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Translating Nishida

       

发布时间:2009年04月18日
来源:不详   作者:Maraldo , John C.
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·期刊原文
Translating Nishida
Maraldo , John C.
Philosophy East and West
Vol.39 No.4
October 1989
pp.465-496
Copyright by University of Hawaii Press

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p.465

 

Nishida Kitaro[a] (1870-1945) is hailed as the first and foremost original philosopher in modern Japan; yet, compared with other preeminent twentiethcentury thinkers, his works have made little impact on philosophers outside his own country. This fact is all the more ironic when we realize how intensely aware Nishida was of the work of his contemporaries in Europe and North America. The difficulties of Nishida's language notwithstanding, a significant factor in the virtual ignorance of his philosophy has been the dearth of competent translations. Until 1987, four of some nineteen volumes of major philosophical writings[1] had appeared in full in English, along with two volumes in Spanish and a smattering of shorter essays translated in part or whole into English and German. This number would in itself seem sufficient for introducing Nishida's philosophical system, were it not for the fact that all but one of the volumes translated into English were not readily available and that their excessively literal style of translation made Nishida's thought virtually inaccessible. The three new publications examined in parts III and IV of this cumulative review, and the recently announced translation mentioned in part I, should begin to make a difference in the reception of Nishida in the West .

I. TRANSLATION AND THE CHALLENGES OF "NISHIDA PHILOSOPHY"

Why should considerable attention be paid to translating Nishida? Recognized during his lifetime as the founder of original philosophical thinking in Japan and a major interpreter of Western intellectual currents, Nishida was sharply criticized in the postwar period for political views that had lent support to the government's Pan-Asia policy. Discussion of his thought for the most part remained polarized between Marxist-leaning critics and "Kyoto-School" philosophers until the past decade or so, when Japanese philosophers of various persuasions rediscovered the significance of his writings for problems both current and perennial. Books on Nishida now appear at the rate of three or four a year. This phenomenon might be written off as another intellectual vogue, but the new work, whether critical or adoptive, makes a substantial case for the relevance of "Nishida philosophy" to the contemporary world. Making a case for Nishida as a major world philosopher depends, of course, upon producing good translations and critical treatments in Western languages. But I see this task not merely as creating a body of derivative

 

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literature in order to establish the reputation of a philosopher. To realize that translation is an integral part of the philosophical endeavor, we need only recall the significance of translating Aristotle, Kant, or Heidegger for a history of philosophy under continual formation. What gets translated as well as how it gets translated affects the content and the style of our philosophizing today.

Whether or not Nishida belongs to the ranks of those who challenge traditional philosophical assumptions, as some recent writers claim,[2] it is undeniable that he poses a considerable challenge to the translator, and on several counts. First, Nishida wrote at a time when philosophical terminology and argumentative styles were still being forged in Japan. His philosophy developed in detailed response to Western philosophers and with a measured undercurrent of Buddhist thinking. The translator has, therefore, to recognize not only the echo of Western terms and ideas in the Japanese text, but also the shadow if not the explicit statement, of Buddhist allusions. In contrast to the more practical and literary bent of premodern Japanese philosophy, Nishida's works represent one of the first attempts to do metaphysics and to come to terms with formal and dialectical logic. Often groping for a new way of conceptualization, they are not characterized by sustained, linear argumentation or minute analysis. For the most part Nishida published what he wrote without much internal revision, preferring instead to rework his ideas in further essays and lectures that read like cascades of symphonic themes, often without a coda. The translator faces the decision of retaining Nishida's probing, meandering style or crystallizing his ideas in more succinct language. In fact, his style of writing is perhaps best described not by a musical but by a geometrical metaphor, that of the "fractal." Fractal geometry deals with the sort of complex, irregular, fragmented shapes that pervade the natural world, such as mountain ranges or crystal formations. Nishida's writings give the impression of this sort of repetitive, "flawed," and still growing phenomenon. Any one passage or text grows around seeds set in previous passages or texts, so that the old adage of understanding the part best in terms of a whole context is even more applicable than usual in his case.

The challenge of translating Nishida is not fully realized, however, until we recognize that the reader/translator has a hand in the formation of the text as a meaningful entity. To adapt a turn of phrase from M. M. Bakhtin,[3] a living, signifying text is the text as read by competent readers; it is not a dead collection of signs. An intelligible translation of a text presupposes an intelligent reader, one who can gather sense from context. The translator must be such a reader who enlivens the text, and he or she can assume, given the plethora of secondary literature in Japanese, that Nishida's texts have had such readers. If philosophically trained readers of the Japanese can make sense out of Nishida's texts, should not translators enable their readers to do the same? I stress these seemingly obvious points because a whole generation of transla-

 

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tions evidently forgot them in their parallel convictions that Nishida's thought is inordinately difficult and yet transmittable only by translating literally. Simplistic assumptions about "letting the text speak for itself" or "what the author says" are undermined as soon as one begins to read, for reading is a process of transforming a collection of signs into something that makes sense, perhaps at times challenges or even defies sense. That the translator must be a highly informed and skilled reader only implies that he or she contributes to the sense of the text.

The exercise of translating Nishida challenges another common assumption, that which opposes "free" and "literal" translations, associates literal with faithful, and takes "free" as tampering with the text. This assumption is all the more questionable when literal translation is conceived as a faithful word-for-word reconstruction of an original text. By stringing together words as if selected from a bilingual dictionary of fixed entries, the translator here supposedly conveys only what the author wrote, that is, supposedly only what a native reader of the source text would read; yet no one would suppose that a native reader makes sense of the text by word-for-word reconstruction. The association of literalness with accuracy assumes an equivalence not merely between words and phrases of two distinct languages, but between readers of the Japanese and readers of the language of translation; it ignores the differences between cultures, times, and even individual readers. A sharp distinction between accuracy and readability, on the other hand, commonly invoked in evaluating translations, assumes that style is not an integral part of the communication of ideas. As an examination of Nishida translations shows, one cannot speak of accuracy where a passage is not intelligible. If accurate equivalents are to be sought, they should be sought for on the level of passages read in contexts, not on a word-for-word level.

In the following, I accordingly pay more attention to the translation of passages than of particular terms; where I do focus on terms, I judge their translation according to proximate and historical contexts. I limit the review to English translations of Nishida, which by far outnumber those in other languages,[4] and treat the works more or less in the order of their publication in English, not Japanese. This represents the chronology of our knowledge of him, and of an evolution in translating styles, but not the internal development of his system,[5] nor even less the full variety of his themes. I do, however, attempt to select and summarize topics that can serve as a thread through Nishida's works, and to offer comments that indicate the state of Nishida studies today and its tasks for the future.

II. THE EARLY TRANSLATIONS

A. A Study of Good. Translated by V. H. Viglielmo. Tokyo: Japanese Government Printing Bureau, 1960. Reprint, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1988.

 

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This translation of Zen no kenkyu[b], Nishida's pioneer work of 1911 that quickly established his status as an original philosopher in Japan, has itself not enjoyed a favorable reputation. Yet because of the importance of the work it exposed, it probably deserved more than the extremely limited distribution to which it was consigned until its reprint last year.

The core of this work is the notion of "pure experience" as "the only reality," that is, the basis of explanation for all modes of experiencing and for everything experienced or known. "Pure" or "immediate experience" is the unitary state prior to the division between experiencing subject and experienced object, knower and known. It is, however, not exclusive of differentiated states, but includes them as derivative moments in the development of a fuller unity. Consciousness is a single system with pure experience as its inherent foundation; the foundational and systematic nature of Nishida's pure experience contrasts sharply with the meaning of the term in William James. Nature and spirit can be understood as the two sides of unified objectivity and its unifying function, respectively; and God is not a transcendent being but the underlying infinite activity of unification. Nishida would continue to search for basic unities underlying disruptions, differences, and contradictions throughout his career, although he eventually abandoned the language of pure experience and the explanatory schemes of A Study of Good.

The translation must likewise be considered an initial attempt. In an opening apology that seems to have become a kind of manifesto for a whole generation of Nishida translations, Viglielmo set forth the principles that guided his endeavor:

The average Western reader may very well feel that this translation suffers from excessive literalness, that many sentences are awkward and unidiomatic, and that even the thought is occasionally obscure. If I am guilty of these charges, the reason is only that I have sought to be scrupulously accurate and thus may have erred on the side of faithfulness. (P. v)

With the objective of "the greatest possible accuracy" in mind, the translator anticipated criticism from lay readers, but hoped for the approval of the professional philosophers, assuring them that Nishida's thought is here rendered with "an absolute minimum of modification or adaptation for the purposes of clarity" (pp.v-vi). This statement is significant for associating literalness with accuracy, awkwardness and obscurity with faithfulness-associations that will prove to be continually questionable in the course of this review.

Though true to his word about unidiomatic English, Viglielmo's A Study of Good fell considerably short of an accurate version of the Japanese philosophical terminology. The opening passage is symptomatic of the kind of misleading translations to be found throughout. "To experience is to know events precisely as they are. It means to cast away completely one's own inner workings, and to know in accordance with the events" (p.1). "One's own  

 

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inner workings" is a vague way to refer to "the artifices of the [reflective] self" that Nishida would discard. The translation of jijitsu[c] as "event" is misleading insofar as the English term denotes a temporal, usually external, happening, whereas the Japanese context calls for a time-neutral statement. Although pure experience can extend over time and accommodate shifts of attention (p.3), it is always directed to a state of affairs (whether later judged as external or internal) present to consciousness and unadulterated by reflective thought. Throughout this work Nishida uses the term jijitsu, itself a translation of "facts" (N 13, p.250), in the sense of a state of affairs, reality, or things as they are.

