Nishida Kitarō's Chiasmatic Chorology

John W. M. Krummel

Description

Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945) is considered Japan's first and greatest modern philosopher. As founder of the Kyoto School, he began a rigorous philosophical engagement and dialogue with Western philosophical traditions, especially the work of G. W. F. Hegel. John W. M. Krummel explores the Buddhist roots of Nishida's thought and places him in connection with Hegel and other philosophers of the Continental tradition. Krummel develops notions of self-awareness, will, being, place, the environment, religion, and politics in Nishida's thought and shows how his ethics of humility may best serve us in our complex world.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Preliminary Studies
1. From Aristotle's Substance to Hegel's Concrete Universal: The Development of Nishida's Dialectic
2. Hegelian Dialectics and Mahāyāna Non-Dualism
Part II. Dialectics in Nishida
3. Pure Experience, Self-Awareness, and Will: Dialectics in the Early Works (From the 1910s to the 1920s)
4. Dialectics in the Epistemology of Place (From the Late 1920s to the Early 1930s)
5. The Dialectic of the World-Matrix (From the 1930s to the 1940s): Acting Persons
6. The Dialectic of the World-Matrix (From the 1930s to the 1940s): The Dialectical Universal and Contradictory Identity
7. The Dialectic of Religiosity (the 1940s)
Part III. Conclusions
8. Nishida and Hegel
9. Nishida, Buddhism, and Religion
10. The Chiasma and the Chōra
11. Concluding Thoughts, Criticism and Evaluation
Lexicon
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Eastern
• Zen

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253017864
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

