Japan emerged from a long period of sakoku or isolation in the middle of the nineteenth century CE, beginning a period of cultural exchange and exploration which is still going on. The Japanese began not only to make their achievements known in the West (Suzuki was a leading figure in this area), but also to absorb and evaluate the achievements of western culture, including philosophy. The achievement of Nishida Kitaro was to be the first Japanese to use the methods and findings of western philosophy as a means to articulate a philosophical outlook profoundly coloured by Zen. This is itself an intellectual project of exceptional boldness. Many writers in the Zen tradition contend that the crowning nondual experience of Zen is in principle inarticulable in conceptual terms (cf. Dogen and Hakuin), but this Nishida declined to accept. Impressed by the powerful metaphysical systems of the West, he set out to investigate whether the central experience of Zen, and the world-picture associated with it, could be given a conceptual articulation. It is to be stressed that Nishida is not a follower of any one western school, even less merely an eclectic. He explores the great systems of the West, even that of Hegel to which he owed the most extensive debt, from a single, consistent point of view, i.e. their adequacy as frameworks for the articulation of Zen experience. What emerges in the end is a unique world-picture which is his own, in which the points of convergence and divergence betwen the two intellectual traditions appear with peculiar sharpness.
Nishida was born on 19 April 1870 near Kanazawa (Ishikawa prefecture), his father for a time a teacher, his mother a devotee of Jodo (Pure Land Buddhism). During his schooling, Nishida was instructed in the Chinese classics, and a Confucian strain entered his outlook, to remain there permanently. It was during his schooldays at Kanazawa that he met D.T. Suzuki, and the two were to remain firm friends for the rest of their lives. After studying philosophy at Tokyo University, Nishida was employed as a teacher at several schools (1895–1909), teaching principally psychology, logic, ethics and German. During this period, as well as reading extensively amongst the classics of western philosophy, Nishida engaged deeply in Zen meditation, and this experience set the basic direction his thought was to follow throughout his life. His diary at the time reveals the depth of this influence. ‘I shall be an investigator of life. Zen is music, Zen is art, Zen is movement; apart from this there is nothing wherein one must seek consolation of the heart.’1 It was during this period that he developed the ideas set out in his first work, Zen no kenkyu (An Inquiry into the Good, 1911).
Nishida left school-teaching in 1909, spending one year on the staff of Gakushuin University, Tokyo, before moving to Kyoto University in 1910. He was promoted to the chair of philosophy there in 1914, and retained this post until his retirement in 1928. Both during his professorship and afterwards, Nishida continued to think and to write, issuing substantial works refining and developing his own philosophy. Attacked by Japanese nationalists before the Second World War for being too receptive to foreign influences, Nishida was unrepentant (as was his friend Suzuki). In his last days, he watched the cities of Japan burning after Allied air raids. He died on 7 June 1945, at Kamakura.
As so often with those who live the life of the mind, Nishida’s biography is outwardly dull, somewhat like that of Kant, for example, whose works he greatly admired. He himself summed up his life like this:
My whole life has been extremely simple. For the first half I sat facing a blackboard and for the second half I stood back to a blackboard. With regard to a blackboard I have made only one complete turn – with this my biography is exhausted.2
Inwardly, by contrast, Nishida lived with great intensity, occupied unceasingly in the attempt to resolve some profound philosophical problems. The major changes in Nishida’s philosophy, of which there are a number, are not the results of shifts in his basic position. Rather, his fundamental starting point and deepest conviction remain constant. The changes he made to his system are each an attempt to improve his answer to the central problem which is his unchanging theme. This problem is posed by Zen experience, in the following way.
At the heart of Buddhism in all its forms, and so of Zen, is the experience of enlightenment, and this experience is mystical in character. Insofar as it can be conveyed in conceptual terms, it is direct apprehension of reality, and reality is found to be not the ordinary world of discrete individuals, causally interacting in time and space, but a predicateless unity. This insight generates philosophical problems of the greatest profundity, of which the most basic is that referred to in the West as the problem of the one and the many: if reality is a predicateless unity, how and why does it (the one) give rise to the universe as we ordinarily experience it, a universe of spatio-temporal individuals standing in complex mutual interrelations (the many)? No less urgent is the question whether the enlightenment experience can be given a coherent conceptual framework, since concepts are by definition the means by which we articulate our experience, i.e. introduce divisions into it. Nearly all mystics claim that no conceptual framework for this experience is possible. Nishida’s originality and daring consist in his combined acceptance of the nondual nature of reality together with his refusal to admit that it cannot be conceptualized. The aim of Nishida’s thought, constant at all points in his career, is to provide a conceptual framework of the kind typical in western metaphysics for an intuition concerning the nature of reality which is profoundly Japanese. He set out to produce nothing less than a metaphysics for mysticism.
