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John Krummel
Ph.D. Religion, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, 2008
Ph.D. Philosophy, New School for Social Research, NYC, NY, 1999
Assistant Editor, Journal of Japanese Philosophy (SUNY Press)
Associate Editor, International Journal of Social Imaginaries (Brill)
Editor, Social Imaginaries Book Series (RLI)
Associate Professor, Chair, Dept. of Religious Studies, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY, USA
Favorite quotes:
Man, in the most hidden ground of his being, truly is only when in his own way he is like the rose—without why.
-Meister Ekchart, Martin Heidegger, Reiner Schürmann-
One must still have chaos within oneself to give birth to a dancing star.
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness is our home?
-Emil Cioran-
Beauty--no matter how disturbing or how still--is always true.
-Sonny Sharrock-
Ph.D. Philosophy, New School for Social Research, NYC, NY, 1999
Assistant Editor, Journal of Japanese Philosophy (SUNY Press)
Associate Editor, International Journal of Social Imaginaries (Brill)
Editor, Social Imaginaries Book Series (RLI)
Associate Professor, Chair, Dept. of Religious Studies, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY, USA
Favorite quotes:
Man, in the most hidden ground of his being, truly is only when in his own way he is like the rose—without why.
-Meister Ekchart, Martin Heidegger, Reiner Schürmann-
One must still have chaos within oneself to give birth to a dancing star.
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness is our home?
-Emil Cioran-
Beauty--no matter how disturbing or how still--is always true.
-Sonny Sharrock-
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This is the first book-length work in English detailing Nishida’s dialectic and its relationship to its most important philosophical predecessors. Nishida’s relationship to Hegel is an area that has not been sufficiently explored. Nor have previous explorations of Nishida’s relationship to Buddhism been adequate in terms of a thorough analysis of concepts. Previous researchers who touched upon this topic have reduced Nishida’s thought to either an extension of Hegelian philosophy or a modern day version of Buddhist thought. Nishida’s thinking in fact is much more complicated and deserves fuller treatment. This is what this work intends to accomplish.
The book also takes a novel approach to Nishida by reading his “absolute dialectic” (zettai benshōhō) in terms of a chiasmatic chorology. The phrase refers to the Greek terms chiasma and chōra. It is intended to suggest that the complexity implied by the dialectic cannot adequately be expressed within the conceptual framework of traditional Hegelian dialectics. But by the same token it also extends beyond previous formulations within Buddhism.
The first essay represents the first systematic articulation of Nishida's philosophy of basho, literally meaning ''place,'' a system of thought that came to be known as ''Nishida philosophy.'' In the second essay, Nishida inquires after the pre-logical origin of what we call logic, which he suggests is to be found within the dialectical unfoldings of world history and human society. A substantial introduction by John Krummel considers the significance of Nishida as a thinker, discusses the key components of Nishida's philosophy as a whole and its development throughout his life, and contextualizes the translated essays within his oeuvre. The Introduction also places Nishida and his work within the historical context of his time, and highlights the relevance of his ideas to the global circumstances of our day. The publication of these two essays by Nishida, a major figure in world philosophy and the most important philosopher of twentieth-century Japan, is of significant value to the fields not only of Asian philosophy and East-West comparative philosophy but also of philosophy in general as well as of theology and religious studies.
This is a chapter in 'Miki Kiyoshi and the Crisis of Thought' edited by Steven Lofts, Nakamura Norihito, and Fernando Wirtz (Chusokudo, 2024).
This is a chapter in Tobias Endres, Ralf Müller, & Domenico Schneider (eds.). Kyoto in Davos: Intercultural Readings of the Cassirer-Heidegger Debate. Leiden: Brill, 2024.
This is a chapter in the forthcoming book, Tetsugaku Companion to Ueda Shizuteru--Thoughts About Experience, Language, and Zen, edited by Racquel Bouso, Ralf Müller, and Adam Loughnane; and published by Springer.