Many other terms in the original are translations of Western concepts that were already standardized by the time of Nishida's writing; others are more fluid in meaning, but clearly differentiable from contrasting technical terms that Nishida chose. Viglielmo's version rendered "sensation" (kankaku[d]) as both "feeling" and "perception"; "representation" (hyosho[e]) as symbol"; and moral "acts" or "conduct" (koi[f]), in T. H. Green's sense of the term, as "behavior." Terms which would allow different translations according to context were frequently rendered inappropriately: seishinteki[g]) as "psychical" or "spiritual" where "mental" would have been apropos; chi[h] as "intelligence" instead of "knowing." The English proceeds to confuse categories that Nishida kept philosophically distinct: "the phenomena of consciousness"(ishikigensho[i]) is conflated with "conscious phenomena" and then with "the phenomenon of consciousness," the latter implying that consciousness is one phenomenon among others in the world, when in fact it is proclaimed to be fundamental reality. Viglielmo was not consistent in his translations of specific terms, but the reader of the English would be at a loss to determine when or whether a term was translated appropriately. The cumulative effect of this word-for-word translation, cumbersome prose, and hit-or-miss rendering of technical terms left an impression that the work was written by a beginning student of philosophy still fumbling with words and ideas.

Fortunately for Nishida scholarship, a new translation of Zen no kenkyuu by Masao Abe and Christopher Ives will soon be published by Yale University Press. Entitled An Inquiry into the Good, this translation was still undergoing final revisions at the time of this review. An adequate discussion will have to await its publication, although my tentative examination of the manuscript allows me to say that it takes accuracy seriously as a matter of style as well as terminology. All of the mistranslations of terms noted above have been corrected, and the translators do an admirable job of adhering to the cadence of the original while avoiding unidiomatic, verbatim constructions. Furthermore, the new version will include material that no Nishida translation should lack: a translator's introduction and annotations. This work shows an awareness of the pitfalls of past translations, to which we now return.

 

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B. Intelligibility and the Philosophy of Nothingness. Translated with an Introduction by Robert Schinzinger. Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1958. Reprint, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1973.

This book was the first substantial introduction of Nishida outside of Japan. First published in German in 1943 and then adapted into English, it contained a six-part exposition and translations of three essays. "Goethe's Metaphysical Background" is a brief impressionistic piece written in 1931 with a minimum of metaphysical terminology (the adjective in the title is the translator's interpolation). The basic idea that art is the appearance of eternity in the present is flushed out in quotations from Goethe's poetry and in poetic comments contrasting Goethe's images with those of other artists and philosophers. The English, though flawed in several places, is fluid compared with that of the other two longer, more technical essays, composed originally as parts of two book-length works. "The Unity of Opposites" is a translation of a selection whose original title, Zettai mujunteki jiko dooitsuj, expresses one of Nishida's most important and difficult notions, the idea that the world and its constituents are identities that form themselves by uniting contradictions. Time, for example, is best exemplified on the level of human history and action where past and future mutually negate one another in the present. This is not the place to expound on Nishida's "absolutely contradictory self-identity." Suffice it to say that this essay was written relatively late in Nishida's career, in 1939, and utilizes a terminology, developed over a decade and systematized in seven volumes, that makes it nearly impenetrable to those unfamiliar with the previous works. Written eleven years earlier but hardly more amenable to facile summary here, is the essay on "The Intelligible World." There Nishida introduced successively comprehensive levels of discourse (that is, of universals) to resolve contradictions found on more limited, abstract levels. On the level of the cognitive self, for example, the idea that truth is independent of our apprehension contradicts the notion that truth operates as a subjectively apprehended norm regulating knowledge; and on the level of the morally conscious self, the idea of the good implies something all the more unreachable in practice the more acute one's conscience becomes. Such contradictions are ultimately resolved in "absolute nothingness," the context or "place" (basho[k]) beyond linguistic determination wherein subject and object, knower and known, acting self and objectified self are negated. The reader will notice that this earlier essay seeks to reconcile contradictions by placing them in successively deeper levels or more inclusive contexts, whereas the later one seems to bind them together immediately into unities or "self-identities." The difference between the two approaches is due to Nishida's development, from 1934 on, of the notion of the world as a dialectical universal. We can approximate this notion here by saying that the movement from less to more inclusive universals is not simply made by the thinking subject, but mediated by the

 

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creative formation of the world itself, and from this point of view identities already enfold contradictions.

As an introduction to Nishida these themes make for extremely hard going, and the way seems to have been impeded rather than facilitated by Schinzinger's book. It is unfortunate that his sixty-page exposition, caught up in the jargon of his translations, did little to clarify the development of Nishida's philosophy or the themes of time, history, and contradiction which all three essays have in common. The translations proceeded largely by breaking down the Japanese original into shorter sentences, sometimes altering its order or terminology and, consequently, its emphasis. The difficulty lies, however, not in too much change but in too little. Both stages of Schinzinger's translation, Japanese into German and then German into English, remained excessively literal and hence opaque to readers of either version. There is scarcely an intelligible sentence in "The Intelligible World." An example of the English:

In this case [that is, the case of transcendental truths], the act of consciousness has no psychological reality, as belonging to one conscious Self; it has the mode of 'being', like the transcendental Self, and belongs to this transcendental Self which Is to be found within the conscious Self. (Pp. 70-71)

This passage, directed against a psychologistic reduction of both truth and the self that seeks it, might better be rendered as: The act of consciousness [that intends truth] is not that of the psychological self but that of the transcental self beneath the conscious self, and [like truth] has transcendent reality (N5, p.124).[6]

Adequate translation of Nishida, however, will have to go beyond a reconstruction merely of sentences and terminology. Schinzinger's "Directions for the Reader" implored his reader to be patient with a translation "faithful to the original," and to keep in mind "the peculiarities of Japanese. thinking" (p.65). His gloss of oriental versus occidental sensitivity (pp.2-6) empha-sizes that the Japanese reader imagines unwritten content, and relates to the words (Chinese characters) aesthetically and not just conceptually. If so, all the more reason for a translation to enable the reader to gather the context as a Japanese is able to, and to render the original into fluent, aesthetically pleasing English. Although beautiful prose may be too much to expect, some reconstitution of the context of the discussions is an essential part of the translation of Nishida.

C. Subsequent expositions of Nishida's thought progressed beyond Schinzinger's simplistic contrasts of East and West, but neither they nor the translations went much beyond literal presentation. An exception is the 1972 dissertation by Robert Wargo,[7] which gave detailed analyses of the themes of Universals as a System of Self-consciousness containing "The Intelligible

 

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World," and translated the forty-five-page "General Summary" of that volume. Wargo's translation was for the most part on target, and proceeded from an astute understanding of the philosophical issues under discussion. His explication clarified the levels of discourse in Nishida's logic, made some illuminating comparisons with analytic philosophy of logic and, though weak on the German side of Nishida's sources, went a long way toward making his system up to his late period intelligible and philosophically cogent. It is regrettable that this dissertation has not yet been reworked and issued as a book.

D. Fundamental Problems of Philosophy. Translated with an Introduction by David A. Dilworth. Tokyo: Sophia University, 1970.

This complete translation of the double volume 7 of the collected works surely would have contributed to Nishida's reputation as an obscuranist were it not for the limited availability of the work. The translator's introduction announced on the cover and title page in fact amounted to no more than two pages in the preface that listed major works and mentioned some parallels with Buddhist ideas.[8] Nishida acknowledges his indebtedness to Buddhism most overtly in the final essay in the volume, "The Forms of Culture of the Classical Periods of East and West Seen from a Metaphysical Perspective." Noteworthy for its sweeping assertion that Western philosophy took being as the ground of reality whereas the East, particularly Japan, made nothingness the ground, this essay should be read together with Nishida's slightly later chauvinistic statement, "The Problems of Japanese Culture."[9]

The major essays of this volume, however, are gathered under the headings "The World of Action" and "The Dialectical World," whose themes are vast and deep, and can be summarized here only to facilitate an evaluation of the translation. "The World as Dialectical Universal," perhaps the most significant essay in the book and one of the most important in all of Nishida's works, is a profound meditation on the logical category of the individual. Nishida maintains that the individual thing or person cannot be grasped as a terminus reached by predicating more and more attributes of a subject until the collection of predicates differentiates that subject from all others. The individual, in other words, is not adequately defined or determined by universal concepts. What gives an individual its individuality is rather its place in a world that is determined by its actions in relation to other individuals. An individual is that which can initiate its own action, and its actions are defined in terms of other, radically distinct individuals. This mutual selfdetermination of a plurality of individuals takes place in what Nishida calls the actual world or the dialectical universal. It is dialectical because, as a "place" (basho), it mediates the interactions of individuals, and, as a logical category, it signifies not another entity but a "medium" that envelopes all the

 

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negations and affirmations that define individuals; further because it is operative only in conjunction with individuals and they in conjunction with it. They determine it as much as it determines or defines them.

