Nishidas Early Pantheistic Voluntarism

·期刊原文
Nishida's Early Pantheistic Voluntarism

Dilworth, David

Philosophy East and West V.20 P35~49

University Press of Hawaii

Honolulu, HI [US] (http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/index.html)

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Nishida Kitarō's formal academic career as professor of philosophy at Kyoto Imperial University began approximately with the publication in 1911 of Zen no kenkyū [A Study of Good] and was coextensive with the Taishō period of modern Japan (1912-26). [1] He retired from university life in 1927 to pursue an even more productive literary career until his death in 1945. This latter career was heralded by the publication in 1927 of Hataraku mono kara miru mono e [From the Acting to the Seeing], a work which showed a clear transi­tion toward a deepening Buddhist philosophical vocabulary. Thus, in one sense, Nishida's works before 1927 can be considered to constitute the "early period" of his long philosophical journey. But this "early period" was a full career in itself, representing his entire academic career from his fortieth through fifty-seventh years, during which he emerged as the leading philosopher in Japan. [2] A Study of Good was indeed a beginning. However, the three major works which followed it before 1927 then constituted a mature position in themselves, namely, Jikaku ni okeru chokkan to hansei [Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness], 1917; Ishiki no mondai [Problems of Consciousness], 1920; and GeiJutsu to Dotoku [Art and Morality], 1923. [3] In still another sense, From the Acting to the Seeing properly belonged to this sequence of works. It was both a conclusion and a beginning, both a consummation and break­through to an even more original philosophy.

If the religious concepts in A Study of Good were mildly eclectic, Nishida's ' subsequent restructuring of his insights into a pronounced pantheistic volun­tarism was all the more novel. Indeed, the ensuing "early" works were not ' directly concerned with the task of pursuing his religious philosophy. Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness was ostensibly a dialogue with Neo-Kantian philosophers in the area of epistemology. Problems of Consciousness and Art and Morality continued epistemological and ontological questions revolving around the primacy of the exponent subject and its prerequisite world. But consideration of the prerequisite structures which define the ontological context of the experient subject again led Nishida into the area of religious philosophy as well.

David Dilworfh is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Manhattan-vine College, Purchase, New York.

[1] This paper runs in sequence to the writer's “The Range of Nishida's Early Religious Thought: Zen no kenkyū,” Philosophy East and West XIX, no. 4 (Oct. 1969), 409-421; the reader is referred to a larger bibliography there.

[2] For an account of Nishida's place as Japan's foremost modern philosopher, see especially Takeuchi Yoshinori, "Nishida's Philosophy as Representative of Japanese Philosophy," under "Japanese Philosophy," Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1966 ed.

[3] All references to Nishida's works in -this paper will be to the Nishida Kitarō Zenshū [Collected Works of Nishida Kitarō], 19 vols. (2d ed.; Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 196S). Parenthetical references in the text are to volume and page numbers in this edition of the Collected Works.

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In A Study of Good Nishida showed clear affinities with idealistic and pantheistic thought structures to be found among Western philosophers. These affinities were grounded in his phenomenology of "pure experience," a notion he partly derived from William James's "radical empiricism" but which he ontologtzed in a way somewhat foreign to James. [4] In his next major work, Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness, Nishida returned to the funda­mental question of a "pure experience." He developed this initial insight via a phenomenology of "self-consciousness" (jikaku) [a] which reaffirmed the onto-logical priority of subjectivity beyond subject-object distinctions, but stressed especially the fusion of being and value, and the primacy of the will over thought. This transition already illustrates the point of consummation and breakthrough within the articulation of Nishida's early thought. His shift from "pure experience" in a somewhat psychologized sense to a fairly emphatic "idealistic voluntarism" indebted to Fichte, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Berg-son, and others, characterized this first recasting of the original ideas of A Study of Good. We shall now see that a similar trend toward a religious voluntarism paralleled this development.

