» m John C. Maraldo: Japanese Philosophy in the Making 1: Crossing Paths with Nishida, ed. Takeshi Morisato, Nagoya: Chisokudo, 2017. Lean Krings (Universitat Hildesheim) Crossing Paths with Nishida is the first of two volumes of collected essays by John C. Maraldo, one of the most prominent figures in Western scholarship on the philosophy of Nishida Kitaro and Japanese philosophy in general. The collection covers essays from three decades, most of which have already been published but are slightly revised for the present volume, with some new additions published for the first time. The prologue as well as new introductory passages provide useful framings, givingbackground information on the contexts in which the texts were first conceived and providing an overall structure to connect the stream of thought between the essays. As the title suggests, Maraldo is not simply aimingat giving an exeg-etic analysis of Japanese philosophy and Nishida's oeuvre, but goes a step further by critically assessingthe theories and notions he finds in these fields, showing their potentials as well as limits and creatively connecting them to a broader context informed by current debates in philosophy. It is a pleasure to follow Maraldo in his engagement with Japanese Philosophy !'as an ongoing, creative endeavor as philosophy in the making" (10) that illuminates how a global mode of philosophy includingnon-Western sources is possible as a creative enterprise and how a pluralistic, decentralized awareness of intercultural, multilingual thought challenges the Western hegemony in philosophy. The consistent quality of Maraldo's essays and the creative potentials of his research make this volume a highly valuable resource for any scholar interested in Japanese thought, Nishida Kitaro, and global, intercultural philosophy in general. The introductory prologue deals with essential questions pertaining to the field of Japanese philosophy in a broad sense, includingpossible definitions of "philosophy", the controversy about the existence (or nonexistence) of (premodern) "Japanese philosophy" and the different uses of the term. Maraldo also argues for the importance of a multiplicity of languages for philosophy in general, and the need for translation between them to draw out the full potential of the philosophies articulated in them. The following essays are divided into two main sections. While the first -153section, "Pathways to Nishida", is concerned with the g-eneral context of Japanese philosophy as a whole, its importance as a non-Western perspective on Greco-European thought and the historical background of Nishida's philosophy, the second section, "Pathways through Nishida", focuses more directly on different aspects of Nishida's writings and their importance for current debates. The first essay, Japanese Philosophy as a Lens on Greco-European Thought , reverses the standard perspective of intercultural and comparative philosophy that evaluates non-Western traditions through the lens of Western philosophy, and instead rethinks Western traditions from the perspective of Japanese philosophy. By taking a stance outside of Western philosophy to get a fresh view on it, Maraldo aims at restoring a definition of philosophy broad enough to describe both Greco-European and Asian philosophical pathways" (22). He first takes a critical look at the commonplace assumption that philosophy is of essentially Greek origin by showing the hermeneutical circle involved in this thought: "To locate the origins of philosophy, one must know what philosophy is; yet only its origins and history can tell us what philosophy is" (23) . The essay proceeds by showing internal differences in the European definition of philosophy, taking the Greek concept of philosophy as a way of life as a possible alternative to modern, purely theoretical philosophy. Additionally, Maraldo refers to Pierre Hadot to show that argumentative discourse is only one theoretical method found in Greek and Latin philosophy besides dialogical, exegetical and systematic approaches. This broader definition of philosophy as a way of life including multiple discursive as well as non-discursive methods provides us with a shared framework for approachingboth Western and East Asian philosophy, but this common background also helps us to understand major differences, as in the way both traditions understand the relation between mind and body. Maraldo analyzes the concepts of a way of life in Buddhist as well as Confucian Japanese thinkers to show how their standpoints of philosophy as a bodily engaged, social and in the case of Confucianism political practice can serve as a point of reference to critically evaluate the overly speculative and disengaged nature of some GrecoEuropean traditions. The second essay, How Meiji-Era Japan Appropriated Philosophy from Europe , provides an overview of the assimilation of Western philosophy -152tf W into the Japanese intellectual landscape by giving short summaries of different thinkers from the Meiji-Era (1868-1912) who translated the Western philosophical idiom into Japanese and refrained it according to their respective interpretations. The essay gives concise accounts of the respective thinkers while providing enough references to secondary literature for interested readers to delve into a more in-depth study. The following essay, "Framing the place and Significance of Nishida's Philosophy in Europe and North America", proposes five frames employed by Western interpreters to attempt a categorization of Nishida as a philosopher: "Japan's first (modern) philosopher", "Philosopher of the East", "Zen philosopher , Founder of the