Murphy Shimamoto
Nishida Kitaro’s Philosophical Middle Way
Introduction
Nishida’s philosophy spans decades, examines a wide array of thinkers and quandaries from both East and West, and assumes multiple terminologically distinct stages. However, this paper contends that undergirding his entire corpus is Nishida’s philosophical Middle Way. When interpreted from this perspective, one can see that despite stark shifts in the objects and thinkers Nishida contends with and the language he utilizes to do so, there persists a fundamental homogeneity in the method with which he approaches philosophical problems and the solutions he identifies. Hence, Nishida should not be regarded as having distinct stages nor should the core of his work be located in the positive solutions he conjures, rather his philosophical project should be regarded as the continuous reapplication of a philosophical method to a variety of philosophical systems, schools, and thinkers. 1
The Middle Way
What this paper argues is that just as many Western thinkers have secularized their religious traditions into the philosophical languages in vogue at their time, Nishida philosophizes a Middle Way. He does this, in logical language, to allay concerns about the contradictions and binaries generated in Western thought, harmonizing them and arriving at Buddhist enlightenment. The value of having identified the Middle Way as the heart of Nishida’s project is its demonstration of the fact that Nishida is not just a Buddhist philosopher who merely takes inspiration from Buddhism to re-evaluate Western philosophy. He is rather a philosophical Buddhist, who wants to use the language of philosophy to logically substantiate a Middle Way philosophical method.
In the Dhammacakkappavattana sutra, the Buddha outlines the Middle Way as the path to enlightenment and out of the suffering brought upon by ignorance. This path is defined as follows, “Bhikkhus, these two extremes should not be followed by one who has gone forth into homelessness. What two? The pursuit of sensual happiness in sensual pleasures, which is low, vulgar, the way of worldlings, ignoble, unbeneficial; and the pursuit of self-mortification, which is painful, ignoble, unbeneficial. Without veering towards either of these extremes, the Tathagata has awakened to the middle way, which gives rise to vision, which gives rise to knowledge, which leads to peace, to direct knowledge, to enlightenment, to Nibbāna.”
The following sections of this paper will reveal Nishida’s understanding of the Middle Way as a philosophical method.
The Two Extremes of Pure Experience
Nishida’s first major work maturely exposits his philosophical Middle Way as the path between the two philosophical extremes of subjectivity and objectivity. These extreme standpoints are overcome in pure experience i.e. Buddhist enlightenment. Nishida writes (1990), “When viewing the subject and object separately we make a distinction: in knowledge, we subordinate the subject to the object, whereas in the will, we subordinate the object to the subject,” (22). Nishida’s framing of subjectivity and objectivity as attempts at attaining knowledge reveal themselves to be exact parallels to the attempts of self-indulgence and self-mortification at attaining freedom from suffering. For Nishida, the problem with a subjective understanding of knowledge is that the subject attempts to dominate objects and define them by acting as an independent entity. This mirrors the self’s attempt to indulge in worldly pleasure as a means of drowning out his suffering. In both cases, a self tries to resolve its either epistemic or existential problems through a self-externalization, or greedy appropriation. Furthermore, as objective knowledge endeavors to negate the subject by subordinating it to objects, self-mortification only attempts to negate the body in order to escape physical suffering. In this case, a self attempts to resolve its epistemic or existential problems through a self-abnegation. Nishida is quick to point out that neither standpoint can lead to true knowledge, just as the Buddha asserts neither extreme will lead to enlightenment, for, “knowledge and the will have a point in common,” (Nishida 1990: 22). This point in common is that primordial state of experiencing subjects and objects called pure experience. Nishida (1990) writes, “From the standpoint of pure experience, there is no such thing as an object divorced from the subject. Truth is that which has unified our experiential facts…our authentic self as being this unifying activity, then to know the truth is to accord with the greater self, to actualize