...he defined philosophy as science [gakumon], i.e. unified conceptual knowledge, more specifically the first and universal science that “reflects on the basic concepts of the particular sciences in general and constructs of them one system of knowledge.” Yet “its object of study is not simply the fundamental concepts of reality. Basic normative notions such as truth, goodness and beauty must of course enter into philosophical study. Philosophy not only clarifies basic notions of reality, but must also elucidate the ideals of human life, the ‘ought’ itself. Philosophy is not simply a worldview; it is a view of human life.” Within his extended definition Nishida, commenting on Bergson, clarifies the role of intuition so crucial to his own thought: “‘intuition’ as such cannot be called philosophy. Even if its contents can derive from intuition, philosophy has its raison d'être when intuition takes the form of conceptual knowledge.” (Nishida 1923, 668) Then later in his career Nishida paradoxically formed concepts of the limits of such knowledge and formulated his philosophy of absolute nothingness that is ultimately mirrored in self-awareness.

For Nishida, experience in its original form is not the exercise of individuals equipped with sensory and mental abilities who contact an exterior world; rather it precedes the differentiation into subject experiencing and object experienced, and the individual is formed out of it. “The moment of seeing a color or hearing a sound” is prior not only to the thought that the color or sound is the activity of an external object or that one is sensing it, but also to the judgment of what the color or sound might be (Nishida 1990a, 3). “Pure experience” names not only the basic form of every sensuous and every intellectual experience but also the fundamental form of reality, indeed the “one and only reality” from which all differentiated phenomena are to be understood. Cognitive activities such as thinking or judging, willing, and intellectual intuition are all derivative forms of pure experience but identical to it insofar as they are in act—when thinking, willing, etc. are going on. [..] Objective phenomena likewise derive from pure experience; when unified they are called “nature,” while “spirit” names the activity of unifying. Pure experience launches the dynamic process of reality that differentiates into subjective and objective phenomena on their way to a higher unity, and the recapture of our unitary foundation is what Nishida means by the Good. [..] ..the early statements of experience prior to a subject experiencing and an object experienced are re-formulated in the late 1920s as “seeing without a seer, hearing without a hearer.” The nullification of the self in pure experience is later expressed as seeing the self from the perspective of the world, where world is understood phenomenologically as a determining horizon of experience.

Toward the end of his life, perhaps thinking of the significance of death for understanding individuality, perhaps re-considering the theme of self-awakening as a kind of death and re-birth, Nishida delved deeper into the relation between the individual finite human self and the absolute or God. In his view, this relation logically defines the place of religion. Experientially it comes to the fore in death. [..] Death is not an event at the end of one's life but penetrates life at each and every moment.

Nishida maintains, the individual precisely as distinct entails a plurality of interrelated individuals. Where his previous analysis of individual self-awareness described it as a self- reflection of the universal of self-awareness, his description now incorporated the dimension of recognition. My recognition of you as not me makes me who I am, and your recognition of me as not-you makes you who you are. Each is a relative other to the self. [..] My personal self-awareness arises not when I recognize my identity through memory, for example, nor simply when I encounter an other I; rather it arises in experiencing the groundlessness of my own existence, in recognizing what is absolutely other to a substantial self-same self. Recognizing the absolute other within constitutes not simply a reflexive self-awareness but a self-awakening, a realizing of the “true self.” (Nishida's term jikaku translates as self-awakening, a Buddhist reading he undoubtedly intends, as well as self-awareness.) Nishida allows for the Buddhist view that there is actually no self to awaken by referring to the self-awakening of absolute nothingness; its awakening is the awakening of the “true self.” [..] In the end, then, Nishida denies the substantiality of the self and rejects both the radical alterity of other persons and the transcendence of an absolute other, in the guise of God for example.

Nishida Kitarō was the most significant and influential Japanese philosopher of the twentieth-century. His work is pathbreaking in several respects: it established in Japan the creative discipline of philosophy as practiced in Europe and the Americas; it enriched that discipline by infusing Anglo-European philosophy with Asian sources of thought; it provided a new basis for philosophical treatments of East Asian Buddhist thought; and it produced novel theories of self and world with rich implications for contemporary philosophizing. Nishida's work is also frustrating for its repetitive and often obscure style, exceedingly abstract formulations, and detailed but frequently dead-end investigations. Nishida once said of his work, “I have always been a miner of ore; I have never managed to refine it” (Nishida 1958, Preface)

