Resumen de Does Emptiness Refect or Transform?: Swedenborg’s Gardens and Kyoto School Tensions
This paper tries to argue that the Kyoto School’s assertion of the concept of emptiness has given it a certain unique approach in facing the post-Kantian challenges of modern Continental philosophy. However, emptiness as a solution also makes emptiness a problem in that the relationship between emptiness and self raises dilemmas and conflicting cosmologies. In this paper I use the example of the mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg and how D. T. Suzuki and Immanuel Kant reacted to him. While Suzuki warms to the unifying mysticism of Swedenborg’s vision, Kant sees his works as something not to be embraced but to be explained. And, indeed, Kant finds himself disturbed that he cannot fully explain Swedenborg away. A world that produces Swedenborg is ultimately undecidable and non-unifiable.
Ultimately, I argue that Tanabe Hajime, whilst using the concept of emptiness the same as his Kyoto School counterpart, D. T. Suzuki, he tends to provide descriptions of self and the world that cohere more closely to Kant than to Swedenborg and Suzuki.