Nishida’s first attempt to formulate such a conceptual framework is set out in An Inquiry into the Good (1911).3 Though this work, like the Ethics of Spinoza which impressed Nishida profoundly, has a title which suggests a work of moral philosophy, the moral recommendations put forward in it are grounded on a complete metaphysics, with which the book opens. Nishida begins by outlining his view of being-as-is or reality, and this he calls pure experience.4 This term is used by Nishida in a special, technical sense. Pure experience is prior to the distinction between subject and object, knower and known. It is not the experience of any individual, but just experience:
by pure I am referring to the state of experience just as it is without the least addition of deliberative discrimination . . . In this regard, pure experience is identical with direct experience. When one directly experiences one’s own state of consciousness, there is not yet a subject or an object, and knowing and its object are completely unified.5
Pure or direct experience is of reality itself: ‘Just like when we become enraptured by exquisite music, forget ourselves and everything around us, and experience the universe as one melodious sound, true reality presents itself in the moment of direct experience.’6 The distinctions between subject and object, mind and matter, ‘derive from two different ways of looking at a single fact . . . But these dichotomies are not inherent in the fact itself.’7
Being thus prior to all discriminations whatsoever, pure experience is prior to time:
Because time is nothing more than a form which orders the content of our experience, the content of consciousness must first be able to be joined, be united, and become one in order for the idea of time to arise. Otherwise we would not be able to link things sequentially and thereby think in terms of time. The unifying activity of consciousness is not controlled by time; on the contrary, time is established by the unifying activity. At the base of consciousness is a transcendent, unchanging reality apart from time.8
All our ordinary mental events are individuated by reference to time. It follows that, in Nishida’s view, self-consciousness is possible only because there is pure experience, and not vice versa.
Facing the next question, how the many arise from the one, Nishida’s answer is reminiscent of the ideas of the western philosopher to whom he owed his most extensive and constant debt, Hegel. The sole reality, he contends, is inherently self-contradictory, and it is the working out of contradictions which generates change:
The fundamental mode of reality is such that reality is one while it is many and many while it is one . . . Since these two dimensions cannot be separated, we can say that reality is the self-development of a single entity. A reality that is both one and many must be self-moved and unceasing. A state of quiescence is a state of independent existence free from conflict with others; it is a state of oneness that rejects plurality. In such a situation, reality cannot come into being.9
On the basis of this metaphysics, Nishida grounds his early theology and ethics. The universe is a sole reality, both infinite unity and infinite opposition; an independent, self-fulfilled infinite activity: ‘We call the base of this infinite activity God. God is not something that transcends reality, God is the base of reality. God is that which dissolves the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity and unites spirit and nature.’10 The ethics based on this metaphysics and theology are transparently Buddhist in inspiration. Nishida adopts the Buddhist distinction between the true self (the ‘original face’ or Buddha-nature present in us all) and the ordinary self. The goal of ethics, the one true good, is to realize the true self. To do this is to dissolve the illusory consciousness of the ordinary self and to unite with God.
Our true self is the ultimate reality of the universe, and if we know the true self we not only unite with the good of humankind in general but also fuse with the essence of the universe and unite with the will of God – and in this religion and morality are culminated. The method through which we can know the true self and fuse with God is our self-attainment of the power of union of subject and object.11
This is pure Zen, in modern language.
