An Inquiry Into the Good

After spending the past six months reading Eastern philosophy almost exclusively, I've reached the end of the list of the original texts I wanted to cover.  Of course, I'm now even more painfully aware of how limited this list was, as every book spawned an interest in three new ones, ranging from other original texts, to the vast secondary literature on Taoism, Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta.  This is hardly the last time I'll study the Asian non-dual philosophies.  But the time has come to look back to the West for a moment.  

Before I did that, however, I noticed an old copy of Kitaro Nishida's first book sitting forlornly on the shelf, only half read two decades ago.  Since the dust jacket billed him as a serious student of both Zen and Western philosophy, I thought he might serve as a perfect pivot point.  And, actually, the book does serve as a good transition, though not quite for the reasons I expected.  An Inquiry Into the Good is not so much a synthesis of Western and Eastern ideas as it is a traditional book of Western philosophy written by someone whose basic worldview is deeply informed by the fundamental experiential insight of any non-dual philosophy -- subject and object aren't always and essentially distinct.  Nishida makes surprisingly little mention of any Eastern writers, thinkers or religious figures.  Instead, at least in this book, he prefers to approach philosophy entirely on Western terms, and speaks more (and positively) about Christ than he speaks about the Buddha.  Yet you can plainly see the influence of Zen ideals that run underneath everything and provide -- to use a phrase Nishisda is fond of -- the alpha and omega of his thought.  In short, An Inquiry Into the Good is Western philosophy elaborated from an Eastern starting point.  Therein lies both its interest and its shortcomings.  

The most interesting part of the book is the way it starts.  In Part 1, Nishida begins with a description of "pure experience" that will serve as the foundation for all his philosophy.  It is immediately obvious that he is describing what I prefer, less judgmentally, to call 'non-dual experience'.  This is the state where subject and object are not yet separate and distinct entities.  It's not an easy experience to describe, which is why most descriptions tend to the metaphorical -- a vast and spacious awareness that is like the sky or the ocean.  Nishida isn't satisfied to rely on these traditional metaphors, and tries to pin down the most salient aspect of the experience in philosophical terms -- namely, that it is not your experience.  You don't have the experience or possess it.  It doesn't happen inside of you as a subjective state.  Instead, it's more like the experience has you, that your everyday self appears inside the experience, as a bit of content that you no longer particularly identify with.  Or as he puts it:

Over time I came to realize that it is not that experience arises because there is an individual, but that an individual arises because there is experience.  (Preface, xxx)

In other words, pure experience does not belong to an experiencing self, but it more like an experience of self.  Hold off on the question of to whom this experience belongs if not you.  

The reason Nishida calls this pure experience is because it does not involve the addition of any conceptual fabrications.  Leave your mind alone.  He has in mind a direct and immediate experience, unmediated by a subjective self, an experience that is unconcerned with identifying or representing anything with concepts.  The initial idea is that all our abstract thinking only comes afterwards, when experience becomes impure, as it were.  Hypotheses like our belief in a material world made of atoms are nothing but abstractions we add to pure experience to make sense of it.  This might at first sound like a version of subjective idealism -- all we can really know about directly are our internal sensations; everything else is just a matter of speculation.  But that reading of it inappropriately installs a primary subjectivity where Nishida sees only a derivative one.  Sensations can be a non-dual experience, but only if they are no longer the sensations of a pre-given subject.  Pure experience isn't about what we usually call our most 'basic' 'inputs'.  We're not looking for the 'atoms' of experience, which in the end would be nothing more than another abstraction created by comparing various experiences.  What makes experience pure is the fact that it is complete in itself.

