Turns to and from political philosophy

2
Turns to and from political
philosophy
The case of Nishitani Keiji 1
Bret W. Davis
In contemporary Western academia, broadly speaking, there are two prominent
approaches to modern Japanese philosophy in general, and to the Kyoto School in
particular. 2 On the one hand, there are the Western scholars of Japanese intellectual
history who have concluded that many Japanese thinkers, including those associ-
ated with the Kyoto School, were 'overcome by modernity' rather than successfully
carrying out an 'overcoming of modernity'. 3 For this group, the Kyoto School is
more pre- than postmodern, and its reformulation of Eastern ways of thinking is
less a viable alternative to Eurocentric modernity than an assertion of 'reverse
Orientalism' (Faure 1995). 4 On the other hand, there are the Western philosophers
and scholars of religion who primarily view the Kyoto School thinkers as dialogue
partners who are capable of significant and novel contributions to the theoretical
and existential aporias of the present. 5 This group anticipates that those Japanese
philosophers, who are not only intimately familiar with Western philosophy, but
also able to freely draw on Buddhist, East Asian, and traditional Japanese ways of
thinking, might be capable of offering fresh insights for addressing the now global
problems of (Western) modernity.
Nishitani Keiji's thought has frequently become the subject matter of both types
of Western scholarship. On the one hand, in part echoing earlier postwar critiques
in Japan, a number of Western scholars have censured Nishitani - especially his
political writings in the first half of the 1940s - on charges of 'collaboration
in the war' (sensō kyōryoku). On the other hand, Nishitani's philosophy of Zen
continues to gain wide recognition for its unique contributions to existentialist
phenomenology and the philosophy of religion.
Elsewhere I have discussed some central themes in Nishitani's philosophy of
Zen. 6 In this essay I shall examine Nishitani's political writings and their place in his
overall path of thought. My analysis here aims to be both critical and sympathetic,
that is to say, I wish both to throw out the bath water and yet preserve the baby
of his thought. I believe that, when discussing the ventures and misadventures of
the Kyoto School's political thought, one must remain committed to steering a
critical yet non-polemical course through the standoff between what James Heisig
has aptly labeled 'the side-steppers and the side-swipers' (Heisig 1990: 14). In
other words, one must seek neither to whitewash nor to vilify. As we shall see,
no simple verdict is possible with regard to Nishitani's political thought; rather,

we must take pains to understand it in its profound, often troubling and always
thought-provoking ambiguities.
My primary focus in this chapter will be on the ambiguities and tensions within
Nishitani's wartime political thought, including his critique of imperialism and
his ideas on the relation between politics and religion. I will also consider his
postwar critique of certain problems that beset a democratic politics based solely
on human rights. In the end I will remark on how after the war Nishitani returns
from his problematical political response to the problem of Eurocentric modernity,
to a more fundamental engagement with the existential and interpersonal problems
that beset the modern age.
The consistent trajectory of Nishitani's thought
Nishitani retrospectively characterized the central task of his life and work as 'the
overcoming of nihilism by way of passing through nihilism' (NKC XX: 192). 7
According to Nishitani, 'nihilism is the reappearance of nihility [i.e. a vacuous
meaninglessness] at the dimension of religion, that is to say, at a level as high (or
as deep) as that dimension where nihility would normally be overcome' (NKC XX:
189). Nihilism has both a trans-historical and a historical dimension for Nishitani.
It is 'a problem that transcends time and space and is rooted in the essence of human
being, an existential problem in which the being of the self is revealed to the self as
something groundless' (NKC VIII: 7). 8 Yet, in a historically specific sense, nihilism
refers to a cultural phenomenon that arose 'in the location of Europe, and in the
age modernity' (NKC VIII: 5). In this historically specific sense, nihilism arose in
modern Europe with the 'death of God' and the self-assertion of the human ego.
The self-assertive ego ultimately finds itself lost in a meaningless world, as the
ground of being gives way to an abyss of nihility.
At a time when the Japanese were enthusiastically and often uncritically import-
ing the surface of Western modernity, Nishitani was one of the first to see that
the West was itself undergoing, in its depths, a period of crisis. 9 Together with
the fruits of Western modernity, Japan had also unwittingly imported the seeds of
Western nihilism. Unlike certain reactionary romantics and traditionalists, how-
ever, Nishitani's response to this situation was not to call for a simple retreat to
an idealized haven of premodern Japanese culture. Rather, he thought that there
was no turning back from modernization, and, moreover, that the crisis of nihilism
could even serve the positive role that the 'Great Doubt' does in the course of
Zen practice (NKC XI: 185). According to Nishitani, a creative reappropriation
and rearticulation of Mahāyāna Buddhist and East Asian philosophy and religion
could assist in steering a path through the impasses of Western modernity and its
crisis of nihilism.
In some respects even the modern Western ego can be seen, he suggests, as a step
on the way to a breakthrough to a postmodern 'radical subjectivity' (kongenteki
shutaisei) that would resonate with the non-ego (muga) of Zen (NKC I: 88). He
claims that contemporary Europe itself is searching for a kind of'subjective noth-
ingness', a non-egoistic sense of self which is intimated in Meister Eckhart and
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in Nietzsche, but which he says is 'already alive from early on in the tradition of
our own country' (NKC 1: 4). In the Japanese tradition Nishitani thus finds the
seeds for an answer to a modern problem, or indeed to the problem of modernity
itself. Yet his aim is not to retreat from the modern age, but rather to help bring
about an 'overcoming of the modern age by way of radicalising its own standpoint'
(NKC IV: 228). He therefore often stresses that this overcoming is not a matter of
a simple return or repetition of Japan's past; Japan must go through Westerniza-
tion/modernization, and its traditional cultural resources must have the 'elasticity'
to develop into new forms. Japan must learn to rediscover its traditions, not as
a 'renewal of the past', but as 'the end point of Westernization, and indeed, of
Western culture itself (NKC VIII: 183). 10 Thus, Nishitani's project of overcoming
nihilism by way of passing through nihilism is at the same time an overcoming of
Western modernity by way of passing through Western modernity.
