1The Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Borges and I” explores one of the most contentious problems in the history of philosophy: the question of the self and the world. The fictional character “the one called Borges” is at the core of the story; I, the narrator, states his name and describes some of their mutual preferences such as hourglasses, maps, the taste of coffee and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson. These shared preferences provide an atmosphere within which the self will, little by little, give way to the other. Their relationship suggests that only one of them will survive, while the other will perish. As a result, I, the narrator, who is bound to perish — as opposed to the fictional character who is bound to survive — continues to persist in the sense that Spinoza insisted that “all things long to persist in their being” (Borges 1964, 230). Eventually, I, the narrator, will be remembered as Borges (as a self which gradually begins to reside in the other). Borges’ literature supports the narrator’s existence, but he notices that he now shows up less in Borges’ works and more in something far more casual, like the strums and beats of a guitar. Being the narrator, he tries to avoid all traps so as not to get overwhelmed by the fictional character, “the one called Borges.” Time and again, I, the narrator, tries to break away from Borges by creating mythological and infinite landscapes in his works but these are gradually taken over by Borges. Inevitably, I, the narrator, starts to lose everything that will ultimately either fall into oblivion or belong to Borges. Thus, what once belonged to I, the narrator, now belongs to Borges (the self exists only to be realized by the other), to the point where the story’s conclusion raises the question of whether the writer is actually I, the narrator, or the fictional character, “the one called Borges.”
2In this article, following Borges’ ruminations on the self and the world, I explore how Henri Bergson and Nishida Kitarō’s philosophical approaches engage with the notions of the self, the other, and the world. I consider the issues that both philosophers are concerned with as well as the implications that such study may have. Underlining the significant convergences or overlaps between the two thinkers, I discuss the key concepts present in both Bergson and Nishida’s philosophical works and use them to build a framework.
- 1 I do not assert that this article is an exception in this sense; rather, I want to sustain the dial (...)
3One of the main motivations behind such a philosophical investigation is to assert the global stature of Bergson’s philosophy. Although there has been a resurgence of Bergson’s thought in the last few decades, thanks to scholars like John Mullarkey, Suzanne Guerlac, Leonard Lawlor, Frédéric Worms, Marc Sinclair, Caterina Zanfi, and Keith Ansell-Pearson who have labored to make Bergson’s philosophy less parochial and more accessible in the English-speaking world, a dialogue between Bergson and Eastern traditions of thought has been remarkably underrepresented.1 In this article, my aim is to draw attention to the affinities (and certain divergences) which exist between Bergson and Nishida’s philosophy. I map the significance of the intuitive approach in ancient Indian religious thought and philosophy, as well as in the Japanese Buddhist tradition. I expand what Bergson and Nishida mean by true self and aim to deepen and widen the connection it shares with the world. We will see that Bergson and Nishida’s notions of the self, and the philosophical concepts which emerge from them, provide the grounds for this conversation to take place.
4Despite their fundamental similarities, this article does not examine how Nishida's philosophy was influenced by traditional Indian religious thought. This is partly because, as Michel Dalissier argues, Nishida viewed most of what was considered “Eastern culture” as “Chinese culture” (Dalissier 2010, 138), and partially because the aspects of the east Asian Buddhist culture which appear in Nishida’s works cannot be reduced to the ones found in ancient India. My research focuses on Bergson and Nishida's positions on the relationship between the self and the world and where or how they diverge. It is equally important here to underscore Bergson’s criticism of Eastern traditions with regard to his conceptualization of mystical vision. Bergson’s valorization of Christianity cannot go unnoticed as he continued to see Joan of Arc as the ultimate mystic while caricaturing Eastern forms of mysticism. The colonial and racial aspects of Bergson's philosophy have been brought up in recent works like Donna Jones’ The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy (Jones 2011) and Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s Bergson Postcolonial (Diagne 2019). In fact, Jones follows the lives of Eduard Le Roy and Jacques Chevalier, two of Bergson's famous disciples who were not only complicit in the colonializing and racializing frameworks of their day, but also played a key role in their spreading through reactionary religious doctrines and pedagogical practices. The insightful article “Decolonizing Bergson” by Alia Al-Saji (2019) explicitly exposes the open/closed dichotomy based on the “primitive” and “mystic” dichotomy in Bergson's The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Bergson 1932), which when viewed through a postcolonial lens can serve as a tool to maintain racial and hierarchical aspects of societal formation. Al-Saji shows how the tools to destabilize the open/closed and primitive/mystic dichotomy actually emerge from the Bergsonian method itself that attends to “multiplicity and difference without opposition and hierarchy” (Al-Saji 2019, 15).
5My intention in this article is consistent with Al-Saji’s methodology since I want to emphasize the connections between the self and the world that are founded on sympathy and love in the ways Bergson and Nishida characterized them. The qualitative multiplicity which undergirds Bergson’s philosophical method, as both heterogenous and continuous, does not allow for the juxtaposition which a hierarchical construction requires. Finally, Bergson's advocacy for a dynamic religion based on love and openness as well as an “intuitive approach” that was unconstrained by the social discourses of race, nation, and imperialism allow Bergson and Nishida to symbolize, what Christopher Jones has termed as, a “globalized ‘tradition’” of intuitive philosophy which is as significant today as it was in the ancient period (Jones 2002, 59).
6Nishida’s association with Bergson’s thought began in his early 1908 essay titled “Junsui keiken to shii, ishi, oyobi chiteki chokkan” (“Pure experience, cognition, will, and intellectual intuition”) and continued well after his death. In an interview Nishida gave, which was published in Asahi Shinbun a day after Bergson’s death on January 4, 1941, attests to this claim:
I personally gained a lot of insight from his idea of “données immediates.” It was only after I familiarized myself with Bergson’s thought that I was able to formulate my idea of ‘pure experience’ and publish my Zen no kenkyu (Yusa 2002, 97).
7As noted by Christopher Jones and Robert Chia, Nishida’s philosophy must be seen as a bridge between Western philosophical views and the Japanese tradition that evolved out of Japan's self-imposed isolation (sakoku) up until the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate's reign in the middle of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, in Eastern traditions of thought, there is no real division between what comprises philosophy and what constitutes religion. This is primarily because religion in Japan does not necessarily refer to a belief system but rather to what Robert E. Carter, in his introduction to the Kyoto School, calls a “conscious transformation” (Carter 2013, 6). Zen Buddhism and Western philosophical methods are combined in Nishida’s philosophy, and these two schools of thought come together to inquire and understand the immediacy of pure experience. Nishida’s style is not that of a Zen Buddhist even though he had gone through a formal training in zazen (the practice of quiet contemplation and meditation) and sanzen (the practice of private conversations with Zen master to bring about spiritual awakening). Nishida's success can be attributed to the fact that he actively sought an interaction between the Western and the Eastern philosophical traditions to capture the tendencies that underlie each of them, despite their irreconcilable differences. Nishida's lifelong struggle to integrate natural sciences to his Zen teaching (as he disclosed to Mutai Risaku a few years before his death) is akin to Bergson's attempt to operate a synthesis between philosophy and the sciences in his own time.
8In this article, I engage with guiding ideas and themes in which the two philosophers converge (or significantly differ) rather than provide a comprehensive account of Bergson and Nishida’s entire œuvre. The early and final writings of Nishida (An Inquiry into the Good; 1911, Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness; 1917, Fundamental Problems of Philosophy — The World of Action and the Dialectical World; 1933 and Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious Worldview; 1949) and Bergson (Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness; 1889, Creative Evolution; 1911 and The Two Sources of Morality and Religion; 1932) will be taken into account to illustrate how the ideas of the self and the world, are interconnected and expressed throughout their works.
