Nishida Kitarō

▪ Japanese philosopher

Introduction

born June 17, 1870, near Kanazawa, Ishikawa prefecture, Japan

died June 7, 1945, Kamakura

      Japanese (Japanese philosophy) philosopher who exemplified the attempt by the Japanese to assimilate Western philosophy into the Oriental spiritual tradition.

Early life

      Nishida's father, Nishida Yasunori, was for a time a teacher of an elementary school among whose few pupils was Kitarō. His mother, Tosa, was a pious devotee of the Jōdo, or True Pure Land, school of Buddhism. Although Nishida's family was descended from a former village landowner, Yasunori ruined his fortune when Kitarō was young, and the entire Nishida family had to move to Kanazawa in 1883. Kitarō entered primary course at Kanazawa Normal School in that year but had to leave on account of sickness in the following year. He was admitted in 1886 into the second class of the high school, and in 1888 he became a student of the Fourth Higher School (junior college).

      In his boyhood, Nishida took traditional lessons in Chinese from an excellent Confucian (Confucianism) teacher, and in his higher school days he was taught by another scholar erudite in Chinese. Another important teacher of Nishida's was Hōjō Takiyoshi, a professor of mathematics of the Fourth Higher School, under whom Nishida had studied mathematics even before he entered high school. This exposure to Chinese culture enriched his life with a lasting Confucian quality and worldview. Later, when Western philosophy and Buddhism (especially Zen Buddhism) were merged in his mature mind, there remained deep within him an undercurrent of Confucian conviction with regard to “the ideal person,” “the Way” to good and truth, sincerity, self-cultivation, and detachment. He and his contemporaries belonged to the last Japanese generation whose education in the Chinese Classics molded their personal character. From his boyhood days, he made several good friends in Kanazawa, among whom was D.T. Suzuki (Suzuki, D T), later an eminent Buddhologist and the main interpreter of Zen Buddhism to the West. Nishida and Suzuki became classmates at higher school, and from that time their mutual spiritual influence continued until Nishida's death.

      In his memoirs, entitled “A Certain Professor's Statement upon Retirement (from Kyōto Imperial University, December 1928),” he writes:

My student days at the Fourth Higher School were the happiest of my life. I was filled with youthful zest. I did anything I wished, heedless of the consequences. As a result I had to leave school before my graduation. At the time I thought it was not necessarily true that one could not achieve anything by studying alone. In fact I thought it would be better to rid myself of the fetters of school and to read freely. But within one year I was prohibited to read any more by my doctor, since I was afflicted with an eye disease. I had to abandon my principle, and went to Tokyo to be a non-regular student of philosophy, in Tokyo University (1891–1894).

      At that time in the Faculty of Letters and Law, there were several promising students who later became famous, some as men of letters and others as university professors. Together with them, Nishida appeared at the same lectures but could not form close friendships, as he had done in higher school.

Academic career

      After graduation Nishida became a teacher in a middle school near his home (1895). In the following year, he was appointed a lecturer in the Fourth Higher School at Kanazawa, and, after two years as a lecturer and later as a professor at the Yamaguchi Higher School in Yamaguchi, he was again appointed as a professor of the Fourth Higher School, teaching psychology, logic, ethics, and German (1899–1909). During his Yamaguchi and Kanazawa teaching periods, he was much engaged in the practice of Zen meditation. Remarks about Zen practice are overwhelmingly conspicuous in his diary of this period. From this effort and through his lectures at the higher school came Nishida's maiden work, Zen no kenkyū (1911; A Study of Good, 1960). At about this time parts of the book were published in Japanese philosophical journals, and his name as an original philosopher attracted attention in the Japanese philosophical world.

Nishida's philosophy of Nothingness (emptiness)

      After one year as professor at Gakushūin University (Tokyo) in 1909, he was appointed associate professor of ethics at Kyōto Imperial University. In 1913 he was appointed professor of philosophy of religion and in 1914 professor of philosophy, a post he held until his retirement in 1928. About the end of his professorship in Kyōto Imperial University, Nishida's philosophy attained its maturity, which can be defined as “the philosophy of the topos (place) of Nothingness.” In his latter years he delved most deeply into philosophical problems and endeavoured to explain more concrete facts by his logic. Thus his idea of the true reality that overcomes the dichotomy of subjectivity and objectivity (the mind and its objects) in the topos of Nothingness became significant, he emphasized, for “historical reality in the historical world.” Nishida developed this implication of absolute Nothingness in his Tetsugakuron bunshū (“Philosophical Essays”; 7 vol.), which he wrote after his retirement. In his last days, as World War II was coming to an end, looking at the fires of the burning cities in the darkness of night, Nishida was much inspired by the words of the prophets of Israel in the Hebrew Bible. He said that the result of this war might be something that neither the victors nor the vanquished could at that time foresee. He died in 1945 at Kamakura.

      Nishida's philosophy was attacked by the nationalists and militarists during World War II because of the Western way of his philosophical thinking. Since then he has been criticized for his loyalty to his nation and for his alleged metaphysical obscurantism by Marxist philosophers and antimetaphysical rationalist philosophers. More philosophically important are the criticisms by Takahashi Satomi and Tanabe Hajime. Takahashi was the first scholar to appreciate and evaluate the distinctively Japanese philosophy in Nishida's Zen no kenkyū, and later he contributed his critical investigation of Nishida's philosophy in its mature form. Tanabe, Nishida's disciple and successor as chair of professor of philosophy at Kyōto Imperial University (1927–45), contributed valuable criticism from his own philosophical point of view.

The stages of Nishida's thought

      Nishida says in his memoirs that he thought of his life in terms of a change of position with the blackboard as an axis: in the first half of his life he sat at a desk facing the blackboard, while in the latter half he sat with the blackboard behind him. Continuing this metaphor, it may be said that in the third stage, represented by his philosophy of the topos of Nothingness, he wished to relinquish both positions, whether facing or in front of the blackboard, so that he and his logic became chalk on the blackboard of the historical world. In Nishida's philosophy, each stage has its independent value. Like a series of vortexes floating on the stream when two (i.e., Western and Eastern) rivers converge, each closes its own circle. The preceding system should not be replaced by the later, even if they flow successively.

      In the first stage of his philosophy, Nishida derived his basic insights from his long, sustained practice of Zen. He was also much inspired by William James (James, William)'s philosophy and psychology and tried to interpret his own basic insights philosophically with the use of psychological concepts borrowed from James. The opening page of Nishida's Zen no kenkyū indicates the general direction of his thought:

To experience means to know events precisely as they are. It means to cast away completely one's attitude of discriminative reflection, and to know in accordance with the events. Since people include some reflection even when speaking of experience, the word “pure” is here used to signify a condition of true experience itself without the addition of the least thought or reflection. For example, it refers to that moment of seeing a color or hearing a sound which occurs not only before one has added the judgment that this seeing or hearing relates to something external or that one is feeling this sensation, but even before one has judged what color or what sound it is. Thus, pure experience is synonymous with direct experience. When one experiences directly one's conscious state there is as yet neither subject nor object, and knowledge and its object are completely united. This is the purest form of experience.

      The concept of pure experience expounded here is the Western philosophical mold into which Nishida poured his own religious experience cultivated by his Zen training. As it is beyond the dichotomy of subject and object, so it is far removed from the difference of whole and part. The whole universe is, as it were, crystallized into one's own being. In the total activity of one's own pure and alert life, one's entire being becomes transparent, so that it reflects, as in a mirror, all things as they become and also participates in them. This is “to know in accordance with the events.” The profoundness of reality, the directness of one's experience of reality, a dynamic system developing itself in the creative stream of consciousness—these are the characteristic motifs of Nishida's philosophy, all suggesting where his thinking was ultimately rooted.

      According to Nishida, judgment is formed by analysis of the intuitive whole. For instance, the judgment that a horse runs is derived from the direct experience of a running horse. The truth of a judgment is grounded on the truth of the original intuitive whole from which the judgment is formed through the dichotomy of subject and predicate or that of subject and object. For the establishment of its truth a judgment is, through its dichotomy itself, referred back to intuition as its source, because intuition is here considered a self-developing whole, similar to Hegel's Notion (Begriff ). As Hegel says, “All is Notion,” or “All is judgment,” so could Nishida say, “All (reality) is intuition,” or “All reality is immediate consciousness.” For this is practically the import of his dictum, “Consciousness is the Unique Reality.”

Influence of neo-Kantian thought

      In the second stage of his philosophy, Nishida was under the influence of the philosophy of Henri Bergson (Bergson, Henri), a French philosopher, which he tried to synthesize with a Neo-Kantian type of German thought that was then prevalent in Japanese philosophical circles. He thus entered the second stage of his thinking, the result of which was incorporated into a book entitled Jikaku ni okeru chokkan to hansei (1917; “Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness”). His basic notion did not undergo any change, but he tried to express what he once called pure experience in a different way. Neo-Kantian influence led him to eliminate from his thought all psychological terms and to follow strictly the path of logical thinking to the end. Actually, however, he found himself standing at the end of a blind alley, where he came up against something that was impenetrable to his logic. “After a long struggle with the Unknowable my logic itself bade me surrender to the camp of mysticism,” so he himself says in the preface. Thus the self as the unity of thought and intuition acquires a mystical background. It is pure activity but ultimately finds itself in the abyss of darkness, enveloping every light of self-consciousness. This darkness, however, is “dazzling obscurity” giving the self the unfathomable depth of meaning and being. The self is thus haloed with a luminous darkness.

