Cette étude consiste en une introduction en neuf étapes à la pensée du philosophe japonais Nishida Kitarô . Le néant nous livre des traces diffuses, que nous aimierions bien effacer à la lumière de l’être. Cependant, une fois appréhendé logiquement et approché phénoménologiquement, le néant révèle une structuration topologique remarquable, qui met en question les problématiques de la métaphysique et de la morale, en particulier concernant la distinction entre l’espace et le lieu, le vide et le plein et les rapports (...) de l’un et du multiple.This essay is a nine steps introduction to the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro’s thought . Nothingness shows us some diffuse traces we would like to clear out with the light of being. However, once logically apprehended and phenomenologically approached, nothingness reveals a remarkable topological structure, which puts into question the problems of metaphysics and moral, in particular concerning the distinction between space and place, fullness and void and the relation of the one and the many. (shrink)

Place and Dialectic presents two essays by Nishida Kitaro, translated into English for the first time by John W.M. Krummel and Shigenori Nagatomo. Nishida is widely regarded as one of the father figures of modern Japanese philosophy and as the founder of the first distinctly Japanese school of philosophy, the Kyoto school, known for its synthesis of western philosophy, Christian theology, and Buddhist thought. The two essays included here are ''Basho'' from 1926/27 and ''Logic and Life'' from (...) 1936/37. Each essay is divided into several sections and each section is preceded by a synopsis added by the translators.The first essay represents the first systematic articulation of Nishida's philosophy of basho, literally meaning ''place,'' a system of thought that came to be known as ''Nishida philosophy.'' In the second essay, Nishida inquires after the pre-logical origin of what we call logic, which he suggests is to be found within the dialectical unfoldings of world history and human society. A substantial introduction by John Krummel considers the significance of Nishida as a thinker, discusses the key components of Nishida's philosophy as a whole and its development throughout his life, and contextualizes the translated essays within his oeuvre. The Introduction also places Nishida and his work within the historical context of his time, and highlights the relevance of his ideas to the global circumstances of our day. The publication of these two essays by Nishida, a major figure in world philosophy and the most important philosopher of twentieth-century Japan, is of significant value to the fields not only of Asian philosophy and East-West comparative philosophy but also of philosophy in general as well as of theology and religious studies. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to investigate Nishida Kitarō’s way of philosophizing in the light of the concept of “transition” in order to deepen our understanding of both Nishida’s philosophy and our thinking about and in transitions, using the concept of “boundary” or “border” (Grenze) as a catalyst. For that purpose, we focus on Nishida’s essay “Place” (「場所」), passing through different parts of the text as if through successive gates on a path of transition between one place (...) and the next, until we reach the final place of “absolute nothingness.” Dwelling on this place, we turn our attention to its internal structure and try to depict it along the outlines of a boundary, following the movements taking place in Nishida’s essay. The second part proposes an interpretation of the place of nothingness as an interminable practice of boundary-crossing that doesn’t come to a halt in a final, all-encompassing place, but dynamically situates itself on countless intersecting planes. After a more or less abstract analysis of the concept of “boundary,” we will apply and concretize this approach by using the example of the skin. To this end, we expose five main features of the skin as boundary: permeability, enclosure, excessiveness, interstitiality and reciprocal self-formation. (shrink)

When we hear the term "Japanese philosophy" we think of Zen Buddhism or the Shinto scriptures. Yet one of the great 20th century interpreters of Western philosophy, Nishida Kitaro, lived and wrote in the Japanese islands all his life, laboring at an ultimate synthesis of oriental thought and Western hermeneutics. To be sure, Nishida's aim was to understand his own cultural influences in relation to the Western world. What distinguished him, however, was his passion for rendering oriental metaphysics (...) understandable in the language of Western philosophy, and his attempts to contrast the paradoxicality of Buddhist logic with the logical strategies of Aristotle, Kant, or Hegel. Featured in this book is an interpretation of Nishida's writings. Professor Carter focuses on the Japanese thinker's notion of "basho," a concept of nothingness as field, place or topos as borrowed from Plato's Tim'us. Expounding on the logical foundations and archaic elements in Nishida's work, and carefully explaining Nishida's critical approach to the questions of God, religion and morality, and pure existence, this discerning book offers students of Western philosophy and oriental thought alike a highly readable introduction to the teachings of a true world philosopher. (shrink)

This dissertation analyzes the philosophical theories and politics of Kitaro Nishida , the founder of modern Japanese philosophy, and Tetsuro Watsuji , the second most famous philosopher in Japan. Both Nishida and Watsuji develop a "spatialized" conception of history to contrast with a temporal model which had the effect of situating Europe as the most advanced form of modern culture. According to their view, the representation of world history should take into account the contemporaneous developments of all cultures. ;Positioning (...) themselves as non-European thinkers but sharing in the modern European intellectual tradition, Nishida and Watsuji develop original philosophical positions in the language of Western philosophy. After the initial formulation of the theory of "pure experience" under the influence of William James, Nishida develops a metaphysical theory of "place," a dialectical system inspired by Hegel. Using Heideggerian phenomenology, Watsuji develops his own theories of "milieu" and "Being-between" . In an attempt to go beyond Eurocentrism, these theories sought to widen the context of Western philosophy from a non-Western point of view. ;However, in the 1940s when Japan became an imperialist state, Nishida and Watsuji used their philosophical theories to justify wartime political ideology. Their anti-Eurocentrism thus allied with Japanese nationalism. However, their philosophical theories could have been developed to critique nationalism rather than endorse it. Their error resulted from the persistent framework of "East vs. West" which essentialized Japan's identity vis-a-vis the West. (shrink)

L’acte de la philosophie japonaise est celui d’un évidement de soi: acte d’accueil des traditions philosophiques du monde, acte en résonance, créateur d’une terminologie, d’une logique, d’une conceptualité originales, s’alimentant aux sources d’une pensée mythique jamais tarie. Les textes présentés ici en feront sentir l’inclassable nouveauté: cette philosophie n’est ni purement shintoïste, bouddhique, chrétienne, néoconfucianiste ; elle n’est ni « orientale » ni « occidentale », mais proprement japonaise.

