Nishidas-Missing-Basho.pdf

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Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2013, Unit S3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Sheffield S3 8AF

CCP 4.2 (2012) 237251 Comparative and Continental Philosophy (print) ISSN 1757-0638Comparative and Continental Philosophy (online) ISSN 1757-0646

An Inquiry into the Goodand Nishidas MissingBasho

JAMES W. HEISIG

Nanzan Institute or Religion and Culture (Japan)

[email protected]

A

In December 2010 Kyoto University hosted a symposium honoring thehundredth anniversary of the publication of Nishida Kitars An Inquiryinto the Good. Te following is an English version of a talk delivered onthat occasion. In it I have tried to argue against the widely held view thatthis maiden work contains the germ of Nishidas mature philosophy, and

at the same time to suggest that an early strain of ambiguity regarding thenotion of the will points to a neglect of the natural world in his logic of place.

KeywordsNishida Kitar, logic, place, Good, basho

I

An Inquiry into the Goodis a rustrating book. Te first time I read it, I thoughtit a hodgepodge o western philosophical opinions loosely organized aroundwhat seemed a rather shaky thesis. At the time I knew nothing o Nishida andalmost nothing o Japanese philosophy. o decipher it I had no choice but torely on my own education and resources, such as they were. Out o courtesy tothe colleague who recommended it to me, I saw it through to the end. Oncearrived, I did not eel particularly moved to read any more o Nishidas work,though the more I heard o him, the more I began to doubt my judgment.It was only afer discovering Nishitani and anabe that I elt the urge to return

to the man whose thought had inspired their own lie work. As my image oNishida slowly grew to the stature o his reputation, I came to understand the
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]


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238 James W. Heisig

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importance oAn Inquiry into the Good as a turning point in his career and inthe history o Japanese philosophy.

Still, each time I returned to Nishidas first book text or another look I con-

tinued to be rustrated by it and ailed to find very much that would illuminatehis mature work. What I did find o interest was the random scatter o ideasin some cases no more than an ambiguity o expressionthat were to stimulatehis ormulation o undamental problems o philosophy. I will take up one othem later, but or now I wish only to reiterate my view thatAn Inquiry into theGood merits admiration today more or the courage o its statement at a timewhen timidity was epidemic among students o western philosophy in Japan,than it does or its philosophical content or style o argument.

Regarding the ideas proposed in the book, one need only consult whatNishida was reading at the time, and in particular works o Schopenhauer,Wundt, James, and Bergson, to see where he picked up the main pieces or hismosaic. Te patterns into which he arranged these pieces are presented as sup-port or his starting thesis: the identification o a unified consciousnessthatis, a consciousness prior to biurcations into subject and object, knowing andwilling, mind and matterwith reality as a whole. Te results show an original-ity that can hardly be reduced without remainder to his sources.

Te style o argument is something else again. Whether it is a matter o

inductively tracing a line o thought to a conclusion or deductively spelling outthe consequences o an initial hypothesis, the logic oAn Inquiry into the Gooddiffers at every step rom that o the western philosophers Nishida cites. Nei-ther does it demonstrate the loyalty to classical texts that characterize the kindo traditional argumentation we find in premodern Conucian, Buddhist, andShinto thought. Large portions o the book read like clusters o penses, andas such, the flow o the text rom one idea to the next differs rom what wefind in most o Nishidas later work. Te most obvious exception is his final

essay, which, although intended as a summary o his thought, shares many othe stylistic traits o his maiden book and, like it, is requently cited by Nishidascholars to reer to ideas whose oundational arguments lie elsewhere. o besure, the importance oAn Inquiry into the Good is easier to assess by setting itin the context o his later thought, but doing so tends to gloss over the questiono how it could have had the initial impact it did, or how it strikes the first-timereader o Nishida.