The reader would be at pains, however, to wrest any logical sense from Dilworth's translation when it comes to understanding these views. Consider the following example:

True dialectical determination requires the mutual determination of at least three things. . . . Only in this way can the mutual determination of truly independent things, i.e., the mutual determination of individuals, be conceived. The continuity of absolute discontinuity must have such a meaning. The medium M between individuals must have the significance of the determination of'place' [basho]. This is the reason why I define dialectics as the selfdetermination of the dialectical universal. And this is the reason why I ground it not on processive determination, but on the 'determination of place' [bashoteki gentei[l]]. My concept of the "one-qua-many and the many-qua-one" refers to such a determination of place. When absolute dialectic takes absolute negation as medium, it is mediated by absolute death; we live through absolutely dying. Herein, immanent association cannot be conceived in any sense, and the linear or processive must be negated. If not, we cannot escape the standpoint of idealistic dialectic. The strong point of empiricism in the past lay herein. (P. 168; bracketed parts are the translator's)

Dilworth's style of translation here attempted to reconstruct the text concept for concept, sentence by sentence. By his own account (p. ix), his literal rendering contained many obscurities, but in its very literalness aimed at "an accurate version of the exact text." The notion of the "exact text" aside, is a translation any less accurate for making explicit the connections that are evident to an informed reader of the original? Consider this alternative:
True dialectical determination of independent things, of individuals, is conceivable only where there are at least three. An I relates not only to a Thou but to third parties as well, and the interrelation among innumerable individuals follows the same pattern. The medium M signifies a determination of individuals according to place [basho], as exemplified in my notion of one [universal] qua many [individuals], of many qua one. This is what I mean'by calling the universal a continuity of absolute discontinuities. I think of dialectics, then, as the self-determination of a dialectical universal, and take as fundamental for this determination not process but place. In absolute dialectics, mediation as absolute negation is mediation as absolute death, living by dying absolutely. The idea of an internal link fails here, and ideas of a linear development or a process must be negated. Otherwise, we remain bound to the dialectics of German idealism, unable to appreciate the strengths of empiricism. (N 7, p. 314)

Nishida's comments here are in part a criticism of Hegel insofar as he models dialectics on the linear development of a relation between two individuals, such as master and slave, who are thought to be interdependent. Likewise deficient is Hegel's model of life and death: In the Preface to the Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel had written that "the life of the mind . . . main-

 

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tains its being in death"; but the link here, like that between individuals, was one of interdependence and not one of absolute negation or disruption. Nishida proposes that individuals are "linked" by their mutual and total independence, hence discontinuity, and that dialectics must be modeled on this sort of relation.

A translation with neither discernment of issues nor gloss on the text, however, hardly conveys the questions Nishida was addressing. And without a good feel for the issues, the translator's aim at literalness and accuracy becomes a travesty. The implication that literalness insures accuracy, once again, assumes a strict isomorphism between not only the words but the gram-mars of two languages. Yet even a seemingly literal translation of words allows several alternatives ("internal link" instead of "immanent association" for naimenteki renketsu[m], for example), and the pretense of a literal (that is, isomorphic) translation of longer noun and verb phrases, because of their highly idiomatic character, results more often than not in serious distortions. A typical instance is the passage (N7, p. 322) where Nishida contends that we can intuit a thing's self-identity because of our awareness of our own. The self-imaging character of self-awareness (jikaku[n]) makes it the prototype of intuition (chokkaku[o] or chokkan[p]) and makes our own intuited self-identity the prototype of the self-identity of other things. The grammatical subject in identity judgments regarding things is thus the object of an intuition in which our self-awareness functions as the intuitor. This discussion is at best obscured by a translation like the following:

Just as the judgement of identity is considered as taking intuition as subject, so too a self-identity must be subjectively regarded as intuition, i.e. as object. True intuition is not merely something seen, as is usually thought, but must determine itself through itself. Indeed, it must be self-consciousness in which the self expresses itself. Contrariwise, the fact that our self-consciousness is a self-identity is because the self sees itself. Moreover, in self-consciousness the self sees itself within itself. This is the reason that self-consciousness is self-identity in the best sense. (Pp. 172-173)

The pretext of a literal translation notwithstanding, Dilworth's version of the "The World as Dialectical Universal" was replete with misleading clues. Conditional situations were rendered by indicative rather than subjunctive clauses; where Nishida discounts the possibility that consciousness might serve as the medium or place that allows independent individuals to act and interact, the translation reads "if phenomena of consciousness are merely established through the unity of meaning... individuals cannot be active, and consciousness cannot have the meaning of the medium M" (p.164). Nishida's other abbreviations, "A" and "e," taken from the German "das Allgemeine" and "die Einzelnen," were retained without explanation instead of using "U" for "Universal" and "i" for individual. Unidentifiable refer-

 

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ences were found on nearly every page; besides a host of untraceable "its", have phrases such as "the former produces the latter" for what should ro "an antecedent giving rise to a consequent." Inappropriate articles were of

added: "I do not mean to say that the universal is merely self-determining

that the place is self-determining" (p. 168, italics mine). Granted that t

Japanese is full of ambiguous indexicals and has neither definite nor indefin

articles, I nevertheless take it as part of the translator's task to clarify his

her text by discerning between alternative possibilities. At times Nishida

more discriminating than the translation. His distinctions between the grar

matical subject (shugoq), the epistemological subject (shukanr) and the

embodied subject (shutais) were muddled by translating these terms "sul

ject," "subjectivity," and "subject," respectively; thus the reader was per

plexed at why Nishida would call the [grammatical] subject an [epistemolog

cal] object or noematic aspect. At times a more "literal" translation woul

have been less misleading; "determination without determiner" was rendere

as "determination of the indeterminate"; and "that which mediates" a

"mediating agent" where Nishida wants to undermine the sense of a universa

or medium as an additional acting individual or agent.

Ironically, the role of a mediating agent is played most conspicuously by the translator who attempts to be literal. Schinzinger's, Viglielmo's, and Dilworth's early translations forgot that the English language is historically as well as grammatically a vastly different philosophical medium from Nishida's Japanese. Written at a time when modern philosophical language in Japan was less than half a century old, as noted earlier, Nishida's works themselves were struggling to translate and reformulate Western ideas. The similar struggle to translate Nishida would take a big step forward when translators began to investigate his sources and to emulate his propensity for creatively transforming them.

E. Art and Morality. Translated by David A. Dilworth and Valdo H. Viglielmo. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1973.

This English version of Geijutsu to dootoku[t], the first translation to receive adequate distribution, showed signs of a new, more idiomatic style. The translators moved beyond the plodding, word-for-word reconstruction of the original to a smoother, sentence-by-sentence rendition. Art and Morality was the fourth major work of Nishida's career, written between 1920 and 1923, and continued a program of shifting the language of pure experience to that of self-consciousness or self-awareness as the ultimate unifying activity of self and world. In the beginning of his treatise Nishida states that self-aware experience is the founding form of true, concrete reality; in it knower and known are one, and

 

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the act and the object of knowing are the self itself in this instance...in concrete experience the two must have an inseparable, internal relationship [which] implies the indefinite development and advance of this experience itself. . .a process that is creative. (P. 9)

This creative expansion of self-awareness is the source of acts of moral decision as well as of the creation and appreciation of art.

The translation amplified Nishida's talk of act and object, borrowed from Brentano's analysis of consciousness, to speak of "intentionality" where Nishida merely uses phrases like "the world of objects." It also brought out the latent dialectics in Nishida's notion of the self by interpolating forms of this word:

. .[W]hen the 'self' is self-conscious of the unity of this kind of dialectical contradiction [that is, between its projection externally as world and its internal mirroring], it can include the infinite external world within itself. : .No matter what kind of phenomenon each phenomenon of consciousness Is, we can always think that it is essentially grounded in this dimension of intuitive, dialectical immediacy. (P. 79)

The last clause is also a good example of the way in which the translators expanded many of the unspecified demonstrative pronouns; the original Japanese ends with a vague "in this dimension" (N 3, p. 352). While the use of brief interpolations and of more specific terms that clarify context without misrepresenting content is laudatory, a glossary or translators' notes would have cleared up some possible confusions on the part of the reader. Nishida's favorite tachiba[u] ("standpoint") was translated as "plane," "horizon," "dimension," even as "intention," or "intentionality," the last somewhat misapplied to objects as well as acts of consciousness. Both "indefinite" and "infinite" translated Nishida's single mugenteki[v] ", but sometimes the English terms appeared incompatible and needed a clarifying note. Even more puzzling without a glossary were phrases like "the objective object" that are perfectly clear in the Japanese which distinguishes an object of perception or judgment (taishoo[w]) from "object" and "objectivity" (kyakkan[x]) in the sense of something communally verifiable.

F. One further transitional piece in the history of Nishida translations deserves mention. Brief selections from Problems of Consciousness, the work Nishida wrote immediately prior to Art and Morality, were published in English in a 1979 anthology on Japanese phenomenology.[l0] Entitled "Affective Feeling," this translation by Dilworth with Viglielmo included parts of chap-ters not only on feeling (kanjo[y]), but on continuities in the content of experience as well. This material brought into sharper focus Nishida's attempt to articulate basic forms of consciousness and to identify the unifying activity, mentioned above, that underlies all particular forms. Feeling was treated as more basic, that is, more concrete and unitary, than sensation; yet because

 

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one can be conscious of feeling, something still more concrete is implied as the activity that finds but eludes the forms of intentional consciousness, and this is called the will. Free will constitutes true individuality, which is expressed more directly in art than in conceptual discourse. This translation, then, can be read as a preliminary study to Art and Morality.

Contrary to the English version of Art and Morality, however, Dilworth's work on "Affective Feeling" broke ground to the level of truly edited translations. The translation was edited not only in that selections were chosen, but more significantly in that they were read interpretively, with the sense of the whole in mind. Sentences were broken down, sometimes abbreviated or paraphrased, and short phrases interpolated which clarified the style but did not change the substance of the passage. Although a few misleading translations might be pointed out, there are more examples of translations that make the original text intelligible in English. Where the older-style word-for-word translation might have had:

Spiritual phenomena are internal changes of quality, an acting without an actor, ana the internal quality and immediacy of spiritual phenomena lies herein. (N 3, p. 100),

Dilworth wrote more succinctly:

Mental phenomena are self-supporting, and exhibit their own internality and immediacy. (P. 234)

Likewise, where the older style might have had:

. .Just as one who watches a tightrope walker moves together with him, in knowing something we must first of all combine with the act, and this combining with the act is feeling. (N 3, p. 68),

Dilworth translated:

Truly to know a thing one must experience a sympathetic union (Mitfühlen) with it. . . .A person watching a tightrope walker moves together with him, becomes one with the activity, through sympathetic coalescence in feeling. (P. 227)

Less propitious was the choice of selections as an example of Nishida's connection to phenomenology. While a reader would be hard put to find anything like sustained phenomenological analysis in Nishida's works, discussions reacting to Husserl, such as those in Universals as a System of Self-Consciousness or in the work next reviewed, would have been more relevant than selections from Problems of Consciousness that were representative of a Neo-Kantian style of reflection.[ll]

Nearly a decade after these early translations, three others-two of the same work-were published within the space of a year and reflect a renewed interest in Nishida outside of Japan.

