Nishida kitaro

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ISBN 1557787611

  • Heisig, James. Nishida’s absolute nothingness is the place beyond discursive determination.

    nishida kitaro

    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).

    This field is similar to Kant’s Bewußtsein überhaupt, 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.

    There is a necessary hierarchy of concreteness among universals that Nishida expresses as the order of topoi or places (basho). This sort of allusion is anecdotal. 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.

    In this way I began to lay a logical base for my ideas. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199841172.001.0001

  • 1926–1945 [1999]. doi:10.2307/1397658
  • –––, 1973, “Nishida Kitaro: Nothingness as the Negative Space of Experiential Immediacy”, International Philosophical Quarterly, 13(4): 463–483.

    doi:10.1080/09552367.2022.2044453

  • Bouso García, Raquel and James W. Heisig (eds), 2009, Confluences and Cross-Currents (Frontiers of Japanese Philosophy 6), Nagoya: Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture.
  • Brink, Dean Anthony, 2021, Philosophy of Science and The Kyoto School. 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.

    4.2.2 One and Many

    Eventually Nishida saw that the “I-You” relation does not exhaust the discontinuous continuity of our being.

    The self-reflection known as self-consciousness or self-awareness (jikaku) provides an answer. 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.

    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. Similar to phenomenologists, Nishida wanted to account for the consciousness that posits such substances and underlies the subject of a judgment. (Complete Works of Nishida Kitarō, in nineteen volumes, cited as NKZ followed by volume and page number.)

  • –––, New Edition 2002–09, twenty four volumes, edited by A.

    Takeda, K. Riesenhueber, K. Kosaka & M. Fujita, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.

    • Representative Translations

    • 1911a [1960, reprint edition 1988]. Where some Vedantic texts equate reality with Brahman and assert that “awareness is Brahman” (prajñānaṁbrahma, Aitareya Upanishad 3.3), “I am Brahman” (ahaṁbrahmāsmi, 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.

      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. doi:10.18874/jjrs.31.1.2004.73–103

    • Kozyra, Agnieszka, 2018, “Nishida Kitarōs Philosophy of Absolute Nothingness (Zettaimu no Tetsugaku) and Modern Theoretical Physics”, Philosophy East and West, 68(2): 423–446.

      doi:10.1080/09552369108575344

    • Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli and Charles A. Moore (eds), 1957, A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
    • Raud, Rein, 2004, “‘Place’ and ‘Being-Time’: Spatiotemporal Concepts in the Thought of Nishida Kitarō and Dōgen Kigen”, Philosophy East and West, 54(1): 29–51.

      After much hesitation, he decided to remarry in 1931.

      Maturity

      Even after developing the concept of “pure experience,” Nishida never satisfied with this concept and continued his research. One form calls for the self to recognize the absolute other in its own core in order to relate truly to the Thou or other relative selves.