TTS Editions | Miki Kiyoshi | Archive 00001 | Philosophy | Shard 00001

Thinking with Master Nishida | August 1941

Translated from the Japanese by Christopher Southward | 2023*

1

It was April 1917, and Master Nishida was in Tokyo to speak at a philosophy conference organized around the theme of The Multiplicity of Worlds.  I was still a student at First Higher School then, and while this was the first time that I’d see the Master in person, his presentation made a deep and lasting impression on me even though it was far beyond my understanding. 

Nishida entered the stage dressed in formal Japanese robes and, adding to his mystique, he paced the stage while speaking in fits and starts, gazing at the floor while warming up his topic.  Rather than directly addressing the audience from notes, he appeared as though he were arranging his thoughts and presenting them underway as he analyzed and resynthesized their many parts.  Now and then, he’d stop in his tracks, pick up a piece of chalk, and trace circles and lines across the blackboard, doing this not as much for our benefit as in search of a method properly suited to the expression of his ideas.  Not the lecturing professor here, this was the Master deeply engaged in the act of philosophizing.  I was witnessing nothing short of the very agonistic unfolding of his thinking, and I now realize that he gave this presentation during what was perhaps the most prolific period of his life in letters.  Following its debut in The Journal of Philosophy [1], the study he presented that day appeared that fall as the postscript to his monumental Intuition and Reflection Within Consciousness [2], and if we were to read this text as an indictment of philosophical hubris, then Master Nishida would appear as that movement’s most apt proponent.

I decided to enroll that fall in the Department of Philosophy at Kyoto Imperial University as Master Nishida’s apprentice after reading an out-of-print edition of his Inquiry into the Good [3], which I’d scavenged at a used bookstore ahead of its republication by Iwanami [4].  Though already a peerless figure within Japanese philosophy, the Master was as yet rather unknown to the world at large, but his name soon began to spread as the result of the publication of Kurata Hyakuzō’s Origins of Love and Understanding [5], which was currently popular among the youth and where, as I recall, he introduced Master Nishida to a larger reading public.  In fact, An Inquiry into the Good jumpstarted my own career in letters, as it was this book that gave me direction when I was at the peak of indecision over what path to take in life.  If this is what philosophy is all about, I thought, then philosophy is what I will do!  While every student of the humanities dreamed in those days of being admitted to Tokyo Imperial University, I was determined to enter the philosophy department at Kyoto in order to study under Master Nishida.  Having so decided, I consulted and gained the support of Professor Hayami Hiroshi [6], who’d patiently mentored me throughout my youth.  With this, I struck out on my own and left my friends behind for Kyoto—a familiar experience, as I’d been a loner since my first year in high school and felt certain that I was destined to lead a life of utter solitude.  Even so, those formative years were the backdrop against which I would fulfill my dreams.  Having left home for Tokyo with only a vague notion of what I would do there, I now found myself leaving the capital for Kyoto with a clear objective in mind, and this encouraged me to persevere. 

September marked the beginning of the school year then and, on my way home in early July, I visited Master Nishida at his home in Rakuhoku, Tanaka Village, Kyoto with my recommendation letter from Professor Hayami in hand.  No sooner had I knocked on the door as I struggled to compose myself than Master Nishida opened it and greeted me.  “Ah, yes!,” he said as I introduced myself, “I’ve been expecting you since your visit with Hayami in Tokyo this spring!,” and he then began discussing with me all manner of things, including his upcoming lectures and course assignments.  When I asked him where I should begin my studies in philosophy, he recommended Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and retrieved a copy of the text from a shelf, handing it to me on the condition that I duly return it.  The current state of our political climate combined with the American wartime trade embargo made it nearly impossible to get hold of German books in Japan then, but one of my high school pals had discovered a tattered copy of a Reclam [7] edition of The First Critique at a used bookstore, and I now recall how we all looked upon him with great envy as he walked around flaunting it. 

Master Nishida treated me kindly from the moment we first met, so I visited him two or three times a month while studying at Kyoto, and our company was always candid and carefree.  Even so, he seldom broached a topic of conversation of his own accord, and we’d often spend half an hour or so sitting in complete silence while I squandered time wondering what questions to ask until, finally unable any longer to bear the tension, I’d announce my departure and get up to leave.  “As you wish,” he’d say, leaving me to decide whether to stay or to go.  A classmate once told me that this was just the Master’s way, and now that I think about it, I realize that this was the busiest period of his career, when he was living and breathing philosophy, so to speak, and it’s certain that he had no time to entertain the passing whims of half-witted students like me. 

