Nishida Kitarō

First published Fri Feb 25, 2005; substantive revision Wed Feb 21, 2024
Nishida Kitarō was the most significant and influential Japanese philosopher of the
twentieth-century. His work is pathbreaking in several respects: it established in Japan
the creative discipline of philosophy as practiced in Europe and the Americas; it
enriched that discipline by infusing Anglo-European philosophy with Asian sources of
thought; it provided a new basis for philosophical treatments of East Asian Buddhist
thought; and it produced novel theories of self and world with rich implications for
contemporary philosophizing and relevance for ecology and the philosophy and
history of physics. Nishida’s work is also frustrating for its repetitive and often
obscure style, exceedingly abstract formulations, and detailed but occasionally dead-
end investigations. Nishida once said of his work, “I have always been a miner of ore;
I have never managed to refine it” (Nishida 1958: Preface). A concise presentation of
his achievements therefore will require extensive selection, interpretation and
clarification.
This article presents Nishida’s work in a roughly chronological order. We may
understand his philosophical project overall as an attempt to restore to experience and
consciousness the rigor, necessity and universality accorded to logic. This project
developed in a direction quite opposite to that of psychologism, which would reduce
logic to the contingencies of the individual mind or brain. It also differed from efforts
to establish pure logic as a self-explanatory realm, in that Nishida insisted on the
starting point of experience, a priority he shared with Husserl’s phenomenology and
William James’ radical empiricism. We might characterize his philosophy in general
as a phenomenological metaphysics for its universalizing of first-person experience. It
can also be considered an ontology of logical forms for its investigations of their
experiential basis, with one qualification: although Nishida proposed a unitary source
of such forms, that source is neither exclusionary nor positive; in other words the
source itself cannot be described monistically as a single, more basic form or thing.
Nishida eventually called this source “mu” (nothingness), a notion he found
particularly prominent in Asian traditions. His signature “logic of place” expressed
absolute nothingness as a way to contextualize not only the world and everything in it
but also the terms or logical forms in which we conceptualize it. His interests led him
to develop a philosophy of culture, and his status as Japan’s premier philosopher led
government officials to call upon him for justification of Japanese expansionism in the
late 1930s and early 40s. His last essays reinterpretted the meaning of self-awareness
and recapitulated his non-dualistic account of world and self as mutually reflective
and creative.

 1. Biography
 2. Theory of Experience and Consciousness
o 2.1 Pure Experience
o 2.2 Self-Awareness
  3. Theory of Universals and the Logic of Place
o 3.1 Absolute Nothingness
o 3.2 Analogies to the Logic of Place
 4. Theory of the Historical World
o 4.1 Enactive Intuition
o 4.2 Theory of Relations: Self and Other, One and Many
 5. Nishida’s Theology: the Finite Self meets the Absolute
 6. Political Theory: Religion, Culture, and Nations
 7. Methods in Nishida’s Thought
 8. The Unity and Development of Nishida’s Philosophy
o 8.1 The Attempt to Unify the Varying Themes
o 8.2 Stages in Nishida’s Thought
 9. The Place of Asian Philosophies in Nishida’s Thought
 10. Critiques of Nishida’s Philosophy
 11. Nishida’s Influence, and Ongoing Research
 Bibliography
o Nishida’s works
o Secondary Literature
 Academic Tools
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

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
Westernization 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 Tetsurō, and Kuki Shuzō, 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
(quoted in 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 1911c: 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 1911c: 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 as 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 “voluntaristic”
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 or seems 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 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. 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 spacetime is a field inseparable from the physical objects within it.
Analogously, for Nishida, all perceived and conceptualized objects are “in” the “field
of consciousness.” Nishida first borrowed this term from William James,[4] but his
development of it as an active and creative placing (basho) came to influence theories
in quantum physics (see below). 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 Gödel’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, but 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. 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” (kōi-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 diverse selves. 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
4.2.1 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.
