On the Negation-Based Structure of “Acting-Self-Awareness”: The Development of Nishida’s Phenomenological Thought

Abstract

Nishida Kitarō, an original philosopher in modern Japan, understood the direct experience that precedes the subject-object distinction as the foundation of all knowledge. Outgoing from this, Nishida worked to clarify the structure of our self-awareness as it functions within experience. While Nishida may have had some amount of sympathy for Husserl’s and Heidegger’s accounts of the structure of an ecstatic conception of the self, he was also critical of their work. Nishida criticized both of them because, for him, Husserl and Heidegger could not overcome conceptions of subjectivity as that which constitutes objects, nor could they avoid substantializing the self-relation. For Nishida, this meant that Husserl and Heidegger’s philosophies both stopped at a clarification of subjective-meaning and thus remained unable to ground objective-facts. In order to overcome the issue shared by the two phenomenologists, Nishida developed his “logic of place”. With this logic, Nishida aimed to critically elucidate the status of various knowledges based on “self-aware determinations of place”. Shortly thereafter, Nishida would move on to his position of “acting-intuition”, which took the self becoming nothing as the true form of self-awareness. He also attempted to find the genuine instantiations of knowledge needed to know a fact as a fact and critically see through mere semblances of knowledge within the self-awareness of the “noetic determinations of the acting-self”. Thus, while phenomenology was never a word that Nishida used to describe his own philosophy, when looking back on his work from a modern viewpoint, I believe we can see unique ideas that could point us toward a more profound phenomenological reduction. Hence, in this contribution, we will look at an important aspect of the middle-period of Nishida’s philosophy: the structure of negative determination in his concept of the “self-awareness of the acting-self”. Specifically, we will look at this theme from the perspective of his theory of time and, by doing so, show Nishida’s potential contribution to modern phenomenological investigations.

Translated by Richard Stone.