The putative fascism of the Kyoto School and the political

·期刊原文
The putative fascism of the Kyoto School and the political

by Graham Parkes
Philosophy East and West

Vol.47 No.3

Pp.305-336

1997.07

Copyright by University of Hawaii

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In the context of the flourishing of Asian and comparative
philosophy in Europe and the Americas over the past few decades, the
study of Japanese philosophy has remained relatively underdeveloped.
There are several reasons for this (some having to do with the
fields of expertise of the scholars who learned Japanese language
and culture in connection with the Second World War), but a recent
trend within the North American academy jeopardizes the study of the
most accessible area of Japanese philosophy: twentieth-century
thought--and the philosophy of the so-called "Kyoto School" in
particular. And if scholarship in this area declines, the study of
earlier figures and schools in the tradition may be correspondingly
inhibited. I am referring to the current fashion, evident in the
work of several figures in Japanese and Buddhist studies, of
branding thinkers associated with the Kyoto School, such as Nishida
Kitaro, Kuki Shuzo, and Nishitani Keiji, as mere fascist or
imperialist ideologues, with the implication that their work is
philosophically nugatory. The neo-Marxist revisionism that has been
sweeping (at least a corner of) the field of Japanology threatens to
suppress open discussion of some important ideas--and thereby risks
falling, with sad irony, into a "fascism of the left."(1)
My project is to consider critical treatments of the Kyoto School
thinkers at the hands of Tetsuo Najita and H. D. Harootunian,
Bernard Faure, Karatani Kojin, and Leslie Pincus. It will turn out
that the textual passages they cite, when they do cite texts, fail
to support their criticisms, usually because they ignore the context
(historical, intratextual, or both) of the passages they excerpt.
Indeed, the scholarship behind these criticisms is, in general,
poor--and in some cases even irresponsible, given how seriously
accusations of fascism or ultranationalism need to be taken in the
current global-political climate. And since most of the people
attacking the Kyoto School thinkers are prominent in their fields,
and in the relevant writings published by respectable university
presses, their criticisms call all the more urgently for a response.

To criticize the critics, however, is not to condone the political
writings of the Kyoto School thinkers. Some of this work is indeed
problematic and raises crucial questions concerning the relations
between philosophical and political discourse.(2) But rather than
treat these issues here, my concern is with exposing the
misconceptions generated by premature ideological critiques. And
although the focus will be on criticisms of a particular school of
Japanese philosophy, these reflections pertain more generally to
politically correct scholarship in Asian studies--and cultural
studies more generally.
A Background Sketch
The so-called "Kyoto School" of philosophy had its beginnings
through the association of the two foremost Japanese thinkers of
this century, Nishida Kitaro and Tanabe Hajime, who met as
colleagues at Kyoto University in 1918. By the end of the thirties
several other figures had become associated with them: notably Miki
Kiyoshi, Hisamatsu Shin'ichi, and Nishitani Keiji. Watsuji Tetsuro
and Kuki Shuzo also taught at Kyoto University, but their
association with the School was looser. Perhaps one factor that
conduced to the formation of a "school" concerned something that
most of these thinkers did not share, and were sharply criticized by
some of their colleagues (Tosaka Jun in particular) for not sharing,
and that was an enthusiastic devotion to Marxism.
During the thirties, Japan's fledgling democracy was far from
thriving. It was a time of militarist expansion abroad and
ultranationalism and fascist-style thought control at home. But
these developments, insalubrious though they were, have to be seen
in the broader historical context. Part of the motivation for
Japan's modernization was a feeling of vulnerability occasioned by
colonial expansion on the part of the major world (Western) powers.
On one hand the considerable might and bulk of the United States
were pushing in from the east, eventually reaching as far as the
Philippines, while on the other the European powers were advancing
through India and Indo-China to China itself, and the Russians were
laying claim to the islands to the north of Japan.(3)
As international tensions increased during the thirties, the
national mood became peculiarly ambivalent. There was a feeling of
resentment against Western imperialism and at the same time a
growing sense of pride (understandable in the circumstances) in
Japan's ability to defend itself and to establish itself as the
leading power in a "new world order" that would extend throughout
Asia as a counterbalance to the Western powers. In the late thirties
and early forties, around the time of the outbreak of the Pacific
War, several members of the Kyoto School--most notably Nishida,
Tanabe, Watsuji, and Nishitani--began to turn their attention to
political philosophy and published a number of texts that had
definite right-wing and nationalistic themes and tones to them.
Though these writings and discussions were actually excoriated by
the rightists in the military and the government at the time (for
not being rightist enough), they were just as sharply criticized by
the Marxists after the war (for being too rightist). Nishitani was
even relieved of his teaching position for several years by the
occupation authorities because of his putative contribution to
wartime propaganda.
During the fifties and sixties a greater number of Japanese ideas
began to be exported to the West, thanks in large part to the work
of D. T. Suzuki. It was not until the early eighties, however, when
more of the relevant texts began to become available in English
translation, that the ideas of the Kyoto School philosophers began
to arrive in the United States in relative force.(4) But given the
prevailing climate in mainstream Anglo-American philosophy (its
general ethnocentrism and tendency to focus on linguistic analysis),
these ideas found hospitable reception less in philosophy
departments than in schools of theology and departments of religious
studies. Thus most of the early enthusiasts of the Kyoto School came
to be interested primarily in the religious and soteriological
aspects of the philosophy, and not in its political dimensions or
implications. And while interest in modern Japanese thought has
remained high in the field of religion (where there has generally
been a greater openness to comparative studies), it is only more
recently that it has attracted the attention of a few professional
philosophers.
Around the time that the ideas of the Kyoto School were beginning to
gain currency, considerable changes were taking place in Japanese
studies in the United States. As the winds of intellectual fashion
blustered and veered, various waves of neo-Marxist,
deconstructionist, and postmodern revisionism rolled across the
field. In reaction against the tendency to find things Japanese
interesting because different, commentators intoxicated with ideas
of differance and alterite now began to accuse the Japanese of
merely "constructing" themselves as different, and a veritable
deconstruction industry got under way to show that they really
aren't as Other as they'd like to think. The good neo-Marxists among
these scholars naturally followed the Japanese Marxists in
criticizing the philosophy of the Kyoto School thinkers, their mood
apparently exacerbated by what they perceived as uncritical
enthusiasm on the part of non-Japanologist scholars in the
contemporary American academy.
The political writings of the,Kyoto School thinkers deserve to be
translated and discussed, since they contain much of interest
concerning the relations among philosophy and politics and
culture--even if their tone is sometimes nationalistic. But instead
of discussion there has been a tendency simply to denigrate the
authors of these texts by means of vague generalization and
innuendo. There is heavy irony in the way some of the critics deploy
Foucault's ideas about knowledge and power against their
opponents--yet refrain from applying them to their own cases.
Knowledge of Japanese seems to empower the promotion of one's views
untrammeled by considerations of responsible scholarship, potential
opponents being presumed impotent with respect to the sources.
Another feature of this syndrome is the frequent attempt to
establish guilt by association, especially with respect to the vexed
case of Heidegger's relations with Nazism. Some critics of the Kyoto
School act as if this case were crystal clear--that Heidegger's
involvement with National Socialism during the thirties vitiates his
philosophy as a whole--such that merely to mention the name
"Heidegger" and call attention to his influence on the Kyoto School
thinkers is deemed sufficient to damn their works as politically
pernicious. Although the Heidegger controversy continues to generate
more heat than light, with ardent enthusiasts and vehement
detractors writing past each other at high volume, there are in fact
some intriguing parallels between his case and that of the Kyoto
School thinkers who were influenced by him. If these parallels were
to be examined through reflective discussions of the problematic
texts on both sides, we might learn some helpful things about the
relations between philosophical ideas and political actualities.
It would be impertinent to pass general judgment on the scholarship
of the critics about to be discussed: my aim is simply to evaluate
their criticisms of the politics of the Kyoto School thinkers. In
the interests of keeping this response to a reasonable length, the
primary focus will be on Nishitani Keiji, for along with Nishida he
seems to take the main brunt of the criticism. But I shall also
consider the case of Kuki Shuzo, an important thinker about whom
little has been written in English, since most of what has been
written about him stands to discourage further discussion of his
ideas.
The "Fascism" of the Kyoto Faction
In volume 6 of The Cambridge History of Japan there is a
contribution titled "Japanese Revolt against the West: Political and
Cultural Criticism in the Twentieth Century," by Tetsuo Najita and
H. D. Harootunian. In the course of an illuminating account of the
project of situating Japan's cultural identity vis-a-vis the West,
the authors show how a concern with the nature of Japanese culture
tended to devolve into assertions of its uniqueness--a phenomenon
that is now the major industry of nihonjinron. At the beginning of a
section titled "Cultural Particularism," they identify four students
of Nishida's who were associated with the Kyoto School (Nishitani
among them) as "the Kyoto faction" and refer to a 1941 symposium
titled "The World Historical Position and Japan," the proceedings of
which were published in three installments in the journal Chuokoron,
and then as a book in 1943. Their characterization of the
proceedings deserves to be quoted at some length.
[The] group's central purpose was to construct what they called a
"philosophy of world history" that could both account for Japan's
current position and disclose the course of future action. But a
closer
examination of this "philosophy of world history" reveals a thinly
disguised justification, written in the language of Hegelian
metaphysics, for Japanese aggression and continuing
imperialism. In prewar Japan, no group helped defend the state more
consistently and enthusiastically than did the philosophers of the
Kyoto
faction, and none came closer than they did to defining the
philosophic
contours of Japanese fascism.
The Kyoto philosophers specified Nishida's ontological concept of
"space" to mean the "world stage" where all human and social
problems
will be resolved under Japan's leadership role. History, or the
world stage,
consisted of the interaction of "blood" and "soil," a conclusion
already
reached by a number of Nazi apologists.... Thus despite their use of

abstract philosophical language, the Kyoto philosophers unashamedly
spoke on behalf of Japanese imperial expansion as the creative
moment
of a vast historical movement to a new level of human excellence.(5)

