Tag: Miki Kiyoshi

Can intellectuals avoid totalitarian instrumentalisation? Nishida’s thought and Japanese imperialism

Can an intellectual avoid instrumentalisation of their thought under totalitarianism? That is the problem faced by intellectuals in an environment of totalitarianism, whose options are few and trying: to join or be co-opted by the totalitarian project, to retreat in the face of power, or resist and risk persecution. For Nishida Kitarō, and for the philosophers associated with the Kyoto School, this was the prospect faced under Imperial Japan. As an examination of the activities of the philosophers and their period writings show, many were co-opted into providing an intellectual basis for Japanese imperialism, and for Nishida, who intellectually resisted the procession of totalitarianism and ultranationalism of the period, still found his resistance to be ineffectual, and his thoughts ignored or co-opted in service of justifying Japan’s imperial project.

In the context of Japan from the 1920s onwards, this totalitarianism appeared in the form of rising ultranationalism that policed the boundaries of acceptable public discourse, and thus the limits and language within which academic philosophy, as practised by Kyoto School philosophers, must reside. A number of events marked the rise of nationalism and its intrusion into the academic space. The 1925 Peace Preservation Law, the establishment of the Superior Special Police Force and the Research Centre for National Spiritual Culture, as well as the Takikawa Incident and Minobe Incident, saw the gradual tightening of the bounds of acceptable discourse in academia.1 This was the effective prohibition of support for liberalism and questioning of the Emperor’s divine authority. The publishing of the Fundamentals of the National Polity set most explicitly the lines and language of political orthodoxy, effectively within which academia must preside.2 It is within this context which Nishida and other Kyoto School intellectuals operated, and in which their response to totalitarianism should be understood.

One consideration may be whether the weaponization of the Kyoto School’s thoughts was deliberate, either by Nishida himself or by other intellectuals associated with his philosophical thoughts. For Nishida, who had fundamental disagreements with the political orthodoxy, participation in politics implied much resistance and persuasion within the acceptable discursive language, though resistance was ineffectual and co-option still pervasive. The case of the Principles of the New World Order is a pertinent case. Written in 1943 with the prospect of influencing the Tōjō government, Nishida’s initial essay was rejected on grounds of being too difficult to understand, and on revision by Tanabe Juri, an associate, was submitted to the government’s audience. Nishida would be disappointed by Tōjō’s understanding of his writing.3 Accounting for Nishida’s indifference towards Tanabe’s draft, Principles stand as a case of the inability of intellectuals to resist and effect change in a totalitarian environment. Both because of its rewriting and the need to follow the language of political orthodoxy, such as Nishida’s use of hakkō ichiu, in its subversion leaves open the space for misinterpretation in support for Japanese imperialism.

For other philosophers of the Kyoto School, their divergent treatment of Nishida’s thoughts is emblematic of the different approaches to working in a totalitarian context. Miki Kiyoshi, a student of Nishida, argued for a theory of cosmopolitanism based on Nishida’s thoughts that privileged Japan’s position as a leader of Asian countries as a product of its unique good qualities.4 For Tanabe Hajime, who drew on Nishida’s concepts of negation, the dialectic between state and individual, particularly one’s absolute rejection in death, could be construed to advocate for the sacrifice of individuals in service of the state.5 In both such cases the co-opting of philosophy in service of totalitarianism was deliberate, as Nishida’s thoughts are taken beyond the control of its originator. Thus is the limit of an intellectual’s ability to avoid instrumentalisation in totalitarianism.

  1. Christopher S. Goto-Jones, Political philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School, and co-prosperity (New York, 2005), pp. 73-75. [↩]
  2. Ibid., p. 77. [↩]
  3. Ibid., pp. 79-81. [↩]
  4. John Namjun Kim, ‘The Temporality of Empire: The Imperial Cosmopolitanism of Miki Kiyoshi and Tanabe Hajime’, in Sven Saaler, J. Victor Koschmann (eds), Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History: Colonialism, regionalism and borders (London, 2007), pp. 156-160. [↩]
  5. Ibid., pp. 163-166. [↩]

Miki Kiyoshi’s Marxist Buddhism: The Impact of Imagination on the Past, Present, and Future

“But the fact that we see the imagination as a faculty peculiar to artists is probably related to the fact that we view artistic activities in particular as original creations. Our job is to elucidate the logic of imagination as a logic of historical creation, while liberating it from its restriction to the realm of beauty and broadly introducing it into the world of action.” – Miki Kiyoshi, The Logic of Imagination

Miki Kiyoshi, a 20th century utopian thinker who combined Marxism and Pure Land Buddhist philosophy, used the relationship between imagination and history to clarify his vision for the future of society.  Miki’s work is influenced by the Kyoto School — an intellectual movement led by thinkers who interpreted Western philosophy in the context of East Asian intellectual traditions — which lays the foundation for his conception of ideas like logos, pathos, and imagination.1  His novel ideas about the historical applications of imagination not only created new ways of interpreting history, but also unprecedented ways of imagining the future.

In his published collection of essays, The Logic of Imagination, Miki argues that imagination is not a purely fictional realm belonging only to artists, but a process which directly impacts the real world.2  This is also true of myth, which he sees as the product of imagination, and whose impact on historical reality can be traced throughout history.3  If imagination influences action, and action shapes history, then imagination must directly influence reality.  This supports Miki’s claim that, “being human also means to exist in a particular historical context — as Miki puts it in ‘History’s Reason,’ ‘human beings do not exist outside of history; they stand within history’.”4  He defines human reality as grounded in historical reality, and historical reality as directly influenced by imagination.  In her study of Pure Land Buddhism and 20th century utopian thinkers, Melissa Anne-Marie Curley argues that Miki used the imaginary utopia of the “Pure Land” as a historical myth to help shape his Marxist vision for the future.5

According to Miki, the myth of the Pure Land belongs to the realm of imagination, but this does not negate its importance — if anything, imagination provides a conceptualisation of the future which cannot be found in reality.  The ability to imagine a better future or a “Pure Land” allows humans to act on this myth.  Here, he applies Marxist theory to imagine such a future: a unified human community supported by the principles of mutual aid.6   Religion, which exists primarily in the human of imagination, is an internal realm, but “Miki maintains that this internal experience inevitably and directly manifests socially, generating new religious phenomena or new forms of social life that are founded upon a demand for happiness and thus arc always toward utopia.”7  Imagination, by Miki’s definition, is both a historical actor as well as a force which influences our future.

  1. Masakatsu Fujita, The Philosophy of the Kyoto School, trans. Robert Chapeskie (Singapore: Springer, 2018), vi, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8983-1_5. [↩]
  2. John W.M. Krummel, “Introduction to Miki Kiyoshi and his Logic of the Imagination,” Social Imaginaries 2, no.1 (2016): 17. [↩]
  3. Ibid., 19 [↩]
  4. Melissa Anne-Marie Curley, Pure Land, Real World: Modern Buddhism, Japanese Leftists, and the Utopian Imagination (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2017), 141, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvvmxmx. [↩]
  5. Ibid., 148 [↩]
  6. Ibid., 151 [↩]
  7. Ibid., 143 [↩]