## 1. Biography




Nishida was born on May 19, 1870 in the village of Unoke on the Sea of
Japan just north of the city of Kanazawa. His birthplace, later incorporated into the town of Kahoku, is the site today of archives and a monumental museum, perhaps the world's largest architectural structure dedicated to a single philosopher. Nishida grew up in the early years of the Meiji era (1868-1912), when Japan had reopened to the world after
two and a half centuries of relative isolation and was undergoing a
revolutionary Europeanization of its political, educational and
cultural institutions. As it touched Nishida's early years, this
"modernization" came in the form of both a rigid, often
oppressive school atmosphere that demanded obeisance to the emperor,
and a liberating exposure to the progressive ideas of the Japanese
"Enlightenment" that had introduced Western philosophy to
Japan. In high school in Kanazawa he studied Chinese Confucian,
Neo-Confucian and Daoist classics, learned to read English and German,
excelled in mathematics, and attempted briefly to penetrate works of
Hegel and Kant. He formed a life-long friendship with fellow student
D.T. Suzuki, and with him dropped out of high school in 1890. Admitted
into Tokyo Imperial University as a "limited status"
student the following year, Nishida studied Kant, Hegel and
Schopenhauer under the first philosophy professors in Japan. After
graduating in 1894 with a thesis on Hume's theory of causation, he
married and held teaching positions at several provincial high schools
and universities. During the next decade, despite the demands of
family life and teaching German among other subjects, he published a
few philosophical essays, but was more intent on formal meditation
practice under Zen masters in Kyoto. He began composing what later appeared as *An Inquiry
into the Good* in 1905 and on the basis of that work secured a
position at Kyoto Imperial University in 1910, becoming Professor of
Philosophy there in 1914.




Nishida concentrated on the philosophical books that made their way
into Japan and for the next decade wrote numerous essays that
reworked ideas from the Neo-Kantians, Royce, Bergson, Hermann Lotze
and, to a lesser extent, Husserl. These essays were collected into
books that investigated a wide range of topics, including art and
morality, from the perspective of a theory of consciousness and the
will. Nishida's fame began to spread in the 1920s. He was
instrumental in securing positions at Kyoto University for Tanabe
Hajime, Watsuji Tetsuro, and Kuki Shuzo, and attracted
students such as Nishitani Keiji, Miki Kiyoshi and Tosaka Jun, who all
became significant philosophers in Japan. He developed his signature
theory of place (*basho*) in the mid 1920s, and continued to
elaborate it after he became professor emeritus and moved to Kamakura
in 1929. In the early 1930s his interests turned to the nature of
human actions and interactions in the historical and social world, and
eventually to the meaning of culture and nationhood.




Because of his prestige as Japan's premier philosopher, government
officials--among them his former student and then Prime Minister
Konoe Fumimaro--appealed to him to justify Japanese
nationalism. Nishida complied by addressing the issues, if not
legitimizing Japan's expansionism and imperialism. Yet he considered much of that work
a distraction. He lectured on "The Problem of Japanese
Culture" in 1938; when published two years later the book quickly sold
some 60,000 copies. He delivered an invited address to the emperor in
1941 that advocated academic freedom and a place for each nation in
the global world, with each developing its own global
 perspective.[1]
 Addresses on the "Principles for the New World Order" and
on "The Body (or Essence) of the Nation" (*kokutai*)
followed. During this time Nishida's critics on the right considered
his political writings either too abstract or insufficiently
supportive of the government; his leftist critics, especially after the Second World War,
found them profusely nationalistic. Despite his failing health
and the bombing of cities all around him, Nishida persisted in his
philosophical investigations, using for example Descartes' Cogito and Leibniz's
Preestablished Harmony as points of departure. He
completed the seminal essay, "The Logic of Place and the
Religious Worldview," just two months before his death on June 7,
1945. Publication of his collected works in 19 volumes began two years
later. An extant photograph shows dozens of people camped out all
night long awaiting the issue of the first volume on July 20,
1947.




Nishida's private life, reflected only faintly in his philosophical
work, nevertheless left its stamp on its tenor. His perseverance
through turmoil explains perhaps some of the intensity of his
writing. Comprehending reality for him was an emotive as well as
intellectual achievement; his calligraphy and poetry, renowned in
their own right, evince an acute awareness of transience and
transcendence. Nishida experienced the death of his first wife and
four of his eight children; upon the passing of his first son he wrote
this *waka* poem:



> 
> 
> Having lived  
> 
> healthily  
> 
> till twenty-three  
> 
> how could he disappear  
> 
> like a dream  
> 
> 
> 
> (Yusa 2002, 314-18).
> 
> 
> 




Three years later he was able to write



> 
> 
> The bottom of my soul has such depth;  
> 
> Neither joy nor the waves of sorrow can reach it  
> 
> 
> 
> (Nishida 1958, frontispiece, trans. by Robert Schinzinger).
> 
> 
> 


## 2. Theory of Experience and Consciousness


### 2.1 Pure Experience




Starting with *An Inquiry Into the Good*, Nishida's early work
calls into question two basic presuppositions of most modern
epistemology: the assumptions that experience is individual and
subjective, and that it leads to knowledge only via a corrective
process with input from the mind or other individuals. For Nishida,
experience in its original form is not the exercise of individuals
equipped with sensory and mental abilities who contact an exterior
world; rather it precedes the differentiation into subject
experiencing and object experienced, and the individual is formed out
of it. "The moment of seeing a color or hearing a sound"
is prior not only to the thought that the color or sound is the
activity of an external object or that one is sensing it, but also to
the judgment of what the color or sound might be (Nishida 1990a,
3). "Pure experience" names not only the basic form of
every sensuous and every intellectual experience, but also the
fundamental form of reality, indeed the "one and only
reality" from which all differentiated phenomena are to be
understood. Cognitive activities such as thinking or judging, willing,
and intellectual intuition are all derivative forms of pure experience
but still manifest it insofar as they are in action --when thinking,
willing, etc. are going on. The experience of a running horse, for
example, underlies the judgment that the horse is running, and the
activity of judging is an exercise of pure experience prior to a
subsequent judgment that "I am now judging." Objective
phenomena likewise derive from pure experience; when unified they are
called "nature," while "spirit" names the
activity of unifying. Pure experience launches the dynamic process of
reality that differentiates into subjective and objective phenomena on
their way to a higher unity, and the recapture of our unitary
foundation is what Nishida means by the Good.




Nishida would deny that his position is a kind of idealism, either
subjective or transcendental, because no subjective mind, human or
divine, is the origin of what is taken as reality, and no personified
or ego-aware spirit is its beginning or end. His notion of pure
experience clearly shows the influence of William James, Ernst Mach,
and others, but it differs from their notions as well as from
twentieth-century expositions of pre-reflective experience by its
emphasis on the non-individuated character and the seamless
development of such experience. It is the pre-individual basis of a
systematic and all-comprehensive process. If we call his view a
"theory" of experience, we should be aware that from his
standpoint the theory is a natural outgrowth of unitary experience and
not a reflection on it as proceeding from a different source. The
question of how pure experience grounds reflective knowledge would
occupy Nishida in works composed after *An Inquiry Into the
Good*.




The directness, relative simplicity, and systematic approach of this
book made it perhaps the most accessible and popular of his
works; and many commentators have tended to emphasize it more than
later writings, despite Nishida's own misgivings about its latent
psychologism. Indeed Nishida's initial position anticipates several
developments in his later thought. For example, the early statements
of experience prior to a subject experiencing and an object
experienced are re-formulated in the late 1920s as "seeing
without a seer, hearing without a hearer." The nullification of
the self in pure experience is later expressed as seeing the self from
the perspective of the world, where world is understood phenomenologically as a
determining horizon of experience. The notion of the individual as
determined by the universal concealed within (Nishida 1990a, 18)
pre-figures Nishida's later adaptation of Hegel's concrete universal;
the later works speak of the individual as the self-determination of
the universal. Finally, the ways in which pure experience can be said
to be most concrete, to enfold all reality and indicate its
undifferentiated ground, reflect methods that characterize Nishida's
philosophy as a whole.


