East-West Synthesis in Kitarō Nishida

·期刊原文

East-West Synthesis in Kitarō Nishida

By Matao Noda

Philosophy East and West

Vol. 4 (1954~1955) pp. 345-359

Copyright 1954 by University of Hawaii Press, Hawaii, US

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This paper is an analysis of the philosophy of Kitarō Nishida (Nishida Kitarō 西田幾多郎 1870-1945), who is now generally acknowledged as a representative metaphysician of modern Japanese. He taught twenty years at Kyoto University, and even after his retirement in 1928 continued writing as Japan's leading thinker. His career covers the entire span of the development of Japanese academic philosophy.

Nishida was quite sensitive to changes of the intellectual climate. He was always flexible enough to give serious consideration to new problems and new theories. The result is that his thought shows a number of stages or perspectives. We can distinguish four such stages of development.

On the other hand, however, Nishida never lost sight of his central problem, namely, the confrontation of Oriental Buddhistic ideas with Western philosophy. In this respect, the direction of his thought was already fixed when as a young teacher in the Junior College at Kanazawa he practiced Zen-meditation under several excellent priests. This central concern with Buddhism can be detected at every stage of his thought.

The four stages mentioned can be discovered in his successive works: (I) "Study of the Good."1911. (II) "Intuition and Reflection in Self-consciousness," 1917. (III) "The System of the Self-conscious Universal," 1930. (IV) "Philosophical Essays" I-VII,1935-1945.[1]

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*0riginally read and discussed with the Committee on Comparative Thought, Stanford University, March 26, 1954. The final section was added on the advice of the editorial staff of the Journal.

[1](a) "Study of the Good" (善の研究 Zen no Kenkyū) (Tokyo: Kōdōkan, 1911 ; 2nd impression, Tokyo; Iwanami Shoten, 1921). (b) "Intuition and Reflection in Self-consciousness" (自覺に於ける直觀と反省 Jikaku ni okeru Cbokkan to Hansei) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1917). (c) "The System of the Self-conscious Universal" ( —般者の自覺的體系 Ippansha no Jikakuteki Taikei) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1930). (d) "Philosophical Essays" (哲學論文集 Tetsugaku Rombunshū) (I-VII, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1935-1946).

We have "Complete Works of Kitarō Nishida" ( 西田幾多郎全集 Nishida Kitarō Zenshū) in 18 volumes (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1946-1953). Volumes I-XII contain all published works of Nishida, and the Supplementary Volumes I-VI contain unpublished manuscripts, diaries, and letters. Quotations below follow the pagination of the "Complete Works." Hereafter this set will be referred to as "Works."

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"STUDY OF THE GOOD"

Nishida's first system was put in simple unsophisticated form in his "Study of the Good." In a sense, this work contains all of his later ideas in a rudimentary form or degree.[2]

Here the major idea is that the scientific world-view as given by modern physics does not reveal reality itself. Take, for example, a red rose. The physicist may regard the rose as an aggregate of atoms and molecules, themselves without color and smell. But Nishida would accept as real the rose as it is given. He believes the painter is nearer the truth than the physicist. And this, by the way, is also one of the typical responses of an Oriental to Western science.

This line of thought may be said to coincide in part with the view of nineteenth-century positivists. For example, Ernst Mach took the immediate sensible phenomena as the primary data, while so-called physical reality was for him a secondary logical construction or a fiction. A classical Western example of a similar nature may be found in Berkeley's criticism of the mechanics of Newton. Nishida was aware of these affinities.

It is notorious, however, that this sort of rejection of physical realism may lead to an extreme subjectivism, solipsism. In order to avoid this consequence, Nishida contends that the immediate experience is prior to the distinction of subject and object. The "pure experience," as he puts it, is the basis from which the subject-object correlation can emerge. Hence, it is not merely subjective. Pure consciousness is the state of consciousness—or, rather, unconsciousness—in which man is one with the thing itself and one with the truth itself. "There is first pure experience, and on it are founded personal egos."[3]

Nishida could find a similar argument in the radical empiricism of William James. According to James, immediate experience covers not only the terms (singular contents) but also the relations between terms. And the subject-object correlation is simply the relation between two serial orders in the field of one immediate experience.

But, unlike James, Nishida takes another step and goes beyond the limit of empiricism. He argues that even the truth of mathematics is guaranteed by the evidence of pure experience, in the sense that it includes not only sensible perception but also the intellectual intuition of a priori truth.[4]

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[2]"This book is excellently summarized in R. F. Piper, "Nishida, Notable Japanese Personalist," Personalist, XVII, No. 1 (1936), 21-31.