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.
Keywords: Modernity; Westernization; nationalism; war; Kyoto School; Japanese Romanticism.
This is the first book-length work in English detailing Nishida’s dialectic and its relationship to its most important philosophical predecessors. Nishida’s relationship to Hegel is an area that has not been sufficiently explored. Nor have previous explorations of Nishida’s relationship to Buddhism been adequate in terms of a thorough analysis of concepts. Previous researchers who touched upon this topic have reduced Nishida’s thought to either an extension of Hegelian philosophy or a modern day version of Buddhist thought. Nishida’s thinking in fact is much more complicated and deserves fuller treatment. This is what this work intends to accomplish.
The book also takes a novel approach to Nishida by reading his “absolute dialectic” (zettai benshōhō) in terms of a chiasmatic chorology. The phrase refers to the Greek terms chiasma and chōra. It is intended to suggest that the complexity implied by the dialectic cannot adequately be expressed within the conceptual framework of traditional Hegelian dialectics. But by the same token it also extends beyond previous formulations within Buddhism.
The first essay represents the first systematic articulation of Nishida's philosophy of basho, literally meaning ''place,'' a system of thought that came to be known as ''Nishida philosophy.'' In the second essay, Nishida inquires after the pre-logical origin of what we call logic, which he suggests is to be found within the dialectical unfoldings of world history and human society. A substantial introduction by John Krummel considers the significance of Nishida as a thinker, discusses the key components of Nishida's philosophy as a whole and its development throughout his life, and contextualizes the translated essays within his oeuvre. The Introduction also places Nishida and his work within the historical context of his time, and highlights the relevance of his ideas to the global circumstances of our day. The publication of these two essays by Nishida, a major figure in world philosophy and the most important philosopher of twentieth-century Japan, is of significant value to the fields not only of Asian philosophy and East-West comparative philosophy but also of philosophy in general as well as of theology and religious studies.
This is a chapter in 'Miki Kiyoshi and the Crisis of Thought' edited by Steven Lofts, Nakamura Norihito, and Fernando Wirtz (Chusokudo, 2024).
This is a chapter in Tobias Endres, Ralf Müller, & Domenico Schneider (eds.). Kyoto in Davos: Intercultural Readings of the Cassirer-Heidegger Debate. Leiden: Brill, 2024.
This is a chapter in the forthcoming book, Tetsugaku Companion to Ueda Shizuteru--Thoughts About Experience, Language, and Zen, edited by Racquel Bouso, Ralf Müller, and Adam Loughnane; and published by Springer.
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.
Keywords: Modernity; Westernization; nationalism; war; Kyoto School; Japanese Romanticism.
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
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.
My contribution seeks to unfold an ontology of the imagination based on the history of the productive imagination in its relation to common sense and recent developments of the notion of the social imaginary, while making use of ideas found in both Western and Japanese thinkers. Kyoto School philosopher Miki Kiyoshi shows a connection between the imagination he inherits from Kant and a certain form-formlessness dynamic he inherits from Nishida Kitarō’s notion of a self-forming formlessness. The source of the imagination’s creativity is in that formlessness that lies both within the interior depths of the psyche and outside in the environing nature. Post-war Japanese philosopher Nakamura Yūjirō—taking off from Miki’s attempts to concretize Nishida’s theory of place in terms of the imagination—in turn points to a connection between imagination and place and explicates this via his development of the Aristotelian notion of common sense (koinē aisthēsis, sensus communis). Common sense in itself has a long 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, 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 explicated by thinkers like Hannah Arendt. Both are found in Kant’s Critique of Judgment but the imagination’s creativity expressed in genius comes into tension with the latter communal sense of common sense that attempts to fetter that creativity of genius with the judgment of taste. The contemporary notion of the social imaginary, for example in Cornelius Castoriadis, seems to encompass both the vulgar and the healthy senses of common sense, and also recalls the