I often caught glimpses of Master Nishida out for walks while on my way to school.  Wearing a wide sash tied loosely around his robed waist, he always moved in long, brisk strides as though driven by an unseen force.  He appeared enchanted at such moments, and it seems to me that his philosophy is suffused with something of the same intensity that I glimpsed in his morning strolls.  

2

Master Nishida always held evening seminars, and his Saturday lectures on special topics were perennial campus favorites—standing-room-only affairs that saw students from the humanities and other departments jostling for space alongside Kyoto Imperial University alumni.  During the five-year period between my enrollment there and my departure for research abroad [8], I faithfully attended his lectures, never missing a session.  The Master always arrived dressed in Japanese robes, and he always spoke in fits and starts while pacing the platform, stopping now and then to trace lines and circles across the blackboard in exposition of his ideas; everything about him was just as I remembered of our first encounter at the philosophy conference in Tokyo.  Now and then, he’d pause behind the rostrum and fall contemplatively silent.  Then, suddenly, as if struck by the solution to a problem and then redirecting his thinking, he’d resume speaking with renewed vigor.  He always stared at the floor while pacing it in speech, but he’d sometimes stop mid-thought and gaze long and myopically at the audience—his signal that it was time either to take a break or to end the session.  His lectures were always scheduled for two hours, but there were times when he’d finish his presentation in one, whereupon he’d say something along the lines of, “I’m exhausted today, so let’s wrap it up here.”  Something about these words always seemed to warm the hearts of those gathered, as we all immediately realized that the Master probably had sat up studying late into the night in preparation for that evening’s meeting.

Departing from the hum-drum teaching methods that one tends to find in the common educator, Master Nishida always spoke without pretension, which is to say that instead of obliging an audience to endure drawn-out explanations of this or that concept, he openly welcomed us to join him in meandering quests of truth grounded in rigorous philosophical speculation.  While the average reader might struggle to understand his work, one discovers with patience that a revelatory phrase can suddenly appear from the spiritual-textual interstices that explicate his intricate logic, bursting forth from their depths in such ways as to illuminate an entire passage.  As such, readers who until such moments might have been disheartened by the density of his work suddenly find their efforts rewarded and discover the wherewithal to continue.  The situation was the same with his lectures.  Students arrived having prepared by reading the Master’s work, and he would begin by exploring the assigned texts, addressing confusing and challenging points along the way, so that the utterance of a simple word or phrase could suddenly reveal a world of meaning and its possible implications for being, and I remember now that my private meetings with him unfolded in like fashion.  He often appeared during our conversations to strike upon lines of thinking that hadn’t occurred to him while, say, writing, lecturing, or consulting with other students and colleagues.  In the years following the publication of Intuition and Reflection Within Consciousness, he further developed as a logician in the purest sense of the word, and I’m grateful for having gotten to study with him during this period.  When I think about his distinctive lecturing style, what I most vividly recall is the Master’s notion of structure, for the act of teaching was for him not a matter of explaining and describing things but of risking the making and unmaking of sense in the interest of building a tenable philosophical system. 

Never one to interfere with his students’ research, Master Nishida allowed us to discover and trace the trajectories of our own thinking.  In this respect, he was often so lenient with us as to appear indifferent to our efforts, but I now understand that he was only using unconventional ways to encourage us all to develop our own voices, and it must have pained him when he found us trying to mimic his style instead.  When we approached him with research proposals, the Master’s reply was always the same:  “Yes, that sounds like an interesting project!,” he’d say, and he’d then begin offering suggestions on methodology and texts we might consider.  He and I had a natural rapport from the start, and such moments always made me feel as though I were confiding in an attentive father-figure.  He could be rather intimidating, but he always warmly welcomed everyone he met, including students who came to him with nothing to say; in my opinion, this was a mark of his greatness as a teacher.  He never dictated our thinking or made unreasonable demands of us, and he never turned anyone away.  It goes without saying, then, that those fortunate enough to have studied under him lavishly praised him, and this tendency extended even to his many general readers.  While the respect he garnered certainly had much to do with his authority as a philosopher, we can also mark it up to his graceful humility as a simple human being.  

