A philosopher is never only a thinker. He is also a life, and sometimes, a sacrifice.
When people think of Japanese philosophy, Zen is usually the first association. Yet the story is far broader — and at times far darker.
One figure who embodies this tension is the Marxist philosopher Miki Kiyoshi (1897–1945) — a thinker who ultimately died for his ideas and commitment. When I began researching Japanese philosophy, Miki was rarely mentioned by philosophers. He was considered less profound, philosophically speaking, than his mentor, Nishida Kitarō.
Today, however, many researchers study him, whether in Japan, America, or Europe, with his biggest impact coming in the areas of the history of philosophy and the history of political science.
What makes Miki unique is the central role he played in the reception of Marxism in Japan and the fact that he stood among the intellectuals who resisted the country's wartime militarism. His thoughts raise questions that feel surprisingly relevant today and his answers are as relevant today as they were in the 1930s and 1940s.
How do we navigate life as both individuals and social beings, shaped by — and shaping — our environments? For Miki Kiyoshi, the answer lies in imagination, the power that creates societies, myths, and technologies. Once forged in resistance to authoritarian power, his philosophy now speaks directly to our debates about artificial intelligence, one of today's most powerful environments.
This article traces Miki Kiyoshi's life and thought in four steps. First is his dramatic biography as a philosopher who resisted Japan's wartime regime and died in prison. Second is his insight that we cannot understand ourselves apart from the environments that act upon us. Third is his unfinished Logic of Imagination, which explores how myth, institutions, technology, and experience are products of imagination. Finally, it shows how these ideas clarify our present and demonstrate the importance of Miki's philosophy for understanding artificial intelligence as a world-creating force.
A Life at the Edge of History
Miki's story reads like a film script. Born in rural Hyōgo Prefecture in 1897, he showed an early passion for literature and philosophy. At Kyoto University, he studied German thinkers and became deeply influenced by Nishida Kitarō, the founder of the Kyoto School.
In 1922, he left Japan for Europe and absorbed ideas from Pascal, Marx, and Heidegger. Upon his return, he began publishing works that challenged philosophy by bringing together philosophy, myth, and ideology.
But Japan in the 1930s was not kind to dissenting voices. The Peace Preservation Law gave the government sweeping powers to suppress communists and anarchists. Miki, who supported socialist ideas and maintained links with critical intellectuals, was arrested, dismissed from his post, and later sent to the Philippines as a reluctant "advisor" during the war.
In June of 1945, just before the war ended, Miki was arrested again for helping a dissident political activist and writer. Malnourished and forgotten, he died three months later in prison. He wrote about freedom and imagination, only to be silenced by the very state he resisted.
Our Connection to The Environment
One of Miki's great insights was that we cannot understand ourselves apart from our environment. In Western philosophy, from Descartes to Husserl, a person is often treated as a detached mind looking out at the world. Miki rejected this. For him, a person is not just contemplative but active. We are not merely thinking beings; we are acting beings, whose choices and labor transform the world around us.
Conceptually, he distinguishes between two types of subjects: "subjectivity" or "contemplative subjectivity" (shukansei 主観性), which corresponds to the subject of knowledge, and "subjecthood" or "acting subjectivity" (shutaisei 主体性).
In today's language, you could say he anticipated the idea that the self is always ecological and social — entangled with its surroundings. Society is not just something "out there" to be studied; it is something we live inside, shape, and are shaped by.
In his Introduction to Philosophy (1940), Miki provides a detailed explanation of the relationship between the acting subject and the environment. He writes:
The environment, insofar as I am not facing it and am within it, cannot be understood as an object [of knowledge] (taishō 対象) or as an [external] object (kyakkan 客観). Something that envelops my being, which has a subjective aspect, cannot simply be an objective thing. The society in which we find ourselves is not a mere object (kyakkan 客観), but a subject acting in a way that is specific to that society. (Miki 2024)
Miki insists that the environment is not something outside of us that can be studied from a distance. Since we are always within it, the environment has a subjective aspect that shapes us as much as we shape it. Society itself is not a passive entity, but rather an active force that influences thought and behavior.