Simply put, Nishidas book, standing on its own merits, would not have quali-fied as a lasting contribution to modern western philosophy. Had it been trans-lated immediately into European languages, it would likely have amounted tolittle more than a curio among American and continental readers, who would


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An Inquiry into the Goodand Nishidas Missing Basho 239


have been lef wondering why this medley o borrowed ideas was being taken soseriously in the academic world o Japan. Tis is by no means a harsh judgmentto render on a first book by a young philosopher. Indeed, it is not very ar rom

the way Nishida himsel judged it at the time as ailing to reach its aims andincomplete, and a decade later as unsatisying and best taken out o print.1Te act is, he quickly turned his sights away rom the books central thesis anddid not himsel take it as the oundational work others took it to be. His subse-quent writing, beginning with the venture into neo-Kantian thought he begana year later, ollowed a quite different strategy, both in his phrasing o questionsand his style o argument. What is more, Nishida did not accept the opinionso those in Japan who immediately hailed it as a triumph, nor would he have

agreed with those who later looked back on it as a philosophical masterpiece.When Kurata Kyakuz praised it in 1912 as finely scented pale blue bellflowersgrowing out o dried-up, sterile earth in the mountain shadows, prompting arise in sales and readership, Nishida was not impressed.2Representative o laterviews among Nishidas disciples is a long and careul study o the major themeso the book by Nishitani Keiji, which states at the outset that An Inquiry intothe Goodis an original tour de orce that would have assured it a place amongother great systems o thought even i Nishida had not developed it urther(Nishitani 1991, 96). Nishitanis assessment is difficult to accept at ace value.

His interpretations not only rely on hindsight; they include a generous amounto his own ideas to help fill in gaps in Nishidas progression o ideas and to pro-vide a wider context rom which isolated statements can take on meanings notsupported by the text itsel.

I these statements seem to tarnish Nishidas halo at the very point whereNishida scholars have labored to burnish it, it is only because I believe thatNishidas development, together with its sel-criticism, should be taken moreseriously. Afer all, great philosophies do not come to birth all grown-up, like

Pallas Athena emerging rom the head o Zeus in a ull suit o armor. Teythrive or degenerate, survive or vanish through criticism much more thanthrough mere textual analysis, exegesis, and comparison. As Whitehead used totell his students, Criticism is the motive power or the advance o thoughto be reuted in every century afer you have written is the acme o triumph(Whitehead, 122). A century afer the publication oAn Inquiry into the Good,Nishidas philosophy has reached a point where the book deserves more studiedcritique by scholars who know his thought best. Although I by no means count

1. Nishida 1990, xxixxxxi. I have used this translation throughout or convenience sake,though the translations have had to be adjusted at some points.

2. Documented in Michiko Yusa, 130.


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mysel one o them, I take heart in the courage o that first book as I try to tracea line to what seems to me a serious deficit in his logic.

II

Among other stylistic traits, Nishidas writing contains two different kindso core sentences that are ofen conused, especially when deprived o theirsurrounding context. Te first are what we may call distilled statements. Tesecome at the conclusion or at a temporary resting point in the course o an argu-ment. Anyone who has read Nishida knows what it is to eel overwhelmed byones own misunderstandings and hal-understanding, and to wonder how arNishida himsel is complicit in the conusion. Te more one reads, o course,the more one recognizes a hint o things going on that never quite make theirway to the surace o his texts: leaps in argument, dim intimations o connec-tions never ollowed through on, oblique allusions and subtle shifs o view thatslip by unnoticed, and neglected assumptions. But like seeds sown in the ur-rows o the text, every so ofen, at the most unexpected moments, they blossominto the sweet ruit o a ripe summation. One ollows him page afer page as hethinks with his pen, cutting through a thick jungle o possibilities and counter-possibilities: i this is so, then that must be so; but i that is so, then this must beso. And then, all o a sudden, one is stopped short by a sentence or two o such

concentration and lucidity that one reaches or a pencil to mark it in the mar-gins. Te discovery o clarity in ambiguity is part o the charm o his work, andanyone who has tried to bring Nishidas writings to another language knowshow difficult it is to convey this characteristic blend o rustration and enlight-enment. I have the impression that these little distillations are the backbonethat supports a great deal o Nishida scholarship. Like pearls on a string, theygive a glimpse o his ideas in systematic orm, minus the torture o how he getsto them. But the act, remains, he does get to them by a more or less controlled

process o argumentation.Tere is another class o core sentences that we may call oracular statements.Tey are not argued conclusions but a kind o authoritative declaration.3Unliketopic sentences that lead into a discussion, these statements arise abruptly anddisconnected rom their environment, like flowers mysteriously blooming inthe desert air. o all appearances, these oracular statements are as important toNishida as are the distillations, but their unction is different. aken on theirown, their orm o discourse is doctrinal and regularly given to exaggeration.

