This dissertation aims to philosophically and historically reconsider Kyoto School philosophy through the framework of totality—proceeding from Nishida Kitarō’s 1911 Inquiry into the Good to Nakai Masakazu’s 1936 “Logic of the Committee.” Separating from religious- and Buddhist-oriented narrations of nothingness, I instead foreground Kyoto School aesthetic, social, and historical production to recast these thinkers via their attempts to holistically conceptualize social development as a self-formative or auto-generating process. Unlike Aristotelian substance, which requires something stable and self-identical that persists beneath or behind transformation as its agent of change, totality is here articulated in terms of “independence and self-sufficiency”—as a “self-moving” whole that “develops and completes itself of itself” without recourse to some more fundamental agent or subject behind it. My philosophical thesis is that Kyoto School thinkers wielded this concept of holistic development to offer a highly novel account of the “self-formation” of society and social forms. The idea is that, rather than relying on the agency of a more basic or pre-formed human subject, or on formal organization by some external state institution, these thinkers conceptualized the autotelic organization of society in terms of intersecting social levels—individuals, groups, collectives, publics, the masses, and class—and in doing so, created a space for these intermediate forms to immanently revise and spur macro-scale processes of social development from within. And yet, pursuing these ideas in their historical register, I also make it clear that this account was by no means immune to reactionary trends in 1910s, ‘20s and ‘30s Japan. Tracking differences across schemas of totality, my research clarifies the structural variations by which the concept of self-formation was co-opted within reactionary conceptions of social holism by certain first generation Kyoto School philosophers, while also providing the resources for an emerging second generation of Kyoto School thinkers to conceptualize social forms like collectives and the masses with the “critical” and “collaborative” functions to intervene in social development, and, for instance, produce counter “public spheres” of “common sense.”