9In Time and Free Will, Bergson makes the case for an intuitive metaphysics that sets itself apart from the spatial registers that have a propensity to homogenize and quantify experience. Bergson’s opposition to the mechanistic and rationalistic philosophies of his time is based on “placing side by side in space phenomena which do not occupy space” (Bergson 2001, xix). In a 1908 letter to American pragmatist thinker William James, Bergson highlights that the issue with the scientific understanding of time is that it “does not endure” (Douglass 1986, 7). This does not imply that Bergson was against science in general. Instead, he was against placing acute emphasis on clock time to characterize every occurrence in a mechanistic way. Bergson asks “does the multiplicity of our conscious states bear the slightest resemblance to the multiplicity of the units of number? Has true duration anything to do with space?” (Bergson 2001, 91), only to assert that it is impossible for science to fully describe the universe because it ignores too many of its qualitative aspects. Bergson argues that conceiving time in terms of a “homogenous medium” is to insert intervals where interpenetration exists between the states of consciousness. This effectively spatializes time and limits the ego’s ability to let “itself live” (Bergson 2001, 100). As a result, consciousness splits into two distinct parts, with the mind acting and functioning in accordance with the external situation while the internal state is ignored in the process: the one projected externally partakes in pure extensity while the inner self is grasped very rarely and so, according to Bergson, it is very rarely that we are truly free. Bergson states:
The greater part of the time we live outside ourselves, hardly perceiving anything of ourselves but our own ghost, a colorless shadow which pure duration projects into homogenous space. Hence our life unfolds in space rather than in time; we live for the external world rather than for ourselves; we speak rather than think; we “are acted” rather than act ourselves. To act freely is to recover possession of oneself, and to get back into pure duration (Bergson 2001, 231-2).
10Due to habits and conventions, Bergson argues, we live at a distance from our true selves. The invariable spatialization of our lives happens through language as well. Although language structures everything around us, it fails to recognize the inner self due to its reliance on concepts and symbols. We “are acted” upon by language with its symbols which analyze our experiences and the rules that govern it and the methods by which it conveys its implicit doctrines. The divided self (as superficial/external and profound/inner) provides the point of contact between the two experiences, the one informed by durée which consists of qualitative multiplicities, and the chronological conception, which consists of quantitative, homogenized, and successive moments. According to Bergson, the continuity of duration is what gives it a dynamic quality, negating the necessity to establish any type of quantity about consistent classification throughout changes. Freedom results from this realization: “Freedom consists in our becoming in time and we are nothing other than this becoming” (Pearson 2018, 56). Freedom emerges by being in contact with the qualitative multiplicities which exist “in a state of incessant, relational division, ‘flux,’ or ‘individuation’” (Hodges 2008, 410). By juxtaposing them, an intellectual representation of these qualitative multiplicities strips them of their true qualities: “states which […] become distinct like the beads of a necklace and therefore require, in order to hold them together, a thread which is neither this nor that, nothing that resembles beads, nothing that resembles anything whatsoever, — an empty entity […]” (Bergson 1946, 82). The entire process undoubtedly reflects practical issues, but it is also crucial to notice that it tries to contain duration (in space) and makes it predictable. When we are “acted upon” in a spatialized reality where the subject is already predetermined by its states, real freedom, in Bergson's view, cannot exist. Bergson’s pre-reflective method stands in opposition to the determinist doctrines and relates freedom to the “immediate data” of consciousness. Life persists since real duration is heterogeneous and interpenetrative; the superficial self stagnates since it is bound to the necessities which are quantitative and contrastive. Suzanne Guerlac identifies the threat from the superficial self and the ghost-like existence when she states:
If, however, we extend scientific modes of thinking to ourselves, Bergson insisted, we would become like things. If we try to measure and count our feelings, to explain and predict our motives and actions, we will be transformed into automatons — without freedom, without beauty, without passion, and without dreams. We will become mere phantoms of ourselves (Guerlac 2006, 42).
11According to Bergson, it is essential to understand that the profound self, or inner self, cannot be contained or measured if one wants to avoid an existence as a phantom. It is rare to be free because of our dependence on the conscious automaton which helps us to face challenges of everyday life. However, as Bergson rightly notes, this mechanism “by which we only meant at first to explain our conduct will end by also controlling it […] automatism will cover our freedom” (Bergson 2001, 237). A truly free act is the one in which the profound self is expressed. Therefore, it is exceptional. Freedom exists in degrees in which we consciously turn ourselves away from the superficial self. This act of turning away brings us in contact with the flux in which the world is experienced by the acting agent. The deeper features of reality are discerned in the “immediately given” lingering and flowing beneath the visual and geometrical constructions of lived reality. The durational flux which cannot be contained within the parameters of language (as language imitates the laws of spatialized reality) is ultimately grasped through intuition.
12According to Bergson, the concept of freedom is one of the fundamental problems of the “moderns”, being to them what “the paradoxes of Eleatics were to the ancients” (Bergson 2001, 240). Bergson integrates his conception of freedom into an epistemological foundation of religion in his later works. Bergson tries to offer a sociobiological account of the genesis of morality and religion in his final book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). By subsuming the two sources of morality and religion under the theory of evolution and thereby providing them a biological cover, Bergson discusses the concepts of moral obligation and moral aspiration within a non-mechanistic and/or finalistic framework. According to Bergson, moral obligation exerts a centripetal force which fosters a rigid, closed model of society generally characterized by static and institutionalized form of religion and the later exudes a centrifugal force because of which open societies can begin to germinate and grow in a dynamic, non-dogmatic manner. Bergson wanted to give biology “the very wide meaning it should have,” so that one could attempt to explain life while staying within the domain of the living (Bergson 1997, 101). Neither of these kinds of moralities which lead to closed and open societies ever exist in their pure form, but they are present in varying degrees. They remain united in their difference and represent the two complementary “manifestations of life” (Bergson 1997, 101). Bergson believed that there has never been a truly open or closed society. While a seemingly closed morality advocates obedience before the law, open morality exists in what Bergson suggested a “call” from a privileged personality. This privileged personality, which exerts a virtual attraction over everyone, is certainly not a mystic of ascetic kind but one who has transgressed the boundaries of life and leaves a personal mark on all changes in life, thought and society due to his inspirational morality. This inspirational/open morality is concerned with creativity and progress and defined by “creative emotions.” Bergson identified the object of dynamic religion, in a circuitous manner, to the source itself, that is, God, an immanent and supra-personal divinity.
13According to Bergson, the evolutionary basis to understand religion would deny the closed system or the orthodox ways in which religious aspects have been understood. The traditional theological approach fails to acknowledge the process of becoming which is continuous and affirmative regarding human freedom. The continual manifestation of creation as change and becoming disregards a single moment of creation and draws attention to multiplicities and unrecognized potentialities in the concept of virtual. By not being limited to the past, creation, according to Bergson, disentangles temporality from time, which brings human freedom back into the picture: that is, freedom which cannot be imagined or determined by the mechanistic models utilized by science. Bergson inverts the understanding of an absolute point of creation and thereby circumvents the entire premise of predestination within the religious, and more so, the question of obligation within the societal framework. Bergson offers an interesting example which echoes the traditional theological approach, causes moral distress, and limits human freedom. In contrast to an unrestricted childhood where one would have been free to do as one pleased, Bergson traces the earliest thing in the memory (the story of our origin and of the forbidden fruit) which occupies a particular “status in relation to us” and not only prohibits but commands obedience from the individual (Bergson 1997, 9). Bergson argues that it is the moral obligation which disrupts the relationship between individual and society. According to Bergson, the desire to assimilate back into society by erasing all evidence of crime and acting as though a crime had never been committed in the first place, rather than the fear of punishment, is what causes “the feeling of remorse in the soul of a desperate criminal” (Bergson 1997, 17). However, the knowledge of the crime exists in the mind of the criminal which makes him feel more isolated in the society he so desperately wants to be a part of than if he was left alone “on a desert island” and therefore it is the force of this feeling of isolation, as Bergson argues, that makes the criminal confess his crime or give himself up (Bergson 1997, 18).
