self-critical and thus less genuinely dialogical forum of intercultural
relations. The history of Western imperial domination of Asia is well
documented (see Panikkar 1969), and post-colonial critique of Western
46
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
imperialism plays a prominent role in contemporary academia. At the
same time, in the field of East Asian studies, Kyoto School thinkers are
frequently accused of contributing to the political ideology of Japanese
imperialism in the 1930s and early 1940s. However, we need to carefully
examine the sense in which and the extent to which the political thought of
the Kyoto School is deserving of its tainted reputation in this regard.
4.1 The Razor’s Edge of “Cooperative Resistance”
The political ventures and misadventures of philosophers—from Socrates
and Plato to Marx and Heidegger in the West, and from Confucius and
Hanfeizi to Gandhi and Nishida in the East—represent an often enduring
though hardly always endearing aspect of their legacies. Relating the
“ideal” world of philosophy to the “real” world of political action is a
perilous, if arguably obligatory, undertaking.
The pitfalls of political intervention are particularly deep when
philosophers find themselves in a nation headed down a road toward
injustice and disaster. What is a philosopher to do in such a situation?
Barring straightforward complicity, there appear to be three choices:
withdraw into reclusion, stand up in overt resistance, or attempt to
negotiate a reorientation by means of immanent critique or cooperative
correction. While many intellectuals in wartime Japan took the first
course, some courageous Leftists braved the second course. Both Tosaka
Jun and Miki Kiyoshi, the key figures of what is sometimes called the “left
wing of the Kyoto School,” died in prison in 1945 as a result of their
intellectual resistance. The majority of the Kyoto School thinkers,
however, including Nishida, Tanabe, and Nishitani, took the third course
of action.
In retrospect Nishitani wrote: “My attempt was, on the one hand, to
explain where Japan was situated within the world to those intellectuals
Winter 2023 Edition
47
The Kyoto School
remaining on the sidelines [of politics]; and, on the other hand, with
respect to the extremely nationalistic thought that was becoming
increasingly prevalent at the time, I attempted from within to open up a
path for overcoming this extreme nationalism” (NKC IV, 384). Rather
than either stand up and die, or sit out and wait, Nishitani and other
members of the Kyoto School attempted to walk the razor’s edge of what
Ōhashi Ryōsuke has called “anti-establishment cooperation” or
“cooperative resistance” (hantaiseiteki kyōryoku) (see Ōhashi 2001, 20ff.).
To be sure, the question of how successfully the Kyoto School managed to
carry out this “cooperative resistance” (and the question of whether they
cooperated more than resisted) is debatable, especially given the fact that
they did not succeed in altering the disastrous orientation of the regime.
Their intentions of cooperative resistance notwithstanding, the fact is that
their political writings were more or less successfully co-opted by the
extreme nationalism that they were more or less trying to reorient or
overcome from within. Nevertheless, we must take care to separate their
ideals from the reality they were attempting to influence, and bear in mind
the constraints of their chosen path of immanent critique.
Whatever the political failings of the Kyoto School thinkers may be, it is
clear that certain crudely one-sided condemnations are at least as
simplistic and misleading as are the occasional attempts of overzealous
acolytes to whitewash everything they ever said or wrote. It is, for
example, highly misleading to sum up the Kyoto School’s various
philosophies of history as “a thinly disguised justification … for Japanese
aggression and continuing imperialism,” or to claim that “no group helped
defend the state more consistently and enthusiastically … and none came
closer … to defining the philosophic contours of Japanese fascism” (Najita
& Harootunian 1998, 238–39; for a severe critique of such polemical
claims, see Parkes 1997 and 2011). The latter dishonor, namely that of
attempting to give quasi-philosophical expression to Japanese fascism,
48
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
surely goes to the proponents of “Imperial Way Philosophy,” who in fact
harshly attacked the “world-historical philosophy” of the Kyoto School for
being insufficiently Japan-centric (see Ōhashi 2001, 71–72).
Judicious critics of the wartime political writings of the Kyoto School
must surely try to steer a middle course between and beyond what James
Heisig aptly calls the “side-steppers and the side-swipers” (see Heisig
1990, 14). With this balance in mind, in the following sections let me
highlight some of the key points and episodes of the Kyoto School’s
wartime political ventures and misadventures.
4.2 Nishida’s Reluctant “War over Words” and his
Ambivalent Universalism
In 1943 Yatsugi Kazuo, a member of the Center for National Strategy,
approached Nishida and asked him to contribute a scholarly account of
Japan’s role in East Asia, that is, to help provide a rationale for the
creation of the so-called “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.”
Nishida is said to have burst out in anger, shouting something like: “What
on earth do government officials and militarists think these days, that
scholars are like artisans from whom they can order something to be tailor
made?” And yet Yatsugi apparently countered to the effect that not only
prominent Japanese scholars, such as Fukuzawa Yukichi, but also Western
philosophers, such as Kant and Adam Smith, did not neglect to apply their
theoretical insights to practical social and political circumstances (see
Ōhashi 2001, 47). In the end Nishida did agree to write an essay,
“Principles for a New World Order” (NKZ XII, 426–434; see Arisaka
1996), though his original text was edited and “simplified” by a sociologist
serving as a go-between. Nishida was even then disappointed that his
attempt to “bring out the dimension of universality present in the Japanese
spirit” seemed to have had no effect on Prime Minister Tōjō Hideki and
his bellicose regime (see Yusa 1994, 124).
Winter 2023 Edition
49
The Kyoto School
From today’s vantage point, Nishida’s political writings appear highly
ambivalent. On the one hand, his resistance to fascism and totalitarianism
is unmistakable. Indeed it comes as no surprise that he was in danger of
being arrested—and apparently only his public stature and the fact that he
had influential sympathizers within the moderate ranks of the government
kept this from happening—when one reads the warning given in his 1941
speech delivered directly to the emperor: “Any totalitarian system that
negates outright the role of the individual is but an anachronism” (NKZ
XII, 271; see Yusa 1994, 111). Even in his most compromised text,
“Principles for a New World Order,” Nishida urgently claims that the “coprosperity sphere” must not entail either ethnocentrism, expansionism,
imperialism, colonialism, or totalitarianism (see NKZ XII, 432–33).
Elsewhere Nishida made clear that his vision was of a multicultural world
wherein neither the West would subsume the East nor vice versa (NKZ
XIV, 404–5), wherein “various cultures, while maintaining their own
individual standpoints, would develop themselves through the mediation
of the world” (NKZ VII, 452–53).
On the other hand, Nishida did think that nations—and in particular the
Japanese nation with the emperor at its spiritual center—had a special role
to play in the historical formation of this truly “worldly world” (sekai-teki
sekai). Moreover, in his writings he did affirmatively employ such
problematic phrases as “all the world under one roof” (hakkō-ichiu) and
the “imperial way” (kōdō). While there is certainly room for criticism here
in light (and hindsight) of the historical record of Japan’s political and
cultural “leadership” (in fact, domination) of East Asia at this time, the
issue of how to critically evaluate Nishida’s theoretical interventions is
complicated by the hermeneutical fact that today we read such catchwords
and phrases through the semantic lenses of the right wing ideologues who
in the end succeeded in carving their definitions into the annals of history.
It must be kept in mind that, at the time, the precise meaning of these
phrases was still in dispute. Ueda Shizuteru has aptly spoken of Nishida’s
50
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
“tug-of-war over meaning,” a struggle which he ultimately lost (Ueda
1994, 97; also see Goto-Jones 2005). Yusa Michiko writes in this regard:
“Rather than invent a new vocabulary that would rise above the fray,
[Nishida] took up the jargon and slogans of the day and sought to redeem
them from their petty provincialism by opening them up to a more
universal perspective” (Yusa 1994, 131).
Nevertheless, even after we have carried out a hermeneutically sensitive
reconstruction of the context, and after we have finished reading between
and behind the lines of his political texts, there undoubtedly remain a
number of problematic aspects of Nishida’s political thought, especially
his idealistic view of the emperor system and Japan’s purported worldhistorical calling to take on a leadership role in the formation of an East
Asia world (see Davis 2006, 227–38; Osaki 2021, 117–256; Arisaka
2020). Affirming the central place of the emperor in Japan as “an identity
of contradictions,” Nishida cryptically writes: “Our [i.e., Japan’s] national
polity is not simply a totalitarianism. The Imperial House is the beginning
and the end of our world, as the absolute present that embraces past and
future” (NKZ XII, 430).[16] And with regard to the central role of Japan in
East Asia, he claims that “in order to build a particular world, a central
figure that carries the burden of the project is necessary. In East Asia today
there is no other but Japan” (NKZ XII, 429; Arisaka 1996, 102).
Critics may argue that Nishida’s universalism is still plagued by an
exemplary particularism,[17] and that he succeeds in questioning
Eurocentrism only by way of shifting the locus of the concrete universal to
Japan. Yoko Arisaka argues that “the chief claim of the defenders—that
Nishida’s philosophical ‘universalism’ is incompatible with nationalist
ideology—fails because universalist discourse was used both as a tool of
liberation and oppression in Japan’s case” (Arisaka 1999, 242). Arisaka
critically adds, however, that “the idea that a particular nation may be the
bearer of a universal principle, such as freedom or democracy, and that,
Winter 2023 Edition
51
The Kyoto School
therefore, its actions in history serve a higher end, should be familiar from
recent American experience” (ibid., 244; also see Maraldo 1994, 355).
To be fair to Nishida, we should confess that we today have yet to solve
the post-Enlightenment aporia of how to reconcile universal humanism
with cultural particularity (a debate we inherit in part from the KantHerder controversy). In other words, the question remains of how to
configure a multicultural world of dialogue instead of either an
imperialistic monoculture or a clash of civilizations. In our search for an
answer to this urgent question, we may still have much yet to learn from a
critical appropriation of Nishida’s thought (see Feenberg 1995; Maraldo
1995; Elberfeld 1999; Kopf 2011; Davis 2013a; Krummel 2014; and
Goto-Jones 2002, 2005, 2008, 2009).
4.3 Controversial Wartime Symposia, and Nishitani’s
Nation of Non-Ego
Nishida’s ambivalent political stance—between a post-imperialistic vision
of a multicultural new world order on the one hand and an assertion of
Japan’s destined world-historical role in realizing this vision on the other
—was carried forth into even more controversial political engagements by
his students Nishitani Keiji, Kōyama Iwao, Kōsaka Masaaki, Suzuki
Shigetaka, and to a lesser extent Shimomura Toratarō. As mentioned in
subsection 2.1, a significant, if stigmatizing, stage in the formation of the
identity of the Kyoto School involved the participation of several of its
members in two wartime symposia, the Literary World’s 1942 symposium
on “Overcoming Modernity” (reprinted in Kawakami & Takeuchi 1979;
English translation in Calichman 2008) and the 1941–43 roundtable
discussions published serially in the journal Chūōkōron and later as a
monograph, The Standpoint of World History and Japan (Kōsaka et al
1943; English translation in Williams 2014).
52
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
The Overcoming Modernity symposium has been aptly characterized as “a
premature challenge to the questions that have yet to be answered today”
(Minamoto 1994, 200). Even one of the most critical accounts of this
symposium—an account which argues that the “only destination reached
by the symposium on overcoming modernity was the place where Japan
itself had been overcome by modernity”—concedes that: “It is,
nevertheless, important to point out that the very critique mounted by
Japanese against modernity prefigured precisely all of those doubts and
obsessions concerning subjectivity, cultural difference, and even racism
that have become the signatures of a Western and putatively global
discourse that marks our own historical conjuncture today” (Harootunian
2000, 94).
As discussed in subsection 2.2, the Kyoto School participants spoke of an
overcoming of modernity that can take place only by way of passing
through modernity, a stance that represented a countertendency to the
rejection of modern Western rationality by the Japanese Romantic School
and other participants in the symposium. In other words, the Kyoto School
participants did not lament the modernization-via-Westernization of Japan,
nor did they nostalgically plea for a return to a pre-modern age; rather,
they called for a further step forward, but one that would involve
creatively recovering viable elements of Japanese tradition at the same
time as building on the best of what could be learned from the West. This
stance shows up clearly in Nishitani’s debate with Kobayashi Hideo, who
argued for a rejection of modernity and a return to the pre-modern
Japanese classics (see Kawakami & Takeuchi 1979, 217ff.). Throughout
his career Nishitani consistently spoke of overcoming modernity only by
way of passing through it, and in this process tradition was to be creatively
appropriated, not conservatively retreated to. He wrote: “There is no
turning back to the way things were. … Our tradition must be appropriated
from the direction in which we are heading, as a new possibility” (NKC
VIII, 183; Nishitani 1990, 179); and: “Simply put, the backward looking
Winter 2023 Edition
53
The Kyoto School
return to tradition is straightaway to be forward looking” (NKC XIX,
104). Later in life Nishitani continued to stress that Japanese Buddhist
organizations need to embrace their historicality, which means to
modernize and then postmodernize; only in this way can they continue to
play a vital role in Japanese society as well as offer the possibilities of
their ways of life to the wider world (Nishitani 2006, 36–38).
In the Chūōkōron discussions as well the Kyoto School resolutely
attempted to think from the “standpoint of world history.” Problematically,
however, they asserted a leadership role for Japan in the present moment,
which they viewed as a turning point in world history. If the standpoint of
world history had indeed been first opened up by both Western
universalism and imperialism, they argued, it was the non-Western nation
of Japan that was in a unique position to free the world from the chains of
the latter in order to realize the true potential of the former.
In his book written around the same time, View of the World and the
Nation (1941), Nishitani went so far as to claim that this was the moment
in time when the “focal point of world history” was to become the
Japanese nation, just as previously world history had centered on the
Roman Empire and then later on the British Empire. However, Nishitani
argued, unlike the former two empires Japan’s historical mission was to
bring about a world that has “no specific center” but rather consists of
various “politically and culturally unified spheres” (NKC IV, 298–300).
The Japanese nation would be able to carry out this mission, he crucially
adds, only if it incorporates a religious spirit of self-negation, thus
becoming what he calls a “nation of non-ego” rather than a self-centered
aggressive empire (NKC IV, 285–86). In this idealistic vision, which
unfortunately had little to do with the cruel realities of Japanese
expansionism, Japan was to be an altogether new kind of empire, a selfnegating and compassionate one that would help other nations to
cooperatively form their own identities, rather than an aggressive and
54
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
“imperialistic” one that would remold others into inferior replicas of itself.
(It remains for us to ask how best to characterize today’s political
superpowers and economic empires, and how to relate their ideologies to
their realities.)
If there is a lasting merit to Nishitani’s wartime political writings and the
Chūōkōron discussions, it might be found in part in their critique of the
contradictions and hypocrisies of Western imperialism (see, for example,
Kōsaka et al. 1943, 348ff.), together with their insistence that Japan’s
“leading role” in Asia not become that of an imperialist or colonizer (see
ibid., 204–5; also see Nishitani’s “My View of ‘Overcoming Modernity’,”
reprinted in Kawakami & Takeuchi 1979, 32). The lasting infamy of the
Chūōkōron discussions, on the other hand, can be found not only in their
idealistic political naïveté, but also in their idealization and even
whitewashing of political realities (such as Japanese aggression in China
and other parts of Asia), as well as in such disturbing specific suggestions
as that of “Japanizing” or “half-Japanizing” some of the “more superior”
ethnic groups in Asia in order to assist in instituting the Japanese led “CoProsperity Sphere” (Kōsaka et al. 1943, 262–63, 337).
