Wakamatsu on Izutsu CH 00
Toshihiko Izutsu and the Philosophy of Word: In Search of the Spiritual Orient Hardcover – January 1, 2014
by Eisuke Wakamatsu (Author)
4.7 out of 5 stars 2 ratings
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Hardcover : 457 pages
Partial contents:
- Shinpi tetsugaku: The Birth of a Poet-Philosopher --
- The Encounter with Islam --
- Russia: The Spirituality of Night --
- A Contemporary and the Biography of the Prophet --
- Catholicism --
- Words and WORD --
- Translator of the Heavenly World --
- Eranos-Dialogue in the Beyond --
- Consciousness and Essence --
- The Philosophy of Mind
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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES TRANSLAtOR'S NOTES
empty void, it is the primordial chaos, the undifferentiated One from which the Many arise, i.e. Beiig itself. Drawing on the a!aycl-vijñana. the Storehouse Consciousness in Yogcra Buddhism. he developed a semantic theory of ontology/consciousness, a depth-consciousness philosophy of language, which he called "linguistic a/ava-consciousness." Deep in our depth consciousness is a realm where meaning exists in the form of semantic potentials. bTja, literally "seeds" Being manifests itself as beings, or as Izutsu puts it elsewhere, "Being is a meaningful articulation of the absolutely unarticulated 'Nothingness."" In short, Being is WORD, "the dianiic force of ontological articulation." 5 In a beautiful passage Izutsu described the instant in which WORD manifests itself as meaning:
As the countless tangled and intertwined "potential forms of meaning" attempt to emerge into the surface brightness of meaning, they jostle and joust with one another in the dusk of linguistic consciousness-the subtle, intermediate zone where the "Nameless" are just on the verge of metamorphosing into the "Named." Between "Being" and "Non-Being," between unarticulated and articulated, the specter of some indeterminate thing faintly flickers.6
But if "Being is WORD," our encounter with language takes on a whole new dimension, and the role of the reader assumes a far greater function than ever before.
Naturally, WORDs must be clear. To understand, through a chain of clear WORDs that a writer has juxtaposed. the meaning behind them that existed from the beginning in the writer's mind—i.e. their prelinguistic realits—that is what I call "reading."
Toshihiko Izutsu's definition of reading is perhaps even more applicable to translating. Trying to grasp what the author wrote and make it read as if he had originally written it in English is what 1, as a translator, aspire to. And yet attempting to occupy even a small corner of the wide-ranging mind of Eisuke Wakamatsu—not to mention the protean intellect of Toshihiko Izutsu —has proved to be a daunting challenge, one that I have fallen far short of meeting, as the many corrections that came back to me at the revision stage have made all too evident. These
mistakes have now, I hope, been corrected, but I am tinder no illusion that I have succeeded in living tip to the ideal that Izutsu sets for the reader/translator.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank Eisuke Wakamatsu, Ryoko Katahara and RyOji Noguchi for checking my translation, Miriam Skey for her careful proofreading and Fred Unwafla for his invaluable comments on everything from content to style. As always, Yasuo Saji, with whom I have worked for more than thirty years, has been a pillar of support during this project's exceptionally long gestation process. I am more grateful than I can ever express for his assistance at every stage of the translation and for his unfailing kindness and encouragement when I wondered whether I would ever be able to complete this work,
But, above all, my deepest gratitude goes to my husband, Frank Hoff, who died last year on November 7th and (lid not live to see the completion of this project, which we worked on together for nearly two years. He has now become my **phantom man.
Jean Connell Hoff
Toronto
February 16. zoi
his work on the "synchronic structuralization of Oriental philosophy," an attempt to synthesize the ñIajor philosophical ideas of the Orient, which for him stretched from Greece, north Africa, Russia and the Middle East all the way to India, China and Japan; his encounter with the concept of\V()RD and the realization that semantics is ontology, that Being is WORD.
