ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the basic argument and significance of the Kyoto School’s notion of ‘nation’, whose original archetype was formulated by Nishida Kitaro¯ (1870-1945), the founder of the School, and was subsequently developed by his successors Tanabe Hajime (1885-1962) and Nishitani Keiji (1900-90). I hope to demonstrate how the theorization of nation by Japan’s leading philosophical school from the 1910s to the 1930s served as an intellectual vehicle where the essentials of modern Western metaphysics – such as notions of transcendental reason and morality, a linear progressive notion of history, and modern political and existential subjectivity – were internalized in Japanese discourse. As part of a broader process of modernization that involved a wholesale reorientation of society and the subject, conceptualizing nation in philosophical terms played an essential role in the formation of the modern Japanese nation-state by constituting the frame of consciousness, in which the subject is informed of particular images, expectations and obligations about nation and his/her relation to it. As exemplified in the modernly coined yet ‘primordial’ Japanese word kokka – simultaneously designating the state and nation with two Chinese characters meaning ‘country’ (kuni) and ‘family’ (i.e.) – the conceptual parameters set in early modern Japanese discourse to discuss nation in political and institutional terms were insufficiently developed at best. This apolitical conception of nation is immediately reflective of the orientation of discourse at the time, whose temporal and spatial scheme largely remained outside of the modern modality. By the end of the two imperial wars (the Sino-Japanese war (1894-95) and
the Russo-Japanese war (1904-95)) however, the effect of modernization and the accompanying intrusion of the dualistic epistemology of modern/Western scientific knowledge came to be felt acutely, giving rise to a nation-wide intellectual trend in favour of aesthetically inclined knowledge, where aspects of experience thrown beyondmodern scientific representation could regain their legitimate place. When Nishida conceptualized an alternate metaphysical framework inclusive of what lies at the bottom of Eastern culture – ‘an attitude that sees the formless and hears the voiceless’ – he too stepped outside the cognitive terrain defined by the dualistic epistemology of modern and Western metaphysics and created a unique philosophy of his own based on an experiential ontology.1 His initial idealistic formulation of a Japanese national archetype – nation as an embodiment
of harmonious social relations among ethically oriented subjects – was a heuristic ethical theory conceptualized as a critique of the universality of modern scientific epistemology and its effects. Although Nishida himself remained critical of ideological orthodoxy until his
very last years, his idealistically conceived archetype of the Japanese nation offered a rich reservoir for imagining about the ‘Japanese nation’, in which, what used to be vaguely felt as the content of ‘Japanese culture’ was elevated to the national spiritual/cultural essence in a modern philosophical language. At stake here is not an ‘ideology’ inherent in Nishida’s philosophy as such, but the nature of an aesthetically and experientially oriented theorization of nation that cannot escape having political implications beyond the philosopher’s intent. By giving expression to his religiously derived experience and elevating that into a form ofmodern philosophy, Nishida’s intellectual endeavour weaved a modern Japanese worldview, Weltanschauung, where those aspects excluded from modern/Western discourse could find aesthetic and/or spiritual articulations supposedly representing that which lies at the core of Japanese spirit, as powerfully demonstrated in his students’ fully modernized theorization of the Japanese nation. As the core modern political institution representing the collective life of its people, as well as an ontological foundation of the modern subject, nation became a socio-political and discursive battle-field, where conflicting temporalities, political positions, values and subjectivities uneasily co-existed side-by-side, especially after the introduction of modern notions of dialectical history and political subject in the 1920s that virtually transformed the political landscape of Japanese society thereafter. Writing in a rapidly transforming and politically charged discourse of the 1930s,
Nishida found himself in an awkward position of contradicting his earlier articulations by somewhat inevitably adapting to the rising modern philosophical parameters and an increasingly synchronized and transparent discourse governed by a singular transcendental perspective. Younger generations of scholars of the Kyoto School, including Tanabe and Nishitani, were more adaptable to changes. On returning from studying in Germany with leading continental philosophers of the time, such as Husserl and Heidegger, they began actively incorporating aspects of the cutting-edge philosophy into their theories of nation. Tanabe, for one, in his celebrated ‘Logic of the Specific’, a historically grounded theory of nation published in the mid-1930s, and Nishitani, for another, in his exploration into the ontological status of nation and the subject, reconfigured the archetypical notion of ethical nation into thoroughly modern forms by unhesitatingly transposing their teacher’s philosophical achievements onto concrete socio-historical and political settings. In their influential accounts of nation, Nishida’s ‘primordial’ worldview and heterogeneous philosophical concepts – such as nothingness and contradictory self-identity – are appropriated as reified signifiers designating the spiritual essence of a timeless Japan and incorporated into their otherwise thoroughly modernized theories of nation, each in their own way. Out of these modern philosophical endeavours emerged the absolute moral nation, whose authoritative voice urges its subjects to fulfill their moral duty of spontaneously sacrificing themselves.
