A Brief Introduction to Ikutaro Nishida's Life

Born in a big landlord family in Hebei County, Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan. After graduating from primary school, 1883 entered Kanazawa Normal School, and 1886 transferred to a special school. In the second year, the school was handed over to the government and renamed the fourth higher education institution. Nishida was enthusiastic about the constitutional movement at that time when he was in middle school. He read the works of Fukuzawa Yukichi, a democratic thinker, and took photos with a group of classmates when the Meiji Constitution was promulgated in 1889. Unfortunately, as a veteran of the reform, the Samoan Changzhou Zongfan Alliance prevented Japan from embarking on a sound constitutional country. 1890, the Imperial Education Act, which was read at all important school activities, set conservative Confucian values such as loyalty to the emperor and the country as the moral standards of students. Nishida was very disgusted with this, and he dropped out of school with his classmates to protest and taught himself at home. Later, due to the bankruptcy of my father's career, I lost the condition of self-study, so I had to transfer to the philosophy elective course of Imperial University of Tokyo 189 1.

After graduation 1895, I went back to Ren Zhongxue as a teacher, and the next year I was transferred to the fourth institution of higher learning as a lecturer. Soon, due to family conflicts and school disputes, mental pressure made him more and more divorced from politics, turned to Buddhism and decided to participate in meditation. From 1897, he lived a lonely thinking life centered on meditation, and began to formally study philosophy from 1903. I know Fichte, Hegel and even the most influential phenomenology in Germany at that time. 1909 went to Tokyo as a professor at Xueyuan. In the second year, he served as an associate professor in the Department of Literature of Imperial University in Kyoto. 19 1 1 year, he published the study of goodness and began to build a philosophical system with the concept of "absolute nothingness" as the core. 19 13 years as a professor of religion at Kyoto university, with a doctorate in literature. On the contrary, he was promoted to the first position in the history of philosophy, and founded the Kyoto School together with his colleague Tian and student Nishiya Kaizhi. 1928 retired.

However, the change of the current situation made Nishida unable to stay out of politics. When militarism established an authoritarian regime, as a leading figure in Japanese philosophy, he could not get rid of the interference of real politics. Shortly after the Mino Dage incident, the Ministry of Education established the Education and Academic Rehabilitation Committee, and Nishida and his colleagues Tian and He Zhelang were invited to participate. He is completely opposite to the educational reform thought of this Committee and can only respond passively. 1936 February 26th incident made Nishida clearly realize that militarism would lead Japan to disaster. However, after his students Fumimaro Konoe, Kimura Koichi and Yisheng Kimura were promoted to dignitaries the following year, they had to be further involved in the political whirlpool at the invitation of the latter. This year, when Japan's all-out war of aggression against China began, Nishida and his students were still critical of the military-led expansion policy. Nishida delivered a speech calling for respect for the diversity of all ethnic groups in the world. In a letter to Kimura Yi, he wrote: "I think we must consider Japan in the world, not just Japan, otherwise things like' Asianism' will be meaningless ..." 5438+000. Kimura Yi even arranged for the teacher to meet with General Takagi, hoping that he could influence the military enlightened faction. However, Nishida is cautious about getting involved in politics. He carefully distanced himself from the authorities' ultra-nationalist remarks, and published many articles, trying to critically comment on the important document of Japanese imperialism and ultra-nationalism, The Original Meaning of National Style. These efforts did not produce any results, although he had the privilege of delivering a New Year speech to the Emperor.

On the contrary, his colleagues in Kyoto school have devoted themselves to politics. He Zhelang actively participated in the activities of the Education Academic Rehabilitation Committee and wrote the infamous Original Meaning of National Style. Mickey Ito became the brains of the New Order Movement in Fumimaro Konoe. In particular, Tian Bianyuan, another founder of Kyoto School, plays an important role in the Education Academic Rehabilitation Committee. He also encouraged students to join the imperial war and published a series of militaristic propaganda articles, which provided a set of Hegelian philosophical rhetoric for Japan's military expansion policy. 1940 Nishida privately said to a student: "This guy Tanabe is a complete fascist!"

From Fumimaro Konoe's beautiful rhetoric in the * * * glory circle in Greater East Asia, influenced by intellectual elites such as Nishida, to Tanabe and Xigu's initiative to construct the * * * glory circle theory and defend the war, philosophers of Kyoto School are eager to become spokesmen of the spirit of the times like Hegel. By 1943, Nishida was also more deeply involved in political activities. Unlike keeping in touch with more enlightened senior naval officials before, this year he was invited by the Army to attend a meeting of the National Policy Research Center. He submitted the article "Principles of a New World Order" at the meeting with the mentality of possibly influencing the tojo hideki government, but the article was quickly rejected on the grounds that it was difficult to understand. Nishida handed the article to Tanabe and asked him to simplify the rewriting. Tanabe rewrote the article to tojo hideki and Lu Haijun, and Nishida has been worried about whether the rewritten article can accurately convey his thought that the Japanese spirit is not limited to the quintessence of the country, but has a global vision. However, whether the authorities understood his ideas or not, tojo hideki's speech at the Greater East Asia Conference in 165438+ 10 soon completely disappointed him. The article "Principles of the New World Order" made Nishida guilty of colluding with Japanese ultra-nationalism after the war, even though he died before the end of the 1945 war.

However, neither Nishida, a failed political dissident, nor Tanabe, a member of the Kyoto clique who also cherished the dream of Japan's "peaceful rise", no matter how perfect the country and the world are theoretically, they are powerless in the face of political power and armed violence. Although Nishida himself is highly respected, since 1944, he has been monitored by the ideological censorship organ of the Ministry of Education for his "too westernized" remarks. Ito Miki and Tasaka Jun were the most important Japanese Marxists before the war, and two former members of Kyoto School died tragically in prison before the end of the war. What the philosophers of Kyoto school can't ignore is the crimes committed by military dictatorships at home and abroad in Japan.