4.4 The “Ōshima Memos”: Record of a Think Tank for
Navy Moderates
It is now evident that the political activities of the Kyoto School during the
war were even more involved—and even more filled with ambiguity—
than was previously thought. Ōhashi Ryōsuke discovered and published in
2001 some wartime notebooks of Ōshima Yasuma, a student of Tanabe’s
(Ōhashi 2001). These notebooks document in detail secret meetings
regularly held by Kyoto School members (including Tanabe and Nishitani
but not Nishida) at the bequest of the Japanese navy between February
1942 and just before the end of the war. While on the one hand the
existence of these secret meetings demonstrates an even more intimate
Winter 2023 Edition
55
The Kyoto School
connection between the Kyoto School and the military than was
previously known, on the other hand it is crucially significant that they
were in cooperation with a certain moderate faction of the navy, a faction
that was opposed to the extremists that dominated the army. There had
long existed a considerable tension between the bellicose arrogance of the
army and the comparatively more moderate and worldly stance of the
navy. As the politically more powerful army was setting a war-bound
course for Pearl Harbor, some reticent navy officials evidently petitioned
the Kyoto School to shed light on the political situation from their “worldhistorical standpoint,” presumably in order to sway public sentiment in a
more prudent direction.
In short, the “Ōshima Memos” help reveal how the Kyoto School found
themselves in a position where they were called on to fight a “war of
thought” on two fronts: against Western imperialism, they felt called on to
delineate a world-historical role for Japan in freeing itself and other Asian
peoples from colonization and exploitation by the Western empires; and,
against Japanese ultra-nationalism, they felt that it was up to them to
convince the public and the military of the illegitimacy of an imperialistic
response to Western imperialism.
Ōshima Yasuma had himself published, in 1965, an often overlooked
account of these meetings under the title, “The Pacific War and the Kyoto
School: On the Political Participation of Intellectuals” (Ōshima 2000,
274–304; also see Horio 1994, 301ff.). In this article, Ōshima summarized
the evolving purpose of the secret Kyoto School meetings in three stages:
In the very first meetings (which apparently took place prior to those
documented in the recovered notebooks), the main theme was “how to
avoid the outbreak of war.” Since war in fact broke out very soon
thereafter, the theme quickly switched to “how to bring the war to a
favorable end as soon as possible, by way of rationally persuading the
army.” To do this they reportedly agreed that it would be necessary to
56
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
overthrow the cabinet of Tōjō Hideki. However, according to Ōshima, all
criticism of Tōjō and the army had to be expurgated in the discussions
published in the pages of Chūōkōron, and the statements of the Kyoto
School had to be “veiled in two or three layers of cloth” in order to avoid
censorship and persecution. Towards the end of the war, the theme of the
secret meetings is said to have changed to that of “how to handle the
postwar situation.”
Among these three themes only the second is recorded in any detail in the
notebooks that were discovered and published by Ōhashi as the “Ōshima
Memos.” Although there may well have been preliminary discussions on
how to avoid war, more explicit references to overthrowing Tōjō Hideki,
and more lengthy discussions about postwar issues, these do not in fact
show up in the recovered notebooks. Nevertheless, the “Ōshima Memos”
do show us a more detailed and uncensored account of the Kyoto School’s
“war of thought” on two fronts during a tumultuous and tragic time of
what was, in fact, Japan’s imperialistic response to Western imperialism.
4.5 After the War: Tanabe’s Metanoetic Turn and
Nishitani’s Other Cheek
Their ambivalent wartime stance between supporting the nationalistic
ideology and subjecting it to critique from a pluralistic and global
perspective—in other words, their attempt to walk a razor’s edge of
“cooperative resistance”—ironically earned the Kyoto School a suspect
reputation in Japan both before and after the end of the war. As Nishitani
confided later to a student: “During the war we were struck on the cheek
from the right; after the war we were struck on the cheek from the left.”
During the war, the stance of the Kyoto School was considered too
cosmopolitan and insufficiently nationalistic, even anti-war. The
discussions published in The Standpoint of World History and Japan were
Winter 2023 Edition
57
The Kyoto School
branded by the Imperial Way ideologues as “ivory-tower speculations that
risked reducing the Empire to simply one more category of world history,”
and further printings of the book were reportedly stopped by the
government censors (see Horio 1994, 291). After the war, the Kyoto
School’s idealistic attempts to impart meaning and direction to Japan’s
“world historical mission” were seen—especially by liberals and leftists
that had at long last been freed from repression and persecution—as
support for its de facto militaristic fascism. Nishitani and others were
purged for several years from their university positions. Even when they
were later reinstated, the stigma of the Kyoto School as having
“cooperated in the war” was hardly erased. Their political thought in
particular was dismissed in toto, and it was not until decades later that the
topic of “overcoming modernity” was once again given serious critical
attention (see Kawakami & Takeuchi 1979; Hiromatsu 1989; and Ōhashi
1992, 143ff.).
The Kyoto School thinkers rarely responded directly to their critics after
the war, and we can only speculate on the reasons for this (see Horio 1994,
300). They accepted suspension from their posts without comment or
complaint, and continued on with their philosophizing, albeit without the
overtly political element of their thought. Nishitani, for example, came
into his own as a philosopher of religion in the postwar era. He continued
to philosophically develop Eastern ideas, those of Zen Buddhism in
particular, in dialogue with medieval Christian mysticism as well as
postmodern existentialism and phenomenology and in response to what he
saw as the central problem of modernity, namely, nihilism. In his mature
attempts to “overcome nihilism by way of passing through nihilism”
(NKC XX, 192), we find a significant thread of continuity with his pre-war
and wartime attempts to overcome (Western) modernity by way of passing
through it. But it is nevertheless possible to mark a crucial and self-critical
“turn” in his thinking with regard to the question of the political role—or,
as it turns out, the lack of one—to be played by the Japanese state in this
58
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
overcoming of modernity and nihilism by way of passing through them
(see Davis 2008b).
Tanabe got a head start on the postwar critics and toward the end of the
war began thinking his way through a radical crisis of self-critique. Hardly
less controversial than the roundtable discussions of the younger members
of the Kyoto School have been Tanabe’s application—or misapplication—
of his “logic of the specific” to a discourse on the legitimacy of the selfassertion of the Japanese nation-state as an archetype for others. The
“logic of the specific” had originally been conceived, in critique of
Bergson and Nishida, as a reappraisal of the logical and ethical role that
ethnic specificity plays in mediating the particular individual and universal
humanity. Adapting Hegel’s political philosophy, Tanabe thought that the
nation-state could both embody the ethnic specificity of the people and
raise it out of its inherent irrationality. As a concrete universal, the nationstate was, if not the absolute itself, in some sense the dialectical
manifestation of the absolute on earth.
The critical lapse came when Tanabe irrationally proposed that the
“relative absolute” of the Japanese nation-state could serve as a kind of
“supreme archetype” for other nations (see THZ VI, 232–33). James
Heisig writes that, in so doing, Tanabe “took a step that was fatal but
really unnecessary, if not outright inconsistent with the principles of his
logic…. According to his own logic, the community of the human race is
to be made up of a community of nations that have found a way to
transcend their specificity without transcending time and culture. Each
nation may come about as an instance of the generic universal, but nothing
in the logic of the specific allows any one instance to become an archetype
for the others. It is as if Tanabe were quoting himself out of context”
(Heisig 2001, 136–37; also see Heisig 1994).
Winter 2023 Edition
59
The Kyoto School
Tanabe finally came to his senses and, in a striking metanoetic turn,
renounced these political assertions and dove into the philosophy of
religion. Philosophy as Metanoetics, the first parts of which were
delivered as lectures in 1944 before the end of the war, was composed not
only as a personal self-critique, but also as a call to self-critique on the
part of the entire nation, and indeed ultimately as a call for an “absolute
critique” of human rationality as such (see the Preface to THZ X; Tanabe
1986). It is the last of these that is the central theme of the book: the idea
that the human reason is inevitably driven to antinomies through which it
must repeatedly die to its own self-power in order to be reborn again
through the workings of an Other-power. It is nevertheless true that “one
looks through that work in vain for any admission of guilt for particular
actions or statements that he had made” (Heisig 2001, 151). In any case,
Tanabe’s public (if vague) repentance was no more successful than the
silence of other Kyoto School thinkers in convincing the majority of
postwar Japanese academics to refrain from throwing the baby of their
philosophical insights out with the bathwater of their political
misadventures.
Only in the past few decades has the reputation of the Kyoto School been
significantly rehabilitated in Japan, due in part to a general recovery of the
nation from immersion in the march of postwar economic progress and
evasion of unresolved cultural aporias, in part to a general reaffirmation of
cultural identity (including all too often a pendulum swing back to
ethnocentric reassertions of “Japanese uniqueness”), and in part to the
positive attention the School has received from scholars in the West. It is
worthwhile noting, as Fujita Masakatsu does in his preface to The
Philosophy of the Kyoto School, that prior to 2001 surprisingly few articles
or books had appeared in Japan with a thematic focus on the “Kyoto
School” as such, even though hundreds of studies had treated “Nishida
Philosophy.” Yet there are promising signs that we are entering a new
academic era in which critical yet appreciative work on the Kyoto School
60
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
can be cooperatively undertaken in Japan, in the West, and recently even
in other parts of East Asia (see Fujita et al. 2003; Heisig 2004; Synthesis
Philosophica 2004; Fujita & Davis 2005; Hori & Curley 2008; Heisig &
Uehara 2008; Lam & Cheung 2009; Bouso & Heisig 2009; Davis,
Schroeder, & Wirth 2011; Elberfeld & Arisaka 2014; Yusa 2017; Davis
2020a; Liao et al. 2022).
Despite the persistence of a faction of polemical intellectual historians,
many philosophers worldwide today view the political misadventures of
the Kyoto School as lamentable footnotes to the main text of their laudable
philosophical endeavors. While research into their political thought—
regarding what it tried to say then and regarding what it can or cannot help
us to think now—remains necessary and important, at the end of the day
many are likely to agree with James Heisig when he emphatically writes:
“One has … to ignore the greatest bulk of the writings of these thinkers to
arrive at the conclusion that anything approaching or supporting the
imperialistic ideology of wartime Japan belongs to the fundamental
inspiration of their thought” (Heisig 2001, 6). The philosophical and
cross-cultural legacy of the Kyoto School lies elsewhere.
5. The Cross-Cultural Legacy of the Kyoto School
5.1 Between and Beyond East and West
In this concluding section, let us return to the question of the legacy of the
Kyoto School with regard to comparative or cross-cultural philosophy.
Today many scholars, in Japan as well as in Western countries, are calling
this “world philosophy” (Itō et al. 2020), a term I take to mean any
approach to philosophy that does not restrict its purview and the sources
on which it draws to any one tradition, such as the tradition of Western
philosophy. As mentioned at the outset, the Kyoto School thinkers were all
dedicated scholars of various fields and figures of Western philosophy; and
Winter 2023 Edition
61
The Kyoto School
yet, at the same time, they kept one foot firmly in touch with their native
East Asian traditions, those of Mahāyāna Buddhism in particular. This
bipedal stance placed them in an extraordinary position between “East and
West” and allowed them to go beyond this binary abstraction.
It is important to bear in mind that the philosophies of the Kyoto School
do not simply drift impartially on the seas of academic comparison, nor do
the Kyoto School philosophers see themselves primarily as mediators of
interreligious dialogue. As existentially engaged cross-cultural
philosophers, they are above all seekers after truth, and they argue
passionately for the validity of seeing the self and the world in certain
ways. As we have seen, while each member of the Kyoto School has his
own vision of the truth, they share (and debate) certain fundamental ideas,
such as one or another version of the core notion of absolute nothingness
and the idea of coming to a genuine self-awareness by way of emptying
the ego. And however much their texts reflect an intimate dialogue with
and critical appropriation of ideas from Western philosophers, it can be
said that many of their main theses nevertheless reflect a distinctly East
Asian Mahāyāna Buddhist and Japanese cultural influence.
Nevertheless, this does not mean that they merely gave modern expression
to traditional East Asian Buddhist thought or Japanese culture. It would be
more accurate to say that their philosophies are critical and creative
developments of these traditions. Even this way of putting it would not do
justice to the influence exerted on their thought by the Western
philosophies with which they grappled so intensely. Although Hisamatsu,
Nishitani, Abe, Ueda and others do explicitly philosophize from the
standpoint of Zen, and although Takeuchi, Hase, and others do so from the
standpoint of Shin Buddhism, it would be misleading to simply and
without qualification characterize either Nishida’s or Tanabe’s
multifaceted philosophies as “Eastern” or “Buddhist.”
62
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
For example, Tanabe’s early “logic of the specific,” with its concern for
the manner in which ethnic specificities mediate particular individuals and
universal humanity, can be read more as a critical appropriation of
Hegelian dialectical logic and political philosophy than as any
straightforward development of East Asian or Buddhist thought. And in
his various later writings on the philosophy of religion, Tanabe wanders
between a preference for Shin Buddhism, Christianity, and finally Zen
Buddhism (see Himi 1990, 129–341). With regard to Nishida, an acute
concern with questions of epistemology, logic, individual autonomy,
creativity, and the historicity of the world are essential to his thought in
ways that are more “modern Western” than “traditional Eastern”; and
Nishida at times explicitly indicates his dissatisfaction with what he sees
as related weaknesses in traditional Eastern thought.
Of course, one might respond: even if Nishida methodologically takes his
questions from Western philosophy, his responses to these questions
reflect his East Asian roots at least as much as his Western studies. To the
Western ontological question of being, his answer is a meontology of
absolute nothingness. It might be that his systematic philosophical
articulations of the idea of absolute nothingness owe more to Western than
Eastern texts. Yet, he nevertheless understands himself to have
autonomously (i.e., in the process of engaging in a nonsectarian
philosophical search for truth) given expression to the formless origin that
is harbored in the traditions of the East. In retrospect Nishida wrote: “It is
not that I conceived of my way of thinking in dependence on Mahāyāna
Buddhism; and yet it has come into accord with it” (NKZ XIV, 408).
Nishitani could have said something similar of his career path, which led
him through the study of Western philosophy and mysticism and “back” to
the standpoint of Zen. Other Kyoto School thinkers took even less of an
Occidental excursion before making what Hölderlin called a
“homecoming though the foreign.” And some, like Hisamatsu and
Winter 2023 Edition
63
The Kyoto School
Takeuchi, began their scholarly pursuits with a self-understanding as a Zen
or Shin Buddhist thinker.