The development of Master Nishida’s philosophical system is the result of more than genius; rather, it’s at least equally due to the fact that he never ceases to study.  Even now, when he is already well into his seventies, he continues to research and learn new things, and he has taught me that constant study is the hallmark of a true thinker.  While it is precisely this commitment to scholarship that keeps him from falling into the meditative quietism that we commonly find among would-be philosophers, we glean from his work the difficulty of translating one’s meditative experience into thinking and of conveying to the reader through text insights gained through the silence of sitting.  A voracious reader who’s always on the lookout for new developments in world philosophy, the Master consumes the latest work on all manner of topics.  No sooner had Western philosophy entered Japanese minds than he incorporated it into a unique system of thought, and it is was through his work that our nation discovered its many possibilities.  From Henri-Louis Bergson’s [9] meditations on time and duration to the neo-Kantianism [10] of Heinrich Rickert [11] and Hermann Cohen [12] or, say, from the work of Franz Brentano [13], Alexius Meinong [14] and the German-Austrian traditions to Edmund Husserl’s [15] phenomenology and the dialectical theology of Karl Barth [16], Master Nishida was their most vocal supporter.  Beginning with Leibniz [17], he popularized Western philosophers here by discovering new approaches to their work, but his research was so wide-ranging that it seems certain that even Cohen and others have greatly influenced him; in fact, I recall that he was always deeply studying mathematics while I was a student in Kyoto.  Maybe this is why he invited the mathematician Dr. Sono Masazō [18] to the department for talks on such topics as set and group theory, but what’s notable here is that he enthusiastically attended those sessions right alongside his students.  Shortly thereafter, he embarked on studies of Marx [19] and a constellation of related thinkers, and we find him in recent years deeply engrossed in history, including the works of Leopold von Ranke [20].  He certainly has a unique reading style, and I witnessed this first-hand while working with him.  Instead of scientifically analyzing each theoretical detail of a treatise, Master Nishida reads intuitively, gleaning the general movement of a writer’s logic by immersing himself in their world, and this remarkable ability to grasp a text’s most salient features speaks to his intellectual sensibility.  And not only this, but he has an uncannily refined way of discerning the merits of a wide range of texts, easily classifying them in terms of the good, the useful, and the absolutely indispensable.  And how accurate this sense of his is!  It’s marked by genius, yes, but he could only have cultivated it by sustaining a far-reaching reading practice.  Kyoto University’s philosophy department now has what is arguably the most revered library in all of Japan, and this is largely due to the fact that the Master strategically and lovingly curated the collection during his teaching tenure; in fact, I often found him browsing the stacks during my own research visits there.

Master Nishida can also be rather mean-spirited.  There were times during our conversations at his home or office when he would mention a well-known philosopher, ask me what I thought of their work, and immediately condemn them.  “It’s garbage!,” he might exclaim, interrupting me just as I began to speak, but the fact of the mater is that even his harsh criticisms were usually well warranted.  He appears here to be led by a unique combination of heightened intuition and unshakable courage, and I can think of no one who rivals him in this respect.  Then again, given his reading practice, this much is to be expected.  When I visit him at his home, I often find books lying open on his desk alongside slips of paper onto which he’ll either have copied one or two important passages or jotted down thoughts that might have struck him while reading; what’s more, he always takes notes in German. 

Master Nishida is as critical of people as he is of books and, here too, he has an uncommon ability to condense into pithy statements his observations of a person’s character, even if what are off-putting traits for him might be inconsequential for someone else.  While he’s certainly both daring and unforgiving in this respect, he’s also rather kindhearted and sentimental.  During seminar one day, he called upon a student whose turn it was to contribute to the discussion only to find them unprepared to speak.  So angered by this was the Master that, visibly teary-eyed, he abruptly reprimanded the student, shouting, “Knuckleheads like you should drop out of school!”  This outburst at once made even me cry as it confirmed his deep commitment to his craft, and while he always seeks balance in judgement and temperament, there are times in fact when I think he’s much too forgiving.  Whenever I visited him after long absences, he always made sure to ask about his apprentices:  “How is So-and-So?”, say.  At other times, he might passingly greet me in the way of, “How are things?  Have you been studying?,” and should I happen to have been idling, then these questions always struck me with a special sting.  But because I knew that he was genuinely interested in my intellectual development, I always returned home determined to work even harder.