As Nishida came to recognize, there are a number of difficulties in this philosophy, chiefly with the concept of pure experience itself. At times, as can be seen from the quotations above, Nishida speaks of it much as Suzuki, for instance, speaks of satori. At others, his descriptions of it are far more reminiscent of psychological descriptions of pre-conceptual experience or the ‘sense-data’ of some western philosophies.12 The attempt to characterize the nature of reality in terms inescapably endowed with overtones of individual psychology will not work, as Nishida himself realized and admitted. To refine his philosophy, he needed to improve this basic metaphysical concept, his way of characterizing reality itself, and the subsequent changes in his philosophy are attempts to do precisely that.
The first major shift is made in a work published in 1917, Jikaku ni okeru chokkan to hansei (Intuition and Reflection in Self-consciousness). In this work, the fundamental metaphysical concept, the term used to designate ultimate reality, is no longer pure experience, but absolute free will. The book, as Nishida himself states, is a meditation on the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814). It is not surprising that Nishida should have felt attracted to Fichte’s ideas. Fichte’s philosophy is an uncompromising idealistic monism: he holds that reality is unitary and mental, an absolute which he regards as a primal self, logically prior to the common-sense distinction between the self and the not-self. The absolute self gives rise to all there is by means of its non-temporal activity. Further, in order to characterize the activity of the absolute, Fichte introduces the concept of an Act (German: Tathandlung). In ordinary speech, an act can only be predicated of a limited, selfconscious individual, whereas in Fichte’s technical sense of the term, an Act ‘does not and cannot appear among the empirical states of our consciousness, but rather lies at the basis of our consciousness and alone makes it possible’.13
It is not necessary to master all the details of Fichte’s thought in order to see why it should have appealed to Nishida. To repeat, the latter’s central problem is how to give a conceptual framework to a world-view based on Zen insight, which posits a nondual reality which in some way has given rise to the phenomenal world. In Fichte, Nishida found a western philosopher engaged on a recognizably similar task, though arrived at in the development of an independent philosophical tradition. In his middle period works, Nishida takes the Fichtean notion of Act and uses it in his conceptualization of the mode of being of the true self or reality. What Nishida in this work calls jikaku or self-consciousness is the nondual mode of awareness, prior to the distinction between the ordinary self and not-self.14 The essential property of self-consciousness is absolute free will, and he attempts to explain all phenomena as developments of free acts of self-consciousness in this sense. The same conceptual scheme is used in two other major works, Ishiki no mondai (The Problem of Consciousness, 1920) and Geijutsu to dotoku (Art and Morality, 1923).
The conceptual scheme elaborated in these three works is more adequate to its task than the concept of pure experience used in An Inquiry into the Good, yet it still remains open to a version of the same objection of psychologism, i.e. Nishida has not managed entirely to eliminate inappropriate elements borrowed from human psychology from his description of the mode of being of the one to which they cannot apply. In the case of Fichte’s philosophy, it is very hard to see how primordial reality can be called a self in any understandable sense, nor how an Act can be other than predicable of limited individuals (who are by definition non-primordial), and Nishida’s use of the latter term, as he came to see, is open to comparable objections. Once again, Nishida was his own best critic. Not content with two attempts, he replaced the conceptual scheme of act and self-consciousness with his final metaphysical category, the concept of the place of nothingness (mu no basho), a notion from which all psychological connotations have been eliminated.15 This idea was first used by Nishida in his work Hataraku mono miru mono e (From the Actor to the Seer, 1927), and was developed by him, in the elaboration of an increasingly complex system, in all his major works thereafter.
The place of nothingness is the concept by means of which Nishida designates reality or the one in the final phase of his thought. All other concepts are related to it or defined by reference to it.16 With characteristic boldness, Nishida defines the mode of being of reality in such a way as at once to deny the adequacy of Aristotelian logic (on which western philosophy is almost exclusively based) and to give an answer to the question of how one and many are related. His answer is that they are the same or, as he puts it, they have absolutely contradictory identity (zettai mujunteki jikodoitsu): ‘The world of reality is essentially the one as well as the many . . . This is why I call the world “absolute contradictory self-identity”’,17 a conclusion consonant with a long tradition in Buddhist thought, according to which samsara and nirvana are ultimately identical.