 

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III. NISHIDA'S TRANSLATION OF NEO-KANTIANISM

Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness. Translated by Valdo H. viglielmo with Takeuchi Yoshinori and Joseph S. O'Leary. Albany: SUNY Press, 1987.

Jikaku ni okeru chokkan to hansei(z), Nishida's second major work, is hardly indicative of his mature thought; but it may come to represent his philosophy well beyond its reputation in Japan because of the accessible style, extensive annotations, and wide distribution of its translation. Accordingly, it deserves fuller treatment than the works reviewed up to this point.

Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness [hereafter IRSC] was, in its author's own view, an inconclusive and ultimately superseded work ("Preface to the Revised Edition," p. xxvi). Any evaluation of it today, therefore, must-situate it within the development of his thought. IRSC seems also a highly eclectic and anomalous book, given contemporary philosophical interests. In our age of predominantly pragmatic and empirical philosophies it looks like a relapse to long-abandoned Schelling-style speculation, conjuring a vision of a systematically connected whole rather than proceeding by close analysis of claims and evidence. Amidst current fashions of pluralism, indeterminability, and historicism, it seems an anachronistic attempt to found the whole of reality in an idealist notion of self-consciousness. Further evaluation will therefore have to take into account its situation within Japanese philosophy and Western philosophical currents. The task is not lightened any by the churning style and serialized nature of the work, whose contents were first unraveled in two journals from 1913 to 1917. The following synopsis is meant to help readers wend their way through the maze of Nishida's reflections.

The opening statement of this work is a continuation of a central problem in A Study of Good: the immediate consciousness of reality known as intuition, while prior and seemingly antithetical to the thinking that interrupts, reflects on, and divides it, is somehow also the inclusive source of reflection. The initial formulations of a solution to this problem likewise continue those of the second chapter of A Study of Good: immediate experience is not a momentary event but a dynamic system that necessarily develops into reflective thought and judgment. In IRSC, the initial central idea is that there is an intellectual intuition wherein subject and object are merged, namely, the activity of self knowing, and this self-consciousness is inherently reflective.

In light of the popular portrayal of Nishida today as a Zen philosopher, it is tempting to see this inchoate solution as an attempt to reconcile the pre-conceptual experience of Zen satori with a predilection to philosophize, a preeminently conceptual activity. Nishida chose, however, to cast this problem in terms of the philosophies current in Japan at the time of his writing: Neo-Kantianism, the German Idealism it reacted to, and Bergson's antimaterialist thought. To these he added, in the last quarter of his treatise,

 

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notions from Christian Neo-Platonists about the primacy and creative activity of absolute will.

The issue the first three schools have in common is the tension between cognitive transcendence and immanence, the possibility or impossibility of taking a cognitive stance outside our experience. For the Neo-Kantians of the Marburg school it took the form of explaining the world we experience as a production of pure thought. Hermann Cohen, and Paul Natorp in his early phase, sought to connect being and thought much more closely than had Kant, and to establish an objective realm of ideal (ethical, aesthetic, religious) structures guided by the theory of mathematical natural science. Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert of the "southwest school" saw existence as subordinated to value; even our factual judgments about existing things are "value judgments" in that they intend truth, the supreme value obliging and leading us to believe. Holding values, then, is a transcendental condition for empirical knowledge of the natural world as well as for understanding human history and culture. Both schools subvert the difference between immanence and transcendence by taking the world of experience as an extension of the world of thought. There is no Thing-in-itself transcendent to our experience; and reason, though the transcendental condition for our experience, is more its origin than its other.

The early Fichte (of the 1794 Wissenschaftslehre, the version used by Nishida) had previously collapsed transcendent realms to the absolute pure ego, which posits within itself both the finite self and all that is other to this self, and which knows itself through intellectual intuition. In IRSC, Nishida seeks to rehabilitate intellectual intuition from its exile by the Kantians and to show that it is of one piece with sensual intuition as an immediate source of knowledge. For Henri Bergson, the other major party in Nishida's discussion, the concepts and categories of reason were outside of or transcendent to true reality, the e'lan vital, and ultimately incapable of capturing it; but his notion of pure duration did strike Nishida as another vision of immediate experience that could be brought into harmony with Kantian critical reflection.

Nishida aims at "a new interpretation of Fichte [that] can serve as the foundation of both Kantian and Bergsonian thought" (p. xix). An example may help to clarify his seemingly eclectic procedure. In a single sentence Nishida combines Windelband's and Rickert's insistence on the normative character of all knowledge with Bergson's insight into the persistence of the past, and claims that self-identity is an "ought," a guiding value, not simply a given fact of experience. Then in the next sentence he connects this with Fichtean self-consciousness to reassert the normative and temporal dimension of all concrete consciousness:

The self-maintenance of the self, whereby "the past is preserved by itself, automatically," is an "ought" embodied in a living process of development, a veritable creative evolution, the motor force of our personal history. This is

 

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not confined to pure self-consciousness without extraneous content, though most easily discerned there, but is the core of all concrete consciousness in its autonomy and spontaneity. (P. 34; N 2, p. 66).

These connections intimate Nishida's new, Jamesian-Bergsonian reading of Fichte that introduces the temporal flux into self-consciousness. It is the merit of Nishida's work that he here anticipates reinterpretations of Fichte in current scholarship which see a connection between Fichte's transcendental Einbildungskraft (imagination), with its characteristic time-consciousness, and a supposedly atemporal intellect. These recent interpretations find intel-lectual intuition, and the self-consciousness it constitutes, rooted in time-consciousness, with the significant consequence that binds consciousness to historicity.[12] Nishida's reflections prefigure recent Fichte scholarship also by stressing that self-consciousness is relational, not merely involuted; it contains reference to the other (p. 106), or, in current parlance, is intersubjective.[l3] In fact, the entire project of IRSC may be better judged by engaging it in dialogue with its true intellectual kin, the works of recent and current German philosophers, who in a sense are the critical successors to the German idealists and Neo-Kantians: Richard Hiinigswald, Wolfgang Cramer, Hans Wagner, and Dieter Henrich. These philosophers also grapple with the problem of the immediacy and nonobjectifiability of self-consciousness, even if they do not follow Nishida's foundationalism.[l4] Indeed, Wagner formulated a position on the dialectical universal and absolute (though not absolute nothingness) that is reminiscent of Nishida's later problematic.[15] And if Nishida's "consciousness that is now conscious" points to a deeper understanding of the issues, it will have to answer critiques such as that of Ernst Tugendhat from the side of linguistic philosophy.[l6]

In summary, IRSC attempts to reconcile intuition or immediate experience with reflection by elucidating the instance in which the two are unified, that is, self-consciousness, a type of intellectual intuition. By seeing the latter as temporal and creative, Nishida is able to characterize cognitive stances as developments out of the immediate experience of self-consciousness, giving rise to variously constituted worlds such as those of religion and art, morality, history, psychology, biology, and physics. These are accordingly rooted in immediate experience, not produced primarily by rational thought or evaluation, as in the Neo-Kantians, and not severed from the immediate flow of experience as in Bergson. Nishida uses Fichte, the Neo-Kantians, and Bergson to put his view of the primacy of immediate experience to the critical test, but also reverses the direction of the latter two by connecting, more directly than they had, experience and knowledge, intuition and reflection. IRSC may be read as Nishida's (rather free) translation of the ideas of Neo-Kantianism and Bergson.

Yet this connection also brought about a radical turn in Nishida's reflections. By stressing the valuational and creative dimension of self-

 

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consciousness, Nishida was led to replace intellectual intuition with will, and ultimately the activity of knowing with the unknowable. In the final sections of IRSC, Nishida draws upon Origen, the Pseudo Dionysius, and John Scotus Eriugena to formulate a notion of absolute free will that becomes the primary instance of self-consciousness. It is "the form of every autonomous, self-developing experiential system" (p. 131). In the sense that absolute will is not simply one form of consciousness among others, but the very foundation of all consciousness and hence of all reality, it assumes the function previously assigned to "pure experience." Nishida's next two major works, Problems of Consciousness and Art and Morality, continued to elaborate this foundationalism of the will. But unlike self-consciousness, absolute will eludes reflection, and so that foundation itself is rendered unknowable. "The world of absolute will is essentially one of mystery, inaccessible to cognition, but approached in art and religion" (p. 155). Hence Nishida's retrospective comment, uttered in both of his prefaces: "I had broken my lance, exhausted my quiver, and capitulated to the enemy camp of mysticism" (pp. xxiii, xxvi). In the end Nishida abandons his initial, Fichtean attempt to ground the unity of intuition and reflection in self-consciousness, only, within a decade, to abandon entirely the ontology of absolute free will.

The publication of IRSC similarly marks a radical turn in the history of Nishida translations, though, we may hope, not one to be altogether abandoned. The translation itself is the product of several hands. Valdo Viglieimo, assisted by Takeuchi Yoshinori, prepared a complete, word-for-word version some twenty years ago, which was later subjected to the editorial scalpel of Joseph O'Leary and a final check against the Japanese original by James Heisig and Jan Van Bragt. O'Leary's Foreword gives judicious recommendations as to how to approach the work, and is admirably up-front about his frustrations with Nishida's style and the extent of his editing, which involved eliminating repetitions, ironing out the circuitous tentativeness of the style...breaklng up paragraphs, arranging sequences of ideas in a more perspicuous order, and omitting fragmentary, opaque and inconclusive passages (while trying to avoid sacrificing anything of substance). . . .(P. xii)[17]

A glance at the Japanese and the English versions of the Postface may suffice for pointing out the extent of the editorial changes. This epilogue refocuses the major themes of the book in a contrast with Kantian philosophy, and could stand on its own as a lecture on how various worlds arise from various a priori. In the following quotation, I italicize words added to the original, place in brackets passages deleted in the English, and place in parentheses my alternative reading.