[3]"Study of the Good," 1911, "Works," Vol. I, p. 28.

[4]"Evcn mathematics, the so-called abstract science, has its basic principle in the intuition, i.e. direct experience." "Study of the Good," 1911, "Works," Vol. I, p. 37. "Intellectual intuition , nothing but our pure experience deepened and broadened," ibid., p. 42.

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Thus, pure experience comes to cover actually the whole range of knowledge, physical, mathematical, and metaphysical. The "pureness" of it, in part, means ultimately to be free from egocentricity.

Here Nishida's thought is akin to the dialectic of Hegel. Nishida's pure experience proves to be a spontaneously developing totality which includes even reflective thinking as its negative phase, and in the end pure experience is identified with ultimate reality. The title of one of the chapters in his "Study of the Good" characterizes Nishida's position somewhat crudely as "Consciousness is the Unique Reality."[5]

In view of such an ontological outlook, how does Nishida treat the problem of value, of the good? He answers in terms of his voluntarism. Returning to the psychology of Wundt, he finds the basic form of consciousness in the volitional process. The unity of experience, which realizes itself through diversity and contrariety, is identified with the activity of the will, which through reflective choice of the means finally attains the end and restores the original unity. This self-realization of the volitional process is the good.[6]

In line with his rejection of solipsism in epistemology, Nishida contends that the above conception of the good does not mean the good of one individual ego alone but, rather, the social good. The realization of one's self and the love of others come to be identical.

In fine, reality and the good, knowledge and action, wisdom and love, are all one. And this one, taken in its perfection, is God. The existence of God is not to be proved by arguments, cosmological or moral; rather, we unify ourselves with the deity in our effort to broaden and deepen the range of pure experience.

The contrast with James, again, may serve to characterize Nishida's idea as a whole. James's radical empiricism goes hand in hand with pragmatism, which means that he also tries to define the true in terms of the good. But here the good is always related to the concrete finite action of man. And religion is grounded in the same way, as is shown in his "will to believe." Nishida, for all his affinity with James, pays little attention to the tatter's sound common sense. He accepts, from the first, the position of a mystic. His metaphysics has its characteristic motif in his mystic religiosity.

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[5]”Study of the Good," 1911, part 2, Chap. 2.

[6]'Nishida reviews various definitions of the good, and finally agrees with Aristotle, who defined it as rational self-activity. "Study of the Good," 1911, "Works," Vol. I, pp. 143-144.

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"Intuition and reflection in self-consciousness"

In the next stage of his thought, Nishida concerns himself with Neo-Kantianism. The result is shown in his first elaborate work, "Intuition and Reflection in Self-consciousness" (1917).

The former stage was epistemologically akin to the idealism of Berkeley. The present work is based on the position of Kant. In respect to the scientific world-view, the difference between these two is the difference between positivism and physical realism. In a word, Kantians try to make idealism adequate to physical realism. And this is also Nishida's concern at this stage in his philosophical development.

"We now start from the a priori truths of logic and mathematics and progress "down" to empirical knowledge, and try to interpret them as the successive products of the one synthetic a priori truth.[7] Similar positions had already been taken, of course, by Neo-Kantians, notably by Hermann Cohen.[8]

But what is characteristic of Nishida in contrast with typical Neo-Kantians is that he puts -much more emphasis upon the unity of self-consciousness as the prototype of all categories. He insists that even behind the logical principle of identity, ordinarily taken as a simple analytical truth, there lurks an intuition of self-identity that has the character of an a priori synthesis. The logical identity itself is founded upon the unity of self-consciousness. "A is A" is based on "I am I."9 And this original intuition of self develops, producing the concepts of number, time, space, and so on.[10]

This is the way once taken by Fichte. To find in the logical identity itself the unity of self-consciousness and thus to raise the formal principle to an avowedly ontological one was what Kant dared not do but what Fichte dared to do. In following Fichte, Nishida was telling the Kantians that he could not be satisfied with epistemology, but needed a metaphysics also.[11]

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[7]About the relation of logic and mathematics, Nishida remarks: "The qualitative self-identity "A is A" implies the distinction of A from non-A. Now if A is without content, the distinction of A from non-A is the same as the distinction of non-A from A. Here originates the idea of the mathematical "one" "1 =1," . . . The act of thus distinguishing and unifying the objects is to be regarded as the act of self-consciousness which mirrors itself in itself, so that it can constitute the infinite series of numbers." "Intuition and Reflection in Self-consciousness," 1917, "Works," Vol. II, pp. 78-79.

