ABSTRACT
How is the Western student of Japanese philosophy to think his way out of this cul-de-sac? Certainly, no way will be found as long as this dilemma is understood as a double bind which compels the philosopher to make impossible choices: Morality or philosophy? Conscience or empirical truth? This is an intellectual dead end. Having allowed the neo-Marxist to paint us into this corner, we must now learn to paint ourselves out of the specious logic and flawed scholarship of ‘Japanokritik’.3 Only when the empirical confusions of the neo-Marxist are exposed can the philosophers begin to learn how to square their commitments to philosophy with the common-sense imperatives of morality. The empirical test is at once simple and unforgiving. The student of the wartime Kyoto School needs only to peruse the arguments and conclusions of the neo-Marxist to learn how not to understand the Kyoto School of philosophy.4 The factual foundation of Japanokritik is so sandy, its textual reliability so suspect and its arguments so tendentious that the philosopher may safely conclude that the researcher who echoes neo-Marxism on the Kyoto School is going to get many of the most important facts of the matter wrong.