Any impression that the term "fascism" might have been used in a
momentary access of hyperbole is dispelled by the subsequent claim
that "the members of the Kyoto faction openly acknowledged their
admiration of European fascism and its own struggle with the forces
of modernity," by further references to "the fascism of the Kyoto
faction," and by a characterization of "some of the members of the
Kyoto faction" as "Japanese-style fascists."(6) No justification is
offered for the application of this harsh label, nor any evidence
beyond a brief quotation from a secondary source dating from 1958.
Although brief, the account of the symposium is flawed in several
respects. For one thing, there are differences among the voices and
ideas of the four participants. Kosaka Masaaki and Koyama Iwao come
across as more vehement than Nishitani Keiji and Suzuki Shigetaka,
whose utterances tend to be more moderate.(7) It is unhelpful to
talk of "the fascism of the Kyoto faction" or the political
perniciousness of "the Kyoto School" in general, in view of the wide
variety of positions held by the individual members. And if such
labels are then applied with similar disparagement to thinkers as
different as Nishida, Tanabe, Watsuji, and Nishitani, all the
interesting issues become obfuscated. What is required instead are
responsible readings of the writings of each particular thinker, on
the basis of which that thinker's political ideas can be evaluated.
Second, the criticism of the "Kyoto faction" for their justification
of "Japanese aggression and continuing imperialism" is somewhat
one-sided, in view of the larger historical context. Without meaning
to extenuate the atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese military
during the thirties, one can observe that the opposition of the
Kyoto School thinkers to British, Dutch, and American imperialist
expansion in East-Asia is not simply groundless. While nationalism
often has disastrous effects, in the form of resistance against
imperialistic expansion it can be quite understandable--unless one
insists on judging the views of academics in Japan during the early
forties by the standards of American political correctness of the
nineties. The point is not to condone Japanese aggression during the
period in question, nor to absolve the Kyoto School philosophers who
supported it, but rather to emphasize the complexity of the
historical and political context and the qualified nature of the
philosophers' support of their government.
Another shortcoming of the account in The Cambridge History is the
omission of some relevant circumstances surrounding the symposium.
An essay detailing these circumstances and their implications, based
on a careful reading of the proceedings and relevant secondary
literature in Japanese, is available in English.(8) It is important
to know that neither the account published serially in Chuokoron nor
the book The World-Historical Standpoint and Japan is a full or
accurate transcript of the discussions: they were both heavily
edited, "veiling statements in two or three layers of cloth," in
order to avoid being suppressed by the authorities.(9) The main
theme of the first session (November 1941) was originally "How to
avoid war [with the United States]," but it was changed after the
attack on Pearl Harbor to "How to bring the war to a favorable end
as soon as possible, in a way rationally acceptable to the
Army."(10) Since the Japanese army was far more bellicose and
powerful than the navy, which had some lines of communication to the
Kyoto School thinkers, the extensive criticisms of the army and
General Tojo that were in the original transcripts had to be
expurgated. This left the misleading impression of "total support
for the war effort among the Kyoto school thinkers."
Furthermore, even the edited transcripts of the symposium were
immediately attacked by the nationalists as being too tame,
"seditious and anti-war." The reaction of the army to the 1943
publication was to order the suppression of public activities by the
"Kyoto faction" and forbid any further print runs of the book or
mention of their ideas in the press.(11) These circumstances make
Najita's and Harootunian's claim that "in prewar Japan no group
helped defend the state more consistently and enthusiastically than
did the philosophers of the Kyoto faction" look rather dubious.
(More appropriate candidates for this honor would be the zealous
proponents of the official "Imperial Way" philosophy [kodo
tetsugaku], such as Inoue Tetsujiro.) Nor is their talk of the Kyoto
faction's "defining the philosophic contours of Japanese fascism"
any better grounded--especially when one considers that fascism
tends, by its very nature, to lack "philosophic contours."(12)
The general point, then, concerns the importance of situating the
political utterances of philosophers in appropriate historical
context. Appeal to nationalist sentiment in a country justifiably
apprehensive in the face of continuing Western imperialism means
something very different from (for example) its significance in a
country just released from the domination of a superpower and eager
for self-assertion in the newest world order. If we are to think
about such historical issues in terms of their potential for
illuminating similar, contemporary problems--and this is surely the
most fruitful way to think about them--we must nevertheless try to
understand the earlier phenomena in their full historical context.
What the Cambridge History article misses and a reading of the text
of the discussions reveals, as Horio Tsutomu has emphasized, is that
the title The World-Historical Standpoint and Japan indicates a
genuine effort by the participants to articulate Japan's potential
place among the leading nations from a world-historical perspective
rather than one of mere nationalism and imperialism. While they do
discuss Gobineau and his theory concerning "purity of blood"--which
was a major source for Nazi racism--they specifically reject it in
favor of Leopold Ranke's idea of "moral energy." This, as Koyama
remarks, has nothing to do with "blood" but is rather "concentrated
in the 'people of a country' [kokumin] culturally and
politically."(13)
After linking the "Kyoto faction" to the Nazis by spurious talk of
"blood and soil," Najita and Harootunian briefly consider the
attempt in the second symposium to provide a moral justification for
the Pacific War. While the proceedings do contain some flimsy
rationalizations, there is also a sincere attempt to elaborate a
philosophy for a new "pluralistic world order"--even if the idea is
for Japan to occupy a position of leadership in this plurality.
Horio provides an account of this attempt and shows how far removed
it is from "the standpoint of Nazism and fascism" (as from the views
of the "Nazi apologists" with which Najita and Harootunian want to
associate it).(14) This strong pluralist and internationalist thrust
in the "world-historical" thinking of the Kyoto School, which was
initiated by Nishida and elaborated by Nishitani, is something their
critics tend to overlook or ignore. The critical perspective needs
to be broadened--beyond severely edited transcripts of symposia held
on the eve and morning of a horrendous war--and to include texts the
Kyoto School thinkers published around that time on similar
topics.(15)
In case these criticisms of the Najita and Harootunian contribution
seem excessive, I should remark on the special place it occupies in
the literature. The chapter in The Cambridge History will be
consulted for many years to come by people without the background to
evaluate the validity of what they find there, and the eminence of
the authors will discourage readers from asking whether the picture
they give of the Kyoto School may be distorted through ideological
bias.
The "Youthful Errors" of Nishitani Keiji
A similar posture is to be found in a work by Bernard Faure, Chan
Insights and Oversights, which otherwise contains some interesting
revisioning of aspects of the Buddhist tradition.(16) In the course
of a brief discussion of "the postwar Kyoto School" at the end of a
chapter titled "Zen Orientalism," Faure reiterates an earlier claim
that "the development of the nationalist tendencies in Nishida's
thought can be seen in the work of his disciples."(17) He then
quotes comments by Nishitani which he says come from "the January
1942 symposium 'The Standpoint of World History and Japan'":(18)
Is it not that the political consciousness of the Germans is more
advanced? I believe too that in people such as Hitler the
consciousness of
the necessity to restore an interior order is clearer than in
Japanese
rulers.... Although today the various peoples of the East have no
national
consciousness in the European way, this is perhaps a chance for the
construction of the [Greater East Asia] Coprosperity sphere ...
because it
means that they are being constituted as people of the Coprosperity
sphere from a Japanese point of view. [ellipses in original]
Faure's comment on this passage is: "As far as I know, Nishitani has
never manifested any regret for such youthful errors, nor has this
aspect of his work ever been discussed among his disciples." But it
is by no means clear what these "youthful errors" consist in. After
all, in January of 1942 Nishitani was forty-one years old and Japan
had just entered the War on the side of Germany. Is his saying that
the leader of Japan's primary ally was more clearly conscious of the
need to "restore an interior order" than were the leaders of his own
country really something for which he should have "manifested
regret"?
What the other "youthful errors" might be is harder to ascertain,
especially since the words after the first ellipsis are not to be
found on the page cited in Faure's footnote to the quotation--nor
within the range an ellipsis normally connotes.(19) They turn out to
be not a direct quotation but rather a free paraphrase of remarks by
Nishitani that appear a few pages later--the force of which can be
appreciated only in the context of what follows and precedes them.
Reflecting on the ills of Western imperialism, Nishitani observes
that English, Dutch, and American colonialism in Malaysia,
Indonesia, and the Philippines have followed a strategy of
guaranteeing the peoples they colonize a relatively comfortable
existence--while actually pursuing policies of exploitation (a kind
of "opium policy," he calls it).(20) He then emphasizes his concern
that Japan not fall into this kind of role in East Asia.
For example, each of the peoples that make up Europe has reached an
extremely high level. By contrast, in Greater East Asia the only
one,
generally speaking, to have reached the same level is Japan, while
the
other peoples have remained for the most part at a much lower level.
This
means, I think, that the task of gradually bringing those peoples to
a
higher level, inculcating national awareness in them, and making
them be
sustaining forces in the Greater East Asia sphere voluntarily and
autonomously will turn out to be the unique mission of Japan in the
