Keiji nishitani biography definition

(1900–90).

A student of Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945), the founder of the Kyoto school that combined German philosophy and Christian mystical thought with zen experience to present a new synthesis of modern thought in Japan.

Like his teacher, he was concerned to synthesize elements of all three streams of thought in order to address more fully fundamental human philosophical problems.

Keiji nishitani biography definition

Unlike Nishida, he took as his point of departure the challenge of Nietzsche and nihilism, and sought throughout his work a resolution to the problem of the self. The Western formulation of the problem was flawed, he argued, because the search for self remained strictly within the realm of the cognitive, the logocentric, and the rational.

Zen could enrich the search because the breakthrough sought through Zen meditation was one that involved the total person and yielded truths about the nature of the self that went beyond the cognitive to produce a total experiential realization of the s