Nishida and Western Philosophy

Nishida a nd Wester n Philoso phy For Virginia Nishida and Western Philosophy R ober t Wilki nso n The Open Uni...

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Nishida

a nd Wester

n Philoso

phy

For Virginia

Nishida and Western Philosophy

R ober t Wilki nso n The Open University in Scotland, UK

© R obert Wilkinson 2009 A ll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. R obert Wilkinson has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, D esigns and Patents Act, 1988, to be identi.ed as the author of this work. Published by A shgate Publishing L imited A shgate Publishing Company Wey Court E ast S uite 420 Union R oad 101 Cherry S treet Farnham B urlington S urrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 E ngland USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Wilkinson, R obert, 1948– Nishida and Western philosophy 1. Nishida, K itaro, 1870–1945 2. Zen B uddhism – Philosophy 3. B uddhism and philosophy 4. Philosophy, Comparative I. T itle 181.1’2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wilkinson, R obert, 1948– Nishida and Western philosophy / R obert Wilkinson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ). ISB N 978-0-7546-5703-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Nishida, K itaro, 1870–1945. I. T itle. B 5244.N554W55 2009 181’.12—dc22 ISB N 978-0-7546-5703-3

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Nishida

a nd Wester

n Philoso

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Contents Preliminary Notes Introduction

vii 1

1 Nishida’s S tarting Point 2 R adical E mpiricism and Pure E xperience 3 Fichte, the Neo-K antians and B ergson 4 Nishida’s L ater Philosophy: T he L ogic of Place and S elf-Contradictory Identity

5 31 61 101

S ummary and Conclusions

151

Bibliography Index

163 169

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Preliminary Notes T he following abbreviations are used for the titles of translated works by Nishida: AM: FPP: IG: IPN: IRSC: NKZ: NRWV:

Art and Morality Fundamental Problems of Philosophy An Inquiry into the Good Intelligibility and the Philosophy of Nothingness Intuition and Re.ection in Self-Consciousness Nishida Kitaro Zenshu: Nishida’s Complete Works in Japanese Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious World View

Chinese words are given in the pinyin romanization, except where they occur in the titles or texts of translations where that system is not used (usually because they predate it). In such cases I have not amended the texts in question: in no case is the meaning or reference in doubt. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Y ale University Press to quote from their edition of Nishida’s An Enquiry into the Good and to the S UNY Press to quote from their edition of Nishida’s Intuition and Reflection in Self-consciousness. A ll citations are made in accordance with conventions of fair use.


Introduction The principal aim of this essay is to examine Nishida Kitarō’s lifelong exploration of western philosophy from the standpoint of someone formed within Japanese culture, and in particular by the Zen element within that culture. S uch an encounter is of philosophical interest in itself, but beyond this has implications for the question of the extent to which cultures can meaningfully be blended at levels below the superficial. Nishida set out to do something unprecedented in intellectual history: to see whether the basic insights of Zen could be formulated in the terms and manner of the western philosophical tradition. T his was an undertaking of great intellectual boldness, for many Japanese would argue that the very attempt to articulate Zen insights within any conceptual framework is itself destructive of Zen spirituality. Nishida refused to accept this, and devoted his life to the task he had set himself. A s Nishida himself recognized, philosophical systems worth their salt, however abstract they may be, have at their root a governing intuition, a profound conviction of some kind about the way things are: in this respect, like good art, they articulate a genuine vision of what there is, one of the major options humanity has so far developed for itself of how things stand in the universe. T hese governing intuitions have been classified by historians of philosophy in various ways. For the purpose of this essay, the most illuminating point from which to begin is with a contrast of two of these deep intuitions. O n the one hand there are those thinkers, like Plotinus and, to some degree, Plato – and certain idealistic monists – who are convinced that reality is more deeply unified that it is variegated; who are convinced that differences are less important to a full understanding of the universe than a grasp of the deep unity which, they are convinced, is manifesting itself as this variety, in whatever way and for whatever reason. T hese are usually referred to as ‘one and many’ philosophies. O n the other hand, there are those, in a long tradition from A ristotle to the present day, whose basic conviction is that what there is consists ultimately of discrete individuals of some kind or kinds, standing in various relations to one another. In such philosophies, nature displays regularities, visible in the ways we codify its laws or those of science, but these regularities are not taken to be evidence of any deeper unity and many more distinctions are taken to be ontologically ultimate than is the case in ‘one and many’ systems. I will call these philosophies individualistic. T hese two types of philosophy have systematically different agendas, and for good logical reasons. T he individualistic systems have to address the issue of identifying individuals and kinds and of codifying their relations. Problems arise at once about the nature and reliability of perception, and so of our knowledge of the world and of truth – problems complicated by the adoption of a mind–body


dualism. A gain, if the distinction between fact and value is taken to be ultimate, a set of familiar problems in the grounding of ethics is generated. In ‘one and many’ systems the prime focus is different: it is not intuitively obvious to persons other than mystics (and mysticism is a condition which admits of degrees) that there is a ‘one’ as well as a ‘many’, nor why the one should or could have given rise to the many, and so a great deal of time and effort has to go into trying to give an account of these matters. A gain, while the individualist philosopher is not especially concerned with how many ontologically ultimate differences reality may manifest, for the ‘one and many’ philosopher the issue is to show how a unity could give rise to such differences as we seem to find all around us; and this often takes the form of trying to minimize the differences in question, to show that they are more apparent or superficial than real. Nishida was most definitely among those who are deeply impressed with the unity of all things, and I will argue that this conviction was for him an empirical matter, derived from his Zen experience: his pupil Nishitani notes that from his earliest years Nishida felt that reality is absolute, something actualized in the deepest part of the self, well beyond the ordinary confines of the ego. It is this deep conviction about the way things ultimately are which gives Nishida’s thought its overall shape, generates its philosophical agenda and drives its development. H is general aim is to formulate a conceptual structure which accommodates this intuition of unity and shows how all philosophically significant distinctions can be accounted for within such a framework. H is philosophy is driven by the need to find unity beneath (as it were) all apparent difference, however ultimate-seeming the difference in question might be – including notably that between the self and the not-self. Each phase of Nishida’s development is a stage in his attempt to find a way of articulating the relation between the ‘one’ and the ‘many’ which was suggested to him by Zen. T his book is not designed to be an exhaustive exposition of Nishida’s thought (and even less of all his western sources), for which indeed more than one book would be needed. It is rather meant to test a number of related hypotheses, of which the first is that Nishida’s reactions to western thought are only intelligible if they are assumed to be expressions of a view of human experience formed mainly by Zen. Another is that the apparent difficulty of some of what Nishida has to say, especially in his later years, becomes much less opaque if it is construed as an attempt to recast certain B uddhist insights in a new vocabulary and to regard it in terms of a conception of the philosophical enterprise which has been deeply influenced by the philosophy of the west. The great Buddhist doctrines of impermanence, dependent origination, no-self and śūnyatā, for example, seem to me to lie behind a great deal of what Nishida has to say, though he always attempts to cast what he has to say in a western mould. Finally, there is the idea that, in the last analysis, what Nishida wanted to do could not be done, and this for deep and interesting logical reasons, which would only become apparent after the attempt

Nishitani 1991, p. 16.

Introduction

had been made. It seems to me likely that some of the ideas dear to Nishida have no western analogue: they are just incommensurable with western concepts and cannot be stated in them. If that is so, and because these ideas are manifestly capable of sustaining a viable way of being in the world, there arises an interesting question as to the grounds on which a choice between them might be made. The first chapter is a short statement of some of the major philosophical issues raised by Zen. T his is the outlook within which Nishida was formed, and it seems to me that his reactions to western philosophies, as they unfold over his career, are in large measure dictated, very consistently, by their conformity or otherwise with his basic point of view. H is thought manifests elements both of continuity and of change. T he basic Zen position never varies, while by contrast the concepts and arguments designed to articulate it are in a state of constant change. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 chart the major phases of these changes and the reactions to the western philosophies which occupied and inspired him mostly during each phase. T he book ends with a summary and a consideration of the implications of the overall argument.


Chapter 1

Nishida’s S tarting Point

…Western culture … regards form (eidos) as being and formation as good. H owever, at the basis of A sian culture … lies something that can be called seeing the form of the formless and hearing the sound of the soundless. O ur minds are compelled to seek for this. I would like to give a philosophical foundation to this demand.

Philosophies which are merely clever or erudite rarely inspire, and even less do they last, attracting the attention of later generations. T hose philosophies which endure do so not only because of their logical power and coherence, but also because they articulate an important perspective on human experience or some significant aspect of it. T he major philosophies of the world have behind them a genuine vision of human experience, a vision which strikes a chord with others and which articulates something we have felt or glimpsed but have not been able to set out so well. T he best of them set out a way of being human which has been found to be a genuine working possibility, a way of being in the world which is sustainable. Nishida did not approach his lifelong dialogue with western philosophy with a mind which was a tabula rasa, but on the contrary with a well-formed point of view. Nishida’s philosophy is an attempt to articulate this point of view: the view of human experience, which is constitutive of Zen. What is original about it is not the Zen vision itself, which had been refined over centuries in China and Japan, but rather the attempt to find a conceptual framework for such a vision at all; for most Zen masters would say that to attempt to do this would be in principle impossible and in practice destructive of Zen. Nishida’s thought is the product of a unique confluence of impulses, requiring the coincidence of the right man and a unique set of historical circumstances. L ike his lifelong friend the Zen scholar D .T . S uzuki, Nishida belonged in the last generation of Japanese to have been largely formed in the old (pre-Meiji) ways of Japanese culture, and at the same time he was one of the first who had access to the wide range of European thought which became available to the Japanese after the opening of their country to the West. Moreover, Nishida was by temperament a born philosopher, manifestly �� Nishida: Preface to From the Actor to the Seer (1927), in NKZ, 4, p. 6; quoted in A be’s Introduction to his translation of IG, p. x. The western view is exemplified, for example, in A ristotle’s Rhetoric 1409a35, where indeterminacy in speech is condemned as unpleasant; Metaphysics 1078a30–5, where beauty is related to mathematics and so to order, proportion and limit. A lso relevant is Poetics 1450b–1451a, where beauty is defined as magnitude: an extremely small animal, whose form we cannot perceive, cannot be beautiful to humans.


captivated by conceptual frameworks: the urge to articulate a set of concepts and beliefs which would do justice to his vision of life and the world never left him – he was thinking and writing about it from his schooldays until a day or two before his death. In the light of the assertions above, it may seem odd to western readers that Nishida very rarely refers explicitly to Zen beliefs, practices, texts or scholarship in his philosophical works: in my view this is because Zen was to him, as to all its genuine practitioners, not just a set of propositional convictions. It was (and is) much more than a philosophy in the current, western and academic, sense – that of a set of highly abstract beliefs arrived at by ratiocination and to be defended by the standard methods of argument and conceptual analysis. Philosophies of this kind generally engage only the reason, and hardly ever touch the other, deeper strata of a human being. T o state the obvious, Zen is a form of B uddhism, a religion which has as its goal a moulding of human nature at its deepest levels, in ways to be discussed more fully below. T o its genuine practitioners, Zen is constitutive of their whole mode of being, as constitutive as breathing or eating. O ne takes such things for granted: there is no need to refer to them in the same way as to the opinions worked out by professional philosophers. E qually, however, though he rarely refers to Zen or other B uddhist ideas in his works, there can be absolutely no doubt that Nishida was at the deepest level formed by Zen, practising it for many years. T o understand his work, then, it is necessary to be aware of the philosophical issues raised by Zen, since it is Zen that forms the starting point from which he begins, and remains the absolutely constant point of reference throughout his life. A ll the changes and developments in Nishida’s philosophy are changes only in order to try to articulate better the Zen outlook: that outlook itself never ceases to be the source of Nishida’s philosophical vision, and his adherence to it never wavered. A ll Nishida’s reactions to western thought are the reactions of a thinker assessing that thought as a potential vehicle for the articulation of a Zen outlook. T his is not quite to say that Nishida’s is a philosophy ‘based on’ Zen: ‘based on’ is too inexact a relational term to capture the complexity of the position. It is undoubtedly true that certain aspects of the Zen experience fall outside the scope of philosophy as a discipline which necessarily uses the methods of rational thought, and not all of the Zen experience can be (so to speak) philosophized. H owever, Nishida was (as has been said) a born philosopher, and his goal was to conceptualize his view of human experience as far as he could. H e was not content to throw in the towel and accept that no important aspects of Zen experience were amenable to a properly philosophical treatment. H e tried genuinely and constantly to philosophize about his experience. Y et, when he comes to philosophize, his whole thought, inescapably, is given its direction and colour by Zen, from his

�� T here is abundant biographical evidence for this, set out in Y usa Michiko’s biography of Nishida. S ee Y usa 2002, passim.

Nishida’s Starting Point

basic question (what is the nature of the ultimate reality?) to the various answers he gives to it. It is to be stressed at the outset that one must not underestimate how very un-western the Zen point of view is. In my view, regarded in its philosophical dimension, it is simply incommensurable with the mainstream of western thought, for reasons I will return to at various points in the course of this essay. T he task Nishida set himself – that of exploring western thought to see if it could be made a suitable vehicle for the expounding of an experience formed by Zen – is one both of great intellectual daring (going against the received orthodoxy of his own culture) and of immense difficulty. There is no short way of substantiating these assertions, and indeed this whole essay is the evidence for them. H owever, before embarking on our investigation of Nishida’s reactions to western philosophy, it is necessary to say something, however briefly, about the philosophical aspect of the Zen vision of the human condition. T his will serve both as essential background to what follows and as a first piece of evidence for the assertion above that Zen is remarkably un-western. It is to be stressed that what follows in the remainder of this chapter concerns only the philosophical aspects of Zen: the various practical aspects of Zen – for example, the much written about and fashionable meditation practices (often involving koans) and the much less exciting and less written about but essential discipline of what one can call ‘acceptance practice’ (shugyō: egosuppressing monastic discipline) – are not relevant to this investigation.

Satori Central to the Zen outlook is an extraordinary experience, called in Chinese wu and in Japanese satori. T o have this experience is the ultimate goal of Zen practice. T o achieve it almost invariably requires an extended course of arduous physical and spiritual discipline, for which various methods have been devised, notably zazen (seated meditation) and/or the use of koans, both extensively discussed in the literature on Zen practice and always accompanied by monastic discipline. A n analysis of this experience is an appropriate starting point for our present investigation, since such an analysis reveals the key philosophical assertions involved in Zen. T hese assertions form the agenda of the Nishida tetsugaku (that is, Nishida’s philosophy), and it is therefore appropriate to begin with some basic

�� It is interesting to note that, in S uzuki’s classic study The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk (1934), four chapters are devoted to monastic work and routine and only one to meditation. A s in roughly analogous western monastic disciplines, various forms of self-denial and hard work are quite as important as prayer and meditation, a point often underplayed in western primers about Zen. Indeed, meditation on its own, outside the context of self-denying discipline, is often counter-productive, serving to reinforce egoawareness rather than to diminish it.


data about satori. T he great Zen scholar S uzuki gives an analysis of satori under eight headings: Irrationality: satori cannot be achieved by reasoning. It is ineffable and is invariably mutilated whenever an attempt is made to explain or convey it by word (as in this present exposition) or by gesture. T his is because, to put the matter in metaphysical terms, what is revealed in satori is what is called in S anskrit śūnyatā and in Japanese mu, and variously translated as ‘emptiness’, ‘nothingness’ or ‘the Void’. It is a reality which is non-dual in nature, that is, something wholly undifferentiated and to which in consequence no concepts whatsoever apply. Concepts are precisely the means by which we articulate differences and divisions in our experience, and so they cannot in principle apply to what is revealed in satori. A gain, since reasoning is the paradigm of conceptual intellection, reasoning is useless as a means to satori, and indeed is a hindrance to it. O ne of the major functions of the Zen techniques mentioned above is precisely to stultify ordinary rationcination, which masks the non-dual nature of the real and prevents our apprehension of it. Noetic quality: despite the fact that satori reveals a non-dual reality, it is not an experience of mere vacancy. Certain meditative techniques can result in a condition in which consciousness is merely empty, but such a state is not satori. Zen adepts insist that what is revealed in satori is knowledge of the most complete and adequate kind available to the human mind, yet paradoxically this knowledge is in a strict sense ineffable: it is awareness which is not cognition. What is learned cannot be articulated in conceptual (or any other) terms, and so cannot be recorded or conveyed, only directly experienced. Authoritativeness: no amount of logical argument can refute satori. Its ineffability renders it immune to such criticism. From the psychological point of view, it has the tone of absolute certainty and unquestionability. It is a centre that holds, and appears to occur (so to speak) in the absolute innermost recesses of consciousness. Affirmation: satori �� involves an affirmative attitude to everything there is. (An experience which was authoritative but negative could not be final, since it would not provide a final resting place and so would be of no value to us.) Sense of the beyond: �� reality as revealed in satori is non-dual. From this it follows that, in common with all other distinctions, those between self and not-self, mind and body, are illusory. S trictly speaking, satori is not an experience had by an individual at all – it is not accurate to speak of ‘my’ or ‘your’ satori. E qually, it cannot be described as an intuition, an event in the mental life of an individual, since Derived �� from Suzuki �� 1927, pp. 213–50; �� 1933, pp.16 sqq; 1982, ch. ii and 1983, ch. viii.


in the moment of satori there is properly speaking no individual and no mind. In the satori experience the normal condition of human consciousness, characterized (in K antian terms) by the transcendental unity of apperception and conceptual intellection, explodes and falls away. R ather, ‘[w]hen [reality] perceives itself as it is in itself there is a satori’. Yet what follows is not a terrible void; rather ‘[t]he feeling that follows is that of complete release or a complete rest – the feeling that one has arrived finally at the destination. As far as the psychology of satori is concerned, a sense of the Beyond is all we can say about it; to call this the Beyond, the A bsolute, or God, or a Person is to go further than the experience itself and to plunge into a theology or a metaphysics.’ Impersonal tone: �� when describing comparable experiences in their own tradition, Christian mystics often use vocabulary which apparently indicates a personal, even a sensual aspect to their experiences, for instance spiritual matrimony; the fire of love; the bride of Christ. There is nothing comparable in Zen literature: satori is entirely impersonal in tone. Feeling of exaltation: �� the general feeling which accompanies all the activities of standard consciousness in daily experience is one of restriction and dependence. In satori, these shackles, often so deeply ingrained in our consciousness as to go unnoticed, fall away, and a feeling of exaltation results. Momentariness: satori �� comes upon us abruptly and is momentary. If an experience is not momentary, it is not satori. T his is a strict consequence of Zen metaphysics. R eality or being-as-is is prior not only to the division between self and not-self and mind and body, but also to space and to time. R eality, as it is in itself, is prior to both time and eternity, and, since time is the medium of change, reality must exist in a fashion which is time-less (but this is not to be confused with the notion of an everlasting being in time). S ince satori is direct apprehension of being-as-is, it cannot be an event in time. It is, as one is forced to say in language devised to deal with temporal existence, a timeless moment. In Zen vocabulary, satori occurs when consciousness realizes a state of ‘one thought’, in Japanese ichinen. Ichinen is an absolute point without duration. T hose who achieve satori are freed from the curse of the restrictions of ordinary time consciousness, in which we crave for something changeless amid the relentless mutability of the world. It will be clear that this extraordinary experience involves philosophical claims at the deepest levels. In the rest of this chapter I will examine some of the most philosophically important issues raised by satori. T his is equivalent to setting out Nishida’s central beliefs, the ones for which he sought to find a conceptual articulation in western thought. T he issues to be focused on are as follows:

�� S uzuki 1950, p. 50. �� S uzuki 1933, pp. 18–19.


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a. the nature of the emptiness which is revealed in the satori experience (since Nishida was Japanese, I will refer to it by its Japanese name mu); b. the relation of mu to the world ordinarily experienced by self-conscious persons in what I shall call, for short, standard experience: conceptualized in terms of spatio-temporal individuals and as characterized, (in K antian terms) by the transcendental unity of apperception. In B uddhist terms, this is the same as stating how the everyday world, the samsara, is related to nirvana, together with examining the implications of the Zen view for the philosophy of time; c. some important doctrines in the area of epistemology, notably concerning the nature of the self and the possibility of non-cognitive awareness; d. what it is like to experience the world after satori; the implications of the doctrine of mu for aesthetics and ethics (including the status and value of the historical world), and concerning immortality.

Mu or Emptiness Zen is a branch of Mahayana B uddhism which abjures so far as is possible the use of scriptures, relying instead on direct mind-to-mind transmission of religious truth from Zen master to pupil. T he reason for abjuring the scriptures is to avoid the tendency, inherent in any textual study, to become ever more deeply interested and involved in conceptual thought, which has to be overcome if mu is to be experienced in satori. Y et while this is so, there can be no doubt that the central notion of emptiness was developed in a number of key scriptures, together with the writings of one of the most important philosophers of the Mahayanist tradition, Nagarjuna (second century ce ). T he scriptures concerned are the prajňāpāramitā sutras. Prajňā is generally translated as ‘wisdom’, although, as will be seen presently, it is of a very unusual kind, and certainly not propositional. Pāramitā means literally ‘having reached the other shore’, and in this context is taken to mean perfection. A ccordingly, this set of Mahayana sutras is generally referred to as that of the Perfection of Wisdom sutras, expressing the most advanced Mahayanist teachings. It was noted above in the description of satori that what is revealed in that experience – that is, mu – is absolutely non-dual, in other words, undifferentiated in every way. It has to be noted as an initial caveat therefore that, strictly speaking, it cannot be characterized in language. T his is evident from the start of the Perfection of Wisdom tradition, and is crisply asserted in the Diamond Sutra: ‘T his dharma which the T athagata has fully known or demonstrated – it cannot be grasped, it cannot be talked about, it is neither a dharma nor a no-dharma.’ T he term dharma here means ‘reality’, and what is being asserted is that mu is beyond all conceptual classifications: it is neither a dharma nor a no-dharma. A ll the Diamond Sutra, ch. 7, in Conze 1958, p. 36.


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points made in the present text and in the sources on which it is based, therefore, are to be interpreted merely as pointers to something which is ineffable: they are propositions, in this respect like those of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, which make up a ladder to be thrown away when we have achieved the insight which is being aimed at. T his is not inconsistent: Zen teachers must, like all good teachers, begin from a point which their students can grasp, and more or less inevitably they have to begin by using language as a teaching medium, being always aware that what they are aiming at is an insight beyond the means of language to express. Mu can only be grasped via the existential, non-objective experience of satori. It cannot be objectified: it cannot be an object of the experience of an individual in a standard state of awareness, that is, subject to the transcendental unity of apperception – it cannot be a component in an intentional experience in B rentano’s sense of the term. T he implications of these statements will become clearer below. It is to be stressed that mu is not a term which denotes some transcendent realm or entity. T hough the word mu is linguistically a noun, and though predicates can be ascribed to it (notably formlessness), these linguistic necessities should not lead us to make the ontological assumptions which such grammatical forms all too often have caused philosophers to make. T here is no absolute in Mahayana B uddhism, no equivalent of the B rahman of H induism or of the god of the major monotheistic religions. In the Mahayana there is absolutely nothing that is held to be real and eternal ‘behind’, as it were, the mutable world revealed in standard experience. A gain, when mu is described as formless, one should beware of falling into the trap of thinking of it as form or thing which has been labelled ‘formless’ and thus unwittingly thinking of mu as if it were some sort of entity, albeit of an odd, unique kind. With the notion of formlessness in mind, it is appropriate here to repeat an important point made by one of Nishida’s successors in K yoto, A be Masao, namely that formlessness has no negative connotations in B uddhist thought. There is an unstated and pervasive preference in western thought for definability, clarity and definiteness, a preference present in the West at least from Plato, who called his transcendent realm of the real precisely the realm of Forms. A gain, in a different way, this preference for definiteness was hugely reinforced by the metaphysics of A ristotle, in which individuals are metaphysical ultimates. T o this day, formlessness is assumed in the West to be somehow less valuable than being which is formed, identifiable, individual or in some way definite. This preference is reversed in B uddhist thought, where animitta (freedom from form and colour) is regarded as a positive value. A nother misunderstanding easy to fall into is to regard mu as equivalent to what western philosophers mean when they use the term ‘not-being’ as opposed to ‘being’ – a state of absolute nothingness. T he statement quoted above from the �� Abe 1997, p. 145. This preference for the indefinite has implications right through the cultures influenced by the Mahayana. It has notable implications in Japanese aesthetics, for example. S ee Wilkinson 2001 for examples.

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Diamond Sutra reflects one aspect of a general assertion concerning mu, namely that it is beyond all dualities: it is neither being nor not-being. Mu is held to be the ground of both being and not-being, and is logically and ontologically prior to this and all other distinctions. It is important to spell out some of the more important dualities which do not apply to mu: life and death; self and not-self; being and becoming; form and formlessness; good and evil; time and eternity. There will be more to say about these as the argument proceeds; for the moment what needs to be stressed is what a truly extraordinary claim is being made here and how remote it is from nearly all western philosophical thought. Mu is not a divinity; not a transcendent good; not an eternal being; not a changeless entity; yet neither is it absolute nothingness. S o far, mu has only been characterized in negative terms, and this is a notoriously unsatisfying way of describing anything. Mahayanists realize that it is necessary to give some positive hints as to what they are trying to convey by this term (subject to the caveats noted above), and the first of these is that it is mindlike or spiritual, insofar as it is like anything. T he goal of Zen can be described as the realization of one’s true nature, variously described as the B uddha-nature, D harma-nature or B uddha-mind. T he principal reason for regarding mu as mind-like to some degree is that satori, in which it is manifested, is a conscious experience, though satori is not awareness of an object by a subject, but rather an awareness which is subjectless. It is an awareness which is not cognition; yet it is an awareness. It may seem odd, in the light of this, that another way of stating the goal of Zen is to say that it aims to achieve the state of mu-shin, literally ‘nomind’; but the contradiction is only apparent. The mind indicated by the term shin in this compound is the mind manifested in standard awareness, the mind of a selfconscious individual aware of an external world, such as we all experience it every day in our waking hours (unless we have had satori, that is).10 Satori can only come about when this mode of awareness is overcome and (as Zen masters are fond of saying) falls away. O nly when the self/not-self distinction is bypassed can mu be existentially realized. Consequently, though mu is mind-like, the likeness to individual consciousness cannot be pushed very far. Mu is said to be a perfectly clear and lucid, ever-present awareness, but it is absolutely non-dual. What in standard experience we call subject and object are in mu not distinct.11 A further positive characterization of mu is that it is dynamic. Indeed, granted its relation to the everyday world (to be discussed in the next section), it has to be, or the incessant change so greatly emphasized in B uddhist thought becomes unaccountable. It has been noted above that mu is beyond all dualities, yet it is also the unobjectifiable ground of all there is. Hence Mahayanists must assert that, for example, it assumes both form and formlessness at the same time; it includes both �� T he closest western parallels are to certain mystical writers, notably E ckhart, but even here the similarity is not complete. S ee S uzuki 1988, Ch. 1. 10 �� T he notion of mu-shin is discussed at length in S uzuki 1969. 11 �� S ee H isamatsu 1960.


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time and eternity, good and evil (and so on), as is appropriate in the course of its expression. (O nce again, it is to be stressed that only linguistic necessity makes it necessary to use pronouns like ‘it’.) A be makes the persuasive point that, although it is customarily referred to by the noun mu, it would be better regarded as a verb denoting the pure activity of emptying. Mu empties everything, including itself, incessantly. A ll these connotations of mu are present when the term is used; and this considerable complexity, as with other key terms in oriental thought (notably the D ao), just has to be kept constantly in mind. It is now appropriate to indicate the way in which mu is claimed to be related to the everyday world.

Mu and the Everyday World Philosophers in both E ast and West have proposed a number of possible ways in which the Many – the everyday world we inhabit, the world of mutable individuals in constantly changing relations, coming into and passing out of existence – are related to the One – the ineffable unified reality without which (it has regularly been claimed) there could be no Many. Such solutions include appearance; selfmanifestation; causation and emanation. Philosophers have variously conceived of the O ne as transcending (being distinct from) the Many, and also as being immanent in the Many. O thers, like Nagarjuna, sought to show that all rationalist accounts of this relation (such as those just listed) lead to antinomies, and that the O ne can only be apprehended intuitively, not by rational cognition at all.12 T he Zen solution is arguably the most radical and intuitively one of the most difficult to understand, namely that the One and the Many are in a certain sense identical; the samsara and nirvana are one and the same. Nirvana is not a state attainable only after death – or, rather, many deaths; nor is it some other dimension to which we somehow transmigrate, some sort of heaven. In Zen thought, nirvana is the condition attained by those whose experience is enriched by the awareness of the identity of the phenomenal world with mu. T o the enlightened, it is here and now; it is the samsara, but viewed from the standpoint of one who has attained the prajňa which comes with satori. It is to be stressed that the claim of identity being made here is not one which satisfies Leibniz’ Law, namely that, for any x and for any y, if x and y are identical, whatever is true of x is true of y and vice versa. Indeed, since one term of the proposed identity is mu (which is non-dual) and the other is the world of individuals, the terms of the proposed identity relation could not be more dissimilar. T he formulation of the samsara–nirvana relation devised by Nishida late in life, of absolutely contradictory identity, gives a better indication of the paradox which is couched in this claim. Insofar as it can be verbalized rather than experienced, 12

�� A ll these options are analysed in Copleston 1982.


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what is being claimed is that mu is fully present in every individual, which thus has properties which in A ristotelian terms are incompatible. T his view of the one/many relation is of considerable antiquity, being the central doctrine of the Perfection of Wisdom sutras referred to above, written down between perhaps the first century bce and the third or fourth century ce . For western readers, these sutras are, when first encountered, some of the most baffling documents in the religious literature of the world, since they embody a denial of one of the foundational laws of western A ristotelian logic: the law of non-contradiction. It seems that the spiritual experience on which these sutras are based, and to which they seek to lead those who read them, is such that it cannot be expressed in terms which satisfy this fundamental principle of A ristotelian logic. Understanding the doctrine of the identity of samsara and nirvana takes us to the heart of Zen. T o grasp fully what an extraordinary idea this is, it is appropriate to approach it via one of the cornerstones of B uddhist thought: the doctrine of pratītya samutpāda, variously translated as relationality, relational origination, dependent co-origination or dependent origination. (I shall use the last of these renderings, all of which, as usual in such cases, have advantages and disadvantages.) Intuitively grasped in the Perfection of Wisdom sutras, the doctrine of dependent origination was given its classic philosophical formulation by Nagarjuna, especially in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. T he overall aim of Nagarjuna’s arguments in this work is to establish that the unreflective belief that the individuals which make up the phenomenal world are real (a basic assertion, as has been said, of A ristotelian metaphysics) leads always to antinomies and has to be abandoned as false. T he positive thesis Nagarjuna wants to establish is that all things are (in his sense of the term) empty: the doctrine of mu or śūnyatā is the doctrine of dependent origination viewed from another angle. In order to make his arguments work, Nagarjuna uses the B uddhist presupposition that, to count as substantial or real, to have svabhāva (a real nature or own-being), an entity must be able to exist on its own. T hat is taken to be equivalent to being enduring, permanent, without change, and not subject to birthand-death. In other words, Nagarjuna equates having svabhāva with being a selfexistent substance. Granted as stiff a test for being real as this, Nagarjuna can proceed to argue that nothing in the world is real in this sense and that all things are empty, in other words unreal in his sense: all things come into being and pass away as the result of the interactions of other temporary beings, the process being assumed to be endless – that is, without end and also without beginning.13 A typical example of Nagarjuna’s dialectical method is his analysis of the concept of causation. He considers three possible positions: firstly, the thesis that cause and effect are identical or that the effect is included in the cause; secondly, that cause and effect are non-identical or that the effect is distinct from the cause; and, thirdly, the view that an effect is regarded as a consequence of a pre-existing cause in virtue of an external combination of conditions. Nagarjuna argues that all Svabhāva is discussed in ch. 15 of the kārikā, Nagarjuna 1991, pp. 228–34.

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three views lead to contradictions. In the first case, if an effect is already part of the cause, then it cannot be produced; in the second, if the conditions which give rise to an effect are truly distinct from it, then there is no reason why any particular effect should follow (hence anything could cause anything); and the third case must succumb to the objections just advanced against the first two.14 Nagarjuna’s goal is to show that all the possible rational analyses of a given concept – in this case, causality – result in incoherence, and this is taken to legitimate the conclusion that no intelligible conceptualization of causality is possible. Nagarjuna applies this dialectical method to other important concepts, aiming by the cumulative effect of his arguments to show that our normal dualistic mode of conceptual thought gives rise to endless contradictions. T his procedure is far from nihilistic in intent, however: once he has shaken our confidence in our ordinary conceptual way of thinking and we are less attached to it, the way is open for the non-conceptual realization of mu/śūnyatā, which is his ultimate goal. It is not only Nagarjuna’s arguments that are of importance in the present context, but also his method. Typically, he will consider the affirmation of a given position; then its negation; then the affirmation of the position together with its negation; and, finally, the negation of both the affirmation and its negation. There are manifest echoes of this way of proceeding in Nishida’s thought at various points, and this goes some way towards explaining why he felt at home with the thought of H egel. Nishida uses this sort of dialectics from time to time, and it seems to me almost certain that the ultimate source is Nagarjuna. A nother key concept considered by Nagarjuna is time,15 and it is appropriate to note the conception of time involved in Zen. T here is a special focus, in B uddhism in general, on the importance of the present moment – a focus shared, unsurprisingly, by Zen. O ne of the most important qualities a Zen aspirant must cultivate is mindfulness. T o be mindful is to focus attention on the contents of the present moment – thoughts, sensations, emotions – indeed on all types of experience. Importantly, this focus is characterized by a spirit of complete detachment. T he contents of the mind are allowed to arise and dissipate (so to speak) as they please, just as they occur. Mindfulness is to be contrasted with the desire to cling on to certain experiences (and their causes) and to reject others, for neither the clinging nor the rejection can be achieved and the failure to achieve them is maddening, a prime cause of the dukkha from which the B uddha sought to free us. T he doctrine of mindfulness is coherent with the view that time is not a flowing medium independent of us and that what there is is better characterized as consisting of moment-states. T his itself coheres with the closely related doctrine of anatta, the absence of any abiding or enduring self within the realm of the conditioned. (It is not surprising that, as will be seen later, Nishida includes in his mature philosophy the claim that the self and the world must be described as a ‘continuity of discontinuity.’) Further, in this philosophy, it is entirely coherent to 14

�� Ibid., pp. 105–17. �� Ibid., pp. 275–9.

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regard each moment as timeless or eternal. T his very sharp focus on the present, and the intuition that is has unlimited depth, together with the associated view that evenly-flowing clock time is an artifice, predispose Nishida to be attracted to western philosophies which take a comparable view of experience. T urning to Zen in particular, it is appropriate to refer to one of the major textual sources for Zen ideas about time: the Uji (Being–Time) fascicle of Zen master Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō (Treasury of the Eye of the True Dharma), a fascicle dating from 1240.16 O rdinarily we absorb the conceptualization of time embodied in our language. Generally such a conceptualization represents time as independent of us, evenly flowing, continuous, and unidirectional (it has an arrow). This is coherent with metaphysical assumptions about change, standardly conceived as being predicated of individuals which (or who) continue to exist through the changes, unless the latter are radical enough to destroy the identity of the individuals in question (according to the usual criteria for such identity). Zen teaching regards all these assertions as examples of avidya and seeks to free us from them. T he fundamental Zen assertion is that there is no absolute time: time is not (as it were) a long corridor in which all events are laid out in a unidirectional sequence – or, as Dōgen puts it, ‘past and present time doesn’t pile up, doesn’t accumulate in a row’.17 T here is no entity or framework denoted by the term ‘time’ which is distinct from the events which occur in it. T ime and things in time (events, etc.) are completely non-dual. Winter is not a time in which it tends to be cold, trees lose their leaves, and so on: these events are the time called winter. T ime is not something additional to the phenomena which occur within it: only grammatical necessity makes us frame sentences which make it look as if there is a something we call time which is discrete from events. Further, clock time is purely an abstraction, made for our convenience, from the real or living time constituted by events. B elief in the reality of clock time is an instance of attachment to concepts, and so an exemplification of avidya. Dōgen puts the point as follows: T he mountains are time, the oceans are time too. If they were not time, the mountains and oceans could not be. Y ou should not think there is no time in the immediate present of the mountains and oceans. If time disintegrates, mountains and oceans too disintegrate; if time is indestructible, mountains and oceans too are indestructible.18 16 References �� to Dōgen’s �� thought can be found throughout Nishida’s works, and there are undoubted affinities between some of his ideas and those of the Soto master. For a summary, see H eine’s introduction to A be 1992, p. 2. 17 �� Cleary 1986, p. 106. 18 �� Ibid. I have deleted the translator’s italics from this passage which in general indicate passages in Chinese in Dōgen’s text: in a way which deconstructionists have lately claimed as their novelty, Dōgen uses a whole arsenal of linguistic devices to shake up the consciousness of his readers and to stop them from fixing their attention on the text of what he has to say.


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B y combining the two Japanese characters here romanized as uji, Dōgen means to assert, as has been noted, the absolute non-duality of time and phenomena.19 T he doctrine of the identity of being and time (or becoming) is of course another way of stating the doctrine of the identity of samsara and nirvana. When things are viewed in this light, there follows the (at first sight) startling assertion that mu cannot just be atemporal or eternal in the manner of a transcendent absolute or god. In the language of western philosophy, being and becoming are the same; in Zen terms, it follows that nirvana cannot just be timeless, since it is realized here and now by those who have attained the prajňa which comes with enlightenment: as Dōgen says, ‘even enlightenment and nirvana are only being-time which is merely the appearance of coming and going’.20 Mu is (as has been stated) prior to all distinctions, including that between the temporal and the eternal. T o have realized mu is to have attained nirvana, and so nirvana must in a sense be beyond both time and eternity; equally, it can be said to include them both without being in any way constrained or limited by them. A fter satori, samsaric time is experienced in conjunction with awareness of mu, though what it is like to experience time in this way is extremely difficult to describe. A s so often in descriptions of Zen experience, our ordinary language is here manifestly under considerable strain: what is being indicated in these difficult sayings is, and is acknowledged to be, at the limits of the sayable. A be Masao makes a helpful comment as follows: if the samsara and nirvana are the same, then eternity must be present below (as it were) every moment. E very moment has an infinite depth: eternity is realized in the midst of time, not at the end of it.21 It must be the case that, after satori, time -consciousness is radically modified so as to include an awareness of the infinite depth of what was before, simply, each moment in the unidirectional movement of a homogeneous time. Being–time has a property which Dōgen calls ‘passageless –passage’ (kyōraku), and a consideration of his remarks on this property will draw attention to another counter-intuitive but important aspect of the Zen philosophy of time. In Uji, Dōgen notes: ‘That is, it [being–time] passes from today to tomorrow, it passes from today to yesterday, it passes from yesterday to today, it passes from today to today, it passes from tomorrow to tomorrow.’22 What is notable here is that this passageless passage is not unidirectional: it passes both from yesterday to today and (counter-intuitively) from today to yesterday. T his is a hint of a further aspect of time consciousness post-satori, namely that time’s arrow has in a certain

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�� T he matter is made more complex by the fact that these two characters can also be read in Japanese as aru toki, meaning ‘sometimes’: once again, Dōgen is making use of the possibilities of language to shake up our ordinary habits of conceptualization, in this case by introducing a significant ambiguity. Cf. Dōgen 1997, p. 39. 20 �� Cleary 1986, p. 107. 21 �� A be 1997, p. 168. 22 �� Cleary 1986, p. 106.


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sense been overcome. We can approach what is being asserted via some remarks in another (undated) fascicle of the Shōbōgenzō: Shōji (Birth and Death): It is a mistake to assume that one moves from birth to death. B irth, being one point in time, has a before and after; therefore in Buddhism birth is called unborn. E xtinction too, being one point in time, also has before and after, so it is said that extinction is nonextinction. T herefore when birth comes it is just birth, and when extinction comes it is just extinction. In facing birth and extinction, don’t reject, don’t long.23

It is to be noted that Dōgen claims we are making a mistake if we make the commonsense assumption that we are moving from birth to death. T he Zen position is rather that we are in a process of living–dying, that is, that we are living fully and dying fully at every moment. T his process of living–dying is held to be without either beginning or end. B ehind these remarks lies the revolution in time awareness which satori brings. What we ordinarily take to be moments which form a continuum is then realized to be a collection of elements unlinked and independent – every one from every other (passageless) – but eternal and of infinite depth. What is experienced in satori is nikon, the absolute present. E ach and every moment is both a beginning and an end: time begins and ends with each moment. S ince time is not a continuous, unidirectional movement but a series of independent moments, it follows that these moments have no special order and can move in any direction: nikon has no arrow. H ence the process of living–dying can be cut off by the realization of mu in satori. When this happens, time is transcended. A be comments that, when this occurs, one can grasp or embrace the entire process of living–dying without beginning and without end and thus can reverse the process. T he unidirectionality of time is thus overcome and the reversibility of time is realized from this bottomless depth of eternity.24

T he past/present/future division is a construction of the surface ego and a result of its preoccupations. The true self, to which Dōgen refers as the ‘Self prior to the universe sprouting any sign of itself’ has no preoccupations and (so to speak) it experiences time from the infinite depth of the absolute present. Zen writers often speak of the interpenetration of all times in all directions, and this is a way of attempting to indicate this post-satori grasp of time. What we ordinarily take to be passage is in reality passageless: the only secure experience of time we have is the present. 23

�� Ibid., p. 122. �� A be 1997, p. 167.

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T wo more points can be made about this conception of time before moving on. The first is that it is this conception of each moment as being independent and of infinite depth that is present in the haiku of Matsuo Bashō and in the other great masters of this form. T o the consciousness of the enlightened, all reality is manifest in what we ordinarily conceive of as a single, momentary event – the frog’s jump into a pond; the sight of thin old cat; an old scarecrow in a field or whatever it might be. T he brevity of the haiku form is, accordingly, no obstacle to the achievement of the prized quality of resonant depth, of poetry which lingers in the mind, slowly unfolding a significance without limit. The haiku form, indeed, with its necessary focus on the momentary, is perfectly adapted to this view of reality. A haiku describes the encounter of eternity with time. S econdly, the contention that ordinary, successive time consciousness is superficial and that the present is of infinite depth is by no means a doctrine unique to Zen, but occurs in other mystical or transcendentalist writings which exhibit a comparable logical pattern of beliefs. T o take one example from many, it occurs in the thought of E merson. A ccording to him, direct experience of reality (which he calls the revelation of the S oul, or of the O ne) abolishes ordinary time (and space) awareness. T hose who ask for a description of the mode of immortality of the soul, or for the state of the soul in heaven, he comments, are wholly misconceiving what spiritual life means, assimilating it to sublunary conceptions of time. A ny person who requires a defence of the doctrine of immortality through argument, he contends, has already fallen: No inspired man ever asks this question or condescends to these evidences. For the soul is true to itself, and the man in whom it is shed abroad cannot wander from the present, which is infinite, to a future which would be finite.25

Zen masters and others, like E merson, who put forward a similar point of view report this conception of time as an empirical matter, but it is also a matter of logic. In order to play the role it has to, the O ne must have a non-temporal mode of being: it must stand wholly outside time, or it would simply become another temporal entity requiring an origin. A ccordingly, whatever awareness of it we have must be radically different from the ordinary experience of unidirectional, successive time: hence the ‘timeless moment’ referred to by so many mystical writers. Nishida, like others of similar persuasion, has to regard ordinary time consciousness as only part of the story, and is predisposed to find congenial philosophies which question its commonsense status as the only possible mode of awareness of time.

�� E merson, ‘T he O ver-S oul’, in idem, Essays 1954, p. 137.

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Some Aspects of Zen Epistemology T he issues I need to focus on in this section are not those that have tended to form the staple of epistemology in the western philosophical tradition. Zen thinkers have not tended to exercise themselves over defining knowledge, for example, or relating it to belief, or analysing the latter; nor are they greatly concerned with issues of the veracity of perception or with advancing (or combating) sceptical arguments such as those set out in D escartes’ First Meditation. T he reason for the absence of these topics from Zen thought is not inability on the part of Zen thinkers, but the fact that the fundamental doctrines of Zen dictate that the focus of interest is elsewhere. What Zen thinkers are principally concerned with is the question of the role and limits of reason, inseparably linked in Zen with questions of the nature of the self and of what one has to call levels of consciousness (while being careful not to read any ontological commitments into spatial metaphors like the one involved in the term ‘level’). T he question of the role and limits of reason arises directly from the doctrines of mu and satori. T he emptiness denoted by mu, as has been noted, is said to be prior to all discriminations. It cannot be conceptualized, and all the conceptual statements made about it by Zen teachers are, strictly speaking, false. (A s has been said, they are justifiable simply as unavoidable means by which to help the unenlightened on the path to enlightenment.) Moreover, rational thought – our ordinary ways of getting about in the world by dividing it up into individuals standing in specific relations to one another – is, by and large, an obstacle on the path to enlightenment because it deepens our habitual condition of avidya (‘ignorance’). T he kind of ignorance indicated by this term is not ignorance of specific areas of useful knowledge, or ignorance of identifiable beliefs (scriptural truths, for instance), but a ubiquitous lacuna present in all our normal thought. Avidya is the condition of those who do not experience the presence of mu in their daily life – note that this is precisely a matter of experience and not merely one of understanding. S ince emptiness is beyond description, it is beyond understanding also. B ecause rational thought is so spectacularly successful at allowing us to get about in the world in our daily lives, we tend too readily to assume that only such thought can give us access to reality. T his attitude can take the form of the philosophical varieties of rationalism, which dismiss any non-rational forms of experience as incapable of giving us knowledge of the truth. S uch doctrines are, from the Zen point of view, the high road leading directly away from enlightenment. S ome of the best-known aspects of Zen in the West are meditational techniques such as zazen (‘seated meditation’) and the use of the special mental exercises called koans, of which H akuin’s ‘what is the sound of one hand clapping?’ is the most frequently quoted.26 A koan is a type of problem which is insoluble through 26 �� H akuin Yabukoji (1753), in Y ampolski 1971, p. 164. T he fame of this koan has brought it about that this work also has the alternative title Sekishu no onjo = ‘T he S ound of a S ingle H and’. T here is a full discussion of the use of koans in Miura and S asaki 1966.


