“To experience means to know facts just as they are, to know in accordance with facts by completely relinquishing one's own fabrications.”
Nishida Kitarō · Kyoto School
knowledgemind
Paraphrase or translation
Philosopher
Last reviewed:
Nishida Kitarō
1870–1945 · Kyoto School · Modern
Nishida Kitarō founded the Kyoto School, the first major body of modern Japanese philosophy in dialogue with Western thought. In An Inquiry into the Good he begins from pure experience, a stage before any split into subject and object, drawing on William James and on Zen practice. Later he developed the logic of basho, 'place': the field in which oppositions such as self and world appear, ending in the 'place of absolute nothingness'.
Read more
His wartime essays on Japanese culture remain debated; scholars disagree on how far he resisted or accommodated nationalism.
One card from the opening of the Inquiry.
Start here
An Inquiry into the Good, Part I, chapter 1.
It defines pure experience in a few pages.
Quotations
Key ideas
Pure experience
Before 'I see the flower' there is just the seeing. Subject and object are later abstractions.
Basho
Things and selves appear within a field, and the deepest field is absolute nothingness.
East meets West
Western logic and Buddhist insight in one system.
Major works
An Inquiry into the Good (1911)
Abe and Ives translation.
Place (1926)
The logic of basho.
Influences
Influenced
- Nishitani Keiji
Common misreadings
- Nothingness is not a void or nihilism. It is the field that lets things appear.
- His political writings are contested; neither 'nationalist' nor 'resister' settles it.
Famous lines Nishida Kitarō never said
None of the lines this library files for Nishida Kitarō is marked Questionable or Misattributed. That is only a fact about these cards. It is not a certificate that every popular sentence is theirs.
FAQ
What is the best book to start with?
An Inquiry into the Good, Part I, chapter 1. It defines pure experience in a few pages.
What is the most famous quote?
This library does not measure fame, and it does not rank lines by how often they are shared. The first line it files for Nishida Kitarō that is not marked Questionable or Misattributed is “To experience means to know facts just as they are, to know in accordance with facts by completely relinquishing one's own fabrications.” (An Inquiry into the Good, Part I, ch. 1, tr. Masao Abe and Christopher Ives, Paraphrase or translation).
What is the most misquoted line?
None of the lines this library files for Nishida Kitarō is marked Misattributed or Questionable. That is a fact about these cards, not a certificate that every popular sentence is theirs.
What is one key idea, in a sentence?
Pure experience: Before 'I see the flower' there is just the seeing. Subject and object are later abstractions.