Th is paper is the second part of a general study on the relationship between Nishida and Chinese philosophy. In the fi rst, I explored the extent to which Nishida’s philosophy was infl uenced, directly and indirectly, explicitly and implicitly, historically and conceptually, by materials coming from the intellectual horizon of Chinese thought. I concentrate here on Nishida’s own position toward what he understood by “Chinese philosophy.” Is this philosophy, so suggestive for Nishida, promoted to a central place in (...) his work or not, and if so, in what sense might we take this idea of “centrality” as specifi cally Chinese? In setting forth several archetypes of Chinese thought present in Nishida’s philosophy, the focus of this article falls on the methodological, logical and metaphysical contrasts we can identify between the Japanese philosopher and Chinese philosophy as his underground intellectual sources. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Consciousness and Machines:A Commentary Drawing on Japanese PhilosophyS. D. Noam Cook (bio)Viewed from within the great unity of consciousness, thinking is a wave on the surface of a great intuition.Kitarō NishidaIntroductionRecent developments in AI have made the long-standing debate about what computers can and can't do a major public concern. What we understand the properties of such machines to be, and consequently how we design [End Page 305] (...) and deploy them, will increasingly shape how we live and how we understand ourselves. Thus, there is an urgent need for better understanding of these issues.Susan Schneider, in her book Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, offers an exceptionally careful and insightful examination of key issues entailed in how we understand AI and ourselves. One of her central concerns is how we might test for machine consciousness. Given the variations in design and function among current and projected AIs, Schneider sees no likely one-size-fits-all test. So, she offers a battery of different tests that she believes together will make such testing more reliable. This seems a wise approach, and reflects the conceptual and pragmatic care Schneider takes throughout the book.Similarly, it seems to me that the question of machine consciousness should also include various understandings of consciousness itself. What consciousness is taken to be has varied widely both historically and culturally. No commonly accepted single understanding has emerged, and may never emerge. Just as having a battery of tests might help us better assess possible machine consciousness, having different understandings of consciousness might give us a better understanding of what we are testing for. The two should work in tandem, each gauging and shaping the other.Like the development of computers themselves, the predominant thinking about AI has been shaped, in part, by key presuppositions of a scientific worldview, with its origins in Western thought and culture. Among these presuppositions are materialism, reductionism, and a primary focus on objective behavior. These are reflected in the common concern with observable behavior of physical aspects of the brain in efforts to understand human consciousness, which in turn has become a familiar model for work on machine consciousness. All this is important and valuable work. But, in the spirit of Schneider's cautions, it should not be taken as one-size-fits-all. Accordingly, I offer one view of consciousness from a different perspective.In what follows, I sketch out an understanding of consciousness that draws on Japanese philosophy, particularly that of the highly influential early twentieth-century Japanese philosopher Kitarō Nishida (1870–1945). I then explore how the tests for machine consciousness that Schneider proposes might be viewed from that perspective.Consciousness: A Perspective from Japanese PhilosophyConsciousness was a central concern for Nishida, whose philosophy is deeply informed by Japanese culture and by Zen theory and practice. As one might expect from such a philosopher, Nishida's exploration of consciousness is not concerned with properties of the brain, but with what we might discern through disciplined reflection on the experience of our own consciousness. Ultimately, he views consciousness as an organic whole [End Page 306] of systemically organized interrelationships of activities and sensations within our subjective experience. This may be understood by first considering 'nothingness'.For Nishida, nothingness does not suggest an ultimate and absolute vacuity, as is often understandably assumed. In Nishida's sense, it is a singular "place" that mirrors the multifaceted world of our common experience. In understanding this, I am told by native Japanese speakers that the English word 'nothingness' has an advantage over the Japanese equivalent, 'mu', in that 'nothingness' can usefully be broken down as 'nothing-ness'. This suggests that nothingness is a state of consciousness where what we commonly experience as distinct (self, other, world, blue, ache, joy, etc.) is indistinct, a state of unified experience. This is consciousness without our finding or discriminating in it the myriad "things" of common experience, but rather a "pure experience" of a singular whole. Nishida introduces his concept of "pure experience" as follows:To experience means to know facts just as they are, to know in accordance with facts by completely relinquishing one... (shrink)

The writings of Nishida Kitar , whose name has become almost synonymous with Japanese philosophy, continue to attract attention around the world. Yet studies of his thought in Western languages have tended to overlook two key areas: first, the influence of the generation of Japanese philosophers who preceded Nishida; and second, the logic of basho (place), the cornerstone of Nishida's mature philosophical system. The Logic of Nothingness addresses both of these topics. Robert Wargo argues that the overriding (...) concern of Nishida's mature philosophy, the attempt to give a reasonable account of reality that includes the reasonableness of that account itself--or what Wargo calls the problem of completeness--has its origins in Inoue Enryo's (1858-1919) and Inoue Tetsujiro's (1855-1944) preoccupation with the problem of standpoints. A translation of one of Nishida's most demanding texts, included here as an appendix, demonstrates the value of Wargo's insightful analysis of the logic of basho as an aid to deciphering the philosopher's early work. (shrink)

This book offers the first introduction to a major Japanese philosophical movement through the interests and arguments of its founder, Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945), his successor, Tanabe Hajime (1885-1962), and student-turned-critic, Tosaka Jun (1900-1945). Focusing on their contributions to thinking about place, space, and dialectics, this concise introduction brings these influential thinkers to life by connecting their work to issues still debated in the philosophy of science and physics today. Beginning with an overview of the reception of quantum physics (...) and relativity theory in Japan and concluding with an account of the direct relevance of the Kyoto School to the development of world philosophy in a posthuman age, each clearly-written chapter engages historical contexts and includes: · Carefully-chosen excerpts and original translations of Nishida, Tanabe, and Tosaka · Focus boxes explaining complex concepts and problems of contextualization. A timeline, glossary and index. Further reading lists featuring relevant and significant articles and books in English. This introduction is an ideal starting point for students and lecturers looking to become better acquainted with three central Japanese philosophers and learn why their work impacts our current thinking about science. (shrink)