Already in 1935 Nishitani had written the following programmatic lines for his
path of thought:
If we in our country can, by means of the ethos which is the heritage of our
ancestors, overcome the various aspects of the crisis of European civilization
(which is at the same time modern world-civilization), the Japanese spirit can
become for the first time an active moment in world history, and may thus
come to have world significance.
(NKC I: 150)
In many ways, Nishitani's path of thought remains, from beginning to end, defined
by this attempt to effect an overcoming of modernity/nihilism by way of passing
through modernity/nihilism, doing this by reappropriating and rearticulating the
'standpoint of Zen' in dialogue with Western philosophy and religion.
Nishitani's turns to and from political philosophy
And yet, there did occur at least one major 'turn' and then 'return' in Nishitani's path
of thought, namely, a turn to and then back away from a specific politicization of
this project of overcoming modernity/nihilism. The assertion of a world-historical
political role for the Japanese state is grafted onto his original idea of a world-
historical spiritual role for the Japanese ethos. This assertion of a world-historical
mission for the Japanese state, which does not appear until 1941, and which no
longer appears after 1944, occupies a central place in Nishitani's thought during
these turbulent years of the Pacific War. After the end of the war Nishitani wrote
that, 'together with the end of the war, Japanese history underwent a severance'
and must begin again from this severance. In a certain sense, this severance also
implied a rupture and the need for a restart in his own path of thought. To be sure,
Nishitani was sharply critical of the many opportunistic intellectuals who, with
the changing political tides, enacted a simple 'conversion' or 'turnabout' (tenkō)
in their intellectual and political stance. Nevertheless, Nishitani did announce
the need to 'apply the surgeon's scalpel to one's own roots' (NKC IV: 453-63).

I will argue below that the main root to which Nishitani self-critically applied the
surgeon's scalpel was his wartime thesis of a special world-historical political role
for the Japanese state.
Nishitani's wartime political thought can be found chiefly in the following
texts: Nishitani's monograph, published in 1941, Sekaikan to kokkakan (View of
the World, View of the Nation); 11 his contributions to the 1941—43 roundtable
discussions, published in the pages of the journal Chūōkōron and later as a
monograph, Sekaishi-teki tachiba to Nihon (The World-Historical Standpoint and
Japan); 12 his contributions to the Literary World's 1942 symposium on 'Overcom-
ing Modernity', which include his essay 'Kindai no chōkoku' shikan' (My View
of 'Overcoming Modernity'); 13 and his 1944 essay, 'Sekaishi no tetsugaku' (The
Philosophy of World History) (NKC IV: 219-58).
As can be seen in the numerous postwar essays (written between 1945 and
1951) on social and political philosophy that make up the rest of volume IV of
his Collected Works, Nishitani did not suddenly cease to write on such themes
with the end of the war. 14 And yet, not only did he steadily retreat from many of
the problematic elements of his wartime political theory, but also increasingly
undertook a more radical step back to what he saw as the more fundamental
and also more historically decisive - in the sense of overcoming the nihilism of
Western and now global modernity - field of an existentially oriented philosophy of
religion. 15
For our purposes Nishitani's path of thought can thus be divided into three broad
periods: (1) an early period (-1941) during which his study of Western philosophy
and religion led him back to his Eastern roots in search of resources for contributing
to an overcoming of modernity/nihilism; (2) a relatively brief middle period during
the war (1941-44) when he overtly politicized his project so as to assert a special
world-historical mission for the Japanese state; and (3) a mature postwar period
(1945-) in which (especially after 1951) he turned the focus of his attention away
from political theory and back to the philosophy of religion.
The general question of cultural nationalism
Before we examine in some detail the explicitly political thought of Nishitani's
middle period, let us briefly consider a more general charge of 'cultural nation-
alism' that would apply to all the stages in Nishitani's thought. When Nishitani
asserts that a philosophy of Zen Buddhism can provide a key for overcoming
the worldwide problem of nihilism, does this necessarily betray an ethnocentric
arrogance? (Maraldo 1995: 246-48).
In responding to this suspicion, we should first of all bear in mind that Buddhism,
often in contrast to (ideological reconstructions of) the native Japanese tradition
of Shintō, has generally played an international role in the constitution of Japan's
cultural identity. In the process of the importation and appropriation of Buddhism,
Japanese culture was enriched by Indian, Chinese, and Korean cultural threads. In
times of reactionary conservatism, Buddhism was rejected by xenophobic factions
of Native Studies (kokugaku) and State Shintō (kokkashintō); at times this rejection
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even gave way to persecution, as in the Meiji haibutsu-kishaku movement. Hence,
within the Japanese context Nishitani's philosophy of Zen Buddhism could hardly
be understood as the assertion of a cultural purism.
Moreover, I would argue that the fact that Nishitani finds key sources for his
philosophy in a Japanese tradition (or, more precisely speaking, in a Japanese
adoption and adaptation of a tradition with a diverse Eastern pedigree) does not
necessarily condemn that philosophy to a pernicious cultural nationalism. I take it
that the crucial question here is whether, in the end, the tradition of Zen Buddhism
is deemed valuable because it is Japanese, or whether it is deemed valuable and
just happens to be Japanese. Of course, separating these two is never a simple
matter, and the inclination to uncritically affirm one's native tradition is a persistent
temptation for philosophers, Nishitani included. Yet surely we would not want
to ban philosophers from drawing on their native traditions as they grapple with
universal problems, anymore than we would want to inhibit them from also drawing
on non-native traditions.
There are indeed many past and present ethnocentric Japanese thinkers who pride
themselves on the purported uniqueness and superiority of things Japanese. But,
ironically, it is also the Eurocentrism of many postwar Japanese intellectuals that
calls for critical scrutiny; after all, what we might call a 'deferred ethnocentrism'
is no genuine alternative to the straightforward variety. The extreme Japanese pro-
ponents of Westernization, who simplistically equate an importation and imitation
of Western culture with progress, no less than their rivals, the reactionary tradi-
tionalists, who long for a retreat to an idealized bygone age, lose the philosophical
ability to 'think for themselves' (Fujita 1999: 32-33).