Greater
East Asia sphere. In this respect Japan's attitude toward the other
peoples
in the Greater East Asia sphere has to be radically different in
spirit
from the European attitude.(21)
What Nishitani is actually saying here hardly seems so egregious as
to require subsequent repentance in public. Perhaps this kind of
talk could lend itself, as critics have feared, to "appropriation by
nationalist ideologies," but the fact that the ultranationalists in
power at the time actually censured Nishitani for his opinions can
diminish our anxiety over this point. His attitude may be elitist
and condescending, but it is hardly fascistic; and the nationalistic
tone is tempered by his concern that the other nations of East Asia
develop a sense of national self-awareness, albeit under Japan's
guidance.
Nishitani's term "high level" (takai suijun) is admittedly somewhat
vague. But while it may be, from the neo-Marxist perspective of
radical egalitarianism, an "error" to claim that Japan is culturally
superior to its neighbors in East Asia, to those of us who believe
that some cultures have reached a higher level than others
Nishitani's claim may not appear obviously erroneous. The
politically correct conceit that any claim of superiority or
inferiority is per se suspect is exerting an especially stultifying
effect on several areas in Asian studies. One can dismiss the
ludicrous excesses of nihonjinron and still plausibly claim
that--with the obvious exception of China--the history of Japanese
culture is richer than those of its East Asian neighbors. (Put less
contentiously: one could argue--on the basis of Japan's
contributions in the fields of poetry and the novel, drama and
theater, music and dance, painting, architecture, and film--that the
country has more to offer well-informed students of culture in the
West.)
Faure calls for "an ideological critique" of the thought of
contemporary Kyoto School philosophers--adding that "as in the case
of Heidegger, we cannot help asking to what extent the
'philosophical text' is affected in its content by the ideological
and political 'context'."(22) Though it is unclear whether such a
critique would be a critique of ideology or would itself be
ideological, one can concur on the importance of considering
philosophical texts in their political contexts. But if Faure wants
to regard the edited transcription of Nishitani's remarks concerning
Hitler as a "philosophical text," the relevant context would surely
be any discussions of Hitler that Nishitani might have published
around that time. One finds just such a discussion in the concluding
essay of a book originally published in 1940, Shukyo to bunka
(Religion and culture), in a brief section titled "Hittora undo no
seishin" (The spirit of the Hitler movement).(23) Since this piece
is the one that Nishitani's detractors most love to hate, it
deserves a brief discussion before we proceed.
If one reads beyond the title of "The Spirit of the Hitler
Movement," it becomes clear that Nishitani's attitude toward Hitler,
as distinct from the spirit that animated the movement, is deeply
ambivalent. What at first impressed him in his reading of Mein Kampf
was apparently the fact that Hitler appeared to be adopting "a
standpoint of 'brute nature' in order to establish a new
spirit."(24) To appreciate what is going on here, one must realize
the extent to which Nishitani is responding to features of the
Hitler movement that appeared similar to ideas he already admired in
Nietzsche.(25) In view of his enthusiasm for Nietzsche from the time
of his youth, it is hardly surprising that Nishitani should find
congenial Hitler's tirade against the decadence of modern Europe and
the pettiness of utilitarian rationalism, as well as his call for a
reconnection with brute nature and the roots of instinct. (One might
recall that Nishitani wrote this essay not long after his return
from Europe, where he had spent two years studying with Heidegger at
the time of his famous lecture-courses on Nietzsche.) But to
understand Nishitani on this issue, it is necessary in turn to avoid
the common misunderstandings of Nietzsche's ideas.
Readers outraged by Nietzsche's talk of cruelty and violence, for
instance, generally fail to notice that he is advocating cruelty and
violence toward oneself, in the practice of self-discipline, rather
than toward others.(26) And when Nietzsche distinguishes the noble
type of human being from the common by its capacity for
self-sacrifice, which seems motivated by passion and contrary to
reason, what he admires is its disregard for calculating its own
interest. Nietzsche's elitism and his praise for an aristocracy of
talent make him unsentimental when it comes to supporting the
decadent and succoring the weak--but this unsentimentality does not
make him the advocate of barbarism that so many critics have made
him out to be. What is missing in Hitler (and the entire Nazi
appropriation of Nietzsche's ideas), therefore, are two key
elements: Nietzsche's emphasis on the disciplining of the drives and
passions for a "renaturalization" of the human being and on the
reflexive turn that make possible the self-knowledge and contempt
for oneself that are the sine quibus non for the difficult task of
self-overcoming to which he calls his serious readers. Hitler's
fanatical nationalism and rabid anti-Semitism--tendencies utterly
despised by the mature Nietzsche--further distance his enterprise
from the Nietzschean project that appeals to Nishitani.
The aspect of the Hitler movement that did not appeal to Nishitani
was Hitler's racism and his ravings about the natural superiority of
the Aryans--especially since they are accompanied by derogatory
remarks about the Japanese.(27) Although those remarks were excised,
for diplomatic reasons, from the Japanese translation of Mein Kampf,
Nishitani read the unexpurgated German edition. In the same vein, he
and his colleagues rejected, in the symposium discussed above,
Gobineau's ideas about racial purity.
There is, however, one point in Nishitani's discussion of the Hitler
movement on which he appears to diverge from the Nietzschean line,
and that is where he talks favorably of Hitler's excoriations of
egoistic self-preservation and exhortations to individuals to be
prepared to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the greater
community of the nation.(28) In condoning the association of
self-sacrifice with the idea of the nation, Nishitani exhibits a
disconcerting blindness to the dangers of totalitarianism. This part
of this text deserves careful examination--optimally by an inquirer
who first establishes a comprehensive understanding of the ethically
disconcerting pronouncements here (an understanding of them in
context and in awareness of the relevant influences that may be at
work) before rushing to judgment. At any rate, in this essay
Nishitani refrains from developing the theme of giving one's life
for the nation, nor does it appear to be elaborated in his other
writings or to be part of a major theme in his thinking as a
whole.(29) His approval of Hitler on the glories of the ultimate
self-sacrifice is perhaps to be ascribed to a temporary access of
nationalistic feeling on Nishitani's part, in the context of an
unprecedented international crisis.
Nishitani's major concern in this text, however, is to attain a new
standpoint that enables the individual to be connected not only to
the nation but also to what he calls "world humanity."(30) And so,
while he sees Hitler's attempt to combat the ills of modern Europe
by the attempt to "overcome the modern spirit" and establish a new
ethos as at least a step in the right direction, he points up the
limitations of such an approach and criticizes it for being narrowly
nationalistic.
It is clear that [Hitler's] standpoint lacks the ideals of humanity
and
world-citizenship as developed ... in the earlier German idea of
spiritual life, which was a transformation of the concept of
universal
love in Christianity. Ultimately, it lacks the religious
dimension.(31)
What is necessary, for Nishitani, is to go beyond the phase of brute
naturalism by "superseding" it, so that spirit can reappear as "raw
life."(32) In this way, reason and spirit and a cosmopolitan sense
of humanity can be preserved, and a "totalitarian" view of the
nation be avoided.
The essay ends by entertaining the possibility that a synthesis of
the ethos of Confucianism (with its emphasis on such practical
concerns as ethics, politics, and economics) and Zen (which aims to
"transcend ordinary reason and spirit and manifest itself
immediately as raw life") might help to resolve the current crisis
in Europe--in which case the Japanese spirit would for the first
time attain "world-historical significance."(33) This is a
prefiguration of the position Nishitani adopts in the Chuokoron
symposia, though what he is saying here, when read in politically
correct circles, may be drowned out by the sound of kneejerking in
reaction to his talk of "the Japanese spirit." Since the current
cultural situation in Europe and America would benefit, in my
opinion, from an injection of the kinds of Confucian and Zen ideas
Nishitani discusses, I find whatever nationalistic elements there
are in this essay to be relatively tolerable. If his enthusiasm over
Japan's imminent entrance onto the stage of world history appears
overly idealistic, one might recall that he had just returned from
two years in Europe, where he would have experienced at first hand a
range of Eurocentric prejudices in the context of a generally dismal
situation, to which his enthusiasm over the Japanese spirit may have
been a reaction.
The point of this excursion has not been to exonerate Nishitani but
rather to emphasize the complexity of the interpretative situation.
If moral judgments are to be made, they need a firmer basis than the
citation out of context of an approving remark about Hitler.
Nishitani's Incorrect Ideology--Reprise
Faure's criticisms of Nishitani could be dismissed as a merely
incidental polemic if it weren't for the fact that he amplifies them
in a broader treatment of the Kyoto School that he contributed to a
multiauthor volume of Japanese studies.(34) In this later essay, the
section formerly titled "The Postwar Kyoto School" is called
"Nishitani Keiji and the Postwar Kyoto School" and begins with an
inauspicious reference to "the 'philosophical' activity of the
postwar Kyoto school."(35) Since the word apparently lacks an
original, the quotation marks around "philosophical" must be
intended as "scare" quotes. Professional philosophers will be
impressed by the insouciance with which nonphilosophers in the field
of Japanese or Buddhist studies are prepared to claim that the
philosophy of the Kyoto School is not really philosophy. One might
have thought that in this domain the dictum "It takes one to know
one" would hold; but Faure--whose references to the "enchanted
circle of philosophy" and to "Nishitani's 'philosophical'
statements" suggest he is above it all--apparently knows better.(36)

