- Length
- 208 pagesAbe and Ives, An Inquiry into the Good, Yale, 1990
- Reading
- DemandingReadable with attention; assumes no other book
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
An Inquiry into the Good
The founding work of modern Japanese philosophy, by a Zen practitioner who read the whole of Western philosophy and decided its starting point was wrong. It has sold over a million copies in Japan and is the origin of the Kyoto School.
- Date
- 1911
- Author
- Nishida Kitarō
- Region
- Kyoto
- Language
- Japanese
- 1960 English, Valdo Viglielmo As A Study of Good; the first English version Attested
- 1990 English, Abe Masao and Christopher Ives Yale; the standard, in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Answered — Drew a named later reply, but was not itself a reply
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Phenomenological — Description of experience as it is given
- Transmission
- Translated — Reached its later readers in another language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years to the reply
- 26 years
Has sold more than a million copies in Japan, where it is read by general readers as well as philosophers, and is barely known outside it.
What the book says
The book in which philosophy in the modern Western sense begins in Japan, written by a man who had practised Zen for a decade and read Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Bergson and William James. Nishida starts from what he calls pure experience: the moment of hearing a sound or seeing a colour before it has been sorted into a subject who perceives and an object perceived. That sorting, he argues, is a later addition, and the philosophical tradition's habit of beginning with a knowing subject facing a world already presupposes the split it is trying to explain. From this single starting point the book works outward in three movements. Reality is pure experience in its self-developing activity, differentiating and unifying itself, so that what we call nature and what we call spirit are aspects of one process. The good is then not obedience to a rule or the maximising of a result but the realisation of the self's own demands - and since the self is not finally separate from the whole, the highest realisation coincides with what religion has always pointed at. The last part treats God as the unifying activity of the universe rather than a being within it.
What it argues
That experience is prior to the experiencer, and that this reverses the order philosophy has assumed. Nishida's formula is that it is not that there is experience because there is an individual, but that there is an individual because there is experience - the person is a limited region carved out of something more basic, not the origin of it. Pure experience is his name for that basic layer, and the argument for it is descriptive: at the moment of hearing a note there is not yet a hearer and a sound, only the hearing, and the division arrives with reflection. Everything else follows. Reality is this activity unifying and differentiating itself; knowledge, feeling and volition are not separate faculties but phases of one movement; and the good is the fullest realisation of what a person most fundamentally is, which turns out not to be a private matter because the self was never sealed off to begin with.
What answered it
Watsuji, on the starting point, and the later Kyoto School in every direction. Tanabe Hajime, Nishida's own successor, developed a rival position; Nishitani took the account of nothingness toward religion. From outside, Marxist critics in the 1930s attacked the whole school as idealist and politically evasive, and the question of the Kyoto School's relation to wartime nationalism has coloured its reception ever since - unavoidably, though this book of 1911 precedes all of it.
How it argues
By description and by patient argument in Western form, with the Zen background almost entirely unstated - the word appears rarely, and Nishida does not appeal to Buddhist authority at any point. The technique is to take a claim from James, Bergson, Fichte or Hegel, show where it stops short, and push. The prose in Japanese is famously difficult and the difficulty is partly a matter of vocabulary: Nishida was writing philosophy in a language that had only recently acquired terms for it, and often had to make the words as he went.
The moment
Meiji Japan, four decades into a national project of absorbing Western learning at speed. Nishida had sat zazen seriously for about ten years, taught in provincial schools, and reached Kyoto Imperial University in 1910 at forty. What he attempted was neither an introduction to European philosophy nor a restatement of Buddhist doctrine but an original argument that used Western conceptual machinery on ground the tradition had not covered - which is why the book is treated in Japan as the moment philosophy there became something more than translation. His private life was a sequence of bereavements, including several of his children.
How it travelled
Almost entirely within Japan for fifty years. The first English translation appeared in 1960, and serious Western engagement came later still, largely through comparative philosophy and through interest in Zen. Its influence at home is of a different order: it made philosophy a Japanese subject, produced a school that dominated the field for half a century, and remains a book that general readers buy.
The strongest objection
That pure experience cannot be described without ceasing to be what it is. Nishida's claim is that there is a layer of experience prior to the distinction between subject and object - but every description of it is made afterwards, by a reflecting subject, in language that has the distinction built in, so the evidence for the claim is necessarily unavailable in the form the claim requires. This is the same difficulty that faces every appeal to the immediately given, and Nishida is more exposed than most because his whole system rests on the one point. Watsuji's objection is different and more social: even granting the description, a philosophy that begins there will reach other people last, and a human being is not first an experiencer who then encounters others.
Why read it
For the first part on pure experience, which is short and is the argument everything else rests on, and for the sheer interest of watching a tradition begin. Read it with an introduction; the Abe and Ives edition supplies a good one. Expect the difficulty to be conceptual rather than technical.
- First printed
- 1911
- First in English
- 1960
- Digitised
- No
Nishida revised his position substantially over the following three decades, moving from pure experience to self-awareness and then to the logic of place and absolute nothingness; whether the later work develops or breaks with this book is argued.
Viglielmo's 1960 English as A Study of Good was the first; the Abe and Ives translation of 1990 is the standard and is in copyright.
Where it stands
Live. Nishida is central to Japanese philosophy and increasingly read in comparative work, in phenomenology and in philosophy of mind, where the argument that experience precedes the subject-object division connects to current debates about pre-reflective consciousness.
On quoting this book
The Japanese is public domain but both English translations are modern and in copyright, and the central term is rendered differently in each. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether the later philosophy of place develops or abandons this framework is argued in every study of him. How much of the position is Zen in Western dress, and how much genuinely independent argument, divides Japanese and Western commentators differently. Whether the early work has political implications, and whether it is continuous with the wartime writings of the school, has been argued in every direction, with a substantial body of scholarship holding that this book is simply apolitical. And whether pure experience is a discovery or a reconstruction after the fact is the philosophical question the entry above turns on.