At the age of forty-three he assumed the
principal chair of religion. Not unlike others of his day, he had diffculties
with the wartime Ministry of Education, and it was not until two years later,
thanks in part to the intervention of Nishida, that he was awarded the doctoral
degree with a thesis entitled “Prolegomenon to a Philosophy of Religion.” In
December 1946, after the defeat in the war, he was obliged to take a leave of
absence from the university, and the following July was designated “unsuitable”
for teaching by the Occupation authorities. Relieved of his position in the
university, he was banned from holding any public position on the grounds of
having supported the wartime government. He intensified his practice of Zen,
which seems to have given him added strength to accept the affront silently and
with tranquility, though not without considerable distress. It was a diffcult time
for him, and his wife, who would watch him spending whole afternoons watching lizards
in the yard, was afraid he would crack under the pain. Still, it was
during those years that he produced some of his finest works, including A Study
of Aristotle, God and Absolute Nothingness, and Nihilism, all acknowledged by
Tanabe at the time to have been “masterpieces.”
Nishitani wrote later
complaining of unjust treatment at the hands of the ideologues. “During the war
he had been slapped on the left cheek and after the war on the right.” Still,
the stigma the Occupation forces intended did not have the crippling effect one
might imagine, both because the purge itself was so haphazard and
viewed with the same distaste as the presence of the foreign army itself, and
because Nishitani took it as an opportunity to rethink his philosophical
vocation. In doing so, he turned his back resolutely from then on against all
invitations to draw practical social conscience into philosophical and
religious ideas, preferring to think about the insight of the individual rather
than the reform of the social order.
Philosophers of Nothingness:
An Essay on the Kyoto School (Nanzan Library of Asian Religion and Culture), by James W. Heisig, University of Hawaii Press, 2001. pp.185-186