close connection between the imagination and common sense in Aristotle. Contrary to what Kant sought, however, this underscores the temporal contingency or historicity and non-transcendental status of common sense, even in its healthy sense, and its communal judgments. At the same time, the form-formlessness dynamic found in Miki and the tension between unbounded creativity and communal responsibility found in Kant’s third Critique in a certain sense also reappears in Castoriadis’ ontology (of magmas) whereby chaos is the source of the imagination’s creativity not only for the individual psyche but for the social-historical or social imaginary significations as well, that is, in the social imaginary’s inner tension between the instituting and the instituted. Recalling the fact that Nishida was inspired by the Greek notion of chōra in developing his theory of place, I then suggest that the linking of the imagination with the process of the forming of the formless as well as with place may allow us in turn to understand the creative imagination ontologically in the Greek terms of chōrismos—etymologically related to chōra—as the difference that brings order to chaos by allotting beings, each to its own place. Imagination as Ein-bildung might then be viewed as the ontological formation that, through differentiation, gives shape, form, to place. This then leads to the issue of autonomy—To whom does the spontaneity of the creative imagination belong when the chaos or formlessness, indeed “freedom,” at the root of its creativity exceeds the boundaries of subjectivity or reason? Heidegger in his later works, albeit in only a few places, suggests such a sense of the imagination as no longer a faculty of the human subject, no longer a doing of man. Forthcoming November 2018
Nishida Kitarō, the cofounder and central figure of the Kyoto school, once stated that to be is to be implaced. Nishida’s second generation Kyoto School descendant and current representative of the Kyoto School, Ueda Shizuteru, furthered this concept to understand both place and implacement in terms of a twofold world or twofold horizon. Nishida initially understood the self in its unobjectifiability as a kind of place wherein subject and object correlate. But this placial self came to be seen as itself implaced within a contextualizing place wherein it can interact with things in the world and with other subjects in an “I-thou” relationship, but which ultimately is further implaced in an abyssal place of absolute nothing. He developed this understanding of place in terms of the socio-historical world and ultimately in terms of the divinity that negates itself in kenōsis to make room for the world of many. Roughly speaking and in a variety of versions, Nishida takes the system of places to involve the following: the place of beings or objects, the place that is consciousness, the place that is the world of human interactivity, and finally the place of absolute nothing. Ueda on the other hand, focuses on the twofold structure of place itself as involving the twofold structure of the horizon of experience. We are implaced in the world that in turn is implaced in a boundless openness. Our place is twofold in that there is the world of significances on this side of its horizon and the a-meaning of the nothing beyond its horizon. While Nishida formulates the system of places in terms of place of being, place of relative nothing, and place of absolute nothing, Ueda uses the fraction symbol as world/open expanse to convey his idea of “world amidst the open expanse.” I will explore this legacy of place as Nishida first formulated it and then as developed more recently by Ueda.
While doing so I will also discuss each of their relations to phenomenology. Nishida was developing his theory of place cotemporaneous to the careers of Husserl and Heidegger. While he was aware of their work, it was only to a limited extent and he was quite critical of both thinkers and phenomenology in general. On the other hand, Ueda is quite knowledgeable of the phenomenological movement of Europe, having studied under Nishida’s student, Nishitani Keiji, who had studied under Heidegger and, himself, having studied in Germany. He incorporates the insights of Husserl, Heidegger, Bollnow, Jaspers, Merleau-Ponty, Eliade, and others, in developing his own understanding of place. What both Nishida and Ueda offer vis-à-vis a phenomenology of place is a sophisticated analysis of that other to being that place as defined and limited must assume: what Nishida calls the absolute nothing (zettai mu) and what Ueda calls the open expanse (kokū). I will then end by looking at the implications these ideas have for our current situation of globalization in the contemporary world.
