Nishida Kitarō

1870-1945 · Japanese · Metaphysics, Philosophy of Religion, Comparative East-West Philosophy, Philosophical Psychology, Philosophy of Culture

It is not that I have experience because I exist; I exist because I have experience.

Nishida Kitarō came of age as Japan forced a reckoning between its inherited traditions and Western intellectual modernity. A Rinzai Zen practitioner and reader of Kant, Hegel, and James, he built the first major original philosophy in the Western mode to emerge from Japan, founding what became known as the Kyoto School.

Topics Nishida Kitarō addresses

• pure experience (junsui keiken)
• absolute nothingness (zettai mu)
• basho (logic of place)
• absolutely contradictory self-identity
• self-awareness (jikaku)
• action-intuition (kōiteki chokkan)
• continuity of discontinuity
• universal of universals
• self-determination of nothingness
• subject-predicate logic
• historical world
• historical body (rekishiteki shintai)
• I and Thou encounter
• inverse correspondence
• soku (the copulative is)
• from the acting to the seeing
• noesis and noema in basho
• religious worldview (shūkyōteki sekaikan)
• kenōsis and divine self-emptying
• the eternal now
• nothingness as ground of being
• the form of the formless
• being-qua-nothingness
• transdescendence

Converse with Nishida Kitarō on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Nishida Kitarō's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.