The Kyoto School: An Introduction

1. Nishida Kitaro (1870–1945)

1 Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945) It is no exaggeration to say that in him [Nishida Kitarō] Japan has had the first philosophical genius who knew how to build a system permeated with the spirit of Buddhist meditation, by fully employing the Western method of thinking. —Takeuchi Yoshinori, “The Philosophy of Nishida,” in The Buddha Eye: An Anthology of the Kyoto School Background At about the same time that Japanese men were sent to the West to study the centuries of advances made since the closing of Japan, a small but steady flow of Western academics came to Japan to teach Western ideas and accomplishments. Two German philosophers who taught in Japan (Ludwig Busse and Raphael von Koeber) contributed to the trend toward German “romantic” philosophy and away from the increasingly less popular English philosophers (J. S. Mill, Spencer, Darwin, and Huxley). The affinity that the Japanese had for German authors continued well into the twentieth century: Martin Heidegger’s Zein und Zeit (Being and Time), for example, was translated into Japanese before it was translated into English, and upon Heidegger’s death, the national radio service, NHK, broadcast a tribute to Heidegger that was several minutes in length. It was in this intellectual climate that Nishida was educated. 13 14 / The Kyoto School Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Hartmann were key figures in the rush to understand the West and its ways. Yet, as James Heisig observes, Nishida “did not simply seek to preserve Japan’s traditional self‑understanding in the face of the onslaught of foreign ideas and ideals, but to submit it to the rigorous critique of philosophy.”1 The account of Nishida’s philosophy that follows is not meant to be complete, but only introduces the reader to the thought of this foundational thinker by drawing out some of the major themes in his lifelong pursuit. The early Nishida is dominant in this account, although themes from his middle and later periods are also present. As a questing philosopher, he continued to rewrite his position time after time, trying to overcome shortcomings or simply reviewing an issue from a new perspective. His first period was dominated by the notion of “pure experience”; his second by “self‑consciousness”; his third by the notion of basho, or topos (a notion that he borrowed from Plato), perhaps best rendered in English as “place,” or “field” (as in “field theory”), or simply as that in which something is located; and the fourth by the complex notion of “the absolutely contradictorily self‑identical dialectical world of the one and the many.”2 Not only does much of the material from the middle and later periods remain untranslated, but these writings tend to be extremely dense and notoriously difficult to read. Thus, while I think that the following account of Nishida’s philosophy is accurate, it represents but a small por‑ tion of his thinking and rethinking about issues that continue to reverberate in the minds of scholars the world over. The point is that readers should not be misled into thinking that they “know” Nishida’s philosophy from reading this account. What I have tried to provide is a basic look at the greatness which he created. What Nishida took to be Japan’s traditional self‑understand‑ ing was a perspective heavily colored by his own interest in Zen Buddhism. Noda Mateo reported that Nishida often stated in his lectures that his aim was to establish “a rational foundation for Zen.”3 Having been a practitioner of Zen for a decade from his mid‑twenties, and even though his philosophic writings hardly Nishida Kitarō / 15 make mention of Zen, one must assume that his aim continued to include an acceptable rendering of the Zen perspective, although he often remarked that his philosophy was not tied to that perspec‑ tive. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Zen continued to provide the lens through which he saw the world. The Early Years: Education Nishida’s secondary education included an intense study of Chi‑ nese language and literature, and mathematics. While he did well, he increasingly felt stunted by militaristic and rule‑oriented administrators. Nonetheless, he found some excellent teachers and studied a wide range of subjects including Japanese, Chinese, Eng‑ lish, German, history, mathematics, geology, physics, and physical education. As he developed intellectually, he was torn between mathematics and philosophy, eventually selecting philosophy as his focus. In July 1889...