The Logic of the Imagination was originally published in two volumes in 1939 and 1946. In the book Miki develops a novel theory of the productive imagination. He views the imagination’s formation (Bildung) of images (Bilder) as involving the unity of logos and pathos and as expressing itself externally in human collective activity. Inspired by Kant’s theory of the imagination but developing it further, Miki takes the imagination as the formless source for the creation of forms, whereby the real is the imaginary (in distinction from Hegel’s notion that the “real is the rational”). Miki takes forms here to mean not ideas in Plato’s sense but rather embodied images that shape the collectively meaningful world with practical and concrete reality: mythos, nomos, and technē as all involving poiēsis (production). He thus discusses the imagination’s products in terms of myths, institutions, and technics [or: technology], spending a chapter on each, and then dedicates his final chapter to the topic of experience, which includes a lengthy discussion of Kant’s theory of the imagination in the first and third Critiques. For Miki these forms are not static but dynamic, whereby history consists of their trans-formations. Towards the end of the book he ties this creativity of the imagination to nature’s productivity that exceeds human creativity.
The Logic of the Imagination, which is representative of Miki’s mature years, is considered not only to be Miki’s most significant work but an important testament to the creativity of Kyoto School philosophy.
The main purpose of this book is to offer to philosophers and students abroad who show a great interest in Japanese philosophy and the philosophy of the Kyoto school major texts of the leading philosophers. This interest has surely developed out of a desire to obtain from the thought of these philosophers, who stood within the interstice between East and West, a clue to reassessing the issues of philosophy from the ground up or to drawing new creative possibilities.The present condition seems to be, however, that the material made available to further realize this kind of intellectual dialogue is far too scarce. This book is intended to be of some help in this regard.The book presents selected texts of representative philosophers of the Kyoto school such as Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime, Miki Kiyoshi, Nishitani Keiji, and others who best illustrate the characteristics of this school, and works that together portray its image as a whole. Those who are interested in Japanese philosophy or specifically the philosophy of the Kyoto School can survey a comprehensive representation from this book.These texts are, of course, quite difficult and cannot be well understood without sufficient preliminary knowledge. Expository essays have therefore been included after each text to provide guidance. In each of these commentaries a scholar of our time with deep understanding of the philosopher in question has provided an account of his life, intellectual journey, and the significance of the text included here.From this book will emerge a new dialogue of ideas that in turn will engender new developments in philosophy, thereby further expanding the network of philosophical thought worldwide.
Abstract: Equality and inequality are basic elements of law, justice and politics. Equality integrates each of us into a common sphere by dis- tributing rights, duties and chances among us. Equality turns into mere indifference as far as we get overintegrated into social orders. When differences are fading away experience loses its relief and individuals lose their face. Our critical re ections start from the inevitable paradox of making equal what is not equal. In various ways they refer to Nietzsche’s concept of order, to Marx’s analysis of money, to Lévinas’s ethics of the Other, and to novelists like Dostoevsky and Musil. Our critique turns against two extremes, on the one hand against any sort of normalism fixed on functioning orders, on the other hand against any sort of anomalism dreaming of mere events and permanent ruptures. Responsive phenomenology shows how we are confronted with extraordinary events. Those deviate from the ordinary and transgress its borders, without leaving the normality of our everyday world be-hind. e process of equalizing moves between the ordinary and the extraordinary. What makes the difference and resists mere indifference are creative responses which are to be invented again and again.
Key Words: equality — indifference — normality — ordinary/extraordinary — response
Keywords:
myth
imagination
creative imagination
productive imagination
Kyoto School philosophy
poiesis
Japanese philosophy
The translation appears in Social Imaginaries, Vol. 2, Nr. 1 (2016).
The first essay represents the first systematic articulation of Nishida's philosophy of basho, literally meaning ''place,'' a system of thought that came to be known as ''Nishida philosophy.'' In the second essay, Nishida inquires after the pre-logical origin of what we call logic, which he suggests is to be found within the dialectical unfoldings of world history and human society. A substantial introduction by John Krummel considers the significance of Nishida as a thinker, discusses the key components of Nishida's philosophy as a whole and its development throughout his life, and contextualizes the translated essays within his oeuvre. The Introduction also places Nishida and his work within the historical context of his time, and highlights the relevance of his ideas to the global circumstances of our day. The publication of these two essays by Nishida, a major figure in world philosophy and the most important philosopher of twentieth-century Japan, is of significant value to the fields not only of Asian philosophy and East-West comparative philosophy but also of philosophy in general as well as of theology and religious studies."
