Nishida Kitaro · Philosophy
Nishida’s late logic of the historical world: reality is a <em>self-identity of absolute contradiction</em> - one and many, continuous and discontinuous, at once - and the world is creative, forming itself ‘from the made to the making’ through individuals who are shaped by the world even as they shape it.
In the 1930s Nishida turned from the field of consciousness to the concrete, historical, active world - the world of bodies, tools, history, and deeds - and asked what logic that world obeys. His answer, stated in a famous 1939 essay, was that the world has the structure of an absolute contradictory self-identity (zettai mujunteki jiko doitsu). The phrase sounds like a paradox, and it is meant to. The world, Nishida claims, is genuinely one and genuinely many at the same time; it is continuous and yet discontinuous; it is a single unified whole and yet is composed of really distinct, independent individuals - and both sides are fully true at once, neither dissolving into the other. The unity does not swallow the many into a mush; the many do not shatter the whole into disconnected fragments. Reality is the holding-together of what abstract logic says cannot be held together.
Nishida’s prime example of contradictory self-identity is the relation between ourselves and the world. On one hand, we are utterly made by the world: we are born into a body, a language, a family, a historical moment, a whole inheritance of meanings and tools that we did not choose and that shape us to the core. We are the world’s products. On the other hand, we genuinely make the world: we act, we build, we create, we transform the very conditions that formed us, handing on a changed world to those who come after. We are the world’s producers. Nishida’s formula for this two-way creation is ‘from the made to the making’ (tsukurareta mono kara tsukuru mono e): the world moves perpetually from what has been formed to a new forming, and we are the pivots of that movement. Self and world are a contradictory identity because each is the maker of the other - the world makes the selves that remake the world - and neither is simply prior.
How do we live this two-way making? Through what Nishida calls action-intuition (koiteki chokkan). We do not first perceive the world as detached spectators and only afterward decide to act on it. Rather, we grasp the world in and through acting in it, and we act through an intuitive seeing that is already engaged and practical. The potter knows the clay by working it; the clay’s resistance teaches the hands even as the hands shape the clay. Perception and production are one continuous movement, not two stages. This means the knowing subject is never outside the world looking in - it is a working part of the world’s own self-formation, a place where the world sees and shapes itself. ‘I make the world’ and ‘the world makes me’ happen in the very same act. Action-intuition is Nishida’s account of how a self that is both made and making actually operates, moment by moment, in the concrete historical world - and it is his final answer to the old picture of the mind as a spectator set over against its objects.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that for the late Nishida the world is an absolute contradictory self-identity - one and many, continuous and discontinuous, held in tension without synthesis - and that it is creative, moving ‘from the made to the making,’ with each individual both formed by the world and forming it through action-intuiti…
Leads to G. W. F. Hegel.
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