The directness and purity of pure experience derive not from the experience's being simple, unanalyzable, or instantaneous, but from the strict unity of concrete consciousness. (6)

This seems to me to be a great starting point.  Nishida seems to be trying to ask the largest possible question -- what is experience? -- with the fewest possible presuppositions.  But there are a couple of things about this starting point that should give us pause.  Both the idea of purity and the concept of consciousness seem to me to smuggle in some expectations right from the start.  If we are willing to question the idea that experience belongs to a human self, why wouldn't we go a step further and question the idea that experience needs any unifying consciousness at all?  The word 'consciousness' cannot help but suggest the model of our own individual consciousness, even though this is exactly the assumption we're trying to find a way beyond. In which case the 'unity' that for Nishida is constitutive of experience is immediately in danger of simply duplicating the most familiar unity we have -- our self identity.  Likewise, the word 'purity' has a long and checkered history that is inseparable from its political and moral implications.  Talking about pure experience implies that there is impure experience.  And we all know that impure stuff is both derivative and bad, as well as essentially distinct from the pure stuff.  So it seems that Nishida is surreptitiously introducing a new duality, one carrying 2,000 years of moralistic baggage.

However, these observations are in no way intended as some sort of refutation of his philosophy.  The most interesting aspect of the book is the way that you can see Nishida struggle mightily against the problems these words express.  The difficulty is of course not merely linguistic, though perhaps to really develop any new philosophical concept we need to introduce new words and liberate old ones.  The difficulty lies in consistently thinking outside our selves, outside our own empirical subjectivity, without accidentally reimporting these selves at a transcendental level.  Nishida tries to do this, and fails.  Perhaps this is due in part to his very abstract and propositional style?  I would call it the 'Western' style of philosophy if Plato's genre-bending dialogues didn't sit so uncomfortably with this description; certainly it's the post-Cartesian (pre-Nietzschean) style.  At any rate, as the book progressed I increasingly had the sense that his core non-dual insight was gradually being swallowed up by and tending to return to the same philosophical platitudes that had been imperfectly ejected at the beginning.  I'm certain Nishida was attempting to reach old mystical concepts like, "God is love" and, "Reality is inherently spiritual", from a new angle.  But in this book at least he simply ends up sounding like a Christian mystic.

Intriguingly, Nishida himself would agree with this assessment.  In a preface written 25 years after the initial publication, he sympathizes with critics who regarded it as "too psychological".

As I look at it now, the standpoint of this book is that of consciousness, which might be thought of as a kind of psychologism.  Yet even if people criticize it as being too psychological, there is little I can do now.  I do think, however, that what lay deep in my thought when I wrote it was not something that is merely psychological. (Preface xxxii)

This suggests that it would be interesting to revisit Nishida's philosophy towards the end of his career, when presumably he was able to more faithfully develop his brilliant starting point.  The situation reminded me strongly of Deleuze's comments about the trajectory of Bergson's philosophy:

Bergsonism has often been reduced to the following idea: duration is subjective, and constitutes our internal life.  And it is true that Bergson had to express himself in this way, at least at the outset.  But, increasingly, he came to say something quite different: the only subjectivity is time, non-chronological time grasped in its foundation, and it is we who are internal to time, not the other way round.  That we are in time looks like a commonplace, yet it is the highest paradox.  Time is not the interior in us, but just the opposite, the interiority in which we are, in which we move, live and change.  (Cinema 2, 82)

Of course, Nishida does not begin with the idea that experience is in us.  Quite the contrary.  But what he ends up saying is effectively that experience is in God, that it is a manifestation of God.  Perhaps later he can finally reverse this formula to say that God is in experience.  But here at the beginning of his philosophy, he seems to get trapped in the idea of a divine subjectivity that that is as closed and completed as we, alongside the early Bergson, imagine our own to be.  An open and unfinished God whose unity is anything but given perhaps still awaits us.

Like I say though, the interest of the book lies in the way we can still glimpse the possibility of this new road even if we get lost in the thickets surrounding it.  Accordingly, I want to examine some of these breadcrumbs in the hopes that they will later enable me to return to the original insight.  Maybe the most interesting aspect of Part 1 is the way that Nishida tries to divide experience into categories like representing, thinking, willing, knowing, and intuiting, while simultaneously trying to undo the damage that these distinctions threaten to do to his theory of pure experience.  For example, one his early statements is that pure experience, since it is not representational, is also, strictly speaking, meaningless.  It always happens spontaneously in the present.  Any judgement about the value or meaning of this experiences, or any memory of it, is not pure experience.  Except that memories, plans, and judgements about experience are also experiences in their own right.  They too have to happen in the present, even if their contents is interpreted as belonging to some other time or dimension.  So Nishida is quickly led to passages like this one:

