Kitaro Nishida was one of the most prominent Japanese philosophers in thinking who founded the Kyoto School of philosophy and exerted a huge influence on Japanese philosophy.
Kitaro Nishida was born in 1870 and after graduating the University of Tokyo in philosophy, he started his academic career as a teacher and later became a professor of philosophy at Kyoto University. He studied in the first years of openness to Western culture and philosophy which determined his further work and life. The main theme coming through all of Nishida’s works is his attempt to blend Western philosophy with Asian Buddhist philosophy. This resulted in novel theories of self and the world as well as the new interpretations of East Asian Buddhist through the prism of philosophy (Moraldo).
The most famous concept of Nishida’s philosophy is the “philosophy of the topos (place) of Nothingness.” This concept encompasses his work in developing a non-dualistic approach to viewing the world (Takeuchi). He considered the “historical reality in the historical world” which is the unification of the world of pure experience and the objective world. His whole work is devoted to overcoming the dichotomy between objectivity and subjectivity in one true reality. His writing style is very abstract and obscure, therefore, his work is hard to interpret and classify(Moraldo).
As Nishida stood at the beginning of the Japanese philosophy as a science, he played one of the decisive roles in its shaping. He viewed philosophy not only as the field of thought for exploring and explaining the world but also as the one setting standards for the ideals of human life(Takeuchi). He regarded it in the context of the ultimate form of self-awareness connecting oneself to the true reality.
References
Maraldo, John C. "Nishida Kitarō". Plato.stanford.edu. N.p., 2005. Web. 3 May 2016.
Takeuchi, Yoshinori. "Nishida Kitaro". Encyclopedia Britannica. N.p., 2016. Web. 3 May 2016.