it,” (24). It is this state of pure experience, the path in between the philosophical extremes of subject and object, which is the direct analogue to Buddhist enlightenment. However, before substantiating that connection it should be emphasized that in Nishida’s last work he discusses religious awareness as the standpoint of true knowledge stating that, “Religious “conversion” is this revolution in the personality base. It does not mean, as people often hold, some kind of going from one extreme to another…It is, rather, a being that is intrinsically deluded…religious spirituality is a wisdom that does not identify the self discriminately,” (Nishida 1987: 86). Here Nishida explicitly uses the language of avoiding two extremes which leads to the standpoint free from delusion. It may seem odd to cite a quote from Nishida’s last work to elucidate what occurs in his first. However, the proceeding section will demonstrate that Nishida’s last work is fundamentally a rearticulation of his first, thereby revealing the method animating the totality of Nishida’s works i.e. a philosophical Middle Way.2
Rearticulation of Pure Experience
Nishida (1990) declares that, “the standpoint of pure experience it is actually the state of oneness of subject and object, a fusion of knowing and willing,” (32). Pure experience is the inuitied unity of perceived opposites, an alternative and more fundamental manner of experiencing the world than our everyday discriminatory modes of perception. Nishida argues that there are degrees of pure experience in which the perceiver unifies himself to a greater number of perceived objects. What Nishida (1990) calls the, “quantitative difference in the scope of their unities,” (31), reaches its apogee with the ultimate pure experience which is to be found in, “a person of religion who, through human love, can intuit the oneness of self and other,” (31). The reason the ultimate pure experience is religious can be attributed to Nishida’s (1990) understanding of, “God as the foundation of the universe,” (153). Given that pure experience is the unification of perceived antipodes and that the scope of pure experience varies quantitatively apropos the number of the objects unified to the perceiver, the broadest level pure experience could logically attain would be the unification of all objects and their perceiver. Hence, in order to achieve the ultimate scope of pure experience, Nishida defines God as the foundation of all objects, i.e. the foundation of the universe. This enables religious subjects to purely experience the totality of all things through purely experiencing the God whence they emerge.3 Due to our own existence as part of the universe, Nishida (1990) rightly adduces that, “God must be the foundation of the universe and our own foundation as well,” (154). Therefore, religious pure experience not only unifies the self with everything but also to his true self. Hence, “one finds the true self in God,” (Nishida 1990: 154). Finally, it is worth noting that pure experience for Nishida is a state of love as, “knowledge and love…are fundamentally the same. This activity is the union of subject and object; it is the activity in which the self unites with things,” (Nishida 1990: 173). When one recalls the etymology of philosophy, it is clear that Nishida claims to unite religion and philosophy through their reduction to the same fundamental process (loving wisdom and loving God unite). Therefore, Nishida’s pure experience can be summarized as a mode of experience, ascending quantitatively in scope, in which a perceiver sheds their discriminatory manner of viewing things in favor of a unifying mode of experience, culminating in religious pure experience joining the foundation of everything, God, and the true self.
Nishida (1990) claimed in his preface to Inquiry into the Good, “That which I called in the present book the world of direct or pure experience I have now come to think of as the world of historical reality. The world of action-intuition…is none other than the world of pure experience,” (xxxiii), and that, “I developed the standpoint of pure experience into the standpoint of absolute will. Then….into the idea of place…I next concretized the idea of place as a dialectical universal,” (xxxii-xxxiii). Nishida’s own self-understanding of his philosophy is that instead of developing and innovating differing philosophical stances, he rather rearticulates the same idea more concretely. Therefore, not only are there remnants of pure experience in Nishida’s last work, but that last work is itself, fundamentally, a rearticulation of the first, just in novel terms.
In Nothingness and the Religious World View, Nishida (1987) asserts that, “We act in our human-historical individuality…individuality that has the structure of absolutely contradictory identity of the many and the one,” (51), and that “A conscious act is a dynamic expression. It is a self-determination of a concrete transpositional matrix, a structure of mutual revealment of self and world. Our selves, the expressive monads of the world, constitute points of the world’s own expression in and through our self-expression,” (59). It seems that this conscious act, which reveals the fundamental contradictory identity grounding ourselves and the universe, is how Nishida rearticulates pure experience. Whereas in Nishida’s early language the opposites of subject and object become unified in their discriminatory opposition through non-discriminatory pure experience, Nishida decides to express the same idea in logical terms by arguing that philosophical binaries are revealed in their contradictory identity. Additionally, as pure experience contained an increasing degree of scope, based on how many objects were unified with the perceiver, culminating in God, Nishida’s contradictory identity reaches its apex in the contradiction between the relative and the absolute. For Nishida (1987), “God, or the absolute, stands to itself in the form of a contradictory identity…it expresses itself through itself…Because it is absolute nothingness, it is absolute being,” (69). As the highest level of pure experience was the religious pure experience of God, the ultimate contradictory identity is God’s own. This is due to the fact that as God was the foundation of the universe in Nishida’s early terminology, “The world of the absolute present is a bottomlessly contradictory sphere that reflects itself within itself…God,” (Nishida 1987: 76). Hence, when Nishida’s vocabulary revolved around experience, the ultimate ground of experience was God and when it later centered around contradictions, the ultimate identity of contradictions was God. Furthermore, in both cases God was the foundation of the self. The only thing that changes is how God is described. Whereas before God was the foundation of the experienced self, Nishida (1987) now states that “At the very root of our individuality we always face the absolute face of God,” (93). Instead of talking about the self’s pure experience of God, Nishida (1987) talks about, “contradictory identity of God and the self,” (98). Continuing this theme, as one previously found one’s true self in the unifying pure experience of subjects and objects, now, “The true self rather appears in that dimension in which it predicates of itself through the logic of the contradictory identity of objectivity and subjectivity,” (Nishida 1987: 83). Finally, as before, “We can reach reality only through love. Love is the culmination of knowledge,” (Nishida 1990: 175), Nishida (1987) later states, “The human world, the historical world, arises from the standpoint where the absolute sees itself within itself through its own self-negation. This is the basis of saying that God creates the world out of love,” (104). Quite simply, while love, in the language of pure experience, is the unification of the universe and its foundation, in the jargon of contradictory identity it is translated as the dynamic interexpression of the self-contradictory God.
It would be unfair to state that there are remnants of pure experience in Nishida’s last work for that would be a gross underestimate of the concept’s endurance. Rather, Nishida does exactly what he claims to have done, that is to have rearticulated the same concept with the same fundamental structure, only differing in the terminology used to elucidate it. Having shown that the structures of religious awareness and pure experience are isomorphic and that both, thereby, follow the path avoiding two extremes, it must now be demonstrated that the path between the two extremes does in fact culminate in a rearticulation of Buddhist Enlightenment.
Pure Experience is Enlightenment
In both pure experience and the historical world of action-intuition, the highest degree such experiences can attain is religious. Nishida (1987) states that, “To cut through the illusions of the discriminating intelligence is not to opt for a mere non-discrimination…the self must realize its own true nothingness…in the Shōbō genzō: “To study the way of Buddha is to study the self, and to study the self is to forget the self; to forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.” I call this seeing by becoming things and hearing by becoming things. What must be negated is the dogmatism of the reified objective self. What must be decisively repudiated is the attachment to the self conceived of objectively,” (90). What occurs in this telling quotation is Nishida’s argument that one must cut through the illusions of philosophical object-logic in order to follow a path parallel to the Buddha’s path of self-forgetting towards enlightenment. The continuity between this understanding and that in An Inquiry into the Good, should be reaffirmed. There Nishida (1990) states, “The moment of seeing a color or hearing a sound, for example, is prior not only to the thought that the color or sound is the activity of an external object or that one is sensing it, but also to the judgment of what the color or sound might be…When one directly experiences one’s own state of consciousness, there is not yet a subject or an object, and knowing and its object are completely unified,” (3-4). We see in both cases the priority of the experiences of seeing and hearing to their being interpreted through object logic. Furthermore, in both cases, this primordial experience culminates in the religious experience which in Nishida’s later work he explicitly associates with Buddhist enlightenment. Even more tellingly, he pits his understanding of religious awareness where, “Now when the self realizes its own bottomlessly contradictory identity,” against what he defines as delusion which, “only arises if one becomes attached to objective determination, to taking what is conceived of by object logic as concrete reality,” (Nishida 1987: 88). Therefore, the task of following the path to religious awareness is the path out of delusion and one’s attachment to it. He compares the delusion of object-logic to a dogma and claims, “Dogmas are like a knife that severs our life’s root,” (Nishida 1987: 90). In order to conclusively demonstrate that Nishida’s philosophy rests on the same ground as Buddhism, thus necessitating his pursuit of a philosophical Middle Way towards a philosophical Enlightenment, we must investigate what Nishida believes life’s root to be.
