Shūzō Kuki

Shūzō Kuki
Born(1888-02-15)February 15, 1888
Tokyo Prefecture, Japan
DiedMay 6, 1941(1941-05-06) (aged 53)
Kyoto, Japan
Philosophical work
Era20th-century philosophy
RegionJapanese philosophy
Kyoto School
InstitutionsKyoto University
Main interests

Shūzō Kuki (九鬼 周造, Kuki Shūzō; February 15, 1888 – May 6, 1941) was a Japanese art critic, philosopher, and poet.

Early life

Kuki was the fourth child of Baron Kuki Ryūichi (九鬼 隆一) a high bureaucrat in the Meiji Ministry for Culture and Education (Monbushō). Since it appears that Kuki's mother, Hatsu, was already pregnant when she fell in love with Okakura Kakuzō (岡倉 覚三), otherwise known as Okakura Tenshin (岡倉 天心), a protégé of her husband's (a notable patron of the arts), the rumour that Okakura was Kuki's father would appear to be groundless. It is true, however, that Shūzō as a child, after his mother had separated and then divorced his father, thought of Okakura, who often visited, as his real father, and later certainly hailed him as his spiritual father. From Okakura, he gained much of his fascination for aesthetics and perhaps foreign languages, as indeed his fascination with the peculiar cultural codes of the pleasure quarters of Japan owes something to the fact that his mother had once been a geisha.

At age 23 in 1911 (Meiji 44), Kuki converted to Catholicism; and he was baptized in Tokyo as Franciscus Assisiensis Kuki Shūzō. The idealism and introspection implied by this decision were early evidence of issues which would have resonance in the characteristic mindset of the mature man.

A graduate in philosophy of Tokyo Imperial University, Kuki spent eight years in Europe to polish his knowledge of languages and deepen his already significant studies of contemporary Western thought. At the University of Heidelberg, he studied under the neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert, and he engaged Eugen Herrigel as a tutor. At the University of Paris, he was impressed by the work of Henri Bergson, whom he came to know personally; and he engaged the young Jean-Paul Sartre as a French tutor. It is little known outside Japan that it has been claimed that Kuki influenced Jean-Paul Sartre to develop an interest in Husserl and his student Heidegger's philosophical approach. Sartre's actual engagement with Husserl's phenomenology however began several years later, dating to a remark by Raymond Aron in a coffee shop discussion in 1932.

At the University of Freiburg, Kuki studied phenomenology under Edmund Husserl; and he first met Martin Heidegger in Husserl's home. He moved to the University of Marburg for Heidegger's 1927/1928 winter semester lectures on the phenomenological interpretation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (published as volume 25 in the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe), and for Heidegger's seminar "Schelling's Essay on the Essence of Human Freedom." The following semester (Summer, 1928) he attended Heidegger's lecture on logic in the light of Leibniz (HGA 26) and his seminar on Aristotle's Physics. Fellow students during these years in Europe were Tetsurō Watsuji and Kiyoshi Miki.

Career

Shortly after Kuki's return to Japan, he wrote and published his masterpiece, The Structure of "Iki" (1930). In this work he undertakes to make a phenomenological analysis of iki, a variety of chic culture current among the fashionable set in Edo in the Tokugawa period, and asserted that it constituted one of the essential values of Japanese culture.

Kuki took up a teaching post at Kyoto University, then a prominent center for conservative cultural values and thinking. His early lectures focused on Descartes and Bergson. In the context of a faculty with a primarily Germanic philosophical background, his lectures offered a somewhat different perspective based on the work of French philosophers.

He became an associate professor in 1933. In that same year, he published the first book length study of Martin Heidegger to appear in Japanese. In this context, it is noteworthy that the German philosopher explicitly referenced a conversation "between a Japanese and an inquirer" in On the Way to Language (Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache). Also, Heidegger expressed a desire to have written the preface to the German translation of The Structure of "Iki".

At the University of Kyoto, Kuki was elevated to professor of philosophy in March 1934. The following year he published The Problem of Contingency, also known as The Problem of the Accidental. This work was developed from his personal experiences in Europe and the influences of Heidegger. As a single Japanese man within an encompassing "white" or non-Japanese society, he considered the extent to which he became a being who lacked necessity. His Kyoto University lectures on Heidegger, Man and Existence, were published in 1939.

From the mid-1930s, while Japan drifted towards totalitarianism and the war in China dragged on, Kuki seemed not to be much disturbed by the growth of militarism.

In 1941, at the age of 53, Kuki died following an attack of peritonitis. His manuscripts are now kept in the Konan University Library.

Works

Published works

Published while alive

Published posthumously

Collected works

Kuki’s Collected Works [九鬼周造全集], in 12 volumes (often abbreviated KSZ in scholarly publications, for Kuki Shûzô Zenshû), are published by Iwanami Shoten.

Vol. 1

Vol. 2

Vol. 3

Vol. 4

Vol. 5: Occasional Writings [をりにふれて] and Theory of Rhyme [押韻論]

Vol. 6: A Draft History of Modern Western Philosophy, Vol. 1 [西洋近世哲学史稿 (上)]

Vol. 7: A Draft History of Modern Western Philosophy, Vol. 2 [西洋近世哲学史稿 (下)]

Vol. 8: Lectures on Contemporary French Philosophy [現代フランス哲学講義]

Vol. 9: Lectures on Contemporary Philosophy [講義 現代哲学] and Seminars on Trends in Contemporary Philosophy [講演 現代哲学の動向]

Vol. 10: Lectures on Heidegger’s Phenomenological Ontology [講義 ハイデッガーの現象学的存在論]

Vol. 11: Introductory Lectures on Literature [講義 文学概論] and Lectures on Contingency [講義 偶然性

Vol. 12: Miscellaneous Documents [資料篇]

Notes

  1. ↑ Nara, Hiroshi. (2004). The Structure of Detachment: the Aesthetic Vision of Kuki Shūzō with a translation of "Iki no kōzō," pp. 96–97.
  2. ↑ Nara, p. 172.
  3. 1 2 Nara, p. 173.
  4. 1 2 Parkes, Graham (1987-09-01). Heidegger and Asian Thought. University of Hawaii Press. p. 158. ISBN 978-0-8248-1312-3.
  5. ↑ Amel Zaidi,Sarah Bakewell:Au café existentialiste, Page des libraires 24 January 2018:'« Tu vois, mon petit camarade », dit Raymond Aron à Sartre, « si tu es phénoménologue, tu peux parler de ce cocktail et c’est de la philosophie ! ». C’est ainsi qu’un cocktail à l’abricot entra dans l’Histoire et changea le cours de la pensée philosophique. C’était au Bec-de-Gaz, un fameux bistrot de la rue Montparnasse à Paris en 1932. « Ça m’a épaté » dira Sartre quarante ans plus tard dans un de ses carnets. Il venait de découvrir la phénoménologie moderne grâce à Aron qui rentrait d’un séjour à Berlin et lui faisait un état des lieux de la pensée allemande..'
  6. ↑ Andrew Inkpin, Sartre's Literary Phenomenology, in Sartre Studies International, Vol. 23, No. 1 (2017), pp. 1-21, p.3
  7. ↑ Marra (2004), p. 9.
  8. 1 2 Nara, p. 174.
  9. ↑ Zwischen einem Japaner und einem Fragenden.
  10. ↑ Marra, Michael F. (2002). Japanese Hermeneutics pp. 89–202, p. 202, at Google Books.
  11. ↑ Light, Stephen. (1987). Kuki Shūzō and Jean-Paul Sartre, p. 31.
  12. ↑ Nussbaum, Louis-Frédéric. (2005). "Kuki Shūzō" in Japan Encyclopedia, p. 571, at Google Books.
  13. ↑ Nara, p. 161.
  14. ↑ Nara, p. 149.
  15. ↑ Nara, p. 175.
  16. ↑ Konan University Digital Archive.
  17. ↑ "「いき」の構造 - 国立国会図書館デジタルコレクション".
  18. ↑ "偶然性の問題 - 国立国会図書館デジタルコレクション".
  19. ↑ "人間と実存 九鬼周造 著 33F@69@1".
  20. ↑ "文藝論 九鬼周造著 28B@142@1".
  21. ↑ "巴里心景 - 国立国会図書館デジタルコレクション".
  22. ↑ Takada, passim.
  23. ↑ Nara, p. 9.
  24. ↑ Takada, p. 288.
  25. ↑ Pincus, p. 52.
  26. ↑ Marra, 2011 p. 396.

References and further reading

Secondary sources