Nishida Kitaro

Born Apr. 19, 1870, near Kanazawa; died July 7, 1945, in Kamakura. Japanese idealist philosopher. Founder of the Kyoto, or Nishida-Tanabe, school of philosophy. Professor at the University of Kyoto (1913–28).

Nishida developed his philosophical system in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. His most important works of this period include A Self-conscious System of the Universal (1929), Determination of Nonbeing in Self-consciousness (1931), and The Fundamental Question in Philosophy (1933). Nishida sought to demonstrate the principal difference between Eastern and Western philosophy. He saw the uniqueness of Eastern culture in its inherent idea of nonbeing. Proceeding from the standpoint of Zen Buddhism, he sought to interpret nonbeing as a concept of an all-encompassing universe that, “being everything, is itself nothing,” “acts without one who acts,” and “defines without one who defines.”

Despite Nishida’s attempt to treat his philosophy as “genuinely Eastern” and as an outgrowth of Buddhist teachings, his views are essentially quite similar to Western European idealist philosophy, particularly existentialism. According to Nishida’s fundamental philosophical concept, which he called anti-intellectual, true being is attained intuitively, as the result of a particular “way of viewing things,” or a “way of perceiving oneself,” that supposedly makes it possible to overcome the opposition of the objective and the subjective.

Nishida viewed social development as a result of the interaction of the universal—nonbeing—and the particular—human individuals—the genuine relationship of which is expressed in the communication between “I” and “Thou.”