Introduction.

This paper represents what is very much a work in progress, so I request your forgiveness in advance for the rather sketchy nature of its propositions. Ironically though, the spectre of incompleteness is already present, and a resolution to the prickly embrace of Nishida and Tanabe will, perhaps, forever rest on a far horizon. Contrary to this desperate vision, I argue that this impossible embrace, even the praxis of its attempt, can condition the mind towards a kind of Erschlossenheit or diss-closure, that may promise an enactive response to our ecological crisis.

After an all too brief resume of the standpoints of Nishida and Tanabe, I will attempt to articulate the conflicting nature of their respective notions of the role of Absolute Nothingness within the dynamic structure of experience qua reality. Finally, I offer a syncretic appraisal as a proposition, not of a resolution as such, but more of a re-configuration and reconsideration of the role of the Ego and the wider Self for experience. If my argument is cogent, I hope the ethical implications, and the relevance for a response to our growing ecological and social crisis, will appear evident.

1. Nishida

As James Heisig notes, Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945) was “the wellspring” of what became known as the Kyoto School.¹ Nishida develops his unique standpoint, inspired by the perspectives of Japanese Buddhism, yet resolutely frames his standpoint within the Western philosophical discourse.

Nishida’s principle insight, the logic of basho, translated as place or locus, is an idea that Nishida lifts from Plato’s notion of khôra in the Timaeus. The basho is kind of place or container, wherein arises all the determinable entities for that basho. Indeed, it is because of the enfolding nature of basho that, what is enfolded within, can be determined. Later Nishida develops his lexicon, in adopting the Hegelian notion of the Concrete Universal, basho then being reserved for describing the general ontological structure of his system, and Universal referring to the ontic-ontological modes. Nishida’s system of Universals operates in a wholly opposite sense to that of the traditional Aristotelian categories; there is no primary substance which consequently possesses secondary characteristics; rather it is the characteristics which determine the individual. Nishida had already arrived at this insight in his first work.

“It is not that there is experience because there is an individual, but that there is an individual because there is experience.²“

The basho insight is key for the establishment of what becomes The Self-aware System of Universals. The system attempts to be a coherent and complete account of the structure of experience qua reality, and later iterations did not radically change this basic structure, although later; Nishida did attempt to articulate more clearly, the relational and dynamic aspects. Nishida’s style is notoriously convoluted, cyclical and difficult to penetrate, partly due to his attempt to describe a complete system, defining the undefinable, Absolute Nothingness, as a principle of its operation. As third generation member of the Kyoto school, Ueda Shizuteu, puts it:

“Thus, the principle itself must be seen as self contradictory. For this reason, Nishida again and again returns for “ressourcement” to the field lying between reflection and what is prior to reflection (a field which should really be called a wasteland) and thereby is driven to revise his thought in accordance with the principle itself. The reason for the tormented quality of Nishida’s texts is to be found in this special character of his thinking.”³

The wasteland is the basho of Absolute Nothingness, an ultimate abgrund which is to be fleetingly experienced, perhaps at the depths of Zen, in a moment of Satori.

We can represent this here as a circumference without a centre.

Contained within is the concrete activity of the material world, which determines the Universal of Self Awareness—broadly corresponding to the noetic-noematic planes of the eidetic realm of Husserlian phenomenology. The difference here is that this eidetic space is grounded by the movement of volition at the deepest point within the universal. In this form of mapping, Nishida gives status to the body in ways similar to that of Merleau-Ponty.

Ordinary consciousness is then circumscribed as a determination from and within this Universal of Self-Awareness, as a shallower region that is situated above the intermediate region of affect or emotion. This Basho of Being corresponds to the Universal of Judgement, where rational thought and subject-object consciousness is determined. This is the locus of Western philosophy and the logos.

With Nishida his analysis often follows a descending trajectory, starting from the place of subject-object consciousness in judgement, then transcending to the place Self-Awareness, affect and the will, in an approach to the all enveloping Intelligible Universal. These three are seen as inter-related dialectically, each enveloping level sublating the contradictory relations pertaining to the enfolded Universal. The system terminates however with the Basho of Absolute Nothingness, representing what he later calls absolute contradictory self identity. As dialectic it is a sublation of a sublation. And of course words fail here.