Perhaps most controversial, from a cross-cultural political point of view, is
Nishida’s and other Kyoto School thinkers’ suggestion that modern
Japanese culture and philosophy in particular has the potential to make
room for the cooperative meeting of the strengths of East and West (see
NKZ XIV, 416–17; also Nishida 1964, 365). What are we to make of such
bold and sweeping claims? There appear to be two problematical
assertions involved: first, an overly generalized, if not at times
hypostatized, split of cultural spheres into “East” and “West”; and second,
a claim that an idea with deeper roots in the so-called East, namely
absolute nothingness, can be developed so as to provide the philosophical
meeting place of both East and West.[18]
Even sympathetic readers of the Kyoto School are often highly critical of
this type of comparative thinking in terms of “East” (tōyō) and “West”
(seiyō). Although he affirms that “the Kyoto-school philosophers give the
west a way into the east like none other,” James Heisig complains that
“the East” which the Kyoto School sets up over against “the West” is
something of an invention: “At best, it is one constellation of a heritage
too long and too plural to be represented fairly by Japan” (Heisig 2001,
271–72). John Maraldo goes further and claims that “the problems Nishida
deals with are universal, and his way of dealing with them contrasts as
much with other Asian philosophers as with philosophers of the so-called
West” (Maraldo 1995, 196). Is it necessary and are we ready to do as
Maraldo suggests, and “put ‘East’ and ‘West’ to rest”?
I myself think this complex issue requires a careful and nuanced response,
in part because “the East” and “the West” are not in fact isomorphically
oppositional terms. While I certainly agree with the wish to avoid
overgeneralizations and politically charged polarizations, and while I think
64
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
the Kyoto School philosophers do need to be read critically in this regard,
I am equally wary of a “globalization of thought” that amounts to a de
facto colonization of “non-Western” traditions by “Western” methods and
categories of thinking; and simply refraining from speaking of “the West”
could amount to merely evading and thus exacerbating this problem.
Moreover, while it is indeed important to debunk essentializing,
homogenizing, and usually self-aggrandizing conceptions of “the West” or
“Western civilization,” a tradition that has in truth been far more fruitfully
“entanlged” with other traditions and far more varied that historical
narratives centered on a pantheon of great white men would have it (see
Elberfeld 2017, 21–127; Mac Sweeney 2023), the threads of the GrecoRoman-Judeo-Christian-Euro-American traditions and cultures have
nevertheless been woven together coherently enough to warrant
sometimes and in some contexts speaking of “the West.”
By contrast, “the East” (or “Asia” for that matter) is a more irredeemably
problematic concept, since it refers to a far less coherently woven set of
traditions and cultures, especially from the perspective of India (which, for
example, did not appropriate any Chinese tradition the way China
appropriated Buddhism). Some may want to argue that, from Japan’s
perspective, or at least from a Japanese Buddhist perspective that weaves
together Indo-Sino-Japanese threads, it may still make some sense to
speak sometimes in terms of “the East.” Yet such usages of this term are
not only overgeneralizing but also Japan-centric. I therefore think it is best
to restrict our broadest generalizations in this case to “East Asia” or
“Mahāyāna Buddhism” or “Japan,” and to bear in mind that even these
expressions reduce a diverse manifold to a broad concept. The concept of
“the East” goes too far, crossing the line from a heuristically useful
generalization to a distortingly homogenizing overgeneralization.
To be sure, as Thomas Kasulis reminds us (Kasulis 2018, 36 and 41),
generalizations are not universalizations; by definition there are exceptions
Winter 2023 Edition
65
The Kyoto School
to any general definition of something. The bigger the generalization, the
more exceptions will it have. Still, we cannot think without generalities,
and it is no doubt a matter of “practical wisdom” (phronēsis) to know
when to construct and when to deconstruct them. Thus, even though we
must be careful to discern the appropriate contexts in which it makes sense
to speak in such vast and abstract terms, it is no more advisable to
unequivocally annihilate general concepts such as “the West” and “East
Asia” than it is to narrowly define or absolutize their relative coherences
and mutual differences.
With regard to the hermeneutics of modern cross-cultural thinking, in
general I believe that the attempt to obliterate the borders that separate
cultural spheres is as unrealistic and potentially pernicious as is the
attempt to hermetically seal them up. Border lines between cultures (as
between languages) exist, but they are always porous and shifting, and
each culture is in itself varied and mobile. Needless to say, defining,
comparing, contrasting, and above all evaluating the relative worth of
various traditions, remain undertakings fraught with theoretical, ethical
and political pitfalls. The theoretical and cultural legacies of colonialism
and Orientalism remain with us long after the political empires have
receded. Moreover, in these postcolonial or decolonial times we all too
often experience reactive fabrications of homogeneous cultural identity
and assertions of counter-superiority, reactions which ironically reinforce
the same kind of colonial divisions and obsessions with unadulterated selfidentity that were in part imposed by, or imported from, the worst of the
West.
In Japan, certain retroactive constructions of identity and reactive counterassertions of superiority have taken the form of what is called nihonjinron: theories of “Japaneseness” or “Japanese uniqueness” (see Dale 1986).
In modern Japanese history, such reactive cultural self-obsessions and selfassertions have taken either the form of denying Japan’s deep-rooted
66
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
traditional connections with its East Asian neighbors, or the form of
claiming that Japan has uniquely embodied and perfected “the essence of
the East.” If the former type of claim is most in evidence in postwar and
contemporary Japan, the latter is found, for example, in the Meiji thinker
Okakura Tenshin’s declaration that, while “Asia is one,” Japan alone is
“the real repository of the trust of Asiatic thought and culture” (Okakura
2000, 1 and 5).
Where do the Kyoto School thinkers stand with respect to such culture
wars? To be sure, the Chūōkōron discussions in particular often asserted
that modern Japan was uniquely suited to institute and represent the
“Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” and this undoubtedly reflected
a widespread post-Meiji Japanese conflation of political, industrial, and
military development with cultural superiority. Nishida also felt that
modern Japan was in a unique political and cultural position to host a
fruitful marriage of East and West, and Tanabe went so far as to set the
nation of Japan up as an archetype for others. In the Kyoto School’s
wartime political writings, there indeed remains much grist for the mills of
contemporary cultural critics, especially for those with hermeneutical
blindfolds or purportedly perfect hindsight. Yet a critique of their political
misadventures and cultural assertions, as necessary as it is, may in fact
reveal something more peripheral than central to the cross-cultural
thinking of the Kyoto School. It is at least necessary to keep both eyes
open: one ready to criticize and the other willing to learn.
We should note that even when Nishida broadly contrasts “Western being”
with “Eastern nothingness,” he in fact immediately goes on to explore
finer distinctions between the Greek, Roman, and Judeo-Christian threads
of the Western tradition, and between the Indian, Chinese, and Japanese
threads of the Eastern tradition. If his essentializing or overgeneralizing of
these threads does remain in various respects problematic, it is
nevertheless hardly the case that he and the other Kyoto School thinkers
Winter 2023 Edition
67
The Kyoto School
never questioned the homogeneity of either “the East” or “the West.”
Secondly, although they have been accused both of contributing to the
“myth of Japanese uniqueness” and of “reverse Orientalism” (see Dale
1986 and Faure 1995), the case is far from this simple. In a time of
uncritical cultural self-adulation by the Japanese ultranationalists in power,
Nishida boldly urged that “both the strong points and weaknesses of our
culture should be openly and honestly pointed out,” for “we cannot take
any one culture and call it the culture” (Nishida 1964, 351 and 353).
Fighting a conceptual war simultaneously on two fronts, against Western
and Japanese ethnocentrisms, Nishida wrote that “until now Westerners
have thought that their own culture is the most superior human culture that
exists, and that human culture inevitably develops in the direction of their
own culture—hence, as Easterners and other peoples who are lagging
behind advance forward, they must become the same as [Westerners].”
Even some Japanese, he regrets, think this way. And yet, he objects, “there
is something radically different in [the culture of] the East.” According to
Nishida, the development of the West will subsume this difference no
more than the East will subsume the West. Even if humanity does share a
common root (what he calls, adapting an expression from Goethe, an “urculture” of multiple possibilities), the development of its branches and
leaves is a matter of diversification, not homogenization. Globalization
should thus be thought of, in Nishida’s vision, as many branches of the
same tree supplementing one other on the basis of both their deep-rooted
commonality and their irreducible diversity (NKZ XIV, 402–6 and 417).
To be sure, there inevitably remains for us the question of the “place” and
manner in which this global communication between cultures should take
place. But without a “view from nowhere,” the only thing we can do is to
attempt to critically and creatively take up ideas that have particular
genealogies and dialogically develop them into what are provisionally
more universally viable forms. Just as concepts of democracy,
68
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
hermeneutics, and indeed philosophia itself have particular cultural
lineages, so do the ideas of emptiness (Japanese: kū; Sanskrit: śūnyatā),
nothingness (Japanese: mu; Chinese: wu), and the true self (shin no jiko)
as a non-ego (Japanese: muga; Sanskrit: anātman) that opens itself to an
encounter with others by radically emptying itself. Nevertheless, all of
these ideas may very well contribute something to an intercultural
dialogue concerning the very place and manner in which a genuine
encounter between cultures and individuals can and should take place. The
locution “world philosophy” is, to my mind, best understood as a
multifaceted forum for cross-cultural dialogue concerning such issues, a
forum that is itself always in the process of being co-constructed by all
those who participate in it.
5.2 Japanese Philosophy in the World
It is not, therefore, necessarily ethnocentric for Japanese thinkers to
suggest the potential efficacy of introducing into a global philosophical
dialogue ideas that derive from Japanese, East Asian, or Mahāyāna
Buddhist traditions. The “Japanese philosophy” of the Kyoto School is
best understood as a contribution to such an intercultural conversation, and
not merely as a reactive opposition to philosophical Eurocentrism or
indeed “philosophical Euromonopolism.” In any case, we must be careful
in how we understand the noun “philosophy” and the modifier “Japanese”
when we speak of “Japanese philosophy” (see Davis 2020b).
Although the question of whether “philosophy” existed in non-Western
traditions is today being intensely debated, with more and more scholars
referring not only to “Indian philosophy” and “Chinese philosophy” but
also to “African philosophy” and “Indigenous philosophy,” the Kyoto
School philosophers themselves never doubted that “philosophy,” in the
literal and historically specific sense, is originally a cultural product of the
Western tradition. But they also recognize that it, like Western science and
Winter 2023 Edition
69
The Kyoto School
technology, has universal implications that can be developed by peoples
around the globe. This does not mean that they think Western philosophy
is free of unrecognized cultural biases and limitations, or that traditional
Asian traditions have nothing essential to offer the development of
philosophy in a post-Eurocentric world. They recognize the difference
between the global potentialities and the still parochial actualities of
philosophy, and their Japanese contributions aim to make philosophy
more, not less, worldly.
In an illuminating study of the debates surrounding the concept of
“philosophy” in Japan since the Meiji period (1868–1912), John Maraldo
has isolated four senses in which the notion of “Japanese philosophy” has
been used: (1) Western philosophy as it happens to be practiced by
Japanese scholars; (2) traditional Japanese thought (Confucian, Nativist,
Buddhist, etc.) as it was formulated prior to the introduction of Western
philosophy; (3) a form of inquiry which has methods and themes that are
Western in origin, but that can be applied to pre-modern, pre-Westernized,
Japanese thinking; and (4) a kind of reverse Orientalism that asserts the
superiority of specifically Japanese ways of thinking.
Maraldo argues for the superior viability of the third of these conceptions,
in part because it pays due hermeneutical attention to the Greek origins of
the heretofore prevailing methods and themes of “philosophy.” And yet,
crucially, he also stresses that the very methods and themes of philosophy
are essentially always “in the making,” and that the production of
“Japanese philosophy” will have to “strike a balance between reading
(pre-defined) philosophy into [Japan’s traditional] texts and reading
alternatives out of them, constructing contrasts to that [pre-defined]
philosophy [of the West]” (Maraldo 2004, 238–44). The Kyoto School in
particular can be understood to have taken up the challenge of critically
and creatively appropriating philosophy so as to free up for questioning
many of its pre-defined Western conceptions.
70
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
A text by Ueda on Nishitani’s philosophy insightfully addresses the
question of the adjective “Japanese” as follows: “If we are to use the
characterization ‘Japanese’, this does not signify merely a particularity of
Japan, but rather must be understood in the sense that a certain area of
universal primal human possibility has been historically realized
particularly in Japan. Hence, ‘European’ does not straightaway mean
‘global’, but rather that a certain area of universal primal human
possibility has been historically realized particularly in Europe. … If we
understand ourselves as the particularization of something universal, this
means, at the same time, that we can understand others as different
particularizations of something universal. Only then, with the
communication between particular and particular, can something universal
come to be realized” (Ueda 1996, 309).
In this passage, which recalls Nishida’s vision of communication between
diversely determined branches of a shared yet essentially indeterminate
root ur-culture, Ueda gives us a clue as to how we might best understand
the cross-cultural contributions of the Kyoto School. They are
philosophers who strive to express something universal from a particular
standpoint. But this does not at all mean that they attempt to reduce
universality to their own particularity; for the latter is in turn understood as
one particular expression of the formless ur-culture, the indeterminate
source of possibilities for individual and cultural determination, that is to
say, the originary nothingness that we all share. The Kyoto School thus
presents us with a unique set of attempts to give philosophical form to this
formless wellspring of both commonality and singularity.
The degree to which the Kyoto School thinkers were successful in their
boldly paradoxical quest to give philosophical form to the formless can be
debated. It is less easy to deny the exigency of the quest itself. If
philosophy today is to mature beyond its Eurocentric and even
“Euromonopolistic” pubescence (see Davis 2020b, 28–33), then it is
Winter 2023 Edition
71
The Kyoto School
necessary to deepen its quest for universality by way of radically opening
it up to a diversity of cultural perspectives. If cultural pluralism, for its
part, is to avoid falling into a relativistic antagonism or isolationism, it
must entail a metamorphosis rather than an abandonment of the
philosophical quest for universality (see Fujita 2013; Maraldo 2013). In
any case, we should understand the thought of the Kyoto School, not as a
set of exclusively Japanese versions of philosophy, but rather as a set of
Japanese contributions to the content of—and indeed to the very formation
of the forum of—a global dialogue of “world philosophy” in the making.
Bibliography
Works by the Kyoto School
Abbreviations Used in this Article
NKC Nishitani Keiji chosakushū [Collected Works of Nishitani Keiji],
Tokyo: Sōbunsha, 1986–95. (Volume numbers are given in Roman
numerals.)
NKZ Nishida Kitarō zenshū [Complete Works of Nishida Kitarō], Tokyo:
Iwanami, 1987–89. (Volume numbers are given in Roman numerals.)
THZ Tanabe Hajime zenshū [Complete Works of Tanabe Hajime], Tokyo:
Chikuma Shobō, 1964. (Volume numbers are given in Roman
numerals.)
USS Ueda Shizuteru shū [Collected Writings of Ueda Shizuteru], Tokyo:
Iwanami, 2001–2003. (Volume numbers are given in Roman
numerals.)
72
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
Anthologies Containing Works by More than One Kyoto School
Author
The texts contained in these anthologies are not listed here separately. (For
a complete list of Western language translations of works by Nishida,
Tanabe, Nishitani, Takeuchi, and Ueda, see the Nanzan Institute for
Religion and Culture website linked to below.)
Calichman, Richard F. (ed. and trans.), 2008, Overcoming Modernity:
Cultural Identity in Wartime Japan, New York: Columbia University
Press. (Contains an introduction to and translation of the 1942
symposium on “Overcoming Modernity” in which Nishitani Keiji
and other Kyoto School affiliated philosophers participated. The
Japanese text of the symposium can be found in Kawakami et al.
