This'll be my last post in this thread also. ;p I just had to post this article (get the .pdf if you have access, the formatting's bad here) because it touches on so many ideas that I agree with it's scary, at least the sections relevant to topics here. Sorry for the length:
SUSHI, SCIENCE, AND SPIRITUALITY: MODERN JAPANESE PHILOSOPHY AND ITS VIEWS OF WESTERN SCIENCE - Thomas Kasulis
Japan seems to present two profiles to the West. One is that of a West-
ernized nation that is a major economic power in the world. Seeing the
skyscrapers of Tokyo's downtown districts, hearing Western rock or
classical music even in village coffee shops, or tasting the French cuisine
of its fine restaurants, it is easy for one to think of Japan as part of the
Western-based family of cultures. This face of Japan seems to confirm the
interpretation of Habermas and others that European rationality is dom-
inating the world. We might be led to expect that with the passage of
time, Japan will become, if anything, even more like the West.
Yet, there is also the other, non-Western, profile as well. It appears to
the consternation of foreign business people trying to establish Western-
like contractual relations with Japanese corporations. It appears to the
frustration of social scientists in their attempts to apply to the Japanese
context Western models of social, political, or economic analysis. It
appears even to philosophers who have tried to study Japanese thought.
Charles Moore, the founder of the East-West Philosophers' Conferences
half a century ago, felt able to write authoritatively about the "Chinese
mind" and the "Indian mind." When he tried to write about the "Jap-
anese mind," however, he could do no better than call it "enigmatic."1
These reactions raise serious questions about how really "Western" Jap-
anese rationality has become.
In short, Japan is a striking example of an Asian nation that has been
successful at Western-style industrialization, technological development,
and capitalistic expansion. Still, it has somehow also kept much of its
own values and modes of behavior. How can this Western thinking and
Japanese thinking exist in the same culture? Part of the answer is
undoubtedly social or historical and best left to the analyses of specialists
in those fields. Part of it is also philosophical, however. Since the major
influx of Western ideas and technology into Japan in the latter half of the
nineteenth century, Japanese philosophers have often addressed these
very issues. In particular, they have asked (1) what the Western form of
scientific and technological thinking is and (2) how it might function in
Japan without eroding spiritual and moral values traditional to East Asia.
In this essay we will briefly examine two philosophical strategies
representative of trends in modern Japanese philosophy. First, we will
examine the early twentieth-century thought of Nishida Kitaro and his
attempt to put Western science into its place, a logical realm subordinate
to that of ethics, spirituality, and aesthetics. Second, we will explore how a
contemporary Japanese philosopher, Yuasa Yasuo, has seen a possible
complementarity between modern Western science, especially medi-
cine, and traditional Asian thought about the mind-body complex.
Before discussing either philosophical approach, however, we need a
sketch of the historical and cultural context of the Japanese encounter
with Western thought. Only against that background can we clearly
frame the problematics of modern Japanese philosophy.
To frame the specifics of the historical circumstances under which
Western thought entered modern Japan, it is first useful to consider gen-
erally how ideas move from one culture to the next. Often, of course,
they are imposed on a culture by a foreign military occupation. Until
1945, Japan was not in such a situation, however, and by then its inter-
nal processes of modernization (or Westernization) were already well
under way. For that reason, there has been no prominent modern Jap-
anese philosophy of "decolonization" as there has been in twentieth-
century Indian, African, Islamic, and (to a lesser extent) Chinese thought.
Even among Japanese critics of Westernization, the rhetoric has usually
not been what "they" (Westerners) have done to "us" (Japanese), but
what "we" have done to "ourselves."
In short, Westernization was somewhat like an import item for Japan
in the free marketplace of ideas. The issue may have been conditioned
by external circumstances (most notably, the expansion of Western
imperialist powers into Asia and the Pacific), but to some extent, at least,
the Japanese welcomed the imported product. The question is: under
what circumstances does a culture freely accept foreign ideas? This is
too complex an issue to address fully here. It is easy to let such a ques-
tion drift off into abstract dialectics concerning the logic of intercultural
(mis-)understanding, however. So, for our background purposes, let us
simply pursue for a bit the marketplace analogy. How does a product
penetrate a foreign market? First, there must be a system of distribution:
the product must be made available to the foreign market. Second,
the product must develop an attractive image in the new culture. Third,
the product must meet some need, or generate some need, in the per-
ception of the potential consumers. Last, the product must suit the tastes
of its new cultural home.