Indeed, this latter orientation carried forward the idealistic aspects of his previous "pantheism" into what may be called a pantheistic voluntarism. This unexpected development within the thought of a supposedly Buddhist philos­opher will require some explanation. But it can be pointed out here that the "voluntaristic" and "pantheistic" tendencies which Nishida exhibited at this stage of his career were not necessarily inconsistent. On the contrary, a careful reading of the Western thinkers to whom Nishida was drawn—Plotinus, Au­gustine, Erigena, the Renaissance mystics, Leibniz, Goethe, Fichte, Hegel—will support the conclusion that, historically considered, "voluntaristic" and "pan­theistic" perspectives have tended to fuse in the Western philosophical tradi­tion. The Western "intellectualistic" tradition, represented by the orthodox Scholastic philosophers, has usually been closer to Aristotle than to Erigena, and has simultaneously tended to reject theological "pantheism." Conversely, the "voluntaristic" tradition has been committed to a notion of the free calculus of the Divine will, usually set within a theologized version of Plotinian meta­physics, in which "creation" itself has been taken as the "manifestation," "ex­pression," "embodiment," and, culminating in Hegel, "self-development" of the Divine. [5] Christian voluntaristic and mystical traditions have generally

[4] See also the writer's "The Initial Formulations of Pure Experience in Kitarō Nishida and William James," Monumenta Nipponica 24, no. 1-2 (spring 1969), 93-111.

[5] We should recall that John Scotus Erigena (ninth century) even rejected St. Augus­tine's version of Christian Neo-Platonism in favor of the more emanatiomstic thought of Dionysius the Areopagite and the Greek Fathers, thus creating a "radical" mystical and voluntaristic strain in the medieval West. Erigena's direct influence on Nicolas of Cusa and other Renaissance mystics is well known. These latter thinkers, in turn, influ­enced the German Idealists, culminating in Hegel.

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expressed a more dynamic notion of Divine creation than the intellectualist (i.e., scholastic) tradition. At least Nishida seems to have read the issue m these terms, as we shall presently see. But even his early affinity for James and Bergson, and his recasting of Leibniz's Monadology via Fichtean insights after A Study of Good, clearly illustrates the conjunction in his mind, and therefore the compatibility, of voluntaristic and pantheistic thought structures.

NISHIDA’S TURN TOWARD RELIGIOUS VOLUNTARISM

In the preface to Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness, which actually is its summary as well, Nishida relates that his thought is turning in the direction of going beyond a psychologism of self-consciousness to the "self-consciousness of the transcendental ego." Taking a hint from Royce, he intends to "give new meaning to Fichte," and thereby "unite on a deep level the present-day Kantian school and Bergson" (Jikaku, II, 3). Through Fichte’s • concept of the self as creative act (Tathandlung) and Bergson's idea of the internal flow of experience (ėlan -vital), Nishida sought to reduce the irra­tionality and objectivity of experience to the fact of experience itself, which is "an independent system of self-consciousness" (II, 4). All systems of experi­ence are said to be reducible to self-conscious systems. As such, they are "internal unions of meaning and reality" grounded in the activity of conscious­ness itself. Thus Nishida stated that "I cannot stop with epistemology; I demand metaphysics" (II, 5). A rather involved journey through Neo-Kantian and mathematical vocabulary, which Nishida himself described as "many twists and turns," moved him to a metaphysics of the self-development of the will (sections 38 and 39 of the work). For the active will is the prime illustration of concrete reality, as the "fusion point of the ideal and actual." The whole work then made this turn toward a consideration of "absolute free will," which formed the final position to which Nishida attained (sections 40 through 44) in 1917.

Nishida's metaphysical demand, then, was for a deepening along voluntaristic lines of his notion of subjectivity previously articulated in A Study of Good. Fichte's absolute ego is "absolute will," the union point of ởv (being) and μηởv (nonbeing), for the a priori of the will includes and unites all other a prioris, including those of knowledge (II, 283). The will is described as the foundation of seeing, hearing, thinking, acting. It is the "foundation of personality" since through its ultimate unifying activity "there is personal unity at the founda­tion of reality. [6] Because of this primacy of volitional life in the self "we are created in the image of God" (II, 291).

[6] For example, "the whole artist or sculptor is behind every stroke of brush or chisel," in the sense that "the self freely unites all activities through the activity of the will" (II,

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In this context Nishida attempted to formulate a concept of Divine creation as the prime illustration of his notion of creative will. Thus his theistic cate­gories, in one sense, were a function of his ontology of the will, whose "intensive quantity" is equated with "pure experience" (II, 314). In another sense, the concept of the experient will may be said to be a function of his ontology of-the Divine creative will. To some extent we have been prepared for this idea by the "expression" language of Nishida's more pantheistic-sounding no­tion of the "relation between God and the universe" at the end of A Study of Good. But his position has moved from the somewhat unoriginal formulation of A Study of Good to a more distinct and personal position.

