Japanese Philosophy

In this paper, I try to show how Japanese practices of self-cultivation found in the so-called “ways” (道 dō, michi) can be interpreted as embodied forms of “caring for oneself ” (epimeleia heautou) and, therefore, as part of a philosophical Lebenskunst or art of living. To this end, I refer to phenomenological accounts of the body as well as to a unique notion of practice found in the writings of Dōgen Kigen, a thirteenth-century Japanese Zen master. Central to this essay is a concern with embodying kata or pre-defined patterns of movement and posture used in nearly all practices of self-cultivation in Japan. To approach this question, I look at the etymological roots of the term kata and its use in the writings of Zeami, the foremost representative of classical Noh theater, both as author and as actor. This is followed by an analysis of certain aspects of the embodiment of kata and the way it is described in Japanese literature.

The concept of antinatalism is now becoming popular on the Internet. Many online newspaper articles deal with this topic, and numerous academic papers on antinatalism have been published over the past ten years in the fields of philosophy and ethics.  The word “antinatalism” was first used in the current meaning in 2006, when the two books that justify the universal negation of procreation were published: one by David Benatar and the other by Théophile de Giraud. However, we can find various prototypes of antinatalistic thoughts in ancient Greece, ancient India, and modern Europe. You might recall the name Schopenhauer.
In this paper, I briefly summarize the history of antinatalistic thoughts and propose a set of categories on antinatalism and related thoughts.

What can philosophers today learn from the psychosomatic practice of Zen Buddhism? How does Zen challenge the methodology of our cerebral practice of philosophy?  In order to address these questions, this essay examines one of the major transitions that have occurred in modern Japanese philosophy, namely the translation of Zen Buddhist ideas into a philosophical idiom. When Zen ideas are discussed in an academic context, we need to be attentive to the fact that they have been displaced from the psychosomatic practices—the embodied-spiritual disciplines—in which they were originally embedded. Fortunately, there have been a few philosophers who have commuted between the psychosomatic practice of Zen and the intellectual discipline of philosophy, most notably the main figures of the first three generations of the Kyoto School: Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945), Nishitani Keiji (1900–90), and Ueda Shizuteru (1926–2019). The central sections of this essay examine how they challenge not just the ideas but also the disembodied methodology of Western philosophy by drawing on their psychosomatic practice of Zen. The final sections then critically compare and contrast Zen’s psychosomatic practice of with Richard Shusterman’s “somaesthetics” and with Pierre Hadot’s retrieval of the ancient Greek and Roman conception of philosophy as a “way of life,” a way that was not only more soteriologically oriented but also more holistically practiced than is modern academic philosophy. The essay concludes by addressing the prospects, for those living in contemporary Western or Westernizing countries, of incorporating psychosomatic disciplines such as those of Zen into the practice of philosophy as a truly holistic pursuit of wisdom and liberating way of life.

Citation information:
Bret W. Davis, “Commuting Between Zen and Philosophy: In the Footsteps of Kyoto School Philosophers and Psychosomatic Practitioners,” in Transitions: Crossing Boundaries in Japanese Philosophy, edited by Francesa Greco, Leon Krings, and Yukiko Kuwayama (Nagoya: Chisokudō Publications, 2021), pp. 71–111.

Amidst ongoing attempts to think beyond Western frameworks for education, there is a tendency to overlook Japan, perhaps because it appears highly modern. This is striking given that some prominent strands of Japanese philosophy have formulated an explicit and exacting challenge to the core onto-epistemic premises of modern Western thought. It is also surprising because Japanese educational practices have resulted in some of the highest achievement outcomes-both cognitive and noncognitive-found anywhere in the world and inculcate a worldview that is distinct. Herein, we thus attempt to make visible the potential contribution of modern Japanese philosophy by outlining some of the core ideas, then turn to sketch resonances with and responses to other projects outlined in this Special Issue. Our approach is elucidation through relational comparison. Through this process, we suggest that the notion of self-negation as a mode of learning may be helpful in explaining why-at the empirical level-the outlook of Japanese students, and perhaps other East Asian students, diverge markedly from their Western peers. Yet we also find that an attempt, such as ours, to link divergent onto-epistemic thought to alternative empirical hypotheses quickly gives rise to various doubts and discomforts, even among otherwise sympathetic scholars.

