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Kuki Shuzo |
Kuki Shūzō (九鬼周造?), (b. Tōkyō, February 15, 1888 – d. Kyōto, May 6 1941) was a Japanese philosopher and university professor.
Shūzō was the fourth child of Baron Kuki Ryūichi (九鬼隆一) a high bureaucrat in the Meiji Ministry for Culture and Education (Monbushō). Since it appears that Kuki's mother Hatsu was already pregnant when she fell in love with Okakura Kakuzō (岡倉覚三) otherwise known as Okakura Tenshin (岡倉天心), a protégé of her husband's (a notable patron of the arts), the rumour that Okakura was Kuki's father would appear to be groundless. It is true, however, that Kuki as a child, after his mother had separated and then divorced his father, thought of Okakura, who often visited, as his real father, and later certainly hailed him as his spiritual father. From Okakura, he gained much of his fascination for aesthetics and perhaps foreign languages, as indeed his fascination with the peculiar cultural codes of the gay quarters of Japan owes something to the fact that his mother had once been a geisha.
At age 23 in 1911 (Meiji 44), Shūzō converted to Catholicism; and he was baptized in Tokyo as Franciscus Assisiensis Kuki Shūzō. The idealism and introspection implied by this decision were early evidence of issues which would have resonance in the characteristic mindset of the mature man.1
A graduate in philosophy of Tokyo Imperial University, he spent eight years in Europe to polish his knowledge of languages and deepen his already significant studies of contemporary Western thought. At the University of Heidelberg, he studied under the neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert, and he engaged Eugen Herrigel as a tutor.2 At the University of Paris, he was impressed by the work of Henri Bergson, whom he got to know personally; and he engaged the young Jean-Paul Sartre as a French tutor.3 At the University of Freiburg, he studied phenomenology under Edmund Husserl; and he first met Martin Heidegger in Husserl's home. He moved to the University of Marburg for Heidegger's lectures on phenomenological interpretation of Kant, and for Heidegger's seminar "Schelling's Essay on the Essence of Human Freedom."3 Fellow students during these years in Europe were Watsuji Tetsurō and Miki Kiyoshi).
Shortly after Kuki's return to Japan, he wrote and published his masterpiece, The Structure of "Iki" (1930), which has fascinated generations of Japanese writers and thinkers. In this work he undertakes to make a phenomenological analysis of ‘iki’, a variety of chic culture current among the fashionable set in Edo in the Tokugawa period, and asserted that it constituted one of the essential values of Japanese culture.
He took up a teaching post at Kyoto University, then a prominent center for conservative cultural values and thinking. His early lectures focused on Descartes and Bergson. In the context of a faculty with a primarily Germanic philiosophical background, his lectures offered a someone different perspective based on the work of French philosophers.
He became an Associate Professor in 1933 (Shōwa 8); and in that same year, he published the first book length study of Heidegger to appear in Japanese. He became Professor of Philosophy in March 1934 (Shōwa 10);4 and his Kyoto University lectures on Heidegger, Man and Existence (人間と実存, Ningen to jitsuzon?), were published in 1939.5
From the mid-thirties, while Japan drifted towards totalitarianism and the war in China dragged on, Kuki seemed not to be much disturbed by the growth of fascism.6
In 1941, Kuki died prematurely from consequences following an attack of peritonitis.7
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