There is, therefore, a polarity in Nishida's thought at the end of Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness. Both volitional self and the creative Self of God are logically functions within the concept of the immediate issue of pure experience. He articulates his insight in Intuition and Reflection in Self-Con­sciousness in the following way. There is said to be a "higher causality" than the "natural causality" in which one "being" and another "being" are related in a causal sequence. This higher causality is one in which "being is born from non-being." For "the will comes from creative nothingness and returns to creative nothingness, or the world emerges by the will of God" (II, 281). We can note the logically rather loose "or" in the previous sentence. The point seems to be that, after the analogy of the will of God, the a priori "causality" of the will precedes the a priori causality of knowledge (which, in Kant’s scheme, constructs the world of natural causality). The will, as immediate concrete activity, is therefore absolute reality, that is, it transcends the relativity of the empirical world since it is the self-determining source of its own immedi­acy of becoming. As such it is the "creative nothingness" from which being emerges. [7]

In this light, Nishida's concept of the will as the "truly creative absolute reality" is structured in terms of Kant's doctrine of the primacy of practical reason over the cognitive ego, with the implied Kantian ontology of the primacy of the a prioris of the ethical Sollen in the Critique of Practical Reason. This debt to Kantian language is clear enough from his next two works, Problems of Consciousness (1920) and Art and Morality (1923), which followed the framework of Kant's two Critiques at almost every turn. But as Nishida

290). Therefore, absolute free will is the "most immediate, concrete experience," the "personal unity of various faculties," and the "internal unity of various experiential systems" (II, 312). It is the "a priori whereby spiritual phenomena are established" (II, 318).

[7] We may note here that Nishida has thus already adumbrated his doctrine of the cre­ative "Nothingness" (mu) [e] of From the Acting to the Seeing (1927) and beyond. However, he fully developed his idea of the "self-determining world" and "self-creative topos of Nothingness" only in Fundamental Problems of Philosophy (1933-34), in which his consideration of "the world of action" led him to construct a logic of dependent causation, or of "dependent origination" (engi), [f] which is a central concept of Buddhist tradition.

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pursued this idea in Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness, he tended to go beyond Kantian language to the thought structures of medieval mysticism. [8]

Nishida writes that "truly creative absolute reality" is that which is (Plotinus's) "all things and yet not a single one of them." Citing both Dionysius and Erigena, he says that it is the "union of motion and rest…Ipse est motus et status, motus stabilis et status mobilis" (II, 278). With the inevitable qualification that all categories fail in this via negative Nishida then says that this is precisely the point of his doctrine of "absolute will." He declares that medieval mysticism is more profound on this point than present-day philos­ophies of precognitive experience, including Bergson's philosophy of pure du­ration. For these latter-day philosophies deal with precognitive (i.e., volitional) experience as still belonging to the objective world, and therefore to the world of relativity.

His interpretation of Bergson aside, the point is that Nishida has linked his conception of the absoluteness of the will with this medieval "pantheistic" vol­untarism. Erigena's God who "creates and is not created" while also being God who "neither creates nor is created" is called a profound idea, similar to the notion of (Fichte's) subject which establishes the foundation of the proposition "A is A" while lying within neither subject nor predicate but not apart from them either. Thus the will is the a priori whereby spiritual phenomena are established. It is both the Plotinian One and the Platonic Eros: "the creative activity of the universe is absolute free will in this sense" (II, 295). Like the God of Plotinus, Dionysius, and Erigena, it ."transcends all categories" and yet is immanent in the creative process (II, 318).

Nishida uses the term "God" (kami ) [b] to translate Erigena's all inclusive concept of Natura (Natura nee creans nee creata, etc.). But like Erigena his logic is that "true continuity implies a pre-given whole which includes disjunction internally." Therefore he finds "profound meaning in Erigena's statement that in God there is neither necessity nor determinism, and that predestination (prae-destwatio ) is nothing more than the decision of God's will" (II, 281). Here again we see the point of the causality of the will lying at the base of the causality of knowledge. "In absolute free will we touch in­finite reality, i.e. we are linked with the will of God" (II, 282). The present is the contact point of infinite worlds. But the present is precisely the field of the active will; infinite worlds are thus united in the will, and the world is the development of meaning or value. (This latter point is aimed at the Neo-Kan-

[8] This is the reason why he says in the preface to that work that he fears some will think he has "broken my lance, exhausted my quiver, and gone over to the enemy camp of mysticism." For he consciously went beyond the dialogue with Kantian and Neo-Kan-tian philosophy in that work as a result of his "demand for metaphysics." The metaphysics he turned to at this stage of his career was the medieval mysticism of the West.

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tians in the context of the whole of Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness.)