4.2.2 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 spacetime, 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
world’s realization or awareness 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 the 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 connotation of self-awakening that we can hear in 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-à-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, out of pure experience, behind the
articulations of spirit and nature.
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 taiō). 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 should 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 lèse
majesté. 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.[5] 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, 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 in 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 1911c: 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’être 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
“deternimed” or 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 The Problem 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 1911c: xxxi), and mysticism (Nishida 1917: 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
allowing 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 Self-Awareness: A System of
Universals (1930), and extends to much of Self-Awareness: The 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 in
order 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 Self-Awareness: The 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 East Asian classics 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 1917: 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 1911c: 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
1933–34: 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 1944: 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 (śūnyatā), 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, 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 prajñapāramitā 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—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 Mādhyamaka school of Nāgārjuna pressing
for the relationality of all existents, and exhortations to appreciate the “groundlessless
of things” in the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa Sūtra (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”
(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. Yet when Nishida urges us to “see the self from the standpoint of
the world,” he suggests a kind of phenomenological bracketing or epoché 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 remain to be closely examined 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”—ultimately
the system of absolute nothingness determining itself as the historical world (Nishida
1930–32)—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,
Sōda 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).[6] Nishida’s philosophy continues to live in the profusion of critical engagements
indicated in the following section and the bibliography below.

11. Nishida’s Influence, and Ongoing

Research
Nishida’s investigations inspired current interpretations of Mahayana Buddhism, just
as his thought was influenced by Buddhist ideas. 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 (nothingness). 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
humans, and an emphasis, unusual in Buddhism, on the embodied self in the historical
world. Nishida is often called the father of the Buddhist-inspired 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 Kōyama Iwao and Kōsaka Masaaki, and lesser known but close disciples
like Mutai Risaku and Shimomura Toratarō. 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 and
cultural theorist Watsuji Tetsurō, and Kuki Shūzō, the philosopher of contingency and
interpreter of Japanese aesthetics. A third generation of the School includes Tanabe’s
student Takeuchi Yoshinori, Nishitani’s student Ueda Shizuteru and Hisamatsu’s
student Abe Masao, who were especially effective in introducing Nishida’s
philosophy in Europe and North America and in applying Nishida’s thought to inter-
religious Buddhist-Christian dialogue.
All things considered, Nishida himself is probably best considered an independent
thinker, as the growing literature in Asian as well as Western languages attests. Many
recent studies focus on crosscurrents and critiques, e.g., Nishida and Chinese
Confucian philosophers (Walsh 2011; Rhydwen 2018; Rošker 2019; Lam 2023);
Nishida’s critique of Karl Marx and new Marxist critiques of Nishida (Haver 2017;
Lange 2017; Uhl 2017; Heleno 2018; Kaye 2022), and the mutually informative
relation between Nishida’s and Ernst Cassirer’s philosophies (Müller 2018; Lofts
2021a & 2021b; Endres et al., 2023). Nishida’s thinking has been a continual resource
for artists and scientists in several fields. His notion of nothingness inspired the
architect Andō Tadao (Baek 2008 & 2009), and his conception of mutual self-world
formation inspired the aesthetics of avant-garde calligrapher Morita Shiryū. His notion
of place influenced Shimizu Hiroshi in complexity theory and information science and
Nonaka Ikujiro in management theory. Ongoing research, much in unpublished papers
and encouraged by new translations, explores Nishida’s relevance for various
theoretical and practical sciences. Suggested implications for clinical psychology,
psychopathology, and neuroscience build upon the contributions of Kimura Bin, who
developed an intersubjective and empathetic approach to psychiatry in part from
Nishida’s (and Watsuji Tetsurō’s) notions of a relational self (Fukao 2023; Stevens
2023: 133–140). New research on environmental issues expands the work of the
ecologist Imanishi Kinji, who, influenced particularly by Nishida’s Inquiry into the
Good, introduced subjectivity and interdependence into the theory of evolution
(Asquith 2002: xxxiv–xxxvii; Izor 2020: 37–39).