To explain these basic categories further, let us consider an extended
analogy: the rapidly growing number of sushi restaurants in U.S. urban
areas. How can we understand this phenomenon in terms of the mar-
ketplace principles just outlined? It is not simply the inherent taste of sushi that has given it its market
niche in the American restaurant industry. Since the 1950s it has been
common knowledge in the United States that the Japanese eat raw fish,
yet few Americans wanted to try it. The issue, therefore, is what moti-
Philosophy East & West vated Americans to want to try it. What changed between the 1950s and
228 the 1980s such that a broadening spiral of supply and demand could
develop? The most obvious difference, of course, was the emergence of Japan
as a powerful economic presence in the world generally and in the
U.S. specifically.
This economic change caused more Japanese business
executives to reside temporarily in the United States, thereby establishing
the demographic base in large cities for economically supporting a small
number of local sushi restaurants. At the same time, more Americans
visited Japan for business reasons, often sampling the local fare as part of
the hospitality extended by Japanese business associates. Hence, avail-
ability increased. Furthermore, as Japan became one of the richest
countries in the world, Americans came to admire its power. Americans
began to think it worthwhile to emulate the Japanese, not merely observe
them from afar as a land of exotica. Hence, we find the principles of
availability/distribution and positive image.
One Japanese quality Americans admired was their health. The
average Japanese male's life expectancy was almost a decade longer
than the average American's. One factor in
maintaining that health might be the Japanese low-fat, low-cholesterol diet. As the young American
professionals of the baby boom years approached middle age and began
to worry about heart disease, the "power lunch" of raw beef and egg so
fashionable on Wall Street in the early 1980s was increasingly replaced
by foods like sushi. This data shows that sushi was perceived as fitting a
societal need to shift dietary habits. The third criterion of the marketplace
was met. The first three factors combined to create a context in which a sig-
nificant number of Americans would try eating sushi. Then, the fourth
condition could be met. If the Americans would acquire a taste for the
new food-if they found sushi to be a desirable dietary option-it would
become possible for sushi bars to establish a market niche in the Amer-
ican restaurant business. That is what seems to have happened.
Similar conditions had to be met for Japan to assimilate Western
ideas, science, and technology. There were two major periods of influx
from the West: the sixteenth century and the modern period starting in
the mid- to late nineteenth century. In the first case, Westernization was
eventually rejected, whereas in the modern period, it has been accepted.
Let us briefly examine each case in terms of the four conditions just
outlined.
The first factor is availability. In the sixteenth century, Westernization
was offered to Japan primarily via Spanish and Portuguese Jesuits and
Franciscans. Following the arrival of the missionaries, there was a mod-
erate amount of trade between those European countries (including the
Dutch shortly later) and Japan.
The second factor is the positive image of the host culture. The
power trappings of Europeanization and Christianity were dual. First,
they brought knowledge of the outside world. Maps helped explain the
geopolitical constitution of the lands beyond Asia. These were relevant
to assessing the opportunities and dangers of future contact with Europe.
The Japanese also found the foreigners fascinating: the aristocrats and
samurai experimented with things European, including Portuguese dress.
The Japanese admired the European worldliness, including the news,
ideas, and goods they brought from afar. It might be noted, however, that
the Japanese did find the Europeans rather crude culturally. There was
some interest in Western foods (sukiyaki, for example, apparently devel-
oped as an attempt to make a Portuguese stew with native ingredients)
and some exposure to Western art, but in general the Japanese felt more
consternation than admiration for the unbathed, bearded barbarians.
Most importantly, however, the Europeans brought new technology:
some medical and scientific knowledge, but also the military technology
of rifles and cannon. This brings us to the third condition-internal need.
For centuries preceding the arrival of the Westerners, Japan had
been in a state of civil war, in which various barons were jockeying for
territory and political power. There was the need for unification under a
new military-political order. The strife ended with the rise to power of
three successive military dictators: Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582), Toyo-
tomi Hideyoshi (1536-1598), and Tokugawa leyasu (1542-1616). His
mastery of Western firearms helped Nobunaga dominate the country
militarily, for example. The new leaders initially respected and encour-
aged Christianity as an aid to unification. They feared the political and
military power of the Buddhist sects, many of them having their own
militia of armed monks, often numbering in the thousands. Therefore,
conversion of the populace to Christianity was not only tolerated, but to
some extent encouraged.
In short, the introduction of both Western weaponry
and Western religious ideas together served the need of uni-
fying the country under the hegemony of the respective military dictators.
The support for these Western influences soon eroded, however.
Ironically, this happened because Christianity and weapons technology
no longer served the purposes of protecting the sovereignty of the mili-
tary elite. Hideyoshi learned that the history of the world outside Japan
showed that where European missionaries went, European navies and
armies soon followed. That hundreds of thousands of Japanese might
have a spiritual bond with priests connected to the imperialist courts of
Europe was not an idea that Hideyoshi and leyasu relished. Christianity
was, therefore, first persecuted and then proscribed.