Nishida implies that the proper relation between cultures is parallel to that between “I and Thou.” In simpler language: “A true world culture will be formed only by various cultures preserving their own respective viewpoints, but simultaneously developing themselves through global mediation”. [..] Nevertheless a special place is accorded the nation of Japan. The Japanese nation is in a position to foster not only an awareness of the East but also a global awareness on the part of every nation. For Japan is the nation in Asia that has best retained Asian traditions while adapting Western technology and values. In the new world order Japan can stand for Asia, and stand against the domination of the West. [...] A charitable reading of Nishida's statements on the special place of Japan interprets them as advocating that his country overcome its outdated vision of itself as a colonizing nation, and embrace a global conception of itself as a nation interacting with other nations in a world of mutually defining equals.[4] A more critical reading interprets these statements as falsely absolutizing the particular nation of Japan in that in the name of Japan they embrace other nations of the East and then abstractly oppose the East to the West.

The self-reflection known as self-consciousness or self- awareness (jikaku) provides an answer. There is a form of consciousness that inherently reflects or mirrors itself within itself, so that there is no difference between that which reflects and what is reflected. In self-awareness, immediate experiencing and reflection are unified. In epistemological terms, knower and known are the same, and this instance of unity serves as the prototype of all knowledge. [..] As in modern phenomenology, consciousness for Nishida means simply that which makes manifest or, to use a visual metaphor, that which illuminates. To emphasize its non-objectifiable character, Nishida later will place consciousness “in” nothingness, that is, consider it a “form” of nothingness, and will eventually consider this a form of relative or oppositional nothingness, a non-being with respect to beings. [..] In this stage of his work Nishida, influenced by Fichte and Schopenhauer, considered “absolute will” as the preeminent form of self-awareness and saw it as the source of acts of moral decision and of the creation and appreciation of art. Since the activity of the will eludes reflection, however, Nishida eventually abandoned this formulation of a unitary source.

Nishida once suggested that we can distinguish traditional Eastern and Western philosophies by the East's prioritizing of nothingness and the West's reliance on being (NKZ VII, 429–30; Nishida 1970b, 237).

In his first book, An Inquiry Into the Good, for example, arguing that logical reasons are often not sufficient to motivate good conduct, he alludes to a maxim of Confucius: “The saying Do not do unto others what you would not have others do unto you, is nearly meaningless without the motivation of sympathy” (Nishida 1990, 113; NKZ I, 132).

If judgments describe things and states of affairs and thus would give us access to reality by setting themselves over-against that reality, we must step back as it were and consider a wider reality that includes judgments. In other words, we must place judgments that predicate universals of things into a wider field of predication, that is, in the “transcendental predicate” of consciousness. [..] [he] developed what he called a predicate logic. He thinks of universals as fields of possibility that becomes specified or determined (more accurately, that determine themselves) in their particular instantiations. There is a necessary hierarchy of concreteness among universals that Nishida expresses as the order of topoi or places (basho). Most abstract are the universals that serve as predicates in particular judgments. Judging or predication in turn takes place in the topos of consciousness, which is further concretized as the universal or topos of reflexive self-awareness wherein acts of seeing, knowing, desiring and willing take place.

Nishida initially formulated his logic of place or topos to counter Neo-Kantian epistemology that took knowledge to be the subject's form-ruled construction of an objective world. He sought not only to undermine the distinctions between subjective and objective but also to place both sides within a more comprehensive and concrete conception. [...] Nishida articulated the topoi also in terms of what we may call a me-ontology, from the Greek meon or non-being. The topos of being describes the world of nature. The topos of relative nothingness comprises the field of consciousness that is no- thing with respect to the things of which it is conscious. This nothingness however is still opposed to being, and so differs from the absolute nothingness that underlies both sides of the opposition. Here and elsewhere Nishida plays on the word for absolute in Japanese, zettai, which literally means breaking through or overcoming opposition. His premise is that the meaning of “to be” is “to be within”; the ultimate “within” is the topos of absolute nothingness.

A model of interpretation is relevant: every text has its context, which in turn may be made a text or thematized by appealing to a further context. There is no final context that can be specified without referring to yet another context. For Nishida this relation would not be settled by invoking the notion of an infinite regress; rather it indicates the necessity of an ultimate context of a different order, one that allows the distinction between a specific text and its context. This ultimately unspecifiable context in Nishida's terms is called absolute nothingness.