As to the transition from formal truth to empirical truth, Nishida is acutely conscious of the difficulties. His way of thinking may be seen in the following quotation; "The so-called constraint of the empirical intuition upon the unity of thought, in other words, the irrationality of empirical content over against the rationality of thought does not originate from the existence of the simple empirical content without form. The opposition between form and content is in truth the opposition between two a prioris, both of which constitute knowledge in their own way. The so-called empirical content is in itself a system constituted by an a priori." Ibid, p89

[8]"Hermann Cohen, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1902).

[9]”Intuition and Reflection in Self-consciousness,” 1917, "Works," Vol. II, pp. 59, 65.

[10]Ibid, Sects. 26-34 (pp. 161-221).

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Without going into his rather abstruse arguments, we can guess what the conclusion of such a metaphysics would be. The stubborn facts of the world, together with their meanings and values, could never be exhausted by a priori logic. Kantians may be satisfied with conceiving the ultimate totality as no more than a limit-concept, but Nishida must touch and grasp the ultimate. If logical synthesis means to be occupied with "being" in the Platonic sense, what Nishida seeks is not "being" alone, but "the unity of being and non-being." Nishida's conclusion was that we should acknowledge the "absolute will" in the manner of Jakob Boehme. He confesses that after painful struggles he had to "surrender himself to the camp of mystery."[12] And of course he did not regret it.

Among American thinkers, Josiah Royce was more akin to Nishida in this stage than any other. Royce made use of the definition of the "infinite" in the set-theory of Georg Cantor in order to conceive his "self-representative system."[13] This corresponds to Nishida's "self-conscious system." Nishida acknowledges that he was encouraged by Royce in this line of thought.

"THE SYSTEM OF THE SELF-CONSCIOUS UNIVERSAL"

After the First World War, the phenomenology of Edmund Husseri was studied extensively in Japan. Though Husseri was a transcendental idealist, his mode of seeing things was in the direction of Platonic realism, free from the subjective construction of a Kantian. Impressed by this, Japanese scholars became interested in Plato and Aristotle. And Nishida was the first to take a step in this direction.[14]

He tries to remold his ontology on a more realistic basis. His concern is now centered upon the problem of the individual substance in the Aristotelian tradition. With Aristotle, what truly is is an individual substance, and he defines this as what is always a logical subject and never a predicate. But, then, the individual (and, therefore, the true being) should be ultimately indefinable in logical terms. No matter how far we might pursue the individual by specifying the universal, the individual would always remain beyond our reach. Over against this difficulty, Nishida always seeks

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[11]Ibid., Preface, "Works," Vol. II, p. 4. It may be useful to remind ourselves here that Nishida was then much interested in Bergson also. "To unify Kantianism and Bergsonianism by giving a new meaning to Fichte's system" was his intention. Ibid., p. 3.

[12]Ibid,p. 11.

[13]"Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual, First Series (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1920), Supplementary Essay, Sect. III, esp. pp. 503-506. See also Ha Tai Kim, "Nishida and Royce," Philosophy East and West, I, No. 4, (January, 1952), pp. 18-29.

[14]This trend of thought roughly corresponds to "realism" among English and American philosophers. The contrast between metaphysical and scientific realism is rather impressive.

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the principle of individuation in the universal itself. He wants to find a sort of "concrete universal," as Hegel puts it. And what Nishida took as his concrete universal was his "field of nothingness."

In order to understand this riddle-like phrase, "field of nothingness," it is necessary, first, to review the historical perspective in which Nishida adopted the idea. The concept of "field" (literally, locus; bashō in Japanese), was presumably suggested to Nishida by the concept of "space" in Plato's Timaeus. It corresponds, of course, to the Aristotelian concept of "matter," which was regarded by Scholastic philosophy as the principle of individuation of finite beings. Nishida, while seeking the principle of individuation in the universal, conceives the latter as a sort of material field wherein forms emerge, so to speak. And in this connection the modem physical concept of field of force, taken by Einstein as a cosmic field, seems to have suggested much to Nishida.

As for "nothingness" (non-being), it should be noted, first, that both Plato and Aristotle regarded "matter" as non-being, because they found true being always on the side of "form." The reason Nishida, while taking the concept of field (hence, of "matter") as quite a positive reality—almost in the manner of the physical field—dared, nevertheless, to characterize ' it as the field of "nothingness" should be traced to the influence of the Oriental tradition.

