20 Facts About Kiyoshi Miki

Kiyoshi Miki was a Japanese philosopher, literary critic, scholar and university professor.

Kiyoshi Miki was an esteemed student of Nishida Kitaro and a prominent member of the Kyoto School.

Kiyoshi Miki had tense relations with both Japanese Marxism and the Imperial government at various stages of his career.

Kiyoshi Miki was born on January 5,1897, in Isseimura, Hyogo.

Kiyoshi Miki was the eldest son of Miki Eikichi, a farmer, and his wife Shin, and was raised a devout Pure Land Buddhist.

In 1910, Kiyoshi Miki entered secondary school and went on to excel in various oratory competitions.

Kiyoshi Miki was admitted into the First Higher School in September 1914, where in his third year he formed a society for reading philosophical texts in Japanese.

Kiyoshi Miki began studying under Nishida and Hatano Seiichi, then in 1918 under Tanabe Hajime.

Kiyoshi Miki was in contact with over fifteen other Japanese students during his stay, including Hani Goro, Abe Jiro, Amano Teiyu and Kuki Shuzo.

In 1924, Kiyoshi Miki moved again to Paris, France where he studied the works of Henri Poincare, Hippolyte Taine, Ernest Renan and Blaise Pascal.

Kiyoshi Miki became a contentious figure upon his return to Japan for his outspokenness and outgoing lifestyle, as well as for a controversial involvement with a widowed older woman.

Kiyoshi Miki was critical of Marxist views on religion and its limited scope of natural philosophy in modern natural science.

Trouble befell him when money he lent to a friend was used, unbeknown to Kiyoshi Miki, to make illegal donations to the Japanese Communist Party.

In 1931, Kiyoshi Miki was appointed as a Japanese representative of the International Hegel League.

Kiyoshi Miki became a staunch proponent of academic freedom after raising earnest criticisms of Nazi Germany and Japanese militarism.

Kiyoshi Miki wrote articles for a conservative newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun, providing commentary on issues of the day.

Kiyoshi Miki's death, suggested to be the result of prisoner mistreatment, caused anguish among Japanese intellectuals.

Sato Nobue, a leading scholar on Kiyoshi Miki's body of work, rejects the notion that Kiyoshi Miki was a mere follower of Nishida, Hegel or Blaise Pascal.

Kiyoshi Miki's thought emphasized the nature of certain concepts in opposition, such as spoken and unspoken philosophy, nature and history, subject and object, logos and pathos, process and moment, organicism and dialectic, immanence and transcendence, and so on.

Kiyoshi Miki's philosophy saw dialectic or the logic of imagination as the process of reconciliation between opposites, with the principal organ of this process being imagination that creates types or forms.