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the use of reason: it has no rational solution, and that is precisely where its value in Zen training lies. S o long as a Zen aspirant tries to solve it through the use of rational thought, it remains impenetrable: the only way to ‘solve’ a koan is to cease to think conceptually at all. T he goal of all these techniques is precisely to bring ratiocination to a dead stop, to its breaking point: once we stop ratiocinating, it is held, satori can occur and emptiness, ever-present but masked by rational thought, can be directly experienced. R eason, in Zen, is said to be limited in application to the samsara, and has to be overcome if emptiness is to be experienced directly. A dherence to rationalism prevents a complete grasp of what there is. O perating in the realm of individuals (the samsara), reason proceeds in characteristic ways to arrive at the segment of the truth to which it can give us access: careful gathering of observations; weighing of evidence; construction of arguments, and so forth. It does not, and does not intend to, grasp its objects without recourse to these means. B y contrast, satori involves none of this, and is characterized as a direct grasping of emptiness, though one has to be careful to remember that in satori there is no individual left to do the grasping. Predictably, therefore, one finds in Zen a preference for forms of awareness that are thus direct, and in general the term used to classify them is intuition (Nishida’s term is chokkan). E ven in the West, this term tends to be reserved for forms of comprehension which somehow bypass the more plodding forms of reasoning: leaps made we know not how, which lead to new forms of understanding. T he Zen usage of the term is analogous but not exactly the same, since in the western usages intuitions generally result in new and illuminating forms of conceptualization and do not occur in the context of the metaphysics of mu. A further and closely related aspect of these doctrines is in the thesis that there is at least one mode of awareness which is not cognitive, namely satori. Satori is a non-conceptual grasping or realization of mu, held to be entirely authoritative and psychologically unquestionable: it is the centre that holds. It is also held to be totally complete and wholly adequate. A s has been mentioned, however, satori cannot be said to be a state of mind of an individual, not a gasping of an object by a subject, and this leads us to a consideration of the central Zen doctrine of the nature of the true self or, as it is strikingly put, your original face before you were born. O ur everyday experience is based at the deepest level on the distinction we make between our self and everything else in the universe, the not-self, and this distinction, unsurprisingly, is reflected in the basic linguistic distinction between the persons of verbs. This everyday self has two principal aspects. The first is what one can call the primal nominative, the ‘I’ which has the experiences we call ours. T his ‘I’, which makes possible the transcendental unity of apperception, is the condition of self-awareness but can never itself be introspected: it can never become itself an object of the mode of individual awareness of the world it makes possible. T he aspect of the self which is introspectible is the accusative, the ‘me’ which has the emotions, thoughts, memories, and so forth which I call mine and which make up my life. T hese two elements together make up the self of everyday

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experience. A principal contention of Zen thought is that this self, and the self/notself distinction derived from it (like all conceptual distinctions), are non-ultimate: the assumption we ordinarily make that they are ultimate is a central instance of the condition of spiritual blindness called avidya. A t the moment of satori, this self falls away and what is revealed is the non-cognitive awareness described at various points above. T his can be described not only as mu but also as the Unborn (fusho) or the B uddha-mind (busshin). T his B uddha-mind is regarded in Zen as our ‘true’ self or (as has been said) our original face before we were born. In a sense, to call this B uddha-mind a self or face of any description is misleading, since it is not individual in any meaningful sense of that term: it is a non-cognitive, non-individual awareness. O f all the terms for it used in Zen, B uddha-mind is preferable, since it at least avoids obvious and inaccurate connotations of any sort of individual selfhood. For present purposes, what matters is to fasten on the basic point that Zen involves the doctrine that consciousness has layers or hidden depths which are obscured in standard self-conscious experience. R ealization of these depths is enlightenment.

Some Further Philosophical Aspects of Zen T o conclude this short survey of the elements of Zen which are of philosophical interest in the present context, it is appropriate to look at the following topics: what it is like to experience the world after enlightenment; the implications of Zen in ethics and aesthetics, the former including the issue of the status and importance of the everyday, historical world of the samsara; and the Zen attitude to death. T o be enlightened is to be aware of mu or busshin in all of one’s experience, and it is natural to ask if any hint can be given of what it is like to live like this. A s we have seen, the Zen doctrine claims that the samsara and nirvana are identical (the samsara–nirvana distinction, like all others, does not apply to mu) and so living in a state of enlightenment is something that must occur here and now, not in some post-mortem or otherwise future state. B ecause the non-ultimacy of the everyday ego has been experientially realized and its longings eliminated, the central change is that all phenomena are experienced absolutely, without any form of attachment. T o convey what this is like, many Zen masters borrow an image from Fazang’s treatise Return to the Source Consciousness, a work originating in the K egon (Chinese Huayan, ‘Flower Garland’) school of B uddhism but popular within the Zen community. T his image compares the enlightened mind to a perfectly calm ocean:


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When delusion ends, the mind is clear and myriad forms equally appear; it is like the ocean, where waves are created by the wind – when the wind stops, the water of the ocean grows still and clear, reflecting all images.27

When the individual mind (the wind) falls away after enlightenment, consciousness (the ocean) becomes absolutely clear: it is totally unpossessive and merely reflects what impinges on it like a mirror. O rdinary experience is a distorting lens: the world is seen from the point of view of an individual with interests and desires, and such a point of view is partial. A fter enlightenment, desire and, with it, partiality have ceased: hence the complete detachment and total clarity ascribed to the experience of the enlightened. T ogether with this absolutely clear and impartial vision comes the capacity for an entirely spontaneous and always appropriate response to whatever situations present themselves (and it is well worth remembering that, if an appropriate response involves conceptualizing the situation, then that is what will occur). S uch responses are effortless and automatic: it is as if all responses become as sure and unhesitating as reflexes are. To give just a faint idea of what this is like, the great Zen master B ankei (1622–93 ce ) uses the example of peripheral perception. In ordinary perception, attention is almost invariably focused on one component of the experiential field; yet, while this takes place, elements of that field not thus focused upon are still being discerned. S uppose we are listening to one of B ankei’s dharma talks (sermons) and we are attending to what he says: while this is going on we still discriminate noises: dogs barking, birds singing, doors closing and so on. T his peripheral perception is both effortless and accurate, and in B ankei’s view manifests the working of the B uddha-mind: ‘Y ou are able to hear and distinguish sounds when they occur without consciously intending to hear them because you’re listening by means of Unborn B uddha-mind.’28 For the enlightened, all experience is thus undeliberative, effortless and appropriate. A s in the closely related D aoist analogue to this condition, it is hardly appropriate to speak of such responses as actions at all, for actions properly called so require an individual agent with an intention, and these conditions do not apply to the responses of the enlightened to their circumstances: the D aoist classics speak instead of wu-wei or actionless activity, and this description applies exactly to what Zen masters have in mind on this subject.29 O ne can see why ideas of this kind appealed so deeply to the samurai, since such sureness of response is a huge advantage in combat – especially in the lightning-fast, close-quarters combat �� Fazang, Return to the Source Consciousness, in Cleary 1983, p. 152. Dōgen devoted a fascicle of the Shōbōgenzō to expounding this image, Kai-in zammai (Ocean Seal Concentration). 28 �� B ankei, Ryumon-ji Sermons, in Waddell 1984, p. 36. 29 �� O n the D aoist conception of wu-wei or actionless activity, cf. Wilkinson 1997, pp. xii ff., and Dao de jing, chs 2, 27 and 43. 27


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of classical Japanese times, where a split second of hesitation resulting from deliberation could mean death.30 B ankei comments on this in a letter addressed to a martial arts practitioner called Gesso, a devotee of the yari or Japanese lance. A nother way, mentioned above, of describing enlightenment is the condition of mu-shin or ‘no-mind’. B ankei comments: ‘In performing a movement, if you act with no-mind, the action will spring forth of itself.’31 For the Zen adept, combat, like any other form of what we would ordinarily call action, is a manifestation of pure spontaneity: the arrow shoots itself, because there is no ‘I’, no individual consciousness, left to shoot it. S uch a condition is at the limits of describability in ordinary language, as B ankei’s description shows: When, without thinking and without acting deliberately, you manifest the Unborn, you won’t have any fixed form. When you are without fixed form, no opponent will exist for you in the whole land. Not holding onto anything, not relying one-sidedly on anything, there is no ‘you’ and no ‘enemy.’ Whatever comes you just respond, with no traces left behind.32

No less startling than this condition of perfectly apt spontaneity of response is the key implication of Zen in the area of ethical theory, a further indication of how remote these ideas are from anything in the mainstream of western thought. We can approach the main point via a much quoted comment by the Zen master Nansen recorded in Case 19 of the great koan collection the Mumonkan (The Pass without a Gate). Joshu (788–897 ce ), later himself to be a prominent ch’an/Zen master of the T ang dynasty, asked Nansen (748–834 ce ) for advice on the path to E nlightenment. Nansen replied: T he path does not belong to the perception world, neither does it belong to the nonperception world. Cognition is a delusion and noncognition is senseless. If you want to reach the true path beyond doubt, place yourself in the same freedom as the sky. Y ou name it neither good nor bad.33

In this passage, Nansen is indicating that nirvana or awareness of mu is beyond all dualisms: perception/non-perception; cognition/non-cognition; and, importantly in the present context, good/evil. It is easy for westerners to fall into the error of assuming that nirvana is a summum bonum in the manner of western moral systems: contemplation of the Forms, identity with the will of god, or whatever it may be. Mu is prior to the good/evil distinction: paradoxically, it includes them 30

�� O n Zen and the samurai, see e.g. S uzuki 1959, ch. iv. �� B ankei, Instructions to Layman Gesso, in H askel 1984, p. 138. 32 �� Ibid.; also Waddell 1984, pp. 138–9. These ideas lie behind the training described by E ugen H errigel in his well-known book on Zen and archery (1953). T he ideas can be closely paralleled in Daoist sources; see e.g. Zhuangzi, in Burton Watson 1968, p. 94. 33 �� R eps 1971, p. 110. 31


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both and both emerge from it. Mu does not give any type of priority to good over evil, any more than to being over not-being or to life over death. Mu is manifest alike in all these dualisms.34 T he moral codes followed by the unenlightened have their use, of course, for those who know only the samsara. Y et they also involve considerable potential as causes for strife: become wedded to these distinctions and, as B ankei often put it, the Buddha-mind is transformed into a fighting spirit. It might seem that loving good and hating evil is a necessary condition for living a moral life. From the Zen point of view, however, such attachments are like all attachments: they reinforce the ego and so prevent enlightenment. A s B ankei put it: Y ou think that good Means hating what is bad. What’s bad is T he hating mind itself. Good, you say, Means doing good B ad indeed T he mind that says so.35

H owever, it does not follow from these assertions that Zen licenses any form of conduct. T hose who are enlightened continue to live in the world – indeed there is no other world in which they can live – and their conduct is spontaneously and appropriately such as to promote the enlightenment of others. A n important part of the realization of this goal is the relief of suffering, and a Zen adept can always be relied upon to manifest compassion, this once again being a spontaneous movement of the spirit on the part of the enlightened. T his is the Zen form of the Mahayana ideal of the bodhisattva (literally, ‘[one who has] the mind for enlightenment’), a saint who does not withdraw from the world but continues to work in it for the good of all. T his ideal itself presupposes the basic Zen doctrine of the identity of the samsara and nirvana, and this doctrine has a consequence which it is appropriate to notice here, namely that Zen does not involve any doctrines asserting the unreality or unimportance of the samsara or (in Christian terms) of this world. Zen thinkers (Nishida included) deny that Zen is a form of mysticism.36 It is not other-worldly in the sense in which, for example, both Platonism and Christianity 34

�� It should be clear that Zen is not a form of Manichaeism either, with two co-basic principles, one of good and one of evil. Mu is more basic than either and the source of both. 35 �� B ankei. Honshin no uta/Song of the Original Mind (1653), in H askel 1984, p. 128. 36 �� E .g. Nishida, NRWV, p. 115.

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can be said to be: there is nothing in Zen corresponding to the realm of Forms or to heaven. A s has been stated repeatedly, nirvana for the enlightened is the here and now experienced as a manifestation of mu. It follows that the samsara is not treated by Zennists as a thing of naught. O n the contrary, it is the arena in which the enlightened must seek to promote the enlightenment of others, since no other arena exists in Zen ontology. It will be clear from what has been said so far that Zen is a remarkably undogmatic system. It does not have a creed which has to be rehearsed or rituals which have to be adhered to; it does not even have an invariant method of training – the Zen spirit simply responds appropriately to whatever situation obtains. It is remarkably unprescriptive, and this is one of the qualities which have allowed it to have so widespread an influence on the culture, art and aesthetics of Japan. A gain, it is part of the metaphysics of Zen that mu is fully present in everything, and from this it follows that there is no area of culture, from martial art to garden design, in which it cannot manifest itself. T here is no type of art which it cannot inform, and no subject-matter which is either specially suitable or unsuitable for art or for practices with a strongly aesthetic content. T he Zen spirit can manifest itself in anything done or made by those who live in an awareness of mu. T here is a great body literature on Zen and the arts of Japan dealing with the manifestations of Zen in the tea ceremony, in the noh theatre, in the forms of Japanese literature and painting – and there is no need to add to it here. More appropriate is to notice the effects of the Zen belief on the aesthetics of Japan. T his subject will be treated at greater length in later chapters, when I will be dealing with the aesthetics which forms part of Nishida’s philosophy, but it is appropriate here to notice some basic points. In philosophies like Zen, where the phenomenal world is held to be, as it were, a surface only, covering an ordinarily hidden depth which is apparently limitless, certain aesthetic virtues tend to be regarded as important, principal among which is profundity or aesthetic depth. A esthetic objects which are profound are those which we find it impossible to sum up: they go on reverberating in our minds throughout life, exhibiting an inexhaustible capacity to suggest new and rewarding interpretations, revealing seemingly endless new vistas of meaning or significance. When reality itself is assumed to have infinite depth, it tends to be the case that works of art which have an analogous quality are highly valued. It is so in the classic Indian tradition of aesthetics, where dhvani or endless resonance is taken to be the defining property of poetic language; and this is equally true of the aesthetics of Japan, where the quality of yūgen – infinite depth – is highly prized (it is the goal of the noh theatre in the aesthetics of Zeami, for example).37 A gain, other important Japanese aesthetic virtue terms manifestly reflect the Zen world-view, for example the untranslatable term sabi. Works of art with sabi suggest a sense of the transitoriness of all things, tinged with sadness and combined with spontaneity 37 �� S ee Zeami 1984. O n the concept of profundity in oriental aesthetics, see Wilkinson 2006.


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and a feeling of deep illimitable quietude. Sabi reflects the atmosphere generated when some individual thing fulfils its transient destiny in the vast expanse of the universe. Sabi is also said to have to do with the merging of the temporal and the eternal, of the mutable and the immutable: it involves seeing the infinite and eternal in the here and now, and so it is akin to satori. Manifestly and unsurprisingly, these (and other) aesthetic virtue terms are deeply rooted in the metaphysics of Zen, and reflect its values and beliefs in a form appropriate to aesthetic evaluation. They are different from their western analogues precisely because they manifest, with great exactness, a culture radically different from that of the mainstream western tradition.38 T he beliefs, attitudes and values constitutive of Zen noted in this chapter inform every aspect of the human condition, including the Zen response to death. A s A be points out, both Platonism and Christianity take the problem of death very seriously, and their solution is to argue that life is prolonged through the immortality of the soul.39 In Platonism, at the time of the death of the body the soul returns to the realm of Forms, and in Christianity individuals are resurrected to eternal life, with some form of individuation of the body. B oth approaches have in common the assumption that the life/death duality is real, an ontological ultimate, and the denial of the view that death is the absolute extinction of life. T he assumption of the reality of the life/death dualism is denied in Zen, as indeed is the ultimate reality of all distinctions: as we have seen repeatedly, mu is prior to all distinctions. Nirvana, accordingly, is not immortality or living-without-dying. Nirvana is being free from both birth and death in the sense of being entirely unattached to either, and so free from either desire for life or fear of death. B oth life and death are realized to emerge from the all-embracing mu. A s B ankei puts it: ‘When the time comes for [an enlightened person’s] physical elements to disperse in death, he will give himself completely to the dispersal and die without regret or attachment.’40 T his is not the same as the stoical acceptance of death on the part of those who believe in the absoluteness of death and who disbelieve in immortality of any kind: it is absolute indifference to death, deriving from the conviction that the life/death distinction ultimately has no meaning.

Conclusion T he above sketch of some of the principal points of philosophical doctrine involved in Zen has been necessary for two closely related reasons. The first, 38 �� O n the way in which the goal of nirvana or one of its close analogues shapes aesthetic thought, see Wilkinson 2001. O n the general issue of how the pursuit of nirvana (etc) shapes a culture, see Wilkinson 2003. 39 �� A be 1997, pp. 111–38. 40 �� B ankei, Ryumon-ji Sermons, in Waddell 1984, p. 56.

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already mentioned, is that these ideas are Nishida’s starting point and constitute the invariant core of his thought, even if he rarely mentions them explicitly – and indeed, writing for a Japanese audience, he had no need to do so. It remains the case, however, that, unless these are ideas are understood, Nishida’s reactions to western philosophies, both positive and negative, are not fully understandable. T he second point is this: the subject of the present essay is Nishida’s reaction to the western tradition of philosophy, a tradition which he spent his life exploring and reflecting upon. Now when persons formed in one culture meet a radically different culture, one of the most natural of reactions is to try to find in the nonnative culture some idea or phenomenon which looks familiar, a point d’appui, a starting point: something recognizable, seemingly comprehensible or in some way culturally congenial. Perhaps one discovers, in the fullness of time and with deepening comprehension of the non-native culture, that this similarity was more apparent than real; yet without the initial point d’appui it is hard to see how the process of coming to understand a culture radically different from one’s own could begin. T his is one area of human understanding where the S chleiermacher–D ilthey notion of the hermeneutic circle fits very well. One can see in Nishida’s developing reflections on western thought the hermeneutic process of gradual deepening of understanding exemplified very fully. Granted the Zen starting point set out above, it is not difficult to see why Nishida, in his exploration of western philosophy, should have been predisposed to be sympathetic to philosophies which embody one or more of the following characteristics: a. the view that standard human awareness – which, in K antian terms, is subject to the forms of intuition, to conceptualization, to the transcendental unity of apperception, and produces judgements – is not the only possible form of experience; b. the view that another mode of experience is possible. S uch a mode is more fundamental than, or in some way prior to, standard experience. S uch a mode of experience is normally hidden from us but can be realized in special circumstances. It is presupposed that human experience can be characterized as having layers of different degrees of depth, which can be revealed in certain types of experience. T he depth which consciousness can manifest is without discernible limit. T his general outlook has an important correlative in the area of aesthetics, in a preference for works of art which manifest profundity, which in some way hint at, or stimulate, experience of the ordinarily hidden depths of consciousness; c. the view that conceptual ratiocination does not reveal this deeper stratum of experience but rather conceals it, and that, to realize this stratum, some more direct or intuitive mode of apprehension is needed and is possible. T his is not simple irrationalism, but rather the doctrine that reason has a


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limited sphere of application, being restricted to standard awareness; d. the view that the ego of everyday experience, the self which exhibits the transcendental unity of apperception and which has the experiences I call mine, is among the constructions of reason. T o suppose that the experience of such an ego is the only possible mode of conscious awareness is false: a mode of non-cognitive awareness which does not include a self/not-self distinction is possible. T here is a true or real self which is the ultimate reality, the unifying power of the universe. T his self cannot be a content of the consciousness of an ego, but it is possible to come to be in accord with it. S uch accord cannot be arrived at by thinking, but only through what in Zen is called non-thinking; e. the view that our ordinary conception of time is mistaken: time is unreflectively taken to be independent of us and of events, evenly flowing and continuous; but special forms of experience reveal that this is not the case. T his is closely related to the belief that our ordinary conception of the self (described above) is also mistaken. T he idea of an enduring self which in some sense transcends an objective world is complementary to the view that time is as described above;41 f. the view that the law of non-contradiction is not sacrosanct; g. the related view that dichotomies often taken to be ultimate – self/not-self; mind/body; good/evil; life/death; one/many – are not so, but can be shown to be instances of some more general, embracing universal; h. the view that the historical, everyday world is important, and that otherworldliness is not an appropriate response in life. A s we will see, Nishida found in the western canon philosophies which (as he interpreted them) approached one or more of these positions to varying degrees. H is intellectual life was in effect a sustained exploration of western philosophies from an invariant Zen point of view, and with a single basic question always in mind: to what extent does this philosophy allow an accurate articulation of Zen experience? T he rest of this essay is devoted to exploring his answers to this question.

41

�� O n this point, see R aud 2004.


Chapter 2

R adical E mpiricism and Pure E xperience

Introduction Nishida’s first book, Zen no kenkyū (An Inquiry into the Good), was published in 1911. (T he ‘zen’ in the title is a homophone for the Zen of B uddhism but is written with a different character: it means ‘good’ or ‘goodness’.) Nishida was forty-one years old, and he had been working on it for a number of years. T his would be evident without independent evidence, from the content of the book alone: it is the first articulation of a philosophy already complete in its essentials, and Nishida was to spend the rest of his life refining it. As was to be the case with his later books, the chapters were composed as separate essays and finally assembled into a complete work. It might seem from the title that the content is primarily concerned with moral philosophy, but the Inquiry is a work of ethics in exactly the same way as the Ethics of S pinoza is. In his book Nishida does indeed put forward some views in moral philosophy, but not until he has set out a complete metaphysics designed to serve as a foundation for his ethical standpoint. For Nishida, this course of action was a logical necessity. In his philosophy, as also in the logically analogous case of D aoism, the good is not merely a way which characterizes the behaviour of human beings but also the way of reality; and this rests, in Buddhism, on the underlying assertion of the identity of one’s real nature (the ‘original face’ referred to in Zen works) with reality itself or B uddha-nature. T he central concept in the metaphysics of An Inquiry into the Good is that of pure experience. T his phrase had been adopted from the radical empiricist philosophy of William James. Nishida wrote in a letter to D . T . S uzuki: ‘I want to build my philosophy on the reality of the mind [shinri] instead of on abstract theory [ronri] on which most traditional philosophies have been based. In this connection I find William James’s “pure experience” quite interesting.’

�� O n this, see Y usa 2002, Ch. 7. �� S pinoza’s work has been known to Nishida since his student days, and he greatly admired both it and its author. Y usa quotes from one of Nishida’s letters: ‘I think there is no one like S pinoza, who is an eminent model for us who engage in philosophy.’ L etter no. 2383, 9 May 1916, in NKZ 19, pp. 530–31; quoted in Yusa 2002, p. 158. �� L etter 55, in NKZ 18, p. 76; quoted in Yusa 2002, p. 89. James’s Essays in Radical Empiricism did not appear in book form until 1912, the year after Zen no kenkyū appeared. However, Nishida owned the first seven of the essays which make up James’s book as

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T he aim of this chapter is to investigate what each philosopher means by this phrase, and to investigate whether and how it changed as it moved from West to E ast.

Pure Experience in the Philosophy of William James James’s philosophy of radical empiricism was designed to solve certain problems which had arisen within the E uropean philosophical tradition, taking this description to include a reference to James’s immediate predecessors and contemporaries in A merica as well. A s will become clear, this background is not without interest in the context of an essay on comparative philosophy, and it is appropriate to say a little about it. T he main source of the problems James was addressing is the issue of the metaphysics of relations. T his issue had become a focus of attention in E uropean thought in the philosophy of L eibniz. T o him, the issue presented itself as the question of the location of relations: if two terms a and b stand in relation R , where is R ? If it is part of either term, it cannot link them; nor can it link them if it is merely some third entity in some way ‘between’ them, for then further relations would be needed to link R to both a and b. A ssuming that propositions of the form aR b have to be construed as ascribing a separate predicate to both a and b, the path to monadism is not difficult to reconstruct. This problem was further complicated by the atomistic psychology of classical empiricism. H ume asserts that all distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and further that the mind never perceives any real connexion between such distinct existences. T aken in conjunction with the assumption of some form of radical mind/body dualism, these assertions have had well-known and far-reaching consequences in E uropean thought, notably in respect of the nature of the self and of the analysis of causality. R econstructing the self in particular becomes extremely difficult on classical empiricist principles. E qually, in the context of the associated representationalist theories of perception, scepticism concerning the veracity of sense perception also comes to seem unavoidable, and some shifts are required to avoid solipsism. K nowledge of the external world becomes extraordinarily difficult to guarantee. T he K antian and subsequent idealist philosophies can be seen as direct responses to these problems, postulating as they do various kinds of extra-experiential, transcendental and/or transcendent entities as enduring subjects of experience and guarantors of knowledge. James’s radical empiricism is a direct response in particular to the idealism of his day: F. H . B radley’s Appearance and Reality had off-prints from their journal publication in 1904–5; he also owned James’s Principles of Psychology (1890), of which his annotated copy survives. S ee D ilworth 1969, p. 102. �� H ume 1978, p. 636. �� B erkeley’s philosophy, James argues, turns our lives into a ‘congeries of solipsisms’: James 1971, p. 42.

Radical Empiricism and Pure Experience

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been published in 1893, with a second edition in 1897. A gain, James’s fellowprofessor at H arvard, Josiah R oyce, had published The World and the Individual in 1900. It was the former in particular whose ideas became a principal target for James: B radley’s arguments for the unreality of relations are repeatedly criticized by him, especially in the essay ‘T he T hing and its R elations’, but also in other parts of Essays in Radical Empiricism. It was in order to deal with the problem of relations, and with the destruction of the self and problems of scepticism involved in classical empiricism, that James formulated his radical empiricism. T he way to elude scepticism is to deny the classical dualism of perceiver and perceived, knower and known; the way to deal with relations is to insist that they are given as an element of primitive experience – they are the data, not constructions from data. T he concept of pure experience is the core of James’s proposed solutions to both these problems. James asserts that ‘there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed’; and this stuff James calls pure experience. In one respect the phrase is not a happy one, since the reference to experience might make it seem that James is heading for idealism, making his basic stuff mental in nature; but such an assumption would be quite wrong. James insists that pure experience is neither mental nor material in nature but neutral in that respect (the point is clearer in R ussell’s version of this philosophy, neutral monism). Pure experience is neither mind nor matter, neither subject nor object: The instant field of the present is at all times what I call ‘pure’ experience. It is only virtually or potentially either subject or object as yet. For the time being, it is plain, unqualified actuality, or existence, a simple that.

T he dualistic division of what there is into mental and physical is not ontologically ultimate. Consciousness is not a name for a stuff or material of which thoughts are made: it is a name for a function which we ascribe to certain elements of pure experience, and that function is knowing. T o call something conscious is not to claim that it is a modification of some ghostly stuff: ‘To say that I am selfconscious, or conscious of putting forth volition, means only that certain contents, for which “self” and “effort of will” are the names, are not without witness when they occur.’ T he same element of pure experience can function both as knower and as known, according to the context, and indeed can be both at once. T he pure

�� James 1971, p. 5. �� S ee R ussell 1914, chs III and IV, and 1921, passim. R ussell discusses James’s views in Ch. I of R ussell 1921. A t one point in Essays in Radical Empiricism, James uses the phrase ‘neutral nature’ to describe pure experience (p. 117). Nishida did not have access to this essay when writing IG. �� James 1971, p. 15. �� Ibid., p. 6; cf. pp. 69–70.


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experience of a room, for example, can form part both of an individual’s mental biography and of the physical biography of the room. Pure experience can figure in the world both as material objects and as thoughts.10 James’s answer to the problem of the self raised by classical empiricism is a consequence of his treatment of relations. T he central claim in his argument is the assertion that relations are not constructed, but real and experienced directly: they are as ultimate as any other element of pure experience. T his he regards as a psychological datum: to deny it would be to deny the basic tenet of radical empiricism: T o be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system.11

T he atomism of the classical empiricists caused in them a blindness to the ultimacy of what James calls conjunctive relations, especially in the case of the ‘coconscious transition’,12 the passage from one experience in the mental life of an individual to the next. T he experience of this sort of continuity, in which one experience shades into the next without a break, is as real as the experience of discontinuities: as he puts it, the experience of continuity between my experiences is as real as the experience of the discontinuity between my experience and yours.13 H is answer to H ume is that, granted the seamless thread of the inner life, that consciousness in which experiences ‘compenetrate and suffuse each other’s being’,14 there is no need for some extra, enduring self over and above these elements: each passing thought is the thinker. T he self is a title assumed in succession by each event in the stream of consciousness. T he self is just this stream of memories, purposes, strivings, fulfilments and disappointments.15 A s Graham B ird has pointed out, one wonders whether there is in fact a great deal of difference between this view of the self and the classical empiricist account.16 B ehind this analysis of the self lies the thesis that all there is is pure experience, and James cannot go outside pure experience in his attempt to answer any of the major metaphysical and epistemological questions which form the subject of the Essays in Radical Empiricism. Just as he has to reconstruct the self from elements of pure experience, so he has to give an account of knowledge within the same 10

�� Ibid, pp.7–10; cf. p. �� 72. �� Ibid., p. 25; �� James’s italics. 12 �� Ibid., p. 27. 13 �� Ibid. 14 �� Ibid., p. 26. 15 �� Ibid., pp. 26–7. 16 �� B ird 1986, p. 82. 11


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restraint. Within this restraint he must, and he does, argue that knower and known are, each, elements of pure experience, either the same element counted twice over in different contexts or two elements of the experience of the same subject, with conjunctive transitional material between them. Within the framework of radical empiricism, this is all that the knowing of a percept by an idea can possibly contain and signify.17 H e explains reference to an object in terms of a distinction between knowledge in transit and knowledge completed and confirmed. Conceptual knowledge is completed only when it is face to face, as it were, with the verifying percept. T he rest of the time, our knowledge is only provisional, and this is just a fact we have to live with.18 A gain, James gives an account of how two minds can experience the same object in comparable terms. L et us take the example of two people experiencing percepts of the same pen. T he original pure pen experience is not conscious: it just is. A s has been said, to be conscious (for James) is to be reported on, to have awareness added to one’s being. A ccordingly, awareness must be added to the original pen experience if any subject is to be conscious of it; and, if that is so, James argues, then there is no paradox in the supposition that there can be more than one awareness of it.19 T ruth likewise has to be accounted for within the realm of pure experience. James did not modify his pragmatist account of truth in developing the philosophy of radical empiricism: propositions are verified when they are confirmed by experience, when they have a cash value. Quite consistently with his principles, therefore, James argues that ‘the “truth” of our mental operations must always be an intra-experiential affair. A conception is reckoned true by common sense when it can be made to lead to a sensation.’20 It is not to the point here to evaluate this philosophy, so difficult as it is to state it convincingly in the absence of a vocabulary which furnishes a way of referring to experience in an ontologically neutral manner. More to the point is to investigate why this philosophy should so have appealed to Nishida that he used a phrase from it to designate the key concept in the first phase of his thought. Before moving to consider this use of the phrase ‘pure experience’, it is appropriate to introduce two further passages from James about that concept which will be of use in the subsequent discussion of Nishida’s thought: ‘Pure experience’ is the name which I give to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories. Only newborn babes, or men in semicoma from sleep, drugs, illnesses or blows, may be assumed to have an experience pure in the literal sense of a that which is not yet any definite what, although ready to be all sorts of whats; full of both oneness and manyness, but in respects that don’t appear … Pure experience in this state 17

�� James 1971, pp. 29–32. �� Ibid., pp. 37–41. 19 �� Ibid., pp. 67ff. 20 �� Ibid., p. 106. 18


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is but another name for feeling or sensation. But the flux no sooner comes than it tends to fill itself with emphases … so that experience now flows as if shot through with adjectives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions. Its purity is only a relative term, meaning the proportional amount of unverbalized sensation which it still embodies.21 S ince the acquisition of conscious quality on the part of an experience depends upon a context coming to it, it follows that the sum total of all experiences, having no context, cannot strictly be called conscious at all. It is a that, an A bsolute, a ‘pure’ experience on an enormous scale, undifferentiated and undifferentiable into thought and thing. T his the post-K antian idealists have always practically acknowledged by calling their doctrine an Identitätsphilosophie. T he question of the Beseelung of the A ll of things ought not, then, even to be asked. No more ought the question of its truth to be asked, for truth is a relation inside the sum total, obtaining between thoughts and something else, and these thoughts … can only be contextual things. In these respects the pure experiences of our philosophy are, in themselves considered, so many little absolutes, the philosophy of pure experience being only a more comminuted Identitätsphilosophie.22

I have selected these passages in part because they illustrate a persistent tension in James’s concept of pure experience (I am going to ignore for the moment the references to post-K antian German thought, which will be dealt with in subsequent chapters). In the opening sentences of the second passage, James sketches a concept of pure experience which represents the closest approximation to the oriental conception of nothingness, the entirely unlimited and so entirely uncharacterizable basis from which all there is emerges. (T he use of the term ‘A bsolute’ is odd in a philosopher who spends as much time as James does criticizing the arguments of absolute idealists.) Y et he at once goes on in this same passage to speak of pure experiences in the plural, of the philosophy of pure experience as a comminuted or pulverized absolutism. The same ambiguity is present in the first passage, where the possibility of a condition of experience which is entirely undifferentiated is acknowledged, though here it is described as abnormal. T he stress here, as in so many passages in James, is on the relentless mutability of pure experience, a mutability which presupposes that that experience is articulated and describable.23 T his ambiguity about the nature of pure experience is persistent and unresolved in James’s thought. B efore moving on to consider the concept of pure experience in Nishida, it is appropriate to summarize some points arising from this brief survey of radical 21

�� Ibid., p. 50. �� Ibid., pp. 70–71. 23 �� T he stress on the mutability of experience is evident right from the chapter in James’s Principles of Psychology in which he discusses the stream of consciousness: James 1890, Vol. I, pp. 229ff. 22


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empiricism. T his philosophy was designed as a response to problems originating in the E uropean tradition of philosophy as it had developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, problems concerning relations, the self, and certain forms of scepticism consequent upon the adoption of mind/body dualism and representationalist theories of perception. T o eliminate the extra-experiential elements used by K ant and post-K antian philosophers in their attempt to solve these problems, James proposed a new form of empiricism, designed to abjure all extra-experiential elements yet to avoid the problems generated by its classical forms: all the major concepts and problems mentioned above were to be analysed and solved within the realm of pure experience alone. R adical empiricism is a secular philosophy designed to solve technical, philosophical problems. T here is no religious impulse behind it – not that James was in the least closed-minded about religion, as his work on religious experience shows abundantly; it is merely that religion and religious experience are not factors shaping James’s thought about radical empiricism.24 We can now turn to investigate what Nishida, a Japanese trying to articulate a world-view deeply shaped by Zen, made of the idea of pure experience.

Pure Experience in An Enquiry into the Good It is appropriate to begin this section with a reminder of Nishida’s position and goal at the time when he wrote his first book. Nishida was a man on the one hand formed by Zen, and on the other captivated by the methods and findings of E uropean philosophy. H is aim was to see if western philosophical methods and concepts could produce an account of Zen experience which would stand scrutiny purely as philosophy, judged by the standards of philosophy; and the importance of this last point is not to be underestimated. R eaders coming fresh to Nishida are often puzzled as to why he so infrequently refers to the various texts (some of them mentioned in the preceding chapter) which make up the classic written embodiment of Zen experience: the reason, I suggest, is that he wanted his thought to stand on its own as philosophy, in the western manner, and to be judged accordingly. H e did not want to be seen to be relying on authority to make his case: he wanted to articulate a philosophy which would be judged satisfactory as just that. A ccordingly, he looked about him for the approach which he thought would best suit this purpose, and his first judgement was that he had found it in the concept of pure (or direct: the terms are synonyms in this book) experience. T o put the matter as generally as possible, when rendered in philosophical terms, the intuitions at the heart of Zen require that there be an ultimate unity of some kind, underlying, or present in, all experience: a description of experience of an 24 �� In particular, James was not in the ranks of those philosophers who dismiss mysticism out of hand as undiscussable and hence of no philosophical interest. S ee James 1986, L ectures 16 and 17.


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A ristotelian cast, in which individuals are all there is, must be regarded from the Zen point of view as radically incomplete. A n ontology in which there are only individuals misses out the most important element of reality, whose nature Nishida tries to capture in his philosophy. T his section will set out the main argument of An Enquiry into the Good, paying special attention to the way in which the concept of pure/direct experience is deployed. The first part of An Inquiry into the Good was not the first to be written. Nishida tells us that parts II and III , headed respectively ‘R eality’ and ‘T he Good’, were written first, being followed by part I, ‘Pure Experience’ and finally by part IV, ‘R eligion’. T he core of the metaphysics is in part II , but Nishida clearly felt that the fundamental concept of pure experience needed a more detailed elaboration than it receives in that part.25 Part I gives his definition of ‘pure experience’, and then tries to show how three important aspects of mental life – thought, will, and what he terms intellectual intuition – are to be analysed in terms of it. A s is the case also with James in Essays in Radical Empiricism, Nishida begins by following a standard philosophical procedure, attempting to show how his chosen key concept is related to and can account for a number of ineludible philosophical issues or problems. Pure Experience Defined Nishida begins with this assertion: [B ]y pure I am referring to the state of experience just as it is without the least addition of deliberative discrimination. T he moment of seeing a color or hearing a sound, for example, is prior not only to the thought that the color or sound is the activity of an external object or that one is sensing it, but also to the judgment of what the color or sound might be … When one directly experiences one’s own state of consciousness, there is not yet a subject or an object, and knowing and its object are completely unified … A truly pure experience has no meaning whatsoever; it is simply a present consciousness of facts just as they are.26

There are a number of points to be made about this, of which the first concerns the force of the adjective ‘deliberative’. Granted the Zen background and the concept of mu, one might expect pure experience to be wholly unarticulated, but this is not (not at this point in the text, at any rate) what Nishida has in mind. Clearly, he means to exclude from pure experience all forms of conceptual judgement (judgement resulting from deliberation), and any relation of the pure experience to whatever nature the judging consciousness might have: it is precisely the relating of the content of an experience to one’s nature, and hence to one’s interests, that gives an experience meaning in Nishida’s sense. Y et for all that, it is clear that IG, Preface, p. xxix. �� Ibid., pp. 3–4.

25 26


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a pure experience as here defined is not wholly indeterminate. Pure experience is here defined in effect as non-dual, but not as unarticulated. It has something one has to call a content, for instance a shade of a colour or a sound, though it is not experienced under those descriptions: without this content it would be simply absolute nothingness, a pure nonentity. H owever, the experience is such that it is not an experience by a subject of an object, nor does it involve any reference to other experiences. Once an experience is classified, say, as of blue or of a birdsong, it involves reflection and ipso facto ceases to be pure. It is awareness of a somewhat, but not by someone. Nishida takes it for granted that such a condition is not only possible but instantiated. Indeed, as will be seen, it is the alpha and omega of consciousness, both its natural state and final goal.27 S uch consciousness is infinite, very close to what Hegel calls das Unendliche. Nishida accepts James’s view that the present has duration: it is a saddleback, not a knife-edge, as the latter puts it.28 T he purity of pure experience is not intended to exclude some complexity from the experience: because the present has duration, more than one object can be attended to in it: ‘T he directness and purity of pure experience derive not from the experience’s being simple, unanalyzable, or instantaneous, but from the strict unity of concrete consciousness.’29 H ence, as also in the case of James, pure experience can be of relations.30 T he concept of unity here introduced is of great importance to Nishida’s argument, and it is necessary to examine it before going on. What Nishida calls unity he regards as a necessary condition for consciousness of any kind: T he unity of consciousness is necessary for the establishment of consciousness and also its fundamental demand. A consciousness without a unity is no different from nothingness. Consciousness is established through conflicts in its content, and the more diversified the content becomes, the more consciousness requires a greater unity.31

It is to be noted that Nishida makes a distinction between unity tout court and what he calls ‘strict unity’: it is the latter that characterizes pure experience and applies in the non-dual but not wholly indeterminate experience just described. It is strict unity that is destroyed by reflection and replaced by unity:

27

�� Cf. ibid., p. 19. �� James 1890, Vol. I, p. 609. 29 IG, p. 6. 30 �� Ibid., pp. 4–5. In a note, Nishida refers to James’s essay A World of Pure Experience (which became the second chapter in Essays in Radical Empiricism) as the source of this idea. 31 IG, p. 151. 28


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R egardless of its nature, as long as consciousness maintains a strict unity it is pure experience: it is simply a fact. B ut when the unity is broken and a present consciousness enters into a relation with other consciousnesses it generates meanings and judgments.32

When a present experience evokes a past experience, purity crumbles away, and disunity replaces strict unity. H owever, in Nishida’s view neither unity nor disunity is ever complete: behind a disunified consciousness there must be a unifying consciousness which makes the relations within the disunified consciousness possible, otherwise they would not be relations within the same consciousness. T hough Nishida never says so explicitly, he treats the assertion that unity is a necessary condition for consciousness as an a priori truth. Whether he can mean the same thing by ‘unity’ in all the applications of this premise is a point to reflect on. S ometimes he seems to designate by it the K antian transcendental unity of apperception; but this cannot be what is meant in the phrase ‘strict unity’, where ex hypothesi the experience embodies no self/not-self distinction. T his is a point which will arise again, since the notion of unity carries great weight throughout the argument of his book, including its theology. Defined in terms of strict unity in this way, it is clear that pure or direct experience is not a state of an individual. L ike James’s pure experience in this respect, this is Nishida’s ontological ultimate, and it is logically prior to individuals: ‘It is not that there is experience because there is an individual, but that there is an individual because there is experience. T he individual’s experience is simply a small, distinctive sphere of limited experience within true experience.’33 Thinking H aving chosen pure experience as his fundamental category, Nishida generates for himself a set of philosophical issues which he has to address and which necessitated the writing of the first part of the book. He has first to show how pure experience is related to major items of our mental life as they are usually classified. He considers that there are three major types of mental content which must thus be related to pure experience, namely thinking (that is, conceptual thought); the will; and what he calls intellectual intuition. His basic contention with regard to standard conceptual thought as manifested in judgements is that such judgements presuppose pure experience and are only possible on condition that there is pure experience. T his he contends to be true both of empirical and of a priori judgements. With regard to the former, he claims that, in making such a judgement, we are not connecting two independent representations but analysing a single representation in its entirety. When we say, for example, ‘the horse runs’, we are analysing a single representation, namely that of the running horse. 32

�� Ibid., p. 9. �� Ibid., p. 19.