This time around, the quotation of Nishitani's remark in the second
Chuokoron symposium is at least given some context--though the
statement "These symposia advocated total war as the unification of
all dimensions of human life" is a misleading characterization of
the proceedings.(37) Faure continues:
Admittedly, Japanese intellectuals like Nishitani did not commit any

war crime and perhaps they knew little about those committed in the
name of the Japanese emperor. Nishitani's political position, like
Nishida's, remained very abstract, removed from actual political
events. Rut it is precisely this tendency toward abstraction, which
will
characterize his later religious and "suprahistorical" thought--that

could be seen as a withdrawal from the sphere of concrete action, a
kind of trahison des clercs that leaves the field open to
fascism--if it does not actively endorse and legitimize it. It is
the same tendency toward abstraction or idealization that could make
the imperial mystique (or the Nazi mystique for Heidegger) look so
seductive, and that allowed them to regard as incidental the
violence that followed (cf. Lacoue-Labarthe 1987, 21).
Here we have the same kind of association of Nishitani's ideas with
fascism as we found in the more direct, though no better
substantiated, assertions of Najita and Harootunian.
Insofar as the problem appears to be a "tendency toward
abstraction," one has to wonder how carefully Faure has read the
texts he is criticizing. In the symposia, the "political positions"
expressed are remarkably concrete (especially for a discussion among
four philosophers): the participants are assessing the philosophical
implications of the current historical situation in response to
"actual political events" that were unfolding, as it were, before
their very eyes. (The outbreak of the Pacific War occurred thirteen
days after the first session.) As Horio remarks, the
attempts--however unsuccessful--by the Kyoto School thinkers to come
to a rational understanding of the historical crisis in which Japan
found itself at the end of 1941 were in that context
exceptional.(38) And what distinguishes Nishitani's "later religious
and 'suprahistorical' thought" is precisely his abiding concern with
problems of history--especially as evidenced in the two major texts
Faure goes on to discuss.(39) The contention that Nishitani's
"tendency toward abstraction" made "the imperial mystique look so
seductive" is equally groundless.(40) In view of the fact that
Nishitani is distinguished from his colleagues by having virtually
nothing to say about the emperor, and little more about the
"national polity" (kokutai), one has to suppose that Faure is here
confusing Nishitani with Nishida, who does talk about the emperor
system.
When Faure finally gets around to posing some pertinent questions,
they turn out to be merely rhetorical.
One of the many horns of the hermeneutical dilemma could be
expressed as follows: by what right could one put Nishitani on
trial?
And yet, how could one avoid doing so? As far as I know, Nishitani
has never manifested any regret for such youthful errors, nor has
this
aspect of his work ever been discussed among his disciples.(41)
Finally we are back to the earlier text--though the antecedent of
"such" is now so far away that the nature of these youthful errors
is even more obscure. The prosecution imagery suggests that there is
something more going on than intellectual inquiry, but the
resolution of the dilemma is in any case simple. One would have the
right to put Nishitani on trial if there were good grounds for
supposing him guilty of a crime (whether juridical or intellectual).
Since such grounds have not been provided, to avoid putting him on
trial will scarcely drain our moral and intellectual energies.
Faure goes on to invoke Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe again, and
specifically his criticism of Heidegger's postwar silence concerning
his espousal of National Socialism, in order to conclude that
[what we should find most] disturbing is that Nishitani, like
Heidegger,
Eliade, or de Man, while assuming the status of a maitre a
penser--and in his case even of an enlightened spiritual master--for

later generations, remained silent about his past.(42)
Aside from the fact that we still haven't been told what these
crimes are about which Nishitani should have spoken out, the analogy
with Heidegger is misleading. Heidegger joined the Nazi party as a
public figure, thereby endorsing its racism and anti-Semitism, of
which he was well aware (to whatever extent he personally may not
have subscribed to them). Whatever errors he committed, Nishitani
refused to align himself publicly with Japanese imperialists or
ultranationalists--and he specifically rejected the racism of the
European fascists in order to promote a "world-historical" view of
Japan's potential role in the international order.
Faure then proceeds to a new discussion, of Nishitani's 1949 text
The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism. In this text, he claims: "Nishitani
blames the war on Western nihilism and its influence on Japanese
imperialists, and he advocates a return to the Japanese tradition,
without ever realizing that the ideology of tradition was itself a
cause of the war".(43) This statement would understandably deter the
potential reader of Nishitani's book from even bothering to pick it
up, so bizarrely naive does its author's contention sound. But
Faure's statement is simply false: there is not a single mention of
"the war" in The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, far less a claim that
it was occasioned by "Western nihilism." Nor does Nishitani advocate
"a return to the Japanese tradition" in any simple sense; again
following Nietzsche, he calls for a creative reappropriation of
certain elements of the tradition: "The point is to recover the
creativity that mediates the past to the future and the future to
the past (but not to restore a bygone era)".(44)
In the course of a later barrage of questions, Faure again touches
on an important point:
How do the ideological commitment to wartime effort and the lack of
any later disavowal affect the thought of Nishitani? Are they merely

accidents, temporary failures, that leave his philosophy basically
intact, or do they leave an indelible stigma? ... Do they not
afflict or
shatter the whole system by revealing its blind spot?(45)
These are important questions, but instead of trying to answer them
it Faure simply asserts:
It is important to acknowledge the possibility of a "continuity
between
Nishitani's wartime writings and his postwar exercises in an
apolitical and
thereby 'innocent' philosophy of religion."
Now we have scare quotes around "innocent"--although this time they
turn out to occur in a one-sentence innuendo at the end of a
one-page review of a book on Nietzsche and Asian thought.(46) This
is a strange gesture indeed: to answer a series of questions by
citing a pronouncement by someone who doesn't appear to have
contributed to the debate about the Kyoto School or published
anything relevant to it. A look at the larger context of the
quotation from the review (by William Haver) is revealing:
What is most disturbing here is the aspiration to "overcome" what is

perceived as a "nihilism." Not only is the entirely uncritical
beatification
(if not deification) of the late Nishitani Keiji as the avatar of a
philosophical "new world order" extremely problematic in view of the

continuity between Nishitani's wartime writings and his postwar
exercises in
an apolitical and thereby "innocent" philosophy of religion; it is
the
pronounced tendency in many of these essays ... to think of
comparative
philosophy's synthesis of "East" and "West" in the mode of a
redemptive
reintegration in the totality, which echoes wartime Japanese debates
on
"overcoming the modern," various expositions of the Japanese emperor
system
and the logic of a "Western" liberal humanism, that ultimately leave

