## 1. Introduction



The progenitor of the Kyoto School is
 Nishida Kitaro[1]
 (1870-1945). In the Meiji period (1868-1912), when Japan
reopened to the rest of the world after more than two centuries of
national isolation, a generation of scholars devoted themselves to
importing Western academic fields of inquiry, including
"philosophy." After many years of studying Western
philosophy and Eastern classics, alongside a dedicated practice of Zen
Buddhism, Nishida was the first major modern Japanese thinker to
successfully go beyond learning from the West to construct an original
and abidingly influential system of thought. This he began to do in
his maiden work, *An Inquiry into the Good*, published in 1911
(Nishida 1990). On the basis of this work Nishida obtained a position
in the Philosophy Department of Kyoto University, where he went on to
ceaselessly develop his thought and to inspire subsequent generations
of original philosophers, including the two other most prominent
members of the Kyoto School: Tanabe Hajime (1885-1962) and
Nishitani Keiji (1900-1990).



As is reflected in the name of the School, its founding members were
associated with Kyoto University, the most prestigious university in
Japan next to Tokyo University. It is perhaps no coincidence that the
School formed in Kyoto, the ancient capital and center of traditional
Japanese culture, rather than Tokyo, the new capital and center of
modernization-via-Westernization. While the Kyoto School philosophers
all devoted themselves to the study of Western philosophy (indeed they
made lasting contributions to the introduction of Western philosophy
into Japan), they also kept one foot firmly planted in their native
traditions of thought. One Japanese scholar of the Kyoto School writes
in this regard: "The keynote of the Kyoto school, as persons
educated in the traditions of the East despite all they have learned
from the West, has been the attempt to bring the possibilities latent
in traditional culture into encounter with Western culture"
(Minamoto 1994, 217).



It would be misleading, however, if we were to think of the Kyoto
School as merely putting a Western rational mask over Eastern
intuitive wisdom. Nor would it be entirely accurate to think of them
as simply using Western philosophical idioms and modes of thought to
give modern expression to East Asian Buddhist thought. For not only is
the Western influence on their thought more than skin deep, their
philosophies are far too original to be straightforwardly equated with
preexisting Asian thought. Insofar as they can be identified as East
Asian or Mahayana Buddhist thinkers, this must be understood
in the sense of having *critically* and *creatively*
developed these traditions in philosophical dialogue with Western
thought. It should be kept in mind that their primary commitment is
not to a cultural self-expression, or even to a dialogue between world
religions, but rather to a genuinely philosophical search for
truth.



The Kyoto School has become most well known, especially in the West,
for its philosophies of religion. Indeed the initial reception of the
Kyoto School in North America took place in university departments of
Religious Studies, where their philosophies of religion have
frequently been viewed as representative of East Asian
Mahayana Buddhism, specifically of the latter's Zen
and Shin (True Pure Land)
 schools.[2]
 While the exchange on these terms has been fruitful, this view can be
misleading in two respects. First of all, even if, for most of the
Kyoto School thinkers, a philosophy of religion is the ultimate
*arche* and *telos* of their thought, it is hardly their
sole concern. They address a full array of philosophical issues:
metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, logic, philosophical
anthropology, philosophy of history, philosophy of culture, philosophy
of language, ethics, political theory, philosophy of art, etc.



Secondly, even when their focus is on the philosophy of religion, they
approach this topic in a non-dogmatic and often surprisingly
non-sectarian manner, drawing on and reinterpreting, for example,
Christian sources along with Buddhist ones. Even Nishitani, who did in
fact come to identify his thought with "the standpoint of
Zen," adamantly refused the label of a "natural theologian
of Zen." He claimed: "If I have frequently had occasion to
deal with the standpoints of Buddhism, and particularly Zen Buddhism,
the fundamental reason is that [the original form of reality and the
original countenance of human being] seem to me to appear there most
plainly and unmistakably" (NKC X, 288; Nishitani 1982, 261).



Kyoto School philosophy, therefore, should be understood neither as a
body of Buddhist thought forced into the form of Western garb, nor as
universal discourse (which the West is supposed to have invented or
discovered) dressed up in Japanese garb. Rather, it is best understood
as a set of unique contributions from the perspective of modern
Japan--that is, from a Japan that remains substantially
undergirded by its historical layers of traditional culture at the
same time as being thoroughly remodeled by its most recent layer of
modernization via appropriation of Western culture--to a nascent
worldwide dialogue of cross-cultural philosophy.



This article will proceed as follows. In the following section, I will
consider the preliminary issues of how to define the Kyoto School and
who to include as its members. The name "Kyoto School" has
been used in the past, in some cases rather loosely, to refer to a
variety of sets of thinkers. It is therefore necessary to begin by
discussing the question: Just who belongs to exactly what? The third
and central section of this article will treat what is generally
considered to be the central philosophical concept and contribution of
the Kyoto School, namely, its ideas of "absolute
nothingness." After discussing the ostensible contrast between
"Western being" and "Eastern nothingness," and
after looking at some of the Buddhist and Daoist sources of the idea
of absolute nothingness, I will discuss the topological, dialectical,
phenomenological, and existential philosophies of absolute nothingness
developed by Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime, Nishitani Keiji, and
the central figure of the third generation of the Kyoto School, Ueda
Shizuteru (1926-2019). The fourth section will address the
political controversy surrounding the wartime writings and activities
of the Kyoto School. The first wave of attention paid to the Kyoto
School in the West in the 1980s largely ignored the political debate
that had long surrounded the School in Japan. While this lacuna in
Western scholarship was amended in the 1990s, notably with the
publication of *Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School and the
Question of Nationalism* (Heisig & Maraldo 1994), the
political ventures and misadventures of the Kyoto School remain a
highly contentious subject (see Maraldo 2006 and Goto-Jones 2008). In
the final section of this article I will return to the question of the
cross-cultural legacy of the Kyoto School as a group of thinkers that
stood between--and even moved beyond--"East and
West."


## 2. Identity and Membership: Who Belongs to What?


### 2.1 A History of External Naming



There has been considerable discussion surrounding the question of how
to define the Kyoto School, and who to include as its members. By all
accounts Nishida Kitaro is the School's originator. (See
the entry on
 Nishida Kitaro.)
 Yet it was never his intention to institute a "school"
based on his own thought; in fact he is reported to have always
encouraged independent thinking in his students. Moreover, unlike
Plato's Academy or the Frankfurt School's Institute for
Social Research, the Kyoto School thinkers never founded an academic
institution or formed an official organization (at least until The
Nishida Philosophy Association was founded in 2003; see the website
listed below). Their association was initially based merely on the
fact that they studied and taught at Kyoto University and developed
their thinking under the influence of Nishida as well as in dialogue
and debate with him and with one another. Indeed the name "Kyoto
School" only came into use by the "members"
themselves much later, when at all.



Names do not only tell us who or what something is; they also tell us
who or what something is not. Definitions not only seek to reveal an
internal essence; they also draw a line of demarcation between inside
and outside. It is thus not surprising that names and definitions
often have their origin in labels appended from without. These labels
may subsequently degenerate into stereotypes; or, conversely, they may
be positively appropriated and redefined by the group itself. Both of
these processes can be seen in the history of the "Kyoto
School."



The name "Kyoto School," in fact, originated from without;
or, more precisely speaking, it originated from the fringes of the
School itself. Tosaka Jun (1900-1945), a student of Nishida and
Tanabe, coined the expression in 1932 in reference to Nishida, Tanabe
and Miki Kiyoshi (1897-1945) as purportedly representative of
the epitome of "bourgeois philosophy in Japan" (see Heisig
2001, 4). Tosaka's own developing thought had an explicitly
materialist and Marxist orientation (see Tosaka 2014), and in his
article he criticized the School as promulgating a bourgeois idealism
that ignores material historical conditions and issues of social
praxis. Tosaka's critique had an impact on the subsequent
development of the Kyoto School's philosophies, and ironically
Tosaka himself is today considered by some to belong, together with
Miki, to the "left wing" of the Kyoto School (see Hattori
2004).



The second significant moment in the naming (or
"labeling") of the Kyoto School came more clearly from
without, and in an even more politically charged context. As Nishitani
was to recollect years later: "The name 'Kyoto
School' is a name journalists used in connection with
discussions that friends of mine and I held immediately before and
during the war" (NKC XI, 207; see Heisig 2001, 277). Nishitani
is referring here to a series of symposia that addressed the question
of the meaning and direction of the Pacific War and another symposium
on the question of "overcoming modernity." These
controversial symposia will be discussed in subsection 4.3 of this
article. In his retrospective comments, penned in 1977, Nishitani goes
on to say that by that time the name "Kyoto School" had
come to be used by Americans and others to "indicate purely a
school of thought."



Since the 1970s the name "Kyoto School" has gradually
recovered its underlying philosophical ring, which for several decades
in Japan (especially outside of Kyoto) had been drowned out by its
political overtones. This recovery happened first of all in the West,
where scholars neglected the political controversies in their
enthusiastic reception of the School's philosophies of religion.
While the political controversies returned with a vengeance to Western
academia a couple of decades later, in a kind of pendulum swing to the
hypercritical, the initial positive attention from the West had by
then helped to rehabilitate the image of the Kyoto School back home in
Japan.



Fujita Masakatsu suggests that the question of defining the identity
of the Kyoto School has often been a more pressing issue for Western
scholars than for the Japanese themselves. He speculates that there
are two reasons for this. One is that the Kyoto School never really
had any noteworthy competing schools of original thought within Japan
with which to contrast itself, and over against which to explicitly
define its own identity. The second reason is that, while Westerners
tend to draw out and focus on the shared general characteristics of
the School's thinkers, usually in contrast with the general
characteristics of Western thought, for Japanese scholars of the Kyoto
School the differences between the various thinkers often appear in
sharper relief than do their shared commonalities (Fujita 2001,
ii).



In any case, just as the formation of the Kyoto School's ideas
took place between Western and East Asian horizons of thought, so has
the scholarly study and, to some extent, even the defining of the
Kyoto School taken place between scholars in Japan on the one hand and
those in Europe and North America on the other. Since one of the
common characteristics of the Kyoto School philosophers is their
attempt to set Japan and their own thought in the context of the wider
world, it is fitting that, with the increasingly international study
of the Kyoto School, their thought is finally becoming what it always
intended to be, namely, "Japanese philosophy in the world"
(see Heisig 2004; Fujita & Davis 2005; Davis & Schroeder &
Wirth 2011).


### 2.2 The Question of Definition



At the start of the twenty-first century, two important volumes
appeared in Japanese with the name "Kyoto School" in their
titles: *The Philosophy of the Kyoto School*, edited by Fujita
Masakatsu (2001; translated into English as Fujita 2018), which
consists of an anthology of texts by eight Kyoto School thinkers
together with an essay on each one by a contemporary scholar; and
*The Thought of the Kyoto School*, edited by Ohashi
Ryosuke (2004), which contains five essays detailing the
controversial history of the name "Kyoto School" as well
as seven essays on potential contributions of their thought to various
fields of contemporary philosophy. While the two books complement one
other in many respects, they nevertheless suggest somewhat different
approaches to defining the school.



Fujita agrees with Takeda Atsushi's working definition of the
Kyoto School as: "the intellectual network that was centered on
Nishida and Tanabe, and mutually formed by those who were directly
influenced in both a personal and scholarly manner by them"
(Fujita 2001, ii and 234-35). Accordingly, Fujita's book
features such thinkers as Tosaka and Miki, as well as unanimously
accepted figures such as Hisamatsu Shinichi (1889-1980) and
Nishitani. As Fujita points out, the relatively open definition of the
Kyoto School as such a scholarly and interpersonal
"network" has the advantage of highlighting the mutuality
of the flow of influence between its members, as well as the fact that
"membership" in the unofficial group did not preclude
serious disagreement with the thought of Nishida or Tanabe. While
critical exchanges did sometimes lead to severed personal relations
(e.g., Nishida and Tanabe infamously stopped speaking to one another),
this was not always the case (e.g., Nishitani and Tosaka remained on
good personal terms despite their political and philosophical
differences). In either case mutual criticism was philosophically
taken seriously, and it frequently provided impetus to further
developments in each member's thought. In this sense, according
to Fujita, an acceptance of mutual criticism could well be considered
one of the defining characteristics of the School.



One point made by Tosaka early on, a point often repeated today, is
that without Tanabe's *critical* appropriation of
Nishida's thought there would be no tradition of the Kyoto
School; we would have only successors of "Nishidian
Philosophy" and not a genuine school of mutually related yet
independent thinkers. The question remains, however, just how
independent a thinker can be with respect to Nishida's thought
and still be considered a member of the School. For even when
subsequent figures in the School sharply questioned certain aspects of
Nishida's thought, they tended at the same time to appropriate
and creatively develop other shared concepts and motifs. A movement of
self-critical development can in fact be seen in the ceaseless
progression of Nishida's own thinking. Nishida considered
himself to be a "miner of ore" who never managed to stay
put in one stage of development long enough to refine the ideas he had
unearthed (Nishida 1958, vii; on the development of Nishida's
thought, see Fujita 2020 and the entry on Nishida Kitaro).



Hence the Kyoto School, like many other vibrant schools of thought,
should be seen as a cluster of original thinkers who, while not
uncritically subscribing to any prescribed dogma, nevertheless came to
share, and debate, a number of common motifs as well as basic concepts
and terminology. As we shall see, the most fundamental of their shared
and disputed concepts is that of "absolute nothingness," a
concept that has, in fact, most often been used as a thematic axis for
defining the School.



In contrast to Fujita, Ohashi explicitly questions the
appropriateness of defining the Kyoto School merely in terms of a
network of personal and scholarly relations. According to Ohashi,
in order for a group of thinkers to form a genuine
"school" of philosophy, "there must be the common
possession or formation of a thought" (Ohashi 2004, 9). For
Ohashi, this common thought of the Kyoto School is that of
absolute nothingness, and he accordingly suggests the following as a
definition of the School: "a group of philosophers spanning
several generations who developed their thought in several areas of
philosophy with the idea of 'nothingness' as a
basis" (ibid., 10; see Ohashi 2001, 13). While he does
include Hattori Kenji's essay on the "left wing of the
Kyoto School" as the opening chapter of his *The Thought of
the Kyoto School*, previously Ohashi explicitly excluded Miki
from the School on account of his principally Marxists orientations
(Ohashi 1990, 12). However, we should note that while Miki did
not maintain a strict adherence to Marxism (see Curley 2020 and
Krummel's introduction to Miki 2024), he did maintain a close
relationship with Nishida, with whom he published several dialogues in
the 1930s. Not only was Miki one of the former students who inspired
Nishida to take an interest in Marxism during this period, but
Miki's own mature philosophical anthropology and philosophy of
society and history remained influenced by Nishida. Indeed, in his
unfinished magnum opus, *The Logic of Imagination* (Miki 2024),
while explicitly engaging with the texts of Dewey, Hume, and
especially Kant, Miki sets forth the Nishida-inspired idea that a
creative "nothingness is what transcends the subjective and the
objective and envelopes them" (quoted in Fujita 2011, 315).