33


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T his representation is a fact of pure experience, and ‘[f]acts of pure experience always underlie judgments, and for this reason we can connect subject and object representations in a judgment’.34 T his is hard to assess without a criterion for the identity of representations, but it is not easy to see how the claim that a single representation underlies all judgements can be sustained, for instance where the judgement is a comparison of two memories of events widely separated in time. Nishida would no doubt reply that such memories make up a single present experience when they are recalled together; but he still needs a non-arbitrary criterion of identity for experiences to make this work. Pure experience must also be the ground of a priori judgements (or ‘purely rational judgements’, as Nishida puts it). If pure experience is indeed ultimate, everything must be derivable from it, including the laws of logic and mathematics. H is argument here is explicitly indebted to L ocke:35 E ven the axioms of geometry are based on a kind of intuition. No matter how abstract two concepts might be, the experience of a unifying reality underlies the comparison and judgment of them. T his accounts for what is called necessity in thinking. A nd as noted earlier, if not only perceptions but also the consciousness of relations is ‘experience’, then we can argue that a fact of pure experience underlies a purely rational judgment as well.36

T he same argument is applied also to stages in a chain of deductive inference: each stage must be guaranteed by an intuitive apprehension of the entailment or nonentailment of premises and conclusion, what L ocke calls intuitive knowledge of agreement or disagreement. T he conclusion Nishida wants to establish by means of these arguments is that thinking and pure experience are not totally different types of mental experience, but rather ‘when we cast off dogma and consider the matter straightforwardly … we realize that the activity of thinking constitutes a kind of pure experience’.37 T he suppressed premise in the argument is that intuition of the kind required in order to grasp an entailment relation or to hold before the mind the elements of an empirical judgement are pure experiences. S upposing this to be true would yield the conclusion that pure experience is a condition for thought, rather than that thinking is a ‘kind of’ pure experience. Indeed, granted the way Nishida has defined pure experience in terms of strict unity, it is hard to see how, on these grounds, conceptual thought can be a species of it. T he value Nishida sets on unity as a property of consciousness and his anxiety to find as much unity as possible underlying apparent difference lie behind certain other 34

�� Ibid., p. 11. �� L ocke, Essay IV, ii, 7, referred to at IG, p. 12. 36 IG, p. 12. 37 �� Ibid., p. 13. 35


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points he makes about thinking. T hus he argues that the difference between internal and external, thought and perception, is not as absolute as is generally assumed: ‘People make this distinction simply because the mental images that constitute the material of thinking change with relative ease and shift on their own.’38 O nce it is accepted that all such distinctions must be made within the context of pure experience, the apparent difference appears much less dramatic and absolute. A gain, when thought is operating freely, it is based almost entirely on unconscious attention, in other words it is not characterized by self-awareness: Contrary to what one might expect, thinking becomes conscious when its advance is hindered. T hat which advances thinking is not voluntary activity, for thinking develops on its own; only when we rid ourselves of the self and merge with the object of thought or the problem – when we lose ourselves in the midst – does the thinking activity emerge.39

Much of this is well taken: we certainly do become more self-aware in proportion to the degree in which the self is in some way frustrated by the world. Nishida is also right to assert that that thought cannot be made to progress as a result of conscious resolutions of the will: one cannot remember, imagine, solve a problem or concentrate by an act of will, but rather (as any Zen master will testify) one must proceed by putting the body in the right state. Y et while these facts are consistent with the doctrine of pure experience, they do not entail it. Nishida does not establish the overall conclusion he wants in his treatment of thinking, namely that ‘thinking and experience are identical’.40 The Will Nishida turns next to consider the will, and gives an account of it within the context of reality conceived of as pure experience. A s is the case in his account of thinking, the general tenor of his arguments tends always to stress that willing is less different from, or separate from, other mental activities than is usually acknowledged, and this is part of his constant strategy of arguing that mental life is far more unified in various ways than ordinary mentalistic concepts make it appear. T his strategy is designed to buttress the doctrine of pure experience: pure experience is the most basic of conscious states, and it is a completely unified state. Nishida assumes that the more unified he can make consciousness appear, the less different from one another mental contents can be shown to be, the more the doctrine of pure experience will be confirmed. An important part of his strategy for finding unity in consciousness is to argue that types of mental state conventionally held to be different are in reality extremely similar. 38

�� Ibid., p. 14. �� Ibid., p. 13. 40 �� Ibid., p. 19. 39


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Consistently with this presupposition, Nishida begins by asserting that the will has no necessary relation to bodily action: ‘[T ]he will is a mental phenomenon that is distinct from external action, and action is not a necessary condition of the will.’41 D ecoupling the concepts of will and bodily action, if sustainable, is a strategy which would make it possible to give an account of the will which is not inherently dualistic, and so would buttress the doctrine of pure experience. H e claims that the will is ‘nothing more than the experience of shifting from one mental image to another. T o will something is to direct attention to it.’42 H e also claims that a representation becomes an object of the will according to the system of representations within which it occurs: if it is associated with bodily movements, it becomes an object of the will. H e appears to regard directing attention to a representation as both necessary and sufficient for willing it, though it is doubtful whether it can be more than necessary, since not all representations attended to become the object of volitions: some are simply contemplated. T he will is for Nishida the most fundamental aspect of consciousness, because the will lends unity to awareness, and so it is the most profound manifestation of the unifying power which Nishida regards as constitutive of consciousness.43 (T he view of the absolutely fundamental nature of the will was to grow in importance in Nishida’s thought, under the influence of Fichte, as will be seen in the next chapter.) T he will, Nishida claims, is an apperceptive activity of consciousness, in other words it is a cause of the union of ideas, appropriate (in the case of the will) for the realization of the self. Seeking consistently to confirm his basic premise that consciousness is unified, Nishida compares willing to other apperceptive activities, such as imagining and thinking. T he goal of the imagination (he announces) is the imitation of nature; the goal of thinking is truth, and the process is controlled by the laws of logic. B oth these activities are far more will-like than is generally realized. H is argument for assimilating will and imagination is this: A s in an artist’s imagination, if we attain to the realm of inspiration, we totally submerge the self in the thing; consequently the self and the thing are in complete congruence, and we feel the action of the thing to be the activity of our own will.44

To assimilate the will and thinking, he says: ‘A sufficient reason is always concealed behind the will. E ven if this reason is not perfect, the will always functions on the basis of a certain truth – that is, the will is established by thinking.’45 Neither of these arguments is conclusive: the assertion that the imagination just imitates nature is not argued for; nor does it sit happily with the other assertions 41

�� Ibid., p. 20. �� Ibid., p. 21. 43 �� Ibid., pp. 92–4. 44 �� Ibid., p. 90. 45 �� Ibid. 42


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concerning the process of self-abnegation in creative thought, which read more like the ‘imagination penetrative’ view characteristic of many E uropean R omantics. T he second argument tries to derive the conclusion that thinking is will-like from the premise that willing is carried out on the basis of belief; but the conclusion simply does not follow. It is necessary at this point to digress briefly in order to outline Nishida’s philosophy of nature, of which his views on the question of the freedom of the will are in part a consequence. T he conventional view of nature is of a system of individuals and forces causally interacting as described by science, and quite independent of our will and consciousness. T here is no room (Nishida claims) for the idea that nature can function spontaneously and from within, or that it can be teleologically explained. S uch assumptions are incompatible with the philosophy of pure experience, which denies the ultimacy of the self/not-self dualism presupposed by all these assertions: Nature conceived of as an objective reality totally independent of our subjectivity is an abstract concept, not a true reality. T he noumenal aspect of nature is the fact of direct experience in which subject and object have not yet separated. For example, what we regard as true grass and trees are grass and trees with living color and forms – they are intuitive facts … What people usually refer to as nature is what remains after the subjective aspect, the unifying activity, is removed from concrete reality.46

Causal-inductive explanations of natural phenomena cannot on this view constitute an ultimate level in explanations of reality, because such explanations assume that matter, rather than pure experience, is ultimate. Pure experience is ontologically ultimate and a mode of consciousness. All things (in a way yet to be specified) emerge from it, nature included. S ince nature is a manifestation of pure experience, it must share the properties of pure experience: most importantly, it cannot ‘come into being without having a unifying activity. Nature therefore possesses a kind of self, too.’47 T his unifying power behind nature (unlike the K antian realm of noumena) is not beyond experience: it is the unifying power of consciousness.48 T his unifying power at the base or root of consciousness (a necessary condition for consciousness, as we have seen, in Nishida’s view) is not a product of nature: indeed, the reverse is true, in that nature (conceived of as a unified system) comes into being only because of it. T his unifying activity exists independently of necessary, causal laws of nature. H ence our will is free because it is a basic feature of consciousness, and it is prior to such laws.49 B oth libertarian and deterministic analyses of the will which presuppose the ontological ultimacy of causal laws 46

�� Ibid., pp. 68–9; cf. pp. 159–60. �� Ibid., p. 70. 48 �� Ibid., p. 72. 49 �� Ibid., p. 99. 47


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are consequently dismissed by Nishida.50 Nishida wishes to conclude, however, that the will is free, and so he has to find a sense of the term ‘freedom’ which is compatible with his analysis of nature and causality. H e has also to avoid simply making the will random, since that would be incompatible with the moral philosophy which is his ultimate concern in this book. H is solution is to claim that the will is free because it follows its own nature, which is in fact the basic nature of consciousness itself. T his nature is awareness both of what is happening and of other possibilities. Phenomena of consciousness, unlike natural phenomena, do not simply arise: we are aware of them. Further, knowing, or being conscious of, something always includes awareness of other possibilities: T o put it more exactly, consciousness always possesses a universal character – consciousness always includes an idealistic element, otherwise it is not consciousness … B eing actual yet including ideals, being idealistic and yet not separating from actuality, this is the distinctive character of consciousness.51

Consciousness is never controlled by things, Nishida claims, for it is always controlling them. It is questionable whether this sense of ‘freedom’ does the work Nishida wants it to do. H e has in effect made a will of some sort constitutive of pure experience or being-as-is, while pure experience is simply beyond categorization – as free, or determined in any sense approximating to the uses of those terms in ordinary discourse. T he grounding of Nishida’s moral beliefs in this type of metaphysics is an issue to be returned to later. It is in the context of this discussion of the will that Nishida raises the issues of truth and knowledge. L ike James, he has to analyse these concepts in a nondualistic way, such that they can be accounted for wholly within the context of the domain of pure experience. In both cases, it is the key concept of unity which is again deployed. We regard as truth, he claims, that which has unified our experiential facts, and objective truth is the system of representations that is most effective and most integrating. T o know the truth or to accord with it is to unify our experience; it is to proceed from a lesser to a greater unity. If we regard our authentic self as being this unifying activity, then to know the truth is to accord with this greater self, to actualize it.52

While the procedure here is Jamesian, the answer Nishida proposes is not: this looks initially as if it might be a version of the coherence theory of truth familiar from western idealist philosophies, with perhaps an element of pragmatism; but the mention of an ‘authentic self’ indicates a Zen origin for this doctrine, for the authentic self is the ‘original face’, the level of consciousness revealed in Zen 50

�� Ibid., pp. 98–9. �� Ibid., p. 98; cf. p. �� 25. 52 �� Ibid., p. 24. 51


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experience. R eality is a unity, and so what brings consciousness to a greater unity must ipso facto bring it closer to what is ultimately real, and hence be true: T he standard of truth is not external, for it lies in our state of pure experience … It is in the state of direct experience – when subject and object merge with each other and we are unable, even if we try, to doubt the single actuality of the universe – that we have conviction about truth.53

A n analogous line of argument is present in Nishida’s account of knowledge. T he doctrine of pure experience entails that knower and known must both be elements of it: knowledge cannot consist in some sort of relation between representation and the external world. K nowledge again is construed as a type of unity: T o say that we know a thing simply means that the self unites with it. When one sees a flower, the self has become the flower. To investigate a flower and elucidate its basic nature means to discard all of the self’s subjective conjectures and thereby unite with the basic nature of the flower.54

Further, in the very possibility of knowledge, Nishida finds an additional confirmation of his belief in the existence of a fundamental unifying presence in the universe: ‘If the world were something different from the unity of our consciousness, we could never make contact with it. T he world we can know and understand is established by a unifying power identical to that of our consciousness.’55 Nishida is asserting that the world is knowable only because it is unified in a certain way, indeed in the same way as our consciousness. A s has been noted already, Nishida does not regard causal–inductive explanations of natural phenomena as ultimate. H e therefore does not consider here the view that consciousness has evolved as it has because it suits the way the world is – that is, from an evolutionary perspective. A s will be seen in the discussion of Nishida’s ethics below, he regards consciousness at its deepest level as having goals, and so for Nishida at this point in his development ultimate explanations are teleological. E volutionary explanations of natural phenomena, which regard the order of things as blind, are for him applicable only to the abstraction from pure experience which we ordinarily refer to as nature. Intellectual Intuition T he third type of mental operation which Nishida wishes to relate to pure experience is what he terms intellectual intuition, the phrase being almost certainly borrowed from the great German idealists. For Fichte, intellectual intuition is our 53

�� Ibid., pp. 26–7. �� Ibid., p. 73. 55 �� Ibid., p. 62. 54


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only mode of awareness of the absolute E go as an activity within us, and H egel regards it as the one real and firm standpoint of philosophy, the identity of subject and object.56 T he term ‘intuition’ (chokkan), whether qualified or not, is important in Nishida’s epistemology, and it is important to have as firm a grip as possible on what he means by this term and its cognates. A gain, his discussion at this point of An Inquiry into the Good introduces some themes that grow in importance as his thought develops. H e introduces the concept here as follows: Intellectual intuition is … an intuition of ideal, usually trans-experiential things. It intuits that which can be known dialectically. E xamples of this are found in the intuition of artists and people of religion. With respect to the process of intuiting, intellectual intuition is identical to ordinary perception, but with respect to content, intellectual intuition is far richer and more profound.57

It is also held to resemble perception in in terms of depth, and also in being susceptible to enrichment by previous experience: ‘T he culmination of this profundity is found in the intuition possessed by a person of religion who, through human love, can intuit the oneness of self and other.”58 T he assimilation of the process of intellectual intuition to perception, it should be noted, is meant to emphasize its non-reflective immediacy: since intellectual intuition is of ideal objects (so to speak), it is not a form of sense-perception. We have seen already the value Nishida sets on unity as a property and goal of consciousness: intellectual intuition is of value precisely because it is (he claims) the most unified state of consciousness. This entails that it is the closest to pure experience, the alpha and omega of conscious states: ‘When a scholar achieves a new idea, the moral person a new motive, the artist a new ideal, the religious person a new awakening, such a unity is manifesting itself.’59 In Nishida’s view, an underlying unity is a necessary condition for any type of thought, and this unity is grasped by intellectual intuition. T he greater the depth and range of this intuition, the more profound the thought it unifies: 56

�� In Fichte, the transcendental ego is the condition of experience which can never itself be experienced. What we can have, Fichte claims, is an intellectual intuition of it. S uch an intuition is neither a privileged mystical state nor an intuition of some sort of entity. R ather, it consists in our awareness of the pure I as an activity present in all selfconsciousness. E veryone who acts is aware of themselves acting, and this awareness is an intellectual intuition in Fichte’s sense, which is accordingly a constant element of selfconsciousness. H egel accepted this idea, glossing this activity as the identity of subject and object. Fichte 1846 (ed. I. H. Fichte), Vol. I, p. 463; Hegel 1927–40 (ed. H. Glockner), Vol. I, pp. 143–4. 57 IG, p. 30. 58 �� Ibid., p. 31. 59 �� Ibid., p. 32.


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T hinking is a type of system, and at its base there must be an intuition of unity … S tated broadly, a vast intuition functions behind such profound thought as the philosophies of Plato and S pinoza. In thought, a genius’s intuition differs not in quality but in degree from ordinary thinking, and it is simply a new, profound intuition of unity.60

It is to be stressed, however, that the content of intellectual intuition, though often ideal and trans-experiential, is not an abstract universality disconnected from facts (by which he means individuals). Nishida insists that what he calls true universality is not disconnected from, or in any way opposed to, facts: ‘We can express the true universal through the determination of individuality. E ach of the true artist’s exquisite brush strokes expresses the true meaning of the whole.’61 T his analogy from aesthetics is the first adumbration in Nishida’s thought of what was to become the key doctrine of the absolutely contradictory identity of universal and particular; of the infinite and the finite; of the eternal and the temporal, and it is Nishida’s way of conceptualizing one of the central experiences of Zen. What he here calls the ‘true’ universal is the unified reality fully present in, and contradictorily identical with, each particular. Nishida just takes it for granted that this sort of intuition occurs: he does not need to argue for its possibility or coherence because for him it was a fact of experience. It is precisely because his Zen background furnished him with such experiences that the concept of intuition was so important to him. S o far as he was concerned, standard perception and ratiocination, dealing in various ways with particulars and abstract universals, could only be a part of the epistemological story, and by no means the most important part. (T his will become abundantly clear in Chapter 4 below, in the discussion of the various basho, the planes in terms of which he came to analyse consciousness at a later point in the development of his thought.) H e needed a way of conceptualizing the experiences of unity of various kinds, which were to him necessary conditions for consciousness, and the concept of intuition was his way of dealing with this issue. In Nishida’s epistemology, intuition is a necessary condition for other modes of mental activity. A ll thought is established on the basis of intuition, and we cannot dispense with it: ‘A certain mystical reality is always hidden at the base of thought, and this pertains even to the axioms of geometry.’62 It follows that intuition is a necessary condition for (‘functions at the base of’, as Nishida puts it) the will: ‘T he will is established through this intuition because to will something is to intuit the oneness of subject and object.’63 Pure experience is the omega or final goal of consciousness, or, in other words, the goal of consciousness is the experience of an ultimate unity. S uch a unity is neither perceptible nor thinkable. It is no surprise, accordingly, to find that such a 60

�� Ibid., p. 33. �� Ibid. 62 �� Ibid. 63 �� Ibid. 61


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condition – the achievement of which is a religious awakening – is only available to us via intuition: T rue religious awakening is neither an abstract knowledge based in thinking nor a blind feeling. In this awakening we realize with our whole being the profound unity at the base of knowledge and the will. It is a kind of intellectual intuition, a deep grasp of life. T he sword of logic cannot penetrate it and desire cannot move it.64

Nishida was later to deny that his views included mystical elements: there will be more to say about this issue in later chapters. For the moment, it is clear and certain that these remarks are not far removed from the language of mysticism. Ultimate Reality H aving described what he regards as the major elements of conscious life in terms of pure experience, Nishida now turns to using the concept so as to answer what was always his basic philosophical question: what is it that really exists? Nishida has a bold answer to this question: ‘[R ]eality is the activity of consciousness … I contend that reality comes into being through interrelationship and that the universe is the sole activity of the sole reality.’65 (T he translators point out that the Japanese term yui-itsu, here rendered as ‘sole’, also has the evaluative overtones of the E nglish terms ‘peerless’ and ‘one of a kind’.) T his sole reality is pure or direct experience: ‘T he state of consciousness in which subject and object have dissolved into the union of thinking, feeling, and willing is true reality. Independent self-sufficient true reality manifests itself in the form of this union.’66 This looks at first as if it is to be the first premise in an idealistic monism of a kind familiar from the history of western or Indian philosophy, the first stage in a one/many metaphysics for which parallels can be found outside Buddhism; but it soon becomes clear that it is not. A s in all philosophies which propose the existence of a one as well as of a many, Nishida has to give an account of how these terms are related and how the many come to exist at all. H e rejects views such as emanation or immanence (as the latter is usually understood in the West) in favour of what he later came to call contradictory identity, the view originating in the Perfection of Wisdom sutras (this concept is dealt with in Chapter 4, below): ‘T he fundamental mode of reality is such that reality is one while it is many and many while it is one; in the midst of equality it maintains distinctions, and in the midst of distinctions it maintains equality.’67 64

�� Ibid., p. 34. �� Ibid., p. 59. 66 �� Ibid., p. 51. 67 �� Ibid., p. 57. 65


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In order for a ‘many’ to exist, the ultimate reality must be other than a characterless somewhat, for such a somewhat, like a consciousness without unity, would be no different from absolute nothingness. T he property of ultimate reality which gives rise to the many in Nishida’s thought is what he calls contradiction or opposition; however, this contradiction is merely unity viewed from another angle. T hey are two sides of the same coin: In the establishment of reality, then, both a unity at the base of reality and mutual opposition or contradiction are necessary … When these contradictions disappear, reality disappears as well. O n a fundamental level, contradiction and unity are simply two views of one and the same thing. B ecause there is unity there is contradiction, and because there is contradiction there is unity.68

B oth unity and contradiction (which in Nishida’s usage often means no more than differentiation) are argued for by means of a priori, conceptual considerations: a reality wholly without difference Nishida regards as logically impossible, no different from an absolute absence of anything. O f necessity, anything we can call a reality must exhibit some differentiation. O n the other hand, no differentiable aspect of the real can be wholly unrelated to other such aspects, since wholly unrelated aspects would necessarily not be parts of the same reality; and, in order for such aspects to be related, there must be a unity which relates them: ‘If all things are established through such opposition, then there must be a certain unifying reality concealed at their base.’69 Nishida assumes that the fact that individuals are related in certain ways entails that there is one unifying factor at the base of all things. O nce there is differentiation there is time, and so Nishida must give an account of how his ontological ultimate, pure experience, is related to time. T he conventional view, Nishida notes, is that conscious phenomena are temporal and subject to time’s arrow – and this is taken in conjunction with the belief that all consciousnesses are unique, even where they have the same content. From Nishida’s point of view this is a misconception of the relationship between being and time: [I]f we return to the base of direct experience, we see that the relationship between consciousness and time is the reverse. B ecause time is nothing more than a form that orders the content of our experience, the content of consciousness must first be able to be joined, be united, and become one in order for the idea of time to arise. O therwise we would not be able to link things sequentially and thereby think in terms of time. T he unifying activity of consciousness is not controlled

68

�� Ibid., p. 56. �� Ibid.

69


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by time; on the contrary, time is established by the unifying activity. At the base of consciousness there is a transcendent, unchanging reality apart from time.70

T hat is, there logically cannot be a sequence of events in a consciousness unless the events are sufficiently unified to permit their being conceived of as part of a sequence. O nce again, it is the unity at the base of all things which is their precondition. T his mode of being is a precondition for time, not vice versa. A s is the case with other thinkers with a comparable metaphysics, Nishida cannot regard our ordinary beliefs about time as revelatory of reality at its deepest level. O rdinary descriptions of the temporal relations of individuals in nature he regards as abstractions from the basic, concrete level of pure experience. O ne more point must be made about the way reality develops through differentiation. Pure experience is ultimate. A ccordingly, it must itself be the origin of all the changes which it manifests: pure experience is all there is, and there is nothing other than it to be the source of change. A s Nishida puts it, what is really happening in all conscious phenomena is that ‘a certain total reality develops and completes itself from within.’71 Pure experience is creative, and, as we have seen, the mode of this creativity is what Nishida calls contradiction. Contradiction is the nature of reality itself: As I said before, while reality is infinite conflict, it is also infinite unity. Conflict is an indispensable aspect of unity, for it is through conflict that we advance to an even greater unity. O ur spirit, the unifying activity of reality, is conscious of itself not when that unity is functioning, but when there is conflict.72

H egel is regularly referred to in Nishida’s works, and it is easy to see why, on the basis of statements like the one just quoted, Nishida should have found H egelianism congenial. It is important to note, however, that, granted the Zen basis of his thought, he cannot accept all of the H egelian apparatus. In particular, he cannot accept that all contradictions are ultimately synthesized into a higher form of unity: reality is both one and many, temporal and eternal, being and becoming at the same time. R eality is permanently self-contradictory in nature. A s so often, Nishida can go some distance in agreeing with a western philosophy, but not all the way. T here will be more to say about Nishida’s views on H egel in Chapter 4 below. A s is the case with James, the doctrine of pure experience leads Nishida to regard the mind/matter, internal/external distinction as non-ultimate: [W]hen seen from the perspective of direct experience, all things are phenomena of consciousness, without distinction between internal and external. T hat which 70

�� Ibid., pp. 60–61. �� Ibid., p. 53. 72 �� Ibid., p. 75. 71


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we speak of as the internal, subjective spirit is a highly superficial and feeble spirit, an individual fancy. In contrast, great, deep spirit is the activity of the universe that is united with the truth of the universe.73

Y et while Nishida has his basic strategy in common with James, it will be clear that his Zen inspiration takes him a long way from James in regard to other matters: what is expressed here is the Zen distinction between superficial ego and original face, and neither of these doctrines is Jamesian. T he question inevitably arises how ultimate reality or pure experience in Nishida’s sense is related to his notion of god – a question to which he has a characteristically bold response. R eality or pure experience is an independent, self-fulfilled, infinite activity. We call the base of this infinite activity God. God is not something that transcends reality, God is the base of reality. God is that which dissolves the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity and unites spirit and nature.74

H e dismisses attempts to prove the existence of god by argument. T he only real proof is by direct experience of the self: ‘we can know the foundation of reality that forms the universe in the depths of our hearts – we can grasp the true face of God. The infinitely free activity of the human heart proves God directly.’75 Citing with approval the Indian assertion that atman (or individual soul) and B rahman are identical, Nishida claims that the deepest knowledge of god is achieved through ‘intuition realized in the inner soul’.76 Further, he refers with approval to the via negativa of Nicholas of Cusa: no positive affirmations can be true of god, since any affirmative statement must affirm a limited attribute, and any limitation must be false of god (this is the same thought which lies behind the characterization of the D ao as nameless and behind the advaitin (or nondualist) description of B rahman as non-dual rather than monistic, the latter being a limiting affirmation).77 God and our original self are the same, and we can never (in Nishida’s view) be satisfied with the condition of being merely an individual self with an everyday consciousness. T here is a fundamental demand in us for a mode of being which is a larger form of unity: O ur love for others is the demand for such a supra-individual unity with them. A ccordingly, we feel greater peace and joy in love for others than in love for ourselves. God, the unity of the universe, is the base of this unifying activity, the

73

�� Ibid., p. 78. �� Ibid., p. 79. 75 �� Ibid., p. 81. 76 �� Ibid. 77 �� Ibid., pp. 81–2. 74


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foundation of our love, the source of our joy. God is infinite love, infinite joy, and peace.78

T he use of the term ‘god’ can be misleading to western readers, with its overtones of individuality and personality which are absent from Nishida’s thought; for what is being spoken of here is not an individual of any kind. H e has recast in his own terminology the Zen doctrine of the presence in us, at the deepest level, of an original face. What is also abundantly clear is that this is very remote indeed from the Jamesian philosophy of pure experience and much closer to D aoism, to which Zen owes not a little. The Good H aving set out his vision of the order of things, Nishida turns next to the moral philosophy which is the raison d’être for his first book, and which he seeks to ground on the epistemology and metaphysics of Parts I and II . H e surveys and dismisses a number of ethical theories – intuitionism; heteronomist and autonomist theories, and hedonism, both egoistic and universalist (utilitarianism) – and then turns to his own positive doctrine. It will be recalled that, in this work, Nishida maintains that the most fundamental aspect of consciousness is the will – its deepest unifying activity and a direct manifestation of the unifying power Nishida finds (as he puts it) at the base of reality. A t the base of the will itself are innate demands which appear in consciousness as goal concepts that unify it. When these ideals are realized – when unification is completed – we feel satisfaction: B ecause that which determines the value of conduct lies wholly in these fundamental, innate demands of the will, when we completely realize these demands (our ideals) our conduct is praised as good, and when we act contrary to them, our conduct is censured as bad. A ccordingly, the good is the realization of our internal demands, our ideals; it is the development and completion of the will.79

Nishida regards this as a form of energetism such as is to be found in the philosophy of Plato and A ristotle: T he highest good, in other words, is for our spirit to develop its abilities and to achieve a perfect development. In this way, A ristotle’s entelechie is the good. For a human to display his or her innate nature – just as a bamboo plant or a

78

�� Ibid. �� Ibid., p. 123.

79


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pine displays its nature – is our good. S pinoza said that virtue is to function in accordance with the self’s own nature.80

It follows further from Nishida’s metaphysical premises that to achieve the good in this way is the same thing as to be in accord with reality. A s is the case in the closely analogous moral philosophy which is part of D aoism, to manifest goodness is to reflect the mode of being of reality itself (this is also why only one of the sections of this book, ostensibly devoted to ethics, is about goodness, the rest being about reality/consciousness): [T ]he development and completion of a thing is the fundamental mode of the establishment of all reality, and spirit, nature, and the universe come to exist by this mode. T he good, conceived of as the development and completion of the self, amounts to our obeying the laws of reality called the self. T hat is, to unite with the true reality of the self is the highest good.81

A n important consequence of this position, Nishida argues, is that it does away with the gap between facts and values and with the consequent is/ought problem: T he view of existence and value as separate comes from an abstraction that distinguishes objects of knowing from feeling and willing; but in concrete reality existence and value are fundamentally one. T hus to seek the good and to return to it is to know the true reality of the self.82

It will be obvious by now that, when Nishida refers to the reality or development of the self, the self he is referring to is not the surface ego (otherwise his moral philosophy would collapse into an egoism like that of S tirner), but the ‘original face’ of Zen, the ‘self’ which is manifest when the surface ego is overcome and dissipates. T he fundamental demand of this true self is for maximal union with what there is, for the overcoming of the subject/object division; and this cashes out in the human world as love of all things, in a manner to be described presently. It is also obvious that Nishida has to assume that the process of the unfolding of reality through contradiction is good in itself and requires no further justification. This is a version of a doctrine which occurs in certain other eastern philosophies, namely that what there is, the rerum natura, is good. Nishida simply adopts this view, no doubt on the grounds of Zen experience. From a philosophical perspective, the view generates a special version of the problem of evil: how is evil possible in a world of things which manifests goodness as its very nature? H is response is a version of what one may call the ‘partial perspective’ answer: 80

�� Ibid., p. 125. �� Ibid., p. 126. 82 �� Ibid. 81


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Falsehood, ugliness, and evil always arise in our viewing abstractly just one aspect of things while we are unaware of the whole, and in being partial to just one aspect of reality and thereby going against the unity of the whole.83

T he same apparent paradox arises, as Nishida indicates, with regard to beauty (since nothing can be allowed to be truly ugly) and other negative values. Nishida consistently accepts that ultimately nothing can be really ugly,84 and these claims as to the ultimate unreality of negative values can find parallels in the writings of visionaries and mystics from other traditions.85 It is salutary to reflect that, to these writers, these assertions are empirical truths, records of experience, not theoretical speculations or conceptual analyses. Without having had the experiences in question, especially of being in a condition of consciousness in which the fact/ value distinction has collapsed, these are hard sayings on which to form a sure opinion, though the consistency with which such thoughts occur in traditions which arose independently is very striking. O ne may comment that Nishida has not got to the heart of the matter, since he needs to say what it is about reality that makes it good (hence he still needs an analysis of goodness); but he could dismiss such comment as the response of someone who has not had the experience which lies behind his claim. Nishida amplifies his discussion of the good by describing it as the unity of a personality; but the turn of phrase is to a degree unfortunate, laden as it is with overtones of an individualism he absolutely abjures. Just as he makes a distinction between the surface ego and the true self, so he distinguishes between what we ordinarily term our personality and our ‘true’ personality. T he true personality could in fact be better described as an impersonality, since it is what is revealed when the surface personality (referred to in the following quotation as ‘oneself’) is dissipated: T he true unity of consciousness is a pure and simple activity that comes forth of itself, unhindered by oneself; it is the original state of independent, self-sufficient consciousness, with no distinction among knowledge, feeling, and volition, and no separation of subject and object. A t this time our true personality expresses itself in its entirety. A nd as I discussed in the section on reality, if we assume that phenomena of consciousness are the only reality, then our personalities are the activity of the unifying power of the universe. In other words, our personalities are the particular forms in which the sole reality – which transcends the distinction between mind and matter – manifests itself according to circumstances.86

83

�� Ibid., p. 143. �� Cf. e.g. AM, pp. 15–16 and 162. 85 �� T his doctrine is also present in The Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana, in H akeda 1967, p. 29. 86 IG, pp. 130–31. 84


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T he demands of the true personality, Nishida adds, are exceedingly solemn, and following them is ‘an endeavour of difficulty and pain.’87 T hough Nishida does not say so explicitly, the reason for this last comment at least is easy to state, since the pre-requisite for allowing the true personality to manifest itself is the annulling of the surface ego, the absolute abandonment of its desires – which is the goal of Zen training and other advanced yogas. T he actualization of the true personality is the only absolute good: all other goods are conditional goods, valuable only insofar as they contribute to this realization. O ur true self or personality is identical with the ultimate reality. A ccordingly, if we know the true self (that is, if we experience it) we ‘fuse with the essence of the universe and unite with the will of God.’88 Nishida’s Inquiry leads naturally to a concluding section on religion in which the concept of pure experience is deployed in the context of philosophical theology. Religion R eligion as Nishida understands it is the demand for unity of consciousness, and this, as we have seen, is the same as the demand for union with the universe. R eligion thus conceived is the goal of human life, not a means to some further end, notably inner peace. S uch inner peace as it may furnish is a by-product of the religious life, not its goal.89 T he relation of god to the world is not like that of an artist to a work of art – that is, transcendent – but like that of noumenon to phenomenon, or of consciousness to its content. T he universe is not a creation of god but a manifestation of god, who is the unifying power at the base of both nature and the mind. T he distinction between mind and matter, like that between subject and object, Nishida cannot regard as ultimate: he argues, consistently, that both distinctions are imposed on pure experience. Matter, for example, cannot be known as a reality independent of our consciousness of it. T he facts of direct experience are the phenomena of our consciousness, and what we call nature, space and time are concepts designed to organize and explain these facts. What physicists call matter is a highly abstract concept, remote from concrete facts. T he order of natural phenomena is actually the order of the phenomena of our consciousness. S pirit and nature are not two kinds of reality, but different views of one and the same reality. A ll these concepts – space, time, nature, mind, matter – arise as a result of what Nishida calls reflection – that is, conceptual thought. T hey are epistemologically posterior to the level of pure experience, which is grasped, as we have seen, by what he terms intuition.90 Granted Nishida’s premises, he can characterize god as the foundation of the phenomena of consciousness, the unity at the base of the ultimately real: ‘T he 87

�� Ibid., p. 134. �� Ibid., p. 145. 89 �� Ibid., pp. 149–52. 90 �� Ibid., pp. 159–60. 88


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relation between the universe and God is the relation between our phenomena of consciousness and their unity.’91 S pirit is not a mere collection of the activities of thinking, willing and feeling: it is rather a single unifying power which underlies these activities; and these in turn are its expression. God is the greatest and final unifier of our consciousness; our consciousness is one part of god’s consciousness and its unity comes from god’s unity. O ur ordinary condition of separate selfconsciousness is the result of reflection: Self-consciousness is a phenomenon that accompanies the unification of a partial system of consciousness in the center of the entirety of consciousness. Self-consciousness arises through reflection, and the reflection of the self is the activity that in this way seeks the center of consciousness. T he self is nothing other than the unifying activity of consciousness.92

Precisely how the individual self arises from the non-dual – if not undifferentiated – state of pure experience is not made clear in this book, and the attempt to be more precise on this key issue was to become a central driving force of the next phase of Nishida’s thought. S ince time is posterior to pure experience, Nishida’s god, who is the unity of this experience, transcends time. Consequently, for god everything is present, and so in god there is no reflection, no memory or hope, and nothing corresponding to ‘special self-consciousness’,93 that is, the type of everyday self-consciousness which is our normal mode of experience. Further, what we term the will of god is invariant, since it is outside time. God, Nishida claims, must be described as living: the existence of god is not a mere deduction from philosophical arguments but a fact of spiritual experience: ‘God can be seen as one great intellectual intuition at the foundation of the universe, as the unifier of the pure experience that envelops the universe.’94 Nishida’s god is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent and infinite, but not transcendent: Just as there is no world without God, there is no God without the world … the relation between God and the world is the relation between the unity of consciousness and its content. T he content of consciousness is established by unity, and there is no unity apart from the content of consciousness – they are not two separate things, but rather the two sides of a single reality. In direct experience all phenomena of consciousness are one activity – however, by

91

�� Ibid., p. 161. �� Ibid., p. 162. 93 �� Ibid., p. 163. 94 �� Ibid., p. 164. 92


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making this single activity the object of knowledge and reflecting upon it, the content is analyzed and distinguished in a variety of ways.’95

Nishida refers with approval to Boehme’s view that god reflects upon himself and so gives rise to the world. It does not follow, however, Nishida argues, that our limited individual personality is merely a phantasm; ‘rather, it is part of God’s development, one of God’s activities of differentiation’.96 T he notion that one is part (in some sense of the term) of the development of the divine is, of course, by no means without parallel in religious writing.97 In the present context, however, it is more germane to note the early hints of what was to become the doctrine of the contradictory identity of one and many in this theological assertion that god and the world are simply two aspects of a unified reality.

Conclusion It is not difficult to appreciate why Nishida was attracted to the concept of pure experience: he needed a concept with which to articulate his intuition of a reality which is a unified consciousness; in which no distinction between self and not-self, mind and matter, thought, feeling and willing can meaningfully be drawn. (S ee the second passage from James on p. 36 above.) T he use of the term ‘consciousness’, with its dualistic overtones, is unavoidable, but the term itself has to be understood in a neutral monist way in most of the contexts in which Nishida deploys it, if he is to be consistent. (Pure experience involves awareness, and irresistibly suggests the term ‘consciousness’.) Nishida found in James a thinker who had tried to give a philosophical account of the world of experience in terms of a recognizably similar concept, and to that extent his philosophy and that of James share one major feature in common. A gain, he adopts (as he must) the strategy also employed by James, of attempting to construe other key concepts in terms of pure experience, though this method, of course, is not specifically Jamesian: it is standard philosophical procedure, constitutive of the conception of the nature of the philosophical enterprise in the western tradition. T hus Nishida relates his concept of pure experience to the concepts of thought; of the will; of intellectual intuition; of knowledge; of truth; of the self; of time; of space; of nature; of goodness; and of god. He has adopted the western conception of what the philosophical enterprise must be for a thinker who adopts the starting point that he does, and this is one respect in which a key element of western thought was to remain a constant in Nishida’s system. 95

�� Ibid., pp. 168–9. �� Ibid., p. 170. 97 �� In the present context, it is relevant to refer to a case mentioned by William James, which also affirms the non-differentiation of feeling and knowledge in the religious experience. S ee James 1986, p. 392, note 1. 96


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Yet when one examines his thought in detail, it is difficult to push the parallel much further in respect of the details of the content of Nishida’s philosophy at this stage of his development. T he stress in James’s account of pure experience is always on its burgeoning novelty, on its constant tendency to variegation and exfoliation, and, moreover, on regarding this tendency as normal and admirable – proof of the vitality of what there is. (See the first passage from James, pp. 35–6 above.) T here is no sense, in reading James, that this is a man who has discovered a stillness of limitless depth at the heart of things; nor does he lament the fact that he has not. James, in common with his universe (one feels), liked to be up and doing. (It will be recalled that James described the – by comparison with Nishida’s – mildly contemplative philosophy of his younger H arvard contemporary S antayana as the perfection of rottenness.)98 Pure experience may be the alpha in radical empiricism, but it is not the omega: there is no sense at all that James regards it as desirable or normal to return to a state of undifferentiated awareness. Indeed, in the first passage quoted above, he explicitly says that only infants or persons in the abnormal condition of semicoma do so. It is interesting to note that at various points in his argument Nishida reverses the evaluation present in this passage from James, regarding dreams or the experiences of babies as richer than the ordinary, conceptualized experience of a normal adult. Conceptual thought, indeed the whole elaborate structure we call the natural world, he regards as an impoverished abstraction from a richer pure experience – he describes it, for example, as ‘simply an incomplete state of pure experience’99 – and it is to the richer but less articulated state that we will seek to return if we follow his moral recommendations. T here is nothing in James’s thought corresponding to the stress Nishida places on the unity of consciousness, either as a fact or as a value (not that Nishida would ultimately admit these to be different), and this is no doubt due to the absence of a religious impulse in James’s radical empiricism. Zen experience formed Nishida at the deepest levels, and it becomes manifest very quickly, reading An Inquiry into the Good, that the parallel with S pinoza’s Ethics is exact with regard to the fact that a deeply religious view of the world shapes its philosophy. T he stress on unity, and above all the wish to return to it, is entirely comprehensible in a Zen context. A s has been noted once above, Nishida denied later in life that his philosophy is mystical, and perhaps if one construes the term ‘philosophy’ in a certain restricted sense this might be true; but it is equally undeniably true that much of what Nishida says in this first book would be intelligible to mystics the world over. The central moral recommendation of this book is that we should so conduct ourselves as to be in accord with the will of god. In Zen terms, this is to allow the original face to manifest itself; more generally, it is to be in accord with the Dao. This is no less than to follow the mystic’s path towards union with the divine, where such union requires the dissolution of the surface ego; and a key element in this dissolution is the suspension of all conceptual intellection. T his is the state to which western The Letters of William James, 1920, Vol. II , pp. 122–3. IG, p. 17.

98 99

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mystics since D ionysius the A reopagite refer to as the D arkness of Unknowing, the darkness beyond light. Pure experience, as Nishida describes it in this book, is not identical with the classic oriental notion of nothingness or mu (since it is not wholly unarticulated), but it is close to it, closer to it than to any western notion. James’s pure experience is not divine. T he most western aspects of An Inquiry into the Good are its method and the repertoire of problems acknowledged as problems, rather than as a debt to any single western philosopher. Nishida had been reading western philosophical and religious writers for some years before and during the writing of this book, and manifestly accepted that the problems which had so exercised these thinkers were indeed problems. H e had mastered a good deal of the western canon, from ancient Greeks to his own time, and internalized their thought. T he philosophical method and layout of the argument derive chiefly from western models. There are references to Plato, A ristotle and the S toics, S t T homas, D uns S cotus, D escartes, Pascal, H obbes, the B ritish E mpiricists up to Mill, and German thinkers from K ant to Nishida’s own time, H egel being cited most often with simple approval (entirely understandably in the estimation of a thinker who regards reality as being characterized by contradiction, in some sense of the term). Y et, while the form of this philosophical vessel may have been determined by European influences, the content is Japanese, unmistakably Zen in its emphasis. T he question Nishida posed himself throughout his life was whether the vessel and the contents suited each other as well as they might. A s he continued to read and to think after the publication of An Inquiry into the Good, he became convinced that the match was not good enough: the concept of pure experience came to seem to him too tainted with the overtones of individualistic psychology to be a suitable articulation for the governing intuition of his thought. H is conception of ultimate reality is remote indeed from any form of individualism, and he felt the need to try to find a better articulation for it. In the next phase of his thought he turned to the works of Bergson, Fichte and the neo-Kantians, in the hope of finding something better.

Chapter 3

Fichte, the Neo-K antians and B ergson

Introduction B y the end of An Inquiry into the Good, Nishida had established the main lines of a philosophy centred on the concept of pure experience; but he had not by any means completed the philosophical programme which such an endeavour involves. A s in the logically analogous cases of neutral monism or idealistic monism, Nishida has to show how a number of key, fundamental concepts and aspects of experience can be derived from his proposed ultimate or metaphysical first principle and, if possible, to show that his way of conceptualizing how things are is preferable to our commonsense and scientific way of viewing the world. Importantly, the commonsense view rests on the A ristotelian assumption that individuals are real and ultimate; that explanations of natural phenomena will be in terms of efficient causation; and that certain distinctions we take to be ultimate (e.g. between space and time, mind and body, subject and object, fact and meaning) are indeed ultimate, marking real and final divisions in the order of things. Granted his assertion of the ontological ultimacy of pure experience, Nishida has to reject all these claims, and has to try to show that all these concepts and distinctions can be convincingly derived from the notion of pure experience as he understands it. H e has to show how pure experience, a unity beyond conceptual grasp, gives rise to conceptual thought, whose central purpose is to mark and articulate differences in what there is, differences that make possible the meaning which all our experience has. Nishida was abundantly aware of these lacunae in his philosophy, and applied himself continually to filling them. His second major book, Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness (hereafter IRSC), which appeared in 1917, marks the next stage in his continuing effort to refine and complete his philosophy, and this chapter is devoted to a study of that work. T he Japanese title of the book is Jikaku ni okeru chokkan to hansei, and it is necessary to say something about the term jikaku, rendered as ‘self-consciousness’ in the standard E nglish translation of the work. Jikaku can certainly mean ‘selfconsciousness’, but this way of rendering it can easily mislead readers of standard E nglish – and especially those trained in the western philosophical tradition – into thinking that by this term Nishida is referring to individual self-awareness of an ordinary kind, governed by the transcendental unity of apperception and subjected to conceptualization. This is in fact a simplified understanding of what Nishida has in mind when he employs the term jikaku. T he primary usage of this term in Japanese is in religious contexts, where it refers to a special type of awareness or awakening, in which subject and object are non-separate; and in this book jikaku


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is used to denote Nishida’s ontological ultimate, but viewed in a special way. Kaku means ‘awakening’, and jikaku is pure experience which has in some sense (to be made more precise, if possible) become aware of itself; has awakened to itself. T he standard usage of the term ‘self-consciousness’ in western philosophy would be considered by Nishida to refer to a condition of self-consciousness without selfawakening, self-consciousness unaware of its groundedness in pure experience. H is choice of the term is not at all surprising, given its connotations in Japanese. H owever, because the term ‘self-consciousness’ in current E nglish is by no means a lexical synonym for what Nishida intends (because there is no such lexical synonym), I will occasionally use the Japanese term jikaku, as a reminder of what Nishida is referring to. Of the other terms in the title, ‘reflection’ (hansei) is Nishida’s word for the mode of consciousness which obtains when the absolute unity of pure or immediate experience has been modified as a result of the working out of the latter’s inherent, dynamic tensions. A s he puts the matter towards the end of An Inquiry into the Good: … due to the conflicts in the system of reality, and as the necessary process of development, the system of reality comes to disintegrate; that is, reflection inevitably arises. B y this means, that which was actual becomes conceptual, that which was concrete becomes abstract, and that which was one becomes many.

Reflection is conceptual thought, and Nishida equates it with the Fall in Christian theology. In common with many other commentators, Nishida therefore considers the Fall not a single historical event but a condition manifested every moment in ordinary consciousness, the result of our separation from primal unity. It is not a condition to be lamented, however, since it is a path which leads us, Nishida claims, back to a condition of profound unity. Intuition (chokkan), by contrast, is a direct, non-reflective grasp of concrete reality, and the term continues to bear in the present work the sense it has in An Inquiry into the Good, where it is often qualified (as in Fichte) by the adjective ‘intellectual’, to make it clear that what is in question is not a form of sense experience (it will be recalled that for Nishida sensations are abstractions constructed from pure experience, and not, as in the case of classical empiricism for example, ultimate data). Intuition is consciousness of the unbroken progression of ultimate reality just as it is: the subject/object division has not arisen, and that

�� A ccordingly, some translators prefer ‘self-awakening’ as the way to render jikaku. S ee e.g. Ueda 1993 and T remblay (in B erque 2000, vol. 1), who prefers l’éveil à soi. IG, p. 169. In the terms of The Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana, reflection is the state which follows the arising of a thought, i.e. the splitting of the O ne Mind into subject and object. S ee H akeda 1967, pp. 50–51 and L ai 1980, p. 45. �� Ibid, p. 170.

Fichte, the Neo-Kantians and Bergson

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which knows and that which is known are one. (T his is not to be taken as implying that intuition transcends the operation of consciousness, rather that intuition establishes the operation of consciousness itself.) Since reflection is a mode of consciousness which stands outside this progression and views it, the question at once arises how this can occur. In K antian terms, Nishida’s fundamental question in this book is: how is reflection possible, since in a sense we can never go outside the realm of intuition. In other words, Nishida in this book is trying to establish how the one becomes manifest as the many; how conceptual experience arises. Further, in common with the other fundamental distinctions considered in IRSC, that between intuition and reflection has to be shown to be non-ultimate, in the sense that both have to be derivable from pure/immediate experience or jikaku: but this is to anticipate the argument. In the period after the publication of An Inquiry into the Good, Nishida continued to read widely in western philosophy. A s is evident from the text of IRSC, he studied and was greatly impressed by the ideas of Fichte and of Bergson; both are often referred to and will be considered at appropriate points below. H is most frequent references, however, are to a group of philosophers now hardly read in the West except by a few historians of philosophy and specialist scholars: the neo-K antians. A t the time he was thinking out the ideas presented in IRSC, neo-K antians occupied most if not all of the important chairs of philosophy in Germany. Their broad approach to philosophy was designed to fill the void left by the collapse of German idealism after the death of H egel, and was in part also a response to the metaphysical pretensions of the other main trend in postidealist German thought, materialism. R eading the neo-K antians was to Nishida what reading Wittgenstein and Quine (for example) was to philosophers in the A nglophone world in the latter half of the last century: they were the benchmarks against which to measure one’s ideas, especially if one bears in mind the deep impression made on the Japanese by German thought in general. (It was regarded as far more profound, for example, than the empiricist–utilitarian tradition.) If one studied E uropean philosophy at all, these thinkers had to be read. Individual issues in neo-Kantianism will be referred to as appropriate below; but since this school of thought has for the moment largely receded over the horizon of history, a very few basic introductory remarks are appropriate here as background. T hese thinkers were integral to the philosophical atmosphere Nishida breathed at the time of composition of IRSC, are regularly referred to in it, and he takes it for granted that their ideas are known to his readers.

Neo-Kantianism The phrase ‘Back to Kant!’ first appeared in Kant und die Epigonen (1865 Kant and the Epigones), by O tto L iebmann (1840–1912), and became the slogan for IRSC, p. 3. S ee also Nishida’s essay My Philosophical Path, in Y usa 2002, p. 301.

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a group of philosophers whose procedure was to adopt what one can call K ant’s general position (as they understood it), apply it to philosophical problems as they were conceived at the time, and see what happened. What happened proved to be fairly varied in terms of philosophical doctrine: it is not possible to produce a list of ideas that all those called neo-K antians would have agreed on, since each representative of the movement had his own particular convictions, with the result that neo-K antianism is less tightly knit as a movement than logical positivism (for example) was later to be. H owever, it is possible to make some useful generalizations about this approach to philosophy, especially in respect of certain common assumptions, if not in respect of doctrines derived based on them. T he neo-K antians can be broadly divided into the Marburg and B aden schools, each having different areas of philosophical interest. T he principal foci of the Marburg school were logic, epistemology and philosophical method, and its most important members were H ermann Cohen (1842–1918) and Paul Natorp (1854– 1924). Cohen’s central interest is the unity of cultural consciousness, coupled with a strong sense of its historical development: he refers constantly to the historical development of the ideas he discusses, to their cultural significance at different times in history. In his Die logischen Grundlagen der exacten Wissenschaften (1910: The Logical Foundations of the Exact Sciences) Natorp tries to prove that the logical development of mathematics does not require intuitions of space and time: as will be seen below, the philosophy of mathematics was one of the areas which preoccupied Nishida in the period leading up to the writing of IRSC, and mathematical issues and concepts occur repeatedly in this book. A gain, fundamental to the classical K antian standpoint is an absolute separation between being and thought, a separation which resulted in the doctrine of the thing in itself. Nishida would have been sympathetic to the efforts of both Cohen and Natorp to bridge this gap. Natorp’s fundamental assertion is that being and thought stand in a constant, mutual relation: being exists only as a process or activity intrinsically related to thought. B eing and thought, one might say, are regarded as polar points on a single scale, though, as Copleston points out, it is not entirely clear that this view is compatible with K antianism, and it readily collapses into idealism. T he main focus of the B aden or S outh-West German school was on the concept of value, though construed in a particular way. Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915) regarded the central task of philosophy to be the investigation of the principles and presuppositions of value judgements, together with the relation between the judging consciousness and the value in accordance with which the judgement is made. T his did not restrict philosophy to areas such as ethics and aesthetics, the normal loci of axiological judgements. Windelband argues that non-axiological judgements also presuppose a value, namely truth. T hus logic, ethics and aesthetics are claimed to presuppose the values of truth, goodness and beauty. T his in turn �� In what follows I have drawn not only on the works of the neo-K antians themselves but also on Beck 1967; Copleston 1965 ; Dussort 1963; Köhnke 1992; and Willey 1978. �� Copleston 1965, pp. 136–7; Natorp 1921, p. 13.


