# Philosophers of Nothingness  Author:: James W. Heisig  ## AI-Generated Summary None ## Highlights > For the Kyoto philosophers, thinking either transforms the way we look at the things of life or it is not thinking in the fullest sense of the word. ([Location 460](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N5ESPLY&location=460)) > In this same connection, the Kyoto philosophers have assiduously avoided all reference to psychoanalytical theory, or to any connection between no-self and abnormal or paranormal psychic states. Given the impact the idea of the unconscious mind has had on western philosophy and symbolic theory at the time they were writing, one can only consider this decision to have been a deliberate one, though their motivations are simply not clear from the texts we have at hand. ([Location 489](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N5ESPLY&location=489)) ### 8 nishida’s life and career > As it turns out, he gave up meditation in 1905 and never returned to it. ([Location 744](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N5ESPLY&location=744)) > The vestiges of his inner struggle remain, but in the form of a philosophical problem: how to reconcile the intuitive, nonreflective consciousness cultivated in the east with the logical, reflective consciousness cultivated in western philosophy. ([Location 746](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N5ESPLY&location=746)) > Of the three Kyoto school philosophers treated here, Nishida was without a doubt the most creative and, not surprisingly, the one about whom the most has been written. The number of new ideas, signaled typically by the coinage of a new phrase, outweighs the advances we find in Nishitani and Tanabe. ([Location 795](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N5ESPLY&location=795)) > The only possible conclusion would seem to be that all of reality must be a kind of consciousness in which individual consciousness is not only caught up but also can be aware of what is going on at the same time. And this is in fact Nishida’s conclusion. ([Location 1071](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N5ESPLY&location=1071)) > “I think that we can distinguish the west to have considered being as the ground of reality, the east to have taken nothingness as its ground.” ([Location 1482](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N5ESPLY&location=1482)) > Nothingness opposes the world as absolute to relative. ([Location 1503](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00N5ESPLY&location=1503)) ### Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962)