The Symposium on Overcoming Modernity and Discourse in Wartime Japan

The symposium on overcoming modernity (kindai no chōkoku) that took place in Tokyo in 1942 has been much commented upon, but later critics have tended to over-emphasize the wartime political context and the ideological connection to Japanese ultra-nationalism. Closer examination shows that the background and the actual content of the discussion were more complicated. The idea of overcoming modernity had already appeared in debates among Japanese intellectuals before the war, and was always open to different interpretations; it could indicate Japanese ambitions to move beyond Western paradigms of modernity, but in other cases it referred to more radical visions of alternatives to modernity as such. Some versions linked up with Western critiques of existing modernity, including traditionalist as well as more future-oriented ones. These differentiations are evident in the symposium, and associated with diverse schools of thought. An important input came from representatives of the Kyoto school, the most distinctive current in twentieth-century Japanese philosophy. Despite the suppression of Marxist thought, the background influence of the unorthodox Marxist thinker Miki Kiyoshi was significant. Another major contribution came from the group known as the Japan Romantic School, active in literature and literary criticism. Other intellectuals of widely varying persuasions, from outspoken nationalists to Catholic theologians, also participated. The result was a rich but also thoroughly inconclusive discussion, from which no consensus on roads beyond modernity could emerge.

Epistemological resistances and the search for alternatives to modernity in intellectual history

The violence of modernity has led to epistemological resistances around the world and the search for alternative ways of reconstructing philosophy. Among the Frankfurt School and early Kyoto School thinkers, for instance, the problem of modernity is framed as an excess of objective rationality, but among the decolonial thinkers of Latin America, the problem is conceptualized as the very myth of modernity itself that has legitimized the colonization and exclusion of non-Europeans. In the search for alternatives modernities, the Kyoto School and Latin American philosophy agree to a vision of inter-civilizational dialogue, which amounts to an engagement of alterity or differences, whereas with the Frankfurt School, albeit struggles to find consensus on how to overcome modernity, aims to merely preclude the problem of reproducing the impulses toward the domination of oneself and others. Nonetheless, all these paradigms have a theoretical point of convergence: that is, since we are all participants of modernity, we are both victims and executioners of its violence, and thus compelled to negate it. This article will discuss how the violence of modernity is experienced, theorized, and then challenged around different continents in order to make visible not just how the violence of modernity is reproduced in different ways but to force ourselves to engage in self-critique in the pursuit to make explicit our own assumptions that repeats the violence of modernity.

Masao Abe

Masao Abe (阿部正雄, 1915–2006), was a prominent exponent of Japanese Zen Buddhism within academic circles in the West and made a distinguished contribution to comparative philosophy and interreligious dialogue. Abe’s Zen was shaped by the thought of the Kyoto school of Japanese philosophy and its principle of “absolute nothingness.” Abe linked absolute nothingness to the Buddhist principle of emptiness (sunyata) and based his engagement with Western philosophical thought and Christian theology on the Kyoto school’s appropriation of this Buddhist teaching. Abe began graduate studies in philosophy at Kyoto Imperial University in 1942, where he was influenced by Keiji Nishitani’s lectures on nihilism and the philosophy of religion. Shin’ichi Hisamatsu’s exposition of Zen challenged Abe’s youthful commitment to Pure Land Buddhism. After completing his studies, Abe worked as a professor at Nara University of Education (1952–1980), while also teaching periodically at Kyoto and Hanazono Universities. Starting in the 1950s, he began a study of Christian theology at Union Theological Seminary, with Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, and Western philosophy at Columbia University. After his retirement from teaching in Nara in 1980, Abe became a visiting professor at Claremont Graduate University and subsequently at the University of Hawai‘i, Purdue University, the University of Chicago, and several other American and European universities. He also participated at the East-West Philosopher’s Conference at the University of Hawai’i and, with John B. Cobb, was co-chair of the International Buddhist-Christian Theological Encounter (the “Cobb-Abe Group”). Abe’s version of Zen was influenced by D. T. Suzuki’s engagement with Western thought, and the philosophy of the Kyoto school, which began with the work of Kitaro Nishida and continued with Hajime Tanabe, Keiji Nishitani, and Shin’ichi Hisamatsu. Nishida, reflecting Japanese Zen teachings, articulated a logic arising within the standpoint (tachiba) of absolute nothingness (zettai mu), the “place” (basho) wherein all dualism is overcome. Nishitani and Hisamatsu would later link Nishida’s philosophy more explicitly with Buddhist teachings, especially the goal of “awakening” (jikaku) to the “emptiness” (sunyata) of all things in their “true suchness” (shinnyo). Based on these philosophical roots in the Kyoto school and following the example of D. T. Suzuki as an apostle of Zen in the West, Abe engaged in extensive comparative studies with Western philosophical thought and interreligious dialogue with Christians and Jews.

Comparison of self-reflection in Humboldtian Bildung and the Kyoto School

This article focuses on the importance of reflective experiences in education. It firstly reviews and compares the Humboldtian Bildung and the Kyoto School, represented by Nishida Kitaro. Both philosophies emphasize the importance of reflective experiences in education, criticising the specific knowledge-skill-based instruction approach. In this sense, the two views are similar. However, this article further explains the significant difference in how the self is considered in relation to the world within each thought, and therefore, how each educational approach is different, namely as seen in the idea of negative education from the Kyoto School. In the latter section, this article develops the discussion of reflection in the process of learning provided in the OECD Education 2030 framework, which was initiated in 2015 and that is still ongoing. Criticising didactic learning as the sole approach for knowledge and skill acquisition, the OECD Education framework advocates instead for the importance of student self-reflection in relation to society to support a broader development of necessary competencies. By comparing the two schools of thought, the article reveals the underlying assumption of self in Western mainstream educational philosophy, and it argues for the importance of open-mindedness toward the other worldview.

Field Recording and the Re-enchantment of the World: An Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Approach

Nonfictional field recording is a genre of music (sound art) which offers a glimpse of art beyond our late-capitalist age. The ongoing ecocide which we, in a state of abject detachment, are witnessing and abetting calls out for artists to reconnect and reengage with the nonhuman world that has been deemed valueless by our civilization. Countering the disenchantment of nature wrought by scientism, human-centrism, and above all capitalism necessitates a dissolving of the barriers we set up between ourselves and our environment, a task which can be only accomplished via religion or art: an art—like field recording—which affords reconnecting its audience with the enchantment of the ignored world surrounding them. In this article, Toshiya Tsunoda’s exemplary Somashikiba (2016)—recorded in locations forgotten by civilization—will be examined via interpretive tools adapted from Ueda Shizuteru’s Kyoto School aesthetics and Takahashi Mutsuo’s poetics. Ueda’s philosophy offers a way of understanding perception which eliminates the subject-object division. Takahashi’s project of recovering the spirituality of place through poetry is a model of historically and politically engaged art. Looking, as these contemporary Japanese thinkers have done, to the precapitalist, pre-formalist past to rediscover (sound) art’s function as a medium which reconfigures the listener’s perception of reality, I argue for the urgency of sound art such as Tsunoda’s which aids in the re-enchantment of the world to a future beyond capitalist, humanist “civilization.”

Dialetheism in the Work of Nishida Kitarō

This chapter shows that the 20th-century Kyoto School philosopher Nishida Kitarō was committed to dialetheism. We show that he argues both that the subject must be knowable as an object and that it cannot be known as an object. We also show that he argues that the self both is and is not identical to the world and to itself in the relation he calls “contradictory self-identity.” This chapter demonstrates that East Asian dialetheism persists in the 20th century.