Kyoto School and leading philosopher of Nothing-ness and Nationalist ideologue". In his assessment of the last mentioned framing, Maraldo deals with the difficult question of Nishida's involvement in the political situation of his time, a recurring topic that Maraldo tries to tackle with by taking a middle stance between onesided condemnation and uncritical justification. The essay concludes with an outlook on how Nishida himself might provide frameworks for reevaluating our own philosophical standpoints, a topic that is only briefly raised but elaborated on in the following section. Section two, "Pathways to Nishida", provides more detailed accounts of how Nishida's work might contribute to current debates in philosophy worldwide. In the first essay of this section, "How Nishida Individualized Religion", Maraldo shows the limits of a widespread interpretation of Nishida's philosophy of religion as a mainly Zen-Buddhist approach while placingit in the overall context of the creation of a modern concept of "religion" (5RiJ;) in the Meiji-era. Nishida's attempt to individualize religion is covered mainly in connection to his concept of death in contrast to other thinkers like Martin Heidegger, showing how knowledge of death for Nishida means the realization of the self through continual self-negation' (153). The essay ends with a critical view on Nishida's concept of an individualized religion, showing how such an approach misses the importance of religion's "concrete social manifestations in history, its particular institutions, scriptural traditions, ritual and other practices (155). "The Problem of World Culture: Appropriating Nishida's Philosophy of Nation and Culture" examines criticisms of Nishida's approach to culture and his use of nationalist frameworks, including the critique by Marxist philosopher Tosaka Jun, trying to show that despite its all too -151 close connection to the nation state, Nishida's concept of "culture (>C/fk) can still be used to re-examine current topics like multiculturalism and g-lobalization. While a good part of the essay takes a critical stance and shows how Nishida's assessment of Japan as a leading nation in Asia s defense against Western imperialism and Eurocentrism leads him to an equally mislead Japanism that sug'g'ests the existence of a homog'enous Japanese people (Sfî) with the Emperor at its center, Maraldo nevertheless discerns a positive level in Nishida's approach which presents the world as a multicultural sphere in which different nations and cultures interact as equals and mutually determine and mediate each other, even though he failed to conceive of the possibility of multiethnic or multicultural nations. The essay closes with an evaluation of Nishida's statement that certain countries have to assume a central position in forming regional worlds or by substitution multicultural nations. The essay "Self, World, and the Nothing'ness Underlying Distinctions' asks if it is possible to embrace the concept of an ultimate context which would allow us to conceptualize both the world at large as well as every being therein, proposing Nishida's "place of absolute nothingness' as a possible candidate for such a notion. Maraldo shows how Nishida's concept of nothmg-ness points to the positive role that an obscure context plays in making distinctions" (181) and provides an alternative to the conflicting theories of "internalism" and "externalism" in the current philosophy of mind. Comparing and contrasting Nishida's approach with Robert Sokolowski's theory of distinctions, Maraldo interprets Nishida's nothingness as an "obscurity that gives rise to and by contrast makes evident-all possible distinctions" (193) by negating its own non-duality and determining itself. Maraldo uses Sokolowski's notion of "urgence (in the sense of a fundamental urge to distinguish or identify that precedes both distinction and identification) to clarify Nishida's concept of the selfdetermination of nothingness, while showing how Nishida's approach calls for a double shift, first to a me-ontological standpoint and secondly to a positive evaluation of obscurity as something that does not have to be eliminated but can be positively appreciated as an important aspect of makingdistinctions, citingthe Chinese Daoist philosopher Zhuang-zi and Zen-Buddhist dialogues as examples for such an appreciation in East Asian philosophy. -150- . at' "Enaction in Cognitive Science and Nishida's Turn of Intuition into Action" centers on the notion of koi-teki chokkan (fr^S/][tt@) in Nishida s later writings. Comparing this notion to enactivist concepts in cognitive science, Maraldo proposes a reconsideration of the standard translation of this term as "action-intuition", "active intuition" or "actingintuition", experimentingwith alternatives such as action-oriented intuition , "performative intuition" and "enactive intuition . Based on Matteo Cestari s account of Nishida's notion of embodiment, Maraldo contextualizes Nishida s philosophy of action with the enactivist theory of Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch. By tracing possibilities of mutual critique which can help to clarify both approaches, Maraldo not only gives valuable hints at how to further develop Nishida's account of embodiment, but also shows its relevance for contemporary thought. "Nishida's Ontology of History" reconstructs Nishida's attempt to formulate an alternative to a linear account of time by drawing on philosophers like Augustine, Heg'el, and Leopold Ranke, as well as Nishida s colleagues Tosaka Jun, Tanabe Hajime and Miki Kiyoshi. Nishida s alternative model of time focuses on the "eternal