Nishida Kitarō
1870-1945 · Modern East Asian Thought · Little-known
Nishida founded the Kyoto School and stands as modern Japan's most original philosopher. He asked where experience sits before it splits into a self on one side and a world on the other, and answered: in a place, basho, a field of nothingness that holds both. He worked Zen emptiness into the machinery of Western logic, and held that a real self appears where the individual and the universal shape each other.
Signature
The position Nishida is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Ground of Being
- Immanence – Transcendence
- Paradox
- Coincidentia Oppositorum
Positions on the 6 axes the sources answer
- Society
- leans Collectivism (25 on a 0–100 scale from Collectivism to Individualism)
- Mind
- leans Beyond Brain (75 on a 0–100 scale from Brain Only to Beyond Brain)
- The Divine
- leans Indescribable (75 on a 0–100 scale from Describable to Indescribable)
- Beauty
- leans Objective (75 on a 0–100 scale from Subjective to Objective)
- Identity
- leans Changing (75 on a 0–100 scale from Unchanging to Changing)
- Nature of Reality
- leans Unity (25 on a 0–100 scale from Unity to Multiplicity)
14 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Nishida refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Pantheism / Panentheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Highest Good
- Harmony
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Dialectical
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - End of Things
- Indistinct from Present
What is the ultimate end of all things? - Perception
- Non-Dual Awareness
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Intuition / Coherence
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Virtue
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Beginning of Things
- Indistinct from Present
What is the origin of reality? - Time
- Eternal Present / Phenomenological Time
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Paradox
- Coincidentia Oppositorum
What is the status of paradox?