The Kyoto School

An Introduction

Robert E. Carter

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781438445434
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

This book provides a much-needed introduction to the Kyoto School of Japanese philosophy. Robert E. Carter focuses on four influential Japanese philosophers: the three most important members of the Kyoto School (Nishida Kitar?, Tanabe Hajime, and Nishitani Keiji), and a fourth (Watsuji Tetsur?), who was, at most, an associate member of the school. Each of these thinkers wrestled systematically with the Eastern idea of "nothingness, " albeit from very different perspectives. Many Western scholars, students, and serious general readers are intrigued by this school of thought, which reflects Japan's engagement with the West. A number of works by various thinkers associated with the Kyoto School are now available in English, but these works are often difficult to grasp for those not already well-versed in the philosophical and historical context. Carter's book provides an accessible yet substantive introduction to the school and offers an East-West dialogue that enriches our understanding of Japanese thought while also shedding light on our own assumptions, habits of thought, and prejudices.

1

Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945)

It is no exaggeration to say that in him [Nishida Kitarō] Japan has had the first philosophical genius who knew how to build a system permeated with the spirit of Buddhist meditation, by fully employing the Western method of thinking.

—Takeuchi Yoshinori, “The Philosophy of Nishida,” in The Buddha Eye: An Anthology of the Kyoto School

Background

At about the same time that Japanese men were sent to the West to study the centuries of advances made since the closing of Japan, a small but steady flow of Western academics came to Japan to teach Western ideas and accomplishments. Two German philosophers who taught in Japan (Ludwig Busse and Raphael von Koeber) contributed to the trend toward German “romantic” philosophy and away from the increasingly less popular English philosophers (J. S. Mill, Spencer, Darwin, and Huxley). The affinity that the Japanese had for German authors continued well into the twentieth century: Martin Heidegger's Zein und Zeit (Being and Time), for example, was translated into Japanese before it was translated into English, and upon Heidegger's death, the national radio service, NHK, broadcast a tribute to Heidegger that was several minutes in length. It was in this intellectual climate that Nishida was educated. Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Hartmann were key figures in the rush to understand the West and its ways. Yet, as James Heisig observes, Nishida “did not simply seek to preserve Japan's traditional self-understanding in the face of the onslaught of foreign ideas and ideals, but to submit it to the rigorous critique of philosophy.”¹

The account of Nishida's philosophy that follows is not meant to be complete, but only introduces the reader to the thought of this foundational thinker by drawing out some of the major themes in his lifelong pursuit. The early Nishida is dominant in this account, although themes from his middle and later periods are also present. As a questing philosopher, he continued to rewrite his position time after time, trying to overcome shortcomings or simply reviewing an issue from a new perspective. His first period was dominated by the notion of “pure experience”; his second by “self-consciousness”; his third by the notion of basho, or topos (a notion that he borrowed from Plato), perhaps best rendered in English as “place,” or “field” (as in “field theory”), or simply as that in which something is located; and the fourth by the complex notion of “the absolutely contradictorily self-identical dialectical world of the one and the many.”² Not only does much of the material from the middle and later periods remain untranslated, but these writings tend to be extremely dense and notoriously difficult to read. Thus, while I think that the following account of Nishida's philosophy is accurate, it represents but a small portion of his thinking and rethinking about issues that continue to reverberate in the minds of scholars the world over. The point is that readers should not be misled into thinking that they “know” Nishida's philosophy from reading this account. What I have tried to provide is a basic look at the greatness which he created.

What Nishida took to be Japan's traditional self-understanding was a perspective heavily colored by his own interest in Zen Buddhism. Noda Mateo reported that Nishida often stated in his lectures that his aim was to establish “a rational foundation for Zen.”³ Having been a practitioner of Zen for a decade from his mid-twenties, and even though his philosophic writings hardly make mention of Zen, one must assume that his aim continued to include an acceptable rendering of the Zen perspective, although he often remarked that his philosophy was not tied to that perspective. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Zen continued to provide the lens through which he saw the world.

The Early Years: Education

Nishida's secondary education included an intense study of Chinese language and literature, and mathematics. While he did well, he increasingly felt stunted by militaristic and rule-oriented administrators. Nonetheless, he found some excellent teachers and studied a wide range of subjects including Japanese, Chinese, English, German, history, mathematics, geology, physics, and physical education. As he developed intellectually, he was torn between mathematics and philosophy, eventually selecting philosophy as his focus. In July 1889, he learned that he had failed his first year of the main division because of his poor class attendance and bad classroom conduct, although his academic achievement was not in question. Unwisely, he decided to drop out of school in 1890, unhappy with the constraints imposed on students and intent on self-learning. He read incessantly on his own but, in doing so, damaged his eyes to the extent that he was ordered by his doctor not to read for a year. It was becoming more and more clear that educating himself was not the realization of the ideal of freedom that he sought. He needed the guidance of strong, educated minds, and the requirements of ordered learning.

