Nishida Kitarō: Self, World, and the Nothingness Underlying Distinctions
John C. Maraldo
The Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy
Edited by William Edelglass and Jay L. Garfield
Print Publication Date: May 2011 Subject: Philosophy, Non-Western Philosophy Online Publication Date: Sep 2011 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195328998.003.0031
Abstract and Keywords
This article provides an introduction to the philosophy of Nishida Kitarō. Nishida, widely recognized as the most important Japanese philosopher of the twentieth century and the founder of the Kyoto School, authored some twenty volumes of essays influenced by Buddhist thought and deeply informed by the Anglo-European philosophy that was just beginning to be introduced to his country. Nishida began his work with the notion of “pure experience,” the moment prior to any distinction between experiencing self and experienced object, as it founds the systematic development of our thinking about the world. After lengthy diversions into German and French dialectical thinking and Neo-Kantian philosophy to explain the nature of self-awareness, he returned to early Greek philosophy and Buddhist thinking and developed a novel alternative to the ways that philosophers have distinguished self and world and sought ultimate grounds for them.
Keywords: Japanese philosopher, Japanese philosophers, Nishida Kitarō, Kyoto School, Buddhism, Buddhist philosophy
The Significance of Nishida Kitarō
Is there an ultimate context that encompasses not only the terms in which we conceptualize the world but also everything, every being, even the world itself? That question was a central concern of Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945) in the mature stage of his philosophy. Nishida, widely recognized as the most important Japanese philosopher of the twentieth century and the founder of the Kyoto School, authored some twenty volumes of essays influenced by Buddhist thought and deeply informed by the Anglo-European philosophy that was just beginning to be introduced to his country. Nishida began his work with the notion of “pure experience,” the moment prior to any distinction between experiencing self and experienced object, as it founds the systematic development of our thinking about the world. After lengthy diversions into German and French dialectical thinking and Neo-Kantian philosophy to explain the nature of self-awareness, he returned to early Greek philosophy and Buddhist thinking and developed a novel alternative (p. 362) to the ways that philosophers have
distinguished self and world and sought ultimate grounds for them. 1
Nishida's alternative notion of “the place of absolute nothingness” that underlies all distinctions and contextualizes all grounds has profound significance for debates concerning the questions gathered under the labels of internalism and externalism, both cognitive and semantic. Once we see through his often forbidding language, his notion suggests a way to uncover the assumptions that both sides of the debate have in common. It points to the positive role that an obscure context plays in making distinctions. The “dazzling obscurity” that he called “the place of absolute nothingness” can be understood as the ultimate context of contexts, the common ground that makes distinctions possible—although it requires a modification in our usual conception of a ground. Just as Nishida's language is clarified by an analysis of distinction making, his own account of absolute nothingness, informed by Daoist and Zen Buddhist reflections, clarifies the relation between self and world.
Distinctions and the Opposition between Self and World
Making distinctions is at the heart of teaching and doing philosophy. Think of the importance of the distinctions—and often of the challenge to the distinctions—between what is and what ought to be, or between what something is and that it is, between synthetic and analytic, passive and active, empirical and transcendental, and so forth. More specifically, recall the distinctions that underlie disputes about the relation between self and world and between mind and world. Not only are the terms of the relation (self and world or mind and world) distinguished, but so too are the types of relationship in question: is mind self-contained and solely internal to the individual experiencing subject or are its contents dependent upon the environment and the world in general?
