East and West: How often the twain doth meet!

Four books have especially shaped my thinking on the relations between the Eastern and the Western traditions in philosophy, broadly speaking.

I’ll just give you author, title, date for three of them, and a short explanation of the fourth.

William Johnson, THE STILL POINT (1970)

Thomas Tweed, THE AMERICAN ENCOUNTER WITH BUDDHISM (1982)

Rick Fields, HOW THE SWANS CAME TO THE LAKE (1992).

Now the fourth. Get a hold of Kitaro Nishida, AN INQUIRY INTO THE GOOD (1990). As the title suggests, this is NOT a work of history but a substantive philosophical work. Further, the 1990 edition, from Yale University Press, is a translation of a book by the named Japanese scholar that he wrote, in his native language, in 1911.

Nishida was very well aware of western philosophy, and an admirer of the American pragmatists in particular. His “inquiry into the good” is very self-aware about his blending of traditions east and west.

Nishida died near the end of the second world war. During his life he was regarded as inadequately nationalistic before and during that war, but then read (disapprovingly) as a nationalistic Japanese spokesman by westerners after the war. From such treatment he has drifted into an undeserved obscurity.

If you want to go further into these matters, start with Nishida and then go on to the other three books I've offered.

Addendum. The Japanese place the family name first, and in Japanese contexts this philosopher's name is Nishida Kitaro (the son of Nishida Yasunori). Disciples have described themselves as engaging in "Nishidean philosophy".

The order of the names is often switched in English language contexts, and I have followed that practice above. If you are going to look Nishida up in some alphabetized sourcebook, be prepared to try both under the Ns and the Ks.

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