ＲＥＶＩＥＷＳ ｉｎｄｅｘ James and Nishida
Preface
In this paper I intend to conduct a comparative study of the philosophy
of William James and Kitaro Nishida, especially concerning the issue of
'pure experience' on which their epistemological and metaphysical ideas
in philosophy are based. What I have to mention beforehand is that my statement
depends on James's idea of 'pure experience' and, therefore, is likely
to have a narrowness to start and end in a one-sided view. I think it may
be meaningful in a sense if this paper is considered to be a review on
'pure experience' of Nishida by a researcher who has dabbled in James's
thought.
However, it is a fact that this paper does not engage in a pursuit of
their ideas in great detail and has a roughness only to spell out the relationship
between them episodically. Fortunately, as the research on 'Nishida philosophy'
is being performed not only by his pupils but also by pupils at second
hand and other people(1) as well and the relationship with James is almost
always described there, academic people will not lack the materials to
know their connection. In that sense, if this paper is enumerated as one
of many essays that describe the relationship between their ideas, I shall
be glad of that.
Ⅰ James and Nishida as 'the researcher of life'
At first, I have to clarify what 'pure experience' really means before
taking the theme of this chapter. When those who believe in the existence
of pure experience think about the experience analytically, they especially
emphasize that there are two kinds of experience, i.e., the immediate and
the reflective because of repugnance against the idea that the so-called
experience all consists of our 'reflection'. As a matter of fact, they
regard highly the immediate experience without reflection. In that case,
to be more thorough, they suppose that the adjective 'immediate' connotes
'pure' on the assumption that only this immediate experience is a true
one.
I maintain this idea was generally accepted and the pure experience became
another name for immediate experience. The pure experience, therefore,
mostly means the immediate experience itself, and it has been concretely
explained based on a standpoint that recognizes the existence of the original
fact without the difference between subject and object.
As it is well-known, this term 'pure experience', which has come to be
known in the world of philosophy, emerges from the "empirio-criticism"
advocated by R. Avenarius. In his book, The Critique of Pure Experience,
he asserted that the experience depended on the sensuous movement if all
apriorisms and metaphysical categories were removed from the content of
experience and that this was to be called 'pure experience'.
E. Mach, from an original standpoint that differed from Avenarius, had
a similar idea. He considered the experience to be an 'element' which was
something mediate, neither thing nor mind and concluded that it was determined
by "the relation of functional dependence" whether it would be
a thing or a mind.(2) In the background of their definitions, one should
be made aware of the fact that there was a new movement to overcome a philosophical
discord between rationalism and empiricism or between materialism and idealism.
And, though this "empirio-criticism" has been born in the Continent,
it is in the genealogy of empiricism with intention of correcting the incompleteness
in it, and, in that sense, it has the same root as the empiricism of James.
Though this criticism became famous in the philosophical history because
it was criticized as an idealism, which was actually subjective in spite
of being nominally neutral, by Lenin's Materialism and Empirio Criticism,
it did not become extensively well-known and only played the role of a
pioneer that had influence on people and thought in the age following them.
However, the idea of pure experience (including the following James's
definition) can be supposed as a new empiricism that confronts a new rationalism
in the philosophical world at that time in the West. In a sense it was
taken to have a broad meaning and application as an accepted term. Therefore,
I am interested in a statement of Kitaro Nishida, who was able to see things
coolly from a distance, "there are two 'schools of epistemology',
that is, 'a school of pure logic' and 'a school of pure empiricism'."(3)
I myself feel that this description of Nishida proved to be true. The
concept of pure experience is not heterodoxy in the empirical thought,
but it is an idea which will be naturally derived as long as we try to
see the experience as it is literally and follow the experience to the
finality. Such an idea, however, did not become predominant not only because
philosophy was under the control of intellectualism according to James's
standpoint, but also because there, in general, was not an idea that the
experience without any reflection should be proved real in our life.(4)
Even if "the school of pure empiricism", as Nishida said, was
not in the ascendant, it was an unmistakable fact that it played a role
as a foundation from which the following analytic philosophy or logical
positivism was derived. In my opinion, this analytic philosophy or logical
positivism might have come to represent a modern empirical philosophy as
it had some intellectualistic tendency.
Now we should get down to the subject by finishing with the consideration
of the horizontal part (the fringe part in James's words) around 'pure
experience'. First of all, what did Nishida think about this 'pure experience'?
It is stated as follows at the beginning of volume 1 of his book, A Study
of Good, published in 1911:
"To experience means to know the fact as it is, that is, to know
according to the fact itself by casting away one's own artifice completely.