This structure enables Nishida to develop a theory of intuition, and to designate three related worlds or domains of knowledge.

In brief, a kind of noumenal world called the intelligible world is associated with the ultimate basho,

the world of self-awareness, being the eidetic realm in a general sense, is associated with the Universal of the same name,

and the Natural world is associated with the Universal of Judgement. It is Self-Awareness then that plays a pivotal role in articulating the intuition between judgement in subject-object cognition and its grounding in the Intelligible Universal.

The judgement of truth, the Artistic sensibility of beauty and the morality of good and bad, are all seen as intuitive reflections from the Intelligible World at the level of judgement, emotion, and volition respectively.

2. Tanabe

Turning now to what Heisig characterises as the “counterfoil” to Nishida: the standpoint of Tanabe Hajime (1885-1962). Fifteen years the junior, Tanabe came to Kyoto in 1919, at the invitation of the professor Nishida, harbouring a project to make first hand contact with the Western tradition in Europe. With the support of both Nishida and a government bursary, between 1922 to 1924, Tanabe studied in Germany, most notably with Husserl in Frieburg, where he was also befriended by Heidegger. On Nishida’s retirement from teaching in 1927, Tanabe replaced his senior college as professor at Kyoto.

The post retirement period for Nishida represents the most productive phase of his mature philosophy, being the period where, what is now known as Nishida philosophy, developed. Tanabe’s philosophical intuition seems however have lead him in an opposing direction, and its hard to resist drawing some parallels with the intellectual conflict between Husserl and Heidegger. In the case of Tanabe vs Nishida, the conflict however is more explicit.

In 1930 in an essay entitled “Requesting the Guidance of Professor Nishida”, Tanabe publicly voiced his critical appraisal of Nishida’s mature thinking as expressed in TheSelf-aware system of Universals, published the same year. For the Japanese philosophical sensibility, Tanabe’s critic was taken as brutal, entrenching a developing animosity between the two men that was never to diminish. Notwithstanding this, both of their respective standpoints did continue to evolve, and in part from the mutual influence of each other. Perhaps the mediating efforts of the students of both philosophers was a factor here. And one such instance of mediation is the 1936 article by former student, and then lecturer at Kyoto, Nishitani Keiji, that reflects on three separate critical views of Nishida’s philosophy, Tanabe’s being one just of them. Tanabe’s 1930 critic is structured around three critical bites into the Nishidian system. And some twenty years later, in 1951, Nishitani again returns to consider as a whole, Tanabe’s critical stance towards Nishida, with the essay, “The Philosophies of Nishida and Tanabe”. Here, Nishitani also details three critical questions, that Tanabe’s standpoint poses; the fact that Nishitani reiterates several of the critical appraisals which had featured in Tanabe’s 1930 essay, reveals the deep seated nature of these problems, ones that Nishida was never fully able to address.

Before making a brief summary of these critical questions, I will summarise Tanabe’s own system, as established before the radical metanoetic about face of 1945. This later rupture, being a response to the shame he felt towards his involvement with the Japanese nationalist project of the war years, is significant but, I believe, not essential for my purposes here. Indeed, metanoetics represents a step beyond philosophy for Tanabe; as a philosophy that is not a philosophy it seems open to the same kind of critic he levelled at Nishida.

Tanabe names this system The Logic of the Specific, the standard translation here is Species, but I am going to follow James Heisig’s hermeneutical gesture in his adoption of specific—for one thing this helps mark the shift of meaning implied with Tanabe’s adoption of the Aristotelian sub-genus of species. The specific is understood as being the locus of mediation between the individual and universal, where the dialectic, individual-sive-universal, finds its concrete and relative expression in the form of the social and political organisation of the state. I’ve adopted the use of (sive) following Urai Satoshi and Sova Cerda’s translation of Tanabe’s 1935 essay: The Third Stage of Ontology. This is an application of the Japanese charactersoku 即, which as James Fredericks notes,

“While the influence of German Idealism on the thought of the Kyoto School is not to be denied, the real source of the School’s dialectical thinking is that of Mahāyāna Buddhism. In this regard, attention must be given to the conjunctive soku (which might be rendered with the Latin conjunction sive).”⁴

I take this as a marker for a dialectical mutual interdependence of the two bounding terms.

