The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy by Bret W. Davis

Author:Bret W. Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

A Logic of Fluidity

Things that have been repositioned in three-dimensional space can be measured with “public” yardsticks and spoken of in “public” language. Yet the undivided knowledge-emotion-volition (chi-jō-i 知情意) of the facts of our direct experience themselves can neither be measured nor spoken of in such public manners. In the fourth chapter of the second part of An Inquiry into the Good, entitled “Reality,” Nishida expresses this point by saying: “We must personally realize the true view of reality, rather than reflect on it, analyze it, and express it in words.”14 Nishida’s critique of positing an opposition of subject and object is thus a critique of the idea that grasping the truth is equivalent to measuring it with public yardsticks and speaking about it in public language.

Let us consider, for example, an exercise such as rotating one’s arm or swinging one’s leg forward and backward. By measuring the sequential positions of one’s arm or leg and the time elapsed between these points, it is no doubt possible to use physics to describe and explain the exercise. But that would not explain the continuity or unity of the exercise, which is precisely how I am conscious of it. Like these exercises, our emotions also have a dynamic quality to them. The emotion of sadness, for instance, is hardly something uniform; its movement is such that at times it tends in the direction of grief, or self-abandonment, or anger. Shifting directions, varying widely, it moves unceasingly. It cannot be summed up in the one word “sadness,” nor can it be precisely grasped by breaking it down into components of grief, anger, and so on since then its unity is lost sight of.

We endlessly attempt to analyze and describe in detail that which changes unceasingly. By dividing up and fixing in place a myriad number of parts and then reconstructing the whole, we attempt to understand that which changes unceasingly. Or else we cut it off at a certain point and try to use that segment to represent the whole. Yet what we actually experience is not an assemblage of divided and fixed pieces; it has rather the quality of a continuous movement that resists being divided up. Such a thing can only be, as Nishida puts it, “personally realized” (jitoku suru 自得する). To use Bergson’s expression, it must be “intuited.” As Bergson says, this requires us to enter deeply into a thing, “to probe more deeply into its life, and by a kind of spiritual auscultation, to feel its soul palpitate.”15

The year before the publication of An Inquiry into the Good, the same year he began teaching at Kyoto University, Nishida published an essay called “Bergson’s Philosophical Method,” in which he expresses sympathy with Bergson’s notion of “intuition.” He explains it as “seeing a thing from within,” or “seeing by means of becoming a thing itself,” and says that it is the only method with which one can “know the true state of a thing itself.”16 Sympathy with Bergson also appears in Nishida’s understanding of “pure experience.

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