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is taken to warrant the postulation of a transcendental value-setting consciousness which lies (as it were) behind empirical consciousness. T o the extent that all individuals appeal to these fundamental values, this transcendental consciousness forms a living bond between individuals. Windelband further claims that absolute values require an anchor in reality, the suprasensible reality we call god. Windelband’s successor H einrich R ickert (1863–1936) took over his master’s assumption of the centrality of the notion of value to philosophy. In R ickert’s view, values have reality but cannot be said to exist. T hey are real because (he contends) we do not create them but we recognize them. In value judgements, the individual brings together the realm of values and the sensible world, giving valuational significance to things and events. Before being there is meaning, and all consciousness involves consciousness of a value, a claim which, as will be seen below, preoccupied Nishida a good deal. Further, R ickert accepted Windelband’s claim that science and history have a radically different philosophical structure. S cience is concerned with phenomena only insofar as they are of repeatable types. S cience is a nomothetic or law-positing activity, and so it focuses on aspects of the world which can satisfy laws. B y contrast, history is concerned with events and persons insofar as they are singular and unique: history (as he puts it) is idiographic. What all these philosophers shared were not areas of philosophical interest or positive convictions but certain assumptions, and it is these latter, as much as the neo-K antians’ positive convictions, that could not but interest and exercise Nishida, given his own starting point. In particular, the neo-K antians assume an absolute distinction between value and being, meaning and fact. T hese dualities they took to be ultimate features of the rerum natura; final, bedrock data from which philosophizing had to begin, not susceptible of further explanation. With these points in mind, we can now approach Nishida’s thought as is developed in IRSC. T he book was written without a preconceived plan, being published first as a series of essays in Japanese philosophical journals. It shows Nishida working out his ideas as he goes along, and indeed changing his mind on certain issues, including the best way of characterizing his ontological ultimate. T he standard E nglish version (to which I will refer) is a somewhat reorganized version of the Japanese text. I have followed a roughly logical order of topics, not at all the order Nishida follows in his text. B efore moving on I would like to pay tribute to the editors of the E nglish version of IRSC, who have performed a great service to Nishida scholars by tracing the sources of many of the ideas/quotations from neo-K antians and other philosophers referred to by Nishida, and have saved subsequent scholars a great deal of time as a result.

Self-consciousness/jikaku In An Inquiry into the Good, Nishida describes his ultimate reality as either pure experience or immediate experience. B y the time of writing IRSC, he has added


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another characterization, namely that reality is a self-conscious system or selfconsciousness: the self-consciousness of the transcendental ego, close to but not identical with what Fichte means by the term Tathandlung: ‘independent, self-existent concrete consciousness, or immediate experience, in both its basic structure and its process of development, takes the form of self-consciousness’. The term ‘system’ is not defined by him, and its use serves chiefly to emphasize that the development of jikaku, however it is to be characterized, is not (like that of the Will in S chopenhauer’s thought, for example) chaotic. Nishida’s thought is not pessimistic: all the differentiation to which the development of self-consciousness gives rise embodies the possibility of a return to an even deeper unity, a unity regarded as self-evidently good. T he very nature of self-consciousness is that it is a self-generating, unending progression: these features are intrinsic to the nature of consciousness as such as Nishida understands it, and constitute data not further explicable. T he self which is conscious is a self in much the same way that Fichte’s E go is an ego, that is, something entirely remote from individual self-awareness but the ultimate ground of its possibility. S ince self-consciousness is what there is, everything else in experience must derive from it. Further, since there is nothing else beside selfconsciousness, the most fundamental description of reality must be that the self makes its own activity its object and reflects on it. T he subject/object distinction is thus held to arise wholly from within self-consciousness, and does not imply the existence of extra-conscious entities of any kind co-ultimate with consciousness. H ence Nishida stresses that self-consciousness in his sense is a far more basic fact about what there is than anything dealt with in psychology. T he latter deals with different types of conscious states of individuals, and such states of individuals are possible only if there is a unifying consciousness which transcends each of them: ‘T he psychological view … is … founded on a trans-individual self-consciousness. (In Kantian terms, the scientific standpoint has as its condition the unity of pure apperception.)’10 No argument is given for the assertion that the unifying consciousness of which he speaks is trans-individual, nor for the accompanying claim that our ability to recollect the past and to think of it in historical concatenation is possible only if we presuppose a self-consciousness which transcends time,11 at least if by the term ‘transcends’ he means (as he appears to) something more than ‘is continuous in time’. Perhaps in his mind are the problems which arise in K antianism once the

IRSC, p. xix. �� Ibid., p. 35. �� Ibid., p. 3. 10 �� Ibid., p. 4. H e has in mind here a passage from the Critique of Pure Reason, B 132, but it is questionable whether K ant’s remarks can be made to license the interpretation that self-consciousness is trans-individual. 11 �� Ibid., p. 4.


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thing-in-itself is dispensed with, and which it would not have been necessary to reiterate at the time. H e goes on to assert at once that ‘T his unifying consciousness … takes the form of an internal “ought” (Sollen)’.12 Here he is manifesting the influence of the Marburg school, which was right at the heart of his thought at the time when he began writing IRSC, though with a significant modification. Nishida accepts the neo-K antian assertion that all consciousness includes consciousness of a value, of an ‘ought’ as R ickert puts it,13 but he cannot allow that these values have a mode of being which is co-ultimate with but discrete from that of self-consciousness. R ather, they must be an aspect of self-consciousness itself. H e accepts that a transcendental ‘ought’ or value grounds cognition, but this value is non-different from self-consciousness: self-consciousness is the ‘ought’ recognizing the ‘ought’ itself, one instance of the self taking its own activity as its object.14 B orrowing an argument from Fichte, Nishida contends that only if self-consciousness is thus construed as the merging of subject and object in intellectual intuition can an infinite regress be avoided. If self-consciousness is analysed in terms of a thinking self conscious of another self which is its object of thought, then there is no reason why the cognizing self should not be the possible object of another consciousness, and so on ad infinitum. Accordingly, since self-consciousness exists, it cannot be analysed in terms of the subject/object distinction. S elf-consciousness has to be a condition to which the subject/object distinction does not apply, an ultimate datum in which subject and object, nominative and accusative selves, are just a unity.15 Manifestly, this fundamental position generates for Nishida a philosophical programme similar to that adumbrated in An Inquiry into the Good, but which he needs to pursue in more detail than he did in his first book. He has to derive from self-consciousness all the fundamental concepts of the commonsense world view, and it is to these derivations that IRSC is devoted – though, as will be seen, his favoured description of his metaphysical ultimate has changed by the time we arrive at the end of the book. In IRSC, he attempts to derive from the notion of self-consciousness the basic ideas of logic and mathematics and the concepts of space, time, art and the scientific view of the world. He also has a good deal to say about the nature of sensation, knowledge and judgement, teleology and the mind/body relation, and he develops his idea of the subject/object distinction. In these discussions the ideas of Fichte, the neo-K antians and B ergson are constant presences, as (significantly) are those of certain major figures in the European mystical tradition. Nishida makes no explicit methodological statement as to how he intends to proceed. H e does not try (in the manner of certain E uropean idealists) to construct a wholly deductive system, as Fichte for example claimed he would do (and 12

�� Ibid., pp. 4–5. �� Ibid., p. 174, n5. 14 �� Ibid., pp. 6–7. 15 �� Ibid., p. 7 and p. 175, n23. 13


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failed). T hough, as we have seen, his concept of pure experience is not close to that of William James, his general position and philosophical agenda at the period of his development we are considering are more like those of radical empiricism or neutral monism than like anything else in the E uropean philosophical tradition. Hence it is not surprising to find that much of IRSC is composed of arguments reminiscent of those which fill the pages of the classical empiricists or of James, arguments which attempt to derive basic concepts from the data of consciousness and from a few fundamental mental operations. T o repeat, although the German idealist tradition is a constant presence in his thought, he does not commit himself to the construction of a wholly deductive philosophy. B efore moving on to consider his arguments on the topics just mentioned, it is appropriate to mention one technical phrase Nishida uses constantly but does not define: this is ‘a priori’, which occurs throughout IRSC as a noun rather than an adverb or adjective, thus (from a summary towards the end of the book): ‘We have argued that reality is one immediate experience, and that oppositions of thought and experience, spirit and body, rational and irrational, necessary and contingent, are but differences of the a priori of experiential unity.’16 A n a priori, in this usage, is simply a way of conceptualizing experience. Elsewhere he refers to sensation and reflection, or the artistic imagination or the scientific view of the world, as different types of a priori or systems of experience.17 The term is no more precisely defined than are those of a form of life or a language game (for example), but I have not found a place in his argument where this particular vagueness makes a difference to the truth of whatever he is dealing with at the time.

Logic and Mathematics Nishida cannot allow that any element of what there is, of whatever kind, is independent of or co-ultimate with jikaku, and that includes the laws of logic. What exists is the development of self-conscious experience, and accordingly the laws of logic have to be derived, in some way, from that. Further, if Nishida can show that what are often regarded as purely formal types of knowledge, in conformity with which the rest of experience is configured, are in fact derived from some property of pure self-consciousness, he will have gone quite some way towards carrying out his philosophical programme. Nishida does not attempt to deal with all the laws of logic, but rather focuses on the most basic one, the law of identity, A is A . If a case can be made for that, he assumes, the rest will follow.18

16

�� Ibid., p. 162. �� Ibid., p. 156. 18 �� Nishida retained this view of logic. It can be found, for example, in his late essay The Intelligible World, IPN, p. 88. 17


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When the development of the contents of consciousness is viewed formally, in abstraction from the contents themselves, he begins, both logic and mathematics are founded (I will return to mathematics presently). H e claims that the selfidentity of any content of consciousness gives rise to the purely logical form ‘A is A ’. T he point being asserted is that it is not possible to regard the principle of identity as independent of the development of the contents of consciousness, the lived experience of thinking. A ll that is needed to ground this law in jikaku, Nishida assumes, is the power to fix and universalize. To abstract and fix any content of consciousness, e.g. awareness of black, is to universalize it, to consider the various particular blacks as differentiations of the universal black. Such fixing and universalizing itself expresses an ‘ought’ or a value and condition of thought. T he law of identity emerges as the precondition of universalizing itself. While Nishida can go so far with the neo-K antians’ assertion that all thought embodies an ought or a value, he must characteristically part company with them when they draw implications based on their assumption of the ontological co-ultimacy of these values with experience. T hus Nishida has to deny R ickert’s claim that truth is transcendent and does not depend on whether human beings think it or not. Nishida denies that a truth which totally transcends thinking can have any meaning for us.19 Nishida is committed also to denying the K antian view that empirical knowledge is constituted by a structuring of content in accordance with a priori forms which are independent of it, and that formal knowledge is established autonomously while empirical knowledge is established in conformity with it. If, as Nishida argues, even the laws of logic are derived from the nature of the objects of thought, then there is no such independence of the form from the content of experience. R ather, all the elements of our ordinary, evolved experience will be derived finally from pure or immediate experience as he understands it.20 T he issue of the validity of the form/content distinction will recur at various points below. A s one might expect in the light of the above, Nishida also denies that the basic logical distinction between relation and quality is ultimate; he considers it instead to be ‘only a difference in viewing a single content of consciousness’.21 Usually we assume that judgements of identity are founded on a relation, but, when we view what is being related as one thing, that is a quality. For example, to think ‘red’ as an independent thing, or by contrast to be conscious of the ‘ought’ whereby ‘red is red’, are just two sides of an originally identical experience. In immediate, concrete experience there is only the self-development of a certain content of consciousness. In one sense it would have suited Nishida if he could have accepted a logicist position in the philosophy of mathematics (as R ickert for example did),22 since he could then have avoided many pages of arguments devoted to the derivation of IRSC, pp. 27–8 and 40–41. �� Ibid., pp. 44–5. 21 �� Ibid., p. 30. 22 �� Ibid., p. 99. 19 20


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basic mathematical concepts from self-consciousness or pure experience. H owever, he regards logicism as false. L ogic he regards as more formal and universal than mathematics, and the laws of mathematics (he claims) must conform to the laws of logic. H owever, mathematical truths cannot be deduced from those of logic, for mathematics has something which must be called a content.23 H ence Nishida must try to derive the basic notions of mathematics from jikaku. H is remarks on these matters are by no means as consistent or convincing as they might be. For example: self-consciousness (he notes) is a purely qualitative development of content. It includes within itself both relation with itself and relation with another, contradictorily. T his is what permits a move from the purely formal standpoint of logic to that of mathematics, and the qualitative something can become the quantitative notion of one. T he quantitative notion of one is both the numerical one and the point in geometry. H ence (he concludes) both these basic mathematical notions are manifestations of basic properties of jikaku. T he unstated premise in this argument is the assumption that the concept of relation with another presupposes that of individuation – in other words the concept of oneness.24 H owever, the assertion here made that the point of geometry is a quantitative notion is elsewhere denied: When a self-conscious system has determined itself, it is a geometric point … S ince a point lies in the state of ‘immediacy’ of a self-conscious system, we can say that a point is qualitative. T he point of pure geometry, from which quantitative aspects have been completely eliminated, is produced by abstracting the qualitative aspects of the elements of number.25

A part from the issue of consistency, it is not clear whether Nishida is committed to a realist ontology of some kind in geometry or not: it is not specified whether the point which remains after this process of abstraction is itself some highly etiolated aspect of pure experience, or just a concept without a denotation in pure experience. A gain, he spends some time on the derivation of the concept of a continuous straight line from the basic nature of self-consciousness. Nishida predictably has little patience with the accounts of consciousness of rectilinearity to be found in the works of the psychologists of his day, notably Wundt. A ccording to the latter, awareness of a straight line is constituted from sensations graded qualitatively and intensively. Nishida asks, however, what it is that binds these graded sensations together as awareness of one straight line: I think that it is precisely the developmental aspect of a self-conscious system. Introspection reveals the infinite possibilities of the development of the self, 23

�� Ibid., p. 40. �� Ibid., p. 106. 25 �� Ibid., p. 103. 24


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and this is the origin of the consciousness of rectilinearity; the notion of straightness reveals the being-in-itself, the state of immediacy, of self-conscious development.26

Put another way, Nishida claims that the form of any individual’s self-consciousness is one straight line. T he straight line of geometry is the extremely abstract selfconsciousness of an individual. Contentless, formal mathematical development exhibits the basic structure of self-conscious unity.27 It is not at all clear, however, why abstraction from the experience of self-awareness, interrupted by sleep and unconsciousness and subjected to multiple distractions, should give rise to the idea of a continuous, straight line. A gain, Nishida argues that there is no radical discontinuity or difference in kind between our mathematical conceptualizations of, for example, a curve or a circle and our sensible intuitions of them. T ake for example the experience of moving our hand from one place to another. T his cannot be categorized, Nishida contends, as just an individual sense-impression. It reveals, at a phenomenological level, an experiential equivalent of the mathematical conceptions of movement and continuity, and it suggests that the continuity constitutive of perception is essentially the same as that which is the object of mathematical thinking. More generally, he contends, this experience suggests that perception is constituted by thought.28 Much the same difficulties arise here as in other such claims by Nishida: experiences of particular circles (tokens) are not mathematical figures (types), and he gives no good argument for supposing that there is not a radical logical difference between the two of the kind he wants to avoid.

Space and Time It will be clear by now that the philosophy of pure experience/self-consciousness dictates Nishida’s basic position with regard to both space and time. H e cannot allow that either of them is co-ultimate with self-consciousness, but instead must argue that both are derived from it. A gain, as one would expect, he denies that space and time are in some way derived from perception, which is itself a complex construction from self-consciousness and, in his view, a considerable abstraction from it.29 It is worth quoting at length a typical passage in which his basic position is asserted: just as it provides the basis of pure time, self-consciousness also provides the basis of pure space … It confers on both time and space their a priori quality. 26

�� Ibid., p. 109. �� Ibid., pp. 106–7. 28 �� Ibid., p. 87. 29 �� Ibid., p. 97. 27


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Whereas time and number express the infinite progression of self-consciousness, in endless relativity, flux, and indeterminateness, space is the determination of relationships, the positive manifestation of self-consciousness as the internal unity which grounds infinite relationships … Self-consciousness is at once the infinite progression of ‘reflection-qua-action’ and an unchanging unity. Thus it demands both infinite transition and infinite determination. Time manifests the contradictoriness of self-consciousness as infinite transition, while space manifests its absolute reality as creative action.30

Jikaku, like Bergson’s pure duration, is a single, internally unified experience, continuous and heterogeneous, in which each part has a particular position and significance: it is consciousness to which no reflective thought has been added. S uch a unity does not require the addition of any universal concepts. A ccordingly, combining or arranging its elements by reference to a homogeneous medium like space or clock time is extrinsic to it and constitutes an addition to it.31 S pace and time are not preconditions of jikaku, but constructions from it. Pure thought creates time and space: the former is its quantitative aspect, the latter its qualitative aspect. T ime is formed from the development of the self, space from the distinction of the directions of this development, and thinghood from the unity of both.32 T his position entails that Nishida has to deny a basic assertion of neoK antianism, namely that there is an absolute distinction in the nature of things between – on the one hand – immediate experience, unified from within, and – on the other – experience unified externally, through the forms of space and time. L ike all the other allegedly absolute distinctions proposed by the neo-K antians, this one is claimed by Nishida to be non-ultimate, both terms in its name being derivable from self-consciousness.33 While he can accept the K antian assertion that time is the form that unifies our experience, he adds the claim that the ability to unify experience in this way derives from the unifying function of transcendental apperception. T ime is, accordingly, founded on our consciousness of an ‘ought’ or value, it being understood that this value is constitutive of self-consciousness, and not a condition for it which is independent of it.34 A s one might expect, Nishida can agree with B ergson and H usserl that absolute time (the clock time used in scientific measurement, which flows evenly) is not the most basic manifestation of time. Prior to it is what B ergson calls pure duration and H usserl phenomenological time: the inner order of the élan vital, from which clock or absolute time is a convenient abstraction.35 Nishida believed 30

�� Ibid. �� Ibid., pp. 17–18. 32 �� Ibid., pp. 151–2. 33 �� Ibid., p. 25. 34 �� Ibid., pp. 13–14. 35 �� Ibid., p. 161. H usserl also calls this ‘appearing time, appearing duration, as appearing’. H usserl 1991, p. 5. 31


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that relativity theory provided support for this view, since he took it to show that the concept of an evenly flowing time had no secure basis in reality.36 (O ne wonders whether he had the right, on his own terms, to argue in this way, since relativity theory, in his view, is true only of the world of science, which he regards as an abstraction from the richness of pure experience rather than as a theory true of absolute reality as he conceived it.) T rying to use absolute time to order the changes in self-consciousness produces a fossilized picture of how ultimate reality functions. T hese changes do not occur in a straight line from past to future: they are better imaged as undulatory, spreading out in a circular manner from the present, regarded as a centre.37 T his view is consonant with remarks that Nishida makes concerning the phenomenology of time consciousness. O ne of the most important differences between matter and life resides in their relation to time. O nly living things know a unique present. Purely material, inanimate things do not have this relation to time; their condition at any given time is accidental to them. B y contrast, living things are in contact with the flow (as Nishida puts it) of an infinite self-consciousness, and bear its stamp.38 T he present, consequently, is of extreme importance to living things: ‘T he present is the center of gravity of the real because it is the point where our experience is in motion, and only that which is in motion is real.’39 T he importance Nishida attaches to the present does not, however, imply acceptance on his part of the B ergsonian doctrine of the absolute unrepeatability of the past, not even the past of a moment ago (though he does accept B ergson’s claim that absolute time arises from the mental habit of spatializing time, regarding it as an entirely homogeneous medium.40) It will be recalled that, for B ergson, duration is a wholly qualitative multiplicity, an absolute heterogeneity of elements which pass over into one another. Put another way, the elements of duration interpenetrate one another. We should think of duration, B ergson claims, as ‘succession without distinction … as a mutual penetration, an interconnexion and organization of elements, each one of which represents the whole, and cannot be distinguished or isolated from it except by abstract thought’.41 A n important consequence of this is that each phase of duration is unique and, hence, cannot be repeated. No phenomenon registered in duration can ever be exactly repeated, since all repetition involves the knowledge that it is a repetition. S uch awareness is qualitative and affects the nature of the repetition:

IRSC, p. 116. �� Ibid., pp. 133–4. 38 �� Ibid., pp. 124–5. 39 �� Ibid., p. 129. 40 �� Ibid., p. 129. Cf, e.g. B ergson 1910, p. 99. 41 �� B ergson 1910, p. 101. 36 37


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even the simplest psychic elements possess a personality and life of their own, however superficial they may be; they are in a constant state of becoming, and the same feeling, by the mere fact of being repeated, is a new feeling.42

A gainst this, Nishida argues that B ergson’s claims about the unrepeatability of any content of consciousness themselves presuppose the possibility of a trans-temporal consciousness, because a consciousness of time which does not presuppose the transcendence of time is self-contradictory.43 Whether this is an important point depends on quite what Nishida means by ‘transcending time’. If he means only that the idea of consciousness without memory is to all intents unimaginable (if not unintelligible), then such an assertion would not have troubled B ergson, who shares this idea.44 E lsewhere Nishida observes that ‘[m]emory makes the past present; it thus transcends time’,45 and this appears to imply that the transcendence he has in mind is merely that of ordinary remembering, which is an event in time in which certain contents of past experiences are recalled. If he means something more by the term ‘transcends’, then we need to be told quite what, and we are not. A t all events, Nishida has another argument against B ergson’s unrepeatability thesis, namely this one: ‘What is unrepeatable here is a sensation on which we have already reflected, not the original sensation itself.’46 T his in turn presupposes (as Nishida knew47) that it is possible to identify an un-reflected upon sensation. To identify such a sensation must mean to discriminate it from others; but how this can be done in a way which does not involve reflection (thus satisfying Bergson’s definition of the unrepeatable) is not clear.

Sensation and Judgement H aving given an account of the origin of logic, mathematics, space and time from jikaku, Nishida turns his attention to other fundamental philosophical issues, which need to be similarly accounted for in terms of his ontological ultimate. It follows from his fundamental assertion of the ultimacy of pure experience that all consciousness contains its objects within itself. H e therefore has to analyse sensation from such a point of view, and in so doing he also goes some way towards redescribing the objective world, deriving it from pure experience. H e cannot accept (for example) the Kantian view that sensation is the unification 42

�� Ibid., p. 200. IRSC, pp. 47–8. 44 �� E .g. in his Introduction to Metaphysics: ‘there is no consciousness without memory’. B ergson 1946, p. 211. 45 IRSC, p. 133. 46 �� Ibid., p. 48. 47 �� Ibid., p. 46. 43


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of the manifold of intuition of externally generated elements, or indeed any commonsense account of sensations as caused by external entities, knowable or otherwise. S ensation (like all other mental operations) has to be accounted for solely in terms of modifications of jikaku, and this he regards as a strength, not as a weakness. T he Marburg school of neo-K antians (he contends) put itself in an impossible position by denying any possibility of the immanence of the objects of cognition within consciousness.48 T he truly given is the self-deployment of the content of consciousness, and sensation (like all other forms of conscious activity) is a species or aspect of this self-deployment – what Nishida often calls a particular a priori or form of consciousness. What happens in what we call sensation is that in the concrete texture of immediate experience sensory content is a living force, which deploys itself according to an internal a priori in what we call the development of sensation. O nly an oblique approach, starting from the conventional premise that sensation arises from the operation of external things on the sense organs, leads us to think of sensation as given from without, or as resulting from the evolution of these sense organs.49

T he external, objective world, our own bodies and their sense organs, are, equally, constructions from pure experience, and the conventional view of sensation as a response to an external stimulus is merely one way – and not the most basic one – of viewing this situation. A s has been contended already, the preconditions of sensation, as the latter is conventionally analysed – time, space and quality – are themselves constructions founded on pure experience. A nother and more basic way of describing sensation is to view it as ‘the process, a kind of fieri, whereby a certain concrete universal determines itself’.50 Pure experience is not a particular, and so it must be a universal; it is not abstract, and so it must be concrete. When it deploys itself according to a certain a priori or form, what results is what we call sensation. A n important consequence of Nishida’s basic approach to the analysis of mental operations is that cognition and sensation, contrary to the opinion of many philosophers, cannot be radically different in kind, since both are manifestations of the self-deployment of a consciousness which contains its own objects. H ence Nishida asserts that to cognize the quality of a certain sensation is to unify it from a deeper position and to view it as the selfdetermination of a concrete universal. In the philosophy in which pure experience is the ultimate ground of all there is and the realm within which everything takes place, the consciousness of cognition is not different in kind from that of sensation. S ensory consciousness is a particular instance of cognitive consciousness, and the latter, though it seems to be chronologically later, is prior to sensory consciousness 48

�� Ibid., p. 49. �� Ibid., p. 44. 50 �� Ibid., pp. 49–50. 49


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in the realm of value. Granted our ordinary conception of time, this may seem nonsensical; but that is because, in Nishida’s view, our ordinary conception of time is incorrect in that time is non-ultimate: ‘the spatiotemporal order, no less than that of sensory quality, must have as its ground the unity of internal quality’.51 T hat is, it must have the quality internal to pure experience as it deploys itself, which entails that at its most basic level our experience is the unfolding of an internal meaning. A s in all philosophies which regard ultimate reality as mental in nature and the material world as in some way a manifestation of mind or consciousness, Nishida has to give a new sense to the concepts of objectivity and truth. H e has excluded from the class of theories to which he can consistently subscribe all subject/objectcorrespondence accounts, and, if he is to avoid solipsism, he has to give a sense to the idea of objectivity within the realm of self-consciousness alone: S ensation, since it is not the real, but only one form of the relationship between consciousness and its content, is similar in this respect to intuition and thinking. It becomes objective by our thinking it as the determination of a continuous unity, and then it is qualified to function as an element of knowledge within the system of experience.52

S ensations are not indications of the nature of an external world, but a type of modification of consciousness. They are truly understood only when regarded in this way. A s is the case in H egel’s thought, the content of experience in Nishida’s philosophy has to have its own nature, to take the place of the nature of the not-self in dualist philosophies, otherwise objectivity in judgements becomes impossible and experience becomes no better than a dream. Just as he has to give a special sense to the notion of sensation, so Nishida has also to work out his own theory of judgement. H e cannot accept a K antian model, in which empirical knowledge is constituted by the imposition of a form on the manifold generated entirely independently of it. A ll the elements and processes involved in judgement have to be derived from self-consciousness alone. T hus for him the judgement ‘T his is black’ is not constituted merely by the combination of two representations, but is always grounded on a prior synthesis. T his prior synthesis is constituted by the content ‘black’, an instance of the constructive, selfdeploying power of pure experience. Judgement is not constituted, as the K antians claim, by the conformity of content to a form which is utterly different from it. R ather, the judgement ‘T his is black’ is constituted by the force of the content ‘black’ itself, which imposes itself as a H usserlian essence. T his A ct founds the objectivity of factual judgments, just as a similar A ct founds the knowledge of logical form, and it also entitles 51

�� Ibid., p. 51. �� Ibid., p. 53.

52


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the content of knowledge to claim its own rights over against form. Immediate experience, that which is truly given, is the self-deployment of the content of consciousness, and it is this act which concretely constitutes judgment.53

Pure or immediate experience simply deploys itself, and it is this self-deployment that Nishida here characterizes by the term ‘A ct’, used in much the same sense as Fichte’s term Tathandlung. For him, both the form and the content of judgement are manifestations of the A ct, which is the activity of pure experience. Further, the distinction between the form and the content of judgement is not absolute in Nishida’s view. T he K antian view is that the formal element in judgement is established autonomously, while empirical knowledge is established in conformity with it. A s we have seen, the philosophy of pure experience leads Nishida to claim that even logic is derived from the nature of pure consciousness; and, since the content of experience is also thus derived, he is not inclined to regard the form and the content of judgement as entirely heterogeneous and independent of each other. H is claim is that (in the light of the assertions quoted in the preceding paragraph) judgement is not constituted by its form, but should be regarded as a development of its content, which is its real foundation. Indeed the content of experience can constrain its form, rather than vice versa: T he apparent independence of the experiential basis of factual judgment from transcendental a priori forms derives from the fact that experiential content inherently itself constitutes a system. B ecause it is inherently systematic, and because it also belongs within a larger system which comprises the logical system too, experience can constrain logical form.54

In other words, it is Nishida’s view that what K ant would call the manifold is not itself formless but rather a manifestation of the self-development of selfconsciousness/pure experience, a process of purely qualitative change which is not a chaos. B ecause pure experience is not formless but has a nature, this nature places a constraint on how it can be conceptualized. Precisely how this constraint operates we are not told. It is not enough for Nishida to argue that, because logic and the content of experience are, alike, manifestations of pure experience, they are bound to be harmonious; for he claims that pure experience manifests contradictions. T he point is unresolved.

Subject and Object A nother distinction usually construed as absolute by philosophers, and the one which most exercised Nishida throughout his career, is that between subject and 53

�� Ibid., p. 43. �� Ibid., p. 45.

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object. A s is the case with other such distinctions, like those between fact and value or form and content, Nishida does not allow this distinction to be other than relative. B ecause he denies that there is any absolute distinction between immanent and transcendent objects of consciousness, he can claim that the distinction between subject and object is contingent.55 T he true subject is the constructive, unifying activity of consciousness, which cannot be made an object of reflection. T his subject is the foundation of the object, and its activity and content are not separate – the view that they are separate Nishida calls ‘abstract dualism’.56 T he synthesizing process of subjectivity is identical with the ‘act’ whereby the content of consciousness develops itself. S ubject is immanent object and object is immanent subject: subject and object are not discrete entities but aspects of the same, self-developing reality: ‘T he subject–object opposition is only a moment of this concrete reality, and the true subjectum in the mediaeval sense is this activity in which the opposition of subject and object is submerged.’57 T he reason for this is that pure experience in itself, the self-deployment of a concrete universal, is neither subjective nor objective, but prior to this distinction, which is only one of point of view: When [any] experience is viewed in terms of its continuity with the underlying comprehensive subject, its self-development now appears as subjective activity (whether thinking or seeing), and the point of origin of this activity, that is, the point of contact between the experienced activity and the underlying concrete subject, is the psychological self. In contrast, when this experience is unified as an object, that is, when it is viewed as part of the object world of the comprehensive subject, it is objective existence.58

L ike all the other major dualisms involved in non-monistic philosophies and in the commonsense view of the world, Nishida has to give an account of the subject/object distinction, which does not presuppose an object world external to consciousness; and this analysis, carried out in terms of points of view, is his way of so doing in IRSC.

Universals T hough it does not follow any of the best-known models, Nishida’s account of universals can be called a version of realism. H e certainly wants to avoid nominalism: universals formed by abstraction from similarities among particulars encountered in sense experience would be inert. In his system, universals are concrete and self55

�� Ibid., p. 69. �� Ibid., p. 70. 57 �� Ibid., p. 71. 58 �� Ibid., pp. 105–6; emphasis in original. 56


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developing and, far from being abstractions from multiple sense experiences, they are a precondition for them. T his is an application of the view we have already encountered – that cognition is as basic a form of experience as sensation: for a particular red to be distinguished from other particular reds, there must be a comprehensive totality at their base; before distinction there must be synthesis, and before the distinction of particular qualities the consciousness of a universal must be operating. T he consciousness of the universal must be immediate, and simultaneous with the consciousness of particular qualities.59

T he relationship between a universal and a particular has generally been thought of as wholly qualitative, a particular being that wherein a certain quality has been added to a universal. For Nishida, by contrast (following L otze and B osanquet60), the true relationship between universal and particular lies in the development of systems of experience. This claim, Nishida argues, can be verified experientially. For example, the notion of a particular colour being subsumed under that of colour in general can be interpreted as the experiential development of colour in general (the Husserlian essence of colour); and the system of colours arises in this way. Colour is a concrete universal operating on itself: as Nishida puts the matter later in the book in B ergsonian terms, the experience of colour is a creative evolution, a manifestation of the élan vital manifested by pure experience.61 It is not at all the case that universalization consists in the quantitative division of an originally indivisible system of experience into independent and static elements which are then recombined.62 Nishida’s universals are real presences within the realm of jikaku.

Mind and Body With all the above in mind, it is now appropriate to turn to Nishida’s account of one of the most basic and important distinctions, one which is constitutive both of the commonsense and of the scientific world views: that between mind and body. O ur body is the most important object in our world, and in examining Nishida’s account of it in IRSC we will also consider his account of how what we ordinarily call the objective world, the not-self, comes to be constructed out of self-consciousness. Nishida was perfectly aware that his ontology of an ultimate pure experience/self-consciousness entails views which are in many respects the reverse of both common sense and science and gives rise to some hard questions – for instance, did the world not exist prior to the emergence of consciousness? H ow 59

�� Ibid., p. 60. �� The relevant texts by Lotze and Bosanquet are identified by the editors in the E nglish edition of IRSC, notes 43 and 44. 61 IRSC, pp. 114–15. 62 �� Ibid., pp. 20–21. 60


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did consciousness arise? Is the scientific account of the evolution of the universe entirely false?63 (It should be recalled that this was written when relativity was a new theory and quantum mechanics in its infancy; about twenty years before it was known that there were any other galaxies beside our own; and about half a century before the big bang theory began to be widely discussed. What he has in mind when he refers to the scientific world view is a picture of the universe based on materialism and D arwinism.) T he view entailed by his philosophy is remote from the scientific world picture: ‘It is not the nebulae, but the history of personality, that is the origin of the world.’64 H e denies that there is such a thing as matter or material substance which is co-ultimate with consciousness, and so he removes all forms of two-substance dualism – interactive, parallelist or epiphenomenal – from his list of possible answers to the mind/body problem; and of course he denies materialistic monism. H is task is to give an account of the development of our concepts of mind and body, and of the objective material world in general, from jikaku alone. His first move is to argue that his view of the nature of things is conceptually less problematic than the alternatives, dualist or materialistic monist. If we begin from the material world, he claims, the way in which consciousness arises is a mystery, and generates problems well known in dualist accounts of the mind/body relation, for instance: how do changes in the eye give rise to the sensation of colour as it registers in the consciousness of an individual? From the scientific point of view, consciousness appears simply as a mysterious adjunct to physical phenomena. It is better to begin from the phenomena of consciousness. If one begins from them, what we call objective phenomena are simply an interpretation of them, a construction made out of them. What we call our body is itself one such construction. A ccordingly, the assertion that sensations depend on pre-existent sense organs means only that, with the emergence and destruction of certain aspects of consciousness which we call sense organs, certain other phenomena of consciousness (sensations) emerge or are destroyed.65 A ll statements about sensations and all statements about bodies (including our own) are really statements about changes in pure experience, the latter being construed in a way that, we find, allows us to make sense of experience. Nishida insists that mentalistic and physicalistic propositions simply register points of view we take on pure experience, rather than recording bedrock ontological differences. Commonsense individualism is just a point of view, and others, equally valid, are available: we can also adopt a purely logical viewpoint, and conceive all relationships as relationships of reasons and conclusions. O r we can proceed to an epistemological

63

�� Ibid., pp. 115–16. �� Ibid., p. 161. 65 �� Ibid., pp. 116–18. 64


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discussion of the grounds of knowledge and, with Fichte, H egel and Cohen, grasp spatial categories in terms of the creative development of thought.66

Nishida makes the unspoken, undefended assumption that such points of view are conceptually unproblematic. H e does not provide any good reason to believe that alternatives to commonsense individualism are co-basic with it. E ven if his preferred point of view sidesteps some of the intractable problems involved in dualist accounts of the mind/body problem, notably how interaction is possible, Nishida still has to give an account of how we come to associate one particular set of experiences (our own) with a particular body (our own). T he latter is ex hypothesi also a set of experiences construed from a particular point of view: how does it come about that these two sets of constructions from pure experience come to be so intimately linked? H ow and why do they come to be so tightly unified? It will be clear from what has been said already that in Nishida’s view the relationship of mind and body cannot be explained in mechanistic terms. Nor is vitalism an option for him, since all it does (he argues) is to postulate a force within cells which goes beyond chemical functions, and such a force is no better than a something-we-know-not-what. T he only viable account of the mind/body relation, Nishida claims, is in terms of teleology: if a body is to be linked intimately to spirit or consciousness, it must be as a teleological unity. What links mind and body is the activity of the will, and it is the will that has to be studied if we want to understand the mind/body relation. Were we not aware of volition, we could not distinguish our body from other material objects and we would have no reason to believe it to have a special relationship to consciousness.67 S ensation arises because our body is a teleological unity, a single functional entity. S uch teleological unity is a precondition of sensation.68 (T here can be little doubt that one of the principal reasons for the change, late in IRSC, in the description of Nishida’s ontological ultimate from self-consciousness to absolute free will is his need to give an account of the mind/body relation. I will return to this change presently.) When things are joined, there must be something in common between them, and, in the case of mind and body, what joins them is voluntary activity. We extract from the world of pure experience that which conforms to the will of the self, and this we conceive of as the self’s body, which can be regarded as a creation of the will.69 Granted the options left to him, it is not a surprise that Nishida should have fixed on the concept of the will in this way: he needs something non-physical to serve as an agent of union between two streams from the realm of jijaku, and unity of purpose is a reasonable choice in the circumstances. 66

�� Ibid., p. 116. �� Ibid., pp. 119–20. 68 �� Ibid., pp. 120–21. 69 �� Ibid., p. 121. 67


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T o complete this account, Nishida needs to say something about the nature of the self, of which the will has been claimed to be an aspect. H e approaches this issue by way of some remarks about apperception. A t one level, apperception is the internal development of conscious content itself – a basic fact which cannot be further explained: A t a deeper level, it is the consciousness of a self-conscious system which is the basic form of reality, and denotes the self-generative, self-developmental aspect of reality. O ne’s consciousness need not be termed particularly ‘mine’, for all content of which one is conscious is universal, and only the consciousness which accompanies this developmental activity of a certain content can be called the self.70

(T he doctrine of the primacy of pure experience is regarded by Nishida as having the consequence that all conscious contents are universal. What is being claimed, one supposes, is that a given awareness of redness or a specific sound could figure indifferently in more than one individual consciousness; but one wonders how plausible this thesis is with regard to, for example, personal memories.) T he self is the primal nominative, as it were, that which has the experiences and which can never itself be an object of consciousness; that which is aware of the development of conscious content. What we call our personal self is a bundle of psychological acts: Our conscious ego is the unity of various a priori as grasped in reflection from the standpoint of absolute will, and our body is the projection of this unity upon the object world of reflection (just as a sense organ is the objective projection of a certain sense experience).71

T he general lines of Nishida’s account of the individual self and of the mind/ body relation are clear enough from these remarks: the unity of the individual self is a result of the unification of purpose furnished by the will, and it is this same conation that unifies the two streams from the realm of jikaku which we call our mind and our body. H owever, Nishida has still not completed this part of his programme: those who accept the commonsense view and the scientific view of the world have a story to tell about how individuals come to be, a story of great complexity, but coherent and based on long chains of efficient causation within the material world. Nishida has rejected this account as merely one point of view, without special status. H is bedrock account of the way things come to be has to be different, and this issue leads to his views on teleology and on the will in the later stages of IRSC. 70

�� Ibid. �� Ibid., p. 157.

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Absolute Free Will In the Preface to the first edition of IRSC, Nishida makes the comment that, ‘[I]f I have succeeded, I think I have shown that a new interpretation of Fichte can serve as the foundation of both K antian and B ergsonian thought’.72 T he new interpretation of Fichte comes to prominence in the later parts of the book, and points to Nishida’s adoption of the concept of absolute free will as his preferred way of characterizing his ontological ultimate, previously called pure or immediate experience or self-consciousness. A s has been mentioned, one reason for this change was undoubtedly Nishida’s need to find a way of characterizing the mind/ body relation within the terms of his philosophy; but he has other reasons for moving to the notion of absolute free will, and these can now be examined. No explanation can be given for the existence of the will. Nishida gives no arguments to account for it: he does not claim, for example, that it is a necessary existent. Its being is simply an ultimate datum, and is inexplicable: ‘T he cause of the will remains an incomprehensible mystery … No concept can capture and no quality can exhaust the self, which comes from, and returns to, creative nothingness.’73 (T his is nothingness in its Zen sense of mu, as explained in Chapter 1.) It is an absolute, truly creative reality, which is both everything and nothing, motion and rest. It is not correct to say that it is one or that it is many; that it changes or that it does not change. It is an unfathomable infinity. It eludes reflection yet is the ground for reflection. Like the god of Pseudo-Dionysius, the will is in everything but is not anything. It embraces infinite order, but is not itself characterized by any order. S ince it grounds causation, it cannot be governed by causal law.74 Even to call it absolute will is misleading; and in a rare quotation from a Zen source Nishida notes that ‘the moment one tries to explain it, one misses the target’.75 S uch a description is inapplicable to everything else that is, and hence to postulate such a thing at all may seem an unnecessary hypothesis. Its postulation is, however, necessary from the philosophical point of view, Nishida claims, and he gives two reasons for adopting this position. The first reason is that the ground for the proposition ‘A is A’ can be found neither in its subject nor in its predicate, nor in something apart from them, but only ‘in an underlying pre-cognitive concrete totality’.76 T he second reason is that the idea of a continuum is possible only if there is such a pre-cognitive ground, for such a concept cannot be arrived at through the idea of endless division.77 T he presupposition that every concept we devise must have a direct original in 72

�� Ibid., p. xix. �� Ibid., p. 134. 74 �� Ibid., p. 135. 75 �� Ibid., p. 139. T he quotation is from The Record of the Transmission of the Lamp/ Jingde zhuan deng lu, in D aoyuan 1990, B ook 5. 76 IRSC, p. 140. 77 �� Ibid. 73


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experience may not at the present time seem compelling, and Nishida adds to these claims a direct appeal to introspection. T he will is pre-cognitive, but that does not entail that no form of awareness of it is possible. O n the contrary, we are constantly aware of it: ‘A s the eye cannot see the eye, nor the camera photograph itself, so it is impossible to capture this totality within the lens of the camera of cognition, yet it is immediately tangible as the freedom of the will.’78 A s he puts the matter elsewhere, we are aware through introspection that our will, while free at every point, is subsumed within one great free will. O ur self is free in its entirety, as the K antian kingdom of ends or as the H egelian Concept. E ach will is independently free, but all are included within absolute will.79 T his does not mean that the individual will, as objectified in the natural world, can break the laws which govern the natural world; but, at root, the will of an individual belongs to a deeper, more concrete stratum of experience, what K ant called the intelligible world.80 T his notion of the ultimate as a pre-cognitive, atemporal will, derived from Fichte, appealed to Nishida not only because of its promising role in the mind/ body relation but also because it allows him to account for the fact of change, one of the principal challenges in one-and-many philosophies. T he absolute will includes what Nishida calls disjunction or tension81 and is the immediate, absolute process of creation. O nce again, he regards this as almost a self-evident datum of experience: there is no fact more immediate and indubitable than the birth of being from non-being, which occurs constantly in the actuality of our experience … when we penetrate to the immediacy of that creative act which produces being from nothingness … we find absolute free will, and come in contact with infinite reality, with the will of God.82

T he term ‘act’ here is used in a sense much like Fichte’s term Tathandlung, and denotes an atemporal feature of the will, not an identifiable, single act of an individual in time. T hat the will is creative is once again just a datum: it is just so, and no explanation of this fact is possible. A gain, the term ‘non-being’ is used in the sense of the Japanese term mu, and does not denote an absolute nothingness, but the pre-conceptual ultimate from which all differentiated entities arise. T hat the absolute will is beyond conceptual grasp does not mean that it is unconnected with conceptual knowledge – manifestly, Nishida cannot allow such a logical gap in a system in which all aspects of experience have in some sense to be derivable 78

�� Ibid. �� Ibid., p. 166. 80 �� Ibid., p. 146. 81 �� Ibid., p. 140. 82 �� Ibid., pp. 140–41. 79


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from the will/self-consciousness/pure experience. H is response to this issue is to claim that the will includes knowledge within itself as one of its aspects: K nowledge expresses the will’s self-return, its regressus, and the world of the objects of knowledge is a mirror in which the will’s form is reflected. T his knowledge gives an image, not the substance of the thing itself, which is unknowable.83

Quite how this image resembles, or differs from, its original is not explained, perhaps because Nishida would regard such a question as unanswerable. A n absolute will thus conceived is claimed by Nishida to solve one of the deepest problems he is addressing in IRSC, namely how to move from, or relate, pure experience (a system of pure thought) to the experience of a public world of discrete selves and objects. T he problem stems partly from our habit of conceiving of a system of pure thought under abstract conceptual descriptions. We then inevitably assume that, as in K antianism, the content of experience is given contingently and extrinsically to the form of thought, and this Nishida regarded as introducing an unacceptable chasm into a realm of experience which he felt at the deepest level to be a unity. T he mistake consists in not discerning the ‘concrete subject’, common both to the realm of pure thought and to the realm of public experience. T his concrete subject is the absolute will, of which both realms are similar activities: in Nishida’s view, the concept of the will enables him not only to relate mind and body but to solve this general problem in his philosophy. Nishida presents a type of transcendental argument to back this claim: T he unity of this self [i.e. the absolute will] is above logic, and cannot be grasped within any of the a priori of pure thought which are its partial aspects. Y et without the experience of this unity it would be impossible to conceive in any way the relationship between the form and the content of knowledge.84

Without the fundamental unity constituted by the will, in Nishida’s view, there would be an unbridgeable bifurcation in what there is. A n important consequence of this general position is that, at the deepest level, explanations of what there is and of what occurs are teleological and not mechanistic. As we have seen, the commonsense and scientific public world is for Nishida not ontologically ultimate, but a partial abstraction from, and construction out of, pure experience. T ime, space, individuals and causation are all derivative from pure experience and, accordingly, neither they nor their relations can be used to explain reality at the most basic philosophical level:

83

�� Ibid., p. 148. �� Ibid., p. 144.

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T o seek to replace teleology with mechanistic explanation is to commit an error like that of the ancient analysts who tried to find the limit point by dividing infinitely; the goal is not to be constructed, but is given from the start, and advance to it is no more than its means. T he teleological goal is the concrete foundation of the object world, and as L otze says, organism is the goal of nature, and spirit is the goal of organism. Matter viewed in relation to the acts which are the immediate object of absolute will becomes teleological, and the point of junction between the two can be thought of as the center of life or as the point of union between spirit and body.85

T his position is unavoidable, granted the positions Nishida has taken up in IRSC. T he will/pure experience is the ground of causation and cannot be regarded as obeying laws of efficient causation. Explanations of phenomena in terms of efficient causation are confined to the world of objects described by science, an abstraction constructed from pure experience. T herefore, if there are going to be any explanations of what there is at a near-ultimate level, they will have to take another form, and it is hard to see what that form could be other than teleological. Even this breaks down at the final point, since, as we have seen, Nishida denies that any explanation can be given for the will itself, whose existence is just a mystery.