- 2 This reminds me of a particular scene, which I shall describe with more detail here to illustrate h (...)
14Bergson’s “moral distress” results from the obligation that the individual feels toward society to “re-attach” himself and, in doing so, get enmeshed into the moral imperative based on societal conventions. These unchanging and fixed social conventions are hypostatized to an unchanging Christian God to whom the individual is obliged to attach himself. For Bergson, God emanates in change and creative activity: “He is incessant life, action, freedom, and creativeness, and in so far as we ourselves manifest these (seen, above all, in the creative joy of the inventor, poet, artist, and mother) each of us has the ‘divine’ at work within” (Gunn 2002, 53). Bergson's God is derived from change and does not try to “determine” the course of evolution, maintaining the possibility of freedom at all times. Bergson’s religion, and corresponding morality, originates from an understanding of lived time which incorporates multiplicity. Bergson’s Two Sources of Morality and Religion attempts to foreground the creative forces of life which can set aside the commonalities of everyday life. The “static religion” that Bergson describes in the second chapter confines human freedom and eclipses the means for the authentic self. Bergson’s religious framework is actually derived from his earlier work Creative Evolution where nature is described in terms of a vital order. The dynamic religion is always open to new forms and preserves life forces to whom the individual feels an obligation in the authentic sense. On the other hand, the “static religion” or “closed morality” is based on a mechanistic or automatic order and provides a limited understanding about obligatory principle. The static religion differentiates solidarity and preservation based on individuality which is assumed to be ontologically created and hence functions as the distinguishing factor for one individual and the other. This account of morality stands against the love for humanity which, for Bergson, is relational and sympathetic in its nature. This is evident from the way Bergson describes the experience of watching a dancer and her/his “graceful movements” when she/he submits “to a rhythm and are accompanied by music” (Bergson 2001, 12). The impression that it creates in which one can predict the “exact attitude that the dancer is going to take” is not limited in its literal sense but overwhelms the observer with “so many invisible threads” that seem to emanate from the performance (Bergson 2001, 12). Bergson considers this an act of communication that is facilitated by the rhythm and results in a “kind of physical sympathy”2 (Bergson 200, 13) that cannot be expressed in language but is simply felt as the audience is entertained by the performance.
15For Bergson, it is the open morality which orients us towards the movement of life in a vitalistic sense. This realization reaches out beyond the closed societies in the form of the élan vital and offers foresight about future dangers, that is, especially death. Thus, in this way, Bergson argues for real freedom which lies in the realization of being immersed in this world and then to anticipate and own up to the possibility of death. For Bergson, this is the definitive feature of authentic experience. Bergson’s philosophical framework brings together the self and the world in this temporal process of pure existence which serves as the foundation for the lived experience. Bergson’s attempt to bring the self and the world together begins with self-realization such that existence can have an encounter with itself. In Bergson’s spiritual framework, God is conceived as life and even in the practices of mysticism there is a contemplative action which points towards an undivided whole. In the third chapter titled “Dynamic religion,” Bergson argues that a mystic would not deny the existence of the real world “perceived by the eyes of the body” (Bergson 1997, 233) but suggest that something is amiss in this particular act of grasping the true reality. It is the fraternity of philosophers who grapple with the need of expressing the inexpressible and conveying conviction through speech. According to Bergson, as Keith Ansell-Pearson and Jim Urpeth put it, “the rational idea of fraternity is one we can admire and respect but not one we can attach ourselves to with passion” (Pearson and Urpeth 2012, 254). In contrast, the mystic’s love is more real and “more alive” (Pearson and Urpeth 2012, 254) since it can break the wider circles of family, country, and humanity: “It is neither of the senses nor of the mind. It is of both, implicitly, and is effectively much more. For such a love lies at the very root of feeling and reason […]” (Bergson 1997, 234). Such a love can be grasped through “the sympathy of life” (Pearson 2020, 121) but the Bergsonian understanding of sympathy (and the emergent connection between the self and the world) in terms of intuitive understanding is difficult to pin down and Bergson himself, at times, hesitated to use it:
Because a Schelling, a Schopenhauer and others have already called upon intuition, because they have more or less set up intuition in opposition to intelligence, one might think that I was using the same method. But of course, their intuition was an immediate search for the eternal! Whereas, on the contrary, for me it was a question, above all, of finding true duration (Bergson 1946, 32-3).
- 3 Since it connects many of his fundamental concepts — including duration, heterogeneous multiplicity (...)
16Bergson’s intuitive method3 is not a new method but it approaches the traditional categories of the relative and the absolute in a new light. In An Introduction to Metaphysics, Bergson states that, direct knowledge which can be perceived from inside defies “relativity” which “is the symbolic knowledge of pre-existing concepts,” whereas “intuitive knowledge […] installs itself in that which is moving and adopts the very life of things. This intuition attains the absolute. Science and metaphysics therefore come together in intuition” (Bergson 1912, 74). With the notion of sympathy, Bergson advances the idea of placing oneself within an object such that one and the other “coincide with what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible” (Bergson 1912, 7). This sympathetic connection can be established with the animal and plant realms extending well towards the “evolutionary movement as a whole” (Pearson 2020, 121). Bergson’s aim which is based on his intuitive method is to grasp the absolute sense in which the self-endures. Through sympathy, one can perceive the primordial flux of life, “beyond the variety of living forms” (Lapoujade 2018, 42) and move beyond the estrangement which has become a characteristic condition of modern life informed by relative knowledge. In his 1911 lecture on “Philosophical intuition,” Bergson clarified his position by stating that that what lies outside in terms of true reality can be felt from within attesting to a holistic appraisal of the self and the world:
[T]he matter and life which fill the world are equally within us; the forces which work in all things we feel within ourselves; whatever may be the inner essence of what is and what is done, we are of that essence. Let us then go down into our own inner selves: the deeper the point we touch, the stronger will be the thrust which sends us back to the surface (Pearson 2020, 133).
17Bergson’s intuitive method is consonant with Nishida’s own philosophy and his conception of duration which is ever changing and becoming (“succession without distinction”) resembles the way the ideas of a self (ātman) and the world (Brahman) have been philosophically discussed in Eastern schools of thought. I will cite two examples taken from Zen Buddhism and Br̥hadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad (whose direct influence appears in Japanese and Indian philosophical traditions) to illuminate how important the intuitive element and the interpenetrative character of the self and the world are before turning my attention to the fundamental role that intuition plays in Nishida’s philosophical thought. The following passage is indicative of Bergson’s deconstruction method by which the two opposite sides of the debate (between idealism and realism) are deconstructed to establish the true nature of consciousness which resides in unrepresentable, unpredictable, and heterogeneous durée réelle:
To a Buddhist, the very terms empirical and rational are subject to come under strong indictment. To elaborate, the Buddha’s insightful perception told him that the initial passionate nature (tṛṣṇā) relies on the dichotomy created between the perceiver and the perceived, and consequently attaches to the dichotomized elements of the passion themselves […] The epistemic consequence of this phenomenon is the alleged postulation of the concept of a self (ātman) in perception, which in turn is the basis for continued suffering. The profound instruction of Buddha, however, turned our attention to the fluid, unimpeded, non-static nature of experience, pointing to the pure, unclouded nature of existence (Dharma) otherwise known as nirvana (Inada 1997, 139).
- 4 In his article, “Gender at Janaka’s Court: Women in the Br̥hadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad Reconsidered,” Stev (...)