3. Te final three sentences o the chapter on Religion are a good instance o the differencebetween an oracular statement and its argument. Nishitani uses them almost verbatim,though without reerence, to open hisReligion and Nothingness (Nishitani 1982).


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Ofen, though not always, they may turn out to have been intuitive flasheso insight that will not be submitted to the argumentative process until later.Perhaps it is in the nature o the bon mot to tend to hyperbole, but i one begins

to jot down the things identified inAn Inquiry into the Good as greatest, high-est, or some other superlative, and then adds to the list the numerous reerencesto all and every, the inconsistencies are too glaring to overlook. Tis may beone o the reasons scholars have an easy time citing lines rom earlier writings insupport o later ideas, and such a hard time showing precisely where his think-ing changed course. In both cases, Nishidas own oracular statements take on analmost scriptural quality: they do not need to be deended or reerenced, andthey can be cited out o context precisely because, at least initially, they have

no wider and more ully articulated context.An Inquiry into the Good relies again and again on such statements, whichmay run rom a single short sentence to several sentences. Even where the sameterm appears again and again, Nishidas way o holding it up and turning itaround and around to examine it rom different angles and consider its conse-quences, the oracular style is retained. ake, or example, the idea o pure expe-rience with whose explanation the book opens. Unlike William James, romwhom he took the idea, Nishida restricts pure experience to the experience oa conscious state, and identifies this as the sole reality. For James, conscious-

ness was only a portion o pure experience, the stuff o which everything iscomposed (James 4:4). Te two essays in which he spells this out, both pub-lished in 1904, contain a startling number o coincidences with Nishidas earlythought. I have no doubt that Nishida never more than dipped into James TeWorld o Pure Experience, and find it unlikely that he even read the first ewpages o Does Consciousness Exist?, where the reutations o neo-Kantianismwould have spared Nishida an immense amount o labor, not to mention theslide into psychologism that he would later reject. Te rejection o the subject-

object, consciousness-content dichotomy, the insistence on continuity-in-dis-continuity in perception and cognition, and the treatment o consciousness asa unction rather than as an entity are not only crystal clear in James, they arecareully argued, taking into account counter-positions. Without that essay, it ishardly surprising that Nishida misunderstood the arguments o the pure experi-ence essay, which explicitly reers back to it.

Be that as it may, Nishida begins by declaring the oundational nature o con-sciousness in its pure and direct orm as coterminous with reality itsel. Histopic sentences are concentrations o conclusions, each o which representsviews that are declared but not spelled out or fitted out with premises. Tey areset in a ramework that gives the appearance o a logical progression o thought,


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but in act the ramework is not supported by an appeal to data or to philo-sophical texts o those who have thought about these matters. Te aint scent oa generalized Buddhist insight into the illusory, phenomenal nature o reality is

the closest we can come to a tacit assumption that hold the ramework in place.Many, i not most o the declarations on pure experience will be taken up by

Nishida in later works or proper argumentation, though not in the same orderor ramework in which they are represented here. Tis makes their relationshipto later, more distilled statements tenuous, certainly not enough to allow us tospeak o a development o ideas. And this is the point I wish to make here:the development o ideas cannot be traced through similarity o wording alone.One needs to show a development in the argument or context within which

the wording appears. In the case o pure experience, the primary context is theattempt to show that the power that holds consciousness together is prior to thedistinction between the subject and the material world, and that the unity oconsciousness is one with reality. At the time, Nishida hoped this would clariythe goal o human existence, in which he saw only one true good: to know thetrue sel (NKZ1: 145). Tis means understanding the control o a uniyingpower at the base o the mind, which, he imagined, in turn to be somehow con-nected to God as the unifier o the universe (NKZ1: 159, 161). None o thisamounted to a precise philosophical question, and while it stands to reason that

he dropped the approach as misleading, we have to seek an alternative signifi-cance or the obvious coincidences o wording in later writings.

