Kyoto School
Thinking Buddhist experience with Hegel and Heidegger: seeking the ultimate not in a supreme being but in an where everything finds its place.
1911 – 2019 · living tradition
The Kyoto School is the first great movement of modern Japanese philosophy, born around at Kyoto University with An Inquiry into the Good (1911). Its thinkers share the project of taking up resources from and in the language of Western philosophy, from to and , but each articulates them differently: Nishida thinks the "place" of , criticizes it in the name of a dialectic of conversion, makes it the path that passes through nihilism to . The school opened a lasting dialogue with Christian theology and phenomenology, carried on by until his death in 2019, the bound recorded here. The wartime writings of some members, notably Tanabe and Nishitani, and their relation to the nationalism of the 1940s remain debated.
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Justification
's philosophy aims to be systematic and demonstrative, but it starts from lived experience and seeks a self-awakening. For , its task is to pass through nihilism to the field of emptiness, where it is overcome.
Nishida, An Inquiry into the Good · Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness (1961)
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Justification
For Nishida, the absolute is not found above the world: one meets it by descending to the depths of oneself, where the self gives up positing itself as a sovereign subject, hence the formula of a transcendence within immanence. The absolute remains radically other, yet it is not elsewhere. The axis can only approximate this: the moderate value, on the side of , reflects this refusal to place the absolute outside the world without making it a mere part of it.
Nishida, The Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview (1945)
is neither a personal God nor a negation of God: it is the place in which all things, God included, are situated. Hence a dialogue with Christian mysticism () and the theology of kenosis that escapes the alternative between theism and atheism.
's precedes the split between subject and object: neither mind nor matter is its ground, which rejects the alternative between materialism and idealism.
Lineages
See on the friezeAll lineages↑ Influences received
- ReinterpretsMadhyamakaNishitani makes the emptiness of Madhyamaka the "field" where Western nihilism, as diagnosed by Nietzsche and Heidegger, is passed through and overcome: a Buddhist notion becomes the answer to a crisis of European mod…Read
- ReinterpretsHeideggerTanabe, Nishitani and Kuki Shūzō studied with Heidegger in Freiburg.Read