18Similar to this, the dialogue which appears in Br̥hadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad between Gārgī4 (the female Vedic scholar who assisted in compiling the Ṛgveda) and the sage Yājñavalkya regarding the nature of the self and the world is both indicative and prescriptive about the ways in which the depth of consciousness can be grasped (notwithstanding the stern reprimand issued by Yājñavalkya to Gārgī at the end of the dialogue for asking such deep questions about existence and reality):
atha hainam͎ gārgī vācaknavī papraccha / yājñavalkyeti hovāca / yad idam͎ sarvam apsv otam͎ ca protam͎ ca kasmin nu khalv āpa otāś ca protāś ceti / vāyau gārgīti / kasmin nu khalu vāyur otaś ca protaś ceti / antariks͎a lokes͎u gārgīti /
Next Gārgī Vācaknavï questioned him. “Yājñavalkya,” she said, “This whole world is woven to and fro on the waters, but on what are the waters woven to and fro?”
“On air, Gārgī.”
“But on what is the air woven to and fro?”
“On the middle worlds, Gārgī.”
kasmin nu khalu prajāpatilokā otāś ca protāś ceti / brahmalokes͎u gārgīti / kasmin nu khalu brahmalokā otāś ca protāś ceti / sa hovāca gārgi mātiprāks͎īh / mā te mūrdhā vyapaptat / anatipraśnyām͎ vai devatām atiprcchasi / gārgi mātiprāks͎īr iti / tato ha gārgī vācaknavy upararāma // 1 //
“But on what are the worlds of Prajāpati woven to and fro?”
“On the worlds of brahman, Gārgī.”
“But on what are the worlds of brahman woven to and fro?”
Yājñavalkya said, “Gārgī, don't ask about what is beyond this, lest your head shatter apart! You are asking beyond the deity that should not be asked beyond. Gārgī, don't ask beyond [this!]”
Thereupon, Gārgī Vācaknavï ceased questioning him (Lindquist 2008, 411-2).
19Like Bergson and the examples from Buddhist and Hindu views of the unified reality mentioned above, Nishida’s philosophical framework is attentive to intuition. In An Inquiry into the Good (1911), Nishida states that philosophical systems are based on an intuitive force that is inexpressible and yet presupposes a deeper grasp of reality than what philosophical systems could ever hope to accomplish. This places the philosophy of Bergson and Nishida on an equal footing where neither can be viewed as a system because both are developing ideas that neither treat the universe as a “completed system of reality” nor make any attempt to give the universe a systemic approach when it is, in fact, “itself becoming” (Carr 1919, 14). According to Nishida, intuition is the only way to understand the kind of creativity that manifests in the universe. This intuitive force is at play even in the writings of Plato and Spinoza:
This unifying intuition is essentially the same as the “knack” of a technique. Broadly speaking, behind all great thought like the philosophies of Plato and Spinoza there is a great intuition at work. Since the intuition of intellectual genius differs from ordinary thinking only in degree, there is no difference in quality, and the former is no more than a new, profound intuition of unity (Nishitani 1991, 66).
20Bergson and Nishida differed from the philosophers of their period in that they considered direct experience or pure experience to be the starting point for philosophical thought and presented concerns regarding the nature of experience itself using their intuitive method. This global connection between Bergson and Nishida as intuitionist philosophers is the reason Edmund Husserl invited Nishida’s colleague Tanabe Hajime to a series of lectures on Nishida tetsugaku (that is, Nishida’s philosophy), which a young Martin Heidegger also attended at Freiberg University, Germany (Jones 2002, 59-60). Both Bergson and Nishida insist that language fails to grasp the totality of our embodied experience. However, there are certain points of divergence in their outlook. According to Bergson, duration remains an ontological and immanent category whereas for Nishida the uniqueness of each duration and the necessary implication that it can never be repeated “presupposes the existence of a timeless transcendent; to assert temporality implies the existence of timeless dimension” (Chia 2014, 296). However, as Robert Wilkinson argues, it is not clear as to what Nishida implies by “timeless transcendent” and he provides Nishida’s view from Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness (1917) that “[m]emory makes the past present; it thus transcends time, and is immediately identical with the action which anticipates the future” (Nishida 1987a, 133) to claim that Nishida’s use of transcendence means that without memory, the idea of consciousness becomes untenable. When memory allows the past to merge and live with the present, a transcendence does take place, but it happens within time through which the past events are ‘recollected’ in the present. This shows that Nishida’s own justification, however, falls short of supporting his reservations regarding Bergson's conception of duration. In the next section, I discuss Nishida’s An Inquiry into the Good (1911), Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness (1917) and his concept of Basho and absolute nothingness to map similarities and the points of difference which emerge from Bergson and Nishida’s philosophical frameworks.
21Like Bergson, Nishida begins his initial inquiries into “pure experience” to align his philosophical framework with Zen teachings. Zen constitutes a living practice that is motivated by a desire for salvation which makes it difficult to speak of Zen in a philosophical sense where abstract ideas can be posited through ratiocination and defended based on logical arguments and conceptual analysis. Traditional philosophical perspectives which consider sense perception and reason as the sole mode of thinking are limited in comparison to Zen beliefs and practices which can comprehend reality as it exists beyond the subject-object dichotomy. One of the key insights of Zen Buddhism is the destruction of ignorance (avidyā) to be able to see the śunyatā or emptiness as the real basis of self and the world. In terms of “knowledge by acquaintance” and “knowledge from description,” Zen emphasizes the immediate knowledge which, in Indian epistemological traditions, is considered as knowledge by perception (pratyakṣa) over knowledge by inference (anumanā). According to the Cārvāka school of thought (which stands for materialist philosophy), since it does not produce a reality devoid of invariable relations, inference cannot be regarded as the ground for knowing reality. It is an uncertain ground for inference as long as the relationship between two occurrences cannot be demonstrated to be unconditional. Therefore, perception is given primacy over inference: “[p]erception is considered by most schools to be the pramāna par excellence […] [even] in the case of Nyaya school [realist philosophical tradition], inferential knowledge (anumanā) follows on perceptual knowledge and lacks its immediacy (aporoksatva)” (King 1999, 147). Knowledge based on perception is treated on a par with the classical Indian notion of darśana — a vision in which a “knowing subject” is not constrained by any determination of space and time. It is remarkable to see the parallels which exist here between darśana and Bergson’s perspective:
One of the most profound and important ideas in the Critique of Pure Reason is this: if metaphysics is possible, it is through a vision and not through a dialectic. Dialectic leads to contrary philosophies; it demonstrates the thesis as well as the antithesis of antimonies. Only a superior intuition (which Kant calls an “intellectual” intuition), that is, a perception of metaphysical reality, would enable metaphysics to be constituted (Bergson 1946, 163).
22Nishida concurs with this Bergsonian viewpoint. In the first chapter of Fundamental Problems of Philosophy (1934) titled “The Dialectical Structure of the Actual World,” Nishida writes, “[t]he world of reality is the world of life in which individual and environment are mutually determining. It is the world of the self-determination of the dialectical universal” (Nishida 1970, 118). Here, Nishida is seen following the doctrine of “dependent co-arising” (pratitya samutpāda) which emerged from the Indian Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna’s Middle Path logic. Nāgārjuna’s philosophical position implies that there are two kinds of truth; conventional truth which is required for the practical reasons of everyday life but is self-contradictory and results in ignorance and ultimate truth (involving intuition and a realization that all distinctions are empty) that provides genuine insight into the true nature of reality. Nishida’s use of the word “dialectical” is different from the logic of dialectical synthesis where the thesis (“being”) and antithesis (“relative nonbeing”) leads to “true nothingness.” Instead, according to Nishida, “the logic of paradox preserves the thesis and antithesis in tension. It has the biconditional structure of affirmation if, and only if, negation, and conversely of negation if, and only if, affirmation” (Nishida 1987b, 28). Emptiness or śunyatā presented by Nāgārjuna is the causal dependence of all things which are perceived as different. In effect, they are deduced from a dependent origination and so they lack nature, identity, power, or intensity: “Everything is what it is conditioned to be, and that leaves everything empty, empty of reality, empty of actuality, phenomena behind which is nothing” (Allen, 2010, 460). The state of no-knowledge that Zen Buddhism stresses is a state without distinctions and without thinking because, as Nāgārjuna argues, to think is to differentiate a thought from non-thought, to encounter a dualism between being and non-being. Thus, Zen practice is not thinking “emptiness” but to empty thinking itself of all objects; objects with which distinctions begin. It is only through no-thought that the delusion about objects and the attachment to those subjects (which entails human suffering) can be dispelled. Therefore, the hostility towards knowledge and language serves as the first principle of Zen teachings. It is then necessarily practiced by entering a state of quietude: “The principle of Zen is silence” (Schinzinger 1958, 14). According to Bergson and Nishida, the essence of immanence is revealed through difference, which Nāgārjuna also emphasizes in his philosophical exposition of “dependent co-arising.” Duration is ontological because it is always differential and cannot be repeated. All beings or individuals endure in “pure duration” and the world is a process of active becoming.