...if knowledge is construction from a certain standpoint, there must be something which has been given as its cause. This is not the thing in itself,but (the thing in itself is not the cause of knowledge, but is) immediate pre-conceptual experience, and it seems that contemporary Kantians are

 

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interpreting the thing in itself in this sense. [That is, the given immediate experience Is prior to knowledge and cannot be cognized.] Knowledge is [nothing but] the unification of the concrete abundance of this experience [seen] from a certain standpoint. (P. 165; N 2, p. 339)

A passage linking the Neo-Kantians, especially Rickert, to Bergson, is deleted two sentences later, and in the next paragraph an explicit connection with Kant's transcendental ego is left to the eye of the discerning reader:

The true epistemologlcal subject is not the self known in introspection, but the unifying activity which constructs a certain objective world. This self [true subject of cognition is that certain standpoint or a priori that] cannot become an obiect of reflection; [Kant's unity of the pure ego is something like this]. (P.165; N 2, p. 340)

Similar deletions and interpretive readings are found on nearly every page of IRSC. At times a rare, playful element in Nishida's otherwise ponderous prose falls by the wayside, as happens to the following allusion to the Record of Lin-chi (Rinzai):

In immediate experience of will the finite is immediately infinite, actuality is immediately substance, [one walks when needing to walk and sits when needing to sit,] and there is no room for conceptual division of the single actuality of acts of will. (P. 147; N 2, p. 299)

At times, a conceptual link is contrived, as when a saying from the Diamond Suutra, a verse famous for eliciting the enlightenment of the Sixth Patriarch of Ch'an, usually translated "with nowhere to abide this mind arises[aa]," in IRSC is rendered "settle down nowhere, yet will the ultimate"--followed by "the absolute annuls all thought and distinction, but the best approximation to the truth of it is absolute free will" (p. 141; N 2, p. 283). This sort of editing will be a constant source of annoyance to those who insist on the literal word, but a source of relief to those more interested in the contours of Nishida's reflections. It necessarily entails some distortion and displacement of details, but just how significant these details and their order are to Nishida's winding discourse will depend upon the reader's objective. It definitely makes for smoother passage through the text.

Whatever the sacrifice involved, the English version has not merely condensed and transposed numerous passages. Appended are some 270 endnotes in which the editor has done us an invaluable service by tracking down the sources of nearly all of Nishida's allusions. By admittedly substituting in the text direct quotations for Nishida's often elliptical and creative paraphrases, however, O'Leary distracts attention from Nishida as a translator of ideas if not exactly of words. He also alters Nishida's style of connecting those ideas by transposing or sometimes replacing Nishida's analogies ("just as . . .") and adverbials (sunawachi[ab], "that is to say"), suggesting coterminous transiation, with conjunctions ("because," "therefore") or prepositions ("from…to") that imply deduction and derivation. This move is true to his stated

 

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purpose of bringing the logical content of the arguments into clear view (p. xii), but let the reader be forewarned that Nishida is often made to appear better (in the art of argument at least) than the Japanese texts would suggest.

The style of translation in fact reminds me of the romanticist hermeneutical principle of "Besser Verstehen," knowing better than the author, not his own intentions, but the issues he is grappling with. This translation has not naïvely taken Nishida's original text as its first and only source, but has gathered the content of his thinking from the context of his own sources and reflections. Alluding to Nishida's remark, "I have always been a miner of ore; I have never managed to refine it," O'Leary aims to "'refine' Nishida's 'ore' as much as was necessary to produce a more readable English text..." (p. xii). A strategy of translation more distant from that governing the early Nishida publications in English is hardly imaginable. The merits of IRSC both as a translation of Nishida and as a groping investigation of self-consciousness are bound to be controversial. Given the fractal-like nature of the original, however, I think that this edition has done a great favor to all who would venture into "Nishida philosophy."

IV. TWO TREATMENTS OF THE LOGIC OF BASHO AND THE RELIGIOUS WORLD VIEW

Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious Worldview. Translated with an Introduction by David A. Dilworth. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987.

"The Logic of Topos and the Religious Worldview." Translated by Yusa Mi-chiko. The Eastern Buddhist 19, no. 2 (Autumn 1986): 1-29; and 20, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 81-119. Introduction to the translation published as "The Religious Worldview of Nishida Kitaro." The Eastern Buddhist 20, no. 2 (Autumn 1987): 63-76.

Bashoteki ronri to shukyoteki sekaikana[ac] was Nishida's last completed essay, composed in the months prior to his death in 1945. It places one of his ultimate concerns, the nature of religion, in the context of the logic he had developed over the previous two decades. A long stretch separates this essay from IRSC, even if the same searching mind is discernible in both. IRSC and its two sequel works had accorded religion (and art) a privileged place in deeming the world of absolute will more accessible through religious and artistic expression than through science and reflection. Like the whole structure of self-consciousness and de-privileged reflective knowledge, however, that absolute will was transindividual, whereas the focus of the final essay is the radical finitude of the individual and the existential knowledge of one's death. Between the two works, Nishida formulated the logic that would reconcile radical individuality with a theory of universals, as we noted above in the discussion of Fundamental Problems of Philosophy.

It is fortunate for newcomers to Nishida that two translations of the last

 

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essay have recently been published and that both summarize the formation of this logic in their substantial introductions. Dilworth's volume also contains the unfinished two-page piece, "Concerning My Logic." The central notion of this logic is the basho mentioned earlier, indicating "location" in ordinary Japanese and translated by Yusa as "topos," by Dilworth as "the place of nothingness," "matrix," or simply "place." For both commentators this notion represents a fundamental shift from the objectified subject-predicate scheme of traditional Aristotelian logic to a field logic of the existential self. Yusa traces its development to Nishida's early view that self-consciousness is reflection not only on the self but "in the self," "the locus in which self-consciousness arises and...which emerges simultaneously with self-consciousness." Later it expresses the place wherein self and world co-arise and stand in "absolutely contradictory self-identity" (Yusa, pp. 67 f.). Yusa's rather schematic summary is complemented by Dilworth's more epistemological sketch of basho as the "last enveloping place" of logical oppositions allowing each to express the other through its own self-negation (pp. 5 f.).

Dilworth emphasizes Nishida's essay as a response to Kant. Nishida wishes to do justice to the religious, that is, the individual and historical dimensions of the individual, reducing it neither to a substrate capable of bearing certain attributes; nor to an autonomous will capable of conforming to universal duties. Dilworth gives admirable summaries of Kant's moral philosophy and of Nishida's reconstruction of the priorities of the second Critique. A postscript on "Nishida's Logic of the East" wastes no words in debunking the myth of an oriental logic uniformly distinct from Western methods. Dilworth's contrast of Nishida with other thinkers, where it is transparent, lays some solid groundwork for clarifying his achievement and place in the philosophical tradition. It is truly regrettable that Dilworth's commentary is often marred by conceptually supersaturated formulations (see, for example, p. 17), just where it would be desirable to unpack Nishida's thick prose, as Dilworth himself recognizes (p. 23).

Where Dilworth is turgid, Yusa is salient, her exposition of the logic of basho full of conceptual leaps diacult to negotiate (see for example pp. 66-68). She is best at extracting the ingredients of Nishida's theology. The expressive, creative, and self-negating nature of the person, the unitary and pluralistic aspects of self and world in their interrelation, the "ordinary standpoint" and "absolute present" in which eternal life-and death-are realized-all these themes are neatly outlined, with God placed in the center. The foil for Nishida here is not Kant but, nominally at least, Schleiermacher, who does not sufficiently negate the human dimension (p. 64). (Would not the contrast rather be that, although Schleiermacher certainly laid the groundwork for Nishida's insistence on the autonomy of religious awareness, his God does not include absolute negation within Himself, even to the point of

 

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embracing the diabolical, as does Nishida's Absolute?) The relation between God and the individual is one of gyakutaioo[ad] or "inverse correlation" (Dilworth has "inverse polarity" and "relation of paradox"): "the more I realize my sinfulness, the more God faces me; the more conscious I am of myself as a singular existence, the more God stands over against me" (Yusa's formulation, p. 73); or, in the words of Zen master Daitoo Kokushi, quoted by Nishida: "[Buddha and I], separated by an eternity, and yet not separated even for an instant" (p. 27). The sketch on pages 72-76, read in conjunction with the translation, should engender some lively debate in the current Christian-Buddhist dialogue, particularly when it is noticed that Nishida does not place the two religions in an "inverse correlation" or "contradictory identity," but speaks of "God or Buddha" and tends to understand each religion in the light of the other.

Two perplexing issues relevant to that dialogue, however, remain untouched by both commentators. First, Nishida's notion of God is a challenge not only to theologians, but to his previous position on basho as absolute nothingness as well. Can we simply assume, as do both commentators, a seamless development in Nishida's logic from 1934 on? This is admittedly a tricky problem; neither an equation of God and absolute nothingness nor a sharp distinction between them is evident. In the final essay, Nishida does tell us that the absolute is absolute only by "facing" (Yusa) or "being opposed to" (Dilworth) nothing. God, "precisely because he is absolutely nothing ...is absolute being" (Yusa, pp. 19 f.; Dilworth, who more often writes "God" where Nishida has "the Absolute," at least avoids the controversial pronoun "he"; pp. 68 f.). Yet the emphasis is placed on the self-negating God as absolute being, who cannot easily be considered the functional equivalent of the absolute nothingness of Nishida's previous discourse. The latter notion arose by taking to its limits the insight that consciousness, relative to what one is conscious of, is nothing; it answered the logical problem of the ultimate "place" or universal. The idea of the Absolute in the last essay, on the other hand, is formed in answer to the religious-existentia1 problems of death and evil. Granted that Nishida endeavored to concretize or existentialize his logic, it is not clear that this Absolute is conceptually tied to the (relative) nothingness of consciousness. And although the individual is described throughout as the Absolute's self-negation, in the end Nishida coined the term gyakutaioo to specify the relation between God or the Absolute and humans. In this "contrary correspondence," as it may be paraphrased, the Absolute and the human interrelate only by each negating itself. Does this relation substitute for the "absolutely contradictory self-identity" or "the continuity of discontinuity" of the previous essays? Newly introduced metaphors are hardly ascribable to "absolute nothingness": God's own power and voice beckoning in the depths of the self, and the talk of faith or grace (Yusa, p. 88; Dilworth, p. 88). Does not this discrepancy signal a shift to a position that would embrace, even

 

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if not favor, Christian theism and Pure Land Buddhist faith, as is amply evinced by Nishida's allusions? Yusa's tendency to translate zettaisha[ae] as "Absolute Being" instead of "the Absolute" and her placing God at the center of self-world relations tacitly acknowledge such a shift. Dilworth's addition to the title of the final essay, "The Logic of the Place of Nothingness. . . ," on the other hand, only conflates the issue, as does the title of his book.