unthought what has not yet been thought, but which imperatively
needs to be
thought.
I leave to the reader the hermeneutical task of determining the
function of these multiple sets of quote marks (of which only the
first two denote quotations from the book under review), which
appear to be a hallmark of writing critical of the Kyoto School. The
putative beatification/ deification of Nishitani consists in the
fact that several contributors to the anthology cite his works, and
I myself characterize him as "a major precursor in the discipline of
comparative philosophy".(47) If this is beatification or
deification, then paradise and the pantheon must be bursting at the
seams by now.
The reference to "the continuity between Nishitani's wartime
writings and his postwar exercises in an apolitical and thereby
'innocent' philosophy of religion" seems to suggest that all readers
who are au courant will simply "know" that the continuity is
sinister and the wartime writings sufficiently pernicious to vitiate
Nishitani's subsequent work. But if Haver is so disturbed by the
problematic effects of these wartime writings, why hasn't he written
about them to demonstrate just how awful they are? Better yet:
translate the most heinous ones, so that they can speak their
iniquity for themselves. The fact that Faure should have no qualms
in adducing Haver's insinuations in support of what purports to be a
scholarly discussion of Nishitani's work is indicative of the level
at which criticism of the Kyoto School tends to be conducted.
Faure goes on to add "nihonjinron ideology" to the list of
Nishitani's transgressions:
Although he does not subscribe to a simplistic brand of nativism, as
is
obvious from the following passage, he plays an active role in the
nihonjinron ideology: "We Japanese have fallen heir to two
completely
different cultures.... This is a great privilege that Westerners do
not share
in . . . but at the same time this puts a heavy responsibility on
our
shoulders: to lay the foundations of thought for a world in the
making, for a
new world united beyond differences of test and West" (xxviii).(48)
These remarks of Nishitani's were published thirty years ago, long
before multiculturalism came into vogue, and at a time when hardly
anyone in the West was devoting serious thought to thinking across
cultures. When Nishitani writes that Westerners do not share in the
privilege of falling heir to two different cultures, he is making an
important point. Certain strands of modern Japanese philosophy are
unique in their having roots in the Indian Buddhist, Chinese Daoist,
and Western philosophical traditions in addition to indigenous
Japanese thinking. There are no parallels in the Western tradition,
insofar as Greek, Judaic, and Arabic influences constitute a
narrower range of sources, couched in languages that are far more
closely related than, say, the Sanskrit and Chinese and European
languages through which the sources feeding modern Japanese
philosophy are channeled. To this extent one can claim that the
multiple genealogy of some of the Kyoto School thinkers is without
parallel--which is not to say that this unique heritage makes it
necessarily superior.
Faure ends the section on Nishitani with an even stranger gesture,
but one eloquent enough to speak for itself:
In the title of the translation of his book on European nihilism,
The
Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, the bold initials form an acronym that
reads: SOON. Is this subliminal message appropriate in a
"philosophical"
work? The eschatological tone of this book, originally written
several years
after the war, is disturbingly close to that of Nishitani's wartime
writings.(49)
The next section reveals another ground for Faure's antipathy in the
shape of the recently founded "New Kyoto School," which is indeed
the source of many ideas in the chauvinistic nihonjinron vein. One
wonders whether it isn't in fact the contemporary spokesmen for the
unique magnificence of Japanese culture that are the major cause of
the indignation of the critics of the original Kyoto School.(50) But
if that is so, then let their thought be criticized as distinct from
that of the Kyoto School proper, against which in any case these
epigones tend reactively to define themselves.
Faure's discourse culminates in its penultimate paragraph with a
remarkable piece of auto-deconstruction:
The recent increase of interest in the philosophy of the Kyoto
School in the
West makes this ideological critique more urgent. However, rather
than
accusing or excusing individual authors, we should shift the focus
to
ourselves, and realize that our accusing or excusing, excluding or
including, is never neutral; that our reading these texts, our
reception, is
always verging on deception.
Well said, indeed. But what is remarkable about this candid remark
is the way it unwittingly echoes the theme of an essay of
Nishitani's from 1949, which, though it was directed at earlier
critics, applies perfectly to the contemporary ones:
Unless the critique recognizes the possibility of fascism within
itself and
purifies its terms from within, it only targets others and misses
the real
danger.... To look at fascism as a matter of the past, as other
people's
affairs, is to create a condition for its [re]emergence.(51)
Kuki Shuzo and Japanese Imperialism
It is a pity that one of the few English commentaries on the
philosopher Kuki Shuzo should be as biased against its subject as
the essay by Leslie Pincus titled "In a Labyrinth of Western
Desire."(52) Since it begins by adducing a discussion by Karatani
Kojin of Kuki's best known work, "Iki" no kozo (The structure of
"iki") (1930), the relevant section of Karatani's essay is a good
place to start--even though space doesn't permit a consideration of
Karatani's overall view of Kuki (as exemplified in other,
untranslated texts).
Karatani introduces Kuki by way of Heidegger's mention of iki in his
"Conversation on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer"
(1954), and he is surely right in saying that Heidegger remained "in
total ignorance of what iki is."(53) But he then goes on to claim
that, even though Kuki was different from "those who preached
anti-Western Japanocentrism or the superiority of the 'Japanese
spirit'," he was nevertheless "a willing participant in the
'overcoming the modern' movement of the prewar fascist period."(54)
This oblique association of Kuki with fascism is somewhat facile. It
may be true that certain participants in the movement to "overcome
modernity" were fascists, but to apply this label to Kuki requires
evidence and argument. One can surely claim that many features of
modernity are insalubrious, and call for resistance against them,
without thereby associating oneself with the fascists among us.
Karatani then suggests that the continuity between Kuki's early
analysis of the components of iki and his later analogy between
these and the "Three Divine Regalia" of the imperial throne shows
that Kuki was "transforming himself into a typical ideologue of
nineteenth-century imperialism."(55) But the passage Karatani quotes
in this context appears quite innocuous and contains nothing that
supports his claim--unless the "sword [as a symbol] of sovereignty
over the world" is supposed to be problematic.(56) Kuki's essay
draws the analogy dispassionately and explicates the symbolism with
no chauvinistic enthusiasm for the empire.
If we look at the larger context of Kuki's analogy, Karatani's claim
appears even more one-sided. There is nothing imperialistic about
this essay of Kuki's, and in the section following his discussion of
the symbolism, he projects a vision of Japan's place in the world
that is radically non-imperialistic. It is true that he talks of
"Japanism" (nihonshugi), but he does so in the context of "worldism"
(sekaishugi) and "internationalism" (kokusaishugi), saying that
Japanese character and culture can define and fulfill themselves
only in relation to others.(57) In line with the internationalist
strains in Nishida's and Nishitani's thinking, Kuki asserts that the
main point is
not to dogmatically make the values of one's own culture the
standard, but
to recognize the unique strengths of other cultures and respect
their
legitimate rights and aim for the coexistence of all human beings.
In that
sense worldism is internationalism.
Far from being objectionable, these sentiments seem quite
appropriate to the "multicultural" situation of the world today.
Kuki does not deny the obvious fact that every culture, including
Japan's, is unique; indeed he understands this as the precondition
for the advancement of world culture.
Each country's culture is a unit with respect to the world as a
whole.
Cultural units have their own unique ways of perceiving.... The
cultural unit
is determined historically and geographically, such that world
culture is
something given in the integration of cultural units. Thus world
culture as
a whole will advance through the exercise of each country's
uniqueness.(58)
This hardly sounds like the "typical ideologue of nineteenth-century
imperialism."
Having applied this label to Kuki, Karatani continues:
The same may be said of Heidegger, who, during the same period,
declared: "Spirit is neither sagacity operating in a vacuum, nor is
it the
irresponsible play of wit; it does not consist in endless
intellectual
dissection, and even less is it universal reason. Spirit is, as
disposed by
origin and fully conscious, the definite opening to the Being
[Wesen] of
the individual." Following this declaration, Heidegger speaks of
"the
historical mission of the German people, situated at the center of
the
West." It is in this context that Kuki's iki and Heidegger's spirit
resonate
with each other. And each in its own way arrives, respectively, at
the "Great
East Asian Coprosperity Sphere" and the "Third Reich."(59)
It is difficult to know what to make of this passage, in part
because of the mistranslations of the excerpts from Heidegger's
text,(60) but mainly because the relation between Heidegger's talk
of spirit and his talk of the historical mission of the German
people is left unspecified--as are the occasions for the resonance
Karatani hears between Geist and iki. The final transition to the
"Great East Asian Coprosperity Sphere" and the "Third Reich," which
could be justified only by a great deal of judicious filling in, is
breathtakingly glib. But there is no attempt at justification--it is
perhaps assumed that readers will have already seen the light--and
Karatani promptly switches the topic to Descartes.(61)
Pincus follows Karatani in bringing Heidegger into the discussion,
though her grasp of his ideas seems no firmer than her guide's.(62)
She adverts to Heidegger's "Conversation" in considering the
appropriateness of Kuki's use in "Iki" no kozo of methods derived
from Western philosophy, and then asks: "Had Kuki not in fact
already succumbed to the temptation of the West when he spoke of iki
as 'sensuous radiance through whose lively delight there breaks the
radiance of something suprasensuous'?"(63) The question is otiose
because Kuki could never have spoken of iki in anything like those
Heideggerian terms--nor did Tezuka Tomio (Heidegger's interlocutor
in the original conversation) "amend Kuki's definition of iki" in
the straight Heideggerese that Pincus cites in her next
footnote.(64) If she had read Tezuka's account of his talk with
Heidegger, Pincus would have learned that what the latter presents
as a dialogue "occasioned by the visit of Professor Tezuka" is in
fact a freely composed fantasy with only a few tenuous points of
contact with the actual conversation.(65) Indeed, recent research on
Heidegger's "Conversation" has shown that much of the
characterization of iki that Heidegger puts in the mouth of his
"Japanese" interlocutor in fact derives from a German monograph on
Noh drama that appeared the year before Tezuka's visit (and which
Heidegger mentions in the "Conversation").(66)
Pincus then appends the following remark, the psychodynamic
allusions of which are baffling: "Interestingly, Heidegger failed to
touch on another temptation to which Kuki doubtless yielded--the
temptation to invest his description of iki with Heidegger's own
desire for the ineffable beyond of Western metaphysics." The remark
becomes somewhat less puzzling in the light of Pincus' next footnote
(no. 23), in which she refers to "Peter Dale's unsparing critique of
[the] encounter [between Kuki and Heidegger]"--a treatment that
assumes not just that Kuki spoke fluent German in his conversations
with Heidegger (which is true) but also that he spoke fluent
Heideggerese (which isn't). Dale's "critique" is unsparing mostly in
the area of metaphor.
Kuki's book ... subtly clothes a spirit of reaction in the idiom of
racial
uniqueness. We remind ourselves of the intimate conjunction between
Heidegger's boldly obscurantist philosophy and the brash jargon of
Nazi
rhetoric. The cosy affinity of this perplexing philosophy with
volkisch
thought suggests hints as to the character of Kuki's own brand of
aesthetic nationalism.(67)
These are more allusions to the insalubrious character of Kuki's
thought by way of association with Heidegger's. Not being up to the
challenging task of articulating what is going on philosophically
between Kuki and Heidegger, Dale's treatment of their "encounter"
never rises above the level of circumstantial anecdote and
generalized disparagement.
Kuki's attempt to impress his maitre a penser with his own
inimitable
"sophistication" (iki), his staunch grasping for that nebulously
equivocal
phrasing beloved by the master, succeeded in giving exotic
confirmation
for Heidegger's own linguistic mysticism.(68)
Even on the level of anecdote this fails. Not only was Kuki older
than Heidegger and every bit his intellectual equal, but as a
cosmopolitan aristocrat it would never have occurred to him to try
to "impress" such a parochial advocate of Bodenstandigkeit as
Heidegger was.(69) Again, the account of the encounter would have
benefited from an attempt to distinguish the voices and ideas of
Heidegger, Kuki, and Tezuka in the text of the "Conversation."
To return to Pincus: pace her picture of Kuki as a philosophical
Saint Anthony beset by seductive temptations from all sides, anyone
familiar with Heidegger's thought will find the reference to
"Heidegger's own desire for the ineffable beyond of Western
metaphysics" absurd, such a desire being completely alien to his
philosophical project. Heidegger emphasizes that the analysis of
Dasein in Being and Time (published the year he met Kuki) is utterly
"this-worldly," stressing the finitude of Dasein and the radical
historicality of Being. One may question his claim to have overcome
the tradition of metaphysics--but not his unremitting drive to do
so.
In explicating Kuki's idea of iki, Pincus writes that certain
"discursive resources" encouraged him to "subordinate that mode of
being [designated by 'iki'] to an absolute logic of ethnic identity
and cultural closure."(70) She declines to explain what "an absolute
logic of ethnic identity" might be, but one senses that Kuki ought
to have shunned it. Pincus elaborates by quoting the last line of
"Iki" no kozo, where Kuki's statement that a full understanding of
iki can be gained only if we take it as "the self-expression of the
being of our ethnos [minzoku sonzai]" is supposed to be
nationalistic in some negative sense:(71)
Ultimately, Kuki reenlisted the passion that the style of iki had
disavowed, this time in the service of national culture. "There is
nothing
for us," he wrote, "but to persevere in our impassioned eros for our