The paper will explicate the Sache or matter of the dialectic of the founder of Kyoto School philosophy, Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945), from the standpoint of his mature thought, especially from the 1930s and 40s. Rather than providing a simple exposition of his thought I will engage in a creative reading of his concept of basho (place) in terms of chiasma and chōra, or a chiasmatic chōra. I argue that Nishida’s appropriation of nineteenth century German, especially Hegelian, terminology was inadequate (...) in expressing what he strove to say—for his concept of basho confounds traditional metaphysical discourse. Because of its chiasmatic and chōratic nature, the Sache he strove to capture and express through the language of dialectical philosophy, perpetually slips away from any systemic bounds. His “dialectic” (benshōhō) implies a chiasma or a criss-crossing of multiple factors on multi-dimensional levels that exceed in complexity simplistic binomial oppositions or the triadic formula of traditional dialectics. The complexity is one of over-determination that threatens to undermine the very language of such a dialectic. As the deep complexity of over-inter-determinations would deconstruct any notion of a substance, what Nishida offers—as opposed to an ousiology (or logic of substance)—is a chiasmology. I thus argue that his so-called dialectic is really an unfolding of that chiasma. And if chiasma expresses the over-determinate aspect of Nishida’s matter of thinking, chōra would express its under-determinate aspect. Nishida himself based his concept of basho or “place” on Plato’s notion of the chōra from the Timaeus. I take Nishida’s basho in its chōratic nature as what simultaneously unfolds and enfolds the chiasma. But in the case of the chōra it is its under-determinate nature that refuses reduction to any of the terms of opposition. In its self-withdrawal, it provides a clearing, a space, for the chiasmatic unraveling of the many. Like the chiasma it undermines any claim to a first substance or the hegemony of a universal First. For in its indeterminateness, it is “nothing” (mu). The unfolding it enfolds is, as Nishida states, “a determination without determiner.” In concrete terms, however, we might develop Nishida’s concept further by returning to the original pre-Platonic Greek meaning of chōra in the sense of “region” or “country,” to understand chōra or basho here as the very space of co-existence provided by this very earth. As a chiasmatic chōra irreducible, in its over- and under-determinations, to being or non-being, Nishida’s basho qua mu proves to be the an-ontological origin of both on and meon (being and non-being). Rejecting the culture-nature dichotomy this notion of our place of being as chiasma and chōra underscores our holistic symbiosis with the earth as the anontological (un)ground and clearing for our co-existence in a concrete milieau with one another and with nature. It is this earth as our ultimate contextual wherein that provides a clearing for co-dwelling and mutual encounter with one’s other, that we must acknowledge today if we are to co-exist authentically and freely vis-à-vis our global neighbors and vis-à-vis the surrounding nature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School, and: A Buddhist-Christian Logic of the Heart: Nishida's Kyoto School and Lonergan's "Spiritual Genome" as World BridgeAmos YongPhilosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School. By James W. Heisig. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001. xi + 380 pp.A Buddhist-Christian Logic of the Heart: Nishida's Kyoto School and Lonergan's "Spiritual Genome" as World Bridge. By John Raymaker. Lanham, (...) MD: University Press of America, 2002. x + 214 pp.These are two very different types of books. Heisig, research fellow (since 1978) and former director (1999-2001) of the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture and well known to readers of this journal as author, book editor, and translator extraordinaire, [End Page 271] has produced the definitive exposition of the Kyoto School in the English language with Philosophers of Nothingness. Raymaker, a longtime Roman Catholic missionary to Japan and student of Lonergan's work, attempts in A Buddhist-Christian Logic of the Heart to establish points of contact between Lonergan's transcendental method and Nishida's pure experience. Let me briefly summarize the two volumes before making some comparative observations.Philosophers of Nothingness is divided into five sections: an "Orientation" (introduction) and a "Prospectus" (transitional epilogue) flanking the three sections on Nishida, Tanabe, and Nishitani, each constituting approximately twenty short chapters. In each case, Heisig combines intellectual biography and history of ideas approaches, thus both setting forth the wider social, political, and intellectual contexts of the Kyoto School thinkers and elaborating on their distinctive ideas. Those interested in the latter will not be disappointed. Nishida's "pure experience," "active intuition," "absolutely contradictory self-identity," "logic of locus" (or basho, topos, place), and "historical world," among other themes, are all given special attention within the broader framework of his philosophical project. In the case of Tanabe, unique concepts such as "absolute mediation," "logic of species," and "metanoetic philosophy" (or philosophy of repentance) are illuminated. And, of course, the contributions of Nishitani are fully represented: "nihilism," "the standpoint of emptiness," and the sunyata of time and history.At the same time, those looking for background discussion will also find Heisig's exposition helpful, and that along (at least) the following three lines. First, an attempt is made to take seriously the self-understanding of Kyoto School thinkers of doing philosophy in the world context. This is, of course, a bold undertaking which some in our time might summarily dismiss either as hubris or as ignorance. Yet beginning with Nishida and continuing through Tanabe, Nishitani and others (such as Tanabe's student, Abe Masao), the task was to engage as Japanese philosophers with Western thinkers and ideas. Here, of course, the tension between particularity and universality is most intense, and the Kyoto philosophers proceeded with full awareness of the issues at stake. Now while their endeavors can be criticized from either direction, what cannot be criticized without self-refutation is their motivating belief that they could understand the West and vice versa.Second, and connected with the first, is the social and political twentieth-century context of Japan and its relationship with modernity and with the Western world. Here, Heisig brilliantly negotiates between laying out the facts and locating the passions and failures of the Kyoto philosophers. This requires that he correctly identify their contributions as Japanese thinkers engaging modernity without ignoring their blind spots. As such, longstanding questions concerning Kyoto School philosophy as an ideology for Japanese nationalism are confronted head-on. Heisig shows how political naīvete resulted in political entanglements. At the same time, his discussion illuminates the sociopolitical backdrop that informs and shapes all philosophizing. The result is a balanced presentation that is neither apologetic on the one side nor condemnatory on the other.Finally, the question of religion and its relationship to Kyoto School philosophy [End Page 272] is also taken up. Nishida's practice of zazen is thus shown to inform his philosophizing, if only implicitly (on Nishida's own account), even while Tanabe's experience of metanoia (conversion) as mediated through the "Other-power" matrix of Shinran's religious thought is shown to impact his philosophy explicitly... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Japanese Philosophy in the Making 1: Crossing Paths with Nishida by John MaraldoJohn KrummelJohn Maraldo, Japanese Philosophy in the Making 1: Crossing Paths with Nishida Nagoya: Chisokudō, 2017The present volume by John Maraldo is a collection of his essays, mostly on Nishida. It constitutes the first volume of a two-part collection on Japanese philosophy, this one focusing on Nishida while the second volume includes works (...) on other Japanese philosophers surrounding Nishida. I have long considered Maraldo to be the foremost scholar in English language works in this field, who has consistently produced thought-provoking and well-grounded work, based on his extensive erudition regarding both Japanese and Western traditions. For the last decade and a half, while reading through his fine articles on Japanese philosophy, I was hoping that eventually a book of his own on this topic would be published. Such a book has finally appeared. It is a book that would certainly benefit Anglophone students and scholars of Nishida and Japanese philosophy worldwide. The essays collected here have been previously published in journals or other volumes, or otherwise presented in conferences. But they have been “lightly revised” (1) for the present volume. The volume could have used additional copyediting to clean up some typos. Nevertheless, I would recommend this book to anyone studying or working on Nishida.The volume begins with the prologue’s caveat that “identities we call Japan, Europe, and philosophy are as shifting as they are settled...” (1). A recurring question, therefore, is how philosophy is defined, how it has traversed through time and place, how Nishida’s thought conveys philosophy, and how we can continue this process of translating philosophy (1). Maraldo’s commentary throughout this volume thus proves to be more than just intellectual history but is itself philosophical as he thinks along with the thinkers he discusses, and invites the reader to do likewise. In this he seeks to bring Nishida’s work into philosophical dialogue with the rest of the world, asking “how does the work of Nishida... contribute to the momentum of philosophy?” (1). Maraldo also inquires what the term “Japanese philosophy” (日本哲学) may mean and provides four possibilities [End Page 135] that were given previously in Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook that he edited with James Heisig and Thomas Kasulis some years ago,1 while in addition providing possible objections to them (6–8). He tells us that he has come to understand Japanese philosophy as an “ongoing, creative endeavor,” as “philosophy in the making”—a phrase that describes for him all philosophical investigation as a “work in progress, subject to reappraisal and reformation, to rethinking” (10). This seems a reasonable—realistic and viable—approach to understanding philosophy, including Japanese philosophy. Moreover, this process of philosophy, as it crosses cultural and historical borders, inevitably involves translation, the “transmission and transmutation through time and through multiple languages” (11). Even within the West, the origin of philosophy cannot be reduced to its Greek origin when, as Maraldo points out, the ancient Greeks themselves drew from wellsprings of “non-Western” thought (17) and the question of a single origin thus proves to involve “crossroads and contingencies” (17). Philosophy as such “occurs via the trans-lation of texts, spoken and written” (11), which not only means the transference of texts through languages but also “the transformation of textually embedded problems, methods and terminologies both across and within natural languages,” “an inter-lingual and an intra-lingual transmission” entailing “the formation of textual traditions” (12). It not only transmits texts but transforms the language, which in turn transforms cultures and traditions (12). Maraldo views Nishida as such a “consummate trans-lator” of philosophy, who reworked both Asian and European sources into his own language while refining his positions throughout his life (13). But even while refusing to confine philosophy to its Greek origins, Maraldo refuses to exoticize Nishida’s works as yet another product of the Orient. Instead, he treats Nishida’s work as worthy of the philosophical attention of the rest of the world. That is to say that he treats Nishida foremost as a philosopher in the global setting, an equal partner in dialogue with philosophers of the... (shrink)