It is quite common for Orientals to think that the way of "nothingness," in the sense of being free from egocentricity, is much higher in value than the way of "being," in the sense of valuing finite beings and egos. One may find a similar estimate of "nothingness," of course, even in the Christian , idea of "poverty." But in contrast to the Christian idea of God as absolute "being," in Buddhism and Taoism "nothing" is raised to the status of the . ultimate ontological principle itself. The Absolute is conceived here as non-being rather than as being. And, according to Nishida and some other modern interpreters of Buddhism, this principle of nothingness has the advantage of being more compatible with modern science and humanism than does the Christian idea of God. They contend that the Oriental ontology of nothingness can accept human freedom and scientific cosmology more consistently than the theistic idea can. Nishida quotes the Zen-priest Hōshaku (of the T'ang period in China): "All our doings are like brandishing a sword in the air [void]."[15]

So much for the historical background. "What is the doctrine of Nishida himself? He distinguishes three stages of knowledge: (a) knowledge of the physical world, (b) knowledge of the human world, and (c) knowledge

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[15]"Philosophical Essays," VII, 1946, "Works," Vol. XI, p. 430.

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of ideal value; and these correspond to the three stages of being, or, rather, the three fields of nothingness.

(a) Knowledge of the physical world. Our knowledge of physical beings may be expressed in the form of a judgment "S is P," where S means the individual fact and P the general concept which determines S. The predicate P represents all kinds of logical constructs, time, space, motion, and so on, while the subject S represents the external thing.

Nishida recognizes here the old problem of individuation in the Platonic and Aristotelian tradition. He is never satisfied with the method of analysis in epistemology and methodology. He tries to include in a logical ontological scheme the whole relation of physical laws and objects.

Neo-Kantians may in their manner consider knowledge to be the product of a priori syntheses and define the individual object as the limit of the synthetic process, but Nishida thinks that this interpretation never suffices to do full Justice to the individual fact. Individuals are not to be postulated as limit-concepts; they are immediately present to us. Our field of consciousness "envelops" them actually.[16]

And Nishida would take this field of consciousness wherein the individual is given as being the "transcendental predicate" adequate to the individual. The usual predicate, mentioned above as P, which designates all logical constructs of the physical theory, shows many limited aspects of the total field, relevant to the individual in question. (Nishida calls these "limited fields.") The predicate, the limited field, is, so to speak, the mirror of the individuals. To repeat, the underlying field as a concrete universal determines itself at once as the individual and the universal, and their mutual correspondence (hence, the truth of physical statements) is guaranteed by the field itself.[17]

There is no need here to enter upon a detailed analysis of the scheme of physical knowledge as given by Nishida. But what has been said may have given the impression that Nishida imposes his ontological scheme somewhat arbitrarily upon the phenomenal state of affairs. The reason is that he is always trying to interpret objective knowledge in terms of self

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[16]According to Nishida, Hegel, with his idea of concrete universal, conceives the individual as the result of "development" of the universal. If we distinguish in respect to the general concept its intension and its extension even Hegel is too much attached to the intensional point of view. The extension of a concept, as the range of individuals immediately given, is not rightly treated. By analogy, one may say that Neo-Kantians and Hegelians all view the individual from the aspect of its "dynamic" development, while they neglect the character of "static" coexistence. That is why Nishida talks about the "field" which "envelops" the individual. See Nishida, "fundamental Problems of Philosophy," Second Series ( 哲學の根本問題.續篇 Tetsugaku no kompon mondai, Zokuben),

[17]In finding the field of consciousness to be the concrete universal which he needs, Nishida was much Influenced by the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Nishida reinterpreted the phenomenological field of consciousness as an ontological field, and took the intentional act as the activity of the field itself.

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knowledge, or "self-consciousness." An examination of the next stage of knowledge makes this part clearer.

(b) Psychological and historical knowledge. The underlying field is "the self-conscious universal." Nishida takes up the same scheme, "S is P." For Nishida, in the position of S stands the individual self. It is known by introspection. And it mirrors itself in the field of consciousness, which corresponds here to P, Nishida thinks this is the basic form of psychological knowledge.

The situation here is the reverse of the former stage. There the individual was given as a logical subject, and consciousness enveloped it from the side of the predicate. But here the inner self takes the position of the logical subject, and the field of consciousness becomes the limited field of psychological knowledge. As a consequence, the underlying total field of consciousness acquires another character. Nishida characterizes this as noetic, while the former field of objective consciousness is, in contrast, noematic.[18]

As has been seen already in respect to the first and second stages of Nishida's philosophy, he always tends to introduce into his psychology the dynamic view of voluntarism. And so he proceeds now to conceive the self-determination of the universal as a volitional process, which means the process of self-realization. And by so interpreting it he comes to conceive the field of consciousness (P), not merely as the domain of psychological knowledge, but also as the whole field of human history. The range of this second stage of knowledge comes to include history as well as psychology. And, furthermore, the activity of self here comprises practical self-realization as well as theoretical knowledge.[19]

But, for all that, Nishida recognizes in this stage of his thought the primacy of intuition over action. The whole volitional process in the historical world of man has its true end in man's complete vision of himself. Man acts in order to see. All man's activities are more or less imperfect forms of self-intuition or contemplation.