Enlightenment’s Origin: Suffering
Nishida is quite explicit about what he considers to be at the root of life, stating, “Buddhism considers that at the ground of human existence lies delusion. Delusion, the source of sin, arises from our taking the objectified self for ourself. The source of delusion lies in the mode of seeing characteristic of objective logic. Therefore, Mahayana Buddhism maintains that one is saved by satori, enlightenment…satori means that one clearly sees the ground of one’s nothingness,” (Nishida 1996: 29). Nishida unequivocally mirrors his philosophy with Mahayana Buddhism when he condemns object logic as delusional and identifies the path out of object-logic to be Buddhist enlightenment. Furthermore, one becomes aware that they are living in delusion because of suffering, “It is only when a person becomes conscious of a profound existential contradiction in the depths of his own soul…it is when this fact of the sorrow of human life is reflect on at a profound level that the problem of religion arises. (Indeed, the problems of philosophy, in my view, arise from this same point.),” (Nishida 1987: 66). What occurs in this citation is absolutely critical. It is well known that Buddhism centers around the problem of suffering, its cause (delusion), and its cessation (the Middle Way to enlightenment). However, religion and Western philosophy have not traditionally put the same emphasis on suffering nor seen it as a problem in a similar way. According to Proverbs 9:10, “The Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is prudence.” Additionally, Aristotle believes philosophy comes from wonder, Hobbes fear, Kant reason, and so on. What this paper means to suggest, is that what Nishida does is deracinate religion and philosophy, replanting them on Buddhist soil. This helps us appreciate the depths to which Nishida is fundamentally an articulation of his Buddhism in the language of philosophy.
It should be immediately perceptible that once Nishida centers religion and philosophy around Buddhist problems, rather than traditionally religious and philosophical problems, one naturally, necessarily, and automatically must also arrive at Buddhist answers. Nishida (1996) goes on to say, “Situations of extreme misfortune, moreover, are bound to awake religious awareness in everyone of us. Religion is a spiritual fact. Philosophers may not invent religion on the basis of their own systems of thought; their task is rather to explain this already existing spiritual reality,” (1). Hence, Nishida wants to deny philosophers the ability to invent, create, or deduce their own systems of explaining the world because they do not start at the ground of suffering and they do not see suffering in the same way. Therefore, I want to suggest he does not unite religion and philosophy but merely reframes them. Nishida does not solve or resolve any of the problems which existed in Western philosophy but he merely redescribes them from an irreconcilable paradigm. For example, would Nishida’s critiques have any relevance at all for a Nietzchean convinced that, “pleasure and displeasure are so intertwined that whoever wants as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other - that whoever wants to learn to ‘jubilate up to the heavens’ must also be prepared for ‘grief unto death’?,” (Nietzsche 2001: 38), and who has sworn against the path which promises, “as little displeasure as possible, in short, lack of pain,” and, “Oriental Nothingness - called Nirvana - into mute, rigid, deaf self-surrender, self-forgetting, self-extinction,” (Nietzsche 2001: 7). All Nishida could say to someone like this is that you are living in delusion, to which the Nietzchean would reply, “and?”. To that Nishida could to appeal to him saying, “and your delusion causes you suffering,”, something the Nietzchean would be delighted to hear. We must understand the word delusion how it functions in Nishida. It should not be taken for an epistemological indicator of something which is opposed to the One Truth, but as a description for something that Nishida believes causes what he considers to be suffering. In short, it means that you are not thinking along the lines of Nishida’s Middle Way. Nietzche, however, does not philosophize to end his suffering but to elevate his joy, “Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall!,” (Nietzsche 2001: 65). Advice on how to meditate does not disprove instructions on how to build a hammer. Moreover, Nishida could say nothing at all to the pious Christian who already presupposes the Lord, fears him, and believes in his revelation as the only standard for truth. If, however, the Christian chose to engage Nishida, not writing him off as a temptation from the devil sent to jeopardize his salvation, in response to Nishida’s pleas to end suffering the Christian would simply have to read from Hebrews 12:6, “For whom the Lord loveth, he chastiseth; he scourageth every son whom he receiveth.” The Christian would, like the Nietzchean, be quite happy to discover that their path is one of suffering for he would reinterpret what Nishida calls delusion as evidence that he is taking up the cross. This does not mean that the Christian or the Nietzschean are correct and picture reality as it really is, but merely that given their fundamentally different aims Nishida’s doctrine is entirely flaccid.
