Abstract

Kitaro Nishida condensed his thinking about art in his later essay "Artistic creation as historical formative process", which was written as a result of a long period of think-ing. In this essay, he took artistic creation as a historical fonuative process, and stud-ied essential problems of aesthetics from the view-point of historical philosophy. In the system of Nishida's philosophy, the concept of "history" doesn't mean the succession of historical facts or events, but a force which drive "the acting self' or "the operating self'. In other words, it is the "TOPOS" where the historical facts take place: i.e. "a creative process" which produces history. Nishida's method of art philosophy is to explain the essence of arts from the view point of "historical formative process". So he criticized K. Fiedler's theory of Vision, and tried to base it on the historical formative process. Then he criticized J. Harrison and explained that societies and cultures have originally the religious character. Nishida aimed at not only making a connection between TOPOS and artistic creation, but he thought various cultural phenomena as movements around the two axes; "immanence" and "transcendence", and placed them in the system of his philosophy, which is based on "TOPOS of the absolute Nothingness"