What Does It Mean to "Speak Truth to Power"?

Abstract

Ever since the end of the Great East Asian War in Japan a debate has been smoldering over the contamination of philosophy by politics. This debate was sparked by a series of writings through which the father of Japanese philosophy, Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945), and some thinkers affiliated with him-the so-called Kyoto School-became involved in the politics connected with the war to establish a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The debate over Nishida and the Kyoto School has repeatedly been overshadowed by the debate over Heidegger. Aside from the strategic considerations of those engaged in the prosecution of the Kyoto School, one reason for the factor' may have something to do with the fact that philosophical parallels can indeed be drawn between Nishida and Heidegger, and that there are also direct links between Nishida and some of his disciples who studied in Germany. Questions concerning Heidegger's political engagement are still explosive, even twenty years after Farias' attempt to prove Heidegger's entanglement with National Socialism. The publication of Emmanuel Faye's book Heidegger--L'introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie has fired up the debate in French philosophical circles.2 And in the debate concerning Nishida and the Kyoto School there also recent news: the publication of Christopher S. Goto-Jones' ambitious study Political Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School, and CoProsperity. inquiry, Heidegger says, is a seeking [Suchenl. Every seeking gets guided beforehand by what sought for. Goto-Jones' inquiry seeks to explain the nature of Nishida's political engagement in the 1930s and 1940s, and his inquiry guided by the conviction that Nishida should be exonerated from the charges regarding his alleged complicity with a Japanese wartime regime that was at least militarist if not fascist. However, the declared intention of Goto-Jones' study not just another exoneration of Nishida. Goto-Jones contends that Nishida, influenced particularly [by] Kant (p. 7), has left behind a still relevant political philosophy that, as some other authors have argued,4 not only not tainted by any form of narrowminded nationalism but also provides a philosophical framework for a theory of a globalizing, multicentered, intercultural world: