In Western nations, there is a clear connection between philosophy and totalitarian politics. Hegel’s philosophy, for example, took a “left” turn in Marx’s thinking — which Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin drew upon — and it took a “right” turn in Treitschke’s and Nietzsche’s thinking — which Goebbels, Hitler, and the National Socialists drew upon, as did Gentile and Mussolini‘s fascism.
In the early 20th century, the other major authoritarian player in the world was Japan.
A few teasers about the intellectuals of Japan’s militaristic politics and mystical collectivism:
* Hozumi Yatsuka (1860–1912): “In August 1884 he went to Germany to study European institutional history and constitutional law. During his stay in Germany he studied at three universities: Heidelberg, Berlin and Strasbourg.”
* Kakehi Katsuhiko (1872-1961) was Yatsuka’s student and also studied at the University of Berlin, where he began to fuse Shinto with German political philosophy. “Kakehi was also heavily influenced by German organic state theories. He acquired his knowledge of German state theory not only from his teacher Hozumi Yatsuka, but also from German mentors with whom he came into personal contact during his independent study in Europe from 1898 to 1903.”
* Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki (1870-1966) is famous in the West for his classic An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (1934). He was “a university-educated intellectual steeped in knowledge of Western philosophy and literature” and who lived and worked with the German scholar Dr. Paul Carus in Lasalle, Illinois for eleven years. Back in Japan, Suzuki he was a strong nationalist who argued that Japanese culture’s integration with Buddhism gave it its uniqueness. He also expressed positive opinions about sympathy for Nazism and anti-Semitism, including Hitler’s plan to expel the Jews from Germany.
And then there is this intriguing connection from philosopher William Barrett about Suzuki and Martin Heidegger:
“A German friend of Heidegger told me that one day when he visited Heidegger he found him reading one of Suzuki’s books [on Zen Buddhism]: ‘If I understand this man correctly,’ Heidegger remarked, ‘this is what I have been trying to say in all my writings.'”
For more, here are some good sources to begin with:
* Richard Koenigsberg’s short article, “Japanese Nationalism: Death in Battle = Fusion with the Emperor.”
* Brian Daizen Victoria, Zen at War (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). Daizen Victoria is reviewed here by Lorenzo Warby and interviewed here by Kathy Arlyn Sokol.
* Walter Skya, Japan’s Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shinto Ultranationalism (Duke University Press, 2009).
Related, on the Heidegger connections:
Fascinating. Thank you. I had no idea there was this connection. How much influence do you think it had overall in the growth of Japanese culture in the first three decades of the 20th century?
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Fascinating! I’m writing about the same process in the modern Middle East and soon realized it was hardly confined there: that these ideas undermined the “Third World’s” efforts to decolonize and modernize worldwide. Thank you.
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