1979.)
Dilworth, David A. and Valdo H. Viglielmo with Agustín Jacinto Zavala
(eds.), 1998, Sourcebook for Modern Japanese Philosophy: Selected
Documents. Westport: Greenwood Press. (A valuable anthology
containing translations of selected works by Nishida, Tanabe, Kuki,
Watsuji, Miki, Tosaka, and Nishitani, together with helpful editorial
material.)
Frank, Fredrick (ed.), 2004 (first edition 1982), The Buddha Eye: An
Anthology of the Kyoto School, Bloomington: World Wisdom. (While
somewhat misnamed as an anthology of the Kyoto School, this
collection does include a good selection of essays by Nishitani, Ueda,
and other modern Japanese religious thinkers.)
Fujita, Masakatsu (ed.), 2001, Kyōtogakuha no tetsugaku [The Philosophy
of the Kyoto School], Kyoto: Shōwadō. (Contains primary texts
from, and critical essays on, eight Kyoto School philosophers.)
––– (ed.), 2018b, The Philosophy of the Kyoto School, Robert Chapeskie
with John W. M. Krummel (trans.), Singapore: Springer. (A
translation of Fujita 2001.)
Winter 2023 Edition
73
The Kyoto School
Heisig, James W., Thomas P. Kasulis and John C. Maraldo (eds.), 2011,
Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press. (This encyclopedic anthology contains a selection of
representative works by all members of, and thinkers affiliated with,
the Kyoto School.)
Jacinto Zavala, Augustín (ed.), 1995, Textos de la filosofía japonesa,
Michoacán: El Colegio de Michoacán.
Kawakami, Tetsutarō, Takeuchi Yoshimi et al., 1979, Kindai no chōkoku
[The Overcoming of Modernity], Sendai: Fuzanbō.
Kōsaka, Masaaki, Nishitani Keiji, Kōyama Iwao, and Suzuki Shigetaka,
1943, Sekaishi-teki tachiba to Nihon [The World-Historical
Standpoint and Japan], Tokyo: Chūōkōronsha. (Contains
controversial rountable discussions by Kyoto School philosophers
discussing politics during the war.)
Ōhashi, Ryōsuke (ed.), 1990, revised edition 2012, Die Philosophie der
Kyōto-Schule, Freiburg: Karl Alber. (This landmark anthology
contains valuable introductions by the editor, as well as German
translations of key essays by Nishida, Tanabe, Hisamatsu, Nishitani,
Kōyama Iwao, Kōsaka Masaaki, Shimomura Toratarō, Suzuki
Shigetaka, Takeuchi Yoshinori, Tsujimura Kōichi, and Ueda
Shizuteru.)
–––, 2001 (ed.), Kyōtogakuha to Nihon-kaigun [The Kyoto School and the
Japanese Navy], Kyoto: PHP Shinsho. (Contains notes taken at secret
meetings of Kyoto School philosophers discussing politics during the
war.)
Other Works by Kyoto School Philosophers
Abe, Masao, 1985, Zen and Western Thought, William R. LaFleur (ed.),
London: Macmillan Press (published in North America by University
of Hawai‘i Press).
74
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
–––, 1990, “Kenotic God and Dynamic Sunyata,” in The Emptying God: A
Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation with Masao Abe on God,
Kenosis, and Sunyata, John B. Cobb, Jr. and Christopher Ives (eds.),
Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, pp. 3–65.
–––, 1997a, “Buddhism in Japan,” in Companion Encyclopedia of Asian
Philosophy, Brian Carr and Indira Mahalingam (eds.), London and
New York: Routledge, pp. 746–791. (Provides an overview of the
history of Japanese Buddhism, ending with D. T. Suzuki as a modern
Buddhist thinker and Nishida as a Buddhism-inspired philosopher.)
–––, 1997b, Zen and Comparative Studies, Steven Heine (ed.), London:
Macmillan Press (published in North America by University of
Hawai‘i Press).
–––, 2003, Zen and the Modern World, Steven Heine (ed.), Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press. (Includes Abe’s articles on Nishida.)
Hase, Shōtō, 2003, Yokubō no tetsugaku: Jōdokyou sekai no shisaku
[Philosophy of Desire: An Inquiry into the World of Pure Land
Buddhism], Kyoto: Hōzōkan.
–––, 2005, Kokoro ni utsuru mugen: kū no imāju-ka [The Infinite
Reflected in the Heart-Mind: The Imaging of Emptiness], Kyoto:
Hōzōkan.
–––, 2010, Jōdo to wa nanika: Shinran no shisaku to do ni okeru chōetsu
[What is the Pure Land? The Thought of Shinran and Transcendence
on Earth], Kyoto: Hōzōkan.
Hisamatsu, Shin’ichi, 1960, “The Characteristics of Oriental
Nothingness,” Richard DeMartino (trans.), Philosophical Studies of
Japan, 2: 65–97.
–––, 2002, Critical Sermons of the Zen Tradition, Christopher Ives and
Tokiwa Gishin (ed. and trans.), New York: Palgrave.
–––, 1982, Zen and the Fine Arts, Gishin Tokiwa (trans.), Tokyo:
Kodansha.
Winter 2023 Edition
75
The Kyoto School
Keta, Masako, 1992, Shūkyō-keiken no tetsugaku: Jōdokyō-sekai no
kaimei [Philosophy of Religious Experience: An Elucidation of the
World of Pure Land Buddhism], Tokyo: Sōbunsha-sha.
–––, 1999, Nihirizumu no shisaku [The Thought of Nihilism], Tokyo:
Sōbunsha-sha.
–––, 2011, Nishida Kitarō ‘Zen no kenkyū’ [Nishida Kitarō’s ‘An Inquiry
into the Good’], Kyoto: Kōyō shobō.
–––, 2017, “The Self-Awareness of Evil in Pure Land Buddhism: A
Translation of Contemporary Kyoto School Philosopher Keta
Masako,” Melissa Anne-Marie Curley, Jessica L. Main, Melanie
Coughlin (trans.), Philosophy East and West, 67(1): 192–201. (A
representative work of an important contemporary philosopher
associated with the Kyoto School, accompanied by a substantial
introduction by the translators.)
Kuki, Shūzō, 2004, A Philosopher’s Poetry and Poetics, Michael F. Marra
(trans. and ed.), Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
–––, 2004, The Stucture of Iki, in The Structure of Detachment: The
Aesthetic Vision of Kuki Shūzō, Hiroshi Nara (ed.), Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press.
Miki, Kiyoshi, 2024, Miki Kiyoshi’s The Logic of Imagination: A Critical
Introduction and Translation, John W. M. Krummel (trans.), New
York: Bloomsbury.
Nishida, Kitarō, 1958, Intelligibility and the Philosophy of Nothingness,
Robert Schinzinger (trans.), Honolulu: East-West Center Press.
(Contains translations of three important essays.)
–––, 1964, “The Problem of Japanese Culture,” Masao Abe (trans.), in
Sources of Japanese Tradition, Vol. 2, Ryusaku Tsunoda et al. (eds.),
New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 350–365.
–––, 1970, Fundamental Problems of Philosophy, David A. Dilworth
(trans.), Tokyo: Sophia University Press.
76
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
–––, 1973, Art and Morality, David A. Dilworth (trans.), Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press.
–––, 1986, “The Logic of Topos and the Religious Worldview,” Michiko
Yusa (trans.), The Eastern Buddhist, 19(2): 1–29 & 20(1): 81–119.
–––, 1987, Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness, Valdo
Viglielmo et al. (trans.), New York, SUNY.
–––, 1987, Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious Worldview,
David A. Dilworth (trans.), Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
(Contains a translation of “The Logic of Place and the Religious
World-view” as well as introductory and critical essays by the
translator.)
–––, 1990, An Inquiry into the Good, Masao Abe and Christopher Ives
(trans.), New Haven: Yale University Press.
–––, 1990, La culture japonaise en question, Pierre Lavelle (trans.), Paris:
Publications Orientalistes de France.
–––, 1999, Logik des Ortes. Der Anfang der modernen Philosophie in
Japan, Rolf Elberfeld (trans.), Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft. (Contains translations of Nishida’s prefaces to his
books and of three of his key essays.)
–––, 1999, Logique du lieu et vision religieuse de monde, Sugimura
Yasuhiko and Sylvain Cardonnel (trans.), Paris: Editions Osiris.
–––, 2005, “General Summary” from The System of Self-Consciousness of
the Universal, in Robert J. J., Wargo, The Logic of Nothingness: A
Study of Nishida Kitarō, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, pp.
186–216.
–––, 2012a, Place and Dialectic: Two Essays by Nishida Kitarō, John W.
M. Krummel and Shigenori Nagatomo (trans.), Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press. (Contains translations of “Basho”
[Place] and “Logic and Life” as well as an insightful and informative
introduction by John Krummel.)
Winter 2023 Edition
77
The Kyoto School
–––, 2012b, Ontology of Production, William Haver (trans.), Durham and
London: Duke University Press. (Contains translations of
“Expressive Activity,” “The Standpoint of Active Intuition,” and
“Human Being.”)
Nishida, Kitarō, 2002, Shin Nishida Kitarō Zenshū [New Complete Works
of Nishida Kitarō], Fujita Masakatsu and Kosaka Kunitsugu (eds.),
Tokyo: Iwanami. (This new revised and rearranged edition of
Nishida’s works contains helpful editorial material, such as citation
information for Nishida’s references.)
Nishitani, Keiji, 1982, Religion and Nothingness, Jan Van Bragt (trans.),
Berkeley: University of California Press.
–––, 1984, “The Standpoint of Zen,” John C. Maraldo (trans.), The
Eastern Buddhist, 18(1): 1–26.
–––, 1986, Was is Religion?, Dora Fischer-Barnicol (trans.), Frankfurt:
Insel Verlag.
–––, 1990, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, Graham Parkes with Setsuko
Aihara (trans.), Albany: SUNY.
–––, 1991, Nishida Kitarō, Yamamoto Seisaku and James W. Heisig
(trans.), Berkeley: University of California Press.
–––, 1999, “Emptiness and Sameness,” in Modern Japanese Aesthetics,
Michele Marra (ed.), Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
–––, 1999, La religión y la nada, Raquel Bouso García (trans.), Madrid:
Ediciones Siruela.
–––, 2004, “The I-Thou Relation in Zen Buddhism,” in Franck 2004, pp.
29–53.
–––, 2006, On Buddhism, Seisaku Yamamoto and Robert E. Carter
(trans.), Albany: SUNY.
–––, 2008, “My Views on Overcoming Modernity” in Calichman 2008,
pp. 51– 63.
–––, 2012, The Philosophy of Nishitani Keiji 1900–1990: Lectures on
Religion and Modernity, Jonathan Morris Augustine and Seisaku
78
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
Yamamoto (trans.), Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press.
Ōhashi, Ryōsuke, 1984, Zeitlichkeitsanalyse der Hegelschen Logik. Zur
Idee einer Phänomenologie des Ortes, Munich: Karl Alber. (A
provocative Kyoto School oriented reading of Hegel.)
–––, 1992, Nihon-tekina mono, Yōroppa-tekina mono [Things Japanese,
Things European], Tokyo: Shinchōsha. (Insightfully treats a range of
cultural and philosophical issues relating to modern Japan, the Kyoto
School and associated thinkers.)
–––, 1994, Das Schöne in Japan. Philosophisch-ästhetische Reflexionen zu
Geschichte und Moderne, Rolf Elberfeld (trans.), Köln: DuMont
Buchverlag. (A classic philosophical interpretation of Japanese
aesthetics.)
–––, 1995, Nishida-tetsugaku no sekai [The World of Nishida Philosophy],
Tokyo: Chikuma.
–––, 1998, Hi no genshōron josetsu: Nihontetsugaku no roku tēze yori
[Prolegomenon to a Phenomenology of Compassion: From Six theses
of Japanese Philosophy], Tokyo: Sōbunsha. (Includes chapters on the
contemporary relevance of key ideas of Nishida, Tanabe, Nishitani,
and Hisamatsu.)
–––, 1999, Japan im interkulturellen Dialog, München: Iudicium.
(Contains a range of essays on Japan’s relation to the West, with
chapters on and frequent reference to the Kyoto School.)
–––, 2013, Nishida Kitarō: Hontō no Nihon wa kore kara to zonjimasu
[Nishida Kitarō: I Know that the Real Japan is Still to Come], Kyoto:
Minerva. (An illuminating philosophical biography.)
–––, 2018a, Kyōsei no patosu [Pathos of Being Together], Tokyo: Kobushi
Shobō. (The Japanese version of a major work by the leading figure
of what could be considered the fourth generation of the Kyoto
School.)
–––, 2018b, Phänomenology der Compassion: Pathos des Mitseins mit
den Anderen, Freiburg & Munich: Verlag Karl Alber. (The German
Winter 2023 Edition
79
The Kyoto School
version of a major work by the leading figure of what could be
considered the fourth generation of the Kyoto School.)
Takeuchi, Yoshinori, 1983, The Heart of Buddhism, James W. Heisig (ed.
and trans.), New York: Crossroad.
Takeuchi, Yoshinori, 1999, Takeuchi Yoshinori chosakushū [Collected
Works of Takeuchi Yoshinori], Kyoto: Hōzōkan.
Tanabe, Hajime, 1959, “Todesdialektik,” in Martin Heidegger zum
siebzigsten Geburtstag: Festschrift, Günther Neske (ed.), Pfullingen:
Neske, pp. 93–133.
–––, 1969, “The Logic of Species as Dialectics,” David Dilworth and Satō
Taira (trans.), Monumenta Nipponica, 24(3): 273–88.
–––, 1986, Philosophy as Metanoetics, Takeuchi Yoshinori (trans.),
Berkeley: University of California Press.
–––, 2000, Zangedō toshite no tetsugaku – Shi no tetsugaku [Philosophy
as the Way of Metanoetics, The Philosophy of Death], Hase Shōtō
(ed.), Kyoto: Tōeisha.
–––, 2003, “Shūkyōtetsugaku no kadai to zentei” [The Tasks and
Presuppositions of the Philosophy of Religion], in Bukkyō to
seiyōtetsugaku [Buddhism and Western Philosophy], Tanabe Hajime,
Kosaka Kunitsugu (ed.), Tokyo: Kobushibunko, pp. 9–42.
Tosaka, Jun, 2014, Tosaka Jun: A Critical Reader, Ken C. Kawashima,
Fabian Schafter, and Robert Stolz (eds.), New York: Cornell
University Press. (A collection of key essays by, and critical essays
on, this former student and Marxist critic of Nishida who some
scholars consider to be a member of “the left wing of the Kyoto
School.”)
Ueda, Shizuteru, 1982, “Emptiness and Fullness: Śūnyatā in Mahāyāna
Buddhism,” James W. Heisig and Frederick Greiner (trans), The
Eastern Buddhist, 15(1): 9–37. (Outlines many of the contours of
Ueda’s understanding of Zen by way of interpreting the Ten
Oxherding Pictures.)
80
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
–––, 1991, Ikiru to iu koto: keiken to jikaku [What is Called Life:
Experience and Self-Awareness], Kyoto: Jinbunshoin.