A primary interest shared by both sides in this dispute is to resist an overbearing imposition of our fallible minds and mental contents on the world, that is, to allow for resistance from the world as a corrective to our ideas. A second shared concern is to strictly preserve the features of experience that differentiate one individual from another. These concerns in turn imply two underlying distinctions, again shared by both sides of the dispute, namely, some distinction between mind and world, however disputed the bounds of the mind may be, and some distinction between individual minds. No matter how external or internal to the individual subject the content of her (p. 363) mind and the meaning of her words may be, the mind is not thought to be wholly internal to the world; its fundamental distinction from world is maintained by both sides. These shared features conceal another, perhaps deeper, unsettled matter for both sides: the nature of the self in the background of this dispute. Is the self “self-contained” within the individual bodily subject, within one's skin so to speak, or does its extension reach beyond the body, at least the body as an object in the world? Is self rather a body-subject that reaches beyond the objective confines of the physical body? Is the “skin” of the self a perceptive organ that interacts with the environment and is not measurable by dimensions given by tape measures? Settling the dispute about the bounds of mind and its cognitions would require determining with much more precision the bounds of self and its transactions with the world. Yet again, whatever the position regarding the unsettled bounds of the self, the disputes presuppose its distinction from world. The talk of a “transaction” between perceptions, cognitions, or self on the one hand and world on the other implies this distinction. Even the most expansive notions of bodily self interacting with the world and with others, as we find in Merleau-Ponty, for example, assume a distinction between self and world. Heidegger's attempt to undermine commonplace assumptions by reformulating the terms and speaking of Being-in-the-World still differentiates between oneself and environment and between oneself and world as the ultimate context of meanings.
This chapter does not attempt to resolve these tangled issues or even describe them with more precision. Nor does it intend to question the fundamental distinction between self and world. Rather, it will present an alternative way, modeled after Nishida, to contextualize the distinctions and to understand the grounds of various levels of distinctions—both the grounds of distinctions like those mentioned above and the grounds of their various levels. It will present the ultimate “ground” as a nothingness with respect to all distinguished terms, and will thus call for a modification of the notion of ground. At the same time it will present a way to understand the meaning and function of nothingness in the philosophy of Nishida KitarO and his East Asian sources.
Self and World in Nishida's Philosophy
Nishida developed a layered set of distinctions he took to be increasingly concrete, that is, inclusive of the terms abstracted out of their underlying context, and eventually he proposed “absolute nothingness” as the ultimate context.2 Using his terms, we can begin with language and the logic of judgments and note the distinction (p. 364) between the subjects and predicates of our judgments—without deciding whether or to what degree those predicates are internal or external to the judging individual. In judgments like “John is jealous of Mary” and “Eartheans mean H O to be water,” 3 we ascribe to a particular (grammatical) subject certain qualities or attributes, an emotion
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and a belief in these examples. The qualities or attributes “belong to” the grammatical subject. At the same time predicates name universals or at least general items not restricted to any particular subject. Judgments then are articulated states of affairs that form the context out of which grammatical subjects and predicates are distinguished. In other words, we can apprehend and then articulate a state of affairs that includes the subject and the predicate and that grounds the distinction between them—again without deciding the necessity or the degree of factors external to the individual who is judging.
Taken as the context that encompasses things and their characteristics or relations, the level of judgments leaves out the acts of mind or consciousness that formulate the judgments. Mind in the act of judging may be said to take the judgment, the articulated state of affairs (John is jealous of Mary, Eartheans think water is H O) as its proposed object for consideration—for confirmation or disconfirmation, for
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example. For Nishida, we must move to a more concrete context that includes both judgments and the mind as judging agent that is considering them. In Nishida's view, however, the acting mind is not simply one side of the distinction; rather, it includes both the act's object, the judgment, and the mind itself. This is because mind or consciousness in act is self-reflexive; however fallibly, it is aware of itself as well as of things in the world, and can thus distinguish between itself and things in the world.4 Self-reflexive mind or
consciousness forms the context out of which mind and things with their attributes are distinguished. The move to include judgments, with their grammatical subjects and predicates, within the context of self-aware mind might seem to imply some form of internalism and suggest that the content articulated in judgments is contained within an individual mind and thus independent of external factors in the world. Nishida's move as such, however, only acknowledges that judgments are the sorts of matters that are held, entertained, or proposed by minds. To use the previous example, Eartheans' belief that water is H O may or may not depend on factors outside Eartheans' minds,
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but the judgment about what Eartheans believe is proposed by someone and, for Nishida, belongs to the context of the self-aware mind considering the judgment. The appeal to a more inclusive context is not meant to settle the issue between internalism and externalism, but to show what both sides presuppose. We have seen how both assume a (p. 365) distinction between mind and world and between one mind and another. If self-consciousness names a demarcation between self and others and self and world, then what is the context out of which these distinctions arise? We must proceed to the next level in Nishida's scheme to see their common ground.