The Tokugawa shoguns also realized that guns did not serve the
purpose of a unified state under an iron-fisted rule. A peasant can be
taught to fire a rifle in a few hours and kill a samurai swordsman who has
spent decades perfecting his skill. Furthermore, ten men with rifles and
cannon could kill a hundred archers and swordsmen. Hence, by the
1630s guns were, in effect, banned.4 If the Tokugawas could ensure that
only the samurai had power and that this power was strictly controlled
by regulating the numbers and locations of the samurai, they could
effectively rule the country through a central bureaucracy. They did so
for over 250 years. During most of that time, with the exception of a few
Dutch traders who visited an outlying island under scrupulous super-
vision, Japan closed itself off from European contact. Hence, the Euro-
peanization process lasted for less than a century, and its effects were
intentionally restricted severely.
The influx of Western scientific ideas nurtured a burgeoning Jap-
anese interest in studying the material world. It might be thought that
Japanese intellectuals would be hesitant to relinquish that interest. It is
significant, however, that Neo-Confucianism, especially that of Zhu Xi, *,
also entered Japan in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, primarily via
Zen Buddhist monks who brought back to Japan texts acquired during
their pilgrimages to China. In that Neo-Confucian tradition there was
also the notion of investigating natural things to understand their laws or
principles. So, although there was not the mathematical dimension
emergent in the contemporary Western science, Neo-Confucianism did
offer an empirical interest in the ways of nature.6 The Tokugawa sh6guns
opted to support that East Asian empiricism over its Western counterpart.
Why? Partly because Neo-Confucianism framed its naturalism within a
social ethic, a dimension of its system that the shogunate could use as
part of its state ideology. In short, although Western science and tech-
nology were available in the sixteenth century and although they often
had the right image, their practical need was limited and temporary.
They also lacked the ethical orientation to fit the image of the state that
the Tokugawa shoguns had wanted to foster. So, it was marginalized.
The second Europeanizing phase in Japan is more pertinent to our
philosophical purposes. When Commodore Perry forced Japan to open
its ports to trade with the West in 1853, Japan once again encountered
Westernization in a dynamic and disturbing way. Accessibility to the
West had suddenly become a given. The West was at Japan's doorstep,
and unlike the early seventeenth century, Japan was no longer
in a position to tell it to go away. Japan felt squeezed and threatened. The
United States had expanded across North America and into the Pacific;
Britain and France were sweeping across the Asian and African con-
tinents; and Japan's nearest mainland neighbors, China and Russia, were
countries of continental dimension.
The second condition for developing a taste for the foreign was also
clearly present-a respect for the foreign culture. Western technology,
including the technology of warfare, had developed enormously since
Japan's last direct contact. The Tokugawa shoguns had kept Japan in a
basically feudal mode for about 250 years. Japan envisioned two possi-
ble destinies: either be a pawn in the imperialist power plays of European
and North American expansion or be an imperialist power in its own
right through extensive economic, political, social, and technological
reconstruction. It chose the latter course. It undertook an extensive pro-
gram to modernize all sectors of the society: the government, education,
industry, and the economy. Much of this movement was obviously a
response to the outside threat of imperialist encroachment. At the same
time, however, it was a response to an internally generated need-our
third condition for accepting the foreign.
The Western intrusion came toward the end of a process of national
change. The power of the sh6guns had waned over the decades, and
thoughts of revolutionary change had been brewing for some time.
Through information leaking into the country via the heavily restricted
trade with the Dutch, intellectuals were at least peripherally aware of the
scientific, medical, and technological revolution occurring
in the West.
Hence, the internal desire for political and social reform dovetailed with
the fear of foreign encroachment. Together, they supported the moder-
nization movement. By the early twentieth century, Japan had achieved a marked suc-
cess. It had defeated both China and Russia in wars and had signed a
major pact with Great Britain that treated the two countries more as
equals. The development of science and technology had become a high
priority in education, politics, and the economy.7 There could be no
turning back. The new Japanese industrial society had an enormous
appetite for natural resources not available within its own archipelago.
Modeling itself on its Western imperialist mentors, Japan looked to
secure its supply of resources overseas on the Asian mainland and
throughout the Pacific Basin. Japan had become an imperialist power
and had set into motion a sequence of events that would result in the
Pacific theater of World War II.
