John Krummel

Nakamura Yūjirō (中村雄二郎) (1925-) is one of the more significant philosophers of contemporary Japan. He graduated from the Faculty of Literature at the University of Tokyo in 1950 and spent his teaching career from 1965 to 1995 at Meiji University, specializing in philosophy and intellectual history. Probably the most important theme that reappears throughout Nakamura’s philosophical project of his mature years is the concept of ‘common sense’ (kyōtsū kankaku 共通感覚). There are additional issues that are important in his philosophy, such as the imagination and place. In the following I touch upon these concepts while outlining his general trajectory leading up to, and providing the context for, the essay following this introduction. And I end with a discussion of the relevance of this piece as well as his general project. I then briefly describe the context for the essay.

Is there such a thing as a Buddhist philosophy, a specifically Japanese Buddhist philosophy? The question calls for a complex answer, involving a discussion of what is “Buddhist” and what is “philosophy.” If one were to answer “yes,” for the twentieth century, the Kyoto School of philosophy comes to mind. But for the most part, although the writings of the Kyoto School founder, NISHIDA Kitarō 西田幾多郎 (1870–1945), were replete with Buddhist inspired ideas, their Buddhist origins were not always made explicit until in his very last works. Nishida’s most famous disciple NISHITANI Keiji 西谷啓治 (1900–1990), on the other hand, never seemed to have any qualms about discussing certain elements in his thinking as Buddhist, in particular, Mahāyāna or Zen-inspired. Yet the issue is not a simple one and it would be reductive to identify Nishitani as nothing but a Buddhist thinker. He certainly was not sectarian or dogmatic in his use of Buddhist concepts, and he also proves himself to be a global thinker in his use of non-Buddhist, i.e., Christian or western ways of thinking. His major concern throughout his career was nihilism and modernity, and we see in his works the unfolding of a philosophical conversation between western philosophy, Christianity, and Buddhism in dealing with the issues of nihilism and modernity. In this essay, I begin with a short biographical introduction to Nishitani the philosopher. I then discuss his views on nihilism, and the various Mahāyāna Buddhist motifs he appropriates and employs in developing his own response to nihilism and the perennial questions of human existence. I also argue that his appropriation of Buddhist concepts in his response to nihilism leads him to what I call “anontology.”

Reiner Schürmann, known for his readings of Heidegger and Eckhart, was also known for his philosophy of ontological anarché. The transition from metaphysical theory to post-metaphysical practice, for him, meant the transition from theoria, which looks at phenomena monomorphically in accordance with principles (archai), to a praxis that is an-archic and thinks in recognition of polymorphic singularities. Here, I seek to clarify Schürmann’s notion of ontological anarchy and the praxis following it. I inquire into its political implications and relation to political anarchism. What is the connection between his “radical phenomenology” of ontological anarché and what he called anarchic praxis?

I focus on Miki’s concept of the imagination as developed in his Logic of Imagination together with his understanding of technology that he also develops in his contemporaneous work Philosophy of Technology. Taking off from Kant’s productive imagination (Einbildung), Miki’s philosophy exposes the ontological function of the imagination in its construction, or formation (Bildung), of the world as well as our own being, in Heideggerian terms, our being-in-the-world. This formation of the world and self that is an embodied praxis is technological, radically altering the environment along with ourselves, thus mediating between human beings and their surroundings and extending our somatic nature into the environing world. Moreover this ontological formation is social or collective, rather than simply being a matter of the individual subject. Through this dynamic process, the world unfolds as historical, and the imagination and technology are thus constitutive of what Miki calls, in Nishidian terms, the historical world. I will conclude with some critical assessments of Miki’s philosophy in regard to the Anthropocene and Miki’s claim that the imagination is operative within nature itself and the need to update Miki’s dialectic of continuity and discontinuity between nature and culture in light of more recent scientific discoveries and technological advances.

