Shin'ichirō Nishi

Shinichirō Nishi (西晋一郎, Nishi Shinichirō, March 1873 – November 1943) was a Japanese philosopher and ethicist, and a contemporary of Nishida Kitaro. Although a prolific and well-known writer during his lifetime, in the post-war era he fell into posthumous obscurity due to his perceived ideological support for Japanese ultra nationalism. Nishi would become well read when it came to Western philosophy, studying Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Rousseau, Kant, Schiller, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Herbart, Lotze, Wundt, Windelband, Rickert, Cohen, Bergson, Poincaré, and many others. Nishi also received significant public attention for his contribution in calming down a national furor in 1931, regarding the government’s proposal to restructure the system of higher education and abolish some of the old high schools.

Nishi argues that western learning in general, including both science and philosophy, is “learning for the sake of learning”; an abstract, amoral, foreign import. He claims that “Eastern learning”, meanwhile, is fundamentally a different kind of learning which comes from a different source; a moral reverence for teaching, over an individualistic, eros driven love of truth itself. Over and against such "selfish" “learning for the sake of learning”, Nishi claims that Eastern learning is so-called “practical” or “real” learning (実学, jitsugaku), connected to all the important aspects of cultured, communal life, and existing to serve the needs of such a life. For Nishi, to understand what the great masters or sages have left to us, is to understand everything that is truly important for the purposes of properly living as a human being.

Nishi uses the techniques of modern scholarship, of modern thinking, to articulate the inner meaning of his tradition, while at the same time asserting its fundamental superiority. Yet Nishi cannot achieve this move by recasting his tradition as “Japanese philosophy” in the manner of Feng Youlan and Chinese philosophy. Nishi would find such a category to be both insufficient for grasping the meaning of the tradition, as well as already a kind of capitulation. That is to say, Nishi argued that not only was the Japanese tradition not ‘philosophical’, but that it was superior. have begun to appear in Japanese, discussing Nishi's thought and legacy in a more positive light.