It is clear, therefore, that the first three conditions-accessibility,
respect for the foreign culture, and internal need-were met. Japan had
had a profound taste of Westernization. The issue was now whether that
taste was palatable and desirable. In the early part of the Meiji period
(1868-1912), intellectuals had expressed the hope that Japan could
modernize without changing its underlying cultural value system. This
ideal had been expressed in the slogan "Eastern morality and Western
techniques" (t6y6d6toku to seiy6geijutsu) popularized by Sakuma Sho-
zan (1811-1864), for example. The more the Japanese intellectuals
studied Western culture, however, the more skeptical they grew about
the possibility of changing their country's social, economic, and political
system without also changing its religious and moral values. Toward the
end of the nineteenth century, for example, there was even an idea that
science and Christianity had developed together so intimately in the
West that it might be advisable for the Japanese emperor to convert to
Christianity. The pro-Christian contingent did not win out in the end, and
the emperor remained the chief priest of Shint6. Still, many prominent
families in the modernization movement did convert. Even today,
although Japan is only one percent Christian, Christianity's influence
among higher social and economic classes is inordinately strong.
The examples of Sakuma's slogan and the plan to baptize the
emperor are revealing. Obviously, even early on, the Japanese were
acutely aware of two philosophically significant points. First, Western
science and technology seemed to be packaged with a value system,
one that at least appeared inimical to traditional Japanese values. Sec-
ond, many intellectuals sensed that the historical development of the
Western economy and the technological world it governed were some-
how related to Christianity. Yet, they also sensed, much to their credit,
that the connection between Western science and Western values and
the connection between Western economics or politics and Western
religion were contingent historical facts, not logical necessities. That is,
they did not make the common mistake of assuming that what had hap-
pened had to have happened. They would, almost from the start, hope
that they could have Western economic and technological development
without adopting Western values in religion, ethics, and aesthetics. Was
this hope justified? This has been a major issue in modern Japanese phi-
losophy.
In exploring this issue, we must be wary of Western cultural
assumptions about science. In the West, one often thinks of scientific
thinking as acultural, a universal form of theory and practice transcending
national boundaries. Unlike art, religion, society, and even morals, we
do not tend to speak of, say, French physics as opposed to Indian phys-
ics, or German biology as opposed to Chinese biology. Certainly, there
may have been indigenous Asian ideas about physical things or life, but
they were not "scientific" in the modern Western sense of a science
involving empirical observation, controlled experiment, and mathemat-
ical modeling. Certainly, there is much truth in that view of science. (Only in the
past couple of decades has the West undertaken a postmodern critique
of science, increasingly treating it as a social and cultural construction.)
Yet, it is also true that the view of modern technology in Japan is quite
different from the one dominant in the West. We must remember that it is
the West that invented the modern scientific method of discovery and
the technological principles for applying what was learned. Japan, as it
has with so many other things that have become important to itself,
imported the very idea of modern Western science. For the West, scien-
tific thinking was a natural culmination of a sequence of ideas and trends
in its history. It developed science originally as a way of discovering the
laws, at first assumed to be the divine laws, of the universe. Assuming
God gave humans the rationality to find the divine pattern, early modern
Western scientists reasoned that it was their destiny to use that knowl-
edge to complete the act of creation, to modify the world, to make it a
better place.
For the Japanese, however, the modern scientific and technological
mode of thinking came from outside only about 150 years ago. With
their traditional Buddhist and yin-yang notions that the world is always in
a process of change, technological alteration was accepted as part of the
natural order. Nature is changing, so we must adapt to it. Indeed, we
are part of the natural change itself. From the traditional Japanese per-
spective, human technology is as natural as, say, the technology of a
beaver. It is not part of a divine plan.
This raises doubts about the common Western presupposition that
science and technology must destroy traditional, nonmodern, non-
Western forms of human rationality, values, and spirituality.
We often forget what modern science's own ideology is supposed to maintain:
science is essentially value-free. The problem is that the Western tradi-
tion has intimately connected science with scientism, that is, with the
belief that the scientific way of knowing is somehow primary, founda-
tional, or privileged. We should also note that in our scientism, we tend
to collapse science into the realm of physics, that is, the discipline which
gives a mathematical model for the forces of the universe. The Galileos,
Keplers, and Newtons were interested in finding the key to explaining
the universe. Mathematics became that key. To go from the idea that
mathematics is the key for all scientific knowledge to the idea that sci-
entific knowledge is the key for all knowledge in general was obviously a
great leap, but one that enthusiasm could span. Westerners were seeking
a replacement for the medieval science of theology; they wanted a sin-
gle, holistic theory that would yield the one great, uppercase Truth.
The Japanese, on the other hand, were not traditionally looking
for that. They were often interested in having a set of lowercase truths, each
getting the job done for the task at hand. For them, truths were not
monolithic but plural, not holistic but partial. The truth varies with the
context. Without context, there is no truth."1 As Zen Master D6gen
(1200-1253) argued in the "Genj6okan" chapter of his Shdobgenzo, the
fish is correct to see the ocean as a translucent emerald palace.
