CEACOP East Asian Comparative Ethics, Politics and Philosophy of Law – serie

Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945) is considered Japan’s greatest modern philosopher. As the founder of the Kyoto School, he initiated a rigorous philosophical engagement with Western philosophy, including the work of Karl Marx. Bradley Kaye explores the political aspects of Nishida’s thought, placing his work in connection with Marxism and Zen. Developing concepts of self-awareness, Basho, dialectical materialism, circulation, will, nothingness, and the state. Nishida’s thought offers an ethics of personal will that radical awakening that offers clarity in a seemingly hopeless world.

Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945) is considered Japan’s greatest modern philosopher. As the founder of the Kyoto School, he initiated a rigorous philosophical engagement with Western philosophy, including the work of Karl Marx. Bradley Kaye explores the political aspects of Nishida’s thought, placing his work in connection with Marxism and Zen. Developing concepts of self-awareness, Basho, dialectical materialism, circulation, will, nothingness, and the state. Nishida’s thought offers an ethics of personal will that radical awakening that offers clarity in a seemingly hopeless world.

Can we endorse valuable rights and freedoms—the cherished forms of equality and liberty we might call liberality—without liberalism? This book outlines such a possibility. Humane liberality upholds and deliberates equality, freedom, and justice through the Mencian virtue of humaneness, based in care and compassion. In positing humaneness to be the first virtue of government, Mencius directs us to formulate policies that are responsive to and promote the wellbeing of the people understood in terms of their actual lived and felt experience—their feelings and their flourishing. Rights and freedoms can and should be affirmed in ways that facilitate that flourishing. This pushes against the usual approaches to valuing rights and liberties of both Confucians and liberals, who tend to reason from abstract first principles rather than through care for people and responsiveness to their actual wants and needs. In setting out this vision, Humane Liberality first critically analyzes the broader problems and possibilities of affirming freedom, equality, and pluralism through Confucianism. It then outlines and promotes an underappreciated concrete humanist account of Mencian morality and politics, which has been overshadowed by more metaphysical orthodox interpretations of Mencius. Concrete humanism insists we adjudicate what is right not through eternal abstractions but instead through situated assessment of human emotions. In this way, humaneness offers a unique and uniquely compelling approach to reasoning about rights and liberties, and humane liberality recasts how we understand and practice Confucian values, liberal principles, and the promise and potential of incorporating the two.