now or absolute present as a field that encompasses past and future as aspects of its own process of self-determination. Especially illuminatingin this context is Maraldo s comparison of Nishida's approach with the Marxist account of Tosaka Jun, showinghow both share a common interest in the present and the everyday, with a crucial point of difference in Nishida's rejection of materiality as underlyingboth nature and history. Nishida insists that "historical reality, as the eternal generation of distinct moments, is self-determining (251) and that this self-determination is mediated by embodied subjects who act in "an absolute present that encompasses a virtual infinity of pasts and futures' (264), thereby enabling the realization of individual freedom. Maraldo interprets the "absolute present" in Nishida's late work as a place, space, or field that allows events to occur within it and that has its center in each and every moment it encompasses. This "de-centering view" opens up time to a mediating field that allows for the projection of innumerable timelines (259) and the enfolding of possible worlds in the concrete self-determination of the historical world. In this way, Nishida's account provides a "counterpoint both to a theological, transcendent foundation of history and to the historical determinism he read in Marxism (261f. ). According to -149Nishida, self and world are part of a process of co-creation in which the self as historical body is the expression of the sphere of the historical world (266) while the historical world is enacted by the embodied subjects that inhabit it. The concluding section of the essay shows how Hisamatsu Shin ichi, Abe Masao and Nishitani Keiji fail to measure up to Nishida's account of time by dehistoricizing his notion of absolute present , and how Nishida s ontology itself lacks the possibility to go beyond an abstract notion of historicity towards a concrete practice of "historiography" that would enable the integration of actual historical narratives. Self-Mirroringand Self-Awareness: Dedekind, Royce and Nishida provides an illuminating insight into the influence of mathematical models on Nishida's notion of "self awareness" (§ it) and his "logic of place (^ i?r6/]JmS), showing how it is possible with Nishida to speak of self-aware generalities", such as a "self-aware world" or a "self-aware system". Maraldo demonstrates that the notion of infinite systems forms the background of Nishida's theory of self-awareness. Starting with Richard Dedekind s contention that "a system is infinite when it is similar to a proper part of itself and his proposal of my own realm of thoughts as a prime example for such a system, Maraldo shows how Josiah Royce modifies Dedekind s theory by taking "the ordered structure of reflective thought as the origin, and not merely a typical instance, of the idea of numerical infinity (281). Nishida adopts Royce's notion of the infinite self-imaging quality of reflective thought as origin of the notion of infinity. Especially influential for Nishida's theory is Royce's example of a perfect map of England that represents not only its surrounding environment but also its own existence in it, leading to an infinite multitude of self-representations. A central problem of this concept is that this map can never be complete because the map-maker , i. e. the thinker, or the activity of thinking is never included in the realm of thoughts; and so that realm may be infinite but it is not all-inclusive" (286). Maraldo mentions a possible solution to this problem proposed by Ueda Shizuteru: If we take out the map-maker or subject as a necessary constituent of the process ("England depicting England ), we may arrive at the concept of an all-inclusive system of self-determination, which is exactly what Nishida is aimingat with his concept of a selfaware or self-determining world (or place of nothingness). Nevertheless, Maraldo contents, some sort of subjective awareness seems to be necessary -148ff ip for anythingto appear at all, and this "suggests a sense in which selfmirroringis not descriptive of [... ] absolute nothing-ness . Moreover, the fact that Nishida speaks of a "seeing without a seer or a state of noself (te%) implies that the ordinary concept of an individual (centered) subject of awareness is less emphasized in his writings. Maraldo shows an affinity of Nishida's approach to Fichte's theory of self-consciousness. Selfawareness or self-knowing is conceived of by both thinkers to be not merely constative. but constructive of the self. Central to this train of thought is the question of how knowing self and known self relate to each other in selfawareness. Maraldo suggests that Nishida solves this issue by introducing different levels of self-mirroring in which "the more concrete level includes the difference between itself and the more abstract level, and that difference corresponds to the difference between elements of the more abstract level (290f. ). He illustrates this structural approach by showinghow, in Nishida, the abstract level of judgements is included in the more concrete level of intentional consciousness which in turn is part of the field of the pure act". In this wav, Nishida tries to think the whole of reality as a field of nothing-ness that encompasses a multitude of self-structuringfields (both concrete and abstract) as expressions of itself. Maraldo concludes the essay by indicating challenges to Nishida's concept of self-awareness found in recent debates between the German philosophers Hans Radermacher, Ernst Tug-endhat and Dieter Henrich. "What Phenomenologists Can Learn from Nishida about