Japanese Philosophy: Overcoming Modernity

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

Nishida Kitaro, originator of the Kyoto School and 'father of Japanese Philosophy' is usually viewed as an essentially apolitical thinker who underwent a 'turn' in the mid-1930s, becoming an ideologue of Japanese imperialism. Political Philosophy in Japan challenges the view that a neat distinction can be drawn between Nishida's apolitical 'pre-turn' writings and the apparently ideological tracts he produced during the war years. In the context of Japanese intellectual traditions, this book suggests that Nishida was a political thinker form the (...) very beginning of his career, and consequently, his later political works cannot be dismissed as peripheral to his philosophical project. Counter-intuitively however, Christopher Goto-Jones argues that a consistently political reading of his philosophy reveals a dissenting standpoint even during the height of the Pacific War. This book argues that the prevailing postwar tendency to dismiss interwar and wartime Japanese culture as fascist or ultra nationalist en total neglects a lively political discourse, which contained some serous and profound political insight and even dissent. By suggesting that Nishida tetsugaku was a voice of dissent during Japan's Great East Asia War, Goto-Jones presents a case for the rehabilitation of Nishida as a political thinker, and as an example of a Japanese resistance, able to make a valuable contribution to contemporary debates about international political, globalization , and inter-cultural relations. Offering a unique and potentially controversial view of the subject of Nishida and the Kyoto School, The Political Philosophy of Japan will be of huge interest to anyone studying Japanese History, Political Philosophy and comparative philosophy alike. (shrink)

Watsuji Tetsuro has influenced both intellectuals and educated laypeople in twentieth-century Japan through his many writings on the allegedly unique character of Japanese civilization. His first book, however, explicated the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche as a metaphysics of will to power. This work, which initially appears anomalous, addressed many of Watsuji's early concerns and foreshadowed major themes in his later thought. ;A provincial Confucian upbringing and the early deaths of several relatives left the adolescent Watsuji rebellious and concerned to overcome (...) death. When he entered the First Higher School in Tokyo , this led him to a neo-idealist valorization of spirit over matter. During most of his period at the school, he opposed modern egoism; by the end, he also began to conceive of spirit--its contrary--as immanent, dynamic, and accessible through intuition. In general, he sought to embrace the dynamism of modernity without its avarice and confusion. ;Although Watsuji had already started to read Nietzsche, his concentrated engagement with Nietzsche's work took place after he entered Tokyo Imperial University . Following a brief period as a hedonist, he began to interpret Nietzsche's will to power as the vital force of the universe, and consequently, the source of all active good, truth, and beauty. The intellect, a sometime instrument of this force, congeals reality, thus rendering it amenable to egoistic manipulation. ;Watsuji elaborated this reading in A Study of Nietzsche : reality was unitary and dynamic and the illusory ego needed to be overcome. At times, he drew a second lesson, namely, that individuals instantiated will to power well or poorly depending on whether they acceded to the outcomes of their struggles with each other. After publishing Study, this lesson as to the spiritual benefits of submission to one's current superiors became central. Starting in the mid-1910s, Watsuji applied this lesson to Japan, which he viewed as having developed in the past through its submission to continental Asian culture, and as needing to develop in the present through a tactical submission to Western culture. In this way, Japan itself became the anti-egoistic alternative to modernity that Watsuji had sought. (shrink)