Emil Lask provides the bridge from Kant to phenomenology but also from Kant to Kyoto School philosophy. Heidegger and Nishida, contemporaneously but independently, took Lask's collapsing of Neo-Kantian hylomorphism in distinct directions. They accepted Lask's anti-subjectivism while moving beyond his object-centrism. Heidegger broadened Lask's notion of lived experience in the direction of the "horizon" explicated in terms of temporality. Nishida takes it in terms of a pre-objective "predicate,” indicative of the "place" wherein beings, objects, grammatical subjects are implaced. Both assume "world" as contextual (back)ground. The essay thus examines Heidegger and Nishida in light of Lask as a common source. In the conclusion I also address a few other related issues surrounding their relationship to Neo-Kantianism and transcendental philosophy in general.

The paper explicates what the World War 2 era Japanese philosopher, Miki Kiyoshi, of the Kyoto School, called the logic of imagination and of forms as an ontology. I understand this ontology as ultimately an “anontology”, where novelty and creativity are predicated upon the pathos of singularity and contingency that Miki calls “the nothing” (mu). Its productive function that is technological vis-à-vis the environment involves an embodied praxis that Miki, borrowing the terms of his mentor, Nishida Kitarō, calls “enactive intuition”. This productivity unfolds the historical world, on the basis of that deep pathos within us in synthesis with logos, as what can be characterized as the auto-determination of the indeterminate. But the advance of technology today takes this unfolding of the world perhaps beyond what Miki anticipated with his self-professed humanism. To make these points, the paper, for the most part, focuses on the last and longest chapter in Miki’s Logic of Imagination, where Miki discusses and appropriates Kant’s concept of imagination and its schematism from both the first and third Critiques while also showing the influences of Heidegger along with Nishida. But the originality in Miki takes his philosophy of imagination beyond these predecessors while also raising questions as to the relationship between human beings and nature and to the very meaning of “nature” (shizen) in Miki. I will also discuss post-war theories of imagination and technology coming after Miki that respond to the more recent digitization and virtualization of the real.

This chapter tracks the development of the concept of self-awareness (jikaku, 自覚) in the thought of the Japanese modern philosopher Nishida Kitarō (西田幾多郎) (Kitarō Nishida) (1870–1945), founder of the Kyoto School. Nishida’s oeuvre can be divided into distinct periods, from the 1910s to the 1940s until his passing, during which he thematized and focused on different issues. Nevertheless, self-awareness is a unifying theme throughout. In the chapter we trace how Nishida develops this concept through distinct periods in his career. His initial focus upon pure experience gives way to his focus upon its articulation in reflection vis-à-vis intuition as the unfolding of the will. This then leads to his thematization of the place wherein judgment or propositional thought unfolds and the broader contextual place wherein that place is situated. That thematization of place, in turn, develops into a look at the world where we interact as historical and social bodies with others (nature, other people, etc.). Nishida understands self-awareness in accordance with each of these themes in the respective periods of his oeuvre. But common to all of them is how Nishida understands self-awareness as a self-mirroring – self-reflection as reflexivity – founded upon the premise assumed by the articulated image or object of awareness, a premise necessarily irreducible to, and in excess of, the image or object. This is the a priori that Nishida for the most part calls the “absolute nothing” (zettai mu, 絶対無). To explain this Nishida makes use of Josiah Royce’s notion of a self-representative system as well as Richard Dedekind’s notion of an infinite system in his set theory. On the basis of Nishida’s references to the mathematics of set theory, I further compare his understanding of self-awareness to Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems as well as to more recent mathematical theorists, influenced by Gödel, whose understanding of the infinite resonates with Nishida’s understanding of the absolute nothing as assumed by self-awareness.