It is equally unfortunate that neither commentator takes seriously the perplexing question of Nishida's nationalism, which is reaffirmed in the concluding pages of his last essay and tied to the attempt to establish religion independently of ethics. His views of the state as the self-expression of the Absolute, if not the Absolute itself, and as the source of morality, if not of religion, were and are hardly inconsequential for political and moral philosophy. The pronouncement that world war must be for the sake of negatingworld war (Yusa, p. 100; Dilworth, p. 103) too easily suggests today a philosophy that is either naïvely idealist and easily exploitable or else an outright affirmation of the Japanese imperialism of the day. If the background play of forces between rightists and leftists during the war provides extenuating reasons, it is up to the commentator to make them known. Yusa avoids any mention of this issue. Dilworth finds the essay "remarkably free" of "ultranationalistic ideologies," although "a comparatively mild strain of chauvinistic definition does appear" (pp. 128 f.). I find this judgment remarkably surprising in light of remarks made in another essay on religion, written less than a year before and previously translated by Dilworth:

As the self-determination of the absolute present, the national polity (koku-tai[af] of Japan is a norm of historical action. . . . True obedience to the nation should be derived from the standpoint of true religious self-awareness. Mere seeking one's own peace of mind is selfish.[l8]

Although a full account of the remarks concerning state and culture may not have been within the intended scope of Dilworth's or Yusa's commentaries, surely some recognition of their controversial character would be in order.

The differences I noted between Yusa's and Dilworth's commentarial styles are reflected in their translations as well. Yusa lets Nishida's abrupt transitions and repetitious formulas stand, while Dilworth interpolates phrases and alternates vocabulary. Yusa seems intent to reproduce Nishida's train of thought and remain faithful to both its letter and spirit; Dilworth is bent on freely interpreting the text and highlighting the contrast with Kant. Yet the assumption that literal means faithful and free means licentious once again proves hollow. That both translators pursue a particular reading of the text and take pains to make the text speak philosophical English, is evident from a look at their renditions of a particularly difficult passage, in contrast to my attempt at a "word-for-word" translation (intended here only as a foil, not a recommendation) .

 

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Word-for-Word Translation

…Yet I think that within the standpoint of the logic of objects, not only can one not discuss the religious fact, but religious problems do not even arise. Our self is that which acts. That which acts, what kind of thing is that? Acting is conceived of in the mutual relation between one thing and another. And what kind of relation is that? In acting, first of all, the one negates the other and the other negates the one; there must be a relation of mutual negation. But merely a relation of mutual negation alone cannot' be called acting. Mutual negation must be [soku] mutual affirmation. For both of the two to maintain their uniqueness to the end, and mutually oppose and negate one another [means that] they conjoin mutually and form one form; and conversely, for them to interrelate mutually, conjoin and form one form [means that] they must mutually oppose and negate each other to the end; i.e., each thing must become unique, each thing must become itself. In like manner we conceive of the interacting world of things, the material world. Here already we cannot help but say that there is what I have called a logic of contradictory self-identity. Yet things merely mutually opposing and negatingsive-affirming each other cannot be thought of as that which truly acts.... (N 11, p. 374)

Yusa's Translation

...Suffice it to say that we cannot discuss religious reality from the standpoint of objective logic, and that religious questions cannot even emerge at this level.

The self is that which acts. Action arises in, and from, a mutual relationship between things. Action presupposes a relationship of mutual negation, wherein one negates the other and the other negates the first. This mutual negation is simultaneously a mutual affirmation. Each thing realizes its own uniqueness. That is, each thing becomes itself. That two things maintain their uniqueness as they stand opposed to each other and negate each other means that they are mutually conjoined and compose one form. Conversely, for the two to interrelate, to be conjoined and form one whole means that they maintain their mutual opposition and negate each other. It is according to this formula that we actually think about the mutual interaction of things, namely, the material world. Therein what I call the "logic of contradictory self-identity" is already at work. In order to think about that which truly acts, however, it is not enough to say that two things stand in opposition and that their mutual negation is simultaneously their mutual affirmation. . . . (P. 3)

Dilworth's Translation

...I will maintain, though, that the subject of religious experience cannot be properly discussed from the standpoint of reason with its logic of objects. Indeed, the question of religion does not even arise from that standpoint. It arises rather with a consideration of the meaning of our own consciously active self, and it leads us through and beyond the framework of Kant's transcendental definitions.

What does it mean to be a consciously active self? I hold that the self is consciously active when it is interactive, and its interactivity is constituted in a dialectic of mutual negation and affirmation of self and other. Self and other, subject and object, are constituted in the individual acts of existential consciousness. These acts are self-originating and yet co-originating, too, as forms of dynamic, reciprocal expression. It is in this structure of bicondition-

 

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al, interexpressive, mutual revealment of self and other that an individual act is an individual act. One can first try to conceive of a world of interactive things in the framework of the physical world. But here, already, we promptly feel the need to work out a logic of dynamic, reciprocal expression. For properly speaking, there is no real interactivity at this level. Description in terms of the mere opposition, the action and reaction, of physical entities falls considerably short of interactivity as dynamic, reciprocal expression. (P. 49)

To call the first translation "word-for-word" is of course a misnomer; it is impossible to construct an English sentence in the same way that a Japanese sentence is constructed. This sort of tianslation does plod on from one word to another, matching independent morphemes in Japanese and English like so many entries in a dictionary. Yet even the attempt to translate every essential item involves decisions that would separate what is "essential" from what is merely a matter of "rhetorical" or grammatical style, as well as the more basic decision that what is merely stylistic is dispensable. Every translation of an individual item, moreover, involves decisions between alternative possibilities. The "word-for-word translation" is no less a reconstruction of the text as the other two examples, and is, I submit, not at all self-evident to the translator. In contrast to each other, Yusa's and Dilworth's translations may appear literal and free, respectively, but in contrast to the word-for-word attempt it is clear that both are nonetheless interpretative readings gathered from differing objectives in translation.

It should be obvious from the passage quoted above that Dilworth fills in transitions and writes adventuresome paraphrases to capture the contours, while Yusa cautiously retains a uniformity of style and terminology to capture the detail of Nishida's logic. Which translation is judged the better will accordingly depend upon the purpose of the reader. Those who would interpret Nishida for others can make good use of Dilworth's; those who would quote Nishida's words had better rely upon Yusa's version. The serious student of Nishida will want to read both, for many a passage obtuse in the one is rendered more felicitously in the other. I found their alternative translations of Zen and Shin Buddhist sayings particularly complementary. To Dilworth, Lin-chi says, "When there is complete self-mastery, everywhere one stands is the truth" (p. 111); to Yusa, "If one recognizes one's subjectivity, wherever one stands, one is authentic" (p. 108). Nishida himself is spared the task of translation, for he quotes this saying in Chinese[ag], out of its original context and without attributing it to the Record of Lin-chi (N 11, p. 419).[19] In general, Yusa more frequently identifies the sources of Nishida's quotations and allusions, whereas Dilworth is more apt to interpolate specifications, such as "the Western medieval notion of a Gottheit" (p. 75), "Cusanus' infinite sphere" (p. 76), or "the Zen experience of [Oriental] nothingness" (p. 109).

I would not fault Dilworth so much for interpolating or rendering passages in an idiom I myself may not have chosen, as for conveying the impression that his translation is unmediated by his specific reading. Not only does his

 

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introduction give no hint of the extent or style of his interpretations; but throughout the essay he has played ventriloquist and spoken in the name of his source: "When I say that...I mean precisely this" (p. 52); "Now to reformulate this in my own way..." (p. 53); "I grant that this concept of common sense remains only a preliminary sketch" (p. 114)-these statements are all entirely interpolations whose speaker is not Nishida but Dilworth! While his growing mastery of the art of translating is deserving of Lin-chi's proverbial thirty blows of encouragement-one need only compare the present book with his previous partial translation of the same essay[20]-we must send Dilworth back to the ranks for not recognizing his subjectivity and admitting to the truth when the stance is his own.

v. RECOMMENDATIONS

First, as to what should be translated: It is neither feasible nor desirable at this time to produce a systematic translation of the collected works, which in any case are presently being reissued in Japan, with a few additions announced for volumes 15 through 19 and a lexicon as a supplementary volume.[21] It is, however, urgent that more works be translated (or re-translated) if we are to build upon the most recent publications reviewed here; and choices will have to be made. The following suggestions reflect, of course, personal preferences; I set them forth with an eye to representing the development of Nishida's rather unique logic. The forthcoming new translation of A Study of Good has already been mentioned; that work would have been the first on my list. With the publication of IRSC, the early works are fairly well represented, although an edited translation of "Logical Understanding and Mathematical Understanding" (N 1, pp. 250-267) would be helpful for grasping the sense and evolution of two enduring notions that it introduces: self-awareness or self-consciousness (jikaku) and medium (baikaisha[ah]) .