The Third Stage of Ontology essay gives a relatively clear layout of the fundamental elements to Tanabe’s dialectic logic of the specific. Tanabe argues here for a Neo-Hegelian social ontology, which takes up a dialectic mediation of the two earlier modes of ontology: namely the Greek natural ontology of Plato and Aristotle, and the later personal ontology which arose with Descartes. Nishida’s thought is situated amongst the personal ontologies, alongside Heidegger, who, Tanabe argues, did not fully appreciate the power of society; Heidegger’s conception of the They, (Das Man) is seen as too weak.

“Completely neglected is the substratum as species [specific] society, which, through the traditional customs that serve as the origin of law, enfolds the subject from without; neglected, that is, with the exception of his teaching of the impersonal public that, as its fallen mode, dissolves self-aware being into convention.”⁵

The specific is the concrete manifestation of a historical dialectical movement between the individual subject and the universal, in relation to which, history is unfolding. In this conception, Tanabe recovers the ethical potential that was lost in the abandonment of the material / ideal substratum of Greek natural ontology in the modern period. The personal ontologies free the subject at the expense an ethical grounding. Thanks to Hegel and Marx, eidetic and material dialectics articulate a,

“substratum-sive-subject, which synthesises the substratum at the centre of ancient ontology and the subject at the centre of modern ontology”.⁶

It is as if Tanabe has mirrored Nishida’s system. The grounding in Absolute Nothingness is cast into an infinite horizon of the historical dialectic where the mediator is no longer the dynamic of Self-Awareness but the Absolute Mediation of the Specific as substratum-sive-subject. Broadly following a Marxist analysis, materiality, as the body and its intimate connection with the reality of the intelligible flow, is transcribed to the material conditions of a society.

My simple diagrams I think put into relief these central distinctions. In Nishida people make society, the formative energy coming up from a sort of abgrund of Absolute Nothingness; whereas with Tanabe it is the historical dialectics of a society that is formative of its people. Tanabe’s ethics argues that the society, or state, must act to emancipate its subjects, thus establishing the conditions for a Bergsonian open society. Sadly however, Tanabe’s logic was far too amenable to the ultra-nationalist discourse, and Tanabe himself fell prey to the social pressure of a state at war, applying his standpoint to argue in favour of Japanese supremacy. But as Heisig argues, Tanabe’s troubling foray into politics is a betrayal of his own system, the specific, so the state, must remain fundamentally relative and non-absolute.

3. Thee Critics

This brings me to the three critics of Nishida that are implied by Tanabe’s logic of the Specific. Firstly, and following Nishitani’s analysis we get several pairs of oppositions:

Tanabe		Nishida
Acting is the basis of his standpoint	ontologic	Seeing is dominant
Absolute Nothingness as a differential within absolute mediation	ontologic	Absolute Nothingness seen within a metaphor of integration.
leads to		leads to
A dialectic with an essentially irrational historical reality.	epistemic	A coherent movement towards a deepening self-awareness and the consequent intuition of an essentially intelligible world.
God then would be always over the horizon of history. Religion and philosophy can never meet.	moral consequence	Religious experience is just this direct union with this intelligible world. ( a seeing by becoming)

Secondly, due to the ‘integral’ and so positive standpoint, Nishida has to resort to a view of anti-value in order to take account of the problem of evil. However, anti-value seems incapable of being incorporated into a system grounded on Absolute Nothingness. Tanabe sums up this critic with a question:

Is it really possible for the principle of anti-value as self-negation to be included in the self-aware system of the universal which takes the self-awareness of absolute nothingness as its final principle?⁷

Thirdly, Nishida’s critic of the Kantian and phenomenological perspectives is put in question. For Tanabe, Kant’s consciousness-in-general must be historically conditioned. Nishida’s integration of the Kantian concept, giving it an epistemological role, where the structure of the Intelligible Universal is reflected within the Universal of Judgement as consciousness-in-general, necessarily results in a trans-historical view of Ideas, and yet Ideas must be conditioned historically. This also leads Nishida to critic Husserl as being unable to offer a similar constitutive role for the Transcendental Pure Ego. For Tanabe, in contrast, this is a strength for phenomenology, since it represents a “valid restriction in reference to Husserl’s position which avoids falling victim to the problem of mystical intuition.”⁸