In providing a view of paideia as dialetheia, we may elaborate the educational dimensions of a view of reality as contradictory, as captured
in the key phrase Double Eyes. In this way, we may be able to connect long-standing traditions in clinical-philosophical pedagogy with a wider range of recent intellectual projects and problématiques worldwide.

The category of sabi is one of the most distinctive forms of Japanese aesthetics. A spiritual love for age, solitude and melancholia, it is central to practices like tea ceremony and haikai poetry: however, a formal description of its character is often deemed impossible. The Japanese philosopher Onishi Yoshinori (1888 - 1959) was however convinced that sabi was a complex but coherent category, and that a philosophical approach to sabi in Japanese poetry could reveal in its structure a mixture of affirmation and negation that brought it close to Romantic irony. Together with yugen and aware , sabi is one of the three Asian aesthetic categories proposed by Onishi ’s intercultural system as counterparts to the European forms of beautiful, sublime and comic. In this essay we turn to his 1940 vol ume Fugaron , still mostly ignored by Western bibliography, to discuss the outlines of Onishi ’s analysis of sabi , its background, its difficulties and intellectual potential.

This short article attempts to carve out a space that recognizes heterogeneous practices and worldviews that foreground concerns often omitted from design orthodoxy.

Knowing that I go back to Japan to spend time with my family over the New Year holiday, a Japanese professor invited my husband and I to join him at his wife’s hometown in Ise, where festivities are held at its shrine, Ise Jingū. He proceeded to tell me about Ise Jingū, founded in 4bc to worship the sun goddess, Amaterasu, symbolized by a mirror, and regarded as one of the most ancient and sacred Shinto shrines in Japan. Its Yayoi architecture, believed to have derived from structures that stored rice, reflects Japan’s agricultural roots. Shinto is the indigenous spirituality of Japan, an intimacy in interrelatedness with nature. The ritual of marking the cycles of birth and decay helps orient people’s passage through life to create a sense of belonging in the world (Suzuki 1958). The unique feature of Ise Jingū is its ritual of dismantling and rebuilding the entire structure on an adjacent site every twenty years, enabling repair and maintenance, and more importantly, ensuring continual reconstruction through generations of artisans and craftspeople who begin as apprentices and then become masters (Takase in Cultural News 2009). Incremental adjustments to its design have been part of Ise Jingū’s evolutionary story. It incorporated Buddhist influences from China during the sixth to eighth centuries, and has adapted responsively to climate change, natural disasters, availability of raw materials, and technological advancement in construction, tools, and workers’ safety. But its evolution over more than a millennium makes it appear to have stood in time, preserving ancient traditions when nestled within a society that has changed dramatically over the same period (Adams 1998).

Watsuji Tetsurô's Ethics is one of the most important works in Japanese ethical thought. But scholarly research in English has largely focused on the first of three volumes of Ethics, leaving the latter two oft-neglected. In order to balance out the views of Watsuji's ethics, this paper focuses on the contributions of the second and third volumes of Ethics. These volumes are essential for any concrete understanding of Watsuji's "ethics of emptiness." The second volume develops the ideas of the first, particularly how the dual-structure (individuality and communality) is concretely realized through the various stages of ethical organization (family, local community, economy, nation, and state). The third volume develops the notions of space and time from the first volume into a theory of climate (fûdo) and history. By analyzing these, we can understand Watsuji's system as a whole and clarify Watsuji's unique contribution ethical theory.

A translation of Miki's short writing entitled "Tetsugaku-no nai Nihon"「哲学のない日本」.  This is a work in progress. If you have any criticisms, suggestions, questions, etc., please contact the translator. 
Special thanks to Cody Staton (KU Leuven) for the helpful suggestions.

In the second volume of Rinrigaku, Watsuji Tetsurō focuses on developing his notion of betweenness (aidagara 間柄) through the ethical organisations (jinrinteki soshiki 人倫的組織) of family, local community, economics, cultural community, and the state. Although those who have commentated on the later volumes have focused on the controversy which surrounds Watsuji’s account of the state, very little attention has been paid to the role of virtues within his thought. It is precisely this academic lacuna which this enquiry is intended to address. In this paper, there are two particular aims which I hope to achieve: firstly, I will seek to explicate the role which virtues play within Watsuji’s ethical system, and secondly, I will attempt to evaluate how the virtues inform Watsuji’s normative approach.