The most important work awaiting publication in English is From the Actor to the Seer (Hataraku mono kara miru mono e[ai]). This 1927 volume is widely regarded as a major turning point in Nishida's philosophical career, from the early positions based upon pure experience and absolute will to the original logic of place, leading to the philosophy of absolute nothingness. From this point on Nishida will attempt to lay a foundation for our- need to "see the form of the formless, hear the sound of the soundless," as he wrote in the Preface (N 4, p. 6). Once again this volume represents not a unified book but a collection of interweaving essays written over an extended period (1923-1927). If it were necessary to assign priorities, I would select the Preface, "The Immediately Given" (pp. 9-37), "Place" (basho) (pp. 208-289), and "A Reply to Dr. Sooda" (pp. 290-323) as the most important for translation. To these I would add "Remaining Problems of Consciousness," a brief essay written shortly after "Place" and published in volume 12 (pp. 5-17).

 

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The development of Nishida's inchoate logic would be much elucidated by a retranslation of "The Intelligible World" and the publication, with commentary, of the "General Summary" (translated by Wargo), both in volume 5, Ippansha no jikakuteki taikeiaj[aj] ("The System of Universals in Terms of Self-Consciousness"). The essay "I and Thou" and the Preface of the sequel volume, Mn no jikakuteki gentej[ak] ("The Determination of Nothingness in Terms of Self-Consciousness"), are significant in their own right and for a retrospective reading of the basho essays in volume 4. I would also recommend thorough revision and republication of Dilworth's translations of the seminal essays, "The Logical Structure of the Actual World" and "The World as Dialectical Universal." Two essays in volume 8, "The Standpoint of Active Intuition" and "Active Intuition," sketch more details in Nishida's views of time, space, and the continuity of discontinuity, and clarify his unique conception of active or actional intuition. Similarly, the essays "Absolutely Contradictory Self-Identity" (previously translated by Schinzinger) and "Poiesis and Praxis" in volumes 9 and 10, respectively, bring these oft repeated themes to a clearer focus. An abridged translation of these four pieces could fill in gaps in our understanding of his logic.

In addition to selections presenting Nishida's developing logic, I would urge translation of pieces that represent his political views. In the wake of the current Heidegger controversy, serious questions have arisen once again concerning the worth of philosophies which, deliberately or not, support extreme forms of nationalism. Whether Nishida was a direct accomplice to Japanese imperialism or was simply exploited by the militarists, whether he was a culpable champion of Japan's "Greater East Asia Go-Prosperity Sphere" or a justified advocate of Japanese culture in a world increasingly under Western domination, are matters of controversy, and it is essential to Nishida's status as a philosopher that this controversy be aired. For that we need accurate translations, supplemented by historically informed commentary, of the political essays written between 1940 and 1944, included mostly in volume 12: first, much more of the one hundred-page essay, "Problems of Japanese Culture" (pp. 275-384), than the dozen pages previously translated (see note 9); then the draft of a lecture to the emperor on the philosophy of history (pp. 267-272); "The Problem of the raison d'^etre of the State" (N 10, pp. 265-337); finally the essays on kokutai (national polity), including "The Principle of a New World Order" (N 12, pp. 397-434), written at the behest of the Research Institute for National Policy and used (some say distorted) in a speech by Prime Minister Tojo.[22]

Exposure to some of the best Japanese critical work on Nishida would also greatly facilitate our evaluation of his achievement. A translation of Nishitani Keiji's[al] collected essays on Nishida has just been announced.[23] For critical expository accounts of central issues by other "Kyoto School" philosophers, I recommend edited translations of Ueda Shizuteru's[am] "Experience and Self-

 

p.491

 

Awareness"[24]; and Abe Masao's[an] "Towards a Critical Understanding of the Problem of gyakutaioo in Nishida Philosophy."25 Ohashi Ryoozuke's[ao] "The Significance of Nishida Philosophy for the History of Philosophy"[26] is a double-edged evaluation of Nishida and the history of philosophy. There is no lack of novel approaches, either. Sueki Takehiro[ap], author of a four-volume treatment of Nishida's system of self-consciousness, gives a sample of his symbolic logical analysis in "A Method of Understanding Nishida and an Interpretation of the Concept of Contradiction."[27] An edited section of Nakamura Yujiro's[aq] new book, perhaps the essay "The Logic of Basho and Sensus Communis--a Task for Contemporary Japanese Philosophy,"[28] would give an idea of recent "deconstructionist'' work. Ueyarna Shumpei's[ar] "The Philosophical Thought of Nishida Kitaro,"[29] gives a balanced if critical assessment of Nishida's place in modern Japanese intellectual and political history. Since a good part of Nishida's philosophy developed in response to Marxism, it would be important to translate trenchant Marxist critiques, both prewar and more recent, such as sections from a 1961 work[30] by Yamada Munemutsu[as] and prewar essays[31] by Tosaka Jun[at]. And since part of the ongoing controversy concerning Nishida is his relationship to Miki Kiyoshi[au], a former Marxist-inclined student who, like Tosaka, died in prison in 1945, I would recommend translation of an assessment by Miki, such as "Some Matters Concerning Nishida Sensei."[32]

Concerning how to translate Nishida, I have stated my case at length against excessively literal reconstructions and for contextual readings. The difference is one of concrete procedure: translating strings of words that form sentences that form paragraphs and essays, as opposed to translating passages as condensations of theses, arguments, or investigations. Contextual
translation assumes not only competence in Japanese grammar and vocabulary but also a knowledge of the philosophical issues and terminology that informed Nishida's writing. The translator will learn much from an examination of the miscellaneous short essays, addresses, and lecture notes in volumes 13 to 15 that represent earlier or later drafts of material in the major essays, or that make explicit Nishida's references and translations from English, German, and French. The revised translation of "The Logical Structure of the Actual World," for example, might profitably refer to, if not incorporate passages from, an earlier and a later lecture series of the same title (15, pp. 385-475, and 14, pp. 214-300).

A must for every Nishida translation is an introduction that explains the translator's approach and summarizes problems, conclusions, and the place of the translated material within both Nishida's development and philosophical currents. Often it will be useful to have a translator-editor's pr`ecis inserted before chapters or sections of an essay, as was recently done by T. P. Kasulis in a translation of a contemporary Japanese philosopher's mind-body theory.[33] Where such summaries or the translation by themselves do not

 

p.492

 

suffice to convey the context of a passage-and that is often the case with Nishida-translator-editors should footnote and identify allusions and sources. O'Leary's extensive notes to IRSC, and Steve Odin's notes to his recent translation of young Nishida's three-page essay on beauty,[34] serve as models in this regard. The context of Nishida's discussions and his frequently unidentified allusions can often be clarified by consulting the books he read; and translators fortunate enough to work in Japan will find their task lightened by a perusal of his personal library,[35] housed mostly in the "Nishida bunko" section of the Kyoto University Faculty of Letters library.

Aside from the general parameters of contextual translation, I would not at this stage recommend that translators together strive for a uniform style or, as is presently being encouraged for German,[36] that they standardize translations of particular terms. A diversity of translating styles, barring the impenetrably literal, can fill out Nishida's rather elliptic manner of reasoning. Similarly, a diversity of translations of terms can serve as an antidote to senses dulled by Nishida's highly repetitive vocabulary. The danger of misleading the reader is easily overcome by a detailed glossary specifying the Japanese term and its translation(s); a model is provided by Jan Van Bragt's glossary at the end of his translation of Keiji Nishitani's Religion and Nothingness.[37] In many cases Nishida varies the nuance or even the sense of a particular term within the same essay; in other instances he uses more than one Japanese term to refer to the same thing. The translator will need to vary or integrate the English terms accordingly. Concerning such terms, translators would find it instructive to consult (1) Nishida's own German and English translations, even if it is not always advisable to follow them (see especially the lecture notes and dictionary entries in N 13); (2) philosophical dictionaries compiled during Nishida's lifetime, such as Tetsugaku jiten,[38] to which Nishida contributed; and (3) the secondary literature recommended for translation above.

The translation of jikaku is a case in point. Where used as a term corresponding to Fichte's or other German philosophers' Selbstbewusstsein, especially in IRSC, jikaku can accurately be translated as self-consciousness. Nishida himself uses this translation in describing the Christian notion of person (N 15, p. 422), but it is incumbent upon the translator to point out that in Nishida's own thought, as in Fichte's, self-consciousness (or Selbstbewusstsein) refers to an activity and not a state. Jikaku and its adjective form jikakuteki[av] also sometimes have Buddhist overtones of self-awakening, in which subject and object are made whole, as when the term describes the manner in which nothingness is self-determining (N 6, passim), or when it describes not only one's self-realization (N 11, p. 445) but concomitantly that of the historical world (the "of" here being both an objective and subjective genitive) (N 11, p. 456). Nuances of self-awakening and self-realization are often heard in jikaku, but I would caution against an assumption that the word always carries a Buddhist connotation and should be translated accordingly. Jikaku

 

p.493

 

in its verbal form is equally an everyday way of talking about realizing or becoming fully aware, for example, of one's responsibilities. It is demonstrably not the case that Nishida consistently uses jikaku in differentiation to jikoishiki[aw] or ishiki[ax], other philosophical terms (without Buddhist connotations) for self-consciousness and consciousness. At times jikoishiki is used (N 3, p. 103), at times simply ishiki (N 4, p. 313), and at times even the doubled jikaku no ishiki[ay] and jikakuteki ishiki[az] (N 4, p. 294), to refer to the same self-reflective/self-mirroring structure that is ever in act, cannot be reduced to an object of consciousness, and as a structure of consciousness is more primerdial than intentionality. Often Nishida will delimit his meaning by explicitly contrasting terms, true consciousness as opposed to Kant's consciousness in general (Bewusstsein überhaupt) or to psychological consciousness, for example. Or he will alternate jikaku(teki) and ishiki(teki) idiomatically, but with no substantive change in meaning (N 11, pp. 376-378). "Self-awareness" may sometimes be a viable alternative, but the point is that a uniform translation of jikaku throughout Nishida's works would be a mistake, and the choice of translation will have to fit the immediate context and be made evident to the reader as a glossary entry.