Perhaps most promising for both Nishida studies and the philosophy and history of
science are ongoing investigations into crosscurrents between Nishida and relativity
and quantum theories in physics (Hashi 2007; Noe 2017; Kozyra 2018; Brink 2021;
Gaudenzi 2022; Ito 2022; Lupacchini 2021 & 2023). Einstein’s visit to Japan in 1922,
due in part to Nishida’s effort, was a catalyst for developments in Japanese field
theories, Imanishi’s among them. In the mid 1920s Nishida’s emergent theory of place
(basho), which places all existing things in an encompassing topos, ostensibly drew
from the concept of the gravitational field in relativity theory, which places matter
within the spacetime its mass deforms, and posits spacetime and matter (or energy) as
inseparable. In turn, Nishida’s notion of basho directly inspired the theory proposed
by Nobel laureate Yukawa Hideki to explain how elementary particles are not
localized point particles but rather spatially extended in “elementary domains,” the
smallest quanta of spacetime. The relation between discontinuous quantum
phenomena and the spacetime continuum both illustrates and is elucidated by
Nishida’s conception of a “continuity of discontinuities.” His seemingly paradoxical
“self-identity of contradictories” expresses and is exemplified by Yukawa’s
simultaneity of the existence and non-existence of elementary domains, and by Niels
Bohr’s complementarity principle of mutually exclusive appearances, particle and
wave, of quantum phenomena. Nishida continued to express relations of
complementarity between subject and object in ways that are relevant to empirical
scientific disciplines as well as philosophy (Tremblay 2018 & forthcoming).

Bibliography
 Nishida’s works
 Nishida Kitarō Zenshū, 4th edition 1987–89, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. (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]. A Study of the Good, V.H. Viglielmo (trans.),
Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press.
 1911b [1989]. Über das Gute: Eine Philosophie der reinen Erfahrung, Peter Pörtner
(trans.), Frankfurt am Mein and Leipzig.
 1911c [1990]. An Inquiry Into the Good, Masao Abe and Christopher Ives (trans.),
New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
 1911d [2017]. Uno studio sul bene, Enrico Fongaro (ed.), Milano: Mimesis.
 1911–12 [2019]. Pensiero ed esperienza vissuta corporea, Enrico Fongaro (ed.),
Milano: Mimesis.
 1911–1934 [2014]. Kitarō Nishida in der Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts, Rolf
Elberfeld and Yōko Arisaka (eds), Rolf Elberfeld (trans.), Freiburg/Munich: Verlag
Karl Alber; includes “Vorworte zu Studie über das Gute” (1911, 1922, 1936),
“Unbeachtet gebliebene Probleme des Bewusstseins” (1926), “Wissenschaftlichte
Methode” (1937), “Das Problem der japanishcen Kultur” (1938 lecture), “Östliche
und westliche Kulturformen in alter Zeit vom metaphysischen Standpunkt aus
gesehen” (1934).
 1911–1945a [1995]. Textos de la filosofía japonesa moderna, Michoacán: El Colegio
de Michoacán; Agustín Jacinto Zavala (trans.); includes:
 “La experiencia pura” (1911), “Problemas de la cultura japonesa”
(1938), “Discurso ente el Tennō: Sobre la filosofía de la historia” (1941),
 “Fundamentación filosófica de las matemáticas” (1944), and “Lógica del
topos y cosmovisión religiosa” (1945).
 1911–1945b [1999]. “Une étude sur le bein” (1911, Bernard Stevens, trans.),
“Logique prédicative” (1928, Jacynthe Tremblay, trans.), “Logique de lieu et vision
religieuse du monde” (1945, Yasuhiko Sugimura & Syvain Cardonnel, trans.), Revue
Philosophique de Louvain, 97 (1).