This idea feels especially relevant today. In the climate crisis, we can no longer treat "nature" as an external backdrop — it affects us through floods, droughts, and heat. In the digital sphere, algorithms and platforms behave like subjects that shape our choices and perceptions. The boundary between humans and environments — natural, social, and digital — is increasingly blurred, just as Miki anticipated.
The Logic of Imagination
If Miki had lived longer, his masterwork would have been Logic of Imagination. For him, imagination was not just daydreaming or art. It was the very power that gives form to human life.
As John W. M. Krummel explains in his introduction, Miki's imagination was not fantasy but world-forming power:
The forms the imagination gives birth to, therefore, are not merely fanciful fictions but the very reality of our world (MKZ 8:41), which is dynamic and never static. This synthetic act of pathos and logos gets played out in different ways through the media of myth, institution, and technology (…). In Ancient Greek terms, mythos, nomos, and technē, along with experience, thus all involve the poiēsis (production) of the imagination. (Krummel 2024, p. 8)
Miki develops this point step by step. He starts with a treatment of myth. (shinwa 神話) He claims that myth is the imaginative force that shapes our surroundings and drives history, providing the symbolic patterns through which societies make sense of themselves.
From there, he turns to institutions (seido 制度) — such as law, language, morality. Institutions are human attempts to stabilize these patterns and adapt to their environment. Yet institutions themselves rely on technology (gijutsu 技術), leading to the third step. For Miki, technology is the practical procedures and instruments that mediate our relationship with the world and enable us to transform it.
Finally, Miki arrives at experience (keiken 経験), where myth, institution, and technology are not abstractions but lived processes. It is here that imagination reveals itself as the ground of how we encounter reality itself. Seen in this way, myth, institution, technology, and experience are not separate topics but stages of one argument. All are products of imagination — not because imagination "adds" something to them, but because without imagination there would be no social, technical, or experiential world at all.
Imagination is the hidden activity that produces the symbolic orders we inhabit, sustains our institutions, directs our technologies, and mediates our everyday experience. It is, quite literally, how humans build the worlds they live in.
At a time when technology is rapidly reshaping institutions and our lives, Miki's assertion that imagination is never neutral but always world-creating is particularly relevant.
Imagination and Artificial Intelligence
If we extend Miki's insights into the present, artificial intelligence becomes a good example of how imagination operates through technology.
For Miki, technology was never merely mechanical but a way human beings mediate their relationship with the world, giving form to their goals and possibilities. AI continues this logic, but in a way that makes its imaginative character especially visible.
Far from being a neutral tool, AI embodies the imaginative structures that produced it — our ideals of efficiency, prediction, autonomy, and even intelligence itself.
AI algorithms and infrastructures are inseparable from the institutions and values that sustain them.
Furthermore, as Miki would have anticipated, AI is accompanied by myths: fantasies of singularity, post-human futures, or machines surpassing their creators. These are not incidental exaggerations but expressions of imagination itself, the symbolic frameworks through which societies interpret new technologies.
Seen this way, AI is not a rupture with the past, but a continuation of the logic of imagination. It crystallizes the very interplay that Miki analyzed — myth, institution, and technology acting together — while reshaping our environments, whether social, digital, or ecological.
The Importance of Miki Kiyoshi Today
Miki's death in prison makes his story tragic, but his philosophy makes it more than tragedy. It makes it a warning and an invitation.
The warning is clear: when societies suppress imagination, they do not eliminate it: they distort it. Myths turn into propaganda, institutions become tools of dominance, and technologies are employed for control and destruction. This was the fate of wartime Japan, and it remains a risk wherever imagination is oppressed by authoritarian power or reduced to mere efficiency.
But Miki also offers us an invitation to see imagination not as a private escape into dreams, but as a public force that shapes the very fabric of collective life. Through imagination, societies generate myths, build institutions, create technologies, and define the horizons of experience. To cultivate imagination is therefore to take responsibility for the worlds we inhabit together.
Today, this invitation feels especially urgent. Artificial intelligence has become one of the most powerful expressions of imagination at work in the world. Like myth and law before it, AI is not only a technical system but a world-creating force that reshapes how we live, relate, and imagine together.
To remember Miki today is to recognize that our technologies carry our imaginative choices within them, and that the futures they bring will depend on how we choose to imagine. If you have ever wondered how imagination builds — or destroys — worlds, then Miki is a philosopher worth rediscovering.