_An Inquiry into the Good_ represented the foundation of Nishida’s philosophy—reflecting both his deep study of Zen Buddhism and his thorough analysis of Western philosophy—and established its author as the foremost Japanese philosopher of this century. In this important new translation, two scholars—one Japanese and one American—have worked together to present a lucid and accurate rendition of Nishida’s ideas. "The translators do an admirable job of adhering to the cadence of the original while avoiding unidiomatic, verbatim constructions."—John C. (...) Maraldo, _Philosophy East and West_ __ __ "More accurate and critical than the first translation into English of Nishida's earliest book.... An important addition to library collections of twentieth-century philosophy, Japanese intellectual history, and contemporary Buddhist thought."—_Choice_ "A welcome new translation of a work by probably the most original and influential of modern Japanese philosophers."—Hidé Ishiguro, _Times Literary Supplement_ "Undoubtedly the most important work for anyone in the West interested in understanding modern Japanese thought. This work premiered Japanese philosophy as modern but has also shown unusual staying power. In the late twentieth century Japanese thinkers, both religious and secular, insist on its importance and relevance."—William R. La Fleur, University of Pennsylvania. (shrink)

_Ontology of Production_ presents three essays by the influential Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō, translated for the first time into English by William Haver. While previous translations of his writings have framed Nishida within Asian or Oriental philosophical traditions, Haver's introduction and approach to the texts rightly situate the work within Nishida's own commitment to Western philosophy. In particular, Haver focuses on Nishida's sustained and rigorous engagement with Marx's conception of production. Agreeing with Marx that ontology (...) is production and production is ontology, Nishida in these three essays—"Expressive Activity", "The Standpoint of Active Intuition", and "Human Being" —addresses sense and reason, language and thought, intuition and appropriation, ultimately arguing that in this concept of production, ideality and materiality are neither mutually exclusive nor oppositional but, rather, coimmanent. Nishida's forceful articulation of the radical nature of Marx's theory of production is, Haver contends, particularly timely in today's speculation-driven global economy. Nishida's reading of Marx, which points to the inseparability of immaterial intellectual labor and material manual labor, provokes a reconsideration of Marxism's utility for making sense of—and resisting—the logic of contemporary capitalism. (shrink)

In this paper, we will revisit the relation between the respective conceptions of pure experience of Nishida Kitaro and William James. As various authors have previously shown, comparing Nishida and James can not only help us better understand both of their specific understandings of pure experience, and consequently its position within their respective enterprises, but also give a platform with which to see how these two authors could contribute to contemporary discussions on philosophical methodology. However, despite (...) the long history of comparative research on these two thinkers, there is still no consensus about the extent to which Nishida's philosophy actually resembles James' work at all. Was Nishida's interest in James' work found only in superficial similarities between two authors interested in overcoming the subject–object distinction? Or did Nishida attempt to somehow develop or radicalize James' work, taking his notion of pure experience into the realm of religion and metaphysics? In this contribution, we will agree with previous authors who have argued that Nishida is best understood as trying to go beyond or develop James' work. However, we will make this claim with the caveat that James had good reason not to take the avenues Nishida pursued, and that Nishida's attempt to radicalize some ideas in James may have led to some difficult points within his early philosophy. (shrink)

Comparisons of non-Western and Western philosophers often adopt a nation-based framework that has tended to posit difference entirely between national cultures while presuming unity and homogeneity within them. There are a number of problems with such a framework. First, the assumption that national cultures are unitary and homogeneous is demonstrably false. Second, the framework of comparison frequently shifts to Western philosophy versus non-Western philosophy, sometimes articulated at the level of nations, and sometimes civilizations. As Naoki Sakai has shown, insofar as (...) such a framework presupposes the unity, homogeneity, and.. (shrink)

Résumé Dans son livre Étude sur le bien (1911), Nishida s’inspira de William James, de Gustav Theodor Fechner et d’Ernst Mach pour développer son concept d’expérience pure. Or, il s’avère que ces trois scientifiques professaient ouvertement le panpsychisme, théorie selon laquelle les minéraux, les plantes et les animaux sont vivants et possèdent une nature psychique analogue à celle de l’être humain. Cet article s’attarde surtout aux relations entre Fechner et Nishida, de même qu’à leurs conséquences possibles sur (...) le développement d’un panpsychisme explicite dans l’Étude sur le bien. Dans ses écrits subséquents, Nishida cessa d’accorder l’esprit aux minéraux et aux plantes. Par contraste, il maintint le panpsychisme dans le cas des animaux car, disait-il, l’esprit est la chose la plus répandue dans le règne du vivant. Nishida passa ainsi d’une conception panpsychiste du monde à une conception quasi-panpsychiste. (shrink)

