China & East Asia · 1870–1945
Nishida Kitarō
Founder of the Kyoto School
Began from “pure experience” prior to the split between subject and object, and later developed a “logic of place” (basho) whose ultimate ground is absolute nothingness.
Life and thought
Nishida Kitarō was born in 1870 in Ishikawa prefecture on the Sea of Japan. Because he had not finished the standard course he could enrol at Tokyo Imperial University only as a special student, and for years he taught in provincial schools while practising Zen intensively. An Inquiry into the Good (1911) made him famous; he taught at Kyoto Imperial University from 1910 to 1928, and his students and colleagues became the Kyoto School. His late writings on the nation and the war remain controversial. He died in June 1945, weeks before Japan’s surrender.
He began from “pure experience”: when we are absorbed in music, say, there is not yet an “I” hearing and a sound heard, only the experience itself; subject and object are later abstractions from it. He later recast this as a “logic of place” (basho): every judgment and every self exists within a field that contains it, and the final field is not a thing at all but “absolute nothingness”, a notion with roots in Zen. It was the first major attempt to state an East Asian insight in the vocabulary of Western philosophy.