Abstract
Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945), founder of the Kyoto School of Japanese philosophy, is widely regarded as Japan’s leading twentieth-century philosopher. While he addressed themes that engaged the views of Western philosophers from Aristotle to Heidegger, he is also known for his efforts to bridge Western analytical and Eastern philosophical traditions. Educated in the highly regimented imperial university system of Meiji Japan, Nishida was an avid student of Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer and completed his doctoral dissertation on Hume but was also a student and practitioner of Zen. His work An Inquiry into the Good earned him an appointment as Professor at Kyoto Imperial University in 1914. During the 1920s, Nishida also drew inspiration from neo-Kantian works, as well as works by Bergson and Husserl, and wrote essays that focused on a theory of consciousness and the will. He gained increasing esteem as he developed his theory of place (basho) during this period and then focused, in the 1930s, on action and interaction. Although he obliged the authorities by lending his voice in support of the ultranationalist war effort, he regarded those forays as secondary to his major philosophical foci. This collection of three essays, expertly and sensitively translated by William Haver, offers a representation of Nishida’s thought within the philosophical field in which he chose to situate his endeavors. In a dramatic departure with any effort to situate Nishida exclusively within the context of 1930s Japan, the title of the anthology, Ontology of Production, highlights Nishida’s engagement, on his own terms, with Marx’s apprehension of the nature of human being in relation to production in the natural world. Nevertheless, the essays were selected, as Haver unabashedly notes in his “Introduction,” with a decidedly “partisan bias”: “to put what counts for us as sense at risk, to break the essential complicity of academic philosophy with state and capital, to resist the concomitant militarization of the globe” (p. 5). In other words, these writings were selected precisely because of their “heterodoxy” with respect to hegemonic understandings in 1930s Japan and to those that prevail today, as well as with respect to Marxism.
The first essay, titled “Expressive Activity” (1925), like the other essays, is about making “sense” of a concept. In this case, it is about the concept of production, as expressive activity, and the “sense” that is made of human “being” when one is engaged in activity as production. Here Nishida engages Marx’s understanding of the relationship between production as interaction of the human with natural nature, but he also engages Plato and Plotinus in terms of the relationship between the idea and real. Nishida attempts to deploy a notion of consciousness or awareness (jikaku) that exists before the very moment of the action, which, by its own realization, results in true awareness of oneself as being. Here Nishida invokes Marx’s materialism, as expressed in the latter’s first thesis on Feuerbach—understanding human being as something that only has and makes sense in the material world, in which humans become self-conscious through their “sensuous activity.” Nishida tries to identify a moment before the act in which the being becomes aware or conscious, which is the prerequisite of the activity being able to be an expression of “self.” It is here that in this first essay that a significant translation issue emerges, because, while Nishida evokes the notion of the “One” in Plotinus, he also refers implicitly to Buddhist notions of consciousness and awareness, in which the notion of the self is itself problematic. Nevertheless, Nishida seeks to overcome this tension by adhering to the referents of ancient Greek philosophy: The idea in the individual human mind is part of the great Idea, of which concrete sensuous experience is only a diminished reflection. And yet, when engaging Marx on this matter, Nishida is also keenly aware of the importance of the interaction of humans with the matter of nature to their awareness and then consciousness of what they are as (creative) human beings. Interestingly, enough, it is worth noting, the Japanese word aware (expression) is achingly similar to the English “awareness,” and also connotes the notion of coming into appearance or manifestation. The conscious self exists before even the recognition of the object in nature with whom it will interact, and yet it becomes manifest even to itself as such in the process of production, as reproduction of the self.
It is important to note that while a key thread of Nishida’s entire philosophical project is the emphasis on the importance of logic to our understanding of being, as he closes this essay, he makes it clear that it is intuition that is key:
But there must be a standpoint in the most profound depths of self-awareness that negates self-awareness itself; that is, there is a standpoint of the negation of the will, and it is from this standpoint that we can render even the self itself a cognitive epistemological object. This standpoint is that of intuition. It is from this very standpoint that time itself is extinguished and everything becomes expression. (p. 61)
This emphasis on intuition is the point of departure for the second essay, aptly entitled “The Standpoint of Active Intuition” (1935). The somewhat static connotation of the term “standpoint” is deceptive here, because this essay firmly situates intuition within the dynamic field of human activity, and particularly “intentional action”:
To speak of the standpoint of intentional action is to say that inside is outside and outside is inside; it is to say that the temporal is spatial, and the spatial is temporal. Thus, we see things on the basis of intentional action; the thing determines the self, and the self determines the thing. And that is active intuition. . . . To say that the self acts intentionally is necessarily to say that the movement of the self is conscious; acting must come from the conscious self. Acting, however, must be the manifestation of force. Mere consciousness is not force. (p. 81)
The “force” of which Nishida speaks, however, is not external. The self can only become the true self in as much as it interacts intentionally. Without that intentionality, the self is only reacting and is not truly “free” (p. 82). Indeed, it is likewise with the world as a whole. “The world of the eternal now . . . itself determines itself by way of custom. . . . Being nothing, the world of the affirmation of absolute negation, the world that itself determines itself, must be this sort of thing” (p. 133).
But it is above all the determination of human being in freedom that is Nishida’s central concern, and this is the subject of the third essay, “Human Being” (1938). While the first two essays begin from the concrete nexus between man and the material world and take us to the somewhat mystical contemplation of being in and through consciousness, in this essay, Nishida insists on the concrete, on the importance of logos and logic. It is this, along with logical intentionality, that separates specifically human beings from other beings. The essay begins by contemplating the fact that the essence of our “expressive activity” must lie in the transcendent, but it ends with a plea for the primacy of Cartesian empiricism.
The student of Western philosophy from Plato and Plotinus to Kant and Hegel will readily identify their influences in the interaction between the universal and the particular in Nishida’s discussion of consciousness and being. However, for one who has studied Zen Buddhism and the various schools of thought that gave rise to its initial form in China, Chan Buddhism, it is the traces of these that are imprinted on every page. Nishida consistently employs the terms mu (nothingness, which is not mere nothingness), extinction, and consciousness (ishiki), and there is a hint of the dissolution of the individual self in universal heart/mind (shin) that is characteristic in many schools of Mahayana Buddhism. For readers who does not know Japanese, the latter is obscured by the unfortunate circumstance that the term consciousness (jikaku) in modern Japanese includes the reflexive “ji” in the word “jikaku,” and thus the recurrence of the word “self” could mislead one to believe that the individual self is as central to Nishida’s thought as it is in what Emanuel Levinas has criticized as the “egology” of Western philosophy. Despite this and other inevitable difficulties involved in translation, this is an excellent introduction to Nishida’s thought. It should is be regarded not only as an introduction to Nishida’s thought and the richness of twentieth-century Japanese philosophy but also as an invitation to investigate the Eastern traditions that account for so much of its depth and mystical appeal.