From Seeing to Acting. Rethinking Nishida Kitaro's Practical Philosophy

In reply to critics who summarily dismiss Nishida's philosophy as weakened on the historical front by excessive attention to the mind and interiority, in this essay I provide textual proof of a major shift in Nishida's late work based on the attept to overcome the dichotomy between the "within" and the "without". This is accomplished by applying a "dialectic of the historical world" to the mutual self-expression of the world and the things that make it up, including ut not restricted to conscious subjects. I see here the core of Nishida's complementary ideas of praxis and poiesis, and from there discuss the reviesd notions of politics, technology, morality and history. I conclude by displacing a blanket rejection of Nishida's view of history with a particular critique aimed at an overly abstract and optimistic tendency that kept Nishida from recognizing the darker side of technology and the relationships of humans to their natural and social world.