The emancipation of the concept of the individual in Nishida Kitarô’s philosophy.

抄録

The notion of the individual(個物 kobutu)is well known to be a key element of the later Nishidian philosophy. There, it plays a necessary role in the dialectical logic of the historical world, so much as to give rise to what Nishida calls a “dialectical monadology”. However, it did not always enjoy such an importance and served essentially to sustain a philosophy of unification based on the idea of the concrete or self-determining universal. In this paper, we will take a closer look at the place assigned to the individual in the formation of Nishida’s philosophy, especially his first usage of Leibniz’ monadology in The problem of Consciousness. The subsequent developments, meanwhile they are accurately explained from the perspective of the concept of nothingness, can also be presented from the correlative idea of the individual. From this position, we will interpret the role of the hypokeimenon and the later transformations of the subsomptive logic into a dialectical logic. The progressive emancipation of the concept of the individual can thus be seen as one of the important developments leading to Nishida’s late thought.