On the question of the ideological foundations of traditional Japanese culture

The article is devoted to the analysis of the phenomenon of the tea ceremony and its main concept of wabi, without which it is impossible to understand the ideological foundations of Japanese spiritual culture. At the same time, the basic concept in which the tea ceremony is recognized and described leads to the ultimate category of the entire Far Eastern culture – Nothingness (Emptiness, nonexistence), which is crucial for understanding Japanese religions, philosophical and aesthetic thought. The article discusses the views of the founder of the Kyoto school of philosophy Nishida Kitaro (1870–1945) and some of his students on the nature of the categories of wabi and Nothingness. Also, an analysis of these categories by researchers of the second half of the 20th century, Izutsu Toshihiko and Izutsu Toyoko is given.

Kyoto School

The Kyoto school of philosophy pivots around three twentieth-century Japanese thinkers who held chairs of philosophy or religion at Kyoto University: Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945), Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962) and Nishitani Keiji (1900–91). Its principal living representatives, who also held chairs at Kyoto until their retirement, are Takeuchi Yoshinori (1913–) and Ueda Shizuteru (1926–). The keynote of the school was struck by Nishida in his attempt, on the one hand, to offer a distinctively Eastern contribution to the Western philosophical tradition by bringing key Buddhist concepts to bear on traditional philosophical questions, and on the other, to enrich Buddhist self-understanding by submitting it to the rigours of European philosophy. The name ‘Kyoto school’ was coined in 1932 by the Marxist philosopher Tosaka Jun (1900–45) to denounce what he saw as a bourgeois ideology – which he characterized as ‘hermeneutical, transhistorical, formalistic, romantic, and phenomenological’ – that had grown up around Nishida, Tanabe and their immediate disciples at the time. These latter included Miki Kiyoshi (1897–1945), Kosaka Masaaki (1900–69) and Koyama Iwao (1905–93) as well as the young Nishitani. At the time the Japanese state had taken its first definitive steps in the direction of a militaristic nationalism that would involve it in the ‘fifteen-year war’ with Asia and finally the West over the period 1930–45. As the leading philosophical movement in Japan, the Kyoto school was caught up in this history, although there was little unanimity among the responses of the principal figures. Postwar criticisms and purges of the Japanese intelligentsia attached a certain stigma to the school’s name, but later and more studied examination of those events, as well as the enthusiastic reception of translations of their works into Western languages, has done much to ensure a more balanced appraisal. Today, the philosophy of the Kyoto-school thinkers is recognized as an important contribution to the history of world philosophy whose ‘nationalistic’ elements are best recognized as secondary, or at least as an unnecessary trivialization of its fundamental inspirations. As a school of thought, the common defining characteristics of the Kyoto school may be seen in an overlap of four nodal concerns: self-awareness, the logic of affirmation-in-negation, absolute nothingness and historicity.

Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945)

Nishida Kitarō, the most significant and influential Japanese philosopher of the twentieth century, was the founder of the Kyoto School of Philosophy which focuses on the notion of pure experience or absolute nothingness. According to this worldview, the existence of social entities such as individuals, organizations, and societies is preceded by actions, relations, and experiences. Nishida’s work contributed to the emergence of a unique Japanese philosophy that combines Anglo-European philosophy with ancient Asian sources of thought such as Zen Buddhism and the philosophy of Lao Tzu. His thinking has profound implications for contemporary process organizational theorizing and especially for a revised comprehension of consciousness, self, world, and organization that is compatible with process philosophy. This chapter examines Nishida’s Zen-based philosophy and its relevance to self and process in organization studies.

Book review: Ontology of Production: Three Essays, written by Nishida Kitarō

This is a review-essay on William Haver’s recent translation of three essays by Nishida Kitarō in a volume entitled Ontologies of Production. Nishida is one of the founders of the famous Kyoto School of philosophy and, while his philosophy is not really Marxist, Haver attempts to bring Nishida into dialogue with Marx in his Introduction and through his selection of essays to translate. I attempt to situate Haver’s translation in a brief discussion of a recent debate on how to write modern Japanese intellectual history and, through this examination, I suggest a framework for analysing modern intellectual history drawing on the work of Harry Harootunian, Moishe Postone and Jacques Bidet. In short, this framework attempts to relate the production of ideas to the temporal dynamic associated with capital, the commodity-form and other related mediations that make up the modern global capitalist system. Then I turn to Haver’s Introduction and translations and both explain some of the key concepts of Nishida and show how, using the framework that I outlined, Nishida’s work can be conceived of as failing to understand its own conditions of possibility in the multiple mediations of capitalism. For this reason, Nishida’s work, like many other romantic critiques of capitalism, criticises the abstractions of modernity at an abstract level, failing to account for the mediations of capitalism such as class and the commodity.

On Tanabe’s Logic of Species

Tanabe Hajime (1885-1962), another pole of the so-called Kyoto-School of Philosophy of modern Japan, attempts to construct a dialectical, triadic logic of genus, species and individual as a creative synthesis between Eastern and Western philosophy. Although the formal pattern of his method is influenced by the Hegelian dialectic, the way of his thinking is rather prevailed by Kantian dualism. This makes a sharp contrast to his mentor Nishida Kitaro, whose logic of Topos or Place qua Absolute Nothingness is criticized as all-embracing and static in character by him. The difference between them might be parallel to that of Greek and Latin theology concerning the Trinity. Tanabe never presupposes any preexistent entity as the primordial One in the eternal dimension, but rather maintains the individuality as the free subjective agent in the field of history. The dichotomy between the universal and the individual is overcome in and through the mediation of the third term— the species — as the negatively self-realized, specific form of the genus. The species, however, turns out to be the self-estrangement, when it loses the perpetually negative mediation of the free subjective activity of the individual.