Realizing that trying to educate himself on his own was more difficult than he had thought, in 1891 Nishida took the entrance examination to apply to become a “limited status” student at Tokyo University, the reduced standing being the direct result of having dropped out of high school before completing the requirements. He found the exam for this “second best” academic entrance easy and was admitted to the Department of Philosophy. In 1894 he wrote a graduation thesis on Hume's theory of causation. After graduating, he was unable to find a teaching job either in Tokyo or his hometown of Kanazawa and spent the rest of 1894 unemployed. He used the time to compose an essay on T. H. Green's theory of ethics, which was published in three installments in 1895 in the “Education Times.”

In 1897 Nishida acquired a job as head teacher at the branch campus of a Middle School in Nanao, which was about sixty kilometers northeast of Kanazawa. His duties included walking great distances in an attempt to attract students to the school. In that same year he married his cousin, Takuda Kotomi. Later that year politicians voted to close the school, and in 1896 Nishida obtained a position as instructor in German at his old school in Kanazawa, the Fourth Higher School. That same year also marks the birth of their first child, a girl whom they named Yayoi.

Nishida's new status as a father, now responsible for supporting a family, seemed to push him toward a more intense practice of Zen. But it was not an easy time for him, for his wife abruptly left with Yayoi, and as a result of this their parents ordered them to be separated for an unspecified time. Furthermore, on the teaching front, Nishida was dismissed due to a “reorganization of the teaching staff” by the Ministry of Education, the result of internal disagreements at the school. He spent much of the summer that year in intense Zen practice in Kyoto. To practice Zen one had to meditate for long hours each week at the monastery. It required diligence and endurance. News came at the end of his intensive Zen involvement that a one-year teaching position in German, in Yamaguchi, a rural community at the southwestern end of the main island of Honshu, was his if he wanted it. A year later he returned to a position in philosophy and German at the Fourth Higher School in Kanazawa. He and his wife and child were reunited, and a second child was born, a son whom they named Ken. All the while Nishida continued his Zen practice. Yusa's translation of Nishida's letter to a friend, on September 15, 1899, makes evident that he struggled with his many duties, family life, and Zen practice: “I'm ashamed that I have made very little progress in my Zen practice. Although I want to, it is really hard to practice Zen when I have a job in the outside world and a wife and children at home.”⁴ In another letter he makes plain his determination: “so regardless of whether I attained awakening or not, I intend to continue practicing Zen for the rest of my life.”⁵ To “awaken” in Zen means to break through the surface level of awareness, to a deeper level of self-awareness: to knowing who you really are, one might say. In 1903 he finally passed his kōan (mu, emptiness, nothingness—a kōan is a mental puzzle one is given as a challenge to solve, except that it has no mental or intellectual solution) and had his kenshō (seeing into one's true nature) experience.

In 1904, his brother Kyōjirō was killed in battle in the Russo-Japanese war, leaving a wife and child. While it took Nishida a long time to recover from this loss, nonetheless he saw to it that a husband was found for the widow, and he and Katomi adopted the child, raising her as their own. While Zen once again proved a comfort to him through a lengthy depression, it was at this time that he ended his formal practice of Zen. He now gave his full attention to philosophy and, in particular, to the study of ethics. His attention also turned to reading on psychology and to the writing of an essay entitled “Pure experience, cognition, will, and intellectual intuition,” which became part one of his first book.⁶

In 1909 Nishida accepted a position teaching philosophy at Gakushōn University, in Tokyo. Nine months later he was appointed lecturer at Kyoto Imperial University, where he remained until his retirement in 1928. His career at Kyoto University was an illustrious one. In 1913 he was awarded the Doctor of Arts, granted tenure, and promoted to full professor. Through it all his melancholy personality was severely tested by a string of family tragedies: he himself succumbed to several lengthy bouts of illness. But in addition, “in 1918 his mother Tosa died at seventy-seven years of age. In 1919 his first wife Kotomi suffered a brain hemorrhage and was confined to bed in a paralyzed state. In 1920 their eldest son died of acute appendicitis at twenty-three years of age. In 1921 and 1922 their second, fourth, and sixth daughters were stricken with typhus. On January 23, 1925, Kotomi died. Six of his children were to die before him. These difficult years served to deepen Nishida's philosophical and personal integration acquired through his Zen training. His later writings featured the point that true religion and true philosophy issue forth from personal suffering.”⁷

