Uhl, Christian

English

Ghent University Academic Bibliography

I I A S  N e w s l e t t e r  |  # 3 8  |  S e p t e m b e r  2 0 0 5 2 3> The Asia-Pacific War 60 Years On: history & memory‘And if I were not afraid you would think me drunk, I would have sworn as well as spoken about the effect that [this man’s words]have always had and still have on me.... This Marsyas ... has often brought me to such a pass, that I feel life isn’t worth living, aslong as I stay as I am. And you can’t say that isn’t true, Socrates.... For he makes me confess that I have a lot of flaws, butnevertheless I neglect to attend to myself, busying myself with the concerns of the Athenians. So I plug my ears and fly away fromhim...’.1‘If the self is cultivated, ...’ -some remarks on philosophy and politics in wartime JapanChrist ian  UhlThis was how Alcibiades spoke toSocrates and other guests gatheredin Agathon’s house for that dinner partyknown to us as the ‘Symposium’. Onelaughs at the performance of the drunk-en politician, but Alcibiades is in truthmore a tragic figure. As a boy, he hadtold Socrates that he intended to governthe polis one day. Socrates wanted toknow what that meant. Alcibiades hadto concede that he did not know – andthat, until then, he had not even beenembarrassed about not knowing – towhich Socrates put to him that before heset about minding the business of oth-ers, he should first ‘attend to himself’.2During the ‘Symposium’, Alcibiadesadmitted that he had failed in the face ofphilosophy. And in the end, after a lifegoverned by selfishness and lust forpower, the Athenian politician and gen-eral died in disgrace at the hands of amurderer.Socrates’ end was tragic as well. It wasthe fulfilling of what Socrates saw as thephilosopher’s primary task - to approachyoung people all over the city and tellthem that in order to live a life in lightof godly truth, they should first ‘take careof themselves’ and ‘know themselves’ -for which his prosecutors attacked him.***‘Every epoch organizes the censorship ofphilosophy in its own way. Socrates hadto give his life. Descartes was persecutedby the Sorbonne’ – thus Hadrien France-Lanord’s disparaging reaction toEmmanuel Faye’s recent entry to thedebate on the entanglement of the influ-ential German philosopher Martin Hei-degger with national socialism.3 Theunceasing debate on Heidegger’s politicsfrequently appears even on the featurepages, and needs no comment here. Lessknown is that in Japan too, ever since theend of the Asia-Pacific War, a similardebate about philosophy’s contaminationby politics has smouldered. This debatewas sparked by a series of publicationsin which the ‘father of Japanese philoso-phy’, Nishida Kitarm (1870-1945), andthinkers affiliated with him – the so-called Kymto School - got involved in thepolitical business of ‘Holy War’ waged fora ‘Greater East-Asian Co-ProsperitySphere’.The debate on Nishida and the KymtoSchool has been overshadowed by thedebate on Heidegger. One reason forthis ‘Heidegger-factor’ in the debate onthe Kymto School rests with merelystrategic considerations of some of thedebate’s participants. But philosophicalparallels can indeed be drawn betweenNishida and Heidegger, and there arealso direct links passing through someof Nishida’s disciples, who studied inGermany. One of these parallels mightbe a common concern with – or a cer-tain resentment against – what we maycall the ‘ordinary self’, which, as it is, isincapable of knowing the truth, and hasto be ‘overcome’, so to speak. It was thisconcern, or resentment, which nour-ished Heideggers’ understanding of thenational socialist movement as a‘national revolution’ against the ‘hope-less frenzy of technology’. And it wasout of the same concern that philoso-phers of the Kymto School embraced thewar as the most effective means to whatwas propagated in war-time Japan as the‘overcoming of modernity’. Moreover,for them – as for Socrates – the problemof the ‘self’ was closely linked with theproblem of knowing how to govern oth-ers, and might therefore help to illumi-nate the relationship between philoso-phy and politics in war-time Japan.