The Germs of Emancipatory Politics in An Inquiry into the Good

Due to the controversy surround his political war-time writings, Nishida Kitarō and his entire corpus has been accused of promoting and supporting Japanese imperialism. Despite the valid criticisms of his writings during the war-time period, Nishida’s early work in An Inquiry into the Good is not so easily interpreted as supporting nationalism. In fact, depending on the lens through which one reads Nishida’s early writings, one can even find the germs of emancipatory ideas that can easily be put in dialogue with other liberatory thinkers such as Marx, Kropotkin, and Adorno. In this article, by considering the pluripotentiality of the text rather than a hermetically sealed off nationalist reading of it, I reread the ethical politics in An Inquiry into the Good through an emancipatory lens, considering how Nishida’s thought could have been taken up in a very different post-1911 Japan that did not move toward authoritarian militarism. Furthermore, I argue that the ambiguity surrounding his early political writings is consistent with his resistance to authoritarian ethics and his emphasis on the autonomy of the individual.