Siberian Federal University

Supplementary material

Application 1 (.pdf, 810 KB)

Issue

Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences. 2013 6 (10)

Authors

Prof. Dr. Katsuhito Inoue

Contact information

Prof. Dr. Katsuhito Inoue:Kansai University Osaka, Japan;E-mail:

Keywords

Nishida Kitarō; the pure experience; the compassion of heaven and earth as one body; Neo-Confucianism; The spirit of extension of knowledge and investigation of things; the transcendent one, Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana; the absolute place of nothingness; the logic of “immanent transcendence”; mirror that reflects itself

Abstract

The character of modernized Western thought can be thought to consist in the observational view which keeps a distance from things. In contrast, the character of even recent East Asian thought consists in standing within the pure experience in which there is not yet a subject or an object. For example, the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō（西田幾多郎, 1870-1945） often uses the phrase “mono-to natte-mi, mono-to natte-hataraku,(物となって見、物となって働く)” which can be translated as, “Look/see by becoming the thing, work/do by becoming the thing.” This phrase means that one should see from within the thing by going within the thing. That is to say, in distinction from the West’s objectively logical thought, Nishida sought at the root of Eastern thought a thinking that becomes the ‘thing’ completely. In other words, to transcend the self, while standing in the existential world that envelops this self, and to stand on the realized plane wherein things come to appear to the extent that the self is made of nothing. In this sense, Nishida’s standpoint is related to what is called ”ko-wu, chih-chie”（knowledge which reaches all thngs 「格物致知」）in the “Ta-hsüeh”（Great Study『大學）. Hence, with regards to Nishida’s philosophy, we can see that it cannot be thought in terms of a self and world, subject and environment, and other such oppositionally constituted dualisms. Rather, both terms are taken to be none other than contradictory, dialectical, and relational (sōsoku-teki相即的), and are determined ‘topologically’ (basho-teki　場所的). This means that, as opposed to the modern Western way of looking at the world from the side of the self, Nishida’s philosophy tries to look at the self from the side of the world, i.e. from the side of things. To give a much earlier example of Eastern verticality, Cheng Mingdao (程顥1032-1085) advocated what he termed a ‘compassion of heaven and earth as one body（天地一体の仁）． We must pay attention to the fact that humanity is a self-awareness based not on observation but on physiological sense. Before we see the objective world, we come into contact with everything physiologically. Usually we live in pure and direct experience. There is not yet a subject or an object, and knowing and its object are completely unified. This is the most refined type of experience. Zhaolun (僧肇374-414）says in his work Zhaolun 『肇論』, “ Heaven and Earth have a common root. All being and we are one body.” And also Chuang-tzu（荘子）says in Zhuangzi 『荘子』, “Heaven and Earth live with us, everything in the universe is united with us.”

Pages

1407-1422

Paper at repository of SibFU

https://elib.sfu-kras.ru/handle/2311/10028

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).