And if man should attain the perfect vision of himself, he might identify himself with the universal of self-consciousness, i.e., the total underlying field. Therefore, it can be said that the self as the total field wants to see itself (the individual subject S) in the self (the predicate P).

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[18]This terminology was suggested by Edmund Husserl. This distinction of noesis and noema is made from the viewpoint of the ultimate field of the "intelligible universal," as will be explained later.

[19]Nishida quotes Augustine, The City of God, Book XI, Chap. XXVII. "By inner sense I am assured both that I am, and that I know this; and these two I love, and in the same manner I am assured that I love them." 'With Nishida the self-realization is termed often love of self in Augustinian fashion. Nishida, "Meditations and Experiences" ( 思索と體驗 Shisaku to Taikem) Second Series (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1919)

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But the fact is that man can never attain this perfect vision in the psychological or historical fields. Take, for instance, man's moral action. Man certainly has his inner conscience as the judge of what he does in the historical world, but he will never find the perfect realization of his innermost conscience. He will never attain the perfect vision of himself in this stage of being.

Therefore, his conscience is in another dimension of being. This is the third and ultimate field of ideal values, termed the "intelligible field."

(c) Knowledge of ideal value. Here the individual subject S is the intelligible self. It sees itself perfectly in the ideal forms of value, the Platonic Ideas. In other words, the correlation of S and P is shown as that of noesis and noema in the full sense of these words. Man's intellectual, moral, and "aesthetic" activities have their perfection and model in this world of intelligible universals. But, to be precise, do the noesis and noema still presuppose an underlying total field? In some sense they do, but in other senses they do not. Nishida posits here his field of "absolute nothingness." In Mahāyāna Buddhism there exists the famous dictum: "The concrete reality is the void, and the void is the concrete reality." Nishida says, in effect, all depends in the end upon "self-consciousness of absolute nothingness."[20]

The two former stages, the physical world and the human world, are based ultimately upon noema and noesis of absolute nothingness. For example, man may be able to answer the question: Why does the physical world, in spite of its abstractness as compared with the human world, never cease to transcend human beings? It is because physical reality is itself founded upon the noema of the intelligible world, while man ordinarily remains short of the noesis in the same world.[21]

Nishida's incidental denomination of the three fields is interesting. The physical world is called "field of being." The human world, "field of relative nothingness." The ultimate field is, of course, "field of absolute nothingness." Here it is seen that in the order of perfection, that is, of value, nothingness is estimated to be higher than being.[22]

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[20]In a sense Nishida stands very near Plotinus; the three universals roughly correspond to the "matter," "soul," and "intellect," of Plotinus. With plotinus, the ultimate "one" was conceived to be "non-being" in the sense that it transcends all beings.

[21]Nishida interprets the ultimate position of Kantianism as being centered upon the noematic structure of tile intelligible world, while he thinks phenomenology pays more attention to the noetic side. And the one lacks what the other has. "System of the Self-conscious Universal," 1930, "Works," Vol. V., p. 149.

[22]Nishida, "From the Acting Self to the Seeing Self" ( 働 くものから見るものへ Hataraku mono kara mira mono e), 1927, "Works," Vol. IV, p. 232. Also pp. 235-236.

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"PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS"

The last stage of Nishida's thought corresponds to the period when, because of nationalistic trends in all domains, historicism prevailed among Japanese philosophers. German historians, Dilthey and others, were read avidly. Heidegger's phenomenology came into vogue. In fact, part of what the latter intended was to give a philosophical foundation to the historicism of the former.

In view of this situation, Nishida again remolds his ontology. He not only wants to give a place to the questions of history as in his former scheme, but also to acknowledge that the social and historical world is the central reality. True reality is historical.[23] But, far from consenting to Heidegger's subjectivism, he maintains his ontological framework of the field and the individual.