Pure Experience

It was in 1904 that Nishida read William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, finding it a “deep and delightful” work.⁸ He took from James not only the term “pure experience,” but also James's insistence on grounding philosophy on experience, rather than abstract theory. These insights would provide Nishida with the seminal concepts for his early work, and remained foundational insights for Nishida throughout his philosophical career. He took James's “radical empiricism” to be confirmation that all empiricism ought to be experientially based, that is, that the temptation to add nonexperiential ideas to an empirical philosophy ought to be avoided. It also meant that ideas that were grounded in experience must be included in any empirical philosophy. Hence, the Zen experiences of seeing into one's true nature and enlightenment were also empirical matters that had to be included in a truly empirical philosophy. Both James and Nishida doubted the adequacy of the intellect and its concept formation to deliver a true picture of the complexity of everyday human experience. Together with the fact that concepts are already once removed in our attempt to “represent” experience, James further argued that “experience as experience outstrips our capacity to conceptually or linguistically articulate it.”⁹ James posited a “primal stuff,” a “big blooming buzzing confusion,” and out of “this aboriginal sensible muchness attention carves out objects, which conception then names and identifies forever—in the sky ‘constellations,’ on the earth ‘beach,’ ‘sea,’ ‘cliff,’ ‘bushes,’ ‘grass.’ Out of time we cut ‘days,’ ‘nights,’ ‘summers’ and ‘winters.’ ”¹⁰ As Edward Moore puts it, for James “the world consists of a flux of pure experience out of which man—by observation and inspiration—carves isolable chunks to which he gives names. These chunks have no identity in reality as chunks. They are simply artificial cuts out of what is in reality a continuum.”¹¹

For his part, Nishida maintained that “meanings and judgments are an abstracted part of the original experience, and compared with the actual experience they are meager in content.”¹² James called concepts “static abstractions” taken from the original “given” in experience: concepts are like the “perchings” of birds in flight, just temporary resting places chosen to stop the incessant flight of experience. Concepts are fixations on a limited aspect of that flow for practical purposes. But there are more smells, colors, textures, and shapes in experience than we have names for. The color chips in a paint store, for example, while outstripping previously limited color choices, can never reach a full display of the infinite color variations possible. Each color chosen is a static fixation on one point in the color spectrum, while the additional experiences of color variations are inexhaustible. If texture and shape are added to the mix, the possibilities expand exponentially. Furthermore, as Zen training makes apparent, to divest oneself of concepts, meanings, judgments, and other mental additions renders one capable of “just experiencing.” Taken to its goal, learning to just experience is to encounter reality as it is, and to experience one's “deep” or “real” self, just as it is. As Krueger explains, “Pure experience for Nishida is both the primordial foundation of consciousness and the ultimate ground of all reality,” as absolute nothingness.¹³ The aim of Zen training is to become one with ultimate reality in the sense that one comes to “grasp” the oneness of all things, a unity that is ineffable, unspeakable, because it is what it is prior to all distinctions, all carvings and conceptual fixations. It has no qualities, characteristics, or form. If followed far enough, pure experience ends in enlightenment, the awareness of the primal flow of reality as it is prior to all intellectual impositions upon it. To grasp this ineffable oneness is to understand that all things that exist are but manifestations or expressions of this original oneness, in which case it is to view the entire universe, in all its parts, as sacred, because all things are manifestations of this one source. All things are “kin,” because they all have the same ancestry. Thus, the view from pure experience is that of a transformed world: one can never simply see the surface of reality alone, for all things have a deeper richness and worth that far surpasses the superficial surface view. As with Japanese philosophy generally, enlightenment is always transformative.

James did not take pure experience this far, resting content to propose it as a heuristic “limiting” concept in that it brought philosophy back to experience and posited a state of being prior to such distinctions as monism and dualism. But as a limiting concept, it did not need to be a fact of ordinary experience itself. James goes so far as to state that “only new-born babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows, may be assumed to have an experience pure in the literal sense of a that which is not yet any definite what”¹⁴ For Nishida on the other hand, pure experience was both given in experience, served as the basis of all possible experience, and was a real and definitive experience available to any and all who followed one or more of the meditative arts. Pure experience was directly available to those wise men and women, in a meditative culture, who sought it out.

But it was his reading of the French philosopher Henri Bergson on “immediate experience” that he found to be central to the development of his notion of pure experience: “It was only after I familiarized myself with Bergson's thought that I was able to formulate my idea of ‘pure experience’ and publish my Zen no Kenkyō [Inquiry Into the Good].”¹⁵ Bergson believed that thinking distorts already given experience because it selects from, emphasizes, and deemphasizes portions of the whole of experience. Reason selects what is most useful to us, then discards the rest and, in doing so, falsifies reality as given to us as a continuous flow or flux. “Duration” is the term Bergson chose to capture this unceasing flow of experience. Only “intuition” is capable of apprehending the whole of our experience from within, rather than as objectified as though existing outside of us. In order to return to a true sense of reality-as-experienced, it is necessary to undo the work of the intellect, leave behind its categories, comparisons, abstractions, and part-by-part analysis, and return to t...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• A Note to the Reader
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945)
• Chapter Two: Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962)
• Chapter Three: Nishitani Keiji (1900–1990)
• Chapter Four: Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960)
• Chapter Five: Conclusion
• Glossary
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography