Kitaro Nishida
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Nishida Kitaro
(1870-1945) Japan's first original modern philosopher and founder of the Kyoto school. Kiitaro's own philosophy made use of contemporary Western thinkers such as Bergson and James, joining them with a Buddhist denial of dualisms and differences, in favour of a pure monism, organic experience before the dualism between subject and object develops. His best-known work is An Inquiry into the Good (1911).
Oxford Dictionary of Buddhism:
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Nishida Kitarō
(1870-1945)
20th-century Japanese zen philosopher and founder of the Kyoto school. During his early life he immersed himself in German language studies and, through that, the study of European philosophy. In particular, he studied the phenomenology of Brentano and Husserl, but had a broad familiarity with the entire tradition of German philosophy from Kant to Heidegger. In addition, he spent time studying European mystical writings from Pseudo-Dionysius to Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa. Kitarō first made a name for himself while teaching at Imperial University, when he published his path-breaking book, An Inquiry Into the Good (1911). In this work, he drew together ideas from both Zen and German phenomenology. Beginning from ‘pure experience’, contingent, finite human beings discover within themselves a bottomless reality that connects to the absolute and infinite, which is both God and emptiness (śūnyatā), both speaking and silent. This connection of the human with the divine, the finite with the infinite, does not eventuate in one subsuming the other or in the indiscriminate mixture of the two or in the relativization of the one to the other; rather both aspects of human life stand in both differentiated contradiction and undifferentiated unity. This ‘identity of contradictories’ is both inconceivable and the basis for all human aspiration. All contradictories meet in the point of absolute ‘nothingness’ (a concept related to the Buddhist idea of emptiness), which is nothing in itself but is the font from which all things arise in their multiplicity and contrariety. Nishida extended these ideas and linked them more explicitly to religious themes in later works such as Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness (1917), Art and Morality (1923), and Fundamental Problems of Philosophy (1933).
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Kitaro Nishida
In this Japanese name, the family name is "Nishida".
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| Era | 20th century philosophy |
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| Region | Japanese philosophy |
| School | Kyoto School |
| Main interests | Zen Buddhism, Moral philosophy |
| Notable ideas | Logic of Basho (non-dualistic concrete logic), Absolute Nothingness |
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Kitaro Nishida (西田 幾多郎 Nishida Kitarō, June 17, 1870 – June 7, 1945) was a prominent Japanese philosopher, founder of what has been called the Kyoto School of philosophy. He graduated from The University of Tokyo during the Meiji period in 1894 with a degree in philosophy. He was named professor of the Fourth High School in Ishikawa Prefecture in 1899 and later became professor of philosophy at Kyoto University. Nishida retired in 1927. Later in his retirement, in 1940, he was awarded the Order of Culture (文化勲章, bunka kunshō). He participated in establishing the (千葉工業大学, Chiba Institute of Technology) from 1940. Nishida Kitaro died at the age of seventy-five of a renal infection. His grave is located at Reiun'in (霊雲院, Reiun'in), a temple in the Myōshin-ji compound in Kyoto.
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Philosophy
Having been born in the third year of the Meiji period, Nishida was presented with a newly unique opportunity to contemplate Eastern philosophical issues in the fresh light that Western philosophy shone on them. Nishida's original and creative philosophy, incorporating ideas of both Zen and western philosophy, was aimed at bringing the East and West closer. Throughout his lifetime, Nishida published a number of books and essays including An Inquiry into the Good and "The Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview." Taken as a whole, Nishida’s life work was the foundation for the Kyoto School of Philosophy and the inspiration for the original thinking of his disciples. The most famous concept in Nishida's philosophy is the logic of basho (Japanese: 場所; usually translated as "place" or "topos"), a non-dualistic concrete logic, meant to overcome the inadequacy of the subject-object distinction essential to the subject logic of Aristotle and the predicate logic of Kant, through the affirmation of what he calls the "absolutely contradictory self-identity", a dynamic tension of opposites that, unlike the dialectical logic of Hegel, does not resolve in a synthesis, but rather defines its proper subject by maintaining the tension between affirmation and negation as opposite poles or perspectives.
Legacy
According to Masao Abe, "During World War II right wing thinkers attacked him as antinationalistic for his appreciation of Western philosophy and logic. But after the war left wing thinkers criticized his philosophy as nationalistic because of his emphasis on the traditional notion of nothingness. He recognized a kind of universality in Western philosophy and logic but did not accept that it was the only universality."[1]
Nishida´s essays during the military regime are described by Christopher Ives (Stonehill College) as serving: 'a philosophical basis for the state and the war.' (See Ishikawa Hakugen.)
| Preceded by unknown |
Department of Philosophy (Chair), Kyoto University 1913-1928 |
Succeeded by Hajime Tanabe |
See also
References
Partial bibliography
- An Inquiry Into the Good (ISBN 0-300-05233-2), Nishida Kitaro, Translated by Masao Abe and Christopher Ives
- Last Writings (ISBN 0-8248-1554-8), Nishida Kitaro, Translated by David Dilworth
- Imperial-Way Zen: Ishikawa Hakugen's Critique and Lingering Questions for Buddhist Ethics. Christopher Ives University of Hawaii
Secondary resources
- Zen & Philosophy: An Intellectual Biography of Nishida Kitaro (ISBN 0-8248-2459-8), Michiko Yusa
- Philosophers of Nothingness (ISBN 0-8248-2481-4), James Heisig
- Nishida Kitaro (ISBN 0-520-07364-9), Nishitani Keiji
- The Logic Of Nothingness: A Study Of Nishida Kitaro (ISBN 0-8248-2969-7), Robert J. J. Wargo
- The Nothingness beyond God: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nishida Kitaro (ISBN 1-55778-761-1), Robert E. Carter
- Curtis A. Rigsby, "Nishida on God, Barth and Christianity," Asian Philosophy, 19,2 (2009), 119-157.
- Botz-Bornstein, Thorsten, "Nishida and Wittgenstein: from pure experience to Lebensform or new perspectives for a philosophy of intercultural communication," Asian Philosophy 13,1 (2003), 53–70.
- Botz-Bornstein, Thorsten, "The I and the Thou: A Dialogue between Nishida Kitarō and Mikhail Bakhtin,” Japan Review 16 (2004), 259–284.
External links
- Nishida Kitaro at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Derrida and the Decentered Universe This article mentions Nishida's views in comparison with Derrida's.
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