The human being far out at sea is correct to see the ocean as a great circle.
The celestial deities are correct to see the ocean as shining like a string
of jewels in the sunlight. They are incorrect only
if they claim that their view is the only correct view.12 Therefore, the Japanese
had the ten- dency to accept science without its being a scientism. Science is true
within its own context; traditional Japanese values in religion, ethics, and
234 aesthetics are also true within their own contexts. This interpretation of
science as no more than one example of multiple, equally valid con-
textual systems was sometimes found in turn-of-the-century Japanese
philosophy.
As students of Western philosophy, however, Japanese thinkers
began to see difficulties in a theory of contextual truth that did not
articulate any hierarchy or criterion of appropriateness for the different
contexts. In such a philosophy, there could be no overall consistency,
nor any dialectic progress toward an ever more inclusive system. Surely,
it was thought, some forms of rationality necessarily evolve out of others;
some forms of thinking are simply of a higher order than others. Once a
culture develops science, it does not go back to animism. At least such
was the argument of Western thinkers like Comte and
Hegel, and the early twentieth-century Japanese philosophers were acutely aware
of their theories. Is scientific knowledge somehow higher than, say, reli-
gious ways of explaining and assimilating reality? Is scientism-a possi-
ble byproduct of Westernization-philosophically justified? If so,
Western technique could not logically exist alongside Asian morality.
These concerns were anticipated by Japanese philosophers early in
this century. Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945), the founder of the Kyoto
School, ruminated about this problem throughout his career. We will
consider two major phases of his thought. The first phase was
developed mainly in his first book, An Inquiry into the Good (Zen no kenkyQ),
written in 1911.
Inquiry into the Good was written at the very end of
the Meiji period, a time when Japanese national confidence was on the
upswing and the country had the opportunity to reflect seriously on the
full implication of Westernization. In that pioneering work, indeed in all
his works to follow, Nishida struggled with the great philosophical issue
of his time-the juxtaposition of Western science and technology with
traditional Japanese values. If Japanese values were to coexist alongside
Western empiricism, there would have to be a common philosophical
structure embracing and grounding the two. Otherwise, Japan would,
intellectually, at least, suffer a cultural schizophrenia.
As a philosopher, Nishida was able to take the issue out of its cul-
ture-bound form (such as the question of whether the emperor should
become Christian in order to help modernization) and universalize it into
the classic Western problem of the relation between fact (is) and value
(ought). In this way, Nishida saw himself addressing a fundamental philo-
sophical question, not just a cultural problem. One option open to
Nishida was to follow the route of Hume and Kant, bifurcating fact and
value into two separate domains and (for Kant) two different kinds of
reasoning. This approach would, of course, affirm the possibility of sep-
arating Western science from Japanese values. But at what cost? Nishida
knew that such a separation of is and ought was itself a divergence from
the Eastern tradition. It was, in the final analysis, a Western approach to
the problem, and it would indeed seem strange that only a foreign way of
thinking could justify preserving Japanese values.
So Nishida tried to bring fact and value, empiricism and morality (or
religion or art), back together in a way consonant with the Asian tradi-
tion. At the same time, he thought his theory should be Western enough
in form to serve the needs of an increasingly Westernized society. Here
Nishida, like his childhood and lifelong friend D. T. Suzuki, found the
writing of William James particularly provocative.15 Rather than analyze
science and value as two unrelated systems of reason, Nishida used
James' notion of "pure experience" to articulate the common experi-
ential flow toward unity underlying both the scientific and valuational
enterprises. The surface differences notwithstanding, on a deeper level,
science, morality, art, and religion share a single preconceptual drive (or
"will") to unity. On the intellectual level, Nishida called this process
"the intellectual intuition." Such was the basic thrust of his maiden
philosophical work. This solution to the fact/value, or is/ought, dilemma also satisfied
Nishida as a practicing Zen Buddhist. Zen's ideal is the achievement of a
preconceptual state of experiential purity ("no-mind") that becomes
enacted pragmatically in various concrete ways, including thought.'6 For
both James and Zen, thought is the temporary response to a break in the
original unity of experience, a response which is itself intended to bring
back the original unity of the experience. As Nishida put it, "pure
experience is the alpha and omega of thought."
Inquiry into the Good became immediately popular among Japanese
intellectuals and is probably today still the best-known work in modern
philosophy among the Japanese. It is questionable how many of those
intellectuals actually fathomed the nuances of Nishida's theory, but the
major point for them was that Nishida had made Western-style philoso-
phizing into something Japanese. His writing style had a Western ring to
it, yet its fundamental insights were consistent with Japanese tradition.