 1911–45c [2011]. “Pure Experience” (1911), “The Logic of Place” (1926), “The
Eternal in Art and Poetry” (1932), “A Religious View of the World” (1945), “My
Logic” (1945), in Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, James W. Heisig, Thomas P.
Kasulis, & John C. Maraldo, eds., University of Hawai‘i Press.
 1913–14 [2003]. “On the Role of Religion”, Gereon Kopf (trans.), The Eastern
Buddhist, 25(1–2): 229–39.
 1917 [1987]. Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness, Valdo H. Viglielmo,
Takeuchi Toshinori and Joseph S. O’Leary (trans.), Albany: State University of New
York Press.
 1919a [1997]. “Coincidentia Oppositorum and Love”, W. S. Yokoyama (trans.), The
Eastern Buddhist, 30(1): 7–12.
 1919b [2013]. “Coincidentia Oppositorum to Ai”, Eric Cunningham
(trans.), Comparative and Continental Philosophy, 5(2): 116–123.
 1920 [1979]. “Affective Feeling”, David Dilworth and Valdo Viglielmo (trans.),
in Japanese Phenomenology (Analecta Husserliana VIII), Y. Nitta and H. Tatematsu
(eds), Dordrecht, Boston & London: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 223–247.
Excerpts from The Problem of Consciousness.
 1921–23a [1973]. Art and Morality, David Dilworth and Valdo Viglielmo (trans.),
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
 1921–23b [2022]. Art et morale, Britta Boutry-Stadelmann (trans.), Nagoya:
Chisokudō Publications.
 1925–1938 [2012] . Ontology of Production: 3 Essays, William Haver (trans.), (Asia-
Pacific), Durham, NC: Duke University Press; includes “Expressive Activity” (1925),
“The Standpoint of Active Intuition” (1935) and “Human Being” (1938).
doi:10.1215/9780822394983.
 1926 [2012]. “The Unsolved Issue of Consciousness”, J.W.M. Krummel
(trans.), Philosophy East and West, 62(1): 44–59.
 1926 & 1936 [2012]. Place & Dialectic: Two Essays by Nishida Kitarō, John W.
Krummel and Shigenori Nagatomo (trans), Oxford: Oxford University Press; includes
“Basho” and “Logic and Life”. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199841172.001.0001
 1926–1945 [1999]. Logik des Ortes: Der Anfang der modernen Philosophie in Japan,
Rolf Elberfeld (trans.), Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft; includes
“Ort” (1926), “Ich und Du” (1932), “Ortlogik und religiöse Weltanschauung” (1945).
 1927–38 [1958]. Intelligibility and the Philosophy of Nothingness: Three
Philosophical Essays [IPN], Robert Shinzinger (trans.), Honolulu: East-West Center
Press. Translations of “The Intelligible World” (1927), “Goethe’s Metaphysical
Background” (1932), and “The Unity of Opposites” (1938).
 1928–29 [2017]. Autoéveil: Le système des universels, Jacynthe Tremblay (trans.),
Nagoya: Chisokudō Publications.
 1929 [2005]. “General Summary of The System of Self-Consciousness of the
Universal”, Robert J. Wargo (trans), in Wargo 2005, The Logic of Nothingness: An
Essay on Nishida Kitarō, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
 1930–32 [2019]. La Détermination du néant marquée par l’autoéveil, Jacynthe
Tremblay (trans.), Nagoya: Chisokudō Publications.
 1930 & 1933 [2017]. Michiko Yusa (trans.), Yusa 2017: 365–369 (appendix);
includes “The Beauty of Calligraphy (Sho no bi, May 1930)” and “On Japanese Short
Poetry, Tanka (Tanka ni tsuite, January 1933)”.
 1931–1944 [2003]. L’Éveil à soi Jacynthe Tremblay (trans.), Paris: CNRS Éditions;
includes various essays.
 1932a [1996]. L’io e il tu, R. Andolfato (trans.), Padova: Unipress.
 1932b [2017]. “Über die Philosophie des Lebens”, Ralf Müller (trans.), European
Journal of Japanese Philosophy, 2: 295–315.
 1933 [2020]. Problèmes fondamentaux de la philosophie: Le monde de
l’agir, Jacynthe Tremblay (trans.), Nagoya: Chisokudō Publications.
 1933–34 [1970]. Fundamental Problems of Philosophy, David Dilworth (trans.),
Tokyo: Sophia University.
 1934 [1990]. “Die Welt als dialektisches Allgemeines,” Matsudo Yukio (trans.),
in Die Welt als dialektisches Allgemeines: Eine Einführung in die Spätphilosophie von
Kitarō Nishida, Berlin: Vista.
 1944a [1970]. “Toward a Philosophy of Religion with the Concept of Preestablished
Harmony as a Guide”, David Dilworth (trans.), The Eastern Buddhist, 3(1): 19–46.
 1934–45 [1998]. “The Forms of Culture of the Classical Periods of East and West
Seen from a Metaphysical Perspective” (1934), “The Historical Body” (1937), “The
World as Identity of Absolute Contradiction” (1939), “Fundamental Principles of a
New World Order” (1943) and “On the National Polity” (1944), in Sourcebook for
Modern Japanese Philosophy: Selected Documents, David A. Dilworth and Valdo H.
Viglielmo, trans. & eds, Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press.
 1935 & 1941 [1990]. “Selbstidentität und Kontinuität der Welt” and “Das
künstlerische Schaffen als Gestaltungsakt der Geschichte,” E. Weinmayr (trans.),
in Die Philsophie der Kyōto Schule, Ôhashi Ryōsuke (ed.), Freiburg & London: Karl
Alber.
 1937a [2008]. “L’Intuition agissante”, Kuroda Akinobu (trans.), Laval théologique et
philosophique, 64(2): 277–93.
 1937 & 1944 [2001]. Il corpo e la conoscenza, Matteo Cestari (trans.), Venice:
Libreria Editrice Cafoscarina; includes “L’intuizione attiva (Kōiteki chokkan)” (1937)
and “Saggio sulla filosofia di Cartesio (Dekaruto tetsugaku ni tsuite)” (1944).
 1937b [2016]. “Der geschichtliche Leib”, Leon Krings (trans.), European Journal of
Japanese Philosophy, 1: 217–246.
 1938 [1991]. La Culture Japonaise en Question, Pierre Lavelle (trans.), Paris:
Publications Orientalistes de France.
 1938–44 [1985]. Estado y Filosofía, Agustín Jacinto Zavala (trans.), Michoacan,
Mexico: El Colegio de Michoacan; includes “La crisis de la cultura japonesa” (1938),
“El problema de la rasón de estado” (1941), and “Teoría dek kokutai” (1944).
 1944 [1970]. “Religious Consciousness and the Logic of the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra”,
David A. Dilworth (trans.), Monumenta Nipponica, 25(1/2): 203–216.
doi:10.2307/2383746
 1945a [1986]. “The Logic of Topos and the Religious Worldview”, Michiko Yusa
(trans.), The Eastern Buddhist 19(2): 1–29 & 20(1): 81–119.
