Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook

Nishida Kitarō

646 Nishida Kitarō 西田幾多郎 (1870–1945) Nishida Kitarō, generally considered Japan’s greatest academic philosopher, made it his lifelong task to wed the spiritual awareness cultivated through a decade of Zen practice with modern philosophy. From Zen he had come to appreciate the living unity of experience that precedes dichotomies of mind and body, subject and object; in western philosophy he recognized the importance of logical thinking, the critical examination of preconceptions, and a comprehensive vision of the world. Beginning with the experiment of his maiden work, An Inquiry into the Good, to see all of reality as “pure experience,” each step of Nishida’s way posed new questions, leaving behind a trail of neologisms to mark the route he had taken: acting intuition, absolute nothingnessž, knowing by “becoming,” theself-identity of absolute contradictionž, the logic of placež, the dialectical historical world, inverse correlationž, and so forth. Nishida’s academic career was centered in Kyoto University, where he taught from 1910 until 1928. The circle of disciples and colleagues that had gathered around him during his life and continued to debate and pursue his ideas after his death produced a rich body of philosophical thought that has come to be known collectively, if somewhat loosely, as “Kyoto School philosophy.” Although a considerable portion of Nishida’s writing was done in the seventeen years after his retirement, his crowning idea, the logic of place, had been framed in an essay published during his final year at Kyoto University. The opening section of that essay is included here. His final essay, completed in the year of his death, was an attempt to weave together the various strands of his mature thought into a single tapestry, a “religious worldview” as he called it. Notoriously difficult for its mixture of dense paraphrases of old ideas with subtle intimations of new ones, it has been the focus of considerable discussion among scholars in Japan. The excerpts included below were chosen to reflect its style and content. In response to Marxist dialectics, which were gaining popularity in Japan during the waning years of Nishida’s teaching career, he sought to add a social and historical dimension to his philosophical reflection. Global politics at the time, including the rise of German nationalism and Italian fascism, further moved him to clarify the meaning of history and the correlation of individuals, ethnic groups, cultures, and nations. As Nishida’s perspective gained in concreteness, he gradually shifted his focus away from the working of consciousness to the historical world as a whole. Brief passages acknowledging that shift have been included here. He came to view human existence as the “self-determination of the world,” where the roots of its n i s h i da k i ta r ō | 647 internal self-contradictions are to be sought. In particular, he viewed the individual as a kind of monad that both reflects the world and is a concentrated reflection of it. Unlike Leibniz’s, Nishida’s individual is shaped by history and at the same time shapes it. Throughout it all, he maintained his affection for the dialectical logic of affirmation-in-negation in order to prevent the contradictions of reality and human life from ending up in the simple irrational Angst he found in western existential thinking. The passage from his essay on Michelangelo and Goethe demonstrates Nishida’s ability to turn away from his typically recondite prose to rephrase his ideas in concrete, moving imagery. During the years immediately following the war in Japan, and especially during the 1980s in the West, Nishida’s political beliefs came under sharp scrutiny, one side accusing him of ultranationalism, the other defending him as a determined but subtle critic of the military regime and its ideology. Although he himself was not ignorant of the charges, as an examination of his personal correspondence at the time makes clear, he was convinced that if the major insight of his logic of place were understood properly, his view of history would be correctly understood. The final selection, a lament against his critics, hints at this. [ym] P ure experience Nishida Kitarō 1911, 3, 9, 11–12 (xxx, 3–4, 6–7); 1933, 5; 1936, 3–4 (xxxi–iii) For many years I wanted to explain all things on the basis of pure experience as the sole reality. At first I read such thinkers as Ernst Mach, but this did not satisfy me. Over time I came to realize that it is not that experience exists...