Abstract
This chapter examines the notion of “self-awareness” (jikaku) in Nishida’s philosophy, a central concept which he struggled to articulate throughout his life. The analyses below trace the development of Nishida’s notion of self-awareness through its various stages. “Self-awareness” begins as an existentialist stance on “experience”, and later develops into an epistemological principle. From there, it further evolved into an ontological elucidation of “reality” that was drawn from his conception of “place”. Nishida then devised a detailed system of philosophy founded on “the logic of place”, while also taking up broad philosophical questions regarding the existential realities that cannot be dealt with in a systematic manner, though his notion of self-awareness.
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Notes
- 1.
This paper is based on a presentation I gave at the Nishida Philosophy Association meeting in July, 2006 (See Okada 2006). I wish to thank Miikael-Aadam Lotman for translating the essay into English.
- 2.
Actually, the German phrase “Schliessen, Achtung”! is quite similar to the Japanese expression. Even though I used this example as a characteristic of Japanese language, there is nothing exclusively Japanese about it. Perhaps the real issue at hand is the difference between pre- and post-modern attitudes, rather than a divergence between the East and the West.
- 3.
Nishida wrote that the “I is self-awareness, i.e. fact-act” (NKZa 14: 118) and, in his later period, acknowledged Fichte’s philosophy with the following: “I must agree with Fichte in that fact-act lies at the recesses of all consciousness. However, instead of conceiving fact-act as a self-determination of the emptied seeing self, he conceived of the self directly from the noematic direction, and thus lapsed into metaphysics. […] Nonetheless, the self-aware determination of nothingness must remain a mere noematic metaphysical substance, until the true meaning of self-awareness is clarified”(NKZa 6: 171–174).
- 4.
There are several different layers of self-awareness that Nishida addressed respectively; however, after reaching the “the self-aware determination of nothingness”, he explicated their relations with the following: “Action can be conceived in terms of the self-aware determination of nothingness; self-aware determinations can be conceived as active determinations, and by conceiving of self-aware determinations we can conceive of knowing” (NKZa 6: 136).
- 5.
“Metamorphosis […] is the essence of the historical life of contradictory self-identity. The world of contradictory self-identity must develop metamorphically as the self-determination of the absolute present. […] The limit is in transition as a self-determination of such kind” (NKZa 10: 389).
- 6.
“Self-awareness is a consciousness of directly bound activities. Thus, judgement and perception can be said to merge directly within self-awareness. But if so, then how can we determine that the principle of [conscious] data is exclusive to perceptual consciousness, when viewed from the standpoint of self-aware consciousness? The consciousness of will as an activity is as direct as that of perception”(NKZa 4: 305).
Nishitani Keiji interpreted Nishida’s description of “the consciousness of the direct merging of activities” with the following: “There is a ‘self-awareness of will’ beyond the mere ‘subjectivity of judgement’; a more profound standpoint of knowledge that goes beyond the kind of knowledge that is commonly seen in opposition to will. It is the standpoint of ‘the self-reflection of knowledge itself’. It is by starting from the standpoint of ‘self-awareness of will’ that even the so-called ‘self-awareness of knowledge’ is established. Furthermore, it is there that we can begin to conceive of problems regarding the concept of individuality, history and culture” (Nishitani 1990: 171, vol. 14).
- 7.
I believe that the German word “ereignen” is most appropriate in this context. In contemporary usage, the verb “ereignen” means “to happen” and its nominal form “Ereignis” means “event”. However, it was originally synonymous with the phrase “vor Augen stellen” (lit: “to place before one’s eyes”) while its Heideggerian connotations to “natural occurrence” go without saying. Moreover, it has the etymological sense of “seeing” while further relating to “selfhood” (in the sense of “appropriation”: or “making one’s own”).
- 8.
This is a famous quotation from Shinran’s Tannishō, in which he laments the ineffectiveness of attaining Buddhahood through any self-reliant religious practice. Nishida cited Shinran already in his maiden work An Inquiry into the Good: “If even the virtuous can be reborn in Pure Land, then how much more likely is it for the non-virtuous”?
- 9.
Were they to intercross by remaining unchanged, then it wouldn’t be a true intercross but a mere intersection. For example, in biology the “crossing-over” signifies an exchange of genetic material resulting in the emergence of a new entity. The self intermingles with the other and begets the “third person”, as it were. Such is the self-awareness of the world as an expression of the self-awareness of the I.
References
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. (1990). Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings. Trans. D. Breazeale, Indianapolis/Cambridge: 1994
Nishida, Kitarō 西田幾多郎(1965-66). Nishida Kitarō Zenshu (Complete works of Nishida Kitarō), 19 Vols. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten (NKZa)
Nishitani, Keiji 西谷啓治(1990). Nishitani Keiji Chosaku-shu (Collected works of Nishitani Keiji), Vol 14. Tokyo: Sobun-sha
Okada, Katsuaki 岡田勝明(2006). Chokusetsu Keiken no Jikaku – Nishida Tetsugaku wo Ikkan Suru Mono –. 3: 51–70
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Okada, K. (2022). “Self-Awareness”: A Pervasive Concept in Nishida’s Philosophy. In: Matsumaru, H., Arisaka, Y., Schultz, L.C. (eds) Tetsugaku Companion to Nishida Kitarō. Tetsugaku Companions to Japanese Philosophy, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41784-4_3
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