Assuming the pure experience is [already] endowed with discriminations, what are the meanings or judgements added to it and how do they relate to pure experience?  People usually argue that when pure experience is connected to objective reality it generates meaning and takes the form of judgements, but from the perspective of my theory of pure experience, we cannot leave the sphere of pure experience.  Meanings or judgements derive from the connection of a present consciousness to past consciousnesses; meanings and judgements are based on the unifying activity in the great network of consciousness.  They indicate the relation between present consciousness and other consciousnesses, and therefore merely express the position of present consciousness within the network of consciousness. (9)

Here you can already see that Nishida needs some sort of fractal structure to discuss pure experience.  There are unities nested within other unities in a way that threatens to topple the 'purity' of experience into meaninglessness.  If all experience is pure experience, then what does 'pure' add to the description?  A version of this question will appear throughout the book, and it is the underlying force that eventually pushes Nishida to his divine mysticism -- the buck only stops with God's consciousness.

The same problem recurs in the chapter on thinking.  Nishida begins by describing thinking as the subsequent relation of two representations.  In this way it would differ from the immediacy of sense perception.  But this relation of experience is also is an experience of relation.  This opens the door for Nishida to claim that most of our thinking is, like all pure experience, not really ours.  

In the instant it shift from one representation to the next, thinking, too, is unconscious, and as long as the unifying activity is actually functioning it must be unconscious.  By the time we are conscious of this activity as an object, it already belong to the past.  The unifying activity of thinking is in this way completely outside the will. (14)

While this is a suggestive passage, introducing the unconscious here raises more questions than it answers.  Is our unconscious (out-of-conscious) precisely within the consciousness of some larger being?  Are we, as Nishida seems at one point to suggest, merely the differentiated moments in the unified development of something like Hegel's Absolute Spirit?  Is Absolute Spirit the same thing as God and both of these equivalent to Non-dual Awareness?  I don't think these are the same concept.  But if your only image of nested unities is a set of concentric circles, then you will find that the larger space in which your self-consciousness exists looks just like the smaller you.  The point of non-dual awareness cannot simply be to discover that your little ego is inside a bigger ego structured in exactly same way.  This is why, despite the fact that Loy shows us how the two formulations can be philosophy equivalent, I find the Buddhist concept of non-self less easy to misinterpret than Advaita Vedanta's concept of the absolute self.  Throughout An Inquiry Into the Good, Nishida will overload terms like 'self' and 'consciousness' and 'unity' in ways that at first seem like mere problems of terminology but later turn out to undermine his whole project.

We can finally leave behind Part 1 by noticing the same pattern cropping up in the chapter on will.  At first, it seems as if Nishida considers will a distinct and somewhat derivative category of experience that deals with the relations between objective representations of the world and subjective representations of our movement.  If there is no subject nor object in pure experience, then will seems to be the last thing that would qualify as pure.  But then Nishida goes on to once again relativize these distinctions that at first seemed absolute.  In his theory, pure experience is always positing a goal for itself.  This goal is exactly what allows for the experience to have the unity that constitutes it.  In other words, pure experience is inherently teleological, with its end operating from within right from the beginning, and Will is the most fundamental category of experience.  Yet while Nishida makes it clear that he has in mind a larger and more absolute Will, not our small self-centered "free will", it's hard to see how we're not now even more mired in the same problem as before.  Absolute will seems destined to be an absolute subject that harmonizes and unifies the (for it) absolutely objective world of little subjects.  

I won't discuss the rest of the book in detail because I think you can already see its essential trajectory.  Once Nisihida slips into this teleological view of pure experience as carrying its own goal within it as the endpoint of its unifying will, it's almost impossible for his theory of the Good to amount to anything other than God working out his divine plan.  From there, it's downhill into the 'bad mysticism' that has nothing concrete to offer us beyond an assurance that all is one and all is for the good in this most perfect of worlds.  The book gets less interesting the further it goes.  Hopefully I can someday return to the late Nisihida to see how his philosophy changed in response to the charge that he was too "psychological".