The Kyoto School’s Takeover of Hegel: Nishida, Nishitani, and Tanabe Remake the Philosophy of Spirit

One example of the way Hegel’s ideas took hold far from his native Germany is their reception in modem Japan. His Phenomenology of Spirit1 was among the first few books in Western philosophy brought back to Japan by two scholars, Nishi Amane (1829-1897) and Tsuda Mamichi (1829-1903), from their trip to Europe in 1862.2 From 1877 on, American educator and orientalist Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908) taught courses on the German philosopher at Tokyo Imperial University. Since the late nineteenth century, Hegel’s works have been translated into Japanese in advance of Kant’s, and the list of Japanese publications on his philosophy now fills over three hundred pages. The pace of publication accelerated since the hundredth anniversary of Hegel’s death in 1931, the year around which the growing popularity of his philosophy of history began to eclipse the interest in Neo-Kantianism dominating Japan’s philosophical circles until that time.

   There are several reasons for Japan’s fascination with Hegel. In the first few decades following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the country held German culture in deep esteem and accorded it a place of honor in the state curriculum. Hegel was seen naturally as a major representative of German thought. Another reason lies in the scope and the character of his achievement. Hegel’s philosophy took upon itself the task of interpreting, according to its principles, everything known to man. It strived to provide a complete account of reality and to build up that account into a system. This could not but strike a sympathetic chord with the Japanese people, fond as they are of the tangible and the phenomenal, and please their sense for organization and exhaustiveness. Of appeal to the Japanese public was also Hegel’s theory of moral substance and objective spirit manifested in social forms. The philosopher’s appreciation for the socializing power of the community and its traditions, palpable in that theory, found resonance in the Japanese propensity to derive individual identity from the group and the community of one’s belonging. The social orientation of the Japanese held firm despite their avid but superficial experimentation with Western individualism and “subjectivity” since about the turn of the twentieth century. From the other side of the globe, Hegel’s views offered a soothing reassurance for a core Japanese value.

   While engaged in patient examination of one temporal aspect of reality after another, Hegel never lost sight of the ubiquitous presence of the eternal. That enduring focus was no less characteristic of his political philosophy, making it agreeable to the absolutist tendencies of the Japanese state of that time. Prevailing over numerous liberal subcurrents, the overall trend of early twentieth-century Japan was conservative. It favored the strengthening of national polity (kokutai), an immutable structure of the racially homogeneous family-state with the divine Imperial household at its center. Hegel’s politically conservative view of the absolute spirit developing through history toward the perfection of its own consciousness manifested in the state was syntonic with that ideology.3 Ironically, Hegel’s principles (recast in the Marxist form) were exploited in equal measure by the Marxist foes of the Japanese establishment.

   Japan’s Buddhist heritage fostered its appreciation for the affinities between Hegelian and Mahāyāna metaphysics. For Hegel, all beings are determined by otherness. More plainly, everything finite is by nature relative to something else; a thing is defined through the complex of its finite relationships. This quality was perceived to accord with the Mahāyāna notion of emptiness (śūnyatā), according to which things have no inherent nature or reality, except in a conventional sense. In particular, the Kegon school of Buddhism postulates mutual identity of phenomena that, while appearing to be possessed of independent existences, lack fixed boundaries and interpenetrate. Having their identities grounded in something other than themselves, yet maintaining their individuality, finite beings in both views can be characterized as both transcendent and immanent to themselves.

   One also notes the inner unrest and multiperspectivism of Hegel’s dialectic, which draws upon the notion of an ever-shifting and fluid nature of conceptual determinations. The dynamic character of dialectic helps loosen the separation between the relative and the absolute. In that, it brings to mind the three-truths (santai) teaching of Tendai Buddhism, which attempts to reconcile two opposite views—one that absolutely rejects the notion of an inherent reality of phenomena, and one that accepts them as provisionally realby postulating a middle way in which each view determines and offsets the other.4

   In its impact, Hege’s thought was not limited to delighting the Japanese public with its affinities with their cultural tradition; it became a powerful force shaping the nascent Japanese philosophy. This is particularly evident in the case of the Kyoto School, a collective name given to a succession of academics active at Kyoto University through a good part of the last century. Although the Kyoto Scholars did not form a school or organization in a formal sense, they shared a neo-Buddhist outlook and adherence to the tenet of absolute nothingness, an outgrowth of the Mahāyāna notion of emptiness. Hegel’s ideas and method played a role in forming their thinking, both directly and mediated through later Western figures captivated by Hegel. Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945), the first and foremost representative of the Kyoto School, is sometimes described squarely as a Hegelian. Hegel’s philosophical idealism also reverberates deeply in the work of many of Nishida’s disciples. To be sure, had their reception of Hegel taken the form of simple adoption or imitation, it would not be of much interest to us today. What makes the Kyoto School’s enchantment with Hegel intriguing is its strongly negative undercurrent. In contrast to the assiduousness with which the Kyoto Scholars assimilated Hegel’s philosophy, they were not always disposed to acknowledging their indebtedness to his ideas. Their overt attitudes toward Hegel ranged from willing embrace to contemptuous rejection, often shifting from one to the other within a single essay, if not in the course of a few pages. To ascribe these fluctuations to confusion or a lack of logical rigor would be a mistake; it would fail to do justice to the complexity of the motives involved. By taking a stand on Hegel, the Buddhist-leaning Nishida and his disciples were confronting a major current of Western intellectual history belonging to—all similarities notwithstanding—a very different tradition. When responding to it critically, they were defining their own distinctive position. Their ambivalence toward Hegel is a sign of self-assertiveness, and at the same time, of an unsettled attitude toward the West. A study of their responses to Hegel offers a glimpse into that attitude. Beyond that, it affords a vantage point from which to view their own philosophy of true reality and the diverse “dialectics” through which they define our place within it.