Now the field of nothingness comes to be explicitly qualified as the "coincidence of opposites." Nishida gives it a more drastic name, "identity of self-contradictories," where "identity" means real unity and also the unifying process of contradictories. Opposite determinations, such as the universal and the individual, the one and the many, time and space, etc., constitute the two opposite poles of the ultimate field. And by the tension and mutual action of contrary poles are produced all forms of beings. There are, then, three series of forms, or three realms of being: the physical world, the world of life, and the historical world.[24]

The physical world as a whole is that aspect of the total reality which is found, so to speak, near the pole of the many and the spatial. It is characterized as "the one based upon the many," a phrase implying mechanical composition. The process in it is "from the many to the one," Le.? die process of mechanical causation, where plural causes produce a single effect.

And in the inner structure of this world there is also a form of the unity of opposites, for, according to the new microphysics, the ideas of "particles" and of the "field" must be recognized as complementary, in respect to matter as well as to light. The many and the one, though opposite to each other, unify themselves in the physical process.

The world of life is situated, contrary to the physical world, nearer to the pole of the one and the temporal. It is "the many based upon the one," i.e., its character is that of organization. The process here is the differentia-

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[23]"The historical world is the only real world. From this world arc derived various other worlds, 'Hitherto one has been apt to fall into the error of conceiving the historical world from outside of it." "Philosophical Essays," III, 1939, "Works," Vol. IX. pp. 94-95. ,

[24] Ibid,III,1939, "Works," Vol. IX, pp. 158-160, ibid,, VI, 1945, "Works," Vol. XI, p.57.

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tion of the original unity ("from the one to the many"), in other words, teleological generation.

The world of life also contains in itself a sort of inner tension between the one and the many. In biological terms, this tension is the correlation of organic unity and its environment. And the life process is denned as the active maintenance of a specific form in the correlation of organic unity and environment.[25] This, according to Nishida, is another case of the formative activity of the ultimate field.

At the limit of the second realm of being—the life process—emerges a new series of forms, the historical world of man. What is peculiar to human activity? It is the making of things by the use of tools. Animals, bees, for example, may make quite elaborate hives, but they always make the same thing. And the beehive has no independence apart from the bees. It is, so to speak, an extension of their own organic bodies. But what man has made detaches itself from the maker, and as an independent objective form can be reacted to anew by its maker. Thus, man, the maker, can make another more appropriate form the next time.

Thus, with the technical practice of man emerges a new aspect of reality: the independent objective world in place of the environment, and free creative activity in place of organic unity.[26] The ontological status of the human world is the correlation of objectivity and creativity.

This correlation can no longer be interpreted either as "the one based upon the many" or "the many based upon the one." Between the many and the one has arisen a gap, as it were. And yet, a mutual interaction of the poles still occurs to produce new forms. In Nishida's terms, the many and the one, by their contradiction, identify themselves. And for him the "historical" world means the world where this identity of contradictories has come to be revealed.

Nishida's epistemology, in view of the above analysis of the human situation, now leaves the former phenomenological scheme, and approaches something like behaviorism. "Behavioral (operational) intuition" becomes his motto. This means the correlation, within the knowing process itself, of making and seeing. As is known from the theory of experiment in microphysics, the experimental operation and the objective determination are complementary. The act of observing modifies the object, so that the be-

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[25]Ibid.. VII, 1946, "Works," Vol. XI, p. 292. Nishida quotes here J. S. Haldane; "We perceive the relations of the parts and environment of an organism as being of such a nature that a normal and specific structure and environment is actively maintained." See J. S. Haldane, The Philosophical Basis of Biology (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1931), p. 16.

[26]This objective world is not the same as so-called physical reality. It it, rather, a world of signs and symbols. Nishida often called it "the representative world."

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havior affects the nature of the object seen. This is one case of "behavioral intuition."

Nishida tries to show this complementarity of operation and intuition in all domains of knowledge, and sums up all in the knowledge of the historical world, where man can freely choose his own perspective, but should also acknowledge that his perspective itself is included in the historical process. In the end, all knowledge is located in the one historical world, and shares its paradoxical unity.[27]

As for human society and culture, they are "forms" in the historical world which are "created and creative." Society has something of organic form. But, unlike the organic body in the animal world, human society has also the character of a technical product. It is determined by the mode of technical production.

Human individuals being free and creative beyond the "social form," there always remains room for "ideal forms" in the historical world. Morality, the arts, and the sciences are these "ideal forms." Nishida is particularly interested in interpreting the arts in terms of his metaphysics of history."[28]

There remains, however, one matter of vital concern for him, namely, religion. Nishida draws a sharp distinction between religion and other cultural forms, especially morality. Morality is concerned with how man should act, while religion concerns man's existence itself, his life and death. This religious concern makes man aware of the bottomlessness of the historical world itself. And it is in view of this religious situation of man that Nishida characterizes his ultimate principle as "the identity of absolute self-contradiction." Apart from the paradoxes of religion, such an expression might not be understandable.

