John Krummel 

Thinking the Float Tank – Thursday, August 24, 2023 (Day 1)

Self-Awareness in Nishida and Beyond: Reflection and Inter-Reflection, Indeterminacy and Infinity

Speaker Bio: 

Associate Professor in Religious Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.  Author of Nishida Kitarō’s Chiasmatic Chorology: Place of Dialectic, Dialectic of Place (Indiana University Press); and of essays on Heidegger, Nishida, Kyoto School, phenomenology, and Buddhist philosophy. Translator of works from Japanese and German. Editor of Contemporary Japanese Philosophy: A Reader (Roman & Littlefield International) and co-translator and introduction author of Place and Dialectic: Two Essays by Nishida Kitarō (Oxford University Press). Associate Editor, International Journal of Social Imaginaries (Brill), Editor, Journal of Japanese Philosophy (SUNY Press), and President, International Association for Japanese Philosophy.

Abstract:

In my presentation I will discuss the concept of self-awareness (jikaku 自覚) in the thought of the modern Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō (西田幾多郎) (Kitarō Nishida) (1870-1945), founder of the Kyoto School. Self-awareness is a unifying theme throughout Nishida’s oeuvre, but especially his 1917 work Intuition and Reflection in Self-Awareness articulates his notion of self-awareness as involving a dialectic whereby intuition leads to a reflection on it, which then as a new intuition leads to a further reflection in an ongoing process. Nishida interprets this process of self-awareness as an endless self-mirroring—self-reflection as reflexivity—founded upon the premise assumed by the articulated image or object of awareness, a premise necessarily irreducible, and in excess, to the image or object. Nishida eventually designates this premise, assumed throughout this process, the “absolute nothing” (zettai mu 絶対無). To explain this Nishida makes use of Josiah Royce’s notion of a self-representative system as well as Richard Dedekind’s notion of an infinite system in his set theory. On the basis of Nishida’s references to the mathematics of set theory, I further compare his understanding of self-awareness to Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems as well as to more recent mathematical theorists, influenced by Gödel, whose understanding of the infinite resonate with Nishida’s understanding of the “absolute nothing” as the indeterminate assumed by determination. If self-awareness is the determination of the indeterminate, the finitization of the infinite, what happens when the determining filters or valves are altered or shut off? Speculating on this, I will discuss Aldous Huxley’s use of Henri Bergson’s theory that the senses filter the reception of data and Huxley’s suggestion that psychedelics like mescalin turns off those filters that shape our ordinary experience; and John Lilly’s sensory deprivation tank as perhaps then paradoxically opening us, instead of withdrawing us from, the world outside. What then would the implication be of the Mahayana Buddhist metaphor of Indra’s net of inter-reflecting jewels from the Avatamsaka Sutra, that Nishida himself alludes to in later works, for his notion of self-awareness as reductively mirroring the irreducible and indeterminate nothing?