At the end of the day the proof lies in the philosophical pudding, not on the
national label of the container from which it is drawn. And in our search for the
best ingredients for thought, no container should be arbitrarily excluded from
offering its contents. In this regard, and especially in the context of an increasingly
Euro-Americanocentric world, is there not something commendable rather than
reprehensible in Nishitani's endeavor - following that of his teacher Nishida - to
make an Eastern and Japanese contribution to a global philosophical dialogue? 16
Cooperative resistance: between imperialism and its critique
Nevertheless, the fact remains that, in his wartime political writings, Nishitani did
claim a special world-historical role for the Japanese state, and also made a number
of statements, particularly in the Chūōkōron discussions, that betray elements of
a much more problematic breed of nationalism.
To some extent like Japan's Pacific War itself, the Kyoto School's Chūōkōron
discussions were inherently torn between a double agenda. As Takeuchi Yoshimi
pointed out, 'the Pacific War had a dual character of being, on the one hand, an
Asian/Japanese resistance to the Western imperialistic powers, and, on the other
hand, a Japanese imperialistic invasion of Asia'. 17 While attempting to reform
Japan's imperialistic ideology from within, Nishitani and the other Kyoto School

participants in the Chūōkōron discussions were also themselves infected by and
complicit in its paradoxes.
By attempting to open up and think from a genuinely 'world-historical
standpoint', 18 the Chūōkōron discussionists sought to critique the discrepan-
cies between Western democratic ideals and colonizing practices. 19 For example,
Nishitani stated:
On the one hand, under the facade of democracy they claim to offer sup-
port until [a colonized nation] is able to achieve independence; but, on the
other hand, while continuing their exploitation, they ceaselessly undertake
covert strategies to prevent the achievement of such independence. Here we
find the hypocrisy contained within the English and American standpoint of
democracy.
(Nishitani et al. 1943: 351)
Here Nishitani sharply exposes the hypocrisies taking place under the banner of
'the spread of freedom and democracy', hypocrisies that continue to haunt us today.
More problematic, however, is Nishitani's attempt to give theoretical justification
to Japan's self-proclaimed leadership role in the creation of a so-called 'Greater
East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere' (daitōakyōeikeri). In what is certainly one of
his most scandalous comments, Nishitani proposes that, in order to create the
Co-Prosperity Sphere, certain other ethnic groups with 'exceptional potential'
could be 'Japanized' or 'half-Japanized' (Nishitani et al. 1943: 262-63; 337). 20
Such a proposal can hardly be defended from charges of ethnocentric cultural
imperialism, and is refuted by Nishitani's own contemporaneous warnings against
'imposing' Japanese culture on the world (see below).
To be sure, Nishitani and the other Chūōkōron participants clearly did labor to
differentiate the idea of Japan's 'leadership' role in the creation of a 'Co-Prosperity
Sphere' from the Western imperialist model of ruling over a network of colonies.
Nishitani was acutely aware that maintaining this distinction was crucial, and he
explicitly warned imperialistically minded Japanese that 'the establishment of the
Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere must not mean the securing of colonies for
our country' (Kawakami et al. 1979:32). 21 But there was nevertheless a marked gap
between Nishitani's idealistic vision of a non-imperialistic Co-Prosperity Sphere
and the brutal reality of Japan's imperialistic actions across Asia; and this gap itself
calls for critical examination.
According to Nishitani himself, this gap was precisely the space of immanent
critique. After the war he wrote in retrospect:
My attempt was, on the one hand, to explain where Japan was situated within
the world to those intellectuals remaining on the sidelines [of politics]; and,
on the other hand, with respect to the extremely nationalistic thought that was
becoming increasingly prevalent at the time, I attempted from within to open
up a path for overcoming this extreme nationalism.
(NKC IV: 384)
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Nishitani thus saw himself as attempting to walk the razor's edge of what Ōhashi
Ryōsuke has called 'oppositional collaboration' or 'resistance in cooperation'
(hantaisei-teki kyōryoku) (Ōhashi 2001: 20ff.). Part of Nishitani's strategy was
to engage in a 'war over words', or what Ueda Shizuteru has called, in his analysis
of Nishida's political thought, a 'tug-of-war over meaning' (Ueda 1995: 97). 22
Although Nishitani was less concerned with the role of the emperor and the 'impe-
rial way' than was Nishida, he did affirmatively appropriate such current phrases
as the 'Co-Prosperity Sphere' and 'self-sacrifice and public service' (messhi-hōkō;
literally 'extinguishing the self and serving the public'), and labor to give them a
non-imperialistic and non-totalitarian interpretation.
Even though Nishitani, like Nishida, ultimately lost this semantic struggle over
catchwords and phrases, and even though his own interpretations should not be
exempted from critical scrutiny in their own right, his attempt to reform reality
by way of articulating a theoretical ideality can at least be seen as a legitimate
endeavor of political philosophy. However, even if Nishitani's intentions were to
reform Japan's ideology from within, the de facto result of his wartime writings
was to encourage his students and readers to dedicate themselves to Japan's war and
its de facto imperialistic response to the threat of imperialism. And, by utilitarian
standards at least, a political philosophy must be judged not just on its intentions
but also on its effects.
Polemical hindsight: slaps on the other cheek
Nishitani's ambivalent wartime stance between supporting the nationalistic ide-
ology and subjecting it to a cosmopolitan critique - in other words, his attempt
to walk a razor's edge of 'cooperative resistance' - ended up earning him a sus-
pect reputation in Japan both before and after the end of the war. As he later
commented: 'During the war we were struck on the cheek from the right; after
the war we were struck on the cheek from the left' (Horio 1995: 291). After
the war, the Kyoto School's compromised attempts to impart meaning and direc-
tion to Japan's 'world historical mission' were simply seen - especially by the
emerging Left that had at long last been freed from repression and persecu-
tion - as support for its militaristic fascism. Nishitani and others were purged
for several years from their university positions. Even when they were later
reinstated, the stigma of the Kyoto School as having 'collaborated in the war'
lingered on.
Slapping Nishitani's cheek from the left has belatedly come into vogue in the
West. One would expect intellectual historians and Japanologists to be most sen-
sitive to shifting textual and historical contexts; and yet several scholars have
managed to exaggerate and distort the culpability of Nishitani's wartime political
thought. Before moving on with my own critical analysis, let me briefly respond
to some of these misconceptions.