The question “What is the nature of experience?” is of perennial philosophical concern. It deals not only with the nature of experience qua experience, but additionally with related questions about the experiencing subject and that which is experienced. In other words, to speak of the philosophical problem of experience, one must also address questions about mind, world, and the various relations that link them together. Both William James and Kitarō Nishida were deeply concerned with these issues. Their shared (...) notion of “pure experience” is the conceptual cornerstone of their attempt to deal with the philosophical problem of experience. This dissertation is an analysis of “pure experience” and its relevance to several issues in contemporary hilosophy of mind. Drawing upon James’s and Nishida’s “pure experience”, I argue both for a sensorimotor-based, “extended” conception of consciousness and a bodily skills-based account of moral psychology. (shrink)

_Ontology of Production_ presents three essays by the influential Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō, translated for the first time into English by William Haver. While previous translations of his writings have framed Nishida within Asian or Oriental philosophical traditions, Haver's introduction and approach to the texts rightly situate the work within Nishida's own commitment to Western philosophy. In particular, Haver focuses on Nishida's sustained and rigorous engagement with Marx's conception of production. Agreeing with Marx that ontology (...) is production and production is ontology, Nishida in these three essays—"Expressive Activity", "The Standpoint of Active Intuition", and "Human Being" —addresses sense and reason, language and thought, intuition and appropriation, ultimately arguing that in this concept of production, ideality and materiality are neither mutually exclusive nor oppositional but, rather, coimmanent. Nishida's forceful articulation of the radical nature of Marx's theory of production is, Haver contends, particularly timely in today's speculation-driven global economy. Nishida's reading of Marx, which points to the inseparability of immaterial intellectual labor and material manual labor, provokes a reconsideration of Marxism's utility for making sense of—and resisting—the logic of contemporary capitalism. (shrink)

This is a review-essay on William Haver’s recent translation of three essays by Nishida Kitarō in a volume entitledOntologies of Production. Nishida is one of the founders of the famous Kyoto School of philosophy and, while his philosophy is not really Marxist, Haver attempts to bring Nishida into dialogue with Marx in his Introduction and through his selection of essays to translate. I attempt to situate Haver’s translation in a brief discussion of a recent debate on (...) how to write modern Japanese intellectual history and, through this examination, I suggest a framework for analysing modern intellectual history drawing on the work of Harry Harootunian, Moishe Postone and Jacques Bidet. In short, this framework attempts to relate the production of ideas to the temporal dynamic associated with capital, the commodity-form and other related mediations that make up the modern global capitalist system. Then I turn to Haver’s Introduction and translations and both explain some of the key concepts of Nishida and show how, using the framework that I outlined, Nishida’s work can be conceived of as failing to understand its own conditions of possibility in the multiple mediations of capitalism. For this reason, Nishida’s work, like many other romantic critiques of capitalism, criticises the abstractions of modernity at an abstract level, failing to account for the mediations of capitalism such as class and the commodity. (shrink)

Place and Dialectic presents two essays by Nishida Kitaro, translated into English for the first time by John W.M. Krummel and Shigenori Nagatomo. Nishida is widely regarded as one of the father figures of modern Japanese philosophy and as the founder of the first distinctly Japanese school of philosophy, the Kyoto school, known for its synthesis of western philosophy, Christian theology, and Buddhist thought. The two essays included here are ''Basho'' from 1926/27 and ''Logic and Life'' from (...) 1936/37. Each essay is divided into several sections and each section is preceded by a synopsis added by the translators.The first essay represents the first systematic articulation of Nishida's philosophy of basho, literally meaning ''place,'' a system of thought that came to be known as ''Nishida philosophy.'' In the second essay, Nishida inquires after the pre-logical origin of what we call logic, which he suggests is to be found within the dialectical unfoldings of world history and human society. A substantial introduction by John Krummel considers the significance of Nishida as a thinker, discusses the key components of Nishida's philosophy as a whole and its development throughout his life, and contextualizes the translated essays within his oeuvre. The Introduction also places Nishida and his work within the historical context of his time, and highlights the relevance of his ideas to the global circumstances of our day. The publication of these two essays by Nishida, a major figure in world philosophy and the most important philosopher of twentieth-century Japan, is of significant value to the fields not only of Asian philosophy and East-West comparative philosophy but also of philosophy in general as well as of theology and religious studies. (shrink)

Expressive activity (1925) -- The standpoint of active intuition (1935) -- Human being (1938).