This is a book about space. On a first level, it reflects traditional Japanese ideas of space against various "items" of Western culture. Among these items are Bakhtin's "dialogicity", Wittgenstein's Lebensform, and "virtual space" or "globalized" space as representatives of the latest development of an "alienated", modern spatial experience. Some of the Western concepts of space appear as negative counter examples to "basho-like", Japanese places; others turn out to be compatible with the Japanese idea of space. On (...) a second level, the book attempts to synthesize, by constantly transgressing the limits of a purely comparative activity, a quantity which the author believes to be existent in Japanese culture that is called "the virtual". Be it Kuki Shûzô's hermeneutics of non-foundation or his ontology of dream, Nishida Kitarô's virtual definition of the body of state, or Kimura Bin's notion of "in-between" (aida) that is so closely associated with the "virtual space" of Noh plays: what all these conceptions have in common is that they aim to transcend a flat notion of "reality" by developing "the virtual" as a complex ontological unity. (shrink)

: Two major philosophers of the twentieth century, the German existential phenomenologist Martin Heidegger and the seminal Japanese Kyoto School philosopher Nishida Kitarō are examined here in an attempt to discern to what extent their ideas may converge. Both are viewed as expressing, each through the lens of his own tradition, a world in transition with the rise of modernity in the West and its subsequent globalization. The popularity of Heidegger's thought among Japanese philosophers, despite its own admitted (...) limitation to the Western "history of being," is connected to Nishida's opening of a uniquely Japanese path in its confrontation with Western philosophy. The focus is primarily on their later works (the post-Kehre Heidegger and the works of Nishida that have been designated "Nishida philosophy"), in which each in his own way attempts to overcome the subject-object dichotomy inherited from the tradition of Western metaphysics by looking to a deeper structure from out of which both subjectivity and objectivity are derived and which embraces both. For Heidegger, the answer lies in being as the opening of unconcealment, from out of which beings emerge, and for Nishida, it is the place of nothingness within which beings are co-determined in their oppositions and relations. Concepts such as Nishida's "discontinuous continuity," "absolutely self-contradictory identity" (between one and many, whole and part, world and things), the mutual interdependence of individuals, and the self-determination of the world through the co-relative self-determination of individuals, and Heidegger's "simultaneity" (zugleich) and "within one another" (ineinander) (of unconcealment and concealment, presencing and absencing), and their "between" (Zwischen) and "jointure" (Fuge) are examined. Through a discussion of these ideas, the suggestion is made of a possible "transition" (Übergang) of both Western and Eastern thinking, in their mutual encounter, both in relation to each other and each in relation to its own past history, leading to both a self-discovery in the other and to a simultaneous self-reconstitution. (shrink)