Bergson With this outline of Nishida’s position in IRSC in mind, we can now turn to examine in more detail his attitude to the western philosophies referred to most frequently in it, beginning with that of B ergson. In 1941, Nishida added a short Preface to a new edition of the book in which he noted that, at the time of the original composition of the work, ‘I was stirred by the works of B ergson, but again, despite my whole-hearted agreement with him, my ideas do not wholly coincide with his’.86 A gain, it will be recalled that, in the remarks quoted at the beginning of the previous section, Nishida hoped he had shown that a reinterpretation of Fichte could serve as the foundation for B ergson’s thought, a statement which presupposes the belief that B ergson’s thought as it stood was not (in Nishida’s estimation) properly founded and, accordingly, was in need of some reinforcement at the deepest level.87 A gain, we have already seen, in the section on space and time, that Nishida’s agreement was not so whole-hearted as to allow him to accept the key B ergsonian doctrine of the unrepeatability of any passage of la durée. H is 85

�� Ibid., pp. 157–8. �� Ibid., p. xxv. 87 �� Ibid., p. xiv. 86


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position with regard to B ergson’s thought is in fact less straightforward than the phrase ‘whole-hearted agreement’ would suggest. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to find reasons why Nishida would have found B ergson’s general position philosophically congenial. Firstly, B ergson (like William James) claims that standard experience – our conceptualized experience of a public world of spatio-temporal, causally interacting individuals – is remote from its philosophical bedrock: the seamless, wholly qualitative flow of duration. Duration is an organic evolution which is yet not an increasing quantity; a pure heterogeneity within which there are no distinct qualities. T he moments of duration are not external to one another; it is ‘succession without distinction … a mutual penetration, an interconnexion and organization of elements, each one of which represents the whole, and cannot be distinguished or isolated from it except by abstract thought’.88 S econdly, we construct the public world of individuals (and so on) from duration because such a public world enables us to get about successfully in the environment: the public world is a construction we have found pragmatically effective. O ur mistake (which generates many philosophical problems) is to impose this manner of conceptualizing things on our inner life, to which it is entirely inappropriate: ‘little by little our sensations are distinguished from one another like the external causes which gave rise to them, and our feelings or ideas come to be separated like the sensations with which they are contemporaneous.’89 We construct an inaccurate and misleading image of our inner life as composed of atomic experiences, successively occurring in clock time – itself an intellectual construction resulting from the spatialization of time. T he effect of this is to lead to a third point which Nishida would have found congenial in B ergson, namely the latter’s assertion that the habit of applying external world categories inappropriately to the inner life causes us to develop a superficial self, which generally masks the deep, basic self whose experience is duration: below the self with well-defined states, [there is] a self in which succeeding each other means melting into one another and forming an organic whole. B ut we are generally content with the first, i.e. with the shadow of the self projected into homogeneous space. Consciousness, goaded by an insatiable desire to separate, substitutes symbol for reality, or perceives reality only through the symbol. A nd 88 �� B ergson 1910, p. 101. In Time and Free Will, duration is a property only of consciousness. B y the time B ergson came to write Matière et mémoire seven years later, he was ready to attribute real duration to objects in the external world, though he never acknowledged that he had made this basic change to his initial position. It is not clear whether Nishida would have accepted this change (to which he does not refer). T he problem is complicated by B ergson’s characterization of matter in the later work as far more mindlike than is generally the case in philosophy. 89 �� B ergson 1910, p. 126.


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the self thus refracted, and thereby broken to pieces, is much better adapted to the requirements of social life in general and language in particular, consciousness prefers it, and gradually loses sight of the fundamental self.90

T hough he does not go into detail on the matter, B ergson claims that the deep self, while generally lost sight of, is not inaccessible. A t one point he says that it can be recovered through a vigorous effort of analysis,91 or through deep introspection.92 What techniques are involved in this analysis/introspection we are not told. In the fourth place, anyone with a B uddhist background would have been at home with the principal epistemological doctrine of B ergson’s thought. T his is the doctrine that what B ergson calls intellect or intelligence (what most philosophers would call reason) does not acquaint us with the real processes which make up reality, but only with the conceptual constructions we have devised, which permit us to act appropriately in the world in which we find ourselves. If we are to be directly acquainted with reality (that is, with duration), another mode of experience is necessary, and B ergson calls this mode ‘intuition’. Intelligence and instinct he regards as faculties which had a common evolutionary origin, rather than treating the former as a development of the latter. What B ergson calls intuition is in his eyes a development of instinct. It is instinct which has become disinterested, selfconscious and capable of reflecting on its object, and it is confined to humans.93 Intelligence (reason) functions pragmatically: it divides the environment and the self into individuals with their states, and notices as much of the individuals thus identified as is necessary to guide the action appropriate for survival and for the running of society. Intuition, by contrast, grasps its object more completely than intelligence: in intuition, ‘the act of knowledge coincides with the act of generating reality’.94 It proceeds by sympathy and results in a complete grasp of its object from the inside. We can get an idea of what an intuitive grasp of things is like if we investigate art. In B ergson’s aesthetics, the artist has the gift of perceiving things for their own sake, and has the capacity to grasp their inner life. H e claims that ‘[a]rt always aims at what is individual’.95 Fifthly and finally, Nishida would have been at home with the doctrine of the élan vital, the force which brings about the creative evolution of all things. For him as for Nishida, ultimate reality is creative, even if for B ergson the élan has no specified or specifiable goal. Duration is relentlessly creative: it never repeats itself, and is cumulative in nature. (For Nishida, as we have seen, absolutely free will has a goal, namely the production of spirit: the claim that it has a goal is 90

�� Ibid., p. 128. �� Ibid., p. 129. 92 �� Ibid., p. 231. 93 �� Bergson 1911a, p. 186; 1972, p. 1150. 94 �� Ibid., p. 773. 95 �� B ergson 1911b, p. 161. 91


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a precondition for the coherence of his assertion that ultimate explanations are teleological in form.) Even with so much he could sympathizes with, Nishida finds, however, a number of issues on which he disagrees with B ergson, and the reasons for these disagreements are of interest in the context of the present study. B ergson’s philosophy centres around the notion of time (and so of process: hence its regularly being mentioned in the same breath as that of Whitehead), and around his insistence that our notion of clock time, with its homogeneous flow, is not an absolute but a construction of intelligence/reason. T he root of Nishida’s disagreement with B ergson, and the reason for his claim that the latter’s philosophy lacks a proper foundation, lies in the fact that Nishida cannot accept that la durée is the ontological ultimate B ergson claims it to be. It was noted above that some of Nishida’s remarks concerning duration and the transcendence of time through memory are not as clear or conclusive as they might be. In the later stages of IRSC he changes his ground slightly, and his principal objection to B ergson’s concept of duration comes to be the claim that it is objectified.96 B y this he means that even duration has been conceived of – to a degree – in a conceptualized manner by B ergson. Nishida argues that the very thesis that duration cannot be repeated, even the duration of a moment ago, presupposes conceptualization. Nishida’s idea is that to assert even so much about duration shows that this notion is itself a product of reason, and on this basis he assumes that what B ergson is referring to by means of this term must itself be to a degree (however minimal) conceptualized, and hence not ultimate – it will be recalled that, for Nishida, the will/pure experience/self-conscious system is entirely beyond conceptualization and beyond the grasp of reason, and that any attempt to characterize it (his own included) misses the mark.97 It is far from obvious that Nishida’s objection is as conclusive as he evidently thought it was. It is quite open to B ergsonians to argue that B ergson’s position is far more similar to that of Nishida than the latter’s remarks here would suggest. Notably, B ergson would assert that his ultimate, duration, is beyond the grasp of reason, and that full awareness of it is possible only via the supra-rational mode of consciousness he calls intuition. Consequently, the move Nishida makes in his objection, from the concept of duration to the nature of its referent, is unsafe. L ike Nishida himself, B ergson is just doing his best (as many other thinkers, eastern and western, have done) to give us a hint of something incommunicable. Moreover, B ergson takes the view that the discipline which uses intuition is metaphysics, from which it follows that metaphysics is not a conceptual discipline. T his is a view with which Nishida should have had a great deal of sympathy. A s we have seen, he finds that the most apposite remarks on what is ultimate are to be found in the works of mystics like E riugena and Pseudo-D ionysius, who insist (like the chan masters) that no characterization of it is possible. It does not follow from this, however, that no experience of it is possible. IRSC, p. 166. �� Ibid., p. 139.

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Nishida considered that B ergson had gone a long way towards the truth: he (B ergson) had discovered that the material world results from the mind’s transformation of pure duration. Consciousness is not an emergent property or function of matter; it is rather that matter is arrived at by subtracting something from consciousness.98 H owever, what was needed in order to render B ergson’s thought ‘even more profound and universal’99 was to recast these views in terms of a self-conscious system. B ergson’s duration is better conceived of as the selfdevelopment of such a self-conscious system, where ‘meaning’ equals ‘being’ and ‘act’ equals ‘fact’. If duration were to be unrepeatable, the reason would have to be (Nishida claims) that there is something at its foundation which transcends time. It is B ergson’s ‘excessive attachment to the idea of time’100 that causes him overlook this aspect of unity, which transcends movement. A t the vanguard of the élan vital there is neither space nor time, but the development of reason itself. A t this point in IRSC, Nishida accepts the H egelian view that the real is the rational and that all reality is syllogistic.101 Whether Nishida should accept this view is another matter. It would entail a H egelian conception of the nature of the philosophical programme, namely the construction of a purely deductive philosophy, an ideal which H egel notoriously fails to implement. Nishida does not commit himself to this ideal explicitly anywhere in IRSC, nor does he attempt to implement it in this book. Granted his basic view of pre-cognitive reality as being beyond all predication, Nishida has no good reason to qualify it as rational in the manner of the H egelian absolute. H owever, even if certain details of the argument are not satisfactory, the chief ground for Nishida’s dissatisfaction with B ergson’s thought during the middle phase of his development is clear enough. In Nishida’s view, the doctrine of the unrepeatability of duration must presuppose that there is something that stands outside the flow of duration. Only memory could verify this doctrine, or indeed even give rise to it: the doctrine could not even be conceived of except in a consciousness which possesses a memory, and such a consciousness must be in a certain important sense the same consciousness, unified – as Nishida puts it. B ehind duration as B ergson describes it there must be something even deeper, an ultimate unified consciousness. One might say that, for Nishida, Bergson had got nine tenths of the way to reality but failed to grasp its ultimate depths – and this is a conclusion which Nishida came to with regard to more than one western philosophy. A lways behind Nishida’s remarks on the ultimate reality, even in this most technical and westernized phase of his thought, one senses the influence of the oriental concept of mu, a nothingness of infinite depth, which is more like a plenum of possibilities than a void; and this notion is quite absent from Bergson 98

�� Ibid., pp. 110–11. �� Ibid., p. 111. 100 �� Ibid. 101 �� Ibid., pp. 111–12. 99


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(as it is from James). If this is so, it must inevitably have seemed to Nishida that a key dimension was absent from B ergson’s thought. This deduction is confirmed if one examines comments on Bergson’s philosophy which occur in works from the last phase of Nishida’s development – the phase in which he had arrived at his logic of the predicate and at his doctrine of the self-contradictory identity of the one and the many. Nishida’s late reflections on B ergson, as on many other western thinkers, are a record of deep disagreements between two worked-out philosophies and have a consistent theme: he finds B ergson’s views not so much wrong as incomplete in important ways. T hus, for example, Nishida takes issue with B ergson’s analysis of space as ‘the relaxation of pure duration’.102 S o long as space is thus conceptualized, Nishida argues, personality cannot be adequately described: it becomes dream-like rather than real. T he reason for this claim is that life in the self-contradictory historical world must be genuinely spatial: the environment must be as fully real as duration, for life is the mutual determination of individual and environment alike.103 For time to be true time (that is, properly understood as such), space cannot be merely the relaxation of time. It must rather be, like space, an absolute negation of nothingness. Were space to be considered as its ultimate point of relaxation, pure duration would be merely the extension of a dream. In Nishida’s view, true pure duration exists as the self-determination of the absolute present. E ternity is fully present in each moment, and each moment is a determination of timeless nothingness, and this is not the way in which B ergson conceives of la durée. T he same thought lies behind Nishida’s comment that the concept of pure duration does not and cannot include the point that life involves death. O nly when we fully face up to the fact of death and internalize the fact of our own eternal dissolution do we come to appreciate our own nothingness appropriately, for we will dissolve back into the mu from which we emerged as one of its expressions. Face to face with the nothingness at the base of our being we encounter the divine, a point Nishida regularly phrases by saying that we live by dying. T his dimension of analysis of the human condition is absent from B ergson’s thought. A gain, the doctrine of creative evolution includes the thesis that creativity is a process immanent in the nature of things. T he élan vital is pure duration existing within the very depths of the self, and this view can be contrasted with (for example) the concept of creativity included in theologies in which the world is made by a transcendent creator. It follows from the philosophy of absolutely contradictory identity that both these views are partial. T he world is the contradictory identity of the one and the many, and from this it follows that absolute immanence and absolute transcendence are one. Consequently, the proper conception of creativity is that it is the self-determination of a concrete universal. B ergson’s account includes only half the picture. Nishida’s final view of Bergson is epitomized in these words: ‘life FPP, p. 41. �� Ibid., p. 117.

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is the self-determination of the dialectical universal … B ergson’s concept of pure duration cannot be said to be true concrete life.’104

Neo-Kantianism T he neo-K antian philosophers are mentioned with great frequency in IRSC. O ccasionally Nishida accepts what they have to say, but more frequently he disagrees with their views. T he reason for this is straightforwardly logical: neo-K antianism involves the assertion of various dichotomies in what there is, and these dichotomies are held to be ontologically ultimate. S uch positions are incompatible with the philosophy of pure experience and hence must be rejected by Nishida. A number of these disagreements have already been noted in the preceding sections; it will be appropriate here to notice two further important areas not yet considered. It is worth repeating here the most basic point at issue, since Nishida’s debates with the neo-Kantians flow from it. Essential to the Kantian position is a basic distinction between thought and being: the mind imposes its own structure on being, which it can never know save as it appears when it is processed via the forms of intuition and the categories. In the neo-K antians, this position reappears as the assertion that meaning precedes being: meaning is the product of the application of the mind’s structure to a flow of experience which is independent of it. A n important consequence of this view is that all consciousness has meaning. H ence, meaning and being, value and fact, is an ultimate dichotomy in neo-K antianism – as has been noted, Natorp’s assertion of their being poles of a continuum is not compatible with a K antian position. Nishida can accept part of this basic position, namely the assertion that all consciousness manifests value or meaning: ‘The consciousness of an “ought” is the most immediate and concrete experience we have, most immediate because it precedes and founds the distinction between thinker and what is thought, and most concrete because it includes within itself various relations.’105 What he cannot accept, however, is the assertion that these values are in some sense ontologically distinct from consciousness, or R ickert’s thesis that they are inexistent (albeit objective and real). B y calling them ‘real’, R ickert means that we do not create these values but rather discover or recognize them.106 In R ickert’s view, when making a value judgement, the subject is bringing together the realm of inexistent values and the existent sensible world, thereby giving valuational significance to things and events. This view is incompatible with the doctrine of the absolute ultimacy of pure experience. For Nishida, value cannot be either prior to, or in any other way distinct from, pure experience, but is an aspect of it. Value is constitutive of and immanent in consciousness: ‘in the phenomenon of 104

�� Ibid., p. 67. IRSC, p. 30. 106 �� Rickert 1928; see IRSC, p. 177, notes 31 and 32. 105


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consciousness the immanence of meaning is its essence. T here is no consciousness which does not possess meaning in some sense, and the unity and identity of meaning are necessary conditions of the constitution of consciousness.’107 O ur immediate consciousness always possesses meaning, in Nishida’s view. Moreover, he holds that to deny this is self-refuting, for to deny that consciousness has meaning is already to presuppose it.108 T he consciousness which denies meaningfulness is already meaningful. T he same logical imperative of denying a multiplicity of ultimates lies behind Nishida’s rejection of R ickert’s theory of judgement. For R ickert, judgement has two components: transcendent meaning on the one hand; and the act of judging – an aspect of the internal development of consciousness – on the other. H e further maintains that the former in no way depends upon the latter, the two being absolutely distinct. Meaning transcends acts of judgement and is coherently conceivable apart from such acts: the relation between the two components of judgement is contingent.109 Nishida objects that these two elements of judgement are not distinct in this way. H e maintains that there is an inseparable relationship between what he calls the phenomenology of judgement and meaning itself. Judgement is not properly conceived of as the expression of meaning but as its activity. Judgement is not an act extrinsic to meaning but the particularizing act necessary for meaning itself, without which meaning is inconceivable.110 Further, it will be recalled that for Nishida time is a construction from pure experience: time is founded on the development of the will, which is more fundamental than time and temporal events. S ince meaning is constitutive of the will, its development is an aspect of the development of the will. S ince judgement is the articulation of meaning, it follows that, in Nishida’s usage, judgement is ‘a far more basic fact of consciousness than can be brought under the category of time, consisting, as it does, in the unity of two objects of thought, or rather, in the self-differentiation of a single object’.111 T he experience of the internal development in the activity of judging transcends time, and so the consciousness of judgement cannot be identified with a class of temporal, psychological acts. R ather, consciousness of judgement, properly understood, enjoys an immediate and indissociable relationship with meaning itself, and together with it constitutes one concrete, logical consciousness. In his admirable book The Body, Y uasa Y asuo remarks that, at the beginning of the twentieth century (when Nishida was writing IRSC), K antianism was the western philosophy most in vogue in Japan and that in a way this was rather unfortunate for Nishida. E ven if, as I suggested above, it was to all intents historically unavoidable that Nishida should take account of neo-K antianism – it was just too big a rock to steer around at the time – his philosophy is not at root an idealistic rationalism of 107

�� Ibid., p. 55. �� Ibid., p. 10. 109 �� Rickert 1928; see IRSC, p. 180, note 48. 110 �� Ibid., p. 26. 111 �� Ibid., p. 27. 108


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a K antian or neo-K antian kind, but displays rather ‘a strongly religious tendency towards recognizing the value of nonrational intuition’.112 Neo-K antianism, with its insistence on a number of ontologically ultimate dichotomies, was not calculated to help Nishida greatly in his quest for a way of articulating a vision of the world in which such dichotomies are not ultimate, indeed are held to be steps on the path away from the ultimate reality; and one wonders what the development of Nishida’s thought might have been had he not spent so much time and effort in dialogue with a style of philosophy which was not of great assistance to him in his quest. T he philosophy of Fichte, less fashionable at the time, was much closer to what he needed.

Fichte Fichte’s ideas are not referred to in IRSC with the same frequency as those of the neo-K antians, though when Nishida does refer to them it is generally with a greater degree of agreement than is the case with the latter, and I would argue that it is not surprising that either of these states of affairs obtains. The influence of Fichte in this phase of Nishida’s thought is of great depth and goes beyond instances of individual arguments and doctrines, extending to the conception of the very nature of the philosophical enterprise itself. For Fichte, the goal and programme of philosophy is a complete deduction of all experience from the possibility of selfconsciousness, the term ‘deduction’ being used in the K antian sense: to deduce a concept is to show that the activity it designates is a necessary precondition for having the sort of experience we do in fact have.113 Fichte believed that we have immediate but non-sensible acquaintance with (that is, an intellectual intuition of) an absolute and infinite self. Accordingly, another way of putting the basic task of philosophy is the complete analysis of what is implicit in the concept of such a self. T he idealist programme consists in deriving from this concept all the structures of our experience, including (most importantly) our presentations and our conviction of their independence from our will; in Fichte’s view, Kant had failed to provide a convincing deduction either of the categories or of our presentations, and it was his intention to rectify these omissions. What Fichte sets out to do is to deduce (in his sense) all the elements of experience from an ontological ultimate. Further, since this ultimate is in an important sense a unity, Fichte is faced with the problem of deriving multiplicity from it in some way – deriving the many from the one. E very form of difference, up to and including contradiction, must be deduced from the one. A bsolute opposition, Fichte notes at one point, is essential to our experience: the self posits the not-self, but the not-self is not external to it. Indeed, in Fichte’s view a self-positing self is impossible without an object such as the not-self. The self can only reflect on itself as determinate on condition that 112

�� Y uasa, 1987, p. 22. �� E.g. Fichte 1982, p. �� 37; 1846, Vol. �� I, p. 462.

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it bounds itself by an opposite: if there is no object, there is no subject either. H owever, the self posits itself as determining and limiting factor, and the notself is the self’s own product: if there is no subject, there is no object either. T he faculty of the mind which permits us to accommodate contradictions within our experience and which can reconcile them is the imagination: we now see that an account of the events in our mind would be simply out of the question without absolute opposites; for the productive imagination, the power on which all these occurrences depend, would be utterly impossible, if absolute opposites, irreconcilables totally unfitted for the self’s apprehension, did not enter the scene … From the very fact of absolute opposition there follows the entire mechanism of the human mind; and this entire mechanism can be explained no otherwise than by the fact of absolute opposition.114

I mention these two basic points from Fichte to show how congenial the Fichtean programme or conception of the philosophical enterprise must have been to Nishida. For someone interested in the philosophical issues raised by Zen experience, Fichte’s programme must have seemed recognizably similar. L ike Fichte, Nishida has an ontological ultimate which is not an individual which he must relate to a world of individuals, with the result that what there is appears (in some sense yet to be precisely determined) to embody contradictions in its very nature. Further, Nishida has to show how the structures of our experience are derivable from this ultimate; and, as we have seen, almost all of IRSC is devoted to carrying out precisely this task. A t some points, Nishida follows Fichte’s example fairly closely. O ne example is his discussion, in sections 7 to 10 of IRSC, of the principle of identity, ‘A is A ’ (considered above in the section on logic and mathematics), which it is interesting to compare with Fichte’s use of the same principle in the construction of his philosophy. T his discussion occurs right at the start of The Science of Knowledge, where Fichte is seeking to establish the primordial, absolutely unconditioned first principle of all human knowledge, which can be neither proved nor defined. Such a principle will express the A ct – which does not and cannot appear among the empirical states of our consciousness, but rather lies at the basis of all consciousness and alone makes it possible.115 T he discussion has to begin, Fichte contends, from a principle which will be allowed by everyone, namely the principle of identity, ‘A is A’. This is not an existential proposition asserting that A exists; it is equivalent to the formulation ‘A = A ’, a formulation which makes clear the non-existential nature of the logical copula. It is equivalent to the proposition ‘If A exists, then A exists’. B etween the antecedent and the consequent is a necessary relation, which Fichte calls X, posited with absolutely no other ground. In other words, Fichte 114

�� Fichte 1982, pp. 201–202; �� 1846, I, p. 226. �� Fichte 1982, p. 93; 1846, I, p. 91.

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does not attempt to derive the relation of logical necessity from anything more basic, but takes it as a datum. Making the assumption that a self exists, Fichte then asserts that both X and A are in the self and posited by the self. T he self asserts, by means of X, that A exists absolutely for the judging self, simply by virtue of its being posited in the self as such. T his assertion Fichte takes to be equivalent to the proposition that something which is permanently uniform exists within the self, forever one and the same. O n this basis he concludes that the X which is posited absolutely can also be expressed as either ‘I = I’ or ‘I am I’. T he proposition ‘I am I’ is unconditionally valid, being equivalent to what Fichte now refers to as the proposition X. T he ‘I’ is, accordingly, posited absolutely, not conditionally. X is absolutely certain, and it is the ground of explanation for all the facts of empirical consciousness.116 T he self posits itself (this has to be true, since otherwise the self is not-ultimate), and this self-positing is the self’s natural, pure activity. B y virtue of this self-assertion it exists, and conversely it posits its own existence merely by existing. It is at once agent and product of action. T he proposition ‘I am I’ expresses an A ct, and the only one possible. ‘I am I’ (Fichte concludes) therefore means that the self exists because it has posited itself. T he self as absolute subject is that ‘whose being or essence consists simply in the fact that it posits itself as existing’.117 When applied to the self, the terms ‘to posit’ and ‘to be’ are identical. Fichte now makes an interesting move in the present context. H e notes that he began from the assertion ‘A = A ’ – in order to begin from an incontestable starting point – and from it (he claims) derived the proposition ‘I am’. It now appears, however, in the light of his subsequent argument, that ‘A = A ’ is derived from ‘I am’, and not vice versa. Further, if in the proposition ‘I am’ we abstract the specific content (the self), what remains is the form of an inference from being posited to being; that is, we are left with ‘A is A’, the basic proposition of logic.118 In other words, Fichte in the end claims to have derived a logical assertion from an ontological one: the principle of identity from the self-positing of the self. Whatever one might think of the validity of these alleged deductions, it remains true that, as we have seen, Nishida makes exactly the same move in IRSC, deriving the law of identity from his ontological ultimate, pure experience. B oth in matters of detail such as the one just discussed and in broader areas, Nishida must have found a great deal in Fichte’s thought which he could recognize. I have already mentioned the programme of deriving the entire subject/object world of standard experience from a unified ontological ultimate. Further, Fichte’s ultimate, the E go, L ife or Will, is the pre-cognitive ground of all there is. It is prior to the subject/object distinction and grounds it. A gain, it is highly dynamic: it is better regarded as an activity than as an entity. L ike Nishida’s pure experience, the E go is not static but constantly unfolding. T he A ct, which (as has been mentioned) 116

�� Fichte 1982, pp. 96–7; 1846, I, pp. 95–6. �� Fichte 1982, p. 98; 1846, I, p. 97. 118 �� Fichte 1982, p. 99; 1846, I, pp. 98–9. 117


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is the activity of the E go, cannot itself be a content of consciousness but alone makes consciousness possible. It is prior to time and space, both of which are unconscious but inevitable posits of the Will, which is itself atemporal. A gain, like H egel, Fichte is committed to the idea that ultimate explanations are teleological: nature (the non-E go) is a posit of the E go, necessary for allowing the E go to develop towards its goal of realizing its absolute moral freedom – the ultimate purpose of what there is. However, even in the case of Fichte, Nishida did not find quite what he was looking for: a framework for the articulation of a Zen-based vision of experience. In the Introduction to the revised edition of IRSC (1941), Nishida notes that when composing this text he wished to oppose the sharp divisions between value and being, meaning and fact, present in the thought of the neo-K antians. H e opposed to them the thesis of an overall union of the two pairs from a position of self-consciousness, which is an internal union of intuition and reflection. This position was close to that of Fichte’s ‘A ct’, but not strictly the same, for I focused on the self-generation and self-development of concrete experience.119

We can investigate the exact meaning of this claim by pursuing further Nishida’s treatment of the proposition ‘A is A ’, which is part of his overall strategy aiming to collapse allegedly ultimate distinctions and deriving all such distinctions from prior pure experience/self-consciousness. H is aim in this context is to argue that the logical principle (or ‘ought’ in R ickert’s vocabulary) ‘A is A ’ and the existence of A are merely two aspects of a unitary ultimate experience, exhibiting only different points of view which can be taken with regard to it: Fichte’s ‘If A exists, then A exists’ attempts to reduce the necessary relation between ‘if’ and ‘then’ to the fact of self-consciousness, but we may go further and claim that the fact of self-consciousness is itself rather based on the consciousness of the logical ‘ought’ ‘A is A ’ … ‘A is A ’ includes as one of its aspects that A exists, and this fact includes as one of its aspects the ‘ought’ ‘A is A ’. T he form ‘A is A ’ gives rise to the content ‘A ’ and vice versa, in contrast to the usual distinctions of form and content. T his unity of activity and result, form and content, is the basic characteristic of the A ct…120

Now, the A ct in Fichte’s thought is transcendental in the K antian sense, a precondition of all possible experience, not a content of concrete experience itself, whereas for Nishida the term ‘A ct’ refers to what he calls ‘our most immediate and

IRSC, p. xxv. �� Ibid., p. 31.

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concrete experience’.121 H is statement, quoted above to the effect that his views and Fichte’s were not ‘strictly the same’, is therefore entirely appropriate. A s he did with B ergson, Nishida distanced himself from some of Fichte’s central ideas as he developed his own final philosophy. For example, in one of the essays collected in The Fundamental Problems of Philosophy he makes the following detailed comment on the fundamental difference between his and Fichte’s use of the term ‘A ct’: Fichte’s concept of the will was rationalistic. It was not the same as my idea of the real will grounded on an absolute irrationality. Consequently, even the Fichtean ‘A ct’…did not mean what I call the action of the personal self. For the personal self is not an absolute ego which includes the non-ego within the ego, but rather something acting within this present reality as the permanent self.122

In the final phase of his development, Nishida did not accept, as some western idealist thinkers have, that the real is the rational. T he missing premise in this argument is supplied elsewhere in this essay: the fact that the ego and the nonego both exist within the ego entails (in Nishida’s view) that there is something rational at the base of things. S uch a conception of self-identity cannot support a true conception of dialectics, which must include the idea of absolute negation as mediation. T rue self-identity is a unity of mutual contradictions, a one-in-many and a many-in-one.123 From the point of view of Nishida’s later philosophy, conceived of in terms of what he calls the logic of place, Fichte’s thought remains ultimately an example of a philosophy which assumes the truth of what Nishida calls object logic – a phrase discussed more fully in the next chapter. For the moment, it can be noted that object logic cannot accommodate what Nishida regards as the basic existential truth about the mode of existence of the self, namely its self-contradictory identity. T o deal with the truth about the self, it is necessary to adopt the logic of the Prajňāpāramitā Sutras, the logic of soku hi (‘is’ and ‘is not’). Fichte’s self is an absolute reason, not the real self as Nishida conceives it, characterized as the latter is by a bottomless depth of self-contradiction. T he Fichtean E go is, accordingly, not ultimate enough for Nishida: reality for him must transcend even that.124 H owever, this is to anticipate some of the ideas which are to be dealt with in the next chapter.

121

�� Ibid. FPP, p. 3. 123 �� Cf. FPP, pp. 21–2 and 45; also FPP, p. 75, where Nishida claims that B ergson’s pure duration and Fichte’s A ct are, in similar ways, only partial conceptualizations of an ultimate reality. 124 �� S ee My Philosophical Path (1939), in Yusa 2002, p. 301; also NRWV, p. 83, for much the same point. 122


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Conclusion The ideas of Fichte continued to be the central western influence on Nishida for several years after the publication of IRSC and can be seen to be important in the two major works which follow it, The Problem of Consciousness (1920) and Art and Morality (1923). H e was not content, however, with the position at which he had arrived, and with the publication of From the Actor to the Seer in 1927 what I would argue to be the most important change in his thought is manifested. In this work he announces his own logic, the logic of place (a rejection of the logic of Aristotle), and he changes his description of what is ultimate to its final form, mu no basho, the place of nothingness (contrasted with yū no basho, the place of being) – concepts to be discussed presently. T here were a number of reasons for this change, which is largely the result of Nishida’s own continuing, acute self-criticism. H e was aware that the Fichtean framework was not capturing the experience he had in mind, and indeed the examination above indicates that the point can be to a degree generalized so as to encompass other western thinkers. T he IRSC period (from the publication of this book up to the publication of From the Actor to the Seer) marks in my view the high point of western philosophical influence on Nishida, and later developments indicate a decisive move towards the philosophy Nishida had been seeking until that time, a philosophy (to anticipate slightly) not commensurable with western models. The western influence manifests itself not only in the fact that IRSC itself is in effect a series of meditations on neo-K antianism and other western philosophies – the subject-matter of the book is almost exclusively composed of reflections on western thought. That influence also manifests itself in deep assumptions about what philosophy is and about the way it is to be carried on. Notably, Nishida continues to accept in this book the assumption that ‘the many’ have to be derived from, or grounded in, ‘the one’ in a way which (for example) Fichte, B ergson and James would have recognized as the business of a one-andmany philosophy; and we have seen above the most important of these derivations, those concerning the principles of logic and mathematics, space and time, the public world of individuals, and so forth. It is also clear that Nishida does not solve the problems inherent in this pattern of thought any more than do the western philosophies which he admired. With hindsight (but only with hindsight), it is clear that, so long as he retained the basic assumption that ‘one’ and ‘many’ have a relation other than that of identity (the position to which he was to come), he could not capture the experience he had in mind. H e needed to abandon the principle of identity if he was to arrive at his goal.


Chapter 4

Nishida’s L ater Philosophy: T he L ogic of Place and S elf-Contradictory Identity

Introduction T his chapter is concerned with Nishida’s thought from 1927 onward, namely from the publication of Hataraku mono kara miru mono e (From the Acting to the Seeing), which appeared in that year. (T his title has been translated in a number of ways, e.g. as From the Actor to the Seer and From That which Functions to That which Sees. A ll these versions have their strengths and weaknesses: fortunately the basic point is clear. T he standpoint of action, in Nishida’s usage at this time, means the standpoint of the surface ego, the individual as ordinarily conceived, acting in the world. T he seer is what B uddhists call the B uddha-nature, the original or deep self. O nly from the latter’s standpoint can the true nature of reality be grasped.) It was in this book that Nishida formulated fully, for the first time, the ‘logic’ (or conceptual framework) which marks the emergence of his mature philosophy: the central notion in it is that of basho or place, the concept with which any exposition of his later philosophy must begin. H owever, although the concept of basho is of great importance in his mature thought, Nishida’s late tetsugaku is more than just a philosophy based on this concept. T his philosophy is not restricted to the logic, metaphysics and epistemology of place. H e went on to trace the implications of the philosophy of place in a comprehensive description of the human situation, and in so doing he stressed other concepts, such as that of absolutely self-contradictory identity or the unity of opposites (zettai mujunteki jikodoitsu). Further, since he came to believe that, to a considerable degree, human experience has the structure it has because human beings live in societies, he came to focus increasingly on what he calls the historical world; and this world he redescribes in terms of his own conceptual scheme. A gain, right at the end of his life he turned back to the philosophy of religion, from which he set out in An Inquiry into The Good, although this time with explicit reference to Buddhist as well as western influences. Nishida’s relation to western thought during this final phase of his thought is complex. With regard to particular thinkers, western philosophies are cited, always to be accepted or rejected (usually the latter), very consistently, according �� T he seeds of the idea of basho can be found in the earlier essays On the Inner Perception (Naibu chikaku ni tsuite) 1924 and Expressive Operation (Hyōgen sayō), both in NKZ 4.

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to their compatibility with Nishida’s mature convictions. H e continues to refer to individual western philosophies with some frequency, and occasionally makes detailed comments on them, but their role has changed from the one they played in the first and second phases of his development. He no longer hopes to find a western model which he can follow in some detail, but rather speaks from the point of view of a philosopher with a settled world-view of his own, which he relates to others but for which these others are not detailed models. T here is no counterpart in his later thought, for example, to the detailed engagement with the neo-K antians of the IRSC period. E ven where he found a concept which appealed to him (for instance monadism), the version he adopted has undergone a sea change. O n the other hand, it must be stressed that western thought remained a constant influence on Nishida in one huge respect, namely the nature of his conception of the philosophical enterprise. Even if western models are not so deeply influential in terms of individual ideas as they were in the first and second phases of his development, the model of giving a coherent and systematic conceptual rendering of experience in the western manner remains Nishida’s goal throughout his career. T he account of experience developed in the later works is intended to be a philosophy in the western sense, not an account of a mystical world-view beyond the reach of logic. If Nishida never wavered in his adherence to Zen, neither did he waver in his determination to produce a philosophy, as the term is understood in the west, which articulates it. Before investigating the concept of place, it is worth reminding oneself briefly of some of the basic premises of Nishida’s thought, which remained in essence unchanged from the start of his career. H e never wavers from the conviction that the phenomena of consciousness are the ultimate data of philosophy: nature emerges from consciousness and not the other way round; indeed, nature is a highly abstract, selective construct from these phenomena, and this doctrine will reappear in a new conceptual dress in his theory of basho. Consciousness is always self-consciousness (in a sense to be discussed): Nishida regards the idea of a conscious awareness which is not the awareness of a self as unintelligible. T hat there is such consciousness is just a datum, an irreducible fact of experience, not further explicable. L ogical categories cannot be used to analyse self-consciousness because, in Nishida’s view, they do not condition self-consciousness but arise from it. It is because we are self-conscious that we can think logically, not the reverse. It follows that the business of philosophy is to provide an account of consciousness and of how what there is emerges from it. Further, consciousness has unfathomable depth: ‘T he depth of the world of reality … is an infinite depth’, and this depth is ‘infinitely dark’. Without digressing too far, it can be noted that Nishida believed that this idea was entirely absent Nishida, General Summary (from The System of Self-consciousness of the Universal/ Ippansha no jikakuteki taikei , 1930), in Wargo 2005, p. 188. FPP, p. 81. Ibid., p. 84, and in many other places.

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from Greek thought, in which (he asserts) reality is conceived of as a principle of order of some kind, a logos, and the presence of the idea of an ultimate reality which is unfathomable and irrational he took to be one of the ways in which his philosophy diverged fundamentally from that of the Greeks. It is not appropriate here to pursue the question of whether Nishida is taking perhaps a simplified view of the role of the irrational in the Greek world view: what is clear is that the idea that consciousness has immense depth is one characteristic of a number of major eastern philosophies, notably H induism and B uddhism, and can be traced back at least as far as the Upanişads. It plays a major role in a number of areas within these philosophies, for instance in aesthetics, where the related idea of profundity is a cardinal aesthetic virtue. Nishida would have been immersed in such ideas from childhood, and they play a role in the conception of basho. T he philosophy of basho is Nishida’s third attempt to solve the problem initially addressed in An Inquiry into The Good: to construct a philosophical account of experience resting on the premise that the ultimately real is consciousness of infinite depth – a conviction drawn from Zen experience. Such a philosophy would be able to account for its own possibility, and be absolutely complete.

The Logic of Place or of the Predicate The start of the final phase of Nishida’s thought is marked by a change in one his most fundamental beliefs concerning the nature of self-consciousness. Up to the period of writing From the Acting to the Seeing, and in common with many other philosophers, he had assumed that self-consciousness could be best be analysed in terms of types of mental activities. Many of the great philosophies of the West include an account of consciousness which explains human experience in terms of mental actions or operations on the data of that experience, or – what comes to the same thing – in terms of mental faculties. T he works of the classical empiricists include lengthy discussions of operations such as the ability to distinguish between experiences, to remember and compare them, to abstract common characteristics from them, and so forth, which produce our conceptually structured daily experience of the world. A gain, K antianism embodies a complex psychology of the faculties, distinguishing between reason, understanding and imagination, which produce experience by conceptualizing conditioned by the forms of intuition. A n assumption common to such views is that self-consciousness is essentially an arena of activities of the kinds indicated. Nishida came to believe that the assumption that self-consciousness should be analysed in terms of activities of a self is a serious mistake generating insoluble problems and presupposing the view that self-consciousness is objectified. H is mature philosophy rests on the assumption that self-consciousness must be analysed not in terms of activities

S ee e.g. Wilkinson 2006. General Summary, in Wargo 2005, p. 194.


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but in terms of a number of planes which he designates as ‘universals’ or ‘places’ (basho). H is claim is that the structure of human experience can be completely described in terms of the basho he outlines. T hat he speaks of the same concept by means of various terms in different contexts – not only ‘place’ and ‘universal’ but also ‘self’ – is an indication of one of the more important features of this concept, namely that a place has not only logical properties, but also metaphysical and epistemological ones as well: the philosophy of basho is a categorial framework which includes both ontological commitments and a theory of knowledge, and some interesting questions arise as to whether all the properties ascribed to a basho are compatible in the way Nishida assumes them to be and whether the notion overall is coherent. T he reason for this blurring of philosophical categories generally kept separate in the West derives from Nishida’s fundamental assertion mentioned above, namely that pure experience is in every sense ultimate. Inevitably, an account of the world as a construction from pure experience will blend metaphysics and epistemology ab initio, since statements about what there is will also be statements about consciousness and awareness. Further, since logic is also held to be derivative from pure experience, it cannot be separated from either metaphysics or epistemology. T he legitimacy of this blending of areas of thought, in this case, stands or falls with Nishida’s whole philosophy. It is perhaps best to begin with the basic logical property of a basho, namely that it is a logical space which makes possible the conception of particular types of entity and relation: the nature of the basho preconditions the entities which can be specified within it. For Nishida, both to be and to be knowable means to be within a basho. Nishida’s root assertion in his later thought is that the complex structure of human experience can be characterized accurately in terms of three major planes, each itself sub-divisible into three (one wonders whether there is an echo of K antianism or H egelianism manifest in this passion for tripartite structures.) T he total logical space occupied (as it were) by all the basho taken together Nishida calls the transcendental plane of predicates, and each basho or sub-division of a basho is an example of the self-determination of this plane. T o make these abstract assertions clearer, it is necessary to investigate each basho and the entities it makes possible. T he three major basho are those of being, relative nothingness and absolute nothingness.

Ibid, p. 208: ‘In contrast to other philosophies that considered the structure of consciousness in terms of acts or processes, I conceive of it topologically, in terms of planes.’ T here is a useful summary of the scheme of the various basho in the essay ‘T he Intelligible World’, from The Self-Consciousness of the Universal (in IPN).


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The place of being (yu no basho) This first basho distinguished by Nishida is the aspect of experience which remains when all references to subjectivity are deleted. T he object of this basho (the object it makes possible) is the natural world: it is the realm of ‘something thought, but not something thinking’. T he basho of being is the place or field from which more aspects of experience have been deleted than is the case with any other: accordingly, Nishida here retains his adherence to the view that the natural world, as conceived by science, is the most abstract of the worlds of which we have experience, and he recasts this view in the vocabulary of the philosophy of place. T he descriptions of objects which occur in the judgements formulated in this basho use the smallest subset of possible predicates in the whole of human experience. This is not to say, of course, that scientific descriptions of the universe are simple – such a manifestly false consequence is not entailed by Nishida’s views. A s will be seen, his contention is that each successive basho includes more aspects of human experience, and the range of descriptions deployed becomes progressively more complex. Underlying the whole analysis of the various basho is the assumption that ordinary, everyday experience – self-conscious, and including an awareness of both individuals and values – is both the most concrete and the most complex form of experience. H is discussion of the three main basho and their subdivisions is arranged in ascending order of complexity, starting with the one remotest from everyday experience and ending with everyday experience itself. E ach step in the analysis is said to manifest an increase in depth, gradually approaching an adequate understanding of self-consciousness. The first sub-division within the basho of being is called by Nishida the subsumptive universal. T his universal manifests itself in judgements of the form ‘A is B ’, for instance ‘red is a colour’, asserting that the grammatical subject is an instance of the universal specified in the grammatical predicate. Such judgements articulate the species–genus relation, and both subject and predicate are universals – the judgements in question yield no knowledge of particulars. In Nishida’s view, such judgements are based on an intuition which reveals that the subject is a determination of the predicate. H e notes further that, in order for (in this example) a colour judgement to be made, the complete system of colours must be presupposed. The system of colours is itself a highly specific basho which makes colour judgements possible. While the colour system itself can be the grammatical subject of judgements in other places, it can never be the subject of a judgement in its own basho: the colour system is not itself a colour. Nishida puts this point by saying that a basho is nothing (it would be better to say ‘no thing’) with regard to the judgements is makes possible, since it is not a member of the class it makes possible, but only (except in the case of the final basho) of other classes. It will be noted that this view is a reverse of the experiential atomism adopted in classical empiricism, according to which individual experiences of colour are supposed, IPN, p. 71.


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after the mental operation of abstraction, to give rise to the general concept of colour. Nishida asserts that it is the whole conceptual background that makes the individual experiences possible, and not the other way round. It will be clear that, with regard to the beings located in it, a basho has the character of a predicate: a basho cannot be the subject of a judgement in that same basho. It is this that leads Nishida to speak of the whole categorical framework he is proposing as a ‘logic of the predicate’, entirely distinct from A ristotelian logic, in which primary reality is ascribed to individuals, subjects which can never be predicates (there will be more to say of this important idea later). This first sub-basho makes clear one of the most important assumptions of the whole philosophy of place, namely that it is the general which makes the particular possible: this claim is used throughout the unfolding of the discrimination of the various basho and I will return to it later – it seems to me to be a recasting of one of the deepest ideas constitutive of oriental thought. It will be clear that this first basho is very limited in respect of the area of knowledge it makes possible. In particular, it does not yield knowledge of individuals. Nishida took very seriously the A ristotelian contention that universals do not yield knowledge of individuals. No list of universals, however extensive, can wholly specify an individual: the infima species is not an individual.10 S ince we do have knowledge of individuals, there must be some predicate which is adequate to them; and Nishida calls this predicate the universal of judgement, the second of the three sub-categories of the basho of being. T he universal of judgement has individuals as its object, and is to that degree more adequate to experience than the subsumptive judgement. T he grammatical subjects of judgements made in this basho are individuals, with predicates specifying properties or sets of properties. O ntologically viewed, this basho is occupied by substances and their attributes. It has just been noted that Nishida accepts the A ristotelian view that universals cannot alone give knowledge of an individual. T his being so, the basho which makes individuals possible (which ‘envelops’ them, in Nishida’s vocabulary) cannot itself be a universal or field of such. Neither, however, can it be itself an individual – or it would itself be just a member of this basho and not the ground of its possibility. T o indicate the nature of this basho, Nishida turns again to the H egelian notion of a concrete universal. B efore H egel it was customary to regard the universal/particular distinction as either identical with or at least closely parallel to the abstract/concrete distinction. H egel introduces the idea that universals can be either abstract or concrete.11 T he abstract universal is that which is common to the various particulars that fall under it. In H egelian terms, such a universal is negated by the particular. H owever, if the particular is in turn negated, what is obtained is a universal which, instead of being separated from the particular, is the reality of the particular itself, in its concrete richness. E xamples of such concrete universals in H egel are the ‘I’, the ‘now’ and the ‘spirit of a free people’. General Summary, in Wargo 2005, pp. 187–8. E.g. Hegel, 1969, pp. 602 and 653–4; cf. Hegel 1991, pp. 239–42 and 253–4.