The next level of concreteness is that of the world—not in the sense of some extramental reality, nor of a preexistent, nonhuman universe, nor of some projection or construction of mind, but rather world that creates knowing, embodied selves and is created by them. Nishida came to call this “the historical world” to emphasize the concrete and everyday space in which we live as embodied, enculturated selves
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immersed in the histories that we make and that make us. The philosophical notions of minds as relatively isolated or self-contained units and of the world as a physical, nonhuman realm are abstracted from the historical world, as is any evidence supporting such notions. Here, too, we might ask whether the self-aware, judging mind is properly understood as a sole individual subject. To take the individual mind acting alone as the self-aware judging mind would be to abstract it from its context in a world of shared language, culture, and history—all factors that make judgments possible. Insofar as internalism and exernalism both recognize that meanings and beliefs are tied to language, culture, and history, they both can agree on this point. This is not to deny that there are individuals with their own mental features. But even to posit such individuating features requires a context of comparison that cannot be derived from any single such mind. Individual agents living in the historical world differentiate themselves from others and reciprocally are subject to differentiation; they create and are created by the historical world. The historical world thus is the context out of which actual, knowing selves are differentiated. This world displays a self-reflexive structure similar to that of self-aware minds, in that it refers to itself as including knowing, embodied selves.
If one were to understand the self-reflexive, historical world as a mind of a higher order, however, Nishida's scheme would amount to a form of panpsychism. This view either extends mind beyond individual subjects to some kind of universal mind or finds mind as a
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constitutive part of the universe. Mind in some sense is taken to be everywhere. Panpsychism would collapse the distinction between mind and world that internalism and externalism hold in common. Nishida does not take that course, but instead maintains a distinction between individual selves as self-aware minds and the world that differentiates and contextualizes them. The world is “self-aware” in the sense that whatever is “in the world” is a reflection or mirroring of the world. In Nishida's parlance, the world “mirrors itself” in all that is
(p. 366) in it, but the individual, self-aware self is a “focal point” of the world. There is no outside to this world. In this respect Nishida's conception shares the assumption common to both internalism and externalism that, whatever the bounds of mind or sources of the mind's content, “world” represents the outermost boundary. Yet if world is the broadest existing context for differentiations, if there is no further existing context out of which terms can be distinguished, then what is the basis of the distinction between world and mind, or of the very conception of world?
Nishida's answer is: nothing that exists; indeed, nothingness. This obscure and difficult topic need not conjure up metaphysical specters that would be anathema to those who debate about self and world, however. We can clarify nothingness in terms of making distinctions, and making distinctions in terms of nothingness. Nishida's implicit account of distinctions casts light not only on his own philosophy but on the working of philosophical distinctions in general, and in particular their role in debates about the relation between self and world.