Among Western scholars, John Maraldo has most thoroughly probed the
question of Kyoto School identity and membership. He isolates six
criteria that scholars have used to include and exclude thinkers from
the Kyoto School: (1) connection with Nishida; (2) association with
Kyoto University; (3) stance toward Japanese and Eastern intellectual
traditions; (4) stance toward the interrelated matters of Marxism, the
nation state, and the Pacific War; (5) stance toward Buddhism and
toward religion in general; and (6) stance toward the notion of
absolute nothingness. Maraldo shows how each one of these criteria
have been used in various ways, consciously or unconsciously, since
the 1930s to either promote the philosophical significance or
disparage the political ideology of the Kyoto School (Maraldo 2005,
33-38).



I would add two more related and interrelated criteria. One is an
essentially *ambivalent* stance (i.e., neither simple rejection
nor simple acceptance) toward Western philosophy and the West in
general. For example, Nishida and others undertake a critical
reception of Western ontology in order to develop an Eastern
meontology or "logic of nothingness," and attempt to
combine a Western "logic of things" with an Eastern
"logic of heart-mind." I will discuss such issues in
section 3 of this article.



Another criterion that could be used to define the School is an
essentially *ambivalent* attitude toward Western modernity (or
toward modernization as Westernization). A critical stance toward a
unilateral globalization of Western modernity, a stance which at the
same time accepts in part its unavoidability and in some respects even
affirms its necessity, was expressed with the idea being discussed at
the time of "overcoming modernity."According to Kyoto
School philosophers, this overcoming would take place *not* by
retreating from Western modernity (as some romantic and conservative
thinkers asserted), but rather by going *through* and beyond
it. This going through and beyond, moreover, would not simply be a
matter of going further down the road of linear progress; it would
entail a hermeneutical as well as ultimately a (me)ontological and
existential re-gress, a radical "step back." For Kyoto
School philosophers such as Nishitani, a critical and creative
retrieval of the traditions of East Asia, those of East Asian
Mahayana Buddhism in particular, is thought to enable the
radical religious and philosophical "trans-descendence"
necessary to move through and beyond the limits and problems of
Western modernity (see Nishitani 2008; Nishitani 1990, 173-81;
Davis 2004).



This idea of "overcoming modernity" has proven to be both
one of the more provocative and controversial aspects of their
thought. For some it promises to contribute an important East Asian
perspective to debates over postmodernism in philosophy and
postcolonialism in culture studies. Yet because the Kyoto
School's ideas of "overcoming modernity" developed
in conjunction with their wartime political theories, theories which
typically saw the nation of Japan as playing a key role in the
historical movement through and beyond Western modernity, it has also
proven to be one of the most criticized aspects of their thought. (It
is noteworthy in this regard that many postwar Japanese proponents of
[Western] postmodernism eschewed making the connection between their
adoption of recent Western self-criticism of modernity/Eurocentrism
and the Kyoto School's earlier critique of these. A noteworthy
exceptions is Nakamura Yujiro, and the neo-Marxist
phenomenologist Hiromatsu Wataru also surprised Japanese academia by
reviving interest in this aspect of the Kyoto School's legacy.)
In any case, it is true that even after the Kyoto School ceased
formulating the idea of overcoming modernity in political terms,
elements of the idea live on in their postwar philosophies of religion
and culture. Hence, a radical problematization of Western modernity
can be considered an important aspect of their identity as a school of
thought.



Another significant Western contributor to the question of the Kyoto
School's identity is James Heisig, who succeeded Jan Van Bragt
as the head of the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture in
Nagoya, an institute which has for several decades now been at the
center of international research on the Kyoto School. In his book,
*Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School*,
Heisig suggests that we follow the lead of Takeuchi Yoshinori
(1913-2002) and define the School by "triangulating"
it around the three leading figures of Nishida, Tanabe, and Nishitani
(Heisig 2001, 3-7 and 275-78).



It is indeed these three figures that form the core of what has become
known as the Kyoto School, and in this article I will accordingly
focus my attention primarily on them, as well as at times on Ueda
Shizuteru, the leading figure of the third generation of the School.
It should nevertheless be kept in mind that these are only four of a
much wider group of original thinkers, some squarely within and some
more or less on the periphery of the Kyoto School.


### 2.3 Members and Associates



Ohashi Ryosuke's thesis, advanced already in his
landmark German anthology, *Die Philosophie der
Kyoto-Schule* (1990, revised edition 2012; see also
Ohashi and Akitomi 2018), is that the Kyoto School should be
understood as a group of thinkers involved in a pluralistic yet
cooperative and sustained attempt to think on the basis of an idea of
"nothingness" or "absolute nothingness." This
distinguishes their thought from that of traditional Western onto-logy
based on the concept of "being." With this definition in
mind, Ohashi lists the central members of the Kyoto School
according to generation as follows: Nishida and Tanabe make up the
first generation; Hisamatsu, Nishitani, Kosaka Masaaki
(1900-1969), Shimomura Torataro (1900-1995),
Koyama Iwao (1905-1993), and Suzuki Shigetaka
(1907-1988) make up the second generation; and Takeuchi
Yoshinori (1913-2002), Tsujimura Koichi (1922-2010),
and Ueda Shizuteru make up the third generation. Elsewhere he also
suggests that the psychologist Kimura Bin (b. 1931) could be
considered part of the third generation of the School, particularly if
we shift the criterion of definition from interpersonal relations to a
genealogy of thought (Ohashi 2004, 9).



Ueda developed an original philosophy of Zen in relation to Meister
Eckhart and Nishida. Takeuchi wrote important works on the philosophy
of religion from a Shin Buddhist perspective. Tsujimura, who studied
under Heidegger as well as under Hisamatsu and Nishitani, has
provocatively and influentially written on Heidegger's thought
from a Zen and Kyoto School perspective. Abe Masao (1915-2006),
a former student of Hisamatsu's, was an important representative
of the Kyoto School and contributor to inter-religious dialogue in
North America, although he is somewhat less well known in Japan
itself. If we were to view the Kyoto School as living past its third
generation, Ohashi Ryosuke (b. 1944), a prolific philosopher
in his own right, whose works in both Japanese and German address a
broad range of philosophical issues, would undoubtedly count as a
central figure of its fourth generation. Other recent affiliates of
the School, who could be seen as belonging to its fourth generation,
include Hase Shoto, Horio Tsutomu, Omine Akira, Fujita
Masakatsu, Mori Tetsuro, Hanaoka (Kawamura) Eiko, Matsumura
Hideo, Nakaoka Narifumi, Okada Katsuaki, and Keta Masako. If the
School shows promise of living on to future generations, it is with
currently active Japanese scholars such as Akitomi Katsuya, Minobe
Hitoshi, Itabashi Yujin, Uehara Mayuko, Inoue Katsuhito, Mine
Hideki, Kosaka Kunitsugu, Tanaka Yu, and Tanaka Kyubun, and
as well as with a number of Japanese and non-Japanese philosophers
living outside of Japan, some of whom have studied and worked
extensively with members of the third and fourth generations of the
School.



We appear to be at a turning point in the history of the Kyoto School,
as is reflected in current retrospective attempts to define it. With
Ueda's and then Hase's retirements from Kyoto University,
on the one hand, and with the creation in 1996 of a Department of the
History of Japanese Philosophy at Kyoto University (see the website
listed below) under the head of Fujita Masakatsu and now Uehara Mayuko
on the other, the Kyoto School is becoming as much an object of
scholarship as it is a living tradition. However, as with most schools
of philosophy, the line between critical scholarship and creative
development is hardly a clear one, and in practice the retrospective
study of the Kyoto School often blends together with its further
unfolding as a still vibrant school of thought.



It is also important to point out that today in Japan the Kyoto School
is not only studied in Kyoto. Since the appearance of Tokyo-based
philosopher Nakamura Yujio's first book on Nishida in
1983, Nishida and the Kyoto School have increasingly received
attention from scholars and students in areas of Japan beyond Kyoto.
Worth special mention in this regard is Kosaka Kunitsugu, whose lucid
and prolific scholarship on Nishida and others has done a great deal
for the sympathetic yet sober textual analysis of the Kyoto School.
The creation of the Nishida Philosophy Association in 2003 (see the
website listed below) has helped inaugurate a new era of cooperative
exchange between scholars from various areas of Japan as well as from
abroad.



One final point on the question of membership: consideration should
also be given to those who could be referred to as "related
thinkers" or "associate members" of the Kyoto
School. The widest understandings (or
 misunderstandings[3])
 of the Kyoto School include in it a number of thinkers who have a
more or less peripheral relation to the inner circle of the School.
For example, there is the case of the well-known Zen scholar and
thinker, D. T. Suzuki (Suzuki Daisetsu) (1870-1966). Suzuki
maintained a long personal relationship with Nishida since their days
as schoolmates. He not only helped introduce the young Nishida to the
practice of Zen, his articulation of Mahayana Buddhist
thought is also acknowledged by Nishida as having influenced the
formation of certain key ideas in his last essay on the philosophy of
religion (see Nishida 1987, 70, 85-86, 108, 122-23). But
Suzuki--who is justifiably famous in his own right for, among
other things, helping introduce Zen to the West--was neither
trained as an academic philosopher nor associated with Kyoto
University; and thus he is perhaps best thought of as a "closely
related thinker" to the School.



There are also the noteworthy cases of Watsuji Tetsuro
(1889-1960) and Kuki Shuzo (1888-1941). Both of
these philosophers were brought to Kyoto University by Nishida, and
both developed philosophies which were more or less influenced by
Nishida's thought (see Maraldo 2005, 34 and 52). And yet, both
their ideas and their activities remained too independent to count
them among the inner circle of the School. It should be kept in mind,
however, that these two "associates" in particular are
first rate philosophers in their own right, whose original work
outshines that of many of the less original though full-fledged
members of the School. Watsuji's novel theory of "culture
and climate" (*fudo*), together with his major work
on the ethics of "betweenness" (*aidagara*), and
Kuki's combination of logical rigor and existential insight in
his major writings on the problem of contingency, together with his
provocative works on Japanese aesthetics (notably his hermeneutical
phenomenology of "*iki*"), have each made lasting
contributions to philosophy and are worthy of international scholarly
attention (see the entry on Watsuji Tetsuro; McCarthy 2020;
Mayeda 2020).



Finally, there is the matter of thinkers who have developed their
ideas more or less under the influence of Nishida and other members of
the Kyoto School. A complete list of this group of "influenced
thinkers" would be long, but it would include such names as
Takahashi Satomi, Takizawa Katsumi, Mutai Risaku, Yuasa Yasuo, Kimura
Bin, Sakabe Megumi, Nakamura Yujiro, and Noe Keiichi. A
number of non-philosophers, such as the world-famous architect
Ando Tadao (Tadao Ando), who designed the Ishikawa Nishida Kitaro
Museum of Philosophy (see the website listed below), have also been
influenced by Nishida and the Kyoto School.


## 3. Absolute Nothingness: Giving Philosophical Form to the Formless



Having discussed issues of definition and membership of the Kyoto
School, we are now prepared to pursue the question of what unifies
their thought as a school of philosophy. I will here follow the
suggestion of Ohashi, Nishitani, and other representatives of the
Kyoto School itself, and focus on the shared--and at times
disputed--idea of "absolute nothingness"
 (*zettai-mu*).[4]


### 3.1 Western Being vs. Eastern Nothingness? Ontology vs. Meontology?



Nishitani wrote the following with regard to Nishida and Tanabe:
"[Their] philosophies share a distinctive and common basis that
sets them apart from traditional Western philosophy: absolute
nothingness. ... Clearly the idea of absolute nothingness came to
awareness in the spirituality of the East; but the fact that it has
also been posited as a foundation for philosophical thought represents
a new step virtually without counterpart in the history of Western
philosophy" (NKC IX, 225-26; Nishitani 1991, 161).



"First philosophy" in the Western tradition is ontology,
which asks the question of "being qua being," and tends to
answer this question either in terms of the most universal
"being-ness" or in terms of the "highest
being." For Aristotle, the primary category of being is
"substance," ambiguously thought in its primary sense as
the particular entity (e.g. Socrates) and in its secondary sense the
universal that makes that entity what it is (e.g. human being), and
the highest being was thought to be the "unmoved mover."
Greek ontology later influenced the Christian theological tradition to
think of God as the "highest being," such that the dual
threads of the Western tradition were woven together as what Heidegger
calls "onto-theology." Hence, the fundamental
philosophical question of the onto-theological mainstream of the West
is, "What is being?" On the other hand, the
counter-question which the Kyoto School finds in the East is,
"What is nothingness?" In place of an ontology, first
philosophy in the East is more often a "meontology": a
philosophy of non-being or nothingness.



Perhaps we should say "*mu*-logy" rather than
"meontology"; for, strictly speaking, the Greek
*meon*, "non-being," should be translated into
Japanese as *hi-u*. What I am translating as
"nothingnesss," *mu*, is written with a single
character rather than as a negation (*hi*) of being
(*u*). This is crucial since the nothingness with which they
are concerned is not the simple negation or privation of being. It is
closer to what Heidegger means by "being." Attentive to
what he calls the "ontological difference" between being
(*das Sein*) and beings (*das Seiende*), Heidegger notes
that with respect to beings, understood as determinate things, being
can only appear as "no-thing." We fail to attend to the
no-thing of being when we think only of things, and especially when we
think of thinking as a mere calculation of predetermined beings.
Heidegger thus calls "the nothing" (*das Nichts*)
the "veil of being." Being cannot but appear to us as
nothing, insofar as we know only of beings. Yet it is *das
Sein* or *das Nichts* which grants an open place, a
clearing (*Lichtung*), for beings to show themselves in the
first place. But this clearing lets beings be by withdrawing itself
from view. Just as "nature (*phusis*) loves to
hide" (Heraclitus), being lets determinate beings come to
presence by withdrawing its indeterminate abundance into absence or
self-concealment (see Heidegger 1975, Vol. 9, 103-22; and Vol.
65, 246-47).



Tanabe studied with Heidegger in the early 1920s. (In fact, upon
returning to Japan in 1924, Tanabe was the first scholar in the world
to write an article on Heidegger's thought.) When he later wrote
the following, Tanabe no doubt had Heidegger's 1929 "What
is Metaphysics?" lecture in mind: "All science needs to
take some entity or other as its object of study. The point of contact
is always in being, not in nothing. The discipline that has to do with
nothingness is philosophy" (THZ VI, 156; see Heisig 2001,
121).



Heidegger was of course not the first Western philosopher to ask after
that which is radically other than beings or "beyond
being" as
 such.[5]
 For example, Tanabe could have also found support for the idea that
philosophy investigates nothingness in the following passage from
Hegel: "Das Erste der Philosophie aber ist, das
*absolute* Nichts zu erdenken" [Yet the first task of
philosophy is to conceive of *absolute* nothingness] (quoted
from Hegel's "Glauben und Wissen" in Ohashi
1984, 203). The Kyoto School might even be thought of as recovering a
suggestion from one of the first Presocratic philosophers,
Anaximander: namely, to think finite beings as determinations, or
delimitations, of "the indefinite" or "the
unlimited" (*to apeiron*).