4. A syncretic enaction.

The syncretic method seeks to honour an essence of justice in the standpoints of my interlocutors, whilst allowing for a free hermeneutic. I take my inspiration from the 12^th Century Korean Buddhist monk Chinul, who successfully brought together the conflictual positions of the subitist and gradualist traditions, helping to establish Korean Son. Indeed the conflict between Tanabe and Nishida seems not so far removed from this ancient division, leading me to question: are we not consistently faced with an essential dichotomy that reiterates itself in many faces? Is not the conflict between Husserl and Heidegger and the mutual critic between Derrida and Levinas just further facets of this? However the conflict, or should I say complementarity, between Nishida and Tanabe, takes on a new depth. Perhaps this is a function of their embrace of Absolute Nothingness as structuring principle. So is it possible to offer some justice to both parties?

Going back to the simple schematics of these two philosophical systems, I have given myself the problem of finding a syncretic mediation.

I take both Tanabe and Nishida as holding onto a rather two dimensional vision in their respective logics, and I think here, we can add another dimension, with the addition of a new locus of Absolute Mediation that acts between a modified version of their systems.

I propose that the locus of this mediation is non other than our ordinary egoic self, and by eventual extension of self-awareness, our whole singular individual, and social collective, self. Such an eventual extension would of course rest on a horizon of possibility.

But to propose that the locus of mediation between a concrete, material and immanent locus, represented in broad terms by Nishida’s insight, and an over arching locus of the Specific, represented again in broad terms by Tanabe’s insight, implies a triune mediation which has the benefit of situating every human being in a locus of responsibility and response-ability.

Such a standpoint would necessarily modify Husserl’s Transcendental Ego too, since the transcendental horizon here is not a pure ego, acting as an epistemological foundation, but rather the Erschlossenheit or diss-closure of a mediating role implicit with Being.

This three fold model also includes three levels of historicity: social, (bio)physical and egoic, with their respective time frames. Each of these histories are taken as the traces of their respective mediations in time. As form accumulates around these traces, identity coalesces, closing off the unfolding meditation into semi rigid patterns. And this movement could be interpreted as Verfallen in the Heideggerian sense. This suggest then an initial task would be the releasing of the hold of identification with the trace, or rather, with a with a singular interpretation of its identity-sive-meaning. So a role for hermeneutical historiographies, introspective analysis and multi-focal sciences seems to be afforded here. Since the three loci form a relational nexus, or to use Buddhist terminology, are dependently co-original, we need to become sensitive to the whole extent of this nexus.

This is what I term as Relation. I don’t know if this is possible, but I assume here that this three fold structure is by far not the full extent of the reality in which we participate. This assumption, an article of faith perhaps, is the transcendent part to Relation, and it may oblige me to work to see this three way mutual mediation begin to be consciously enacted, rather than, as at present, to be dissonantly unfolded in the ignorance of it. Relation is not an option it is an minimal ontological reality, the current ecological and social crisis is but evidence of the ignorance of this fact.

In the conscious enacting of the three fold mediation, perhaps an apperception of further horizons of deepening relations will arise, the visions of which it may be appropriate to situate as Religious.

1 Heisig, J.W. Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School. Nanzan Library of Asian Religion and Culture. University of Hawaii Press, 2001, 7.

2 Nishida, K. An Inquiry into the Good. Translated by M. Abe and C. Ives. Yale University Press, 1992, 19.

3 Ueda, S. ‘Pure Experience, Self-Awareness, “Basho”’. Études Phénoménologiques 9, no. 18 (1993): 63–86 – https://doi.org/10.5840/etudphen19939183, p70

4 Fredericks, J., ed. ‘Philosophy as Metanoetics, An Analysis’. In The Religious Philosophy of Tanabe Hajime: The Metanoetic Imperative. Studies in Japanese Philosophy. Chisokudō Publications, 2020, 58.

5 Tanabe, H. ‘The Third Stage of Ontology’. Translated by Satoshi Urai and Sova P. K. Cerda. European Journal of Japanese Philosophy 7 (2022): 361–410, 395.

6Ibid., 399.

