THE POSTWAR KYOTO SCHOOL: MASAO ABE
The Kyoto philosophers made important intellectual contributions to the world during the postwar era as well, but they have not touched upon political issues to a significant degree. Instead, they have continued to explore the ways in which Buddhist-inspired thought can enlarge and enrich world philosophy. In particular, Nishitani’s Religion and Nothingness has been recognized as one of the great philosophical works of the latter half of the 20th century. It is also worth mentioning that since the 1980s, Western philosophers and theologians have acknowledged the seminal contributions of Kyoto philosophers such as Nishida, Tanabe, and Nishitani to world philosophy. And following the new revelations in the late 1980s about the depth of Heidegger’s entanglement with Nazism, these same Kyoto philosophers came under attack for their political statements during the Pacific War era. Such attacks were made mostly by Western scholars oriented toward the left, whereas Japanese scholars tended to take a less critical and antagonistic posture toward the Kyoto school’s wartime politics.
Abe’s New Direction
A revealing and somewhat new direction for the Kyoto school, though, was taken during the postwar era by the philosopher Masao Abe (1915–2006). It is this thread that I would like to follow, since a consideration of Abe’s work sheds light on Japan’s highly altered intellectual atmosphere since the end of the war. In fact, his philosophy of religion and culture provides an excellent window on the ways in which Japanese attitudes toward the West shifted as a result of the Pacific War. Significantly, Abe, in the manner of other postwar Kyoto philosophers, studiously avoided taking political stands except to support world peace. And in his most significant divergence from the prewar Kyoto school political orientation, he severely criticized the nation state as a historical evil, while urging that sovereignty rests with humanity. In his view, the outstanding challenge of his era was for humanity to transform itself into a single self-aware entity. It is quite clear that in taking such a strong stand as a global citizen, Abe left the cultural nationalism of the prewar Kyoto school far behind.
Abe furthered Asia’s relationship with the West in three important ways. First, he facilitated the understanding of Buddhism, and especially Zen, in the West, building on the pioneering efforts of D. T. Suzuki. Second, in his numerous encounters with Christian and Jewish theologians, Abe played a major role in building interfaith dialogue during the last decades of the 20th century and his dialogical approach to world theology and philosophy of religion helped bring the spiritual traditions of Buddhism and Judeo-Christianity closer together. And third, he argued that humanity’s most pressing need is to awaken to itself as one and that spirituality must be the basis for humanity’s coming together as one entity.
The main thrust of the prewar Kyoto school was to make a significant Japanese contribution to world philosophy. But Abe did not make any striking and original additions to the ideas that Nishida, Tanabe, and Nishitani had already set forth. Instead, one of his major accomplishments was to compare Zen philosophy with the philosophical traditions of the West and to detail precisely the ways in which Zen was both similar and different to aspects of Western philosophy. In this respect, he resembles D. T. Suzuki who introduced Zen to the West.
Abe set up three fundamental categories for human thought: Being, the concept at the heart of Aristotle’s philosophy, Nothingness, as represented by Zen, and the universal Ought that is the basis of Kant’s philosophy. He made the point that Zen is not concerned with concepts and, in fact, destroys them. Nevertheless, when one attempts to formulate the Zen position in philosophical language, it must be placed in the metaphysical category of Nothingness.
In his article “Zen and Western Thought,” Abe took care to focus on both the strengths and weaknesses of Zen as philosophy. Unlike cultural nationalists, he did not emphasize Zen’s uniqueness. Nor did he insist on the superiority of the standpoint of Non-thinking and the advisability of rejecting all scriptures and teachings. Rather, his approach was comparative throughout as he elucidates Zen’s strengths and weaknesses.
Abe located the strength of Zen in its ability to have no attachment to thinking. This enables the self to experience itself from the inside. It also recognizes, in the manner of Kant, that theoretical reason can never know things as they truly are. Therefore, Zen enables one to act from No-mind which then gives life to one’s thoughts. Only such action is truly free.
For Abe, the main weakness of Zen was that its approach of Non-thinking often ended up as merely not-thinking, that is, the failure to think. Zen sometimes falls short of inspiring positive and creative thinking that can address the major ethical and social issues of our time, even though it is capable of doing so. Thus, the challenge that Zen faces as a world religion is that it must become an effective historical force. By embracing Western standpoints of substantial existence (“Being”) and ethics (“Ought”) that are encountered in dialogue with Western philosophers and theologians, Zen renews its own perspective and becomes more complete. It can then combine the theoretical acuity and practical efficacy of Western thought with the self-mastery and nonattachment to thought and action that Zen makes possible.
Dialogue with Other Religions
Cultural nationalist rhetoric is not present in Abe’s encounters with Christian and Jewish theologians. Moreover, he goes far beyond making just the obvious point that Buddhism and Western religions need to understand each other better and learn from each other. Instead, he maintained that religions can help each other achieve a more subtle and accurate understanding of spiritual experience. For example, in all religions there is a level of awareness in which a personal God disappears and the emptying of God takes place. This experience of kenosis has been identified by Christian mystics such as Eckhart but has not been emphasized within Christian theology. In such experience, according to Abe, self-awakening takes place and brings the practitioner to the deepest spiritual realm. This is an insight from the Buddhist tradition that can help Christians fortify their own understanding and practice.
