Nishida Kitaro is a well-known Japanese philosopher whose work is marked by attempts to combine the world outlooks of the national spiritual tradition with elements of European philosophical thought. The article analyzes Nishida’s views on culture that are an independent part of his original philosophical theory. Religion, art, morality, science are the ideal forms of being in the historical world. The work of a scientist or artist is a manifestation of the formative activity of a person. The historical world as (...) the “sphere of absolute nothingness” is the final point of the introspection of “nothingness,” where reality comprehends the identity of its opposites through human activity. Nothingness, or “Emptiness,” in the East Asian tradition has another, dynamic, dimension – these are the relations between people and the relations between man and the cosmos, or Nature, which are not perceived by rough human feelings and not comprehended by equally rough mind. Nishida stressed that for Japan the issue of the authenticity of the national foundations of culture, separated from Chinese and Indian influences, has a clearly positive answer in the aesthetic sphere: in the field of traditional poetics. The traditional aesthetics of Japan reflects the archetypal structure of the national culture. All world cultures have a common prototype, but each of them is a deviation, one-sidedness of this prototype. In the West, a culture of the form triumphed, beginning with Plato and Aristotle. In Japan, on the contrary, the culture was characterized by fluidity, processability, formlessness. In fact, Nishida is one of founding fathers of modern Japanese cultural studies. (shrink)

Resumen: La investigación se ciñe en el análisis del primer periodo de producción filosófica del filósofo japonés NISHIDA Kitarô (1870-1945) y, con tal motivo, se ciñe al estudio de tres de sus obras: Estudio sobre el Bien (1911), Intuición y Reflexión en la Autoconciencia (1917) y Arte y Moral (1923). Con ello, se trata de responder a la necesidad de presentar una aproximación factible y plausible cuyo objetivo es arrojar luz sobre las consecuencias que resultan del enfoque psicologista y voluntarista (...) que marca la primera etapa de la filosofía de Nishida. Con ello se quiere clarificar hasta qué punto, bajo qué condiciones y cómo, Nishida maneja determinada idea de subjetividad y, específicamente, cómo con ello pone sobre la mesa todo un conjunto de interrogantes comunes a la modernidad que permean en los presupuestos epistemológicos, éticos y en el estudio de la creación y apreciación artísticas. Abstract: The research presents an analysis of the first period of philosophical production of the Japanese philosopher NISHIDA Kitarô (1870-1945). For that reason, it presents the inquiry around three of his major works: Inquiry into the Good (1911), Intuition and Reflection in Self-consciousness (1917), and Art and Morality (1923). The aim is to respond to the necessity of introduce a feasible and plausible approximation that wants to throw light about the consequences resulting from a psychologist and voluntarist point of view typical of the first period of Nishida's works. It wants to clarify the conditions and how Nishida uses certain idea about subjectivity and, especially, how is conduced his asking about some epistemological, ethical as well as artistic schemes shared and common to philosophical modernity. (shrink)

Ethical principles including autonomy, justice and equality function in the same paradigm of thought, that is, logocentrism - an epistemological predilection that relies on the analytic power of deciphering between binary oppositions. By studying observable behavior with an analytical approach, however, one immediately limits any recognition and possible understanding of modes of thought based on separate epistemologies. This article seeks to reveal an epistemological predilection that diverges from logocentrism yet continues to function as a fundamental component of ethical behavior. The (...) issue of cancer disclosure in Japan is used to exemplify the nature of relative subjectivity (kankeiteki-shukansei), a term I define and believe to be an epistemological predisposition fundamental to ethical behavior. Relative subjectivity denotes an epistemology quintessential to the behavior of individuals who attend to the respective tides of each particular situation, each interpersonal relationship or, in the context of clinical medicine, to the needs and values of each patient. (shrink)