–––, 1992, Nishida Kitarō o yomu [Reading Nishida Kitarō], Tokyo:
Iwanami. (The first of many influential books on Nishida by Ueda, in
which Ueda develops his own thought by way of carefully reading
Nishida’s texts, beginning with An Inquiry into the Good.)
–––, 1983a, “Ascent and Descent: Zen Buddhism in Comparison with
Meister Eckhart (Part 1),” James W. Heisig (trans.), The Eastern
Buddhist, 16(1): 52–73.
–––, 1983b, “Ascent and Descent: Zen Buddhism in Comparison with
Meister Eckhart (Part 2),” Ian Astly and James W. Heisig (trans.),
The Eastern Buddhist, 16(2): 72–91.
–––, 1989, “The Zen Buddhist Experience of the Truly Beautiful,” John C.
Maraldo (trans.), The Eastern Buddhist, 22(1): 1–36.
–––, 1990, “Freedom and Language in Meister Eckhart and Zen Buddhism
(Part One),” Richard F. Szippl (trans.), The Eastern Buddhist, 23(2):
18–59.
–––, 1991, “Freedom and Language in Meister Eckhart and Zen Buddhism
(Part Two),” Richard F. Szippl (trans.), The Eastern Buddhist, 24(1):
52–80.
–––, 1992, “The Place of Man in the Noh Play,” Paul Shepherd (trans.),
The Eastern Buddhist, 25(2): 59–88. (In the first part of this essay,
Ueda outlines his account of “living-in-the-double-world.”)
–––, 1993a, “Zen and Philosophy in the Thought of Nishida Kitarō,” Mark
Unno (trans.), Japanese Religions, 18(2): 162–193. (Examines
Nishida’s early attempt to develop a philosophy of pure experience
on the basis of his practice of Zen.)
–––, 1993b, “Pure Experience, Self-Awareness, ‘Basho’,” Etudes
Phénoménologiques, 18: 63–86.
–––, 1994a, “The Practice of Zen,” Ron Hadley and Thomas L. Kirchner
(trans.), The Eastern Buddhist, 27(1): 10–29. (Succinctly introduces
Winter 2023 Edition
81
The Kyoto School
Ueda’s interpretation of the practice of Zen.)
–––, 1994b, “Nishida, Nationalism, and the War in Question,” in Heisig &
Maraldo 1994, pp. 77–106. (Ueda’s influential response to the
controversy surrounding Nishida’s political writings.)
–––, 1995, “Nishida’s Thought,” Jan Van Bragt (trans.), The Eastern
Buddhist, 28(1): 29–47.
–––, 1996, “Nishitani Keiji: Shūkyō to hishūkyō no aida” [Nishitani Keiji:
Between Religion and Non-Religion], in Shūkyō to hishūkyō no aida
[Between Religion and Non-Religion], Nishitani Keiji, Ueda
Shizuteru (ed.), Tokyo: Iwanami, pp. 287–316.
–––, 2004, Zen y la filosofia, Raquel Bouso (ed.), Barcelona: Editorial
Herder.
–––, 2011a, “Contributions to Dialogue with the Kyoto School,” Bret W.
Davis (trans.), in Davis & Schoeder & Wirth 2011, pp. 19–32. (In this
essay composed especially for this volume, Ueda reflects on the
problem of nihilism in an age of globalization and on the
contributions to a global philosophical dialogue made by Nishida’s
philosophy of “absolute nothingness” and Nishitani’s philosophy of
“emptiness.”)
–––, 2011b, “Language in a Twofold World,” Bret W. Davis (trans.), in
Heisig & Kasulis & Maraldo 2011, pp. 765–784. (Based on texts
originally written in 1990 and 1997, Ueda prepared this essay to
represent his thought in this first comprehensive sourcebook of
Japanese philosophy.)
–––, 2011c, Wer und was bin ich: Zur Phänomenologie des Selbst im ZenBuddhismus, Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber. (A valuable collection of
some of Ueda’s essays written in German. Earlier versions of the first
four chapters are available in English translation in Ueda 1982, 1989,
1992, and 1983a. For a review of this book and overview of Ueda’s
thought, see Davis 2013g).
82
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
–––, 2018 [1965], Die Gottesgeburt in der Seele und der Durchbruch zu
Gott. Die mystische Anthropologie Meister Eckharts und ihre
Konfrontation mit der Mystik des Zen Buddhismus, new edition
edited by Wolf Burbat, Freiburg/Munich: Verlag Karl Alber.
–––, 2019, “Horizon and the Other Side of the Horizon,” John W.M.
Krummel (trans.), in Contemporary Japanese Philosophy, edited by
John W.M. Krummel, New York: Roman and Littlefield, pp. 93–106.
–––, 2022, “Meister Eckhart’s Mysticism in Comparison with Zen
Buddhism,” Gregory S. Moss (trans.), Comparative and Continental
Philosophy, 14(2): 128–152. (A translation of a programmatic
chapter in Ueda 2018.)
Watsuji, Tetsurō, 1988, Climate and Culture: A Philosophical Study,
Geoffrey Bownas (trans.), New York: Greenwood Press.
–––, 1996, Watsuji Tetsurō’s Rinrigaku: Ethics in Japan, Yamamoto
Seisaku and Robert Carter (trans.), Albany: SUNY Press.
Works on the Kyoto School
Journals and Special Issues of Journals
Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 36(3), 2011. (A special issue
devoted to Nishida’s philosophy.)
Comparative and Continental Philosophy, 14(2), 2022. (A special issue on
“The Legacy of Kyoto School Philosopher Ueda Shizuteru.”)
The Eastern Buddhist New Series, 25(1), 1992. (A special edition, “In
Memoriam Nishitani Keiji 1900–1990.”)
The Eastern Buddhist New Series, 28(2), 1995. (A “Nishida Kitarō
Memorial Issue.”)
Études phénoménologique, 18, 1993. (A special issue devoted to “L’école
de Kyōto.”)
Winter 2023 Edition
83
The Kyoto School
European Journal of Japanese Philosophy, since 2016. (Frequently
includes articles on Kyoto School philosophers.)
Journal of Japanese Philosophy, since 2013. (Frequently includes articles
on Kyoto School philosophers.)
Nihon no tetsugaku [Japanese Philosophy], 2000–2017. (Frequently
included articles on Kyoto School philosophers.)
Nihon-tetsugaku-shi kenkyū [Research in the History of Japanese
Philosophy], since 2003. (Frequently includes articles on Kyoto
School philosophers.)
Revue philosophique de Louvain, 1994 (no. 4, Novembre). (A special
issue devoted to the theme: “La réception européenne de l’école de
Kyōto.”)
Synthesis Philosophica, 37, 2004, Zagreb, Croatia. (A special issue
devoted to “Japanese Philosophy,” with articles in German, English,
and French, many of which are written by leading Japanese scholars
of the Kyoto School.)
Zen Buddhism Today, 14, 1997. (An important collection of articles on the
theme: “Religion and the Contemporary World in Light of Nishitani
Keiji’s Thought.”)
Zen Buddhism Today, 15, 1998. (An important collection of articles on the
theme: “Nishida’s Philosophy, Nishitani’s Philosophy, and Zen.”)
Other Works on the Kyoto School
Akitomi, Katsuya, 2022, Gensho kara/e no shisaku: Nishida Kitarō to
Heideggā [Thinking from/to the Inception: Nishida Kitarō and
Heidegger], Tokyo: Hōsōdaigaku Kyōzai.
Akizuki, Ryōmin, 1996, Zettai-mu to basho: Suzuki-zengaku to Nishidatetsugaku [Absolute Nothingness and Place: Suzuki’s Zen Studies
and Nishida’s Philosophy], Tokyo: Seishisha.
84
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
Arisaka, Yoko, 1996, “The Nishida Enigma: ‘The Principle of the New
World Order’,” Monumenta Nipponica, 51(1): 81–106.
–––, 1999, “Beyond East and West: Nishida’s Universalism and
Postcolonial Critique,” in Border Crossings: Toward a Comparative
Political Theory, Fred Dallmayr (ed.), New York: Lexington Books,
pp. 237–252. (An insightful critical treatment of the ambiguities in
Nishida’s cultural and political philosophy.)
–––, 2020, “The Controversial Cultural Identity of Japanese Philosophy,”
in Davis 2020a, pp. 755–79.
Berque, Augustin (ed.), 2000, Logique du lieu et dépassemente de la
modernité, two volumes, Bruxelles: Ousia.
Brink, D. A., 2021, Philosophy of Science and the Kyoto School: An
Introduction to Nishida Kitarō, Tanabe Hajime, and Tosaka Jun, New
York: Bloomsbury Academic. (Includes translations of and
commentary on texts in which these Kyoto School philosophers
interpret the latest developments in science, such as quantum
mechanics and relativity theory.)
Bouso, Raquel and James W. Heisig (eds.), 2009, Frontiers of Japanese
Philosophy 6: Confluences and Cross-Currents, Nagoya: Nanzan
Institute for Religion and Culture.
Bowers, Russell H. Jr., 1995, Someone or Nothing: Nishitani’s “Religion
and Nothingness” as a Foundation for Christian-Buddhist Dialogue,
New York: Peter Lang.
Buchner, Harmut (ed.), 1989, Japan und Heidegger, Sigmaringen:
Thorbecke. (Contains documents of, and essays about, the relation
between Heidegger and the Kyoto School.)
Buri, Fritz, 1997, The Buddha-Christ as the Lord of the True Self: The
Religious Philosophy of the Kyoto School and Christianity, Macon:
Mercer University Press.
Carter, Robert E., 1997, The Nothingness Beyond God: An Introduction to
the Philosophy of Nishida Kitarō, second edition, St. Paul: Paragon
Winter 2023 Edition
85
The Kyoto School
House.
–––, 2013, The Kyoto School: An Introduction, with a foreword by
Thomas P. Kasulis, Albany: State University of New York Press.
Cobb, John B. Jr. and Christopher Ives (eds.), 1990, The Emptying God: A
Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation with Masao Abe on God,
Kenosis, and Sunyata, Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books.
Curley, Anne-Marie, 2020, “Miki Kiyoshi: Marxism, Humanism, and the
Power of Imagination,” in Davis 2020a, 447–463.
Dalissier, Michel, 2009, “Nishida Kitarō and Chinese Philosophy,” in Lam
& Cheung, pp. 211–250. (An intriguing account of Nishida’s study of
classical Chinese philosophy and the influence it exerted on his
thought.)
Dallmayr, Fred, 1993, “Heidegger and Zen Buddhism: a Salute to
Nishitani Keiji,” in Fred Dallmayr, The Other Heidegger, Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, pp. 200–226.
Davis, Bret W., 2002, “Introducing the Kyoto School as World
Philosophy: Reflections on James. W. Heisig’s Philosophers of
Nothingness,” The Eastern Buddhist, 34(2): 142–170.
–––, 2004, “The Step Back through Nihilism: The Radical Orientation of
Nishitani Keiji’s Philosophy of Zen,” Synthesis Philosophica, 37:
139–59. (An introduction to the central themes of Nishitani’s thought,
focusing on his topological phenomenology of a “trans-descendence”
through nihilism to the “field of śūnyatā.”)
–––, 2006, “Toward a World of Worlds: Nishida, the Kyoto School, and
the Place of Cross-Cultural Dialogue,” in Heisig 2006, pp. 205–245.
–––, 2008a, “Letting Go of God for Nothing: Ueda Shizuteru’s NonMysticism and the Question of Ethics in Zen Buddhism,” in Hori &
Curley 2008, pp. 221–250.
–––, 2008b, “Turns to and from Political Philosophy: The Case of
Nishitani Keiji,” in Goto-Jones 2008, pp. 26–45.
86
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
–––, 2011a, “Nishitani after Nietzsche: From the Death of God to the
Great Death of the Will,” in Davis & Schroeder & Wirth 2011, pp.
82–101.
–––, 2011b, “Nothingness and (not or) the Individual: Reflections on
Robert Wilkinson’s Nishida and Western Philosophy,” The Eastern
Buddhist, 42(2): 143–156.
–––, 2013a, “Nishida’s Multicultural Worldview: Contemporary
Significance and Immanent Critique,” Nishida Tetsugakkai Nenpō
[The Journal of the Society for Nishida Philosophy], 10: 183–203.
–––, 2014, “Ethical and Religious Alterity: Nishida after Levinas,” in
Elberfeld & Arisaka 2014, pp. 313–341.
–––, 2017, “Encounter in Emptiness: The I-Thou Relation in Nishitani
Keiji’s Philosophy of Zen,” in Yusa 2017, pp. 231–254.
–––, 2019, “Expressing Experience: Language in Ueda Shizuteru’s
Philosophy of Zen,” in Gereon Kopf (ed.), Dao Companion to
Japanese Buddhist Philosophy, New York: Springer, pp 713–38.
––– (ed.), 2020a, The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy, New
York: Oxford University Press. (Contains chapters on the major
Kyoto School philosophers by leading scholars in the field.)
–––, 2020b, “Introduction: What Is Japanese Philosophy?” in Davis
2020a, pp. 1–79.
–––, 2021, “Commuting Between Zen and Philosophy: In the Footsteps of
Kyoto School Philosophers and Psychosomatic Practitioners,” in
Francesca Greco, Leon Krings, and Yukiko Kuwayama (eds.),
Transitions: Crossing Boundaries in Japanese Philosophy, Nagoya:
Chisokudō Publications, pp. 71–111.
–––, 2022a, Zen Pathways: An Introduction to the Philosophy and
Practice of Zen Buddhism, New York: Oxford University Press.
(Makes reference to Kyoto School interpretations of Zen throughout
and contains a chapter on their understanding of the relation between
Zen and philosophy.)
Winter 2023 Edition
87
The Kyoto School
Davis, Bret W., Brian Schroeder and Jason M. Wirth (eds.), 2011,
Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto
School, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (A collection of
essays by North American, Japanese, and European scholars aimed at
engendering multilateral exchanges between the Kyoto School
philosophies and such Continental figures as Kant, Nietzsche,
Heidegger, Arendt, Löwith, Habermas, Merleau-Ponty, Irigaray,
Levinas, Derrida, and Marion.)
Denker, Alfred et al. (eds.), 2013, Heidegger-Jahrbuch 7: Heidegger und
das ostasiatische Denken, Freiburg & Munich: Alber Verlag.
(Contains a number of essays by and on thinkers affiliated with the
Kyoto School.)
Döll, Steffen, 2005, Wozu also suchen? Zur Einführung in das Denken von
Ueda Shizuteru, Munich: iudicium. (Contains a scholarly and
informative introduction to Ueda’s thought, together with an
annotated translation of his “The Place of Self-Awareness.”)
–––, 2011, “Ueda Shizuteru’s Phenomenology of Self and World: Critical
Dialogues with Descartes, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty,” in Davis
& Schroeder & Wirth 2011, pp. 120–137.
–––, 2020, “Ueda Shizuteru: The Self That Is Not a Self in a Twofold
World,” in Davis 2020a, pp. 485– 499.
Elberfeld, Rolf, 1999, Kitarō Nishida (1870–1945). Moderne japanische
Philosophie und die Frage nach der Interkulturalität, Amsterdam:
Rodopi. (Compellingly argues for Nishida’s significance as a crosscultural philosopher.)