And yet the book does not confine itself to Izutsu but discusses many other thinkers who influenced him, directly or indirectly, or who, as in the case of Yoshinori Moroi, for example, were totally unknown to Izutsu and yet were working simultaneously in parallel fields. The inclusion of studies of such diverse figures as his first publisher Mitsuo Ueda; Pan-Asianist Shümei Okawa; his language teachers Setsuzo Kotsuj I, Abdu r-Rasheed Ibrali i ni, Mesa B igiev and Yosh itar Yokemura; Orientalist Louis Massignon and his "contemporary" al-llalthj; Yasaburô Ikeda; lbn 'Arabi; Jacques Derrida; Daisetz Suzuki, as fascinating as they are, may at first strike the reader as odd. But as one reads further, one realizes that they all illustrate main themes in the book: the importance of Zeitgeist, how certain ideas transcend cultures and animate an age; parallelism and synchronicitv, the way other ideas transcend time and link thinkers who lived in different eras; the hypothesis of a Zwischenwelt, mediocosmus, inundus imaginalis, or M-realni that mediates between the world we live in and the noumcnal world; the subject of the mystical experience; the metaphysics of light; the One and the Many; the unity of existence; the immanence as well as transcendence of God. For the Western reader, the discussions of Japanese thinkers have the additional advantage of shining a spotlight on the vibrant intellectual milieu in which Izutsu lived.
Two aspects of Toshihiko Izutsu's life seem central to an understanding of Izutsu, the philosopher of WORD: his extraordinary gift for languages—by his own reckoning he knew thirty—and an early, seminal mystical experience. In a sense, the philosophy that lie would go on to develop was an attempt to articulate that experience not simply through language but in linguistic terms. And yet, Izutsu was acutely aware of the limitations of language and the way it delimits our view of the world. Differences in languages, and therefore in cultures, are not superficial, he believed; they indicate differences in perceptions of reality—hence, his fascination with the different personae of Cod in world religions, the many names for the One and his existential concern about the "clash of cultures."
The embodiment of these two strands of language and spirituality is the poet, prophet or shaman. Paul Claude], the Prophet Mohammad. the 'thoist poet Ch'ti Yuan, each experienced a mystical ekslasis (a state of self-annihilation, of being literally outside of oneself) and enlhousi-asmos (being filled with God) and became a medium of revelation, a conduit through which the divine word descends. Philosophers, too, serve a similar function when they introduce new technical terms into our vocabulary as Rudolf Otto did with the concept of Das Nurninose, or Henry Corbin with the expression mtindus imaginalis, or Japanese thinkers such as Munevoshi (SOetsu) Yanagi. Shüzö Kuki and Kitaro Nishida, who contributed to the development of Japanese philosophical terminology.
Izutsu clearly loved poetry; he often cites, and translates, poems in his works. 'What he .savs of the Russian poet Trutchev—"the primaly goal of poetry [was] to grasp intuitively the basic essence of the universe, the deepest level of being, and to express his awareness of it symbolically through visual images"—is what he attempted to achieve in his own philosophy. Ekstczsis and enthousiasmos are not the goal of the mystic philosopher any more than they are for a poet or prophet or shaman. "A person who thoroughly explores the world of Ideas and reverently enters the secret inner chambers of transcendent life has the sacred duty to come back down to the phenomenal world, ignite the flame of transcendent life in its very midst and work diligently toward the idealization of the relative world." The katabasis, the descent from the noumenal world back down to the phenomenal world in which we live, is not the end of the mystical experience but the beginning of the mystic philosopher's mission. And that mission, as Iztitsu himself described it, is ultimately a practical one: to prepare "a suitable locus in which
mutual understanding" among cultures can he actualized.3 To do so, Izutsu drew upon his vast knowledge of Oriental thought to develop a philosophy of WORD.
izutsu's starting point was the concept of mu, which is usually translated as Non-Being or Nothingness. But far from being a static,
PREFACE TO THE JAPANESE ED[UON
honshitsu. Most of his readers abroad still do not know his most important work. The possibility of uierstanding him in his totality is open to Japanese readers alone.
A writer poses a question. The role of a reader is not simply to critique it or comment on it. It is to take the written word to an even deeper level and sometimes to find in it a world or worlds of which even the author him/herself had no idea. The written word remains unchanged, but with the advent of the reader, the meaning hidden within it spontaneously reveals itself. Through "reading" as what Izutsu terms a creative act, the advent of a reader who practices creative "misinterpretation" brings the work to its completion. Frankly speaking - without fear of misinterpretation - authors do not know their own works in their entirety.
