Kyoto School

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The University of Kyoto , where the Kyoto School was formed.

Kyōto-Schule ( Japanese 京都 学派 , Kyōto-gakuha ) is the name for a school of philosophy in Japan that originated in Kyoto at the beginning of the 20th century , the membership of which is different depending on the definition. It marks the beginning of the systematic examination of the western intellectual tradition.

Her spiritual father is considered to be professor Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945), who was then teaching at the University of Kyoto and around whom the school was formed between 1914 and the late 1920s. In this context, “school” is not to be understood as a specific, systematic teaching represented by its followers, but rather an intellectual environment with the University of Kyoto as its center.

The Kyōto school uses the vocabulary of the occidental philosophical tradition, but sets itself apart with completely separate topics against this and also against its own tradition. Even though she confidently sets her topics, she often ties in with Buddhist concepts and experience, which gives her an independent Asian-Japanese philosophy. The main focus is on the question of man and the world. She gained a great reputation through her religious philosophy , although this is only one of the topics she deals with.

History and members

The name Kyōto School was first used in 1932 by a student of Nishida, Tosaka Jun , with an originally polemical intention, but developed from then on into a common neutral term. Nishitani recalls that the name was first used by a journalist who covered two controversial symposia of the group on the Pacific War .

Since the Kyoto School never established an official institute, opinions differ as to who should be assigned to it. Members of the Kyōto school come from disparate intellectual currents, so that lively criticism of the works of the others was and is among each other. However, some basic aspects can be identified which are common to all members:

  • Teaching activity at the University of Kyoto or an affiliated institution;
  • the philosophical basis is Nishida's concept of the Absolute Nothing ;
  • this is accompanied by a critical demarcation from Western metaphysical views of the world;
  • an ambivalent attitude towards the western form of modernization;
  • a philosophical vocabulary based on Nishida.

Even if the formatting was a rather loose group, it can be said that the respective holder of the chair for modern philosophy at the University of Kyoto was their intellectual center. This was Nishida from 1913 to 1928, who was followed by his student and critic Hajime Tanabe until the mid-1930s . From 1955 to 1963 Nishitani Keiji held the chair. From 1937 to 1939 Nishitani had attended lectures and seminars with Martin Heidegger in Freiburg im Breisgau , which also influenced the school. When he left, the school fell into a loose grouping. The great importance attached to Nishida, Hajime and Nishitani is also shown by the fact that James Heisig puts them at the center of his definition of the Kyoto school.

Ryōsuke Ōhashi defines the group through its central theme of the Absolute Nothing, by means of which he then defines the following generations of the school:

Davis belongs to the fourth generation Abe Masao, Ōhashi Ryōsuke, Hase Shōtō, Horio Tsutomu, Ōmine Akira, Fujita Masakatsu, Mori Tetsurō, Kawamura Eiko, Matsumura Hideo, Nakaoka Narifumi, Okada Katsuaki and Keta Masako. Nishida's long-time friend and Zen Buddhist DT Suzuki can be seen as connected to the group . The philosophers Watsuji Tetsurō and Kuki Shūzō are generally not included, which is due to the high degree of independence of their work.

Themes of the Kyoto school

A strong bond with Buddhist thinking is fundamental to the group. Of the Western philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger also had a great influence on the school.

Absolute nothing

The first philosophical questions of the occidental tradition were ontological and thus aimed at the question of being . For Aristotle , the essence of being was substance , and as the highest being he placed the immobile mover . While this procedure, called by Heidegger ontotheology, poses the question of being ("What is being?"), In the tradition of the Kyoto school, however, the focus is on the question of nothingness ("What is nothing?"). In contrast to the ontology developed in the West, the Eastern intellectual history focuses on meontology (from Greek meon , non-being).

Meontology tries not to think of nothing as a negation of being, but as an absolute ( 絶 対 無 , zettai mu ; “absolute nothing”). Heidegger had in his lecture “ What is metaphysics? “ Nothing is shown next to being as an equally necessary precondition horizon for all appearing beings. Based on this thought, Tanabe defines philosophy as the discipline that has to devote itself to nothing: all individual sciences deal with beings (objects), philosophy has nothing as its theme.

In his examination of the occidental tradition, Nishitani dealt with western concepts of nothingness, especially with Meister Eckehart , Heidegger and Nietzsche. His main concern was to investigate the extent to which these concepts do not have an absolute nothing on the subject, but are permeated by traces of a relatively (i.e. through negation) imagined nothing. He comes to the result that the most consistent concepts of an absolute nothing can be found in the Eastern tradition. The idea of the Absolute Nothing is so anchored for Nishitani in a reach back in Eastern tradition, the philosophy of the Absolute Nothing, as reflected Kyoto School expresses in, is for him ultimately a unique contribution to the school for the modern spiritual world is. Nishida goes even so far as to divide cultures into a Western culture, which sees the ground of reality in being, and an Eastern culture, for which the ground of reality is nothing.

Giving nothing philosophical expression in their quest to the concept of the absolute, the Kyoto School on the can Mahayana - Buddhism developed idea of Shunyata (emptiness, emptiness, Jap. 空 , Kū ) and on particularly for Taoism and Zen -Buddhism's characteristic term Wu ( 無 , mu ) fall back. The interpretation of the Shunyata represented by the Kyōto School is closely related to the teaching of the non-self, which was central in early Buddhism : Since all things have arisen in mutual dependence, there is no self that is independent of other things. The absolute nothing is therefore not to be thought of as independent of the world (especially not as an entity ). In this context, the Kyoto School also referred to a sentence from the Heart Sutra , in which emptiness and world are equated: "Form is not different from emptiness, emptiness is not different from form."

criticism

On the one hand, thinkers of the Kyoto School were characterized by an ambivalent attitude towards the Western form of modernization , on the other hand they saw the process as inevitable. They tried to counter this with a concept of "overcoming modernity ", which is not based on linear progress thinking, but rather on "going through" the process of modernization. In order to show possibilities for this, some thinkers tied their considerations strongly to an alleged special role of the Japanese nation in world history (cf. Kokutai and Nihonjinron ). The fact that they did this primarily in connection with the events of the Second World War and that they were often affirmative of the imperialist empire led to long-lasting criticism.

literature

  • Ryōsuke Ōhashi (ed.): The philosophy of the Kyoto school. Texts and introduction. Alber Verlag, Freiburg / Munich 1990, 2nd expanded edition with a new introduction in 2011. ISBN 978-3-495-48316-9
  • Lydia Brüll: The Japanese Philosophy. An introduction. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1989, ISBN 3-534-08489-6
  • James Heisig: Philosophers of Nothingness. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu 2001, ISBN 978-0824824815 (English, introduction and overview)
  • Myriam-Sonja Hantke: FWJ Schelling's identity philosophy in the horizon of the Kyôto school . iudicium Verlag, Munich 2005. ISBN 3-89129-179-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ James Heisig: Philosophers of Nothingness . University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu 2001, p. 4
  2. ^ Bret W. Davis: The Kyoto School . The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (February 27, 2006 article).
  3. ↑ James Heisig: Philosophers of Nothingness . University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu 2001, pp. 3-7 and 275-278
  4. ↑ See James Heisig: Philosophers of Nothingness. University of Hawaii Press , Honolulu 2001, p. 121
  5. ↑ See Bret W. Davis: The Kyoto School . The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (February 27, 2006 article).
  6. ↑ See the description by Bret W. Davis: The Kyoto School . The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (February 27, 2006 article).