Philosophy East and West

The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy is by all counts an ambitious work. Its primary goal is to provide the reader (the specialist and non-specialist alike) with a foundational framework in which to engage interpretively the tradition of Japanese philosophy. It would be impossible to summarize, let alone do justice to, the thirty-six rich and illuminating chapters written by many of the most prominent scholars in the field from Japan, Europe, Australia, and North America.

Navigating between the "violence of inclusion" that would reduce the philosophically other to our own conception of philosophy and the "violence of exclusion" that would fail to recognize what we share with this other (p. 37), Bret Davis begins the volume with a wonderfully nuanced and powerful account of the central question the anthology seeks to answer: namely, "what is Japanese philosophy?" We immediately find ourselves in a hermeneutical process of "emptying our cup," as the Buddhist saying goes, of bracketing our preconceptions of what constitutes "Japanese," "philosophy," and thus "Japanese philosophy," so that we will be open to what is to come. For this volume invites us to: rethink the nature of philosophy and religion, and the border line between them; inquire into the nature of cultural identity and its construction and reconstruction; engage in a conceptual as well as sociopolitical-ethical critique of culture; rethink the human, the self, and the relations between the human and nature, the individual and the world, and ourselves and others; understand ourselves by understanding the other. In short, the volume invites us to join and participate in the project of Japanese philosophy itself.

Davis is careful not to close off the meaning of Japanese philosophy by providing a clear and definitive definition. Only after a great deal of demythologizing of essentialist understandings of what is or is not Japanese, philosophy, and thus Japanese philosophy, does Davis finally provide the reader with a tentative definition of what we are to understand by Japanese philosophy. He writes: "I suggest that we call Japanese philosophy any rigorous [End Page 1] reflection on fundamental questions that draws sufficiently and significantly on the intellectual, linguistic, cultural, religious, literary, and artistic sources of the Japanese tradition" (p. 60). This "definition" is intentionally left open in order to make room for a great many voices to participate in the defining and, thus, in the ongoing creative construction and reconstruction of Japanese philosophy. Rather than an essentialist definition that would clearly delimit the defining border that would determine the substance and sphere of Japanese philosophy (as opposed to everything else), Davis offers us a hermeneutical place in which the event of Japanese philosophy takes place. Japanese philosophy is always to be in becoming and never to be fixed in place or time. And the thirty-six chapters of this volume do not simply explain what Japanese philosophy is; rather, each in its own way is a focal point in the creatively dynamic life of Japanese philosophy itself. It is above all this that makes the volume unique: a historical reconstruction of the tradition of Japanese philosophy that is not simply a passive transmission and preservation of the past, but a penetration of the historical works that revitalizes the creative energies that expressed themselves in these works. To this end, the authors throughout the volume do not shy away from acknowledging the interplay between the historical socio-political context and the ideas of Japanese philosophy. Thus, as Iwasawa Tomoko in "Philosophical Implications of Shintō" nicely shows, the defining of Shintō is not entirely unproblematic and cannot be divorced from an understanding of the socio-political history of Japan in which Shintō has been constructed and reconstructed. Nor do the authors shy away from addressing the often uncomfortable truths of these socio-political realities that are part of what might be called the cultural ideology of Nihonjin-ron (日本人論 Japanessness), an ideology that essentializes both the Japanese people and Japanese philosophy...