The stages of Nishida’s thought

Nishida says in his memoirs that he thought of his life in terms of a change of position with the blackboard as an axis: in the first half of his life he sat at a desk facing the blackboard, while in the latter half he sat with the blackboard behind him. Continuing this metaphor, it may be said that in the third stage, represented by his philosophy of the topos of Nothingness, he wished to relinquish both positions, whether facing or in front of the blackboard, so that he and his logic became chalk on the blackboard of the historical world. In Nishida’s philosophy, each stage has its independent value. Like a series of vortexes floating on the stream when two (i.e., Western and Eastern) rivers converge, each closes its own circle. The preceding system should not be replaced by the later, even if they flow successively.

In the first stage of his philosophy, Nishida derived his basic insights from his long, sustained practice of Zen. He was also much inspired by William James’s philosophy and psychology and tried to interpret his own basic insights philosophically with the use of psychological concepts borrowed from James. The opening page of Nishida’s Zen no kenkyū indicates the general direction of his thought:

To experience means to know events precisely as they are. It means to cast away completely one’s attitude of discriminative reflection, and to know in accordance with the events. Since people include some reflection even when speaking of experience, the word “pure” is here used to signify a condition of true experience itself without the addition of the least thought or reflection. For example, it refers to that moment of seeing a color or hearing a sound which occurs not only before one has added the judgment that this seeing or hearing relates to something external or that one is feeling this sensation, but even before one has judged what color or what sound it is. Thus, pure experience is synonymous with direct experience. When one experiences directly one’s conscious state there is as yet neither subject nor object, and knowledge and its object are completely united. This is the purest form of experience.

The concept of pure experience expounded here is the Western philosophical mold into which Nishida poured his own religious experience cultivated by his Zen training. As it is beyond the dichotomy of subject and object, so it is far removed from the difference of whole and part. The whole universe is, as it were, crystallized into one’s own being. In the total activity of one’s own pure and alert life, one’s entire being becomes transparent, so that it reflects, as in a mirror, all things as they become and also participates in them. This is “to know in accordance with the events.” The profoundness of reality, the directness of one’s experience of reality, a dynamic system developing itself in the creative stream of consciousness—these are the characteristic motifs of Nishida’s philosophy, all suggesting where his thinking was ultimately rooted.

According to Nishida, judgment is formed by analysis of the intuitive whole. For instance, the judgment that a horse runs is derived from the direct experience of a running horse. The truth of a judgment is grounded on the truth of the original intuitive whole from which the judgment is formed through the dichotomy of subject and predicate or that of subject and object. For the establishment of its truth a judgment is, through its dichotomy itself, referred back to intuition as its source, because intuition is here considered a self-developing whole, similar to Hegel’s Notion (Begriff ). As Hegel says, “All is Notion,” or “All is judgment,” so could Nishida say, “All (reality) is intuition,” or “All reality is immediate consciousness.” For this is practically the import of his dictum, “Consciousness is the Unique Reality.”

Influence of neo-Kantian thought

In the second stage of his philosophy, Nishida was under the influence of the philosophy of Henri Bergson, a French philosopher, which he tried to synthesize with a Neo-Kantian type of German thought that was then prevalent in Japanese philosophical circles. He thus entered the second stage of his thinking, the result of which was incorporated into a book entitled Jikaku ni okeru chokkan to hansei (1917; “Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness”). His basic notion did not undergo any change, but he tried to express what he once called pure experience in a different way. Neo-Kantian influence led him to eliminate from his thought all psychological terms and to follow strictly the path of logical thinking to the end. Actually, however, he found himself standing at the end of a blind alley, where he came up against something that was impenetrable to his logic. “After a long struggle with the Unknowable my logic itself bade me surrender to the camp of mysticism,” so he himself says in the preface. Thus the self as the unity of thought and intuition acquires a mystical background. It is pure activity but ultimately finds itself in the abyss of darkness, enveloping every light of self-consciousness. This darkness, however, is “dazzling obscurity” giving the self the unfathomable depth of meaning and being. The self is thus haloed with a luminous darkness.

The third stage of Nishida’s philosophy was marked by a reversal of his whole procedure, as is shown in his Hataraku mono kara miru mono e (1927; “From the Acting to the Seeing Self ”). Whereas he had always made the self the starting point for his philosophical thinking, he now parted definitely with Transcendental Idealism or, rather, broke through it to find behind it a realm of reality corresponding to his own mystical experience. This may be called the realm of Non-self, or Nothingness, which should not be confused with the non-self of Idealism as the realm of the objective over against that of the subjective, or with annihilating nothingness of Sartre’s Existentialism. The “Non-self ” of Nishida is the ultimate reality where all subject–object cleavage is overcome. In accordance with Buddhist tradition he called it “Nothingness” and sought to derive the individual reality of everything in the world, whether it be a thing or a self, from the supreme identity of Nothingness. The Idealist “pure self,” as the universal consciousness or consciousness in general, is still abstract, while the “Non-self ” of Nishida establishes itself as true individuality in the absolute Nothingness, which includes, not excludes, the individual reality of the thing-in-itself (the ultimate reality of things). Indeed, the problem of the individual now became Nishida’s chief concern. In his quest for its solution he made an intensive study of Greek philosophy, especially Plato and Aristotle.

He found the thinking of these philosophers to be relatively free from the cleavage of subject and object, in comparison with modern Western philosophy, which always presupposes, consciously or unconsciously, the cogito (the thinking subject) as the starting point of thought. The ontology of Plato and Aristotle rather makes a logic of reality reveal itself, a logic that explains the world of reality as seen from within. Whether “explaining” or “seeing,” such a logic is to be understood as an act taking place in the world of reality itself. Nishida seeks thus to clarify the significance of the individual and the universal from the viewpoint of the Absolute Nothingness. Thus he propounds that Nothingness or mu is the universal that is to be sought behind the predicate as the universal concept and, at the same time, is the abyss of Nothingness in which the self as the individual is crystalized. He developed the idea of the “topos of Nothingness,” adopting the concept of topos from Plato’s Timaeus and from this time on Nothingness is explained as the uniqueness of the topos.

In the fourth stage of the development of his thought, Nishida applied the idea of the topos of Nothingness to the explanation of his “historical world.”