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This thesis studies the thought of Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro through an analysis of his 1938 lecture series The Problem of Japanese Culture (Nihon bunka no mondai), his 1940 monograph The Problem of Japanese Culture, and reactions in the Japanese press to Nishida's writings from 1940 to 1941. Chapter 1 argues that The Problem of Japanese Culture includes anti-ultranationalist motifs, which I term "academic liberty" and "global orientation," as well as nationalist motifs like those I term "Japanese essentialism," "anti-Sinic differentiation," and "imperial centrality," and that the existence of these motifs in Nishida's work can be understood to be the result of Nishida's dialogue with the transnational Iwanami culture that developed around publishing house Iwanami Shoten. Chapter 2 argues that these motifs are made more nationalistic in The Problem of Japanese Culture as a result of Iwanami Shigeo's indictment during the 1939-1940 Tsuda Incident, during which historian Tsuda Sokichi was brought to trial by ultranationalist forces. Chapter 3 identifies Iwanami writers, anti-Nishida ultranationalists, and pro-Nishida ultranationalists as representing the three main strands of interpretation of Nishida's thought from 1940 through 1941, and argues that the more nationalistic tone and content of The Problem of Japanese Culture allowed for the assertion of an ultranationalist reading of Nishida.

This dissertation explores the writings of the fourteenth-century poet and intellectual Chūgan Engetsu 中巌円月, a leading figure in the literary movement known to history as Gozan (“Five Mountains”) literature. In terms of modern disciplinary divisions, Gozan literature straddles the interstices of several distinct areas of study, including classical Chinese poetry and poetics, Chinese philosophy and intellectual history, Buddhology, and the broader tradition of “Sinitic” poetry and prose (kanshibun) in Japan.Among the central contentions of this dissertation are the following: (1) that Chūgan was the most original Confucian thinker in pre-Tokugawa Japanese history, the significance of his contributions matched only by those of early-modern figures such as Ogyū Sorai, and (2) that kanshi and kanbun were creative media, not merely displays of erudition or scholastic mimicry. Chūgan’s expository writing demonstrates that the enormous multiplicity of terms and concepts animating the Chinese philosophical tradition were very much alive to premodern Japanese intellectuals, and that they were subject to thoughtful reinterpretation and application to specifically Japanese sociohistorical phenomena. No less intrepid in the realm of poetry, Chūgan candidly addressed themes such as illness, war, and poverty, and experimented with unusual Sinitic forms such as hexasyllabic quatrains and the vernacular “song lyric” or ci 詞, which though popular in China was very seldom seen in Japan.The thematic and stylistic breadth of Chūgan’s oeuvre reveals the catholicity of Gozan literary culture and suggests directions for further research into Japanese intellectual history and Sinitic poetry during the medieval era.

A central question in aesthetics is whether aesthetic judgment is subjective or objective. Existing approaches to answering this question have been unsatisfying because they begin with the assumption of an individual observer that must then be communalized through the introduction of a transcendent object or the transcendental reason of the subject. Rather than introduce a vertical transcendence to account for the ideal observer, I propose an alternative account based on the anthropology of the Japanese philosopher WATSUJI Tetsurō. According to Watsuji, human existence is a movement of double negation whereby we negate our emptiness in order to individuate ourselves and we negate our individuality in order to form communal wholes. Human beings are empty of independent existence, and thus open to create ideal aesthetic subjects in historically and regionally situated communal contexts. I propose an account of aesthetic experience as a double negation in which we negate our surroundings in order to create a sense of psychical distance and negate our ordinary selves in order to dissolve into the background of primordial unity. I examine aesthetic normativity and find that the subject of aesthetics is active and plural rather than passive and individual. Aesthetic judgment and taste are, respectively, individual and communal moments in the process of double negation. Artistic evolution is a process by which the context of artist, artwork, and audience develop into a meaningful historical milieu. Genius is the ability to make public one's private values through the creation of objects that can travel beyond their original contexts and create new contexts around them. Such an ability is the result of a double negation played out between the genius and critical receptivity. Extended examples taken from Noh theater, Japanese linked verse, tea ceremony, and The Tale of Genji are also used to illustrate my arguments.