71DOI: 10.4312/as.2023.11.1.71-90
A Comparison of Nishida’s basho from his Middle 
Period with Plato’s chóra and the One of Plotinus
Marko URŠIČ* 8
Abstract 
In this paper, the principal question is the following: How and to what extent can Nishi-
da’s basho (“place”), as it is outlined in his famous treatise Basho (1926), taken together 
with the “adjoining” essay The Unsolved Issue of Consciousness (1927), be understood and 
interpreted from Plato’s and/or Plotinus’ (i.e. Neoplatonic) philosophical viewpoint—
and, possibly, also vice versa? What do Nishida’s conception (or rather intuition) of basho 
on the one hand, and Plato’s quite “vague” concept of chóra in Timaeus and/or Plotinus’ 
first hypóstasis “the One” on the other, have in common? The main formal similarity be-
tween basho and “the One” is that they cannot be “predicated” (in the Aristotelian sense) 
by anything else—or, to put it in Platonic terms, both are absolutely transcendent. How-
ever, there are also several important differences, mainly because of the different frames of 
thought, which are discussed in this paper.
Keywords: Nishida Kitarō, Plato, Plotinus, basho, chóra, the One, comparative philosophy
Primerjava med Nishidovim pojmom basho v njegovem srednjem obdobju s 
Platonovo chóro in Enim pri Plotinu
Izvleček
Osrednje vprašanje v tem prispevku je naslednje: Kako in v kolikšni meri lahko razumemo 
in interpretiramo Nishidov pojem basho (»prostor«) – kakor ga je japonski filozof razvil 
v svoji znani razpravi Basho (1926) in pridruženem besedilu Nerešeno vprašanje zavesti 
(1927) – s Platonovega in/ali Plotinovega (tj. novoplatonskega) filozofskega stališča ter, 
morda, tudi obratno? Kaj imata skupnega Nishidov pojem (ali prej intuicija) basha na eni 
strani ter Platonov dokaj »nejasen« pojem chóra v Timaju in/ali Plotinova prva hipostaza, 
tj. Eno, na drugi? Glavna formalna podobnost med bashom in »Enim« je v tem, da ne 
moreta biti opredeljena (»predicirana« v aristotelskem pomenu) z ničimer drugim – oziro-
ma, če se izrazimo v platonski terminologiji, oba sta absolutno transcendentna. Vendar pa 
je med njima tudi več pomembnih razlik, ker sta nastala v različnih miselnih okvirih, o 
katerih razmišljamo v tem prispevku.
Ključne besede: Kitarō Nishida, Platon, Plotin, basho, chóra, Eno, primerjalna filozofija
* Marko URŠIČ, Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, 
 University of Ljubljana.
 Email address: marko.ursic.fil(at)gmail.com
72 Marko URŠIČ: A Comparison of Nishida’s basho from his Middle Period ...
The comparative philosophy between East and West has always been and still is 
a hard task. Those times when the Eastern philosophical and/or religious systems 
were modified by Western interpreters in order to fit into some Europocentric refe-
rential scheme have passed, fortunately, long ago. In my younger days, the opposite 
tendency was quite strong, mostly influenced by French (post)structuralism1, name-
ly the opinion that we Westerners should study and understand all Eastern philo-
sophies (Indian, Chinese, Japanese etc.) just “by themselves”, i.e. not “contaminated” 
by our notions and theoretical “prejudices”. However, one of the main and metho-
dologically justified principles in the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg 
Gadamer is the acknowledgement that there is no real cognition without some kind 
of productive “prejudice”, or rather that there is no mutual understanding of differ-
ent cultures or historical epochs without what he terms the “merging of horizons”. 
Following and developing this view, I am convinced that at the end of the day all 
human knowledge and experiences converge, because they are in the deepest (or 
highest) sense the same for all of us. Therefore, in spite of the unavoidable fact that 
some or even many nuances happen to be “lost in translation”, we can understand 
each other in the basic strata of our human Dasein. As Heraclitus said at the dawn 
of the Western wisdom: “Logos is common to all”. Nevertheless, after the fall of the 
Tower of Babel, our deeply common lógos requires translations of our different lan-
guages, in order to compare our ways of thought in their similarities and differences, 
and thus to understand others and thereby also ourselves.
For a Western philosopher like me, a comparative approach also proves itself quite 
difficult—maybe contrary to expectations—in the research into the greatest Japa-
nese modern philosopher, Nishida Kitarō, in spite of the fact that he was very 
receptive and creative in his studies of Western philosophies. There are several 
reasons why this comparison is difficult. First, Nishida is a very deep and complex 
thinker, and can be compared with his greatest European contemporaries (Hus-
serl, Heidegger, Cassirer, Bergson, et al.). Secondly, Nishida endeavoured to con-
struct a most comprehensive philosophical system, a synthesis extending from the 
classical Greek philosophers (especially Aristotle) to many Western philosophers 
of the Modern Age, from Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz to Kant, Fichte, Schelling 
and Hegel, Schopenhauer and Lotze, Emil Lask and others. We might note here 
that in Western philosophy the last attempt at such a comprehensive philoso-
phical synthesis, as Nishida tried to develop, was the great system of Hegel. It is 
surely an extremely hard task to think “together” and include in a single consistent 
system so many different philosophical paradigms, and at the same time to remain 
sensitive to all subtle differences among them. 
1 In this tendency, Jacques Derrida’s concept of differance has been particularly influential (see David 
A. Dilworth 1993, 136–40).
73Asian Studies XI (XXVII), 1 (2023), pp. 71–90
The third reason why Nishida is difficult for a comparative philosopher, especially 
for a Westerner, are the deep and important foundations of Nishida’s philosophy 
in the tradition of the Buddhist spirituality, especially in Zen and the Madhya-
maka School of Mahayana Buddhism (needless to say, I appreciate and like this 
background to Nishida’s thought very much). Here I have in mind particularly 
the Buddhist “origin” of Nishida’s key concept (or, better, of his intellectual “in-
tuition”) of mu no basho, the “place of nothing”, as well as his basic idea of the 
“ungroundedness” of the will. In this context, I would like to express my opinion 
that every pristine philosophical thought has and indeed must have its spiritual, 
“experiential” background, both personal and cultural, whereby I guess that we can 
more easily recognize the background of a philosophical system that is rooted in 
another cultural frame, more or less different from our own.
