Nishida Kitaro. An Inquiry into the Good. Part IV, Chapter 3 / Translation from Japanese, Introductory Article and Commentaries by S. Kapranov
The World of the Orient September 30, 2026 DOI: 10.15407/orientw2026.03.150 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that God is the basis of the Universe and its unifying force rather than its creator, and that spirit and nature are two aspects of the same reality. Proposes that God is a "Great Personality" with self-consciousness, absolute free will, and non-selective love, and that through pure experience a person can overcome the limits of the individual "I" and know the Spirit of God. |
Abstract
The publication presents the Ukrainian translation of Chapter 3 of the fourth part of the Zen-no kenkyū (Investigation of the Good) by Nishida Kitaro, a prominent Japanese philosopher of the 20th century. The chapter is devoted to the concept of God. Nishida defines God as the basis of the Universe. He rejects creationism: the Universe is not God’s creation, but His manifestation. God is a unifying force that underlies both spirit and nature. According to Nishida, spirit and nature are two aspects of the same reality, that is, the same facts of direct experience or phenomena of consciousness. Therefore, God is the basis of our consciousness, and our consciousness is a part of God’s consciousness. According to Nishida, God is not an impersonal Absolute, He is a “Great Personality”. Like any personality, God has self-consciousness, free will, and love. However, they differ from the human qualities of the same name. God’s self-consciousness must include all phenomena of the Universe, but He has no consciousness of His “I”, because “everything is ‘I’ ”. God’s freedom of will is absolute, but it is not selective will, arbitrariness, since the latter is a sign of imperfection. God’s love is also not selective: God loves all that exists, because the Universe is His manifestation, in a certain sense everything is a particle of God. Further, turning to the concept of pure experience, Nishida considers God as “the greatest intellectual intuition underlying the Universe, and the unifier of pure experience that encompasses the Universe as well”. According to Nishida, in pure experience a person can overcome the limitations of his/her own “I” and know the Spirit of God. In the above-mentioned chapter, Nishida turns to Western sources, primarily to the Christian tradition: the Gospel of Matthew, patristics (Augustine), scholasticism (Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas), theology of the 18th – early 20th centuries (Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, John Richardson Illingworth), mysticism (Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme). He also turns to modern philosophy (Spinoza, Hegel) and psychology of religion (William James).