The Concept of God in Early Nishida’s Philosophy

Abstract

This study examines how Nishida Kitarō’s early philosophy redefines the concept of God within the framework of pure experience ( junsui keiken , 純粋経験). Reading An Inquiry into the Good (1911) alongside the Fragments on Pure Experience (1903–1912) and the Lectures on Religion (1913–1914), it traces how the concept of God develops from the logic of experience rather than from any transcendent domain. For Nishida, the religious demand arises from life’s inner need to unify the finite and the infinite; God, accordingly, is not a being among beings but the unifying activity ( tōitsu , 統一) through which knowing and being are one. Against the familiar picture of Nishida as a champion of immanence against a monolithic “Western dualism,” the study argues that his position is a non-dualism that refuses both the separation of theism and the fusion of monistic pantheism, and that his true target is the metaphysics of substance: a target contested within the Western tradition itself, as his endorsement of Nicholas of Cusa’s coincidentia oppositorum in the recently published (2020) autograph notebooks of the Lectures on Religion attests. On this reading, the early notion of God as unifying activity is the structural antecedent of absolute nothingness ( zettai mu , 絶対無): a unity that is no object of knowledge and no determinate thing, yet that by which all things are established, already, in all but name, the mature concept of place ( basho , 場所).