SOURCE: "The Initial Formations of 'Pure Experience'," in Monumenta Nipponica: Studies on Japanese Culture, Vol. XXIV, Nos. 1-2, 1969, pp. 93-111.

In the following essay, Dilworth examines the idea of "pure experience" as set out in the writings of William James and, later, Nishida.

Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945), Japan's foremost modern philosopher, published his first major work, A Study of Good, in 1911,¹ the year after he became assistant professor of philosophy at Kyoto University. By all accounts, the leading and generative idea of that work was Nishida's concept of 'pure experience', a term he used throughout A Study of Good to develop his central notion of subjectivity which deepened in his later thought into an explicit Zen ontology of the 'self. This first major work, which won Nishida immediate and lasting acclaim, was actually the fruit of a long spiritual Odyssey by the time of its publication in his forty-first...