of creativity coincides with the major institutional break, the transition from
the Heian court rule to Kamakura feudalism.
After five generations empty of major or secondary philosophers (and
sparse even in minor ones), another dense, competitive network of creative
thinkers appears in the generation 1600–1635. This network continues to turn
up significant rival thinkers down to 1800 and, more loosely connected, to
- The underlying transition is the Tokugawa unification; again we see a
thinning out of its networks of creativity after six generations.
After an interval of minor figures during two or three generations in the
1800s, there is a burst of major and secondary creativity, linked in a tight
network, during 1900–1935. This is the Kyoto school, which suddenly revives
Buddhist philosophy in a blend with Western (mainly German) metaphysics.
The underlying shift is not precisely the Meiji restoration, which is followed
by a single generation in which philosophy is dominated by imitative imports
of European ideas. What has shifted by the 1890s is a new organizational base
for intellectual production: the autonomous university, which becomes the
home of the Kyoto school and its rivals and offshoots.
In general, then, we find four major networks of creativity, corresponding
to the onset of four major institutional transitions in the outermost political-
structural base. Looking more closely, we can see that the immediate means of
intellectual production also changed at each period, opening up new opportu-
nities for intellectual life and stimulating the formulation of new positions. In
two of these instances (1165–1365 and 1600–1800), the network lasts for half
a dozen generations before petering out. In one case (800–835) there is only
a single creative generation (in the case of 1900–1935 it appears that the
network continues, but I do not trace this further). What keeps the networks
going for such six-generation periods is not the transition per se, but the
ongoing dynamics of the intellectual competition.
There is an almost perfect correlation between the onset of new political-
economic structures and the onset of intellectual creative networks, with one
negative case: the transition from Kamakura to Muromachi. This marks the
shift between the rule of clan feudalism by the Kamakura shoguns (1185–1330)
and the much more decentralized (and commercialized) feudalism which set in
with the weak Ashikaga shogunate (1338–1573). The latter (especially the
Sengoku or “Country at War” period after 1467, when Japan was a patchwork
of rival military domains, self-governing cities, and monastic states) was the
major economic growth period, the time of Buddhist penetration into the
countryside, and of the fusion of the hierarchy of Zen monasteries with the
feudal aristocracy. But although it was a time of cultural flourishing, in arts
which have come to characterize the Japanese aesthetic (tea ceremony, brush
painting, garden architecture), it was a vacuum for noteworthy philosophers,
Innovation through Conservatism: Japan • 325