An Analysis of Distinctions
We can preface Nishida's particular account with Robert Sokolowski's illuminating analysis of distinctions in general. Sokolowski notes that making distinctions is not merely a matter of opposing one thing to another. We make distinctions when some obscurity stands in the way of clarifying an issue, and to understand them we must keep in mind the particular obscurity behind them. The obscurity “lets the
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distinction occur” even when it is meant to hold everywhere and always. Making distinctions requires not merely that we separate or exclude terms, but that we first bring them together “so there is the activity of bringing together along with the annulment of their belonging together.” The nondistinction does not come before the distinction; rather, the “ability to hold two as one comes along with the ability to hold two together as distinguished” from one another. Let us take these two “holds” one at a time. “Holding two together as one is holding them precisely as not distinguishable.” Holding them together as one involves both “the possibility of their being distinguished
and the denial [or perhaps the deferral] of that possibility.” We might add that holding two together as distinguished reaffirms that possibility. Before the possibility of distinction, we have what Sokolowski calls mere assimilation, and we don't see the one as one. He
calls distinction-making the “emergence of thinking and reasoning.” 8
With some appropriate shifts, to which we will return later, we can employ a similar analysis to understand Nishida's talk of nothingness. The stage of assimilation is what early Nishida called pure experience. This is not yet thinking and reasoning in (p. 367) that it is prior to the crucial epistemological distinction between subject experiencing and object experienced. Later, Nishida abandoned the talk of pure experience but retained the same priority of a unity in at least three notions: “knowing by becoming,” where self and things in the world are seen as one; self-awareness as “a seeing without a seer”; and nothingness as a universal notion in which “there is no distinction between that which expresses and that which is expressed.” 9 In his first works, Nishida was pressed to explain how distinctions and reflective thought could arise out of a state of unity; thus, we see him struggling with the themes of “intuition and reflection in self-awareness” (the title of one of his early books; Nishida 1917). He eventually gave up the logical and temporal priority of the assimilated state and moved to a kind of interdependence of unity and plurality, or identity and difference—the one comes along with the other. Nishida tried to express this sort of holding together in the enigmatic phrase “absolute contradictory self-identity,” an identity that holds many together as one both as belonging together and as not belonging together, as bringing them together and negating the ability to keep them together.
This is part of what goes on in making distinctions: when we distinguish one thing from another, we first hold them together as being distinguishable but do not distinguish them. Then in distinguishing them we annul their belonging together. This annulment occurs in what Nishida calls the self-negation of nothingness, a negation of its nonduality. To elaborate, nothingness is not simply the initial oneness of the two, or the many, held together. And what holds them together cannot be any one thing; it cannot even be called what all things have in common, that is, “being” as the most universal concept. Nor can it be a second principle, different from being, like becoming, which would still need a third principle holding together these two, being and becoming, and differentiating them. Nothingness for Nishida is not so much a third principle (as in Hegel) as the obscurity that lets the (or any) distinction occur. Nishida calls this nothingness absolute. Literally, the Sino-Japanese term for absolute, zettai, means breaking through opposition, so absolute nothingness is not opposed to anything; it is the place where all things are held together as one, along with the negation of that oneness. As a universal, it is an attempt to name all things without opposing them. Individual things and persons emerge as the “self-determinations of nothingness” (to use Nishida's terms) just as items emerge into clarity and distinctness from the obscurity behind their distinction.
Nishida's talk of a self-determining context recognizes the impetus to clarify, which Sokolowski thinks precedes distinction and occurs within the obscurity that calls for it. But Nishida does not separately name this impetus or identify it as occurring within the obscurity. Rather, the obscurity (i.e., nothingness) is of itself infinitely determinable. In the term absolute nothingness Nishida combines the background obscurity and the cognitive impetus that give rise to distinctions. His talk of absolute nothingness brings to light the
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fundamental obscurity precisely as obscurity, not clarifying it away, but letting it work to generate clarity and (p. 368) distinctness. Or, as he would probably rather say, absolute nothingness brings itself to light in the activity of self-awareness.