10 11


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S uch a universal embodies the totality of the concept. It is absolutely precise, and in it the content of the concept is immanent. When this content is abstracted, an abstract universal is formed, and such an abstract universal is an isolated and abstract moment of the concept, which does not correspond to its truth. When the content is included in the concept, it is not an isolated moment, but truth itself. T he abstract universal is the product of thought; the concrete universal is thought itself, on its path towards the real. T he concrete universal is the universal of reason, not just of understanding, in the H egelian senses of these terms. Unsurprisingly, this notion has been the subject of a number of interpretations, but common to them all is the synthesis of the general and the particular, and so the notion combines the abstraction of the former with the concreteness of the latter. E ven so short a discussion of H egel as the above should go some way towards making it clear why Nishida should have found the idea of a concrete universal appealing – not merely because it allows him a way out of the problem of indicating what nature the universal/basho of judgement must have if it can be neither abstract universal nor concrete individual. T he focus on the special status of the present moment, the ‘now’, is entirely in accord with the B uddhist practice of mindfulness and with the claim that each moment, rightly experienced, is of infinite depth. Moreover, what is revealed in mindful experience of the present is of a richness unsuspected in standard attention, directed as this is to the surface ego. Mindful attention reveals things in their ‘suchness’, that is, as they appear to attention when the latter is not conditioned by the partial demands of the surface ego. E xperience of things in their suchness is regularly said to reveal a reality of infinite depth, and such insights sit awkwardly with the standard distinction between the abstract universal and the concrete particular. A gain, as will be seen presently, Nishida accords a very special status to the ‘I’, the transcendental unity of apperception, also singled out by H egel. T he notion of an aspect of reality which somehow combines properties of a particular with immense richness of content would have been one with which a Zen thinker like Nishida felt entirely at home. T he universal of judgement allows the conception of individuals to the extent that they satisfy descriptions which involve only compatible predicates. T his basho does not permit descriptions which predicate change over time of an enduring subject . T o permit the description of change, we need to move to a basho which includes time and permits such descriptions, and this next basho, the deepest level in the overall basho of being, Nishida calls the syllogistic universal. T his next step on the road to the conceptual richness of ordinary experience makes possible the conception of enduring substance which changes over time – an S which can be p at time t and not-p at time t1. A s with all the other changes of basho, Nishida contends that this change is necessitated by the revelation of some inadequacy in the categories furnished by the preceding, shallower basho. H e sometimes puts this in a H egelian manner by claiming that contradictions become apparent in the shallower basho, necessitating a move to a conceptually more comprehensive logical zone. It should be borne in mind, however, that his concept of ‘contradiction’ (and indeed ‘negation’) is as spacious as that of H egel or Marx, not univocal, and

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is certainly not limited to formal contradiction of a logical kind. T hus, in the cases encountered so far, the moves from the subsumptive universal to the universal of judgement and from the latter to the syllogistic universal are not the result of the occurrence of formal contradictions within basho, but rather of the inability of a given basho to permit a necessary type of description of the world. In the present case, the natural world, the overall object of the basho of being, manifestly cannot be described fully in atemporal judgements: it is a temporal world, and it must be possible to describe change. O nce it is possible to deploy descriptions which presuppose time and can conceptualize change, it also becomes possible to accommodate another basic feature of the world, namely that individuals act on each other – a fact which cannot be dealt with in the place of the universal of judgement, in which individuals are conceivable only in an etiolated manner. A s has been indicated, Nishida likes to describe a world which includes change as a world which manifests contradiction and is describable only within a schema which can accommodate contradictory predicates. S uch a schema must be something which is predicate but never subject, and he claims that that which is predicate but never subject is consciousness. A few comments are appropriate at this point. The first is this: it was noted above that, in Nishida’s usage, the concept of basho has logical, metaphysical and epistemological aspects, and this move to the syllogistic universal is the first major indication of the metaphysical dimension of this term. The first two universals look very much like domains of discourse or categorial frameworks of increasing degrees of conceptual richness, but this third universal is described in ontological terms, as consciousness. Further, in each case, the basho has an epistemological dimension related to the aspects of the world and the experience it makes possible. Nishida does not comment on this heterogeneity in the nature of the basho he discriminates, and he evidently did not regard it as problematic: it is important to bear it in mind, however, when assessing the ultimate coherence of his thought. S econdly, the introduction of the notion of consciousness into the conceptual arena makes possible for the first time the distinction between the knower and the known. It has to be stressed, however, that this is the thinnest possible notion of consciousness, just enough to make the knower–known distinction intelligible. T o allow a richer notion of consciousness, one which includes the distinction between the mental phenomena of knowing, feeling and willing, it is necessary to move to another of the three major basho distinguished by Nishida. We now leave the basho of being, whose object is the natural world, and move to the basho of relative nothingness. The place of relative nothingness (taritsuteki mu no basho) T his second major place has the alternative name of the universal of selfconsciousness (jikaku-teki ippansha), and this, together with Nishida’s view that consciousness is a predicate but never a subject, gives a clue as to why he should have chosen the phrase ‘relative nothingness’ as its primary appellation. A s has


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been remarked, a basho is always ‘no-thing’ with regard to those aspects of the world and experience it makes possible, and so it is asserted to be with regard to self-consciousness and to what it makes possible. What it makes possible consists in all those aspects of experience which either are or depend on the forms of mental life we call knowing, feeling and willing, the objects of the three sub-basho within this main division. This explains why ‘nothingness’ should be in the name; but why relative? The reason is that the self-consciousness to which Nishida is here referring is in his vocabulary objectified, that is, it consists in those aspects of self-conscious life of which I am aware, not in the ‘I’ which is aware of them. H e has in mind the standard distinction between contents of consciousness which can be observed by introspection (the accusative ‘me’, as it were) and the transcendental unity of apperception, K ant’s Ich denke, the ‘I’ which can never in principle be introspected. T he Ich denke is not included in this basho, being dealt with later. The final basho he will call, for reasons to be explained, the place of absolute nothingness; this preceding place is an aspect of self-consciousness, but not its deepest aspect. It is ‘no-thing’, but not absolutely so yet. It is the noematic aspect of self-consciousness, not the noetic aspect. A gain, as with the syllogistic universal, this basho is defined primarily in ontological terms which have epistemological consequences. T he three sub-basho within this second major sub-division are the formal, the static and the active, corresponding to knowing, feeling and willing respectively, and each being conceived as an aspect of the self as object, as the ‘me’. T he formal self is the self that knows, the self that is aware of the relations between things. T his is manifestly, however, only one aspect of self-consciousness, for the self also has feelings. Nishida calls the self of which emotions are predicated the static self: ‘the feeling S elf is determined as quiet, static unity’.12 ‘Static’ might at first seem an odd term to employ for an aspect of mental life which is the prime cause of action and often directs large aspects of out lives, but I think what Nishida has in mind is the idea that feeling is passion rather than action. Feelings happen to us, and we discover we have them: they are not possible objects of conation (though restraining them can be). In a sense, then, the self which is the subject of feelings is not per se an acting self, but a static one within which changes occur not under the control of any other aspect of the self. Manifestly, however, there is more to the self than that: we act not only on the basis of emotions but also on the basis of knowledge: we have a will, and the willing aspect of the self is the third and deepest sub-basho in this overall place. T his makes possible the conception of the self as an agent, a cause of change, both in the world and in the self itself – we can act so as to modify ourselves. Nishida retains the view emphasized in the IRSC period that the will is the ‘essence’ of consciousness: ‘What is called intentionality is but weak willing. T he general opinion that intentionality is the essence of consciousness stems from the fact that will is generally considered to have mere act-character … Will is knowing IPN, p. 113.

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efficacy and effective knowledge.’13 T his notion of the active self, in Nishida’s view, is inherently contradictory (in his broad sense of that term): ‘Will is, as many pessimists say, the point of contradiction: we desire in order to end the desire; we live in order to die.’14 T o resolve this contradiction, we need to move to the third major basho in Nishida’s system: the basho of absolute nothingness (zettai mu no basho), also called the intelligible universal or the universal of intellectual intuition.15 We need to penetrate to a depth of the self where even the will is transcended. The place of absolute nothingness (zettai mu no basho) In common with the preceding major basho, the intelligible universal (eichi-teki ippansha) has three sub-divisions: consciousness in general; the intelligible feeling self; and the intelligible willing self. What these sub-basho make possible is, respectively, the experience of the values of truth, beauty and goodness, important elements of our conscious experience not accommodated in any of the previous places.16 T here is perhaps a late echo of neo-K antian thought in this stress on value as constitutive of consciousness at its deeper levels; it certainly explains why Nishida is at pains to stress that what he calls the intelligible world is not some transcendent realm, rare of access: it is the world we daily inhabit.17 Nishida explains as follows how the intelligible universal makes value possible: When the Universal of self-consciousness has its place in the intelligible Universal, and is lined, deepened and enveloped by this Universal, all ‘being’ which is in our self-consciousness gets, by mirroring the intelligible world, a ‘normative’ character, the character of values … If the root of noesis lies deep in the intelligible Universal and is determined by it, then the act of consciousness, mirroring the content of that which sees itself, becomes normative and becomes an act of realization of value.18

Values are among the constituents of consciousness at its deepest level, and this manifests itself in the fact that, at this deep level, consciousness is inherently evaluative. S ince the world is a construction from pure experience, it follows that values are inherent in the world. When people use the phrase ‘the real world’, in the sense of a reality taken to be in itself value-free, with the implication that values are foam on the wave – foam added by humans and reflecting their own concerns only – Nishida replies (consistently with his thought as a whole) that the 13

Ibid., p. 76; cf. pp. 78–9. Ibid., p. 81. 15 Ibid., p. 110. 16 Ibid., p. 120. 17 Ibid., pp. 84, 125. 18 Ibid., pp. 92–3. 14


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‘real world’ so construed is no more than an abstraction from a much richer reality in which values inhere.19 As has been noted, the first sub-division of this basho is called by Nishida ‘something like K ant’s Bewusstsein űberhaupt (consciousness-in-general), or the ‘pure E go, das “reine Ich”’.20 T his is consciousness which has transcended the depth of self-consciousness and sees its own self-conscious activity: it has transcended consciousness in the direction of noesis. T he intelligible self/consciousness-ingeneral transcends our quotidian self-consciousness and is not in any sense to be regarded as ‘conscious being’, a description Nishida reserves for the conscious self alone.21 What we ordinarily call the objective world is transcendent with regard to this surface ego/conscious self – it is independent of that ego and not generated by it. H owever, for Nishida, the objective world is not (as we have seen) something consciousness-independent: on the contrary, it is the content of something which resides on a very deep plane of the self. It is in fact the content of the intelligible self, a content which appears to the surface ego as an objective world. R eserving the property of being for the surface self, Nishida notes that the realm of the intelligible self is ‘unreal’. It is ‘a world of mere meaning, or – one step deeper – the world of truth’.22 A t this level of depth, the transcendental plane of predicates acquires the significance of a plane of categorial determinations in the K antian sense, and these categories form all the objects of knowledge. When the universal of judgement is enveloped by that of self-consciousness and the latter is in turn enveloped by the intelligible universal, all the content of consciousness on the plane thus reached has value, or meaning – terms which Nishida generally uses as equivalent. T his makes perfect sense from his point of view: his analysis assumes that ordinary consciousness is the richest form of consciousness, and ordinary consciousness includes awareness of values. T his step in his philosophy of basho introduces value into his analysis of self-consciousness. It also follows, Nishida argues, that in a certain sense consciousness-in-general does not have a content of its own: the content of the intelligible universal proper is not manifest at this level. Insofar as consciousness-in-general is the place of the universal of self-consciousness, its content is the content of the latter. What happens is that the content of the universal of judgement, enveloped by the universal of self-consciousness, changes with respect to its significance, not with respect to its ‘being’.23 Nishida sometimes puts this point by saying that consciousnessin-general is ‘empty’, though this term has to be interpreted with care and one must recall that reality is a construction from pure experience. H ence, ‘since this consciousness-in-general … does not possess its own content, its ideal content, namely the intelligible noema, is without mediation the content of reality. T he 19

Ibid., p. 125. Ibid., p. 89. 21 Ibid., p. 94. 22 Ibid., p. 93. 23 Ibid., p. 112. 20


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real world can be regarded as a direct manifestation of the intelligible noema.’24 It follows that the value which is rendered appreciable by this sub-basho, namely truth, is not experienced as the content of, or as an aspect of, consciousness-ingeneral itself, but as something external to it, which it recognizes as an ideal of intellectual life. T ruth is an ideal to which we aspire, not an expression of something within. For it to reach the level of expression, we need to proceed to the deeper place at which the content of the intelligible self becomes manifest. T he content of the intelligible universal proper only becomes an element of experience at its second level, that of the intelligible feeling self. T his content is feeling, and it manifests itself as beauty in the experience of artistic intuition. T he realm of the aesthetic is one which occupied Nishida throughout his career, and indeed his first published essay is an analysis of beauty.25 T he basic reason for this is not far to seek, since aesthetic experience can readily be construed as being much closer to the experience of things in their suchness than ordinary experience is. A esthetic contemplation, although a temporary state, is a condition in which objects are perceived more fully and more richly than in ordinary experience: the latter is a state in which attention is selective, conditioned by the immediate purposes of the surface ego. In aesthetic experience objects reveal a detail and a depth not apparent in ordinary experience. T he experience of the enlightened must bear some resemblance to a permanent aesthetic state in respect of the richness of what is perceived. It is not surprising, therefore, that aesthetic experience should be located in one of the deepest of the basho distinguished in the late philosophy. Nishida characterizes artistic intuition in a number of ways, for instance as the fusion of form and matter, or as an intuition in which acting and seeing are identical, or as the identity of subjectivity and objectivity,26 or as the realization of the ‘congruence of intelligible noema and intelligible noesis’.27 Common to all these formulations is the notion that in artistic intuition (that is, in truly creative thought) self-awareness disappears and consciousness becomes wholly focused on the object: during such an experience there is no longer my awareness of x, but only x-awareness. T he distinction, apparent at the level of consciousness-ingeneral, between the self on the one hand and its content, apprehended as ideas, on the other – does not obtain. S uch a consciousness is a direct expression of our feeling. A esthetic experience is not cognitive (‘beauty does not at all enter the horizon of knowledge’28), 24

Ibid., p. 117. Bi no setsumei/An Explanation of Beauty. T his essay appeared in his highschool’s alumni publication, Hokushinkai Journal, in 1900. 26 E .g. FPP, p. 35, pp. 136–7 and in other places. 27 IPN, p. 113. It will be clear both from this passage and from many others that Nishida makes a great deal of use of the noema/noesis distinction from H usserl, whose philosophy he was instrumental in introducing to Japanese thinkers early in the twentieth century. S�� ee T remblay, La Néantisation du soi (etc), in B erque (ed.) 2000, Vol I, p. 87. 28 IPN, p. 113. 25


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because that which sees itself in artistic intuition has transcended the abstract standpoint of the consciousness-in-general, and directly sees the content of the intelligible Self. Beauty is the form of appearance of the idea itself; it is only in artistic intuition that we have an intuition of the idea; only the beautiful is a visible representation of eternity on earth.29

Consciousness-in-general still embodies the subject/object, knower/known distinction, which is a precondition for any form of awareness that can be called cognition. When this distinction is absent, even if only temporarily, it is no longer possible to speak of cognition. H owever, it should be noted that what we have awareness of here is the idea itself, not the self itself. T his limitation indicates that we have still not reached the deepest level of the intelligible self. T hat level is the level of the intelligible willing self – Nishida retains his conviction that practical reason is a far deeper facet of consciousness than theoretical reason. What this sub-basho makes possible in terms of being is the moral free will and its object, the moral good. Nishida has a number of ways of speaking of this level of the self. H is central point is that, at this level, the self is aware of itself without mediation, or, again, that noema is completely submerged in noesis. T he content of awareness is the self itself, not an idea or a symbol of any kind: this contrasts with the previous level, where the content of consciousness is beauty. Noesis manifests itself as the moral conscience, the self’s awareness of its own relation to the moral good.30 Nishida insists that the idea of the good is without a specific content and that we can never arrive at a condition in which the moral ideal for which we strive is achieved. T his is because he regards the content of the moral self as ‘infinitely deep’.31 A ny ideal derived from a content which is infinitely deep is inexhaustible, and hence not realizable. As is the case in certain examples of E uropean R omantic thought, the moral life is a condition of continual striving to achieve an ideal which in principle always eludes us: ‘T here is only moral development and infinite progressing.’32 T he ideas of great depth and inexhaustibility go hand in hand, both in the moral and in the aesthetic spheres, and in both E ast and West.33 E ven this analysis into nine levels of consciousness, however, does not bring the story to an end. Even at the level of the intelligible willing self, Nishida finds a limitation/contradiction which has to be resolved. T he ‘contradiction’ has in fact already been announced above, and consists in the thesis that we act in the name of an ideal of the good which can in principle never be fully specified. In Nishida’s view, this means that even the moral free will, the last being which has its basho in the intelligible universal, contradicts itself and must seek to find unity in something Ibid.; see FPP, p. 249 on the denial of time in aesthetic intuition. Ibid., pp. 113–14. 31 Ibid., p. 114. 32 Ibid. 33 O n the idea of the profound, see Wilkinson 2006. 29

30


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– a further basho, which envelops even itself, and in which the moral will is not conceived as some sort of object, however unusual.34 T he difference at this point is that there is no further universal to which to move. T he problem has arisen because of attachment to the subject/object distinction, and it is this attachment that has to be transcended. Nishida’s solution is to argue that there is a further place, enveloping all the universals described above, which he calls the place of absolute nothingness. This is the final basho which makes all the others possible and of which all the others are the articulation or self-determination. A ll things arise from it, but, since it logically precedes the subject/object distinction, nothing whatever can be said about it in our subject/object language: ‘it has completely transcended the standpoint of knowledge, and may perhaps be called “world of mystic intuition”, unapproachable by word or thinking’.35 However, this final basho, even if inarticulable, can be experienced, and the experience of it is religious experience. A ccordingly, Nishida would claim that the postulation of this final basho is anything but a piece of conceptual legerdemain, an idea which rounds off a system but has no referent. H is system is underwritten by experience, Zen experience. H is assertion that there is a mu no basho is intended by him as an empirical statement, not as a conceptual truth. I see no reason to doubt that the mu to which he refers is that experienced in kenshō, and that the idea of the place of absolute nothingness arises directly from his Zen experience. It is Zen that gave Nishida what he needed in order to complete his system of thought and to do what (as we shall see) he regarded western thinkers as failing to do, namely produce a system which accounted for its own possibility. T here will be more to say presently about Nishida’s later ideas concerning religious experience, and I will come back to them also in discussing his reaction to the thought of L eibniz. For the moment, it is appropriate to say something about his claim that his entire late system, the logic of the place of nothingness (mu no bashoteki ronri), is what he calls a logic (conceptual framework) of the predicate (jutsugoteki ronri). B y ‘logic’ Nishida does not mean quite what western thinkers usually understand this term to signify. We have seen in the preceding pages, more than once, that Nishida takes logic to emerge from consciousness and to be grounded in it: he does not conceive of logic as a set of rules which transcend consciousness and that condition it from the outside, as it were. A gain, as we have seen throughout the exposition of the various basho, Nishida does not regard logic and metaphysics as discrete areas of thought: logic reflects ontological commitments, and vice versa. H e makes this assumption explicit in his zeppitsu (last essay) completed just before his death, ‘Concerning My L ogic’ (‘Watakushi no ronri ni tsuite’): ‘L ogic is the discursive form of our thinking. A nd we will only be able to clarify what logic is by reflecting on the form of our own thinking.’36 IPN, pp. 125–6. �� Ibid., p. 135 (et al.). 36 NRWV, p. 126. 34 35


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What he says about a ‘logic of the predicate’ has to be interpreted with this in mind. What Nishida calls predicate logic is to be contrasted with what he usually terms ‘object logic’ (or sometimes ‘abstract logic’ or ‘the logic of the subject’, that is the grammatical subject, shugoteki ronri): by the latter he means a categorial framework based on the A ristotelian assertion that individuals are what is ultimately real. Such individuals can occupy only the subject-place in judgements; they can never be predicates. A framework of this kind includes the ontological commitment that to the idea that formed, determined, enduring individuals are the paradigm of the real. Nishida often points out that much oriental thought is based on an intuition which is contrary to this point of view and incompatible with it, namely that the ultimately real is a void, or the formless.37 Moreover, Nishida regards Aristotelian logic as incapable of reflecting accurately the reality of the conscious self, that is, the K antian Ich denke which can never be an object and is always a predicate, never a subject. A s we have seen, right from the start of his career, Nishida wished to found his philosophy on what he called the reality of the mind (shinri), and a central aspect of this reality is the existence of a nonobjectifiable transcendental unity of apperception which is predicative in nature. Manifestly, a quite different categorial framework is needed if these assertions are to be accommodated, and this is what Nishida sought to provide in his predicate logic. Unsurprisingly, he also calls this aspect of his thought the ‘logic of the E ast’ (tōyōteki ronri).38 A way to approach Nishida’s basic line of thought in this area is via his phrase ‘the transcendental plane of predicates’. S uch a plane could also be described as the realm of all possible determinations: if there were no determinations, there could be no individuals. Individuals are made possible only because there is this plane of predicates, from which can be derived descriptions which specify them in some degree. For Nishida, the individual is possible only because there is this conceptual background; and, further, this background is of infinite richness. The example of the system of colour judgements, discussed above, is one example of this claim. For Nishida, no individual colour judgement is possible unless the entire colour system is in place: the latter is not an abstraction from individual experiences of colour. T he central idea of predicate logic is the same as the central idea of Nishida’s metaphysics of absolute nothingness/pure experience, namely that the particular emerges from, and is made possible by, an infinitely rich whole, as a temporary selection or abstraction from it. Nishida’s logic and metaphysics (which includes, as we have seen, the thesis that consciousness is predicative in nature) are in effect two manifestations of the same idea.

37 T here is a concentrated development of this idea in his essay The Forms of Culture of the Classical Periods of East and West Seen from a Metaphysical Perspective, in FPP. 38 T here is a clear statement of these points in ‘My Philosophical Path’, the Preface to Third Philosophical Essays, 1939 in Y usa 2002, pp. 301–4.


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T his idea, derived ultimately from non-dual, nirvanic intuitions, manifests itself very widely in a great deal of oriental culture. It is part of a nexus of ideas which stress the temporariness and unreality of individuals of all kinds, in direct contrast to the typical western focus on the reality and value of such individuals, and it has implications beyond logic, metaphysics and epistemology, into ethics and aesthetics. T his is not the place to digress and discuss all the manifestations of this idea: one example will have to do, namely the Japanese aesthetic concept of sabi. T here is no lexical equivalent of this term in western languages, for the good reason that it occurs as part of a whole set of beliefs, attitudes and tastes which hardly (if ever) occur in the mainstream of western thought. Sabi is a complex concept combining a number of elements: it is a sense, tinged with melancholy, of the transitoriness of all things; it is a sense of deep, illimitable quietude; and it typically arises when we see any individual of any kind fulfilling its root destiny of transience, dissolving back into the universe from which it emerged. It involves a sense of the co-presence of the mutable and the immutable, of the temporal and the eternal. In the present case, the common theme is the importance of the background and the holism implied in this outlook. A s in art, so in metaphysics: it is the background, the locus of all possibilities, which matters and from which all things arise and to which they will return (there is no belief system in the world which has a better developed sense of ephemerality than B uddhism).39 T he logic of the predicate, which is the same as the metaphysics of absolute nothingness, is another manifestation of this idea. O bject logic has two consequences in particular which Nishida wants to avoid. In the first place, object logic tempts us to take a false view of the self. It tempts us to regard the surface ego as a real,enduring individual. Nishida sees this as both metaphysically false and (in common with all B uddhists) as an impediment to salvation – it is the prime source of the illusions from which B uddhist training seeks to free us.40 S econdly, object logic does not permit us to grasp the real nature of the world, which cannot be thought of within an A ristotelian framework. T his real nature Nishida came to conceptualize as zettai mujunteki jikodoitsu: according to the taste of translators, this can be rendered either as ‘the unity of opposites’ or as ‘absolutely self-contradictory identity’ (or in a variety of other ways); I will adopt the latter: it seems to me more appropriate as a way of rendering the radicality of what Nishida has in mind – an idea derived from the Perfection of Wisdom S utras and from the logic of soku hi. Nishida’s final conception of the world is one which is unstatable in terms of A ristotelian logic.

39

O n aesthetic concepts in nirvanic systems, see Wilkinson, 2000 and 2001. A s he puts it in NRWV: ‘T he source of illusion is in seeing the self in terms of object logic’ (p. 79). 40


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Absolutely Self-contradictory Identity T hough Nishida never explicitly recanted the complex system of the planes of consciousness or basho just described, they certainly receded from the forefront of his thought: perhaps he came to think of them, in S antayana’s admirable phrase, as a long way round to nirvana. A s the years progressed, he came to focus more on what he terms the historical world and its dynamism. T here are occasional references to other universals, but the main survivor into the last period of his thought is the concept of the mu no basho, the place of nothingness, the ground of all there is, although, coherently with the stress on dynamism, this concept is often rechristened as the dialectical universal. In his final works, as the other basho fade from view, he comes to focus on the nature of things described in terms of his last key concept, that of absolutely self-contradictory identity. In metaphysical terms, this is the claim that the one is the many and the many are the one, in a condition of unresolved contradiction: ‘T he world of reality is essentially the one as well as the many … T hat is why I call the world of reality ‘absolute contradictory self-identity [or ‘unity of opposites’].’ 41 R eality is both being and non-being, subjectivity and objectivity, the self-identity of this absolute opposition. It is also dynamic and selfdetermining.42 In the terms of the Perfection of Wisdom S utras, the samsara and nirvana are one and the same: the mu no basho is the world we inhabit. Nirvana is not another place, realm or time: it is the here and now, the historical world we live in, rightly experienced in the infinite richness which Buddhists call suchness. T his idea and its consequences must be examined in greater detail. A s tends to be the case throughout Nishida’s career and as already noted, the sense of the term ‘contradiction’ used in his discussions of absolutely contradictory identity is such as to accommodate a number of different relations, as happens also with the related term ‘negate’. T he relation between mu and the world is contradictory in the sense that the former is fully present in each individual that makes up the latter: mu does not transcend the world, but neither is it immanent in it in the sense in which that term is generally understood in the West. In this usage, ‘contradiction’ is taken to designate a relation peculiar to Zen thought. A s we shall see, however, a different sense of contradiction occurs in Nishida’s discussion of the nature of the self. A gain, the term ‘negate’ is sometimes used to mean as little as ‘change’ or ‘limit’, and at other times to designate the way in which mu, which is wholly undetermined, gives rise to the world by means of self-negation, that is to say, by manifesting itself as individuals.43 T he various senses are generally indicated by the context. IPN, p. 163. ‘S elf-determining reality, i.e. dynamic reality, must be self-contradictory. S ubjectivity and objectivity may be regarded as different directions of the self-contradiction.” FPP, p. 246. 43 T his is the same idea as that expressed in the much quoted line from The Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana: ‘A thought [i.e. something individual] suddenly arises.’ S ee 41 42

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O ne point on which Nishida insists is that items which are in his sense contradictory cannot be wholly unconnected, and this notion he regards as unthinkable in object/abstract logic. In the latter, he claims, things which contradict each other cannot be connected, ‘[b]ut there would be no contradiction if they did not touch each other somewhere. Facing each other is already a synthesis. H ere is the dominion of dialectical logic.’44 Contradiction does not presuppose an ultimate discreteness of individuals but, on the contrary, demands that the elements of the contradiction are located within a common matrix: wholly unrelated individuals would be precisely that – unrelated – and could not stand in the relation of contradiction, however that is defined. The common matrix in Nishida’s case is the mu no basho. T he central thesis that mu is fully and contradictorily present in all particulars has consequences in many philosophically important areas, and one of the most crucial of these is the mode of existence of the self. Insofar as the self is an individual, it exhibits the contradictory identity of the one and the many,45 and this contradiction at the heart of the self is described by Nishida in a number of ways. For example, he regards the structure of consciousness as self-contradictory: T he unity of consciousness, namely the S elf, is not possible in a merely straightlined process. A ll the phenomena of my consciousness are many, and at the same time, – as mine – also one. T his is a unity of opposites in the shown sense.46

A gain, our self changes in a dialectical manner by negating itself: we live only by listening to the voice of the absolute in the depths of the actual world, yet so long as we remain an ego we cannot come into contact with the absolute/god, for god is absolutely hidden from the ego.47 T he contradictory nature of the self’s mode of being is manifest also in our awareness of our own mortality, our own ‘eternal nothingness’48: that every living being must die, and that our self faces permanent negation in death, are both contradictions in Nishida’s usage. A gain, and to anticipate slightly Nishida’s later remarks about time, the self is a continuity of discontinuity (hirenzoku no renzoku), its individuality being composed of a series of discontinuous moment-states.49 Granted the number of states and relations which Nishida is prepared to subsume under the umbrella concept of H akeda 1967, p. 50. 44 IPN, p. 177. 45 ‘A s individuals of the world of unity of opposites, we are in the depth of our origin in contradiction with ourselves.’ IPN, p. 234. 46 IPN, p. 197. 47 ‘T here is no road from us to the absolute. God is an absolutely hidden God.’ FPP, p. 234. 48 NRWV, p. 67. 49 Some commentators see the influence of Dōgen in this idea. See Heine’s comments in his introduction to A be 1992, p. 2.


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contradiction, it is unsurprising that he can find contradiction instantiated in a great many phenomena. While dealing with the concept of the self in Nishida’s late philosophy, it is appropriate to notice one of his other important concepts, that of expression (hyōgen). T he world of particulars is formed through the self-determination or self-negation of mu, which in itself is entirely without determination of any kind. A nother way of putting this is to say that the world is an expression of mu. E ach individual in turn expresses itself by reacting to the world in which it finds itself. A ccordingly, We form the world by acts of expression. T his means, on the contrary, and at the same time, that we form ourselves as viewpoints of the world. T he world forms itself, as negating unity of innumerable individuals which form themselves.50

E ach individual is thus both an expression of the world and an expressing subject within it. A nother way of putting this is to say that each individual can be said to manifest a perspective on the world, both in its own nature, as a manifestation of that world, and as an active agent expressing itself in modifying that world through its own self-expressive reactions to it. T his way of characterizing the relation between individual and world leads Nishida to have sympathy with certain aspects of monadism: as he puts it, ‘I am an expressive monad of the world.’51 H is relation to the thought of L eibniz will be taken up again later. B oth this limited monadism and the notion of absolutely contradictory identity inform Nishida’s analysis of the concept of action, a concept he describes in a number of ways. For example, action can be described as the negation of the other or as the will to make the other (the world) an expression of oneself, while – contradictorily – the self denies itself and becomes part of the world.52 Put another way, each individual conscious act manifests a contradictory identity: while each action exists and moves in itself, it also dynamically expresses the world.53 Nishida also puts this point more elaborately as follows: the world is a constant movement from the formed to the forming – the constant, creative self-expression of the contradictorily identical one and many. E ach action is an attempt to form the world, but is at the same time a ‘being formed’. We are individuals formed by the world, essentially engaged in acts which are re-forming that world, which is also re-forming us constantly. A cting is not just acting but also ‘being acted.’54 These actions are always reflective of the social context of the agents. We are what Nishida terms ‘historical–bodily’ beings: our sense of ‘I’ and ‘you’, like the self50

52 53 54 51

IPN, p. 197. NRWV, p. 52. IPN, p. 171. NRWV, p. 51. IPN, p. 186.


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consciousness of the child, develops out of our social situation.55 Nishida asserts that we cannot escape this social context and its formative influence on us.56 T his looks as if it could be a statement of a perspectivism of the kind to be found in the thought of O rtega y Gasset, for example, but it is not developed enough in Nishida for one to say whether it falls foul of some form of self-refutation. T his same basic notion of the constant mutual forming of the world and the individual extends into Nishida’s late epistemology, which centres around the notion of kōiteki chokkan, the term he uses to designate ‘the fundamental and most concrete form of conscious comprehension of reality’.57 T his is another Nishidan term about which translators disagree, and with good reason, since no translation of it is entirely satisfactory. Kōi means ‘deliberate action’, and the compound as a whole could be literally rendered as ‘intuition which has the character of action’ or ‘action-like intuition’. It appears variously rendered in translations as active intuition, acting intuition or action–intuition, of which I will adopt the last. Nishida has a number of reasons for introducing this notion. In the first place, it is an extension into epistemology of the analysis of action just noted: action is always also a ‘being acted’, a mutual modification of world and individual. We must experience the world in order to act on it, and we learn to perceive the world better by acting on it. Just as he insists that practical reason is more profound than the theoretical, so he insists that our natural mode of being-in-the-world is not contemplative but active, an aspect of the constant mutual interaction between individual and world. The idea that experience is a passive reflection of the world he regards as entirely false: ‘intuition, separated from action, is either merely an abstract idea, or mere illusion’.58 A ction–intuition, like any other form of action in Nishida’s late thought, is a mutual relation of forming and being formed: ‘A ction– intuition means our forming of objects, while we are formed by the objects. A ction–intuition means the unity of the opposites of seeing and acting.’59 A s has been seen repeatedly in these pages, the philosophy of pure experience leads Nishida to take a view of concept formation diametrically opposed to that to be found, for example, in the classic empiricists, according to whom concepts are arrived at by some process of abstraction based on noting common elements in numerically distinct perceptions. Concepts are not formed in this way in Nishida’s view. We form concepts in the course of action–intuition: ‘Conceiving something through action–intuition means: seeing it through formation, comprehending it through poiesis.’60 T he basic thesis of the philosophy of pure experience is that the world is a construction from such pure experience, and manifestly such construction has to 55

Ibid., p. 204. Ibid., p. 226. 57 Ibid., p. 211. 58 Ibid., p. 208. 59 Ibid., p. 191. 60 Ibid., p. 212. 56


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have some method: action–intuition is the basic formative operation by means of which this construction is carried out. In such a context as Nishida’s philosophy, cognition cannot be the writing of experience occasioned by a ready-formed external world on a largely passive mental tabula rasa, as is pictured in classical empiricism. Nor can he accept the K antian picture of a manifold of intuition behind which lurks an unknowable thing-in-itself. Cognition has to be understood as a form of dynamic, reciprocal expression.61 Nishida writes as if he regards action–intuition as predicable both of mu and of individuals. It must certainly be case that the former is true: action–intuition must be an aspect of the self-determination of the ultimate, or there would be no individuals. In other places he speaks of it as predicable of us in the here and now. In his essay The Unity of Opposites, for example, he argues that what he calls the ‘conventional’ epistemological view of ‘the act of understanding’ takes this act out of context, as if it were an isolable act of consciousness occurring on a vertical line, as it were. T he correct view, by contrast, is that ‘we, as poiesis, as the historical–productive S elf, are progressively grasping and apprehending reality through action–intuition. T he problem does not arise abstract-logically, but out of the depth of historical life.’62 If pressed on the point, he would no doubt reply that, since one and many, mu and individuals, are ultimately non-different, both modes of expression are legitimate. S ince it is predicable of mu, it must be the case that action–intuition is a state in which subject and object are not differentiated, and, equally, when used of individuals it must be a state of total absorption in whatever, in conventional terms, the content of the experience is. T he reference to the historical self and to historical life leads to a consideration of another important area in Nishida’s late thought: that of time and of what he calls ‘the historical world’. A s has been noted before, the Zen doctrine of the contradictory identity of the one and the many leads Nishida to regard the everyday world as being of the greatest interest and importance since, rightly experienced, it is nirvana. T he historical (or historical–social) world means the world of selfconscious persons with intentions, a world of constant dynamism, change and creativity, with a special temporal structure: ‘O nly in the historical–social world of true unity of opposites are past and future simultaneously in the present, contradicting themselves … past and future are thoroughly confronting one another; the formed forms even the forming, and the creative forms the creator.’63 A gain, as has been noted before, time must be non-ultimate in Nishida’s thought. T he one/mu is such that no descriptions apply to it, and so it must be atemporal just as it is non-spatial (and so forth). Insofar as anything can be said about it in NRWV, p. 56: ‘S ubject and object in expression – or again, the I-T hou relation – has this form of dynamic reciprocity.’ 62 IPN, p. 218. I agree with R obert E . Carter that it is not clear whether action–intuition in this world of individuals is supposed to characterize the mental life of us all, or just that of Zen masters. S ee Carter 1997, pp. 65–6. 63 IPN, p. 179. 61

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relation to time, Nishida uses a standard formulation from mystical works the world over, namely that its mode of being is an eternal now. T ime is an aspect of the self-determination of the one. S ince the one is fully present in each of the many, eternity is fully present in each moment thus determined. E ach moment is the paradox of samsara and nirvana: the moment, in becoming a ‘true’ moment, becomes one of the individual many, which is to say, the moment of the eternal present which is the unity of opposites … the present in time is the self-determination of the eternal now. B ut the present, as unity of opposites, is decided as something which is to be negated, and time moves on, from one present to another present.64

A s a unity in contradiction, time moves endlessly from past to future, from the formed to the forming, though this is not to be regarded as a flow, but as a succession of such moments65: time is a continuity of discontinuity, and no two points in time can be objectively connected.66 Consequently, time is not to be thought of as having an origin from which it began nor a place toward which it is progressing (the nature of things is not fully explicable in terms of either teleology or mechanism, a point Nishida makes regularly in his later writings): ‘It arises from and returns to non-being. T ime must be considered to be the self-determination of absolute nothingness.’67 T his doctrine does not entail that we, as individuals, transcend time: the eternal present is the mode of being of the dialectical universal, the contradictorily self-determining one. T he eternal now includes time, and our personal selfhood has no meaning apart from our social–historical context.68 (H owever, this is not to be construed as a K antian-style doctrine that time is an ultimate form of experience: on the contrary, consciousness – to repeat – includes time which arises from it.69) Nishida insists that the self is by nature ineludibly embedded in the historical context as he understands it. We are constantly formed by, and in turn form, this context: ‘we, as concrete human beings, are born in the social-historical world, as acting–reflecting beings. And so far as we may proceed, we cannot abandon this standpoint.’70 O nce again, it is hard to say whether this is a view which runs the danger of selfrefutation, since it is not clear whether being in this situation inevitably involves us in having an epistemologically partial perspective from which we cannot escape. 64 Ibid, pp. 165–6. Nishida sometimes links this to the concept of action–intuition: the present ‘always must be an intuition which has the meaning of seeing things through action’. FPP, p. 206. 65 FPP, pp. 117–18. 66 Ibid., pp. 31 and 34. 67 Ibid., p. 250. 68 Ibid., p. 119. 69 Ibid., p. 65. 70 IPN, p. 226.


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Nishida would not want to be committed to such a view: he manifestly intends his own thought as a true description of what there is. It will not need to be emphasized that this way of conceiving of the one/many relation and of time confirms this philosophy as fundamentally a philosophy of religion, which it manifestly was right from the start. It is appropriate to conclude this summary of Nishida’s later philosophy with his last thoughts on this subject, an area in which his deeply B uddhistic inspiration is patent. A s in the case of other Zen thinkers, religion as Nishida understands it has little to do with accepting sets of propositional beliefs such as those that play so large a part in the monotheisms of the West. R eligion for him is not a philosophical construct but an event in the soul, and it arises when individuals realize vividly and on the pulse a sense of their own mortality: ‘when I realize my own eternal death, my eternal nothingness, I become truly self-conscious. I become aware that my very existence is an absolute contradiction.’71 R ealization of my own death brings with it a sharp sense of my own uniqueness. We would not agonize over the issue of religion, Nishida claims, were religion something that transcends us. We agonize over our predicament because it is part of our very life, characterized as this is by the paradoxical, self-contradictory mode of being of the self.72 Nishida is anxious to stress that the claim that religion arises from events in the soul does not entail either that god is conceivable (the subject of possible conceptual thoughts) or that awareness of god is in some sense subjective. It has to be kept in mind constantly that Nishida’s use of the term ‘god’ tends to produce associations in the minds of western readers which are entirely inappropriate to his meaning, since his views are neither theistic nor deistic:73 the term ‘god’ in Nishida’s writings could be replaced by the term ‘absolute’ with no loss of meaning. Further, as has been stressed many times already, this absolute is fully and contradictorily present in the everyday world: indeed, even this formulation is misleading, since the everyday world is the self-negation of the absolute, the predicateless manifesting itself as individuals. T he absolute/god is also the absolute present, the historical world, and the place of absolute nothingness. It is contradictorily and simultaneously absolute being (zettai yu) and absolute nothingness (zettai mu), a point Nishida finds adequately reflected only in Nagarjuna’s doctrine of eightfold negation.74 Hence Nishida quotes with approval the words of Zen master Daitō Kokushi (also called Myōchō):

NRWV, p. 67. T he claim that we are made anxious by the contradictory nature of our existence is present from the 1934 essay The World as Dialectical Universal/Benshōhōteki ippansha to shite no sekai. 72 NRWV, p. 81. 73 Ibid., p. 76. 74 Ibid., pp. 70–71. For a fuller exposition of these points, see T remblay 1993, passim. 71


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B uddha and I, distinct through a billion kalpas of time, Yet not separate for one instant; Facing each other the whole day through, Y et not facing each other for an instant.75

T he absolute and the everyday world are contradictorily identical: hence the Zen doctrines that (a) the everyday world is the appropriate arena for religious practice; that (b) we should seek to be wholly focused on (‘mindful of’) every moment, for every moment manifests the absolute completely; and that (c) the religious life has no special content.76 S uch a relation between the individual and the absolute cannot be conceived of in terms of object logic, the logic which embodies the subject/object distinction as ultimate, and which gives primacy to the grammatical subject.77 O nly predicate logic, or, as he later calls it, absolutely dialectical logic can accommodate the notion of self-contradictory identity Nishida has in mind – he stresses, however, that what he means by the phrase ‘dialectical logic’ is not what H egel means, for in his view H egel’s thought does not ultimately escape the point of view of object logic – an issue to be returned to later. A consequence of the self-contradictory identity of the absolute with the world is that, in conventional subject/object terms, absolute evil must be a property of god, since it follows ineludibly from Nishida’s premises (and he is not alone among B uddhists in this) that the absolute is fully present in evil as in good: ‘A god who merely judges the good and the bad is not truly absolute.’78 The difficulty arises, Nishida claims, from conceiving of god in terms of object logic and abstract inference. What he terms the ‘testimony of our spirit’79 is evidence that the absolute does not look upon good and evil with indifference, but prefers affirmation. T his issue over evil is one instance of a more general feature of Nishida’s thought about religion and morality. H e insists that the moral point of view is not a stepping stone or a stage on the path to the religious life: the religious and the moral points of view are simply incommensurable (again, an idea not peculiar to Nishida). T o make religion derivative in some way from morality would in Nishida’s view make it a social matter, and would put society at the root of the soul’s existential condition.80 T his is not incompatible with Nishida’s stress on the importance of the historical world in the formation of much of what we think. T he soul’s existential condition, its self-contradictory identity with the absolute, is not thus formed – it is an ultimate datum, beyond the reach of social conditioning of any kind. T he religious point of view is rather one in which values, as these Cited in NRWV, p. 78. Ibid., p. 115. 77 E .g. ibid., pp. 107, 119 and in many other places. 78 Ibid., p. 75. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid., p. 82. 75 76


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are conceived of in moral or social thought, are simply transcended: the religious domain is one in which such values simply have no application.81 T his must be so, granted Nishida’s account of how we reach awareness of god/the absolute. A s we have seen a number of times already, Nishida accepts the view that consciousness has an unfathomable depth, of which we are normally unaware – and the term ‘unfathomable’ is chosen with care. T he more we penetrate into that depth, the more we transcend the surface ego and the closer we approach what Zen thinkers call our original face before we were born, in other words the absolute; B y looking back, deep into the roots of our own self-contradiction, we turn and reach the absolute.’82 A ll the categories of object logic fail to apply at this level of consciousness, moral categories included. R eligious conversion is for Nishida the absolute overturning of the frames of reference of the grammatical subject and predicate in terms of which the self is usually conceived. S alvation is transcending the desiring, rational self.83 It is the realization that the true nature of the soul is neither desire nor reason nor both, but the deep self of the original face. A gain, the notion of eternal life has to be construed in a particular way in such a framework of contradictory identity. Just as there is no transcendent realm in which the religious life is lived, and no special content for that life, so eternal life does not consist in some sort of translation to a timeless hereafter, be it even a nirvanic one: My position is … that eternal life is gained at the point where birth and death [samsara] and no-birth and no-death [nirvana] are realized as one … From the very first, there is, in the Buddhist phrase, ‘neither birth nor extinction’. Another such phrase has it, ‘T he eternal is here and now’.84

Nishida is emphatic that this view of religion has nothing to do with mysticism. This looks odd at first, but it has to be remembered that what Nishida is at pains to make clear is the Zen view that religiousness is not something reserved for special moments or surroundings, or for future lives or other dimensions, or for states of mind hardly ever instantiated and then only by a privileged few. T hroughout his life, he took the view that such an account of religion makes it a thing apart from life and fit only for an elite, and to take such a view is to render religion a useless irrelevance to the lives of almost everyone: such a religion would be ‘merely the idle matter of idle men’.85 When Nishida rejects the claim that his philosophy is fundamentally mystical, he is assuming an understanding of the word ‘mystical’ consonant with the view of religion as a whole which he rejects – and for two main reasons. Firstly, it follows from his premises that all human beings have a 81

Ibid. IPP, p. 235. 83 NRWV, p. 85. 84 Ibid., pp. 87–8. 85 Ibid., p. 115. 82


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religious nature (whether they are aware of it or not), because all share the human predicament of the contradictory identity of the self, and so religious experience is a potentially universal experience.86 S econdly, the world we live in is nirvana – as well as, contradictorily, the samsara – and can be experienced as such all the time: as he puts it in the Zen manner, the true Way cannot exist apart from the world, even for an instant.87 T here can be no doubt that, in an acceptable sense of the term ‘mystical’, the experience of overcoming the desiring, rational self and of surrendering entirely to the absolute is to all intents a mystical experience; but he insists that it is not in principle elitist or separate from everyday life, and that is pure Zen. Reactions to Western Philosophy in Nishida’s Later Works It is appropriate now to turn to look at the reactions to western philosophy present in Nishida’s later thought. I have not sought to detail every reference Nishida makes to every western philosopher, since such a procedure would be subject to a law of diminishing returns, not least on the grounds of repetition. My aim is to set out his principal reactions to some major figures in the western tradition, reactions which seem to me to be of striking consistency, and which raise some general questions to be taken up in the Conclusion to this essay. Plato �� It is accepted that the concept of basho was suggested to Nishida by the notion of place as it occurs in the Timaeus [48e–52c], and this furnishes an appropriate starting point for this stage of our enquiry. A t that point in the dialogue, T imaeus distinguishes two elements of the universe which need to be kept separate, the intelligible archetype and its visible copy. H e then introduces the thesis that there has to be a third item, a receptacle or matrix in which becoming occurs. T his receptacle cannot be (for example) water or fire, indeed any of the candidates selected by earlier (Presocratic) philosophers as the primary stuffs of which all things are manifestations or transformations. T he reason is that experience shows that all the candidates for being primal ultimates are constantly changing into each other: fire becomes air, which condenses into clouds, then into water, then water condenses into earth, and so on, in an endless cycle of change. A ll that remains constant amid this cycle of continuous mutability is the medium in which these changes occur. T his medium has no form or structure of its own, and for precisely this reason it makes possible the occurrence of all the varied individuals and changes which occur in it. H aving no form or structure (that is, no properties), it is not perceptible by any of the senses; and, further, it can only be thought of by means of a ‘spurious’ form of reasoning (52b). A s A . E . T aylor once put it, this odd form of reasoning is systematic negation, the denial of the 86

Ibid., p. 85. Ibid., p. 115.

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applicability to the receptacle/matrix of all definite determinations.88 Unless the matrix has no determinations, it will be unsuitable for its logical role as the locus for becoming of every kind: were it to have a nature of its own, this nature might well be incompatible with that of some type of becoming. which could not then be realized within it (50d–e). T his receptacle is chôra, place or space. It will be clear that Plato’s idea of place has a number of parallels with Nishida’s basho. In its logical aspect, a basho is a logical space which makes possible a class of judgements, but which is not itself a member of the class of judgements it makes possible: with reference to the class of judgements it makes possible, a basho is ‘no-thing’. A basho, like Plato’s place, has none of the properties of the class it facilitates. A gain, the ultimate basho, the mu no basho or place of nothingness, is beyond all determinations, like Plato’s place; and, like the latter, it makes all other determinations possible. Nishida would have felt at home with this characterization of the ultimate matrix: that which is to receive perpetually and through its whole extent the resemblances of all eternal beings [i.e. the Forms] ought to be devoid of any particular form. Wherefore, the mother and receptacle of all created and visible and in any way sensible 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 incomprehensible.89

T his is a logical point, of course, with a number of manifestations in metaphysics: that which makes a whole class of events or entities possible cannot be a member of that class – it must be nothing with regard to it in Nishida’s terms. T he cause of events in time cannot be an event in time; the cause of all particulars cannot be a particular; that which makes determinations possible cannot be a determination, and so on, or in each case there will be an infinite regress. The mu no basho is Nishida’s way of halting all these regresses. It is hard to believe that he would not have thought of such an issue before reading Plato, since one of the functions of the oriental notion of the void (which is what mu no basho is) is precisely to fulfill this logical role. He would no doubt have found welcome confirmation of his ideas in the Timaeus, and it seems to me highly likely that he decided on the term basho as a result. T he other Platonic term regularly used by Nishida in his later thought is eidos (Form or ‘Idea’). In the philosophy of the various basho, what Nishida terms ‘the Ideas’ appear as a content of consciousness at the level of the intelligible universal. T he following remarks are typical of this usage:

88

T aylor 1966, p. 456. �� Plato, Timaeus 51a–b (Jowett’s translation in Jowett 1970).