Elberfeld, Rolf, 1999, Kitarō Nishida (1870–1945). Moderne japanische
Philosophie und die Frage nach der Interkulturalität, Amsterdam:
Rodopi. (Compellingly argues for Nishida’s significance as a crosscultural philosopher.)
Faure, Bernard, 1995, “The Kyoto School and Reverse Orientalism,” in
Japan in Traditional and Postmodern Perspectives, Charles Wei-
88
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
Hsun Fu and Steven Heine (eds.), New York: State University of New
York Press, pp. 245–281.
Feenberg, Andrew, 1995, “The Problem of Modernity in Nishida’s
Philosophy,” in Alternative Modernity, Andrew Feenberg, Berkeley:
University of California Press, pp. 169–192.
Elberfeld, Rolf and Yōko Arisaka (eds.), 2014, Kitarō Nishida in der
Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts, Freiburg & Munich: Alber Verlag.
(Contains a rich variety of essays by Japanese, European, and
American scholars on Nishida in the context of twentieth century
philosophy.)
Faure, Bernard, 1995, “The Kyoto School and Reverse Orientalism,” in
Japan in Traditional and Postmodern Perspectives, Charles WeiHsun Fu and Steven Heine (eds.), New York: SUNY Press. (A
severely critical treatment of the nationalistic aspects of the Kyoto
School.)
Fujita, Masakatsu (ed.), 1997, Nihon kindai shisō o manabu hito no tame
ni [For Students of Modern Japanese Thought], Kyoto:
Sekaishisōsha. (Contains helpful introductory chapters on members
of the Kyoto School and other key thinkers in modern Japan.)
–––, 1998, Gendaishisō toshite no Nishida Kitarō [Nishida Kitarō as
Contemporary Thought], Tokyo: Kōdansha. (An introduction to
Nishida, focusing on the idea of pure experience, the critique of
dualism, and the question of language in his early writings.)
––– (ed.), 2000ff., Nihon no tetsugaku [Japanese Philosophy], Kyoto:
Shōwadō. (An annual journal published by the Department of
Japanese Philosophy at Kyoto University.)
––– (ed.), 2001, Kyōtogakuha no tetsugaku [The Philosophy of the Kyoto
School], Kyoto: Shōwadō. (Contains primary texts from, and critical
essays on, eight Kyoto School philosophers.)
–––, 2011a, Nishida Kitarō no shisaku-sekai [The World of Nishida
Kitarō’s Thought], Tokyo: Iwanami. (Gathers ten lucid and insightful
Winter 2023 Edition
89
The Kyoto School
essays on a range of key issues in Nishida’s philosophy.)
–––, 2011b, “Logos and Pathos: Miki Kiyoshi’s Logic of the Imagination,”
Bret W. Davis with Moritsu Ryū and Takehana Yōsuke (trans.), in
Davis & Schroeder & Wirth 2011, pp. 305–318.
–––, 2013, “The Significance of Japanese Philosophy,” Bret W. Davis
(trans.), Journal of Japanese Philosophy, 1: 5–20.
–––, 2018a, Nihon tetsugaku-shi [The History of Japanese Philosophy],
Kyoto: Shōwadō. (Based on two decades of lectures on the history of
modern Japanese philosophy at Kyoto University by one of the
leading contemporary scholars in the field.)
––– (ed.), 2018b, The Philosophy of the Kyoto School, Robert Chapeskie
with John W. M. Krummel (trans.), Singapore: Springer.
–––, 2020, “The Development of Nishida’s Philosophy: Pure Experience,
Place, Action-Intuition,” in Davis 2020a, pp. 389–415.
Fujita, Masakatsu, et al. (eds.), 2003, Higashiajia to tetsugaku [East Asia
and Philosophy], Kyoto: Nakanishiya Press.
Fujita, Masakatsu and Bret W. Davis (eds.), 2005, Sekai no naka no nihon
no tetsugaku [Japanese Philosophy in the World], Kyoto: Shōwadō.
(A collection of articles by Western, Chinese and Japanese scholars
attempting to hermeneutically situate and critically evaluate the
significance of modern Japanese philosophy in the world.)
Goto-Jones, Christopher S., 2002, “If not a clash, then what? Huntington,
Nishida Kitarō, and the politics of civilizations,” International
Relations of the Asian Pacific, 2: 223–43.
–––, 2005, Political Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, The Kyoto School, and
Co-Prosperity, London: Routledge. (A provocative new
interpretation of the political dimensions of Nishida’s philosophy,
which argues that Nishida’s political thought should be understood
neither in terms of Japanese ultranationalism, nor in terms of Western
liberalism, but rather as a modern development of Eastern and in
particular Mahāyāna Buddhist thought.)
90
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
––– (ed.), 2008, Re-politicising the Kyoto School as Philosophy, London:
Routledge.
–––, 2009, “The Kyoto School, the Cambridge School, and the History of
Political Philosophy in Wartime Japan,” Positions, 17(1): 13–42.
Hanaoka, Eiko, 2009, Zen and Christianity: From the Standpoint of
Absolute Nothingness, Kyoto: Maruzen.
Harootunian, Harry, 2000, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and
Community in Interwar Japan. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hashi, Hisaki, 1999, Die Aktualität der Philosophie. Grundriss des
Denkwegs der Kyoto-Schule, Wien: Doppelpunkt.
Hattori, Kenji, 2004, “‘Kyōtogakuha-saha’ zō” [The Image of the “LeftWing of the Kyoto School”], in Ōhashi 2004, pp. 23–43.
Heisig, James W., 1994, “Tanabe’s Logic of the Specific and the Spirit of
Nationalism,” in Heisig & Maraldo 1994, pp. 255–288.
–––, 1998, “Kyoto School,” in E. Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, London: Routledge.
–––, 1999, “Philosophy as Spirituality: The Way of the Kyoto School,” in
Buddhist Spirituality: Later China, Korea, Japan and the Modern
World, Takeuchi Yoshinori (ed.), New York: Crossroad, pp. 367–388.
–––, 2001, Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School,
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. (A lucid introduction to the
Kyoto School, focusing on key ideas of Nishida, Tanabe, and
Nishitani; includes a wealth of valuable references to the debates that
have surrounded the School, and an extensive multilingual
bibliography. For a review, see Davis 2002.)
––– (ed.), 2004, Japanese Philosophy Abroad, Nagoya: Nanzan Institute
for Religion and Culture. (A valuable collection of scholarly articles
presented at an international conference on the past and future of
studies of “Japanese philosophy” in the various regions of the world.)
––– (ed.), 2006, Frontiers of Japanese Philosophy, Nagoya: Nanzan
Institute for Religion and Culture. (The first of an ongoing series of
Winter 2023 Edition
91
The Kyoto School
anthologies that focus largely on the Kyoto School. See also Hori &
Curley 2006; Heisig & Uehara 2008; Lam & Cheung 2009; and
Bouso & Heisig 2009.)
–––, 2016, Much Ado About Nothingness: Essays on Nishida and Tanabe,
Nagoya: Chisokudō. (Collects a range of important essays on Nishida
and Tanabe by one of the leading scholars in the field.)
Heisig, James W., Thomas P. Kasulis and John C. Maraldo (eds.), 2011,
Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, Honolulu: Hawai‘i University
Press.
Heisig, James W. and John C. Maraldo (eds.), 1994, Rude Awakenings:
Zen, The Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press.
Heisig, James W. and Uehara Mayuko (eds.), 2008, Frontiers of Japanese
Philosophy 3: Origins and Possibilities, Nagoya: Nanzan Institute for
Religion and Culture.
Heisig, James W. and John C. Maraldo (eds.), 1994, Rude Awakenings:
Zen, The Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press. (A well-rounded landmark collection of
articles on the political controversy surrounding the Kyoto School.)
Heisig, James W. and Uehara Mayuko (eds.), 2008, Frontiers of Japanese
Philosophy 3: Origins and Possibilities, Nagoya: Nanzan Institute for
Religion and Culture.
Himi, Kiyoshi, 1990, Tanabe tetsugaku kenkyū: Shūkyōgaku no kanten
kara [Studies of the Philosophy of Tanabe: From the Perspective of
Religious Studies], Tokyo: Hokujushuppan. (The most
comprehensive single-author work on Tanabe’s thought, with a
predominant focus on the several stages of his later philosophy of
religion.)
Hiromatsu, Wataru, 1989, “Kindai no chōkoku”-ron [Theories on
“Overcoming Modernity”], Tokyo: Kōdansha.
92
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
Hori, Victor Sōgen and Melissa Anne-Marie Curley (eds.), 2008, Frontiers
of Japanese Philosophy 3: Origins and Possibilities, Nagoya: Nanzan
Institute for Religion and Culture.
Horio, Tsutomu, 1994, “The Chūōkōron Discussions, Their Background
and Meaning,” in Heisig & Maraldo 1994, pp. 289–315.
Ives, Christopher (ed.), 1995, Divine Emptiness and Historical Fullness: A
Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation with Masao Abe, Valley
Forge, Pennsylvania: Trinity Press International.
Jacinto Zavala, Agustín, 1989, Filosofía de la transformación del mundo:
Introducción a la filosofía tardía de Nishida Kitarō, Michoacán: El
Colegio de Michoacán. (One of many valuable texts and translations
by the premier Spanish-speaking Nishida and Kyoto School scholar.)
–––, 2001, “On Some Elements of the Concept of Basho,” Dokkyo
International Review, 14: 119–134.
Kasulis, T. P., 1981, Zen Action/Zen Person, Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press. (A classic philosophical introduction to Zen
Buddhism.)
–––, 1982, “The Kyoto School and the West,” The Eastern Buddhist,
15(2): 125–45. (An early review article which includes insightful
critical responses to the literature on the Kyoto School that had
appeared in the West prior to 1982.)
–––, 2018, Engaging Japanese Philosophy: A Short History, Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press. (The magnum opus of one of the leading
scholars in the field. Contains lengthy treatments of Nishida and
Watsuji among other premodern and modern Japanese philosophers.)
Kopf, Gereon, 2001, Beyond Personal Identity: Dōgen, Nishida, and a
Phenomenology of No-Self, Richmond, Surry: Curzon Press.
–––, 2004, “Between Identity and Difference: Three Ways of Reading
Nishida’s Non-Dualism,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies,
31(1): 73–103. (A good account of how Nishida’s dialogue with his
critics, Takahashi Satomi and Tanabe Hajime, assisted him in the
Winter 2023 Edition
93
The Kyoto School
pursuit of a philosophy of non-dualism that does not reduce
difference to identity.)
–––, 2011, “Ambiguity, Diversity, and an Ethics of Understanding: What
Nishida’s Philosophy Can Contribute to the Pluralism Debate,”
Culture and Dialogue, 1(1): 21–44.
––– (ed.), 2019, The Dao Companion to Japanese Buddhist Philosophy,
Dordrecht: Springer. (Contains chapters on Nishida, Hisamatsu,
Nishitani, and Ueda.)
Krummel, John W. M., 2012, “Basho, World, and Dialectics: An
Introduction to the Philosophy of Nishida Kitarō,” in Nishida 2012a,
pp. 3–48.
–––, 2014, “World, Nothing, and Globalization in Nishida and Nancy,” in
Leah Kalmanson and James Mark Shields (eds.), Buddhist Responses
to Globalization, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, pp. 107–29.
–––, 2015, Nishida Kitarō’s Chiasmatic Chorology: Place of Dialectic,
Dialectic of Place, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (A very
well researched and insightful monograph on Nishida’s philosophy.)
–––, 2022, “Ueda Shizuteru’s Philosophy of the Twofold,” Comparative
and Continental Philosophy, 14(2): 153–161.
Kosaka, Kunitsugu, 1995, Nishida Kitarō: Sono shisō to gendai [Nishida
Kitarō: His Thought and the Contemporary Age], Kyoto: Minerva.
–––, 1997, Nishida Kitarō o meguru tetsugakusha gunzō [The Group of
Philosophers Surrounding Nishida Kitarō], Kyoto: Minerva.
(Contains clear presentations of Nishida’s thought in relation to that
of Tanabe, Takahashi Satomi, Miki, Watsuji, and Hisamatsu.)
–––, 2001, Nishida tetsugaku to gendai: Rekishi, shūkyō, shizen o yomitoku [Nishida Philosophy and the Contemporary Age: Explaining
History, Religion, and Nature], Kyoto: Minerva.
Lai, Whalen, 1990, “Tanabe and the Dialectics of Mediation: A Critique,”
in The Religious Philosophy of Tanabe Hajime, Taitetsu Unno and
94
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
James W. Heisig (eds.), Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, pp. 256–
276.
Lam, Wing-keung and Cheung Ching-yuen (eds.), 2009, Frontiers of
Japanese Philosophy 4: Facing the 21st Century, Nagoya: Nanzan
Institute for Religion and Culture.
Laube, Johannes, 1984, Dialektik der absoluten Vermittlung. Hajime
Tanabes Religionsphilosophie als Beitrag zum “Wettstreit der Liebe”
zwischen Buddhismus und Christentum, Freiburg im Breisgau:
Herder.
Liao, Chin-ping, 2018, Shūkyō-tetsugaku no kyūsairon: Kōki Tanabetetsugaku no kenkyū [Soteriology of Philosophy of Religion: A Study
of Tanabe’s Later Philosophy], Taiwan University Press.
Liao, Chin-ping, and Kawai Kazuki (eds.), 2022, Kiki no jidai to Tanabetetsugaku: Tanabe Hajime botsugo 60 shūnen kinen ronshū [Tanabe’s
Philosophy in a Time of Crisis: Essays Commemorating the 60th
Anniversary of the Death of Tanabe Hajime], Tokyo: Hōsei Daigaku
Shuppan Kyoku.
Liao, Chin-ping, et al. (eds.), 2022, Higashi-ajia ni okeru tetsugaku no
seisei to hatten: kanbunka no shiten kara [The Origin and
Development of Philosophy in East Asia: From an Intercultural
Perspective], Tokyo: Hōsei Daigaku Shuppan Kyoku. (Contains
forty-four chapters by Chinese, Japanese, and a few other scholars on
various aspects of modern philosophy in East Asia, including many
on members or affiliates of the Kyoto School.)
Light, Steven, 1987, Shūzō Kuki and Jean-Paul Sartre: Influence and
Counter-Influence in the Early History of Existential Phenomenology,
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Mafli, Paul, 1996, Nishida Kitarōs Denkweg, Munich: Iudicium Verlag.
Maraldo, John, 1995, “The Problem of World Culture: Towards an
Appropriation of Nishida’s Philosophy of Nation and Culture,” The
Eastern Buddhist, 28(2): 183–197.
Winter 2023 Edition
95
The Kyoto School
–––, 1997, “Contemporary Japanese Philosophy,” in Companion
Encyclopedia of Asian Philosophy, Brian Carr and Indira
Mahalingam (eds.), London and New York: Routledge, pp. 810–835.
(A rich overview that situates the Kyoto School in the wider context
of modern and contemporary Japanese philosophy.)
–––, 2003, “Rethinking God: Heidegger in the Light of Absolute
Nothingness, Nishida in the Shadow of Onto-Theology,” in Religious
Experience and the End of Metaphysics, Jeffery Bloechl (ed.),
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 31–49.