### 2.2 Self-Awareness




The question of how reflective thought is grounded in pure experience
finds a tentative answer in Nishida's next essays. How can pure
experience develop into reflective thought that would seem to
interrupt and interpret it from an external vantage point? The
self-reflection known as self-consciousness or self-awareness
(*jikaku*) provides an answer. The most basic form of consciousness
inherently reflects or mirrors itself within itself, so that
there is no difference between that which reflects and what is
reflected. In this self-awareness, immediate experiencing and reflection
are unified. In epistemological terms, knower and known are the same,
and this instance of unity serves as the prototype of all
knowledge. Two points may prevent a misunderstanding of Nishida's
position here. First, his talk of *self*-awareness and
*self*-reflection does not imply the pre-given existence of
some personal self that at times may be self-conscious. Secondly, if
consciousness is not placed in a pre-given self, it also is not placed
in the objective world as a complex of brain cells or as the effect of
material objects on the mind or brain. As in modern phenomenology,
consciousness for Nishida means simply that which makes manifest or,
to use a visual metaphor, that which illuminates. To emphasize its
non-objectifiable character, Nishida later will place consciousness
"in" nothingness, that is, consider it a
"form" of nothingness, and will eventually consider this a form of relative or oppositional nothingness, a non-being with respect to beings. In the meantime, he formulated it
as the activity that precedes but ultimately unifies self and
world. Knowledge of things in the world begins with the
differentiation of unitary consciousness into knower and known and
ends with self and things becoming one again. Such unification takes
form not only in knowing but in the valuing (of truth) that directs
knowing, the willing that directs action, and the feeling or emotive
reach that directs sensing. In this stage of his work Nishida,
influenced by Fichte and Schopenhauer, considered "absolute will" as
the preeminent form of self-awareness and saw it as the source of acts
of moral decision and of the creation and appreciation of art. Since
the activity of the will eludes reflection, however, Nishida
eventually abandoned this formulation of a unitary source.


## 3. Theory of Universals and the Logic of Place




Nishida's epistemological motivation gradually gave way to an
examination of common ontological assumptions that underlie
epistemology in the Western philosophical tradition. Not content
merely to expose such assumptions, however, Nishida formulated a novel
ontology of experience and self-awareness that would give them logical
necessity.




Considering what is taken as the ordinary consciousness of objects,
Nishida's analysis questions both the notion of consciousness and that
of objects. We can explicate Nishida's first concern, with the
ontology of consciousness, in the following way: If the basic form of
consciousness did not have the reflexivity of self-awareness, then the
"consciousness" of objects would be blind, as it were,
like a mechanical or neurological reaction to stimuli with no
awareness whatsoever, and no way to account for awareness. The problem
appears in attempts to define consciousness in a non-circular way. A
definition of consciousness as a state of *awareness* or
*sentience*, for example, or a state in which there is
something it *feels* like to be in that state, merely replaces
*consciousness* with its synonyms. In a sense, awareness is
irreducible, but it has a logical structure that accounts for its
connection to a world of objects. Structurally, awareness mirrors
itself in itself, in a manner analogous to the way an infinite set
mirrors itself in its equivalent subsets, or to the way an ideal map
mirrors itself in all accurate representations of that
 map.[2] 
 (Note that the English *awareness* can be used without the
word *self*, but the Japanese word that translates as
*self-awareness* is an inseparable compound, *ji-kaku*.)
If such self-awareness is to have logical necessity, it cannot be
explained as a contingent property of a particular mind or
consciousness that sometimes reflects on itself, that is, as a second
order consciousness of being conscious of something.




Similarly, if self-awareness is to be an awareness of more than merely
oneself, it cannot be interior to the self alone. Modern
epistemology's solution was to split the world (the totality of all there is) in two, mind and
nature, and then to see the mind as a mirror of nature, and ideas as
representations of real objects. Nishida's solution was to see the
world as mirroring itself in all the things "in the
world." Whatever is "in the world" is a mirroring of
the world. In this sense it is the world that is
"self-aware" or self-reflexive; and there is no outside to
it. An individual's "self-awareness" is a partial
mirroring of the world; Nishida later described the individual self as
a focal point of the world. While he was still thinking in terms of
consciousness, however, Nishida avoided pinpointing awareness and
spoke of the world as a field of consciousness to indicate the
extension of the term beyond the individual self. This field is
similar to Kant's *Bewusstsein uberhaupt*, in that it
functions as the condition for the possibility of particular acts of
consciousness, but unlike Kant's notion that turns everything into an
object of consciousness, its reflexive structure allows it to take
itself into account without making it another object.




We may use Nishida's own terms to explain his second concern, the way
that objects ordinarily function in judgments. In what Nishida
alternatively called the logic of objects or subjective logic, objects
of consciousness are made the grammatical subject of propositions or judgments,
and are specified by predicating properties of the 
subject. Eventually a subject is reached that cannot itself be
predicated of anything else, recalling Aristotle's
*hypokeimenon* or individual substance that can be subject but
never predicate. Even when modern epistemology eschewed or at least
modified Aristotle's notion of substance as a substrate for contingent
properties, it appealed to substrates in the sense that they define
the primary subject of a judgment, that is, the judgment's topic and grammatical subject. Similar to phenomenologists,
Nishida wanted to account for the consciousness that posits such
substances and underlies the subject of a judgment. Essays in *From
That Which Acts to That Which Sees* (1927) and subsequent works
invert Aristotle's notion of the hypokeimenon and propose that
consciousness is the "transcendental predicate" that can
never be a subject; in other words consciousness in act can never be
made an object of consciousness that could become a grammatical subject. Nishida is aware of the paradox of
such formulations that would make consciousness the subject of
sentences that describe it, and he sometimes resorts to explicitly
paradoxical descriptions such as "seeing without a seer"
and "seeing the form of the formless, hearing the voice of the
voiceless." But he again also uses the straightforward metaphor,
the "field of consciousness," to indicate its
non-subjective and non-objectifiable character. Consciousness cannot
be grasped as the property of an individual substance nor as anything
like a substance or underlying substrate itself. It functions as the
field that is the opening of world and self.




If judgments describe things and states of affairs and thus would give
us access to reality by setting themselves over against that reality,
we must step back, as it were, and consider a wider reality that
includes judgments. In other words, we must place judgments that
predicate universals of things into a wider field of predication, that is, in the
"transcendental predicate" of consciousness. Here Nishida
might have further developed a phenomenology of the agency of
predication, but instead he moves to a more logical account of its
scope and developed what he called a predicate logic.[3] He thinks of
universals as fields of possibility that become specified or
determined (more accurately, that determine themselves) in their
particular instantiations. There is a necessary hierarchy of
concreteness among universals that Nishida expresses as the order of
topoi or places (*basho*). Most abstract are the universals
that serve as predicates in particular judgments. Judging or
predication in turn takes place in the topos of consciousness, which
is further concretized as the universal or topos of reflexive
self-awareness wherein acts of seeing, knowing, desiring and willing
take place. And just as the world of self-awareness enfolds the world
of nature described in judgments, it in turn is enfolded in the topos
(Nishida calls it "the intelligible world") within which
the creative self pursues ideal values like truth, beauty and
goodness. Here Nishida echoes the medieval, seemingly all-inclusive
*transcendentalia* that transcend all categories. In his terms,
all predication would be a mirroring of the transcendentals of being
and of the one (*unum*), the true (*verum*), and the
good (*bonum*). But those transcendentals, insofar as they
themselves all elude predication, actually point to a more inclusive
and undifferentiated topos, absolute nothingness.




