ABSTRACT
For many commentators, the publication of Zen no kenkyū (1911) represents the beginning of Japanese philosophy. Its pages contain the first attempt to formulate the Japanese intellectual tradition into the language of Western philosophy. For Heisig, the importance of this work, and of the Kyoto School more generally, is not located in its ‘Japaneseness’ but rather in the fact that the school ‘positioned themselves in a place as unfamiliar to the eastern mind as it is to the western’ (Heisig 2001:260).2 This contradictory location presents a series of dilemmas to the scholar. In particular, there has been a tendency to read the Kyoto School as though they were ‘Western’ philosophers with the simple admixture of some ‘Asian spice’. However, such an approach does not do justice to the intellectual heritage of the school. In this regard, Heisig laments that ‘very little attention has been given to the Kyoto School by scholars devoted to the classical thought and texts of the east’ (Heisig 2001:260). Even Japanese scholars have been remiss in this regard. In the last chapter, I attempted to provide something of this context, however briefly. In this chapter it will be seen that Nishida Kitarō was selfconsciously engaged in a discourse with both the Japanese tradition and with currents of European thought-and it would be impossible to identify his location without a grounding in each. In particular, a reading of Nishida’s first book, Zen no kenkyū, will be seen to be politicized by its ‘Japanese’ context in a way that a traditionally ‘European’ reading would miss. The political space here is alien to the European context. To some extent, this explains why the early Nishida has always been seen as an apolitical thinker.