During the war Nishitani warned that Japanese cultural contributions to the
world must not take the form of political impositions. In 1941 Nishitani wrote, in

no uncertain terms, that,
if one tried to directly ascertain a worldly character within traditional
[Japanese] spirit and thought, and then sought to impose that spirit and thought
on the world, one would be overlooking or slighting the fissure that does exist
between what is Japanese and what is worldly. That kind of imposition [of
traditional Japanese spirit and thought onto the world] would be rejected by
the world, with the predictable result that Japan would be pushed back within
itself where it could not help but fall into a self-intoxicated ultranationalism
[jiko tōsui no kokusuishugi].
(NKC IV: 353) 23
In such passages Nishitani was directly challenging - with a considerable degree
of professional and even personal risk - the ultraconservative and imperialistic
ideologues of wartime Japan.
Here as elsewhere we find that it is highly misleading to refer to Nishitani's
philosophy of history as 'a thinly disguised justification... for Japanese aggres-
sion and continuing imperialism', or to claim that 'no group helped defend the
state more consistently and enthusiastically... and none came closer... to defin-
ing the philosophic contours of Japanese fascism' than did Nishitani and the other
members of the 'Kyoto faction' (Najita and Harootunian 1998: 238-39). The lat-
ter dishonor, namely that of attempting to give quasi-philosophical expression
to Japanese fascism, surely goes to the proponents of 'Imperial Way Philosophy'
(kōdō no tetsugaku), who in fact harshly attacked the 'world-historical philosophy'
of the Kyoto School for being insufficiently Japanocentric. The Chūōkōron discus-
sions were branded by the Imperial Way ideologues as 'ivory-tower speculations
that risked reducing the Empire to simply one more category of world history',
and further printings of Sekaishi-teki tachiba to Nihon (The World-historical Stand-
point and Japan) were reportedly stopped by the government censors (Horio 1995:
291; Ōhashi 2001: 71-72).
It is also rather misleading to simply claim that Nishitani offered up his
philosophy of religion in 'support for and justification of a totalitarian absorp-
tion of the individual by the state' (Kambartel 1989: 72). First of all, as does
Nishida, Nishitani consistently and explicitly rejects 'totalitarianism' or 'totalism'
(zentaishugi) as one of the political pitfalls to be avoided. Rather, in the Chūōkōron
discussions he states:
What is really called for, both in case of Japan and in the case of Greater East
Asia, is an ethics which is neither simply that of isolated individuals nor that
of totalism, but one which, in a certain sense, sublates both.
(Nishitani et al. 1943: 213) 24
Nishitani's dialectical attempt to navigate beyond these extremes resembles, in
certain respects, contemporary efforts to move beyond the standoff between liberal
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individualism and communitarianism, rather than any ideological justification of
a 'totalitarian absorption of the individual by the state'.
An enigmatic intertwining of religion and politics
Moreover, it is not the case that Nishitani simply offered up his philosophy of
religion in uncritical service to the totalitarian state. This important matter is
far more complicated, and deserves more careful interpretation. In Sekaikan to
kokkakan (View of the World, View of the Nation), Nishitani critically calls into
question the traditional Japanese notion of the 'oneness of religion and politics'
(saisei-icchi) which had been reconstructed in the guise of State Shinto. He writes:
In its deepest foundations, religion does not directly connect even with the
public life of a nation... .This relation does not permit any simple politiciza-
tion of religion or religionisation of politics.... If religion were to be treated
as a kind of means for politics, its true efficacy would disappear, and it would
thus fail to even be an effective means.
(NKC IV: 369) 25
Yet we may question whether Nishitani managed to ever fully clarify what he spoke
of as the 'subtle complexity' of the relation between politics and religion. While on
the one hand he clearly dismisses the reduction of religion to a means for political
ends, he does suggest that:
on the other hand, it is the duty of religionists to teach the people the true
meaning of non-egoistic existence ['shi'naki kyōchi] and to invigorate their
spirit of public service [hōkō], as well as to go further and instruct the state
with regard to the proper ethical principles [dōnen].
(NKC IV: 374) 26
Hence, while refusing any 'direct relation' between politics and religion, Nishitani
does suggest a dual role for religion with regard to the state: religion can spiritually
prepare the people for public service and it can serve as an ethical guide to the state.
In hindsight we may regret that, in comparison to the emphasis placed on
the aspect of 'self-sacrifice and public service' in Nishitani's text, the aspect of
'instructing the state with regard to the proper ethical principles' was not developed
so far as to emphasize the possibility - and indeed the responsibility - of religious
leaders and philosophers to openly criticize the state when its policies and actions
are unethical. It is not enough for the emperor to smile at the priest over a mutual
understanding of the 'inseparability and yet non-identity' of politics and religion
(NKC IV: 375); 27 at times the priest must boldly speak out against the injustices
of the empire. How exactly, in Nishitani's vision of 'the mutual interpenetration
of worldly religiosity and national ethics' (Kawakami et al. 1979: 29), is a Gandhi
or a Martin Luther King to draw religious inspiration for resistance, not servitude,
to the unjust state? It must be said that in Nishitani's enigmatic intertwining of

eligion and politics, the potential for religious cooperation with the state is made
clearer than is the potential for critical resistance.
The ideal nation of non-ego
Nevertheless, as a philosopher of religion Nishitani did attempt to offer ethical
instruction to the state, albeit in the form of 'cooperative' rather than confronta-
tional resistance. He did this by way of offering a vision of what the Japanese state
should strive to be, namely, a 'nation of non-ego' (muga no kokka) rather than
an egoistic empire. 28 The core of Nishitani's political theory was the idea that the
nation must incorporate a religious principle of 'self-negation' (jiko-hiteisei). In
order to overcome 'the contradiction between freedom and authority', in order to
serve as 'leader' of the Co-Prosperity Sphere without succumbing to the temptation
of imperialism, and in order to open up within itself a 'trans-national worldli-
ness', the nation 'must come to include within itself a religious horizon' (NKC IV:
289). Nishitani's ideal was that Japan would become a religious and cosmopoli-
tan ('worldly') nation of non-ego, rather than a self-centred empire of ego (NKC
IV: 285-86). It is precisely this ideal of a 'nation of non-ego', inspired by the
religious practice of 'self-negation', that Nishitani points to in his 1946 epilogue
to Sekaikan to kokkakan as his attempt to resist and change from within Japan's
wartime politics (NKC IV: 381).