In summary, Nishida initially formulated his logic of place or topos
to counter Neo-Kantian epistemology that took knowledge to be the
subject's form-ruled construction of an objective world. He sought not
only to undermine the distinctions between subjective and objective
but also to place both sides within a more comprehensive and concrete
conception. That is, while he first construed knowledge on the model
of self-awareness in which self reflects itself within itself, he also
felt compelled to find a locus of non-differentiation behind the
distinction between such awareness and things seen from its vantage
point. As non-differentiated and inclusive, that locus is field-like,
a metaphor that Nishida at first replaced with the notion of topos or
"place" (*basho*). Then he placed the topos of
self-awareness in the even more inclusive and concrete value-forming
world. That world of creative activity anticipates what Nishida
eventually considered the ultimate topos that defies description,
predication, or determination by something beyond or different from
it. His logic of place offered an alternative to the logic of
substances presupposed in much traditional metaphysics.




The logical schema of topoi is paralleled by an ontological account.
Nishida articulated the topoi also in terms of what we may call a
*me-ontology*, from the Greek *meon* or non-being. The
topos of being describes the world of nature. The topos
of relative nothingness comprises the field of consciousness that is
no-thing with respect to the things of which it is conscious. This
nothingness, however, is still opposed to being, and so differs from
the absolute nothingness that underlies both sides of the opposition. Here
and elsewhere Nishida plays on the word for absolute in Japanese,
*zettai*, which literally means breaking through or overcoming
opposition. His premise is that the meaning of "to be" is
"to be within"; the ultimate "within" is the topos of absolute
nothingness.


### 3.1 Absolute Nothingness




The topos of absolute nothingness is the ultimate "within
which" all reality takes place. It can be understood as an
alternative to a transcendent determiner of the world as
conceptualized, for example, in medieval philosophy's notion of God,
Fichte's transcendental ego, or Husserl's transcendental
subjectivity. Nishida did use the language of transcendence to explain
absolute nothingness, saying it transcended the opposition between
being and non-being, for example; but such language did not indicate
any thing, power, or consciousness beyond the world. Absolute
nothingness is infinitely determinable and its determinates form the
actual world, but this "self-determination" occurs
"without anything that does the determining," like an agency without an agent. Equally paradoxical are the positive
descriptions Nishida gives it, in spite of the implicit claim that it
defies description. Rather than a mere absence of being, meaning, or
function, absolute nothingness is active and creative in forming the
actual world; and it manifests or awakens to itself through
self-awareness. It is the foundation of the world and of the self
which is a focal point of the world; but it is an uncommon kind of
foundation in that it functions through self-negation. It cannot be
called "absolute" unless it negates any particular
determination of it and simultaneously enfolds them all. It is the
universal of universals. Nishida was not able to combine these various
descriptions into one coherent notion, but they partially converge in
the sense of an undifferentiated whole that includes all its
differentiations.


### 3.2 Analogies to the Logic of Place




Nishida intended his theory of place or topos to provide a logical
foundation for his previous philosophy of experience and
self-awareness. Several overlapping models help make sense of this
logic. Nishida drew upon some models explicitly, for example, Plato's
notion of the receptacle (*chora*) of ideas in the
*Timeus* and Aristotle's adaptation in his notion of
*topos* in *On the Soul*. Another model Nishida used
early on was the notion of fields in modern physics and relativity
theory, in which space-time is a field inseparable from the physical
objects within it and determining how (when and where) they exist.
Analogously, for Nishida, all perceived and conceptualized objects are
"in" the "field of consciousness" (Nishida
borrowed the term from William James). Another early model was the
logic of universals that serve as predicates. Particulars or
individuals are placed within universals to specify their difference
from other particulars or individuals, and less extensive universals
are placed within more extensive ones, until one reaches the ultimate,
boundless universal called nothingness. This "transcendental
predicate" cannot become the subject matter of any description
or proposition in positive terms, but it is ultimately entailed by
every specification. 




Other analogies, although not explicitly mentioned by Nishida,
nevertheless serve to clarify his logic at least in part. A model of
interpretation is relevant: every text has its context, which in turn
may be made a text or thematized by appealing to a further context. 
There is no final context that can be specified without referring to
yet another context. For Nishida this relation would not be settled by invoking the notion of an infinite regress; rather it indicates the necessity of an ultimate context of a different order, one that allows the distinction between a specific text and its context. This ultimately unspecifiable context in
Nishida's terms is called absolute nothingness. The analysis of
successful physical theories provides yet another model. Each of
Nishida's successive topoi serves as a level of analysis that resolves
contradictions on less comprehensive levels, as Einstein's relativity
theory encompasses Newtonian theory and resolves contradictions in
it. But for Nishida the final level that holds differences or
contradictions together is ultimately unanalyzable absolute
nothingness. Despite Nishida's relative ignorance of modern logic and
his identification of predicates with universals, we may also find
parallels to his logic of place in mathematical logic: an axiomatic
system is a topos that, according to Godel's theorem, is not
self-explanatory or self-generating since it contains undecidable
propositions, and there is no final system with a self-explanatory
foundation. Nishida's absolute nothingness is the place beyond
discursive determination. Discourse analysis also suggests parallels:
it analyzes how a discourse is framed or directed to an audience with
certain interests, but the analysis too has its own frame that does
not terminate in any definitive or final frame. Foundationalist
theories of knowledge and reality might seem to provide a model of
Nishida's logic of place, but in Nishida the metaphor of grounding
gives way to that of placing, locating, or encompassing, and in any case the ultimate
place is more an *Abgrund* or void than a positive ground.


## 4. Theory of the Historical World




It is clear that Nishida proposed his various topoi not as static
contexts terminating in an ultimate genus, but rather as a dynamic
process of contextualization or world-formation. This always implied
the temporality of the "self-aware" world, and not merely
time as a dimension of the physical world. Nevertheless, Nishida did
not explicitly take account of the historical nature of the world
until the early 1930s, after his critics, in particular his younger
colleague, Tanabe Hajime, and his former students, Miki Kiyoshi and Tosaka Jun, turned his
attention to the historical dimension of reality and human action. The
critics suggested that Nishida ignored the world determined by
individual human action by replacing individual human subjectivity
with trans-individual experience or consciousness and eventually
shifting human agency to the world as a universal. In response,
Nishida began to articulate the world as a dialectical universal. The
basic idea is that the world is a place of mediation between acting
individuals. It is not a transcendent topos that one-sidedly
determines individuals but a topos that arises with them through their
creative interactions. There are two sides of this idea to consider:
the world and the interacting individuals.




We conceptualize the formation of the world as history, but must think
of history in terms of the logic of place and not simply as a temporal
process. At any moment the world in process mirrors the indeterminacy or openness
of absolute nothingness and contains the conditions for novelty and
future possibilities; however it also encompasses everything that has
already been determined. In Nishida's words, the historical world
proceeds "from the created to the creating." And it so
proceeds not in a linear fashion, as if viewed from some point outside
the world, but rather "in" every moment or, conversely,
out of an "eternal now" or "absolute present"
that describes the topos of its continual creation. This present in
its absolute presence is the place where history can happen precisely
because it enfolds the past, though is not entirely determined by the
past, and it holds the future as infinite possibility. It is eternal or
absolute in the sense that it contains infinite time by negating
(fixed) time (NKZ VIII, 76ff.). Viewed in terms of the absolute
present--the ever-present juncture between a determined past and
an open future--the world appears as a "continuity of
discontinuities."




Similarly, we conceptualize the historical world sometimes as produced
out of nature by human work and activity, sometimes as producing the
individuals who interact in it, but we should think of it primarily as
the mediating place of interactive creation. Individuals create their
identities through their interactions in the world, and that world is
continually created with them. (Nishida's idea of a mediating place
finds a distant analogue in Einstein's theory of gravitational space,
where space is not independent of the physical objects in it but
rather is shaped by them). The historical world forms itself through
the actions of embodied individuals who mutually form each other. Adapting a phenomenological perspective, Nishida argues that the historical world as the most concrete topos of our reality must be the starting point for understanding the more abstract world of life and even more abstract natural world.




