The primary goal of this paper is not to argue for the “influence” of Cassirer, but rather to make known the reception of Cassirer in Japanese philosophy, illustrate the interconnection between Cassirer’s critique of culture and that of Japanese philosophy, and hopefully spark interest in what might be a fruitful dialog between Cassirer scholars and those working in Japanese philosophy. Historically, the paper defines Japanese philosophy and makes known its engagement with Western philosophy and the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism and (...) its project of a critique of culture during its own self-development. Systematically, the paper points to the possible interconnection between Cassirer’s critique of culture and that of Japanese philosophy and makes the case for a mutually productive dialog between Cassirer scholars and those working in Japanese philosophy. Implicitly, the paper attempted to show that an engagement with Japanese philosophy from the perspective of a critique of culture forces us to question the Western dichotomy between philosophy and religion and the importance of this for the further development of a non-Eurocentric critique of culture. And by extension, that a critique of culture must be cognitive of the historicity of the culture from which it speaks. (shrink)

This paper provides a reading of Nishitani’s philosophy of culture. It argues that the advent of nihilism is the logical conclusion of what will be called the “fracturing of culture” in which philosophy and religion lose their creative force to revitalize a cultural tradition as the sense of being-in-time that forms the historical life of a historical world. Section two sets out the paradoxical nature of Nishitani’s philosophy of culture as both a transcendental and existential project. Section three draws attention (...) to the fact that a concept of culture always belongs to a concrete culture as part of its own understanding of itself. Section four interprets the advent of nihilism in terms of a crisis of culture that ensues from the loss of the existential understanding of history that grounds a cultural world, that forms the standpoint of a historical event of worlding, the historical life that we are. Section five examines Nishitani’s project in terms of the reappropriation of a lost tradition through an existential receptive reinterpretation of Buddhism. Section six argues that for Nishitani the advent of nihilism comes about as a result of the negation of myth by science and thus the overcoming of nihilism comes about through the recollection of myth. Section seven determines the nature of myth for Nishitani through a comparison with Cassirer’s and Heidegger’s understanding of myth. Three elements of myth are focused on: 1) myth as an existential confrontation with being-in-the-world; 2) this existential being-in-the-world forms an existential being-in-time; and 3) myth is the position of the imagination, a thinking by means of form-images [keizō 形像] (Bild, image). Section seven considers the difference between Cassirer’s and Nishitani’s respective accounts of myth. Section nine examines the nature and function of philosophy, science, and religion in terms of their relation to myth and in terms of how they understand interdependent origination. Section, ten ends the paper by considering what is called the “fracturing” of culture and the advent of nihilism. (shrink)