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason demonstrates that it is impossible to have knowledge of the thing in itself by means of either concepts or intuitions. The great student of Nishida Kitarō and Martin Heidegger, Japanese philosopher, Keiji Nishitani (1900–1990), does not seem to dispute Kant’s claim that the thing in itself cannot be known by means of reason or indeed by any act of consciousness whatever. But for Nishitani the Critique does not demonstrate that it is impossible to experience or obtain awareness of the thing in itself through purely non-subjective, non- representational, and non-conceptual means. In what follows, I recon- struct Nishitani’s formulation of the paradox of representation and show how his method of resolving the paradox provides an argument against Kant, that one can know the thing in itself by non-conceptual means. For Nishitani it appears that the impossibility of knowing the thing in itself by means of reason shows a new path forward. Rather than attempt to know the thing in itself by means of reason or subjectivity in general, we can still gain access to the thing in itself by transcending reason and subjectivity altogether. To state this even more generally: insofar as philosophy itself performs its rational work from the standpoint of subjectivity (whether implicitly or explicitly), we can apprehend the thing in itself by transcending the standpoint of philosophy. In Nishitani’s terms, the only way to know the thing in itself is by “breaking through self-consciousness” (Nishitani 1983, 16–17).

The category of sabi is one of the most distinctive forms of Japanese aesthetics. A spiritual love for age, solitude and melancholia, it is central to practices like tea ceremony and haikai poetry: however, a formal description of its character is often deemed impossible. The Japanese philosopher Ōnishi Yoshinori (1888-1959) was however convinced that sabi was a complex but coherent category, and that a philosophical approach to sabi in Japanese poetry could reveal in its structure a mixture of affirmation and negation that brought it close to Romantic irony. Together with yūgen and aware, sabi is one of the three Asian aesthetic categories proposed by Ōnishi's intercultural system as counterparts to the European forms of beautiful, sublime and comic. In this essay we turn to his 1940 volume Fūgaron, still mostly ignored by Western bibliography, to discuss the outlines of Ōnishi's analysis of sabi, its background, its difficulties and intellectual potential.

Nishida’s and Merleau-Ponty’s “perceptual ontologies” lead to other notions of self, spirituality, and faith, bringing out the distinctive and comparable religious paths of Buddhism and embodied phenomenology entered by deepening the prereflective openness to the world’s “voices of silence.” Loughnane’s study highlights how Nishida’s and Merleau-Ponty’s turn towards a series of artists in their respective cultural contexts brings out the particular groundedness in the materiality of the beings of the world in this “mutual interexpressivity” or “reversibility.” Faith is revisioned as the dropping of egoistic control to allow perception to be carried into the depths of the world of spiritual hearkening.

The philosophy of Tanabe who is the successor of Kitarō Nishida is also explained by the principle of nothingness and love. Tanabe succeeded 'the logic of nothingness'(無の 論理). From my view point, this nothingness is nothingness as negative word and death. Tanabe aims to reach the truth by using dialectics of negative word thoroughly. This negative word is the meaning that nothing is nothingness. Therefore, we can say that the dialectics of Tanabe is developing dialectics of nothingness (無の弁証法). Tanabe himself named it as absolute dialectics (絶対弁証法) that transcends idealistic dialectics of Hegel and materialism dialectics of Marx. Still more, he understands the world as dialectic movement. This idea overlaps the dynamic development and movement of Aristotle. The development of dialectics logic reached the peak by the philosophy of Tanabe in the history of philosophy. But meanwhile, he criticized the theory of pure experience of Nishida as theory of bystander. At a glance, this means that Tanabe denies 'nothingness as reality' that is flow of life and energy in the universe. It is the original energy of creation from nothingness and can explain the energy of expanding universe, dark matter and dark energy. As Tanabe denies this energy, he shows the weakness of his theory. He did not talk about the Creation of the Universe, as it is mysterious. He can develop his time theory but he cannot expose the cosmology that includes the theory of energy.

