Nishida Kitaro

Nishida Kitaro

Nishida Kitaro (西田 幾多郎 Nishida Kitarō')(1870 – 1945), (Ishikawa Prefecture) –was a prominent Japanese philosopher who created a highly original and distinctive philosophy through overcoming his personal difficulties and applying Zen practice to Western philosophical thinking. Nishida founded what has been called the Kyoto School of philosophy. He graduated from The University of Tokyo in 1894, during the Meiji Era, with a degree in philosophy. He was named professor of the Fourth High School of Yamaguchi Prefecture in 1899 and later became professor of philosophy at Kyoto University. Nishida retired in 1927.

Life

Early Life

Nishida Kitaro was born on June 17,1870, in the Mori section of Unoke, a farming village on the Sea of Japan, about twenty miles from Kanazawa, the capital of Ishikawa prefecture. He was the eldest son and the third of five children. His family, which had held the powerful position of head the village during the Tokugawa era, were wealthy land owners. His father,Yasunori, was not only wealthy but also dedicated to education. In 1875 his father opened an elementary school in a temple and also became a teacher. He enrolled Kitaro in the school. Four years later his father officially started an elementary school in his house, which is the present-day Unoke elementary school. After graduating from elementary school in 1883, Kitaro entered the Ishikawa Normal School in Kanazawa. Around that time his parent became estranged and his father became bankrupt when his business failed. Kitaro became ill with typhoid and had to leave school.

In July, 1886, he entered the middle school attached to the Ishikawa Prefecture College. In July, 1889 Nishida Kitaro was admitted to the Fourth Higher School. Nishida lived in the home of Hojyo Tokiyoshi, who taught him mathematics and English At this school Nishida met his lifelong friend, T.D.Suzuki, who later became a world famous scholar of Zen Buddhism, and Yamamoto Ryokichi. The school was moved from local jurisdiction to the Ministry of Education, and the warm and friendly atmosphere of the school changed to one where the students were subjected to rules and regulations on all sides.

Despite Hojyo’s efforts to persuade him to become a mathematician, Nishida took an interest in Zen Buddhism and began to specialize in philosophy. He left the Fourth Higher School just before his graduation in 1890. Until 1893 Nishida studied in Tokyo Imperial University as a special student. Even though he was studying philosophy, he was discriminated against because of his status as a special student. Regular students could freely use the library and school facilities, but a special student was under restrictions in every area of the university. After graduation, his irregular background made it difficult for him to find a job.

Teaching Career

He taught briefly at the middle school of a local village in Ishikawa prefecture, where he married Tokuda Kotomi, the daughther of Tokuda Ko, in May of 1895. (Together, Nishida and Kotomi had eight children; six daughters and two sons.) In 1896 he secured a position teaching German at the Fourth Higher School in Kanazawa, but was dismissed because of internecine strife. Around this period his wife divorced him temporarily, and he became obsessed with Zen Buddhism. The same year his former teacher, Hojyo Tokiyoshi, who was now the principal of the Yamaguchi Higher School, invited Nishida to be a teacher. In 1899 Hojyo Tokiyoshi became principal of the Fourth Higher School, and again invited Nishida there to teach psychology, ethics, German, and logic. He taught there for ten years, during which he conducted productive research of basic philosophical views. Nishida ambitiously organized a student reading circle which read Goethe’s Faust and Dante’s Inferno and invited lectures from various religious sects and denominations. He was like a father who always looked after his students, an attitude which later led him to found a philosophical scholars group, Kyoto Gakuha (academic school).

After Hojyo was transferred from the Fourth Higher School back to the Yamaguchi Higher School, Nishida found himself incompatible with the new principal. For several years Nishida led an ill-fated private life His brother was killed on the battlefield in 1904. In January of 1907, Nishida’s daughter Yuko died of bronchitis and in June of the same year, another daughter, only one month old, died. Nishida himself became ill with pleurisy. He overcame his personal tragedies and devoted himself to research and increasing the level of his intellectual and academical output. In 1909 he was appointed a professor of German at Gakushuin University in Tokyo.