Due to the general difficulties of the comparative philosophy between East and 
West, and also because of some particular features of Nishida’s philosophy, as sta-
ted above, I have decided to apply two thematic reductions in the present paper: 
1) The first reduction is obvious from the very title of this (broader) research pro-
ject: in the focus of the comparison, there will be the relations between Nishida’s 
and Plotinus’ philosophies. Of course, this does not mean to put completely aside 
all other philosophers, which were important for the development of Nishida’s 
thought, but rather just to limit this project thematically, in order not to miss the 
leading thread in a too large labyrinth. 2) The second reduction applies only to 
my present contribution in this paper, where I limit myself to the issue of basho 
in Nishida’s “middle period”, particularly developed in his treatises Basho (2012a 
[1926]) and the “adjoining” paper The Unsolved Issue of Consciousness (2012b 
[1927]). I have divided the topics discussed here into three sections: 1. Nishida’s 
basho and Plato’s chóra; 2. Some differences between Plato and Plotinus’ Neo-
platonism; 3. Nishida’s basho in comparison with the One of Plotinus, particularly 
concerning their relation to the “place of ideas” in the Intellect. In short, the main 
task of the present paper is to analyse and understand the triangle of three impor-
tant philosophical concepts: basho – chóra – the One.
Nishida’s basho and Plato’s chóra 
In Nishida’s treatise Basho, we cannot find a unique and exhaustive definition of the 
key concept basho—such a definition indeed cannot be expected, since basho is con-
sidered as the highest “transcendent predicate” and therefore not positively defina-
ble. But, of course, we find several outlining “descriptions” of basho and its different 
epistemic levels, from basho as the physical space of material objects, basho as the 
74 Marko URŠIČ: A Comparison of Nishida’s basho from his Middle Period ...
“place” of various mental acts and entities, up to the “highest” (or “deepest”) “basho 
of nothing” (mu no basho). Still, interpreters of Nishida have tried to formulate a 
more comprehensive definition of basho, among them we may quote here John W. 
M. Krummel, one of the principal English translators and Western commentators 
of Nishida’s works: “So what then is basho? […] It would be a ‘place’ enveloping and 
encompassing all mental acts and their objects, all perspectival horizons of inten-
tionality that constitute the world of objects” (Krummel in Nishida 2012a, 9). Of 
course, this is only a preliminary and non-compulsive “definition” of Nishida’s “mid-
dle period” basho—nevertheless, it is enough adequate for our present investigation.2
Notwithstanding the sophisticated development of Nishida’s concept(s) of 
basho(s), his original idea of the universal “place” where all differences are “im-
placed” was unique (and, of course, also his “deepest” intuition of mu no basho)—as 
we can see already from the first page of his treatise: 
… in order for objects to relate to one another, [to] constitute a single 
system, and maintain themselves, we ought to consider not only what 
maintains the system but also what establishes the system within itself 
and wherein the system is implaced. That which is must be implaced in 
something. Otherwise the distinction between is and is not cannot be 
made. Logically it should be possible to distinguish between the terms 
of relationship and the relationship itself, and also between that which 
unifies the relationship and that wherein the relationship is implaced. 
Even if we attempt to think in regard to acts, taking the I as a pure unity 
of acts, insofar as the I is conceived in opposition to the not-I, there must 
be that which envelops the opposition between I and non-I within itself 
and makes the establishment of the so-called phenomena of conscious-
ness possible within itself. Following the words of Plato’s Timaeus, I shall 
call the receptacle of the ideas in this sense, basho [place; chóra]. Needless 
to say, I am not suggesting that what I call basho is the same as Plato’s 
“space” or “receptacle place”. (Nishida 2012a, 49–50)
In spite of the fact that Nishida’s original concept of basho was inspired by Pla-
to’s chóra, we have to state that the latter is quite far from the former, as already 
2 We may supplement this “definition” of basho with Krummel’s further explications, for example: 
basho is the “pre-objective environing background for determining acts and determined content, 
the plane of potentials (predicates) allowing for the foreground emergence of beings qua objects 
or qua grammatical subjects” (Krummel in Nishida 2012a, 16)—or, in short, basho is “the place of 
implacement” (ibid.) of (all) existing entities and/or acts; it is “behind all objectifying or determining 
acts” (ibid., 12); basho is “the un-objectifiable, the indeterminate, the non-differentiated, i.e. ‘nothing’ 
(mu)” (ibid.) etc.
75Asian Studies XI (XXVII), 1 (2023), pp. 71–90
Nishida himself pointed out in the last sentence of the quoted passage—but, un-
fortunately, he has not articulated this distinction clearly enough. Later, in the 
“adjoining” paper The Unsolved Issue of Consciousness, he repeated the above quoted 
formulation of basho as “the receptacle of the ideas”. We read at the beginning 
of this paper: “In the Timaeus Plato regarded the hypodoché [i.e. chóra] to be the 
receptacle of the ideas. But this was nothing but a material principle called space” 
and so on (Nishida 2012b, 51). At the end of the same paper, he sketches (rather 
casually) his critique of Plato’s conception of chóra: “In Greek philosophy, the Pla-
tonist school arrived at the idea of ‘the place of ideas’. But having conceived the 
forms as through and through being, Greek philosophy ultimately failed to render 
any logical independence to place. It conceived place as matter vis-à-vis being” 
(ibid., 56). (Obviously, Nishida had in mind here also Aristotle, not only Plato.) In 
his notes to Nishida’s paper, Krummel adds the following explanation: “See Plato 
Timaeus 52a. Nishida has in mind here Plato’s notion of chóra, which he touched 
upon above as the receptacle of the ideas” (ibid., 59, note 26). In the introduction 
to this paper, Krummel also speaks of Plato’s chóra as the inspiration for Nishida’s 
concept of basho: “Nishida states how he was inspired by Plato’s notion of chóra 
in the Timaeus and took it as a clue in developing his own concept of basho or 
‘place’” (ibid., 45). I think that it is important to bear in mind that Nishida’s basho 
is actually his own concept, which is a much more refined and enhanced concept 
of “place” than Plato’s chóra was, so we may ascertain that the latter was only a 
preliminary motivation for Nishida. In the following, we shall look into some 
important aspects of this comparison.
First we have to agree that Plato’s chóra, like Nishida’s basho, is conceived as an 
empty “place”, i.e. as a formless “receptacle” (hypodoché), in which all sensory objects 
as the “images” or “impressions” of Platonic ideas (“the Forms”) are “implaced” 
(if we use Nishida’s term). In this “definition” of the indefinable chóra (following 
Timaeus), I have emphasized the word “sensory”, since chóra does not “implace” 
ideas themselves, but only sensory (physical) things as the “impressions” of ideas.3 
Let us consider carefully the famous passage from Timaeus (50b…52b):
… And the same argument (lógos) applies to the universal nature which 
receives all bodies––that must be always called the same, for, inasmuch 
as she [!] always receives all things, she never departs at all from her own 
nature, and never, in any way or at any time, assumes a form (morphé) 
3 The literal meaning of the Greek term ekmageîon, which occurs in Timaeus (in our quoted passage), 
and also in a rather different, epistemological sense in Plato’s Theaetetus (194d), is the “impression” 
of a form in some matter/material, for example in wax (cf. also the famous “wax analogy” of 
Descartes in his second meditation).