Nishida Kitarō is considered Japan's first and greatest modern philosopher. As founder of the Kyoto School, he began a rigorous philosophical engagement and dialogue with Western philosophical traditions, especially the work of G. W. F. Hegel. John W. M. Krummel explores the Buddhist roots of Nishida’s thought and places him in connection with Hegel and other philosophers of the Continental tradition. Krummel develops notions of self-awareness, will, being, place, the environment, religion, and politics in Nishida’s thought and shows how (...) his ethics of humility may best serve us in our complex world. (shrink)

The essay is a written version of a talk Nakamura Yūjirō gave at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris in 1983. In the talk Nakamura connects the issue of common sense in his own work to that of place in Nishida Kitarō and the creative imagination in Miki Kiyoshi. He presents this connection between the notions of common sense, imagination, and place as constituting one important thread in contemporary Japanese philosophy. He begins by discussing the significance (...) of place (basho) that is being rediscovered today in response to the shortcomings of the modern Western paradigm, and discusses it in its various senses, such as ontological ground or substratum, the body, symbolic space, and linguistic or discursive topos in ancient rhetoric. He then relates this issue to the philosophy of place Nishida developed in the late 1920s, and after providing an explication of Nishida’s theory, discusses it further in light of some linguistic and psychological theories. Nakamura goes on to discuss his own interest in the notion of common sense traceable to Aristotle and its connection to the rhetorical concept of topos, and Miki’s development of the notion of the imagination in the 1930s in response to Nishida’s theory. And in doing so he ties all three—common sense, place, and imagination—together as suggestive of an alternative to the modern Cartesian standpoint of the rational subject that has constituted the traditional paradigm of the modern West. (shrink)

_An Inquiry into the Good_ represented the foundation of Nishida’s philosophy—reflecting both his deep study of Zen Buddhism and his thorough analysis of Western philosophy—and established its author as the foremost Japanese philosopher of this century. In this important new translation, two scholars—one Japanese and one American—have worked together to present a lucid and accurate rendition of Nishida’s ideas. "The translators do an admirable job of adhering to the cadence of the original while avoiding unidiomatic, verbatim constructions."—John C. (...) Maraldo, _Philosophy East and West_ __ __ "More accurate and critical than the first translation into English of Nishida's earliest book.... An important addition to library collections of twentieth-century philosophy, Japanese intellectual history, and contemporary Buddhist thought."—_Choice_ "A welcome new translation of a work by probably the most original and influential of modern Japanese philosophers."—Hidé Ishiguro, _Times Literary Supplement_ "Undoubtedly the most important work for anyone in the West interested in understanding modern Japanese thought. This work premiered Japanese philosophy as modern but has also shown unusual staying power. In the late twentieth century Japanese thinkers, both religious and secular, insist on its importance and relevance."—William R. La Fleur, University of Pennsylvania. (shrink)

A new reprint of Nishida Kitarō's second monograph in his life as a philosopher, Speculation and Experience, in the original Japanese, comprising early essays written in Kyoto between 1912 and 1914. This volume is also cross-referenced to the pagination of the older (1946) and newer (2003) editions of the Complete Works of Nishida Kitarō, vol. 1.

This essay by Nishida Kitarō from 1927, translated into English here for the first time, is from the initial period of what has come to be called “Nishida philosophy” (Nishida tetsugaku), when Nishida was first developing his conception of “place” (basho). Nishida here inquires into the relationship between logic and consciousness in terms of place and implacement in order to overcome the shortcomings of previous philosophical attempts—from the ancient Greeks to the moderns—to dualistically conceive the relationship between being (...) and knowing in terms of subject-object or form-matter. During the course of articulating his novel approach to consciousness and cognition, Nishida discusses what he takes to be the weaknesses of Greek hylomorphism, Kantian (and neo-Kantian) dualism, and Husserlian phenomenology. Dissatisfied with the attribution of mere passivity to placiality, and turning away from consciousness objectified as a subject of statement, Nishida imparts to consciousness qua place a certain logical independence as an active yet un-objectifiable “predicate.” This investigation of consciousness as the unobjectifiable place for objectification leads Nishida to the notion of what precedes consciousness itself, a “place of nothing” (mu no basho) that envelops the dichotomized structures of subject-predicate, being-nothing, subject-object, universal-particular, et cetera. (shrink)

‘Mathematics is the science of the infinite, its goal the symbolic comprehension of the infinite with human, that is finite, means.’ Along this line, in The Open World, Hermann Weyl contrasted the desire to make the infinite accessible through finite processes, which underlies any theoretical investigation of reality, with the intuitive feeling for the infinite ‘peculiar to the Orient,’ which remains ‘indifferent to the concrete manifold of reality.’ But a critical analysis may acknowledge a valuable dialectical opposition. Struggling to spell (...) out the infinity of real numbers mathematicians come to see the active role of emptiness. Pondering over the essence of self-awareness, the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō comes to see the ‘place’ where it abides as absolute nothingness. Thus, the two ways of seeing coalesce into a perspective in which infinity and nothingness mirror each other. (shrink)

: This essay analyzes the relation between nothingness and the work of art, where negation appears as a fundamental element of art. Starting at a discussion of the concept of nothingness in existential phenomenology, it points to the limitations of Heidegger’s notion of nullity and negation, which spring from the denial of the dimension of consciousness to his Dasein. Although Sartre recovers that dimension in his portrayal of the pour-soi, now the idea of nothingness is not taken to its ultimate (...) consequence, where art would appear as a product of consciousness that is entrenched in nothingness. Only through an enlarged notion of consciousness, one that allows the perception of negative experience as intrinsically related to poiesis, will the work of art appear ontologically grounded in a form of Being that searches for its own contradiction. Such an enlarged notion of consciousness appears in the thought of Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō , where concepts such as ‘‘the place of nothingness’’ and ‘‘pure experience’’ can serve as ground to an analysis of the relation between nothingness and the work of art. (shrink)