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Nishida and Western Philosophy O nce the determination of the intelligible universal is reached, the acting self intuits its own content, that is, it sees Ideas. Moreover, since the self-determination of the acting self is founded on the noetic determination of our profound inner life, this ideal content can be said to be the direct effusion of this inner life, and it is here that we possess an eternal life that transcends time. In this sense, I fully appreciate the meaning and value of Plato’s philosophy, provided we keep in mind that the acting self, as was said above, is nothing other than the noetic determination of the self that sees while being nothing itself.90

The qualification ‘in this sense’ is important, since Nishida is some way from accepting the central tenets of classical Platonism (or at least Platonism in its middle phase), that is, the belief that there exist a number of discrete, real universals which are timeless and ontologically ultimate, and exist in a dimension other than that occupied by particulars. H is ultimate is the mu no basho, which is not a Platonic Form (or ‘Idea’) in this sense, and all Nishida’s universals are expressions of it. In what sense, then, is Nishida using the term ‘Idea’? Nishida’s usage becomes clearer if one follows it through the texts in which he makes absolutely self-contradictory identity his central concept, for example: ‘creative self-determination of the dialectical universal must always have the function of seeing the Platonic Ideas, i.e. it must have the significance of that which transcends time. T ime is the self-determination of the eternal now.’91 T he dialectical universal is the mu no basho, which is timeless, and its self-negation gives rise to the temporal world, in which time and eternity are contradictorily identical. A ccordingly, the content of any ‘moment’ of its contradictory self-negation must also be timeless, being in this respect like a Platonic Form: ‘we see Ideas in the sense that the present is self-determining, i.e. we see something trans-temporal.’92 H owever, Nishida insists that what is revealed in ‘the depths of expression’ is not merely the ‘Ideas’.93 T o accept that would be to accept the Platonic view that all things can be regarded as the self-determination of a universal, that reality is a logos, and this is something that Nishida must reject. T he ‘Ideas’ in his sense are a content of the consciousness of the acting self, which is deeper than its content. T he real cannot be just a logos and classical Platonism cannot give a full account of it, since it cannot give a full account of the acting, desiring self. T he real is not just a world of intuition, something eternal: it is also, contradictorily, the social– historical world.94 T he Ideas are not ultimate, but ‘merely the noematic content

90 General Summary, Wargo 2005, p. 205; cf. p. 202, where he speaks of the noematically seen content of the acting self as ‘Ideas’ in a sense similar to that of Plato’s Forms. 91 FPP, p. 99. 92 Ibid., p. 105. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid., pp. 61 and 72–3.


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of that which is self-determining’.95 T he concrete social–historical process can be regarded as seeing the Ideas,96 as well as being at the same time dialectical. For Nishida, the Ideas are contents of a deep level of consciousness, but they are not ontological ultimates and, further, they are realized in the historical process (and so he is far from regarding us as being trapped in Plato’s cave): ‘H istory, which is a dialectical process of self-determination, may be said to be the process of transforming the content of racial life into the Platonic Ideas.’97 T he Ideas in late Nishida are more akin to ideals we seek to realize, the grand organizing principles or goals of life. Nishida’s metaphysical differences from Plato preclude him from accepting classical, middle-period Platonism; but he clearly felt that some elements of the concept of Form were useful in articulating the elements of consciousness just described. (It is interesting to compare Nishida’s use of the notion of a Platonic Form with that of S chopenhauer, set out in the T hird B ook of The World, etc. In the latter’s system, the Ideas are immediate objectifications of the Will, being related to individual things as archetypes are to copies. T he special power of the artist resides in a capacity to apprehend Ideas rather than particulars, and the Ideas are embodied in works of art. S pectators of works of art are thus enabled to contemplate the Ideas and to enjoy a brief respite from the blind strivings of the Will. S chopenhauer’s Ideas are somewhat closer to Plato’s than I take Nishida’s to be.) Aristotle It is certainly not too much to say that many ideas articulated in the works of A ristotle are constitutive of the western intellectual tradition so far. If the main oriental tradition of which B uddhism is a major component is incommensurable with the western tradition, it is to be expected that the differences can to some degree be articulated as disagreements with A ristotle, and this is precisely what one finds in Nishida. One of the values of his work for comparatists is that he identifies with precision some E ast/West differences at the most profound and basic level. Further, these differences rest ultimately on differences in intuition about what the world is like at this most fundamental level: no philosophy which has been taken seriously is a purely conceptual structure, but has its deep roots in experience, in humanity’s most profound convictions about what there is. H ere again, Nishida helps to pinpoint what these primary differences are. Nishida’s later works do not include, by and large, prolonged discussions of individual points from the works of Aristotle; but that should not disguise the fact that his philosophy of basho, and indeed the whole tetsugaku of Nishida, can be construed as an attempt to find an alternative to A ristotelianism, because A ristotelianism cannot accommodate some of the deepest intuitions of oriental thought. S ome of Nishida’s comments on A ristotelianism have already been mentioned, or are implicit in his views – notably with regard to the logic of the predicate, discussed above. It is appropriate 95

Ibid., p. 85. Ibid., p. 36. 97 Ibid., p. 87. 96


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here to sum up Nishida’s fundamental points of disagreement with A ristotle. As we have noted before, Nishida identifies these differences in beliefs about the relation of ultimate reality to form; put another way, he identifies a basic East/ West divide with regard to whether reality is ultimately structured or whether it is ultimately formless, a Void. A ristotelian logic and metaphysics rest on an intuition about what there is, namely that reality is in itself formed, sorted into individuals which fall into kinds. T he real is orderly, it is a logos, and it is in the last analysis intelligible.98 T he root of Nishida’s disagreement with A ristotle, which is an example of a consistent, enduring, major E ast/West divergence in belief, is that reality is not a logos, nor is it structured. A s has been noted before, Nishida’s reality has in it something dark and irrational, and is further (and not unrelatedly) of unfathomable depth. It is mu, nothingness in the sense in which Nishida uses that term. All of Nishida’s disagreements with Aristotle flow from this fundamental difference. For example, the A ristotelian belief that the world is in itself sorted into individuals classified by kinds leads naturally to the belief to which Nishida refers as the logic of the subject. A real thing is that which can be subject and never predicate. T his generates the problem of how individuals can be known: we manifestly do have knowledge of individuals, but how is this possible if judgements only specify attributes of individuals through the amassing of universals specified in the predicate? Again, there is a further problem about knowledge of change, in response to which A ristotle postulates unchanging substance/hypokeimenon to furnish something enduring and so knowable. It will be clear that Nishida accepts none of this. H is view of change is the Buddhist view of dependent origination, a nexus of flux and mutual determination, arising from and returning to mu, and this is what leads him to reject some of the most fundamental tenets of A ristotle’s thought. In particular, Nishida comments repeatedly that A ristotelianism cannot furnish an adequate account of the self, that is, the self as conceived in Zen as contradictorily identical with mu, whose mode of being is not that of a substance enduring changes but that of a series of momentstates – a continuity of discontinuity, as he puts it. H ence he dismisses A ristotle’s concept of entelecheia because the individual is not merely self-determining, but is determined in relation to other individuals. T here must be the continuity of discontinuity for there to be a true individual, i.e. there must be the union of mutually independent beings. We may speak of true activity only in such terms. T he world of reality is the world of the action and relation of things.99

The Aristotelian manner of defining the individual, as a determination of universals, generates a further problem. T he central property of individuals from Nishida’s point of view is that they are acting individuals, that is, they are self-determining, 98

E .g. ibid., pp. 114–15. Ibid., p. 115.

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and such an acting individual (Nishida claims) cannot be defined by adding specific differences to a universal, however many such differences there may be.100 T he same point can be made in another way: the self cannot be properly understood in terms of the A ristotelian notions of subject and predicate, where the truly real is a subject which cannot become a predicate. Nishida’s view is that the self must become its own predicate, ‘something which predicates itself by negating itself – and thus becomes self-expressive and self-conscious’.101 T he conscious self has its being as a predicate which can never be subject.102 T his has a general consequence of great importance: Nishida argues that epistemology is doomed to failure if it conceives of the relation of self and world on the model of the relation between objects. A s we have seen, for Nishida what we call perception is the mutual determination of self and world – a process of dynamic, reciprocal expression. Descartes and Leibniz It will be clear that Cartesianism is a philosophy calculated, as it were, to interest Nishida. D escartes attempts to construct all knowledge with mathematical certainty, on the basis of a datum of self-consciousness: the cogito. S ince self-conscious experience of a certain kind is at the basis of Nishida’s philosophy too, it is to be expected that Nishida would reflect on Cartesianism, and indeed he did so throughout his career. T hus in An Inquiry into the Good we find him scrutinizing the cogito. H e takes the view that the proposition Cogito ergo sum is not an expression of intuitive certainty which links reality and thinking. It does not, in his terms, record a fact of pure experience. R ather, Nishida takes the view that the cogito is an inference of existence from thought.103 L ater in his career, during the period of the elaboration of the theory of the various basho, he makes a different point concerning the cogito. It will be recalled that, in the system of the basho, Nishida describes the self-determination of the universal as a form of cognition, indeed as the deepest and most comprehensive form of cognition: Descartes can be considered to be the first to take self-conscious determination as a form of cognition in opposition to those who espoused a more metaphysical view that saw the self-conscious self as a metaphysical reality. D escartes’ cogito ergo sum is my transcendental predicate plane determining itself. B ut when D escartes took this as the fundamental form of certain knowledge, it immediately acquired a metaphysical meaning for him.104

100

Ibid. NRWV, p. 55; cf. General Summary, Wargo 2005, pp. 187–8. 102 NRWV, p. 59. 103 IG, pp. 39–40. 104 General Summary, Wargo 2005, p. 193. 101


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It will be recalled that, in this period of his development, Nishida had abandoned the idea that self-consciousness can be adequately analysed in terms of mental activities, in favour of the theory of planes or basho. In this passage Nishida calls ‘metaphysical’ the former view, which includes the idea of an enduring, substantial self. It is clear that the epistemology of Cartesianism will not fit with that of the later Nishida: the notion of an isolated consciousness receiving data from an independent physical world is remote from Nishida’s universe of mutual expression, all arising from and returning to the place of nothingness. T his point is worth dwelling on, as it becomes more prominent in Nishida’s comments on D escartes in his last phase. Cartesianism retains the A ristotelian presupposition of the reality of individuals, and reinforces it, in the model of the ghost in the machine, with an image of self-consciousness existing as an isolated substance. (T he concept of substance as something which requires nothing else in order to exist, Nishida notes, is a mediaeval survival in D escartes’s thought.105) T he Cartesian mind–soul is an individual separable entity of non-extended substance, interacting somehow, via the pituitary gland, with a body endowed with extension. T his model of the mode of existence of the self is very remote from Nishida’s conception of the social–historical self, inextricably embedded in a nexus of mutual expression/formation with the not-self. It is no surprise to find that, in a typical late comment on the cogito, Nishida criticizes it for not recognizing the true mode of being of the self, which is the acting self. In rationalistic thought, the self has always been conceived of individualistically: the ‘T hou’ is not regarded as an indispensable pre-requisite for the ‘I’, because the fundamentality of action was not appreciated (this is action in Nishida’s sense, of course: a manifestation of contradictory identity which is both formed and forming – a self-moving event which also expresses the world.) ‘I think, therefore I am’ should really be ‘I act, therefore I am’. If action is basic, then there must be a ‘T hou’, a not-self. T he ‘I’ exists in the nexus of dependent origination, not in Cartesian isolation: ‘T he self of the mere cogito ergo sum does not avoid being an abstract self.’106 With regard to L eibniz, Nishida has a good deal to say in his last phase about the concepts of a monad and of the pre-established harmony: the issue to consider is how much of L eibniz’ thought can be retained in the context of Nishida’s tetsugaku. T he investigation of the idea of a pre-established harmony will also allow the addition of some more details from Nishida’s late philosophy of religion. Nishida’s sympathy with the concept of a monad arises in the context of his late view on the mode of being of the self, characterized as it is by self-contradictory identity and being also ineludibly social–historical. In his essay The Unity of Opposites, in describing the nature of the self, Nishida asserts that the self always has in it something self-transcendent or self-negating. T he fact that the present has form, and encloses in itself both the past and the future, is a manifestation of this FPP, p. 39. FPP, p. 170; cf. pp. 91–2 and the essay The I and the You/Watakushi no nanji (= Nishida 1936). 105 106


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self-transcendence of the self. T he world thus described is self-expressive and selfforming: ‘T his is to be understood in the same sense as the individual which, as monad, mirrors the world, and is at the same time a viewpoint of perspective’.107 A s we have seen, Nishida regards the self/not-self relation as one of mutual implication. Further, the world is one in which self and not-self mutually interact and form one another: the world is creative, and moves from the formed to the forming. T here is therefore a sense in which each individual can be regarded as monadic: each self is an element in the web of dependent origination and both affects and is affected by that web, even if only to a small extent. T he question is whether this can be monadism ‘in the same sense’ as L eibnizian monadism, and the answer would seem to be plainly in the negative: Nishida’s selves are fully interactive with the world, and indeed contribute to its constant self-formation, whereas a L eibnizian monad is windowless – a non-interactive substance proceeding through the series of appetitions the specification of which is its definition or complete individual notion. A gain, elsewhere Nishida remarks that his view that in god, an infinitely expressive being, subject and object are one can be assimilated to the L eibnizian view that each monad is a mirror of god.108 L eibniz certainly does say that each monad ‘expresses the whole universe in its own way’,109 but this is not the same sense of ‘expression’ as the one employed by Nishida. In L eibniz, a expresses b if there is a constant and regular correlation between what can be said of a and what can be said of b, but this is not what Nishida intends in speaking of the world as an expression of mu. Nishida’s later remarks on monads are more cautious and qualified. In the essay The Place of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview, he notes that what he calls expression is a self-conscious act which embodies a unique perspective on the world: E xpression entails the contradictory identity, and dynamic transaction, of the conscious act (self) and the world (other). E ach conscious act is an existential monad of the world’s own self-reflection. Our self-consciousness does not take place in a merely closed-up, windowless self. It consists in the fact that the self, by transcending itself, faces and expresses the world.110

E xpression is ‘monadological in this existential sense’.111 The qualification ‘in this existential sense’, though it is not defined, appropriately distances Nishida from full-blown monadism. What he has is mind is manifestly that, in common with monads, selves as he conceives them are points of view which (in his sense) reflect IPN, pp. 182–3. Nishida 1970c, p. 23. 109 L eibniz 1988, IX, p. 47. 110 NRWV, pp. 52–3. 111 Ibid., pp. 51–2. 107 108


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the world; but they are not monads in Leibniz’ metaphysical sense, as he explicitly acknowledges in these later remarks. S imilar questions arise over his use of the notion of pre-established harmony in another late essay, Towards a Philosophy of Religion with the Concept of PreEstablished Harmony as Guide (1944). H e introduces the phrase ‘pre-established harmony’ in his sense in the context of a discussion of god. God in Nishida is referred to in a number of ways: the place of nothingness; the self-identity of absolute contradictions, and also the absolute present – nothingness is such that, while all things arise from it, no predicates apply to it, and this includes temporal predicates. T he nearest one can approximate to a characterization of it is to call it an ‘absolute present’, even if the description (as mystics regularly note) is not satisfactory. H e goes on: In the world of the absolute present, each event negates the past and the future, and determines itself as a unique event, on the one hand, but is an event which vanishes forever, on the other. T his is the world of creation, and at the same time the world of coming into being and passing away. T he notion of the preestablished harmony must be, not some supposition as in L eibniz, but the logical principle of the structure of the historical world.112

S ome light is shed on what this last assertion means a little later on, where he states that the world is the self-determination of absolute nothingness. T he absolute present contains everything that will arise in the eons of the future, and this he calls pre-established harmony.113 A gain, he asserts that the logic of basho takes the principle of sufficient reason as its fundamental principle, and the principles of inference within that logic follow that law, and not the law of identity. T he logic of basho can also be called the logic of the compossibles: everything that happens is in the structure of a pre-established harmony, and subject to the principle of sufficient reason.114 It seems to me that, as in the case of monadism, Nishida is further from L eibniz than his way of writing might seem to indicate. L eibniz’ universe is one of a genuine pluralism, the creating monad (god) being fully transcendent of the many other monads. T he many are harmonious in that the sequences of all their appetitions are compossible and designed to be so by god. Nishida’s one (mu) does not transcend the many which arise from its self-negation but is fully and contradictorily present in each of them. Further, notions of divine benevolence which lie behind the L eibnizian doctrine of the pre-established harmony do not apply to nothingness: as Nishida is at pains to stress, there is something dark and irrational at the heart of his universe. Whatever arises from nothingness at any moment in time must be compossible because it happens; but Nishida’s time 112

Nishida 1970c, p. 23. Ibid., p. 26. 114 Ibid., p. 31. 113


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is a continuity of discontinuity, and it is hard to see how anything like the preharmonized sequences of appetitions of the L eibnizian world can pertain to the world of expressions of the eternal now. Nishida claims another similarity with L eibniz in respect of his concept of expression. T he mutual relation between independent entities, Nishida claims, can be neither mechanical nor teleological: instead, such entities express one another. In this usage, ‘express’ can be understood only as a connection between mutually contradictory entities. It is a relation which must be conceived of in terms of activity and passivity: a being which expresses another is active. T he being which most clearly expresses the world is the most active, and this claim Nishida assimilates to the L eibnizian assertion that bodies are individuated not by extension but by substantial forms.115 In L eibniz, the context of this assertion is that each individual is an infima species, that is, an entity uniquely determined by the concept or definition given for it. Each individual is an infima species in this sense if every individual is different in some respect, such that no two individuals are exactly alike. In L eibniz, the individual nature of a substance is taken to be equivalent to a substantial form, and in humans it is identical with the soul. In turn, Nishida takes this state of things to be equivalent to the one reflected in his assertion that a being with form is an acting being. O nce again, there is some distance between these points of view: L eibniz’s views are designed to provide a principle of identity for continuously existing entities which do not interact, while the expressions of which Nishida speaks are fully interactive and at the same time discontinuous in an important sense. In one respect, there is a genuine similarity between L eibniz and Nishida, since both share the doctrine of the non-ultimacy of space and time, yet the reasons for which they accept this view are predictably different. In the case of L eibniz, this is because the ultimacy of space and time would give rise to problems which would be insoluble by the principle of sufficient reason. If time were ultimate, why did god create things when he did, and neither sooner nor later? If space were an independent entity, what reason could be given for the fact that god orders the spatial positions of things exactly as he does?116 In the present context, Nishida derives space and time as follows: That infinite individuals are expressed in the one in the form of self-negation is the form of time. It is the form of the moving world, the perpetually perishing world. In another respect, that the one expresses an infinite many in itself in the form of self-negation is the form of space. It is the form of the world which preserves itself, the eternal world.117

115

L eibniz 1988, XII . L eibniz 1956, pp. 75–6 (=‘Fifth letter to Clarke’ sections 55–6). 117 Nishida 1970c, p. 26. 116


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In Nishida’s case, space and time are non-ultimate because mu is neither spatial nor temporal, and space and time, in common with everything else, must arise from it. H owever, this does not make them well-founded phenomena in the L eibnizian sense, but rather real, if non-ultimate. While claiming some similarities with L eibniz in this essay, Nishida is at pains to distance himself from the former’s concept of god. L eibniz had not escaped from A ristotelian logic, the logic of the subject of predication, and so the relation between the totality of individuals was not truly conceived as a self-identity of contradictions. T he one was always fundamental. In Christian terms, god is the absolute subject. A ccordingly, the world could not help being the best of all possible worlds, being the creation of a god who lacked no perfection. H owever, in Nishida’s view such a god is not the absolute god; he is perfect only relative to the imperfect, and good only relative to evil. L eibniz’s god is the highest substance possible within the realm of subjects of predication.118 B y contrast, Nishida asserts: ‘T he true God is not the usual idea of God but rather die Gottheit such as is spoken of by the mystics of the West. The true God is the “Emptiness” of the Prajñāpāramitā-sutra.’119 T he truly absolute god (Nishida claims) both embraces and transcends us; but this cannot be stated in Aristotelian logic of the subject of predication, and is not pantheistic. Whether this last claim is true depends on precisely how the term ‘pantheism’ is defined: if, by definition, the notion of the absolutely contradictory identity between one and many is excluded, then indeed Nishida’s view is not pantheistic. T he root of the attraction of L eibnizianism for Nishida lies in L eibniz’s claim that a world which is the self-determination of the absolute present/nothingness ‘is one in which in its foundation each individual self reflects the world of the absolute present and at the same time is a self-determination of the world of the absolute present’.120 S ince mu is fully and contradictorily present in each individual, there is a sense in which each individual can be said to ‘reflect the world of the absolute present’ – indeed this must be the case; but this is not the way in which a Leibnizian monad reflects all other monads, nor the way in which created monads are related to the supreme, divine monad. A gain, L eibniz’s god is not Nishida’s, as the latter is careful to point out. T he whole context of L eibnizian monadism, designed to solve metaphysical problems originating in the concept of substance as it was used in seventeenth-century E urope, is absent from and has no bearing on Nishida’s thought. All he can really take from Leibniz is the notion of reflection of the whole by individuals. T here is this limited similarity between monadism and the vision of the world embedded in the theory of dependent origination. Kant Nishida was well versed in K antian thought, and refers with some regularity to points raised by the philosophy of the three Critiques. From what has been 118

Ibid., pp. 33–4. Ibid., p. 35. 120 Ibid., p. 45. 119


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said so far, however, it will come as no surprise that he could not accept many Kantian doctrines. He disagreed with Kant on three absolutely basic issues: firstly, rationalism; secondly, the question whether the ontological ultimate is an object of possible experience; and, thirdly, what can be called the completeness of the philosophy. K ant can give no account of the origin of the manifold, which must remain just a datum in his system, while the philosophy of mu no basho is designed to overcome any such restrictions. Much of what Nishida has to say about K ant is a working out of these disagreements and of their consequences. It is convenient to consider Nishida’s remarks according as they relate to the content of the three Critiques in the order in which the latter were written, taking his philosophy of religion together with K ant’s ethics in the second Critique. D uring his period of the analysis of the various basho, Nishida, unsurprisingly, forms his estimate of other philosophies on the basis of his estimate of the depth of their analysis of consciousness. Within this framework, the critical philosophy (Nishida claims) takes the standpoint of the theoretical intelligible self and, accordingly, cannot go beyond such truth as forms the content of the formal self. Ultimately, the philosophy of the first Critique is restricted to being an epistemology. K ant’s understanding of consciousness did not allow him to conceive of the levels of the intellectual feeling self or of the intellectual willing self, and so he could not (Nishida claims) provide a principle of the determination of the content of the beautiful or the good. Nishida’s intelligible world lies outside the realm of experience which is possible in the critical philosophy, and involves doing the sort of metaphysics which K ant abjures. K ant sticks at the level of the formal intelligible self and does not go beyond it.121 This claim of insufficient depth in the Kantian analysis of the self recurs in Nishida’s works with slightly different emphases. T he critical philosophy operates within the domain of the natural world: reality as K ant conceives it is, at root, the world as described by empirical science. A s we have seen repeatedly, Nishida regards this conception of the world as fairly superficial, in the sense that it is a highly formed abstraction, remote from pure experience. Nishida’s world is that of the identity of self-contradictories, and in this world predicative determination has almost no meaning. T his is in marked contrast to K antianism, in which the predicate includes the subject formally. K ant’s subjectivity of cognition is the subjectivity of the synthetic unity of cognition and does not involve a conception of the subject as self-determining in Nishida’s sense. T he thing-in-itself exists outside the K antian subject, and that subject is only determined predicatively or categorically. K ant does not have the concept of an absolutely self-negating self, and so K antianism cannot adequately describe the actual reality of mutually determining individuals: ‘T he predicative determination which truly includes and determines the subject itself must possess absolute negation within itself.’122 K antianism includes a version of the subject/object distinction, since it includes the thing-in-itself as IPN, pp. 122–3. FPP, p. 33.

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object, and so the K antian subject cannot be self-determining in Nishida’s sense. K ant had no need for the concept of a self-negating self, and this is precisely where Nishida finds the critical philosophy wanting. A true account of the self has to be dialectical, though not in the manner of Fichte or H egel.123 In K ant, cognition involves the imposition of form on a given, the structuring of the manifold according to the forms of intuition and the categories of the understanding. T his Nishida equates with the view that science begins from the ‘negation’ of common sense. S uch a process, a move away from sensuous intuition through the application of logical categories, is not, in Nishida’s view, the path to truth. What he calls objective cognition ‘presupposes that the beginning and end of the cognitive process are always one experience … truth always returns to its point of departure’.124 H e claims that his own doctrine of action–intuition embodies this truth. It will be clear from the discussion of action–intuition earlier in this chapter that Nishida cannot accept the K antian model of cognition. Granted his metaphysics based on mu, Nishida can regard cognition as formative of reality in a way in which, in the K antian scheme, it is not. In the latter, while cognition involves the imposition of a form on a given manifold, nothing can be said about the source of the manifold, and so nothing can be concluded on the question of whether the cognizing subject is affecting the world or vice versa. Nishida’s ultimate is not hidden but can be experienced, and so he can intelligibly make this claim, which is a consequence of his disagreement with K ant over whether the ontological ultimate is hidden or not. Nishida thinks that, in the final analysis, he can subsume Kantianism within his own ‘logic of the human–historical world’.125 T o do this, however, requires that, as in the case of L eibniz, some K antian doctrines are reconstrued in a decidedly Nishidan manner. For example, the K antian doctrine that space and time are forms of intuition Nishida reconstrues as follows: that the phenomenal world is spatial manifests the negation of the many by the one (on the assumption that there is only one space and that all spatial things exist within this one space). E qually, that the phenomenal world is temporal reflects the negation of the one by the many, since time presupposes that there are events, and hence some sort of division in what there is. This, Nishida claims, reflects in turn the self-contradictory nature of acts of consciousness. A s we have seen, Nishida regards these acts of consciousness as embodying perspectives on what there is. Nishida assimilates such perspectives to K ant’s schemata and, like K ant, regards schematization as an activity of the imagination. (In the area of practical reason, Nishida construes the schemata as laws which appear as self-determinations of the predicate.) A gain, Nishida equates the K antian Ding-an-sich to his own notion of the self-transforming matrix of the historical world.126 123

Ibid., pp. 93–4. NRWV, p. 114. 125 Ibid., p. 61. 126 Ibid. 124


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T hese interpretations are manifestly at some distance from their originals in the critical philosophy. In K ant, the doctrine of schematization is needed to bridge a gap that would otherwise be fatal to his analysis of experience. T he pure categories of the understanding are entirely heterogeneous from the manifold of appearances and can never be discovered in any intuition (in K ant’s sense of that term). If they are to be applicable to appearances at all, some way must be found of determining their applicability, and the schemata are designed to fill this role. A schema is a rule for the production of images which so delimits a category as to permit its application to the manifold. (A s always in K ant, the object has to conform to the schema, not the other way round.) T hese schemata are transcendental, specifying a priori conditions under which the categories can be applied to a manifold. T his is the same as determining the temporal conditions under which a category can be applied to appearances, since time is the only feature common to all appearances whatsoever. I confess I can see little in common between K ant’s notion of a schema as an a priori rule for categorial application and Nishida’s quasi-L eibnizian notion of a perspective. A schema in K ant’s sense does not express a perspective on the world: at best, it might be said partially to determine one, since the schemata determine which categories will be applied to the manifold. T he same remoteness from K ant is equally true in the case of Nishida’s interpretation of the thing-initself. T o repeat, in the critical philosophy the thing-in-itself is in principle beyond the range of all possible experience, which is not the case with the contradictorily identical historical world. T urning to the philosophy of the second Critique, Nishida finds more to reject than to adopt, and the grounds for disagreement lie at the deepest level, in differing analyses of consciousness and of the self and in differing conceptions of the limits of rationalism. For example, Nishida regards each act of consciousness as being somehow like a point on the divine sphere of Nicholas of Cusa – a centre radiating to infinity (I assume this would be due to its place in the infinite web of dependent origination). K ant’s theory of the categorical imperative presupposes this basic existential fact, but it cannot be made intelligible within ‘the merely immanentistic terms of Kant’s own definitions of transcendental subjectivity’.127 Nicholas of Cusa’s sphere has no centre; it is one of the symbols Nishida uses repeatedly for the self-transforming matrix of the eternal present, of which he has experience by acquaintance. Kant is confined to the realm of appearances, and so cannot in principle know whether or not infinite radiation (in this sense) occurs. Again, Nishida finds too abstract Kant’s definition of the autonomy of the self as the capacity to follow the moral law for its own sake. Conceived of in such terms, Nishida argues, the self is merely the self-determination of an abstract universal, ‘the self of no person and yet the self of any person’.128 A self which follows the maxim of doing duty for its own sake has no reality, no unique individuality of its own, and is merely an abstract being. T he K antian account of moral thinking 127

Ibid., p. 54. Ibid., p. 71.

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is an abstraction from the reality of what it is like to make a concrete decision, an experience in which the self ‘negates’ itself. Moreover, the concrete, historical self is not merely rational in the transcendental sense: ‘It exists by being able not to follow the moral law for its own sake.’129 Nishida makes the unusually dismissive claim that the K antian ethics of practical reason is ‘only a bourgeois ethics’.130 H e writes this in the context of a discussion on the importance of compassion in eastern moral thought. Compassion signifies that ‘opposites are one in the dynamic reciprocity of their own contradictory identity’. 131 Nishida claims, following his friend D . T . S uzuki, that compassion is foundational in eastern ethics. H e does not say what he means by the term ‘bourgeois’ in this connection, but I doubt that he is using it in the Marxist sense. T he concept of compassion is centrally important not only in Nishida’s ethics but also in his account of religion, and I believe it is more likely that he has in mind what he regards as one of the most severe of the limitations of K ant’s rationalism, namely his account of religion. K ant’s account of religion is explicitly and deliberately kept within the bounds of reason alone. In the Critique of Practical Reason he conceives of the belief in god and in the immortality of the soul as postulates of pure practical reason. In effect, K ant makes religion a means to the good, to morality, whereas in Nishida’s philosophy the religious point of view entirely transcends moral distinctions. K ant’s faith is purely a matter of reason, and for him the religious domain is not autonomous, not distinct from morality. It will be expected from the remarks above outlining Nishida’s account of religion that he does not share any of the major K antian positions in this area. Nishida includes trans-rational states in his account of religion – indeed they are central to it – and so he has to regard all rationalisms (even one as sophisticated as that of K ant) as generating incomplete accounts of religious consciousness. From his point of view, everything that is deepest in the religious area of existence is omitted by K ant. H ence Nishida comments on K ant’s account of religion in general: ‘I cannot find in Kant any autonomy given to the religious consciousness itself.’132 A philosophy which tries to make religion a matter of blosse Vernunft or mere reason has missed the point that religion arises as an event at the deepest level of consciousness, when the very existence of the self becomes problematic. T he self at this level cannot be fully analysed in terms of the object logic which underlies all K antian thought. It is perhaps what he has to regard as the relative shallowness of the K antian account of religion and morality that lies behind Nishida’s unusual use of the term ‘bourgeois’ noted above. 129

Ibid., p. 72. Ibid., p. 107. Nishida also rejects the K antian stress on the role of motive in determining the moral value of an action. For Nishida, only our actual practice has moral value. S ee AM, p. 104 and Wilkinson in B raembussche et al. (eds) 2009, pp. 79–81. 131 NRWV, p. 107. 132 Ibid., p. 49. 130


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In the course of his discussion of K ant’s view of religious consciousness, Nishida also expresses reservations about the latter’s account of aesthetic consciousness in the first part of the Critique of Judgement, and it is appropriate here to say something of his reaction to K ant’s aesthetics.133 Much of what Nishida has to say about K antian aesthetics occurs in works from the second phase of his thought, to which I will refer in what follows. As with the first two Critiques, Nishida’s reservations on the third are a consequence of differences in his account of consciousness from that of K ant. Western accounts of aesthetic consciousness/ experience tend to conceptualize it (if not invariably) as contemplative or (as in K ant) disinterested, a form of awareness in which what is perceived is not referred to the set of practical demands of the surface self, with the consequence that we are said to be either less self-aware or not self-aware when we are in an aesthetic state. S uch aesthetic awareness is richer than ordinary perception, and non-possessive: since perception is not filtered through a small set of needs of the ego, we notice much more of what is out there to be perceived than is the case in ordinary, practical perception. Common to many of these accounts is the presupposition that the aesthetic form of consciousness is something special, non-standard, standing apart from our ordinary mode of experience. Nishida disagrees with these basic assertions. In the first place, he denies that aesthetic experience can meaningfully be said to be (in his sense) less self-aware than standard consciousness. O n the contrary, we attain to an even deeper self-consciousness in aesthetic intuition than we do in mere conceptual self-consciousness. It is an error to think that aesthetic intuition is unselfconscious or nonconscious in a sense similar to perceptive consciousness. In aesthetic intuition we transcend the plane of conceptual selfconsciousness, include it internally, and truly attain to consciousness of the free self. Just as the content of consciousness in aesthetic expression arises as the content of this free self, it attains to a unique individuality.134

A esthetic intuition/experience occurs at the level of the free self/pure experience, and, from the standpoint of the free self, there is no special aesthetic form of consciousness: Pure feeling, pure consciousness, is always aesthetic. It is not that the content of feeling is beautiful as mere sensory content. When there is immediate synthesis in the personal horizon – the horizon of absolute will, as pure act in which colors distinguish themselves, that is, in the intentionality of pure visual perception – colors suddenly come to life; they become living colors in themselves – that is, aesthetic objects. When we become eye and ear with our entire being, feeling

133

Ibid., p. 48. AM, p. 112.

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passes over into things and is naturally accompanied by the flow of aesthetic emotion as expression.135

It is important to be clear about what Nishida means by the term ‘feeling’ in the passage just quoted. B y this term he does not intend to indicate one type of mental content among many discrete emotions which can be readily introspected in standard consciousness and are discussed by psychologists. ‘I think that feeling is not just one aspect of mental phenomena; rather, I hold that it is the fundamental condition for the establishment of consciousness.’136 Nishida denies that beauty can be assimilated to ordinary properties of objects in the world. B eauty does not qualify a thing in the same sense that red or blue does, it ‘is not an existential quality of things, for aesthetic feeling is a subjective state aroused by things.’137 T he suppressed premise here is that beauty is always an object of feeling (in his sense) and so in a particular way requires consciousness before it can some into being. H owever, his premises allow him to agree with the K antian view that this dependence on consciousness does not entail that beauty is radically subjective. Indeed, granted his sense of the term ‘feeling’, he must argue that the experience of beauty includes a demand for universality of a particular kind: I think the very fact that we say that feeling is a kind of consciousness already implies that it is a transindividual, transtemporal and transspatial intentionality in its own right … E very phenomenon of consciousness that immanently includes its object must be regarded as including a requirement of universal validity. T his requirement of universal validity, which transcends space and time, is a sine qua non for the establishment of consciousness. T he factual existence of such a requirement presupposes the existence of a transindividual consciousness.138

Pure consciousness is always aesthetic, and so the beauty which is its object or content must be universal, since pure consciousness is trans-individual. A lthough he agrees with K ant on this point, he denies the K antian view that there is a valid distinction to be made between purely formal beauty and beauty which depends on content: In my view, there is no beauty without content; in the beautiful, there must be internal life that can be expressed, and the expression of pure internal life is always felt as the beautiful. If we understand the essence of formal beauty in K antian terms, it cannot be said to be mere formal beauty, as K ant himself 135

Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 14. S ee also Nishida’s essay Affective Feeling, in Nitta and T atematsu 1978, pp. 223–47, which is a translation of Kanjō from Ishiki no mondai/The Problem of Consciousness (originally published in 1920). 137 AM, p. 5. 138 Ibid., pp. 8–9. 136


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thought, but, rather, must express the content of our pure rational life. Must we not see a spiritual act of the power of understanding as the expression of the content of the act itself, which reflects from the standpoint of the act underlying all acts? Formal beauty must be a kind of beauty having content in such a sense. Various kinds of contents of life derive from our various intentional acts, and various kinds of aesthetic beauty similarly derive from these acts.139

Nishida is relying here on the elements of Fichte’s thought which he accepted during the second phase of his thought, notably the concept of the A ct/Tathandlung as a way of conceptualizing the condition of pure experience. T he latter must in some sense be a will, and the nature of a will is to act. T hus, what some might regard as purely abstract forms (architectural arabesques, for example) Nishida construes as manifestations or expressions of acts. T here is a suppressed premise to the effect that whatever is a manifestation of will must have a content – no will acts randomly. A ll acts are therefore expressive, and so all acts have a content. T his comment on K antian aesthetics is an instance of a more general disagreement with K ant, who assumes that an absolute distinction between form and content is possible in other areas of thought. T hus, to repeat, K ant claims that empirical knowledge is constituted by the structuring of content (the manifold) by a priori forms (the forms of intuition and the categories). T his presupposes that formal knowledge is autonomously established, while empirical knowledge arises in conformity with it; that logic and mathematics, for example, are autonomous structures which dictate laws which natural science must follow. Nishida disagrees with the assumption that so absolute a form/content distinction reflects the true state of affairs. A s we have seen in our discussion of IRSC, he is at pains to derive even the most basic of logical and mathematical concepts and laws from his ultimate, and this leads him to criticize K antianism from his standpoint: B ut has the form of empirical knowledge then no intrinsic relation to its content? Can form ever be more than merely one abstract facet of concrete experience? Can there ever be a formal judgment which lacks all content? E ven logical knowledge is derived from the nature of objects of thought in general, and mathematical judgment presupposes mathematical objects. Judgment, then, is not constituted by form, but should rather be seen as a development of the content of experience, and as constituted by this content.140

In the philosophy of pure experience, no distinctions are ultimate, and this extends to that between form and content. In general, then, Nishida’s immense admiration for K ant does not lead him to accept many of the earlier philosopher’s views, since he disagrees with him, as has been indicated, at a very deep level. It is of interest in the present context to 139

�� Ibid., p.185; cf Kant 1951, pp. �� 54–73. IRSC, p. 44.

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speculate what K ant would have made of a philosophy derived from Zen. O ne can gain some idea from his reaction to the D aoism to which Zen owes more than a little. In his 1794 essay Das Ende aller Dinge (The End of All Things) he writes scathingly of a system of thought he judged would lead only to quietism, and so to a lack of interest in the sublime demands of duty as they are made manifest by the categorical imperative: O ut of this misbehavior the monster system of L aotse arises, teaching that the highest good consists in nothingness, i.e. in the feeling of being swallowed up in the abyss of the godhead … only in order to enable man to enjoy eternal calm and thus reach the blessed end of all things. T his nothingness, truly conceived, is a concept which annihilates all understanding and in which thought itself arrives at its end.141

K ant’s rationalism was unshakeable, and he could see no value in any system which includes trans-rational states. Hegel H egel’s thought is referred to by Nishida throughout his philosophical development, and it is not difficult to see why this is so. Nishida found in him a philosopher to whom the notions of contradiction and negation were central, and this was to be of great assistance in trying to formulate Zen insights within a philosophical framework, as will be clear from the foregoing outline of Nishida’s thought. S elf-contradictory identity and the generation of individuals and change as a result of negation are cornerstones of Nishida’s final philosophy. Again, the idealist programme is to a degree similar to that in which Nishida was engaged; both involve an attempt to derive the world from experience, however that term is being construed in each case. Y et it would be a serious mistake to regard Nishida as a H egelian in a deep sense, for two principal reasons. Firstly, despite the similarity of their philosophical enterprise, Nishida would not have considered himself an idealist. H e regarded idealism as a partial account of reality, generating as many intractable philosophical problems as materialism. Granted his relentless stress on the analysis of consciousness, it is quite possible to lose sight of this point, and he does often use turns of phrase that would be equally at home in the writings of an idealist philosopher, no doubt because whatever can be known of nothingness has to be known via some sort of conscious awareness. Y et it has always to be borne in mind that his nothingness is neither mental nor material but prior to and the source of both. Nothingness is non-dual or formless. A ccordingly, Nishida’s nothingness is quite different from H egel’s Geist. S econdly, Nishida’s use of the term ‘dialectic’ and its cognates can also mislead: his insistence that reality can only be accurately conceived in dialectical terms should not cause us to forget the fact that his dialectics is not H egelian, since it includes no synthesis whatsoever of the elements of the contradiction, the one and the many. T he one is fully and �� K ant, Das Ende aller Dinge, quoted in K roner 1956, pp. 15–16.

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contradictorily present in each of the many, and there is no synthesis involved. Neither is there any suggestion of progress in the unfolding of reality, in the way in which that idea can be applied to H egelianism. T he course of history in Nishida’s analysis manifests change, each stage of which must be a direct manifestation of nothingness, but this change is not a progress. It is certainly not the case that history is a progress towards the formation of the state. Ultimately, Nishida considered that H egel operated within the framework of object logic, and this precluded the latter from arriving at a conceptualization of the real which Nishida could have accepted. Nishida’s comments on individual points in H egelianism have to be considered within this framework. In the first and second phases of Nishida’s development, dealt with in Chapters 2 and 3 above, references to H egel’s thought tend to be citations from H egel of similar or identical ideas which Nishida manifestly regards as useful corroborations of his own thought from a powerful authority. For example, in the discussion of thought in An Enquiry into The Good, Part I, Chapter 2, Nishida claims that the concepts of thought and of pure experience derive from different views of what is in fact a single phenomenon. If one accepts the H egelian assertion that the essence of thinking is not abstract but concrete, then thinking and pure experience are nearly identical. From this point of view, the universality of a concept is not what it is often taken to be, namely an abstraction from experiences of a similar nature. R ather, it is the unifying force of concrete facts. A s H egel claims, the universal is the soul of the concrete, a point Nishida cites more than once.142 T he H egelian view that individuality has developed from universality (and not vice versa) would have been manifestly congenial to Nishida, who attempts to derive all there is from pure experience. A gain, Nishida welcomed the H egelian view that god did not create the world at the beginning of time, but rather is its eternal creator. T he relation between god and the world becomes the relation between consciousness and its content. T he same pattern of corroborative citation is evident in the many references to H egel in Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness, of which the following are typical examples. In the first place, we saw in the discussion of Kant in this chapter that Nishida rejects the assumption that there is a sustainable, absolute distinction between form and content. In Nishida’s view, it is meaningless to speak of merely formal truths: judgement is constituted by content, and content is its foundation. T his content is not the isolated subject or predicate, but the unity which conjoins the two or, better, the unity which exists prior to their distinction. H egel was right, Nishida concludes, to regard the absolute relation of form and content as one in which they are mutually transformed into each other. A content is not understood by some external operation, but as a result of its own self-deployment. It is no mere content, but a kind of ‘ought’ or value possessing the power to constitute judgement.143 IG, p. 17; cf. e.g. Hegel 1969, p. 129. IRSC, pp. 44–5; Hegel, 1991, pp. 201–3 (Enzyclopädie, para. 133).

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A related point occurs in Nishida’s attempt in IRSC to derive the basic notions of logic and mathematics from pure experience. B oth logic and mathematics are in his view areas in which thought creates its own content – areas in which that which is already included in the concept is posited.144 T his raises the question of how precisely logical and mathematical truths each arise and what the difference between them might be. Nishida argues that when self-consciousness (in his IRSC sense of the term) has determined only itself, it is in a state which can be termed self-relatedness. Judgements reflecting this condition are logical and purely qualitative. H owever, self-consciousness contains its own impulse or motive to development. In H egelian terms, self-consciousness is the unity of relation with itself and relation with another.145 It is this relation with another that makes possible the move from logic to mathematics, allowing the qualitative ‘something’ to become the quantitative ‘one’, the concrete object which exhibits both self-relatedness and relatedness to others. T he quantitative ‘one’ is a H egelian being-for-itself. E lementary mathematical objects are thus manifestations of selfconsciousness, Nishida concludes.146 This pattern of thought in Hegel, finding an original unity behind an apparent distinction, was of great use to Nishida in IRSC, a main concern of which was to derive all the elements of experience from self-consciousness. Nishida refers to it also in his discussion of the distinction he wants to collapse most of all: that between subject and object, knower and known. In K antianism, the unifying activity of consciousness and the content thus unified are assumed to be ultimately distinct, and, as we have seen, this is not a position Nishida could accept. What is really occurring, Nishida claims, is the A ct whereby the content of consciousness develops itself. T he true subject is just such an A ct or dynamic development. T his true subject encompasses both knower and known in a dynamic unity. T his can be put in H egelian terms: the contrast between subject and object is that between the universal concept as simple unity, distinguished from its determinations on the one hand, and from judgement, which is the concept’s state of differentiation, on the other; but their true reality is found in their unity, the syllogism, the essential ground of whatever is true. T he subject/object opposition is only a moment of this concrete reality, the activity in which the subject/object opposition is submerged.147 T he reference to reality being conceivable as a syllogism occurs more than once. It will be recalled that Nishida regarded his notion of a self-conscious system as an improvement on the philosophy of B ergson, much as he admired the latter. B ergson’s concept of la durée Nishida took to be much the same as that of the self-conscious system in which act equals fact. Bergson’s idea of the flux of time (le temps qui s’écoule) is self-consciousness in Nishida’s sense, and can be said to be syllogistic. Just as space and time are regarded by Nishida as constructions 144

�� H egel, ibid, para. 88 in H egel, 1991, pp. 141–5. Hegel, ibid, paras. 424–39; in Hegel, 1971, pp. 165–78. 146 IRSC, p. 106. 147 Ibid, pp. 70–71; Hegel Enzyclopädie, para. 181 in H egel 1991, pp. 256–7. 145


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from self-consciousness, so there is neither space nor time at the vanguard of the élan vital. T here is an A ct more fundamental than space and time which is the development of reason itself. A ll reality, as H egel says, is syllogistic. T he major premise expresses the universal law which is the material world in space, while the minor premise expressing fact is the world of consciousness or actuality.148 T he tone of Nishida’s remarks about H egel in the period of the philosophy of basho and thereafter is rather different from his earlier overall acceptance of whatever H egelian point is being cited. O nce Nishida had worked out the point of view which was to become final in his thought, it became more common for him to point out where H egelianism is unsatisfactory as an account of reality, i.e. where it diverges from his own philosophy. D uring the period of the elaboration of the various basho, Nishida locates many western philosophies according to his estimate of the depth of their analysis of consciousness, which is equivalent to saying which level of basho they can accommodate. It will be recalled from the discussion of K ant above that in this regard K antianism is judged to have reached the standpoint of the theoretical intelligible self. Fichte is said to have reached the standpoint of the practical intelligible self, and S chelling (starting from artistic intuition) takes the standpoint of the feeling intelligible self. T urning to H egel, Nishida comments: it must be said that his philosophy merely deepened the theoretical standpoint through and through, and therefore never reached beyond the noematic determination of the intelligible Universal. E verything is based on noematic transcendence, and the principle of determination of the noesis was not made clear. Fichte and Schelling too thought of will and intuition merely as acts; the willing one and the seeing one do not enter their perspective.149

T o understand the intelligible world, it is necessary to analyse its noetic determination and its relation to our consciousness. T he intelligible noesis is another way in which Nishida refers to our true self, and he regards all three of the major German idealists as not having grasped this level of consciousness or its formative, noetic activity properly. T hey penetrate as far as the noema, the formed, but not to the forming noesis (the willing, seeing oneness). T he same objection to the depth of H egel’s analysis of self-consciousness underlies a reservation Nishida has about the former’s theory of judgement. H egel thought of judgement as the self-determination of a universal, and his logic is a systematic working out of that idea. Y et H egel’s logic does not fully explain what Nishida calls the universal which envelops and determines the individual: it does not clarify the relation between self-consciousness and the universal/basho which forms the basis of discursive knowledge. It follows that no satisfactory foundation can be given to the transition from the object to that which is conscious. H egel’s IRSC, pp. 111–12; cf. also p. 128. IPN, pp. 122–3.