My own impression is that the most one can say o Nishidas attempt to reduceall o reality to pure experience is that it stimulated him to think things outmore careully on his own. Tere is no sense in which the rest o his work canbe seen as an exegesis on an original, inspired text.An Inquiry into the Goodwasnot the sort o book that could have been bundled up in a basket and floateddown the river to be picked up downstream and educated into a great prophetic

text to galvanize an identity or Japanese philosophy. It belongs too much towhat came afer it to suppose otherwise. It was so much Nishidas own bookthat only hecould have pulled out the themes that to us today, in the light o hiscollected works, may seem sel-evident.

Te same thing could be said, even more orceully, o his chapters on Godand Religion, in which oblique allusions to other philosophersthough nottheir argumentsfigure more prominently in the body o the text. I I am notmistaken, the mature Nishida would have been the first to recognize the patch-work nature oAn Inquiry into the Goodand been beuddled by scholars tryingto make it into a maniesto he spent the rest o his lie spelling out in detail.


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III

In an attempt to come to terms with An Inquiry into the Good on its owngrounds, I would like to take up Nishidas idea o the will. Afer the long andsterile battle with neo-Kantian thought that ollowed his first book, it wasthis idea that signaled his exit. Te resulting elevation o will to absolute statusmarks a turning point,but there are subtle hints o that view discernible alreadyin the ambiguity o the notion o will we find in An Inquiry into the Good.We may begin by condensing what Nishida has to say about the will into fivestatements, all o them relativizing volition to the primordial unity o con-sciousness in pure experience, and hence to reality itsel:

1. Will as such is neither external action nor a aculty but a kind orational thinking, and as such is that part o consciousness that unifiesmental images as they pertain to the action o the subject.

2. Mental representations o willing can alternate between the subject oknowing and the object o willing. Tus, the presence o willed objectssignals a rupture o the primordial unity o consciousness.

3. Prior to conscious will, there is a passive, goal-oriented instinct thatis an unexplainable act. In consciousness, will is an apperception thatreaches unity through a progression rom the impulsive eeling o moti-vation to the fixation on a goal in desire to the generation o action indecisions based on sufficient reasons more or less clearly known.

4. Psychologically, the will is a primary orm o all phenomena o con-sciousness, though not as undamental as reason,4and as such clearlyexpresses sel-consciousness,.

5. Philosophically, since it is consciousness that creates all reality, includ-ing material bodies, will, insoar as it serves as a uniying element inconsciousness, belongs at the base o reality.

It is possible, but probably not very useul in the long run, to show whichparts o the theories o will in Schopenhauer, Wundt, and James Nishida pickedup on and which he passed over. Once again, what is missing, though, is a clearexplanation o how these conclusions were strung together. His next step aferAn Inquiry into the Goodwas rather to rephrase a question that had gone unan-

4. Te English translation, which is at times lax with its use o particles, reers to will as theundamental uniying activity o consciousness (or example, Nishida 1990, 123), but the

subservience o will to reason would indicate that it be reduced to aundamental activityalong with the drive or knowledge. Also, the English phrasing makes it seem as i Nishidaagrees with Hoffding that will controls understanding; see Nishida 1990, 123).


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swered in the book as a whole, namely, what it means to say that the knowercan know itsel. (We may recall here that Schopenhauers insistence on sel-knowing as grounded in will led him to conclude that the sel knowing itsel is

not a genuine orm o knowledge.5) It may be mere coincidence, but Nishidasinitial intuition o will as part o the oundation o reality is directly connected,at least chronologically, to an extended treatment o sel-reflective knowing thatsets out to affirm much the same thing through a painstakingly argued conron-tation with neo-Kantian ideas. It was only at the end o this adventure, in 1917,that he returned briefly to his discussion o the will. He opens with a statementthat echoes but also advances the position oAn Inquiry into the Good:

Te truest core o our immediate experience isabsolute fee will, which holds ac-

tivities o various kinds together in unity, and which provides the internal bondo various systems o experience. I we compare systems o experience to circles,the line joining their centers is absolute ree will, so that what unites them is nota static cognition, but infinitely dynamic autonomous will.