Nishitani continued to express this ideal after the end of the war, in passages
such as the following:
Just as the fundamental problem of individual human existence cannot be
resolved without a shift from the 'egoistic' way of being to the 'non-egoistic'
way of being, the horizon for genuine world peace cannot be opened up with-
out a shift from today's 'egoistic' way of being a nation to a 'non-egoistic' way
of being a nation.
(NKC IV: 69)
This notion of a 'nation of non-ego' had been the guiding ideal of Nishitani's
political philosophy already in 1941, and it was with this ideal that he carried out
his immanent critique of the political reality of wartime Japan. Several years after
the war Nishitani continued to promote this vision of a 'nation of non-ego' as the
key to resolving the tension in the relations between the three terms: the individual,
the nation, and the world (NKC IV: 56).
Yet the concrete details of this political vision are never made entirely clear.
Moreover, perhaps a crucial problem with this vision was not simply that it was
vague, and not only that it was unduly idealistic and underestimated the totalitarian
and imperialistic quality of Japan's family-state nationalism (kokkashugi), but
rather that it ended up doing what Nishitani himself had claimed should not be
done; namely the direct linking of politics and religion. This linking was not, to be
sure, a matter of reducing religion to a servant of politics; it was more a matter of
attempting to base politics on a religious principle of self-negation. From beginning
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to end Nishitani was fundamentally a religious thinker, and, as with other spheres
of life, including art, ethics, and philosophy, he thought that 'world politics must
be deeply rooted in the ground of religiosity' (NKC IV: 69).
In any case, while in his later philosophy of religion Nishitani certainly continued
to write of an existential conversion from the 'egoistic' way of being to the 'non-
egoistic' way of being, after 1951 he no longer attempted to develop an explicitly
political philosophy based on this religious motif.
The purported world-historical mission of the Japanese State
There is another element of Nishitani's wartime political thought that gets even
more decisively severed and left behind. During the war Nishitani asserted that
the Weltgeist had called upon the Japanese state to carry out a non-imperialistic
unification of the world, starting with the creation and leadership of the so-called
Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
According to Nishitani's wartime 'philosophy of world history', it was 'Europe
that, by exerting its power around the entire globe in modern times, had first
opened up the world into a unified totality'. And yet, this one world had 'yet
to been freed of its European bias'. Thus far we can agree with Nishitani, and
indeed the European/American bias of the globalizing world is a problem that
has only worsened since that time. Next, Nishitani claims that, 'as a result of
Japan's becoming a powerful nation, the European world was broken, in other
words, the conflation of Europe and the world was pealed apart'. Although perhaps
somewhat overstated, historians may in fact look back at Japan's ability to resist
colonization as a certain turning point in the history of the West's relation with
the rest of the world. The crucial problem in Nishitani's discourse arises with the
following quite astonishing claim: that Japan alone 'is able to purely and neutrally
observe the facts of world history "just as they are"' (NKC IV: 222-23). This
breathtaking confidence in the objectivity of Japan's worldview in 1944 betrays,
despite all his attempts at immanent critique from a world-historical standpoint,
an unacknowledged Japanese bias of Nishitani's wartime political theory.
Moreover, Nishitani did not merely hold a naïve belief in Japan's neutral objec-
tivity; for, according to his political theory, the 'life of the Japanese state' had
become 'the pulse of world history', (Kawakami et al. 1979: 35) 29 and it was
destined to succeed the Roman Empire and the British Empire as the 'third focal
point of world history' (NKC IV: 298). 30 He even went along with the Hegelian
reasoning of the Chūōkōron discussions 31 to claim that the Japanese state had
assumed the historical mission of the Weltgeist, and to assert that past 'actions
against China' (such as the Manchurian Incident) could be 'justified' as part of
the process of the establishment of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere
(Nishitani et al. 1943: 171-72; 395).
At the same time, Nishitani argued that, unlike former world-historical empires,
Japan's special mission was to bring about a world that has 'no specific center', but
rather consists of various 'politically and culturally unified spheres' (NKC IV: 298-
300). 32 He thought that the Japanese state would be able to carry out this mission,

as we have seen, only if it incorporated a religious moment of self-negation, thus
becoming a 'nation of non-ego' rather than a self-centred and exploitative empire.
In this idealistic vision, which unfortunately had little to do with the cruel
realities of Japanese militaristic expansionism, Japan was called on to be an alto-
gether new kind of international leader, a self-negating and compassionate one that
would help other nations to cooperatively form their own identities, rather than an
aggressively imperialistic one that would remold others into inferior replicas of
itself. In the end, the Japanese Empire fell into the trap of becoming a decidedly
imperialistic response to the threat of Western imperialism, and Nishitani's polit-
ical discourse effectively served to legitimate the Empire at least as much as to
transparently submit it to an immanent critique.
Not surprisingly, it was first and foremost his thesis of a world-historical political
role for the Japanese state that Nishitani cut out from his thought and left behind
after the war; this was the main 'root' to which he had to 'put the scalpel'. To be
sure, Japan's defeat in the war was the external occasion for this severance; and one
wonders how long it would have otherwise taken Nishitani to realize that imperial
Japan had failed to heed his ethical instructions and become a 'nation of non-ego'.
In any case, during the five or six years immediately following the end of the war,
Nishitani thoughtfully gathered what he still found valuable in the remnants of his
political detour while steadily turning back toward his own home-ground of an
existential philosophy of religion.
Human rights: respect for the other or self-assertion of the ego?
However, even after 1951, it is not accurate to simply label Nishitani's thought as
'apolitical', or to claim, as some critics have, that he simply fled from politics to
the innocuous realm of religion. Rather, John Maraldo is right to claim that: 'Just
as there is a religious undercurrent to his explicitly political thought, there is from
early on a political dimension to his philosophy of religion' (Maraldo 1998: 101).
We have already examined the religious undercurrent (which in fact flowed explic-
itly on the surface) of his wartime political thought. In what follows I would like to
consider a rather controversial political aspect of his philosophy of religion. Specif-
ically, I would like to examine Nishitani's lifelong suspicion of 'human rights'.