I remember this as though it were only yesterday, but it must have happened around the time that I was in graduate school.  I was visiting the now late Professor Fukuda Yasukazu [21], and as was fairly common with him then, he was drinking and already a little tipsy when I arrived at his office. When conversation turned to Master Nishida, Professor Fukuda said, “That Nishida is full of the animal spirits [22], isn’t he?”  In fact, I just happened recently to have published in Bungei Shunj­­ū [23] a paper on Descartes’ notion of the animal spirits, and I must say that I too have often sensed something of this at work in him.  Indeed, we might fairly say that this “subtle wind”and “flame” [24] are at the very core of his being.  Even now, when he’s well into his seventies and thinning with age, the Master is as sprightly as ever, and he handily scarfs down mounds of sweets and fruit and guzzles pots of tea with the best of them.  Something tells me that there’s an element to his thinking that is so radically animalistic as to reveal the unwavering power of his spirit, radiant as it is with this ineffable force.  He seldom shows it publicly, but Master Nishida strikes me as one who’s much more empathetic than the average person; we might even say that he senses an infinite darkness lurking in the deepest recesses of Mind.  Never a pure philosophical concept, Mind is for the Master always a matter of material-corporeal experience itself—the very basis of human subjectivity [25].  There must certainly be at work in him a spirit that gives him to thinking even though he most profoundly understands that thinking is the original sin.  His philosophy is an attempt to illuminate that darkness—in fact, it’s the very light that shines forth from it—and the deeper the darkness, the stricter its demands upon rationality.  If his philosophy resists classification as pure irrationalism, then neither can we think it as simple intuitionism, so that, in final analysis, we can say that Master Nishida works in tireless quest of both reason and sense.  Nothing is more splendid than a burst of light that pierces the pitch-black night of thought, and thinking is just this light for the Master [26]; it rises from that abysmal pit in such a way as to inform his allure.  He is said to have been an avid reader of Russian literature during his teaching tenure at Fourth Higher School.  Even now, he’s quite fond of Dostoyevsky [27], and it seems to me that certain points resonate between their work.  Going well beyond mere mysticism, this resonance responds to the problem of what the Master calls “historical substance” [28].

3

When writing, Master Nishida makes a point of drafting two to three pages of text every morning, his work regimen being comparable to that of an epic-form novelist.  In fact, I get the impression that he composes his theses with the same sort of enthusiasm that one finds in a fledgling writer, their incremental progression serving as something of a journal of his thinking whose circular logic absolutely defies restriction to the linear chapter sequencing that we find in the average treatise.  Master Nishida has never to date written the standard sort of text that might have allowed for ready division into easily discernible sections; rather, he pens dissertations that he compiles into tomes.  And these are no regular theses.  I gather of his process that as soon as he’s brought a text to a stage of relative completion, he then sets to working out ideas that he feels need more development, and this always leads to yet another project.  But his texts have no “end” as such.  He often refers to Fiedler’s [29] notion that the work of art is never complete, and it is precisely incompletion that I believe characterizes his work.  Master Nishida works in such a way as to compose a single long-form thesis in the course of writing several essays in fragments.  But, even here, his work is never done.  He strikes me as the figure of the novelist who, having spent his life writing shorter works, eventually discovers his efforts to have culminated in nothing less than one great saga.  Although he writes on a wide range of topics, his body of work represents his singular quest, unparalleled in its rigor and consistency, for the essence of a unified foundational principle.  Of course, his recent Inquiry into the Good shows development of this search throughout, and while it is imperative that we watch what he does there in this respect, let us also note that this text offers its own series of fundamental principles that we would be remiss to overlook.  While he is an extremely perceptive thinker of his epoch, the Master also stands out for his ability to generate new epistemological trends, such that we might even say that he has the sensibilities of a world-class journalist.  And even this fails to capture the truth of his gift, for no other thinker rivals him in either his keenness and sensitivity to the movements of an era or his tireless pursuit of an ideal, and it is precisely these elements that are the sources of the novelty and depth of his philosophy.  Seers tend either to vacillate between any of the vain pursuits that define an era or to fixate upon a single one that suits them with such narrow vision that they finally find themselves stagnating and accomplishing nothing; neither is the case with Master Nishida.  That ways of living are determined by their environments and, conversely, that environments are determined by ways of living is a point about which he is adamant lately, and this dialectic just about sums up his philosophical style.  Suffice it to say that the Master’s unique writing style is so integral to his philosophy as to render them inseparable.  Just as Hegel [30] thought through his distinctive writing style, so too does Master Nishida through his own.  For the Master, style is itself a philosophy, and it would be nearly impossible for him to express the one without the other.