Chapters One through Six of this 1)00k were serialized in the journal Mita Bungaku (Mita Literature) between the spring of 2009 and the autumn of 2010, but they have been largely rewritten. Chapters Seven through Ten and the Chronology were written especially for this book. Authorial additions within quoted texts are enclosed in brackets H. Following Izutsu's usage the spelling "Koran" will be used instead of "Qur'an," and Wade-Cues romanization will be used instead of Pinyin for Chinese words and names. Pinyin spellings will be given in the index.
Translator's Notes
TFIE ONLY EXPRESSION that seems appropriate to describe the present book is "intellectual biography.' 'lb be sure, it does follow the events of its protagonist's life in more or less chronological order—a childhood spent practicing Zen meditation with his father; the Kcio years as a student and teacher; his early works on Creek philosophy and nineteenth-century Russian literature; his two translations of the Koran into Japanese (the first to be made from the original Arabic) and the works on the semantics of the Koranic Weltanschauung; his major English-language study Su/ism and Taoism; his years as an acknowledged authority on Islamic mysticism at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal and later at its branch in rFellrarI and subsequently at the imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy; the lectures on Oriental philosophy that he gave at the Eranos Conference; his return to Japan in 1979 on the last rescue mission out of Teb ran on the eve of the Iranian revolution; the works in Japanese on Oriental philosophy that he wrote in Japan during the last fifteen years of his life.
But what stands out in the present book are the purely internal events of intellectual development: his awakening to the mysteries of language; his discovery through Creek philosophy that intellectual inquiry and the vita contemplativa are not mutually antithetical; the evolution of his ideas about "meaning" while teaching linguistics at Keio University; the impact on him of other thinkers, living and dead, from lbn Arabi to Mircea Eliade, from Mallarmé to Jean-Paul Sartre;
PREFACE b lHF JAPANESE EDITION W Fill. JAPANESE U ii U
Up until that point, Iliere is no denying that Izutsu had been seen as somehow detached frttni contemporary history. There seems to have been something aloof about Izutsu, and, as a resuLt, countless quasi-mythical anecdotes attached themselves to him from an early period. Even describing Izutsu as an lslaniicist, while not mistaken, seems overly restrictive, like calling him simply a philosopher of language. Such titles do much to conceal the truth, I believe. And indeed, he never identified himself as a specialist in the studs' of Islam, except with reservations. Nearly every year from 1967 to 1982, lzutsii attended the Eranos Conference. Begun in 1933 by Olga Froebe-Kapteyn with the cooperation of Jung and Rudolf Otto, Eranos was an attempt to integrate Eastern and Western spirituality. Izutsu gave a total of twelve lectures at Eranos, but never chose Islamic philosophy as the main topic for any of them. What he did discuss was the thought ofLao-'. and Chuang-tai and the Ch'u Tz'ü (Elegies of C11,11), Confucius and the I Clung (Book of Changes). the Buddhist thought of the Zen, 1-ha Yen and Yogcra schools. Indian philosophy. etc. As ill be clear to Izutsu's Japanese readers, these topics How directly into Ishiki to hon-shitsu. If he had not been invited to Eranos, that work might never have seen the light of day.
Ishiki to honshitst, is Toshihiko Izutsu's magnum opus. Even were we to include the works written in English, that fact would remain unchanged. Although he never wrote a memoir, Ishiki to honshitsu can be read as his spiritual autobiography. As we watch it unfold, beginning with Sartre through the poets of the Kokinsho (ca gao: Collection of Japanese poems from ancient and modern times), Rilke, Mallarmé, the Islamic philosophers. Con lucius, Jewish mysticism and Jungian psy-chologv, we seem to be following along itli him in the footsteps, as it were, of his intellectual development. Yet if we read this work as an account of his own spiritual journey, we notice there is one topic missing: his relationship with Christianit\.