(Nishida 1987, 154; emphasis added, omission restored)

Nishida goes on, in an imagery o concentric circles that will later orm thebasis o his logic o basho, to speak o this absolute will that transcends the lim-its o cognition as a mystery, inaccessible to cognition but approached in art

and religion. Not only does he shif his stance to give will a primacy over rea-son, he also cuts the idea o reality as experience ree o its role as unifier oconsciousness in order that it may serve as a more encompassing absolute touniy the world as a whole. In what can only be an allusion to Schopenhauer,he declares that the world o the thing-in-itsel is the world o will and canbe reached only by will (Nishida 1917, 156). But where Schopenhauer wouldidentiy the system o the world with nature, Nishida returns to talk o God:

Since absolute will unifies all world o experience to orm a single system, onemay hold, with religious people, that the world is a personal maniestationo God and history the biography o God. Te world o truth would be thethought o God. (Nishida 1987, 162, omission restored)

Already inAn Inquiry into the Good, God was described as the unifier at thebase o the mind and thereore o the universe. Since Nishida did not conceiveo God as other-worldly, and since he held God to be no more and no less sym-bolical a way o speaking than our talk o the world, he was able to take a stepthat none o the philosophers on whom he drew would dare take in such simpleterms, namely to define God as a conscious, personal orce at work in the world:

5. See the succinct statement in On the Fourold Root o the Principle o Sufficient Reason; Andon the Will in Nature (Schopenhauer 2010, 6).


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Te relation between the universe and God is the relation between the phenom-ena o our consciousness and their unity . . . God is the unifier o the universeand the universe is a maniestation o God. Tis comparison is not metaphori-

calit is a act. God is the greatest and final unifier o our consciousness; ourconsciousness is one part o Gods consciousness and its unity comes rom GodsunityTe universe is an expression o Gods personality. (Nishida 1990, 161)

Tis was the position he moved away rom with his idea o absolute will.Putting this all together, Nishidas search or an absolute ground to reality

led him beyond a description o a unified mind and beyond an idea o a per-sonal God as a uniying principle or all minds to an idea o pure will as a vitalorce in all that exists. Experience was no longer to be limited to the pureexperience o consciousness; it had become, as it was or James, a generalizedname or existence as such. Mind, with all its activities, was tentatively relocatedas the effects o a non-human, impersonal, non-conscious orce o will. Tereare statements inAn Inquiry into the Good that seem to orebode this view andstatements that seem to deny it, but the vagueness o his language suggests thathe had not yet thought the matter through to his own satisaction.

IV

Granted that Nishidas style o argumentation changed dramatically in the years

that ollowedAn Inquiry into the Good, it is clear that the stimulus o ideas andhal-ideas ventured in that book remained within him or some time afer hisneo-Kantian period. When he does return to discuss the will, it is to assign itthe unction o a provisional unifier o consciousness, preserving the biurca-tion o an inner world o mind rom an outer world o nature and establishinga moral ought (c. NKZ 2: 285, 394395). It is still reerred to as ree (NKZ 2:425), but only as an a priori o consciousness, not as an absolute. It is as i theidea o absolute ree will had been erased rom his thought, later to be absorbedwithout remainder into the general notion o God.

It is not my intention to argue that this was a mistake, but only that an unor-tunate and lasting consequence o that choice was the subsequent neglect o theworld o nature. Nishidas first account o nature is based on the premise that,like all o reality, it is a concrete act o consciousness that includes both sub-ject and object. As part o pure experience, it engages in the uniying activityo consciousness and in that sense can be said to possess a kind o sel that isreflected in each o its concrete orms. Butto see a orce at work in nature assuch is to project human volition into the natural order, and thus to objectiy

what is really only an analogical inerence that points to a pure experiencebeyond our will and the orces o the natural order (Nishida 1990, 7072).


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And what that, nature is poured in its entirety into the general mold o con-sciousness as the sole reality.

Tat said, there is a certain ambivalence towards the natural world concealed

in the idea o the will proposed in An Inquiry into the Good. Clear passage tothis ambivalence is provided by Nishidas use o the termyky(), which,depending on the context could be translated as need, requirement, drive, or, asI shall do here, demand. As best I can recall, the word never figures dominantlyin later writings and shows very little verbal concordance with these first uses,which makes it easy to overlook. Even within its native context, the term doesnot at first glance seem important to his general description o the will, let alonean important, i unacknowledged, challenge to it.

o give an idea o the variety o uses and the importance o the concept orlocating the status o willsetting aside the handul o cases in which thegeneric sense o the word, as in the requirements o the law o causality or thepractical demands o lie in generallet us consider the ollowing three clusterso ideas, all stated as patchworks o Nishidas own words.