Moreover, as Kyoto School thinkers frequently do point out, Christian
negative theologians and mystics, most notably Meister Eckhart, at
times make use of the notion of "the nothing" to refer to
that which transcends all concepts and all oppositions. For Eckhart,
"nothing" (*niht*) was one way of indicating the
"Godhead" (*gotheit*) beyond "God"
delimited as a personal being (see Eckehart 1963, 328). *Niht*
here is an expression, at the limits of language, which attempts to
indicate "the nothingness of indistinct fullness from which flow
... all oppositions and relations" (Schurmann 1978,
168). Eckhart speaks of a breakthrough, not only beyond the ego, but
also beyond God Himself, a breakthrough, that is, to an abyssal
Godhead understood as "the silent desert into which no
distinction ever gazed, of Father, Son, or Holy Ghost" (Eckehart
1963, 316). Analogously, Nishida writes that "when we truly
enter thoroughly into the consciousness of absolute nothingness, there
is neither I nor God" (NKZ V, 182; see Nishida 1958, 137).



Nishitani affirms Eckhart's intimations of a Godhead of absolute
nothingness, even though he notes that this is "markedly distant
from orthodox Christian faith," which limits the concept of
nothingness to the relative nothingness expressed in the
*nihilum* of *creatio ex nihilo*, that is, to the
absolute privation of being out of which the highest being creates
lesser beings (NKC X, 75; Nishitani 1982, 66; also see NKC VII). Yet
Nishitani's student and Eckhart scholar Ueda Shizuteru, despite
profound appreciation for Eckhart's thought and its nearness to
Zen, argues in the end that Eckhart's nothingness, like that of
negative theology in general, still points to an inexpressibly higher
*being* (see USS VIII, 146). Critically adapting
Heidegger's expression, we might say that the nothing is still
understood as "the veil" of this inexpressibly higher
being. Both Nishitani and Ueda ultimately look to Zen for a
nothingness so absolute that, in thoroughly negating any traces of
opposition to beings (i.e., as a higher being transcending worldly
beings), it is paradoxically found fully in the concrete facts and
activities of the here and now (see USS VIII, 5ff.).



Ohashi stresses, however, that neither the Buddhist tradition nor
the Kyoto School should be thought of as having a patent on the
radical "thinking of nothingness." In fact, he argues,
"this thought slowly came to the fore within Western philosophy
itself," a process that indeed set the stage for Kyoto School
contributions to contemporary philosophy (Ohashi 2004,
12-13). Nishitani had already explored a number of resonant
notions of nothingness, not only in the Neoplatonic and Christian
mystical traditions, but also in 19th and 20th
century Western philosophers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger (see NKC
VIII; Nishitani 1990). And yet, here again Nishitani finds residues of
an ontological bias, where a kind of "relative
nothingness" is posited as either a simple negation of or as a
veil for being. Nishitani ultimately concludes that Nietzsche
succeeded only in expressing a "standpoint of relative absolute
nothingness"; and even in Heidegger, he critically suggests,
"traces of the representation of nothingness as some
'thing' that is nothingness still remain" (NKC X, 75
and 108; Nishitani 1982, 66 and
 96).[6]



In any case, it is fair to say that the Kyoto School thinkers
generally consider the purest sources for the idea of absolute
nothingness to lie in the traditions of Asia. Hisamatsu went so far as
to speak of absolute nothingness as "oriental nothingness"
(Hisamatsu 1960); though it is important to bear in mind that his
claim is that this idea was first clearly *discovered* in the
traditions of Asia. Absolute nothingness is by no means only relevant
to Asian cultures, anymore than in 1500 CE the earth was only round in
the West. Moreover, if the *idea* of absolute nothingness
"came to awareness in the spirituality of the East," as
Nishitani says, the *philosophy* of absolute nothingness is
generally considered to be the Kyoto School's own contribution
to the contemporary world of thought opened up by the meeting of
Eastern and Western traditions.



Nishida--who could hardly be accused of underestimating what
Japan had to learn from Western philosophy--also spoke at times
in very general terms of Eastern nothingness in contrast with Western
being. In his essay, "The Types of Culture of the Classical
Periods of East and West Seen from a Metaphysical Perspective,"
he wrote: "How then are we to distinguish between the types of
culture of the West and East from a metaphysical point of view? I
think we can do this by dividing them into that [i.e., the culture of
the West] which considers the ground of reality to be being, and that
[i.e., the culture of the East] which considers this ground to be
nothingness." In Greek philosophy, he goes on to say,
"that which has form and determination was regarded as the
real"; or even, as in Plato, reality, that which has true being,
was understood as the Forms. Judeo-Christian culture, however
radically different in various ways it was from Greek culture, and
despite negative theology's indications of a *Deus
absconditus* as a kind of nothingness, nevertheless primarily
considered the *person* of God as "the most perfect
being" to be the basis of reality. In radical contrast to both
the Greek and Judeo-Christian origins of Western culture, Indian
culture, like that of China and Japan, took "the profoundest
idea of nothingness as its basis" (NKZ VII, 429-33; see
Nishida 1970, 237-40).



In the closing lines of the preface to his 1926 book, *From That
Which Acts to That Which Sees*, a book many scholars view as the
beginning of "Nishida Philosophy" proper, we find the
following famous and programmatic lines: "It goes without saying
that there is much to admire, and much to learn from, in the
impressive achievements of Western culture, which thought form as
being and the giving of form as good. However, does there not lie
hidden at the base of our Eastern culture, preserved and passed down
by our ancestors for several thousand years, something which sees the
form of the formless and hears the voice of the voiceless? Our hearts
and minds endlessly seek this something; and it is my wish to provide
this quest with a philosophical foundation" (NKZ IV, 6).


### 3.2 The Buddhist and Daoist Background for the Idea of Absolute Nothingness



Before looking more specifically at how Nishida and other members of
the Kyoto School attempt to give philosophical form to the formless,
it will be helpful to look at some of the threads in Eastern
traditions on which the Kyoto School thinkers are explicitly and
implicitly drawing as they weave their texts on absolute
nothingness.



Their explicit references are primarily to Mahayana
Buddhism, especially to the East Asian Buddhist schools of Zen
(predominantly the Rinzai tradition but also notably Dogen of
Soto) and Pure Land (predominantly Shinran's Shin)
Buddhism. The key Sanskrit term in Mahayana Buddhism here is
*sunyata* ("emptiness";
*ku* in Japanese). With the noteworthy exception of the
later Nishitani, however, the Kyoto School tends to favor the Chinese
glyph *mu* ("nothingness"; *wu* in Chinese),
which is found predominantly in Zen, and which reflects the early
attempt to "match terms" with Daoism in the translation
and interpretive development of Buddhism in China. Let us briefly
examine both of these Asian sources for the Kyoto School's
philosophies of absolute nothingness, *sunyata*
and
 *wu*/*mu*.[7]



In Mahayana Buddhism *sunyata* refers
first of all to the fact that all things come into being in
"interdependent origination" (Sanskrit:
*pratitya-samutpada*; Japanese: *engi*), and
they are therefore "empty" of any independent substantial
self-nature or "own-being" (Sanskrit:
*svabhava*). This thought is closely tied to the basic
Buddhist thesis of "no-ego" (Sanskrit:
*anatman*; Japanese: *muga*). All beings, including
the ego, are interconnected and in flux. Psychologically,
*sunyata* refers also to the releasement from
all *attachment* to beings, from all reification and willful
appropriation of them. Such attachments are both based on and in turn
support the primary attachment to the fabricated ego, since the ego
both strives to possess and is unwittingly possessed by its
reification of beings. To awaken to the emptiness of all things, to
their lack of substantial own-being or egoity (Japanese:
*shogyomuga*), therefore, is to free oneself from both an
ego-centered and reified view of things as well as from the illusion
of the substantial ego itself.



Yet, if the movement of negation stops here at a one-sided negation of
being (i.e., at negation of the illusory independent substantial
reality of things and the ego), then the idea of
"emptiness" is not itself
 emptied.[8]
 That would leave us with either a pessimistic nihilism or,
ironically, a reified view of emptiness itself. These are what the
Buddhist tradition calls "emptiness-sickness" (Japanese:
*kubyo*). True emptiness must be understood to
dynamically negate the very opposition of being and (relative)
nothingness (see Nakamura 1975, Vol. 1, 278). Hence, in
Mahayana we find an explicit return--through a
"great negation" of a reified misunderstanding of
being--to a "great affirmation" of a non-reified
understanding of being. Emptiness thoroughly understood is nothing
separate from or opposed to "being" properly understood.
As the often chanted lines of the *Heart Sutra* put it:
"[phenomenal] form is emptiness; emptiness is also [phenomenal]
form; emptiness is no other than form; form is no other than
emptiness" (see Bercholz & Kohn 1993, 155). The famous
Mahayana Buddhist philosopher of
*sunyata* Nagarjuna (ca. 150-250
CE) went so far as to provocatively state: "The limits (i.e.,
realm) of *nirvana* are the limits of
*samsara*. Between the two, also, there is not the
slightest difference whatsoever" (Inada 1993, 158). In other
words, *nirvana* is neither a nihilistic extinction of nor
a transcendent escape from the phenomenal world
(*samsara*); it is rather an enlightened manner of
being-in-the-world here and now (see Garfield 1995, 332). This radical
reaffirmation of the phenomenal world was particularly stressed in
East Asian developments of Mahayana Buddhism, where we find
such remarkably affirmative phrases as: "true emptiness,
marvelous being" (Japanese: *shinku-myou*).



Even though he never disavows the term Nishida coined, "absolute
nothingness" (*zettai-mu*), in his mature writings
Nishitani explicitly employs the Mahayana term
"emptiness" (*sunyata*,
*ku*) in his attempt to think a way beyond both the
exacerbated attachment to being and the reactive nihilism that
together plague the modern world (see Ueda 2011a). Nishitani writes as
follows: On the one hand, emptiness can be termed "an absolute
negativity, inasmuch as it is a standpoint that has negated and
thereby transcended nihility, which was itself the
transcendence-through-negation of all being." In this sense,
"emptiness can well be described as 'outside' of and
absolutely 'other' than the standpoint shackled to being,
provided we avoid the misconception that emptiness is some
'thing' distinct from being and subsisting
'outside' it." On the other hand, then, emptiness is
truly emptiness "only when it empties itself even of the
standpoint that represents it as some 'thing' that is
emptiness. ... [True emptiness] is to be realized as something
united to and self-identical with being" (NKC X, 109-10;
Nishitani 1982, 97). Following in the wake of Nishida's
topological thinking of absolute nothingness (see subsection 3.3
below), Nishitani also thinks of emptiness as a "place" or
"field" (*ba*) wherein beings can appear as they
truly are in their proper basis or "home-ground"
(*moto*).



The idea of a nothingness that radically transcends, or underlies,
both being and its simple negation can also be traced back to
pre-Buddhist Chinese thought. A Chinese scholar laments the
philosophical ambiguity inherent in the Chinese character *wu*
(nothingness). He writes that "in Chinese
'*wu*' can mean both the contrasting pair of
'*you*' [i.e., 'being'] and the
metaphysical source of both '*you*' and
'*wu*'" (Zhang 2002, 150). In the terminology
of the Kyoto School, the former sense of *wu* (*mu* in
Japanese) is a matter of "relative nothingness," while the
latter sense is akin to what they call "absolute
nothingness." The latter sense of *wu* is expressed in
chapter 40 of the *Daodejing* as follows: "The myriad
things under heaven are generated from being. Being is generated from
nothingness (*wu*)." This unnamable non-dualistic source
of all being and relative non-being is also referred to as the Way
(*dao*). Of the latter it is said, in chapter 14 of the
*Daodejing*: "It is called the shapeless shape, the image
of no-thing" (see Izutsu 2001, 50-51 and 104). It is not
hard to link this thought with Nishida's professed intention of
giving philosophical foundation to the "form of the
formless" that he maintained lies at the heart of the traditions
of the East.



In the Daoist tradition we also find an idea of nothingness used in
the context of radically emptying the mind in order to attune the
finite self to the
 in-finite[9]
 rhythm of the Way. The *Zhuangzi* speaks in this regard of the
practice of "sitting down and forgetting everything" and
of "being empty like a mirror" (see Watson 1968, 90 and
97). When Zen talks of returning to one's "original face
before one's parents were born," we find the Daoist ideas
of "forgetting the ego" and "returning to the
root" combined with the Mahayana Buddhist notion of
the "original purity of the mind." The original brightness
and purity of the mind, which lies hidden beneath the clouds of
defiling passion, is also frequently expressed in Mahayana
texts with the analogy of a mirror that is able to spontaneously
reflect the world without egoistic discriminations.



Zen presumably inherits this analogy of the original mind as mirror
from both Mahayana and Daoist sources. In the traditional
edition of *The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch*,
however, all residues of dualistic discrimination--including
those that remain even in the notion of a mirror that needs to be
continually wiped clean of impurities--are swept away in the
famous lines: "Originally there is not a single thing"
(Chinese: *benlai wu-yi-wu*; Japanese: *honrai
mu-ichi-motsu*). In this quintessential Zen expression are wedded
together the meontological and psychological senses of
*wu*/*mu*: a rejection of an ontology of independent
substances, a declaration of an originary (self-negating) nothingness,
and an expression of a radical freedom from egoistic attachment as
well as freedom for spontaneous creativity and compassion.



In Zen we find the Mahayana Buddhist notion of emptiness and
the Daoist notion of nothingness fully intertwined and developed into
a practice of living both completely unattached and completely engaged
in the world of "true emptiness, marvelous being." In the
famous *wu* or *mu* koan that opens the
*Gateless Barrier*, Wumen (Mumon) urges those who wish to reach
enlightenment, that is, those who wish to pass through the
"barrier of the gate of nothingness," to concentrate their
entire life force on this *wu* (*mu*), taking care to
understand it neither as "nihilistic nothingness" nor
"in terms of being and non-being" (Nishimura 1994, 22; see
Cleary 1999, 71). This was the koan that Nishida finally passed
after nearly a decade of intense practice of Zen (see Yusa 2002,
45ff.). And as Nishida confided many years later to Nishitani, it was
from early on his "impossible desire" to somehow bring Zen
and philosophy together (NKZ XIX, 224-25). Even more than did
Nishida, several subsequent Kyoto School philosophers, most notably
Nishitani, Hisamatsu, Abe, and Ueda, explicitly endeavored to bring
the practice as well as the thought of Zen into relation with
philosophy (see Davis 2021; 2022, 275-89).


