Global citizens, cosmopolitanism, and radical relationality: Towards dialogue with the Kyoto School?

Abstract

Recent discussions around education for global citizenship continues to retrace notions of cosmopolitanism first laid out in Europe. Ostensibly seeking global inclusivity, much of this work ultimately returns to a rather narrow set of ontological and epistemic themes, primarily Stoicism and Pauline Christianity. The Kyoto School offers a constructive reconstruction of these core premises of European cosmopolitanism. In resisting the ontologizing of autonomous individualism and abstract universalism, Kyoto School thinkers offered an alternative tripartite structure that drew greater attention to the specific (nation-state): individual and universal are inevitably mediated by the ‘logic’ of specific histories, languages, institutions, and communities. Rather than naïve nationalism, this view emerged within a radically relational worldview: ‘continuity-in-discontinuity’ emplaced within absolute nothingness. Kimura Motomori, a leading Kyoto School educational thinker, explicitly extended these Nishidian ideas to challenge Rousseau’s contracting individualism, Kantian abstract universalism, and Hegelian teleological temporality, thus offering a fresh vision of cosmopolitanism: self-aware citizens engaging concretely in the task of (re)opening their specific societies. In conclusion, in part to demonstrate the very forms of critique we envisage, we trace historically the impacts of Kyoto School cosmopolitanism ideas on postwar policy in Japan and lament the recent regressive closing.

Keywords:

• global citizenship
• nationalism
• individualism
• metaphysics
• relational ontology
• Japanese education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term used to legitimate Japan’s imperial empire in East Asia.

2 This is the translation offered by James Hesig (2001, p. 66). Hesig refutes the idea that this seemingly contradictory statement is simply ‘oriental mumbo-jumbo’ (p. 65), but instead represents ‘a way of stating that the fact that things have an identity of their own at all is not due to something internal to them – a substantial principle – but is based on the location of the relative world of being in an absolute of nothingness’ (p. 67). See also soku-hi in Hesig et al. (2011, p. 1264).

3 Hesig’s concise summary of Tanabe provides a useful supplementary explanation here: ‘By denying its identity with an other, the self not only affirms its own individuality but at the same time affirms the dependence of that individuality on the relationship with the other that it is not. The self-sufficiency of the notion of substance is too obviously a fiction to serve as the basis for what makes a thing the individual that it is…Each thing, and hence also each individual consciousness, is at one and the same time its own self and an other to every other thing with which it interacts, and apart from this interaction nothing exists’ (Hesig, 2001, p. 117).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Satoji Yano

Satoji Yano recently retired from Kyoto University, as Chair Professor in Philosophical Anthropology and Rinsho Kyoiku (translated at Clinical Pedagogy). He now teaches at Bukkyo University (The Buddhist University) in Kyoto. His most recent book is entitled A Genealogy of Japan’s Educational Thought: The Kyoto School and Marxism (2020).

Jeremy Rappleye

Jeremy Rappleye is an Associate Professor in Philosophical Anthropology and Rinsho Kyoiku. He is interested in bringing Kyoto School ideas on education into global dialogue, on the level of both philosophy and practice. Recent papers include Reimagining Modern Education: Contributions from Modern Japanese Philosophy and Practice (2020).