京都学派の哲学者たちは、後の現象学的身体論を先取りするような身体観を提示した。本稿は、こうした京都学派の身体論の生成と展開を西田幾多郎や田辺元のテキストに沿って内在的に読解しながら、その本来の近代認識論批判の立場（日本的「身体論」）が文化本質主義的イデオロギー（「日本的身体」論）へと転じる機制を明らかにした。そのうえで、20世紀後半になって古典芸能の身体性や世阿弥の能楽論を安易に「日本文化」に還元して解釈する「日本的身体」論が横行する言説状況が到来したことを批判した。
The Kyoto School philosophers, Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime, etc., produced theoretical discourses of the body in 1930's, which foreran Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body. This paper reveals the process of their discussion and examines how those metaphysical debates on the body that appeared in modern Japan(日本的「身体論」) fell into cultural essentialism(「日本的身体」論).

In reply to critics who summarily dismiss Nishida's philosophy as weakened on the historical front by excessive attention to the mind and interiority, in this essay I provide textual proof of a major shift in Nishida's late work based on the attept to overcome the dichotomy between the "within" and the "without". This is accomplished by applying a "dialectic of the historical world" to the mutual self-expression of the world and the things that make it up, including but not restricted to conscious subjects. I see here the core of Nishida's complementary ideas of praxis and poiesis, and from there discuss the revised notions of politics, technology, morality and history. I conclude by displacing a blanket rejection of Nishida's view of history with a particular critique aimed at an overly abstract and optimistic tendency that kept Nishida from recognizing the darker side of technology and the relationships of humans to their natural and social world.

Published in video format, together with an accompanying Guidebook (217 pgs) and optional Book Transcript (534 pgs), as part of The Teaching Company's Great Courses series. Also published as an audiobook by Amazon's Audible.
    The twenty-four lectures/chapters offer a thorough and engaging introduction to both the practice and the philosophy of Zen Buddhism. The course/book provides clear and in-depth explanations of the real teachings and practices of this ancient Asian tradition, and it relates those teachings and practices to the real lives of twenty-first century Westerners. It is ideally suited for those who wish to both learn about the philosophical teachings and also engage in the practice of Zen, especially its central practice of meditation. Several of the lectures explain the nature and methods of Zen meditation, and periodic “mediation checkups” offer strategies for dealing with common issues that arise and offer further guidance for developing and deepening a practice of meditation.   
    The first lecture of the course/book reflects on our approach to Zen. It questions some preconceptions and popular images that we may have in order for us to recover what Zen calls “the beginner’s mind.” The second lecture then goes right to the core of Zen as a path of self-discovery that leads, paradoxically, through a process of self-forgetting. The next two lectures then explain Zen meditation and how to practice it. After that, several lectures explain, from a Zen perspective, the basic teachings of Buddhism, including the “Middle Way” between indulging and repressing our desires, and the problem of spiritual suffering that is rooted in our resistance to impermanence, our excessive cravings, and our misunderstanding of the nature of the self.
    The course/book goes on to clarify Zen’s understanding of the nature of the self in relation to other selves and the world as a whole, and also Zen’s teachings with regard to karma, morality, nature, art, language, and spiritual as well as physical death and rebirth. It explains what it means not only to bring your mind into a state of concentration and stillness while on the meditation cushion, but also what it means to dwell in the “Zone of Zen” during your daily activities. It ends with an elucidation of the The Ten Oxherding Pictures, a classic and beloved set of pictures and verses that summarize the stages a practitioner goes through on the path of Zen.

The aim of this chapter is to expand the discourse on how the Japanese philosophy of ikigai could be integrated into existing andragogical theories such as transformational pedagogy(s) as an instrument of self-reflection, location reassurance and reorientation. In this way, ikigai could be applied beyond the Japanese culture to support people in adult education as "beings in development" regarding self-reflexive processes about themselves and their environment. This can be done in a variety of ways, including by: (a) initiating such processes, (b) designing them in a holistic and sustainable way, (c) potentially considering the individual and the environment in equal measure, and (d) resulting in transformation processes for individuals themselves and the world around them.