### 3.3 Nishida's Topology of Absolute Nothingness



Besides contrasting Western being with Eastern nothingness, in his
later writings Nishida also at times makes a broad distinction between
a Western "logic of things" and an Eastern "logic of
the heart-mind (*kokoro*)." While Western thought tends
to begin with an objective logic of substances (be these physical or
mental), he claims that in Buddhism one can find the germ of a logic
of the heart-mind, even if traditionally this remained largely at the
level of an expression of personal experience rather than being fully
developed into a genuinely philosophical logic (see Nishida 1964,
356). Scholars of Buddhism may object that it was Nishida's own
knowledge of Buddhism that remained too much at the level of personal
experience, rather than the sophisticated discourses of Abhidharma,
Madhyamaka, Yogacara, Tiantai, and Huayan traditions of
Buddhist philosophy themselves.



In any case, in the development of Nishida's thought,
"being" is thought of in terms of the objectivity of
determinate things, "relative nothingness" is understood
as a mere privation or simple negation of being, and an enveloping
sense of "nothingness" is provisionally associated with a
kind of transcendental subjectivity of consciousness or the
heart-mind. Ultimately, however, Nishida comes to posit absolute
nothingness as the "place" (*basho*) that embraces
*both* subjective (noetic) and objective (noematic) dimensions
of reality. Thus, he relegates not only privation of being but also
subjective nothingness, in the sense of the "field of
consciousness," to a type of "relative
 nothingness."[10]



In 1934 Nishida writes: "Reality is being and at the same time
nothingness; it is being-and-nothingness [*u-soku-mu*],
nothingness-and-being; it is both subjective and objective, noetic and
noematic. Reality is the unity of subjectivity and objectivity, and
thus the self-identity of what is absolutely contradictory. Or rather,
it is not that [the separate spheres of] subjectivity and objectivity
come to unite, and then we first have reality. [The opposition of]
subjectivity and objectivity must instead be thought from out of a
dynamically dialectical reality that is self-determining" (NKZ
VII, 441; see Nishida 1970, 29). Reality, as the dialectical
"self-determination of absolute nothingness," is in
Nishida's later works understood as a dynamic "identity of
the absolute contradiction" between subjective (relative)
nothingness and objective being. Absolute nothingness is the temporal
and spatial "place" wherein individual persons and things
determine one another in their mutual interactions.



The "place of absolute nothingess" (*zettai-mu no
basho*) first became the central concept of Nishida's
thought in the mid-1920s, though he continued to develop and rethink
the idea up until his last completed essay in 1945, "The Logic
of Place and the Religious Worldview." Nishida first explicitly
worked out an idea of absolute nothingness in his 1926 book, *From
That Which Acts to That Which Sees* (NKZ IV), a book which
inaugurated his middle-period of thought. In this work, which includes
an important essay entitled "Place"
("*Basho*"), Nishida's topological reasoning
develops in rough outline as
 follows[11]:



Just as all events must "take place" somewhere, all beings
must be situated in some place. Beings always exist in relation to
other beings, and any relation requires a third term, namely, the
place or medium wherein they are related. In other words, for A and B
to be related, there must be some place, C, in which their relation is
situated. To begin with, we can understand this C as the spatial
"context" in which objects are situated in relation to one
another. But the context in which things are defined is more than
spatial; a thing is not only here as opposed to there. Things are
determined according to a number of criteria, each of which operates
within its own field of judgment. Hence, the place C can be further
understood as a "category" of judgment, such as the
quality "color." Red and blue are revealed, and contrasted
with one another, as colors within the same color field.



In order to let concrete things reveal themselves yet more fully,
however, we should think of C as "consciousness." Our
minds are able to correlate various categories of judgment, such as
color, size, shape, location, etc., and therefore to perceive
individual things as composed of unique combinations of various
qualities and relations. For example, we are conscious of a certain
thing as a round, soft, red, sweet, apple sitting on a table. The
field of consciousness is the field in which these different
categories are unified in the perception and judgment of the qualities
of a particular thing in relation to other particular things and their
qualities.



Ultimately, however, there is a crucial limit to the subjective
"field of consciousness." As Kant demonstrated, subjective
consciousness cannot reflect things as they are in themselves, but
only as they appear when schematized according to subjective
categories. What, then, is the ultimate place wherein the encounter
between subjects and objects takes place, wherein persons and things
coexist? According to Nishida, this must be the place wherein persons
and things not only undergo changes in accidental categorical
qualities, but wherein they essentially and existentially "come
to be and pass away." It is the place, not just of intellectual
judgments, but of birth and death. This ultimate "groundless
ground," which "envelops" all beings, yet which does
so in such a way that lets them contain their own principle of
self-determination, Nishida calls "the place of true
nothingness." Although in no sense a determinate being, neither
is this place of true or absolute nothingness a mere static vacuity.
It must be thought of as both the epistemic source of consciousness
and the ontological origin of beings.



Although Nishida comes to the idea of the place of absolute
nothingness most directly through his confrontations with Kant and
Neo-Kantianism, he does not shy from thinking this place in
metaphysical as well as epistemological terms: nothingness is not
merely a reflective, but is also a creative principle (NKZ IV,
238-39). As he writes much later, "absolute nothingness at
once transcends everything and is that by which everything is
constituted" (NKZ IX, 6). And yet, Nishida repeatedly tells us
that, as no-thing outside of or other than the place of the coming to
be and passing away of truly individual beings, absolute nothingness
is *not* to be thought of as a "transcendent
being." Nor is it to be understood as the processional unfolding
of a "potential being," that is to say, as a kind of
Hegelian "world Spirit" with its own cunning reason at
work behind the scenes of its historical march toward
self-realization. The absolute, according to Nishida, must be thought
of as nothingness in order to distinguish it from all ontologies that
would reduce the uniqueness and autonomy of truly individual beings
either to a transcendent being or to an underlying mechanical or
teleological process.



One of the driving concerns behind Nishida's repeated insistence
that the absolute be thought of in the meontological terms of a
formless, indeterminate place of absolute nothingness, is that only
therein can self-determining and irreducibly singular individuals be
given their due. All ontologies of universal being fail to allow for
the existence of the "true individual," or for the genuine
encounter between such individuals. Since "there is no universal
[of being] whatsoever that subsumes the I and the thou" (NKZ VI,
381), the locus of genuine interpersonal encounter must be thought of
in terms of the place of absolute nothingness (see Davis 2014).



It should be pointed out that the Japanese term for
"absolute," *zettai*, literally means a
"severing of opposition," which implies the sense of
"without an opposing other." The contrasting term is
*sotai*, which indicates "relativity" in the
literal sense of "mutual opposition." The true absolute
must embrace, rather than stand over against, the relative. The
absolute, therefore, must not oppose itself to relative beings;
rather, its self-determination must be such as to allow their mutually
autonomous relations to take place. According to Nishida, it is only a
philosophy of the place of absolute nothingness that can do justice to
the notion of the absolute as well as account for both the autonomy
and the mutual relativity of individuals.



While on the one hand Nishida becomes increasingly concerned with
allowing for radical interpersonal alterity within the place of
absolute nothingness, on the other hand he also consistently argues
from early on that "consciousness" should not be thought
to entail an unbridgeable epistemological subject-object split.
Although he initially adopted, and adapted, the notion of "pure
experience" from William James and others to express this
nondual basis of knowledge (see Nishida 1990), Nishida later drops
this expression in favor of the notion of "self-awareness"
(*jikaku*). According to Nishida, self-awareness can be defined
as a "self reflecting itself within itself" (NKZ IV,
 215).[12]
 Since absolute nothingness is not a "self" in the sense
of a subject standing over against an object, any more than it is an
ego with its own interested categories of perception, the
self-awareness of absolute nothingness must be that of a "seeing
without a seer" or a "knowing without a knower."
"Since there is no-thing that reflects, it is like a mirror
reflecting the mirror itself" (ibid., 181).



In Nishida's middle period, the paradigm for knowing is a
"pure seeing" (*tada miru*) beyond all acting and
volition. Nishida claims that as finite individuals we can approach
this ideal by way of thoroughly negating or emptying the ego.
"By truly emptying the self, the field of consciousness can
reflect an object just as it is" (NKZ IV, 221). The self reaches
the place of absolute nothingness, and therefore first truly comes
into contact with other beings, by way of thoroughly emptying itself
in a movement of "immanent transcendence" that takes it
back *through* the depths of the field of consciousness.



In his last completed text, "The Logic of Place and the
Religious Worldview," Nishida most fully develops the religious
implications of the idea of absolute nothingness. There he suggests
that absolute nothingness is the best way to understand God or the
absolute, which he defines as that which "contains its own
absolute self-negation within itself" (NKZ XI, 397). As absolute
nothingness, God is the dynamic principle of affirmation by way of
absolute self-negation. The true absolute essentially negates its
transcendent divinity and expresses itself in the forms of the
 relative.[13]



Nishida insists that this idea of God can be understood no more in
terms of an immanent pantheism than in terms of a transcendent theism.
It may perhaps best be called "panentheism"; but for
Nishida this too remains a static term of "objective
logic" and fails to capture the necessity of thinking God as
*both* irreducibly transcendent and thoroughly immanent. As
Nishida is fond of saying, God or the Buddha is "immanently
transcendent." It is the paradoxical logic one finds in the
*Prajnaparamita Sutras* of
Mahayana Buddhism (i.e., what D. T. Suzuki called the
"logic of *soku-hi*," a logic of "is and is
not") that Nishida thinks most profoundly expresses the
"absolute dialectic" of the divine as the dynamic
principle of absolute nothingness (NKZ XI, 399; see Nishida 1987,
69-71).



If we as finite relative beings can and do touch the infinite
absolute, it is only by way of a mutual self-negation. Nishida calls
this mutual self-negation "inverse correspondence"
(*gyakutaio*). By way of radically emptying ourselves, we
can touch that which is the radical origin of self-emptying, the
absolute as an essentially self-negating absolute nothingness.
According to Nishida, an immanent principle of self-negation is, in
fact, the very essence of life. "True life (*seimei*)
must contain within itself an absolute nothingness, a [principle of]
absolute negation" (NKZ VIII, 341). It is such a life that can
truly be self-determining as a "creative element of a creative
world."



In his middle period, inaugurated by the first formulations of the
idea of "the place of absolute nothingness" in *From
That Which Acts to That Which Sees*, Nishida's thought was
characterized by a shift from his earlier voluntarism to a kind of
intuitionism of pure seeing without a seer (see NKZ IV, 3-6). In
his later period, however, Nishida's epistemology became much
more dynamic and dialectical; rather than "pure seeing,"
his key epistemological phrase then became
"action-intuition" (*koi-teki chokkan*).
Although self-emptying still plays a vital role, this is understood
not as preparation for a passive intuition, but rather as an active
process of "seeing a thing by becoming it." In other
words, intuition happens only in the midst of the dialectical process
of acting upon and in turn being acted upon by things.



In his later period, the place of absolute nothingness is accordingly
reconceived much more dynamically as the "self-determination of
the dialectical world," a world which continually moves
according to the principle of "from created to creating."
The absolute finds expression only in the midst of the mutual
interaction of individuals and things, and true individuals are both
determined by and "counter-determine" (*gyaku-gentei
suru*) the movement of the dialectical world (see NKZ VII, 305ff.;
VIII, 313-14). Although one can trace an immanent unfolding of
Nishida's thought in this direction, it is also clear that a
major impetus for his dialectical development of the idea of absolute
nothingness can be found in the criticism he received from his junior
colleague, Tanabe Hajime.


### 3.4 Tanabe's Absolute Nothingness as the Other-Power of Absolute Mediation



It is Tanabe's declaration of partial independence from
Nishida's thought in an essay written in 1930, "Requesting
Instruction from Professor Nishida" (THZ IV, 305-328),
that many see as the origin of the Kyoto School as more than a group
of disciples of "Nishida Philosophy." In this essay Tanabe
sharply criticizes Nishida's middle-period philosophy of the
"place of absolute nothingness," claiming that it falls
into kind of Plotinian "emanationism" that ultimately
rests on a religious or mystical intuition. For Tanabe, this posed two
serious problems for a genuine philosophy of absolute nothingness.



To begin with, in crossing the line between philosophical reason,
based on ordinary experience, and supra-rational intuition, based on
extra-ordinary religious experience, Nishida had purportedly committed
a methodological transgression. Here Tanabe poses a question that
still resounds through (some would say haunts) the halls of Kyoto
School studies to this day. As James Heisig puts it, the Kyoto School
thinkers in general do not share an important assumption of Western
philosophy as a whole, namely, a "clear delineation between
philosophy and religion" (Heisig 2001, 13-14). This is a
complex issue, since the Western concept of "religion" was
just as much an import to Japan as was "philosophy." The
problems faced and the possibilities opened up by a Zen Buddhist
"philosophy of religion" in particular differ in
significant ways from a Judeo-Christian one, insofar as the former
calls for extending rational thought in the direction of a
"practice of awakening" rather than in the direction of a
leap of faith.



The provocative methodological issues involved in the relation between
the philosophical thinking and the Zen practice of some Kyoto School
philosophers deserves greater attention than can be given here (see
Davis 2021; 2022a, 275-289). Let it suffice to point out here
that Tanabe too later crisscrosses the line between philosophy and
religion as much as any Kyoto School thinker, although his Shin
Buddhist inclinations took him in the direction of "faith"
rather than
 "intuition."[14]
 After this religious turn in his thinking, Tanabe claimed that
philosophy and faith must be mediated by a personal act of metanoesis
(Tanabe 2000, 34; Tanabe 1986, 29) and that, in order to develop a
genuine philosophy of religion, "in the end one must have faith
and become self-aware by means of religious faith" (Tanabe 2003,
27).



For his part, Nishida responded to Tanabe's early critique by
affirming that his idea of the self-awareness of absolute nothingness
does indeed entail the profound significance of religious experience.
Yet he claims that this is neither mystical in the sense of
"religious ecstasy" nor "is it thought in the
direction of substance, as is Plotinus' One." He denies
the charge of emanationism, claiming that in his thought "it is
not a matter of the self-determination of being, but rather the
self-determination of nothingness" (NKZ VI, 154). For Nishida,
only if the absolute is thought in terms of a self-negating
nothingness, rather than in terms of a transcendent plenum of the One,
is it possible to truly affirm the world of the many. The absolute is
found in the very midst of beings, not beyond them. It is
"because this is absolute nothingness," Nishida writes in
the parlance of Zen, "that the mountain is mountain, the river
is river, and all beings are just as they are" (NKZ V, 182; see
Nishida 1958, 137).



But the other major concern of Tanabe's critique of Nishida was
that, insofar as absolute nothingness is made into an unchanging basis
or enveloping "place" of a system of reality, and insofar
as it is seen as transcending the dialectical interactions among
beings, then such a philosophy ends up falling back into a metaphysics
of being after all. In order to radically think the idea of absolute
nothingness, Tanabe argues, we must conceive of it rather in terms of
"absolute mediation" or "absolute dialectic."
Absolute nothingness must be thought, not as an enveloping place, but
as the very movement of "absolute negation," a movement
which originates in the self-negation of absolute nothingness itself.
Tanabe writes: "Since the absolute, as nothingness, must act as
an absolute mediating force, it presupposes relative being as its
medium. In contrast with the doctrine of the creation of the world
maintained by the theist, or the theory of emanation propounded by the
pantheist, [for] historical thinking the absolute and the relative,
nothingness and being, are interrelated each with the other as
indispensable elements of absolute mediation" (Tanabe 2000, 27;
Tanabe 1986, 23).



