Nishida Kitaro: A philosophical response to modernity

John Michael Olson, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation poses the thesis that Nishida's philosophy is a continual response to the challenge of Western modernity. Hence, the dissertation follows the evolution of Nishida's philosophy to explain and analyze his progressive integration, criticism, and rejection of elements of modernity. In the first chapter I address Nishida's philosophical beginning as a problematic synthesis of Western and Eastern philosophers. Nishida used this synthesis to formulate an escape into the interiority of a radical subjectivity. The second chapter postulates that Nishida's development of his philosophy of basho was an attempt to correct his earlier philosophical stance by placing meaning, not in terms of a still modernistic subjectivity, but in contexts which have no meaning in and of themselves. This transfer of meaning into contextualization effectively disrupts the essentialism of the modern subject-object dichotomy. The third chapter explains how Nishida describes the self-negating logic of contextualization as poiesis—a “making and being made.” Poiesis is an elimination of the modern independent self-existent person, a cultural indicator of value, and a subtle reintroduction of person as modernistic productive power. The fourth chapter details Nishida's transformation of poiesis from a mode of instrumentalistic power to a concept of complete reciprocal negation. By his explication of reciprocal negation, Nishida demonstrates how the conceptual roots of oppressive power as found in traditional axiology are eliminated.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Mitchell, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Philosophy

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