23In Intelligibility and Philosophy of Nothingness: Three Philosophical Essays (1958), Nishida writes:
At the base of the world, there are neither the many nor the one; it is a world of absolute unity of opposites, where the many and the one deny each other. There is the individual, as individual, “form-giving”. The individual creates, makes things, and is, at the same time: from the formed towards the forming (i.e., it is in the transitory movement from being a formed individual towards becoming a forming individual). This is the creative activity of the “historical nature” (Nishida 1958, 168).
24The “creativity activity” of the world can only be grasped through intuition. Zen teachings also state the oneness of all things essentially turning philosophy into a way of life. The notion of pure experience that Nishida discusses in An Inquiry into the Good (1911) is not in essence, a pursuit of a philosophical system, but a way of life where after casting aside the “one’s devices” the unifying totality of the world and the consciousness is revealed. Nishida maintains that “[t]he fundamental mode of reality is such that reality is one while it is many and many while it is one; in the midst of equality, it maintains distinctions, and in the midst of distinctions it maintains equality” (Nishida 1990, 57). Following the Zen tradition which sees “Dharmahaya” (oneness of being) in all phenomena, Nishida argues that the self that remains with the pure experience can recognize the differentiating development, and it is intellectual intuition that enables one to recognize the ineffable and unspeakable unifying force that is already at work. Intellectual intuition also serves as the basis for the will which is fulfilled when the intuitional unity between all things is achieved. According to Nishida, true self does not exist as separate from intuition. Nishida further argues that “true religious awakening” lies in the realization of the “profound unity at the base of knowledge and will” (Nishida 1990, 34). With this awakening (or satori, the ultimate goal of Zen practice) the world is transformed along with the self where the Buddha-nature becomes known within one’s heart:
An infinite power is hidden even in our small chests that are restricted by time and space; the infinite unifying power of reality is latent in us. Possessing this power, we can search for the truth of the universe in learning, we can express the true meaning of reality in art, and we can know the foundation of reality that forms the universe in the depths of our hearts — we can grasp the true face of God. The infinitely free activity of the human heart proves God directly (Nishida 1990, 81).
25When struck by satori (since Enlightenment happens at once like an epiphany), the true self experiences the absolute present (or nikon). In Section 39 of Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness (1917), Nishida argues that the determined self (as opposed to the true self) which is imagined as separate from the processual whole (since it becomes difficult to see how intuition can be, at once, the method leading to the true self and contain connotations of vision which happens as soon as it occurs) lacks the ability to appreciate the present in which the past is recalled and future imagined: “[t]he present is the center of gravity […] where our experience is in motion, and only that which is in motion is real […] it is the point of fusion between the will’s advance to the future and reflection’s return to the past” (Nishida 1987a, 129).
26Nishida, however, expresses discomfort with Bergson's assertion that it is not possible to return to the moment of the past since “[o]nly in that which is morally dead is the past entirely fixed” (Nishida 1987a, 129) and the past operates as a means to the present and the future. Nishida rejects duration as an ontological category and argues that there is a degree of conceptualization involved in Bergsonian understanding of duration. Nishida argues that if real duration can only be grasped by intuition rather than through reflection then it is equally true to suggest that “it cannot be thought of as repeatable, neither can it be thought of as unrepeatable” (Nishida 1987a, 130) invoking the “logic of contradictory identity” (mujunteki dōitsu) that is associated with Nāgārjuna and became pivotal in his later writings. This assertion is informed by Zen teachings since Diamond Sutra states, “[t]his dharma which the Tathagata has fully known or demonstrated — it cannot be grasped, it cannot be talked about, it is neither a dharma nor a no-dharma” (Conze 1958, 36) where dharma implies reality and the two claims are kind of pointers to that which cannot be expressed since expressing it would tantamount to putting it in a determined and closed system. Nishida agrees with Bergson’s views about direct experience, the intuitive method, the superficial and the profound self, the spatialization of time and the resultant alienation that individuals feel from within, and the creative activity (the élan vital) which is always at work in the universe, but he disagrees with his view that duration implies unrepeatability. In Bergson’s cosmology, everything is characterized by continuity and, as Wang Liping states, “[t]here is no void or nought, and each thing must be immanent in the others (as each note is immanent in the others in a piece of continuous music)” (Liping 2008, 92). But in Nishida’s later worldview, activity, or the attempts to explain the nature of experience are replaced by nothingness (which is to be interpreted as “more like a plenum of possibilities than a void”) (Wilkinson 2009, 90). It may be argued that Nishida views Bergson’s notion of pure duration as incomplete rather than incorrect. Additionally, Nishida aimed to better grasp Bergsonian reality via the lens of Zen Buddhist teachings, about which it may be safely assumed that Bergson had no reservations based on his claim in the introduction to Creative Evolution that:
[A] philosophy of this kind will not be made in a day. Unlike the philosophical systems properly so called, each of which was the individual work of a man of genius and sprang up as a whole, to be taken or left, it will only be built up by the collective and progressive effort of many thinkers, of many observers also, completing, correcting and improving one another (Bergson 1944, xxiv).
27Nishida and Bergson share considerably more philosophical concerns than their disagreement over how to approach duration as an ontological reality might seem. However, Nishida’s idea of Basho (or absolute nothingness) which can be first traced to his two essays, “On the inner perception” (1924) and “Expressive operation” (1925) distances him from Bergson and closely resembles Zen beliefs and practices. It is important to note that during this time Einstein publicly disagreed with Bergson, asserting that it is only the physicist’s time which exists. Bergson’s work, Duration and Simultaneity (1922) could not do much to salvage his position in a fast-changing world that was in awe of the idea of relativity. Bergson’s reputation had already begun to decline even before he was awarded the Nobel Prize.
28Nishida developed his notion of Basho (place, topos, field) in his later writings, drawing inspiration from Plato’s Timaeus, to show how the logical categories Plato chose to emulate, and on which the universal order is founded, fall short of understanding self-consciousness. In addition, Nishida uses Aristotle’s idea of primary substance, which unites logic and metaphysics and refers to that which can be subject but never predicate, as the foundation for the issue (specifically, the issue of knowing particulars) he seeks to answer with his concept of Basho. It can be argued that Nishida’s concept of Basho is an attempt to present a concrete universal with its own principle of individuation. Nishida's concept of Basho is like Plato’s idea of a receptacle (of the third kind which differs from the things and their manifestations) in that it permits the existence of various things and their change from one state to another while sharing none of the properties of the things and yet permitting their becoming. Basho predetermines the things which exist within basho and their nature changes with a change of basho. In the fourth chapter of The Intelligible World, Nishida states the self which is not aware of itself resembles “the transcendental plane of predicates of the Universal by judgments” (Nishida 1958, 90) which implies that, in the natural world, the self relies on the judgments derived from the grammatical subject and predicate which articulate a universal and yield no knowledge of the particular. For instance, a statement like “red is a color” presupposes a domain of discourse of color and allows for the universal judgment to take credence. Here, the domain of discourse of color which makes color judgments possible cannot be the subject of a judgment derived from the color red. In other words, the domain of discourse of color cannot be conceived from the mental operations based on the individual experiences of the colors, such as red.