In my presentation I will discuss the concept of self-awareness (jikaku 自覚) in the thought of the modern Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō (西田幾多郎) (Kitarō Nishida) (1870-1945), founder of the Kyoto School. Self-awareness is a unifying theme throughout Nishida’s oeuvre, but especially his 1917 work Intuition and Reflection in Self-Awareness articulates his notion of self-awareness as involving a dialectic whereby intuition leads to a reflection on it, which then as a new intuition leads to a further reflection in an ongoing process. Nishida interprets this process of self-awareness as an endless self-mirroring—self-reflection as reflexivity—founded upon the premise assumed by the articulated image or object of awareness, a premise necessarily irreducible, and in excess, to the image or object. Nishida eventually designates this premise, assumed throughout this process, 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 resonate with Nishida’s understanding of the “absolute nothing” as the indeterminate assumed by determination. If self-awareness is the determination of the indeterminate, the finitization of the infinite, what happens when the determining filters or valves are altered or shut off? Speculating on this, I will discuss Aldous Huxley’s use of Henri Bergson’s theory that the senses filter the reception of data and Huxley’s suggestion that psychedelics like mescalin turns off those filters that shape our ordinary experience; and John Lilly’s sensory deprivation tank as perhaps then paradoxically opening us, instead of withdrawing us from, the world outside. What then would the implication be of the Mahayana Buddhist metaphor of Indra’s net of inter-reflecting jewels from the Avatamsaka Sutra, that Nishida himself alludes to in later works, for his notion of self-awareness as reductively mirroring the irreducible and indeterminate nothing?
The presentation will focus on Kyoto School philosophy’s “philosophy of world history” 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 World War II (1941~42) known as 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 world order. Metaphysically this notion of a co-prosperity sphere as well as of a polycentric world was grounded in the Kyoto School’s concept of “nothingness” as an open space for autonomous but corelated subjects. While these discussions have been under fire by post-war critics, especially the Left, for its association with Japanese imperialism, I will examine the potential viability of these ideas today as we look to the emergence of a polycentric world without a single hegemon, a world that ideally would give space to difference and diversity and avoid the violence of homogenization. A comparison of the Kyoto School with Jean-luc Nancy in this regard may provide some clues.
This is a version of a talk, presented at Kyoto in Davos: The Question of the Human from a Cross-Cultural Vantage Point conference, Institute of Philosophy, Hildesheim University, Germany (September, 2020); with other versions presented at several other conferences and locations.
Another version of this paper given in several conferences. This one was given at the annual SPEP meeting in Pittsburgh, 2019.
This invited talk was presented at Why the Kyoto School Today? Conference, King’s University College at Western University, London, Ontario, Canada (March, 2019); Temple University Japan Philosophy Lecture Series vol. 10, Tokyo, Japan (June, 2019); and Kyoto in Davos: The Question of the Human from a Cross-Cultural Vantage Point conference, Institute of Philosophy, Hildesheim University, Germany (September, 2020); and shorter versions were presented at a number of other conferences without the powerpoint.
Ueda on Being-in-the-Twofold-World or World Amidst The Open Expanse: Reading Nishida Through Heidegger and Reading Heidegger Through Nishida
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 presentation 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 multiple turns, including “placial turns”—Nishida’s “logic of place” and Heidegger’s “topology of beyng”—have in turn sparked a creative blending and unfolding of their thematics to meet in the philosophy of Ueda. Ueda reads each in light of the other, making use of Heideggerian terms and concepts in reading Nishida and conversely making use of Nishidian themes and concepts in reading Heidegger. His reading of each vis-à-vis the other sheds some interesting light on their thought. Through his readings and appropriations that underscore their commonalities and differences, Ueda develops a compelling philosophy of place, world, horizon, and the open expanse, a thinking of being-in-the-twofold-world. The paper thus examines the meeting of Nishida and Heidegger in Ueda.
