Nishida Kitarō

Nishida Kitarō was the most important Japanese philosopher of the modern era and the founder of what came to be called the Kyoto School. Writing at a time when Japan was absorbing Western learning at great speed, he tried to build a philosophy that used the methods and vocabulary of European thought while drawing on the Zen Buddhist experience he had practised for years. His key ideas, "pure experience" and the "logic of place", aimed to overcome the split between a knowing subject and the objects it knows. His late political essays, written during the Second World War, remain a matter of controversy.

Nishida was born on 19 May 1870 in Unoke, a village on the Sea of Japan coast just north of Kanazawa, in what is now Ishikawa Prefecture. He was born in the third year of the Meiji era, two years after the Meiji Restoration had begun the rapid modernisation of Japan, and his generation was the first to study Western philosophy in Japanese universities. At school in Kanazawa he read the Confucian, Neo-Confucian and Daoist classics, learned English and German, did well at mathematics, and formed a lifelong friendship with D. T. Suzuki, later the best-known interpreter of Zen in the West. The two left the school together in 1890 after clashing with its strict new regime.

Nishida was admitted to Tokyo Imperial University in 1891 only as a "limited status" student, a humiliation he felt keenly, and studied the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Schopenhauer. He graduated in 1894 with a thesis on David Hume's theory of causation.

For the next fifteen years Nishida taught, often German and ethics, at provincial schools, including the Fourth Higher School in Kanazawa, and briefly in Tokyo. He married, and his family life brought much grief; several of his children died young. During these years he practised Zen meditation intensively under masters in Kanazawa and Kyoto, keeping a diary of his sittings. He insisted that he was not doing Zen philosophy, but the experience of a mind in which the self is no longer set apart from what it experiences runs through his work.

In 1910 Nishida was appointed to Kyoto Imperial University, becoming professor of philosophy in 1914. In 1911 he published Zen no kenkyū, An Inquiry into the Good, often described as the first original work of modern Japanese philosophy. Its central idea is "pure experience", borrowed in part from the American philosopher William James. Before we reflect on it, Nishida argued, experience is a single whole in which there is not yet a separate "I" seeing and a thing seen: a musician absorbed in playing, or someone lost in hearing a sound, is not aware of a subject facing an object. The division into mind and matter, self and world, is a later abstraction. True reality is this unified, dynamic experience, and goodness lies in the full realisation of the self as part of it. The book ends with religion, which Nishida saw as the self's discovery of its unity with the deepest ground of reality.

Over the following years Nishida reworked these ideas in dialogue with the Neo-Kantians, Henri Bergson, Josiah Royce and Edmund Husserl. In the mid-1920s he developed his best-known concept, basho, usually translated "place" or "topos". Western logic since Aristotle, he argued, had treated reality in terms of subjects that have properties. Nishida instead asked in what "place" subjects and objects themselves appear. Judgements take place in consciousness, consciousness in turn appears within a wider field, and the final, all-embracing place cannot itself be an object; he called it the "place of absolute nothingness", a term with deep Buddhist roots. This nothingness is not empty negation but the open field in which everything is what it is.

From the 1930s, partly in response to criticism from his colleague Tanabe Hajime and Marxist former students, he turned to history, action and the body. His late idea of the "absolutely contradictory self-identity" described a world in which opposites, such as the one and the many or the individual and society, depend on each other without being resolved into a higher unity, as they would be in Hegel's dialectic. His final essay, "The Logic of Place and the Religious Worldview", completed in 1945, brought these ideas to bear on religion.

Nishida's fame grew in the 1920s, and he helped bring thinkers such as Tanabe Hajime, Watsuji Tetsurō and Kuki Shūzō to Kyoto, and taught students including Nishitani Keiji, Miki Kiyoshi and Tosaka Jun. This loose circle, with very different politics, became known as the Kyoto School. He retired at the end of the 1920s and moved to Kamakura, near Tokyo, but continued to write.

As the Empire of Japan went to war in China and then in the Pacific, Nishida was sought out by officials, among them his former student, Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro. He lectured on "The Problem of Japanese Culture" in 1938, addressed the emperor in 1941, and in 1943 drafted a text on the principles of a new world order. These writings spoke of the imperial household and a world in which each nation found its own place, language that could be read as supporting Japanese expansion. Scholars still disagree about them. Some see an attempt to steer militarist ideas in a more pluralist direction; others see an endorsement of imperialism. During the war right-wing nationalists attacked him as too Western and too abstract, while after it the left condemned him as nationalist.

Nishida died in Kamakura of a kidney infection on 7 June 1945, two months before the end of the Second World War. When his collected works began to appear in 1947, people queued overnight to buy the first volume.

His students and successors, especially Nishitani Keiji and later Ueda Shizuteru and Abe Masao, carried his thought into dialogue with Christian theology and European philosophy, particularly that of Martin Heidegger. The Kyoto School is now the best-known strand of modern Japanese philosophy abroad and a central topic within Chinese and East Asian philosophy, and Nishida is studied as a thinker who brought Buddhism and Western philosophy into genuine conversation.