Resumen de Independence and Self-Realization: THe Historical Background of the Early Nishida’s Individualism
It is obvious that Nishida Kitarō’s considerations on the topics of individuals and individuality in An Inquiry into the Good were a watershed moment in Japanese thought. However, no matter how original Nishida’s thought was, his ideas did not merely appear out of nowhere. Nishida, who was born in the turbulent Meiji era (1868–1912), lived in a time captivated by the need to reconcile the flood of new ideas concerning the value of individual autonomy and moral cultivation with both traditional ethics and the need to create a modern and centralized state. In this paper, I wish to sketch Nishida’s intellectual environment, as well as show how it helped create the framework in which his early ethical thought operated.
This will be accomplished by first giving a sketch of the circumstances in which individualism was imported into Japan by enlightenment thinkers like Fukuzawa Yukichi. I shall then use this discussion of Fukuzawa in order to contextualize the importation of the position which likely had the most influence on Nishida’s early ethics, the theory of self-realization (自己実現説). I shall then wrap this article up with a largely biographical sketch of how Nishida relates to these developments in Japanese individualism.
