Nishida Kitarō

Nishida Kitarō (born June 17, 1870, near Kanazawa, Ishikawa prefecture, Japan—died June 7, 1945, Kamakura) was a Japanese philosopher who exemplified the attempt by the Japanese to assimilate Western philosophy into the Oriental spiritual tradition.

Early life

Nishida’s father, Nishida Yasunori, was for a time a teacher of an elementary school among whose few pupils was Kitarō. His mother, Tosa, was a pious devotee of the Jōdo, or True Pure Land, school of Buddhism. Although Nishida’s family was descended from a former village landowner, Yasunori ruined his fortune when Kitarō was young, and the entire Nishida family had to move to Kanazawa in 1883. Kitarō entered primary course at Kanazawa Normal School in that year but had to leave on account of sickness in the following year. He was admitted in 1886 into the second class of the high school, and in 1888 he became a student of the Fourth Higher School (junior college).

In his boyhood, Nishida took traditional lessons in Chinese from an excellent Confucian teacher, and in his higher school days he was taught by another scholar erudite in Chinese. Another important teacher of Nishida’s was Hōjō Takiyoshi, a professor of mathematics of the Fourth Higher School, under whom Nishida had studied mathematics even before he entered high school. This exposure to Chinese culture enriched his life with a lasting Confucian quality and worldview. Later, when Western philosophy and Buddhism (especially Zen Buddhism) were merged in his mature mind, there remained deep within him an undercurrent of Confucian conviction with regard to “the ideal person,” “the Way” to good and truth, sincerity, self-cultivation, and detachment. He and his contemporaries belonged to the last Japanese generation whose education in the Chinese Classics molded their personal character. From his boyhood days, he made several good friends in Kanazawa, among whom was D.T. Suzuki, later an eminent Buddhologist and the main interpreter of Zen Buddhism to the West. Nishida and Suzuki became classmates at higher school, and from that time their mutual spiritual influence continued until Nishida’s death.

In his memoirs, entitled “A Certain Professor’s Statement upon Retirement (from Kyōto Imperial University, December 1928),” he writes:

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My student days at the Fourth Higher School were the happiest of my life. I was filled with youthful zest. I did anything I wished, heedless of the consequences. As a result I had to leave school before my graduation. At the time I thought it was not necessarily true that one could not achieve anything by studying alone. In fact I thought it would be better to rid myself of the fetters of school and to read freely. But within one year I was prohibited to read any more by my doctor, since I was afflicted with an eye disease. I had to abandon my principle, and went to Tokyo to be a non-regular student of philosophy, in Tokyo University (1891–1894).

At that time in the Faculty of Letters and Law, there were several promising students who later became famous, some as men of letters and others as university professors. Together with them, Nishida appeared at the same lectures but could not form close friendships, as he had done in higher school.

Academic career

After graduation Nishida became a teacher in a middle school near his home (1895). In the following year, he was appointed a lecturer in the Fourth Higher School at Kanazawa, and, after two years as a lecturer and later as a professor at the Yamaguchi Higher School in Yamaguchi, he was again appointed as a professor of the Fourth Higher School, teaching psychology, logic, ethics, and German (1899–1909). During his Yamaguchi and Kanazawa teaching periods, he was much engaged in the practice of Zen meditation. Remarks about Zen practice are overwhelmingly conspicuous in his diary of this period. From this effort and through his lectures at the higher school came Nishida’s maiden work, Zen no kenkyū (1911; A Study of Good, 1960). At about this time parts of the book were published in Japanese philosophical journals, and his name as an original philosopher attracted attention in the Japanese philosophical world.

Nishida’s philosophy of Nothingness

After one year as professor at Gakushūin University (Tokyo) in 1909, he was appointed associate professor of ethics at Kyōto Imperial University. In 1913 he was appointed professor of philosophy of religion and in 1914 professor of philosophy, a post he held until his retirement in 1928. About the end of his professorship in Kyōto Imperial University, Nishida’s philosophy attained its maturity, which can be defined as “the philosophy of the topos (place) of Nothingness.” In his latter years he delved most deeply into philosophical problems and endeavoured to explain more concrete facts by his logic. Thus his idea of the true reality that overcomes the dichotomy of subjectivity and objectivity (the mind and its objects) in the topos of Nothingness became significant, he emphasized, for “historical reality in the historical world.” Nishida developed this implication of absolute Nothingness in his Tetsugakuron bunshū (“Philosophical Essays”; 7 vol.), which he wrote after his retirement. In his last days, as World War II was coming to an end, looking at the fires of the burning cities in the darkness of night, Nishida was much inspired by the words of the prophets of Israel in the Hebrew Bible. He said that the result of this war might be something that neither the victors nor the vanquished could at that time foresee. He died in 1945 at Kamakura.

Nishida’s philosophy was attacked by the nationalists and militarists during World War II because of the Western way of his philosophical thinking. Since then he has been criticized for his loyalty to his nation and for his alleged metaphysical obscurantism by Marxist philosophers and antimetaphysical rationalist philosophers. More philosophically important are the criticisms by Takahashi Satomi and Tanabe Hajime. Takahashi was the first scholar to appreciate and evaluate the distinctively Japanese philosophy in Nishida’s Zen no kenkyū, and later he contributed his critical investigation of Nishida’s philosophy in its mature form. Tanabe, Nishida’s disciple and successor as chair of professor of philosophy at Kyōto Imperial University (1927–45), contributed valuable criticism from his own philosophical point of view.