–––, 2004, “Defining Philosophy in the Making,” in Heisig 2004, pp. 220–
245. (An informative and thought-provoking essay on the question of
what “Japanese philosophy” has meant and should mean.)
–––, 2005, “Ōbei no shiten kara mita Kyōtogakuha no yurai to yukue”
[The Whence and Whither of the Kyoto School from a Western
Perspective], Azumi Yurika (trans.), in Fujita & Davis 2005, pp. 31–
56. (An excellent critical essay on the question of defining the “Kyoto
School,” which unfortunately has yet to be published in English.)
–––, 2006, “The War Over the Kyoto School,” Monumenta Nipponica,
61(3): 375–401. (An insightful review article on Goto-Jones 2005
and Williams 2005.)
–––, 2013, “Japanese Philosophy as a Lens on Greco-European Thought,”
Journal of Japanese Philosophy, 1: 21–56.
–––, 2017, Japanese Philosophy in the Making 1: Crossing Paths with
Nishida, Nagoya: Chisokudō. (Collects a range of important essays
on Nishida by one of the leading scholars in the field.)
–––, 2019, Japanese Philosophy in the Making 2: Borderline
Interrogations, Nagoya: Chisokudō Publications. (A second volume
of revised essays by this leading scholar. Contains essays on the
philosophies of Watsuji, Tanabe, and Kuki, and on issues in political
and environmental philosophy.)
96
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
–––, 2020, “Nishida Kitarō: Self, World, and the Nothingness Underlying
Distinctions,” in Davis 2020a, pp. 361–372.
–––, 2023, Japanese Philosophy in the Making 3: Alternatives with Tracks
through Zen, Nagoya: Chisokudō Publications. (A third volume of
revised essays by this leading scholar. Contains essays on Nishitani
and Ueda among others.)
Marchianò, Grazia (ed.), 1996, La Scuola di Kyōto: Kyōto-ha, Messina:
Rubberttino.
Matsumaru, Hideo, 2013, Chokusetsu-chi no tankyū: Nishida, Nishitani,
Haideggā, Daisetsu [An Investigation into Immediate Knowledge:
Nishida, Nishitani, Heidegger, D. T. Suzuki], Yokohama: Shunpūsha.
Matsumaru, Hisao, Yoko Arisaka, and Lucy Christine Schultz (eds.),
2022, Tetsugaku Companion to Nishida Kitarō, New York: Springer.
Mayeda, Graham, 2006, Time, Space, and Ethics in the Philosophies of
Watsuji Tetsurō, Kuki Shūzō, and Martin Heidegger, London & New
York: Routledge.
–––, 2020a, Japanese Philosophers on Society and Culture: Nishida
Kitarō, Watsuji Tetsurō, and Kuki Shūzō, Lanham, MD: Lexington.
–––, 2020b, “Kuki Shūzō: A Phenomenology of Fate and Chance and an
Aesthetics of the Floating World,” in Davis 2020a, pp. 523– 541.
McCarthy, Erin, 2010, Ethics Embodied: Rethinking Selfhood through
Continental, Japanese, and Feminist Philosophies, Lanham, MD:
Lexington. (Insightfully and provocatively brings Watsuji’s ethics
into dialogue with contemporary issues in Continental and feminist
philosophy.)
–––, 2020, “Watsuji Tetsurō: The Mutuality of Climate and Culture and an
Ethics of Betweenness,” in Davis 2020a, pp. 503– 522.
Minamoto, Ryōen, 1994, “The Symposium on ‘Overcoming Modernity’,”
in Heisig & Maraldo 1994.
Winter 2023 Edition
97
The Kyoto School
Mitchell, Donald W. (ed.), 1998, Masao Abe: A Zen Life of Dialogue,
Boston: Charles E. Tuttle Co. (Consists of thirty-five chapters by
different authors reflecting on the significance of Abe’s dialogues
with philosophers and theologians in the West.)
Morisato, Takeshi, 2021, Tanabe Hajime and the Kyoto School, New
York: Bloomsbury Academic. (An accessible introduction to
Tanabe’s thought.)
Müller, Ralf, Raquel Bouso, and Adam Loughnane (eds.), 2022, Tetsugaku
Companion to Ueda Shizuteru, New York: Springer Publishing.
Nagatomo, Shigenori, 1995, A Philosophical Foundation of Miki Kiyoshi’s
Concept of Humanism, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.
Nakamura, Yūjirō, 1983, Nishida Kitarō, Tokyo: Iwanami.
–––, 1987, Nishida tetsugaku no datsukōchiku [The Deconstruction of
Nishida Philosophy], Tokyo: Iwanami.
Neto, Antonio Florentino, and Oswaldo Giacoia Jr. (eds.), 2017, A Escola
de Kyoto e suas fontes orientais, Campinas, Brasil: Editora Phi.
Ōhashi, Ryōsuke (ed.), 2004, Kyōtogakuha no shisō [The Thought of the
Kyoto School], Kyoto: Jinbunshoin. (Contains five chapters that
critically examine past and present images of the “Kyoto School,”
and seven chapters that explore the potential of Kyoto School thought
in various areas of contemporary philosophy.)
Ōhashi, Ryōsuke and Akitomi Katsuya, 2020, “The Kyoto School:
Transformations Over Three Generations,” in Davis 2020a, 367–387.
(An introduction to the Kyoto School by prominent representatives of
its two most recent generations of scholars.)
Osaki, Harumi, 2019, Nothingness in the Heart of the Empire: The Moral
and Political Philosophy of the Kyoto School in Imperial Japan,
Albany: State University of New York Press. (A critical interpretation
of the wartime political writings of the Kyoto School.)
Ōshima, Yasuma, 2000, “Daitōasensō to Kyōtogakuha: Chishikijin no
seijisanka ni tsuite” [The Pacific War and the Kyoto School: On the
98
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
Political Participation of Intellectuals], in Sekaishi no riron:
Kyōtogakuha no rekishigaku ronkō [Theory of World History: The
Kyoto School’s Writings on History], Mori Tetsurō (ed.), Kyoto:
Tōeisha, pp. 274–304.
Parkes, Graham, 1884, “Nietzsche and Nishitani on the Self through
Time,” The Eastern Buddhist, 17(2): 55–74.
–––, 1997, “The Putative Fascism of the Kyoto School and the Political
Correctness of the Modern Academy,” Philosophy East and West,
47(3): 305–336.
–––, 2011, “Heidegger and Japanese Fascism: An Unsubstantiated
Connection,” in Davis & Schroeder & Wirth 2011, pp. 247–265.
Parkes, Graham, 1997, “The Putative Fascism of the Kyoto School and the
Political Correctness of the Modern Academy,” Philosophy East and
West, 47(3): 305–336. (A critical response to polemical treatments of
the nationalistic aspects of the Kyoto School, including those by
Pincus 1996 and Faure 1995.)
Pincus, Leslie, 1996, Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki
Shūzō and the Rise of National Aesthetics, Berkeley: University of
California Press. (A highly critical treatment of the implications of
cultural nationalism in Kuki’s aesthetics.)
Piovesana, Gino K., 1994, Recent Japanese Philosophical Thought, 1862–
1996: A Survey, revised edition including a new survey by Naoshi
Yamawaki: “The Philosophical Thought of Japan from 1963 to
1996,” Richmond, Surrey: Japan Library (Curzon Press Ltd). (A
classic survey of modern Japanese philosophy.)
Stambaugh, Joan, 1999, The Formless Self, Albany: SUNY Press.
(Insightfully discusses Dōgen, Hisamatsu, and Nishitani.)
Standish, Paul and Naoko Saito (eds.), 2012, Education and the Kyoto
School of Philosophy: Pedagogy for Human Transformation, New
York: Springer.
Winter 2023 Edition
99
The Kyoto School
Stevens, Bernard, 2000, Topologie du néant: Une approche de l’école de
Kyōto, Paris: Éditions Peeters.
–––, 2020, Heidegger et l’école de Kyôto. Soleil levant sur forêt noire,
Paris : les Editions du Cerf.
–––, 2023, Kyoto School in Comparative Perspective: Ideology, Ontology,
Modernity. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. (Contains chapters on
Nishida and Nishitani as well as on the Kyoto School affiliated
psychiatrist Kimura Bin and the liberal political theorist and
intellectual historian Maruyama Masao.)
Suares, Peter, 2011, The Kyoto School’s Takeover of Hegel: Nishida,
Nishitani, and Tanabe Remake the Philosophy of Spirit, Lanham,
MD: Lexington Books.
Sugimoto, Kōichi, 2011, “Tanabe Hajime’s Logic of Species and the
Philosophy of Nishida Kitarō: A Critical Dialogue within the Kyoto
School,” in Davis & Schroeder & Wirth 2011, pp. 52–67.
Takeda, Atsushi, 2001, Monogatari “Kyōto-gakuha” [The Story of the
“Kyoto School”], Tokyo: Chūōkōron Shinsha. (An engaging
biographical account of the interpersonal relations and scholarly
activities of the Kyoto School.)
Tanaka, Kyūbun, 2000, Nihon no “tetsugaku” o yomitoku [Reading
Japanese “Philosophy”], Tokyo: Chikuma Shinsho. (Consists of
introductory chapters on Nishida, Watsuji, Kuki, and Miki.)
Townsend, Susan C., 2009, Miki Kiyoshi 1897–1945: Japan’s Itinerant
Philosopher, Boston: Brill.
Tremblay, Jacynthe, 2000, Nishida Kitarō: Le jeu de l’individuel et de
l’universel, Paris: CNRS Editions.
Tremblay, Jacynthe, 2024, Le Soi égaré: Entretiens avec Nishida Kitarō,
Première série, Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal.
Tsunetoshi, Sōzaburō, 1998, Nihon no tetsugaku o manabu hito no tame ni
[For Students of Japanese Philosophy], Kyoto: Sekaishisōsha.
100
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
(Consists of introductory chapters mostly on Kyoto School
philosophers.)
Ueda, Shizuteru (ed.), 1992, Jōi ni okeru kū [Emptiness in Passion],
Tokyo: Sōbunsha. (An important collection of essays on Nishitani.)
––– (ed.), 1994, Nishida-tetsugaku [Nishida Philosophy], Tokyo:
Sōbunsha. (An important collection of essays on Nishida.)
––– (ed.), 2006, Zen to Kyoto-tetsugaku [Zen and Kyoto Philosophy],
Kyoto: Tōeisha. (An important anthology on the most significant
twentieth century Japanese philosophers who were engaged in the
study and practice of Zen.)
Ueda, Shizuteru and Horio Tsutomu (eds.), 1998, Zen to gendaisekai [Zen
and the Modern World], Kyoto: Zenbunka Kenkyūsho. (Consists of
chapters on Nishida, D. T. Suzuki, Nishitani, and Hisamatsu,
addressing the relation of their thought to Zen.)
Ueda, Yoshifumi, 1990, “Tanabe’s Metanoetics and Shinran’s Thought,” in
The Religious Philosophy of Tanabe Hajime, Taitetsu Unno and
James W. Heisig (eds.), Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, pp. 134–
149.
Unno, Taitetsu (ed.), 1989, The Religious Philosophy of Nishitani Keiji,
Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press. (A landmark collection of
responses to Nishitani’s philosophy of religion.)
Unno, Taitetsu and James W. Heisig (eds.), 1990, The Religious
Philosophy of Tanabe Hajime, Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press. (A
landmark collection of responses to Tanabe’s philosophy of religion.)
Unno, Taitetsu, 1998, River of Fire, River of Water: An Introduction to the
Pure Land Tradition of Shin Buddhism, New York: Double Day. (An
accessible and engaging introduction to Shin Buddhist thought.)
Waldenfels, Hans, 1980, Absolute Nothingness: Foundations for a
Buddhist-Christian Dialogue, J. W. Heisig (trans.), New York: Paulist
Press. (An important early Western work focusing on Nishitani from
the perspective of Buddhist-Christian dialogue.)
Winter 2023 Edition
101
The Kyoto School
Wargo, Robert J. J., 2005, The Logic of Nothingness: A Study of Nishida
Kitarō, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. (A landmark
philosophical study which traces the early development of Nishida’s
thought from out of the context of Japanese philosophy in the Meiji
period, and which focuses in particular on the subsequent
development of his unique “logic of basho”.)
Wilkinson, Robert, 2009, Nishida and Western Philosophy, Surrey, UK:
Ashgate. (An account of Nishida’s philosophy which sets his thought
in the context of his Zen background as well as his critical dialogue
with Western philosophers such as James, Bergson, Fichte, the NeoKantians, and Hegel. For a review, see Davis 2011d.)
Williams, David, 2005, Defending Japan’s Pacific War: The Kyoto School
Philosophers and Post-White Power, London & New York:
Routledge. (A highly provocative revisionist account of the Pacific
War and defense of the Kyoto School’s wartime political thought,
which centers on an interpretation of Tanabe as a pioneer “postWhite” political philosopher.)
–––, 2014, The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance: A Reading,
with Commentary, of the Complete Texts of the Kyoto School
Discussions of “The Standpoint of World History and Japan,” New
York: Routledge.
Yusa, Michiko, 1994, “Nishida and Totalitarianism: A Philosopher’s
Resistance,” in Heisig & Maraldo 1994, pp. 107–131.
–––, 1997, “Contemporary Buddhist Philosophy,” in A Companion to
World Philosophies, Eliot Deutsch and Ron Bontekoe (ed.), Oxford:
Blackwell, pp. 564–572.
–––, 2002, Zen & Philosophy: An Intellectual Biography of Nishida
Kitarō, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. (A very informative
and lucid account of Nishida’s personal and scholarly life, including
his relations with other Kyoto School thinkers.)
102
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
––– (ed.), 2017, The Bloombury Research Handbook of Contemporary
Japanese Philosophy, New York: Bloomsbury. (Contains a number of
chapters devoted to developing the thought of philosophers
associated with the Kyoto School.)
–––, 2019, “D. T. Suzuki and the ‘Logic of Sokuhi,’ or the ‘Logic of
Prajñāpāramitā’,” in Gereon Kopf (ed.), The Dao Companion to
Japanese Buddhist Philosophy, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 589–616.
Other Cited Sources
Aristotle, Introduction to Aristotle, second edition, Richard McKeon (ed.),
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973.
Bercholz, Samuel and Sherab Chödzin Kohn (eds.), 1993, The Buddha
and His Teachings, Boston: Shambhala.
Buchner, Harmut (ed.), 1989, Japan und Heidegger, Sigmaringen:
Thorbecke.
Cleary, J. C. (trans.), 1999, Wumen’s Gate, in Three Zen Classics,
Berkeley: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research.
Dale, Peter, 1986, The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness, New York: St.
Martin’s Press.
Dallmayr, Fred, 1996, Beyond Orientalism, Albany: SUNY Press.
Davis, Bret W., 2013b, “Forms of Emptiness in Zen,” in Steven
Emmanuel (ed.), A Companion to Buddhist Philosophy, West Sussex:
Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 190–213.
–––, 2013c, “Heidegger and Asian Philosophy,” in François Raffoul and
Eric S. Nelson (eds.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger,
New York: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 459–471.
Derrida, Jacques, 1992, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s
Europe, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (trans.),
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Eckehart, Meister, 1963, Deutsche Predigten und Traktate, Josef Quint
(ed. and trans.), München: Carl Hanser.
