ABSTRACT
As we have seen, Nishida himself lamented that, once he had created it, his thought became a public good, beyond his control, and it acted on him in return. He further complained that nobody had yet understood his work, and that his words had been twisted and used out of context. If we are to take Nishida’s objections seriously, rather than to dismiss them as pleadings for exoneration,1 then we must seek to understand what happened to his thought once he set it onto paper-how did the speech-acts of others manipulate his particular linguistic and ideological conventions?2 If violence was indeed done to Nishida’s philosophy during its passage into the public domain, to what extent should this exonerate him; if his thought provided a direction or a path, should he be held responsible for the distance others travelled along it? One of the most obvious avenues for Nishida’s thought was through the school of philosophy that grew-up around him, the so-called Kyoto School. It is often overlooked in the literature that septuagenarian Nishida’s public presence during the war-years was, with the exception of a few notable incidents, mostly by proxy — his students and colleagues, such as Tanabe Hajime and Nishitani Keiji played far larger roles in public debates. Indeed, already in 1936, Tosaka Jun, once a student of Nishida and then one of his most vocal critics, doubts ‘how many progressive students of philosophy are reading Nishida tetsugaku…it is no longer at the vanguard of philosophy [sentanteki na tetsugaku]’ (TJZ II:343). Indeed, without the ‘counterfoil of Tanabe’s thought and the creative enlargements of Nishitani’, the Kyoto School would never have been born, and Nishida’s prominence might have been rather smaller or short-lived (Heisig 2001:7). Heisig suggests that even in the post-war period, Nishida’s eminence
owes more to the popularity of the works of Tanabe and Nishitani than to his own writings.
