Paper short abstract:

My paper analyses the Kyoto School’s philosophical articulation of the concept of absolute nothingness on two levels: as a philosophical discourse, and as part of societal discourse it is located within, and seeks to understand the interplay between the content and the context of this concept.

Paper long abstract:

My paper analyses the Kyoto School’s philosophical articulation of the concept of absolute nothingness on two levels: as a philosophical discourse in itself, and as part of societal discourse in which the philosophical discourse is located in, and seeks to understand the interplay between the content and the context of this concept.

From this perspective, the Kyoto School’s use of absolute nothingness in their philosophy can be seen as an endeavour to move beyond recognition of identity to fundamental unity, while still having functioned as an identity claim for Japanese subjectivity’s special position in being particularly close to such fundamental truth. Nishida Kitarō’s philosophical work provided the basis to move Japan’s prewar discourse on identity to claims of ontology via aesthetics in an effort to reframe identity through a constructed opposition of East and West as that of being and emptiness. This move reflected the centrality of aesthetics in the production of a specifically Japanese subjectivity and how aesthetics was conceived as the ground left available by the universalisation of a ”Western” identity through modernity.

This paper considers the discursive context of the Kyoto School philosophy as central motivation for its concerns: what their philosophical position was articulated in dialogue with and what need it fulfilled in the wider discourse it participated in. Thus, this paper looks at the Kyoto School philosophy as a practice conducted within society in response to its contemporary issues, and while it admits the possibility of philosophy as being ”an eternal pursuit of truth of things”, it points out that the questions animating this pursuit at any given time tend to be motivated by their societal context.