This paper explores the life and thought of Tomonaga Sanjyuro (1871–1951) from historical and theoretical perspective, in order to find out formation of the epistemological base of understanding modern international relations in Japan. ‘Epistemological base’ is what all people in a certain time and place cannot help depend on or start from, when they try to conceive and explain the question, “What is International Relations?”, regardless of their theoretical or methodological or political standpoint. In other word, this paper aims at founding the proto-paradigm of IR/International Thoughts, or the episteme that made modern IR/International Thoughts possible before such paradigm or school or discipline emerged.
First part of the paper deals with the importance of Tomonaga's Thought, which has been hidden by the presupposition of his historical role as merely an introducer or interpreter of history of modern Western Philosophy. Although his main academic work concentrating on introduction of Western philosophy, he wrote many articles about how Japan or Japanese should be-have as a civilized nation, when trying to receive Western customs, cultures, and way of thinking. He developed his argument by citing and applying his knowledge of the history of Western philosophy, sometimes almost going beyond rigid academic restraint. Tomonaga was not an ivory-tower scholar. Actually he was in a sense a critic of Japanese civilization. His concern is always what is the best philosophical position or attitude Japanese nation should import and incorporate, by amalgamating these western philosophy and traditional way of thinking.
Second part analyzes his one of the two main works, Kant No Heiwa Ron (Study of Kant's discourse on Peace) (1922). Tomonaga always faced with twofold project. One is how to make Japan/Japanese philosophically independent and stable, by make them understanding the history of Western philosophy from his lectures in Kyoto University and his first main book, Kinsei Ni Okeru Ga No Jikaku Shi (Awakening the consciousness of Self in the history of modern Western philosophy) (1916). The other is how to construct the world that Japan/Japanese was stably founded in modern world, as a subject who has the same entitlement as other western states or nations. Kant No Heiwa Ron has been understood as an interpretation of Kant's Perpetual Peace (1795). However this book made a vital role of explaining how self (man), state, and international relations tightly connected by cross-reference structure. His main contention was not how Kant thought peace, but how to use and interpret Kant's argument in his unique way in order to construct the modern world. This paper concludes the validity of his constitution of ‘Self-State-International Relations’ after his death in 1951 and to the present.

抄録全体を表示

The standpoint at the Kitarō Nishida’s philosophy has an extremely strong religious color, especially in relation to Buddhism. That is truly Eastern form of thought, i.e. ‘holistic monism,’which is of a different nature than the Western form, especially with regards to the dualism characteristic of the Latin Western tradition. This monism describes a transcendentally single principle which, while preserving to the end its transcendence, develops itself by arising within itself, is a logic which transforms all things from within, and is a whole from which all origination of development is derived. In other words, we can say that this principle is a logic of ‘substance(tǐ)and function(yòng). It should also be noted, however, that the ‘transcendent unity’of this holistic monism, while we can say that it is transcendent, is not something externally transcendent. In this sense it can be contrasted to that which is featured by the Latin tradition of Western thought in its assumption of an external, personal, singular, divinity which stands outside of that which it transcends. The Eastern transcendent unity of which I speak is, to the utmost, an ‘internal transcendence.’ However, Nishida’s philosophy has inexhaustible depths to offer. We can see this depth in his notion of “oppositional correspondence(gyaku-taiō)”emphasized in his later years. What Nishida tried to teach via his logic of oppositional correspondence is that “the self is itself insofar as it transcends itself.” To put this in other words, we can say that the self which turns its back to God is, just as it is, enveloped within God’s love, or that the self full of desires which cannot cleanse itself of its sin, is, just as it is, receiving the salvation of divine mercy. The paradoxical situation which Nishida describes is that while the individual self is separate in relation to the absolute self, that individual self remains, at the same time and just as it is, unified with the absolute self in deep reality. In short, Nishida’s logic is none other than a “logic of immanence and transcendence.” While transcendence remains utterly within the absolute Other, it is precisely there that the relative existent being is something utterly finite. While there is an absolute division between these two, in the depths they are unified. The finite relative self, in the depths of itself, finds ‘transcendence,’and it is here that such a kind of perspective opens towards the absolute other. This problem of the ‘transcendental other’ at the root of the relation between self and self constitutes the centre of Nishida’s thought.

抄録全体を表示