Two shifts are required to follow Nishida's moves. First, we must shift from a cognitive to an ontological account or, more precisely, a “me-ontological” account (from the Greek to meon, nonbeing). This shift is from describing how thinking itself works (by making distinctions, etc.) to how reality or the “world” works. Nishida does call his mature philosophy a “logic of place” or of “topos” (basho in Japanese), but he articulates this “logic” as a kind of ontology (or me-ontology), not as a cognitive description of how mind or reason should operate. The introduction of me-ontology into debates in the philosophy of mind and language may seem a load that such debates are not meant to bear, but Nishida's logic is relevant insofar as it questions the assumptions of those debates regarding the means by which we distinguish self and world, for example. His logic of place undermines all anthropomorphic assumptions about the locus of awareness in the individual subject's mind. Making distinctions describes logically (if not causally) the emergence of the world out of nothingness as the place of nondistinction. The second shift we must make is from thinking of obscurity as something we must by all means eliminate to considering obscurity as something we can appreciate—even if it cannot be the last word. The positive role of obscurity and negativity are familiar to us through Daoism and its echoes in Zen sayings that speak of the darkness that harbors no discriminations, the darkness that lets light appear.
Let us delve a bit further into each of these shifts. The first involves the rather strange talk of absolute nothingness bringing itself to light and evincing self-awareness, rather than reflective human minds bringing things to light through the mental activity of making distinctions. Examples may help explain this shift further. Some distinctions imply a third term (Graham 1992, 211). Binary distinctions like above/below and before/after imply a hidden term that is a point of reference and indirectly leads to the one making the distinction. Some binary distinctions, like up/down and left/right, directly imply the maker of the distinction as the point of reference. Other binary
distinctions such as between I and you or I and it do not allow for this hidden third term, “because the maker of the distinction is part of the
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distinction” (Hori 2000, 289). These types of distinctions hinge directly or indirectly on a self as the point of reference. In the right/left kind of distinction, the point of reference is an embodied self that can be moved, so that what was right becomes left, for example—or even removed and not mentioned, so that we speak simply of right/left. But in the second type of distinction, between I and it, for example, the self-reference stays put. 12 Nishida wants to move this self-reference as it is located in the individual (p. 369) to the logical space out of which it too emerges, along with its oppositions. The ultimate locus of these distinctions between self and other and between subject and object is his “absolute nothingness.” This self-negating name points to the obscurity that gives rise to and by contrast makes evident all possible distinctions.
The steps through which Nishida tried to accomplish his shift were summarized earlier as the development of his logic of place, from the context of judgments through the context of self-awareness to that of the historical world and, ultimately, to absolute nothingness. This clarifies an element of making distinctions that is taken for granted by everyone who would clarify philosophizing by starting with the self as a cognizing agent.
For example, Sokolowski notes the difference between the thinking, reasoning person who begins to make distinctions and the unthinking person. He states that making distinctions is the emergence, the beginning, of thinking and reasoning, but he also implies that it is an achievement of reasoning. We can place the obscurity behind this emergence/achievement in the properly human self, which for
13
Sokolowski (in another essay) means reason naturally ordered toward truth. Such a self reaches for clarity and truth out of an inner impetus, the second element that Sokolowski must add to the obscurity in general to account for the activity of making distinctions. Although Sokolowski says this impetus is not to be differentiated from distinction in the way that identification is, so a deeper obscurity would not underlie both of them, nevertheless, we can ask what does hold the impetus and obscurity together. One might think that the impetus indicates a subjective or noetic side, whereas obscurity in general describes the noematic side or matter thought about. Both, then, are found “in” consciousness; that is, they are found as moments or nonindependent parts of consciousness.
If we recognize that obscurity is not merely a matter of the mind, not merely found in a consciousness striving for clarity and articulate speech, then we move in Nishida's direction. In his early attempts to formulate a logic of place, Nishida in fact did consider consciousness as the place or locus of the articulating subject/predicate distinction, and even called it “nothingness” (mu in Japanese) in the sense that it
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establishes the being or nonbeing of things. Nishida noted, however, that one's very act of consciousness at any one time always eludes one's own objectifying consciousness. Eventually he tried to formulate something more basic, a deeper level as it were than the consciousness within which obscurities and distinctions are placed. Nishida's absolute nothingness deliberately conflates the self's urge to clarify and the rational agent—all into a greater, perhaps darker, background. And what is (p. 370) this background without foreground or opposite? There is simply no way to say—that is, no what to indicate. Nishida's talk of nothingness gainsays the notion that the thinking self is the ultimate reference point in making distinctions.
