A Study Of Good
Nishida Kitaro
Printing Bureau, Japanese Government
Nishida’s philosophy of absolute nothingness or his logic of the self-identity of absolute contradictions is difficult to understand, I believe, unless one is passably acquainted with Zen experience.  Nishida himself was a good student of Zen and always deplored the fact that the Zen advocates, especially those who are regarded as its authorized exponents, are utterly ignorant of, or indifferent to, West- ern philosophy or the Western way of thinking.  He thought it was his mission to make Zen intelligible to the West.  Western people generally look down upon the Eastern mind as not sufficiently equipped with intellectual apparatus to deal with problems of reality or being.  They forget, however, that the intellect is not the only instrument to solve these problems, and that the East has found its own method of grappling with them, effectively and satisfactorily.

It is true that philosophers of the West talk about pure experience or radical empiricism or transcendental apperception or the intuition of the “here-now’”.  But these ideas are the outcome of intellectual analysis and abstraction.  In the East nothingness or emptiness or the self-identity of contradictions has nothing to do with analysis and abstraction, it 1s purely an experience personally gone through.  In other words, the West starts intellectually with a dualistic world, whereas the East keeps the feet firmly on the ground of emptiness, which is a world of concrete existentialism and not a logical framework of abstraction.

It is, therefore, quite natural that the East has no philosophy corresponding to the various systems of speculation as we see in the West.  Easterners have no need for such, their approach to life and reality is not on the plane of intellection.  To them the “trans- cendental apperception” is a matter of pure experience and not the concept the great German thinker reached after years of intense thinking.  Nishida makes the Western point of arrival his point of departure, that is to say, his analysis begins with the self-identity of contradictions and after much. logical maneuvering returns to it.  The tour, apparently unnecessary, was not to no purpose because he thus could make his experience of Zen much clearer and more illuminating not only to himself but to others.  The latter now feel that the intellect in itself may lead one to an endless labyrinth but that when it is backed by a personal experience it helps to clarify the whole situation.