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logic remains ultimately a logic of the grammatical subject, an object logic. Now experiential content, which is based on self-consciousness, cannot be wholly objective, and accordingly object logic cannot wholly explicate the structure of self-conscious experience, because there is that within it which cannot be made object: Instead of trying to explain self-consciousness in terms of object logic, I take the form of self-consciousness to be the basic logical form, i.e. I argue that it is precisely because we are self-conscious that we are able to think logically.150

T urning to the phase in which his thought is dominated by the notion of absolutely self-contradictory identity, Nishida came to have serious reservations about the H egelian conception of dialectics. H e objects that it is not a dialectics of true, absolute negation. When the universal truly negates itself, it becomes a world of individuals. If it merely determines itself as a process (such as that of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, for example), it is still not truly absolute negation. H egel was the originator of dialectical logic, but it remains in his case a logic of subject and noema, a derivation from Greek philosophy. In true dialectical logic, the individual is the universal and the subject is the predicate, and this is derivable from the thesis of the self-identity of contradictories. Within Nishida’s thought, it follows that dialectical logic is a logic of practice: it arises in the domain of the acting self, considered as a social–historical reality.151 A similar point arises in Nishida’s discussion of the nature of the absolute and of whether it can be called a self-identity. O ne conception of self-identity is that all predicates are included in the subject, but this analysis yields only simple change, not the sort of dialectical change Nishida needs to make his system work. Nor can self-identity be located in the predicate, where the subject is conceived of as the self-determination of the predicate: this is the form of thought underlying idealism. In Fichte’s case, both ego and non-ego exist in the self-identity of the A bsolute E go, and this again does not yield a dialectical view of reality: ‘E ven the dialectic of H egel, which is supposed to have destroyed subjectivism, still cannot avoid being a self-identity of the predicate.’152 T rue self-identity must be a unity of mutual contradictories, a many-in-one and a one-in-many. Whatever accommodates mutual contradictories is not an object but an activity. Again, Nishida came to find the Hegelian notion of a universal unsatisfactory, because in his view it cannot subsume an individual. T he H egelian universal remains abstract, and the reason for this is that – to repeat – H egel does not have an adequate concept of self-identity. S elf-identity does not mean that a thing is itself: true self-identity includes contradictions. It is difference qua sameness. S elf-contradictory identity entails that the relation of the self to the self includes General Summary, in Wargo 2005, p. 188. FPP, pp. 93–7 and 167. 152 Ibid., p. 22. 150

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the relation of the self to the other or not-self. Now H egel conceived of the unity of sameness and difference as the fundamental ground. H e conceived of it as unity and present reality,153 and the Concept is at the foundation of such a thing. H owever, if true self-identity is absolutely contradictory, the Concept cannot be at its foundation; for the Concept is only an individual or unit. It remains a determined universal, not a truly self-determining universal. If that is so, no unique individual is possible, for individuals are made possible (as we have seen) only by mutual determination. Individuals in Nishida’s view are made possible only by the mutual negation or contradiction of individuals.154 H egel’s dialectics is an idealistic dialectics which sees self-identity in the direction of the predicate. It might seem that Nishida should call his own philosophy idealistic, since it also places the self-identity of contradictories in the direction of the predicate. Nishida’s reply to this point is that, in his thought, the self never appears on the side of the subject. It appears neither as object nor as infinite activity, but it subsumes them both: ‘T he self becomes the self-identity of the predicate only when it includes its own opposite within itself.’155 T rue objectivity includes subjectivity, and vice versa. T o see self-identity in the direction of the predicate reduces consciousness to a mere reflection, and the logical conclusion of such a line of thought is to reduce consciousness to a state of mere not-being. Granted the above, it is to be expected that Nishida found that H egelian logic could not accommodate what he took to be the true relation of the divine reality (god, as he generally says) to the world. God’s mode of being is absolutely paradoxical, as god is both immanent and transcendent at the same time. T o construe this as pantheism is to remain within the framework of object logic, of which even H egel’s logic remains an example. Nor is Nishida’s position to be regarded as a species of pantheistic mysticism, which is once again a view founded on object logic. T he logic of contradictory identity is a negative theology grounded in an entirely different categorial framework. T his framework is best illustrated by Nagarjuna’s logic of eightfold negation, which excludes every possibility of predication, and is certainly not a dialectics in which substance becomes subject in the H egelian manner. O nly the Perfection of Wisdom schools, Nishida concludes, have properly grasped this paradoxical view of god.

Conclusion T his is an appropriate point at which to close this chapter – with Nishida, at the end of a lifetime’s study of western philosophy, concluding that only an eastern tradition has grasped fully what he wants to say in respect of religion and distancing himself in important respects from H egel, one of the most constant western presences in H egel Enzyclopädie, para. 121 in H egel 1991, pp. 188–92. FPP, pp. 25–6; cf also pp. 133, 167 and 189. 155 Ibid., p. 33; cf. p. 127. 153 154

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his writings. The content of the final tetsugaku of Nishida is thoroughly Japanese: he could find no model in the western tradition which could fully articulate what he wanted to say. It remains true that, throughout this last phase in the development of his thought, Nishida retains as his goal the construction of a philosophy in the western sense: his conception of the nature of the philosophical enterprise remains western, as it had been throughout his career. T here is a marked change, however, in the role played by individual western philosophies. In his later years, Nishida finally reached a conceptual formulation of Zen experience which satisfied him, and this formulation, as has been shown, differs from western thought at the deepest level. Nishida was well aware of this, and his later comments on western philosophers are generally an accurate statement of his differences from them. H e writes as a thinker with a worked-out position of his own, distancing himself from the ideas of many of the most important western philosophers, from Plato and A ristotle to those of his own day. T hat he should have reached such a position is itself of great philosophical interest, and will be considered in the summary and general conclusion to this essay.

S ummary and Conclusions A s I have noted before, Nishida was a born philosopher. From his schoolboy publications to his zeppitsu, it is clear that we are in the company of a man fascinated by conceptual frameworks at the highest level of abstraction, and gripped by a desire to defend his beliefs by the standard means used by philosophers. In one respect his works show a similarity to those of S chelling: they make it manifest that the development of his ideas and arguments is to all intents continuous. E ven within the major phases of his development, Nishida constantly reworks the details of his position, and in his case this is largely the result of his own acute self-criticism. Most of the changes in his thought are the result of his own dissatisfaction with his earlier work: he was not one to rest content with any formulation of a philosophical position if he came to find it open to objection in some way, or if the reading of some new source suggested to him a new avenue of argument or conceptualization. T his continuous development, however, takes place within a framework which manifests two constant features. The first is the Zen conception of the world which Nishida seeks to articulate; the second is the western philosophical manner in which he seeks to articulate it. It is beyond question that the fons et origo of Nishida’s view of experience was furnished to him by Zen, and that this was a centre which held throughout his life. H is experience convinced him that all individuals and all aspects of the world in which they have their being arise from and return to an ultimate reality which is formless: nothingness or mu. Logic; mathematics; space; time; relations; the daily world – all alike arise from the formless and manifest or express it, and indeed express it fully, since mu is fully and contradictorily present in everything discriminable. We enter nirvana when we experience this: nirvana is the daily world properly and fully experienced: the samsara and nirvana are one and the same. T his insight determines the logical pattern of Nishida’s thought and sets his philosophical agenda. He must try to find a way of conceptualizing the formless and of deriving from it everything there is. T his logical pattern remains constant throughout his development: the philosophy of pure experience; the Fichtean analysis which succeeded it; the complex structure of the various basho and of predicate logic; and the philosophy of absolutely contradictory identity are all attempts to execute this programme. T hat this was the nature of his programme explains his conviction, expressed in a letter to T anabe H ajime, that ‘[g]enuine philosophy does not emerge out of reflective consciousness (ishiki) but out of totally letting go of one’s ego’. �� L etter 2372, 30.11.1914 in NKZ 19, p. 521; cited in Yusa 2002, p. 158.

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Just as invariant as his insight and his programme is the western model of philosophizing which it follows. A s we have seen, Nishida insists repeatedly that his thought is not mystical. E ven if one can debate certain aspects of this claim – it rests on the contestable assumption that mysticism is other-worldly and, to a degree, elitist – one can appreciate his reasons for making it. O ne of them was that he wanted his thought to stand up as philosophy as he found it exemplified in the western tradition: a systematic conceptual inquiry, based on first principles designed to be indubitable and built up in a framework of various types of argument and analysis. (I take this also to be one of the reasons why he rarely refers to oriental texts in his writings, especially in the earlier phases of his development: such references become more frequent only when he has decided that, in effect, no western philosophy will quite do what he needs it to do.) T he full canon of deductive, inductive and transcendental arguments, together with the unveiling of presuppositions and conceptual analysis, is deployed by him at various points. In this important and basic respect the influence of western thought on Nishida was deep and abiding. By contrast to the fixedness of these two features of his thought, Nishida’s reactions to individual western philosophies develop markedly as the years pass, not only in respect of those who influence him but also in respect of the role they play in the evolution of his thought: in the first and second phases of his development he conducts a dialogue with the West, in the serious hope that there may be a way of adopting a western model to his purpose of articulating Zen. T his changes from the period of the philosophy of the various basho onwards: thereafter, Nishida writes as a philosopher who has worked out his own position and is aware that it cannot be stated in terms of western philosophy (as distinct from western mysticism), and his references to western philosophies become quite often statements of deep divergence which help to make clear the unwestern nature of what he has to say. In general, the comments he makes on western philosophers change in the direction of independence as his development proceeds. Granted Nishida’s philosophical agenda, it is not difficult to see why he should have found the neutral monism of James and the B ergsonian philosophy of duration appealing. In each case, they are philosophies with a logical pattern of a kind which is recognizably similar to the one he had to construct, deriving the everyday world as they do from an ultimate form of consciousness held to be the source of all differentiations. Y et Nishida was far too acute not to appreciate, right from the start, that these philosophies did not articulate quite what he wanted to say. In the former case, as is noted in Chapter 2 above, there is no evidence that James, for example, held pure experience to be richer than the everyday experience we derive from it, nor that he held it desirable to return to it: indeed James would regard such an experience as psychologically abnormal. Quite absent from James is the religious impulse which lies behind Nishida’s thought throughout his career. Moreover, James’s pure experience is not the same as the oriental mu. While his pure experience precedes the subject/object distinction, it is not wholly undifferentiated. With regard to la durée, Nishida concluded that, while

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there was much he could accept from this philosophy, B ergson had not penetrated to the ultimate depths of consciousness. B ergson’s doctrine of the unrepeatability of duration must presuppose that there is something that transcends duration; for such a doctrine is inconceivable except on a presupposition of this kind. S uch transcendence can only be ascribed, in Nishida’s view, to an even deeper level of unified consciousness. Nishida regards Bergson, as he was to regard a number of other western thinkers, as not having got quite to the heart of the matter with regard to the ordinarily hidden depths of consciousness. German philosophy, especially in the works of the three major idealists, was very well received in Japan during Nishida’s career: in it, the Japanese felt they were in the presence of a style of thinking which manifested an intuition of the depth and mystery they themselves felt to be present in consciousness, a depth absent from the positivist and utilitarian philosophies they had also encountered in their discovery of the West. Unsurprisingly, then, comments on the great tradition of German thought are to be found throughout Nishida’s works. (In addition, Nishida was fluent in German, at one point early in his career being employed to teach it.) With regard to the philosophy of K ant, it becomes progressively clearer over the course of Nishida’s career that he disagrees with some of the deepest of its presuppositions and assertions – especially in epistemology and ethics and, to a lesser degree, in aesthetics. A t the root of K antianism there is a dichotomy between being and thought which is ultimate. E xperience is the imposition of form onto a manifold about whose origin nothing can properly be said. S uch a philosophy includes an ultimate which is beyond all possible experience. It leaves an unknowable at the heart of things, in that the source of the manifold cannot be accounted for. Nishida regarded such a philosophy as incomplete. It excluded from consideration what was to him the most foundational and unquestionable experience: that of direct acquaintance with the infinite, contradictorily present in the finite. Hence his final conclusion that the philosophy of the first Critique remains only an epistemology; it is not the complete account of what there is which he sought. O n its own principles, K antianism has to exclude the metaphysics Nishida was attempting to formulate. In the area of ethics and of the philosophy of religion, Nishida’s views are remote from those of a thinker who, as a consequence of a rigorous commitment to rationalism, restricted religion to such beliefs as are demonstrable within the bounds of reason alone. (It is worth recalling the basic point that K ant was not preoccupied with religion in the way the German idealists were, a point to be returned to presently. K ant, of course, approached philosophy from the point of view of someone who wanted to work out what made science possible, whereas for Nishida the world of science is an abstraction from a richer, deeper truth.) For Nishida, religion was not merely a matter of reason, and certainly not a matter of reasonable belief used as a means to buttress ethical ideals. Nishida’s religion derives from experiences which lie deep in a soul troubled about its situation in the ever-shifting web of dependent origination; disturbed by its mortality and

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the emptiness of all things (as that phrase is used in the Mahayana). Moreover, in Nishida’s thought, the ethical point of view is transcended in the religious experience – a trans-rational state whose validity K ant would have repudiated. A s Nishida puts it, he could find in Kant no account of the autonomy of the religious consciousness; and, in Nishida’s sense of this phrase, he is exactly right. Even in the domain of ethics, Nishida came to find the Kantian advocacy of duty for duty’s sake an incomplete account of moral experience, because it presupposes too abstract a conception of the self. It is manifest from IRSC (not to mention other works) that Nishida spent a great deal of time and effort studying the works of the neo-K antians, and it would be unhistorical to expect otherwise, since they were a major presence in German philosophy at the time. Much of IRSC is given over to a detailed dialogue between Nishida and these thinkers, though I would argue that their philosophies were not such as to be a great deal of use to him in the pursuit of his overarching goal – the conceptual articulation of a Zen-based philosophy. In neo-K antianism the thought/ being dichotomy reappears as the assertion that meaning precedes being, where meaning is the product of the imposition of the mind’s structure on the manifold. In the philosophy of pure experience no distinctions are ultimate, since all must arise from pure experience itself, and, as was seen in Chapter 3 above, Nishida spends quite some time arguing against the ultimacy of various distinctions advocated or assumed in neo-K antian thought. Meaning or value was for him constitutive of consciousness, not in any way distinct from it. Nishida disagreed with neoK antianism at bedrock level, as he did with K antianism itself. Of the major German idealist thinkers, Fichte and Hegel were, each, significant influences on Nishida, and of the two Hegel’s was the more abiding presence. T here were a number of reasons for the sympathy which Nishida, in common with other Japanese, felt for these two philosophers. It has already been noted that they both assumed that consciousness has a depth not generally manifest in quotidian experience. Further, it is not insignificant that both Fichte and Hegel (and indeed Schelling, who figures less in Nishida’s thought) began their intellectual lives as students of theology. T here can be no doubt that the main impetus to idealism in the case of Fichte was the need to make the K antian critical philosophy consistent by eliminating the thing-in-itself, which thereby made inevitable the conversion of the K antian transcendental ego into an absolute E go. H owever, when he adopted this view, Fichte did so with a theologian’s preoccupations, notably with regard to the relation of the infinite to the finite. This theme runs through his work, as it does also through that of H egel (it was not for nothing that Nietzsche regarded all three of the great idealists, S chelling included, as theologians in disguise). A gain, all the idealists shared the assumption that reason could be used to characterize the absolute, legitimating the very undertaking of the construction of an idealist philosophy. Further, the absolute idealists were committed to a philosophical programme of a kind similar in important ways to that of Nishida, most obviously in the derivation of the many from an ultimate which is unified. In all these general respects, Nishida had a considerable affinity with these thinkers. The main impulse


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behind his view of the world was religious, and his central philosophical problem was that of devising a characterization of the way in which the infinite and the finite are related; his search concluded with the characterization of absolutely contradictory identity. A gain, he had to accept that reason could be used in this endeavour or he would not have set out to do western-style philosophizing at all, but this is not to be taken as implying that he was a thoroughgoing rationalist in all respects (which, as has been seen, he was not). For a time, it seemed to Nishida that Fichte’s ideas could be of real assistance to him in executing his philosophical programme, both in general and in some matters of detail. H aving converted the K antian transcendental ego into an absolute, Fichte had to deduce (in the Kantian sense) the world of experience from a unified consciousness. T his consciousness is pure activity and can be called will as well as ego: like Nishida’s pure experience, it is dynamic and constantly unfolding. T he world is constituted as a result of the A ct, which, qua imagination, posits the world of individuals. T his A ct of positing is transcendental: it is a condition for experience but can never be experienced. S uch creation is atemporal, since the will is prior to time: for Fichte, who assimilates causal relations to those of logic, the world stands to reality as consequent stands to antecedent. B oth in general respects and in some particular respects – for instance the derivation of the laws of logic from the ontological ultimate – Nishida drew a certain degree of inspiration from Fichte; yet his commitment to this form of idealism could not last, as he came to recognize. E ven in the IRSC period, he was aware that his own use of the term ‘A ct’, designating not only a possible experience but in fact our most immediate and concrete experience, was distant from that of Fichte, and he came to regard the latter’s conception of the A ct as only a partial description of ultimate reality. He came finally to believe that Fichte’s thought does not escape from object logic, which cannot accommodate the notion of the absolutely contradictory identity of the self. H egel is a constant presence throughout Nishida’s development. E ven though he does not generally use the terms in their H egelian senses, Nishida found the concepts of the concrete universal, negation, contradiction and dialectics very useful to him in his attempt to articulate Zen and, as in the case of Fichte, the idealist programme in philosophy bore many points of resemblance with his own. Y et, as has been argued in Chapter 4, Nishida could never be a thoroughgoing H egelian. H e did not consider his own philosophy to be idealist, and he regarded H egel as still being in the grip of object logic. A gain, his idea of dialectics is not that of H egel, since the Nishidan version includes no synthesis whatever of the contradictory elements in the dialectics. It follows from Nishida’s premises that, in consequence, H egel cannot have a proper concept of self-identity, that is, of absolutely contradictory identity. A lso, Nishida could not accept the H egelian concepts of a universal or the H egelian account of judgement. Nor could H egel, in his view, give a correct account of the absolutely paradoxical idea of the mode of being of god.

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I have left the consideration of Plato and A ristotle until last in this summary because Nishida’s reaction to their philosophies leads us to some of the deepest issues raised by his encounter with the thought of the West: hence this forms an appropriate conclusion to the present essay. We have seen that Nishida adopted the term basho in response to reading the Timaeus; more revealing are his reactions to the central Platonic doctrine of Forms (or ‘Ideas’). H e places the Ideas as a content of consciousness at the level of the intelligible universal, one of the deepest basho. H e could not, however, accept Platonism as a complete philosophical account of reality, fundamentally because Platonism (despite the special place occupied by the Form of the Good) retains determination at the level of the Forms. T he realm of Forms is a realm which exhibits plurality: that is, it is formed and not formless. A s Nishida put it, Plato conceives of reality as a logos, and this he could not accept. T he real world, in Nishida’s view, is not just eternal: it is also, contradictorily, the historical world. As so often in Nishida, Plato is classified as a thinker who penetrated quite a long way into he depths of reality, but (in common with Fichte, H egel and B ergson) not quite deep enough. T he assumption that reality is formed is also present, of course, in the philosophy of A ristotle, in this case as the thesis that the real consists of individuals existing in kinds, and it is Aristotle who for the first time explicitly formulated the predicate logic which Nishida came to abjure: for A ristotle, a real thing is something which can be subject and never predicate. A s we have seen, this generates what Nishida regarded as a wrong concept of self-identity, together with deep problems over the knowledge of individuals and the relation of the self to the world, conceived as a relation between objects. A ristotle’s reality is intelligible: it is not dark, irrational, self-negating and self-contradictory. It contains enduring substances, not a web of dependent origination, a continuity of discontinuity. Insofar as A ristotelian assumptions are constitutive of the western tradition, Nishida has finally to reject that tradition – and all the philosophies that instantiate it – as a means of articulating his world-view. Nishida was perfectly aware of all this, and it is of interest to consider his reflections on the situation, which have implications concerning the possibility of his entire enterprise, that of finding a philosophical articulation of a Zen worldview in terms derived from western philosophy. T here is a concentrated statement of his reflections in one of the essays collected in Fundamental Problems of Philosophy: The Forms of Culture of the Classical Periods of East and West Seen from a Metaphysical Perspective. In this essay he locates the most significant, foundational difference between the culture of the classical periods of western and Japanese history precisely in respect of their beliefs concerning reality: the Greeks took being to be the ground of the real; the Japanese took nothingness or mu (and in so doing, in Nishida’s view, adhered precisely to the true spirit and intent of the Mahayana). Greek culture is predominantly A pollonian. Plato’s Forms are not just concepts, but formative principles of the actual world. T he O ne of Parmenides is not non-being, but ultimate being, and the flux of Heraclitus is logos. E ven the Unbounded of A naximander has the meaning of a self-contained circle – it is


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formed. T he thought of Plotinus, however mystical it may appear, does no more in Nishida’s view that develop Platonism to its ultimate point. A bsent from Greek culture is the idea of reality as an absolute infinity, something which absolutely transcends actuality. T he position is quite different with regard to several of the major belief systems of the E ast. T he religion of India takes a profound idea of nothingness as its basis. T he god of B rahmanic religion both transcends and includes all creation, being at the same time universally immanent, and the D ao in L aozi and Zhuangzi is manifestly non-being. O ne can see the culmination of this position, Nishida argues, in Mahayana B uddhism, epitomized in the assertion: phenomenal being, precisely as it is, is emptiness; emptiness, precisely as it is, is phenomenal being’. Japanese culture, Nishida contends, is specifically based on the notion of mu. In the essay currently under consideration he was inclined to associate this assertion closely with the claim that Japanese culture is not a culture of nous, or intellectual in the Greek sense, but a culture of feeling (joteki bunka. T his is not feeling in the sense of something personal: indeed, granted the rationality of human nature, Nishida was inclined to regard feelings as impersonal. T he important notion of mono no aware designates a prime example of a feeling in the sense he has in mind in this context.) Five years later, in 1938, concerned at the rise of antiintellectualist and emotionalist nationalism in Japan, he changed his position somewhat, characterizing the distinctiveness of the Japanese as what he terms concrete intelligence – a determination to get to the facts. H e then characterized the main difference between occidental and oriental culture in terms of direction: occidental culture moves from environment to subject, while oriental culture moves from subject to environment. In Japan, this tendency is manifested in the desire to empty the self and become immersed in things, as in the Zen state of mushin or ‘no –mind’, or as in the Pure L and notion of the effortless acceptance of the grace of A mida, jinen-hōni. T his change, however, does not affect Nishida’s basic claim that the cultures most characteristic of the E ast rest on a conception of reality as being formless, while those most characteristic of the west regard reality as formed. I believe that Nishida was correct in identifying this metaphysical assertion as one which pinpoints one of the deepest of all differences between E ast and West FPP, pp. 237–8. �� Ibid., p. 240. �� Ibid., p. 248. Mono no aware is one of the key terms of classical Japanese aesthetics, and defies lexical translation into western languages, since it gains its meaning from the context of B uddhist belief and ways of feeling. It is a species of pathos engendered by the ephemerality of all things. �� Nishida, ‘T he Problem of Japanese Culture’, in T sunoda, D e B ary and K eene (eds) 1958, pp. 859, 869–70. T here is also a collection of Nishida’s writings in this area in French: see Nishida 1991. �� Ibid., pp. 869–70.


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throughout almost all of their historical development so far, and one of the many valuable aspects of Nishida’s thought is that he brings this matter into very sharp focus. It is a difference which has manifestations throughout the entirety of the cultures concerned, and not just in technical philosophy. T his is not surprising: it is quite wrong to assume that beliefs as abstract as this one have no practical implications. A bstractions of this kind are constitutive of our respective senses of identity and readily shape institutions at the deepest level. For example, closely related to the thesis that reality is formless is the B uddhist notion of nirvana, the attainment of which, by all sentient beings, is the final goal of all Buddhist endeavour. Nirvana (like its close logical analogues, moksha in H induism, and the state of being a sage or sheng in D aoism) is the condition in which anything the West would call being an individual ceases. A s in H induism and D aoism, the goal of life for the B uddhists is to bring themselves (and all sentient beings) into harmony or accord with the ultimate, and if the ultimate is formless (non-individual) then so must be the state of being in accord with it. T hus in these traditions the state of being an individual is neither irrevocable nor, ultimately, a condition to be desired, but rather a condition to be overcome. T he contrast with most western belief systems could hardly be more patent or striking. In exoteric Christianity, for example, individuality is held to obtain, in some sense, in the afterlife, despite the philosophical difficulties over individuation to which this gives rise, and god is held in some sense to be an individual. T he depth of the belief in the reality (and indeed value) of individuals in western culture can hardly be overstated, and the same holds for the depth of the contrary belief – that in the reality and value of the formless in the eastern traditions just mentioned. It is a mistake, of course, to regard either E ast or West as monolithic on these matters, and the reality of history is (as always) fantastically rich, complex and untidy: but that there are general tendencies of the kind discussed here is hardly disputable. D ifferences as deep as these raise a number of interesting considerations. For example, it is a serious question to what extent cultures which differ at so profound a level can meaningfully be synthesized or blended. It is not obvious that the serious pursuit of nirvana or of its analogues aiming at the dissolution of individual selfhood, a pursuit which has shaped many of the institutions of eastern societies, is compatible either in theory or in practice with western individualism as we see it all around us in the West. T o take a fashionable example, it is certainly not the case that the practice of meditation on its own counts as such a blending in any serious sense. A s Zen teachers know, meditation practised outside the context of a programme affecting all areas of life and aimed at self-dissolution, is liable to be used just as a sort of tranquillizer or rest-cure, as a means of temporary relief for the self, with the final goal not of dissolving it but of revitalizing it for the next phase in the battle of life (the battle between egos). From the philosophical point of view, perhaps the most interesting issue is that of how to choose between belief systems which differ at as basic a level as has

�� S ee Wilkinson 2003.


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been described at various points in this essay. T he form/formless question (I would argue) is a genuine case of – in K irkegaard’s phrase – either/or. Manifestly, the systems of thought based on each alternative have proved capable of supporting viable forms of life (in the Wittgensteinian sense), and each has formed complex cultures in which human beings have flourished. The practical viability of both systems is therefore not open to doubt. O n the philosophical level, the grounds left for choice are logical coherence and, ultimately, coherence with our bedrock experiences and intuitions about the way things are; and I would argue that in the present case these two considerations are not independent. Many western-trained thinkers cannot accept the thesis that reality satisfies contradictory descriptions (in Nishida’s sense of ‘contradiction’) at the same time, in other words they do not believe that what Nishida calls self-contradictory identity is possible, because nothing self-contradictory is possible. B y contrast, to those who have achieved satori, the accuracy of the idea is self-evident, and indeed evident with an experiential authority (like other mystical insights), which is simply beyond dispute for those who have had the experience in question. T hese experiences are of a depth such as to inform whole lives. None of the above is to be construed as an argument for the view that Zen or logically analogous doctrines are in some way irrational or include irrational elements in a way that western systems do not. R ationality consists in large part in working out rigorously the consequences of one’s foundational beliefs, the beliefs in turn being dependent on equally foundational experience. S uch a working out of consequences is precisely what has been done in the major eastern philosophical traditions, with great thoroughness and acumen. O nce some understanding has been attained of what non-dualism means in experiential and philosophical terms, a large number of theories and practices within eastern societies fall into place as carefully and thoroughly worked-out means for arriving at the desired goal, be it nirvana, moksha, or analogous states. R ationality manifests itself in the same way both in the E ast and in the West. T he chief difference (if one may simplify so complex a matter) lies in the centrality given to non-dual or mystical experience in the E ast by comparison to its relative non-centrality in the West. T he fact that Nishida’s philosophy rests on experiences of the kind described is not in itself a problem. From the philosophical point of view there is a greater problem in the fact that he does not try to argue that the insights which he tries to conceptualize are veridical. H e does not try to provide any purely epistemological grounds for his unquestioning acceptance that these experiences do reveal the way things are. H e provides many references to thinkers who agree with him, among them many western mystics like Pseudo-D ionysius, E ckhart, or B oehme. H e says more than once that he cannot convince anyone who does not have the religious experience of being troubled by the soul’s existential predicament, an experience which he regarded as being of self-evident authority; but the fact that this experience was authoritative for him does not entail that it is indubitable in a

�� O n this issue, see Peerenboom 1991.

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sense which is philosophically satisfactory. H is unquestioned acceptance that the subject/object distinction is non-ultimate is one of the most important of those derived from these unquestioned, basic experiences. A further issue arising with Nishida’s philosophy in general is whether he has separated it from idealism as definitely as he claims to have done. Nishida never wavers from his claim that a true philosophical account of reality will be the same as a true philosophical account of experience, of consciousness: the voyage to reality is a voyage inwards. B y taking pure experience or self-consciousness (jikaku) as his ultimate category, he generates for himself a philosophical programme in many ways indistinguishable from that of absolute idealism. H e would no doubt insist that mu is prior to the mind/matter distinction. H e might further claim that it is only linguistic necessity, only the dualism built into language that makes him speak of the self-consciousness of absolute nothingness. If he cannot speak of mu as if it were like the mental in some way, then it would not be like anything and it would disappear into total ineffability. Perhaps all his mentalistic assertions have to be construed as indicating merely that the nature of the ultimate is such that it can be gestured at only in mentalistic language. Y et this would assimilate his thought in this respect to the mysticism he explicitly sought to avoid, and he would join the long list of those, both eastern and western, who have filled libraries with works which try to communicate experiences said to be in the last analysis ineffable. Nishida cannot allow that what he wants to communicate is ineffable, or his entire programme would become in principle impossible. S uch considerations do not invalidate Nishida’s thought as an account of experience, but they pose serious problems for an account which claims to be philosophical but not idealist. What, then, is the special value of Nishida’s thought? It does not reside in the underlying Zen insights, which have a long and by no means exclusively Japanese pedigree. T hey do indeed constitute a very important element in Japanese culture, but not the only one of such importance: it will not do to try to make Nishida the articulator of ‘the Japanese mind’ or of ‘Japanese philosophy’ – supposing some monolithic formulation could be devised for so complex and ramified a phenomenon. Nishida’s significance seems to me to be more particular but nevertheless of great importance. Significant philosophers tend to be so because they have worked out some major position in thought with great penetration and thoroughness. Though it may seem paradoxical, Nishida’s significance is that he demonstrated a conceptual incommensurability of central importance at a level of great philosophical depth, and he was the first to do it in philosophical language. He clarifies with great force a basic point at which Zen and any system embodying A ristotelian assumptions differ and cannot be blended, and which is perfectly encapsulated in the notion of absolutely contradictory identity. It is this realization that directs his reactions to western philosophies, which he seems to me to analyse with great penetration and consistency from his own point of view. H e pinpoints a location at which cultural synthesis must come to an end, and we just have to make a choice, and this choice depends in the final analysis on experience. Certainly, to dismiss Nishida’s thought because he contends that reality has a contradictory


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nature will not do at all. T hose who claim that this cannot possibly be true would do well to recall that this assertion is a record of an experience had by many, and foundational of Zen. It would be wiser for those who have not had this experience at the very least to suspend judgement, rather than claim that reality must conform to a different set of concepts. I would argue further that the incommensurability demonstrated with such sharpness by Nishida is closely related to the more general décalage described above between those central oriental systems of thought aiming at nirvana or one of its close analogues and those western philosophies which rest on the A ristotelian belief in the final reality of individuals. In this case, cultural synthesis has a limit in theory as well as in practice, and we have to make a choice. If the considerations advanced in this book are correct, then Nishida did not find a set of concepts derived from western philosophies which could articulate Zen experience. It became clear to him, from the time of the formulation of the theory of the various basho, that he would need to forge his own categorical framework, and he did so, clarifying the deepest differences between the traditions in question in the process. Manifestly, such an achievement is a significant addition to human philosophical understanding.


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Index

‘A is A ’ Fichte on 95–7 Nishida’s proposition 97 ‘a priori’, Nishida’s use of term 68 A be Masao 11, 13, 17, 27 absolutely self-contradictory identity 117–26, 148, 151, 160 ‘A ct’ (Tathandlung) 66, 77, 84, 97–8, 143 action-intuition meaning 120 Nishida on 120–21, 138 see also artistic intuition; intuition advaitin 52 aesthetics, Nishida/K ant disagreement 141–3 anatta 15 A naximander, T he Unbounded 156–7 animitta 11 apperception Nishida on 82 transcendental unity of 10, 11, 21, 28, 29, 40, 61, 72, 107, 109, 115 A ristotle 1, 11 entelecheia 53, 130 Nishida’s disagreements with 129–31, 156 reality 130, 156 artistic intuition, Nishida on 112–13 atman 52 avidya 16, 20, 22 B aden school, neo-K antianism 64 B ankei 24, 25, 27 on peripheral perception 23 B asho Matsuo, haikus 19 basho (place) 101 of absolute nothingness 110–16 of being 105–8 limitations 106 subsumptive universal 105

and the colour system 105–6 inspired by Plato’s Timaeus 126–7, 156 nature of 104 of relative nothingness 108–9 the active 109–10 the formal 109 the static 109 and self-consciousness 103–4 types 104 see also mu no basho beauty Nishida/K ant disagreement 142–3 Nishida on 55, 112–13, 142 being-time see uji belief systems 158–9 B ergson, H enri 67, 72 duration (la durée) 87–8, 89, 90, 146, 152–3 élan vital doctrine 88, 90 intellect doctrine 88 on intuition 88 Nishida agreement with 86–9 disagreement with 89–92 on time 73–4 B ird, Graham 34 bodhisattva 25 B oehme, Jakob 58, 159 B radley, F.H ., Appearance and Reality 32–3 B rahman 52 B uddha-mind see busshin B uddhism doctrines 2 K egon 22 Mahayana 10, 11, 157 busshin (B uddha-mind) 12, 22, 23, 25 causation, Nagarjuna on 14–15 chokkan see intuition the cogito (D escartes), Nishida on 131–2

170


cognition K antian 138 Nishida on 138 colour system, and basho 105–6 compassion, Nishida/K ant disagreement 140 consciousness 33 acts of 138 Nishida/K ant disagreement 139 origins 80 and pure experience 48 as self-consciousness 102 unity of Nishida on 39–40, 66–7, 118 and religion 56 see also self-consciousness contradiction Nishida’s use 117–19 and ultimate reality 50, 51 Copleston, Frederick C. 64 creativity 91 culture Greek/Japanese, comparison 156–7 Japanese, Nishida on 157 D aitô K okushi 123–4 D aoism 31, 53, 54, 59, 158 K ant on 144 death, and Zen 27, 91 D escartes, R ené the cogito 131–2 first Meditation 20 dharma 10 dhvani 26 dialectic, Nishida/H egel disagreement 144–5, 148, 155 Diamond Sutra 10, 12 dichotomies 29 neo-K antianism 92, 94, 154 D ionysius the A reopagite 60 D ogen Shôbôgenzô 16, 18 on time 17, 18 dukkha 15 duration (la durée) B ergson 87–8, 89, 90, 146 Nishida’s objection to 89, 90, 152–3 and space 91

E ckhart T olle 159 E go, Fichtean 96–7, 98 élan vital doctrine, B ergson 88, 90 E merson, R alph Waldo, on time 19 emptiness see mu energetism 53–4 enlightenment 22–3 Nansen on 24 entelecheia, A ristotelian 53, 130 epistemology, Zen 20–22 E riugena 89 evil, problem of, Nishida on 54–5, 124 experience modes of 28 in neo-K antianism 72 see also pure experience expression (hyôgen) and monadism 133–4 and mu 119 Nishida/L eibniz, comparison of views 135 Fazang, Return to the Source Consciousness 22 feeling, Nishida on 141–2 Fichte, I.H . 46–7, 66, 83, 94–8 on ‘A is A ’ 95–7 the ‘A ct’ (Tathandlung) 66, 77, 84, 97–8, 143 see also the will on the E go 96–7, 98 on goal of philosophy 94 on the imagination 95 influence on Nishida 94–9, 155 on the self 94–5 The Science of Knowledge 95 formlessness, connotations 11 Forms (Ideas) doctrine (Plato) 11, 27 influence on Nishida 127–9 fusho 22 geometry, Nishida on 41, 48, 70–71 God Nishida/L eibniz, comparison of views 136 Nishida on 56–8 references to 134 the good, and pure experience 53–6

Index haikus, B asho Matsuo 19 hansei see reflection harmony, pre-established, Nishida on 134 H egel, G.W.F. 39, 47, 63, 144–9 dialectic, Nishida, disagreement 144–5, 148, 155 Geist concept 144 Nishida, disagreement with 147–8 self-consciousness 146 self-identity 148–9, 155 on universals 106–7, 145, 148 H eraclitus, logos 156 H induism 158 history, science, differences 65 H ume, D avid 32, 34 H usserl, E dmund 72 hyôgen see expression Ich Denke, K antian 109, 115 ichinen 9 Ideas see Forms identity contradictory 49, 91, 159 principle of 95–6 imagination Fichte on 95 and the will 43 intellect doctrine, B ergson 88 intuition (chokkan) 21, 47, 62 B ergson on 88 meaning 62–3 and pure experience 46–9 and religious awakening 49 space and time as 138 and thought 115 see also action-intuition James, William 51 Essays in Radical Empiricism 33, 38 on pure experience 31, 33–7, 58, 59, 152 on relations 34 on the self 34 Japan, culture, Nishida on 157 jikaku 72, 75 meaning 61–2 see also self-consciousness Joshu 24

171

judgement K antian view 77 Nishida on 76–7, 93 R ickert’s theory of 93 kaku 62 K ant, Immanuel aesthetics 141 cognition 138 on D aoism 144 Ding-an-sich 138 Ich Denke 109, 115 on judgement 77 Nishida’s disagreement with 136–44, 153–4 schema 139 on sensation 74–5 subject-object distinction 137–8 works Critique of Judgement 141 Critique of Practical Reason 140 The End of All Things 144 see also neo-K antianism knowledge empirical, Nishida/K ant disagreement 143 as unity 46 koans 7, 20–21 kôiteki chokkan see action-intuition language, and time 17 law of identity, Nishida on 68–9 L eibniz, Gottfried 132–6 L aw 13 monadism 119, 132, 134, 136 L iebemann, O tto, Kant and the Epigones 63 living-dying concept 18 L ocke, John 41 logic A ristotelian 115, 116 Nishida on 114–16 logos H eraclitus 156 reality as 103, 128, 130, 156 Marburg school, neo-K antianism 64, 75 meditation 7, 20, 158

172


mind-body dualism 1–2 Nishida on 79–82 and the will 81 mind-matter, Nishida on 51–2, 160 mindfulness, doctrine of 15–16, 107 moksha 158 monadism 119, 132, 134, 136 and expression 133–4 Nishida’s self, comparison with 133 see also the self mu (emptiness) 10–19, 24–5, 90–91 and expression 119 meaning 11–12 and nirvana 17, 24, 27 non-conceptuality 20 pervasiveness 26, 27, 151 mu no basho (place of nothingness) 99, 110, 114, 117, 118, 127, 128, 137 mu-shin state 12, 24 Mumonkan 24 mushin 157 mysticism Nishida on 125–6, 152 and Zen 25 Nagarjuna 10, 13 on causation 14–15 logic of eightfold negation 123, 149 Nansen, on enlightenment 24 Natorp, Paul, The Logical Foundations of the Exact Sciences 64 nature philosophy of, Nishida’s 44 and pure experience 44 neo-K antianism 63–5 B aden school 64 dichotomies 92, 94, 154 experience in 72 Marburg school 64, 75 Nishida’s disagreement with 92–4, 154 Nicholas of Cusa 139 via negativa 52 nikon 18 nirvana 13, 122, 158 everyday world as 121, 151 and mu 17, 24, 27 see also samsara Nishida K itaro 1

‘A is A ’ proposition 97 ‘a priori’, use of term 68 on action-intuition 120–21, 138 on apperception 82 A ristotle disagreements with 129–31, 156 on artistic intuition 112–13 on beauty 55, 112–13, 142 B ergson agreement with 86–9 disagreement with 89–92 on the cogito 131–2 on cognition 138 on consciousness, unity of 39–40, 66–7, 118 contradiction, use of term 117–19 duration, objection to 89, 90, 152–3 on evil, problem of 54–5, 124 on feeling 141–2 Fichte’s influence 94–9, 155 Forms, influence of 127–9, 156 on geometry 41, 48, 70–71 on God 56–8 on harmony, pre-established 134 H egel, disagreement with 147–8 on Japanese culture 157 on judgement 76–7, 93 K ant, disagreement with 136–44, 153 on law of identity 68–9 on logic 114–16 on mind-body dualism 79–82 on mind-matter 51–2, 160 on mysticism 125–6, 152 neo-K antianism, disagreement with 92–4, 154 philosophical development 151 inclination 5–6, 151 philosophy of nature 44 philosophy (tetsugaku) 7, 101, 150 Platonic influences on 126–9, 156 on pure experience 36–58, 68, 120–21 definition 38–40 and the good 53–6 and intellectual intuition 46–9 and religion 56–8 and thinking 40–42 and ultimate reality 49–53

Index and the will 42–6 on religion 123–6, 153–4 on the self 8 on self-consciousness 66–8, 70–71, 102–4, 146, 148 on sensation 74–6 significance 160–61 on space and time 71–4 on time 73, 74, 93, 121–2 on true personality 55–6 on truth 45–6 on universals 78–9, 106, 107 on value 110–11 western thought influences of 60, 63, 101–2 reactions to 126–50, 152 on the will 44–5, 83–6, 109–10 works An Inquiry into the Good 31, 38, 47, 56, 59, 60, 61, 62, 67, 101, 103, 131, 145 Art and Morality 99 From the Actor to the Seer 99, 101, 103 Fundamental Problems of Philosophy 98, 156 Intuition and Reflection in SelfConsciousness 61, 65, 67, 145 The Place of Nothingness 133 The Problem of Consciousness 99 Towards a Philosophy of Religion 134 The Unity of Opposites 121, 132 Nishitani (Nishida’s pupil) 2 noh theatre 26 not-self, and the self 21–2, 29, 79, 94, 133 T he O ne, Parmenides 156 ‘one and many’ philosophies 1, 2 one-many relation 13–14, 121, 123 O rtega y Gasset, José 120 Parmenides, T he O ne 156 perception, peripheral, B ankei on 23 see also apperception Perfection of Wisdom sutras 14, 49, 116, 117, 149 personality, true, Nishida on 55–6

173

philosophies enduring 5 individualistic 1–2 ‘one and many’ 1, 2 philosophy of nature, Nishida’s 44 place see basho Plato 1 Forms doctrine 11, 27, 127 influence on Nishida 126–9, 156 Timaeus, inspiration for basho 126–7, 156 Plotinus 1, 157 prajňâ 10, 13, 17 pratîtya samutpâda 14 present absolute 134, 136 eternal, time as 122 Pseudo-D ionysius 83, 89, 159 pure experience and consciousness 48 definition 35–6 and the good 53–6 and intuition 46–9 in James’s philosophy 31, 33–7, 58, 59, 152 and nature 44 in Nishida’s philosophy 36–58, 68, 120–21 and religion 56–8 and thinking 40–42 and time 50–51 and ultimate reality 49–53 and the will 42–6 radical empiricism 33, 36–7 rationality, Zen 159 reality as absolute infinity 157 A ristotelian 130, 156 as inner journey 160 as logos 103, 128, 130, 156 manifestations of 1, 2 as syllogism 146–7 see also ultimate reality reason limitations 28–9 and samsara 21 reflection (hansei) 62

174


relations James on 34 metaphysics of 32 religion Nishida/K ant disagreement 140, 153–4 Nishida on 123–6 and pure experience 56–8 and unity of consciousness 56 religious awakening, and intuition 49 R ickert, H einrich 65, 69, 92 theory of judgement 93 ronri 31 R oyce, Josiah, The World and the Individual 33 R ussell, B ertrand 33 sabi 26–7, 116 samsara 10, 13, 17, 122, 151 and reason 21 see also nirvana samurai 23–4 S antayana, George 59, 117 satori (wu) 7–10, 12 affirmation 8 authoritativeness 8 feeling of exaltation 9 impersonality 9 irrationality 8 momentariness 9 noetic quality 8 non-conceptuality 21 sense of beyond 8–9 S chelling, F.W.J. von 151, 154 schema, K antian 139 science, history, differences 65 the self in classical empiricism 33, 34 Fichte on 94–5 James on 34 Nishida/K ant disagreement 139–40 Nishida on 82 Nishidan, monadism, comparison 133 and not-self 21–2, 29, 79, 94, 133 in Zen 22, 54 see also monadism self-consciousness 57 and basho 103–4 consciousness as 102

H egelian 146 Nishida on 66–8, 70–71, 102–4, 146, 148 and space and time 71–2, 146–7 and subject-object distinction 67, 146 and value 111 see also jikaku self-identity, H egelian 148–9, 155 sensation descriptions 75 K antian view 74–5 Nishida on 74–6 sheng 158 shinri 31, 115 space, and duration 91 space and time as intuition 138 Nishida/L eibniz, comparison of views 135–6 Nishida on 71–4 and self-consciousness 71–2, 146–7 see also space and time S pinoza, B aruch, Ethics 31 subject-object distinction 77–8, 160 K antian 137–8 and self-consciousness 67, 146 suffering, relief of 25 S uzuki, D .T . 5, 8, 31, 140 svabhâva 14 syllogism, reality as 146–7 T anabe H ajime 151 T aylor, A .E . 126 thinking, and pure experience 40–42 thought, and intuition 115 time B ergson on 73–4 clock 16 D ôgen on 17, 18 E merson on 19 as eternal present 122 and language 16 Nishida on 73, 74, 93, 121–2 reversibility 18 and Zen 16–17, 29 see also space and time truth, Nishida on 45–6

Index uji (being-time) 16 ultimate reality and contradiction 50, 51 and pure experience 49–53 T he Unbounded, A naximander 156–7 unity, knowledge as 46 universals H egelian 106–7, 145, 148 Nishida on 78–9, 106, 107

and pure experience 42–6 Windelband, Wilhelm 64–5 Wittgenstein, L udwig, Tractatus 11 wu see satori wu-wei 23 Wundt, Wilhelm 70

value 64–5, 92 Nishida on 110–11 and self-consciousness 111 vitalism 81

zazen 7, 20 Zen aesthetics 26–7 and death 27, 91 epistemology 20–22 extra-philosophical aspects 6 goal 12 manifestations of 26 and mysticism 25 non-scriptural basis 10 rationality 159 self in 22, 54 and time 16–17, 29

western thought influences on Nishida 60, 63, 101–2 Nishida’s reactions to 126–50, 152 the will and imagination 43 and mind-body dualism 81 nature of 83 Nishida on 44–5, 83–6, 109–10

Y uasa Y asuo, The Body 93 yűgen 26

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