We should view Nishida’s endeavors to retreat into a more primordial state of experience or to find the bottom of all contradictions in a contradictory identity, not as having found the perspective from which to see the world as it is, but rather as nothing more than a philosophical tool to achieve Nishida’s various goals. In the case of the latter, for example, Nishida uses the logic of contradictory identity to invent the guidelines for what he calls a new world culture. This new world culture is not a reconciliation of every Christian faith and the totality of Western philosophy with Nishida’s Eastern perspective, for such a project is fundamentally impossible, given the irreconcilable grounds from which they are cultivated. Hence, Nishida’s new world culture is merely what he believes to be the logical spirit of Mahayana Buddhism disguised in Western philosophical language. This should rather remind us that Nishida does not unite religion and philosophy as they were in the West to an Eastern understanding, but that he rather uses these Western terms to style his Eastern concepts.
Nishida (1970) is entirely correct when he says, “I attempt to articulate a philosophy of religion,” (42), insofar as we understand this to mean that he uses the language of Western philosophy in order to articulate a Buddhist Middle Way philosophical method. It must now be asked, why Nishida felt the need to rearticulate Buddhism at all.
The Spectre of Mysticism
In 1919 Nishida (1997) wrote, “Buddhism is a rigorous field of study that demands logic,” (7). This sets the stage for the entirety of the Nishidian project. It is this pursuit of giving Buddhism a logic that animates Nishida's work. Now, why does Buddhism need a logic? In Nothingness and the Religious World View, Nishida (1987) clearly outlines the impetus for his philosophical articulation of Buddhism when he says, “Now the Buddhism that took its rise in Indian soil was very profound as religious truth, but it did not avoid being other-worldly. Even Mahayana Buddhism did not truly attain to the world-creatively real in the sense I have just indicated. I think that it was perhaps only in Japanese Buddhism that the absolute identity of negation and affirmation was realized, in the sense of the identity of the actual and the absolute that is peculiar to the Japanese spirit. Examples of this realization are found in such ideas of Shinran…But even in Japan, it has not been positively grasped. It has only been understood as an absolute passivity to Amida, or as some non-discriminatory wisdom in a merely irrational, mystical sense,” (102). For Nishida, while Japan perfected the absolute contradictory identity of Buddhism, its great flaw was that it failed to be grasped in a positive non-mystical sense. The reason Nishida tries to logically articulate Buddhism is to demystify it. This aim is apparent throughout Nishida’s work. He (1970) says, “the essence of religion…Even enlightenment would seem only to mean to penetrate to the fundamental source of self-awareness. It is not anything mystical at all,” (44), and that, “No man would conceive of the standpoint of self-awareness as something mystical…consciousness of the very existence of the self,” (39). Additionally, when Nishida (2020) is describing the failure of his project in Intuition and Reflection in Self-consciousness, he states, “I had broken my lance, exhausted my quiver, and capitulated to the enemy camp of mysticism,” (xxvi). And when Nishida (1990) describes what he has accomplished throughout the linguistic phases of his work he writes, “I developed the standpoint of pure experience into the standpoint of absolute will. Then….into the idea of place…I next concretized the idea of place as a dialectical universal,” (xxxii-xxxiii). The achievement of his exposition of Buddhist thought in the language of the dialectical universal is that it is a concretization rather than a mystical abstraction. When Nishida (1996) says, “The real absolute is the absolutely contradictory self-identity. This is the only way we can describe God in a logical language,” (20), we must understand this to mean that the Buddhist insight of absolutely contradictory self-identity, or God, can only be expressed concretely, positively, and non-mystically in the logical language of absolutely contradictory self-identity. When Nishida (1970) says, “Self-consciousness is that in which the knower is the known, thinker is the thought…it is the undifferentiation of subject and object of expression…to express it in logical terms, as in the Prajñā pāramitā-sūtra, it may be said that ‘because all minds are not mind, therefore they are called mind.’ It may seem to be a paradox but the discrimination of non-discrimination is true self-awareness,” (40), we can unambiguously see that his logic of absolutely contradictory identity is the mystical logic of the Prajñā pāramitā-sūtra, or, “The dialectic of sokuhi of the Prajñāpāramitā tradition,” (25), demystified. Hence, Nishida’s work consists in the constant rearticulation and deeper concretization of the formerly mystical logic of sokuhi. This logic is Nishida’s philosophical Middle Way which he uses to harmonize philosophical extremes generated in Western thought. We should keep in mind that this is what was behind Nishida’s efforts all along as even back in 1919 he states, “Buddhism is a rigorous field of study that demands logic; at the same time it is a religion whose essence is love…I believe that logic is linked at root to human emotions,” (Nishida 1997: 7) and finds that connection between love and logic in, “to truly love means bringing the contradiction of self and other to coincide…It is in the essence of love defined in such a way that coincidentia oppositorum expresses itself in its purest form,” (Nishida 1997: 11). This remains consistent with his understanding of love and logical reconciliation of contradictions from An Inquiry into the Good to his Last Writings.