Self-Awareness' analyzes Nishida's (mistaken) critique of Husserl's phenomenolog-ical method which pivots on Nishida's conviction that "intentionality splits consciousness into subject and object and cannot account for the prior consciousness in act, that is, for [... ] 'consciousizingconsciousness' or 'consciousness that is now conscious'" (308). Maraldo shows how Husserl's concepts of lived experience", "living present", "Erlebnis" and "primal I" serve as solutions to the problem raised by Nishida. But apart from the shortcomings of Nishida's critique of phenomenology, Maraldo sees five potential contributions of his philosophy to the phenomenology of self-awareness, the main dispute of which he locates in the question "whether self-awareness is an outcome of reflection, i. e., a result of a secondary act of thinkingabout experience' (319f. ). Maraldo refers to Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi to summarize the standard response to this question by phenomenologists which proposes -147the existence of a pre-reflective self-awareness as a (minimal) form of self-consciousness that grants immediate and non-observational access to myself and my experiences without the need for an explicit reflection on this experience. The first contribution by Nishida to this debate, accordingto Maraldo, is his assumption of an inherent reflexivity of self-awareness that is neither a prior stage like the pre-reflective, nor [... ] a subsequent stage (324). According to this account, self-awareness does not need a further motivatingforce to generate reflection as a secondary act. It 'encompasses both pre-reflective consciousness and acts of reflection" and ties self and world to an undifferentiated awareness to form a greater, unified whole (325). The second contribution mentioned by Maraldo is Nishida's concept of a field-like awareness that moves self-awareness beyond the self and places it in a self-determining world that mirrors itself in us, elevatingthe importance of the world to a central factor in the constitution of self-awareness. This shift of self-awareness from a centered self to a decentered world allows for the third contribution discussed by Maraldo, which shows how the distinction between phenomenal and phenomenolog-ical consciousness can be interpreted as a distinction between "the felt sense of how things appear to us, on the one hand, and the general power to let things appear that encompasses all of us, on the other (329f. ). Accordingto Nishida and this is the fourth contribution - "losing explicit consciousness of oneself is essential to a fuller experiencing' of interactions (331), a phenomenon which is captured by Nishida in expressions like becoming the thing" and which points to a "unitary mode of self-awareness". The fifth contribution described by Maraldo lies in Nishida's observation that selfawareness is in fact something that has to be embodied and even bodily cultivated. Because of the limited space available for this review, I will cover the concludingessays in a very short manner and hope that the interested reader will take the book in her hand for further study. Heidegg'er and Nishida: Nothing'ness, God, and Onto-Theology" explores the concept of nothingness as a juncture for comparing the thought of both philosophers. NothingGives: Marion and Nishida on Gift-givingand God analyzes JeanLuc Marion's de-substantialist notion of God as loving by contrastingit with Nishida s philosophy of religion. The last essay, The Many Senses of the One World: Reflections on Nishida's and Heideg-ger's Thought in the -146 - . m 1930s and the Environmental Crisis of Today" focuses on the concept of the "world" in Nishida and Heideg'ger, showinghow both develop alternatives to a naturalist account by emphasizing the "capacity of the world in its creative opposition to human individuality (434). a (1) Maraldo's major contributions to this field of research apart from his numerous essaysinclude his work as a co-editor of Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1995, as well the massive Japanese Philosophy. A Sourcebook, Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2011 (which has meanwhile been translated into Spanish). ( 2 ) As Maraldo puts it: "No longer does the description "Western philosophy' count as a tautology; no longer is the qualification 'Western' an excuse that relieves philosophers of the need to know something about the thinking relegated to traditions outside Europe as philosophy's claimed home territory. (18) ( 3 ) Maraldo proposes a shift in our hermeneutical approach towards texts that could be perceived as nationalist from our current perspective informed by a relatively liberal environment of philosophy: What we need, in the case of Nishida and 'Kyoto School' philosophers is a hermeneutics for reading texts composed under threat of punishment for non-compliance with state ideologies". 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'SKKQî 42 < O)T&-^^ . ?@X. :fT<B¥-iSBl«^6[i. Ajlj. )5IS, M-^-W-<WBIS ..................... ^^. it® 58 ^-^<7)'f'^lsbff)( )-fa31'in'SW^KWWW!:iti<'^-C- Toward A Dialogue Between Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) and Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945) n9# ® 78 . Steve G. Lofts 124 at iStfe 125 s^gr^-Âu-ijmB^-êw^^K-T^J (^^:)-" ?SM ?^ 131 #± %A 137 mw=-^g  -^.y^bs'. s^b -S-wr&MJ'^AfS^^-^a'w^NS®*®-J--"----" ^^ ^^ 141 John C. Maraldo: Japanese Philosophy in the Making 1: Crossing Paths with "Nishida, ed. Takeshi Morisato, Nagoya: Chisokudo, 2017. ............. Lean Krings 153 ^. ^J^D. ........................ :............................................. -..... lUft »^