The Light Side of Obscurity
Nishida's shift to go beyond the thinking self requires a positive assessment of obscurity. We do not understand obscurity adequately when we treat it solely as an undesirable vagueness of expression. It is precisely the absence of articulation that Nishida appreciates in his talk of nothingness. We find precedents in classical Daoist texts and Zen dialogues. The writings ascribed to the Daoist Zhuangzi are full of examples, although there is no direct evidence that Nishida drew from them. Zhuangzi dares to speak of the Way, the Dao, that “has never known boundaries” and speech that “has no constancy.” Boundaries come about when there is recognition of a “this” and a “that.” Consider this passage, undoubtedly meant to humor the logicians and the normative philosophers of his day:
Now I am going to make a statement here. I don't know whether it fits into the category of other people's statements or not. But whether it fits into their category or whether it doesn't, it obviously fits into some category [it is distinguishable]. So in that respect it is no different from their statements [it is behind such distinctions]. However, let me try making my statement.
There is a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is being. There is nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. Suddenly there is being and nonbeing. But between this being and nonbeing, I don't really know which is being and which is nonbeing. Now I have just said something. But I don't know whether what I have said has really said something or whether it hasn't said something. (Zhuangzi 1964, 38–39)
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In this passage Zhuangzi playfully intimates the “dissolution of boundaries,” as he calls it, that still preserves the possibility of distinctions. He also uses the metaphor of a hinge in its socket to express the “state in which ‘this’ and ‘that’ no longer find their opposites.” “When the hinge is fitted into the socket, it can respond endlessly” (Zhuangzi 1964, 35). Although interpretations of such
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passages in Zhuangzi differ greatly, we can think of these passages as a precedent to the positive appreciation (p. 371) of the obscurity that underlies distinctions. A good hinge turns freely and takes one appropriately in this direction rather than that; it articulates the sides.
Zhuangzi actually enjoins us to swing the door and use illumination or clarity:
When the hinge is fitted into the socket, it can respond endlessly. Its right then is a single endlessness and its wrong too is a single endlessness. So I say, the best thing to use is clarity. (Zhuangzi 1964, 35)
Surely, it seems, we would want to distinguish clarity from obscurity. And out of what obscurity would that distinction arise? We are thrown back to the primordial obscurity, from which emerges the kind of clarity we ordinarily praise. Zhuangzi does an admirable job in clarifying obscurity without eliminating it.
Many Zen dialogues, which were influenced by Daoist texts and in turn inspired some of Nishida's thoughts, also show an appreciation of obscurity, often in the guise of darkness. The dark refers to a standpoint beyond or behind discriminations. Black and dark are words often used to describe the Buddhist notion of emptiness as the undifferentiated that comes to be manifest only in articulated forms. 17 Again we are reminded of making distinctions as a way of manifesting, presenting, or making present—but also of the positive role of the obscurity that underlies distinction-making. That appreciation of obscurity and the negative is what is gained from Nishida's talk of nothingness. And —to end with a distinction—what is gainsaid is the notion that clarity always takes precedence over obscurity in the practice of philosophy.
Distinctions that are crucial to discussions about the relation between self and world and mind and world refer at least implicitly to a common ground underlying the distinctions. In the philosophy of mind and of language, the intricate and often nuanced distinctions made in the debates between internalism and externalism likewise imply a common ground, usually left in the dark, that makes a debate intelligible to both sides. Nishida reflects on the role that such common ground plays in the specific distinctions at stake and in making distinctions in general, in an attempt to clarify the role that obscurity plays as a ground for making distinctions.