76 Marko URŠIČ: A Comparison of Nishida’s basho from his Middle Period ...
like that of any of the things which enter into her; she is the natural 
recipient of all impressions (ekmageîon), and is stirred and informed by 
them, and appears different from time to time by reason of them. But 
the forms which enter into and go out of her are the likenesses of eter-
nal realities modelled after their patterns in a wonderful and mysterious 
manner, which we will hereafter investigate. […] Wherefore the mother 
and receptacle (hypodoché) of all created and visible and in any way sensi-
ble things is not to be termed earth or air or fire or water, or any of their 
compounds, or any of the elements from which these are derived, but 
is an invisible and formless being which receives all things and in some 
mysterious way partakes of the intelligible, and is most incomprehensi-
ble. [… that is /next to the Forms and the sensory world/] a third nature, 
which is space (chóra) and is eternal, and admits not of destruction and 
provides a home for all created things, and is apprehended, when all sense 
is absent (anaisthesía), by a kind of spurious reason (logismós nóthos), and 
is hardly real––which we, beholding as in a dream, say of all existence 
that it must of necessity be in some place (tópos) and occupy a space 
(chóra), but that what is neither in heaven nor in earth has no existence. 
(Plato 1985, Timaeus, 50b…52b)
As we may see from the last sentence of this passage, Plato would probably agree 
with Nishida’s statement: “That which is must be implaced in something” (see the 
quotation from Nishida 2012a, above). However, chóra as the Platonic primordial 
place where the demiurge creates and therefore “implaces” sensory things as eídola of 
the paradigmatic Forms (i.e. as their “impressions” which “enter into and go out of ” 
chóra) does not “implace” ideas themselves in the sense as Nishida’s basho implaces 
(also) ideal entities and/or cognitive acts. Nishida was, of course, conscious of this 
difference when he remarked: “Needless to say, I am not suggesting that what I call 
basho is the same as Plato’s ‘space’ or ‘receptacle place’” (ibid.). However, in order to 
be clearer about Plato’s chóra, it would be better to refer to this “receptacle” as the 
place for ideas to be “impressed” in it (or in Her, i.e. in the cosmic “Mother”), not to 
denote it as the place of ideas, since in Plato’s philosophy the place of ideas is con-
sidered as the transcendent tópos hyperouraníos, mentioned in Phaedrus (Plato 1985, 
247c), which is surely not the same with chóra in Timaeus. Moreover, Plato in his 
dialogues does not explicitly (i.e. with theoretical concepts) define a place of ideas, 
except in the very abstract sense of their conceptual tópoi, for example in Parmenides 
or in The Sophist. Only in the later development of Platonism, especially in the Ne-
oplatonism of Plotinus and his followers, is the Intellect (nous) explicitly considered 
and much discussed in the sense of the place of ideas (and/or of intellectual acts), as 
we shall point out more clearly in the next section.
77Asian Studies XI (XXVII), 1 (2023), pp. 71–90
Secondly, I would like to mention here another difference between chóra and 
basho: Nishida, when speaking about basho as the “place of ideas”, states that “there 
must be that which envelops the opposition between I and non-I within itself 
and makes the establishment of the so-called phenomena of consciousness pos-
sible” (see again the quoted passage from the Basho treatise, above). In this sense, 
the conscious phenomena, made possible by the opposition of I and non-I, are 
often presented by Nishida with the metaphor of mirroring, for example in the 
following passage, where he speaks of the basho that includes everything: “And at 
its bottom it would have to be a plane that endlessly extends with nothing there, 
like a formless space that mirrors what has form” (Nishida 2012a, 89). However, if 
we follow our comparative study, Plato does not use the metaphor of mirroring in 
the context of chóra. The mirror-metaphor is often present later, in Neoplatonism, 
particularly in Plotinus who compares matter to an empty (or even false) mirror.4 
But in Plotinus matter is considered as the ultimate “privation” (stéresis) of being, 
as the complete absence of any form (which it neither “enfolds” implicitly), there-
fore it cannot “alternate”, and even less “generate alternations” in the sense that 
Nishida conceives of basho in the following passage: “We then come to think that 
space without form or sound is a universal containing everything and that form 
and sound are generated through the alternations of space” (Nishida 2012a, 78).
Nishida distinguishes several levels of space, especially the following three, as pre-
sented in Krummel’s note 180 to the Basho treatise: “Again we see here a three-
tiered sequence of deepening but in terms of space: (1) perceptual space or the 
basho of beings; (2) a priori space in the basho of consciousness (or oppositional 
nothing); and (3) true nothing [i.e. mu no basho]” (Krummel in Nishida 2012a, 
206).5 It is evident that Nishida’s basho is not only the space of sensory beings, 
equivalent to Plato’s chóra or Descartes’s res extensa, it is much more (or paradox-
ically, “less”, namely as the ultimate mu no basho). Nevertheless, the notions of 
“space” (i.e. chóra in Plato and/or tópos in Aristotle6) and “place” (in the sense of 
Nishida’s basho) are closely intertwined, as we can see also in the following pas-
sage, where Nishida distinguishes three levels of basho in relation to the levels of 
being, and each of these levels is “implaced” in its own (level of ) basho: 
4 Plotinus (1967, Enneads, III 6(26).7.25–42 and 9.17–19). In this and the following references to 
the Enneads of Plotinus, the numbers in brackets—here 26—denote the chronological order of his 
54 treatises.
5 Nishida’s passage to which this Krummel’s note refers is the following: “The perceptual space that 
we see is not immediately a priori space. But it is implaced within a priori space. Accordingly there 
would have to be true nothing behind a priori space” (Nishida 2012a, 80).
6 In the Greek philosophy, generally speaking, there is not a sharp distinction between tópos and 
chóra, e.g. also in the last sentence of the above quoted passage from Timaeus.
78 Marko URŠIČ: A Comparison of Nishida’s basho from his Middle Period ...
We see things that are merely at work in the basho of determinate be-
ings, we see the so-called acts of consciousness in the basho of opposi-
tional nothing [i.e. the cognitive space which enables the subject-pred-
icate propositions and their truth-values], and we see true free will in 
the basho of absolute nothing. (Nishida 2012a, 65; see also Krummel’s 
note 116)
Following this threefold scheme, we may state that Plato’s chóra corresponds only 
to the first level of Nishida’s basho, being the “receptacle” of the sensory, physical 
objects as the “impressions” (or, metaphorically, “shadows”) of the ideas.
Other than the above quoted passage, in the treatise Basho Nishida explicitly refers 
to Plato only once more. At the end of the first section of this treatise, he states: 
In Plato’s philosophy, the universal was conceived to be objective reality. 
But this did not lead to the idea that the universal that truly envelops all 
things would have to be a place (basho) that establishes them. For this 
reason place [basho, namely as chóra, see Krummel’s note 75] was instead 
thought of as unreal and as nothing. But there would have to be such a 
place (basho) even in the depths of the intuition of the ideas themselves. 