_Ontology of Production_ presents three essays by the influential Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō, translated for the first time into English by William Haver. While previous translations of his writings have framed Nishida within Asian or Oriental philosophical traditions, Haver's introduction and approach to the texts rightly situate the work within Nishida's own commitment to Western philosophy. In particular, Haver focuses on Nishida's sustained and rigorous engagement with Marx's conception of production. Agreeing with Marx that ontology is production and production (...) is ontology, Nishida in these three essays—"Expressive Activity", "The Standpoint of Active Intuition", and "Human Being" —addresses sense and reason, language and thought, intuition and appropriation, ultimately arguing that in this concept of production, ideality and materiality are neither mutually exclusive nor oppositional but, rather, coimmanent. Nishida's forceful articulation of the radical nature of Marx's theory of production is, Haver contends, particularly timely in today's speculation-driven global economy. Nishida's reading of Marx, which points to the inseparability of immaterial intellectual labor and material manual labor, provokes a reconsideration of Marxism's utility for making sense of—and resisting—the logic of contemporary capitalism. (shrink)

This essay analyzes the relation between nothingness and the work of art, where negation appears as a fundamental element of art. Starting at a discussion of the concept of nothingness in existential phenomenology, it points to the limitations of Heidegger's notion of nullity and negation, which spring from the denial of the dimension of consciousness to his Dasein. Although Sartre recovers that dimension in his portrayal of the pour-soi, now the idea of nothingness is not taken to its ultimate consequence, (...) where art would appear as a product of consciousness that is entrenched in nothingness. Only through an enlarged notion of consciousness, one that allows the perception of negative experience as intrinsically related to poiesis, will the work of art appear ontologically grounded in a form of Being that searches for its own contradiction. Such an enlarged notion of consciousness appears in the thought of Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō, where concepts such as "the place of nothingness" and "pure experience" can serve as ground to an analysis of the relation between nothingness and the work of art. (shrink)

In his philosophy of nothingness, Kitar Nishida illuminates the matrix of transformation of the world ''from the Created to the Creating'' through shintai, or the body. In this matrix, shintai enters into the stage of an action-sensation continuum and emerges as the immaculate iconic tool of nothingness to create new figures as extended self. This idea of shintai has resonance with the development of postwar art in Japan. The ''Space of Transparency'' put forth by Ufan Lee, the leader of Monoha, (...) is the principal example. This essay investigates Nishida's notion of shintai and its influence on Lee's theory of art. (shrink)

This chapter will explicate what Nishida means by “nothing” (mu, 無), as well as “being” (yū, 有), through an exposition of his concept of the “place of nothing” (mu no basho). We do so through an investigation of his exposition of “the place of nothing” vis-àvis the self, the world, and God, as it shows up in his epistemology, metaphysics, theology and religious ethics during the various periods of his oeuvre – in other words, his understanding of nothingness (...) that he takes to be the root of the self, the world, and the religious notion of an absolute or God. We will also indicate some of the sources of his notion from the Eastern and the Western traditions. What unites his view to nothing from the different periods is an existential praxis, and what I call an “anontology” that avoids reduction to either opposites of being and non-being (on-mēon). (shrink)

: In his philosophy of nothingness, Kitar Nishida illuminates the matrix of transformation of the world ‘‘from the Created to the Creating’’ (tsukuru mono kara tsukurareta mono e) through shintai, or the body. In this matrix, shintai enters into the stage of an action-sensation continuum and emerges as the immaculate iconic tool of nothingness to create new figures as extended self. This idea of shintai has resonance with the development of postwar art in Japan. The ‘‘Space of Transparency’’ put forth (...) by Ufan Lee, the leader of Monoha, is the principal example. This essay investigates Nishida’s notion of shintai and its influence on Lee’s theory of art. (shrink)

The essay is a written version of a talk Nakamura Yūjirō gave at the College international de philosophie in Paris in 1983. In the talk Nakamura connects the issue of common sense in his own work to that of place in Nishida Kitarō and the creative imagination in Miki Kiyoshi. He presents this connection between the notions of common sense, imagination, and place as constituting one important thread in contemporary Japanese philosophy. He begins by discussing the significance (...) of place (basho) that is being rediscovered today in response to the shortcomings of the modern Western paradigm, and discusses it in its various senses, such as ontological ground or substratum, the body, symbolic space, and linguistic or discursive topos in ancient rhetoric. He then relates this issue to the philosophy of place Nishida developed in the late 1920s, and after providing an explication of Nishida’s theory, discusses it further in light of some linguistic and psychological theories. Nakamura goes on to discuss his own interest in the notion of common sense traceable to Aristotle and its connection to the rhetorical concept of topos, and Miki’s development of the notion of the imagination in the 1930s in response to Nishida’s theory. And in doing so he ties all three—common sense, place, and imagination—together as suggestive of an alternative to the modern Cartesian standpoint of the rational subject that has constituted the traditional paradigm of the modern West. (shrink)