With Inquiry into the Good, modern Japanese philosophy-the so-called
Ky6to or Nishida School-was born.
As Nishida's philosophical thinking further matured, however, he
grew dissatisfied with Inquiry into the Good-not with its purpose, but
with its philosophical form, its structural presuppositions. In particular,
he criticized its psychologism (or "mysticism," as he sometimes called
it). At the heart of his uneasiness was that Inquiry into the Good had
attempted to solve the problem of the science/value split by appealing to
a kind of experience, asserting it to be the ground of both the is and the
ought. Nishida's readings in the Neo-Kantians during the period shortly
after the publication of Inquiry into the Good made him sensitive to the
problem of how forms of judgment, rather than strata of experience,
236 interrelate.17 That is, his concerns shifted from philosophical psychology
to epistemology.
Throughout his life, Nishida constructed and subsequently razed his
own attempts at systematic philosophy. He was an adamant critic of his
own work and never seemed satisfied with the mode of explanations he
had developed thus far. So the second phase of his thought rejected the
idea that Inquiry into the Good had explained anything at all; it had
simply described the drive of consciousness toward unification. One
problem was that the psychologistic standpoint could only trace the
evolution of thought in the individual's experiential process. It could, for
example, describe how the desire for unity would lead to the emergence
of scientific, moral, and religious thinking. But what about the fields of
science, morality, and religion themselves? How can we analyze the
interrelation of their claims without limiting them to modes in the biog-
raphy of a particular person's own experience? It is, after all, one matter
to say that my empirical, moral, aesthetic, and religious experiences
relate to each other, and quite another matter to say that science, mor-
ality, art, and religion are related. The first is to connect experiences
within myself, the latter to connect kinds of judgments about what is
right. Nishida was impressed with the Neo-Kantian attempts to articulate
and explain the rationale of judgments and came to believe his earlier,
Jamesian view to be overly subjectivistic.
This new interest led Nishida to examine more closely the structure
of judgmental form, what he called its "logic" (ronri). The fundamental
insight he explored was that any judgment necessarily arises out of a
particular contextual field, place, or topos. The Japanese word for this
contextual field is basho. There may be a plurality of truths and contexts,
but how do those contexts interrelate? In effect, Nishida wanted to argue
for the priority of the religious over both the idealist and empiricist, over
both the psychologistic and the scientific. Although his argument was
complex and refined or revised over many years, we can briefly sum-
marize his point here in order at least to suggest how his line of
thought developed.
Nishida analyzed closely the logical structure of judgmental form.
Because he believed that any judgment necessarily arises out of a par-
ticular contextual field or place, his task in his later years was to explain
the logic of those fields (basho no ronri). One way this system came to be
formulated was in terms of the three basho of being, relative nothingness, and absolute nothingness.
Roughly speaking, these corresponded to the
judgmental fields of empiricism, idealism, and what he called the field of
the "acting intuition" (koiteki chokkan).
Nishida's "logic of basho" is a complex system always in flux and
under revision. Still, it represents Nishida's most integrated and system-
atic attempt to deal with the issues of fact and value. To see the overall
structure of Nishida's logic of basho, we can consider a simple empirical
judgment-for example, "this table is brown." Scientific statements are
generally of this form. They seem to express pure objectivity; the obser-
ver is so neutralized that he or she does not even enter into the judgment
per se. They are statements about what is, statements about being (hence,
the nomenclature "basho of being").
Yet, Nishida asked in what contextual field (basho) is such an
objective judgment made? Where does one stand in
making such a judgment about being? Nishida argued that such a judgment actually
also makes judgments about our own consciousness. To neutralize the
role of the observer as ordinary empirical judgments do is to say some-
thing about the observer-its role can be neutralized and ignored. This is
an odd thing to say, however, since the larger contextual field of the
judgment "the table is brown" is something more like "I see a brown
table, and because what I see is real and external to my self, I can delete
any reference to the self." So, Nishida maintains, the field or place of
empirical judgments is really within the encompassing field of judgments
about self-consciousness. Empiricism is actually dependent on, stands
within, a field of judgments about self and its relation to the objects of
experience. Since empirical judgments, as empirical judgments, ignore
the being of the self, treating it as a nothing, this encompassing field can
be called the "basho of relative nothingness." The self is, relative to
empirical judgments, treated as a nothing. Of course, from the standpoint
of the basho of relative nothingness, the self is very much a something,
the very thing empiricism assumes, yet ignores. This insight, when taken
literally, becomes the basis for idealism, theories that maintain that all
knowledge is based in the mind.