Bibliography and Suggested Readings
Davis, Bret W. “The Kyoto School.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL=(http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2010/entries/kyoto-school/).
Graham, A. C. (1981) Chuang-Tzu: The Inner Chapters. London and Boston: Unwin Publishers. Find this resource:
——— . (1992) Unreason Within Reason: Essays on the Outskirts of Rationality. LaSalle, IL: Open Court. Find this resource:
Heisig, James W. (2001) Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Find this resource:
Hori, Victor Sōgen. (2000) “Kōan and Kenshō in the Rinzai Zen Curriculum.” In The Kōan: Texts and Contexts in Zen Buddhism, edited by Steven Heine and Dale S. Wright. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
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——— . (2003) Zen Sand: The Book of Capping Phrases For Kōan Practice. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Find this resource:
Maraldo, John C. (2010) “Nishida Kitarô.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta, ed. url: (http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2010/entries/nishida-kitaro/).
——— . (2006) “Self-Mirroring and Self-Awareness: Dedekind, Royce and Nishida.” In Frontiers of Japanese Philosophy, edited by James W. Heisig. Nagoya: Nanzan Institute of Religion and Culture, 143–163.
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Nishida Kitarō. (1911) Zen no kenkyū, translated as An Inquiry into the Good by Masao Abe and Christopher Ives. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.
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——— . (1917) Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness, translated by Valdo H. Viglielmo with Takeuchi Yoshinori and Joseph S. O'Leary. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987.
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——— . (1927) Hataraku mono kara miru mono e [From That Which Acts to That Which Sees]. Volume 4 of Nishida KitarO Zenshū. Tokyo: Iwanami, 1987. Partial translation by James W. Heisig, “The Logic of Place,” in Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, edited by James W. Heisig, Thomas P. Kasulis, & John C. Maraldo. Honolulu HI: The University of Hawaii Press, 2011, 647–657.
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——— . (1943) “Sekaishinchitsujo no genri” [“The Principles of the New World Order”]. In Volume 12 of Nishida KitarO Zenshū. Tokyo: Iwanami, 1987. Translated by Yoko Arisaka in “The Nishida Enigma: ‘The Principle of the New World Order,’ ” Monumenta Npponica 51/1 (1996), 81–106.
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Nishitani Keiji. (1999) “Emptiness and Sameness.” In Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader, edited by Michele Marra. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1999. This is Marra's translation of “Kū to soku,” in Volume 13 of Nishitani Keiji Chosakushū. Tokyo: Sōbunsha, 1987, 111–118.
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Wargo, Robert. (2005) The Logic of Nothingness. Honolulu, HI: The University of Hawaii Press. Find this resource:
Yusa, Michiko. (2002) Zen & Philosophy: An Intellectual Biography of Nishida KitarO. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Find this resource:
Zhuangzi. (1964) Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings, translated by Burton Watson. New York: Columbia University Press. Find this resource:
Notes:
(1) Pure experience is developed in Nishida's first major work, Zen no kenkyū (Nishida 1911). I give a synopsis of the themes and development of Nishida's philosophy in Maraldo 2010. Davis 2010 places Nishida's work in the context of the Kyoto school.
(2) My variation here of Nishida's famous “logic of place” is geared toward an explication of a theory of distinctions and represents one among many interpretations. Nishida himself offered different versions during his career; one of the first is in essays in Nishida 1927. For other accounts see Maraldo 2010 and Wargo 2005, especially 121–178.
(3) The reference of water is to Hilary Putnam's famous “twin earth” thought experiment that generated much of the externalism-internalism debate: if water played exactly the same role in the thinking of two different societies but one usage referred to H O and the
2
other to some other chemical compound, would the meaning of water be the same or not? See Hilary Putnam, “The meaning of ‘meaning,’” in Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
(3) For a more detailed analysis of Nishida's self-reflexive structure of consciousness and world, see Maraldo 2006.
