若き西田幾多郎の生の倫理 --新資料「倫理学講義ノート」におけるギュイヨー受容--

Abstract

From September 1910, four years after the lecture on ethics at Shiko (四高) which formed the basis of the third volume of his An Inquiry into the Good, Nishida Kitaro gave a set of lectures at Kyoto Imperial University. In lecture notes prepared for this occasion, he presented a view of the good as an “expansion of life”. Behind this assertion was the thought of Jean-Marie Guyau (1854-1888), who, along with Henri Bergson, is an important figure in discourses concerning the philosophy of life in the French-speaking world. In this paper, I interpret Nishida’s ethical thought as an “ethics of life” and discuss its characteristics, taking the young Nishida’s acceptance of Guyau as a clue. When Nishida viewed the moral good as an extension of life, the treatment of moral obligation became problematic, since obligation is often conceived of as something that suppresses life. Nishida had already criticized the obligation to suppress one’s own desires unnecessarily, and sought to find the essence of moral obligation in a greater desire in Part III of An Inquiry into the Good. At this stage, however, Nishida was reluctant to evaluate the ethical value of “life” or “vitality, ” criticizing the idea that the enhancement of vitality is the standard of value. In preparing his Lecture Notes on Ethics Nishida read Guyau's Esquisse d’Une Morale Sans Obligation Ni Sanction. He was then exposed to the idea that life consumes and expands itself based on the principle of fertility, and that the natural developmental process of life can explain our sense of duty. In this paper, I argue that Nishida's acceptance of Guyau’s idea of “morality without obligation” is the background for his view of the “good” as the expansion of life in his Lecture Notes on Ethics. In his Lecture Notes on Ethics, Nishida also quotes several interesting episodes from Guyau’s Esquisse d’Une Morale Sans Obligation Ni Sanction. These quotations reveal the particular aspects of Guyau’s view of life with which Nishida sympathized. By including quotes from these episodes as clues to Nishida’s acceptance of Guyau, this paper will clarify Nishida’s ethical philosophy of life.