Abe’s interpretation of kenosis derives from the primordial Christian notion that God is love. If God is all-loving, then He negates and empties Himself by identifying himself with all that exists. In response to Abe’s interpretation, the eminent Roman Catholic theologian Hans Kung asserted that Abe had imposed Buddhist categories on Christian texts. Abe’s response was that this was not his intention. He stated that he was interpreting Christian texts from a standpoint within the Christian tradition itself, although his interpretations may violate orthodox ones. Therefore, his argument for a particular textual interpretation should be evaluated rationally. If his argument is valid, then he has helped to strengthen Christianity’s understanding of itself while opening up new conceptual resources.
Abe’s aim was to shore up religion at a time when anti-religious forces were presenting very powerful attacks on the veracity and efficacy of religion. These challenges required religions to deepen and revitalize themselves by radically reexamining their self-understanding. They would only be able to successfully defend their own positions against attack by reinvigorating them in interreligious dialogue. Therefore, Abe believed that his reinterpretations of Christian doctrines were salutary and beneficial for Christianity itself.
At the same time, Abe was saying that Buddhists can greatly benefit from dialogue with Christians. They can recognize the importance of justice and righteousness and attempt to develop a deep awareness of social ethics similar to what exists in the West. It is not enough for Buddhists to show that thought and action is truly spiritual when it comes from a place beyond the rational mind. Buddhists also need to show how such thought and action can effectively deal with social inequality and injustice. In Abe’s view, Buddhists can utilize the qualities of wisdom and compassion as the basis for a new notion of justice, thereby compensating for a notable shortcoming of Buddhist philosophy until now.
Abe on Humanity As a Self-Aware Entity
Abe considered internalizing and grasping humanity as a self-aware entity as the most urgent need of our time. World peace is only possible through the self-negation of both individuals and nations. It is only by awakening to the original Self that this goal can be achieved. Such an awakening involves the overcoming of the ego, the source of division and conflict. Going beyond the ego leads to the erasure of not only the distinction between self and others but also of that between self and nature. In going beyond the ego, humanity self-awakens as a single living entity. Then humanity is sovereign, not the nation. This sovereignty comes from and is established by humanity negating itself and acting with wisdom and compassion.
When Abe declared that the national consciousness has become a historical evil, he made a decisive break with the outlook of the prewar Kyoto philosophers. Rather than assigning any particular nation such as Japan a world historical mission, Abe bluntly asserted that the nation-state had become demonic and that the age of the nation-state was over. The vast military power of nations cannot be checked by individuals, and sovereign states do not engage in self-negation.
On this point the earlier Kyoto philosophers were naïve and overly optimistic. They believed that the Japanese government with its immense military power could be restrained by relatively conscious intellectual elites. It was their hope that the Japanese government would act in a self-negating way, and they tried to use their connections with the Japanese navy to influence politics and policy. But the result was that many individuals were sent to their deaths in the name of the sovereign power of the nation.
In Abe’s vision, as individuals come to exist in the expanse of Self-awakening, they build solidarity and live cooperatively as a single humanity. This is a spiritual process in which individuals take a transcendent standpoint as their original Self awakens. It involves the overcoming of anthropocentrism and the anti-nature bias of modern Western ideologies.
But this awareness of Oneness among God, humanity, and the universe will not lead to the swallowing up of the individual and the loss of individual freedom. Here again, the contrast between Abe’s view and that of the prewar Kyoto philosophers is instructive. Abe sees races and peoples as cultural and ethical rather than political groupings. In a single world, humanity will be mediated by free individuals acting creatively on the basis of cultural identity rather than by nations organized to maximize power. The reference point, for Abe, was no longer the Japanese nation as a family state united by a royal figure and serving as a model for other family states. Rather, the individual’s home is the entire cosmos as it awakens to its true nature. The model Abe presented resembles an anarchist utopia rather than the paternal and authoritarian state that existed in prewar Japan.
The clear continuities between Abe’s work and that of the prewar Kyoto philosophers should not be ignored. Like Nishida, Tanabe, and Nishitani, Abe presented modern Japanese thought to the world. Together, these Kyoto philosophers demonstrated that philosophy and theology could no longer remain provincial and Eurocentric. But instead of trying to overcome Western modernity, Abe saw the thinkers of the modern West as partners for dialogue. In the late 20th century, the time seemed right for him to spread Japanese thought. Defending Japan from being swamped by Western ideas no longer claimed the high priority that it did during the Pacific War.
Abe in Relation to Postwar Japan
Abe’s new focus and less political outlook in comparison with the early Kyoto philosophers was a response to vast historical changes as well as Japan’s own transformation. In prewar times, many Japanese felt that the West would never accept Japan as an equal because of Western racism and desire for domination. The solution was to withdraw from the wider world and set up a regional grouping where Japanese overall excellence would be recognized and its contributions appreciated.
