Q.Would you agree with Nishitani's definition of 'modern'?

I’d say yes, with a clear qualification. Nishitani’s definition of “modern” is not a calendar date but a mode of self-understanding — the point where human reason and subjectivity become the ground of all meaning, and the world is seen as something to be mastered rather than received. That captures the core of what we call modernity in philosophy: the turn inward, the confidence in method, and the loss of a given cosmic order.

Where I’d hesitate is in treating that definition as exhaustive. “Modern” also carries social and historical weight — industrialisation, secularisation, the nation-state — which Nishitani’s philosophical framing doesn’t fully cover. So his definition is sharp and useful for understanding the spirit of the age, but it’s one lens, not the whole picture.

Nishitani Keiji, a Japanese philosopher of the Kyoto School, did not treat “modern” as a mere date on a calendar. For him, the modern age is defined by a radical shift in human self-understanding: the rise of the autonomous subject, the triumph of scientific rationality, and the reduction of nature to an object for human mastery. In his reading, modernity is the moment when humanity steps out of a cosmos filled with meaning and into a world it must construct for itself. That is a powerful and genuinely illuminating definition — but is it one we should fully accept?

The strength of Nishitani’s view is that it captures the inner logic of modernity, not just its outer trappings. Industrialisation, capitalism, the nation-state, secularism — these are all symptoms. The deeper cause, he argues, is a new mode of being: the self that stands over against the world, that doubts, measures, and controls. This is why he is so interested in Descartes, for whom the thinking “I” becomes the foundation of all certainty. Once that happens, the world is no longer a sacred text to be read but a resource to be exploited. That diagnosis rings true for anyone who has felt the coldness of a purely instrumental world.

Yet the definition has real limits. First, it is deeply Eurocentric. Nishitani is describing the European experience of modernity — the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, the industrial age — and then treating it as if it were universal. But Japan, China, India, and the rest of the world did not become “modern” in the same way or at the same time. They encountered modernity largely through colonialism and forced opening, and their modernities were shaped by negotiation, resistance, and adaptation. A Japanese peasant in 1870, an Indian clerk in 1900, and a Parisian flâneur in 1850 were all “modern” in some sense, but their experiences share almost nothing of Nishitani’s neat philosophical schema.

Second, the definition is too intellectual. It assumes that the defining feature of modernity is a change in ideas — the rise of the subject, the death of God, the dominance of science. But for most people, modernity has been experienced as a change in material conditions: railways, factories, cities, mass media, vaccines, and the bomb. A worker in a Manchester mill in 1840 did not need to read Descartes to be modern; she was modern because her life was governed by the factory clock, not the seasons. Nishitani’s definition captures the philosophy of modernity but misses its lived, bodily, and economic reality.

Third, the definition is too clean. It implies a sharp break between the premodern and the modern, as if one day people woke up in a different world. But historians know that change is messy. Religious belief did not vanish with the Enlightenment; it was reshaped. Community ties did not dissolve with industrialisation; they were re-formed in new ways. The “modern subject” that Nishitani describes is an ideal type, not a description of any actual person. Most people, even in the most modern societies, live with a mix of attitudes — some rational, some traditional, some superstitious.

So would I agree with Nishitani? Partly. As a philosophical definition, it is brilliant — it names the deep structure of the modern mind. But as a historical definition, it is too narrow, too Western, and too abstract. It tells us how thinkers understood modernity, but not how ordinary people lived it. If I had to choose, I would say: Nishitani’s definition is a necessary starting point, but not a sufficient one. It opens the door, but the room is much larger than he imagines.