Abstract
This chapter tracks the development of the concept of self-awareness (jikaku, 自覚) in the thought of the Japanese modern philosopher Nishida Kitarō (西田幾多郎) (Kitarō Nishida) (1870–1945), founder of the Kyoto School. Nishida’s oeuvre can be divided into distinct periods, from the 1910s to the 1940s until his passing, during which he thematized and focused on different issues. Nevertheless, self-awareness is a unifying theme throughout. In the chapter we trace how Nishida develops this concept through distinct periods in his career. His initial focus upon pure experience gives way to his focus upon its articulation in reflection vis-à-vis intuition as the unfolding of the will. This then leads to his thematization of the place wherein judgment or propositional thought unfolds and the broader contextual place wherein that place is situated. That thematization of place, in turn, develops into a look at the world where we interact as historical and social bodies with others (nature, other people, etc.). Nishida understands self-awareness in accordance with each of these themes in the respective periods of his oeuvre. But common to all of them is how Nishida understands self-awareness as a self-mirroring – self-reflection as reflexivity – founded upon the premise assumed by the articulated image or object of awareness, a premise necessarily irreducible to, and in excess of, the image or object. This is the a priori that Nishida for the most part calls the “absolute nothing” (zettai mu, 絶対無). To explain this Nishida makes use of Josiah Royce’s notion of a self-representative system as well as Richard Dedekind’s notion of an infinite system in his set theory. On the basis of Nishida’s references to the mathematics of set theory, I further compare his understanding of self-awareness to Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems as well as to more recent mathematical theorists, influenced by Gödel, whose understanding of the infinite resonates with Nishida’s understanding of the absolute nothing as assumed by self-awareness.
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Notes
- 1.
All references to Nishida’s works will be from his Collected Works (Nishida Kitarō Zenshū) cited in the text as NKZ, followed by the volume and page numbers.
- 2.
The Japanese term here is mugen (無限), which has the senses of both the infinite and the indeterminate, as well as the endless.
- 3.
On this see Kobayashi (2004, 179).
- 4.
On this see Maraldo (2017, 277).
- 5.
Odagiri also makes this claim in Odagiri (2008, 76).
- 6.
See also Rucker (1982, 40–41).
- 7.
- 8.
This is in his Was Sind Und Was Sollen Die Zahlen? (What Are Numbers and What They Mean) translated as Essays on the Theory of Numbers (Dedekind, 1963, 64 [§66]). The translator Beman renders Gedankenwelt as “realm of thoughts” while I translate it here as “thought-world.” On this see also Rucker (1982, 50).
- 9.
Also see Maraldo (2017, 280).
- 10.
- 11.
This is discussed in my paper, “Lask, Heidegger, and Nishida: From Meaning as Object to Horizon and Place” in a forthcoming volume edited by Ralph Müller on the Kyoto School in Davos.
- 12.
On this also see Ishihara (2017, 203).
- 13.
Also see Maraldo (2017, 326–327).
- 14.
On these levels, see Odagiri (2008, 77, 78).
- 15.
Nishida further divides the universals into sub-levels. For example, the universal of judgment is divided, from the most abstract to the most concrete, into the universal of subsumption (subsumptive universal) as its formal level, the universal of judgment (judicative universal) in the narrow sense as its static level, and the universal of syllogism (syllogistic universal) as its active level.
- 16.
See Maraldo (2017, 295–296) on this and the following.
- 17.
On this also see Kobayashi (2004, 182–183).
- 18.
For example, Nishida in his early work had recognized the importance of our recognition of the validity (妥当) or truth/falsity that accompanies our cognitive judgments, which however in turn implies infinity: “the infinity [無限性] of thinking is also clear from the nature of thought as a consciousness of validity. Thinking is not simply a consciousness of representations, but also a consciousness of validity, that is, a consciousness of truth […]. As a consciousness of truth, a consciousness of validity, thinking contains […] infinity” (NKZ 1:265). Every (affirmative) judgment is accompanied by an implicit understanding – or claim – that its predication is true or valid. This veritative aspect of judgment is distinct from its predicative aspect. But this also entails an infinity in that the movement from the predicative to the veritative aspect that pronounces a judgment to be true can be repeated, or mirrored, infinitely: one is certain one’s judgment is true, certain of that certainty, certain of the certainty of that certainty, and so on (Suares, 2011, 17).