(4) Nishida expanded this notion to the political realm when he spoke of a globally realized world, the world of worlds that are oriented to the entire world, which is possible in the present age as a place of unity-in-diversity. See, for example, Nishida 1943, 427.
(5) Advocates of panpsychism are found on the side of materialism as well as idealism; for an example of the former see Galen Strawson et al., Consciousness and its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism? (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2006). For a survey of different positions see William Seager and Sean Allen-Hermanson, “Panpsychism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2007 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2007/entries/panpsychism/
(6) Robert Sokolowski, “Making Distinctions,” in Pictures, Quotations and Distinctions: Fourteen Essays in Phenomenology (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), p. 56.
(7) Sokolowski, pp. 62, 65.
(7.) The quotation about the universal of nothingness is the formulation of Heisig 2001, 83.
(10) In his seminal essay “Basho” [Place] in 1926, Nishida mentions the “dazzling obscurity” (in English) of Pseudo Dionysius Areopagita (Nishida 1927, 229).
(11) The difference between the direct and indirect point of reference is my addition to Graham's and Hori's analyses.
(12) Hori's point (2000, 289) is that the second type does not allow for an “identification of opposites” that can be understood intellectually; rather, “the nonduality of I/it, of subject/object ... must be experienced.”
(13) Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 206.
Husserl, whom Sokolowski is interpreting here, would call transcendental subjectivity (or the transcendental ego) the ultimate place of distinction-making; but this name would involve a similar problem, for it alone would not account for the obscurities it encounters.
(11) See Michiko Yusa's account of the first formulations of “The Logic of the Topos (1924–1926)” in Yusa 2002, 202–204.
(12) The dissolution of boundaries is also the theme of the famous butterfly passage: Zhuangzi dreams he is a butterfly, and then wakes up, but no longer knows that he isn't perhaps the butterfly dreaming he is Zhuangzi. “Between Zhuangzi and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things” (Zhuangzi 1964, 45).
(13) Does the Zhuangzi teach a radical relativism or perspectivism that replaces the notion of “the Dao” with multiple daos, none of which is preferable? Does it advance an asymmetrical relativism that does not reduce Zhuangzi's own speaking to just another equally dismissible dao? Does it express a dialectical synthesis of opposites? Here I would not try to adjudicate the various interpretations, but rather point out what they have in common: the positive appreciation of the obscurity behind distinctions. This is not to equate Nishida's absolute nothingness with Zhuangzi's Dao. A. C. Graham notes that Zhuangzi's sequence of statements and of beginnings and nonbeginnings “are no doubt intended to lead to an infinite regress” (Graham 1981, 56). Nishida, on the other hand, ends (and begins) with absolute nothingness. Both Zhuangzi and Nishida, however, point to the inevitable remainder that gets left out of any distinction and analysis, as Graham mentions in the case of Zhuangzi (1964, 55).
(14) According to the famous formula in the Heart Stitra, “emptiness is nothing but form, form nothing but emptiness.” The emphasis in the interpretation above is that form is necessary to manifest emptiness, just as emptiness is necessary for the existence of forms. The Indian Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna stressed the latter point (in chapter 24 of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikāi); Nishida's disciple, Nishitani Keiji, stressed the former point (Nishitani 1999, 180).
John C. Maraldo
John C. Maraldo is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Florida. He is the author or editor of seven books, including Der hermeneutische Zirkel: Untersuchungen zu Schleiermacher, Dilthey und Heidegger (1974 and 1984); The Piety of Thinking: Essays by Martin Heidegger with Commentary (with James G. Hart, 1976); and Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School and the Question of Nationalism(with James Heisig, 1995). He has published numerous articles in Japanese and English on Japanese thought. His current concern is to foster dialogue between Japanese and Anglo-European philosophy and provide alternatives in contemporary philosophical issues.
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