Home > Positioning > Subjects > Metaphilosophy > Philosophy in Japan > The Kyoto School

The Kyoto School

The Kyoto School is the line of thinkers around Nishida Kitarō and Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962) at Kyoto Imperial University, continued by Nishitani Keiji (1900–1990). Tosaka Jun (1900–1945) held that without Tanabe’s critical taking-up of Nishida there would be no school at all.

Nishida’s An Inquiry into the Good (1911) sets the order of things in its preface. Its last part treats religion, “which I have long held to be the conclusion of philosophy”. He named the book for the good because, “although philosophical inquiry fills its first half, I hold the problem of life to be the centre and the conclusion”. And experience comes before the knower: “it is not that there is experience because there is an individual; there is an individual because there is experience”. In 1932, as quoted in a University of Tokyo paper, he wrote that the motive of philosophy must be not wonder but the deep sorrow of life.

Tanabe turned philosophy against itself. Lectures at Kyoto at the end of 1944 became Zangedō to shite no tetsugaku (1946), philosophy as the Way of zange, the Buddhist word for repentance and confession, which Tanabe himself glossed with the Greek metanoia. In James Heisig’s words, the book “argues for the ultimate futility of all philosophy, and proposes instead a ‘philosophy that is not a philosophy’”. Reason, in Bret Davis’s account of it, 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”: the language is Shinran’s (Buddhism in Japan).

Nishitani said plainly where he stood. “When I say ‘philosophy,’ for a person such as myself, born and living in Japan, I first of all mean Western philosophy, since this is the most influential one”, and “we are faced with the ineluctable necessity of re-thinking once more Oriental thought and philosophy with the help of what we learned from Western philosophy” (1984). His own concern: “Daily life is the basic problem and the last key to all problems. That is the standpoint of Zen … To think that standpoint by way of philosophy is my basic concern”, and he aimed at “making philosophy work as the thinking of basic non-thinking, just like the everyday labor of working the field and pulling the weeds”. In “The Standpoint of Zen” (1967) he reads Western philosophy back to the same root: for Augustine, as for Socrates, “the love of knowledge which gives rise to philosophy was backed up by a practice of self-investigation which sought a resting place for his own existence”.

Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960), who taught at Kyoto before moving to Tokyo in 1934, built ethics as a discipline on a word. “Ethics is the question ‘what is rinri?’” (Ningen no gaku to shite no rinrigaku, 1934, as quoted), and rinri is made of rin, fellows, “the group as a system of relations among certain people, and also the individuals defined by that group”, and ri, principle. To define ethics as the study of ningen, the human being as between persons, was “to escape the modern error that makes ethics merely a problem of individual consciousness” (Rinrigaku, 1937). Tosaka objected to the method in 1935: “even if Japanese or Chinese could make the word rinri, analysing the word does not prove that the thing itself is so”; the word could serve only “as an illustration, an intuitive symbol”.