21st Dinner – Nishida Kitaro’s Historical Bodies and Intuition

The Invited Philosopher

Sofia C.

This was the 21st dinner & philosophy event, and the 5th virtual dinner. Sofia had dinner in Quito, Ecuador. I had dinner in Stuart, Florida.

Menu

1. Paty’s dinner: Thai curry tofu with sweet potatoes and broccoli, served with basmati rice.
2. Paty’s wine: Bodegas Manzanos 111 Red Blend, year 2023.
3. Sofia’s dinner: Fruit and cheese platter.

The Philosophy

Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945), founder of the Kyoto School, was shaped by Western thinkers, especially Kant, Hegel, neo‑Kantianism, phenomenology, and William James, while also grounding his thought in Zen practice. His early work “An Inquiry into the Good” (1911) engages with William James’s concept of pure experience, which he reinterprets through Zen: pure experience is the moment of awareness before we interpret it via thoughts or action. This is illustrated by Ueda Shizuteru’s example on how Japanese describe hearing a sound:

• Japanese: “The sound of the bell is heard.”
• English: “I hear the bell.”

The Japanese phrasing captures the event before the ego appropriates it. Later, Nishida reformulates his philosophy around basho which means “place” in Japanese. He also calls Basho “absolute nothingness” but not as a void, but a creative, generative openness, the condition for all appearing multiplicity of phenomena. Basho came to influence theories in quantum physics as the logical field in which reality appears and determines itself. As a response to criticism by his peers that he was ignoring the historical dimension of reality and human action, Nishida formulated his theory of “The Historical World” as ongoing self‑formation, continuously generated through the embodied actions of all individuals. Finally, he also describes “acting intuition” as the unity of awareness and action, and “historical bodies” as our embodied selves carrying history, i.e. our cultural habits, language, and practices. The historical body is the concrete way the world expresses itself through us, and the way we, in turn, shape the world. This is how Nishida’s concepts fit together:

• Pure experience: Reality appears before conceptualization.
• Basho: The field that makes appearance possible.
• Historical world: A determinate world‑formation that arises within basho, co‑created by individuals and society through embodied action.
• Historical bodies: The embodied individuals, humans, through which the historical world expresses and transforms itself.
• Acting intuition: The non‑dual unity of awareness and action through which historical bodies enact and shape the historical world.

The Summary

We focused on how Nishida’s Theory of the Historical World applies to our lives. To live within Nishida’s non‑dualistic metaphysics, where, in moments of pure experience, “I” and the world are not two things but One, we need to be present at the moment of awareness. That’s the instant before the mind interprets what’s happening, just as Sofia reminded me from the video she watched in Spanish. When our mind interprets the experience, it divides it into “I” (subject) and “thing” (object) experienced. Once interpreted, we interact with the experience based on our historical body. We may, however, remain with pure experience and interact, as Nishida formulated it, with “acting intuition” without interpretation. Acting intuition is responsive action, not reactive. Either way, our actions are the creative process that generates the historical world by mutual determination between us and others.

Analysis

Creating our Historical Worlds

We shared similar experiences of marriage and divorce and agreed that our historical world and historical bodies during marriage were being created without awareness and that the divorce changed that. Nishida proposed that the historical world is formed through the ongoing, reciprocal interaction of individuals, aka historical bodies, each shaping the world and being shaped by it at the same time. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy uses the example of an artist:

The artist takes in or intuits the world and transforms or enacts it, both of which are but two moments in a single unfolding, not only of the world but of the artist as well.

During our marriage, we both agreed that each of our historical worlds was shaped by both our husbands and ourselves, in a reactive, not responsive way, and that this historical world was also shaping us. We were not silent watchers, and the marriage had not become uncreative; we were artists, but we were painting a tragedy. We eventually chose to create different “art”. For us, divorce was the act of creation required to abandon the old art, and allow new, healthier historical worlds to be born. Given that we are painting on a blank canvas of our lives (Basho), we create a masterpiece of an historic world, and this art can be dark, sad, or uplifting and splendid, but it is still a masterpiece. When seeing our historical world as “art” and inspired by Nishida, we committed to asking ourselves these questions daily:

• What are we painting or what world are we creating?
• What did we paint or create in the past, and how has our art changed?
• What is the role of others in our masterpiece?

Through these questions, we reclaim our role as the authors of our circumstances, replacing the narrative of victimhood with one of creative responsibility.