In the last century and a half, many have lamented the loss of a sense of the holy (or the sacred)—das Heilige in German—that is, the condition of modernity that Friedrich Nietzsche called the “death or God” or what Friedrich Hölderlin poetized as the “flight of the gods.” Martin Heidegger, even while speaking of the forgetting of Being (Seinsvergessenheit) in the history of Being, and even as he had discoursed on the nihilism of modernity, appropriated this term, das Heilige, as one of his many terms for Being (Sein) as distinct from, and yet granting, beings (Seiende). In what sense, then, is the holy for Heidegger tied to its apparent opposite in the modern world—the sense of desacralization or nihilism in modernity—while also being the Being of beings? And how are we to (co-)respond to the holy in an unholy (desacralized) world? In the following I will attempt to unpack this paradox. Keys to solving this question may be found in the ancient Greek concepts of chaos and chora to which Heidegger’s understanding of the holy is connected. Heidegger’s own concepts of Lichtung (clearing) and Gegend (that-which-regions, regioning) can also be related to his view of the holy.

This article focuses on Kyoto School philosophy’s “philosophy of world history,” during World War II, and its arguments for a multipolar world order in opposition to the older Eurocentric and colonialist world order. The idea was articulated by the second generation of the Kyoto School—Nishitani Keiji, Kōyama Iwao, Kōsaka Masaaki, and Suzuki Shigetaka—in a series of symposia held during 1941 to 1942 and titled the “The World-historical Standpoint and Japan.” While rejecting on the one hand the myopic patriotism of the ultranationalists, they argued for a view to the world and its history, that in contrast to the Eurocentric view to world history, was polycentric. In terms of world politics they associated their view with the aim to construct a co-prosperity sphere in East Asia of autonomous nations to counter European colonialism as part of a new polycentric or multipolar world order. Metaphysically this notion of a co-prosperity sphere as well as of a multipolar world was grounded in the Kyoto School’s concept of “nothingness” as an open space for autonomous but corelated subjects. During the war, these discussions came under fire by critics from the Right, and then after the war, from the Left. I will examine the potential viability of these ideas today as a polycentric world may be on the horizon that ideally would give space to difference and diversity and avoid the violence of homogenization. A comparison of their notion of the nothing with Jean-luc Nancy’s concept of the same may provide some clues.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Japanese Philosophy in the Making 1: Crossing Paths with Nishida by John MaraldoJohn KrummelJohn Maraldo, Japanese Philosophy in the Making 1: Crossing Paths with Nishida Nagoya: Chisokudō, 2017The present volume by John Maraldo is a collection of his essays, mostly on Nishida. It constitutes the first volume of a two-part collection on Japanese philosophy, this one focusing on Nishida while the second volume includes works on other Japanese philosophers surrounding Nishida. I have long considered Maraldo to be the foremost scholar in English language works in this field, who has consistently produced thought-provoking and well-grounded work, based on his extensive erudition regarding both Japanese and Western traditions. For the last decade and a half, while reading through his fine articles on Japanese philosophy, I was hoping that eventually a book of his own on this topic would be published. Such a book has finally appeared. It is a book that would certainly benefit Anglophone students and scholars of Nishida and Japanese philosophy worldwide. The essays collected here have been previously published in journals or other volumes, or otherwise presented in conferences. But they have been “lightly revised” (1) for the present volume. The volume could have used additional copyediting to clean up some typos. Nevertheless, I would recommend this book to anyone studying or working on Nishida.The volume begins with the prologue’s caveat that “identities we call Japan, Europe, and philosophy are as shifting as they are settled...” (1). A recurring question, therefore, is how philosophy is defined, how it has traversed through time and place, how Nishida’s thought conveys philosophy, and how we can continue this process of translating philosophy (1). Maraldo’s commentary throughout this volume thus proves to be more than just intellectual history but is itself philosophical as he thinks along with the thinkers he discusses, and invites the reader to do likewise. In this he seeks to bring Nishida’s work into philosophical dialogue with the rest of the world, asking “how does the work of Nishida... contribute to the momentum of philosophy?” (1). Maraldo also inquires what the term “Japanese philosophy” (日本哲学) may mean and provides four possibilities [End Page 135] that were given previously in Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook that he edited with James Heisig and Thomas Kasulis some years ago,1 while in addition providing possible objections to them (6–8). He tells us that he has come to understand Japanese philosophy as an “ongoing, creative endeavor,” as “philosophy in the making”—a phrase that describes for him all philosophical investigation as a “work in progress, subject to reappraisal and reformation, to rethinking” (10). This seems a reasonable—realistic and viable—approach to understanding philosophy, including Japanese philosophy. Moreover, this process of philosophy, as it crosses cultural and historical borders, inevitably involves translation, the “transmission and transmutation through time and through multiple languages” (11). Even within the West, the origin of philosophy cannot be reduced to its Greek origin when, as Maraldo points out, the ancient Greeks themselves drew from wellsprings of “non-Western” thought (17) and the question of a single origin thus proves to involve “crossroads and contingencies” (17). Philosophy as such “occurs via the trans-lation of texts, spoken and written” (11), which not only means the transference of texts through languages but also “the transformation of textually embedded problems, methods and terminologies both across and within natural languages,” “an inter-lingual and an intra-lingual transmission” entailing “the formation of textual traditions” (12). It not only transmits texts but transforms the language, which in turn transforms cultures and traditions (12). Maraldo views Nishida as such a “consummate trans-lator” of philosophy, who reworked both Asian and European sources into his own language while refining his positions throughout his life (13). But even while refusing to confine philosophy to its Greek origins, Maraldo refuses to exoticize Nishida’s works as yet another product of the Orient. Instead, he treats Nishida’s work as worthy of the philosophical attention of the rest of the world. That is to say that he treats Nishida foremost as a philosopher in the global setting, an equal partner in dialogue with philosophers of the...