Someone may cite Roshiateki ningen as Izutsu's discussion of Christianity, and indeed in it he called Dostoevsky "a Christian wit-lless."If4 But we should not forget that he added soon afterwards that Dostoevsky was above all a true mystic. "a new mail" —novy chdovvek—who transcends the single religious belief system of Christianity. What tliit work makes clear is the lot of a spiritual revohitioiiarv qua man of letters who lived in dangerous tImes. ilie issue here is literally the direct historical relationship ofThshili I ko Izutsu to Christian thinkers. Al one time liiitsu was strongly moved b such Christian intellectuals as the poet CLaudel, Augustine, John Eritigena and John of (lie Cross. One of these thinkers whom he discussed \\ ith IIIICflSC emotion was Bernard of Clairvaux 'Ihe impact of these poets and religious figures would pierce his soul with a force comparable to that of his contact jib the Urcek sages. So strong and so profound was their influence that, as is clear iii the preface to that work, without this encounter. Izutsu would probably never have begun Shiupi tetsugaku.
Toshihiko Izutsu's philosophical projects converge on the "synchronic structural ization of Oriental philosophies," the subtitle of Ishiki to honshitsu, in other words, what he describes elsewhere as creating "a comprehensive structural framework, a kind of mctaphiloso-p1w of Eastern philosophies . . . ."- "Svnchronic" in this context means treating a problem as though it exists 1)0(11 in the present and sub specie aeternitalis-4'transposing the main philosophical traditions of lhc Orient spatially into an ideal plane at the present point . . . to create artificially an organic space of thought, which could include all these traditions structurally, by taking Ithem] off . . . the axis of time and by recombining them paradigmatically." That such an undertaking would be impossible for a single individual to complete was something Izutsu understood from the outset. The words in ls'urj,nu tetsugaku no genzo must be understood in this way, i.e. the "acute sense of powerlessness" he felt as he tried to penetrate the depths of Oriental philosophy through the prism of Islamic mysticism.24 At the beginning of Ishiki to honshitsu as well, he writes that this work is only a prolegomenon to a "synchronic structural ization of Oriental philosophies2
To be sure, what Itsuzu rote was only a "prolegomenon." Yet, as can frequently be seen in an outstanding work, it clarifies the fundamental issues. And even while he acknowledged that the end result would be only an introduction, time very fact that he took up his pen was because he believed there would be readers for it. Izmitsti's readers are spread across the world. But what is needed now, I believe, is for Japanese to 'dread" Izutsu's Japanese works, beginning with Ishiki to
PREFACE TO TIlE JAPANESE EDITION
they were to be banished from his Republic. In our own day, it is not the poets who are to be expetttd but the philosophers. The reader of Shinpi tetsugaku can almost hear its author saying this. "Metaphysics is something that should come after metaphysical experience," izutsu says in that work.4 It is no wonder, then, that a person such as he did not recognize as "philosophy" an activity that had severed its ties with transcendence and no longer lent an ear to the voice of poetic inspiration. Nor did he regard himself as a student of philosophy, much less those who unhesitatingly styled themselves "philosophers" simply because they were studying that subject. Already by this time, in his innermost heart, the term "philosopher" had a special meaning for him, completely divorced from its generally accepted usage.
As lie himself suggests, the public life of Toshihiko Izutsu can he roughly divided into three periods. The first began in igp, the year of his maiden work, Arabia shisöshi. and continued through the publication of Shinpi tetsugaku, Roshiateki ningen (1953; Russian human-
it-,)6
uman-itv) and the translations of the Koran (1957-1958 and 1964),7 up until the beginning of his life overseas. The second period was spent in pursuit of interdisciplinary studies abroad, first at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, then at the Tehran branch of McGill's Institute of Islamic Studies and at the imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy there, namely the period up to his return to Japan in 1979 as the Iranian revolution intensified. During this time he was deeply involved in the Eranos Conference and published almost all of his works in English. The third period lasted from the time of his return to Japan until his death and saw the publication of one work after another, including Isurarnu seitan (1979; The birth of Islm).8 Isuramu tetsugaku no gen;o 0980; The original image of Islamic philosophy),') ishiki to honshitsu: scishinteki TOvO o inotomete (1983; Consciousness and essence: In search of the spiritual Orient),bo isuramu bunka: sono kontei ni ani mono 0981; Islamic culture: The elements that make up its foundation)," KOran a vomu (1983; Reading the Koran),' Imi no ftik(imi e: Too tetsugaku no suii (1985; To the depths of meaning: Fathoming Oriental philosophy)," Kosu mosu to anchi kosuniosu (1989; Cosmos and anti-cosmos),4 Choetsu no kotobti (1991; Transcendental WORDs),Ii up to and including part one of his notes on Oriental philosophy, Ishiki no keiiijogakii i; Met apliysics of conscious-ness).'6 At the time of his death. he was about to begin writing the sequel to this posthumously published work, so it would be fair to say that he staved the course, never resting until he Look up residence in the other world.
