SOURCE: "The Philosophy of History in the 'Later' Nishida: A Philosophic Turn," in Philosophy East & West, Vol. 40, No. 3, July, 1990, pp. 343-74.

In the following essay, Huh discusses Nishida's two primary philosophical preoccupations: the philosophy of self-consciousness in his early writings and the philosophy of history later in his career.

I. Introduction

This essay on the philosophy of history of Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945) begins from my conviction that Nishida in his writings pursued two main lines of thought, almost equally pervasive and persistent. These lines are the development of a philosophy of self-consciousness in his pre-1931 corpus and the philosophy of history-politics in his later writings. Both philosophies are essentially ontologies, by virtue of what Nishida calls the application of forms of self-consciousness (jikaku no keishiki).¹

These forms function in almost every phase of Nishida's philosophy, with the notable exception of his discussion of the sciences, and in the...