Gradually Nishida came to recognize the importance of embodiment for
human interaction and communication, and introduced the notion of the
expressive or historical body. The body is not primarily a physical
object and product of the natural world, but a historical subject and
co-creator of the world. Insofar as the many historical bodies of the
one world differ from each another, they too form a
"discontinuous continuity." Nishida was fond of calling
this type of totality, which holds together differences without sublating
them into a higher unity, a "self-identity of contradictories."




Two parts of Nishida's theory deserve further explication: his novel
conception of enactive intuition and his explanation of the relations
between self & other and one & many.


### 4.1 Enactive Intuition




In attempting to explain the formation and working of the historical
world, Nishida coined the term "action-oriented intuition" or "enactive intuition"
(*k**oi-teki chokkan*). His texts suggest a
reciprocity between action and intuition, so that we could also speak
of "intuition-oriented action" or simply of
"action-intuition." Here again Nishida sought to discover the topos
or common space that underlies a distinction, this time between
intuition or seeing as a more or less passive reception of the world
and its objects, and action as the human-engendered production of the
world. Hence, this is another case of his "self-identity of contradictories." The common space is the enactive or performative
intuition exemplified by artistic creation.




For example, we might ordinarily conceive of the
artist as a pre-given entity who views, is inspired by, and utilizes
pre-given things in the world around her as she then goes about making
her work. The production of the work would then be a causative process
contributing in turn to the production of the historical world. We
might also understand the work as an objectification of the artist, an
expression of her inner spirit that externalizes and actualizes
it. Nishida envisioned an alternative, however.




For Nishida, the artist takes in or intuits
the world and transforms or enacts it, both of which are but two
moments in a single unfolding--not only of the world but of the
artist as well. Both artist and work are formed mutually and are
reflected in one another. Whereas this mutual formation can be described
in terms of a causative process taking time, with the person first
intuiting or internalizing and then acting or externalizing, Nishida
described it in terms of the place or topos wherein intuiting entails
acting and acting entails intuiting, and wherein the difference between
internal and external collapses. Granted, the work can take on a life
of its own as an object of appreciation or criticism, but it always
carries its reference to the artist, as the identity of the artist
likewise cannot be separated from her work.




Artistic creation is only
one example of such *poiesis*, as Nishida called
it. Scientific experimentation also provides an example of enactive intuition insofar as experiments require the performance of a body acting and understanding through instruments (NKZ VIII, 326). Enactive or performative intuition is operative in *praxis* or political-social action as well, insofar as it
grasps the world as including the self. Nishida emphasized that
enactive intuition is a bodily achievement, the performance of an
embodied individual who in turn is formed by the world; again, both
body and world must be conceived as historical. While
enactive intuition pertains to the dialectical way the
individual historical body forms and is formed by the world, the way
the world forms, once again, is described by the phrase "from the created to
the creating."


### 4.2 Theory of Relations: Self and Other, One and Many


#### Self and Other




We can shift the focus from the action of the individual historical
body to the interaction between distinct individuals, with
the world as the mediating space of mutual formation. In fact, Nishida
maintains that the individual, precisely as distinct, entails a plurality of
interrelated individuals. The relation between "I and
Thou" was the first part that Nishida considered, although he
continued to intertwine that relation with an internal relation in
self-awareness. Where his previous analysis of individual
self-awareness described it as a self-reflection of the universal of
self-awareness, his description now incorporated the dimension of
recognition. My recognition of you as not me makes me who I am, and
your recognition of me as not-you makes you who you are. Each is a
relative other to the self.




That Hegelian analysis is incomplete,
however, without the recognition of the absolute other in the self's
interior. This other, recalling Nishida's notion of absolute, does not
exclude the self; rather it constitutes self-identity as continually
negating what it has been. My personal self-awareness arises not when
I recognize my identity through memory, for example, nor simply when I
encounter an other I; rather it arises in experiencing the
groundlessness of my own existence, in recognizing what is absolutely
other to a substantial self-same self. Recognizing the absolute other
within constitutes not simply a reflexive self-awareness but a
self-awakening, a realizing of the "true self."




Nishida's term for self-awareness is *jikaku*, which can also be translated as *self-awakening*, a Buddhist
reading he undoubtedly intends.
Nishida allows for the Buddhist view that there is actually no self to
awaken by referring to the self-awakening of absolute nothingness; its
awakening is the awakening of the "true self." Absolute
nothingness in action, as it were, entails a negation (of a
substantial, self-same self) and an affirmation (of the true self). In
the manner of self-negation, I am one with you while not being the
same as you. Not only between us does a "continuity of absolute
discontinuities" obtain, but also within each of us, insofar as
our identity is in continual formation. In the end, then, Nishida
denies the substantiality of the self, and he re-visions both the radical
alterity of other persons and the transcendence of an absolute other,
in the guise of God for example, as we shall see.


#### One and Many



 Eventually Nishida saw that the "I-You" relation does
not exhaust the discontinuous continuity of our being. We must also
take into account the third party, the relative
other, "he" or "she," who forms at least an implicit reference to every
"I-you" interaction. Nishida seems intent not so much on
explaining alterity, however, as preserving interdependent
individuality, which of course still requires difference. He has in
mind the individuation of all phenomena but begins with the prototype
of individuality, the self-aware human person, who is more concretely
an individual than other single living beings, not to speak of
individuated atoms or particles at the most abstract level. What
determines individuality at the most concrete level is the one
historical world that functions dialectically as the place or medium
of interaction among innumerable individuals. The world is one yet
many; individuals are many yet one in their mutual
determination. (Nishida uses the Buddhist connective *soku* to
indicate the relation between one and many and to emphasize their
inherent reversibility. *Soku* translates roughly as "and at the same time": "one and at the same time many", "many and at the same time one." Otherwise, however, his terminology in this part of his
philosophy is often more Hegelian than Buddhist.)




Nishida's own formulations once again make
use of the pattern of an undifferentiated whole differentiating or
determining itself, in this case as distinct individuals. Although the topological account of a self-determining or immanently determining historical world seems to invoke more spatial than temporal notions, the description of this topos as the space wherein individuals interact and mutually determine one another is meant to accommodate the temporal dimension as well. The world is formed in conjunction with the individual embodied selves who interact in it; like Einstein's space-time, it is not independent of the things "in" it and does not preexist them. But for Nishida the realization or awareness of individual selves entails the realization or awareness of the world as well. As mentioned earlier, the world too is "self-aware" (*jikaku-teki*) not only in the sense of being self-reflexive but also in the sense of realizing and recognizing itself via its individual selves who are its "focal points." Here we see another instance of Nishida's way of universalizing first-person experience. In the discussions of the one and the
many, however, Nishida relatively neglected the notion of
self-awakening--the other, Buddhist-tinged reading of *jikaku*
that is such an important part of the I-You relation.


## 5. Nishida's Theology: the Finite Self meets the Absolute




Toward the end of his life, perhaps thinking of the significance of
death for understanding individuality, perhaps re-considering the
theme of self-awakening as a kind of death and re-birth, Nishida
delved deeper into the relation between the individual finite human
self and the absolute or God. In his view, this relation logically
defines the place of religion. Experientially it comes to the fore in
death. We will consider the meaning of death first, then the nature of
God or the absolute in relation to the finite self.