However, if the underlying idea is not new, Nishida’s formulation of it certainly is. Western logic embodies a number of basic principles or ‘laws of thought’. Among these are the law of identity (a thing is itself and not another thing: a is a) and the law of contradiction (the statements p and not-p cannot both be true). Nishida’s logic of place denies both: the real is both one and many, and contradictory descriptions of it can both be true. Faced with the conclusion that Zen experience cannot be accommodated within Aristotelian logic, Nishida asserts that this latter logic is inadequate and replaces it with his own. In the logic of place or field logic, subjects are determined by their place. The logical place of a concept is the enveloping universal in terms of which it is defined. If the definition of an object is found to embody contradictions, a deeper, more encompassing universal must be found in terms of which it can be defined. The more general the enveloping universal, the more concrete it is. The ultimate and most concrete of universals Nishida calls nothingness. It is that which is only place and has no place in anything else. This cannot be called being and so must be called nothingness.
Using his logic of the place of nothingness, Nishida goes on to assert that he can account for a major feature of the universe, namely that it is not static but subject to constant change. Reality is self-contradictory; self-contradictions involve tensions, and tensions produce change. As a result, reality is essentially creative: ‘At the base of the world, there are neither the many nor the one; it is a world of absolute unity of opposites, where the many and the one deny each other.’18 This mutual negation of one and many is creative: ‘Such a world, as unity of opposites, from the formed towards the forming, is essentially a world of “poiesis”.’19 Using this basic framework, Nishida redescribes all the facets of existence, all generated by mutual contradiction ultimately grounded on nothingness.
Nishida devoted his last work, Bashoteki ronri to shukyoteki sekaikan (The Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious World-view, 1945),20 to an analysis of religion within the conceptual framework just outlined. The key to understanding religion is to grasp the true nature of the self and its relation to being-as-is or reality. It follows from Nishida’s logic that the mode of being of the self is self-contradictory:
the self and the absolute are always related in the paradoxical form of simultaneous presence and absence . . . This logic conceives of the religious form of life as constituted in the contradictory identity of the self and the absolute.21
From this two important consequences flow, of which the first is that religion is not merely one aspect of life among many which can be ignored or attended to according to taste. Rather, religion is part of the very fabric of reality: ‘The question of religion lies not in what the self should be as a consciously active being, but in the question of what the self is: not in how the self should act, but in the self’s very is and is not.’22 Second, it follows that religious consciousness is not a special gift vouchsafed to only a few: ‘The religious mind is present in everyone. One who does not notice this cannot be a philosopher.’23 This is because the true self and the one (God) are identical: in the language of Mahayana Buddhism, the Buddha-nature is present in us all. The way to God is inward. In Nishida’s vocabulary, we approach God by investigating the contradictions inherent in the self: ‘religion can be grasped only by a logic of absolute affirmation through absolute negation.’24 The vocabulary is that of Hegelian dialectic; but the thought comes from Zen.
Whether this philosophy is acceptable depends on the answer to the deep philosophical question of whether dialectical logic is ultimately coherent, and it is a tribute to the power of Nishida’s philosophy that it turns on issues of this degree of profundity. His special achievement is to have highlighted very sharply the essential point of divergence of the two philosophical cultures he combined. The direct experience of the one, whatever it is called in the varying eastern traditions, appears to be unformulable in terms of western logic. If it is to be formulable at all, and so included in philosophy (in the western sense of the term), a new logic is needed, and this Nishida, who appreciated the problem with perfect clarity, attempted to formulate. The Kyoto school of philosophy which he founded has developed his ideas since his death; but his example is one which any philosopher approaching this area of investigation must address, and that is a considerable achievement.
1 Quoted in Shimomura Torataro, Nishida Kitaro and Some Aspects of his Philosophical Thought, printed as afterword to V.H. Viglielmo’s translation of Zen no kenkyu as A Study of Good, Tokyo, Government Printing Bureau, 1960, p. 198.
2 Quoted in Shimomura Torataro, op.cit., in Viglielmo, op.cit, p. 197.
3 As the Sources and Further Reading section makes clear, this work has been translated twice into English. An Inquiry into the Good is the title of the second version by M. Abe and C. Ives (used here); the earlier Viglielmo translation has the title A Study of Good.
