Nishida Kitarō
1870-1945 · Japanese · Metaphysics, Philosophy of Religion, Comparative East-West Philosophy, Philosophical Psychology, Philosophy of Culture
It is not that experience exists because there is an individual, but that an individual exists because there is experience.
Nishida Kitarō came of age as Japan forced a reckoning between its inherited traditions and Western intellectual modernity. A Rinzai Zen practitioner and reader of Kant, Hegel, and James, he built the first major original philosophy in the Western mode to emerge from Japan, founding what became known as the Kyoto School.
Topics Nishida Kitarō addresses
- pure experience (junsui keiken)
- absolute nothingness (zettai mu)
- basho (logic of place)
- absolutely contradictory self-identity
- self-awareness (jikaku)
- action-intuition (kōiteki chokkan)
- continuity of discontinuity
- universal of universals
- self-determination of nothingness
- subject-predicate logic
- historical world
- historical body (rekishiteki shintai)
- I and Thou encounter
- inverse correspondence
- soku (the copulative is)
- from the acting to the seeing
- noesis and noema in basho
- religious worldview (shūkyōteki sekaikan)
- kenōsis and divine self-emptying
- the eternal now
- nothingness as ground of being
- the form of the formless
- being-qua-nothingness
- transdescendence
Questions to put to Nishida Kitarō
Pure Experience and the Early Period
- What do you mean by pure experience?
- How is pure experience different from ordinary consciousness?
- Why did you later become dissatisfied with the pure experience framework?
- How does pure experience relate to the subject-object distinction?
- What's the connection between pure experience and reality itself?
Basho and the Logic of Place
- What is basho, and why does it matter?
- How does the logic of place differ from ordinary logic?
- What do you mean by a predicate that can never become a subject?
- How does basho reorganize the relationship between subject and object?
- What is transdescendence, and how does it work?
- How do you arrive at absolute nothingness as the universal of universals?
Absolutely Contradictory Self-Identity
- What does absolutely contradictory self-identity mean?
- How can something be both one and many at the same time?
- What's wrong with the Aristotelian formula 'A is A'?
- What does the copulative soku express that ordinary logic cannot?
- How does the world proceed from the made to the making?
- What role does self-negation play in your understanding of reality?
Action-Intuition and the Historical World
- What is action-intuition, and how does it differ from ordinary perception?
- How do we see things by acting on them?
- What do you mean by the historical body?
- How does the continuity of discontinuity hold moments together?
- What makes the historical world different from the natural world?
- How are individuals both radically free and determined by history?
Religion, Nothingness, and the Absolute
- How is absolute nothingness related to God?
- What do you mean by a dialectical and kenotic God?
- How does your philosophy relate to your Zen practice?
- What is the religious worldview, and why does it complete philosophy?
- How can God be both transcendent and immanent at the same time?
- What's the difference between religion seeing from within and philosophy seeing from without?
East-West Cultural Forms and the Wartime Writings
- How do you distinguish Eastern and Western approaches to reality?
- What does it mean that the West takes being as ground and the East takes nothingness?
- How did you apply the logic of basho to questions of national polity?
- What role did you see for Japan in the historical world of the 1940s?
- How do you understand the relationship between your philosophy and your political statements?
Converse with Nishida Kitarō on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Nishida Kitarō's own writing, cited to the page.