A similar case could be made for other key terms such as soku[ba] or its cognate sunawachi[bb]. The former, famous as a part of the paradoxical sokul hi[bc], "is/is not" logic of the Prajnnaapaaramitaa sutras that D. T. Suzuki conveyed to Nishida (N 11, p. 398), forms by itself a grammatical connective between two noun phrases. Suggesting unmediated conjunction, inseparability or reciprocity, it has been translated by the Latin terms qua and sive and by phrases like "[X] is simultaneously [Y]" or "is immediately one with," or else circumscribed in various ways. Whatever the translation, I see no alternative to some further comment in a glossary or introduction. The translation of technical terms like basho ("topos," "place," and so forth) and neologisms like gyakutaioo, mentioned above, should likewise fit the context as well as attempt to capture the general denotation.

To say this is merely to reiterate my argument that good Nishida translations must be adaptive. We have come a long way from the word-for-word style that pervaded the early work. To adapt a phrase from the philosopher himself, we must continue to move from a context created by author and reader of the Japanese to creating a new text in English. Considering the amount of material still deserving of translation, the task has hardly begun.

 

NOTES

1.Counting the individual volumes Nishida published, which constitute the first twelve of nineteen volumes of his collected works, Nishida Kitao zenshu[bd], 2d ed. (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1965-1966). In this review, references to Nishida's works are cited as "N" followed by the volume and page numbers.

 

p.494

 

2. See, for example, Takeuchi Yoshitomo[be], Nirhida Kitaro to gendai[bf] ("Nishida Kitaro and the Present"), Regulus Library 102 (Tokyo: Daisan Bunmeisha, 1978), forward; Nakamura Yujiro, Nishida tetsugaku no datsukoochiku[bg] ("A Deconstruction of Nishida Philosophy") (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1987), p. 15; and Nei Yasuyuki[bh], Gendai tetsugaku to jimbunkagaku: Nishida letsugaku de Fuko, Derida o yomu[bi] ("Contemporary Philosophy and the Cultural Sciences: Reading Foucault and Derrida through Nishida") (Tokyo: Nobunkyo, 1987), p. 1.

3."The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis," in Speech Genres and Other Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), esp. pp. 104-107.

4. Published German translations, three complete and four partial, would make up about one book-length work; there are to my knowledge no published French translations, and but two works into Spanish, a complete translation of Zen no kenkyu, as well as several essays recently translated by Agustín Jacinto Zavala (see note 22). For a nearly complete list see "Kitaro Nishida Bibliography," compiled by Masao Abe and Lydia Brüll, International Philosophical auarlerly 28, no. 4 (Winter 1988): 373-381. Other

translations into German, Spanish, and French are presently under preparation; announced for publication this year is Japanisches Denken, ed. R. Ohashi (Pfullingen: Neske-Verlag), which will include translations of N 8, pp. 7-89 and 10, pp.223-241.

5. Nishida's development is succinctly traced in David A. Dilworth, "Nishida Kitaro: Nothingness as the Negative Space of Experiential Immediacy," International Philosophical euarterly 13, no. 4 (December 1973): 463-483; and in Masao Abe, "Nishida's Philosophy of 'Place'," International Philosophical euarterly 28, no. 4 (Winter 1988): 355-371.

6. Nishida uses choetsuteki[bj] to render both "transcendent" and "transcendental," and often, like Kant, does not distinguish between the two.

7. Robert Joseph John Wargo, "The Logic of Basho and the Concept of Nothingness in the Philosophy of Nishida Kitaro" (Diss., University of Michigan, 1972; University Microfilms International, no. 73-11, 291).

8. Nine years later, Dilworth did publish an admirable summary of its themes and improved the style of translation of the few sentences he quoted; see his article "The Concrete World of Action in Nishida's Later Thought," in Japanese Phenomenology, Analecta Husserliana 8 (Dordrecht, Holland, and Boston: D. Reidel, 1979), pp. 249-270.

9. Brief excerpts from this 1940 essay were translated by Masao Abe and Richard Demartino, in Sources of/apanese Tradition, vol. 2, ed. Tsunoda, De Bary, and Keene (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), pp. 350-365. 10. Japanese Phenomenology, pp. 223-247.

11. For a prCcis of the Husserlian themes, see Yoshihiro Nitta, Hirotaka Tatematsu, and Eiichi Shimomisse, "Phenomenology and Philosophy in Japan," in Japanese Phenomenology, PP. 8-9.

12. See, for example, Alexis Philoenko, "Die intellektuelle Anschauung bei Fichte," in Der transzendentale Gedanke: die gegenwärtige Darste[lung der Philosophie Fichtes, ed. Klaus Hammacher (Hamburg: Meiner, 1977), pp. 91-106.

13. See Thomas Hohler, Imagination and Reflection: Intersubjectivity: Fichte's Grundlage of 1794 (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), pp. 92 ff.

14. See, for example, Hans Wagner, Philosophie und Reflexion (Munich/Basel: Ernst Reinhardt, 1959/1967), and Dieter Henrich, "SelbstbewuBtsein und spekulatives Denken," in his Fluchtlinien (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982).

15. See James G. Hart's review article on Wagner's book: "Constitution and the Being of Mind," in Contemporary German Philosophy 4 (1984), pp. 327-338.

16. See Tugendhat's trenchant Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination, trans. Paul Stern (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1986).

17. The extent of the editing has generated intense controversy, even among those who had a hand in this translation.

18. "Towards a Philosophy of Religion with the Concept of Pre-established Harmony as Guide," in The Eastern Buddhist 3, no. 1 (June 1970), pp. 36 and 45.

19. The Chinese can be found in Taisho shinshu daizokyo[bk] (Tokyo, 1929-1938), vol. 47, p.

p.495

 

400a21. Ruth Fuller Sasaki translates the saying more literally as "Make yourself master everywhere, and wherever you stand is the true [place]," in The Record of Lin-chi (Kyoto: Institute for Zen Studies, 1975), p. 17; and Paul Demiéville as "il faut partout être son propre maître; il faul être vrai ou que l'on soit" in Entretiens de Lin-Tsi (Paris: Fayard, 1972), p. 89.

20. "Religious Consciousness and the Logic of the Prajnnaapaaramitaa Suutra (From the Logic of Place and a Religious World-view)," in Monumenta Nipponica 25, no. 1-2 (1970): 203-216.

21. Nishida Kitaro zenshu, 3d ed. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1987-); pagination up to volume 14 will be the same as that of the second edition. Much of the previously unpublished material, ten extremely brief articles written between 1912 and 1919, recently appeared in Nishida tetsugaku: shin shiryo to kenkyu e no tebiki[bl], ed. Kayano Yoshio[bm] and Ohashi Ryozuke (Kyoto: Minerva, 1987), pp. 2-54.

22. A Spanish translation of and introduction to much of this material, by Agustin Jacinto Zavala, has been published as Estado y Filosofia (Zamora, Mexico: El Colegio de Michoac`an, 1985). An unpublished French translation of the essay on Japanese culture, and extensive discussions of Nishida's political philosophy, have been prepared by Pierre Lavelle.

23. Tentatively titled Kitaro Nishida: The Man and His Philosophy, this translation, by Seisaku Yamamoto and D. S. Clarke, Jr., of Nishitani's Nishida Kitaro: sono hito to shiso[dn]" (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1985) will appear in the Nanzan Studies in Religion and Culture series, edited by James W. Heisig.

24. "Keiken to jikaku[bo]," in Shiso[bp], no. 738 (December 1985): 17-46, and no. 744 (June 1986): 60-90.

25. "Nishida tetsugaku ni okeru 'gyakutaioo' no mondai--sono hihanteki rikai no tame[bq]," in Riso [br], no. 562 (March 1980): 109-126, and no. 565 (June 1980): 108-122.

26. "Nishida tetsugaku ni okeru 'tetsugakushiteki' igi[bs]," in Kayano and Ohashi, Nishida tetsugaku,pp. 86-109.

27. "Nishida rikai no hoho to mujungainen no kaishaku[bt]," in Shiso, no. 738 (December 1980): 47-63.

28. "Basho no ronri to kyotsukankaku-gendai Nihon tetsugaku no ichi kadai[bu]," in Nakamura Yujiro, Nishida tetsugaku, pp. 69-96.

29. "Nishida Kitaro no tetsugaku shiso[bv]," in Ueyama Shumpei, Nihon no shiso[bw] (Tokyo: Simul Press, 1971), pp. 75-138.

30. Nishida Kitaro no tetsugaku--Nihonkei shiso no genzo[bx] (Sanichi Shoboo; reprinted 1978).

31. "Kyoto gakuha no tetsugaku[by]," in Tosaka Jun zenshu[bz], vol. 3 (Keiso Shobo, 1960), pp. 171-176; and "Nishida tetsugaku no hoho ni tsuite," in vol. 2, pp. 340-348.

32. "Nishida Sensei no kotodomo[cb]," in Miki Kiyoshi zenshu[cc], vol. 17 (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1968), pp. 295-312.

33. See Yuasa Yusuo, The Body: Toward an Eastern Mind-Body Theory (Albany, New York: SUNY, 1987), trans. Nagatomo Shigenori and T. P. Kasulis.

34. "An Explanation of Beauty: Nishida Kitaro's Bi no Setzumei," in Monumenta Nipponica 42, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 211-217.

35. A full list is given in Nishida Kitaro zenzosho mokuroku[cd], ed. Yamashita Masao[ce] (Kyooto Daigaku Jimbun Kagaku Kenkyuujo, n.d.).

36. Elmar Weinmayr, "Nishida tetsugaku no konpon shogainen-Doitsugo e no juyo[cf] (German Reception of Basic Concepts in Nishida Philosophy), in Kayano and Ohashi, Nishida tetsugaku, pp. 207-238.

37. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 292-395. 38. (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1922).

 

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