One may be tempted to think, perhaps, that Nishida’s dialectic is in the long run nothing but his own "credo quia absurdum." But it must also be added that for Nishida religious life was not merely one partial domain of human experience but was also indicative of its integral character.

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[27]Nishida interprets the operationism of Bridgman in this metaphysical way. See the article "Empirical Science," "Philosophical Essays," III, 1939, "Works," Vol. IX, pp. 223 ff, Nishida's mode of argument may be known by the following quotation; "Bridgman says that the basic concepts of physics have hitherto been defined, apart from the physical operation, as some qualities of things, as in the case of Newtonian absolute time. In line with Bridgman, I .[Nishida] think that philosophy has hitherto conceived the structure of the objective world in an abstract manner, apart from our formative activity (poiēsis) in the historical world. . . . The content of the philosophical principle that is truly concrete should be given from the operational standpoint. In respect to all abstraction and analysis it should be specified from what standpoint and in what way they are performed." Ibid, pp. 239-240.

[28]"See his article, "Artistic creation as formative activity of the historical world," "Philosophical Essays" IV, 1941, "Works," Vol. X, pp. 177 ff.

[29]"Ibid., VII, 1946, "Works," Vol. XI, pp. 393-394, 410.

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CONCLUDING REMARKS

In the above review of the development of Nishida's philosophy we fried to distinguish the four stages rather sharply from one another. We may need here to sum them up and to make clear what was Nishida's basic principle throughout the changes of his perspectives. As was said at the beginning of this paper Nishida always aimed at the "confrontation" of Oriental, especially Buddhist, ideas with Western philosophy and science. By the word "confrontation" two things are meant: first, an explicit acknowledgement that Buddhist ideas contain a view of life different from that of Western philosophy, which view has hitherto been presented in intuitive forms mainly in works of art and symbols of religion; second, the assertion that Buddhist ideas have a claim not only upon their intuitive expressions but also upon their own logical ontological scheme. It was this claim which Nishida would try to develop through assimilation of Western philosophy, and finally to lead to a sort of synthesis of the East and the West.

We can certainly say that in his first and second stage Nishida could "confront" in the first sense Oriental Buddhism and Western philosophy. At first, he took up the positivistic interpretation of science and tried to introduce the mystic intuition of Buddhism into the phenomenal world of a positivist, thus giving Oriental mysticism its own place in the philosophical world-view. But in the meantime, Nishida missed in the older positivism the logical systematization of basic categories of science, and turned to constructive idealism. Thus, in accord with Josiah Royce, Nishida arrived at a voluntaristic mysticism which he named "the standpoint of the Absolute Will" and by which he wanted to do Justice to the claim of Oriental religiosity. What, by the way, Ha Tat Kim so well analyzed in his paper "Nishida and Royce" was Nishida's idea on this second Stage.[30]

The idealistic construction itself, however, was not a spontaneous, adequate expression of what Nishida understood as the essence of Buddhism. The claim of Buddhism upon its own ontological scheme was not satisfied. To use Northrop's terminology somewhat freely, Oriental thought was allowed here the place of the "aesthetic component" of the world-view, but no claim upon its "theoretic component."[31] Thus, it was only in the third stage of his thought that the "confrontation" of East and West in the second meaning took place in the philosophy of Nishida. He came to grasp, by recurring

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[30]Ha Tai Kim, "Nishida and Royce." Philosophy East and West, I, No. 4 (January, 1952), 18-29.

[31]F. S. C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West, (New York: The Macmillan Co, 1947), pp.302-305.

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to Greek objective idealism, his own logical ontological scheme, "the field of nothingness and the individuals therein."

According to Nishida, "Western ontology from Parmenides and Plato down to the modern scientific world-view has always been inclined to locate reality and value in the objective domain. Even the Christian God is conceived to be transcendent to us in the objective direction, as ens realissimum. Now, in the Oriental tradition lies a contrary view. The subjective act of consciousness, which is to be characterized as non-being if being is understood as essentially objective, is made the center of ontological thinking. The Absolute is conceived to be immanent in the subject, and its transcendence— for after all the Absolute transcends finite beings—is inner transcendence in the sense of being "more intimate to us than ourselves," as the well-known Augustinian phrase says. With this idea of the Absolute coincides Nishida's conception of the ultimate field as matrix of all realities.[32]