The beating heart of Nishida’s project was the philosophical exposition of a Middle Way sokuhi logic between philosophical extremes. Nishida used this method in order to philosophically develop Enlightened freedom from suffering and thereby, demystify and concretize Buddhist logic in philosophy. It must now be asked why Buddhism must be demystified in the first place.
The World Situation
Nishida’s (1970) historical eternal now entails that, “We exist in an eschatological perspective at every moment as the momentary self-determinations of the absolute present. In the standpoint of the self-determining present, each moment is the beginning and end of the world…Present-day Buddhists have forgotten such a true meaning of the Mahayana (Great Vehicle). Eastern culture must arise again from such a standpoint. It must contribute a new light to world culture. As the self-determination of the absolute present, the national polity (kokutai) of Japan is a norm of historical action in such a perspective. The above mentioned true spirit of the Mahayana is in the East preserved today only in Japan,” (36). According to Nishida, the current historical eschatology, which demands an answer to a new world culture, involves the Mahayana spirit uniquely preserved in Japan. Furthermore, “From the perspective of present-day global history, it will perhaps be Buddhism that contributes to the formation of the new historical age. But if it too is only the conventional Buddhism of bygone days, it will merely be a relic of the past. The universal religions, insofar as they are already crystallized, have distinctive features corresponding to the times and the places of the races that form them. While each thus partakes of the essence of religion, none has exhausted it…I am generally sympathetic with the direction of Berdyaev’s The Meaning of History, but his philosophy does not go beyond the mysticism of Boehme. The new age must primarily be scientific…These new directions must now be given a thoroughgoing logical foundation,” (Nishida 1987: 121-122). We see here Nishida’s conviction that Buddhism, particularly that Mahayana spirit preserved and perfected in Japan, is the key to forming and animating what he wants to claim is new world culture. However, it cannot be the Buddhism of the past for that would be both anachronistic and mystical. The new age demands a scientific-logical foundation, antithetical to the traditional mystic language of Buddhism. Nishida understands himself to be historically implaced in a moment within which Buddhism’s Middle Way sokuhi logic offers the key towards developing a truly world culture and yet his historical moment precludes mysticism, instead requiring a rigorous scientific logic to express one’s ideas. Hence, Nishida’s usage of philosophical-logical language to articulate a Buddhist Middle Way. We must now take a look at how this Middle Way logic manifests itself concretely in the historico-political world.
Nishida (1996 principles) states that, “Each world epoch possesses its own project. As each epoch seeks to realize its project, it passes into the succeeding epoch. For instance the project of eighteenth-century Europe involved self-realization at the level of the individual, that is, individualism and liberalism,” (100), and that, “Since the nineteenth century, imperialism as well as class struggle have dominated the world. As long as a nation lacks awareness of its world-historical mission and therefore remains in the imperialist standpoint, class struggle will also continue. Communism is totalistic, but its principle still derives from the eighteenth-century abstract conception of the world based on individualism,” (100-101). Now, in these world-historical developments, that of the 18th and 19th century, one should be able to glean the Buddhist two extremes manifest in the political sphere. In the case of the self-realization and assertion of liberal individualism one should be able to notice its parallel with self-indulgence and in one’s self-negation to their economic class in communism, Buddhist self-mortification. If we were to explain these terms in the binary between public and private it is clear that in the former the public is subordinated to the private and in the latter vice-versa. Furthermore, in foreign relations imperialism involves the self-indulgence and self-assertion of the colonizing nation and the reciprocal self-negation, subordination, and self-mortification of the colonized nation. Nishida (1996) is quite clear in outlining a Middle Way out of these extremes in the case of imperialism when he argues that for, “the self-realization of the nation’s world-historical mission,” (100) which takes the form of, “each nation must develop itself, yet at the same time it must negate itself and reach beyond itself to participate in building a global world,” (101), culminating in, “each nation returning to itself and affirming its own world-historical mission, and by uniting with other such nations, that a unified world is attained,” (103). This for Nishida, is a Middle Path out of the extreme binaries wrought by imperialism. It should here be noted that in this world-historical