Of course, this theological doctrine is being formulated as a prerequisite ontological condition for Nishida's doctrine of self-consciousness and the will. But at the same time it is a kind of theistic (or "pantheistic") position. Again, it is a "creationism." He writes:

The Bible states "God said: Let there be light, and there was light." The world begins with the will of God. Origen, in opposition to the Neo-Platonists, recognized moral freedom at the foundation of the creation of the world. His consideration of the material world as a world of punishment rather than that of the last emanation of God is a profounder position than that of the merely in­tellectual Neo-Platonic school. To say that God created the world from nothing may seem irrational, but God, transcending causation, is intellectually neither being nor non-being. If we can recognize some causation before knowledge, it must be a moral causation. As in Augustine's statement that God created the world out of love, moral causation is more fundamental than natural causation. (II, 285)

In a subsequent passage, he states that Plotinus's One is prior to Plato’s Ideas, but the Plotinian One is still not the true source of creative emanation. It is found in Origen's doctrine of the creative Divine Will (II, 288; cf. 297-298, 342). Absolute Divine Will "reflects" upon Itself, and thus "creates" world history (citing Jacob Boehme). World history is "the personal content of God." As Augustine teaches, there is no "time" prior to God's creation. since "time" is also created by God. [9]

Summarizing up to this point: the position Nishida developed in Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness (1917) reflected an even closer affinity than before with the Western mystical tradition, and, as in A Study of Good (1911), substantial references to Buddhist ontology are not to be found. At this stage Nishida is interested in formulating an ontology of absolute will, as the prime illustration of his doctrine of self-consciousness. The absoluteness of the will to which he alludes is only derivatively the human will. In the active will "we touch the will of God," who is the primary exemplification of his voluntaristic categories. Thus Nishida turned to the emanationism, or more precisely, the "creationism" of the medieval tradition of Christian Neo-Platonism. That he did so via the "subjectivity" categories of such authors as Kant, Fichte, and Bergson, is one mark of Nishida's originality. In the last analysis, there may be a more convincing philosophical anthropology here than a theology,

[9] In Problems of Consciousness (1920), he pursued this same creationism in terms of the God of Leibniz. Continuing- to deal with the idea of the will at the basis of creation, he focused upon Leibniz's doctrine that God, conceiving of infinite possible worlds, creates one of them as the result of His volitional decision. Thus "contingent truths" are estab­lished by the will of God, which also unites the a prioris of the "ratio generalitatis." Even Leibniz's doctrine of pre-established harmony is said to stand "on the basis of the absolute love of God" (III, 89-90, 94, 132).

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and the lines between the two are somewhat indistinct in the texts that have been cited. Nishida has, however, deepened his earlier religious categories to a significant extent. Moreover, his work represents a remarkable assimilation of Western categories into his own perspective which, though still somewhat groping, has taken a step forward to a more original position.

THE LOGIC OF NISHIDA'S ‘NEC CREANS NEC CREATA’

The phase of religious voluntarism between A Study of Good (1911) and From the Acting to the Seeing (1927) was such an important stage in Nishida's intellectual journey that a closer analysis of its fundamental logical structure seems called for. 'For the above-cited "creative nothingness" of absolute will already suggests his key notion of the "topos of nothingness" and its implied Buddhistic ontology which he began to articulate in that latter work. The "creationism" of Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness was not, in the last analysis, a cosmological doctrine. Indeed, his doctrine of the creativity of absolute will had neither a prime cosmological nor prime sociological coloration in these texts. Its function was to deepen Nishida's central notion of the "absolute" subjectivity which lies behind the world of relativity and objectivity. Thus it can be read as a suggestion of the notion of the self-realization of "self-mind" (jishin ) [c] in Zen Buddhist literature. [10] The analogy with Christian Neo-Platonic thought structures seems to have been consistently, if confusedly, employed to suggest this absoluteness of the "self" itself. Therefore, it would not be incorrect to find here a strong suggestion of Nishida's fundamental Zen experiences. His theology of absolute will suggests a theology of the self in such a Buddhistic sense.

At each stage of his career, Nishida employed the categories of a changing cast of Western philosophers to reformulate, and thereby deepen, his funda­mental Zen orientation. Thus his philosophical career was a systematically unfolding Buddhist dialogue with Western thought, which, because of its con­sistently high level of discourse, laid the foundation for the "philosophy of re­ligion" in the Kyoto school. [11] His analyses of Western authors are meaningless

[10] For a discussion of self-realization and "self-mind" see Masao Abe, Zen to seiyō shisō [Zen and Western Thought], in Zen, ed. D. T. Suzuki and Keiji Nishitani, 8 vols. (Tokyo: Chikoma Shobo, 1967), I, 113-134, especially 133-136. A longer discussion of these ideas in the wake of Nishida's philosophy may be found in Keiji Nishitani, Shūkyo to wa nanika [What Is Religion?] (Tokyo: Sōbunsha, 1961), especially chapter 1, "What Is Religion?," pp. 3-52.