When I deliver an introductory lecture on Japanese Philosophy, I always raise the following question: Is it appropriate to modify the word philosophy with an adjective such as Japanese? Philosophy is, after all, a discipline that addresses universal problems, and so transcends the restrictions implied in geographical descriptors. However, as Kuki Shūzō argues in his essay “Tokyo and Kyoto,” I think that this is only part, and not the whole truth of the matter.One’s thinking takes place within (...) the framework of one’s cultural heritage, and the different nuances of each of the words one uses can influence how one thinks. It is for this reason that every philoso­phy has its own unique character. As Otto Pöggeler suggests, there is something about the thought of Japanese philosophers such as Nishida Kitarō and Nishitani Keiji that does not fit easily into the framework of “philosophy” in the Western tradition. This is a conse­quence of the fact that they did not simply passively adopt, but rather attempted to critically challenge Western philosophy. I suppose that their grounding in Japanese and other Eastern traditions contributed to their critical challenge of Western philosophy. And I submit that there is a strong tendency in traditional East Asian thought to not simply grasp things within a presupposed framework of “knowledge,” but rather, since “knowledge” itself is understood to be a certain kind of restriction, to return to its roots.Needless to say, neither Nishida’s nor Nishitani’s thought is merely a philosophical reiteration of such traditional East Asian teachings. Nevertheless, we can say that the East Asian idea that knowledge is at root something restrictive lives on in their thinking. The radical­ity of Nishida’s and Nishitani’s thought can be understood to lie in the manner in which they cast light on the limits of the “knowledge” pursued by Western philosophy, problematizing the basis on which this knowledge is established as well as the framework it sets up.I think that the “character” of this or that philosophy arises from such different ways of seeing things and different attitudes toward “knowledge.” It is crucial to point out, however, that the gaps resulting from these differences need not become hindrances for philosophical thinking. Indeed, I think that the existence of such gaps, rather than hindering “dialogues” between different philosophies, is precisely what enables them to be meaningful. This is also what I have in mind when I stress the importance of dialogue in my lectures on Japanese philoso­phy. It is, after all, the creative dialogue engendered in this manner that enables philosophy to progress along its path of radical inquiry. (shrink)

In this presentation I discuss the concept of “place” in the Japanese twentieth century philosopher and founder of the Kyoto School of philosophy, Nishida Kitarō, in light of the ancient Greek concept of chōra, and compare it with the German thinker Martin Heidegger’s notion of “region” that was also inspired by chōra. We can point to Plato’s concept of chōra in his Timaeus as an important source for both twentieth century philosophers of the East and the West. But (...) we can also draw connections to the pre-Platonic everyday understanding of chōra as well. I argue that chōra in general entails concretion-cum-indetermination, a space that implaces human existence into its environment and clears room for the presencing-absencing of beings. (shrink)

This article tries to show the place of God in philosophy of Nishida Kitaro. Thus, religious aspect of philosophical thought of Nishida has been considered in four themes, namely, God as the ground of reality, absolute nothingness, divine love, and religion. Nishida interprets God in mystical vocabulary which it is similar to theory of pantheism. He explains relation between God and the creatures as manifestation of God. For him, God is the ground of reality and according this opinion, there (...) is not any separation between God and world. He also believes that God is not being, but He is absolute nothingness- of course it is not the same nothingness in Islamic philosophy that we know- and consciousness of this nothingness is equal with love of God and love of self. We intuit God from within and divine love lies in us. (shrink)

In his philosophy of nothingness, Kitarō Nishida illuminates the matrix of transformation of the world "from the Created to the Creating" (tsukuru mono kara tsukurareta mono e) through shintai, or the body. In this matrix, shintai enters into the stage of an action-sensation continuum and emerges as the immaculate iconic tool of nothingness to create new figures as extended self. This idea of shintai has resonance with the development of postwar art in Japan. The "Space of Transparency" put forth by (...) Ufan Lee, the leader of Monoha, is the principal example. This essay investigates Nishida's notion of shintai and its influence on Lee's theory of art. (shrink)

The list of publications having to do with Japanese intellectual history in general and Kyoto School philosophy in particular has grown steadily over the past years, both inside and outside of Japan. This is due in no small part to the important contributions made by those whose papers are included in this volume, the proceedings of an international conference held in June 2009 at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Although much remains to be done if Japanese philosophy (...) is to shed its esoteric and exotic image in order to take its rightful place in the curriculum as one of the many valuable sources of philosophical reflection, the ongoing dialogue among veterans in the field and younger scholars reflected in these pages is as promising as it has ever been. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto SchoolRobert E. Carter (bio)Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School. By James W. Heisig. Nanzan Library of Asian Religion and Culture. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001. Pp. xi + 380. $21.95.Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School, by James W. Heisig, is indeed a very good book. It provides a systematic interpretation and appraisal of (...) the three key figures of the Kyoto school—Nishida Kitarō, Tanabe Hajime, and Nishitani Keiji—together with an in-depth account of the sociopolitical context in which they worked. Heisig succeeds in indicating the importance of each of these philosophers both within the Japanese context and beyond. He deftly summarizes the philosophical positions of each of the three and details the interactions between them, as well as with other philosophers of their era. The book's style is accessible, although the ideas are often dense and the analysis subtle. There are no footnotes per se, but instead a bibliographical essay is provided for each of the sixty-six sections of the book. [End Page 273]Heisig claims that the Kyoto school philosophers give the West a way into the East like none other (p. 272). They thrust Japanese philosophical and religious thought onto the world stage, revealing an East Asian perspective to the outside world, as well as to the Japanese themselves. They self-consciously attempted to articulate the distinctiveness of the Japanese mind-set in particular, and the Eastern way of thinking generally. Heisig artfully weaves the thought and times of these three thinkers together into a tapestry of understanding and insight of the highest quality.As is always the case, however, there are issues that remain which might have been dealt with, and interpretive differences to be noted. Nishida began his philosophical journey with his groundbreaking Inquiry into the Good, published in 1911.1 His goal in that work, as Heisig describes it, was to introduce the important but radically nonphilosophical language of Zen to the closed world of philosophy, and conversely to use philosophy to find a language to talk about those things that Zen had always insisted were not susceptible to rationalization. The Inquiry created a significant stir in Japan upon its publication, and Nishida's appropriation of William James' notion of pure experience appeared to span the philosophical differences East and West without smoothing over those differences.Yet Heisig's critical honesty forces him to underplay the actual lasting importance of the Inquiry. Nishida, too, later criticized the heavy psychological emphasis of the book.2 However, it seems too strong to argue, as Heisig does, that the work is a classic only because of its influence and its place in Nishida's own philosophical development (p. 41). Heisig is frank in anticipating that some will find his diminishing of the Inquiry as "irreverent." I admire his irreverence as a cautionary attempt to save us all from a bandwagon elevation of Nishida and the Kyoto school, but I think he underestimates the subtle brilliance of the book and its profound originality. To be sure, the Inquiry is a notebook of insights and ideas to be developed. Not only is experiential nonduality a focus (and with it a critique of the dogma of intentionality), but there is also the reinstatement of religion as foundational to all systematic thinking, an account of God as both immanent and transcendent (including nothingness) together with God's role in Eastern thought, and a theory of ethics based on the innate tendencies within each of us as located at the deeper, unconscious levels of our nature. Heisig concludes that the Inquiry is "less an achievement than an agenda to direct his work in the years ahead" (p. 42). It seems evident to me that this pioneering work is both an immense achievement and an agenda for a lifetime of future investigation. The richness and suggestiveness of Nishida's explorations in the Inquiry seem to me to ensure that the work is genuinely worthy of being judged a classic on its own philosophical merits.Heisig recognizes over and over again the importance of the mystical element in all three... (shrink)

