Born in Hiraimura, Hyogo Prefecture, on December 28, 1896 (although his birth was registered on January 5, 1897), after studying at the prestigious First High School in Tokyo, he enrolled at Kyoto University to study under Kitarō Nishida, having been deeply impressed by his book An Inquiry into the Good. From 1922 to 1925, he studied first in Germany, under Heinrich Rickert in Heidelberg and under Martin Heidegger in Marburg, where he met, among others, Karl Löwith and Hans-Georg Gadamer, and then in France in Paris, where he began working on Pascal. In 1927, he became a professor at Hōsei University in Tokyo. Influenced by Heidegger, he began to develop a humanistic interpretation of Marx’s thought. In 1930, he was accused of aiding the Communist Party, arrested, and imprisoned for several months. Forced to leave academia, he began working as a journalist and in publishing. From 1938 to 1940, he was a member of the Shōwa Research Association, while devoting himself to the development of what would become his masterpiece, The Logic of Imagination, which remained unfinished. While working on an interpretation of Shinran’s thought, he was arrested again for political reasons in 1945. He died in prison a few days after the end of the war, on September 26, 1945, in Tokyo.