29According to Nishida, what permits the individual experience to take place is the entire domain of discourse (basho), which does not share qualities of the things as they exist in it. Hence, to claim that “red is a color” means that it is located in a basho and that its meaning would change as the basho changes. The inference which can be drawn from this argument about basho is that it is essentially nothingness or no-thing with regard to the judgments it makes possible. Even though the universal (the domain of discourse of color) is what enables the particular (“red is a color”), basho cannot be seen as either the universal or the particular because doing so would make it a part of this basho and be in opposition to the principle of own individuation. Here, Nishida employs the Hegelian notion of concrete universal which emerges when the particular is negated and instead of getting separated underlies the concrete reality of the particular. Such concrete universals emphasize the present moment, which contains unlimited depth in its concrete richness, and they serve to highlight the unifying truth of existence. From here, Nishida moves to the place of relative nothingness (taritsuteki mu no basho) where the self-consciousness “consists in those aspects of self-conscious life of which I am aware, not in the ‘I’ which is aware of them” (Wilkinson 2009, 109). Nishida argues that for us to be conscious of something the thing must reside in our consciousness like sensations and feelings. However, then what can be said about the field of consciousness (basho)? Does it lie outside the consciousness like objects which are external to consciousness, or can it be differentiated from the phenomena of consciousness and Nishida is positing something new here? Once again, the field of consciousness (basho) cannot be characterized as either existing or not existing and yet it cannot be negated that it makes consciousness possible. Finally, Nishida suggests basho as the place of absolute emptiness (third kind) in his philosophical theory to address the aforementioned contradiction. It is from this basho that the values of truth and beauty emanate. Nishida writes:
When the Universal of self-consciousness has its place in the intelligible universal, and is lined, deepened and enveloped by this Universal, all “being” which is in our self-consciousness, gets, by mirroring the intelligible world, a “normative” character, the character of values […] A world of pure meaning and value is thought of only in so far as the being which has its place in consciousness mirrors the content of something trans-conscious. Only in this sense, does the act of our consciousness intend pure meaning. If the root of the noesis lies deep in the intelligible Universal and is determined by it, then the act of consciousness, mirroring the content of that which sees itself, becomes normative and becomes an act of realization of value (Nishida 1958, 92-3).
30Here, Nishida not only provides his understanding of the intelligible world but also of the intelligible self which opposes the conscious self as ‘objectively given’ and “mirrors the content of something trans-conscious” (Nishida 1958, 92). At the deepest level, consciousness acts upon itself. However, Nishida’s philosophical system tends to go deeper into the world and is immanent in it, much like Nāgārjuna did before him. At the same time, final basho is a richly religious experience, and not a philosophical one unless philosophy is viewed from the Eastern perspective, as a way of life. Furthermore, Nishida’s concept of Basho has ontological, metaphysical, and epistemological aspects and demonstrates that the particular emerges from, and is made possible by, the whole which is unified and continuous. In this context, Robert Carter’s assertion that the concept of nothingness in Nishida’s philosophy causes a transformation and turns philosophy into poetry, where “poetry becomes a way of living, of acting, of viewing all things as the cosmos” is insightful (Carter 1997, 89). It is in this sense that philosophy becomes a way of life and Nishida’s philosophy can be envisioned just like that. In Nishida’s philosophical framework, the metaphysical ramifications of such poetic envisioning, which asserts that the self and the world are both dynamic and self-determining, however, are accommodating of a specific relation, namely, of contradiction: Nishida states, “[t]he world of reality is essentially the one as well as the many […] [and] That is why I call the world of reality ‘absolute contradictory self-identity’ [or ‘unity of opposites’]” (Nishida 1958, 163). However, in Bergson's philosophy, the concepts of nothing, non-being, and negation (which are manifestations of the relation of contradiction) are transformed into “pseudo-problems” (Bergson 1944, 302), which I discuss in more detail in the following section.
31In his later writings, Nishida made efforts to grasp the actual lived experience in addition to the logical, metaphysical, and epistemological concerns resulting from his philosophy, and he proposed that the concept of the place (basho) of absolute nothingness serves as the basis of the self and the world. This seemingly stems from his approach of refining concepts such that the self-awareness arising from the place of absolute nothingness becomes transparent in the act in which the self’s annulment and its culmination into the nothingness takes place. Nishida once said, “[w]e have to refine in a new way the ore of Eastern culture that includes such precious metals,” where Michel Dalissier contends that the process of refining emptiness must be interpreted in an ontological sense (Dalissier 2010, 137-8). To distinguish his own position which is attentive to the place of absolute nothingness from other forms of culture, Nishida lays out some essential differences between the cultures of the East and the West in the third chapter of Fundamental Problems of Philosophy (1970) titled “The forms of culture of the classical periods of East and West seen from a metaphysical perspective.” According to Nishida, the idea of form as reality where even “the flux of Heraclitus was [considered] as logos” emanated from Greek culture which serves as the foundation for Western culture. He claims that the idea of personality — God’s relationship with man as articulated via a covenant — in Western civilization was made possible by Christian culture and Israelite religion. In the changing socio-religious contexts where the focus moved from form to reality and finally to person (“God was the absolute person”), Nishida traces an emergence of the philosophy of nothingness (Nishida 1970, 239). He traverses eastward to India to suggest the grounds for nothingness for Brahmanic religion which catered to a denial of all things including personality. Nishida set apart the Chinese culture from both Indian and the Judeo-Christian religion by emphasizing the development of its social ritual (Sitte) which is at once rooted in “the Way of man” as it is in “the Way of heaven” and suggests that the concepts of nothingness as they developed in India and China differ from one another as the former considered it “a denial of knowledge by knowledge” while the latter viewed it as “a denial of practice by practice” (Nishida 1970, 241-44). Nishida provides these opposing worldviews from the cultures of East and West to situate and characterize the Japanese culture as based on the articulations of the idea of nothingness. From a philosophical point of view, Nishida attempts to trace a refinement of reality as both being and non-being that participates in a dialectical tendency where “[s]elf-determining reality, i.e., dynamic reality, must [also always] be self-contradictory” (Nishida 1970, 246). Thus, within the cultures of East, Indian and Chinese cultures can be characterized as cultures of nothingness, but Japanese culture differs from them in its articulation of the idea of nothingness which is expressed through what Nishida refers to as “pure feeling” (Nishida 1970, 248; Dalissier 2010, 145). As Michiko Yusa explains Nishida’s cultural typology between the “Christian West” and the “Buddhist East” with their particular philosophical approaches grounded in being and non-being projects his intention to affirm each culture’s “uniqueness in the global society, even though it originally developed itself by interaction with other cultures. Only that way can it contribute to the formation of a truly global culture” (Yusa 2002, 260). The cultural typology of Nishida can then be viewed as a movement from being to non-being and finally towards nothingness “which enables a being to reach his or her place and take rest there” (Dalissier 2012, 477-81). According to Nishida, the nature of movement is temporal here as the “present determines present itself” and is not determined either by the past or the future: “[h]erein the ‘form of the formless, the voice of the voiceless’, can be conceived” (Nishida 1970, 252). The “infinite movement” that can only be felt and not intellectually determined or “be frozen spatially” is what Nishida emphasizes (Nishida 1970, 252). Thus, Nishida is able to convey the concept of the self as a “self-determination of the temporal vector” by conceiving of time as a category of reality (self-determination of the absolute present) and the world as a dynamic expression where the self exists by negating the world's spatial dimension (Nishida 1987b, 64). An individual’s expression arises as a response to the underlying contradiction, which projects a common matrix where the self and the world, the one and the many, exist simultaneously. Nishida states:
We form the world by acts of expression. This means, on the contrary, and at the same time, that we form ourselves as viewpoints of the world. The world forms itself, as negating unity of innumerable individuals which form themselves (Nishida 1958, 197).