We may understand his philosophical project overall as an attempt to restore to experience and consciousness the rigor, necessity and universality accorded to logic. This project developed in a direction quite opposite to that of psychologism, which would reduce logic to the contingencies of the individual mind or brain. It also differed from efforts to establish pure logic as a self- explanatory realm in that Nishida insisted on the starting point of experience, a priority he shared with Husserl's phenomenology and William James' radical empiricism. We might characterize his philosophy in general as a phenomenological metaphysics or an ontology of logical forms, but with one qualification: although he proposed a unitary source of such forms, that source is neither exclusionary nor positive; in other words the source itself cannot be described monistically as a single, more basic form or thing. Nishida eventually called this source MU (nothingness), a notion he found particularly prominent in the traditions of the East.

His notion of the essentiality of religion is remarkably individualistic, removed from all social contingencies. He locates the core of religion in the heart of the individual: religious awareness arises in one's knowing one's own death.

In a sense awareness is irreducible, but it has a logical structure that accounts for its connection to a world of objects. Structurally, awareness mirrors itself in itself, in a manner analogous to the way an infinite set mirrors itself in its equivalent subsets, or to the way an ideal map mirrors itself in all accurate representations of that map.[2] (Note that the English awareness can be used without the word self but the Japanese word that translates as self-awareness is an inseparable compound, ji-kaku.) If [..] Modern epistemology's solution was to split the world in two, mind and nature, and then to see the mind as a mirror of nature, and ideas as representations of real objects. Nishida's solution was to see the world as mirroring itself in all the things “in the world.” Whatever is “in the world” is a mirroring of the world. In this sense it is the world that is “self-aware” or self-reflexive; and there is no outside to it. An individual's “self-awareness” is a partial mirroring of the world; Nishida later described the individual self as a focal point of the world. While he was still thinking in terms of consciousness, however, Nishida avoided pinpointing awareness and spoke of the world as a field of consciousness to indicate the extension of the term beyond the individual self.

If death is an ever-present opening, the other side of that opening so to speak is the absolute. To die is to stand vis-à-vis the absolute. In the discussion of the “I- Thou” relation, this term appeared as the absolute other in one's interior; here it shifts to the absolute in contradistinction to finite beings. Nishida calls it God as well, but makes clear that he is not referring to a personal, transcendent being. If transcendence is involved, it is a going beyond by going within. He also implies that it is not synonymous with absolute nothingness. If nothingness as opposed to being is implied, it is in the verbal sense of self-negating. The absolute arises through its own self-negation and inclusion of the relative self. [..] Nishida admits that his notion of an absolute totally embracing the relative, even in its diabolical forms, is more in tune with a Mahayana Buddhist tradition than with the Christian sources that inspired him. To express the relation between a God and the relative finite self, Nishida introduces a new term, “inverse correlation”(gyaku taiō). This relation is another instance of opposites held together in a unity, a kind of “self-identity of contradictories,” but this time not a symmetrical one. The more one faces one's death, the negation of one's life as an individual, the more acutely one is self-aware as an individual. The closer the finite self approaches God the stronger the difference between them becomes. This peculiar kind of relation implies that God and the relative self are inseparable but never dissolve into one another. If their distinction entails an undifferentiated source of their difference, an absolute nothingness, then the more that source is emphasized the stronger the distinction holds.

We may use Nishida's own terms to explain his second concern, the way that objects ordinarily function in judgments. In what Nishida alternatively called the logic of objects or subjective logic, objects of consciousness are made the subject of propositions or judgments, and are specified by predicating properties of the (grammatical) subject. Eventually a subject is reached that cannot itself be predicated of anything else, recalling Aristotle's hypokeimenon or individual substance that can be subject but never predicate.

...the standpoint of place or topos (basho). This involves the attempts to articulate levels of differentiation and place them in more and more inclusive circles (to use one of Nishida's metaphors) until one reaches the most concrete and comprehensive circle, a circle without circumference whose center is everywhere. Nishida calls each such circle a place or topos, which allow things to be and to be seen as what they are. The final topos places self-awareness in the world of action and expression which contextualizes it, and ultimately in absolute nothingness. Nishida refers to the ultimate topos, alluding to Buddhist doctrine, as “the form of the formless,” clearly replacing earlier attempts to describe the basic form of concrete reality in positive and subjectivistic terms such as pure experience, self-awareness and absolute free will

Comprehending reality for him was an emotive as well as intellectual achievement; his calligraphy and poetry, renowned in their own right, evince an acute awareness of transience and transcendence.