      The third stage of Nishida's philosophy was marked by a reversal of his whole procedure, as is shown in his Hataraku mono kara miru mono e (1927; “From the Acting to the Seeing Self ”). Whereas he had always made the self the starting point for his philosophical thinking, he now parted definitely with Transcendental Idealism or, rather, broke through it to find behind it a realm of reality corresponding to his own mystical experience. This may be called the realm of Non-self, or Nothingness, which should not be confused with the non-self of Idealism as the realm of the objective over against that of the subjective, or with annihilating nothingness of Sartre's Existentialism. The “Non-self ” of Nishida is the ultimate reality where all subject–object cleavage is overcome. In accordance with Buddhist tradition he called it “Nothingness” and sought to derive the individual reality of everything in the world, whether it be a thing or a self, from the supreme identity of Nothingness. The Idealist “pure self,” as the universal consciousness or consciousness in general, is still abstract, while the “Non-self ” of Nishida establishes itself as true individuality in the absolute Nothingness, which includes, not excludes, the individual reality of the thing-in-itself (the ultimate reality of things). Indeed, the problem of the individual now became Nishida's chief concern. In his quest for its solution he made an intensive study of Greek philosophy, especially Plato and Aristotle.

      He found the thinking of these philosophers to be relatively free from the cleavage of subject and object, in comparison with modern Western philosophy, which always presupposes, consciously or unconsciously, the cogito (the thinking subject) as the starting point of thought. The ontology of Plato and Aristotle rather makes a logic of reality reveal itself, a logic that explains the world of reality as seen from within. Whether “explaining” or “seeing,” such a logic is to be understood as an act taking place in the world of reality itself. Nishida seeks thus to clarify the significance of the individual and the universal from the viewpoint of the Absolute Nothingness. Thus he propounds that Nothingness or mu is the universal that is to be sought behind the predicate as the universal concept and, at the same time, is the abyss of Nothingness in which the self as the individual is crystalized. He developed the idea of the “topos of Nothingness,” adopting the concept of topos from Plato's Timaeus and from this time on Nothingness is explained as the uniqueness of the topos.

      In the fourth stage of the development of his thought, Nishida applied the idea of the topos of Nothingness to the explanation of his “historical world.”

Yoshinori Takeuchi

Additional Reading

Shimomura Toratarō, “Nishida Kitaro and Some Aspects of His Philosophical Thought,” the preface to Nishida's A Study of Good (1960), gives an excellent description of the development of Nishida's thought, especially the early period, when Japan was undergoing westernization. Valdo H. Viglielmo, “Nishida Kitaro, The Early Years,” in Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture, ch. 13 (1971), goes into details of Nishida's younger days (until 1903). David A. Dilworth, “The Initial Formations of ‘Pure Experience' in Nishida Kitaro and William James,” in Monumenta Nipponica, 24:93–111 (1969), treats the influence of William James on Nishida's thought. See also the same author's “The Range of Nishida's Early Religious Thought: Zen no Kenkyū,” Philosophy East and West, 19:409–421 (1969); and “Nishida's Final Essay: The Logic of Place and Religious World-View,” ibid., 20:355–367 (1970); and Nōda Matao, “East–West Syntheses in Kitarō Nishida,” ibid., 4:345–359 (1955), which compares Nishida's later thought with the philosophical ideas of Whitehead. The most comprehensive discussion of Nishida's work is Nishitani Keiji, Nishida Kitarō (1991; originally published in Japanese, 1968).The following works of Nishida are available in English translation. A Study of Good, trans. by Valdo H. Viglielmo (1960), is Nishida's maiden work, which gives a well-balanced treatment of philosophical problems. Intelligibility and the Philosophy of Nothingness, trans. by Robert Schinzinger (1958), and Fundamental Problems of Philosophy, trans. by David A. Dilworth (1970), include introductory remarks on Nishida's life and work. See also “Nishida Kitarō: The Problem of Japanese Culture,” trans. by Abe Masao in Sources of the Japanese Tradition, pp. 857–872 (1958); and Gino K. Piovesana, Recent Japanese Philosophical Thought, 1862–1962 (1963).Roger T. Ames

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