The theme of personal death is absent in Nishida's early work on pure
experience and self-awareness, and mentioned only abstractly in essays
on the historical world and the self, for example: "In absolute
dialectics, mediation as absolute negation is mediation as absolute
death, living by dying absolutely" (NKZ VII, 314). In the last
completed essay, "The Logic of Place and the Religious
Worldview" (1945), Nishida is more experiential. Death is not an
event at the end of one's life but penetrates life at each and every
moment. It is the ever-present opening, so to speak, where one's utter
finitude can come to light. Insofar as this is the finitude of the
individual self, it also implies a logic of individuation where the
role of other relative selves is diminished. "I am myself by
knowing my own death" (NKZ XI, 420) is both a declaration of
existential self-awareness and a statement of what makes me uniquely
me. What makes me an individual is not merely my differences from
others nor my sameness with some essential core; it is precisely what
most makes me *not* me, what negates *me*, in any moment
of action. In this context, death signifies the self-negation of the
finite self.




If death is an ever-present opening, the other side of that opening, so
to speak, is the absolute. To die is to stand vis-a-vis the
absolute. In the discussion of the "I-You" relation, this
term appeared as the absolute other in one's interior; here it shifts
to the absolute in contradistinction to finite beings. Nishida calls
it God as well, but makes clear that he is not referring to a
personal, transcendent being. If transcendence is involved, it is a
going beyond by going within. He also implies that it is not
synonymous with absolute nothingness. If relative nothingness as opposed to
being is implied, it is in the verbal sense of self-negating. The
absolute "lives" through its own self-negation and inclusion of the
relative self. It does not die in the sense that relative beings do,
for it embraces all others whereas they, by being individual, exclude
others. God cannot be wholly transcendent to or exclusive of the
self or the world. Even Nishida's early work, *An Inquiry Into the
Good* , had spoken of God in a way that undermined the notion of a
transcendent being outside the world; it conceived of God as the
infinite activity of unification at work behind the articulations of
spirit and nature out of pure experience.


 

In his final essay, Nishida
admits that his notion of an absolute totally embracing the relative,
even in its diabolical forms, is more in tune with a Mahayana Buddhist
tradition than with the Christian sources that also inspired him. To
express the relation between a God and the relative finite self,
Nishida introduces a new term, "inverse correlation"(*gyaku taio*). This relation is another instance of
opposites held together in a unity, a kind of "self-identity of
contradictories," but this time not a symmetrical one. The more
one faces one's death, the negation of one's life as an individual,
the more acutely one is self-aware as an individual. The closer the
finite self approaches God, the stronger the difference between them
becomes. This peculiar kind of relation implies that God and the
relative self are inseparable but asymmetrically co-dependent. God or the absolute embraces and never excludes the human or relative, and the relative self never coincides with or dissolves into God. Nishida's inverse correlation is perhaps comparable to some theological notions of non-reciprocal dependence, where for example it is said that God is my being yet I am not God's being. But in Nishida's case, insofar as the distinction entails an undifferentiated source of their
difference, an absolute nothingness, the more that source is
contacted the stronger the distinction holds. 


## 6. Political Theory: Religion, Culture, and Nations




Nishida's discussion of the absolute and the finite self does not
neglect the notion of religion and its relation to culture and the
nation-state. These themes already formed an integral part of his
theory of the historical world, but became all the more pressing in a
time of world war. The concern with death was perhaps as much a
political as a personal matter for Nishida, whose health in 1945 was quickly
failing. In one respect, he distanced himself from his milieu, where
everyday life was dominated by an authoritarian state. In his last completed essay, he focuses on
the individual in relation to an absolute that in no way is subject to
an absolutist state. His notion of the essentiality of religion is
remarkably individualistic, removed from all social contingencies. He
locates the core of religion in the heart of the individual: religious
awareness arises in one's knowing one's own death.




On the other hand, Nishida recognizes that religion is a social and
cultural phenomenon, and that the contemporary individual is a subject
of a state. He seems however to reverse any implied priority of
culture over religion and state over individual: it is because culture
is religious in its core that we find religion in every culture; and
obedience to the nation must be based on true religious awareness. To
be sure, writing under a totalitarian government in 1945, Nishida
couches his statements carefully in language that would deter his
imprisonment on grounds of lese majeste. He also says,
for example, that insofar as the individual self is historically
formed it must be understood as a nationally identified self; and
further that it is selfish merely to seek one's own peace of mind. In
the end, Nishida remains ambiguous about the extent to which
individuals are, or should be, formed by the will of the state, and
whether religion can or should criticize the state or society.




To say that culture is essentially religious means that it, too, is an
"affirmation of the self-negating absolute" (NKZ XI,
458). Religion and culture are each framed in the singular here, as
something essential to all religions and cultures in the plural. At
this level culture and religion function almost as regulative
ideas. They are not the result but the telos of the one world forming
its self-identity. Nishida's formulations recapitulate much of his
theory of the historical world. As the various ethnic peoples in the
world become aware of themselves as constituents of a global world,
that is, as they become "world-historical" nations, they
mirror the formation of the historical world. As self-aware and globally historical, the world will be mirrored
variously in each nation.




If we hear Hegelian echoes in these formulations, we should also
note Nishida's difference from Hegel: the formation of the
"world-historical" world does not imply a hierarchy of
cultures evolving as forms of increasing rationality; and it is
exemplified in the everyday, as Nishida says, not the
exceptional. Nishida's global world seems more open to a genuine
pluralism of cultures, world religions and national identities. Each
can retain its uniqueness but to do so each must become self-aware by
becoming aware of the plurality, by relativizing or negating itself.
This self-negation creates the space in which true intercultural
encounter can take place. Nishida implies that the proper relation
between cultures is parallel to that between "I and Thou."
In simpler language: "A true world culture will be formed only
by various cultures preserving their own respective viewpoints, but
simultaneously developing themselves through global mediation"
(NKZ VII, pp. 452-3).




Nevertheless a special place is accorded the nation of Japan. The
Japanese nation is in a position to foster not only an awareness of
the East but also a global awareness on the part of every nation. For
Japan is the nation in Asia that has best retained Asian traditions
while adapting Western technology and values. In the new world order
Japan can stand for Asia, and stand against the domination of the
West. Nishida's language, perhaps deliberately ambiguous to avoid his
incarceration, ostensibly wavers as to whether this special mission
describes Japan's calling, what it can be for the world, or refers to
its current practice in its war-time struggle with other nations. A
charitable reading of Nishida's statements on the special place of
Japan interprets them as advocating that his country overcome its
outdated vision of itself as a colonizing nation, and embrace a global
conception of itself as a nation interacting with other nations in a
world of mutually defining
 equals.[4] 
 A more critical reading interprets these statements as falsely
absolutizing the particular nation of Japan, suggesting that
Japan embraces other nations of the East which is abstractly
opposed to the West. Similar challenges face us in the
twenty-first century not only in a world of continuing imperialism and contesting nations with different religious and cultural traditions, but also in single nations
of multicultural composition.


## 7. Methods in Nishida's Thought




Nishida composed essays on interrelated themes rather than sequential
and tightly edited books. Major essays were subsequently collected and
published as books, but often do not form chapters of a single
coherent work. Instead of investigating a problem in a series of
straightforward linear arguments, he tended to write in spirals that
kept circling back on previous formulations and reworking them in new
contexts. His style is akin to the manner in which one repeatedly
practices a traditional Japanese art like calligraphy, poetry or even
Zen mediation: working at a particular activity or expression, getting
better and better at it without erasing one's previous attempts. It is
possible, however, to discern four methods that pervade his philosophy
and make it easier for the reader to follow the train of his
thought.




First is Nishida's way of taking the more inclusive as the more
concrete, and the more restricted as the more abstract. This makes
sense insofar as abstraction involves removal of parts, but Nishida
also uses this method to reverse the usual order of things in
explanatory schemas or hierarchies. As mentioned earlier, the historical world lived by
human beings, for example, is more concrete than the material world
studied by physics since the historical, human world comprehends (in
both senses of the word) the merely physical and can never be reduced
to it. Between these two worlds is the biological realm of life
forms, less concrete than the human world but more concrete than the
physical world.




