Kitarô Nishida

• Familienname: Nishida, jap. 西田
• Vorname: Kitarô, jap. 幾多郎
• Japanische Schreibweise mit dem Familiennamen voran: Nishida Kitarô 西田幾多郎

Finally, in the thought of Nishida Kitarô and the Kyoto school the fully enlightened selfless self or emptied self of Zen Buddhism is analyzed precisely as a social self located in the betweenness of I-Thou relations of intersubjectivity in the spatial basho or locus of absolute Nothingness. (SO-TSS 435)

"The dialectical universal" is another expression of the "place" in which concrete entities exist. In regard to Nishida's concept of "place", what is often at issue among critics and commentators is the relationship between "the things that are in place" (oite aru mono) and "the place in which things are" (oite aru basho). Tanabe critically interprets Nishida's "place of nothingness" as a place that embraces everything and makes them indistinct. But the following quotation from Nishida indicates that this is not the case. "That one thing and another thing determine each other, or that one thing and another thing act on each other, is a matter of place ... determining itself. And that the place determines itself is a matter of one thing and another thing acting on each other" (NKZ 8: 16). Nishida argues here that the mutual activity of "things that are in place" and the self-determination of the "place in which things are" are not two different events. This means that there is no "place" which exists in itself apart from the action of "things that are in place". As is evident in Nishida's repeated use of the phrase "appearance qua reality" (see, for example, NKZ 9: 104), phenomena that appear in this world are for Nishida that only reality; there is no metaphysical "place" in the sense of a substantial noumenal reality existing behind the phenomenal appearance of "things that are in place".

Tanabe interpreted "place" as something substantial to which the manifold of beings are reductively homogenized, but "place" in the context of Nishida's thought never functions in such a manner. The ultimate function of Nishida's "place" is rather only to let "things that are in place" be as they are, or to let them act as they act. This is precisely the reason why the place is called "nothingness." (Sugimoto Kôchi S. 61f. In: Davis, Bret W./ Schroeder, Brian/ Wirth, Jason M. (Hg.) (2011): Japanese and Continental Philosophy. Bloomington & Indianapolis.)

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• http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nishida_Kitar%C5%8D