“An Inquiry Into the Good”

In January of 1911, Nishida published “An Inquiry Into the Good,” the fruit of his efforts. The book was welcomed by the general public even though it was filled with difficult terms. Although he was inspired by American philosopher William James and French philosopher Henri Bergson, Nishida developed an original concept, ”pure experience,” which does not contain any cognitive perception of oppositions, such as those of subject and object. Nishida defines “pure experience”as direct experience without deliberative discrimination. After the Meiji Restoration, Western culture and Western concepts were flooding into Japan, and people were urgently trying to understand and absorb them. In the academic world Nishida created an original unique philosophy which provided a Western philosophical framework for Zen experience.

In 1910 Nishida was appointed assistant professor of ethics at Kyoto Imperial University; in 1914 he was nominated to the the first chair of History of Philosophy and taught until his retirement in 1928.

Maturity

Even after developing “pure experience” Nishida never satisfied with this concept and continued his research. Influenced by Henri Bergson and the German Neo-Kantians, he discovered a deeper significance in it and elevated the concept of “pure experience” to a higher level. In his second book “Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness,” Nishida developed the metaphysical concept of “jikaku,” meaning “self-awakening.” He realized this self-awakening was “absolute free will,” which for him meant the ultimate cogitation and the origin of the act of creation, which emerges from and at the same time returns to absolute nothingness.

In 1918, another wave of the tragedy struck Nishida’s family. Nishida’s mother died in 1918, the next year his wife, Kotomi, suffered a brain hemorrhage, and in 1920 Nishida’s eldest son, Ken, died of peritonitis at the age of twenty-two. Soon three more of his daughters fell ill with typhus. In 1925 his wife, Kotomi, 50 years old, died after a long period of suffering. In spite of the tragedy and personal suffering Nishida continued to conduct his philosophical research. In 1926 as Nishida developed the concepts of “pure experience”and “absolute free will,” he offered the important concept of “place.” The next year the epoch-making concept of “Hataraku mono kara miru mono e” (from that which acts to that which is seen) gave form to the idea of “basho no ronri”(logic of place).

In 1928 Nishida left his position as professor’s position at Kyoto University, and in the same year his first grandchild was born. He married his second wife, Koto, in 1931. In 1940, during his retirement, he was awarded the Cultural Medal of Honor. Nishida Kitaro died at the age of seventy-five of a renal infection. His grave is located at Reiun'in, a temple in the Myoshin-ji compound in Kyoto.

Philosophical Background

Sakoku (literally "country in chains" or "lock up of country") was the foreign relations policy of the Tokugawa shogunate, which dictated that nobody, whether foreign or Japanese, could enter or leave Japan on penalty of death. This lasted from 1641 to 1853, though the term was not coined until the 19th century. It was still illegal to leave Japan until the Meiji restoration.

On July 8,1853 Commodore Matthew Perry of the U.S. Navy steamed into the Bay of Edo (Tokyo) with four warships: Mississippi,Plymouth, Saratoga, and Susquehanna and displayed the threatening power of his ships' Paixhans guns. He demanded that Japan open itself to trade with the West. These ships became known as the kurofune, the Black Ships.

Nishida Kitaro was born in 1868, the same year in which the Tokugawa shogunate ended and the Meiji era began. He grew up under the strong influence of Western civilization and the indigenous traditions which were resisting of this new wave. Western culture, especially materialism and industrialization, began to flood over Japan as though a dam had broken. The Japanese government responded to the foreign influx with a thin veneer of policy and culture. Foreign Minister Kaoru Inoue built a special guest house(rokumeikan) where foreign VIPs were welcomed as guests with balls and receptions. Many intellectuals,especially the youth, were not able to keep in step with this trend. For Japanese people, Western thought seemed like an alienation from tradition, especially from the nature-centered thinking of Buddhism and Shintoism. Intellectual youths despaired of their lives and their futures. This trend was symbolized by the suicide of Fujimura Misao, an eighteen-year-old student who wrote his final poems under a tree near the Kegon Waterfall before taking his life. One of the reasons he gave was the sudden modernization and alienation from nature. Young Nishida tackled this kind of pessimism through Buddhist thought.