 1945b [1987]. Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious Worldview, David
Dilworth (trans.), Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

Secondary Literature, A Selection in Western

Languages
 Abe, Masao, 1988, “Nishida’s Philosophy of ‘Place’”, International Philosophical
Quarterly, 28(4): 355–371. doi:10.5840/ipq198828437
 –––, 1992, “‘Inverse Correspondence’ in the Philosophy of Nishida: The Emergence
of the Notion”, International Philosophical Quarterly, 32(3): 325–344.
doi:10.5840/ipq199232319
 –––, 1995, “The Problem of ‘Inverse Correspondence’ in the Philosophy of Nishida:
Toward a Critical Understanding”, International Philosophical Quarterly, 35(4): 419–
436. doi:10.5840/ipq199535443
 Altman, Matthew C., 2020, “Nishida Among the Idealists”, Philosophy East and
West, 70(4): 860–880. doi:10.1353/pew.2020.0061
 Arisaka, Yoko, 1996, “The Nishida Enigma: ‘The Principle of the New World
Order’”, Monumenta Nipponica, 51(1): 81–106. doi:10.2307/2385317
 –––, 1997, “Beyond ‘East and West’ Nishida’s Universalism and Postcolonial
Critique”, The Review of Politics, 59(3): 541–560. doi:10.1017/S0034670500027716
 –––, 2001, “The Ontological Co-Emergence of ‘Self and Other’ in Japanese
Philosophy”, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8(5–7): 197–208.
 –––, 2021, “Transition to the ‘Eternal Present’: Nishida Kitarō’s Notion of Self and
Responsibility in Our Context Today”, in Krings, Greco, and Kuwayama 2021: 52–
67.
 Asquith, Pamela J., 2002, “Introduction”, to the English translation of A Japanese
View of Nature: The World of Living Things, by Kinji Imanishi, London/New York:
RoutledgeCurzon, xix–xliii.
 Axtell, G. S., 1991, “Comparative Dialectics: Nishida Kitarō’s Logic of Place and
Western Dialectical Thought”, Philosophy East and West, 41(2): 163–184.
doi:10.2307/1399768
 Baek, Jin, 2008, “From the ‘Topos of Nothingness’ to the ‘Space of Transparency’:
Kitarō Nishida’s Notion of Shintai and Its Influence on Art and Architecture (Part
1)”, Philosophy East and West, 58(1): 83–107. doi:10.1353/pew.2008.0005
 –––, 2009, Nothingness: Tadao Ando’s Christian Sacred Space, Abingdon/New York:
Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203642818
 Botz-Bornstein, Thorsten, 2003, “Nishida and Wittgenstein: From ‘Pure Experience’
to Lebensform or New Perspectives for a Philosophy of Intercultural
Communication”, Asian Philosophy, 13(1): 53–70. doi:10.1080/09552360301662
 –––, 2004, “The ‘I’ and the ‘Thou’: A Dialogue between Nishida Kitarō and Mikhail
Bakhtin”, Japan Review, 16: 259–284.
 –––, 2022, “Nishida Kitarō and Muhammad ‘Abduh on God and Reason: Towards a
Theology of Place”, Asian Philosophy, 32(2): 105–125.
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. An
Introduction to Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime and Tosaka Jun, London/New York:
Bloomsbury.
 Carter, Robert Edgar, 1989 [1998], The Nothingness beyond God: An Introduction to
the Philosophy of Nishida Kitarō, New York, NY: Paragon House. Second edition, St.
Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1998.
 Campo, Alessandra, 2023, “Henri Bergson’s Complete Mysticism and Kitaro
Nishida’s Energetism: A Case of Common Intuition”, Bergsoniana, 3.
doi:10.4000/bergsoniana.1316
 Cestari, Matteo, 1998, “The Knowing Body: Nishida’s Philosophy of Active Intuition
(Kōiteki chokkan)”, The Eastern Buddhist, 31(2): 179–208.
 –––, 2009, “From Seeing to Acting: Rethinking Nishida’s Practical Philosophy”,
in Bouso García and Heisig 2009: 273–296. Cestari 2009 available online (pdf)
 Cheung Ching-yuen, 2009, “The Potential and Limits of Nishida Kitarō’s
Philosophy”, in Lam and Cheung 2009: 165–175. [Cheung 2009 available online
(pdf)]
 Cheung Ching-yuen and Lam Wing-keung (eds), 2017, Globalizing Japanese
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