上田閑照の二重世界内存在・世界/虚空―ハイデッガーを通した西田読解、および西田を通したハイデッガー読解
上田閑照によれば、ハイデッガーの前期から後期までの全思索を、西田の全時期の思索(複数の転換をも含める)と比較するということは、「西田哲学の意義、その可能性と問題性とを究明する最も大切な道の一つ」である。この発表では、上田の思想の創造的展開において重要な位置を占めるこの西洋と東洋二人の思想家を併置しながら上田の哲学を探る。二人の思想家とはすなわち、現象学と現代ヨーロッパ哲学に影響を与えたマルテイン・ハイデッガーと、京都学派の哲学の発展と現代日本哲学に広く影響力をもった西田幾多郎を指す。ハイデッガーと西田の思想の流れ、その複数の転換 [場所的転回をも含む西田の場所的論理、およびハイデッガーの有(存在)の居住論(トポロジー)]は、逆に彼らのテーマの創造的な交錯と展開に火をつけて、上田の哲学の中で互いに出会うことになった。上田はハイデッガーの用語と概念を使用しながら西田を読み、また逆に西田の主題と概念を使用しながらハイデッガーを読み、それぞれを互いに照らし合わせて読解する。彼らの共通点と差異を主張する自分なりの解釈と使用を通して、上田は説得力のある場所、世界、地平、虚空などの哲学、二重世界内存在の思想を発展させた。以上のようなことから、この発表では、上田における西田とハイデッガーの出会いを探ることにする。
Longer abstract: Emil Lask has been said to provide a bridge from Kant to phenomenology through a kind of self-deconstruction from within Neo-Kantianism. One could also argue that he provides a bridge from Kant to Kyoto School philosophy in Japan. Remarkably both Martin Heidegger and Nishida Kitarō, independent of one another but contemporaneously, took Lask's collapsing of Neo-Kantian hylomorphism in parallel but distinct directions, developing Lask's conception of a pre-judicative object-paradigm and the implicit difference within it between category and material. Both to a degree accepted Lask's anti-subjectivism in his attempt to avoid psychologism. Nishida and Heidegger, however, also moved beyond Lask's object-centrism. In the case of Heidegger, Lask's notion of prethematic lived experience is broadened in the direction of the "horizon" that in Sein und Zeit becomes explicated in terms of the temporality of human existence. In the case of Nishida in Basho it is understood in terms of a pre-objective "predicate" (in distinction from the grammatical subject) and as indicative of the "place" wherein beings, objects, or grammatical subjects are implaced. For Nishida, place in its deepest significance is the place of nothing, for Heidegger, temporality is the meaning of being. Both notions indicate a pretheoretical lived sense of meaning that assumes the "world" (Welt, sekai) as the contextual ground for the emergence of objects or beings. I thus examine Heidegger and Nishida under the light of Lask as a common source of influence and inspiration and to whom both were responding.