7Ibid., 298-299.

8Ibid., 301.

Gosh, at the end of the day three years is not much time to write a thesis. Of course, one can take more time, but three years is a good target… after all if I believe that my thesis has the potential to be a valid answer to the ecological crisis, which is becoming more and more urgent, and if I believe that this answer has a political significance, then I have to write it in the shortest possible time!

In fact, I didn’t start the thesis until after Christmas, because I only had the chance to leave England and to come to Provence in October, and the administrative and housing process had also taken quite some time. And with my choice to write the thesis in French my writing has necessarily taken more time at the start – one has to always give space for learning.

Here its “la rentrée” and a gentle autumn wind has begun to blow, even if this glimpse in my mind is purely imaginative – it’s warmer here in Provence even than a midsummer day in Lancaster! And this year seems decisive. I have written the first draft of the introductory chapter, and the aim this year is to complete a first full draft of the thesis. It’s a huge challenge! It’s good then for me to remember the overall challenge of my project.

In that vein my thoughts return to the story of my adventure with a group of activists in Lancaster when we cycled to Paris in 2015 to protest at the COP21 summit.

Here is the the documentary film I made of that trip.

“We are entering an unprecedented multidimensional crisis, it is reef we are begining to founder upon.”

I passed my masters and received a distinction for my dissertation, so the door was then open for me to go deeper into the field I had discovered in my dissertation. This time I can take up the theme of my 2006 text, and I can attempt the crazy adventure of finding a foundation for a new ethics! But who could be open enough to supervise this research?

Always pragmatic, I proposed the project to my dissertation supervisor, and he seemed to be interested. But, after a meeting with him and another professor as co-supervisor, the scope of my project had to be reduced to meet the expectation of the Anglo-Saxon thesis framework. I duly submitted the new version and received an offer to pursue the project in Lancaster.

At the same time, I selected several possible supervisors in French universities, and received one enthusiastic response from Professor Hüsch of Aix-Marseille University. He found the project promising and had suggested some changes of direction, but this time not a narrowing of the field, but a widening!

Now make a difficult choice. Financially, with the possibility of a government loan for a research PhD in the UK, Lancaster would be an obvious choice. But in terms of my attempt to say something that could be a valid and strong response to the climate emergency, the only project was Aix-Marseille. And when I thought about it, the brightest vision was around that of research in France. It is often said that if you have to choose between your heart and your reason you should follow your heart, even if it means taking a leap into the unknown and into a more precarious financial situation.

Below are the abstracts of the three project proposals, the original, the accepted version for Lancaster, the accepted version for Aix-Marseille. It’s up to you to decide if I’ve made the right choice, for me, I need to keep my mind moving towards the completion of the thesis.

The text I had written during my little volunteer pilgrimage in 2007 was a kind of “pre-phenomenological” critical reflection that had addressed both the problematic we face and the inherent contradictions of spiritual liberation, in order to arrive at a reinterpretation of one of the cardinal models of Buddhism: the Four Noble Truths. For my Master’s thesis, I then tried to reformulate these statements in a philosophical framework.

Through this work I discovered that there is already a rich philosophical tradition of phenomenology and many comparative studies that have taken various positions between phenomenology and Buddhist thought. In the dissertation I argued that there is a strong similarity between the process of phenomenological reduction, epoche, with Edumund Husserl and the praxis of Buddhist meditation. Even if phenomenological thinkers do not always see a transcendent horizon, their work can be contextualised within such a framework as the elaboration of the relative aspect experience that, at the same time, can give rise to a spiritual dimension of transcendence. For me it is with Zen Buddhism where this comparative gesture seems most fruitful.

Here is the link to download the dissertation.

Back home in Lancaster, I was fortunate that there was a university where I could undertake an MA in philosophy. However, like most UK philosophy schools, the orientation of my first encounter with philosophy was through the perspective of the so-called ‘analytic’ philosophy.