In this paper, I explicate Ueda Shizuteru’s philosophy of the twofold being-in-the-world and the ethics he draws from it. Ueda provides an original reading of Nishida’s concept of pure experience and develops it together with an understanding of Nishida’s concept of place by combining it with the phenomenological notion of the horizon. This leads him to understand the world, or place wherein we are, as twofold, implying the semantic space or network of meanings within it, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the boundless or undetermined open which envelops the former as its other. Our being as being-in-the-world is thus also twofold in implying both sides of the horizon, inside and outside, whereby we are ontologically grounded but at the same time without ground in being suspended by the semantic emptiness and ontological nothingness lying beyond.

In this review essay of Harumi Osaki’s book, Nothingness in the Heart of the Empire, about the Kyoto School’s wartime political philosophy, I examine the arguments and claims behind Osaki’s thesis that the Kyoto School tends to align itself with nationalist and imperialist formations that lead to political concerns. I focus on some of the concrete problems with her arguments, including the book’s lack of examination of the sociopolitical context behind and surrounding the philosophers’ wartime discourse. These problems result in a one-sided or unbalanced image of the Kyoto School, lacking nuance and painting complex grey areas in black and white.

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.

This paper discusses Reiner Schürmann’s notions of ontological anarché and anarchic praxis in his readings of Heidegger and Eckhart, while bringing his philosophy of anarchy into dialogue with Zen-inspired Japanese thought. I thereby hope to shed light on his thought of anarchy in terms of what I call “an-ontology.” The inspiration for this project is the fact that Schürmann himself had practiced Zen as a young adult in France and had engaged in comparative analyses of Zen and Eckhart in his earlier works. I take what Schürmann meant by the principle of anarchy as a form of praxis that precedes the theoretical bifurcation between being and non-being. A similar sort of “anarchic praxis” is recognizable in Zen and we can find comparable (an)ontological implications of such praxis in the Zen-inspired writings of the Japanese medieval thinker Dōgen and of the contemporary philosopher Nishida Kitarō.