[11] For further information on the "Kyoto school," see the writer's "The Range of Nishida's Early Religious Thought" (vide n. 1) and references, especially to Hans Waldenfels, "Absolute Nothingness: Preliminary Considerations on a Central Notion in the Philos­ophy of Kitarō Nishida and the Kyoto School," Monumenta Nipponica XXI, no. 3-4 (1966), 354-391, Of interest also is Jan Van Bragt, "Notulae on Emptiness and Dialogue

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apart from this fundamental Buddhist concern. However, in another important sense, his philosophical expression, and therefore his own fundamental insight, was integrally mediated by Western categories. This substantive mediation by Western categories of a basic Zen ontology may well be judged as a kind of unprecedented international philosophical synthesis. In the long run, this perhaps first great synthesis of Eastern and Western metaphysics may be Nishida's true claim to fame.

A closer analysis of the logical structure and philosophical language of this important "transitional" stage in Nishida's deepening dialogue with Western metaphysics will support these observations. In Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness, "truly concrete immediate experience" was described as "absolute free will." Thus "true reality" was said to mean "infinite development (egressus) and infinite return （regressus）," again employing the language of Christian Neo-Platonism. In fact, logical opposites are united in the will, just as Erigena's God is motus stabilis et status mobilis (II, 284). The will comes from creative nothingness and returns to creative nothingness, which is the richness of its own immediacy. It is the absolute which transcends and embraces all contradiction in its own immediate self-identity. Thus what Nishida was suggesting was that the volitional immediacy of the self can be understood in terms of the language and logic of this Neo-Platonic tradition. The Plotinian One (or Nishida's self) is "all things and yet not a single one of them." Seen from another perspective, the One (or self) is the Good, and therefore "ecstatic" in an ontological sense: bonum est diffusivum sui. The self-expressive self-determination of the One is simultaneously a process of self-generation. "Conversion," too, is the self-reflection of the Divine (or the self). In other terms, conversion too is ontological. A dynamic rhythm of infinite egressus and infinite regressus constitutes the nature of immediate, and absolute, Reality, that is, of the absolute free will of the self.

In the medieval Christian tradition, the theological concept of the mediation of Christ was added to this Neo-Platonic metaphysical framework. Even in PIotinus the hierarchies of the Divine emanation were only the objective, "ontological" side of an essentially "subjective" experience of the Divine. The "soul" must "strike forward yet a step," beyond the world of Nous, to union with the One, that is, to the subjective experience of "solus cum solo" of the mystical tradition. The Platonic "soul"—that loose entity in Plato's own Dialogues—is akin to, or exists as an essential relation to the One or Good. The soul's very "being" is constituted by its "becoming," by either its turning away

—Reading Nishitanrs 'What Is Religion?'," Japanese Religions IV, no. 4 (winter 1966), 50-78. On Nishida's dialogue with the West, which has influenced the Kyoto school, see his essay of 1934, "The Forms of Culture of the Classical Periods of East and West Metaphysically Considered," translated by the writer in Japanese Religions V, no. 4 (spring 1969). 26-50.

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from, or returning to, the Good. Thus for the soul, too, conversion is ontological. The medieval Christian tradition capped this doctrine of Itinerarium mentis in Deum with the theology of Incarnation, that is, life in the Word made Flesh who initiates the return of the soul to God through grace. Nishida has taken this Neo-Platonic language and logic and applied it to his doctrine of absolute will. But the ontological nature of grace, Christ's initiating mediation, is not included here in Nishida's theology of the self. Here we may be able to see signs of the crucial point of difference between Nishida's Zen orientation, on the one hand, and not only Christian thought but also Tanabe's radical Pure Land doctrine of "conversion" through the "mediation" of Other-power, on the other. [12]

At any rate, the "profound suggestion," in Nishida's phrase, of the Western mystical tradition has been taken as paradigm of the self as absolute will. Nishida has assimilated aspects of that tradition into his own thought struc­ture, but with significant differences as well. Thus a "dialogue" with Western religious ideas has already begun.

