Background
N'shlda, Kltaro was born in 1870.
N'shlda, Kltaro was born in 1870.
1901, koji; Professor of Philosophy and Region, former Imperial Kyoto University.
Kitaro Nishida is esteemed as the first modern Japanese ‘philosopher’ in the European sense and is primarily associated with the founding of the ‘Kyoto School’ of philosophy. Through his role in that school Nishida had a seminal influence upon such contemporary Japanese philosophers as Abe Masao, Yoshinori Takeuchi, Hajime Tanabe but particularly upon the two greatest twentiethcentury disseminators of Japanese thought in the West, D. T. Suzuki and Keiji Nishitani. Perhaps the respective courses of European and Japanese thought are now so propitiously aligned that the importance of Nishida’s philosophical achievement can be appreciated outside Asia. Since the epoch-making work of Nietzsche and Heidegger, much continental European philosophy has attempted to resolve the challenge of nihilism by articulating the nature of existence and existential experience without recourse to metaphysical dogma or a philosphical language tainted by the traditional categories of metaphysics. Such an undertaking is a particularly difficult one as European thought lacks what Buddhist tradition has long possessed, namely an experimental analytic capable of theorizing nothingness. On the other hand, the situation faced by many Japanese religious thinkers after the Mciji restoration of 1868 was to capitulate to the increasing influences of European norms of thought, to become outright nationalist reactionaries or to utilize the conceptual artillery of European philosophy as a means of bringing into communicable clarity for Japanese and European readers alike the undogmatic but elusive insights of Zen philosophy. Nishida made the last path his own and offered to European philosophy a profoundly non-nihilistic Zen view of nihility rendered in Western philosophical terms. The confrontation of Buddhist thought and Western philosophy in Nishida's work involves a characteristic conceptual and experiential transposition. Whereas Christianity and Western metaphysics might be disadvantaged by holding the absolute to be above both immediate expression and experience, they have the advantage of a conceptual framework which can cognize the transcendent. Conversely. Zen philosophy is advantaged by regarding the absolute to be amenable to immediate experience, while it lacks the conceptual artillery to grapple with that which lies beyond immediate expression. Nishida attempts a fusion of the positive aspects of both European and Zen tradition by suggesting that the Zen experiential intuition of absolute nothingness can be conceptually articulated via Nicholas of Cusa's negative concept of God: it is never that which can be stated of it for it is always more than that; it is what it is not stated to be. Nishida’s invocation of absolute nothingness or emptiness should not be understood within the customary polarities of being and nonbeing, affirmation and denial. Zettai mu encompasses both the immanent simultaneity of all coming into being and of all passing away. It is close to what the existential metaphysics of Nietzsche and Heidegger would render as the ‘being’ of all becoming. Rather than calling it Being, Nishida names the absolute ‘nothingness’ on the grounds that were the absolute an absolute Being, all potentialities would be realized and the infinity of coming into being and passing away would be denied. Zettai mu allegedly preserves that potentiality, offering to Western thought the possibility of an existentially affirmative nihilism. It fell to Nishitani, one of Nishida's most talented successors, to work out the philosophical implications of such a mode ot thought.