This does not mean, of course, that, from the very beginning, izutsu was the profound scholar that one might infer from his present international reputation. There were mans' events in the process that led to the birth of loshihiko izutsu the philosopher. These were not exclusi clv internal, such as his encounters with lbn 'Arabi and Lao-tzfl and Chiianr-t,i. Out of his meetings and interactions with people and ideas in the world around him would emerge 'lbshihiko Izutsu the epoch-making philosopher. And yet even when reading the selected works ofToshihikolZutSu,'7 it is difficult to catch a glimpse of his relation to the world in which lie lived. The names of even such great Japanese philosophers as Kitaro Nishida (1870-1945) and Daiset Suzuki (1870-1966), for example, appear only once or twice in his works, and Izutsu made virtually no references to other Japanese thinkers who preceded him. Ihat does not mean lie showed no interest in Japanese thought. his veneration for Daisetz Suzuki was no small matter, and we know from writings not included in his selected works that he read Munevoshi (SOetsu) Yanagi (1889-1961). Nisliida's best student, Keiji Nishitani (1900-1990), was someone who recognized 'Foshihiko Izut.sus genius at an early stage. To this list could be added the names of Islamic scholar Shctmei Okawa (1886-1957) and such Kcio lllininar-ies as Shinobu Orikuchi (1887-1953) and Izutsu's mentor, Jiinzabtirn Nishiwaki (1894-1982).
Nor was it Japanese thinkers alone who influenced him. Izutsu frequently mentioned his contemporary Jacques Derrida, but perhaps the non-Japanese intellectual he loved most was Louis Massignon. In terms of the strength of their influence, Rudolf Otto and Nlircea Eliade also cannot be overlooked. But, except in the case of his colloquies with other thinkers and writers, even the names of these friends, mentors and scholars of an earlier generation hardly appear at all in his selected works. Providing us with clues to fill ill this gap is Yomu to kaku (Reading and writing), an anthology of his essays published in 2oo9.'
PREPACK TO THE ENGLISH EDON
would like to single out Ryôko Katahara of Keio University Press, who was also the editor for the Jap'a'nese edition, and, above all, Yasuo Saji of the International House of Japan, who has given me his constant and wholehearted support during the long translation process. My profound thanks goes to them both.
Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to those who have gone on before us. One of them is Frank lioff, the translator's husband. As she writes in her Translator's Notes, he worked tirelessly with her on the translation, but died on November 7-2013 and did not live to see the book completed. My father, Akio Wakamatsu, who was looking forward to the publication of this translation, also died before its completion, on May 7. 2012. Death, to be sure, is the demise of the body. But if it signified the end of existence, there would probably be no need for metaphysics. Its very existence tells us that metaphysics forms the basis of life. The dead cannot be seen, but they live together with the living in a different form. This book could not have been completed without their support. I thank them from the bottom of my heart.
Eisuke Wakamatsu March 6. 204
Preface to the Japanese Edition
Al rim, START of a lecture in 1943. loshihiko Izutsu said he was not a philosopher. He was twenty-nine years old.
Nl specialty primarily has been Arabic. Persian and Turkish literature, and since these are all Islamic literatures, naturllv I have had to study Islam to sonic extent. For that reason I have nothing to say to those of you who arc specialists in philosophy... •1
He was not being modest. The position (zutsu held at the time was a research fellowship in Arabic language and literature at the Institute of Philological Studies, Keio University. On the other hand, however, he had a book on philosophy to his credit, Arabia shisôshi (ii: History of Arabic thought)2 and had written on Mulammad and lhn 'ArabT. Although Shin p1 tetsugaku (Philosophy of mysticism, 1949) would not be published until after the war, the lectures on the intellectual history of Creek mysticism upon which it was based had already been given at Keio.4 On the evidence of these achievements, for all inxtents and purposes, he might well have said he was a student of philosophy.