Japan’s defeat in World War II removed the regionalist solution as an option. As economic development replaced military strength as the national purpose, the Japanese outlook once again became internationalist. Recognition from the West and integration of Japan into the world economy became the national goals that would be accomplished through economic rather than military means. Of course, American policy played an indispensable role in facilitating this radical change of direction. The American government ensured that the Japanese economy would be seamlessly integrated into global capitalism and made its own domestic market available to Japanese goods. It also used Japan’s economic success as a high-profile example for other Asian nations to follow in order to combat the allure of socialist economic systems.
Within the vastly altered circumstances of the postwar era, there were basically two possibilities for Japanese cultural policy. One was to choose isolation and cultivate Japan’s own cultural garden while protecting it from foreign influence. This approach could be rationalized by saying that non-Japanese are unable to understand Japanese culture in any case. Many Japanese have taken this cultural nationalist stance and claimed that Japanese culture is unique and totally different from Western culture. This often leads to a cultural and ethical relativist position that denies the existence of any universal standards and warns against judging Japanese practices according to Western values. When the Japanese economy became very strong in the 1980s and early 1990s, Japan’s excellence in scientific and technological fields as well as management was largely attributed to the influence of Japan’s traditional culture rather than to the adaptation of Western models.
For these Japanese cultural nationalists, cultures have largely fixed essences and almost totally separate existences. Instead of welcoming cultural exchange as a means of strengthening one’s own culture, their approach has been to strengthen Japanese culture by keeping out foreign people. However, given Japan’s need to develop its economy through exports and the necessity of active trading with the West, such cultural nationalism could be viewed as a somewhat unrealistic and counterproductive strategy. In practice, what they have advocated is to selectively import culture from the West and then Japanize it. Japan’s uniqueness is then defined as the ability to take from other cultures, modify what is taken from the outside, and create a recognizably Japanese culture from the mixture.
The other choice was the one taken by Abe, that is, to become proficient at English and to bring Japanese culture to the attention of the rest of the world. Abe did much to bring Buddhism to the attention of philosophers and theologians in the West. Still, the impact of Asian thought within Western philosophy and theology has been limited. For the most part, philosophy departments have remained culturally insular and hardly aware of the issues addressed by philosophers outside the West. Divinity schools, though, have had a better record, and Abe was engaged in dialogues with an impressive number of leading Christian theologians. Even though Abe often met walls of cultural resistance, he accomplished much.
Abe’s departure from the cultural orientation of the early Kyoto philosophers can be attributed to Japan’s defeat in the war. But after a period of 50 years, the challenges presented by history had changed as well. In the 1930s, national independence and cultural recognition were the paramount issues for non-Western peoples. By the 1970s, the colonial system had been dismantled for the most part. Economically developing nations, especially those in East Asia, were poised to follow Japan and become integrated into global capitalism.
The Challenge of One World
Under these new conditions, the challenge on the horizon was to become one world. Could a human identity follow in the wake of a globalizing economy? Abe was acute in perceiving that the traditional cultures of the East could play a key part in the realization of a single human identity. He saw this next challenge as fundamentally spiritual in nature. His preferred way of meeting this challenge was for both Eastern and Western religions to renew themselves through interfaith dialogue. As a result, religions would no longer be Eastern or Western in character. In throwing off cultural provincialism, they would become truly world religions and capable of guiding individuals to an inclusive human identity. Religion, instead of being a divisive force leading to conflict, would become a catalyst for awareness of human unity.
Abe did not view any present-day nation as having incorporated the ideal of human unity into its policies. Unlike Nishida, Tanabe, and Nishitani, Abe did not see Japan as the vehicle for the realization of his own vision. Although he was supported by the Japan Foundation, a Japanese governmental organization, he neither introduced a political dimension into his work nor tried to exert political influence. Thus he avoided the fateful step taken by the early Kyoto philosophers that led to their entanglement with Japanese nationalism and their departure from the universalist principles embedded in their religious philosophies.
Through Abe’s efforts, the potential of the Kyoto philosophers for actually bridging cultures has been realized. The early Kyoto philosophers made an impressive contribution to world religious philosophy, and in recent years, their work has been translated to a far greater degree and made more accessible to the rest of the world. But it was Abe who transmitted at the personal level the insights of the great Buddhist thinkers to teachers and students in the West, following the pioneering work of D. T. Suzuki.
What then are the implications of the Kyoto school’s experience for relations between Asia and the West? In Philosophers of Nothingness, his study of the leading Kyoto philosophers, James Heisig draws an arresting conclusion. “One has, deliberately or otherwise, to ignore the greatest bulk of the writings of these thinkers to arrive at the conclusion that anything approaching or supporting the imperialistic ideology of wartime Japan belongs to the fundamental inspiration of their thought. Insofar as any of them did willingly add support, it may be considered an aberration from their own intellectual goals.” This may be an overly generous interpretation of what the Kyoto philosophers actually were doing but Abe has brought the universalistic impulses that were clearly present in the Kyoto philosophers right from the start to fruition and for that he deserves much credit.
