Abstract
Nishida Kitarō shared with phenomenologists a concern to account for experience as it is lived, prior to how it is described objectively. His philosophy implies the phenomenological sense of experience, consciousness and self-awareness as dimensions of illuminating or revealing things. His engagement with Husserl in particular guided much of his questioning and criticisms of the centrality of intentionality and of reflective self-awareness. This chapter shows why his critique of Husserl is mistaken, but also indicates how Nishida contributes to the phenomenology of self-awareness. His notion of awareness as inherently reflexive or self-mirroring helps clarify the connection between pre-reflective awareness and reflection and the connection between awareness and the role of a self. Other themes in Nishida’s philosophy, such as the practice of awareness in engaged bodily action, hold promise for further phenomenological investigation.
Part of this chapter was previously published in John C. Maraldo, Japanese Philosophy in the Making 1: Crossing Paths with Nishida (Nagoya: Chisokudō Publications, 2017). Reprinted with permission.
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Notes
- 1.
Cognitive scientists and philosophers alike often use this phrase, first proposed by Thomas Nagel (1974), to pin down the meaning of consciousness.
- 2.
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- 4.
By intuiting Nishida seems, in this case, to mean sensually perceiving only, and in contrast to using the term kōsei sayō (構成作用) to refer to the acts that “constitute” or “construct” ideal, non-perceptual objects such as mathematical ideas. His emphasis, in any case, is on consciousness as it now acts, rather than on what it manifests. Husserl’s notion of constitution pertains to the way consciousness bestows and manifests meanings in general.
- 5.
Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the Japanese and the German are my own.
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- 7.
Zahavi (2003: 159–160) names these critics and shows that they mistake Husserl’s limited analyses in Logical Investigations and Ideas I for his fleshed-out position that is evident in other works, such as Cartesian Meditations. (A copy of the 1931 French edition of that work was in Nishida’s library.) Zahavi writes, “[Husserl] in a manner not unlike Sartre, took self-awareness to be an essential feature of subjectivity and […] considered reflection to be a founded and non-basic form of self-awareness.”
- 8.
J.N. Findlay, in the introduction to his translation of Husserl’s Logical Investigations, puts it this way: “A conscious act [for Husserl] is simply what Natorp calls a being-there-of-something-for-me, and variations of conscious acts are merely variations in this peculiar ‘being-there-for me’, in ‘appearance’ as opposed to ‘what appears’” (Husserl 1970: 26). We will consider later whether the qualification “for me” differs fundamentally from Nishida’s position. I am greatly indebted to James G. Hart for pointing out many texts in Husserl and helping me get clear on his position.
- 9.
“The study of the stream of living experiences proceeds in its turn in properly formed acts of reflection that themselves belong to the stream of lived experience, and can and must be made objects of phenomenological analyses in corresponding, higher-level reflections.” (Husserl 1950 [1913]: 180). On the same page, Husserl distinguishes between a lived but not beheld experience (ein erlebtes aber nicht erblicktes Erlebnis) and a lived experience that is beheld.
- 10.
Sokolowski (1974:140–143) describes the living present in this way and gives a fuller explanation of inner time consciousness.
- 11.
My summary here greatly simplifies the questions of the temporality and trans-temporality of “the I” treated in Husserl (2001) and Husserl (2006). Taguchi (2006) offers a thorough and penetrating account of Husserl’s notion of the “primal I” and the way in which it functions as the medium of all experience.
- 12.
When asked by the wanderer Vacchagotta whether there is a self (atman) or not, the Buddha remained silent, explaining later to a disciple that both the belief that there is an eternal unchanging self, and the belief that consciousness is annihilated at death, are misleading. See the translation of Thanissaro Bhikkhu (http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn44/sn44.010.than.html). Accessed 20 Jan. 2017.
- 13.
In the final sections of Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness Nishida presents the will and willing as the primal act (Tathandlung) of consciousness wherein knowing self and known self are identical, subject and object are one. Mitsuhara (2015) argues that Husserl’s focus on the ‘I″ as the unifier of various worlds influenced Nishida’s shift to the will as the unifier of worlds. Later, in the opening sections of “The Intelligible World,” willing and not intentionality counts as the essence of consciousness for Nishida. Nishida’s critique of Husserl’s intentionality as the “essence of consciousness” often seems to assume that only perceptual experience, and not willing, judging, etc., display intentionality. At this stage, Nishida’s notion of a self-knowing willing focuses on the immanent act and seems to disregard the dimension of what is willed, the intentional object of willing. Nevertheless, insofar as willing leads to action, Nishida’s focus here anticipates his later shift to enactive intuition: knowing by acting and acting by knowing.
- 14.
Similarly, Hart (2009: 106–109) argues along Husserlian lines that intentionality requires and is based on a self-awareness or self-presence that is prior to its manifestation of things.
- 15.