Nishitani's qualms concerning the politics of human rights have been the subject
of some criticism (Little 1989; Van Bragt 1998: 82-83). Let us begin to examine
this issue by looking directly at some passages from Nishitani's texts on the subject.
The gist of Nishitani's critique of the ethics (or ethos) of human rights is succinctly
given on the final page of his 1961 magnum opus, Shūkyō to wa nanika (What is
Religion? translated as Religion and Nothingness), a text which in general hardly
deals with themes that are overtly 'political'. There he writes:
True equality is not simply a matter of an equality of human rights and the
ownership of property. Such equality concerns man as the subject of desires
and claims and is ultimately based on the self-centered mode of human being.
In other words, it has basically not freed itself from the principle of self-love.
(NKC X: 315) 33
37

38
Even more provocatively, a similar point had been made in the Chūōkōron
discussions as a general critique of the standpoint of 'liberal democracy' as such:
The standpoint of modern democracy is after all centered on the arbitrary lib-
erties of the individual. Hence, however much mutual recognition of equality
or a [social] contract is spoken of, this refers merely to putting a restriction
on the unlimited expression of willfulness and desire, and not a negation of
the standpoint of willfulness and desire as such.
(Nishitani et al. 1943: 354)
And in a late text we find Nishitani still harshly critical of the notion of human rights
as the 'basis of modern democracy', claiming that behind such a standpoint lurks
a fundamental attitude which 'inflates the petty ego and reinforces self-assertion'
(NKC XVIII: 27; NKC XVII: 22-26).
As shocking as these ideas may appear to contemporary Westerners, accustomed
as we are to think of democracy founded on human rights as the unquestion-
ably ideal form of government, Nishitani's critique is not without its point. We
might recall that the first great (though certainly controversial) Western text of
political philosophy, Plato's Republic, raised similar concerns. For Plato too, the
problem was that democracy tends to cater to the least common denominator of
ourselves, the basest part of the tripartite soul, namely appetitive desire; and,
moreover, it encourages politicians to pursue their lust for power by means of
sophistical manipulation of egoistic desires. One need only turn on the television
today to recognize that much of our pleasure, wealth and power oriented society
is driven by 'the standpoint of willfulness and desire'. Our society (especially
America) is also a litigious one, where a culture of claiming 'my rights' at times
has more to do with egoistic self-assertion than with a genuine plea for humane
treatment.
Nevertheless, for those who live in today's metropolitan and multicultural soci-
eties and who are no longer able to rely on the shared moral sentiment of a traditional
community (Gemeinschaft), is not the political institution of 'human rights' a nec-
essary, even if not sufficient, condition for peaceful coexistence? The need for a
mutual self-assertion of rights may be a symptom of a lack of natural and sponta-
neous compassion in our societies, but without it would not the battle of egos go
unchecked?
Furthermore, as Jan Van Bragt objects to Nishitani, 'why cannot human rights
be seen... as first of all stressing the rights of the Other?' (Van Bragt 1995: 254).
At the very least, it would seem that the rights of other persons are to be put on
par with the rights of the self. This is clear in Kant's deontology, an ethical theory
which is often used to support the idea that each individual person is endowed
with inalienable rights. According to the second formulation of Kant's categorical
imperative, you must 'act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person
or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only' (Kant 1949: 87).
Despite Kant's emphasis on autonomy (self-legislation), the categorical imperative
can hardly be characterized as a principle of self-assertion. On the contrary, it is

an inner command that negates the willfulness of the desiring ego in the name of
a non-egocentric respect for all persons as ends in themselves.
Van Bragt goes a step further to question what he sees as the ethically dangerous
implications of Nishitani's allegedly 'symmetrical negation of the I and the Thou'.
He refers to the fact that Nishitani speaks not only of 'killing the self, but also
of doing this by way of 'killing every "other"' (NKC X: 290). 34 This attitude
would seem to contrast sharply with, for example, Levinas' call for a radically
'asymmetrical' ethical relation, a relation of responsibility to the Other who can
never be reduced to 'the Same', in other words, to the immanent domain of the
ego (Levinas 1969).
And yet, Nishitani would no doubt respond that the 'other' that is to be 'killed' is
not the truly interpersonal other, but rather that conception of the 'other' which is
projected and manipulated by the ego. It is in this context that Nishitani writes that
one 'must kill all [so-called] "others" and thus the [so-called] "self' (NKC X:
290). By killing off such ego-projections, one can return to the 'true self, which
is not a subjective ego at war with others, but rather a 'self that is not a self (jiko
narazaru jiko) which is essentially open to compassionate engagement with others.
According to Nishitani, a true human relation is one in which the other is neither
absolutely alien to the self nor simply absorbed within the self. Rather, being non-
dualistically 'not one and not two', the self and other are in a 'circuminsessional'
relation of identity-in-difference and difference-in-identity (NKC XII: 276ff.). 35
Nevertheless, even granted the profundity of Nishitani's account of a true
interpersonal relation, a crucial question remains. What about those all too fre-
quent situations where we fail to achieve such an originary human relation, or
where relations break down into violence? Is there not a vital role played by the
institution of human rights in a world of genocide, exploitation, terrorism, and
torture?
In fact, despite his reservations, Nishitani does explicitly recognize a place for
the assertion of human rights. In a late essay he writes:
The significance of human rights [kenri] and authoritative power [kenryoku]
cannot be denied. There is a need for individuals to assert their rights....
In what is broadly speaking called the political realm, in other words where
humans must act communally, there is no getting around the need for authori-
tative power. In this sense authoritative power and human rights are definitely
necessary.
(NKC XX: 82)
It is clear from this passage that Nishitani does not wholly dismiss the value of
the institution of human rights. What he finds problematic is rather the following
situation:
But in the contemporary world [authoritative power and human rights] are cut
off and separated from the other aspects of human being; they are abstracted
39

40
and forcefully asserted. It is as if human rights and authoritative power have
come to define the entirety and central characteristic of human being.
