Gereon Kopf is an assistant professor in the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Luther College, IA. He is currently a JSPS fellow based at the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture.
The philosophy of Nishida Kitarõ offers the reader today not only a paradigm for a comparative philosophy, but also a methodological framework to construct a Buddhist philosophy. The key and, at the same time, the obstacle to his philosophy is the concept of the “self-identity of the absolute contradiction.” This conceptual cornerstone of Nishida’s philosophy is as controversial among scholars today as it is central to his philosophy. Critics, such as Tanabe Hajime and Takahashi Satomi, argue that Nishida’s philosophy privileges the principle of identity over that of difference and falls into a monism; his supporters, most of all Nishitani Keiji and Ueda Shizuteru, to the contrary, claim that it comprises the key to philosophical non-dualism. In general, I am convinced that even his “self-identity of the absolute contradiction,” if it is read carefully within the context of Nishida’s philosophy, will render a paradigm that falls neither into a logical contradiction nor into a monism but that provides the foundation for a non-dualist philosophy. To this end, I will reread it ³rst in the context of Nishida’s overall project and, then, on the background of Nishida’s debates with his critics.
