Moral Circle and the Self: Chinese and Western Approaches Book

I can't say that I actually finished this book -- I'm giving up on it now at page 80. That is, I finished the introduction by David A. Dilworth and got halfway through the essay "The Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview."

Nishida is very difficult to read. Even after reading James Heisig's "Philosophers of Nothingness," I found myself high and dry with Nishida. It feels as if he's writing these ideas down in the form they come to him, which must be easy for him, but is very hard for me. There are ideas here that I simply don't understand, and then there are ways of saying things that are more confusing than they might otherwise be. I am impressed with anyone who can read Nishida and understand him straight-forwardly.

Unfortunately the introduction, which might be expected to shed light on the main text, is almost as opaque. David A. Dilworth is riffing on Nishida's ideas and trying to contextualize them with other complicated ideas, he isn't trying to clarify the text for bewildered readers. That's too bad. There's also this sense, which is hard to explain exactly, that Dilworth is just a bit too excited. His tone is not that of a steady, balanced scholar whose claims are in within the bounds of decorum. Instead, he seems thrilled, and so a bit unbalanced, as if he might make claims that other Nishida scholars would find outrageous. The problem is, I am still so new to Nishida that I can't really judge whether he is being judicious or daring.

As for Nishida's ideas themselves, I found them very interesting. I would love to eventually finish this whole book, and other Nishida books. One idea that struck me as interesting is his identification of self and world as a monad. A lot of us growing up in the English-speaking world live with a certain picture of how things are: there is a world, big and sprawling, that exists apart from any individual self. Selves poke around in this world and then die. The world doesn't need selves to exist, and selves are actually kind of random, the kind of things we would ignore if we didn't happen to be selves ourselves (if you follow me).

In Nishida's view, though, self and world are inseparable. They are different from each other, of course, but not that different, because one only makes sense as the opposite of the other. In a way, your whole world (that is, the part of the world you know and makes sense to you) is an expression of who you are, and at the same time you are an expression of what the world is. But this isn't just the idea that nothing exists except what you see (i.e. solipsistic idealism) -- it's more like, you and your world are one inseparable whole together (a monad). Well, I may have that wrong, but I liked that.

Another good idea that stuck with me is Nishida's definition of the religious. He takes Kierkegaard's distinction between the religious and the moral: morality (what we do) is not that same as religion. You can be a very well-behaved person, even a heroic person, without being religious. That's why Nishida says: "Some thinkers neglect this point and try to conceive of God and to discuss religion merely from the human side. They are not even aware of a clear distinction between religious and moral questions. This is comparable to shooting a bow while blindfolded" (78-79).

For Nishida, you can never think about religion merely from the human side, because the question of human identity immediately brings up the question of religion. Our own existence is contradictory and confusing. His main example of contradiction is kind of confusing, but here it is -- once you can conceive of your own death, you have become a self. In other words, if your own death is not a concern to you, you don't really have any strong idea of who or what you are. However, as soon as you conceive of your own death and think about it, you have in some sense transcended it. But then you are kind of stuck in this contradiction: transcending your own death even as you can't escape it.

The more you contemplate yourself, the more contradictions you find. I just gave you the only example he gives in the book as far as I read, but presumably there are lots of other contradictions. You have almost a ladder of contradictions going down, down, down into your being. Maybe you think that at the bottom of these contradictions will be something stable, robust, and solid, your "self." Not so, says Nishida. It's contradiction all the way down!

However, this endless chain of contradictions has to be located somewhere. Nishida locates in "absolute nothingness," an idea which sounds depressing but really isn't. It just means a "something" which is so lacking in characteristics or qualities that it isn't anything at all. It's roughly equivalent to the Mahayana idea of "emptiness." Nishida puts his own spin on it by saying that it's also God -- the God that Christians write and think about is really absolute nothingness.

So your own existence is an endless chain of contradiction suspended within God/Buddha/absolute nothingness. If you peer into the "bottomless depths of your soul," then, you'll find God/Buddha welling up in you. But in a way this is another one of your contradictions, to be always the same as, but always different from God/Buddha/absolute nothingness. To make this point he quotes the Buddhist Daito Kokushi:

Buddha and I, distinct through a billion kalpas of time,
Yet not separate for one instant;
Facing each other the whole day through,
Yet not facing each other for an instant.

So, long story short, as soon as you start asking the question "What am I?," you start asking the question "What is God?" In a way, your own existence is like a crisis can only be resolved in God. If you start to contemplate your own existence, you'll start to see this crisis, but at the same time become open to the religious dimension of life.

I'm not sure how much of that I can agree with, but it's immensely thought provoking. Hopefully some time soon I'll be able to follow up my interest in Nishida and his work.