Nishida Kitarôs Studies of the Good and the Debate Concerning Universal Truth in Early Twentieth-C :: Philosophy Philosophical Papers

Nishida Kitars Studies of the Good and the Debate Concerning Universal Truth in Early Twentieth-Century JapanABSTRACT When Nishida Kitar wrote Studies of the Good, he was a high schooling teacher in Kanazawa far from Tokyo, the center of Nipponese scholarship. While he was praised for his intellectual effort, there was no substantive agreement about the content of his ideas. Critics disagreed with the way he conceived of fair play and of truth as contained in reality. Taken together, I believe that the responses to Nishidas early work give us a window on the state of Japanese philosophy in the early twentieth century. In what follows, I give evidence for the existence of such a debate about the nature of truth and reality. After a sketch of Nishidas position (in which scientific truth is made subordinate to an all-encompassing divine truth), I outline the positions of two other modern-day thinkers Kat Hiroyuki and Takahashi Satomi. With respect to Nishida, they offer markedly dif ferent takes on the question of universal truth Kat favors an antireligious, scientific positivism while Takahashi accepts an existentialist apprehension of radical human finitude, in which human access to any certainty is denied. I conclude that one is confronted with a lively debate by Japanese philosophers inside Japan about the definition of truth and consequently about the nature of reality. Nishida Kitar (1870-1945) wrote the essays that make up Studies of the Good while a high school teacher in Kanazawa, in the hokuriku region on the Japan sea, far from the center of scholarship in Tokyo. The essays originally appeared separately in various journals and in 1911 were published in book form. From the publication of the first essay, Concerning the Nature of Reality, in Tetsugaku zasshi, the journal of the philosophy seminar at Tokyo Imperial University, Nishida faced a number of direct and indirect critiques. While his intellectual effort was highly praisedone person proclaimin g that such a level of accomplishment . . . would have been unattainable for anyone precisely a true scholarthere was no such agreement about the content of what Nishida had written. Critics disagreed with the way he conceived of reality and of truth as contained in reality. Taken together, I believe that the responses to Studies give us a window onto the state of philosophizing in Japan in the early twentieth century. The responses show that four decades into the course of study of opening up to the West, philosophers in Japan were in full-scale debate about the nature of truth and reality.