Nishida's Philosophical Resistance to the Secular-Religion Binary

Abstract

It has been common in scholarship to frame Nishida Kitarō’s philosophy (西田哲学) as an attempt at overcoming the dualities of Western modernity. But what has been downplayed in this reading is how Nishida re-interprets the concept of religion in a way that challenges modernist theories of religion, with implications that speak to the problematics of the secular-religion binary today. Nishida’s view of religion, as an existential form of awareness, and a structuring logic of historical reality, with its own epistemological criteria, contrast with the theoretical accounts that assume religion is opposite to the real—or that religion is subordinate to the secular. By designating religion as a logical category that coincides with the real, Nishida’s philosophical standpoint offers a means to not only re-think the relationship between the secular and the religious, but to re-think the relationship between the West and the rest of the world, because if rationality is not a superior category over religion, then the races, cultures, and ethnicities that have been historically subordinated are placed on an equal epistemological footing with Western philosophy and science. In this sense, Nishida’s philosophy of religion allows us to think critically about the “problem of religion” and presents a discussion that can also be used to address some of the issues raised within post-colonial studies.