In this later text, *Philosophy as Metanoetics*, written around
the same time as Nishida was elaborating his own kenotic idea of a
self-negating absolute nothingness, Tanabe, in a putative critique of
Nishida, also writes: "Because the absolute subject of
Other-power is absolute nothingness ... it must be thoroughly
mediated by the relative self. In contrast to a mere
'self-identity of absolute contradictories', only that
which entails the absolute existential mediation of the death and
resurrection of the self can be called absolute nothingness"
(Tanabe 2000, 13; Tanabe 1986, 8). Tanabe's passing dismissal of
Nishida's terminology here is hardly convincing, since in fact
Nishida too speaks of the absolute self-negation of absolute
nothingness and of the existential death and resurrection of the
finite self. In any case, Tanabe's philosophy as the "way
of metanoetics" (*zangedo*) entails a ceaseless
movement of what he calls "absolute critique," where the
self-power of finite reason again and again runs up against
antinomies, and is reborn only by way of absolute nothingness as what
he calls, in the parlance of Shinran's Shin Buddhism, the
workings of Other-power (*tariki*).



As Nishitani and others have pointed out (see NKC IX, 212ff.;
Nishitani 1991, 161ff.), Tanabe's criticisms often fail to do
justice to Nishida's thought, and we should not forget the
impetuses Tanabe acknowledges having received from his erstwhile
mentor. Yet, on the other hand, his criticisms were not without their
point, and his provocations certainly did serve as counter-impetuses
that spurred Nishida on, not just to clarify, but also to further
develop his philosophy of absolute nothingness (see Sugimoto 2011;
Kopf 2004). No doubt in large part due to the persistent attention
given by Tanabe's "logic of the specific" to the
historical world, to the irrational element of the specific through
which the individual and the universal must be mediated, and to the
dialectical relations between finite beings, Nishida gradually moved
toward a much more dynamic conception of absolute nothingness as the
self-determination of the dialectical world, a self-determination
which takes place only by way of the mutual interactions between
individual persons, things, and their social-historical contexts.


### 3.5 Nishitani's Three-field Topology: Being, Nihility, and Emptiness



In the tradition of the Kyoto School, Tanabe's role has often
been seen, justly or unjustly, as more of a dialectical counterpoint
than an independent alternative to Nishida. Following the lead of
Nishida's own creative appropriation of Tanabe's critique
of his middle-period philosophy of place, many subsequent Kyoto School
figures have tended to incorporate Tanabe's dialectical thinking
into, rather than seeing it as a replacement for, Nishida's
topological thinking of absolute nothingness. To be sure, such
thinkers as Takeuchi Yoshinori and Hase Shoto were
profoundly influenced by Tanabe who, inspired by Shin Buddhism,
understands absolute nothingness in terms of the absolute mediation of
Other-power. Yet many others received their primary impetus from
Nishida and from Zen. Although Nishida's conception of a kenotic
and dialectical self-determination of the place of absolute
nothingness was inspired by Shin Buddhism and Christianity as well as
Zen Buddhism, later Kyoto philosophers such as Nishitani, Abe, and
Ueda relates their thought primarily to Zen even as they also
continued to engage in dialogue with Shin Buddhism and Christian
theology and mysticism.



Tanabe's method of thinking, as we have seen, was intensely
dialectical, a method he developed through his prolonged study of
Hegel. Nishitani, on the other hand, began his study of Western
thought by focusing on Bergson, Schelling, Nietzsche and the German
mystics. Between 1937 and 1939 Nishitani studied with Heidegger, who
was at the time beginning to grapple with the question of nihilism,
and whose phenomenology had developed into a thinking of the
"clearing of being" or what he would later characterize as
a "topology of being" (Heidegger 1975, Vol. 15, 335).
Influenced no doubt in part by his contact with Heidegger (and
evidently in turn influencing Heidegger, who frequently invited him to
his house to learn about Zen), Nishitani developed, in his own highly
original manner, existential and phenomenological aspects of
Nishida's topology of absolute nothingness.



The problem of nihilism gradually became a major focus of
Nishitani's personal and scholarly attention. Nishitani
understood the historical phenomenon of nihilism as a vacuous
nothingness that assaults the modern world, a world bereft of its
ethical and religious moorings. Despite Nishitani's appreciation
of the profundity of his mentor Nishida's philosophy, he thought
it failed to adequately address this crucial modern problem (see Ueda
2011a). According to Nishitani, Nishida's philosophy, whether it
be his early thought of "pure experience" or his later
notion of "action-intuition," begins already from a
standpoint where the dualistic consciousness of the ego has already
been broken though (see NKC IX 247-48; Nishitani 1991,
184-85). For his part, Nishitani was concerned with the question
of how to think the topological pathway leading to such a breakthrough
to non-duality.



The question of how to open up an existential path to the place of
absolute nothingness was particularly acute given the prevalence of
the pendulum swing between two extremes endemic to modernity: on the
one hand, an extreme reification of the subjective ego together with a
corresponding objectification and technological manipulation of
things; and, on the other hand, a reactive nihilism which threatens to
nullify the very reality of both the self and things. For Nishitani,
humanism and science were incapable of overcoming this dilemma of
reification vs. nullification; in fact, they had helped create it. In
an age of secular egoism and anti-religious nihilism, how could an
experience of the place of absolute nothingness take place?



To begin with, Nishitani says we must heed the call of
Nietzsche's madman and cease fleeing from the experience of
nihilism. God as the highest being is dead, and it remains an open
question whether he can be reborn as absolute nothingness. In any
case, the venture of Nishitani's philosophy of Zen is more
concerned with the existential imperative of letting go of attachments
than it is with immediately grasping hold of a new concept for God. In
order to finally free humans from their egoistic obsessions and
manipulative objectifications in the dualistic "field of
[reified] being and [dualistic] consciousness," Nishitani argued
for the necessity of first boldly stepping back into the "field
of nihility."



Yet the real breakthrough to a non-dualistic reaffirmation of self and
world only occurs when the relative nothingness of nihility is in turn
broken through to a genuine experience of absolute nothingness or true
emptiness on the "field of emptiness." Nishitani thus
explained the personal encounter with nihilism as an experience of the
extreme relative nothingness of "nihility" or
"vacuous nothingness" (*kyomu*), and for him the
central task of "overcoming nihilism by way of passing through
nihilism" entailed transgressing beneath (i.e.,
"trans-descending") the "field of nihility" to
the "field of emptiness" (see NKC X, 109 and 122ff.;
Nishitani 1986, 97 and
 108ff.).[15]
 As mentioned earlier (subsection 3.2), the "field of
emptiness" is not a vacuum of relative nothingness that assaults
beings from without; it is an open clearing wherein beings are neither
nullified nor reified but rather let be in the mutual freedom of their
coming to be and passing away in unobstructed interrelation with one
another. It is also the place in which a genuine interpersonal
encounter can take place (Nishitani 2004; Davis 2017).



While Nishitani's "field of emptiness" (*ku
no* *ba*) corresponds in many respects to what Nishida
calls the "place of absolute nothingness" (*zettai-mu
no basho*), Nishitani takes the peculiar problems that beset the
modern secular and technological world, as well as postmodern
critiques of metaphysics and subjectivity (especially those of
Nietzsche and Heidegger), far more seriously than did Nishida.
Nishitani also connects his thought much more explicitly with the
tradition of Mahayana Buddhism than did Nishida, writing on,
and writing from, what he calls the "standpoint of Zen"
(see NKC XI; and Nishitani 2009).


### 3.6 Ueda's Two-layered World: Linguistic Horizons within the Empty-Expanse



Ueda Shizuteru was a student of Nishitani's who became a
renowned Eckhart scholar as well as a scholar and lay master of Zen
(see Muller et al. 2022). For decades he was also at the center
of the revival of Nishida studies that began in the 1980s. Like
Nishitani, Ueda explicitly orients himself to and from the standpoint
of Zen and takes a topological, phenomenological, and existential
approach to the idea of absolute nothingness (Ueda 2011c). Following
in the tradition of the Kyoto School's dialogue with Western
philosophers, in one of his influential works Ueda engages the work of
Husserl, Heidegger and other phenomenologists to articulate a
religiously charged philosophy of what he calls "twofold
being-in-the-world" (*nijusekainaisonzai*) (USS IX;
see also Doll 2011, 2020; Krummel 2022).



While the first layer in which the self is located is the historical
horizon of the everyday life-world, this horizon itself is ultimately
found to rest in an absolutely "empty-expanse," a place of
absolute nothingness that both enfolds the everyday world as well as
grounds the radical freedom of the individual "self-negating
self" (see USS IX, 22-24 and 324ff.). Ueda finds this idea
of returning, by way of absolute self-negation, to a primordial
wellspring of existence that is "empty and free"
(*ledig und frei*) in Meister Eckhart, and, in an even more
rarified form, in Zen Buddhism (see Davis 2008a). It is from the
latter that he borrows the term "empty-expanse"
(*koku*) as a topological expression for
*sunyata*.



For Ueda, then, the two-layered-world is inhabited by a
two-layered-self. This is how Ueda understands what Nishitani referred
to as a "self that is not a self." The self, as
being-in-the-world, ultimately realizes itself in a moment of absolute
self-negation where it dies to itself and stands as a
"non-ego" or "hollow-being" in the
"hollow-expanse" which envelops the horizonal life-world.
The true self, as a self that becomes itself by passing through the
absolute negation of its ego, is thus a two-layered
being-in-and-beyond-the-world; it stands in the horizon of the world
which, in turn, rests in the empty-expanse of absolute
nothingness.



This empty- or hollow-expanse is, to be sure, beyond conceptual
understanding, insofar as concepts have as their medium the world of
language and its determinations of meaning. Nevertheless, what lies
beyond the reach of language is not to be understood as an ineffable
mystical realm to which one ascends and remains, but rather is to be
experienced in extreme moments from the limits of language as that
which at once tears through and mends, exceeds and encompasses,
transcends and transforms our linguistic horizons of intelligibility.
Insofar as we do not close in on ourselves and rigidify our linguistic
delimitations of the world, we can open ourselves up to the silence of
this surrounding expanse of unlimited openness, which in turn allows
us to speak and act more freely and responsibly in our worlds of
linguistic significance (see Ueda 2011b).


### 3.7 The "Self that is not a Self" and the Nothingness of Radical Subjectivity



Ueda argues that both the ego of the Cartesian *cogito*, as
well as the non-ego (Sanskrit: *anatman*; Japanese:
*muga*) of Buddhism, must ultimately be comprehended on the
basis of an understanding of the self as a repeated *movement*
through a radical self-negation to a genuine self-affirmation.
Ueda's formula for this movement is: "I, not being I, am
I." Even when one says "I am I," if we listen
closely there is a pause, a breath, between the first and the second
"I." Precisely that opening--which necessarily occurs
as a moment in the ceaseless movement by which the identity of the
self is constituted--is the "ecstatic space" wherein
an open encounter with others is possible.



A genuine encounter with another person no longer takes place simply
within my, or your, or even our world-horizon. Ueda uses the greeting
of the bow as a concrete example to illustrate how mutual
self-negation--the emptying of all ego-centered presumptions and
agendas--returns us to a communal place where we, paradoxically,
share "nothing" in common. "There, by way of making
oneself into a nothingness, one returns into the infinite depths of
that 'between' where there is neither an I nor a you.
... Then, when we rise again so as to come back to life anew and
face one another, this becomes a matter of, as Dogen puts it:
thus am I; thus are you" (Ueda 1991, 67; see USS X, 107ff.).
Open to others, and to the empty-expanse in which together we dwell, I
am I (USS X, 23-24).



Nishitani had earlier used the expression "the self that is not
a self" to characterize the shared endeavor of Nishida and
Tanabe as that of thinking "a 'self that is not a
self' turning on the axis of absolute nothingness" (NKC
IX, 238; Nishitani 1991, 175). The idea of the true self as a
"self that is not a self" expresses an essential aspect of
what Nishida and other Kyoto School thinkers call--following D.
T. Suzuki, who in turn gleaned the idea from the *Diamond
Sutra*--the "logic of *soku-hi*," a logic
of "is and is not" or affirmation by way of negation (see
NKZ XI, 398-99; Nishida 1987, 70; Akizuki 1996, 109-152;
Yusa 2019). Nishida strikingly claims that the self is, at bottom, a
self-contradiction, and that it can truly be itself only in the
process of thoroughly negating and thus opening itself (NKZ VI, 290,
377-78, 401). The self finds its most originary freedom, and its
most open engagement with others, through a radical self-negation
which returns it, not to a higher Will or encompassing Being, but to
kenotically self-negating absolute nothingness that, in turn, finds
expression only in the interaction of truly self-determining
individuals. For Nishida, the true individual is an interpersonal
self-determining focal point of the self-determination of absolute
nothingness, in other words, an interactive and creative element of a
creative world (see NKZ VIII, 343ff.).



Nishitani's first book, *The Philosophy of Radical
Subjectivity*, sought a more originary conception of the human
subject than had been developed in modern Western philosophy. In
general, for Nishitani, modern "subjectivity" remains
bound by a reifying attachment to things and ultimately to the ego.
Nishitani did recognized certain advances in the direction of a truly
"radical subjectivity" in modern ideas such as that of
individual "autonomy." For example, the Kantian idea of
the ethical "person," which opens itself to a universal
standpoint by way of a negation of the self-will of the ego, suggested
for Nishitani a "kind of standpoint of
'non-ego'" (see NKC I, 60). However, the autonomy of
the Kantian ethical subject can also be seen as asserting a sublated
form of self-will, namely in its will to form as well as to conform to
the universal. Nishitani finds profounder intimations of a truly
radical subjectivity in both Meister Eckhart's mystical theology
and Nietzsche's radical atheism, each of which in its own way
goes beyond, or digs beneath, attachments to and sublations of egoity.
Ultimately Nishitani returns to the language of Zen Buddhism to
express his conception of the "radical subjectivity of non-ego
[*muga*]" as a "subjective nothingness"
(*shutai-teki mu*) (NKC I, 88).



This radical subjective nothingness is not to be confused with the
relative nothingness of a "subjective consciousness" which
sets itself over against, and objectifies, the world. As with
Zen's koan of nothingness (*mu*), a realization of
the radical subjectivity of non-ego (*mu-ga*) entails breaking
through the dualistic barrier that artificially separates self and
world. For Nishitani, this breakthrough is expressed as "the
self-awareness of the bottom dropping out" (NKC I, iii). It is a
radical return, or "trans-descendence," to "the
background of our own selves," to the *Ungrund* on which
we originally possess "not a single thing"
(*mu-ichi-motsu*) (NKC XI, 243).