RELIGIOUS INTUITION

I shall conclude this study of the range of Nishida's early religious categories by returning to the notion of religion itself which he developed after A Study • of Good. Here we will find another instance of the transition from the kind of intuitive religiosity which Nishida first articulated in A Study of Good (1911) in a nondualistic ontological framework, especially in the chapters entitled "Intellectual Intuition" and "The Religious Demand," to the Zen position of From the Acting to the Seeing (1927). But Nishida was able to add consid­erably to his initial formulations precisely because of the exigencies of the vol­untarism of the ensuing works. His doctrine of the primacy of "religious in­tuition" thus underlay the whole of his subsequent writings, as well as being another step toward From the Acting to the Seeing.

In Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness, creative absolute will was described as "not the negation, but the synthesis of affirmation and negation." It is the unity of form and content, that is, the personalizing unity of the self. Therefore absolute will has both a "universalizing direction" in the sense of

[12] Tanabe Hajime was Japan's leading philosopher after Nishida Kitarō, whose disciple he was before developing his own thought through a critique of Nishida. Tanabe's thought was a modern articulation of the metaphysical premises of Pure Land Buddhism, and also attempted to synthesize Buddhist and Christian values, as can be seen from his Logic of the Dialectic of the Species (1946), Dialectic in Christianity (1947), Existence, Love, and Action (1948), etc. But Nishida's last essay, "The Logic of Place and a Religious World-View" (1945), clearly was a synthesis of the religious variables in Christian, Pure Land, and Zen traditions, as well as of existentialist thought, to the extent that some of Tanabe's criticism seems overdrawn.

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the unity of various a prioris, and a "particularizing direction" in the sense of the development of a prioris themselves. But, in this frame of reference, "the absolute affirmation of a certain content is the standpoint of art, its negation is the standpoint of thought, and the negation of the negation, i.e. the absolute affirmation of the whole, is the standpoint of religion" (II, 307, emphasis added). This relationship between art, thought, and religion was not consis­tently maintained. In other passages the moral will is considered the affirma­tion, and pure thought the negation, of absolute will. But religion again com­pletes the synthesis of the triad: "It is, so to speak, the artistic standpoint of transcendental consciousness" (II, 311). As we have previously seen, religious intuition refers to the felt totality of the immediacy of concrete experience in a nondualistic sense, that is, as "negation of the negation."

In this latter formulation, Nishida's tendency to fuse art and religion into a general aesthetic religiosity is again apparent. He writes that the direct ob­ject of absolute will "upon which we can in no way reflect or objectify, i.e. the primary world" is the world of art and religion. Each phenomenon of con­sciousness in this world is a symbol of the concrete unity of the whole. Thus, in the hierarchy of concrete systems of experience to which Nishida often al­ludes, the "historical world" is more immediate and concrete than the "phys­ical world of natural science," as previously seen in A Study of Good. But the worlds of art and religion are "even more profound direct realities than both of these" (Jikaku, II, 364-365). [13]

As we have seen above, aesthetic and religious contents are symbols of the concrete unity of the whole. Nishida declares: "the'true self lives in a world of mystery which the Symbolist poets see at the foundation of reality" (II, 319). In Art and Morality he begins chapter 5, "The Union Point of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty," with St. Francis's Hymn to the Sun, which was per­haps a high point of the "theophanic tradition" of Western medieval mysticism. Everything is a "symbol of God" in this perspective of religious intuition. He continues:

If we deepen this viewpoint even further we may say with the priest Keibö that "heaven and earth are of the same root as the self, and the myriad things are of the same substance as the self." We must not seek supreme wisdom

[13] In his next work, Problems of Consciousness, Nishida wrote that, m the concrete standpoint of true reality, "constructive and reflective categories fuse at a deeper level of insight. Universal and particular fuse, all relations become internal, and everything becomes relation, as in art and religion" (III, 209), If there is a hierarchy of experiences culminating in religious feeling, then it is one whose direction lies not in transcending the experiential world, but in discovering the immediacy of the self at its center. For the self is the source and ground of all experiential hierarchies, and, as Zen teaches, of all scrip­tures and religions as well. But the problem is, what is this "immediacy of the self"?

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(Bodhi) above, nor depart from the world of life and death (saṁsāra).... He who enters into the heavenly kingdom must first attain to the depths of the self.

