西田哲学における行為的自己とフランス哲学における自我と他者

Abstract

It is usual to compare Nishida's philosophy with German idealism, especially Fichte's thought. Is it improper to relate it to French Philosophy? Nishida mentions in the sixth volume of his complete works the stream of the philosophy of sentiment in France that flowed from Pascal's ideas to those of Maine de Biran. He appreciates this philosophical trend because he sees it developing and deepening the self-consciousness discovered by Descartes as cogito in the same direction as he is pursuing it. Nishida considers a type of judgment in which the special is subsumed by the general as the fundamental structure of our experience and rewrites it with elementary logic in the form of a subject and predicate. He then attains the concepts of place and the individual in the subsuming judgment by pushing the specific and the general toward subject and predicate, respectively, to the extreme: The “individual” is the last subject that could never turn into a predicate, and reciprocally, place, named the “concrete universal” at this stage, is the last predicate that could never turn into a subject. The concrete universal is a place where the individuals are put, or exist, and in this case, the whole individuals constitute the natural world. However, what is truly individual could be nothing other than what is truly personal. Can a person take his place in the concrete universal to be situated in the natural world? Descartes' cogito sum has already given a negative answer to this question. Even if the existence of the entire universe is uncertain, I exist absolutely as long as I do not cease thinking. Yet, where am I? Nishida finds the Cartesian ego in the self-conscious universal that extends below the concrete universal and envelops it. The self-conscious universal constitutes a sphere of consciousness where the ego resides in different modes according to the profundity of self-consciousness. However, the self-conscious universal is still no more than a limited and abstract plan of the active universal, so that the Cartesian ego is a shadow of one of the active selves determined by the active universal. That is, a shadow of the intellectual active self that corresponds to consciousness in general in Kant's philosophy. The active self in its intellectual mode remains purely formal and does not yet possess its proper content. Fichte tried to fill this formal self and mistook the transcendent will for an active self. It is Maine de Biran, Nishida thinks, who took the proper direction, going toward, not noema, but noesis, and finding sentiment intime or intérieur as the substance of the active self. Writing of his favorite, Bergson, Nishida claims that this French philosopher's concept of pure duration must be the content of the consciousness in general. While Kant largely formalized the intellectual active self to minimize its content, Bergson maximized its content as pure duration to minimize its formal aspect. In this sense, Bergson followed Maine de Biran. What is the difference between them? In Nishida's view, the individual is active as long as it determines itself by itself, but this self-determination is effective only if the individual determines itself against other individuals. The active self undergoes self-determination by seeing the absolute other in itself and reciprocally by seeing itself in the absolute other. The difference is that in Biranism the absolute other is matter whereas in Bergsonism it is other life. As matter is, from Nishida's perspective, an abstract aspect of personal individual life, the Bergsonian self would have a deeper and richer self-consciousness than the Biranian self. However, in the pure duration of Bergsonism, the self-determination of the active self does not imply self-negation. Nishida thinks that in pure duration, the self passes to itself continuously because there the self-determination does not operate against the absolute other, namely, the other person, or “thou.”

Is it anachronistic to point out some similarities between Nishida's position and today's French phenomenology concerning the problem of the other person? In Nishida, the active self determines itself against the other person in such a way that the active self sees the other person within itself and at the same time sees itself within the other person. The active self absolutely denies itself by opposing itself against the other self and has to die to become revived in the latter. In Nishida's expression of this, one can formulate that the active self breaks through its own base to meet the other self. Self-love is accomplished with the love of others. Moreover, the active self is obtained by transcending the conscious self toward the noesis of intentionality, and this transcendence means a kind of phenomenological reduction of time to the self-determination of the eternal now (nunc aeternum) that continuously begins anew as instants. This self-determination is nothing else than the self-determination of the active self as freedom. The contemporaneous French philosophers Lévinas and Henry also try to go beyond the Heideggerian Being, the essence of which is time, to grasp the unique way of being of the ego and alter ego. For Lévinas, who sees the same structure in both temporizing consciousness and the linguistic act of constituting a sense of proposition, the sense of being of other persons is absolutely independent of the intentionality of consciousness, because the other as an interlocutor could never be the sense of words, namely, the sense of the words “the other”, but must be the foundation of communication within which every sense or idea represented by words respires and lives. I cannot intentionally constitute the other. On the contrary, it is the other who summons me to existence as responsible to him. It is not true that I am responsible to him because of my freedom. I am free because of my responsibility to him. I give him myself before any deliberation and in the absolute passivity prior to any passive or active relation. I exist as long as I am a hostage or a substitute for him. The other exists in the heart of my being and my existence is not intelligible without ethical relation with other persons. Finally, Henry discovers, within the Heideggerian Being rather than beyond it, my existence or the way of the ego's being. The ego can no longer be constituted by intentionality within time, but it receives itself to exist, by self-affection in the mode of absolute passivity. Henry's concept of absolute passivity consists of self-affection while Lévinas indicates self-donation with the same concept. For Henry, self-affection is the definition of life as far as life is characterized by sensibility or affectivity, and, explaining the absolute passivity of self-affection, he refers to Life that operates at the base of my life. Life is a perpetual movement receiving itself, and my life as well as every other life receives itself in the movement of Life, carried with this movement. Therefore, one finds at the base of his existence, through its absolute passivity revealed in his affective experience, the Other or Life that transcends him inside, in the heart of his being, rendering it to him, and opening toward other individual lives. Henry also sees in the ego, like Nishida and Lévinas, the other in a large sense of this term, as a decisive constituent of its being.