Ueda writes in his Reading Nishida Kitarō (Nishida Kitarō o yomu) that to compare Heidegger’s entire thinking up to his last period with Nishida’s thought also up to his last period, including their multiple turns, would be “one of the most valuable paths to investigating the significance, potential, and problematics of Nishidian philosophy.” In this paper I examine the philosophy of Ueda Shizuteru through the juxtaposition of those two thinkers, of West and of East, who prove to be significant for the creative unfolding of his thought: Martin Heidegger who had inspired much of phenomenology and Continental philosophy, and Nishida Kitarō who had inspired the development of Kyoto School philosophy and much of contemporary Japanese philosophy. The Heideggerian and Nishidian streams of thought, in their “placial turns”—Nishida’s “logic of place” and Heidegger’s “topology of beyng”—meet in Ueda as he reads each in light of the other’s terminology and concepts. Through his readings and appropriations that underscore their commonalities and differences, Ueda thus develops a compelling philosophy of place, world, and horizon, a thinking of being-in-the-twofold-world. The chapter thus examines the meeting of Nishida and Heidegger in Ueda.

In this presentation I discuss the concept of “place” in the Japanese twentieth century philosopher and founder of the Kyoto School of philosophy, Nishida Kitarō, in light of the ancient Greek concept of chōra, and compare it with the German thinker Martin Heidegger’s notion of “region” that was also inspired by chōra. We can point to Plato’s concept of chōra in his Timaeus as an important source for both twentieth century philosophers of the East and the West. But we can also draw connections to the pre-Platonic everyday understanding of chōra as well. I argue that chōra in general entails concretion-cum-indetermination, a space that implaces human existence into its environment and clears room for the presencing-absencing of beings.

The imagination—Einbildung—as its German makes clear is the faculty of formation. But this formative activity in various ways through the history of its concept has been intimately related to the concept of common sense, whether understood as the sense that gathers, orders, and makes coherent the various sense, or as the sensibility of the community. This contribution seeks to unfold that history of the concept of the creative or productive imagination while also tracing the parallel history of the concept of common sense (sensus communis) and their relationship that begins with their inception in Aristotle, a connection that has been retained implicitly in one way or another, intentionally or not, at different times—but also often forgotten—in their history and that seems again to manifest with the recent conceptions of the social imaginary. I will trace this history in the Western philosophical tradition while also making use of a couple of Japanese philosophers who take part in this intellectual history. We shall follow the history of the imagination from Aristotle through Kant’s epistemology in his first Critique—when its productive function becomes positively, rather than negatively, evaluated—and on to the post-Kantians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Post-Kantians like Schelling and Heidegger ontologize that productivity of the imagination beyond the epistemic sphere and, in a parallel fashion, broaden its significance beyond the individual and onto the collective. Common sense also has a long and parallel history within the West that involves a variety of meanings starting with the Aristotelian faculty for integrating the various senses (as koinē aisthēsis) that was closely associated with the imagination (phantasia), and ending with two contrasting notions of a communal or social sensibility (as sensus communis)—the vulgar “commonplace” notion of common sense as habituated custom and the healthy sense of common sense as prudential, contextual, ethical judgment. Both senses of common sense together with the faculty of the imagination are found in Kant’s third Critique but the imagination’s creativity expressed in genius comes into tension with the latter communal sense of common sense (Gemeinsinn) that attempts to order and fetter that creativity with the judgment of taste. The contemporary notion of the social imaginary, for example, in Castoriadis, certainly recalls the close connection between the imagination and common sense in Aristotle but also seems to encompass both the vulgar and the healthy senses of common sense along with their tension in Kant. Although Kant wanted to argue for a transcendental basis of common sense as such that would fit with his theory of the imagination from the first Critique, the imagination itself has been broadened in the third Critique, making way for post-Kantian developments, such as in its ontologization, expanding it beyond the merely epistemic as noted above. At the same time this also broadens the significance of the faculty beyond the cognizing mind of the individual and onto the social sphere to unfold what was implicit in Kant’s third Critique. In Japan Miki Kiyoshi develops that ontology of the imagination even though he still affirms its transcendental status. Nonetheless he explicates its formative creativity as involving the human collective producing not only ideal forms for thought but also institutions and technics of human culture. Likewise, Castoriadis understands the creativity of the imagination in socio-collective terms. But in addition, he underscores—in contrast to Miki—its temporal contingency or historicity and non-transcendental status. At the same time, the tension between unbounded creativity and communal responsibility found in Kant’s third Critique—together with the form-formlessness dynamic found in Miki—in a certain sense reappears in Castoriadis’ theory of the social imaginary and the creative imagination. We might say that in general the notion of Gemeinsinn in Kant in that sense provides a bridge between the idea of a creative or productive imagination and the idea of the social imaginary, while harking back to the original relationship between koinē aisthēsis and phantasia in Aristotle. This connection is implicitly assumed, perhaps unintentionally, by many of the relevant thinkers who discuss either concept. It is made explicit in contemporary Japanese philosopher Nakamura Yūjirō’s discussions of common sense, but can also be extracted out of Hannah Arendt’s discussions of the imagination, judgment, and sensus communis. Conceptually the two converge in Castoriadis’ and Ricoeur’s notions of the social imagination/imaginary. I thus plan to trace the parallel history of these two concepts (imagination and common sense). This is a chapter in the book 'Social Imaginaries: Critical Interventions' edited by Suzi Adams and Jeremy Smith