日本哲学とは何か。私は最近、『オックスフォード日本哲学手引書』（The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy） の編集者として、この意外にも複雑な質問に面していた。日本哲学の定義付けにより、その範囲も当然変わってくるのである。日本哲学を網羅すべき手引書を計画する際、明治以前の仏教や儒学の理論的な言説を「哲学」とするのか、それとも「思想」あるいは「宗教」として扱うのか、という難解な問題を避けることはできない。この小論で説明するように、たいていの欧米人学者と日本人学者の間には、その点にかんしての相違がみられる。私は、明治以降の「近代日本哲学」のみでなくそれ以前の、日本では「日本思想史」として扱われている内容も、『手引書』で取り扱うことにした。その『手引書』の長い序論において、私は、「日本哲学とは何か」という質問に含まれている諸問題をできるだけ詳しく取り上げてみた 。この小論では、いくつかの要点や暫定的な結論を述べ、次の結論にたどり着く。「日本哲学」とは、「（主に）日本における哲学の部分集合」であると同時に、より重要な意味では、対話の場所としての「世界哲学」における、日本の伝統・文化・言語を主に出発点とする学問である。

Many of us indeed struggle and asks these questions: Why do we exist? What do we live for? What is our intention in life? Assuredly, those questions are laborious to answer and of course, are a description of our endless search for the meaning of life; on both a group and individual level. Yet, when we're at workplaces, we desire whatever we're doing to hold something that not only gives us money; but also happiness, passion, and a feeling that we are fulfilling our ends.

This is a partial translation of Kuki Shūzō's "Gūzensei-no mondai" 偶然性の問題 (1935). This translation is a work in progress and if you have any suggestions, criticisms, questions, etc., please feel free to contact the translator.
Special thanks to Sean Winkler for his variable comments on the text.

In different ways, Watsuji, Nishida, and Merleau-Ponty describe a self that extends
beyond the skin through a sort of dialectic of internal/external space of perception and
action, which has implications for understanding the relationship between art and
nature in artistic creation. Through an exposition of Watsuji’s conception of human
being in relation to a climatic milieu, Nishida’s theory of the expressive body as the site
of the world’s own self-transformations, and certain claims made by Merleau-Ponty in
his essays on painting, this article provides a way of understanding how material media
may become expressive when they are taken up by artists.

An English translation of Miki Kiyoshi's "Katarare-zaru Tetsugaku" 語られざる哲学 (1919). A page break is indicated with two vertical lines (||) and a paragraph change, inserted by the translator, is indicated with a single vertical line (|). This is the first of the twelve sections that constitute the whole essay (which would amount to 90 pages or so). This translation is a work in progress and please feel free to contact the translator for suggestions, criticisms, concerns, discussions, etc.

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Ponty wrote extensively about artistic expression in their early works, yet in the last period of their careers that consideration is put mostly aside as they engage more directly with abstract ontological concerns. As this happens, a curiously overlooked concept becomes prominent in their writings, namely "faith." While Merleau-Ponty's is a "perceptual faith" (foi perceptive), and Nishida's is, broadly speaking, a religious faith (shinnen 信念), neither is strictly secular nor spiritual, yet both entail a remarkably similar ontology of the motorperceptual body. Unfortunately, their lives ended before they could fully develop these philosophically problematic concepts. This is especially unfortunate because, as I argue, faith is one under-explored interpretive key that can help us understand not just the late period but also the entirety of their philosophic projects. 1 The present study therefore seeks to expand their notions of faith, not by imagining how it might have evolved had they further developed the concept, but by going back to their early writings, showing how their understanding of artistic expression actually prefigures their later concepts of faith. I argue that in their philosophies, the practice of artistic expression is a practice of faith -not faith in a transcendent being, scripture, or event, but faith as a motor-perceptual body woven into a motor-perceptual world. To explore this possibility within and between their writings, I frame their understandings of expression as "motor-perceptual faith," which serves as a provisional device for placing the two in dialogue, for finding new conceptual continuities between their early and late writings, and for challenging strict boundaries between art, religion, and philosophy East and West.

Nishitani is a 20 th century Japanese philosopher of religion associated with the Kyoto School. He is best known for his articulation of a philosophy of Zen Buddhism that aims to "overcome nihilism by way of passing through nihilism." He writes of the need to move from the "field" of representational consciousness and reified being, back through the field of nihility, and then all the way down to the ultimate field of emptiness or śūnyatā, the field on which all beings exist as they truly are in mutually supporting and interpenetrating relations with one another.

The Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Religion and the Publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781119009924 .