Videos of SPEP presentation: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCff0OTUMMJajEwqXXXJzHbA/videos?view=0&sort=dd&shelf_id=1
Abstract: Kyoto School Philosophy on Place: Nishida and Ueda
Nishida Kitarō, the cofounder and central figure of the Kyoto school, once stated that to be is to be implaced. Nishida’s second generation Kyoto School descendant and current representative of the Kyoto School, Ueda Shizuteru, furthered this concept to understand both place and implacement in terms of a twofold world or twofold horizon. Nishida initially understood the self in its unobjectifiability as a kind of place wherein subject and object correlate. But this placial self came to be seen as itself implaced within a contextualizing place wherein it can interact with things in the world and with other subjects in an “I-thou” relationship, but which ultimately is further implaced in an abyssal place of absolute nothing. He developed this understanding of place in terms of the socio-historical world and ultimately in terms of the divinity that negates itself in kenōsis to make room for the world of many. Roughly speaking and in a variety of versions, Nishida takes the system of places to involve the following: the place of beings or objects, the place that is consciousness, the place that is the world of human interactivity, and finally the place of absolute nothing. Ueda on the other hand, focuses on the twofold structure of place itself as involving the twofold structure of the horizon of experience. We are implaced in the world that in turn is implaced in a boundless openness. Our place is twofold in that there is the world of significances on this side of its horizon and the a-meaning of the nothing beyond its horizon. While Nishida formulates the system of places in terms of place of being, place of relative nothing, and place of absolute nothing, Ueda uses the fraction symbol as world/open expanse to convey his idea of “world amidst the open expanse.” I will explore this legacy of place as Nishida first formulated it and then as developed more recently by Ueda.
While doing so I will also discuss each of their relations to phenomenology. Nishida was developing his theory of place cotemporaneous to the careers of Husserl and Heidegger. While he was aware of their work, it was only to a limited extent and he was quite critical of both thinkers and phenomenology in general. On the other hand, Ueda is quite knowledgeable of the phenomenological movement of Europe, having studied under Nishida’s student, Nishitani Keiji, who had studied under Heidegger and, himself, having studied in Germany. He incorporates the insights of Husserl, Heidegger, Bollnow, Jaspers, Merleau-Ponty, Eliade, and others, in developing his own understanding of place. What both Nishida and Ueda offer vis-à-vis a phenomenology of place is a sophisticated analysis of that other to being that place as defined and limited must assume: what Nishida calls the absolute nothing (zettai mu) and what Ueda calls the open expanse (kokū). I will then end by looking at the implications these ideas have for our current situation of globalization in the contemporary world.
Video of presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oU1dwfyxbk
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Purchase the full article via http://www.zetabooks.com/journals/social-imaginaries.html
Or purchase a subscription for your institution!
Purchase the full article via http://www.zetabooks.com/journals/social-imaginaries.html
Or purchase a subscription for your institution!
Purchase the full article via http://www.zetabooks.com/journals/social-imaginaries.html
Or purchase a subscription for your institution!
This is a blog about two books edited by Saulius Geniusas (one co-edited with Dimitri Nikulin) as part of the Social Imaginaries book series.
We would like to announce that an international conference on Japanese philosophy will be held as follows:
Date: 7-9 October 2016 (Friday and Sunday)
Venue: Kyushu University Nishijin Plaza, Fukuoka City, Japan
Theme: Opening up Japanese Philosophy: The Kyoto School and After
Proposals: Organized panels and individual papers
Languages: English or Japanese
Submission deadline: 31 May 2016 (Japanesephilosophy@gmail.com)
Notification of acceptance by email: 1 July 2016
URL: http://tetsugakuconferenc.wix.com/2016
Organizer: International Association of Japanese Philosophy (IAJP)
This conference specifically encourages young scholars to submit their proposals. Topics may cover any periods, figure or context, including Japanese thoughts and intellectual history for instance, pertaining to Japanese philosophy in a broad sense. Please feel free to disseminate this announcement to those who might be interested.
The IAJP held meetings at the Eastern Conference of the American Philosophical Association in December 2014 and in January 2016. The IAJP plans to continue holding meetings annually at the Eastern Conference of the APA in the US. This present conference will be the first IAJP meeting in Asia.
We very much look forward to receiving your proposals.
Sincerely yours,
John Krummel
President, International Association of Japanese Philosophy
This is a reminder of the coming deadline for our annual international conference which will be held in Kyoto in the Spring of 2020. It will provide you with a unique opportunity to visit the beautiful and ancient city of Kyoto in Japan while attending a philosophy conference at a Zen temple: