ONE of the Kyoto School’s most vociferous opponents of the Western Marxism that was rapidly creeping into Japan in the second and third decades of the twentieth century was Kiyoshi Miki (1897-1945). Having studied under two of the School’s main figures, Nishida and Tanabe, this controversial figure began life as a poet and went on to lecture on philosophy. In 1922 he went to the German city of Heidelberg and studied under the direction of the Neo-Kantian thinker Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936), meeting a number of other Japanese students in the process. Kiyoshi took a keen interest in the Romantic Idealism of Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), as well as Kierkegaard’s existentialism and Nietzsche’s work on nihilism.
Returning to Japan, Kiyoshi sparked a large degree of controversy for his outspoken approach to politics and for having a love affair with an older woman. The prejudices of his detractors saw him denied a position at Kyoto University and, instead, he was transferred to Tokyo. Strangely enough, although Kiyoshi was opposed to Marxism’s rejection of spirituality he nonetheless became involved with revolutionary workers’ groups that were organising in Japanese factories. This tumultuous period saw him produce several books that were critical of Marxism, including The Material Concept of History (1928), Preliminary Concepts of Social Sciences (1929) and The Morphology of Ideas (1931). Despite being a non-Marxian socialist, however, in January 1930 he was framed when money Kiyoshi had lent to a friend ended up in the hands of the local Communist Party and he was wrongly considered to have financed a subversive organisation and detained for a period of six months. Following his incarceration, Kiyoshi openly distanced himself from Marxism and was widely attacked by the left-wing Proletariat Science Research Institute as a result.
Kiyoshi went on to become the Japanese co-ordinator of the International Hegel League, using his position to campaign for academic freedom and highlight the dangers of Japanese militarism and Nazi totalitarianism. This led to many of his books being banned by the Imperial Government, although Kiyoshi retained his anti-Marxist beliefs and contributed to a traditionalist newspaper called Yomiuri Shimbun. As I mentioned yesterday, although Western commentators have accused the likes of Kiyoshi and various others of being ‘fascists,’ his support for the country’s Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere – by which Japan wished to replace the United States as the region’s geopolitical kingpin – was nonetheless opposed to the increasing aggression of the Japanese Army.
Promoting his ideas through the Shōwa Research Association, which was a highly respected cultural organisation, Kiyoshi eventually found himself disillusioned when some of the key principles were hijacked by the military for propaganda purposes. After spending a year in the Philippines as a correspondent, Kiyoshi was re-arrested in Japan for having sheltered the poet, playwright and Kyoto School dissident Takakura Teru (1891-1986). Kiyoshi eventually died in prison, just forty days after the Second World War ended.
Turning now to philosophy, Kiyoshi wrote a number of books on Western thinkers and these include discussions of Aristotle (384-322 BC) and Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). His magnum opus, Logic of the Imagination, was written over the course of many years and is an attempt to unify the principle of divine reason (logos) with human emotion (pathos). As Kiyoshi explains in his Preface, the
“problem which had continuously occupied my mind was that of how the objective and the subjective, the rational and the irrational, and the intellectual and the emotional could be united. During that period I formulated this problem as that of the unification of logos and pathos, and worked mainly on analyzing the two elements of logos and pathos, which can be found in each and every historical phenomenon, and on articulating the dialectical unification of these elements.”
This was an attempt to improve upon his 1932 work, The Philosophy of History, something he considered too formal and rationalist. Appreciating Kant’s efforts to reconcile understanding with sensibility, Kiyoshi wished to move beyond the idea of human intellect and explore the notion of the individual in relation to his or her embodiment of emotion. Inspired by a combination of Pascal’s “logic of the heart,” Alexander Baumgarten’s (1714-1742) “logic of the imagination” and Théodule-Armand Ribot’s (1839-1916) “logic of the sentiments,” Kiyoshi set out to examine whether there is a form of logic that is not solely reliant upon reason:
“It is through the body that we strike up against things themselves in their physicality. We, as things ourselves, strike up against things. Now, if we refer to the body in its subjectivity as pathos, a logic of things will have to be more than simply a logic of logos; for it will need also to relate to matters of pathos.”
Logic, in other words, cannot account for our daily adventures with suffering and emotion. By acting through our bodies, we encounter another experience of reality and therefore existing philosophical interpretations relating to knowledge and imagination do not take into consideration what Kiyoshi describes as a “logic of praxis”. This, he took from Heidegger’s ontological question of Being and its focus on human existence. Indeed, although it was never published Kiyoshi had already written a book entitled Philosophical Anthropology, in which he explains that unlike the sciences anthropology does not abstract “being from the body”. Rather than relegate the human condition to a study of mind, anthropology ensures that the individual is suitably “animated or ensouled”. As he suggests:
“Actual praxis transcends consciousness and gets out of the inner world. It is by way of the body that praxis exits the inner world, and it is impossible to consider praxis without the principle of embodiment.”
At the same time, by accentuating the importance of pathos Kiyoshi regards the body as “a place of passivity” in which it appears. This passive aspect can seem misleading, however, because Kiyoshi considers the pathos to be active to the point of being a form of self-expression. He calls this “body in subjectivity,” stating that it is pathos which gives rise to the heart and mind that animate the body itself. The mind also becomes embodied, rather than being reduced to mere consciousness:
“There is a double transcendence of consciousness. On the one hand, the relation in which consciousness is determined by external beings, which transcend consciousness in an outward direction, may be termed ‘reflection’ or ‘imitation.’ On the other hand, the relation in which consciousness is determined by the inner body, which transcends consciousness in an inward direction, may be referred to as ‘expression’ or ‘exhibition.’”
This inner dimension of the body is responsible for the artistic creation that transcends pure consciousness. Influenced by Nishida and Nishitani, not to mention Zen Buddhism, Kiyoshi views this “something other” as nothingness and the implication is that we harbour an impulsive aspect that is directed by praxis towards our inner selves with the result that “the world is opened up”:
“It is the ground of human existence that transcends human existence. Such a ground is ‘nothingness.’ Moreover, it is not the relative nothingness that is thought to be the utmost limit of being, but rather the nothingness that envelops even objective being.”
To undergo this process is to experience the pathos that unveils the nothingness at the very core of our being. This is what Kiyoshi means by the “logic of imagination,” something that is not separate from embodiment but relies upon the wellspring of emotion. The praxis of individual action is not simply based on the human passions, however, but is a means of what Masakatsu Fujika has described as “giving form to the formless”. The power of the imagination provides pathos with its objective identity and this is particularly evident in the role of myth. It is here that pathos is enjoined with logos in the sense that myth is centred on religious or moral purpose. Once combined with the use of the intellect, pathos takes shape as an embodied idea. This represents the great marriage of wisdom and emotion.
