Philosophy East and West

Abstract:

The Nishidian "pure experience" as well as its further development as acting intuition on the basho is in tune with phenomenology. In this context and based on the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty's interest in the immense "thinking literature" of the East, as well as in the phenomenological orientation of the Kyoto School formed around the figure of Nishida Kitarō, a comparative approach between the two will be established, taking their respective conceptions of mu (nothingness) and creux (hollow), as the dialectical nucleus to understand self and world in a non-dualistic manner. It is my claim that Nishida and Merleau-Ponty shed light on another conception of identity as opened to the other. In this evolving identity, receptiveness works as an "in-between" as well as a silence that constitutes the passivity that activity integrates, that is, existence: a self-awakening to a relational philosophy centered in the depths of the self in the flesh or basho.