NISHIDA KITAR S CHIASMATIC CHOROLOGY
WORLD PHILOSOPHIES
Bret W. Davis, D. A. Masolo, and Alejandro Vallega, editors
NISHIDA KITAR S CHIASMATIC CHOROLOGY
Place of Dialectic, Dialectic of Place
John W. M. Krummel
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2015 by John W. M. Krummel
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-01753-6 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-253-01786-4 (ebook)
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
To Reiner Sch rmann
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Preliminary Studies
1 From Aristotle s Substance to Hegel s Concrete Universal: The Development of Nishida s Dialectic
2 Hegelian Dialectics and Mah y na Non-dualism
Part II. Dialectics in Nishida
3 Pure Experience, Self-Awareness, and Will: Dialectics in the Early Works (from the 1910s to the 1920s)
4 Dialectics in the Epistemology of Place (from the Late 1920s to the Early 1930s)
5 The Dialectic of the World-Matrix Involving Acting Persons (from the 1930s to the 1940s)
6 The Dialectic of the World-Matrix Involving the Dialectical Universal and Contradictory Identity (from the 1930s to the 1940s)
7 The Dialectic of Religiosity (the 1940s)
Part III. Conclusions
8 Nishida and Hegel
9 Nishida, Buddhism, and Religion
10 The Chiasma and the Ch ra
11 Concluding Thoughts, Criticism, and Evaluation
Lexicon of Key Non-English Terms
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
I WOULD LIKE to thank Professors Shigenori Nagatomo, J. N. Mohanty, and Mahmoud Ayoub for intellectual help, advice, support, and encouragement during the composition of this project. I would like to express special gratitude to Professor Nagatomo for helping me get started in reading and translating Japanese philosophical texts. I also want to thank Professors Kazashi Nobuo and Inaga Shigemi, who were helpful in pointing me toward some useful sources. I would like to express my appreciation to Professors Agnes Heller, Richard Bernstein, John Maraldo, Fred Dallmayr, Graham Parkes, and the late Joan Stambaugh, who helped me along the way with words of encouragement throughout this project. Special thanks are due to Bret Davis, an editor of this book series, for showing interest in and supporting my work. I express my gratitude also to Professors Robert Carter and Jason Wirth for reviewing and commenting on my manuscript. And I thank the production team at Indiana University Press, especially Dee Mortensen and Sarah Jacobi, for their work, enthusiasm, and helpfulness. I am also very much in debt to Hobart and William Smith Colleges for providing me with a grant from the Faculty Research Fund during 2011-2012, which helped me complete this book. I cannot thank enough my parents, Fusako and the late John William Krummel, who provided me with support and understanding during the many years of my studies and research leading up to and through this project.
NISHIDA KITAR S CHIASMATIC CHOROLOGY
Introduction
M ANY WHO HAVE read the writings of the seminal philosopher of the Japanese Kyoto School, Nishida Kitar (1870-1945), have been mystified by his enigmatic assertions regarding contradictory self-identity, inverse correspondence, continuity of discontinuity, and self-negation, which seem to shamelessly defy any allegiance to the logical law of non-contradiction. All these ideas pertain to his dialectic ( bensh h ) and his philosophy of place ( basho ), which together characterize what has come to be called Nishidian philosophy (Nishida tetsugaku ), belonging to the later half of his oeuvre. In this work I propose to explicate Nishida s dialectic of place-a dialectic of mutual self-negation ( jiko hitei ) that results in his notion of absolutely contradictory self-identity ( zettai mujunteki jikod itsu )-vis- -vis Mah y na Buddhist thought and Hegelian dialectical philosophy and in terms of what I will call a chiasmatic chorology. What I mean by the latter phrase, in brief, is that Nishida s so-called dialectic seeks to express the concretely real in its complexity that proves to be both a chiasma of (over-)inter-determinations and an undeterminable field or ch ra that makes room for these determinations. Nishida as a philosopher was concerned with the perennial questions of metaphysics, questions concerning the one and the many, identity and difference, being and non-being, and so on, in the determination of things, including the world, the cosmos, the human self, and their interrelations. These concerns inform his epistemological interests, for example, the relationship between the epistemological subject and its object or the determining act of knowledge and its determined content. I find that the metaphysical and the epistemological in Nishida s thought are inseparable: they mirror each other as self-expressions of the real. One s self-awareness mirrors the self-awareness of reality predicated on a self-determining place. What is mirrored or expressed precisely is what Nishida regards as the contradictory or dialectical nature of reality, wherein all that is is implaced. Nishida s interest in the interrelationality between opposites and among distinct elements becomes most pronounced and most developed dialectically under the rubric of contradictory identity in his later years, from the 1930s to his death. (Commentators differ in exactly how his oeuvre is to be segmented. I shall adopt a fourfold periodization for heuristic purposes.) 1 It is during this period that Nishida develops his conception of contradictory self-identity in a dialectical fashion to encompass not only the internal self-reflective experience of consciousness-the concern of his earlier works-but also, beyond that, the historical unfolding of reality in man s relationship to his environment.
Throughout his works we notice Nishida s employment of the terminology of Hegelian dialectics, not only in the later works but even in the earlier ones. Yet Nishida s conceptions of contradictory identity and self-negation, along with his related conception of absolute nothing ( zettai mu ), seem to owe much to the Mah y na Buddhist tradition with its dialectic of emptiness, that is, the line of thought that can be traced back to the non-dualistic notions concerning inter-dependence (e.g., between form and emptiness or sa s ra and nirv a ) and the lack of ontological independence ( svabh va; own-being or self-nature ) in the Praj p ramit s tra s and N g rjuna s M dhyamika philosophy, via their subsequent East Asian appropriations in Tiantai , Huayan , and Chan/Zen thought. Although Nishida s formulations of the issue make ample usage of Western philosophical concepts in general and Hegelian dialectics in particular, the core content of his conception of dialectic of place appears Mah y nistic. One of my purposes is to clarify Nishida s dialectical thinking of contradictory identity in relation to that line of thinking in the Mah y na traditions and to the dialectics of Hegel, that is, to clarify in what regard it owes allegiance to them and wherein it diverges from them. Wherein lies the Hegelian influence and wherein the Mah y na influence? In seeking the answer to these questions, we cannot ignore how Nishida viewed his dialectic of contradictory self-identity vis- -vis Buddhism and Hegelianism. And what are the merits or demerits of this appropriation of Hegel s language, especially in light of further developments of his ideas by some of his pupils? 2
While attempting to answer these questions dealing with the relationship of Nishida s thought to its forebears, this work will underscore that aspect of his dialectical thinking wherein lies its unique and distinct creativity. I shall characterize (especially in the concluding chapters) Nishida s dialectic of contradictory identity and place as a chiasmology or chiasmatic chorology to emphasize the inter-dimensional and placial complexity involved in his so-called dialectic. What I mean is a dialectic of place (basho) as encompassing both the vertical interrelations between whole and part, indeterminate and determined, absolute and finite, and nothing and beings, on the one hand, and the horizontal interrelations among finite determinate individual beings, on the other; and furthermore in both the temporal and the spatial dimensions, that is, the diachrony of the unfolding of history, collectively or individually, and the synchrony among correlative individuals, as well as between individual and environment. The interrelations are inter-determinations, while the field or place itself remains undetermined. Chiasmatic and chiasmology refer to the chiasma of those vertical and horizontal, spatiotemporal as well as ontological and meontological, cross-dimensional interrelationalities that come into play in Nishida s dialectical thinking of contradictory identity. In addition, I call Nishida s dialectics a chorology in reference both to his general characterization of his thinking-already during his middle period bu