(GeiJutsu, III, 350-351)

But since this "self" is the unity of infinite forces, there is "the rhythm of in­finite personality behind the movement of our very hand"; we are "self-conscious of the infinitely deep flow of life." Deepening this idea as well, "each of our actions is also the dance of God" (Geijutsu, III, 104-105). Thus the Christian theophanic tradition, and allusions to Buddhist and Indian tradition as well, are now employed to support Nishida's sense of the symbolic quality of the content of direct experience. Given the previously discussed ontology of thought as a "reflection," that is, a "negative" moment of absolute will, the symbolic worlds of art and religion are the precise paths of the ontological conversion implied in Nishida's theology of the self. For absolute will tran­scends objective reality in the Kantian sense (the world of space, time, and causality) and "returns to itself" via art and religion (II, 312). In Hegel's terms, it is to return to absolute affirmation (synthesis), which is the true self in its existential condition of self-determining immediacy. Precisely in such an experience of immanence the self discovers true transcendence. In this existential synthesis which cuts across the traditional dualism of immanence and transcendence, the moral will is said to be the "turning point from knowledge to absolute affirmation." In moral action we "come into contact with God who is absolute infinity." But religion is more than this: it is the fusion of, moral imperative and existence; it is the "artistic standpoint in the core of the personality," that is, in absolute will. Both philosophical thought and moral action thus acquire internal unity in religion (III, 136).

Once again we seem to have come full circle. The point we have now attained is identical with the doctrine of religious intuition in A Study of Good. However, the concept of the primacy of religious feeling over intellectual and moral functions of the self has been deepened by the voluntaristic idealism of the self developed through Nishida's ensuing works. In Art and Morality (1923), Nishida could write that the distinction between religious and aesthetic feeling is that the former aims at reality, not merely appreciation and pleasure. Religion is "profound adoration of truth and sincere practice." Therefore it is not correct to depreciate the search for truth, as often found in men of religion. For religion encompasses knowledge by transcending it. while transcending and encompassing morality as well. Thus religion resembles art in respect to being the form of concrete intuitive subjectivity; but, like morality, it is thoroughly rigorous and practical (III, 391). In chapter 11, entitled "Truth and Beauty," Nishida's doctrine was that both directions of individualization of feeling (beauty) and its universalization (truth) fuse in the reli-

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gious attitude (III, 517). In chapter 12, "Truth and Goodness," we are told that the good is attained in action, in passionate feeling. This is also achieved in moral action, but it is religious experience which goes to the heart of Nishida's position. At this point, "there is nothing which is not an expression of the self" (III, 545). Therefore, he wrote in the concluding paragraph of the work which immediately preceded From the Acting to the Seeing that

Our losing the self objectively does not mean losing the individuality of the self. The self does not cease to exist. It discovers infinite good and sadness beyond Spinoza's 'intellectual love.' To enter into the worlds of Beauty and Goodness we must pass through the gateway of truth. Within the gate lies eternal and imperishable true reality. On this side of the gate, the self which we see within consciousness in general is nothing more than the shadow of a darker Instinct.

(Ill, 545)

Nishida's text thus symbolically ends his "early period" on a profound Zen note.

A FINAL COMMENT ON NISHIDA'S EARLY RELIGIOUS VOLUNTARISM

The theological voluntarism found in three of the major works written during Nishida's academic years was the fruit of his primary concentration on epistemological and phenomenological questions. In every case his thought also pursued the metaphysical presuppositions of his insights, and therefore was interwoven with ontology. Consistent threads of a coherent ontological position emerged particularly in reference to his phenomenology of the absolute volitional self which, appearing first at the end of Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness, became the overwhelming focus of attention in Art and Morality. Parallel to this trend, Nishida's early theological voluntarism evolved into the position which we have studied in these pages. But with the exception of the somewhat incoherent system at the end of Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness, Nishida's theistic position after A Study of Good never received a structured formulation as such. I have therefore made this study of his ensuing and transitional religious ideas from a large selection of scattered passages. It would be inappropriate to demand of them the inherent structure of a well-articulated system of ideas.

Because of this limitation, it would also be inappropriate to subject Nishida's transitional pantheistic voluntarism to a systematic critique. Nishida himself wrote in the preface to the revised edition of Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness in 1941 that "though I reread this work in preparation for the revised edition, it is so distant from my present philosophical position that I cannot add anything further" (II, 13). Even in the foreword to Prom the Acting to the Seeing, written in 1927, he had stated that "when I finished writing Art and Morality I conceived a desire to consider the question of religion, and

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increasingly turned my speculation towards that question." Evidently, then, he did not consider the religious ideas formulated after A Study of Good to constitute a formal or final position. In that same foreword he declared that "when I pondered how I could grasp the insight which lay at the root of my ideas for a long time, I turned away from voluntarism, such as in Fichte's thought, to a kind of intuitionism." Therefore, by the end of this transitional period Nishida was himself beginning a criticism of his own religious ideas. From the Acting to the Seeing was the first fruit of this process of self-criticism.

Cautioned by these considerations, I will add here only a few comments on the religious voluntarism studied in this present survey. I would first draw attention to the fact that Nishida's transitional theistic position showed some signs of breaking with the "substantive God" language of A Study of Good. While this break was not thoroughgoing, it was the beginning of a transition toward a philosophical anthropology in which the "absolute will/absolute God" polarity came to the fore. This philosophical anthropology was also not con­sistently or explicitly expressed as such. But the very freedom with which Nishida interchanged the logical variables in this new crystallization of ideas bore witness to the polarity itself. The result of this phase of speculation on the self as if it were the Plotinian One or Erigena's Natura was to move Nishida to a more final position centering upon the absolute will, that is, the "self which is neither side of the polarity. Thus what Nishida himself called -in the preface to the revised edition of Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness "my hard-fought battle over several years" was a gradual clarifica­tion of a "middle path" theology of the immediacy of the self, rather than of an absolute God which he seems to have expressed at the end of A Study of Good.

The real fruit of this theological voluntarism, I would suggest, was Nishida's new concern for the notion of a priori causality itself. His thought was here mediated by Kantian philosophy, and by his dialogue with Neo-Kantian philosophers and Husserl. Pursuing that search back into the a priori of moral cau­sality in Origen's and Augustine's doctrines of the Divine creation, Nishida came to clarify the idea of apriority itself. His reading of Christian Neo-Platonism (Augustine, Erigena, etc., but not, of course, the second century phi­losopher Origen) in terms of the results of Kant's Critique of Practical Reason may have contributed to our understanding of some components of the theological voluntaristic tradition of the West. At the same time it helped forge his own central idea of the will as the "a, priori of a prioris" a phrase which is repeated over a hundred times in Problems of Consciousness and Art and Morality. It was a short step from this concern for the apriority of experience itself to the doctrine of the "field" or "place" (basho) [d] of "creative nothingness" in From the Acting to the Seeing.

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In this manner, the subjectivity of post-Kantian thought was the path along which Nishida returned to medieval creationism. Christian Neo-Platonism, in turn, was the medium through which Nishida returned to the apriority of the "self" itself. His creationism of the absolute will was still somewhat confused with the "substantive God" language of theophanic expressionism, owing to his continued use of Fichtean and Hegelian language. Hence, while he could write of a creative or "expressive" God or absolute self, Nishida's thought still lacked a genuine pluralism needed to formulate a concept of a creative "universe." In fact, given his pantheistic (i.e., "substantive") identification of God and self, "creation" inevitably remained a unilateral activity. In such a framework, the "universe" still does not go beyond having the somewhat "phenomenal" character of being the "return," or the "self-reflection," of the Divine (or of the absolute volitional self). Therefore Nishida's own thought seems to be open to the charge of an implied dualism between the Divine (or the absolute volitional self) and the merely phenomenal universe. The error of this kind of traditional dualism is that it absolutizes the subjectivity of God or self at the cost of derealizing the "universe."

Nishida's greatness may be seen in the fact that after coming this far in four major works written between 1911 and 1927, he was able to begin a critique of his own position, and, thereby, to formulate a distinctly personal system which came to be known as Nishida tetsugaku. He thus went on to develop a new basis for a genuine pluralism and a religiously centered philosophy that was deeply Buddhistic, but with increasing attention to the area of "social-historical reality." We have reviewed to this point only the range of Nishida's early religious vocabulary, which laid the basis for the leap forward into his mature Nishida tetsugaku, developed between 1927 and 1945.

Nishida's articulation of the concept of the "social-historical world" and a "creative universe," to use his own phrases, can be found especially in his later synthesis of ideas entitled Fundamental Problems of Philosophy (in two volumes, 1933-34). His rejection of Fichtean voluntarism and Hegelian absolutism in favor of a Zen metaphysics was there emphatic. By that work, and continuing throughout his later years until his last and most Important religious essay, "The Logic of Place and a Religious World-View" (1945), he had be­gun explicitly to reject "pantheism" from his own position. Thus it must be stressed that Nishida's later critique of and dialogue with certain Western thought structures was the fruit of his own spiritual odyssey, which took him through those Western categories to a more Eastern position. In Nishida's case, this later process of philosophizing was a self-criticism as well. It may be said that this experience of Nishida represented in microcosm much of the pattern of assimilation of Western philosophical ideas in Japan's modern period.

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