- reading : Geitaro Nishida
- Some people may think that I read a lot of books. It is true that I love books. I think it has been my nature since I was a child. When I was very young, I used to like to go upstairs to the storehouse by myself and look at the four or five boxes of Chinese books that my grandfather used to read. Of course, there was no way he could understand them. I just looked at the books with large, harsh characters and thought that there was something in them that I could read. So my reading may have meant peering into books. In that sense, I have peeked into quite a lot of books, and I may say that I still do. The books I have really read are probably very few.
- Still, there were books that I read with great emotion when I was young. When I was a little over 20, I read Schopenhauer for the first time and was very moved by it. I thought it was an interesting book. But as the years went by, there were no more books like that. I was in the mood for nil-admirari. I have no desire to carefully read a personās books and carefully study his ideas.
- But the ideas of great thinkers appear differently as oneās thinking progresses. And we are taught by new ones. For example, people like Plato in ancient times and Hegel in modern times.
- I first read Hegel when I was about 20 years old, but he is still with me today.
- I think I read Aristotleās āMetaphysicsā for the first time when I was over 30 years old.
- I read it first in the Bons Library translation and then in Rolfesā translation in the old Philosophische Bibliothek. It was very strange. But when I was nearly fifty, suddenly [Aristotle came alive to himself. I think that to read a book, oneās thought must go that far. When you reach a point of connection, the whole becomes clear at once, like a fire in a dark night. The thought of a great thinker becomes your own, and you can say that you have understood it. I often tell young people that in order to read the writings of a great thinker, you must grasp something of his or her bones. And you have to be able to use them to some extent. Every great thinker has something like bones. Just as a great sculptor has the bones of a chisel, a great painter has the bones of a brush. It is not worth reading the writings of a thinker who has no bones. Learning the calligraphy of the great master is not a matter of imitating the form of his characters. Even very recently, I donāt think I understood the important things Leibniz contained in his work. Even though I thought I had once been able to accept Leibniz decades ago.
- For example, Aristotle has his own way of looking at things and his own way of thinking. He also has his own way of using a sword. If you have some knowledge of this, you will be able to predict how he would think about such and such a problem, even if you donāt read it to any great extent.
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We can expect him to think about these issues in this way.
This was described as emulator.
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- Thatās what Iām trying to figure out. That is why I do not have a complete collection. Nor do I have a complete collection of Kant or Hegel. Of course, I am not satisfied with that, nor do I recommend such a method to others. Such a reading is good if you can truly reach the essence of the thinker, but if not, you cannot avoid falling into subjective and dogmatic interpretation. Reading must be precise and meticulous, down to the very tip of the tongue. Needless to say, this must be the reading method that everyone should follow. But to go too far in that direction, interpreting words and phrases without grasping the underlying meaning, is a shallow way of reading. It may seem precise, but it is in fact crude.
- As I said at the beginning, I am a peeker, so you might say I am a miscellaneous reader. As I get older, my understanding becomes slower, my impressions are more limited, and my memory becomes poorer. Even if I read a book once, I tend to forget its contents immediately. However, when I find a book that is just connected to my thoughts, I find it very interesting and it seems to stay in my mind. I have read very few anthropological books in my life. However, when I read Malinowski and Harrison this summer, the structure of primitive societies that they wrote about was connected to what I had been thinking about in Rogis and Ontologisch, and I felt as if my ideas were being empirically proven, which I found interesting.
- I think it goes without saying, but I believe that one should read the writings of the great thinkers who marked an era, those who were the originators of a major school of thought. If we can grasp the ideas of such thinkers, we can understand their schools of thought just as if we were tracing vines. Of course, a difficult thinker requires some guidance, but I do not think it is a good idea to read only general outlines or endnotes. People often say that some books are difficult. If a book is only difficult and has no content, there is no need to read it, but if it is difficult because it is beyond the scope of oneās own thought, then one should go to any length to find out what it is. But if it is difficult because it is beyond the scope of oneās own thought, then one should go all the way. Knowing only one thought is the same as not knowing any thought at all. In particular, it is necessary to know the historical ground from which such an idea emerged and what significance it has. This is even more so today, when conventional thought seems to have reached a dead end and we are compelled to create something new. No matter how great a thinker may be, when a school of thought is settled, it is settled in one of many possible ways. When it comes to a dead end, going beyond it is not by moving in this direction, but by returning to the original direction and thinking about it. How did we come to this direction? In this sense, we should also read the writings of the originators of thought. The writings of a person who has set a certain direction out of many possibilities may suggest that there was another way to go. (November 1938)
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