With Nishitani's conception of a radical "subjective
nothingness," understood as a "standpoint of
emptiness" realized on the "field of emptiness," we
find an explicit appropriation of both the psychological and the
meontological (or *mu*-logical) paradigms of nothingness found
in the traditions of East Asia. The notions of non-ego (*muga*)
and "no-mind" or "mind of nothingness"
(*mushin*) are thought in terms of the spontaneous openness of
the heart-mind that stands within the field of emptiness, an open
place which grants beings the free space needed for their unobstructed
(*muge*) interactivity.



As we have seen, Nishida, Nishitani, and Ueda each conceived of
absolute nothingness in both an existential and a topological sense.
Although Tanabe eschewed the topological conception of absolute
nothingness, nevertheless, by understanding both the relative self and
the absolute in terms of a ceaseless movement of affirmation by way of
radical negation, he too, in his own way, philosophically appropriated
the East Asian paradigms of psychological and meontological
nothingness.


## 4. Political Ventures and Misadventures



It should be clear by this point that the philosophical stakes
involved in the Kyoto School's thought are high--indeed
they invite us to rethink many of our most basic concepts and ways of
experiencing the world and ourselves. For this very reason Kyoto
School thinkers promise to be especially valuable partners in any
post-Eurocentric forum of philosophical dialogue. Genuine philosophy,
after all, thrives on the opportunity to call its fundamental
presuppositions into question, even if stubbornly Eurocentric
philosophers fail to heed this crucial calling of their discipline.
Unfortunately, the world of politics tends to be a far less
self-critical and thus less genuinely dialogical forum of
intercultural relations. The history of Western imperial domination of
Asia is well documented (see Panikkar 1969), and post-colonial
critique of Western imperialism plays a prominent role in contemporary
academia. At the same time, in the field of East Asian studies, Kyoto
School thinkers are frequently accused of contributing to the
political ideology of Japanese imperialism in the 1930s and early
1940s. However, we need to carefully examine the sense in which and
the extent to which the political thought of the Kyoto School is
deserving of its tainted reputation in this regard.


### 4.1 The Razor's Edge of "Cooperative Resistance"



The political ventures and misadventures of philosophers--from
Socrates and Plato to Marx and Heidegger in the West, and from
Confucius and Hanfeizi to Gandhi and Nishida in the
East--represent an often enduring though hardly always endearing
aspect of their legacies. Relating the "ideal" world of
philosophy to the "real" world of political action is a
perilous, if arguably obligatory, undertaking.



The pitfalls of political intervention are particularly deep when
philosophers find themselves in a nation headed down a road toward
injustice and disaster. What is a philosopher to do in such a
situation? Barring straightforward complicity, there appear to be
three choices: withdraw into *reclusion*, stand up in overt
*resistance*, or attempt to negotiate a reorientation by means
of *immanent critique* or *cooperative correction*.
While many intellectuals in wartime Japan took the first course, some
courageous Leftists braved the second course. Both Tosaka Jun and Miki
Kiyoshi, the key figures of what is sometimes called the "left
wing of the Kyoto School," died in prison in 1945 as a result of
their intellectual resistance. The majority of the Kyoto School
thinkers, however, including Nishida, Tanabe, and Nishitani, took the
third course of action.



In retrospect Nishitani wrote: "My attempt was, on the one hand,
to explain where Japan was situated within the world to those
intellectuals remaining on the sidelines [of politics]; and, on the
other hand, with respect to the extremely nationalistic thought that
was becoming increasingly prevalent at the time, I attempted from
within to open up a path for overcoming this extreme
nationalism" (NKC IV, 384). Rather than either stand up and die,
or sit out and wait, Nishitani and other members of the Kyoto School
attempted to walk the razor's edge of what Ohashi
Ryosuke has called "anti-establishment cooperation"
or "cooperative resistance" (*hantaiseiteki
kyoryoku*) (see Ohashi 2001, 20ff.).



To be sure, the question of how successfully the Kyoto School managed
to carry out this "cooperative resistance" (and the
question of whether they cooperated more than resisted) is debatable,
especially given the fact that they did not succeed in altering the
disastrous orientation of the regime. Their intentions of cooperative
resistance notwithstanding, the fact is that their political writings
were more or less successfully co-opted by the extreme nationalism
that they were more or less trying to reorient or overcome from
within. Nevertheless, we must take care to separate their ideals from
the reality they were attempting to influence, and bear in mind the
constraints of their chosen path of immanent critique.



Whatever the political failings of the Kyoto School thinkers may be,
it is clear that certain crudely one-sided condemnations are at least
as simplistic and misleading as are the occasional attempts of
overzealous acolytes to whitewash everything they ever said or wrote.
It is, for example, highly misleading to sum up the Kyoto
School's various philosophies of history as "a thinly
disguised justification ... for Japanese aggression and
continuing imperialism," or to claim that "no group helped
defend the state more consistently and enthusiastically ... and
none came closer ... to defining the philosophic contours of
Japanese fascism" (Najita & Harootunian 1998, 238-39;
for a severe critique of such polemical claims, see Parkes 1997 and
2011). The latter dishonor, namely that of attempting to give
quasi-philosophical expression to Japanese fascism, surely goes to the
proponents of "Imperial Way Philosophy," who in fact
harshly attacked the "world-historical philosophy" of the
Kyoto School for being insufficiently Japan-centric (see Ohashi
2001, 71-72).



Judicious critics of the wartime political writings of the Kyoto
School must surely try to steer a middle course between and beyond
what James Heisig aptly calls the "side-steppers and the
side-swipers" (see Heisig 1990, 14). With this balance in mind,
in the following sections let me highlight some of the key points and
episodes of the Kyoto School's wartime political ventures and
misadventures.


### 4.2 Nishida's Reluctant "War over Words" and his Ambivalent Universalism



In 1943 Yatsugi Kazuo, a member of the Center for National Strategy,
approached Nishida and asked him to contribute a scholarly account of
Japan's role in East Asia, that is, to help provide a rationale
for the creation of the so-called "Greater East Asia
Co-Prosperity Sphere." Nishida is said to have burst out in
anger, shouting something like: "What on earth do government
officials and militarists think these days, that scholars are like
artisans from whom they can order something to be tailor made?"
And yet Yatsugi apparently countered to the effect that not only
prominent Japanese scholars, such as Fukuzawa Yukichi, but also
Western philosophers, such as Kant and Adam Smith, did not neglect to
apply their theoretical insights to practical social and political
circumstances (see Ohashi 2001, 47). In the end Nishida did agree
to write an essay, "Principles for a New World Order" (NKZ
XII, 426-434; see Arisaka 1996), though his original text was
edited and "simplified" by a sociologist serving as a
go-between. Nishida was even then disappointed that his attempt to
"bring out the dimension of universality present in the Japanese
spirit" seemed to have had no effect on Prime Minister
Tojo Hideki and his bellicose regime (see Yusa 1994,
124).



From today's vantage point, Nishida's political writings
appear highly ambivalent. On the one hand, his resistance to fascism
and totalitarianism is unmistakable. Indeed it comes as no surprise
that he was in danger of being arrested--and apparently only his
public stature and the fact that he had influential sympathizers
within the moderate ranks of the government kept this from
happening--when one reads the warning given in his 1941 speech
delivered directly to the emperor: "Any totalitarian system that
negates outright the role of the individual is but an
anachronism" (NKZ XII, 271; see Yusa 1994, 111). Even in his
most compromised text, "Principles for a New World Order,"
Nishida urgently claims that the "co-prosperity sphere"
must *not* entail either ethnocentrism, expansionism,
imperialism, colonialism, or totalitarianism (see NKZ XII,
432-33). Elsewhere Nishida made clear that his vision was of a
multicultural world wherein neither the West would subsume the East
nor vice versa (NKZ XIV, 404-5), wherein "various
cultures, while maintaining their own individual standpoints, would
develop themselves through the mediation of the world" (NKZ VII,
452-53).



On the other hand, Nishida did think that nations--and in
particular the Japanese nation with the emperor at its spiritual
center--had a special role to play in the historical formation of
this truly "worldly world" (*sekai-teki sekai*).
Moreover, in his writings he did affirmatively employ such problematic
phrases as "all the world under one roof"
(*hakko-ichiu*) and the "imperial way"
(*kodo*). While there is certainly room for criticism
here in light (and hindsight) of the historical record of
Japan's political and cultural "leadership" (in
fact, domination) of East Asia at this time, the issue of how to
critically evaluate Nishida's theoretical interventions is
complicated by the hermeneutical fact that today we read such
catchwords and phrases through the semantic lenses of the right wing
ideologues who in the end succeeded in carving their definitions into
the annals of history. It must be kept in mind that, at the time, the
precise meaning of these phrases was still in dispute. Ueda Shizuteru
has aptly spoken of Nishida's "tug-of-war over
meaning," a struggle which he ultimately lost (Ueda 1994, 97;
also see Goto-Jones 2005). Yusa Michiko writes in this regard:
"Rather than invent a new vocabulary that would rise above the
fray, [Nishida] took up the jargon and slogans of the day and sought
to redeem them from their petty provincialism by opening them up to a
more universal perspective" (Yusa 1994, 131).



Nevertheless, even after we have carried out a hermeneutically
sensitive reconstruction of the context, and after we have finished
reading between and behind the lines of his political texts, there
undoubtedly remain a number of problematic aspects of Nishida's
political thought, especially his idealistic view of the emperor
system and Japan's purported world-historical calling to take on
a leadership role in the formation of an East Asia world (see Davis
2006, 227-38; Osaki 2021, 117-256; Arisaka 2020).
Affirming the central place of the emperor in Japan as "an
identity of contradictions," Nishida cryptically writes:
"Our [i.e., Japan's] national polity is not simply a
totalitarianism. The Imperial House is the beginning and the end of
our world, as the absolute present that embraces past and
future" (NKZ XII,
 430).[16]
 And with regard to the central role of Japan in East Asia, he claims
that "in order to build a particular world, a central figure
that carries the burden of the project is necessary. In East Asia
today there is no other but Japan" (NKZ XII, 429; Arisaka 1996,
102).



Critics may argue that Nishida's universalism is still plagued
by an exemplary
 particularism,[17]
 and that he succeeds in questioning Eurocentrism only by way of
shifting the locus of the concrete universal to Japan. Yoko Arisaka
argues that "the chief claim of the defenders--that
Nishida's philosophical 'universalism' is
incompatible with nationalist ideology--fails because
universalist discourse was used both as a tool of liberation and
oppression in Japan's case" (Arisaka 1999, 242). Arisaka
critically adds, however, that "the idea that a particular
nation may be the bearer of a universal principle, such as freedom or
democracy, and that, therefore, its actions in history serve a higher
end, should be familiar from recent American experience" (ibid.,
244; also see Maraldo 1994, 355).



To be fair to Nishida, we should confess that we today have yet to
solve the post-Enlightenment aporia of how to reconcile universal
humanism with cultural particularity (a debate we inherit in part from
the Kant-Herder controversy). In other words, the question remains of
how to configure a multicultural world of dialogue instead of either
an imperialistic monoculture or a clash of civilizations. In our
search for an answer to this urgent question, we may still have much
yet to learn from a critical appropriation of Nishida's thought
(see Feenberg 1995; Maraldo 1995; Elberfeld 1999; Kopf 2011; Davis
2013a; Krummel 2014; and Goto-Jones 2002, 2005, 2008, 2009).


### 4.3 Controversial Wartime Symposia, and Nishitani's Nation of Non-Ego



Nishida's ambivalent political stance--between a
post-imperialistic vision of a multicultural new world order on the
one hand and an assertion of Japan's destined world-historical
role in realizing this vision on the other--was carried forth
into even more controversial political engagements by his students
Nishitani Keiji, Koyama Iwao, Kosaka Masaaki, Suzuki
Shigetaka, and to a lesser extent Shimomura Torataro. As
mentioned in subsection 2.1, a significant, if stigmatizing, stage in
the formation of the identity of the Kyoto School involved the
participation of several of its members in two wartime symposia, the
*Literary World*'s 1942 symposium on "Overcoming
Modernity" (reprinted in Kawakami & Takeuchi 1979; English
translation in Calichman 2008) and the 1941-43 roundtable
discussions published serially in the journal
*Chuokoron* and later as a monograph, *The
Standpoint of World History and Japan* (Kosaka et al 1943;
English translation in Williams 2014).



The *Overcoming Modernity* symposium has been aptly
characterized as "a premature challenge to the questions that
have yet to be answered today" (Minamoto 1994, 200). Even one of
the most critical accounts of this symposium--an account which
argues that the "only destination reached by the symposium on
overcoming modernity was the place where Japan itself had been
overcome by modernity"--concedes that: "It is,
nevertheless, important to point out that the very critique mounted by
Japanese against modernity prefigured precisely all of those doubts
and obsessions concerning subjectivity, cultural difference, and even
racism that have become the signatures of a Western and putatively
global discourse that marks our own historical conjuncture
today" (Harootunian 2000, 94).



As discussed in subsection 2.2, the Kyoto School participants spoke of
an overcoming of modernity that can take place only by way of passing
*through* modernity, a stance that represented a
countertendency to the rejection of modern Western rationality by the
Japanese Romantic School and other participants in the symposium. In
other words, the Kyoto School participants did not lament the
modernization-via-Westernization of Japan, nor did they nostalgically
plea for a return to a pre-modern age; rather, they called for a
further step forward, but one that would involve creatively recovering
viable elements of Japanese tradition at the same time as building on
the best of what could be learned from the West. This stance shows up
clearly in Nishitani's debate with Kobayashi Hideo, who argued
for a rejection of modernity and a return to the pre-modern Japanese
classics (see Kawakami & Takeuchi 1979, 217ff.). Throughout his
career Nishitani consistently spoke of overcoming modernity only by
way of passing through it, and in this process tradition was to be
creatively appropriated, not conservatively retreated to. He wrote:
"There is no turning back to the way things were. ... Our
tradition must be appropriated from the direction in which we are
heading, as a new possibility" (NKC VIII, 183; Nishitani 1990,
179); and: "Simply put, the backward looking return to tradition
is straightaway to be forward looking" (NKC XIX, 104). Later in
life Nishitani continued to stress that Japanese Buddhist
organizations need to embrace their historicality, which means to
modernize and then postmodernize; only in this way can they continue
to play a vital role in Japanese society as well as offer the
possibilities of their ways of life to the wider world (Nishitani
2006, 36-38).



In the *Chuokoron* discussions as well the Kyoto
School resolutely attempted to think from the "standpoint of
world history." Problematically, however, they asserted a
leadership role for Japan in the present moment, which they viewed as
a turning point in world history. If the standpoint of world history
had indeed been first opened up by both Western universalism
*and* imperialism, they argued, it was the non-Western nation
of Japan that was in a unique position to free the world from the
chains of the latter in order to realize the true potential of the
former.