Second is Nishida's recourse to the explanatory schema of wholes that
reflect themselves in their parts. Here Nishida adapts the idea of
self-representative systems presented in Josiah Royce and in Richard
Dedekind's idea of an infinite system reflected in its parts. For
Nishida, if there are no parts outside a whole, its evident
differentiation must be explained. After his first major book, *An
Inquiry into the Good*, Nishida came to explain this
differentiating development not in terms of a temporal process but as
the self-reflective or self-mirroring structure of a whole. Knowledge,
for example, is not a matter of two disparate realities, a knowing
mind and a known object, conforming to one another, but a single
concrete reality that "reflects itself in itself" on
differing levels that give rise to the more abstract notions of
knowing subject and known objects. And after Nishida described
self-awareness (*jikaku*) as the activity of self reflecting
itself within itself, he came to speak of other structural wholes,
including place or topos and even the world itself, as
"self-aware" (*jikaku-teki*) insofar as they
reflected themselves within themselves.




Third is
Nishida's way of elaborating this "within" in terms of
enfolding or enwrapping, as a whole enfolds or contains parts that
partially reflect it , or as the universal of color encompasses that of
red, for example. Nishida also referred to more limited realms as
particularizations or "self-determinations" of more
inclusive realms, but he often used the metaphor of wrapping to
describe the manner of determination. The ultimate universal or
enfolding whole has no determinate features; it is
"nothingness" (*mu*).




The fourth method is Nishida's way of treating oppositions and
distinctions, emphasizing alternatively their undifferentiated ground
or their irreducible relation. He often sought to return (not reduce) oppositions
and distinctions to the non-differentiated condition that underlies
them, ultimately to the nothingness that gives rise to (or determines
itself as) various distinctions. Although terms translating as
"ground" or "foundation" are found throughout
his works, this emphasis undermines any recourse to a founding
principle or entity wholly transcendent to, and thus ultimately
different from, the world or reality. "Absolute
nothingness" may be understood as the lack of any positively
definable transcendent ground. When for example Nishida writes
"absolute nothingness transcends all that is, but at the same
time all that is arises through it" (NKZ IX, 6), we may
interpret him as pointing to an undifferentiated source beyond the
distinctions it gives rise to, a source that is necessarily entailed
by their being brought together precisely as distinct from one
another.




The emphasis on relation similarly undermines any attempt to reduce
opposed or distinguished terms to some element common to both. In mid
career Nishida used the language of dialectics to describe relations,
while insisting that the opposed terms were not sublated into a higher
unity. Later he used expressions like "the self-identity of
absolute contradictories" to describe the way in which opposed
terms are held together, the many and the one for example. His notion
of an "inverse correlation" also reflects this method.
Nishida's emphasis on relation modifies his notion of self-reflective
structures to make it clear that they maintain difference within a
whole and are not simply self-replicating or recursive. This is
noticeable in his last essay, for example, when he describes
individual selves as focal points where world reflects itself in
itself (NKZ XI, 378). His rejection of a positive foundation or
substratum, and his insistence on irreducible but inseparable terms in
relation, explain why the holistic tendency evident in his methodology
does not devolve into a simple monism, and why many commentators refer
to his philosophy as non-dualist instead.


## 8. The Unity and Development of Nishida's Philosophy


### 8.1 The Attempt to Unify the Varying Themes




A grasp of both the unity and the development of Nishida's thought is
also crucial to understanding it. As should be obvious, Nishida's
thought underwent extensive changes over the course of four
decades. Less evident is that the varying themes are united by a
deepening of the same basic insights. The Preface to the third volume
of his *Philosophical Essays* published in 1939 gives us his
own view of the unity of his progression: "It is said that that
I repeatedly discuss the same problems, and [indeed] from *An
Inquiry into the Good* on, my objective has been to see things and
think things from the most direct and fundamental standpoint--to
grasp all things from the standpoint of whence they come and whither
they go" (NKZ IX, 3). A Preface written three years earlier to
the reprint of *An Inquiry into the Good* identifies some of
the crucial connections in the changing thematic: the standpoint of
pure experience articulated in that maiden work developed into that of
absolute will, and later into the notion of place or topos,
concretized further as a dialectical universal, which in turn gets
expressed as action-intuition. "That which I called...the
world of pure experience I have now come to think of as the world of
historical reality. The world of enactive intuition--the world of
poiesis--is none other than the world of pure experience"
(Nishida 1990, xxxiii).




Since Nishida composed his essays in a language and for a culture that
had known philosophy as a distinct discipline for little more than
half a century, his view of that discipline is equally crucial for
understanding the unity and progression of his thought. Although his
view likewise evolved over the course of his life, it reveals one
abiding feature: philosophy should be not only the articulation but
also the awareness of the most fundamental unities of experience,
knowledge, action, and ultimately self and world.




Relatively early in
his career, when he was still under the sway of Fichte, the
Neo-Kantians, and Bergson, he defined philosophy as science
[*gakumon*], i.e. unified conceptual knowledge, more
specifically the first and universal science that "reflects on
the basic concepts of the particular sciences in general and
constructs of them one system of knowledge." Yet "its
object of study is not simply the fundamental concepts of
reality. Basic normative notions such as truth, goodness and beauty
must of course enter into philosophical study. Philosophy not only
clarifies basic notions of reality, but must also elucidate the ideals
of human life, the 'ought' itself. Philosophy is not
simply a worldview; it is a view of human life." Within his
extended definition Nishida, commenting on Bergson, clarifies the role
of intuition so crucial to his own thought: "'intuition' as
such cannot be called philosophy. Even if its contents can derive from
intuition, philosophy has its raison d'etre when intuition takes
the form of conceptual knowledge." (NKZ 13, 254).




Then, later in his career, Nishida paradoxically formed concepts of the
limits of such knowledge and formulated his philosophy of absolute
nothingness that is ultimately mirrored in self-awareness. Such
awareness became a task for philosophy or, more specifically, for the
philosopher. Throughout his life Nishida's own practice of philosophy
attempted to realize an abiding insight expressed in the various
terms he recounts in the Preface cited above. In that sense his
thought is systematic, while not forming a closed system. It is a
consistent attempt to re-conceptualize philosophy, to reframe the
terms in which many philosophers think about self and world. This is, in part, 
what is meant by saying that Nishida would have us think from the
perspective of the world rather than the "I."


### 8.2 Stages in Nishida's Thought




Many readers of Nishida have attempted to delineate stages in the
development of his philosophy (Elberfeld 1999, 71ff.); others have
rejected a division into discrete stages (Heisig 2001,
104). As a heuristic approach to a summary of his thought, we may broadly
distinguish three stages. The first is defined by an overwhelming
conviction that concrete reality is at base unitary and can be
articulated from the standpoint of consciousness. We have seen that
Nishida successively names its most basic form "pure
experience," "self-awareness," and "absolute
free will." Each of these exemplifies the fundamental reality
from which all else becomes manifest through a process of
differentiation. In *An Inquiry Into the Good* (1911), pure
experience describes the primal undifferentiated form that
subsequently dirempts into differentiated forms: experiencing subject
and experienced objects, intellectual intuition and reflective
thought, objectified nature and objectifying spirit--all on their
way to a higher unity. *Intuition and Reflection in
Self-Awareness* (1917) shifts that idealistic description to
epistemological questions. It explicates self-awareness as the form in
which reflection and immediate experience or intuition are unified, that is,
the form that reflects itself within itself and gives rise not only to
differentiating judgments but to differently experienced systems such
as spirit and matter and to "worlds" such as art and
religion. Eventually Nishida proposes that the most basic form of
self-awareness is not a kind of knowing at all, but a willing or
"absolute free will" evident in valuing and creating. He
develops this proposal in *Problems of Consciousness* (1920)
and *Art and Morality* (1923). Nishida later said his first attempts, formulated from the standpoint of consciousness,
invited the charges of psychologism (Nishida 1990, xxxi), and
mysticism (Nishida 1987, xxiii), and so he abandoned the language of pure
experience and absolute will. It is clear, however, that his initial
convictions persisted a good deal longer: the most concrete form of
reality is undifferentiated, and consciousness as the manifestation of
reality is inseparable from it.