As I was about to discover, apparently, the other so-called ‘continental’ philosophical approach is quite looked down upon within the echelons of the ‘real’ philosophical world: the heirs of Hume, Russell and Wittgenstein. I remember it was in one of my first seminars when the lecturer referred to this other philosophical tradition which, according to him, was not a real philosophical tradition. Maybe this was a kind of provocation or a joke, but I was quite shocked to receive this attitude. A little later I chose to take a research module and look into this divide between the “analytic (Anglo-Saxon)” and “continental” philosophical worlds, and I was really surprised to discover that my research supervisor was that same professor! Finally, I learnt that he was not so resentful towards the philosophers from the other side of the Channel.

In my opinion, the clear distrust between the two sides of the philosophical world remains a rather curious phenomenon. There is both a historical aspect, rooted in the conflicts of the two world wars, and also perhaps a perennial rivalry between the British Empire and the continental European powers, especially the Germans and the French. But in addition, there is a real conceptual divide, partly due to the ascendancy of science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When the empirical maternalism of modern science had shown, so it seems, that the metaphysical questions were now out of date, philosophy had only two paths open take: either to become the servant of the scientific method, or to try to look beyond science and to attempt a metacritic of the project of modernity. The question of science therefore seems to be a recurring theme, a protagonist that hides in its ubiquity.

If you would like to know more about “the divide” here is the bibliography of my essay on this theme.

It was fourteen years ago and I was in the midst of change. Six months earlier, I had been ejected “karmically” from my life as sound editor in the film industry in London. I had to return to my home town in the north of England to stay with my parents, a difficult task. So in those first months of 2007, I escaped to do some voluntary work with the Iona community in Scotland. It was to be a first step on a longer voyage; that May I took the coach to the south of France to volunteer with the buddhist monks at Nalanda monastery near Lavour, then later that September I started working with the L’Arche community. But nothing turned out as planned.

The karmic kick which pushed me out of London and my old life was caused by a kind of mental breakdown. Writing became the means to go through those turbulent times, and in my return to my parents home I started to write a response to a question that had arisen during the premier acute phase of this mental crisis: what is my responsibility? That itinerant year gave me a voyage of reflection alongside the physical journey. Firstly, the difficult life with my parents was a kind of psychological immersion into my youth and the remembrance of an unloved child. This mirrored my dive into the depths of the question of what I should do.

• 

• 

My voyage on the path of an itinerant volunteer was also a support to this writing project. With my first steps I was lucky to be able to stay several months with a liberal Christian community as it traversed the Easter celebration, and in the following step, stay with the Buddhists. All this gave me fruitful exchanges for my reflection. After six months I had found a position where I thought I might be able to stay for a longer period and perhaps even become fluent in French. In September I arrived at the L’Arche community in Beauvais, north of Paris. L’Arche is a catholic organisation where volunteers live in community with young people with special needs to aide them in their daily life. At the start I felt welcomed, but soon after the presentation of my documents, particularly my birth certificate, this became complicated. That simple act of showing my birth certificate, and so revealing my transgender status, did not go down well with the management. To cut a long story short, there was no question of me being able to stay and fulfil the role in the community; they told me it was too complicated for them to make a decision at that moment, so after a month I would have to go. I still have the bitter taste when I think of it; the most striking example of discrimination that I have suffered to date has been given by the hands of christians — it’s not a paradox, it is simply hypocrisy.

It was then the end of my voyage as I didn’t have enough money to stay in France and so I returned to England. This was the end of a chapter for me, I had finished the first draft of my writing project, and more important, I had found my voice.

On my return to the UK I found a little job in the neighbouring town which gave me the opportunity to exit the closed sphere of my aged parent’s. Its not worth going into more detail here, except to say that in one way it was really helpful to me that I could live nearby to them in what was to be the last ten years of their life. I was healing that, to some extent, I could repair a relationship that had become too damaged.

Ten years later I had worked on the ideas given birth in that initial volume, written by hand in a notebook — it had become in some ways a real text. However I was not at all satisfied with the result, nor with the lack of feedback from the handful of friends I had invited to read it. During that period I had also tried to work the ideas into the artistic domaine. But one of the things that had always concerned me with the text was its naive level of philosophy; either I should attempt real philosophy or I should stay on the artistic path. But even with my attempts to work at the artistic level, a domaine I knew well — having a bachelor degree from Goldsmiths’ — I found that nevertheless I still had need to deepen my philosophical ideas more. If I could be more clear at the level of ideas, the artistic work would perhaps also become more precise and more evocative.