Abstract

Toshihiko Izutzu’s Ishiki to Honshitsu, recently translated into German under the title of Bewusstsein und Wesen, represents a Zen-inspired clarification of a deep underlying tension that characterizes the figure of Socrates: on the one hand a commitment to a fully public form of discourse and on the other hand a recognition of the elusively private dimension of language . Izutzu lets his philosophical encounter between East and West find its focal point in that tradition of Persian Sufism which culminates in the thought of Mulla Sadra. It is here that Wesen takes on flesh. Remarkably enough, Plato too had his Persian encounter, as can be inferred from the “Myth of the True Earth” that comes at the end of the Phaedo and represents the last recorded words of Socrates. The ancient Persian legend of Hūrqalyā, the Celestial Earth of emerald cities that Henri Corbin recounted a generation ago, is almost certainly Plato’s source. The resurrection world it depicts is a world of Wesen that can be cognitively appropriated only through the kind of direct intuition that is the goal of Zen meditation