1. Tere is a universal demand behind will and eeling, and behindrational activity in general that is different rom physical demands.Human beings have a demand to survive, but this cannot account or

the lofier goals o the will, since the most powerul demands are notthe most valuable or the most pleasurable. Te innate demandso con-sciousness are the truest and deepest.

2. Tese undamental demands o consciousness are acts that hold thekey to reality, but they take various orms, making it necessary torepress the lower orms or the sake o the higher. Te only demand inthe universe with absolute value is the demand o personhood or unityo consciousness. It is the cause o will and reason, but is weaker in willand stronger in reason, which is active behind all instinct and whosesatisaction is the highest good.

3. Te greater parts o our urges are all social, but the highest satisactionis to actualize an individuality in the sel that is not centered on merelysubjective demands. Te only way to be aware o the deepest demandor this is to revert to a state prior to rational deliberation, where onecan hear it as an inner voice. By first satisying the sel and then givingsatisaction to others, one comes to the greatest demando all, the reli-gious drive to achieve unity with the universe, a demandthat precedesall particular activities o consciousness.


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What strikes one about Nishidas appeal to the notion o demand is that itsets up certain contradictions that are otherwise easy to gloss over in the text.Contradiction, both logical and ontological, did not bother Nishida in the long

run. Indeed, he was later to confirm their importance in his logic o bashowherecontradiction was what prompted the break through rom the limitations oone basho to a more encompassing one, as well as in his idea that contradictionaccounts or dynamism. In any case, I see three principle contradictions here,all o which are reconcilable only by taking a step beyond the standpoint oAn Inquiry into the Good.

First, there is an apparent inconsistency between the demand or the unity oconsciousness as the supreme and highest demand and the claim that there is a

demand or a unity with reality deeper than consciousness alone. While viewingthe mind as a system o demands (Nishida 1990, 150), Nishida grounds thesedemandsin something that is not mind. Because he sets up a hierarchy amongdemands, or at least admits that there is one, we cannot dismiss the problem.At the same time, because the phenomena o consciousness have been calledthe sole reality, what unifies consciousness is already identical with what uni-fies reality. Te misfit between the demands and the power leaves us with adoubt about this identity.

Second, the demand or love o others is introduced as i it were something

higher than love o sel, but the greatest good is associated with the demandto know the true sel and not with love o others. Tese two demandsneedreconciling at a level beyond sel and other, but the demandsand goals o theuniverse that might be thought to accomplish this are always brought back tothe satisaction o the sel.

Tird, the demandbehind will is made subservient the demand or knowledgeand both o them subservient to the demand to uniy the two in consciousness.(Curiously, no specific mention is made o a demand or eeling, which also has

to be part o that unity.)Tis sets up a undamental contradiction between thetwo most basic demands: on the one hand, there is a demandto split conscious-ness into higher and lower unctions, and on the other, there is a demand to healthe split. Tis leaves us with two choices: either consciousness is both its owndisease and its own medicine; or there is a demandwithin consciousness or acure outside o consciousness. In the ormer case, the sole reality is not simpleand unified (as was claimed or pure experience) but complex and divided; inthe latter, consciousness and its phenomena are not the sole reality.

Nishida did not acknowledge these problems explicitly inAn Inquiry into theGood, but there is another and more serious difficulty lying in the shadow ofthese various contradictions, one that turns out to have been a stimulus to his


