十九世紀ドイツ心理学と西田幾多郎の『善の研究』

Abstract

In this paper I discuss the influence of German psychology in the 19th century on Nishida's maiden work, An Inquiry into the Good. A movement to turn the psychology into a natural scientific enterprise began in Germany in the 19th century: Herbart tried to show that inner experience obeys mathematical laws. Lotze introduced physiology into psychological research. Weber and Fechner mathematically formulated the relationship between the size of the stimuli and that of the sense as a law based on experiments. And Wundt founded the Institute for Experimental Psychology in Leipzig University in 1879. When Nishida began his study in Imperial University in 1891, this German natural scientific psychology was often reported in Japan. Accordingly it was natural that he made a plan to introduce the results of the newest psychology in those days into his philosophy. The German psychologist who had the greatest influence on Nishida was Wundt. The key concept of An Inquiry into the Good, pure experience, which stands for the state before the change by the thinking and the recognition corresponding with the reality comes from Wundt's concept of direct experience. Nishida adopted furthermore Wundt's idea that nature is an abstracted form of pure or direct experience. In addition, he accepted Wundt's concept of the difference of degree. However, unlike Wundt, Nishida defined pure experience as the state of the unity of consciousness. As a result he came to think that thinking is a moment which brings about a new pure experience and that the experience in the middle of the thinking is also pure in the broader sense. An Inquiry into the Good is, therefore, a unique work written under the influence of the 19th century German trend of thought.