In his book written around the same time, *View of the World and
the Nation* (1941), Nishitani went so far as to claim that this
was the moment in time when the "focal point of world
history" was to become the Japanese nation, just as previously
world history had centered on the Roman Empire and then later on the
British Empire. However, Nishitani argued, unlike the former two
empires Japan's historical mission was to bring about a world
that has "no specific center" but rather consists of
various "politically and culturally unified spheres" (NKC
IV, 298-300). The Japanese nation would be able to carry out
this mission, he crucially adds, only if it incorporates a religious
spirit of self-negation, thus becoming what he calls a "nation
of non-ego" rather than a self-centered aggressive empire (NKC
IV, 285-86). In this idealistic vision, which unfortunately had
little to do with the cruel realities of Japanese expansionism, Japan
was to be an altogether new kind of empire, a self-negating and
compassionate one that would help other nations to cooperatively form
their own identities, rather than an aggressive and
"imperialistic" one that would remold others into inferior
replicas of itself. (It remains for us to ask how best to characterize
today's political superpowers and economic empires, and how to
relate their ideologies to their realities.)



If there is a lasting merit to Nishitani's wartime political
writings and the *Chuokoron* discussions, it
might be found in part in their critique of the contradictions and
hypocrisies of Western imperialism (see, for example, Kosaka et
al. 1943, 348ff.), together with their insistence that Japan's
"leading role" in Asia not become that of an imperialist
or colonizer (see ibid., 204-5; also see Nishitani's
"My View of 'Overcoming Modernity'," reprinted
in Kawakami & Takeuchi 1979, 32). The lasting infamy of the
*Chuokoron* discussions, on the other hand, can
be found not only in their idealistic political naivete,
but also in their idealization and even whitewashing of political
realities (such as Japanese aggression in China and other parts of
Asia), as well as in such disturbing specific suggestions as that of
"Japanizing" or "half-Japanizing" some of the
"more superior" ethnic groups in Asia in order to assist
in instituting the Japanese led "Co-Prosperity Sphere"
(Kosaka et al. 1943, 262-63, 337).


### 4.4 The "Oshima Memos": Record of a Think Tank for Navy Moderates



It is now evident that the political activities of the Kyoto School
during the war were even more involved--and even more filled with
ambiguity--than was previously thought. Ohashi Ryosuke
discovered and published in 2001 some wartime notebooks of Oshima
Yasuma, a student of Tanabe's (Ohashi 2001). These
notebooks document in detail secret meetings regularly held by Kyoto
School members (including Tanabe and Nishitani but not Nishida) at the
bequest of the Japanese navy between February 1942 and just before the
end of the war. While on the one hand the existence of these secret
meetings demonstrates an even more intimate connection between the
Kyoto School and the military than was previously known, on the other
hand it is crucially significant that they were in cooperation with a
certain moderate faction of the navy, a faction that was opposed to
the extremists that dominated the army. There had long existed a
considerable tension between the bellicose arrogance of the army and
the comparatively more moderate and worldly stance of the navy. As the
politically more powerful army was setting a war-bound course for
Pearl Harbor, some reticent navy officials evidently petitioned the
Kyoto School to shed light on the political situation from their
"world-historical standpoint," presumably in order to sway
public sentiment in a more prudent direction.



In short, the "Oshima Memos" help reveal how the
Kyoto School found themselves in a position where they were called on
to fight a "war of thought" on two fronts: against Western
imperialism, they felt called on to delineate a world-historical role
for Japan in freeing itself and other Asian peoples from colonization
and exploitation by the Western empires; and, against Japanese
ultra-nationalism, they felt that it was up to them to convince the
public and the military of the illegitimacy of an imperialistic
response to Western imperialism.



Oshima Yasuma had himself published, in 1965, an often overlooked
account of these meetings under the title, "The Pacific War and
the Kyoto School: On the Political Participation of
Intellectuals" (Oshima 2000, 274-304; also see Horio
1994, 301ff.). In this article, Oshima summarized the evolving
purpose of the secret Kyoto School meetings in three stages: In the
very first meetings (which apparently took place prior to those
documented in the recovered notebooks), the main theme was "how
to avoid the outbreak of war." Since war in fact broke out very
soon thereafter, the theme quickly switched to "how to bring the
war to a favorable end as soon as possible, by way of rationally
persuading the army." To do this they reportedly agreed that it
would be necessary to overthrow the cabinet of Tojo Hideki.
However, according to Oshima, all criticism of Tojo and
the army had to be expurgated in the discussions published in the
pages of *Chuokoron*, and the statements of the
Kyoto School had to be "veiled in two or three layers of
cloth" in order to avoid censorship and persecution. Towards the
end of the war, the theme of the secret meetings is said to have
changed to that of "how to handle the postwar
situation."



Among these three themes only the second is recorded in any detail in
the notebooks that were discovered and published by Ohashi as the
"Oshima Memos." Although there may well have been
preliminary discussions on how to avoid war, more explicit references
to overthrowing Tojo Hideki, and more lengthy discussions
about postwar issues, these do not in fact show up in the recovered
notebooks. Nevertheless, the "Oshima Memos" do show
us a more detailed and uncensored account of the Kyoto School's
"war of thought" on two fronts during a tumultuous and
tragic time of what was, in fact, Japan's imperialistic response
to Western imperialism.


### 4.5 After the War: Tanabe's Metanoetic Turn and Nishitani's Other Cheek



Their ambivalent wartime stance between supporting the nationalistic
ideology and subjecting it to critique from a pluralistic and global
perspective--in other words, their attempt to walk a
razor's edge of "cooperative
resistance"--ironically earned the Kyoto School a suspect
reputation in Japan *both* *before and after* the end of
the war. As Nishitani confided later to a student: "During the
war we were struck on the cheek from the right; after the war we were
struck on the cheek from the left."



During the war, the stance of the Kyoto School was considered too
cosmopolitan and insufficiently nationalistic, even anti-war. The
discussions published in *The Standpoint of World History and
Japan* were branded by the Imperial Way ideologues as
"ivory-tower speculations that risked reducing the Empire to
simply one more category of world history," and further
printings of the book were reportedly stopped by the government
censors (see Horio 1994, 291). After the war, the Kyoto School's
idealistic attempts to impart meaning and direction to Japan's
"world historical mission" were seen--especially by
liberals and leftists that had at long last been freed from repression
and persecution--as support for its *de facto*
militaristic fascism. Nishitani and others were purged for several
years from their university positions. Even when they were later
reinstated, the stigma of the Kyoto School as having "cooperated
in the war" was hardly erased. Their political thought in
particular was dismissed *in toto*, and it was not until
decades later that the topic of "overcoming modernity" was
once again given serious critical attention (see Kawakami &
Takeuchi 1979; Hiromatsu 1989; and Ohashi 1992, 143ff.).



The Kyoto School thinkers rarely responded directly to their critics
after the war, and we can only speculate on the reasons for this (see
Horio 1994, 300). They accepted suspension from their posts without
comment or complaint, and continued on with their philosophizing,
albeit without the overtly political element of their thought.
Nishitani, for example, came into his own as a philosopher of religion
in the postwar era. He continued to philosophically develop Eastern
ideas, those of Zen Buddhism in particular, in dialogue with medieval
Christian mysticism as well as postmodern existentialism and
phenomenology and in response to what he saw as the central problem of
modernity, namely, nihilism. In his mature attempts to "overcome
nihilism by way of passing through nihilism" (NKC XX, 192), we
find a significant thread of continuity with his pre-war and wartime
attempts to overcome (Western) modernity by way of passing through it.
But it is nevertheless possible to mark a crucial and self-critical
"turn" in his thinking with regard to the question of the
political role--or, as it turns out, the lack of one--to be
played by the Japanese state in this overcoming of modernity and
nihilism by way of passing through them (see Davis 2008b).



Tanabe got a head start on the postwar critics and toward the end of
the war began thinking his way through a radical crisis of
self-critique. Hardly less controversial than the roundtable
discussions of the younger members of the Kyoto School have been
Tanabe's application--or misapplication--of his
"logic of the specific" to a discourse on the legitimacy
of the self-assertion of the Japanese nation-state as an archetype for
others. The "logic of the specific" had originally been
conceived, in critique of Bergson and Nishida, as a reappraisal of the
logical and ethical role that ethnic specificity plays in mediating
the particular individual and universal humanity. Adapting
Hegel's political philosophy, Tanabe thought that the
nation-state could both embody the ethnic specificity of the people
and raise it out of its inherent irrationality. As a concrete
universal, the nation-state was, if not the absolute itself, in some
sense the dialectical manifestation of the absolute on earth.



The critical lapse came when Tanabe irrationally proposed that the
"relative absolute" of the Japanese nation-state could
serve as a kind of "supreme archetype" for other nations
(see THZ VI, 232-33). James Heisig writes that, in so doing,
Tanabe "took a step that was fatal but really unnecessary, if
not outright inconsistent with the principles of his logic....
According to his own logic, the community of the human race is to be
made up of a community of nations that have found a way to transcend
their specificity without transcending time and culture. Each nation
may come about as an instance of the generic universal, but nothing in
the logic of the specific allows any one instance to become an
archetype for the others. It is as if Tanabe were quoting himself out
of context" (Heisig 2001, 136-37; also see Heisig
1994).



Tanabe finally came to his senses and, in a striking metanoetic turn,
renounced these political assertions and dove into the philosophy of
religion. *Philosophy as Metanoetics*, the first parts of which
were delivered as lectures in 1944 before the end of the war, was
composed not only as a personal self-critique, but also as a call to
self-critique on the part of the entire nation, and indeed ultimately
as a call for an "absolute critique" of human rationality
as such (see the Preface to THZ X; Tanabe 1986). It is the last of
these that is the central theme of the book: the idea that the human
reason is inevitably driven to antinomies through which it must
repeatedly die to its own self-power in order to be reborn again
through the workings of an Other-power. It is nevertheless true that
"one looks through that work in vain for any admission of guilt
for particular actions or statements that he had made" (Heisig
2001, 151). In any case, Tanabe's public (if vague) repentance
was no more successful than the silence of other Kyoto School thinkers
in convincing the majority of postwar Japanese academics to refrain
from throwing the baby of their philosophical insights out with the
bathwater of their political misadventures.



Only in the past few decades has the reputation of the Kyoto School
been significantly rehabilitated in Japan, due in part to a general
recovery of the nation from immersion in the march of postwar economic
progress and evasion of unresolved cultural aporias, in part to a
general reaffirmation of cultural identity (including all too often a
pendulum swing back to ethnocentric reassertions of "Japanese
uniqueness"), and in part to the positive attention the School
has received from scholars in the West. It is worthwhile noting, as
Fujita Masakatsu does in his preface to *The Philosophy of the
Kyoto School*, that prior to 2001 surprisingly few articles or
books had appeared in Japan with a thematic focus on the "Kyoto
School" as such, even though hundreds of studies had treated
"Nishida Philosophy." Yet there are promising signs that
we are entering a new academic era in which critical yet appreciative
work on the Kyoto School can be cooperatively undertaken in Japan, in
the West, and recently even in other parts of East Asia (see Fujita et
al. 2003; Heisig 2004; *Synthesis Philosophica* 2004; Fujita
& Davis 2005; Hori & Curley 2008; Heisig & Uehara 2008;
Lam & Cheung 2009; Bouso & Heisig 2009; Davis, Schroeder,
& Wirth 2011; Elberfeld & Arisaka 2014; Yusa 2017; Davis
2020a; Liao et al. 2022).



Despite the persistence of a faction of polemical intellectual
historians, many philosophers worldwide today view the political
misadventures of the Kyoto School as lamentable footnotes to the main
text of their laudable philosophical endeavors. While research into
their political thought--regarding what it tried to say then and
regarding what it can or cannot help us to think now--remains
necessary and important, at the end of the day many are likely to
agree with James Heisig when he emphatically writes: "*One
has ... to ignore the greatest bulk of the writings of these
thinkers to arrive at the conclusion that anything approaching or
supporting the imperialistic ideology of wartime Japan belongs to the
fundamental inspiration of their thought*" (Heisig 2001, 6).
The philosophical and cross-cultural legacy of the Kyoto School lies
elsewhere.


## 5. The Cross-Cultural Legacy of the Kyoto School


### 5.1 Between and Beyond East and West



In this concluding section, let us return to the question of the
legacy of the Kyoto School with regard to comparative or
cross-cultural philosophy. Today many scholars, in Japan as well as in
Western countries, are calling this "world philosophy"
(Ito et al. 2020), a term I take to mean any approach to
philosophy that does not restrict its purview and the sources on which
it draws to any one tradition, such as the tradition of Western
philosophy. As mentioned at the outset, the Kyoto School thinkers were
all dedicated scholars of various fields and figures of Western
philosophy; and yet, at the same time, they kept one foot firmly in
touch with their native East Asian traditions, those of
Mahayana Buddhism in particular. This bipedal stance placed
them in an extraordinary position between "East and West"
and allowed them to go beyond this binary abstraction.



It is important to bear in mind that the philosophies of the Kyoto
School do not simply drift impartially on the seas of academic
comparison, nor do the Kyoto School philosophers see themselves
primarily as mediators of interreligious dialogue. As existentially
engaged cross-cultural philosophers, they are above all seekers after
truth, and they argue passionately for the validity of seeing the self
and the world in certain ways. As we have seen, while each member of
the Kyoto School has his own vision of the truth, they share (and
debate) certain fundamental ideas, such as one or another version of
the core notion of absolute nothingness and the idea of coming to a
genuine self-awareness by way of emptying the ego. And however much
their texts reflect an intimate dialogue with and critical
appropriation of ideas from Western philosophers, it can be said that
many of their main theses nevertheless reflect a distinctly East Asian
Mahayana Buddhist and Japanese cultural influence.



Nevertheless, this does not mean that they merely gave modern
expression to traditional East Asian Buddhist thought or Japanese
culture. It would be more accurate to say that their philosophies are
*critical* and *creative* developments of these
traditions. Even this way of putting it would not do justice to the
influence exerted on their thought by the Western philosophies with
which they grappled so intensely. Although Hisamatsu, Nishitani, Abe,
Ueda and others do explicitly philosophize from the standpoint of Zen,
and although Takeuchi, Hase, and others do so from the standpoint of
Shin Buddhism, it would be misleading to simply and without
qualification characterize either Nishida's or Tanabe's
multifaceted philosophies as "Eastern" or
"Buddhist."



For example, Tanabe's early "logic of the specific,"
with its concern for the manner in which ethnic specificities mediate
particular individuals and universal humanity, can be read more as a
critical appropriation of Hegelian dialectical logic and political
philosophy than as any straightforward development of East Asian or
Buddhist thought. And in his various later writings on the philosophy
of religion, Tanabe wanders between a preference for Shin Buddhism,
Christianity, and finally Zen Buddhism (see Himi 1990, 129-341).
With regard to Nishida, an acute concern with questions of
epistemology, logic, individual autonomy, creativity, and the
historicity of the world are essential to his thought in ways that are
more "modern Western" than "traditional
Eastern"; and Nishida at times explicitly indicates his
dissatisfaction with what he sees as related weaknesses in traditional
Eastern thought.



