Nishida Kitaroʼs modern Japan

Nishida Kitaro (Meiji 3 - Showa 20) experienced “Modern Japan” as an encounter of the Western world and the Eastern world (Japan). In the prologue of From That Which Acts to That Which Sees (1927), Nishida first defined the West as a world of tangible culture and the East as a world of intangible culture. This idea of division, however, goes back to the division between the finite and the definite, that between the relative and the absolute, and so on, which he collected in his young days in Yamaguchi. He also carried it on his later speeches Some Issues on Japanese Culture. Nishida tried to unify the two dimensions that absolutely contradict each other and in the process he gradually became aware the division between the West and the East. What were most important for Nishida were the issues of life such as “For what do people live, die and work?” In order to decide these issues, in his days in Yamaguchi, Nishida tried to leap the finite dimension into the infinite dimension with the help of religion. In the mean time, he came to think that the issues of life should be explained by philosophy, which led him to the anguish over the issue of evil. This is the question about Modern Self that troubled not only Nishida but the whole modern Japan. At the end of the conflict concerning Modern Self, a turnabout comes. This is the radical experience that made Nishida possible to stand on a position of philosophy that included religion, the position of Pure Experience in An Inquiry into the Good. Although it is impossible to express the position of intuition in words, Nishida had constantly tried to give logical expression to what is impossible to express in words, standing at the position of intuition. With intuition Nishida attempted to unify the two dimensions which absolutely contradict each other.