ABSTRACT
The Kyoto School has been defined as ‘the philosophical movement centred at Kyoto University that assimilated Western philosophic and religious ideas and used them to reformulate religious and moral insights unique to the East Asian cultural tradition’.1 What is missing from this definition is any recognition that the Kyoto School also produced a profound meditation on the nature of politics, history and society in a world dominated by the West. The previous five chapters have demonstrated that there is more to the project of the Kyoto School than the modernisation of Zen tradition. During the 1930s and 1940s, Kyoto thinkers created a philosophy of history worth comparing with the historicist ideas developed by any of Hegel’s successors in Europe after 1831. This Japanese meditation on the provocation of post-Whiteness was driven by what Nietzsche called ‘the will to render the world thinkable’.