Plato, the central figure in Shin p1 tetsugaku, would have expelled poets from the state. Not because he had any objection to the arts. What Plato objected to were harmful fabrications. Poets ought to be conduits of revelation. When they lost sight of their role as conveyors of divine enlightenment and became preoccupied with self-expression,
PR;: It I hF. F NI ISII F:I)I11ON PRI:FA:FF() 111K ENGUSU EfltION
years, Sliinpi tetsugaku (Philosophy of mysticism). "Metaphysics should conic after a metaphysical experience," he wrote. It will come as no surprise that Bergson said much the same thing in Les deux sources de Ici morale et de la religion (1932; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 1935). Some people have had profound experiences, but only a few have been able to put those experiences into words, and rarer still are those who have been able to express them in rich, poetic language.
The works for which Izutsu is known in the West are his studies of Islamic mysticism, especially Sufism and Taoism, and his semantic hermeneutics of the Koran, such as The Ethi co-Religious Concepts in the Qur'an. Some have called him a scholar of lslm; during his lifetime, he was recognized as such even in Japan. But he never called himself an Islamic specialist. He considered himself to be a philosopher of language in the higher sense, or rather, to use his most important key term, a metaphysician of kotoba (t"), WORD. When Izutsu writes kotoba, it does not mean words or language in a narrow sense. Just as color is WORD for an artist, sound is WORD for a musician, and shape is WORD for a sculptor. In prayer, the most eloquent WORD is silence. For Jesus as depicted in the New Testament WORD perhaps was the gaze with which he looked at people. Izutsu believed that the world is full of WORDs, that WORD forms the basis for the existence of all things. Being is WORD" - Izuu's philosophy can be summed up in this one sentence.
Izutsu's two main works are Shinpi tetsugciku (1949), published when lie was 35, and lshiki to honshitsu (1983; Consciousness and essence). It is a fact worth noting that, although he was conversant with more than 30 languages, had no difficulty writing in English and spent the main part of his scholarly life abroad, he wrote what would become his major works in Japanese. He left books in English that compare favorably with his Japanese writings, but even if these were to be included, that does not change the fact that the two books just mentioned are his main works.
It would be difficult to translate these two books into English any time soon. And yet reading the passages quoted in the present work ought to sufficiently convey the brilliance of the ideas they contain. Words do not achieve their end when they are written but when they are read. It is not the writer who brings a hook to coinpktion; that is the job of the reader. Izutsu's works have a quality well suited to being called modern classics. Books that are considered classics are alive. lhev continue to be read over the ages, changing as they do so. The vords in the New Testament are the same as they were on the 11y they were written, but the Incallilig hidden in them has become richer with the passage of time. That ability to change over time is proof that a work is a classic.
Izutsu. a Japanese, left works on Islamic philosophy that are in no
wa inferior to those of the Islamic scholars who were his contempo-
raries. Similarly it is highly likely that people whose native language is not Japanese will discover the latent potential oflhshihiko Izutsu's philosophy. I strongly hope so. Not only so that research on the illdivid-ual called 'Foshihiko Izutsu may flourish, but, rather, because the role metaphysics ought to play in ameliorating the clash of, and conflicts between, cultures that continue to this very day is, I think, bil no means a small one. Thshihiko izutsu believed that philosophy must play a bigger role in bringing about peace in the true sense. Philosophy for Toshihiko Izutsu was not an abstract matter. The mission of philosophy, he believed, was to cause the workings of that invisible somctln;ig called Wisdom to abound in the world we live in Al the risk of being misunderstood, the fundamental issue for Thsh lb iko Izutsu was how can philosophy save the human race.
