[Philosophy] Akira's Japanese Intellectual History Bible | Chapter 7: Modernity — The Pure Experience of the Kyoto School　～In this suffocating age, gaining freedom through the sacred blank of wuwei～

日本語 | English | 繁體中文（台灣） | 簡体中文 | 한국어 | Tiếng Việt

Hello everyone. This is Akira.

In the previous chapter, we looked at the “return to Japan” movement that emerged in the late Edo period, centered around Motoori Norinaga.

It was an attempt to distance oneself from foreign thought and protect the blank space of one’s heart within Japan’s classical texts and sensibilities.

Today, let’s take that ball and catch it even deeper — entering another form of “return” that appeared from the Taisho to early Showa periods:

—— the thought of the Kyoto School.

While Norinaga and others in the previous chapter emphasized “returning to Japan’s classics and language,” the thinkers of the Kyoto School went one step further and sought to return to “experience itself, before it becomes words or concepts.” At the center of this was Nishida Kitarō.

Nishida’s An Inquiry into the Good, published in 1911, emerged as an attempt to “recover one’s own experience from its very foundation” at a time when Japan was actively pursuing modernization. He argued that, contrary to Western philosophy which begins by separating “subject” and “object,” the state before that separation is the most fundamental reality. This is what he called “pure experience.”

Pure experience refers to the state in which things are simply open as they are, before we divide them into “I am feeling this” or “there is an object.” For example, the moment you wake up in the morning and look outside — before you put it into words like “beautiful” or “cold,” there is an instant where light, air, and your own sensations are still merged together. Nishida taught that the origin of “reality” lies precisely there.

This idea was quite radical for intellectuals at the time. Since the Meiji period, Japan had been desperately “importing” Western scholarship and institutions. In the midst of that, Nishida proposed returning to one’s own lived experience before that importation.

Nishida’s pure experience was later developed in their own ways by Tanabe Hajime, Watsuji Tetsurō, Kuki Shūzō, and others. Starting from “experience itself,” they re-examined questions such as “What is a human being?”, “What is society?”, and “What is culture?” Kuki Shūzō’s delicate analysis of aesthetic sensibility in The Structure of “Iki” was also born within this current — an analysis of a uniquely Japanese sensibility.

What is important is that they did not reject Western thought. Rather, after thoroughly studying and digesting Western philosophy, they sought to open a new horizon for “thinking in Japanese and living in Japanese.” This was not a mere return to tradition, but a creative endeavor to re-incorporate foreign thought into one’s own experience.

What does this attempt teach us today? We now live in a society that constantly demands “meaning” and “evaluation.” Is this experience useful? Is it correct? Is it productive? — Such filters are placed in front of experience. Nishida’s pure experience teaches us the possibility of temporarily removing those filters and returning to “simply being.”

The time spent simply gazing outside without thinking about anything. The moment of just listening to the sound of rain. Within such times that “seem like nothing is happening,” the most fundamental experience actually lies hidden — the Kyoto School quietly speaks to us in this way.

This return to “pure experience” is by no means just a story of past philosophy. In our modern age, exhausted by information overload, it is also a quiet form of resistance to recover the weight of “simply being.”

In the next chapter, we will catch this ball even further and explore how thought shifted from wartime to the postwar period, focusing on Maruyama Masao and Tsurumi Shunsuke. I would love to hear your thoughts and impressions.

---

Footnote

¹ Nishida Kitarō, An Inquiry into the Good (Iwanami Bunko)

² Hirayama Hiroshi, Lectures on Japanese Intellectual History, Lecture 23 “Taisho Democracy” and related lectures

---

Akira

📧 Email: akira@discipline.tokyo

📮 Anonymous Consultation Form: https://discipline.tokyo/contact.php

🔗 All Activities Summary: https://discipline.tokyo/index.php

※ This series and related content are the crystallization of my thoughts and are protected by copyright law. Please clearly indicate the source when quoting. Unauthorized reproduction or commercial use is prohibited.

© 2026 Akira All Rights Reserved.