Of course, one might respond: even if Nishida methodologically takes
his questions from Western philosophy, his responses to these
questions reflect his East Asian roots at least as much as his Western
studies. To the Western ontological question of being, his answer is a
meontology of absolute nothingness. It might be that his systematic
philosophical articulations of the idea of absolute nothingness owe
more to Western than Eastern texts. Yet, he nevertheless understands
himself to have autonomously (i.e., in the process of engaging in a
nonsectarian philosophical search for truth) given expression to the
formless origin that is harbored in the traditions of the East. In
retrospect Nishida wrote: "It is not that I conceived of my way
of thinking in dependence on Mahayana Buddhism; and yet it
has come into accord with it" (NKZ XIV, 408). Nishitani could
have said something similar of his career path, which led him through
the study of Western philosophy and mysticism and "back"
to the standpoint of Zen. Other Kyoto School thinkers took even less
of an Occidental excursion before making what Holderlin called a
"homecoming though the foreign." And some, like Hisamatsu
and Takeuchi, began their scholarly pursuits with a self-understanding
as a Zen or Shin Buddhist thinker.



Perhaps most controversial, from a cross-cultural political point of
view, is Nishida's and other Kyoto School thinkers'
suggestion that modern Japanese culture and philosophy in particular
has the potential to make room for the cooperative meeting of the
strengths of East and West (see NKZ XIV, 416-17; also Nishida
1964, 365). What are we to make of such bold and sweeping claims?
There appear to be two problematical assertions involved: first, an
overly generalized, if not at times hypostatized, split of cultural
spheres into "East" and "West"; and second, a
claim that an idea with deeper roots in the so-called East, namely
absolute nothingness, can be developed so as to provide the
philosophical meeting place of both East and
 West.[18]



Even sympathetic readers of the Kyoto School are often highly critical
of this type of comparative thinking in terms of "East"
(*toyo*) and "West"
(*seiyo*). Although he affirms that "the
Kyoto-school philosophers give the west a way into the east like none
other," James Heisig complains that "the East" which
the Kyoto School sets up over against "the West" is
something of an invention: "At best, it is one constellation of
a heritage too long and too plural to be represented fairly by
Japan" (Heisig 2001, 271-72). John Maraldo goes further
and claims that "the problems Nishida deals with are universal,
and his way of dealing with them contrasts as much with other Asian
philosophers as with philosophers of the so-called West"
(Maraldo 1995, 196). Is it necessary and are we ready to do as Maraldo
suggests, and "put 'East' and 'West' to
rest"?



I myself think this complex issue requires a careful and nuanced
response, in part because "the East" and "the
West" are not in fact isomorphically oppositional terms. While I
certainly agree with the wish to avoid overgeneralizations and
politically charged polarizations, and while I think the Kyoto School
philosophers do need to be read critically in this regard, I am
equally wary of a "globalization of thought" that amounts
to a de facto colonization of "non-Western" traditions by
"Western" methods and categories of thinking; and simply
refraining from speaking of "the West" could amount to
merely evading and thus exacerbating this problem. Moreover, while it
is indeed important to debunk essentializing, homogenizing, and
usually self-aggrandizing conceptions of "the West" or
"Western civilization," a tradition that has in truth been
far more fruitfully "entanlged" with other traditions and
far more varied that historical narratives centered on a pantheon of
great white men would have it (see Elberfeld 2017, 21-127; Mac
Sweeney 2023), the threads of the
Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian-Euro-American traditions and cultures have
nevertheless been woven together coherently enough to warrant
sometimes and in some contexts speaking of "the West."



By contrast, "the East" (or "Asia" for that
matter) is a more irredeemably problematic concept, since it refers to
a far less coherently woven set of traditions and cultures, especially
from the perspective of India (which, for example, did not appropriate
any Chinese tradition the way China appropriated Buddhism). Some may
want to argue that, from Japan's perspective, or at least from a
Japanese Buddhist perspective that weaves together Indo-Sino-Japanese
threads, it may still make some sense to speak sometimes in terms of
"the East." Yet such usages of this term are not only
overgeneralizing but also Japan-centric. I therefore think it is best
to restrict our broadest generalizations in this case to "East
Asia" or "Mahayana Buddhism" or
"Japan," and to bear in mind that even these expressions
reduce a diverse manifold to a broad concept. The concept of
"the East" goes too far, crossing the line from a
heuristically useful generalization to a distortingly homogenizing
overgeneralization.



To be sure, as Thomas Kasulis reminds us (Kasulis 2018, 36 and 41),
generalizations are not universalizations; by definition there are
exceptions to any general definition of something. The bigger the
generalization, the more exceptions will it have. Still, we cannot
think without generalities, and it is no doubt a matter of
"practical wisdom" (*phronesis*) to know when
to construct and when to deconstruct them. Thus, even though we must
be careful to discern the appropriate contexts in which it makes sense
to speak in such vast and abstract terms, it is no more advisable to
unequivocally annihilate general concepts such as "the
West" and "East Asia" than it is to narrowly define
or absolutize their relative coherences and mutual differences.



With regard to the hermeneutics of modern cross-cultural thinking, in
general I believe that the attempt to obliterate the borders that
separate cultural spheres is as unrealistic and potentially pernicious
as is the attempt to hermetically seal them up. Border lines between
cultures (as between languages) exist, but they are always porous and
shifting, and each culture is in itself varied and mobile. Needless to
say, defining, comparing, contrasting, and above all evaluating the
relative worth of various traditions, remain undertakings fraught with
theoretical, ethical and political pitfalls. The theoretical and
cultural legacies of colonialism and Orientalism remain with us long
after the political empires have receded. Moreover, in these
postcolonial or decolonial times we all too often experience reactive
fabrications of homogeneous cultural identity and assertions of
counter-superiority, reactions which ironically reinforce the same
kind of colonial divisions and obsessions with unadulterated
self-identity that were in part imposed by, or imported from, the
worst of the West.



In Japan, certain retroactive constructions of identity and reactive
counter-assertions of superiority have taken the form of what is
called *nihonjin-ron*: theories of "Japaneseness"
or "Japanese uniqueness" (see Dale 1986). In modern
Japanese history, such reactive cultural self-obsessions and
self-assertions have taken either the form of denying Japan's
deep-rooted traditional connections with its East Asian neighbors, or
the form of claiming that Japan has uniquely embodied and perfected
"the essence of the East." If the former type of claim is
most in evidence in postwar and contemporary Japan, the latter is
found, for example, in the Meiji thinker Okakura Tenshin's
declaration that, while "Asia is one," Japan alone is
"the real repository of the trust of Asiatic thought and
culture" (Okakura 2000, 1 and 5).



Where do the Kyoto School thinkers stand with respect to such culture
wars? To be sure, the *Chuokoron* discussions in
particular often asserted that modern Japan was uniquely suited to
institute and represent the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity
Sphere," and this undoubtedly reflected a widespread post-Meiji
Japanese conflation of political, industrial, and military development
with cultural superiority. Nishida also felt that modern Japan was in
a unique political and cultural position to host a fruitful marriage
of East and West, and Tanabe went so far as to set the nation of Japan
up as an archetype for others. In the Kyoto School's wartime
political writings, there indeed remains much grist for the mills of
contemporary cultural critics, especially for those with hermeneutical
blindfolds or purportedly perfect hindsight. Yet a critique of their
political misadventures and cultural assertions, as necessary as it
is, may in fact reveal something more peripheral than central to the
cross-cultural thinking of the Kyoto School. It is at least necessary
to keep both eyes open: one ready to criticize and the other willing
to learn.



We should note that even when Nishida broadly contrasts "Western
being" with "Eastern nothingness," he in fact
immediately goes on to explore finer distinctions between the Greek,
Roman, and Judeo-Christian threads of the Western tradition, and
between the Indian, Chinese, and Japanese threads of the Eastern
tradition. If his essentializing or overgeneralizing of these threads
does remain in various respects problematic, it is nevertheless hardly
the case that he and the other Kyoto School thinkers never questioned
the homogeneity of either "the East" or "the
West." Secondly, although they have been accused both of
contributing to the "myth of Japanese uniqueness" and of
"reverse Orientalism" (see Dale 1986 and Faure 1995), the
case is far from this simple. In a time of uncritical cultural
self-adulation by the Japanese ultranationalists in power, Nishida
boldly urged that "both the strong points and weaknesses of our
culture should be openly and honestly pointed out," for
"we cannot take any one culture and call it *the*
culture" (Nishida 1964, 351 and 353).



Fighting a conceptual war simultaneously on two fronts, against
Western *and* Japanese ethnocentrisms, Nishida wrote that
"until now Westerners have thought that their own culture is the
most superior human culture that exists, and that human culture
inevitably develops in the direction of their own culture--hence,
as Easterners and other peoples who are lagging behind advance
forward, they must become the same as [Westerners]." Even some
Japanese, he regrets, think this way. And yet, he objects,
"there is something radically different in [the culture of] the
East." According to Nishida, the development of the West will
subsume this difference no more than the East will subsume the West.
Even if humanity does share a common root (what he calls, adapting an
expression from Goethe, an "ur-culture" of multiple
possibilities), the development of its branches and leaves is a matter
of diversification, not homogenization. Globalization should thus be
thought of, in Nishida's vision, as many branches of the same
tree supplementing one other on the basis of both their deep-rooted
commonality *and* their irreducible diversity (NKZ XIV,
402-6 and 417).



To be sure, there inevitably remains for us the question of the
"place" and manner in which this global communication
between cultures should take place. But without a "view from
nowhere," the only thing we can do is to attempt to critically
and creatively take up ideas that have particular genealogies and
dialogically develop them into what are provisionally more universally
viable forms. Just as concepts of democracy, hermeneutics, and indeed
*philosophia* itself have particular cultural lineages, so do
the ideas of emptiness (Japanese: *ku*; Sanskrit:
*sunyata*), nothingness (Japanese: *mu*;
Chinese: *wu*), and the true self (*shin no jiko*) as a
non-ego (Japanese: *muga*; Sanskrit: *anatman*)
that opens itself to an encounter with others by radically emptying
itself. Nevertheless, all of these ideas may very well contribute
something to an intercultural dialogue concerning the very place and
manner in which a genuine encounter between cultures and individuals
can and should take place. The locution "world philosophy"
is, to my mind, best understood as a multifaceted forum for
cross-cultural dialogue concerning such issues, a forum that is itself
always in the process of being co-constructed by all those who
participate in it.


### 5.2 Japanese Philosophy in the World



It is not, therefore, necessarily ethnocentric for Japanese thinkers
to suggest the potential efficacy of introducing into a global
philosophical dialogue ideas that derive from Japanese, East Asian, or
Mahayana Buddhist traditions. The "Japanese
philosophy" of the Kyoto School is best understood as a
contribution to such an intercultural conversation, and not merely as
a reactive opposition to philosophical Eurocentrism or indeed
"philosophical Euromonopolism." In any case, we must be
careful in how we understand the noun "philosophy" and the
modifier "Japanese" when we speak of "Japanese
philosophy" (see Davis 2020b).



Although the question of whether "philosophy" existed in
non-Western traditions is today being intensely debated, with more and
more scholars referring not only to "Indian philosophy"
and "Chinese philosophy" but also to "African
philosophy" and "Indigenous philosophy," the Kyoto
School philosophers themselves never doubted that
"philosophy," in the literal and historically specific
sense, is originally a cultural product of the Western tradition. But
they also recognize that it, like Western science and technology, has
universal implications that can be developed by peoples around the
globe. This does not mean that they think Western philosophy is free
of unrecognized cultural biases and limitations, or that traditional
Asian traditions have nothing essential to offer the development of
philosophy in a post-Eurocentric world. They recognize the difference
between the global potentialities and the still parochial actualities
of philosophy, and their Japanese contributions aim to make philosophy
more, not less, worldly.



In an illuminating study of the debates surrounding the concept of
"philosophy" in Japan since the Meiji period
(1868-1912), John Maraldo has isolated four senses in which the
notion of "Japanese philosophy" has been used: (1) Western
philosophy as it happens to be practiced by Japanese scholars; (2)
traditional Japanese thought (Confucian, Nativist, Buddhist, etc.) as
it was formulated prior to the introduction of Western philosophy; (3)
a form of inquiry which has methods and themes that are Western in
origin, but that can be applied to pre-modern, pre-Westernized,
Japanese thinking; and (4) a kind of reverse Orientalism that asserts
the superiority of specifically Japanese ways of thinking.



Maraldo argues for the superior viability of the third of these
conceptions, in part because it pays due hermeneutical attention to
the Greek origins of the heretofore prevailing methods and themes of
"philosophy." And yet, crucially, he also stresses that
the very methods and themes of philosophy are essentially always
"in the making," and that the production of
"Japanese philosophy" will have to "strike a balance
between reading (pre-defined) philosophy into [Japan's
traditional] texts and reading alternatives out of them, constructing
contrasts to that [pre-defined] philosophy [of the West]"
(Maraldo 2004, 238-44). The Kyoto School in particular can be
understood to have taken up the challenge of critically and creatively
appropriating philosophy so as to free up for questioning many of its
pre-defined Western conceptions.



A text by Ueda on Nishitani's philosophy insightfully addresses
the question of the adjective "Japanese" as follows:
"If we are to use the characterization 'Japanese',
this does not signify merely a particularity of Japan, but rather must
be understood in the sense that a certain area of universal primal
human possibility has been historically realized particularly in
Japan. Hence, 'European' does not straightaway mean
'global', but rather that a certain area of universal
primal human possibility has been historically realized particularly
in Europe. ... If we understand ourselves as the
particularization of something universal, this means, at the same
time, that we can understand others as different particularizations of
something universal. Only then, with the communication between
particular and particular, can something universal come to be
realized" (Ueda 1996, 309).



In this passage, which recalls Nishida's vision of communication
between diversely determined branches of a shared yet essentially
indeterminate root ur-culture, Ueda gives us a clue as to how we might
best understand the cross-cultural contributions of the Kyoto School.
They are philosophers who strive to express something universal from a
particular standpoint. But this does not at all mean that they attempt
to reduce universality to their own particularity; for the latter is
in turn understood as one particular expression of the formless
ur-culture, the indeterminate source of possibilities for individual
and cultural determination, that is to say, the originary nothingness
that we all share. The Kyoto School thus presents us with a unique set
of attempts to give philosophical form to this formless wellspring of
both commonality and singularity.



The degree to which the Kyoto School thinkers were successful in their
boldly paradoxical quest to give philosophical form to the formless
can be debated. It is less easy to deny the exigency of the quest
itself. If philosophy today is to mature beyond its Eurocentric and
even "Euromonopolistic" pubescence (see Davis 2020b,
28-33), then it is necessary to deepen its quest for
universality by way of radically opening it up to a diversity of
cultural perspectives. If cultural pluralism, for its part, is to
avoid falling into a relativistic antagonism or isolationism, it must
entail a metamorphosis rather than an abandonment of the philosophical
quest for universality (see Fujita 2013; Maraldo 2013). In any case,
we should understand the thought of the Kyoto School, not as a set of
exclusively Japanese versions of philosophy, but rather as a set of
Japanese contributions to the content of--and indeed to the very
formation of the forum of--a global dialogue of "world
philosophy" in the making.