(Nishida 2012a, 59)
On this point, namely that there must be a basho of ideas themselves, we can 
surely agree with Nishida, and this is also in line with the Neo-Platonic point of 
view. However, in order to consider explicitly the “place” of the Intellect (of nous 
in Greek) we have to pass from Plato to Plotinus. I suppose that Nishida—at 
least in the treatises of his we are discussing—did not consider carefully enough 
some relevant distinctions between Plato and Plotinus, and therefore he did not 
realize that the Intellect as the “place of ideas” in Plotinus was much closer to 
his own philosophy of basho than the concept of chóra in Plato’s Timaeus.7 But 
before going into more details on this crucial point of the present comparative 
study, we should first remember some important differences between Plato in 
Plotinus themselves.
7 On the other hand, it is evident from some casual references to Plotinus in Nishida’s earlier works 
that he knew the mystical flavour of Plotinus’ philosophy, and consequently that he was conscious 
of the difference between Plotinus and Plato. For example, in his book Intuition and Reflection in 
Self-Consciousness (1987 [1917]), Nishida wrote: “In terms of a theory of stages of reality, Plotinus, 
Pseudo-Dionysius and Eriugena show that God transcends all categories, that absolute free will 
which entirely eludes reflection is the most concrete, primary reality” (Nishida 1987, 155).
79Asian Studies XI (XXVII), 1 (2023), pp. 71–90
Some Differences between Plato and Plotinus’ Neoplatonism
We may state that the chóra of Timaeus has a rather unfortunate role in Plato’s 
foundation of philosophical idealism, especially from the ontological point of view, 
because it introduces into his system a kind of (at least implicit) dualism, although 
that was not Plato’s own intention. If we follow the traditional (especially Chris-
tian) understanding of Platonism, it seems that it is just Plato, with his distinction 
between “the world of senses” and “the world of ideas”, who is the principal founder 
of ontological dualism in the Greek philosophy. However, this is not entirely correct, 
since a really dualistic metaphysics was not established until Aristotle, with his dis-
tinction between form and matter. As is well known, Plato endeavoured to explain 
the relation between sensory objects and ideas with the concept of “participation” 
(méthexis) of the former in the latter8—and we might assume that Plato’s main 
motive for introducing the relation of participation was to preserve, in spite of the 
“separation line” (chorismós), ontological monism, albeit in a rather “dualistic” variant. 
Plato’s primarily monistic ontology (ideas as the only real beings) was also the main 
reason why he was confronted with serious troubles when he tried to define the 
nature of chóra in Timaeus. Therefore, it is probably not a coincidence that chóra only 
features in this dialogue of Plato’s, and nowhere else. The whole discourse of Timae-
us is introduced to the reader as a kind of cosmological mýthos, not as a theoretical 
(dialectic) dialogue in the proper philosophical sense. From this point of view, it is 
also understandable that Plato mythologically refers to chóra as the cosmic Moth-
er. Last but not least, we have to remark that Aristotle’s theoretical concept of the 
“first matter” (próte hýle) is essentially different from Plato’s “indefinable” chóra—we 
may say that the former is quite well defined as the “pure potentiality”—whereas 
Plotinus’ concept of matter as complete “privation” of being is different from both, 
although it seems to be closer to Aristotle’s concept of the first matter as pure po-
tentiality than to Plato’s chóra.
Plotinus mentions chóra in some of his treatises, but mostly just as a reference to 
his great master Plato, not as a theoretical concept of his own system, which is 
8 Nishida was, of course, very well aware of the importance of méthexis in Plato’s philosophical 
system—however, he was not satisfied with Plato’s solution. At the beginning of the treatise The 
Unsolved Issue of Consciousness, he wrote: “Toward the end of Phaedo Plato conceives the nature of 
things as depending upon their participation in the ideas. He thinks that the beautiful is beautiful, 
the large is large, the small is small, et cetera, by means of participation in the idea of beauty, 
the idea of largeness, the idea of smallness, et cetera. […] But how can the ideas join individual 
things when they remain eternally unchanged without any association with the opposing nature?” 
(Nishida 2012b, 51) Nishida assumed that in Platonism chóra was a medium for joining things, 
but this assumption is valid only for physical things, since chóra as the “receptacle” (hypodoché) “was 
nothing but a material principle called space” (ibid.). In order to join together higher entities too, 
like thoughts and acts, Nishida “upgraded” Platonic chóra to his concept of basho …
80 Marko URŠIČ: A Comparison of Nishida’s basho from his Middle Period ...
radically monistic. Plotinus does not need chóra, since his ontology strictly applies 
the concept of méthexis (or metálepsis), which he has taken over from his master. 
In Plotinus’ monism, all beings “participate” in the “one-many” reality of three pri-
mordial “hypostases”: the Soul (psyché), the Intellect (or Spirit, noûs), and the One 
(tò hén). We have to point out again that matter (hýle) is considered by Plotinus 
as the complete “privation” (stéresis) of any form (eîdos), as the ultimate absence of 
the Light of being, of the One or the Good (tò agáthon). Plotinus does not even 
need the figure of a demiurge, since the process of “emanation” (the term itself was 
coined later) replaces him in the evolution of the world from three hypostases.
For our context, it is especially important to understand properly how Plotinus 
conceived of the place of ideas, in order to establish its correspondence with Nishi-
da’s basho of consciousness. Following Plotinus, ideas are “implaced” in the In-
tellect itself. The Intellect as the second hypostasis—after the One that “reflects” 
itself in the Intellect (by the internal division into nóesis and nóema, which are dual 
even in the Intellect’s own pure self-reflection)—is conceived by Plotinus as the 
transcendent “world of ideas” (and further on, by emanation of the world Soul, 
ideas as lógoi are immanent in the world, which is a unique cosmos). Concerning 
the true “place” of ideas, Plotinus’ principal point is that they are not outside the 
Intellect (as it might be argued from some passages of Timaeus about ideas as 
paradigmatic “archetypes” for Plato’s demiurge), since they constitute, as spiritual 
“living beings”, the Intellect’s own “one-many” structure. Let me emphasize again: 
Plotinus’ ideas are within the Intellect, not somewhere “high up”, in some distant 
“heaven”. Let us look at a relevant passage from the treatise That the intelligibles are 
not outside the Intellect, and on the Good:
One must not, then, look for the intelligibles [i.e. ideas] outside, or say 
that they are impressions of the real beings in Intellect [… but] we must 
attribute all (real existences) to the true Intellect [itself ]. For in this way 
it will also know them, and know them truly and will not forget them or 
go round looking for them, and the truth will be in it and it will be the 
foundation of all realities and they will live and think. (Plotinus 1984, 
Enneads, V 5(32).2.1 and 9–13)
At the end of this passage, it is particularly fascinating that the ideas (“intelli-
gibles”), which are “implaced” (using Nishida’s term, again) in the inner “place” 
of the Intellect, are themselves—as well as the Intellect as a whole—living and 
thinking beings. We have to understand them not only as intelligible “objective” 
entities, i.e. as archetypal paradigms, but also as intelligent “subjective” acts of the 
eternally living Intellect itself. Of course, the “living eternity” is a paradox, but 
81Asian Studies XI (XXVII), 1 (2023), pp. 71–90
philosophy has to accept paradoxes as “contradictory identities”, if we use Nishi-
da’s term from his late writings. However, we shall leave these fine metaphysical 
enigmas of Plotinus for some other discussion, lest we turn too far away from the 
main topic of the present paper.
Now let us look at another famous passage from Plotinus’ tractate On the intelligi-
ble beauty (1984, Enneads, V 8(31).4), where it is evident that the Intellect, which 
“implaces” in itself the ideas (or the “intelligibles”) as living entities and/or acts, 
is not only a transcendently real “place”, but it is also a very beautiful, sublime 
tópos, the Platonic tópos hyperouraníos, shining in the supreme Light of the One or 
the Good. The apex of this Plotinus’ vision is the overall reflecting or “mirroring” 
world of shining entities, of “true realities”, which can be visualized also as immor-
tal “gods” (or later, in the Christian Platonism, as angels).9 In the context of our 
comparative study, the vision of mirroring also has an important role in Nishida’s 
philosophy, particularly in considering the basho of consciousness. Beside that, the 
following passage from the treatise On the intelligible beauty is also very interesting 
because it is reminiscent of “Indra’s net”, a famous metaphor from the Mahāyāna 
Buddhist Avatamsaka Sūtra, which is also mentioned in some interpretations of 
Nishida’s philosophy (see Krummel in Nishida 2012a, 208, note 203). As I have 
already said, Plotinus speaks in this passage about the “true realities” (i.e. ideas) 
as gods who “are gods because of their intellect [… since] their thinking is al-
ways right in the calm and stability and purity of Intellect […as] they continually 
contemplate” (Plotinus 1984, Enneads, V 8(31).3ff.). In the next chapter of this 
treatise, we come to the metaphor of the resplendent light in which each being is 
transparent to every other, “and each star is the sun and all the others”:
For it is “the easy life” [i.e. a Homeric phrase for the gods] there, and truth 
is their mother and nurse and being and food—and they see all things, 
not those to which coming to be, but those to which real being belongs, 
and they see themselves in other things; for all things there [in the In-
tellect] are transparent, and there is nothing dark or opaque; everything 
9 Concerning the transcendent “world of ideas”, the question can be raised as to what kind of matter 
this “place” and its “implaced” entities (“intelligible realities”) are constituted of. Does something 
like “intelligible matter” exist, independently of the ideal entities themselves, but also quite different 
from the “dark” matter as the complete “privation” (stéresis) of being? Plotinus discusses this question 
in two treatises: On (the two kinds of ) matter (1966, Enneads, II 4(12)) and On the impassibility of 
things without body (1967, Enneads, III 6(26)), but does not come to a definite conclusion. (The 
question of the “heavenly matter” was later extensively discussed in Christian scholasticism.) Here 
I just add my opinion that the problem of the “intelligible matter” and the issue of the “place of 
ideas” are in spite of their metaphysical connection two different questions, or to put it another way, 
if we assume the existence of the “place of ideas”, this assumption does not necessarily imply the 
existence of some other kind of matter, at least not such which would be akin to the sensory matter.
82 Marko URŠIČ: A Comparison of Nishida’s basho from his Middle Period ...
and all things are clear to the inmost part to everything; for light is trans-
parent to light. Each there has everything in itself and sees all things in 
every other, so that all are everywhere and each and every one is all and 
the glory is unbounded; for each of them is great, because even the small 
is great; the sun there is all the stars (hélios ekeî pánta ástra), and each star 
is the sun and all the others. A different kind of being stands out in each, 
but in each all are manifest. (Plotinus 1984, Enneads, V 8(31).4.1–12)
Let me return to the main point of this section: as we can see in both quoted pas-
sages from Enneads, we may attribute to the (Neo)Platonic “world of ideas” a noe-
tic “place” within the Intellect—which Nishida might call the “basho of cognition”. 
However, for Plotinus it would not be appropriate to attribute a place to the One 
itself, since the One is neither “implaced” nor “implacing” the Intellect (nor the 
Soul, etc.). The One is absolutely “dimensionless”, whereas every place must have 
some dimension(s), although quite abstract and possibly infinite. (If I venture a 
question: Could we say that Nishida’s “place of nothing” is also dimensionless? 
Could any place be dimensionless?) To stress again, the One of Plotinus is not a 
place, not even a place of/for philosophical intuition (or ecstatic contemplation), 
if we understand the term “place” per analogiam with the cognitive place in/of the 
Intellect, let alone with the geometric space of sensory objects. But if we never-
theless try to preserve geometrical metaphors, which are also liked by Plotinus 
(and later even more so by Cusanus), we might rather say that the One is like a 
“point” in(to) which all beings/realities “converge”. More accurately, it is like a 
transcending central point of the series of concentric circles (i.e. of beings), which 
tend to converge with their radii in(to) the limit that is not one of the members 
of the series itself. Just as the Sun is not one of its infinite radius.10 If we have in 
mind the comparison between Plotinus and Nishida, we might also say that the 
One is the “null” point of the entire series of concentric circles that constitute the 
“predicate-plain” of/for all possible cognition.
Plotinus repeatedly emphasizes in his treatises11 that the One itself is not a being, 
not even the “highest” (or the “first”) Being—that is namely the Intellect, not 
the One, although it is named “the first hypostasis”. The One is, we may say, the 
most “inner point” of the Intellect, and thereby of the Soul, and consequently of 
the whole world of emanated beings. But even if the One does not exist as other 
beings (ideas, sensory objects, their shadows etc.), it is not nothing, not even the 
“true nothing” (shin no mu) in Nishida’s sense. In Plotinus, the One is “beyond” 
being and nothing. In order to comprehend this “transcendence” of transcendence, 
10 See Plotinus, Enneads (1984, IV 3(27).17.9–13; 1988, VI 5(23).5; VI 9(9).8.10–24, and elsewhere).
11 Enneads (1967, III 8(30); 1984, V 1(10); V 3(49); V 6(24); 1988, VI 7(38); VI 9(9) et al).
83Asian Studies XI (XXVII), 1 (2023), pp. 71–90
we have to bear in mind Plato’s famous phrase that the Good is “beyond all sub-
stances/essences” (epékeina tês ousías, Plato 1985, Republic, VI, 509b9): that means 
that the Good (or the One, in Plotinus) is not just an idea (a substance/essence) 
among other ideas, not even the “highest” Idea, but it might be metaphorically 
visualized as the all-present Light which illuminates all beings, all ideas and all 
the sensory objects which “participate” in their reality (in Plato’s famous “Allegory 
of the Cave”, the Good is likened to the Sun, although perhaps more accurately 
to the all-present “Sunshine”). Therefore, the supreme Light has two transcending 
“names” in Platonism: “the One or the Good”, whereby the “meaning” of these 
two “names” indicates the absolute identity: the One = the Good. Both “names” 
evoke the same absolutely “transcendent predicate” (as Nishida would say), but 
do not predicate each other. The Platonic “the One or the Good”—like Nishida’s 
basho—cannot be in the position of the Aristotelian grammatical “subject” (hy-
pokeímenon), since it is not a substance. And here we are already at the topic of the 
third section of the present paper.
Nishida’s basho in Comparison with the One of Plotinus
We return now to two Nishida’s treatises from his middle period, to Basho (2012a 
[1926]) and its “adjoining” paper The Unsolved Issue of Consciousness (2012b [1927]). 
First, I have to point out that Nishida’s “logic of basho” is much closer to Plato 
(and even more to Plotinus) than to Aristotle, in spite of the fact that there are 
in both treatises (and in Nishida’s works in general) more references to Aristotle 
than to Plato and Plotinus—the main reason for this is Nishida’s polemical point 
towards Aristotle’s conception of “primary substances” (prótai ousíai, see Categories 
2a35), which are individual entities, and “secondary substances” (deúterai ousíai), 
which are universals (ibid., 2a11–a18). In Aristotle’s logic, this distinction cor-
responds to the subject-predicate structure of propositions. As every student of 
philosophy knows, Aristotle criticized the doctrine of his philosophical teacher 
Plato that ideas (or the Forms) had transcendent ontological reality, or otherwise 
stated, Aristotle’s position was that the ideas in Platonism were just “hyposta-
tized” predicates, considered by himself only as “secondary substances”. (Needless 
to add, one of the greatest and longest disputes in the history of the Western 
philosophy followed: the so-called “problem of universals”.) Nishida, in contrast 
to Aristotle, has developed his doctrine of basho on the “predicate-plane”, not on 
the substantival “subject-plane”. The “basho of nothing” (mu no basho) is not and 
cannot be a substance, since it is the supreme “transcendent predicate”, i.e. the last 
in the sequence of predicates (universals), which cannot be itself predicated by 
anything else—and (also) in this sense, the deepest basho “is” nothing. Something 
84 Marko URŠIČ: A Comparison of Nishida’s basho from his Middle Period ...
similar, mutatis mutandis, can be stated about Plato’s “the Good” and/or Plotinus’ 
“the One”. From the logical point of view (needless to say, we take here the term 
“logic” in a broad sense, like Nishida), the emphasis on the “predicate-plane” is 
common to both Nishida and Platonism—and later, of course, to Kant, but we do 
not enter here into the very complicated relations between Nishida and Kant—
whereas the “predicate-plane” is not Aristotle’s approach in ontology.12 Let us look 
at several important details by considering some passages from Nishida.
In the treatise Basho, Nishida writes: “This predicate-plane is what we may con-
ceive to be the world of our consciousness. To be that what I am conscious of 
means to be implaced in such a predicate-plane. The object of thought is implaced 
in it as well and so is the object of perception” (Nishida 2012a, 96). However, 
basho itself as the “transcendent predicate” can never become neither the object 
of thought nor of perception, at the utmost it might be present-in-absence in the 
philosophical intuition.13 For if we tried to approach “basho of true nothing” (shin 
no mu no basho) from the merely logical (i.e. cognitive in the Aristotelian sense) 
point of view, Nishida would teach us the following: “By driving forward in the 
direction of the predicate of judgement towards its culmination, that is, by con-
tinually transcending predicated in the predicate-direction, we see the mirror that 
simply mirrors. Upon it is mirrored the world of infinite possibilities as well as the 
world of meanings” (ibid., 90). Krummel adds the following note to this passage: 
12 In this context, we can also state that the concept of “the good” in Nishida’s first and seminal book 
An Inquiry into the Good (1990 [1911]) is closer to Plato’s ontological conceiving of “the Good” 
than to Aristotle’s concept of the good in Nicomachean Ethics and elsewhere—although Nishida’s 
concept of the good is still considerably different from Plato’s tò agáthon. In a quite exposed point of 
his Inquiry, in Chapter 23, Nishida assumes in a rather Platonic manner that “from a certain angle, 
the concept of the good coincides with the concept of reality” (Nishida 1990, 125–26) and that 
“in concrete reality existence and value are fundamentally one”, while at the end of this chapter he 
resumes: “The above ideas [of the good] are fundamental to Plato’s stance (that the idea of the good 
is the foundation of reality) in Greece and to the Upanishads in India. And in medieval philosophy 
we encounter the expression, ‘All reality is good’ (omne ens est bonum). I think such ideas constitute 
the most profound notion of the good.” (Nishida 1990, 126)
13 In the introduction to his English translation of An Inquiry into the Good, Masao Abe, an eminent 
professor of the “Kyoto School”, raises the following question: “How did Nishida develop the 
standpoint of self-consciousness into the standpoint of basho, place? With the notion of place 
Nishida moved from voluntarism to a sort of intuitionism” (Abe in Nishida 1990, xxii). As a part of 
his answer to this question, Abe refers to Nishida’s statement from the preface to From the Acting 
to the Seeing [1927]: “Since [the book] Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness [1917] I have 
considered the intuition at the base of the will. I have had an idea, like Plotinus’ idea, that to act 
is to see. For this reason I have regarded the absolute will as the ultimate” (ibid.). It seems to me 
important that Nishida mentioned Plotinus in this context; compare, for example, Plotinus’ treatise 
On Nature and Contemplation and the One (1967, Enneads, III 8(30)). See also Nishida’s preface 
to the third edition (1936) of An Inquiry into the Good (Nishida 1990, xxxii). Obviously, Nishida’s 
reading of Plotinus was important for the formation of his “intuitionistic” logic of basho.
85Asian Studies XI (XXVII), 1 (2023), pp. 71–90
“I.e., what Nishida elsewhere calls the transcendent predicate or the basho of ab-
solute or true nothing” (ibid., 211, note 241). And Nishida continues on the same 
page: “In the foregoing, I have explained that breaking through the basho of being 
enclosed by universal concepts, there is the basho of nothing, which we may regard 
as a mirror that simply mirrors and which we can see the will in the relationships 
of that basho to the basho of being. […] At the basho of true nothing, the will itself 
must be negated as well (ibid., 90). On the last page of the treatise Basho, Nishida 
resumes his main point(s):
… for the predicate-plane to see itself in the subject-plane means that 
the predicate-plane itself becomes the basho of true nothing. It means 
that the will destroys itself and that everything implaced in it becomes 
intuition. As the predicate-plane becomes infinitely expansive, basho it-
self becomes truly nothing and what is implaced in it simply becomes 
an intuition of the self. That the universal predicate reaches its extremity 
means that the particular subject reaches its extremity and become itself. 
