Philosophy of the Kyoto School
from 1911
Buddhist nothingness taken up as a philosophical concept and argued against Kant, Hegel and Heidegger on their own ground.
- Active
- from 1911
- Where
- Kyoto Imperial University
- Also
- 京都学派 Kyōto gakuha
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- Japanese And Korean
The claim
Absolute nothingness is not the absence of being but the field in which subject and object both arise. Reality is encountered before the split into knower and known — pure experience, prior to the distinction.
What it held
Nishida Kitaro began with a question about where experience starts. When you hear a melody, there is not first a hearer and then a heard; there is hearing, and the division into subject and object is something the intellect does afterwards. He called this pure experience, and spent forty years working out what follows.
What follows is the logic of place — basho. Western logic asks what a thing is; Nishida asks where it is, in what field it is determined. The deepest such field is absolute nothingness, which is not a void but the condition for anything's appearing at all.
Tanabe and Nishitani developed it in different directions, Nishitani engaging with nihilism directly and arguing that European nihilism stops halfway: it negates being but not the negating subject, and going all the way through produces emptiness rather than despair.
The school's wartime record is a real problem and the entry says so. Several members lent philosophical language to Japanese imperialism, and the argument about how far the philosophy is implicated in that has been running since 1945 without resolution.
How it argued
Continental philosophical argument, in German and Japanese, using Buddhist categories as philosophical concepts rather than as religious claims.
What it was arguing against
The subject-object framework of European epistemology, and any philosophy that begins from the knowing subject as given.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether nothingness is a philosophical concept or a religious one imported wholesale. The wartime collaboration, which divides scholars sharply and is not settled.
Common misconceptions
That it is Zen in academic dress. Nishida read Kant, Hegel, James and Bergson closely and argues with them technically; the Buddhist material is used as philosophy, not cited as authority.
How it began
Nishida's An Inquiry into the Good in 1911, written by a man who had practised Zen for years and then took a chair in philosophy at Kyoto.
What became of it
Living. A third and fourth generation continue, and the school is now studied seriously in Europe and North America.
Lasting influence
The main channel by which Japanese philosophy entered Western academic discussion. Heidegger read Nishitani's generation, and the exchange ran both ways.
Why it still matters
Its critique of the subject-object framework anticipates arguments made independently in phenomenology, and its account of pure experience is a genuine contribution.
Put another way
A field, which is not a thing among things and is where things are.
Where to start
Nishitani's Religion and Nothingness. Clearer than Nishida and it shows what the school is for.
The surprising bit
Nishida's Inquiry into the Good was a bestseller in Japan — a technical work of philosophy that ordinary readers bought in large numbers.
In their own words
Pure experience is prior to the distinction between subject and object.
Nihility is the abyss that opens up at the ground of the self.
Connections
- Parallel to
- Phenomenology
The verdict
Japan's first original philosophy in the Western sense, with a compromised political record that its best interpreters do not minimise.