Nishida and Western Philosophy

Robert Wilkinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754657033
• eBook ISBN: 9781317087212
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945) is the most important Japanese philosopher of the last century. His constant aim in philosophy was to try to articulate Zen in terms drawn from Western philosophical sources, yet in the end he found that he could not do so, and his thought illustrates a conceptual incommensurability at the deepest level between the main line of the Western tradition and one of the main lines in Eastern thought. This book is a work of comparative philosophy. Attention is given to the consequences of Nishida's metaphysics in the areas of ethics, aesthetics, the philosophy of religion and notably the implications of Nishida's example for the question of pluralism. This study of Nishida brings into sharp focus the question of whether, faced with a conceptual incommensurability at as deep a level as that manifested by Zen, the choice between it and its Western alternative can be wholly rational.

Chapter 1
Nishida’s Starting Point

…Western culture … regards form (eidos) as being and formation as good. However, at the basis of Asian culture … lies something that can be called seeing the form of the formless and hearing the sound of the soundless. Our minds are compelled to seek for this. I would like to give a philosophical foundation to this demand.1

Philosophies which are merely clever or erudite rarely inspire, and even less do they last, attracting the attention of later generations. Those 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. The 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. The 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. Like his lifelong friend the Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki, 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 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. To state the obvious, Zen is a form of Buddhism, a religion which has as its goal a moulding of human nature at its deepest levels, in ways to be discussed more fully below. To its genuine practitioners, Zen is constitutive of their whole mode of being, as constitutive as breathing or eating. One 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. Equally, however, though he rarely refers to Zen or other Buddhist 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.2 To 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. All 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. All 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.

This 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. However, 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. He was not content to throw in the towel and accept that no important aspects of Zen experience were amenable to a properly philosophical treatment. He tried genuinely and constantly to philosophize about his experience. Yet, when he comes to philosophize, his whole thought, inescapably, is given its direction and colour by Zen, from his 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. The 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. However, 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. This 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: ego-suppressing monastic discipline) – are not relevant to this investigation.3

Satori

Central to the Zen outlook is an extraordinary experience, called in Chinese wu and in Japanese satori. To have this experience is the ultimate goal of Zen practice. To 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. An 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. These assertions form the agenda of the Nishida tetsugaku (that is, Nishida’s philosophy), and it is therefore appropriate to begin with some basic data about satori. The great Zen scholar Suzuki gives an analysis of satori under eight headings:4

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. This is because, to put the matter in metaphysical terms, what is revealed in satori is what is called in Sanskrit 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. Again, since reasoning is the paradigm of conceptual intellection, reasoning is useless as a means to satori, and indeed is a hindrance to it. One 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. Strictly speaking, satori is not an experience had by an individual at all – it is not accurate to speak of ‘my’ or ‘your’ satori. Equally, it cannot be described as an intuition, an event in the mental life of an individual, since 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 Kantian terms) by the transcendental unity of apperception and conceptual intellection, explodes and falls away. Rather, ‘[w]hen [reality] perceives itself as it is in itself there is a satori’.5 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 Absolute, or God, or a Person is to go further than the experience itself and to plunge into a theology or a metaphysics.’6

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. This is a strict consequence of Zen metaphysics. Reality 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. Reality, 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). Since 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. Those 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. This is equivalent to setting out Nishida’s central beliefs, the ones for which he sought to find a conceptual articulation in western thought. The issues to be ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preliminary Notes
• Introduction
• 1 Nishida’s Starting Point
• 2 Radical Empiricism and Pure Experience
• 3 Fichte, the Neo-Kantians and Bergson
• 4 Nishida’s Later Philosophy: The Logic of Place and Self-Contradictory Identity
• Summary and Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index