The Kyoto School: An Introduction by Robert E. Carter

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Kyoto School: An Introduction by Robert E. Carter Bret W. Davis Review of Robert E. Carter, The Kyoto School: An Introduction (with a Foreword by Thomas P. Kasulis) Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013, 236 + xxii pages Over the past two decades, Robert Carter has played an important role in the reception of Japanese philosophy among Anglophone scholars and students. His role has been that of a bridge builder between the specialized research of scholars on the one hand and newcomers interested in getting a first foothold in the field on the other. Trained as a philosopher, Carter later spent some time in Japan, learning enough of the language to work with a Japanese counterpart to translate Watsuji’s magnum opus into accurate and fluid English prose. Yet the niche that Carter has so fruitfully filled is not so much that of a philological expert who delves into and excavates a narrow range of Japanese texts and scholarship. Rather, Carter works mainly with available translations and secondary literature spanning a wide range of traditional and modern Japanese thought, which for his readers he interpretively filters down into a digestible and engaging set of descriptions, explanations, theses, and arguments. This has resulted in a set of monographs that are very well suited to students and nonspecialist scholars, as well as to general readers who want to know whether and [End Page 301] why they should be interested in Japanese philosophy in the first place. Personally, the book of Carter’s I find most useful in the college classroom is the wide-ranging Encounter with Enlightenment: A Study of Japanese Ethics (SUNY, 2001). But his latest book, the one here under review, also admirably succeeds in achieving its aim. That aim is expressly not to provide a comprehensive survey of the major Kyoto School philosophies, the development and detail of which, he cautions, would each more than fill an entire volume. Rather, Carter intends his book to serve as an enticing entranceway into the field. As he acknowledges in his Conclusion, “A difficulty with any introductory text is that it must leave out a great deal if it is to truly serve as an introduction” (153). Letting other available works (especially James Heisig’s Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School [Hawaii University Press, 2001] and also my own “The Kyoto School” [in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]) orient those interested to the fuller array of the thought of and scholarship on the Kyoto School, Carter clearly states that “the aim of the present study is to introduce each thinker and to tie that account to a major, readily accessible, text.” The four thinkers he chooses to focus on are the three leading figures of the School: Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945), Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962), and Nishitani Keiji (1900–1990), plus a noteworthy philosopher more tangentially related to the School: Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960). For each of these four philosophers, Carter focuses his attention on one key book that is readily available in English translation: Nishida’s An Inquiry into the Good, Tanabe’s Philosophy as Metanoetics, Nishitani’s Religion and Nothingness, and Watsuji Tetsurō’s Rinrigaku: Ethics in Japan. Moreover, Carter makes no attempt to systematically or comprehensively analyze these books. Rather, he seeks to go straight to the heart of why he feels these works are interesting and important. Carter is right to warn us that his focus on one key work per philosopher does not allow us to see the development of their ideas. No matter how important the selected books may be, they are but snapshots in the overall trajectory of the authors’ paths of thought. For example, Tanabe is presented as a predominantly Shin (Pure Land) Buddhist thinker, who relies on faith and who is critical of the limits of reason, because the focus is on his 1946 Philosophy as Metanoetics. Yet this text represents a kind of religious turn in Tanabe’s path of thought. Before that time, as Carter notes, Tanabe had emphasized the power of dialectical reason and had been critical of Nishida for relying on what he considered to be transrational mystical experience. Moreover...