32According to Nishida, the true self which is based on this kind of universal reconciliation also expresses profound affinity with God who is described as “the foundation of infinite activity”:
A deep understanding of nature cannot but acknowledge a spiritual unity at its ground. Further, to be true and complete, spirit must be at one with nature; that is to say, there is only one reality […] [which] is an independent and self-sufficient infinite activity. And it is to the foundation of this infinite activity that we affix the name of God. God is certainly not something transcending this reality from outside. The foundation of reality is directly God; God is what unites spirit and nature as one by doing away with the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity (Nishida 1990, 96).
33In the above-mentioned statement, Nishida is offering a theological interpretation of nothingness and a religious insight by understanding God as the foundation of infinite activity. By doing this, Nishida is able to reveal a dialectical plane on which the transcendental views (from the Christian West) and immanent views (from the Buddhist East) about God operate. At the level of semantic function, Nishida’s concept of God, absolute nothingness, the self and the world are woven by “the logical matrix of the co-determination of binary opposites” where the one always contains and carries the transcription of the other (Nishida 1987b, 26). Thus, as Yasuhiko Sugimura rightly states, “[w]hat is at stake here is ultimately the fact of discerning with each advent of ‘pure experience’ the ‘self-reflective' unification — in the sense of ‘self-shimmering’ — which itself illuminates even from the inside” (Sugimura 2015, 93). This conversion of the self through reflection and refinement represents a movement which culminates into the unity of consciousness as the final state. According to Nishida, it not only serves as the point of convergence for philosophy and religion but also provides the ground for unity and intimacy with the other where love can be conceived, in the sense of self-shimmering and modulating tendencies felt through “motion-in-stillness, stillness-in-motion” (Keiji 1991, 147). As Nishida states in his lecture titled “Coincidentia Oppositorum and Love” (1919) which was delivered at Otani University, Kyoto, it is love that allows the contradiction of the self and the other to sustain itself and provides a positive expression to the entire process. Nishida contends:
At first all forms of consciousness are independent of one another and are incompatible. By consolidating them into a unifying whole, in the way of coincident oppositorum, we create the feeling of love. Love is the result of bringing into the unity of coincidence the opposition of self and other, the contradiction arising from incompatibility of benefit and harm. Such a love cannot be explained logically, but what we call in logical terms “coincidentia oppositorum” takes the form of love on the stage of everyday life becoming the basis of all things (Nishida 1997, 11).
34Thus, according to Nishida, when all forms of consciousness are combined into one unifying whole, a process of fusion between the self and the other occurs, and the resulting emotion is termed as love. In the essay titled “The Place of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview,” Nishida notes that realizing the self’s own inherent existence marks the beginning of authentic religious experience. This is particularly so because the structure of this realization is based on absolute contradiction: Nishida states, “the self truly realizes its own temporal uniqueness as it faces its own eternal negation” (Nishida 1987b, 67). Nishida is able to break free from the language of causality and incorporate contradiction by placing self-awareness in a temporal locus whose frontiers are always open and non-spatial. In this way, the presence of the true self, which emerges free from the presuppositions and conditions determining its existence, is confirmed by the negation of the self. As Dalissier notes, nothingness and negation become “the fundamental reality, which allows one to conceive a qualitative infinite. This qualitative infinite […] allows for the comprehension of nothingness as the place evading infinite qualification, the alternation of presence and absence of qualities” (Dalissier 2009, 74).
35Since an absolute being cannot be derived by merely opposing the relative, and since the relationship between the human and divine cannot be solely based on transcendence, Nishida contends that the Christian conception of God fails to accurately depict the true religious experience. Accordingly, Nishida mentions the episode in which Isaiah stands before God and cries, “[w]oe to me! For I am undone! Because I am a man of unclean lips! Because my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts” (Nishida 1987b, 68) to argue that the self must cease to exist when faced with the absolute. According to Nishida, “God […] is truly absolute by being opposed to nothing” and possesses absolute negation within itself (Nishida 1987b, 68-9). Paradoxically, the absolute which exists without being related to the relative in logical terms but through its own self-negation is able to “return to itself in the form of the relative” which allows the true absolute to express itself in the form of infinite many (Nishida 1987b, 69). The logical structure of Nishida’s philosophy is established by this insight based on absolutely contradictory identity, which enables him to assert that “because there is Buddha, there are sentient beings, and because there are sentient beings, there is Buddha” (Nishida 1987b, 69). Thus, the self, reflecting on its own existential depths serves as the starting point for a truly religious experience. The resulting self-conscious view which is based on negation not only permits the “religious exigency” but also reveals the existential fact on which the paradox of God is based (Nishida 1987b, 77). Nishida regards the essence of man as a deeply religious question and argues that even in Eastern forms of Mahayana Buddhism (the Zen sect and the True Pure Land sect or Jōdo Shinshū which speak of self-power and other-power) the path to Enlightenment is not properly understood. According to Nishida, the question of religion arises from not what the self “should be” but what self “is”; For Nishida, the self's own existence, or “the self's very is and is not,” is where the question of religion derives its existential matrix (Nishida 1987b, 80, 76). Therefore, from Nishida’s point of view, the self making efforts to leap towards the objective plane at which the God or Buddha has been placed through a dialectic of negation and affirmation can be characterized as self-power and do not in any way qualify as a true religious act. Similar to this, depending on Amida Buddha to deliver oneself from “fiery evil passions” can be characterized as other-power but has no theological basis (Nishida 1987b, 79). According to Nishida, the religious form of life is informed by absolute nothingness and self-negation, which serve as the essential foundation that highlight the existential nature of the self. Thus, through his detailed analogies to the Buddhist tradition and the Western conception of God, Nishida demonstrates the complex paradoxical structure of negation and affirmation and how the self and the world are co-determined in a mutual and reciprocal manner. Nishida employs the method of deriving incontestable principles to lay out his philosophical framework and his detailed analysis to explain the paradoxical nature of the absolute underlines the influence of Western thinkers on him. However, Nishida’s philosophical program and the religious worldview completely differs from those cultures which considered being as the foundation of reality. Nishida, in fact, refines the concepts generally associated with Eastern cultures to argue about the self-determining dynamic reality which does not proceed from the self to the absolute nothingness through negation but is revealed by plunging into the emptiness, into “depth of time” (jikan no soko) (Dalissier 2010, 155).
36For Bergson, the argument about nothingness which emerges from plunging into emptiness is contradictory as it circles around that which it tries to refute, that is, everything. Bergson argues that “the idea of Nothing […] is self-destructive and reduced to a mere word; and that if, on the contrary, it is truly an idea, then we find in it as much matter as in the idea of All” (Bergson 1944, 324). According to Nishida, the emphasis on duration in Bergson’s philosophy is recognizably similar to his own philosophical framework, but like other Western thinkers, Bergson did not delve deeper into the unified consciousness to realize how the one and the many mutually affirm and negate each other, depicting the “absolute contradictory self-identity” as a structural biconditionality for their existence. Here, the point of divergence which appears between Nishida and Bergson’s philosophical framework is based on how they interpret contradiction and consequently provide different approaches to nothingness. According to Bergson, the logic of paradox which operates and determines the relationship between the self and the world remains a paradox as such since there is something which always subsists within nothing. For Bergson, a complete “letting go of one’s ego” so that a genuine philosophy of nothingness can emerge (as Nishida stated in his letter to Tanabe Hajime; Wilkinson 2009, 151) is impossible to attain. As Bergson argues, the real problem lies in the mistaken use of expressions like ‘more and less’ and ‘empty and full’. According to Bergson, “full is an embroidery on the canvas of the void” and “[j]ust as we pass through the immobile to go to the moving, so we make use of the void to think the full,” consequently, a utilitarian perspective emerges, where the self which is dissatisfied with the present reality tends to seek “the absence of this sought-for reality wherever we find the presence of another” (Bergson 1944, 300, 298). Bergson considers the static habit as the underlying cause of the metaphysical problem about the “idea of nothingness,” which leads to substitution of something with nothing.