The second stage, broadly speaking, is defined by the standpoint of
place or topos (*basho*). This involves the attempts to
articulate levels of differentiation and place them in more and more
inclusive circles (to use one of Nishida's metaphors) until one
reaches the most concrete and comprehensive circle, a circle without
circumference whose center is everywhere. Nishida calls each such
circle a place or topos, each alloowing things to be and to be seen as
what they are. The final topos places self-awareness in the world of
action and expression which contextualizes it, and ultimately in
absolute nothingness. Nishida refers to the ultimate topos, alluding to
Buddhist doctrine, as "the form of the formless," clearly
replacing earlier attempts to describe the basic form of concrete
reality in positive and subjectivistic terms such as pure experience and absolute free will, This stage is evident in essays
in *From That Which Acts to That Which Sees* (1927) and *The
Self-aware System of Universals* (1930), and extends to much of
*The Self-aware Determination of Nothingness* (1932). A
Hegelian language of dialectics gradually became more and more
prominent in his formulations, as he turned his attention to the place
of individuals interacting in the world. He wrote of individuals as
the "self-determinations" of the universal of
self-awareness; and of absolute nothingness as a dialectical
universal.




The third stage sharpens the focus on the dialectical world as a place
of mediation between interacting individuals as historically embodied
selves. Nishida now conceptualizes the world as the historical
manifestation of absolute nothingness. This stage represents what is
for Nishida the most comprehensive and concrete standpoint, that of
the historical world. The world unfolds "from the created to the
creating," not in a straightforward linear progression but out
of an "absolute present" that in each moment holds
together past determinations and decisions for the future. The
historical world as such is a "self-identity of
contradictories." The self realizes itself not in knowing itself
as distinct from other selves or things but through forms of
self-negation. One form calls for the self to recognize the absolute
other in its own core to relate truly to the Thou or other relative
selves. Another form calls for one to give oneself over to things or
"become one with" the things it would know--through
"enactive intuition," seeing them by interacting with them
and interacting by allowing them to transform oneself. In this
stage relations come to the fore: the relations between I and Thou,
the one and the many, the expressive self and its expressions, the
Japanese nation and other nations. Each of these relations constitutes
a self-identity of contradictories and resists a monistic
interpretation. This stage, understood heuristically, stretches from
the final essays in *The Self-aware Determination of
Nothingness* through *The World of Action* and *The
Dialectical World* (collected as *The* *Fundamental
Problems of Philosophy,* 1934), seven volumes of *Philosophical
Essays* (1935-45) and several political writings, on to Nishida's last
essay, "The Logic of Place and the Religious
Worldview"(1945). The final essay returns to the theme of
religious awareness and makes more explicit the Buddhist references,
as well as the Christian influence, latent in much of Nishida's
philosophy. The focus on death and finitude, while consistent with the
idea of self-negation, suggests a shift of standpoint, but Nishida's
final reflections are too brief to be called a new stage in his
philosophy.


## 9. The Place of Asian Philosophies in Nishida's Thought




Because Nishida throughout his career cited Western philosophers far
more often than Asian sources, it is easy to read his thought as an
ongoing engagement with problems that have their origin in Western
traditions. In addressing the concerns of Western thinkers he
followed the path taken by nearly all Japanese professors of
philosophy since the inception of the academic discipline in the
1880s. Yet his appropriation of ideas from Asian philosophies is also
evident to the discerning reader, if more by way of allusion and
affinity than by direct citation. It was not always necessary for him
to name his Asian sources as explicitly, for he could appeal to the
general education of Japanese readers who would be familiar with the
classics of Asia and with the convention of appropriating ideas
without directly referring to them. While commentators have long
pointed out the debt of Nishida to Zen Buddhist practice and thought,
they have only recently begun to identify other Asian sources of his
philosophy by researching his vast library in Asian languages
(Dalissier 2009b). In retrospect, it is clear that all along Nishida
was infusing Western philosophy with Asian thought far more
pervasively than the few references to Buddhism above might indicate.




In general, we can discern two ways that Nishida made use of Asian
sources: anecdotally and systematically. Nishida's writings are strewn
with unacknowledged quotations or paraphrases of verses in classical
Chinese sources, as well as allusions that may or may not identify
their source in Indian, Chinese, or Japanese literature. This sort of
allusion is anecdotal. Unobtrusively placed in the current of a
discussion on a particular issue, the anecdotal allusions serve to
clarify an idea, to provide a concrete example, or to insert a playful
turn of phrase into otherwise ponderous prose. One example is the
passage in the early work, *Intuition and Reflection in
Self-Consciousness*, where Nishida argues that the will of the
individual can freely express absolute will as the creative activity
of the universe when the individual will operates spontaneously,
without reflection or objectification. Nishida inserts a saying from
the Zen Buddhist *Record of Linji* in the middle of a sentence
to express this undivided spontaneity: "To think of the infinite
behind the finite, or of noumenon behind actuality, is to enter the
realm of objectified knowledge. In the immediate, lived experience of
willing, however, the finite is immediately infinite, actuality is
immediately noumenon, *one walks when needing to walk and sits when
needing to sit*, and there is no interval for conceptual
analysis" (NKZ II, 299; see Nishida 1987b, 147). Nishida also
incorporates Confucian phrases, often without identifying them as
such. In his first book, *An Inquiry Into the Good*, for
example, arguing that logical reasons are often not sufficient to
motivate good conduct, he alludes to a maxim of Confucius: "The
saying *Do not do unto others what you would not have others do
unto you*, is nearly meaningless without the motivation of
sympathy" (Nishida 1990, 113; NKZ I, 132).




Nishida makes use of Asian philosophies systematically both in key
notions such as *nothingness* and in the methods that
characterize his thinking. The notion of absolute nothingness recalls
Indian ideas as well as Chinese Daoist and Buddhist
expressions. Indeed, Nishida once suggested that we can distinguish
traditional Eastern and Western philosophies by the East's
prioritizing of nothingness and the West's reliance on being (NKZ VII,
429-30; Nishida 1970b, 237). He explicitly mentions the profound idea
of nothingness developed in Indian religion (Nishida 1970b, 239), and
we can find a precedent to his notion of absolute nothingness as beyond
being and nonbeing in the Hymn of Creation in book ten of the *Rg
Veda*: "nonbeing existed not, nor being"
(Radhakrishnan 1957, 23). Nishida also had in mind the Chinese Daoist
classics attributed to Laozi and Zhuangzi, where "the Way (or
Dao) was clearly said to be 'nonbeing'" (Nishida
1970b, 242). The Japanese term Nishida uses is *mu*
(*wu* in Chinese), a sinogram that in Chinese literature
usually functions simply as a negation of being or having and in this
respect fails to convey Nishida's full sense of nothingness that does
not reduce to a lack of being. Nevertheless, philosophical Daoist
literature provided a precedent that Nishida could draw upon. In
chapter 40 of Laozi's *Daodejing* we find the statement,
"The myriad things are born from being. Being is born from
nonbeing." Reminiscent of Nishida's absolute nothingness as a
creative source, the *Daodejing* refers to the generative power
of nonbeing and to the non-nameable Dao or Way that gives rise to the
myriad things. One source suggestive of Nishida's sense of absolute
nothingness as the most inclusive and undifferentiated place is the text
known by its legendary author's name, the *Zhuangzi*. It refers to
a Dao that has never known boundaries but preserves the possibility of
distinctions. Taken up by Chinese Buddhism, *wu* not only
referred to non-existence but also served as a variant of the Mahayana
Buddhist notion of emptiness (*sunyata*), a
negation of the self-subsistence of individual beings and an
affirmation of their interdependence. Nishida drew upon such Buddhist
and Daoist precedents in formulating his critique of substantialist
metaphysics and his notion of absolute nothingness as an
all-encompassing, ultimate frame of reference that is creative yet not
transcendent to the world.




