Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School (review)

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1 Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School (review) Robert Edgar Carter Philosophy East and West, Volume 54, Number 2, April 2004, pp (Review) Published by University of Hawai'i Press DOI: For additional information about this article Access provided by National Taiwan University (7 Sep :06 GMT)

2 And Burton Watson renders it as: Notes Little did I guess I d ever pass so many years... or even this mountain again, in one, now long, life: here on Mount Dead-o -Night. (p. 57) Did I ever think in old age I would cross it again? So long I ve lived, Saya-between-the-Hills. 5 1 Michiko Yusa, Zen and Philosophy: An Intellectual Biography of Nishida Kitarō (Honolulu: University of Hawai i Press, 2002), p. 281; translation slightly modified. 2 Gomi Fumihiko, Inseiki shakai no kenkyū (A study of the cloistered Imperial Court) (Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha, 1984), pp Tsunoda Bun ei, Taikenmon in Tamako [or Shōshi] no shōgai (The life of the Imperial Mother, Taikenmon in Shōshi) (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1985), pp , Kubota Jun, Sankashū (The mountain-hut collection) (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1983), p Burton Watson, Saigyō: Poems of a Mountain Home (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School. By James W. Heisig. Nanzan Library of Asian Religion and Culture. Honolulu: University of Hawai i Press, Pp. xi þ 380. $ Reviewed by Robert E. Carter Professor Emeritus, Trent University Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School, by James W. Heisig, is indeed a very good book. It provides a systematic interpretation and appraisal of the three key figures of the Kyoto school Nishida Kitarō, Tanabe Hajime, and Nishitani Keiji together with an in-depth account of the sociopolitical context in which they worked. Heisig succeeds in indicating the importance of each of these philosophers both within the Japanese context and beyond. He deftly summarizes the philosophical positions of each of the three and details the interactions between them, as well as with other philosophers of their era. The book s style is accessible, although the ideas are often dense and the analysis subtle. There are no footnotes per se, but instead a bibliographical essay is provided for each of the sixty-six sections of the book. Philosophy East & West Volume 54, Number 2 April > 2004 by University of Hawai i Press

3 Heisig claims that the Kyoto school philosophers give the West a way into the East like none other (p. 272). They thrust Japanese philosophical and religious thought onto the world stage, revealing an East Asian perspective to the outside world, as well as to the Japanese themselves. They self-consciously attempted to articulate the distinctiveness of the Japanese mind-set in particular, and the Eastern way of thinking generally. Heisig artfully weaves the thought and times of these three thinkers together into a tapestry of understanding and insight of the highest quality. As is always the case, however, there are issues that remain which might have been dealt with, and interpretive differences to be noted. Nishida began his philosophical journey with his groundbreaking Inquiry into the Good, published in His goal in that work, as Heisig describes it, was to introduce the important but radically nonphilosophical language of Zen to the closed world of philosophy, and conversely to use philosophy to find a language to talk about those things that Zen had always insisted were not susceptible to rationalization. The Inquiry created a significant stir in Japan upon its publication, and Nishida s appropriation of William James notion of pure experience appeared to span the philosophical differences East and West without smoothing over those differences. Yet Heisig s critical honesty forces him to underplay the actual lasting importance of the Inquiry. Nishida, too, later criticized the heavy psychological emphasis of the book. 2 However, it seems too strong to argue, as Heisig does, that the work is a classic only because of its influence and its place in Nishida s own philosophical development (p. 41). Heisig is frank in anticipating that some will find his diminishing of the Inquiry as irreverent. I admire his irreverence as a cautionary attempt to save us all from a bandwagon elevation of Nishida and the Kyoto school, but I think he underestimates the subtle brilliance of the book and its profound originality. To be sure, the Inquiry is a notebook of insights and ideas to be developed. Not only is experiential nonduality a focus (and with it a critique of the dogma of intentionality), but there is also the reinstatement of religion as foundational to all systematic thinking, an account of God as both immanent and transcendent (including nothingness) together with God s role in Eastern thought, and a theory of ethics based on the innate tendencies within each of us as located at the deeper, unconscious levels of our nature. Heisig concludes that the Inquiry is less an achievement than an agenda to direct his work in the years ahead (p. 42). It seems evident to me that this pioneering work is both an immense achievement and an agenda for a lifetime of future investigation. The richness and suggestiveness of Nishida s explorations in the Inquiry seem to me to ensure that the work is genuinely worthy of being judged a classic on its own philosophical merits. Heisig recognizes over and over again the importance of the mystical element in all three thinkers (a quick count nets sixteen references), which is to his credit. However, mysticism does not appear in the index, nor is it ever made clear in what way these thinkers are or are not mystics. This issue is particularly crucial for Nishida s philosophy, for he repeatedly denied that he was a mystic, even though many (myself included) refer to his philosophy as mystical. One cannot doubt the intent of Nishida s insistence that he himself was a philosopher and not a retiring contem- 274 Philosophy East & West

