Kiyoshi Miki

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Kiyoshi Miki (三木 清, Miki Kiyoshi^?, 1897 – 1945) was a Japanese philosopher. He studied under Nishida Kitarō and Tanabe Hajime at the imperial university of Kyoto. Later he went to Germany, to study the work of Martin Heidegger, Blaise Pascal, Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. Upon his return to Japan, his outspokenness and outgoing lifestyle, coupled with a controversial affair with an older woman, led to his being denied an academic position at Kyoto. Further trouble engulfed him when he lent money to a friend who used it, unbenowst to Miki, to contribute to the Communist Party. Miki was then implicated in this development (the far-left movements were being cracked down upon, and such donations were illegal) and after brief imprisonment lost any chance of regaining decent academic standing. While he remained in touch with his mentor, Nishida, and other members of the Kyoto School, he worked outside of academia proper, producing popular writings aimed at a wide audience.

Miki believed that philosophy should be pragmatic and utilized in addressing concrete social and political problems. He wrote articles for the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, providing commentary on such issues of the day. His firm belief that philosophy should lead politics encouraged the political activism of intellectuals, and when he was offered in 1937 the opportunity to head up the cultural section of the Showa Kenkyu Kai (Showa Research Association), a think-tank concerned with building an intellectual basis for Prince Konoe Fumimaro's Shintaisei (New Order Movement), he eagerly accepted. While he formulated the concept of the "Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere," he was infuriated when the Army employed it in justifying its aggressive expansion in China. Following the collapse of the Showa Kenkyu Kai, and in an environment of the militarization of society and intensifying warfare abroad, Miki became depressed and isolated. After helping a friend on the run from the authorities, he was imprisoned. Miki died in prison on September 26, 1945. His death, at a time when the US Occupation of Japan under General Douglas MacArthur was already underway, deeply upset Japanese intellectuals. Miki's complete works are available from Iwanami Shoten.

[edit] Thought

He developed a reading of Heidegger's early philosophy as essentially being in the tradition of Christian individualism, reaching back to Saint Augustine and being fundamentally anti-Greek in character. As such, his reading of Heidegger falls with the broad class as Jean-Paul Sartre, in that it ignores the priority Heidegger gives to the ontological question of Being, in favour of seeing Heidegger's philosophy as an analysis of human existence.

He became a Marxist in 1925, and preceded Sartre in suggesting a synthesis of Marxism and existentialism.