Throughout his entire career, Nishida Kitarō was, arguably, interested in challenging Immanuel Kant’s formulation of the moral will. In his first work, An Inquiry into the Good, he criticizes Kant’s pure practical reason as idealistic, arguing that the good should be understood not in terms of an abstract, formal relation of reason with itself, but in terms of personality as a single, unique, unifying power that is the true reality of the self. He echoes this language in his last work, (...) “The Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview,” proposing that the personal self exists as a self-determining individual through creative expression. This article will investigate how Nishida’s development of this concept of the personal self grounds his proposal that the goal of the moral will is realization of the good as a personal, rather than abstract, ideal, through the intentional action of active intuition. (shrink)

The growing scholarship on the Kyoto School of Japanese Buddhist philosophy has brought it to the attention of more and more people in the West, but in the process, the Kyoto School has acquired a fixed identity. It is usually depicted as centered around three main figures—Nishida Kitarō, Tanabe Hajime and Nishitani Keiji—and concerned with the philosophy of nothingness. In fact, however, as the thirteen scholars in this volume show, the Kyoto School included several other members beside the inner (...) circle of three, and these members were concerned with a wide range of philosophical issues beyond the philosophy of nothingness. The range and variety of these essays give a much more realistic picture of the many fronts on which the Japanese encountered Western philosophy. (shrink)

I compare the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro with the Egyptian philosopher and reformer Muhammad ‘Abduh. Both philosophies emerged within similar cultural contexts. Bot...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: I would like to begin by thanking the Journal of Japanese Philosophy for making space in these pages for a review of my monograph Watsuji on Nature: Japanese Philosophy in the Wake of Heidegger. Although book reviews do not usually receive a reply from the author—much less one as lengthy as the article that follows—one seemed necessary in this instance because my ideas, unfortunately, have been (...) seriously mis-represented here. Moreover, the number and kinds of misreadings, mistakes, misunderstandings, and omissions are so extensive that even a brief attempt to address the main points at issue is no small task. But the primary problem is that the reviewer contends that I say the opposite of what I actually maintain with regard to some of the central claims of the book. These mistaken assertions are primarily the consequence of a failure to understand crucial philosophical concepts (especially metaphysical nondualism, being-in-the-world, intentionality, and disclosure). But they also stem from a series of errors ranging from the exclusion of some of the fundamental ideas and arguments of the book to the misreading of pivotal claims and the mistranslation of the Japanese-language primary sources.I begin with a single but telling example that is characteristic of the way the reviewer repeatedly portrays me as saying the opposite of what I actually say. Droz states that “For Johnson, while human beings taken collectively as a whole have the capacity to transcend the fūdo, individual human beings apparently do not” (Droz, 133). But what I actually say is that Watsuji “has not shown that this same capacity belongs to the individual human being” (Johnson, 191). I then give a series of examples of individual transcendence: “the forms of transcendence that are evident in, for example, the complex identities of immigrants, of those who have lived in multiple countries, of those who live in multiple milieus at the same time [...] of those who develop a very different character from their compatriots even as they live together in the same place” (Johnson, 191). [End Page 167] I go on to point out that “we also need a subtler account, on a much smaller scale, of the ways the self is both constituted by and is also able to transcend its fūdo. In what follows we will give an indication of some of the issues involved” (Johnson, 191). I then proceed to give such an overview, concluding with the point that “the strong identification with one aspect of one’s milieu rather than another shows that the self is much more than the simple expression of its fūdo. This form of transcendence, I suggest, can be studied with profit as an instance of what Watsuji calls the individual dimension of human beings” (Johnson, 192).Misrepresentations of this sort abound. The most serious instance of this kind concerns one of the central theses of this study. At the beginning of her review, the author purports to recount two criteria that I propose “to clarify what the philosophical concept of fūdo entails” (Droz, 129). But in fact, I list four criteria under two distinct categories. First, in order to determine the scope and boundaries of a fūdo, I propose the following two criteria:1. certain regions as articulated wholes found in nature itself, which is what Watsuji attempts to articulate with his taxonomy of basic types of fūdo (Johnson, 34).2. a relational whole of disclosure, self-interpretation, and natural locale (Johnson, 34).But the reviewer takes note of (1) and passes over (2) in silence—this omission is significant and, as we will see shortly, it leads her into later difficulties. Droz instead moves directly to a second topic, namely, what I intend by the term nature, which is a concept found in both of these criteria. Here I follow Mill in thinking that we need some way to distinguish between nature and nonnature if nature is not simply to be equated with everything. I therefore propose two criteria that we might use to distinguish nature from artifice within a fūdo: A. nature as all-encompassing space and place B. the sheerly given self-unfolding of things . (shrink)

Much Ado About Nothingness brings together 14 essays on Nishida Kitaro and Tanabe Hajime by one of the leading scholars of twentieth-century Japanese philosophy. With Nishida’s “logic of place” and Tanabe’s “logic of the specific” providing a continuity to the whole, the author writes from a conviction that “the overriding challenge for those doing philosophy in the key of the Kyoto School, with their sights set squarely on self-awareness like Nishida and Tanabe before them, is to turn its attention (...) to the wider world….”. (shrink)