This scheme of Nishida had at first an essentially static character. In each domain of being the universal field envelops the individual, and the individual mirrors itself in the universal. It was a sort of structural analysis of being. But as he came nearer to the historical and social world Nishida was led to put more emphasis upon the spontaneous self-determination of the individual over against the universal. The scheme obtained a dynamic character. The unity of the field and the individual proved to be a paradoxical one, which was named "the identity of self-contradiction." Every domain of being is based upon a form of paradoxical unity. The historical world itself, which Nishida recognized as the central reality, was defined as the domain where through human activity reality becomes aware of its paradoxical unity.[33]

Thus, the ontology of Nishida in its last and definite form presents itself as a dynamic view of reality in the form of a system of paradoxes. A paradox may be defined as a self-contradictory statement that is not to be put aside as simply false or to be solved away, but is acknowledged as meaningful in itself. Such paradoxes concern continuity and discontinuity of the physical world,life and environment, and the subject-object correlation. What

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[32]This metaphysical contrast corresponds to the ethical contrast between the Christian God that judges and the Buddha that commiserates with finite beings. "Philosophical Essays," VII, 194fi, "Works," Vol. XI, pp. 434, 458. This line of thought Nishida shares with Daisetz Suzuki, his boyhood friend. See Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, A Miscellany on the Shin Teaching of Buddhism (Kyoto; Office of Shin-Sect ōtani-ha, 1949), pp. 35-36. Here Suzuki contrasts with Christianity the Shin-sect of Buddhism, which is the most akin to Christianity among Buddhist sects.

[33]In spite of his sympathy with historicism, Nishida may be said to have remained to the end aloof from the Western conception of history based upon Christianity. This estimate was given by a German philosopher who once taught in Japan. See the article by Karl Löwith, "Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen," contained in Anteile, Martin Heidegger zum 60, Geburtstag, (Frankfurt am Main: Vittoria Klostermann, 1950), pp. 109-110, 114,note 1.

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ultimately gives unity and meaning to these contradictions is religion, for religious life is not merely one partial domain of human experience, but is also indicative of its integral character.

One may wonder, however, where the function of analytical thinking shall lie when it is granted that reality is a system of paradoxes. One may wonder if Nishida's philosophy is nothing more than a series of lazy arguments. In order to answer this question it would certainly be necessary to examine more in detail than is possible here Nishida's method of philosophy, in respect to the point whether a dialectical logic, different from ordinary logic but nevertheless a logic, is possible or not. But, in general, Nishida’s argument for the possibility of dialectical logic, apart from the consideration of the historical tradition mentioned above, is simple and straightforward. Usually he refers to the existence of self-knowledge and argues that here lies a self-recurrent, and logically self-contradictory, mode of thinking which is based upon an indubitable fact, that there should be some form of thinking where self-contradiction itself can be of vital meaning.[34]

Let it suffice to raise the issue here. Besides, the issue is not quite decided even among present-day analytical philosophers.[35] But even if we should admit with Nishida some form of self-contradiction as logically meaningful, it does not follow that all self-contradictions have meaning. Indeed, the paradoxical unity which Nishida conceives is the basic principle itself, which must of course be sought by an effort of analysis. Nishida's philosophy, viewed from this angle, is an elucidation of the structural and functional analogy between various domains of being by repeated analyses of each of them. The analysis was characterized by the attitude of going ever so close to the real state of affairs. Hence, Nishida could insist that his philosophy was an objective logical analysis of the real world, free from any forced preconceptions.[36] And in following him one wonders what other direction a genuine metaphysics could take, provided that it is to be based upon the Oriental tradition.

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[34]In referring to Descartes, Nishida says: "Descartes started from the self, from the proposition 'cogito ergo sum.' But before that he had put into doubt even his own existence. So what he grasped was, in fact, the self-contradictory truth that what thinks is what is thought. But he put the truth into the form of substance (logical subject). On the contrary, I think that thence should have started a new logic and a new idea of reality. . . . The logic by which we conceive our own existence is the logic of the universal which contains in its extension our own self. "Philosophical Essays," VI, 1945, "Works." Vol. XI, p. 161.

[35]F. B. Fitch, Symbolic Logic (New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1952) Appendix C, "Self-Reference in Philosophy." In mentioning this article, I am far from saying that Professor Fitch is for Nishida. I only suggest that part of what Nishida insists upon, that is, the inevitability of self-reference in the method of philosophy, is contained in Fitch's argument.

[36]Speaking of the "Identity of Self-contradiction," Nishida says: "I am not arguing on the basis of religious experience. I am arguing on the basis of a thoroughgoing logical analysis of the historical reality. Moreover I do not analyse its structure only, but pursue its movement." "Philosophical Essays," III. 1939, "Works," Vol. IX, p. 57.