In this paper, I explore a possible a/theological response to what Nietzsche called the ‘death of God’—or Hölderlin’s and Heidegger’s ‘flight of the gods’—through a juxtaposition of the Christian-Pauline concept of kenōsis and the ancient Greek-Platonic notion of chōra, and by taking Nishida Kitarō’s appropriations of these concepts as a clue and starting point. Nishida refers to chōra in 1926 to initiate his philosophy of place and then makes reference to kenōsis in 1945 in his final work that culminates—without necessarily completing—his oeuvre. What he had thereby accomplished is an inversion of Platonism resulting in the collapse of the transcendent/immanent—idea/genesis and by implication the Heaven/Earth—dichotomy. I then unpack the ethical implication of this kenotic chōra Nishida has left us with. It suggests from us a certain response to the desacralization or secularization of the world. I shall build upon this suggestion and unfold its implications by drawing from a variety of sources, starting with Nishida but including others, such as Meister Eckhart, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Gianni Vattimo, Reiner Schürmann, Mark Taylor, Jürgen Moltmann, and other philosophical and theological sources.

A chapter in the book, Philosophies of Place: An Intercultural Conversation, edited by Peter D. Hershock and Roger T. Ames, and published by University of Hawaii Press. In this chapter I present a phenomenological ontology of place vis-a-vis horizon and also alterity (otherness), discussing related themes in Heidegger, Kitaro Nishida, Shizuteru Ueda, Otto Bollnow, Karl Jaspers, Ed Casey, Günter Figal, Bernhard Waldenfels, and others. Wherever we are we are implaced, delimited in our being-in-the-world constituted by a horizon that implaces us, not only literally but semantically and ontologically. Whether we take place in its semantic sense or as ontological, I underscore its duplicity—taking off from Ueda Shizuteru’s concept of two-fold being-in-the-world—as on the one hand demarcating a realm of determinacy, our ontological finitude or our social imaginary world, and on the other hand through its horizonal nature as pointing to an indeterminacy or exteriority that demarcates or delimits that realm, finitizing us. That latter may be characterized as an excess irreducible to semantic or ontological determination or as a nothing or a-meaning. Hence place with its horizon implies the interface of meaning and a-meaning, nomos and anomy, principles and anarché, in Nishidian terms being and the nothing (mu), in Heideggerian terms unconcealment and concealment or world and earth. Thus the horizon that constitutes place entails both finitude and openness, allowing for alterity and alteration, whereby the determinations within place are never fixed, secure, or guaranteed. In demarcating a place, the horizon always points to a yonder beyond the place, its other. In its very contact with the unassmilable or irreducible, the line of demarcation is itself thus unpredictable in its fluctuations. The place determined within the nothing or the clearing of unconcealment amidst the concealed will thus always be provisional despite any appearance or claims to the contrary. Its determination is indeterminate.