This book is not an easy read. The writing is often jargon laden and obscure. While the content concerns Marxism and the Kyoto School of philosophy, it also explores the relationship—or lack of it—between historical awareness and philosophical flights of fancy. The concern is, in part, justified, yet historical embeddedness is not necessarily a philosophic requirement, although it is a requirement if one follows the demands of Marxist political philosophy.

This book is divided into four parts: The Kyoto School and the Problem of Philosophy, History, and Politics; Rethinking Nishida Kitarō with Marx; Tanabe Hajime, Imperialism, and Capitalism; and The Legacies of Kyoto School Philosophy. There are some fine moments in this collection of essays. William Haver's translations of some of Nishida's middle and later works are exemplary and helpful. Christian Uhl's essay, “Nishida Kitarō and the Antinomies of Bourgeois Philosophy,” is beautifully written and cogently argued.

Uhl reminds us that Nishida Kitarō was born in 1870 and “the transition of Japan into a capitalist market economy was basically completed around 1890” (p. 110). With it came the rapid influx of Western learning. However, while Nishida studied Western learning, he remained convinced to the end that the content of Eastern philosophy had to be “fundamentally at odds with [Western] ‘science’” (p. 113). Indeed, the material world that science studies is but an abstraction from “real reality” that is given as “pure experience.” Uhl is more than bothered by this turn of thinking, for it demands a kind of intuitive knowledge that “is not acquired methodically in a laboratory, but occurs ‘as if in a dream’” (p. 114). The upshot of this is that “Nishida eventually pushes ‘philosophy’ right into the abyss of what we mean today when we think or speak of ‘religion’” (p. 116). And, of course, Uhl is right. Yet what his closely argued and well-written essay reveals is that the governing assumption at play is that Western knowledge, including Marxism, assumes that the materialist hypothesis is the only one that makes sense. Indeed, Nishida never abandoned his Buddhist and Germanic idealistic roots. In our own time, some contemporary scientists, such as Amit Goswami and Robert Lanza, take a remarkably similar position: matter is not the primary stuff of the universe, for it is consciousness that is primary and matter is the epiphenomenon. My point is not that these scientists are necessarily correct, but only that materialism is itself an assumption, and that the issue should not be taken lightly. It should not surprise us, however, that Marxist humanism would reject a religious or idealist perspective. In fairness to Nishida and Uhl, Uhl writes that Nishida showed a “profound receptivity to the writings of the late Marx” that served as the “genesis of the central concepts of Nishida's philosophy of history, such as ‘dialectics,’ ‘poeisis,’ and ‘active intuition’” (p. 133).

The section of the book dealing with Tanabe Hajime makes amply clear his continuing dialogue with Marxist thought: “Thus, unlike the established view of Tanabe as a conservative religious thinker, he was deeply concerned with Marx and Marxism” (p. 178). Takeshi Kimoto compares both Marx's and Tanabe's readings of the Greek philosopher Epicurus with Tanabe's position that the predetermined swerve of atoms actually leaves room for both freedom and chance. The basic contingency of the world can never be eliminated (p. 182). Max Ward's essay, “Tanabe Hajime as Storyteller: Or, Reading Philosophy as Metanoetics as Narrative,” observes that Tanabe begins his “Metanoetics” historically, with a crisis of conscience over the agony and suffering of World War II, but then shifts to affirm that the “fundamental project of philosophy” is “self-awareness (jikaku)” (p. 219). What began in the midst of history concluded with the abstract interiority of personal self-realization. The result allows Tanabe “to posit metanoetics without having to confront either the irresolvable socio-political contradictions that were the historical ground for his purported turn to metanoetics, as well as how he himself was implicated in this history” (p. 223).

The final section of the book deals with “The Legacies of the Kyoto School Philosophy” and the Japanese philosophers whose writings were influenced both by members of the Kyoto School and by Marxist theory. They include Kakehashi Akihide's social and political philosophy, reading Marx's Capital “as a Nishida-inflected “logic of place”; Uno Kozo's economic interpretation of Capital; Umemoto Katsumi's work on civil society that was heavily influenced by Watsuji Tetsurō; Nakai Masakazu's analysis of the structure of communication and his idea of the “committee”; Satofumi Kawamura and “the care of the self” (p. 234). Tosaka Jun (who may have first coined the phrase “the Kyoto School”), Miki Kiyoshi, Kuki Shuzō were all inspired by Nishida and yet remained critics of Nishida as well. And finally Kuki's work in aesthetics was highlighted and in particular his analysis of “iki” as coquetry, but more importantly as “pride and honour,” did much to describe in detail important aspects of the Japanese mind and culture.

The editors make clear that Japanese philosophy was heavily entwined in discussions of capital, labor, and ideal society. This book describes just how deeply enmeshed the Kyoto School philosophers were in their deliberations about Marx and Marxism.