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move beyond the limitation of this first book: the question of the relationshipbetween personal, conscious will, and the power of will in wider reality. Hisoblique allusion to the human mind as part of the consciousness of God did

not bring the problem to the surface. Strictly speaking, if God is the epitome ofunity, there should be no parts at all. Indeed, since God is not demandedbyanything outside of God, when Nishida comes to identify God with absolute

will, he has to exclude anything that issues demandsor manifests a will, includinginstinct, motivation, desire, and decision. In a word, if God is an absolute that

wills, it cannot be by analogy with the will treated inAn Inquiry into the Good.Te idea o God is not one o Nishidas clearer ideas and is so ofen attached

tobon mots that perhaps we should not make too much o it. But insoar as

God is spoken o as absolutely infinite

6

and as a power that is accessible todirect experience, the notion o a cosmic demandis at least indirectly hintedat. Te progression rom instinct to motivation to desire to decision is set upin such a way that the subject is seen to move rom a true, primordial state oparadise to lesser states o divided consciousness. o return rom dividednessto original unity means cutting off all desires and all decisions based on merereedom o choice. However, the next step to an absolutefeewill logicallyrequired seeing will as a orce working in the cosmos o itseland independentlyo consciousness. In taking that step Nishida stepped over the human historical

world as well as the natural world. Instead, he reintroduced talk o a God wholooked so suspiciously like a ully individuated, unified sel that the borderlinesbetween sel and God all but vanished. Te intelligible world remained theworld o the intelligible sel. Tat lef him with the problem o how to returnto engagement with and moral responsibility towards the actual world o ordi-nary human experience.

Nishidas own protestation to the contrary, the assumption that the mostully concrete reality is one that displays a unity o absolute contradictories

transcending the comings and goings o mind is a high-level mental abstrac-tion. At most, it is a orm o the orms that reality takes in the concrete. Teactual contradictions that beset human experience in its most concrete orm,as we all know, are not paired against one against the other in a pure, absolute,and intelligible orm. Tey come at us rom all sides as a disorderly struggle orattention; weak and strong, connected and disconnected, clear and vague theycome at us. It is only in trying to sort all this out that we are able to lif ourselvesabove the concrete and bring order to the commotion, or that ailing, to expressit, just as it is, throughout whatever symbolic medium we have at our disposal.

6. Te English translation has anachronistically translated ully nothing as absolute noth-ingness in reerence to God (Nishida 1990, 82).


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Te true concreteness o human history cannot be explained simply on the basiso a mutual interpenetration o the maker and the made. It entails the imme-diate struggle or order through the ongoing reconstruction o an intelligible

world and the cultivation o habits o thought and action in the actual worldthat alone render it concrete. Complaints against the abstractness o Nishidasview o the historical world hounded him to the last rom all sides, leaving himfinally to admit, in the last words he wrote beore he died, that his critics hadnot been persuaded (Nishida 2011, 668669).

Rather than enter into a discussion o the development o Nishidas later ideason the concreteness o the intelligible-historical world, there is a more seriouscriticism to be aced. Simply put, his brie sortie into absolute will aside, the

highest cosmic orce, the absolute demand o reality, remained bound in Nishi-das thinking to the absolutizing o sel-awareness as the highest good, suchthat even God can be reduced to the internal necessity at work in conscious-ness (Nishida 1990, 145, 133). o the end his idea o no-sel was attachedto the primacy o human subjectivity. In An Inquiry into the Good, Nishidashows mixed eelings about the anthropomorphism involved in attributinghuman mental unctions to the universe, but at least he seems open to the ideao nature as alive and as the oundation or human eeling, will, and knowledge(Nishida 1990, 50). rue, his notions o God, the bashoo the intelligible-his-

torical world, and absolute nothingness would approach this cosmic dimen-sion, but never with the strength o will or demand that would give it primacyover human consciousness.

In this regard, the saving grace or Nishidas logic would have been to find amore oundational place or time in his account o will. By this I mean a broadersense o time than that bounded on one end by sel-awareness and on the otherby the eternal now. History would have to be liberated rom its anthropocentricbias. Even i we think only o planet earth, the brie lapse o the evolution into

human consciousness does not merit the status a universal o all universalsthat would allow it to embrace the whole o the natural world as a subordinate.Discounting the story o the emergence o lie some ten billion years into theearths nearly ourteen billion year history is not only philosophically illogical,it is irresponsible. For human intelligence to survive the damage that the his-tory o civilization has inflicted on our native habitat and to maintain the mostbasic conditions or the possibility o consciousness itsel, it does not help phil-osophically to reduce the natural world to the maidservant o sel-awareness.Te greater story requires that the direct line rom human consciousness to therealm o religion, absolute nothingness, and God be broken to make room orthe absolute mediation o the natural world. Between the final, infinitely open


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250 James W. Heisig


basho o reality itsel and the basho o the intelligible-historical world, a placemust be made or a basho o the natural world in whose story everything humanbeings are and do is inextricably located.