4 plative. Yet his philosophy is profoundly mystical in content, even if dependent on the mystical experiences of others (e.g., the Buddha and Eckhart). Nevertheless, his sustained analysis of nondualistic awareness and his emphasis on all beings as manifestations of the absolute seem decidedly mystical. A mystic is one who directly experiences the unity or oneness of all things. George Bosworth Burch, my first teacher of philosophy, argued that experience is a genus of which there are three species: empirical, rational, and mystical. To see a house is an empirical experience; to see the necessity of the Pythagorean Theorem is a rational experience; to see the unity of all things is a mystical experience. A blind person cannot see a house; a stupid person cannot see the necessity of the Pythagorean Theorem; the ordinary person does not see the unity of all things. Meister Eckhart, whom Nishida and Nishitani refer to often, saw human beings as one with the absolute at the ground of existence: one finds not the self at the interior depths of the soul but the absolute. This would have been an appropriate place to deal with the issue of mysticism in Nishida s thought and to clarify the precise usage of that term in the context of the Kyoto school. One of the many highlights of Heisig s study is his sensitive rendering of Tanabe s philosophy. He ably demonstrates that without Tanabe s own original philosophizing and the resultant critique of Nishida s views, the Kyoto school might never have developed at all. It was Tanabe who set the movement on a dialogical path of importance by diverging from Nishida s position and thereby enlisting others in the grappling with Nishida s ideas as well as with his own. Nishitani studied with both Nishida and Tanabe, and the influence of both men can be seen in his work. However, even though Heisig s explication of Tanabe s thought is perhaps the best available in English, I cannot help but speculate that his understanding of Tanabe has colored his interpretation of Nishida and Nishitani. To cite a specific example, Heisig says of Nishitani s no-self that it is not a question of ascending to a higher, truer self on one s own but of a letting go of self acting on its own (p. 221). Readers will recall that Tanabe, a follower of the Pure Land Buddhist tradition, wrote of other-power (tariki), rather than the self-power (jiriki) of Zen. Outside power, represented as God or Amida, grants salvation upon the reciting of the divine name (Namu Amida Butsu) as a divine gift. The self-power of Zen emphasizes dedicated practice and meditation: it is a pathway of effort, of total exertion in bringing about one s own enlightenment. Heisig s reading of Nishitani has the ring of Pure Land Buddhism: it is not I who act but God/Amitabha who works through me, rather than the encounter with one s own immanent divinity within the depths of the soul. It was Nishida himself who wrote that Zen and Pure Land both hold the same position. The two schools are aiming at the same ultimate truth. 3 But the truth he speaks of is the truth of letting go of the ego-self and encountering the original face of divinity in our depths, our own true nature, and thereby coming to an awareness of the suchness of all things. For Nishitani, God is not an object outside, but an immanent arising within. Whether God might be both of these at once is another question. Heisig is fully familiar with all of this, and while one might quibble about interpretive nuances, his own nuances are themselves dependably well reasoned and suggestive. Book Reviews 275

5 The book concludes with a Prospectus that seeks to place the Kyoto school as a significant world philosophical tradition, complete with suggestions for future work needed to clarify positions taken, including the nature of God. Heisig singles out three questions of particular importance that arise from a study of these three philosophers of nothingness: (1) the no-self as the subject of moral choice, (2) selfawareness and the critique of the anthropocentric view of reality, and (3) the detachment of God from being. Leaving a more detailed response to these three questions for another time, Heisig concludes that the Kyoto school makes an unsolicited contribution to world philosophy that both respects the traditions of philosophy and expands them (p. 272). And Heisig s book itself is no small contribution toward making the philosophies of nothingness simply compelling. Notes 1 Kitarō Nishida, An Inquiry into the Good, trans. Masao Abe and Christopher Ives (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990). 2 Nishida, Preface to An Inquiry into the Good, p. xxxi. 3 Nishida, Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious World View, trans. David A. Dilworth (Honolulu: University of Hawai i Press, 1987), p Philosophy East & West