Resumen de Nishida Kitarō and Friedrich Schleiermacher: on the Romantic Spinozism in their Early Thought
Although the clarification of Nishida’s reception of classical German philosophy has been particularly significant in Nishida studies, the influence of Friedrich Schleiermacher has long been underestimated due to the limited references to Schleiermacher in Nishida’s writings. Challenging this tendency, Kobayashi Toshiaki has highlighted an undeniable affinity between them concerning their Romanticism. Based on this hypothesis, this essay aims to demonstrate that the affinity between Nishida and Schleiermacher can be elucidated through their shared Romantic Spinozism. First, both Schleiermacher’s “intuition and feeling” and Nishida’s “pure experience” denote the pre-reflective state of consciousness which implies a sense of unity with the divine reality. Second, they both criticize the anthropomorphic view of a personal God in favor of the impersonal God of Spinozism, and argue for religious immortality in which human individuality merges into the unity of the divine reality, akin to “a drop in the ocean.” Moreover, this structural comparison is reinforced by Nishida’s interpretation of Schleiermacher in the recently published manuscript of Nishida’s “Lecture on Religious Studies.”