Winter 2023 Edition
103
The Kyoto School
Elberfeld, Rolf, 2017, Philosophieren in einer globalisierten Welt: Wege
zu einer transformativen Phänomenologie, Freiburg/Munich: Verlag
Karl Alber.
Friedländer, Paul, 1969, Plato: An Introduction, second edition, Hans
Meyerhoff (trans.), Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Fukuyama, Francis, 1992, The End of History and the Last Man, New
York: The Free Press.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 1989, Das Erbe Europas, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Garfield, Jay L., 1995, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way:
Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Habermas, Jürgen, 1979, Communication and the Evolution of Society,
Thomas McCarthy (trans.), Boston: Beacon Press.
Heidegger, Martin, 1956, Was ist das—die Philosophie?, Pfullingen:
Neske.
–––, 1975ff., Gesamtausgabe, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann.
Itō Kunitake, Yamauchi Shirō, Nakajima Takahiro, Nōtomi Noburu (eds),
2020, Sekai-tetsugaku-shi [World History of Philosophy or History of
World Philosophy], 9 volumes, Tokyo: Chikuma Shoten.
Izutsu, Toshihiko (trans.), 2001, Lao-tzu: The Way and Its Virtue, Tokyo:
Keio University Press. (A bilingual edition)
Kasulis, T. P., 1981, Zen Action/Zen Person, Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press.
Kenneth K. Inada, 1993, Nāgārjuna: A Translation of his
Mūlamadhyamakakārikā with an Introductory Essay, Delhi: Sri
Satguru Publications.
Liu, JeeLoo and Douglas L. Berger (eds.), 2014, Nothingness in Asian
Philosophy, New York: Routledge.
Mac Sweeney, Naoíse, 2023, The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives,
New York: Dutton.
104
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
Najita, Tetsuo and H. D. Harootunian, 1998, “Japan’s Revolt against the
West,” in Modern Japanese Thought, Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi
(ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 207–272.
Nakamura, Hajime (ed.), 1975, Bukkyō-go daijiten [Large Dictionary of
Buddhist Terms], Tokyo: Tōkyōshoseki.
Nishimura, Eshin (ed.), 1994, Mumonkan [The Gateless Barrier], Tokyo:
Iwanami.
Panikkar, K. M., 1969, Asia and Western Dominance, Collier Books.
Parkes, Graham (ed.), 1987, Heidegger and Asian Thought, Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press.
–––, 1996, “Nietzsche and East Asian Thought: Influences, Impacts, and
Resonances,” in The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, Bernd
Magnus and Kathleen M. Higgins (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 356–383.
Plato, 1961, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Edith Hamilton and
Huntington Cairns (eds.), Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Said, Edward, 1978, Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books.
–––, 1993, Culture and Imperialism, New York: Vintage Books.
Schürmann, Reiner, 1978, Meister Eckhart: Mystic and Philosopher,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Wagner, Rudolf G., 2003, A Chinese Reading of the Daodejing: Wang Bi’s
Commentary on the Laozi with Critical Text and Commentary,
Albany: State University of New York Press.
Watson, Burton, 1968, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, New York:
Columbia University Press.
Williams, Paul, 1989, Mahāyāna Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations,
London/New York: Routledge.
Zhang, Dainian, 2002, Key Concepts in Chinese Philosophy, Edmund
Ryden (trans.), New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Winter 2023 Edition
105
The Kyoto School
Academic Tools
How to cite this entry.
Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP
Society.
Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet
Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO).
Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers, with links
to its database.
Other Internet Resources
International Association for Japanese Philosophy
European Network of Japanese Philosophy
Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture
The Japanese Philosophy Blog
Kyoto University Department of the History of Japanese Philosophy
Ishikawa Nishida Kitaro Museum of Philosophy [in Japanese]
The Nishida Philosophy Association
Related Entries
Daoism | existentialism | Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich | Heidegger,
Martin | Japanese Philosophy | Japanese Philosophy: Pure Land | Japanese
Philosophy: Zen Buddhism | mysticism | Nishida Kitarō | phenomenology |
Watsuji Tetsurō
Notes to The Kyoto School
1. Japanese names are written here in the Japanese order of family name
first, followed by given name. Exceptions are in the cases of Masao Abe
(Abe Masao in Japanese) and D. T. Suzuki (Suzuki Daisetsu in Japanese),
106
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
who write their given names first for their publications in Western
languages.
2. Keeping in mind that all the Kyoto School thinkers drew inspiration
from multiple religious traditions, it is nevertheless possible to see the
School’s generations of chair holders at Kyoto University as loosely
alternating between primarily Zen Buddhism (Z) oriented thinkers and
primarily Shin Buddhism (S) oriented thinkers: Nishida (Z and also S);
Tanabe (S and also Z); Hisamatsu Shinichi and Nishitani Keiji (Z);
Takeuchi Yoshinori (S); Tsujimura Kōichi and Ueda Shizuteru (Z); Hase
Shōtō and Keta Masako (S).
3. Frederick Franck’s edited volume, The Buddha Eye: An Anthology of
the Kyoto School (2004, first edition 1982), is often singled out for
criticism in this regard. While the book certainly provides us with an
important anthology of modern Japanese religious philosophy, it is
misleading to portray the Shin Buddhist thinkers Kiyozawa Manshi and
Soga Ryōjin, and the Zen master Kobori Sōhaku Nanrei, as members of
the Kyoto School. D. T. Suzuki is also normally not included under strict
definitions of the Kyoto School.
4. There are other shared pivotal ideas of the Kyoto School that could have
been chosen. For example, one could focus on the search for a new logic:
a logic of “the self-identity of absolute contradictories,” a “logic of soku-hi
(is and is not),” or an “absolute dialectic.” Or one could focus on the idea
of “self-awakening” or “self-awareness” (jikaku), which is not the selfconsciousness of a subjective ego but rather a “seeing without a seer,” an
“action-intuition,” or the non-dualistic awareness of a “self that is not a
self.” Alternatively, one could focus on the manner in which many of the
Kyoto School thinkers radically problematize the relation between
“philosophy” and “religion,” that is to say, the way their thought calls into
question accustomed ways of thinking the relation between reason and
Winter 2023 Edition
107
The Kyoto School
thought on the one hand, and experience, practice, and faith on the other.
For the purposes of this article, however, I think it best to focus on what is
generally accepted as the major philosophical thesis and theme of the
Kyoto School: their idea, or rather ideas, of absolute nothingness.
5. Plato’s highest Form, that of the Good, is said to be “beyond being” (see
The Republic 509b). Plotinus interprets Plato’s Good as “the One,” but for
him this is not only beyond being but also beyond all form as such. In this
respect, at least, as well as in the idea that the soul too must become
formless in order to return to this formless One beyond being, Plotinus’
One is closer than Plato’s Good to some of the Kyoto School’s ideas of
absolute nothingness (however, see section 3.4 below for Tanabe’s critique
of Nishida’s alleged affinity with Plotinus, and for Nishida’s response to
this critique). The following comment by Paul Friedländer on the
difference between Plotinus and Plato is revealing in this context: “That
the Highest must be without form or shape, that the soul must become
formless in order to comprehend it—there is nothing like this in Plato. …
It never did or could enter the mind of Plato, a citizen of so formconscious a world, to let the soul be dissolved in formlessness”
(Friedländer 1969, 83).
6. Nishitani reportedly admitted much later in conversation with Graham
Parkes that “the parallels between Nietzsche’s thinking and his own run
farther than he was prepared to allow in Religion and Nothingness”
(Parkes 1996, 381; see also Parkes 1984). For my own treatment of
Nishitani’s sympathetic critique of Nietzsche, see Davis 2011a. For a
defense of Heidegger from Nishitani’s critique, and a reading that sees a
great deal of harmony in their thoughts of nothingness, see Dallmayr
1993. It is hardly surprising that Heidegger would show a keen interest in
East Asian thought, given that he wished to think being understood as das
Nichts, which he felt was unthinkable within the Western tradition of
philosophy as onto-theology. For my own treatment of the resonances and
108
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Bret W. Davis
differences between Heidegger’s and the Kyoto School’s Zen
understanding of nothingness, see Davis 2013c. See also Parkes 1987;
Buchner 1989; and Denker et al. 2013
7. A full explication of the different notions of śūnyatā in the various
schools of Mahāyāna philosophy, and an investigation into their relation to
the Kyoto School’s philosophies of absolute nothingness, are tasks that lie
beyond the scope of this article. It would be fruitful to compare, for
example, the early Nishida’s philosophy of pure experience and his later
philosophy of the enveloping place of absolute nothingness, not only with
the Mādhamaka stress on the emptiness of any self-subsistent “ownbeing” in individual entities, and hence the emptiness of linguistic
concepts that inevitably isolate and reify and thus fail to grasp things, but
also with the Yogācāra idea of śūnyatā as the emptiness of the
subject/object distinction in the enlightened experience of the flow of
dependent origination, and with the Tathāgatagarbha idea of śūnyatā as the
emptiness of defilements, that is, as an expression for the original purity of
the Buddha-womb or Buddha-nature. For a good introduction to these
Mahāyāna schools, see Williams 1989. For an engaging introduction to
philosophical Daoism, see Moeller 2004. It should be noted, however, that
Moeller critically downplays the Wang Bi metaphysical interpretation of
the Daoist wu (according to which nothingness is an infinite and ineffable
source of finite beings; see Wagner 2003), while it is this influential
traditional interpretation that presumably exerted a significant influence on
the topological metaphysics of mu in at least Nishida’s middle period
writings. For an intriguing investigation into Nishida’s study of classical
Chinese philosophy and the influence it exerted on his thought, see
Dalissier 2009. For a lucid and insightful introduction to the Mādhamaka
and Daoist philosophies of śūnyatā and wu, and to their synthetic
developments in the Zen tradition, see Kasulis 1981. For my own attempt
to elucidate the various interrelated yet distinct senses of emptiness in Zen
Buddhism, with references to Kyoto School philosophies, see Davis
Winter 2023 Edition
109
The Kyoto School
Bret W. Davis
2013b. For an anthology on the topic of “nothingness” in various Asian
traditions, see Lin & Berger 2014.
of these and other philosophical sources that Nishida critically
appropriated when developing his logic of basho, see Jacinto 2001.
8. In his helpful remarks on the Eastern intellectual history behind the
Kyoto School’s idea of absolute nothingness, Whalen Lai writes: “Of the
eighteen forms of śūnyatā (emptiness) in Mahāyāna, two have captured
the Chinese imagination more than the others: śūnyatā-śūnyatā (the
emptiness of emptiness, a double negation that reaffirms the real); and
atyanta-śūnyatā … or ‘ultimate emptiness’. The latter is a total Emptiness
all around, and in that sense, is a precursor to [the Kyoto School’s]
absolute nothingness” (Lai 1990, 258). Indeed, if the notion of atyantaśūnyatā can be seen as a precursor to its topological aspect, the notion of
śūnyatā-śūnyatā can be understood to prefigure the dialectical and kenotic
(self-emptying) aspect of the Kyoto School’s absolute nothingness.
11. An English translation of “Basho” is available in Nishida 2012a. For a
German translation, see Elberfeld 1999. For studies of Nishida’s logic of
place, see Wargo 2005 and Krummel 2012. For other studies of Nishida’s
philosophy in English, see Carter 1997, Wilkinson 2009 (cf. Davis 2011b),
Maraldo 2020, and Krummel 2015.
9. I hyphenate “in-finite” here to stress that the infinite nothingness of the
Dao is found only in the midst of the natural flow of finite things.
Mahāyāna notions of śūnyatā (as śūnyatā-śūnyatā) and the Kyoto School
notions of absolute nothingness can be said to share this double sense of
“in-finity.” In other words, the truly infinite is found only in the very midst
of the finite.
10. Some scholars prefer to translate “basho” as “locus” or “topos.” Along
with Plato’s chora as the “receptacle of forms” (Timaeus 49; see NKZ IV,
209, 315; NKZ XI, 73) and Aristotle’s soul as the “topos of forms” (De
Anima 429a.15; see NKZ IV, 213), Nishida makes reference to Husserl’s
notions of “region” (Region) and the “field of consciousness”
(Bewusstseinsfeld) in working out his own idea of place (basho) (see NKZ
IV, 210). Since for Nishida the place of absolute nothingness completely
enfolds both subjective (noetic) and objective (noematic) polarities, he
comes to view Husserl’s phenomenological notion of the Region as
implying only its noetic aspect (see NKZ V: 237). For a detailed account
110
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
12. For an argument that Nishida’s philosophy of “self-awareness”
precludes a genuine relationship with the interpersonal other, see Heisig
2001, 82–83; for a response, see Davis 2002, 158ff.; 2014.
13. Decades later, Masao Abe became a prominent proponent of the idea
of the kenosis or “self-emptying” of God as absolute nothingness. While
Abe inherits this interpretation of kenosis from Nishida and Nishitani (see
NKZ XI, 398–99; NKC X, 65; Nishitani 1982, 59), he provocatively
develops it in dialogue and debate with leading Western theologians and
philosophers of religion (see Cobb/Ives 1990; Ives 1995).
14. Takeuchi Yoshinori understands Tanabe’s thought to have gone
through three transitions with regard to the question of the relation of
philosophy to religion (see Takeuchi 1999, Vol. 5, 47–65). According to
James Heisig’s explication, Takeuchi “lays out three patterns for the
philosophy of religion: a clear separation of the religious experience from
philosophical reflection, the pursuit of a kind of thinking which sees
philosophical thinking as at the same time belonging to religious
experience, and the search for a unity in the tension between these two
positions. These three patterns are then shown to represent transitions in
Tanabe’s own philosophy” (Heisig 2001, 324–25).
15. On Nishitani’s three-field topology of the step back through nihilism,
see Davis 2004, 155ff.
Winter 2023 Edition
111
The Kyoto School
16. In an uncharacteristic mistranslation Arisaka renders the phrase “our
world” as “the world,” giving the passage a far more ethnocentric meaning
(see Arisaka 1999, 242).
17. In other words, Nishida would be accused of promulgating a Japanese
version of what Derrida criticizes as the “logic of the example” used by
Eurocentric universalists such as Husserl, according to which Europe is
the particular that reveals the universal, the example that manifests the rule
(see Derrida 1992).
18. It should be kept in mind that both of these assertions mirror ones
frequently made in “the West,” which has—as Edward Said and other
critics of “Orientalism” have demonstrated—maintained its own identity
and sense of superiority in large part by positing an ultimately degrading
image of its “Other” as “the East” or “the Orient” (see Said 1978 and
1993). For example, the idea that one culture can provide the place toward
which all cultures are to progress also appears in the claim that American
style liberal democracy and free-market capitalism mark the teleological
“end of history” (see Fukuyama 1992). It is also found in the claim that
the true evolution of society lies in finishing the “unfinished project of
[Western] modernity,” which involves articulating universal rules of
discourse for communication between cultures (Habermas 1979). It is also
paradoxically found in the claim that “unity in diversity,” not imperialistic
hegemony, is the “true heritage of Europe,” a heritage that needs to be
“spread to all cultures around the world” (Gadamer 1989; also see
Gadamer’s statement quoted in Dallmayr 1996, xiii).
Copyright © 2023 by the author
Bret W. Davis
112
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy