Finding a Common Ground: Lowith and Nishida

Karl Lowith moved to Japan in 1936 where he became acquainted with the founder of the School of Kyoto, Nishida Kitaro. Lowith was unable to appreciate the meaning of Nishida's philosophy and maintained, until the late 1940s, a Eurocentric point of view regarding Japanese culture. Nonetheless, beyond this missed historical encounter between Lowith and Nishida lies a space of philosophical common ground located in a shared understanding of time and history that puts much emphasis on the eternal present and the impossibility of thinking history as a linear progression bringing salvation, as some philosophies of history have attempted to prove.