(Nishida 2012a, 102)14
And just at the end of the treatise, Nishida humbly acknowledges: “I regret that 
after many repetitions in the foregoing discussion ultimately I could not ade-
quately express what I was thinking …” (ibid., 102). This is indeed a noble con-
fession from a great thinker! In our highest aspirations, we always feel that words 
are not enough to express our deepest intuitions. Nevertheless, as we have already 
stated, a year later Nishida returned to the topics raised of Basho in his “adjoining” 
paper The Unsolved Issue of Consciousness, explaining again his critical position to-
wards Aristotle’s “subject-plane” ontology of substance:
… Aristotle, however, once defined substance (ousía) as that which be-
comes the grammatical subject of judgement but not the predicate [in 
Metaphysics 1028b36–37, see Krummel’s note 19]. As a definition of sub-
stance I find this sufficient […] however, can we not conceive of what is 
in a still deeper sense by putting this in reverse as that which becomes 
the predicate but not the grammatical subject. Aristotle sought the 
transcendent basis of judgement merely in the direction of the grammat-
ical subject. The transcendent that truly founds judgement, however, is 
not in the direction of the grammatical subject but instead in the direc-
tion of the predicate. […] As we conceive the predicate to be completely 
14 Krummel adds to this passage the following note: “We may say that this refers to the experience of 
emptiness in the Buddhist significance. […] This is Nishida’s rendering, in modern philosophical 
terminology, of the middle standpoint of Mahāyāna Buddhism.” (ibid., 217–18, note 315)
86 Marko URŠIČ: A Comparison of Nishida’s basho from his Middle Period ...
transcendent in the above sense, it must be something that cannot be 
stated to be a being [i.e. a substance] in the sense of a grammatical sub-
ject. As opposed to a being qua grammatical subject, it must be complete-
ly nothing. (Nishida 2012b, 54–55)
When reading these and similar passages of Nishida, it seems rather surprising (at 
least to me) that Nishida himself did not refer in his works more to Plotinus (and 
also to Plato), because the similarities between his concept of basho and the concept 
of the Intellect as “the place of ideas” in Plotinus is (rather) clear, in spite of some 
important differences to which we will come later. Of course, there is a large historic 
(and not only cultural) distance between Plotinus and Nishida, and it is understand-
able that Nishida directed his philosophical “dialogues” more to the modern than 
to the ancient Western philosophers, however, this is not the whole explanation of 
Nishida relative “silence” about Plotinus, especially if we have in mind that both 
philosophers strived for philosophia perennis. It is even more surprising that in those 
few passages from Nishida’s middle period, where he mentions Plotinus, he does 
not mention this late Greek sage with as much respect as he actually deserved—al-
most the opposite, in fact. For example, in Basho Nishida mentions Plotinus only 
once, as he expresses the following quite sharp judgement: “The Greeks with their 
intellectualism, even with Plotinus’ ‘the One’ (tò hén), were unable to thoroughly 
exhaust this significance of true nothing” (Nishida 2012a, 94). In spite of the fact 
that we surely could discuss to what extent or if at all Nishida’s judgement of “the 
Greeks” concerning the understanding of “true nothing” is justified (but I will not 
go here into this direction), it is at least rather odd that Nishida also placed Plotinus 
into Greek “intellectualism”, as if “the One” in Plotinus were something only con-
ceptual and abstract, as it was in the debates of Sophists, or even in the discussion 
about the one and many and so on in Plato’s dialogues Parmenides and/or Sophist. 
Nevertheless, I think that Nishida knew perfectly well that “the One” of Plotinus 
was much more than just an “intellectualist” idea.
A similar opinion about Plotinus to that expressed in Basho, although more moderate 
and explained in a little more detail, can be found in Nishida’s “adjoining” paper The 
Unsolved Issue of Consciousness, in the context of the discussion about Plato’s chóra: 
The One in Plotinus is conceived as what transcends nous and further-
more envelopes it within. And yet it still tends in the direction of the 
father in Plato’s Timaeus and not in the direction of the mother. Pure 
matter, without form, is conceived simply as that which mirrors, as [in 
itself ] nothing. Greek philosophy failed to discover the deep and true 
significance of nothing. (Nishida 2012b, 51) 
87Asian Studies XI (XXVII), 1 (2023), pp. 71–90
A point of contention in this quite general judgement is the fact that “mirroring” 
is not even mentioned by Plato in the context of chóra, while the “pure matter” in 
Plotinus is not something that mirrors, but at the utmost the “privation” of being is 
like a “false mirror”. In the last paragraph of the same text, Nishida repeats his, we 
may say, premature judgements about Plotinus and Greek philosophy in general:
In Greek philosophy, the Platonist school arrived at the idea of the “place 
of ideas”. But having conceived the forms as through and through being, 
Greek philosophy ultimately failed to render any logical independence to 
place. It conceived place as matter vis-à-vis the forms and as nothing vis-
à-vis being. Even the One of Plotinus was nothing but what transcends 
in the direction of the ideas, and the issue of matter remained unresolved. 
[…] The true One must be the place of absolute nothing, something that 
absolutely cannot be determined as being. (Nishida 2012b, 56)
I surmise that the principal problem of this interpretation of the Plotinus’ One 
comes from Nishida’s questionable understanding of Plato’s chóra as the “place of 
ideas”, which I have already discussed in the first section of this paper. From this 
starting point, Nishida jumps to the One in Plotinus, attributing to it a “place” that 
should be “the place of absolute nothing”—thereby subsuming Plotinus’ philosophy 
under his own “logic of basho”?—and finally saying (in this latter case, Plotinus 
would probably agree) that “the true One must be […] something that absolutely 
cannot be determined as being”. Indeed, Plotinus “first hypostasis”, the One or the 
Good, is “beyond” (epékeina) all beings (or “substances”), also “beyond” all transcend-
ent ideas (i.e. Platonic Forms), and even “beyond” the Intellect (nous) as a whole, the 
“second hypostasis”, which “implaces” the ideas within itself as “subject-object”, as 
“one-many”. (I have put the word “beyond” in quotation marks, because here it is not 
meant in the ordinary spatial sense, i.e. beyond all visible celestial spheres, although 
it might be considered as a kind of “ideal” tópos, a transcendent “place”, or if we use 
the traditional Platonic term, the “world of ideas”.)
From Nishida’s cursory references to Plotinus (at least in the two treatises that we 
discuss in this essay), it seems that he considered Plotinus mainly as an interpreter 
of Plato—like many important Western philosophers of the Modern Age, fol-
lowing the enormous influence of Hegel’s history of philosophy. However, today 
we know (again, after many centuries) that Plotinus was not only a very lucid 
interpreter of Plato’s philosophy, but that his “Neoplatonism” was indeed a new, 
enhanced variant of Greek idealism, which was based, of course, on the perennial 
philosophical insights of the “divine” Plato himself. In the last few decades, a 
new Plotinus “renaissance” has been going on. We may guess that these historical 
88 Marko URŠIČ: A Comparison of Nishida’s basho from his Middle Period ...
turns in evaluations of the history of philosophy and the shifts concerning the 
importance of its principal representatives are probably the main reason for Nishi-
da’s “overlooking” the deep similarities between his own philosophy and Plotinus. 
One of the main motives for our present comparative project is also to correct this 
“lapse” and to fill the gap between two historically and culturally distant, yet in 
their very depths much related philosophical systems and/or ways.
Let me resume the analysis of the relations among Nishida, Aristotle and (Neo)Pla-
tonism, following the longer passage about Aristotle from Nishida’s paper The Un-
solved Issue of Consciousness, quoted above. In his “reversal” of Aristotle’s metaphysics, 
Nishida passes from the ontological “subject-plane” to the “predicate-plane”—we 
might say that this is his step “back” from Aristotle to Plato.15 Nishida’s way to 
transcendence points in the same “direction” as the (Neo)Platonic way, to the lim-
iting point where “the predicate-plane becomes infinitely expansive” (see above), 
however, the limit itself is different: for Nishida the limit of the expansion of the 
predicate-plain is basho that is “true nothing”, while for Plato/Plotinus the limit 
of the ascend to transcendence is “the Good” or “the One”. Nevertheless, from the 
epistemological point of view, the way “upward” is very similar in both cases: going 
“up” to the transcendence through the ascending hierarchy of more and more “pure” 
predicates. And even on the level of the Intellect (i.e. noûs in Plotinus, basho of 
consciousness or “oppositional nothing” in Nishida) there are striking similarities, 
particularly in the comprehension that the supreme wisdom is not attainable by in-
tellect alone, but by intuition which transcends the duality of intellectual cognition. 
Here I would like to emphasize again my conviction that the deep similarities 
between Nishida and Plotinus are greater and much more important for the com-
parative philosophical investigations than the differences between them—and 
this is also my main motive in this research project: the highest (or the deepest) 
15 Nishida’s closeness to the “(Neo)Platonic Way” in philosophy is evident also in his last treatise 
Nothingness and the Religious Worldview (1993 [1945]). In the first chapter of this treatise, where 
Nishida endeavoured to develop further his “logic of basho” in the direction of the historical-
cultural (Buddhist) “background”, he returned to the explanation of the “logic of the predicate”, 
especially to the difference between Aristotle’s “objective” ontology and Kant’s (later also Husserl’s) 
“subjective”, i.e. transcendental method. In this essay, he states again that “in contrast to Aristotle’s 
subject that cannot be predicate, the conscious self has its being as predicate that cannot be 
subject”, and adds “I think I can grasp the true meaning of Kant’s contribution to philosophy 
from the perspective of my logic of the predicate” (Nishida 1993, 59). For our present context, it is 
especially relevant that Nishida in his last treatise explicitly assigns the “logic of the predicate” to 
Plato as well, when he remarks that “Plato’s ‘essences’ [i.e. ideas, the Forms] would seem to pertain 
to this latter assumption” (ibid., 57), namely to the predicate-plane philosophy, in contrast to the 
Aristotelian “objective” ontology of the grammatical subject (hypokeímenon). This view would apply 
even more to Plotinus, (cf. the above quoted passage from the 1984, Enneads, V 5(32), titled That 
the intelligibles are not outside the Intellect, and on the Good).
89Asian Studies XI (XXVII), 1 (2023), pp. 71–90
points of Western and Eastern philosophies converge, since we are all members 
of the same global human “family”. In addition, I have to remark that my aim in 
this comparative study is absolutely not to “correct” Nishida’s understanding of 
(Neo)Platonism, since every philosopher, especially such a great thinker as Nishi-
da, has the right to understand and develop the philosophies of his predecessors 
in his own way (like Aristotle in his understanding of Plato, Hegel towards Kant, 
Heidegger towards Husserl etc.)—maybe these “misunderstandings” are in fact 
essential for the historical development of philosophy—and that is why my prin-
cipal intention in the present comparative project is just to analyse and elucidate 
similarities as well as differences between two great thinkers, Plotinus and Nishi-
da, not to judge which of their ways is “better”. 
Following this line of thought, I must finally say at least a few words about the 
main difference between Nishida and Plotinus, which I notice as a seeking wan-
derer in their vast philosophical “landscapes” at the very top (or bottom) of their 
ways: the final goal of Nishida’s philosophical meditation is to attain the “basho of 
true nothing”, while the highest summit of Plotinus’ philosophical contemplation 
is the ecstatic “experience” of the One or the Good, beyond every duality, even 
beyond the highest cognitive duality of the Intellect. This difference is reflected 
also in the “topological” distinction between the deepest “place” (basho) of the 
“true nothing” in Nishida and the transcendent “point” of the One, as conceived 
of by Plotinus. The One of Plotinus is not even the highest “Self ”, since the latter 
is attained (already and/or only) in the Intellect as the “self-reflected” One—while 
in Nishida this point is not quite clear (at least for me), since he often speaks of 
the “basho of nothing” as a kind of source (?) of the will and/or of the intellect. 
However, to be honest, we also have to add that in the philosophy of Plotinus it is 
not quite clear how and why the process of emanation “starts” from the One to the 
cognitive duality of the Intellect, to the multiplicity of ideas within it, and then 
“downwards” to souls and things. The question “Why there is anything at all, rath-
er than nothing?” remains the great philosophical enigma. Concerning Nishida’s 
concept of basho, I think that it is probably helpful to “comprehend” it against the 
background of Zen’s mu (in Sanskrit śūnyatā). 
At the end of this paper, and as my contribution to the comparison between 
Nishida in Plotinus, I venture to ask a question which seems essential to me, but 
is surely too difficult for a finite human mind to answer: Is the “true” nothing of 
Nishida (and, in several “variants” of philosophical and/or religious formulations, 
also of the whole Buddhist spiritual tradition) indeed so much different from 
“the One” in the ancient Greek wisdom? Or, if I ask otherwise: Is the “pure” be-
ing different from the “pure” nothing? (Not only in the abstract sense of Hegel’s 
dialectical logic, but also in the “experiential” sense of great mystics of East and 
90 Marko URŠIČ: A Comparison of Nishida’s basho from his Middle Period ...
West.) Or, if I ask the same question inside the ancient Indian (and consequently 
overall Asian) religious wisdom: Is Buddha’s nibbana indeed different from the 
Upanishadic moksha? Or, put in terms of the great Christian mystics Dionysus 
the Areopagite and/or Master Eckhart: Is the deepest divine Gloom different 
from the supreme Light? Of course, I cannot answer to any variant of this “final” 
question. However, we philosophers must raise such questions that cannot hope 
to be answered, at least not “here”, not “yet”, and the issue of nothing vs. being is 
surely one of the most basic philosophical questions.
Acknowledgement
This paper is a part of the research project of the author with Prof. Yujin Itabashi 
from the Rissho University in Tokyo, titled “A Comparison between Philosophies 
of Nishida Kitarō and Plotinus”.
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