- 19.
See Ishihara (2017, 104).
- 20.
As free, the self can transgress the very laws of reason it legislates as Reiner Schürmann, in his many works, argues decades later. The self here is free to realize or contravene given norms. But this is also an insight of Fyodor Dostoevsky that Nishida was certainly aware of.
- 21.
On this see Ōta (2014, 199–200).
- 22.
See Ishihara (2017, 106–107).
- 23.
See Maraldo (2017, 332).
- 24.
On this see Maraldo (2017, 339–340).
- 25.
Maraldo (2017, 323) explains that the Japanese term for “expression” (表現) doubles the sense of letting-appear and manifest (表す, 現す).
- 26.
Nishida here uses the Japanese for “self-expression” (自己表現) to refer to what Royce meant by “self-representation.”
- 27.
For more on the meaning of the “nothing” or “nothingness” (mu) in Nishida, see Krummel (2018).
- 28.
Dedekind’s notion of the “thought-world” as an infinite system that Nishida refers to has been related to the undefinability theorem attributed to Alfred Tarski’s discovery of 1933. But in fact Gödel discovered this theorem – that arithmetical truth cannot be defined in arithmetic – previously in 1930 while proving his Incompleteness Theorems which were published in 1931.
- 29.
- 30.
See Rucker (1982, 165, 192, 289).
- 31.
- 32.
Here he uses the English “self-reflection” in his appropriation of Nishida’s “self-awareness.” Also see Takeuti (1985).
- 33.
On the other hand, he called a multiplicity that can be conceived as “one thing” (einem Ding), a consistent multiplicity (eine konsistente Vielheit) or a “set” (eine “Menge”). This is in his 1899 letter to Dedekind in Cantor (1932, 443), and translated by Stefan Bauer-Mengelberg in Heijenoort (1967, 114).
- 34.
- 35.
But Plotinsky also points out, seemingly in concord with Nishida, that as a system’s economy thus replicates itself in self-reflexion, in self-differentiation and self-dissemination, the very concept of a self becomes “profoundly problematic” (1994, 32).
- 36.
This is the point where Nishida expresses disagreement with Husserl (as well as Brentano) (NKZ 2:154–155), but it is questionable whether Nishida fully understood Husserl. He ignores Husserl’s account of a pre-objectified, pre-reflective awareness in his notion of the “living present” (lebendige Gegenwart) in his phenomenology of time and his idea of the primal I as a “nameless” (Namenlose) “functioning…” (Fungierende))Husserl, 2001, 278).
- 37.
Perhaps Nishida’s idea of reflection or self-awareness in this respect is not unlike Heidegger’s understanding of the da of Dasein. Nishida’s turns beyond individual consciousness to broaden that place of opening wherein beings can manifest, and, after 1930, more explicitly to the world itself and its ungroundedness is, moreover, analogous to Heidegger’s own turn away from subjectivity in his later works.
- 38.
Ōhashi (2004, 222) makes use of Wittgenstein’s metaphor in discussing Nishida.
- 39.
The infinite here, in Nishida’s terms, would be the absolute nothing that embraces without limits any being and its negation (non-being); but also, in Reiner Schürmann’s terms, it would be ontological anarché that exceeds, is in surplus of, any order – principle or end, arché or telos – that we may impose on it. For a comparison of Nishida with Schürmann, see Krummel (2022).
Going beyond Nishida or Gödel, we might also regard the unlimited or indeterminate here as symbolic of the unconscious constitutive of consciousness, the meaningless constitutive of meaning, the wasteful or excess as constitutive of the economic – “constitutive of that which is unequivocally opposed to these contaminating forces and is supposed to be purified of them…” (Plotinsky, 1994, 28).
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Krummel, J.W.M. (2023). Self-Awareness in Nishida as Auto-Realization qua Determination of the Indeterminate. In: Geniusas, S. (eds) Varieties of Self-Awareness. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 121. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39175-0_10
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