Master Nishida’s philosophy is imbued with Eastern intuition, and while he might have developed this sense through his zen practice, we can assume that there must also be other contributing factors at play.  One actually hears echoes of Gutoku Shinran [31] throughout his work, and while it even resonates with the ideas of Motoori Norinaga [32] and others, I think it would be more accurate to say that the markedly “oriental” elements of the Master’s thought could only have emerged from directly lived experience; in fact, life itself is the source of all that is new in his philosophical perspective.  While this aspect of his work places it in dialogue with thinkers like Goethe [33], Master Nishida must be quite appalled by recent popular trends in zen, as he aims only to develop a uniquely Japanese philosophy.  In fact, he always says that he must “pass through Western logic in order to attain the essence of a Japanese philosophical sensibility,” and he offers the following advice to the youth: “Read the Eastern classics for personal growth and enrichment, but turn to the West if you plan to study philosophy.”  I gather from this that he means that while deep study of Western philosophy is indispensable to the work of becoming an academic philosopher, to the degree that the discipline transcends the academy and has practical implications for life itself, it is incumbent upon the student to learn the many lessons offered by Eastern literary and spiritual traditions.  I believe that philosophical depth derives from human greatness, which is to say that it is neither acquired through imitation nor learned through study.  The depth of Master Nishida’s philosophy is grounded in his personal greatness, and even if we were to consider his character apart from it, we would have to concede that he is nonetheless rare in his time.  In fact, one of my acquaintances once noted that Master Nishida and Master Rōhan [34] are the world’s preeminent Japanese writers today.

When I was a student at Kyoto Imperial University, Master Nishida always arrived to campus dressed in a kimono and work boots, and I always thought that this gave him the appearance of something between a village elder and a schoolmaster.  Covering topics ranging from Meinong’s notion of the object to Husserl’s phenomenological method, his seminars were filled with lectures on the latest developments in Western philosophy as yet largely unknown in Japan.  In this way, the Master presented a figure that combined the best characteristics of the country bumpkin and the avant-garde scholar.  Max Wundt [35] has argued that Socrates [36] represented the ethical traditions of Attican aggrarian life.  But let us note that even Socrates incorporated into his philosophy elements that resembled sophist teachings that were then new to Greek thought and widely circulated throughout Athens from abroad, and we can say that, within Japan, Master Nishida’s philosophy holds a position similar to that which Socrates’ thinking held in Greece in his day.  Promoting neither moral orthodoxy nor pure sophism, Socrates instead developed a method unsurpassed in his time for its novelty and originality and thereby established the ancient Greek philosophical tradition.  So too with Master Nishida who, by bridging the gap between East and West, has developed a completely new Japanese philosophy.

4

‍ Master Nishida is always well-informed about worldly affairs, and I often find myself amazed by the range of his grasp of the human condition.  Especially since his retirement from Kyoto Imperial University, during which time his teaching and administrative responsibilities must have been drastically reduced, he has become more outspoken about social and economic issues, the political climate, and other areas of interest.  He’s recently acquired a villa in Kamakura and regularly spends winter and summer months there, and our conversations always begin with an overview of current affairs when I go to visit him.  It follows to reason that he should want to enjoy the limited time that he allows himself in the company of others discussing mundane topics, as he spends the majority of his time alone grappling with philosophical problems.  Even so, Master Nishida never approaches the news with the disengaged attitude of the passive consumer; rather, he grows more heated with each passing moment that we spend in debate.  At such times, it’s as though he were rolling up his sleeves, so to speak, and preparing to stake his life on a worthy cause.  Call him chivalrous or romantic, but I certainly sense in him the best of the Meiji-era gentleman, and while he can be rather exacting in his observations and criticisms of social conditions, I find that he usually hits his mark with well-formed arguments.  This could have something to do with his experience of mentoring the likes of Konoe Fumimaro [37] and Kido Kōichi [38] during his tenure at Gakushūin University.  Since their promotions to high governmental positions, Master Nishida has become even more attentive to state affairs.  I can only imagine the sorts of criticisms he might have leveled at Konoe, Kido, and other officials, but the fact of the matter is that, even as he ages, the Master grows more outraged by our nation’s political direction.  It’s as though he’s regained an adolescent spirit in this respect, and we can only commend him for his patriotic love for the people.  His wide-ranging interests and knowledge notwithstanding, Master Nishida has remained throughout his career committed to a single ideal, and he’s never taken a moment’s rest from its pursuit.  While he’s amassed an exemplary body of work, we can expect his abilities to have allowed him to create nothing less.  Every time we meet, he says to me, “My work has only begun,” and it is with such dogged persistence that he keeps his objective in view.  Indeed, his is a single-mindedness that puts the rest of us to shame.  He once gave me a scroll upon which he’d penned a poem; it reads:

Red like the rising sun                                                                 

over the peaks of Mt. Atago—                                                 

Such is the becoming of life  

whose embers never die.

