Time, Space, and History in Nishida Kitaro's Philosophy of the 1930s

The problems of space and time are among that of meaning-making. They carry paradigmatic approaches that determine the understanding of the world, human being, history, and therefore never lose their significance. The involvement of the East Asian philosophical heritage expands the horizons of research into these problems, opening up opportunities for the search for original solutions and new perspectives of vision. The object of this study is Nishida Kitaro's works from the 1930s, which have so far been only fragmentarily studied and insufficiently addressed in both Russian and Western historical and philosophical scholarship. It was during this period that a number of problems of space, time, and history were specifically articulated and developed by the Japanese philosopher. The study relied on historical-philosophical reconstruction, hermeneutic-textual analysis, as well as contextual and conceptual analysis. General linguistic methods of text translation were also employed, namely, lexical-semantic substitution, grammatical substitution, and interpretation. This article author’s contribution to the field consists in the fact that the peculiarities of the interpretation of such problems as the problem of the correlation of space and time, historical time, eternal present, discontinuity and continuity were considered in the context of the key concepts of Nishida Kitaro of the late period – active intuition, the place of absolute nothingness, self-determination of absolute nothingness, the historical world. The article shows the vectors of transformation in the understanding of spatio-temporal issues by the Japanese philosopher in a comparison of his ideas presented in his early works with the works of the 1930s, relating to the middle and late periods of his activity, consisting in the transition from a “view of the world from the position of consciousness and self-awareness” to a view from the position of an organic part of a self-moving and self-determining world. As a result of the study, the author identifies such features of Nishida's philosophy as absolute presentism, the identification of space and time, the creation of an epistemology of history based on the conception of active intuition and the theory of time as “self-determination of the eternal present.”

Nishida Kitaro, absolute nothingness, active intuition, absolutely contradictory identity, eternal now, moment, discontinuous continuity, historical world, time-space, historical present