Abstract
It is obvious that in my experience, I cannot leave my own experience. Given that, how can I know that there are other perspectives than mine? In the present paper, I first approach this problem from the standpoint of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. Husserl seems to answer the question by his reflection on the “primal I” (Ur-Ich). I will analyze this strange but thought-provoking concept by interpreting it as a kind of “non-contextual self.” Second, I will compare the result of this consideration with the concept of “pure experience” and “basho” (place) proposed by Kitaro Nishida. I try to show that these seemingly bizarre ideas of non-individual self might be necessary for our understanding of self and others. Individuals can only appear in a certain context, whereas there is a sort of experience that does not fit in any context.
A previous version of this article was translated into Chinese and published in Fudan Journal (Social Sciences), Vol. 59, No. 1, 2017, 47–56.
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This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 17K0215307.
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Taguchi, S. (2018). Non-contextual Self: Husserl and Nishida on the Primal Mode of the Self. In: Altobrando, A., Niikawa, T., Stone, R. (eds) The Realizations of the Self. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94700-6_3
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