I can think of no better words to capture the essence of the Master.

[1]『哲学雑誌』

[2] 『自覚に於ける直観と反省』

[3] 『善の研究』

[4]   岩波書店 : Iwanami Shoten, est. 1913 by Iwanami Shigeo (Japan, 1881-1946)

[5] 『愛と認識との出発』、倉田百三著 (Japan, 1891-1943)

[6]   速水滉 (Japan, 1876-1943)

[7] Reclam Publishers, est. 1828 by Anton Philipp Reclam (1807-1896)

[8] See Yusa Michiko’s [遊佐美智子] consideration of Miki’s European research period in “Philosophy and Inflation: Miki Kiyoshi in Weimar Germany, 1922-1924.”  Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 53, No. 1, Spring 1998, pp. 45-71.

[9] Henri-Louis Bergson (France, 1859-1941)

[10] Immanuel Kant (Germany, 1724-1804)

[11] Heinrich Rickert (Germany, 1863-1936)

[12] Hermann Cohen (Germany, 1842-1918)

[13] Franz Brentano (Germany, 1838-1917)

[14] Alexius Meinong (Ukraine; Austria, 1853-1920)

[15] Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (Austria; Germany, 1859-1938)

[16] Karl Barth (Switzerland, 1886-1968)

[17] Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (Germany, 1646-1716)

[18] 園正造博士 (Japan, 1886-1969)

[19] Karl Marx (Germany, 1818-1883)

[20] Leopold von Ranke (Germany, 1795-1886)

[21] 深田康算 (Japan, 1878-1928)

[22] 動物精気: See René Descartes’ (France, 1596-1650) notion of les esprits animaux [the animal spirits] in Discourse on Method:  “And finally what in all this is most remarkable of all, is the generation of the animal spirits, which resemble a very subtle wind, or rather a flame which is very pure and very vivid, and which, continually rising up in great abundance from the heart to the brain, thence proceeds through the nerves to the muscles, thereby giving the power of motion to all the members” (The Philosophical Works of Descartes, Vol. 1.  Translated by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross.  London: Cambridge University Press, 1973, p. 115).

[23] 文藝春秋: Japanese periodical and press est. 1923 by Kikuchi Kan [菊池寛] (Japan, 1888-1948)

[24] Op. Cit., p. 115.

[25] My rendering here of Miki’s treatment of the question of experience in Nishida’s work is informed by William Haver’s explication of the taiken/keiken [体験・経験] distinction as it appears in Nishida’s work. On this note, see his introduction and glossary entry to Ontology of Production: Three Essays by Nishida Kitarō.  Translated by William Haver. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012, pp. 1-33; p. 196).

[26] Just as Marx sought to overcome the dialectical tension between “dead” and “living labour,” Nishida sought to transcend “the given” as “that which is thought” through what he called the “passage of the made to the making,” and this unmaking and remaking of made sense deeply resonates with Heidegger’s question concerning “thinking.” On these points, consider, for examle, Marx’s Capital, Nishida’s “Absolute-Contradictory Self-Identity” （「絶対矛盾的自己同一」）, and Heidegger’s What is Called Thinking?

[27] Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (Russia, 1821-1881)

[28] 歴史的物質

[29] Friedrich Kurt Fiedler (Germany, 1894-1950)

[30] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Germany, 1770-1831)

[31] 愚禿親鸞 (Japan, 1173-1263)

[32] 本居宣長 (Japan, 1730-1801)

[33] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Germany, 1749-1832)

[34] 幸田露伴 [幸田成行] (Japan, 1867-1947)

[35] Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (Germany, 1832-1920)

[36] Socrates (Greece, 469-399 B.C.E.)

[37] 近衛文麿 [In text as 近衛公] (Japan, 1891-1945; Prime Minister of Japan 1937-1939; 1940-1941)

[38] 木戸幸一 [In text as木戸候] (Japan, 1889-1977; Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal of Japan, 1940-1945)

*Additionally archived at Binghamton University Libraries, The Open Repository @Binghamton (The ORB): https://orb.binghamton.edu/comparative_literature_fac/44. © 2023 Christopher Southward; All Rights Reserved.