Yet, Nishida was no idealist either. He criticized idealists (including
Kant, Hegel, and Husserl) for not recognizing the true character of the
basho within which their theories were formulated. The mistake of the
idealists, according to Nishida, is that they think of the self as a thing,
either a substance or a transcendental ego. Nishida claimed that the "I"
in the previously stated judgment "I see a brown table and...." is not an
agent, but an action, what he called the "acting intuition." So the basho
of idealism that sees the self as both subject and object is itself encom-
passed by a third basho, the contextual field of "absolute nothingness."
The acting intuition is both an active involvement in the world and an
intuitive reception of information about that world. It is a process, not a
thing, so it can never be either the subject or the object of itself. It can
never be the gist of judgment-it is absolutely a nothing when it comes
to any judgment. Hence, it is called "absolute nothingness."
The acting-intuiting process (the absolute nothingness) is, therefore,
the true basis of judgments about both fact and value. On the surface
level, fact is, as it were, the intuiting side, whereas value is the acting
238 side. Yet, one never exists without the other. The two are moments
or profiles of a single process. The facts we discover are influenced by
what we value, and what we value is influenced by what we discover.
Thus, as Yuasa Yasuo has explained in his analysis of Nishida,19 the
intuition is also active (informed by value) and the acting is also passive
(as response to data received). The two poles of the process are totally
inseparable.
For Nishida, therefore, science cannot replace spirituality, nor can it
be separated from questions of value. Within its own terms, in its own
basho, science can advocate an impersonal, value-free objectivity. But
what makes science possible is the scientist-a person with interests,
values, and creativity. It is human intention that cordons off a place
within which science can function.
Furthermore, human intentionality can he explained within its own
mentalistic or idealistic terms, as we do in phenomenology, psycho-
analysis, and some forms of psychology. In taking the self as their starting
point, these disciplines have a clearly demarcated field within which to
function. Yet, Nishida asks, what makes that field possible? Even "self" is
a construction. It is not a given, but a product. As the idealists recognize,
the self creates values that direct human activities like science. Nishida
noted, however, that focusing an analysis on the self, indeed the very
idea that there is a self, is itself a value. Nishida maintains that there is
something more basic than self that constitutes the self-a responsive
and creative process. That there is something more basic than self is a
fundamental insight related to religious, ethical, and (sometimes) aes-
thetic values. It is this ineffable ground that is the basis for both self and
the empirical world as known through science. At least such was Nishi-
da's argument.
To sum up, in Japan, science did not have to break free of religious
roots. It did not have to establish its hegemony. Rather, science and
technology were foreign imports used to meet a set of practical needs
related to political, military, and economic necessity. The traditional
Japanese understanding of religion in terms of responsiveness and crea-
tivity was not displaced or successfully challenged by a new way of
knowing. It did not have to be. The spiritual could continue to be a
cornerstone of Japanese values, and, as Nishida tried to show, science
could be seen as a special contextual extension of it, rather than a chal-
lenger to it.
Of course, not every Japanese philosopher agreed with Nishida. Yet,
his impact has continued to be significant in Japan. In preparation for the
college entrance examinations, only one book of Japanese philosophy is
required reading: Nishida's Inquiry into the Good. Nishida's philosoph-
ical system is significant as an early, prewar philosophical struggle to
articulate how it was possible to maintain "Asian values" and still
develop "Western technique." His theory, in effect, justified what was
already the social practice of giving science its "place" alongside the
"places" of traditional religious and moral values. His philosophical
theory showed, if nothing else, a distinctively Japanese way of accepting
science without paying homage to the totem of scientism.
Has this tradition continued into more recent Japanese philosophy?
The Kybto School of philosophy founded by Nishida remains one of the
most vigorous traditions in Japanese thought today.20 Even philosophers
who are not directly connected with the school still appreciate Nishida's
pioneering work. We may wonder, therefore, whether there can be some
fruitful interaction between Japanese and Western thought in the future.
Yuasa Yasuo (1925- ) is a Japanese philosopher who has been giving
this issue some extensive thought over the past two decades, especially
in terms of philosophical and medical views of the body. Since his works
are beginning to be available in English translation,21 let us briefly dis-
cuss his theory and its implications for our present theme.
Yuasa notes that, like science in general, Western and Asian medical
traditions arose out of a radically different set of assumptions. He espe-
cially focuses on contrasting models of the body. With the birth of mod-
ern science in the West, the metaphor of the body as mechanism has
become highly influential. Against this background, the West has tended
to understand the living body's relation to the dead body as analogous to
a machine that is either operative or turned off. Hence, modern Western
medicine derives to a great extent from the anatomical information
learned through the dissection of corpses or vivisection of animals,
neither of which allows access to the functions of the conscious human
body. More recently, the model was enhanced by the study of physiol-
ogy in terms of organs and their biochemical functions. For Yuasa, what
is significant is that most of this information was amassed under the
assumption that the body can be understood independently of the mind,
the physical mechanism independently of consciousness.