37In the fourth chapter of Creative Evolution (1907), Bergson provides a critical exposition of the idea of nothing and disorder to argue that nothing always implies the presence of something. Bergson argues that other Western thinkers have generally paid little attention to the concept of nothing (a claim Nishida also makes later in his works) and side-lined the “intimate connection in which I stand to the rest of the universe” (Bergson 1944, 298). According to Bergson, the issue of disorder has epistemological ramifications because it is a “fundamental problem of knowledge” and is accompanied by suppression of that order which is not possible (Bergson 1944, 298). Disorder is derived from order which is treated as real in Bergson’s philosophical framework and the two forms that order can take (namely, the mechanistic and vital) are not drawn in relation to absolute nothingness. Instead, the absence of one presupposes the presence of other. According to Bergson, the interplay, or the absence/presence of these two forms of order totally dissolve the implication of disorder as an idea. As a result, Bergson argues “all that is left of disorder is a word” (Bergson 1944, 299). Since Bergson argues that the movement from presence to absence (or order to disorder) does not dissolve into the abyss of nothingness, this reinforces the illusion that surrounds the philosophy of absolute nothingness. In discussing the idea of nothing Bergson is not simply treating it as a pseudo-problem but carefully undoing it to explain the additive function by which something appears from nothing. It is in this way that Bergson works out his own position which treats negation, the void and nothing as “radically false conception” (Bergson 1944, 299). In the Bergsonian system, the idea of nothing is a false premise since it is derived from the presence of being and Bergson chose to discuss it in Creative Evolution to pit it against a moving model of duration based on continual becoming. As Vladimir Jankélévitch notes, Bergson’s philosophy follows the pattern of life which is “not bound to choose between the one and the many, between identity without nuances and alterity without coherence” (Jankélévitch 2015, 31). Bergson’s position is mobile, fluid and caters to a flow which cannot be curtailed by disjunctive arguments on which, according to him, the issue of being and non-being rests. Bergson frames the entire debate of existence which is made to appear “as a conquest over nought” (Bergson 1944, 300) from the lens of freedom and argues that dogmatic philosophy fails to appreciate reality which endures as it is not being perceived as having conquered non-existence and subsequently posited itself. This intention is what gives “true being” its logical existence, as opposed to its psychological existence (Bergson 1944, 301). However, Bergson demonstrates that from a logical schema, a circle drawn on the board presupposes the “logical essence” of the circle (that is, the definition of the circle) which is eternal. Bergson states that the principle of circle can be seen as the evidence to suppose that there is a principle on which everything rests. The foundation of everything, however, would then be eternity rather than nothingness if it were based on a principle similar to the one that defines a circle. Additionally, all existence would appear as a logical axiom following the principle on which everything rests and therefore negate the possibility of free choice “either in the things or in their principles” (Bergson 1944, 301). Thus, the idea of novelty disappears if possibility predates reality in such a closed and mathematical system. Bergson considers such logical entailment as “conclusions of a doctrine like that of Spinoza, or even that of Leibniz […]” (Bergson 1944, 302). Therefore, the idea of nothing becomes a pseudo-problem as it always entails the idea of everything making it impossible to eliminate the self from the image of nothing: Bergson argues, “[a]t the very instant my consciousness is extinguished, another consciousness lights up — or rather, it was already alight: it had arisen the instant before, in order to witness the extinction of the first […]” (Bergson 1944, 303). The continual perception of negation from without (a state of Cartesian doubt where the external world is reduced to its bare minimum) or from within (the abolition of the self which, in turn, posits itself as an external entity gradually dissipating) manifests in the image of nothing. Within this perceptual field, Bergson argues about a point which is equidistant from the above-mentioned negations, and it is precisely here that the image of nothing is formed. Since both the points are in reality perceived as “perpetual[ly] leaping from one to another” the image of nothing, then, is “an image full of things, an image that includes at once that of the subject and that of the object” (Bergson 1944, 304).
38This Bergsonian demonstration of nothing as an image of fullness counters the implication of emptiness that is generally associated with it and undercuts the primacy accorded to it (which enables the conquest of existence over nothing). According to Bergson, since nothing never excludes the presence of something, the opposition arising between being and non-being becomes a false proposition which, in turn, illuminates the use of negation in the very critique of nothingness he advances. Bergson rejects the type of negation which entails an opposition between being and non-being from which a higher dialectical synthesis might be reached. For Bergson, negation is conceived in a temporal sense imbuing a deeply psychological character to it. Thus, within Bergsonian framework, negation does not imply an objective reality (since it always includes at once the subject and the object) but a function to differentiate the active present from the inactive past. As Bergson suggests in his explanation about the function of vision, the purpose to visualize an object also relies on concealing certain aspects “so that the remainder, instead of being encased in its surroundings as a thing, should detach itself from them as a picture” (Bergson 1919, 28). Negation is the operation through which life conceals certain aspects “so that the underlying reality […] that of duration, [with] its fullness, continuity, unity, and in which nothing stands out, but everything interacts or interpenetrates” is revealed (Kebede 2017, 69). The way in which Bergson articulates negation as a function is a reworking of the metaphysical conundrum, which he claims has been read incorrectly by philosophers. By conceiving negation in terms of an ontological opposition between what is and what is not, the static tendency which abounds in spatial sense arises. As a result, to think of existence implies locating being in space and “subsuming it to the present” which proceeds to sublating thesis (being) and the antithesis (non-being) or conversely, as Martina Ferrari states, “purging of creative negation from being” (Ferrari 2017, 240). Bergson situates negation at the center of active life since disorder “corresponds to the disappointment of a certain expectation” and compels the self to act upon “that order which does not offer us actual interest” (Bergson 1944, 298). By doing this, Bergson’s integrative framework stands against the ontologically oppositional stance that posits the dualism of being and nothingness. This does not imply that there are not any oppositional concepts in Bergson’s philosophy; rather, it just means that they are not given an ontological status. Hence, the self inheres in negation as it sanctions qualitatively different ways of being through novelty and unpredictability. This negation is not the absence of existence but a representation of the regret of the past or suppressed expectation about an order that might have been as Bergson states, “[f]rom annihilation to negation, which is a more general operation, there is now only a step. All that is necessary is to represent the contrast of what is, not only with what has been, but also with all that might have been” (Bergson 1944, 321). It is in this sense that negation assumes a pedagogical character compelling the intellect to “formulate the disappointment of a real or possible expectation […] in short, propose to teach others or to teach itself” (Bergson 1944, 318). This act of teaching oneself or others implants nothingness into being and their oneness is actualized. In Bergson’s philosophy, the distinction between the subject and the object is reconciled by the unified view of reality. The unpredictability lies in striving to surpass oneself which ultimately reveals the unity of life and matter. Here, negation is functional in the sense that it poses limitations which needs to be overcome to become part of self-generating reality. Negation provides the ground for life to succeed and advance itself which, according to Bergson, is expressed in the feeling of joy.
39In this article, I attended to the intimate relationship between the self and the world which Bergson and Nishida describe in their own ways and reveal the metaphysical specificity of their philosophical systems. I have mapped both the similarities and differences with which Bergson and Nishida articulate their method that attests to the foundation on which the self and the world rests. Bergson and Nishida’s convictions converge around the language of intuition which serve as a valuable alternative to a language which remains loaded with static inferences. Through their intuitive method, Bergson and Nishida made genuine attempts to solve the most fundamental problems of philosophy and alluded to a vision of the one and the many which is embedded in different cultures and religious worldviews. In this sense, their philosophies are both global and local, and play a vital role in understanding the connection that the self shares with the world. Their various perspectives on the self and the world not only demonstrate the richness of their thinking but also what creative philosophies should resemble.