Nishida implies a distinction between the two senses in the opening of Art and Morality (1923), to cite but one example: “The self that reflects [utsusu 写す] itself within itself must entail an infinite progression. A static self would be a self that is thought about, not the thinking self itself” (NKZ 3: 247). One of numerous instances where he conflates the two expressions appears in Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness: “When in self-consciousness the self makes its own activity its object and reflects (反省する) upon it, this reflecting is the very process of the self’s development…The self’s reflecting (反省する) on the self, its reflecting or mirroring (写す) itself, cannot be brought to a halt at this point, for it consists in an infinite process of unification” (NKZ 2: 15–16). Later in the same paragraph, hansei suru 反省する, utsusu 寫/写す, and utsusu 映す are used synonymously to describes the self’s reflecting itself in itself—despite differences in the connotations of 写す, reflecting as reproducing, and 映す, reflecting as projecting.
- 16.
Viz. “The Intelligible Word” (NKZ 5: 149), or the 1930 essay on “The Act of Consciousness as the Self-determination of Place”: “When we conceive of our consciousness as intentional, where the self intends itself endlessly in itself…” (NKZ 6: 91). Nishida implies a self-mirroring intentionality at the ground of the way that consciousness is directed to objects.
- 17.
Krummel and Nagatomo (2012: 83, 208), the translators of Nishida’s Basho essay, suggest that Nishida himself alludes to the Buddhist idea when he writes, “In speaking of our true livedness in perceptual acts, we are implaced in the basho of true nothing, an endless overlapping of mirrors.”
- 18.
The authors also cite Heidegger’s version: “The self is there for the Dasein itself without reflection and without inner perception, before all reflection. Reflection, in the sense of a turning back, is only a mode of self-apprehension, but not the mode of primary self-disclosure” (Heidegger 1982: 159; Heidegger 1989: 226).
- 19.
“The public character of mind” is Robert Sokolowski’s description (Sokolowski 2000: 12).
- 20.
I prescind here from the disagreement among some phenomenologists as to whether the most basic level of consciousness is non-reflective and not merely pre-reflective. The latter implies some sort of motivation toward second-order reflection.
- 21.
See for example Hart 2009: 108–09.
- 22.
Gallagher and Zahavi (2016) imply that reflection somehow is motivated when they write, “Thus, phenomenology maintains, the access that reflective self-consciousness has to first-order phenomenal experience is routed through pre-reflective consciousness, for if we were not pre-reflectively aware of our experience, our reflection on it would never be motivated. When I do reflect, I reflect on something with which I am already experientially familiar.”
- 23.
Nishida eventually conceives these contexts in terms of basho (場所) or “places,” with more inclusive and thus more concrete places enveloping more limited and thus more abstract ones. Significantly, these places not only envelop but do so precisely by reflecting or mirroring themselves. The self-reflecting or self-aware (自覚的) structure of the various basho is a pervasive theme in Nishida’s later philosophy; the ultimate “basho of nothingness” may be construed as the dynamic source of differentiated basho. The theme of self-awareness in terms of Nishida’s non-phenomenological philosophy of basho lies outside the confines of the present chapter.
- 24.
In a later essay of 1943, “On Self-Awareness,” Nishida writes (in the translation of Shirai Masato): “Moreover, that does not mean to proceed from the self, but rather to proceed from the world, for the self as something that acts is reflected on (反省せられる) from the standpoint of the world…. When the world becomes self-aware, our self becomes self-aware. When our self becomes self-aware, the world becomes self-aware (Shirai 2013: 304, 309; NKZ 10: 557, 559).
- 25.
Gallagher and Zahavi 2016: “All the experiences are characterized by a quality of mineness or for-me-ness, the fact that it is I who am having these experiences. All the experiences are given (at least tacitly) as my experiences, as experiences I am undergoing or living through. All of this suggests that first-person experience presents me with an immediate and non-observational access to myself, and that (phenomenal) consciousness consequently entails a (minimal) form of self-consciousness.” Even in early Sartre, where the I or ego is an outgrowth of reflection and is not “there” in pre-reflective experience, there is still a sense in which that pre-reflective experience is mine and not yours.
- 26.
Spoken by Bob Stevens, PBS television series “First Peoples,” Part 1.
- 27.
I am grateful to Ishihara Yūko for this reference.
- 28.
Ishihara ( 2011) gives a detailed and illuminating account of the controversy about self-awareness in current philosophy and Nishida’s relevance for it. She shows that Nishida recognizes both reflective (反省的) and pre-reflective self-awareness but shifts the debate to that between differentiating awareness and undifferentiated awareness. Insofar as she does not consider the ambiguity in Nishida’s notion of reflection or the mirroring structure of self-awareness and its potential for phenomenology, the contributions that this chapter suggests complement the insights she presents.
- 29.
Maraldo (2014) explores this notion in the context of enaction theory in cognitive science.
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Maraldo, J.C. (2019). Nishida and the Phenomenology of Self-Awareness. In: TAGUCHI, S., ALTOBRANDO, A. (eds) Tetsugaku Companion to Phenomenology and Japanese Philosophy. Tetsugaku Companions to Japanese Philosophy, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21942-0_5
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