“Nishida Kitarō’s Philosophy of Absolute Nothingness (Zettaimu no tetsugaku) and Modern Theoretical Physics”

Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945), the founder of the Kyoto school of philosophy, often stated that his philosophy of Absolute Nothingness (zettaimu no tetsugaku), which had in part been inspired by Zen Buddhism, was not a kind of mysticism. In his last unfinished essay, Watakushi no ronri ni tsuite (Concerning My Logic, 1945) he complained that his logic of absolutely contradictory self-identity (zettaimujunteki jikodōitsu no ronri) had not been understood by the academic world and its meaning had been distorted. Nishida decided that the only way of clarifying his philosophical standpoint was to redefine the concepts of 'mind' and 'logic' by showing the relation of the philosophy of Absolute Nothingness to the philosophy of science, especially to quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of relativity. Nishida wrote many essays dedicated to the philosophy of science, the most important among them is Keiken kagaku (Experimental Science, 1939, translated by me into Polish, with comments from Krzysztof Stefański, professor of physics). The purpose of this article is to explain how Nishida incorporated into his philosophy of absolute nothingness the standpoint of operationalism, elaborated by Percy W. Bridgman (1882-1961, who received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1946) in order to undermine the adequacy of classical logic as far as the description of reality was concerned.