mission Nishida identifies Japan as playing a crucial and special role, for, “a central figure that carries the burden of the project is necessary. In East Asia today there is no other but Japan [that can undertake such a role],” (Nishida 1996: 102). There is, of course, controversy regarding this statement. However, it should be noted that the idea that Japan occupies a special position in realizing this world-historical mission matches his previous assertions that the logic to realize this world-historical mission has been uniquely preserved in Japan’s Mahayana tradition. Additionally, this would elevate Nishida himself into a figure of world-historical importance, as the philosopher who was able to scientifically-logically disclose the true Mahayana spirit, which provides the resolution to the world-historical mission he understands to be present in his own time. As Hegel ended history, Nishida would provide the answer to the problem of his historical moment. He is the philosopher equipped with the language to satisfy his historical moment’s demand for scientific logic and yet reared in the pure spirit of the Mahayana which clears the path towards solving that same historical moment’s dilemma. Nishida understands himself as the possible bridge between East and West, and as laying the path for a new world culture.4 However, unlike Hegel, Nishida does not provide a conclusive end to history per se. It is only a decisive answer in a particular historical moment which does not thereafter determine the resolution to future historical problems which will emerge. That is up to each future historical epoch and the actions of creative human beings within them. Regardless, Nishida sees himself as uniquely placed and enabled to resolve his world-historical problem.
Conclusion
Nishidian philosophy, throughout its many incarnations and objects of attack, stays faithful to a philosophical method which attempts to harmonize philosophical extremes with a Middle Way logic of sokuhi. The application of this logic leads to a type of philosophical Enlightenment, parallel with the Buddhist, which is geared towards the cessation of suffering. Finally, in an endeavour to provide a path for a new global culture, Nishida concretizes and demystifies this logic, using it against the epistemological and political binaries which prevent that culture’s flourishing.
Notes
1 As will be revealed in the paper, all I claim about Nishida’s philosophical Buddhism is that it is a philosophical method which applies a Middle Way Buddhist logic of sokuhi, as Nishida understands it, to traditional philosophical problems. He does this in order to remove ’delusions’ which are the cause of suffering. Nishida’s Buddhism is not the philosophical exposition of any particular Buddhist school or sect, but rather his method of approaching philosophical binaries, i.e. his Middle Way logic sokuhi which acts as the path out of the sufferings caused by object logic.
2 Another reason why we must emphasize that Nishida’s philosophical project is fundamentally a philosophical articulation of a Middle Way logic is his (1996) statement that, “Be it a path of self power (jiriki) or Other-power (tariki), be it Zen or True Pure Land Buddhism, both Mahayana traditions stand on the same ground and ultimately they meet,” (29). For Nishida, it is not whether the correct philosophical method is the Zen or Pure Land Middle Way but that it is a Middle Way in general. If one is interested in the differences which emerge between these competing understandings of the Middle Way one could look at Nishitani and Tanabe respectively. But it is important to note that for Nishida, these differences are in no way decisive, for both crucially follow a philosophical Middle Way.
3 The perceiver himself is included within that totality.
4 But as mentioned when discussing the Nietzschean and the Christian, Nishida is less of a bridge and more of a magician who plays sleight-of-hand, claiming to have united religion with philosophy when in actuality he merely regrounds them, transforming those words into useful, deceptive tools unrelated to what they had meant and done in their original context.
Works Cited
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian del Caro, Cambridge UP, 2001.
Nishida Kitarō. Coincidentia Oppositorum and Love. Translated by Michael Finkenthal and W. S. Yokoyama, Eastern Buddhist Society, 1997.
---. An Inquiry into the Good. Translated by Masao Abe and Christopher Ives, Yale UP, 1990.
---. Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness. Translated by Valdo H. Viglielmo with Takeuchi Yoshinori and Joseph S. O’Leary, Chikusokudō Publications, 2020.
---. Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious Worldview. Translated by David A. Dilworth, U of Hawaii P, 1987.
---. The Logic of “Topos” and the Religious Worldview. Translated by Yusa Michiko, Eastern Buddhist Society, 1996.
---. The Principle of the New World Order. Translated by Yoko Arisaka, Sophia University, 1996.
---. Towards a Philosophy of Religion with the Concept of Pre-established Harmony as Guide. Translated by David A. Dilworth, Eastern Buddhist Society, 1970.