Te proper idiom or speaking o the natural world as a basho is that o a pre-conscious dynamic, o a demandwhose contradictions are not neatly lined up tosynthesize into the kind o sel-identity appropriate to talk o consciousness.In terms o the central thesis oAn Inquiry into the Good, this means removingthe unity o consciousness rom the equation o pure experience with reality,and in its place introducing demand as the qualifier that holds the equationtogether. Te ormulation would be: It is not that there is consciousness andthereore there is demand, but there is demand and thereore there is conscious-

ness. It is out o such demandthat lie and consciousness were born and also outo that demandthat we may one day render them extinct. In a sense, whether ornot one attaches a teleological unity or moral ought to this general demand is aspecification o consciousness and as such does not affect the underlying drive.o make the intelligible-historical world the oundation o our natural environ-ment, the ultimate bashoo our experience beyond which lies the religious realmo nothingness, is to support at a primary level the very subjugation o the naturalworld that has begun to rise up in rebellion against our technological civilizationand the lie-style we have grown accustomed to.

As much as this suggestion directly contravenes the positions Nishida tookin the opening sections o his essays on Logic and Lie and I and You, thereasons or doing so are more than theoretical. Tey are not even moral in thestrictest sense. Tey grow, as we have said, rom demonstrable acts that philo-sophical reasoning cannot afford to neglect. Te notion o a cosmic demand thatenvelops and empowers the whole o human consciousness and history is onlyone way o approaching these acts o course, but it seems to suggest a correctiveto Nishidas basho logic that would help restore to his philosophy a considera-

tion o those concrete orces o nature that have been harnessed by the powerso consciousness and history to sicken the planet. I, as Nishida quipped in AnInquiry into the Good, hope is a state o disunity in consciousness (Nishida1990, 27), then it is precisely rom such disunity, and not rom any rarefiedawakening to aboriginal unity, that we need to have a second look at the naturalworld and our obligations towards it. Te neo-Kantian call or a reconstructiono the objective world out o the transcendental orms and categories seento reside in pure consciousness or consciousness-in-general ended up in amoral reflection restricted to the human order. I do not see any evidence thatNishida ever ully liberated himsel rom this enterprise. Such a philosophicalorientation, when set in the context o the ongoing ravaging o to the natu-


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ral world without which there would be no sel-awareness, no philosophy, andindeed no civilization at all, seems to have its priorities backwards and to becomplicit in the moral indifference. It may be difficult to imagine precisely how

Nishida would have reormed his thinking to incorporate the natural world asthe primary bashoo being, but it is even harder to imagine that he would havelacked the courage to ace this pressing concern which Nishida scholars seemsystematically to exclude rom their evaluations o his work.

Abbreviation

NKZ [Complete Works o Nishida Kitar]. okyo: IwanamiShoten, 20032009.

References

James, William. 1987. Does Consciousness Exist? Te Works o William James. Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Nishida Kitar. 1987.Intuition and Reflection in Sel-Consciousness. ranslated by ValdoH. Viglielmo with akeuchi oshinori and Joseph S. OLeary. Albany: TeState University o New York Press.

______. 1990. An Inquiry into the Good. ranslated by Abe Masao and ChristopherIves. New Haven, C: Yale University Press.

______. 2011. Concerning my Logic. In J. Heisig, T. P. Kasulis, and J. C. Maraldo,Japa-nese Philosophy: A Sourcebook. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Nishitani Keiji. 1982. Religion and Nothingness. Berkeley: University o CaliorniaPress.

______. 1991.Nishida Kitar. Berkeley: University o Caliornia Press.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. 2010 On the Fourold Root o the Principle o Sufficient Reason,and On the Will in Nature: wo Essaysranslated by Mme. Karl Hillebrand.Benediction Classics.

Whitehead, Alred North. 1948. Science and Philosophy. New York: Wisdom Library,1948.

Yusa, Michiko. 2002.Zen and Philosophy: An Intellectual Biography o Nishida Kitar.Honolulu: University o Hawaii Press.

Documents

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