Asian forms of medicine such as Chinese acupuncture, on the other
hand, developed out of the study of living, conscious human beings. The
operative assumption is that the mind-body forms a single energy system
responsive to the field in which it functions. To a traditional Asian med-
ical theorist, it would be counterintuitive to study a dead or unconscious
human body. It would be like trying to study electromagnetism with the
electric current turned off.
Because of this difference in philosophical assumptions, Asian and
Western medical traditions developed expertise in radically different
aspects of human health and disease. Acupuncture developed highly
sophisticated procedures for controlling pain, for example. (It is hard to
study pain by dissecting a corpse.) On the other hand, Western medicine
became expert at the physical manipulation of the body through surgery,
240 for instance. (Surgery would not develop very far in a culture where
patients were conscious and unanesthetized.)
In recent decades, Western medicine has developed increasingly
sophisticated instruments for studying the living, conscious human being.
There has been, therefore, a concurrent interest in psychosomatic and
holistic approaches to medicine. Conversely, Asians have been learning
Western medical techniques and have shown an interest in Western
surgical, pharmaceutical, and diagnostic approaches. So, we are finding
a situation in which two different conceptual schemes-and their corre-
spondingly different claims about the body-are being brought into
conjunction. Can the two systems influence and enrich each other?
Yuasa claims they can, but only if each side is willing to call into ques-
tion some of its most treasured assumptions. Since the Western tradition
is more familiar to most of us, let us list just two major assumptions that
Yuasa believes must be rethought in the Western view of the body.
According to Yuasa, the modern West has generally tended to
assume that the relationship between the mind and the body is fixed and
universal. That is, Western theorists tend to ask, "What is the relationship
between the mind and the body?" Yuasa points out that, in contrast,
most Asian traditions assume there is a range of interaction and integration
between mind and body. For example, as I learned to type or play the
piano, the relationship between my mind and my fingers changed.
Originally, my mind had to "tell" my fingers what to do in a separate,
self-conscious act. The fingers responded slowly, awkwardly, and impre-
cisely. Now my fingers are more the extension of my mind when I type
or play the piano. This suggests modification in the mind-body system.
Yuasa also points out that traditional Asian medicine retained its
intimate relation with Asian spiritual disciplines. The Indian yogin is a
good example of how the integration of mind and body is considered to
be both a spiritually and medically healthy goal. As we noted already,
modern Western science had to separate itself from religion in order to
develop. Fasting, contemplation, prayer, chanting, and repetitive ritual
exercises can all shed light on aspects of our bodies as well as our souls,
but these activities have fallen outside the concerns of the Western sci-
entific study of the body. Modern Western medicine has only recently
begun to explore the therapeutic benefits of biofeedback, relaxation
exercises, visualization techniques, and so forth. In effect, these origi-
nally spiritual exercises are beginning to find their way back into our
Western understanding of the body.
The second assumption that Yuasa believes Western
mind-body theories should reexamine concerns what he sometimes calls the "third
entity" that is neither mental nor somatic, but the basis of both. Taking
physics for its paradigm, modern Western science has drawn too strong a
bifurcation between matter and energy. If we were to take biology, not
physics, to be the ground of science (as Asian cultures did, in many
respects), then we would see the need for this third term. In fact, we
would be asking not about matter and energy's applicability to biology,
but rather about this third term's relation to nonhuman phenomena.
A Yuasa believes that in East Asia, the Chinese concept of qi (ki in Jap-
anese) is just such a third term. It is interesting that it is foundational to
East Asian theories of acupuncture, artistry, electricity, and cosmology
alike. What Yuasa calls for is a more Western physical study of this
phenomenon that is not even as yet recognized as a category
in the West. Such research is, in fact, under way in both China and Japan.
From the examples of Nishida and Yuasa, what summary statements
can we make about the modern Japanese philosophical views of science
and technology?
Edited: 2010-10-09, 11:31 pm
![[Image: ?u=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fw...ja.svg.png]](http://img.weblio.jp/ic/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2Fthumb%2F6%2F66%2FTianxia_ja.svg%2F240px-Tianxia_ja.svg.png)
I guess it really is catchy. I can't think of the Japanese counter part of "hairy barbarian" though. I don't know any word that means that and can't find anything. Possibly 毛唐 but that's not "barbarian" and it was originally a word for Chinese people.