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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nishida and Western PhilosophyAmos YongNishida and Western Philosophy. By Robert Wilkinson. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009. vii + 175 pp.Robert Wilkinson is a comparative philosopher who teaches at Open University in Edinburgh and has worked for years in the areas of comparative philosophy of mind and comparative aesthetics. This book should be read as part of a larger discussion of the philosophy of Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945), which (...) began with Keiji Nishitani (Nishida Kitarō, trans. S. Yamamoto and J. W. Heisig, University of California Press, 1991) and continues with Robert E. Carter (The Nothingness Beyond God: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nishida Kitaro, Paragon House, 1997) and Robert J.Wargo (The Logic of Nothingness: A Study of Nishida Kitarō, University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), among others. Going beyond his predecessors, however—even though it is unfortunate that Wilkinson does not interact much with them explicitly—Nishida and Western Philosophy prosecutes a clear even if perhaps controversial thesis: that in the end, Nishida’s philosophy of self-contradictory identity was, as a natural outgrowth of his Buddhist and Zen experience of satori (awakening), fundamentally incommensurable with the philosophy of identity that has characterized the major trajectory of the Western philosophical tradition.There are four chapters to the book (besides the introduction and then the summary and conclusions). The first focuses on Nishida’s starting point, the Zen Buddhist experience of enlightenment regarding the ultimate emptiness (mu), which albeit a difficult term to translate can be understood at least in part as referring to the nonduality, or even the interrelatedness, of all reality. Nishida’s work can be seen as a lifelong quest to formalize this experiential insight systematically in dialogue with the Western philosophical tradition. In a sense, this can be understood as a spirituality in search of a metaphysic, and given the emergence of Japan on the world stage at the beginning of the twentieth century, it is not surprising that up-and-coming Japanese philosophers like Nishida sought to legitimate their own insights in the Western idiom. But precisely for the same reason, however, Nishida rarely appealed to Asian sources, even within the Buddhist tradition, especially in his earlier work.Chapter 2 explicates Nishida’s early philosophy of pure experience, particularly as summarized in his Inquiry into the Good (1911; English translation: Yale University Press, 1990). The major dialogue partner at this point was William James and his notion of radical empiricism, which provided Nishida with Western conceptual resources to think through the primordial base from out of which conscious experience emerged. Thus did pure experience point to the nondual dimension of consciousness before the split between subject and object. Nishida never repudiated his Jamesian connection, although his ongoing work pushed him further and deeper into the metaphysical and ontological dimensions of consciousness that eventually left behind James’s more psychologically driven formulations.Next Wilkinson turns to Nishida’s second major book, Intuition and Reflection in [End Page 231] Self-Consciousness (1917; English translation: State University of New York Press, 1987), and focuses primarily on the Japanese philosopher’s interactions with the Neo-Kantian school of philosophy, Fichte, and Bergson. Each of these provided specific resources for this stage of Nishida’s philosophical project. The Neo-Kantians helped him to think about how the noumena-phenomena and fact-value distinctions contrasted with his own philosophical intuitions regarding their primordial unity in historicity. Fichte enabled the forging of a philosophy of action-consciousness, which promised to go beyond the subject-object distinction, even if in the end (for Nishida), the Fichtean ego remained “trapped” within the logic of identity rather than becoming “delivered” by or within the Zen logic of no-thingness. Bergson, meanwhile, was attractive precisely because of his dynamic (rather than static) philosophy of elan vital or conscious becoming even if Nishida was already discerning at this time that the Bergsonian elan both presumed an ontological togetherness that succumbed to the Western logic of identity on the one hand, and was not sufficiently attentive to the contrary of becoming—death, or the lapsing back into no-thingness—which was a prominent feature of historical reality on the other hand. Yet these Western interlocutors... (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this study, I examine the Confucian influence upon An Inquiry into the Good, the first publication of Nishida Kitarō. Nishida’s student Kōsaka Masaaki depicts his mentor’s conception of the good in terms of realising the 'Mandate of Heaven'. Taking this to be indicative of the importance of Confucianism for Nishida’s early thought, I compare his philosophy of pure experience and ethical project of ‘self-realisation’ with corresponding ideas found in the Confucian corpus. I especially focus on the (...) Great Learning and Doctrine of the Mean as interpreted by the Neo-Confucian Wang Yang-Ming. This study builds upon the pioneering work of Michel Dalissier, Dermott Walsh and David Williams on the Kyoto School and Confucianism. My portrayal of Confucianism is indebted to the ‘philosophical’ translations of Roger Ames, David Hall and Henry Rosemont, Jr., which bring into relief the tradition’s ‘relational ontology’ that Graham Parkes teaches is shared by the Kyoto School. (shrink)

The following essay, “The Unsolved Issue of Consciousness” (Torinokosaretaru ishiki no mondai 取残されたる意識の問題), by Nishida Kitarō 西田幾多郎 from 1927 is significant in regard to the development of what has come to be called “Nishida philosophy” (Nishida tetsugaku 西田哲学). In what follows, in addition to providing some commentary on the important points of his essay, I would like to show its relevance or significance not only for those who would like to study Nishida’s thought but also for (...) philosophy in general, especially in the contemporary setting. It was first published in 1927 by Iwanami Publishers in a collection of essays by different authors, Philosophical Essays in Commemoration of the Sixtieth Birthday of Dr. .. (shrink)

This essay by Nishida Kitarō from 1927, translated into English here for the first time, is from the initial period of what has come to be called “Nishida philosophy” (Nishida tetsugaku), when Nishida was first developing his conception of “place” (basho). Nishida here inquires into the relationship between logic and consciousness in terms of place and implacement in order to overcome the shortcomings of previous philosophical attempts—from the ancient Greeks to the moderns—to dualistically conceive the (...) relationship between being and knowing in terms of subject-object or form-matter. During the course of articulating his novel approach to consciousness and cognition, Nishida discusses what he takes to be the weaknesses of Greek hylomorphism, Kantian (and neo-Kantian) dualism, and Husserlian phenomenology. Dissatisfied with the attribution of mere passivity to placiality, and turning away from consciousness objectified as a subject of statement, Nishida imparts to consciousness qua place a certain logical independence as an active yet un-objectifiable “predicate.” This investigation of consciousness as the unobjectifiable place for objectification leads Nishida to the notion of what precedes consciousness itself, a “place of nothing” (mu no basho) that envelops the dichotomized structures of subject-predicate, being-nothing, subject-object, universal-particular, et cetera. (shrink)

A new reprint of Nishida Kitarō’s maiden philosophical classic, 善の研究 (An inquiry into the Good), cross-referenced to the pagination of the older (1946) and newer (2003) editions of the Complete Works of Nishida Kitarō, vol. 1, as well as to translations in English, Chinese, German, Italian, Korean, Romanian, and Spanish. This is the second volume of "Classics of Philosophy in Japan," a series of books dedicated to the dissemination of important philosophical texts at an affordable price.

In 1919, Nishida Kitarō delivered a speech at Ōtani University discussing the relationship between Nicolaus of Cusa’s coincidentia oppositorum and love. The address, given within weeks of a disabling injury suffered by Nishida’s wife, Kotomi, gives evidence of how severe personal crisis would come to influence his philosophical work, and highlights several themes that would dominate the writings of the last twenty-five years of his life.

« L’autodétermination du maintenant éternel» est un essai central portant sur une question qui ne cessa de préoccuper Nishida tout au long de sa carrière, celle du temps et, corrélativement, celle du soi véritable. L’analyse de la temporalité à laquelle il procède constitue l’un des apports majeurs de sa philosophie sur la scène de la philosophie contemporaine. L’inspiration platonicienne et le rapport constant à Augustin sur ce sujet conduisirent Nishida à approfondir considérablement sa «logique du basho» ou du (...) lieu et à réinterpréter en retour de manière «englobante» la temporalité. Pour lui, tout ce qui est se situe dans le temps, forme fondamentale de la réalité. Or, le temps se situe dans le présent. À partir de cet acquis, Nishida élargit encore plus sa perspective en établissant que le présent lui-même se situe dans le soi. En réalité, le véritable soi n’est autre que le soi présent. Le stade suivant, le plus englobant de tous, est celui du maintenant éternel, dans lequel tourne le temps. Il résulte de la temporalité «englobante» de Nishida une conception du présent qui met l’accent sur le rapport à l’histoire, sur un soi plus fondamental et éthique, de même que sur le thème de l’altérité. (shrink)