Being in The Now

Sofia and I shared experiences of serious car accidents we’d had in recent years, and how lack of awareness contributed to them. There is scientific research on how emotional stress causes car accidents, including the stress of divorce and separation. In my case, I was on a 5-hour road trip, escaping work and emotional stress and looking forward to a 3-day spiritual retreat, yoga, meditation, talks, and paddling in the river, in the North of Florida. I was 2 hours North of Miami, when yet another summer downpour started. I do not remember what I was thinking or doing, as I may have been lost in my “mind”, but I was surely going too fast because when I saw the car in front of me hydroplaning, I braked too hard so as not to crash into it. My vehicle immediately started to also hydroplane and rotate like a needle on a broken compass, and when it drove onto the grassy shoulder, I knew it was going to hit the median guardrail. This is when time slowed down, and I entered pure experience with the knowledge that this could be the moment I die. I was able to think and act in slow motion with a memory stored in my historical body to be reused at the appropriate time, telling me to move the wheel to the opposite direction but do it very slowly so as not to overturn the car. At first, I hit the median hard, and I was still alive. But it did not slow down the rotating car, as I was still rotating almost facing the road in the opposite direction. Thankfully, no cars were on the road.  I then steered in the opposite direction with a short, soft turn. The car started twisting in the opposite direction and hit the median once more, and then came to a standstill in the grassy shoulder of the highway. The car was totaled, but I was fine. The car in front of me had stopped. They came to see me. It was a family with a young son. I was grateful I had not hit them and that I came out unharmed.

Sofia’s experience was similar but scarier as she hit another car but luckily nobody was harmed except for a scratch. In my case, the crash changed the direction of my life. I reengaged with someone who lived near the site of the accident, and I later moved close to that area, perhaps 20 minutes from the crash site. That is where I live today. Sofia and I are not sure if the site of her crash, which is close to where she grew up, had a special meaning, but finding meaning is perhaps not something Nishida would propose, as he states that reflection leads to “objectification”. In Nishida’s view, the historical world is neither deterministic nor random. It is a “living history”, a creative, expressive movement that is constantly self-defining. Nishida would say that we, as creative subjects, are the very agents through which that world determines itself. It is a world of “creative freedom”, a movement of constant formation that is as inevitable as life itself, yet as unique and unpredictable as each creative act.

When we are stressed, it is impossible to have “pure experience” or “acting with intuition”. Nishida spoke of the “logic of objectification”, the way we view the world as a screen of things placed “out there” to be managed. Stress is the feeling of being trapped within this logic. We are trying to solve a problem that we have artificially cut out from the seamless flow of reality. By treating life as a set of separate “problems” to be fixed, we create the tension that manifests as stress, or as a car crash.

Nishida would not suggest “managing” your stress in the modern sense (which is just more “deliberative discrimination”). He does not propose a way out of habitual, reactive patterns with a step‑by‑step practice like Zen meditation or mindfulness training. Instead, he describes a structural shift in how the self operates. Nishida would encourage us to be fully immersed in the action we are currently performing. When the actor, the action, and the object of the action are unified, the “stress” of the ego disappears because there is no one left to be stressed. One enters pure experience whenever awareness precedes conceptual judgment. There is no ritual. No meditation requirement. No spiritual belief needed. When awareness comes first, action becomes non‑dual, responsive rather than reactive, grounded rather than habitual. This is acting intuition as the unity of awareness and action. It is simply awareness before interpretation.

Can Atheists be in the Now?

We wondered whether someone who rejects experience in spiritual terms can still access the non‑material dimension of the historical world. An atheist can find themselves in what Nishida calls pure experience: moments of presence that arise in certain settings, like being alone in nature or absorbed in an activity. They can also act from intuition grounded in awareness of the present moment. What may differ is how they interpret it afterward: atheists might not see these moments as something to cultivate or integrate into daily life, but simply as situational experiences that happen and then pass. They may seek out more of these experiences without understanding that they are seeking a distraction from their everyday lives. Yet, spirituality is pure experience in everyday life. Nishida would say that people who live only from material concerns and dismiss deeper forms of awareness are acting from the ego’s conceptual standpoint, which limits acting intuition, but they still co‑create the historical world through their embodied presence.

People are people. I am myself.

The path I walk,

I will continue to walk.
Nishida Kitaro