culture of bushido idealism and Buddhist rejection of reality."
(KSZ, 1:81)
The context of this quote is important. It is true that Kuki is
maintaining, as he maintains throughout the book, that iki
represents an idea that is peculiar to Japanese culture. But it is
incontrovertible that certain ideas are peculiar to the cultures in
which they developed and the languages in which they are expressed.
What Kuki is arguing against, as a reading of the entire last
paragraph of the book shows, is the universalism of Platonic
metaphysics--or at least its appropriateness for the investigation
of culture. He wants to resist the degeneration of iki into an
"abstract and ideational void," where it becomes lost in an empty
exchange of "ready-made generic concepts."(72) Calling for a radical
overturning of Platonic epistemology, he wants to transform the
practice of anamnesis (soki) into a recollection of concrete and
vital features of the tradition. Rather than "burying [their]
spiritual culture in oblivion," the Japanese are to cultivate
"passionate eros for [their] idealistic and anti-realistic culture."

In a situation where the importation of Western ideas was
threatening to eclipse Japan's cultural heritage and sever people's
connections to their historical roots, Kuki is advocating--just as
Nietzsche and Heidegger did, and perhaps under their influence--a
reappropriation of certain traits from the tradition. There is
nothing objectionable in this, unless accompanied by the assertion
that one's culture is superior to all others and ought to dominate
the world. Kuki was too cosmopolitan a character for such chauvinism
(before publishing "Iki" no kozo, he spent eight years in Europe
studying European philosophies and literatures), as evidenced by his
discussion of Japanese culture and world culture in the essay
"Nihonteki seikaku," discussed earlier.
Pincus follows Karatani's lead on this essay and concludes that it
shows Kuki's "ultranationalism." Bringing Heidegger back into the
discussion, she cites Karatani again, who has apparently been able
to "implicate the German along with Kuki in a peculiarly modern
conspiracy":
Both philosophers, Karatani charges, imposed a "despotic system" on
the
cultural or spiritual disposition they hoped to rescue from the
ravages of
modernity. In both cases, that "despotic system" harbored
ideological
potential for imperialism and nationalistic fanaticism.(73)
One must again protest this practice of condemning a Japanese
thinker, even at second hand, on the basis of his association with
Heidegger. When evaluating philosophical ideas or the integrity of
philosophers, assigning "guilt by association" is as questionable a
tactic as it is in the real world of law.
While Pincus declines to say what the "despotic system" of
Karatani's charge consists in, the statement with which she
introduces her paraphrase of Kuki's discussion of the kokutai and
the "Divine Regalia" (as previously cited by Karatani) is
unequivocal: "By the late 1930s, Kuki had enlisted the tripartite
structure of iki in the service of an ultranationalist imperial
state."(74) In view of the singularly unfanatical tone of Kuki's
discussion, and given his subsequent explicit exhortations to
"recognize the uniqueness and strengths of other cultures and
respect their legitimate rights," the charge that Kuki is writing
"in the service of an ultranationalist imperial state" is as
unsubstantiated as Karatani's characterization of him as "a typical
ideologue of nineteenth-century imperialism." It is as if the
critics, hypersensitized by their ideological agenda, scan suspect
texts for key words like "uniqueness," "kokutai," and "Japanese
spirit," whereupon the discovery of any occurrence triggers a burst
of remonstrance in terms of "nationalism," "nihonjinron," and so
forth.
Having brought in the kokutai, Pincus then asks: "Why did "Iki" no
kozo lend itself so easily to appropriation by an ultranationalist
ideology?"(75) (There is a shift here from the claim that Kuki
"enlisted the structure of iki in the service of an ultranationalist
imperial state" to the much weaker assertion that his book "lent
itself" to appropriation.) She proposes that the culprit in this
case is "a logic of organicism placed at the disposal of the state,"
which Kuki purportedly discovered while in Europe. This "logic" is
supposedly articulated "in the opening lines of "iki" no kozo,"
which Pincus quotes. Kuki writes that the relation between a people
(minzoku) and its language together with the meanings embodied in it
is "an organic [yukiteki] one in which the whole determines the
parts."(76) An unexceptionable idea, surely, which Kuki entertains
through his late writings, where he talks of the ways in which the
history and geography of a culture become embodied in its language.
But by dropping a quick series of politically proper names (Jean-Luc
Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Walter Benjamin), Pincus has
Kuki employing a logic that implies an "aestheticization of the
political" that is "the distinguishing mark of fascism."
This misses the point. A number of writers have drawn instructive
attention to the dangers of conceiving the relation between the
individual and the state on the analogy of cells and an organism.
But Kuki is not concerned with the state and is not talking about
this relation at all: he uses the organic metaphor to emphasize that
we are only going to be able to understand cultural practices of the
kind connoted by iki in the context of the self-awareness of the
people whose practices they are.
Having conjured up the spirit of fascism, Pincus administers the
coup de grace by citing a passage from an essay Kuki wrote in the
late 1930s, "when Japan was deeply mired in imperialist aggression
on the Chinese mainland":
By vanquishing China, we Japanese must teach them in a decisive
manner the spirit of Japanese philosophy. It is our
cultural-historical
mission to lend spiritual succor to the renewal of their
mother-country by
imprinting our idealistic philosophy in the form of bushido in the
innermost recesses of their bodies.(77)
Finally we arrive at what appears to be a clear expression of
nationalist and imperialist sentiment on Kuki's part, even though
the passage has been spiced up a lime for the anglophone reader.
Where Kuki talks about teaching "clearly" (meikaku ni), Pincus has
"in a decisive manner"; and by translating an idiom meaning "deeply
impressing upon them" literally (as "imprinting in the innermost
recesses of their bodies"), she gives his exhortation a bizarrely
sadistic tone that is not in the original.
This statement of Kuki's again needs to be understood in its
context. In view of what was happening in China at the time he wrote
the four-page essay in which the passage appears (and he must have
been aware of the general situation, if not the details), some of
the ideas in it do appear ethnocentric and chauvinistic--perhaps
reprehensibly so. But before pointing the finger of moral blame, one
should take into account the fact that Kuki was a great admirer of
Chinese culture and was distressed, as were many of his colleagues,
at the low level to which it had degenerated by the time he was
writing. His avowed concern is with the "cultural-historical
meaning" of the war in China rather than with matters of empire.
Earlier in the essay he writes that "the Japanese have to become
more aware of how close they are in blood to the Chinese" and urges
his readers to "cooperate with the Chinese to construct an Asian
culture" on the basis of "the many things [the Japanese] have
learned from the Chinese in the past."(78) He emphasizes the need to
"protect the Chinese against the West" and to "provide a realistic
foundation for future cooperation between Japanese and Chinese."(79)
And immediately following the passage quoted by Pincus is the
admonition: "We must not be stingy in contributing to the spiritual
resuscitation of the Chinese people." In his conclusion Kuki writes:
"I cannot help hoping that the time for hating the Chinese will pass
and the time for loving them from the bottom of our hearts will soon
come."(80)
One can accuse him, then, of being naive in political matters and
somewhat chauvinistic (at least by comparison with enlightened
American academics of the nineties), bet this outspoken venture into
commentary on current political affairs seems flimsy grounds for the
accusation of imperialism and ultranationalism.
In Conclusion
We have seen a series of unsubstantiated (or poorly substantiated)
accusations of political incorrectness leveled at members of the
Kyoto School in several recent contributions to Japanese and
Buddhist studies. It would not have been necessary to discuss this
syndrome at such length if it were not for the fact that some of the
authors in question are major figures in the field, holding
positions at prestigious institutions and publishing with respected
university presses. They thus have considerable power to influence
students, or potential students, of Japanese philosophy, and to
discourage them from studying the work of certain figures. By
employing the rhetoric they do, they are likely--even if this is not
their conscious intention--to shut down discussion of important
issues prematurely.
This is not, for the last time, to deny that some of the utterances
of members of the Kyoto School are highly problematic. Nor that much
of the writing in the field of nihonjinron is plainly silly and
potentially pernicious. Nor that contemporary Japanese politicians
evidence an alarming tendency to "forget" aspects of recent Japanese
history as it suits them and--what is worse--to attempt to induce a
kind of national amnesia on that basis.(81) But these are areas in
which careful distinctions are in order; and since such labels as
"fascist," "imperialist," and "ultranationalist" denote traits that
deserve (in my opinion) to be combated with the utmost vehemence, it
is irresponsible to apply them indiscriminately.
What makes the frequent appearance of this syndrome all the more
lamentable is that it obfuscates some genuinely interesting issues
that have significant bearing on contemporary questions concerning
nationalism, neofascism, racism, and cross-cultural understanding.
These issues are pressing enough to deserve responsible attention at
the hands of contemporary scholars--something very different from
the ideologically biased and self-indulgent treatment they so often
receive. One can only hope that the trends of politically correct
Japanology will not succeed in closing down a potentially
enlightening series of conversations before they have a chance to
get properly under way.
NOTES
I am grateful to Yoko Arisaka, Jan Van Bragt, James Heisig, William
LaFleur, and, Michiko Yusa for helpful comments on an earlier, less
moderate version of this essay, as well as to the Japan Studies
Endowment at the University of Hawai'i for a research grant that
supported some of its writing.
(1) I want to distinguish here between the work of the original
proponents--French, mostly--of poststructuralism, deconstruction,
and postmodernism, and their unphilosophical devotees and emulators
in the United States. There is much in the former that is valuable,
insofar as it comes out of a deep understanding of the Western
philosophical and intellectual traditions.
(2) Some of these questions have at last been broached in English by
several of the contributors to James W. Heisig and John Maraldo,
eds., Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of
Nationalism (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1995). This
collection of fifteen essays by contributors from America and Japan
offers a good variety of perspectives on the issues, only a few of
which are ideologically strident.
(3) Instructive in this area are Akira Iriye, Power and Culture: The
Japanese-American War, 1941-1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1981), and John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in
the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986), both of which show the
extent to which the war was a war of cultures. A fascinating
comparison of the ways the Second World War is remembered--and not
remembered--in Japan and Germany is lan Buruma, The Wages of Guilt:
Memories of War in Germany and Japan (New York: Farrar Straus
Giroux, 1994).
(4) A major factor has been the fine series of translations and
commentaries published as the Nanzan Studies in Religion and Culture
under the general editorship of James Heisig.
(5) Tetsuo Najita and H. D. Harootunian, "Japanese Revolt against
the West: Political and Cultural Criticism in the Twentieth
Century," in Peter Duus, ed., The Cambridge History of Japan
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 6:711-774, at pp.
741-742. For a chapter in such a prestigious work of reference the
text contains some surprising instances of careless scholarship
and/or editing. Between pages 743 and 749 alone one notes the
following: Watsuji's "graduate thesis" (p. 743) was on Schopenhauer
not Nietzsche; Nietzsche did not try to "restore some of the great
monuments of Greece" (p. 744)--"monumental history" is only one of
three kinds of history he distinguishes, and that he treats with
considerable skepticism; Watsuji did not derive the ideas of
"spiritual community" or "personalism" from Nietzsche (p. 745),
since the latter failed to entertain such ideas; the date of
Heidegger's Being and Time is not 1926 (p. 746) but 1927; "human
intentionality" (p. 748) is not a Heideggerian concept (perhaps
they're thinking of his mentor Husserl?)--his emphasis on
"exsistere," or rather Existenz, aims precisely to subvert talk in
terms of intentionality or consciousness; and macrons are missing
from "Koyama" and "koron."
(6) Najita and Harootunian, "Japanese Revolt," pp. 742-743. It is
true that many members of the Kyoto School were as ambivalent as
many fascists in Europe were about the forces of modernity, but that
is hardly sufficient grounds for the assertion that they admired
European fascism.
(7) For some judicious criticism of Nishitani's contribution to the
symposium, see John Maraldo, "Questioning Nationalism Now and Then,"
in Heisig and Maraldo, Rude Awakenings, pp. 333-362, at pp. 352-355.