(NKC XX: 82)
The modern reduction of human beings to competing rights claims and to relations
of power is unable, says Nishitani elsewhere, to reveal the true essence of human
freedom and existence (Nishitani and Yagi 1989: 192). Indeed, this reduction has
alienated us from our most originary relation with one another. He writes that
'although such things as fundamental human rights have a certain significance, no
matter how much one advances them, the problem of what it means for one human
being to encounter another remains unresolved' (NKC XII: 277). 36 According to
Nishitani, when such an originary encounter between human beings takes place
as a matter of 'circuminsessional interpenetration' (egoteki sōnyū) (NKC X: 166—
67), 37 I and Thou dialogically intermingle without collapsing into a monological
one. When and only when this relation is realized, he suggests, 'absolute opposi-
tion is at the same time absolute harmony'. Such harmony can take place among
persons only when 'the other is at the center of the self, and where the existence of
each one is "other-centered"' (NKC XII: 285). According to Nishitani, unless we
learn to 'step back' to this originary relation, that is, 'unless the relations between
individual and individual, between nation and nation, between all groups, return
to this condition, we remain stuck with a [Hobbesian] battle between wolves in the
wild' (NKC XII: 286). 38
In the end: a radical step back
Shortly after the war, Nishitani reiterated his critical stance not only toward fascist
totalitarianism, but also toward 'democracy centered on the individual [ego]',
'ethnocentrism centered on the nation' and 'communism under the banner of world
revolution' (NKC IV: 56). Although he claimed then that 'the task for us today is to
seek a new fundamental standpoint that can simultaneously enable [the coexistence
of] the standpoints of the individual, the nation, and the world' (NKC IV: 56),
shortly thereafter he turned the focus of hi s attention away from a direct engagement
in political philosophy per se.
To the question of what type of political system would be most appropriate for
passing through an age of nihilism, the later Nishitani might have sympathized
with a comment made by the later Heidegger: 'I don't have an answer to that ques-
tion, but I am not convinced that it is democracy', (Neske, Günter and Kettering,
Emil 1988: 96) at least, Nishitani would presumably add, not in its current state
of consumerism, sophistry, and litigiousness. 39 It may be tempting for critics to
see this confession of ignorance and skepticism with regard to political theory on
the part of Heidegger and perhaps Nishitani as, at best, proof of the impotence
of their political thinking, or, at worst, as the unexpunged remains of their polit-
ical misadventures. And yet, self-critically, we might also take such hesitancy to
wholeheartedly endorse current forms of democracy as indications that the funda-
mental existential and interpersonal problems of the contemporary world cannot be

solved by means of a political system of human rights alone. Liberal proceduralism
can regulate the 'battle between wolves', but it cannot free us from this state of
war itself.
That being said, I do believe that democracy in general, and the 'negative free-
dom' guaranteed by the institution of human rights in particular, provide us with
certain indispensable prerequisites for individually and collectively grappling with
the fundamental questions of humanity. As we have seen, the later Nishitani at
least would agree with this. Yet his own thinking aimed deeper. His mature phi-
losophy of Zen intimates the possibility of a radical step back to the 'field of
emptiness', wherein one's true self, as a 'non-ego', ecstatically dwells with others
in a non-dual relation of mutual compassion. Although this philosophy of reli-
gion is no longer 'political' in the narrow sense of proffering a raison d'État, it
does offer to lead us back to the most originary dimension of our interpersonal
being-with-others-in-the-world.
Nishitani's turn away from political philosophy in the narrow sense was thus
ultimately a return to the most radical personal and interpersonal questions. He
attempted to step back beneath systems of ethics and politics to the simple question
of what Heidegger would call the 'fundamental attunement' (Grundstimmung) of
our existence. Nishitani writes:
When we try to think about the various problems of our contemporary life,
in the end this always comes down to the question of the basic way of being
or attitude of human being, that is, to the question of the fundamental way in
which human beings envision themselves.
(NKC XVII: 21-22)
It is with regard to such elemental questions of personal and interpersonal existence
that Nishitani's writings most compellingly continue to speak to us today.
Notes
1 This chapter was developed out of an earlier article written and published in Japanese
as 'Shūkyō kara seiji e, seiji kara shūkyō e: Nishitani Keiji no tenkai' (From Religion
to Politics, and from Politics to Religion: Nishitani Keiji's Turn), in Fujita Masakatsu
et al. (2003). Another version has appeared in Chinese translation as a chapter in Bian
Chongdao et al. (2002).
2 For a general introduction to the Kyoto School, see Davis 2006. Section 4 of this article
gives an overview of the debate surrounding the political thought of the Kyoto School.
3 For a voluminous example of this approach, see Harootunian 2000, esp. Chapter 3.
4 For a stern rebuttal to the polemical excesses of Faure and other critics of the Kyoto
School's politics, see Parkes 1997.
5 In addition to the numerous works on the Kyoto School's philosophies of religion
that belong to this category, for a provocative new interpretation of Nishida's political
thought, which argues that it should be understood neither in terms of Japanese ultra-
nationalism, nor in terms of Western liberalism, but rather as a modern development
of Eastern and in particular Mahāyāna Buddhist thought, see Goto-Jones 2005. For a
ground-breaking and well-balanced collection of articles on the question of nationalism
41

42
and the Kyoto School, see Heisig and Maraldo 1995. Also see the illuminating
article by Stevens 1997, which situates what he calls the 'political misjudgments'
of Nishitani in the context of a general critique of 'the paradoxical and obscure link
between philosophers of religious ontology and nationalistic-totalitarian politics', but
which also affirms in the end that 'Nishitani's religious ontology undoubtedly contains
elements that can contribute to the renewal and deepening of authentic humanism and
democracy.'
6 See Davis 2004 a, b; and Davis 2005.
7 Translations from Nishitani's Collected Works (Nishitani Keiji Chosakushū) and from
other Japanese sources will generally be my own, though in footnotes I will refer to
corresponding pages of existing translations.
8 See Nishitani 1990: 3.
9 Karl Löwith, who spent several years in Japan during the 1930s, remarked: 'When in
the latter half of the previous century Japan came into contact with us and took over
our advances with admirable effort and feverish rapidity, our culture was already in
decline, even though on the surface it was advancing and conquering the entire earth.
