/lit/ - Literature

>According to the Kyoto School, it is up to the Japanese nation to overcome this legacy by creating a new world history through a nationalism and imperialism proper to it — and the only way to realise this whole project is a ‘total war’ (soryokusen, a translation from the German totaler Krieg). This total war is presented as a purification through which new subjectivities will arise from the lost Japanese spirit and realise absolute nothing ness as the ground for a ‘universal world history’ in which many ‘specific world histories’ can ‘exist harmoniously and interpenetratingly’. This ‘total war’ is thus an ‘accelerationist’ strategy par excellence that seeks to intensify the conflicts between states and individuals in order to transcend the world as objective totality. War, for the Kyoto school philosophers, is the force that defines history and therefore world history. We might well say that the Idealists’ concept of strife (Streit) is reincarnated in the concept of war here. Idealists such as Schelling Holderlin, Hegel, and the early Romantics found in Greek tragedy a literary form which expresses such a strifes tragedy is based on the necessity of fate, and the tragic hero affirms the necessity of suffering as the realisation of his freedom. In the Japanese version, though, tragedy finds its realisation in a vision of ‘world history as purgatory’. To the eyes of the Kyoto School, the Sino-Japanese war had nothing to do with imperialism, but happened because it was the moral obligation of Japan to save China. The realisation of the Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere is one part of the new history that Japan is ‘obliged’ to realise for the benefit of East Asia. The conception of this ‘just war’ is given in Kosaka Masaaki’s concluding statement of the first roundtable section for the magazine Chubkoron:

>When man becomes indignant, his indignation is total. He is indignant in both mind and body. This is the case with war: both heaven and earth become indignant. In this way, the soul of humanity comes to be purified. This is why it is war that determines the crucial turning points in world history. Hence world history is purgatory.

>The different intellectual milieus of China and Japan yielded different interpretations of modernity, then. It might be said that the Japanese intellectuals experienced a deeper problem of time and history, and that it was the question of time qua history that they sought to overcome. Chinese intellectuals such as Mou Zongsan, on the other hand, were puzzled by the question of why modern science and technology had not arisen in China, and concluded that this probably owed largely to China’s long intellectual history, which has a totally different philosophical temperament from that of the West.

needless to say, YH is rather critical of the Nishitani and the Kyoto school solution.