(8) Horio Tsutomu, "The Chuokoron Discussions: Their Background and
Meaning," in Heisig and Maraldo, Rude Awakenings, pp. 289-315.
(9) Horio (quoting Oshima Yasumasa), "The Chuokoron Discussions," p.
290.
(10) Ibid., pp. 301-302.
(11) Ibid., pp. 291, 303.
(12) See the opening argument of the chapter "Fascism and
Nationalism," in George H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory,
4th ed. (Hinsdale: Dryden Press, 1973), pp. 799-849.
(13) Kosaka Masaaki et al., Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon (The
world-historical standpoint and Japan) (Tokyo: Chuokoron, 1943), p.
107; cited by Horio, "The Chuokoron Discussions," p. 306.
(14) Horio, "The Chuokoron Discussions," pp. 308-309. For an
incisive discussion of the views of Kosaka and Koyama as expressed
in this symposium, see Naoki Sakai, "Modernity and Its Critique: The
Problem of Universalism and Particularism," in South Atlantic
Quarterly 87 (3) (1988): 475-504, esp. pp. 487-496; reprinted in
Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian, eds., Postmodernism and Japan
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989), pp. 93122, et pp.
105-114.
(15) Apparently the commentaries in Japanese have not paid attention
to the context of other texts, insofar as they tend to focus on
ideological issues at the expense of philosophical ideas, and the
situation wish respect to the criticisms in English has been no
better. See Horio, "The Chuokoron Discussions," p. 291, and also
John Maraldo's discussion in Heisig and Maraldo, Rude Awakenings,
pp. 351-356.
(16) Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993).
(17) Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights, p. 85.
(18) The passages Faure cites actually come from the symposium held
in March 1942 under the title "Daitoakyoeiken no rinrisei to
rekishisei" (The moral and historical nature of the Greater East
Asia Coprosperity Sphere). "Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon" (The
world-historical standpoint and Japan) was the title given to the
first symposium (November 1941) and later to the publication of the
proceedings of all three sessions.
(19) Faure cites "Kosaka, et al. 1942, 201 " but is apparently
referring to the 1943 book publication, on p. 201 of which the first
two sentences of his quotation are to be found.
(20) Kosaka et al., Sekaishiteki tachiba to Nihon, p. 204.
(21) Ibid., p. 205. John Maraldo has taken Nishitani's summation of
these ideas and shown how marvelously similar they are to recent
American government policy (Heisig and Maraldo, Rude Awakenings, pp.
354-355). Not that that recommends them, of course. Maraldo's
conclusion sums it up well: "I suggest that in the 1940s [Nishitani]
did not set himself up as an advocate of state or ethnic
nationalism, but of a globalism that seriously mistook his nation's
capacity to negate itself and overcome self-centeredness."
(22) Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights, p. 87.
(23) Nishitani Keiji, "Kinsei Yoroppa bunmei to Nihon" (Modern
European civilization and Japan), in Shukyo to bunka (Tokyo: Kokusai
Nihon Kenkyujo, 1969), pp. 149-190.
(24) Nishitani, "Kinsei Yoroppa bunmei," in Shukyo to bunka, p. 183.

(25) It is significant that Nishitani's first extended treatment of
Nietzsche, in the essay "Niichie no Tsuaratsusutora to Maisuta
Ekkuharuto" (Nietzsche's Zarathustra and Meister Eckhart), appears
earlier in Shukyo to bunka, pp. 3-38.
(26) For a discussion of this issue, see "Interlude 1: Art-Works
against Nature," in Graham Parkes, Composing the Soul: Reaches of
Nietzsche's Psychology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994),
pp. 157-169. On the task of disciplining the natural drives, see the
section in chap. 9 titled "Ordering the Psyche Polytic."
(27) Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (1925) (Munich: Franz Eher Nachfolger,
1933), pp. 318-319. The further paranoid rantings against the
Japanese (pp. 720-724) make fascinating reading. There is a fine
irony, in retrospect, in Hitler's dismissal of the Japanese as mere
"bearers of culture" in contrast to the "culture-founding" Aryans.
He says that while it may look as if the Japanese are adopting
Western technology, all that is really happening is that "European
science and technology are being embellished with Japanese
features." If the Aryan influence on Japan were to be cut off, he
continues, Japan's rise in science and technology would cease
immediately. "Within a few years the wellsprings would dry up," and
Japanese culture would "sink back again into the somnolence from
which it was awakened by the onslaught of Aryan culture seven
decades earlier."
(28) Nishitani, "Kinsei Yoroppa bunmei," p. 184. Hitler writes that
the forces that genuinely form and preserve the state are "the
individual's capacity and will to sacrifice himself for the whole"
(Mein Kampf, p. 167). In discussing Hitler's promotion of this kind
of Idealismus, the willingness to lay down one's life for the sake
of an ideal, Nishitani also refers to a later passage concerning
self-sacrifice: "The crowning glory of all sense of sacrifice lies
in the giving of one's own life for the sake of the community" (Mein
Kampf, p. 327).
(29) The most important text to consider in this context would be
Sekaikan to kokkan (View of the world and view of the nation) from
1941. A severely critical account, the selectivity of which betrays
an extreme ideological bias, is given in Ruth Kambartel, "Religion
als Hilfsmittel fur die Rechtfertigung einer totalitaren
Staatsideologie in Nishitani Keijis Sekaikan to kokkakan."
Japanstudien 1 (1989): 71-88. For more balanced views, see the
discussions in Mori Tetsuro, "Nishitani Keiji and the Question of
Nationalism," in Heisig and Maraldo, Rude Awakenings, pp. 316-322,
and John Maraldo, "Questioning Nationalism Now and Then," ibid., pp.
347-351.
(30) Nishitani, "Kinsei Yoroppa bunmei," p. 179.
(31) Ibid., p. 185.
(32) Ibid., p. 186. Nishitani uses shiyo here, the term used to
translate Hegel's Aufheben,
(33) Ibid., pp. 187 ff.
(34) Bernard Faure, "The Kyoto School and Reverse Orientalism," in
Charles Wei-Hsun Fu and Steven Heine, eds., Japan in Traditional and
Postmodern Perspectives (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), pp. 245-281.
(35) Faure, "The Kyoto School," p. 256.
(36) Ibid., pp. 258, 263.
(37) Ibid., p. 257. The term "total war" (zentaisen) is not
introduced until the third meeting of the symposium, where the
primary focus is not on "total war" but on what the participants
term "all-out war" (soryokusen). Horio characterizes the distinction
as being "between the idea of 'total war' (totale Krieg) centered on
military might alone, and the war going on in Europe and the
Pacific, what was rather an "all-out" war
(Generalmobilisierungskrieg) that entailed a state ideology as well
as a view of the world" ("The Chuokoron Discussions," p. 311).
(38) Horio, "The Chuokoron Discussions," p. 295.
(39) See Nishitani's discussions of history in the first chapter of
The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, trans. Graham Parkes with Setsuko
Aihara (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), which sets the tone for the rest
of the text, and the final chapter of Religion and Nothingness,
trans. Jan Van Bragt (Berkeley, 1982), the main topic of which is
the relation between history and emptiness.
(40) Faure's invocation of Lacoue-Labarthe here (Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics [Oxford: Blackwell,
1990], p. 21) is uninstructive as long as he declines to say which
of the latter's criticisms of Heidegger, some of which are incisive,
apply to Nishitani, and in what sense--since the situations of
Heidegger in 1933 and Nishitani in 1942 are in many ways quite
different.
(41) Faure, "The Kyoto School," p. 260.
(42) Ibid., p. 262.
(43) Ibid., p. 261.
(44) Nishitani, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, p. 179. The
italicized "not" appears in Nishitani's original text.
(45) Faure, "The Kyoto School," p. 262.
(46) William Haver, review of Nietzsche and Asian Thought, in
Journal of Asian Studies 51 (3) (1992): 629-630.
(47) Graham Parkes, "The Orientation of the Nietzschean Text," in
Graham Parkes, ed., Nietzsche and Asian Thought (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 13.
(48) Faure, "The Kyoto School," p. 265. The passage in question is
quoted by Jan Van Bragt in the introduction to his translation of
Religion and Nothingness, and is not from Nishitani's book on
Nishida, as Faure's reference has it.
(49) Faure, "The Kyoto School," p. 265. The esotericism here is
baffling, especially since there are no "bold initials" in Faure's
text. But the insinuation that Nishitani's The Self-Overcoming of
Nihilism (which contains philosophical discussions of such figures
as Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, Nietzsche, and
Stirner) is not really a philosophical work is simply jejune.
(50) Faure criticizes the "New Kyoto school" and the "nativist
thinking" of Umehara Takeshi in a section of his "The Kyoto School"
(pp. 265 ff).
(51) Nishitani, "Hihan no ninmu to fuashizumu no mondai" (The duty
to criticize and the problem of fascism), as paraphrased by John
Maraldo in Heisig and Maraldo, Rude Awakenings, p. 357.
(52) Leslie Pincus, "In a Labyrinth of Western Desire: Kuki Shuzo
and the Discovery of Japanese Being," boundary 2, vol. 18 (3)
(1991): 142-156; reprinted in Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian,
eds., Japan in the World (Durham and London: Duke University Press,
1993), pp. 222-236. References will be to the page numbers of this
later, more easily accessible edition.
(53) Karatani Kojin, "One Spirit, Two Nineteenth Centuries," South
Atlantic Quarterly 87 (3) (1988): 615-628, at p. 621; reprinted in
Miyoshi and Harootunian, Postmodernism and Japan, pp. 259-272
(references, again, to this later edition). For an illuminating
discussion of Heidegger's "Conversation," see chap. 2 of Reinhard
May, Heidegger's Hidden Sources: East-Asian Influences on His Work,
trans. Graham Parkes (London: Routledge, 1996).
(54) Karatani, "One Spirit," p. 266. For careful discussions of the
kindai no Chokoku movement, see Ohashi Ryosuke, Nihonteki na mono to
Yoroppateki na mono (On things Japanese and things European) (Tokyo:
Shinchosha, 1992), pp. 143-163, and Minamoto Ryoen, "The Symposium
on 'Overcoming Modernity,'" in Heisig and Maraldo, Rude Awakenings,
pp. 197-229. See also the discussion of neo-Marxist criticisms of
the movement in William R. LaFleur, "A Half-Dressed Emperor:
Societal Self-Deception and Recent 'Japanokritik' in America," in
Roger T. Ames and Wimal Dissanayake, eds., Self and Deception: A
Cross-Cultural Philosophical Enquiry (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), pp.
263-285.
(55) Karatani, "One Spirit," pp. 266-267. Karatani is referring to
the discussion in the essay "Nihonteki seikaku" (Japanese character)
in Kuki Shuzo zenshu, 3:287-289.
(56) Karatani, "One Spirit," p. 267, referring to Kuki, "Nihonteki
seikaku," p. 287.
(57) Kuki, "Nihonteki seikaku," p. 290.
(58) Ibid., pp. 290-291.
(59) Karatani, "One Spirit," p. 267. The author gives no reference
for the citations from Heidegger. The passages are to be found in
lectures from 1935, subsequently published as Einfuhrung in die
Metaphysik (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1953), pp. 37-38 (where Heidegger is
actually quoting himself from the Rectoral Address of 1933); but the
translator of Karatani's essay has apparently not used either the
English translation by Ralph Manheim, Introduction to Metaphysics
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), pp. 49-50, or the
rendition in (what is probably Karatani's source) Jacques Derrida,
De l'esprit (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1987).
(60) The most egregious error is the translation of zum Wesen des
Seins, to the essence of Being," as "to the Being [Wesen] of the
individual." Heidegger then speaks of "our people in the occidental
middle" (unseres Volkes der abendlandischen Mitte) rather than the
German people, situated at the center of the West."
(61) For a philosophically illuminating treatment of Kuki's thought,
see Sakabe Megumi, Fuzai no uta (Songs of absence) (Tokyo: 1990).
(62) One particular misunderstanding deserves mention here because
it makes Heidegger seem more nationalistic and chauvinistic than he
is, and thereby serves the strategy of framing Kuki as an accomplice
of Japanese ultranationalism. Pincus writes that "The apparent
universality of Dasein ... was belied by Heidegger's insistence that
the problematic of Dasein enjoyed an exclusive relation with the
German language and its linguistic-philosophical past" ("In a
Labyrinth," p. 226). Heidegger never insisted on exclusivity with
respect to "the problematic of Dasein": to do so would have vitiated
the entire project of Being and Time, the aims of which were far
more ambitious than a parochial analysis of German Dasein alone.
(63) Pincus, "In a Labyrinth," p. 233.
(64) Ibid., p. 223 n. 22.
(65) See Tezuka Tomio, "Haidegga to no ichijikan," in Kotoba ni
tsuite no taiwa, Haidegga zenshu (Tokyo: Risosha, 1968), 21:159-166.
The Japanese text is reproduced with a German translation in
Reinhard May, Ex oriente lux: Heideggers Werk unter ostasiatischem
Einfluss (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 1989), pp. 82-99. Another
German translation, by Elmar Weinmayr from the original edition of
Tezuka's essay (Rive 264 [1955]: 54-58), is to be found in Hartmut
Buchner, ea., Japan und Heidegger (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke Verlag,
1989), pp. 173-180. My English translation is available in Reinhard
May, Heidegger's Hidden Sources, pp. 59-64.
(66) See Reinhard May, Heidegger's Hidden Sources, chap. 2. The work
Heidegger mentions, and draws from, in the "Conversation" is Oscar
Benl, Seami Motokiyo und der Geist des No-Schauspiels (Wiesbaden:
Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, 1953).
(67) Peter N. Dale, The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (London: Croom
Helm, 1986), p. 72. Much of this book is interesting and
informative, though the florid style and frequently shrill tone make
it difficult to read.
(68) Dale, The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness, p. 73.
(69) For an interesting brief discussion of their relationship, see
Ohashi Ryosuke, "Heidegger und Graf Kuki: Zu Sprache und Kunst in
Japan als Problem der Moderne," in H.-H. Gander, ea., Von Heidegger
her: Messkircher Vortrage 1989 (Frankfurt, 1991), pp. 93-104. In
writing that Kuki "studied under Martin Heidegger" (p. 68), Dale
perpetuates the myth that the Japanese who studied with him during
the twenties were on the level of graduate students at the feet of
the master. On this issue, see my essay, "Rising Sun over Black
Forest: Heidegger's Japanese Connections," in May, Heidegger's
Hidden Sources, 79-117.
(70) Pincus, "In a Labyrinth," p. 228.
(71) "Self-expression" is a poor translation of jikokaiji. The
term is used to translate Heidegger's Erschlossenheit and would best
be rendered as "self-disclosure."
(72) Kuki, "Iki" no kazo, in Kuki Shazo zenshu, 1:1-85, at pp.
80-81. The term translated by "ideational," keisoteki, refers to the
Platonic eidos or idea (keiso).
(73) Pincus, "In a Labyrinth," p. 234.
(74) Ibid.
(75) Ibid., p. 235.
(76) Kuki, "Iki" no kozo, p. 8.
(77) Pincus, "In a Labyrinth," p. 236, citing Kuki, "Jikyoku no
kanso" (Thoughts on the current situation), in Kuki Shuzo zenshu, 5:
36-39, at p. 38.
(78) Kuki, "Jikyoku no kanso," p.
(79) Ibid., p. 38.
(80) Ibid., p. 39.
(81) lan Buruma's treatment of this issue in The Wages of Guilt:
Memories of War in Germany and Japan (New York: Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux, 1994) makes disquieting reading.
Graham Parkes Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawai'i
and Visiting Scholar, Reischauser Institute of Japanese Studies at
Harvard University