Study On Nishida Kitaro’s Philosophy Of Religion

Nishida Kitaro is the founder of the Kyoto School in Japan,and “Nishida Philosophy” can be said to be the beginning of modern Japanese philosophy.In his philosophical system,the theory of religion occupies a very large proportion,and religion is also regarded by Nishida as the motivation and the destination of his own philosophy.However,due to the limitations of insufficient translation and introduction,most of the domestic research fields are limited to his early thoughts,less attention is paid to the later development,and there is little systematic discussion of his religious theories.In view of this,this thesis focuses on the theme of the “God-Man relationship” and attempts to systematically elaborates on Nishida’s philosophy of religion from the following aspects:The first is the issue about the nature of Nishida’s religious theory.There are roughly two stages of domestic academic views on it: the literature from 1960 s to1990s basically regarded it as a kind of “religious philosophy”;the literature since2000 regarded it as a “philosophy of religion”.By combing Nishida’s stipulations on the word “religion” in his maiden and posthumous works,with the changes in the position of the two cognitive forms of “intuition” and “reflection” in his theory,this thesis summarizes Nishida’s definition of religion as “the god-man relationship of immanent transcendence”,then finds that this relationship has occurred a turning phenomenon from “desire abolish” to “mind return” in terms of man’s transcendence,and a coversion from “pantheism” to “panentheismus” in terms of God’s immanence,furthermore,its epistemology also shows the characteristics of a transition from“pre-reflective agnosticism” to “reflection theory of self-representative system”.This thesis argues that although the early nishida’s religious theory does have a somewhat "religious philosophy" character,it should still be regarded as a "philosophy of reliogion" on the whole.The second is the issue on staging of Nishida’s philosophy of religion.Japanese academic circles have formed theories ranging from one to six periods on the issue of Nishida’s philosophy,among them,the moderate three and four-period theories has become the mainstream.Domestic academic circles also focus on the threeperiod theory,and have produced the characteristic proposition of “2-stages with 3-periods”,however,there is no systematic study on the development of Nishida’s philosophy of religion in the domestic academic circles.Combined with Nishida’s own viewpoints,this thesis interprets the development of Nishida’s philosophy of religion as the theorizing process of “Nothingness”,and divides the five core concepts he proposed when he outlined his own philosophy development into three stages: “the Nothingness that transcend the noema”,“the Nothingness that transcend the noesis” and “the Nothingness that transcend the ousia”.This structure shows that Nishida has always emphasized a Non-objectified Thinking Mode of Anti-binarism,tying to unify the individual “existence” with the universal “reality” at the root,thus the definition of the concept of “Nothingness/God” was actually promoted by the changes in his understanding of the concept of man.The third is the interpretation of the concepts of “Gyakutaiou” and “Byojotei”.This group of concepts comes from Nishida’s posthumous works.Due to Nishida’s sudden death,these two concepts that have not been explained in detail have suffered many criticisms and became an open topic in the field of Nishida’s philosophy research.Based on the overall perspective on the entire development of Nishida’s philosophy of religion,with linking the specific factors in the presentation of this group of concepts,this dissertation attempts to defines them in a philosophy of religion’s context,which is regard the Gyakutaiou as “the function of mutual transformation between the individual and the whole”,and the Byojotei as “the environment which the individual and the whole are mutually limited”.The last is the cross-cultural research issue of Nishida’s philosophy of religion.According to the differences between philosophy of religion and religious doctrine,this thesis focuses on the connection and difference between Nishida’s philosophy of religion and four other religious theories from the many dialogues between EasternWestern religious thoughts that his posthumous work involves,including T.Suzuki’s logic of “soku-hi”,Jodo Shinshu’s “Myogo” theory,which are based on Mahayana Buddhism,and Kierkegaard’s “paradox” and Barth’s “eschatology”,which are based on Protestant Christian thought.This thesis holds that Nishida basically adopts an echoing attitude towards the quotations of the former group of ideas,while the discussion between of the latter group is way more comparative.