But in contrast to the Russians of the nineteenth century, at that time the Japanese did
not open themselves critically to us; instead they first of all took over, naively and
without critique, everything in the face of which our best minds, from Baudelaire to
Nietzsche, experienced dread because as Europeans they could see through themselves
and Europe. Japan came to know us only after it was too late, after we ourselves lost faith
in our civilization and the best we had to offer was a self-critique of which Japan took
no notice.' (Löwith 1995: 229). Nishitani responds to Löwith's critique by attempting
to critically think through both European and Japanese nihilism (NKC VIII: 178ff.;
Nishitani 1990: 176ff.).
10 Nishitani 1990: 179.
11 Sekaikan to kokkakan was originally published in 1941 and reprinted in volume IV of
Nishitani's Collected Works. Translations of parts of Sekaikan to kokkakan are included
in Dilworth et al. 1998.
12 Nishitani et al. 1943. It has recently been made evident that the political activities
of Nishitani and other members of the Kyoto School during the war were even more
involved - and even more filled with ambiguity - than was previously thought. In
2001 Ōhashi Ryōsuke published some wartime notebooks of Oshima Yasuma, which
document in detail secret meetings regularly held by Kyoto School members at the
bequest of a moderate faction of the Japanese navy (as opposed to the bellicose army)
between February 1942 and just before the end of the war. As the politically more
powerful army was thrusting the nation headlong into war, some reticent navy officials
evidently petitioned the Kyoto School to shed light on the political situation from their
'world-historical standpoint', presumably in order to sway public sentiment in a more
prudent direction. See Ōhashi 2001.
13 Reprinted in Kawakami et al. 1979.
14 As we shall see below in the discussion of human rights, the later Nishitani did at times
address certain political themes. In his participation in a series of roundtable discussions
published in 1961, Nishitani reflected on such themes as the symbolic significance of
the emperor for the Japanese people (Nishitani Keiji and Kuyama Yasushi 1961: 51,
69). On the one hand, in these discussions Nishitani remains critical of the one-sided
'victor's justice' after the war, and he suggests that both sides should ultimately feel a
religious sense of guilt for engaging in war (Nishitani Keiji and Kuyama Yasushi 1961:
93-94). On the other hand, Nishitani affirms the need to reform education in Japan in
order to let democracy take root (Nishitani Keiji and Kuyama Yasushi 1961: 255-57).
On the latter point, see notes 24 and 39 below.
15 The two major works that can be seen as inaugurating this return to an existential
philosophy of religion are the 1948 Kami to zettai-mu (God and Absolute Nothingness)
(NKC VII) and the 1949 Nihirizumu (translated as The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism)

(NKC VIII). This attempt to bring the radical mysticism of Meister Eckhart and the
atheistic existentialism of Nietzsche into dialogue with one another and with Zen, picks
back up with a theme from an important 1938 essay, 'Niiche no Tsuaratosutora to
Maisutā Ekkuharuto' (Nietzsche's Zarathustra and Meister Eckhart), which Nishitani
placed at the beginning of his first book, Kongen-teki shutaisei no tetsugaku (The
Philosophy of Radical Subjectivity) (NKC I).
16 NKZ XIV: 402-16. Also see the final section of Davis 2006: chap. 5.
17 Quoted from Matsumoto Kenichi's preface to Kawakami et al. 1979: viii-ix. Also see
the opening section to Ueda 1995. Japan's imperialistic invasion of Asia had, of course,
begun much earlier with its colonization of Korea and Taiwan, and with its aggressive
military actions in China, since 1931. The term 'Pacific War' is problematic in this
regard, inasmuch as it would divert our attention from this history. With this cautionary
note in mind, however, since Nishitani's overtly political writings began in 1941, I have
used the term 'Pacific War' in this chapter.
18 On the significance and, at the time, controversial nature of the Kyoto School's attempt
to understand Japan's situation from a 'world-historical standpoint', see Horio 1995 and
Mori 1995.
19 On the history of Western imperialistic domination of Asia, see Panikkar 1969.
20 It is indeed instructive to self-critically compare this statement with recent state-
ments by Western, and particularly American, proponents of the 'globalisation' and
'democratisation' of other parts of the world (see Maraldo 1995: 354-55).
21 Also see Nishitani et al. 1943: 205 and 229.
22 Also see Yusa 1995: 131.
23 See Dilworth et al. 1998:390.
24 See also NKC IV: 279; Dilworth et al. 1998: 289. There can be no doubt that Nishitani
supported democracy over any totalism or totalitarianism after the war, as can be seen
from his contributions, such as the following comments, to a discussion of how to reform
education in Japan so as to allow for a flourishing of democracy: 'For democracy to
function as a viable system, education must focus on personal participation in public
life so that the individual is not treated as merely a unit or element of society but
as an individual person in his or her own right' (Nishitani Keiji and Kuyama Yasushi
1961/1981: 257; 166).
25 See Dilworth et al. 1998: 393.
26 See Dilworth et al. 1998:393.
27 See Dilworth et al. 1998:397.
28 It is worth noting that, while the idea of 'non-ego' (in Japanese muga; in Sanskrit
anatman) is clearly rooted in Buddhist thought, both during and after the war Nishitani
also uses Christian sources to develop the idea (see, for example, NKC IV: 380).
29 Also see Nishitani et al. 1943:380-81.
30 See Dilworth et al. 1998: 382.
31 See Hiromatsu 1989: 173-74.
32 See Dilworth et al. 1998: 383-84.
33 See Nishitani 1982: 285.
34 See Nishitani 1982: 263. It should be born in mind that the language of self- and other-
negation is used to refer to an existential conversion to a religious standpoint, and not on
the level of ethical relations between subjects. In an essay entitled "That which is Beyond
Ethics', Nishitani speaks of both the danger and the necessity of passing through and
beyond the ethical to the religious dimension (NKC VI: 308).
35 See Nishitani 1991.
36 See Nishitani 1991: 48-49.
37 See Nishitani 1982: 148.
38 See Nishitani 1991:57.
39 That Nishitani nevertheless did support the flourishing of democracy in postwar Japan
is clear from his contributions to a roundtable discussion on the subject. One of his
43

44
expressed concerns was that democracy not simply be imported and handed down
from above as a ready-made system of rights, but rather that the Japanese people be
reeducated so as to be able to take part in democracy as a living historical process that is
'always directed toward improvement' (Nishitani Keiji and Kuyama Yasushi 1961/1981:
255; 166-67).
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