Thinker

Nishida Kitaro quotes

7 passages in English · 1870–1945 · Kyoto School.

Overview

Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945) founded the Kyoto School at Kyoto Imperial University, forging a modern Japanese philosophy in dialogue with James, Bergson, Neo-Kantianism, and Zen practice. An Inquiry into the Good (1911) made ‘pure experience’ his early keystone; later essays develop the logic of basho (place) and absolute nothingness. His final major essay, The Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview (1945), ties religious conversion to absolutely contradictory self-identity.

Main ideas

Early Nishida treats pure experience as immediate knowing prior to subject–object split, and the good as realization of personality. Mature Nishida relocates reality in the self-determining place of absolute nothingness: individuals arise as determinations of that place. Religious consciousness is not mere self-power; it is simultaneously the call of God or Buddha, grasped by a logic of absolute affirmation through absolute negation.

Major works

  • An Inquiry into the Good
  • Fundamental Problems of Philosophy
  • Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious Worldview

Legacy

Nishida set the agenda for Kyoto School metaphysics and comparative philosophy of religion; Nishitani, Tanabe, and later comparative theologians continually return to basho and absolute nothingness.

Themes in this archive

Experience (3) · Good (1) · God (1) · Faith (1) · Love (1)

Quotes by theme

Nishida Kitaro on experience

  1. Pure experience is the state of experience just as it is, without the slightest addition of deliberative discrimination.
  2. To experience means to know facts just as they are.
  3. The good is the realization of personality.
  4. Pure experience is identical with direct experience.
  5. There must be an overturning, a radical conversion of mind, in any religion. Without it there is no religion.
  6. The religious consciousness does not arise out of our own selves; it is simultaneously the call of God or Buddha.
  7. Compassion always signifies that opposites are one in the dynamic reciprocity of their own contradictory identity. The religious will arise as the self-determination of this dimension of sympathetic coalescence.