4 The term ‘pure experience’ is borrowed from William James and the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), but it will be clear that it is only the term that Nishida has borrowed, it being used in a sense entirely his own. This is generally true of Nishida’s other terminological borrowings. At various times he uses terms from Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, James, Bergson and Husserl. For an outline of the ideas of each of these thinkers, see the relevant sections of D. Collinson, Fifty Major Philosophers, London, Routledge, 1991.
5 An Inquiry into the Good, pp. 3–4.
6 op.cit., p. 48.
7 op.cit., p. 49.
8 op.cit., pp. 60–61.
9 op.cit., p. 57.
10 op.cit., p. 79.
11 op.cit., p. 145.
12 cf. e.g. op.cit., p. 8.
13 J.G. Fichte, Wissenschaftslehre, 1794: trans. P. Heath and J. Lachs, as The Science of Knowledge, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982, p. 93.
14 Abe points out that what is meant by jikaku in Japanese is somewhat different from ‘selfconsciousness’ in English. Its connotations in Japanese are religious rather than epistemological. It indicates a state in which reality awakens to itself: ‘self-awakening’ is a better way of translating it. Inquiry into the Good, p. xxi.
15 The term ‘place’ (but not its meaning in Nishida’s thought) is borrowed from Plato, who uses the concept of ‘topos’ in his dialogue Timaeus.
16 This nothingness is not mere absence, as it would be in ordinary western philosophical usage. Though the term is western, its sense in Nishida’s thought is Oriental. Its connotations are those of mu in Zen, and stretch back ultimately to the Prajnaparamita Sutras and the Void (sunyata) of Nagarjuna. This nothingness is the ground of all being, not its absence.
17 Nishida, The Unity of Opposites from Philosophical Essays: Third Series, trans. R. Schinzinger in Intelligibility and the Philosophy of Nothingness, Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, p. 163. As Schinzinger indicates, Nishida’s Japanese zettai mujunteki jikodoitsu (absolutely contradictory identity) can also be rendered as ‘the unity of opposites’, preferred by some translators.
18 op.cit., p. 168.
19 op.cit., p. 167.
20 The words ‘of Nothingness’ do not appear in the Japanese. The translator has very reasonably added them to the title of the English version of this work.
21 The Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious World-view, p. 83.
22 op.cit., p. 76.
23 op.cit., p. 85.
24 op.cit., p. 91.
An Inquiry into the Good, 1911
Thought and Experience, 1915
Intuition and Reflection in Self-consciousness, 1917
The Problem of Consciousness, 1920
Art and Morality, 1923
From the Actor to the Seer, 1927
The Self-consciousness of the Universal, 1930
The Self-determination of Nothingness, 1932
Thought and Experience. Continuation, 1937
Fundamental Problems of Philosophy (2 vols), 1933– 1934
Philosophical Essays (3 vols), 1933–1945
The Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious World-view, 1945
the Buddha, Hui-neng, Dogen, Bankei, Hakuin, Suzuki
(1) Works by Nishida
Art and Morality, trans. D.A. Dilworth and V.H. Viglielmo, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1973
Fundamental Problems of Philosophy: the World of Action and the Dialectical World, trans. D.A. Dilworth, Tokyo, Sophia University, 1970
Intelligibility and the Philosophy of Nothingness, trans. R. Schinzinger, Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, 1973 (three of Nishida’s essays, from different periods of his development)
Intuition and Reflection in Self-consciousness, trans. V.H. Viglielmo, with Y. Takeuchi and J.S. O’Leary, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1987
Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious Worldview, trans. D.A. Dilworth, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1987
A Study of Good, trans. V.H. Viglielmo, Tokyo, Government Printing Bureau, 1960 / An Inquiry into the Good, trans. M. Abe and C. Ives, New Haven, CT and London, Yale University Press, 1990
(2) About Nishida
Abe, M., ‘Nishida’s philosophy of “place”’, International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 4, 1988, pp. 355–371
Carter, R.E., The Nothingness Beyond God: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nishida Kitaro, New York, Paragon House, 1989
Dilworth, D.A., ‘The initial formulation of “pure experience” in Nishida Kitaro and William James’, Monumenta Nipponica, vol. 24, nos 1–2, 1969, pp. 93–111
Viglielmo, V.H., ‘Nishida Kitaro – the early years’, in D. Shively (ed.), Tradition and Modernism in Japanese Culture, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1971, pp. 507–562