My book has been fortunate to be blessed with an extremely talented translator. What I sensed while reading the English text is that this translation is not simply it matter of turning the Japanese I wrote into English. The work has taken on a new life of its own. The beauty of the translator's language will no doubt be apparent to the reader. but what deserves attention is the depth of Jean Connell Hoff's "reading." 'l'he difficulty of translation lies not in choosing the right words but in reading and understanding the original. Through her reading of it, "iv book has been reborn on a new level. I wish to COIWCV to her my sincere thanks.
The efforts of many people have, in fact, gone into the prodmie-tion of this translation. Although I cannot cite all their names here. I
Afteiword
321
Chronology Preface to the English Edition
329
Notes
31
THE YEAR 204 MARKS the centenary of the birth ofToshihiko Izutsu, one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. In his case, there is no need to add the qualifier "Japanese." His ideas transcend national borders and are universally loved and accepted.
Last year was the twentieth anniversary of Izutsu's death. Today his writings are gaining more readers in Japan than they did even at the time they were written. The on-going publication of his complete Japanese works, begun last year in Japan, has met with a warm reception from many readers not only in the field of philosophy. Artists, opinion makers and ordinary people, not to mention specialists in literature, religion, linguistics, anthropology and ethnographv, are attempting to find new meaning in Izutsu's words that will cut through the confusion of the times. In this respect, Izutsu calls to mind Henri Bergson, who after his death would come to enjoy even wider influence than ever before outside his special field.
Toshihiko Izutsu did not start out as a philosopher. The age he lived in made him one. The person whom he called his "one and only mentor" in his entire life was the poet Juiazahuro Nishiwaki, who was on close terms with T.S. Eliot. The reason I mentioned Bergson's name earlier is not simply because the trajectories of their influence overlap but because poetry and a pure, transcendental experience underlie the metaphysics of both men. Izutsu called the magnum opus of his earl
Bibliography
1. WORKS BY TOSHIIIIKO IZUTSU
397
2. OTHER WORKS CITED
.421
Index
1. INDEX OF NAME
439
2. SUBJECT INDEX
Contents
Preface to the English Edition xiPreface to the Japanese Edition
Translator's Notes xxi
CH 1 Shinpi tetsugaku: The Birth of a Poet-Philosopher 14
- The Pure Starting Point
- The Sage of Stagira and the Sacred Duty
- The Poet Who Prophesies 19
- Mitsuo Ueda and SOetsu Yanagi 25
CH 2 The Encounter with Islam
- The Children of Shem: SetsuzO Kotsuji )
- TheTwo Tatars.. 50
- Shtmei Olcawa and the Origins of Japanese Islam 54
- Martyrdom and Dialogue: lJallaj and Massignon 6*
- The Writer's Mission 71
- The Seer of Souls and the Mystic Poet:
- I)ostoevsky and Tyutchev 79
- The Poet Who Sang of Life before Birth 85
- The Eternal Idea 92
CH 4 A Contemporary and the Biography of the Prophet
- Religious Philosopher Yoshinori Moroi 101
- Shamanism and Mysticism 108
- Biography of the Prophet uS
- The Saint and the Poet 127
- The Praxis of Proceeding toward Truth:
- ShüzO Kuki and Yoshihiko Yoshimitsu 141
- Izutsu's Influence on Christians:
- Shusaku Endô, YOji Inoue and Takako Takahashi 47
- The Position of Islrn in Izutsu's Scholarship 155
- Language and Semantics 161
- The "Introduction to Linguistics" Lectures 168
- The Semantics of Waka iSo
- The Translation of the Koran 189
- Structure and Structuralism 199
- IL)n 'Arabi 206
- Lao-tzU, Chuang-tzu and Ch'u Yuan 215
- The "Time" of Eranos 223
- Otto and Eliade 233
- The Traditionalists and Sophia perennzs 241
- On the Eve of Ishiki to honshitsu" 253
- Ad Orientern 259
- A Spiritual Autobiography 264
- "Consciousness" and "Essence" 270
- The Mystic Philosophy of WORD 279
- Buddhism and Depth Psychology:
- The Unconscious and Mu-consciousness 287
- The "Readings" of 'Writers 296
- True Reality and Panen heism:
- Kitaro Nishida and Ben'nei Yamazaki 308