Systematic use of Asian philosophies is also apparent in Nishida's
methods. Where his arguments seek higher forms of inclusion rather
than rejection of opposing views, he harks back to Chinese Buddhist
schemes of explanation that absorb and contextualize rival doctrines
rather than exclude them. Nishida's manner of contextualizing, in his
theory of place or topos, draws from Chinese cosmological methods in
which "to explain and infer is to locate within the
pattern" (Graham 1989, 320; cited in Dalissier 2009b,
226). Yogacara Buddhist theories of consciousness as the primary
reality and explanatory principle most likely influenced Nishida's
tendency in his early works to explain all reality in terms of
consciousness. Later, his way of unifying opposites and defining
things in terms of self-negation adapts a
Buddhist *prajnaparamita* logic of negation,
in which individuated terms entail their negation and are understood
as co-relational rather than exclusive.




But the reader of Nishida can find resonances with certain Asian philosophical ideas even when Nishida did not make use of them. Even where there is no evidence of direct influence, the affinity of
some key notions and arguments with classical Indian Buddhist ideas is
striking. It is possible, for example, to read Nishida's development of
the three topoi or places of being, relative nothingness, and absolute
nothingness, as a deepening of awareness that resembles the
progression of awareness, described in many Buddhist schemes, where one first sees through the realm of desire, then through the
realm of forms, and finally awakens to the formless realm beyond discrimination (Stevens
2009, 71). Also suggestive of the convictions underlying Nishida's
philosophy are arguments of the Madhyamaka school of
Nagarjuna pressing for the relationality of all existents,
and exhortations to appreciate the "groundlessless of
things" in the *Vimalakirti-nirdesa Sutra*
(Priest 2009, 472). We might also recognize distant affinities--and related significant differences--between Nishida's notion of reality (the world) itself becoming self-aware and pre-Buddhist Indian Vedanta, or its later development, non-dual Advaita Vedanta. Where some Vedantic texts equate reality with Brahman and assert that "awareness is Brahman" *(prajnanambrahma*, Aitareya Upanishad 3.3), "I am Brahman" (*ahambrahmasmi*, Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.4.10), or "You are That" (*tat tvam asi*, Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7), meaning your *true* self is identical with ultimate reality, Nishida places a caesura--his "inverse correlation"--in the equation of relative human self and the Absolute. Yet when Nishida urges us to "see the self from the standpoint of the world," he suggests a kind of phenomenological bracketing or epoche of the "I"--of the *Ichdoxa*--that resonates with the intentions of these Vedantic expressions. That implied suggestion and its challenge to both Vedantic thought and Husserlian phenomenology, however, remain to be explored in the growing literature on Nishida's philosophy. 



## 10. Critiques of Nishida's Philosophy


 Criticisms of Nishida's thought were a significant part of its
development during his lifetime, and continue to this day to inform
debates about its meaning and relevance. Insofar as Nishida aimed at a
comprehensive "system of self-awareness" (Nishida 1987b,
70)--ultimately the system of absolute nothingness
determining itself as the historical world--his philosophy
seems to preclude the possibility of radical internal critique. Nishida
did not envision his system as closed to development or to an open
future. But several key notions that he never abandoned leave scant
room for acknowledging gaps: the notions of a
universal that reflects itself clearly if not completely in its
particulars, of a world that mirrors itself in its individuals, of
more inclusive topoi that fully envelop less inclusive topoi, or of an
absolute that is immanent in all relative selves. How does such a
system account for fallibility, unpredictability, distortion or
violence? And where does the author Nishida stand in relation to the
system that he describes. Is the author too merely a reflection of the
system?



In contrast to interpreting Nishida's thought as presenting a system
that would preempt problems, one can also read it as a series of
attempts to clarify for himself the activity of living a philosophical
life. From this perspective, critique appears as a constant feature of
Nishida's personal development. During his lifetime Nishida took his
critics seriously and sometimes changed course because of their
criticisms. Takahashi Satomi, while still a graduate student at the
University of Tokyo, criticized Nishida's notion of pure experience
and spurred him to clarify it in an article published soon after
*An Inquiry Into the Good*. His colleague at Kyoto University,
Soda Kiichiro, criticized the lack of clarity in his initial
formulation of *basho* (place) in 1926 and prompted him to
remove Neo-Kantian comparisons. More significantly, in the early 1930s
his younger colleague Tanabe Hajime and his former student and Marxist
philosopher Tosaka Jun criticized Nishida's focus on consciousness and lack
of attention to history and social being; Nishida subsequently
developed his notions of the historical world and the historical
body. In the last years of his life, he seemed to anticipate his death
and recognize human finitude more strongly as an inevitable disruption
of any comprehensive systematic account. Two years before his death in
1945, he wrote, "Our life and our existence are not our
own. They are the determinations of absolute nothingness.... Philosophy
begins with the self set on living truly. It is a way for the self to
become self-aware and to live" (NKZ 10, 401,
 472).[5] 
 Nishida's philosophy continues to live in the profusion of critical
engagements indicated in the list of secondary literature below. 


## 11. Nishida's Influence




Nishida is often called the father of the Kyoto School of philosophy
because of his influence on a group of thinkers who were his students
or younger colleagues. Best known outside Japan are his colleague and
critic, Tanabe Hajime, frequently considered the School's co-founder,
and his student Nishitani Keiji. As a "school" the group
comprises a rather fuzzy set that includes Marxist-leaning former
students such as Miki Kiyoshi and Tosaka Jun, more nationalistic
students like Koyama Iwao and Kosaka Masaaki, and lesser
known but close disciples like Mutai Risaku and Shimomura
Torataro. Other colleagues, students and friends on the fringes of the
School proper nevertheless show the impact of Nishida's ideas: the Zen
Buddhist scholar-teachers D. T. Suzuki and Hisamatsu Shin'ichi, the
ethical theorist Watsuji Tetsuro, and Kuki Shuzo, the
interpreter of Japanese aesthetics and culture. A third generation of
the School includes Tanabe's student Takeuchi Yoshinori, Nishitani's
student Ueda Shizuteru and Hisamatsu's student Abe Masao, who have
been especially effective in introducing Nishida's philosophy in
Europe and North America and in applying Nishida's thought to
inter-religious Buddhist-Christian dialogue.




Nishida's investigations inspired current
interpretations of Mahayana Buddhism, just as his thought was influenced
by Buddhist ideas. For many people, his explication of pure
experience and self-awareness re-interprets Zen awakening; his
intertwining of self and world develops the Buddhist teaching of
co-dependent origination; and his philosophy of nothingness
articulates the notion of emptiness and the experience of *mu*
(nothing). His philosophy has also presented to his Buddhist and
Christian readers serious challenges, such as a notion of a non-dual
relation between God and man, and an emphasis, unusual in Buddhism, on
the embodied self in the historical world. 


 Nishida's logic of place has been a resource for theoreticians
working in various scientific fields, for example Imanishi Kinji in
biology and ecology, Shimizu Hiroshi in complexity theory and
information science, Nonaka Ikujiro in management theory, and Ko Hojo
in the philosophy of chemistry. The architect Ando Tadao, and artists
like the calligrapher Morita Shiryu have also drawn from
Nishida's philosophy, as has the psychotherapist Kimura Bin.
Ultimately, Nishida himself is best considered an independent thinker,
as the growing literature in Japanese and Western languages
attests.