The Formation of Nishida’s Philosophy

Having been born in the third year of the Meiji Era, Nishida was presented with a newly unique opportunity to contemplate eastern philosophical issues in the fresh light of Western philosophy. Nishida's original and creative philosophy, incorporating the ideas of both Zen and Western philosophy, was aimed at bringing the East and West closer. Throughout his lifetime, Nishida published a number of books and essays including An Inquiry into the Good, and "The Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview." Nishida’s life work was the foundation for the Kyoto School of Philosophy and the inspiration for the original thinking of his disciples. The most famous concept in Nishida's philosophy is the logic of “basho” (Japanese: 場所; usually translated to other languages as place or topos). We can clearly understand Nishida’s unique and creative not only through his writings, but also a from a study of his life. He experienced many serious domestic tragedies. When he retired from Kyoto University, where he taught for twenty years, he recalled the past and said that his life was extremely simple: during the first half of it he was sitting in front of the blackboard, and during the second half of it he was standing behind the blackboard. His biography described how he turned the blackboard around, but we know that his family life was full of suffering, and that in his scholarly life of research he also faced difficult philosophical problems. From another person’s point of view, Nishida’s life was unstable and difficult. Nishida himself could state positively that his life was simple because he lived with purity, sincerity and earnestness.

In his diary at the age of thirty-three Nishida wrote, “I do Zen meditation not for academic reasons but for my heart (mind) and my life,” and on another day, “learning is, after all, for the purpose of living, life is most important, learning without the life has no meaning.” For a period of six years starting at the age of twenty-eight, his diary recorded were many descriptions of the Zen meditation which he did in the morning, afternoon and evening. It is interesting that Nishida never categorized Zen meditation as religion. People later called his philosophy, “Nishida tetsugaku (philosophy)” which was really a reflection of his life of adversity. Many times he was thrown down from a cliff of life and had to crawl up from the bottom of the valley. Sometimes he lost his “true self” and had to search for it. His philosophical theory was, in a sense, the result of his life-struggle.

There were many types of “despair” and “alienation” during the Meiji era. Nishida’s philosophical struggle was affected not only by these social contradictions but by his domestic situation. Just as Søren Kierkegaard was influenced by his father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, young Nishida’s way of thinking was affected by his father, Nishida Yasunori. His father,Yasunori, was an educator, but he kept mistresses. Before his marriage to Nishida’s mother, Tosa, he had an illegitimate child, and his behavior disgusted the local villagers. Yasunori was finally obliged to leave his house and lands because of financial difficulties. It was said that the bright and laughing Nishida gradually became a gloomy and pessimistic child. His friends and teachers often remarked his odd silences; sometimes he sat all night with Hojyo Tokiyuki without saying anything.

Notable disciples

• Tanabe Hajime
• Nishitani Keiji

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

Partial bibliography

• An Inquiry Into the Good (ISBN 0-300-052332-), Nishida Kitaro, Translated by Masao Abe and Christopher Ives
• Last Writings (ISBN 0-824-81554-8), Nishida Kitaro, Translated by David Dilworth

Secondary resources

• Zen & Philosophy: An Intellectual Biography of Nishida Kitaro (ISBN 0-824-82459-8), Michiko Yusa
• Philosophers of Nothingness (ISBN 0-824-82481-4), James Heisig
• Nishida Kitaro (ISBN 0-520-073649-), Nishitani Keiji
• The Logic Of Nothingness: A Study Of Nishida Kitaro (ISBN 0-824-82969-7), Robert J. J. Wargo

External links

• entry at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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