***Japan’s officially declared war objectivewas the establishment of a ‘New Orderin East Asia’ and the defeat of the oldworld order as represented by the Leagueof Nations. The philosophers of theKymto School assessed these objectivespositively. The League of Nations, theyargued, had been established to ensureworld peace based upon the ‘abstractidea’ of a unity of autonomous peoples,upon capitalism and liberalism. In theAnglophone world however, freedom,was just another word for ‘free competi-tion’, meaning ‘repression of the weak’,and it was this inner contradiction thathad finally resulted in the destructionand defeat of that world order.4 The Westno longer represented the world; it hadfallen into crisis, and in awareness ofthis, had pulled together defensively toform a particular world, thus facilitatingthe growing self-confidence of the East.The latter was no longer simply an objectof world history. It had woken up to ‘sub-jectivity’ and came forth as a self-aware‘world-historical subject’. Like those ofEurope, the peoples of Asia were joiningtogether into a ‘Family of Peoples’, withJapan as its avantgarde. The fulfilmentof this ‘world-historical mission’ ofJapan, however, hinged on a profoundself-overcoming of what Japan itself hadbeen so far.For, they noted, the modernisation andindustrialisation of Japan under themotto of ‘Civilisation and Enlighten-ment’ had brought the ailments of mod-ern industrial societies to Japan as well.Opposing the power of capitalist worldcivilisation was synonymous withopposing individualism, democracy, andliberalism, i.e. the system of values ofmodern civilisation. A deep rift separat-ed the ‘atomized’ individual from stateand society, the ‘private’ from the ‘pub-lic’. The modern state lacked a centre ofgravity, a centripetal force counteractingthe centrifugal forces exercised by self-ish, private interests. ‘The entrepre-neur’, maintained a member of theKymto School, ‘thinks about the econo-my, the lawyer about law, and so on, butthinking about things in such isolatedrealms has now reached its limits’. A‘real renewal’, he continued, had to putan end to the ‘rampant spreading ofsuch narrow subjectivity’ and it was the‘breaking down of these borders’ thatwas the task of philosophy. The ‘totalwar’, therefore, was ‘precisely a ‘philo-sophical war’. Because by compellingthe concentration of forces, the conver-sion of the modern state into a ‘nation-al defence state’, and teaching theindividual ‘asceticism’ and the subordi-nation of his or her private interests tothe public weal, the war excelled inanswering this very demand for thebreakdown of borders, the mergingtogether of the disintegrating areas ofthe military, art, economy, politics, andthinking etc., and the transformation ofthe modern ‘homo oeconomicus’ (keizai-jin) back into an ‘original human’ (hon-rai no ningen) . In a nutshell: the ‘totalwar’ was more than just a struggle for anew society and a new world order inpolitical terms. It was, at the same time,‘the total destruction of the modernstate, society, economy, culture and phi-losophy’, i.e. the ultimate ‘overcomingof modernity’ itself.***Leaving further consideration of theseideas to the reader, I shall limit myremarks here to the significance of theword ‘asceticism’. Referring to a specif-ic religious exercise or practice of self-overcoming – i.e. the overcoming ofvices and desires – the word imparts anexplicitly religious connotation to thedefinition of the war as the ‘overcomingof modernity’ per se. This religiousdimension also manifests itself in thewording of the following statement ofone of Nishida Kitarm’s disciples, Kmsa-ka Masaaki: ‘By the way, how should we view the atti-tude that regards the salvation of the smallhuman being as something separated fromthe salvation of humankind as a whole?Nishida too recently said that world histo-ry is the purgatory of the soul ofhumankind, and that war too probably hasthis meaning.... In this way the soul ofhumankind becomes purified. Therefore allturning points of world history have beendecided by war. For this reason world his-tory is the purgatory of humankind’. 5The understanding of history as a purgeand purification of the sins of the past,the idea of war as an ascetic exercise, orthe Kymto school philosopher TanabeHajime’s conviction, that unceasing ‘pen-itence’ is the true principle of history – allthis elevates the political philosophisingof the Kymto School into the realm of thereligious, and, moreover, directly links itwith the demand for a transformation orovercoming of the ‘ordinary self’. Thequestion of religion, Nishida Kitarmwrites, ‘is neither limited to the problemof objective knowledge, nor to the ques-tion of morals, which concern the Oughtof our willing ego. The questions arerather: What are we? Where are we? Whatis the essence of ourselves?... What makesthe self-being the true self?...’.6 Onlyagainst this background can the call ofNishida’s disciples for a re-transforma-tion of the modern ‘homo oeconomicus’back into an ‘original human being’reveal its significance and pathos. Nishida’s metaphysics also explain whyfor his disciple Kmsaka the salvation ofthe ‘small human being’ is linked withthe salvation of humankind as a whole.Within the limited frame of myremarks, however, I shall restrict myselfto a simple illustration of the linkbetween what we may call the ‘cultiva-tion of the self’ and the ‘salvation ofhumankind’ by quoting some lines fromthe Chinese classic The Great Learning(Daxue). These lines may also shed lighton a certain understanding of the rela-tion between philosophy and politics,which one may recognize in Nishidaand his disciples too:If the things are understood, then under-standing is complete.If understanding is complete, then thethoughts are true.If the thoughts are true, then the mindis in order.If the mind is in order, then the self iscultivated.If the self is cultivated, then the house inorder.If the house is put in order, then the stateis governed properly.If the state is governed properly, thenthere is peace in the world. 7***Christopher S. Goto-Jones has recentlyhighlighted the significance of indige-nous Japanese, non-Western traditionsof political thought to a proper under-standing of Nishida’s political philoso-phy, stressing in particular the criticalpotentials of a Buddhist ‘politics ofawakening’.8 Indeed, the call for an over-coming of the ordinary, selfish self as apre-condition for good governmentimplies a criticism of the state of mindof ordinary men such as the imperialistpolitical and military leaders of war-timeJapan. Some have identified a similarkind of criticism in the call of Nishida’sdisciples for an ‘overcoming of moder-nity’. Still, ambiguity remains. Forbefore the establishment of peace in theworld, the salvation of humankind, orthe emergence of a Buddhist state envi-sioned by Nishida at the end of his life,there was the purgatory of world histo-ry, the affirmation of the war as an asce-tic exercise. And so in the Kymto School’sconcern with the overcoming of the‘ordinary self’ we may also find ananswer to the question asked by the Hei-degger expert Otto Pöggeler, ‘how couldthe Kymto School get so close to the warparties’?9 The historical significance ofthis question, however, must not beoverestimated: neither Alcibiades, northe Japanese ‘war parties’ ever really lis-tened to the philosophers’ advice: ‘Youhave to attend to yourself first!’ <Notes1. Platon, Symposion, 215 d - 216 a, modifiedby author.2. Platon, Alcibiades 1, especially 128 d3. Lanord in an interview in Le Monde, quot-ed from Jürg Altwegg, ‘Wirkt sein Gift nochimmer? Frankreich debattiert über Hei-degger als Hitlers Philosoph’, in Frank-furter Allgemeine Zeitung, Samstag, 21. 5.2005, Nr. 116, p. 31.4. The following quotes are from a series ofthree round-table-discussions (‘Sekai-shiteki tachiba to Nihon’, Tma kymeiken norinrisei to rekishisei’, and ‘Smryokusen notetsugagu’), held by four philosophers ofthe Kymto School (Nishitani Keiji, KmyamaIwao, Kmsaka Masaaki, Suzuki Shigetaka).These symposia were published in thepopular journal ChMM KMron in January1942, , April 1942 and January 1943. 5. ChMM KMron, January 1942, p.1926. Nishida Kitarm, ‘Bashoteki ronri toshmkymteki sekaikan’, in Nishida KitarM zen-shM, 19 vols., Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1978-80, vol XI, p. 412.7. Quoted from Peter Pörtner, Jens Heise, DiePhilosophie Japans – Von den Anfängen biszur Gegenwart, Stuttgart: Kröner, 1995, p.335-338 (English mine).8. Christopher S. Goto-Jones, Political Philos-ophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School, andCo-Prosperity, London and New York: Rout-ledge, 2005. This book inspired my remarks.9. Otto Pöggeler, Neue Wege mit Martin Hei-degger, Freiburg i. B./ München, 1992, p. 88.Christian UhlDept. of Japanese and Korean StudiesLeiden University‘total war’ was ‘the total destruction of the modernstate, society, economy, culture and philosophy’, i.e.the ultimate ‘overcoming of modernity’ itself

'If the self is cultivated,...': some remarks on philosophy and politics in wartime Japan

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'If the self is cultivated,...': some remarks on philosophy and politics in wartime Japan

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