What is said 'pure' implies a situation of true experience without the
addition of consideration and classification because the experience contains
some thought usually. For example, it is like a situation of the moment
of seeing a color or hearing a sound which occurs not only before I have
thought that it is an action of something external or a feeling I have
on this seeing or hearing, but even before I have added the judgment of
what this color or sound is. Then, pure experience is identical with direct
experience. When one experiences immediately his conscious state, there
is as yet neither subject nor object, and knowledge and its object are
completely united. This is the purest form of experience."(5)
This philosopher, however, had published two essays called Pure Experience,
Speculation, Will and Intellectual Intuition (1908) and About Mutual Relations
of Pure Experiences and Reports (1910) before the publication of this book.
In addition, we can say this idea has been the object of his lifelong philosophical
thinking since he aimed to become a philosopher 20 years before if we approve
of his report that he used to indulge in thinking about the world of pure
experience "as if he, as a high-school student, was dreaming while
walking in the town of Kanazawa." (6) However, it is certain that
the idea of pure experience realistically seen in A Study of Good was especially
influenced by Mach and James.
Why is that? Nishida was interested in James because James, he thought,
would respond to his own anguish as follows:
"I read a book on religious philosophy written by a celebrated writer,
Otto Pfleiderer. It was very logical, coherent and arranged very well,
and that was all. I could not think that he knew the taste of religious
life. The logical syllogism was very minute and certain, but it made me
feel like I saw an artificial flower, and I gained nothing after reading.
...It is true that modern Western ethics is totally a knowledge research
and the discussion was precise, but it does not pay attention to the experience
of human deep soul, and it completely forgets to see where it steps. Some
analyze the element of bread or water, but none explain its taste. In short
I feel they fake and have no abilities in the human mind. I hope that the
present ethicists will research into the consciousness of great soul experience
of ancient great figures before the academic problem itself. This is a
factual research of ethics. If knowing what Lessing argues on the beauty
of ancient art in a book, we shall be able to feel the stratified taste
and realize the truth of beauty more than knowing Hartman's aestheticism
in a book. I prefer such an art theory as immediately conveys a moral experience
to ethics. However, such books are very few indeed. I recently read Dante's
The Divine Comedy for amusement. Dante is one of those who have this experience.
I always think that Schopenhauer's doctrine of will as a fundamental principle
and his theory of 'reine Anschauung' are more interesting and deeper than
the intellectual theory of Hegel and others. What do you think about it?"(7)
This long confession reveals the inner workings of the mind of Nishida
who "is going to be a researcher of life"(8) as a result of fact.
Judging from the complete correspondence of this idea with James's, we
can suppose that it is not mysterious that the concept of pure experience
is held by each of them in form of common speculation.
However, it might be unavoidable to assume that the theory of pure experience
of Nishida completely followed that of James as a result because of a historical
fact that James had announced the term pure experience before Nishida did.(9)
In fact, in Nishida's A Study of Good, his own thought is described by
quoting and borrowing James's idea of the stream of thought in The Principles
of Psychology, his mystic idea in The Varieties of Religious Experience
and his idea of the world of pure experience in Essays in Radical Empiricism.
We, nevertheless, can not blame Nishida even if we say that Nishida's
thought is a follower of James's idea.(10) It is because the conception
of pure experience is derived from a realistic way of grasping a certain
experience before it contains reflection as stated before, and therefore
it is a description of the original empirical fact which each of us can
see through his own imagination.
For instance, let us compare the phrases of both philosophies as follows:
"Fechner said that one morning in spring he gazed at a ranch where
flowers bloomed, birds sang and butterflies danced while he rested himself
on a Rosenthal chair in Leipzig and indulged in the view of day when a
naked fact was true in contradiction to the natural scientific view of
night with no color and sound. I have been thinking that reality has to
be actual as it is and hence the so-called world of material is only conceived
from early time though I do not know what has influenced me to do so."
(11)
"If my reader can succeed in abstracting from all conceptual interpretation
and lapse back into his immediate sensible life at this very moment, he
will find it to be what someone has called a big blooming buzzing confusion,
as free from contradiction in its 'much-at-oneness' as it is all alive
and evidently there."(12)
The former is Kitaro Nishida's statement and the latter James's one. However, even if someone said the former was James's statement and the latter Nishida's, we might have overlooked the misunderstanding unless we were great experts. These statements could be made only by those who had a common direction about an empirical phenomenon with their own nuance of expression. Therefore, Nishida and James had the same viewpoint as "the researcher of life" as Nishida said. In that sense, as it has been discussed in a lot of essays on Nishida by Japanese, he might have only used James's thought because it was most similar to his own.
Ⅱ Concerning two theories of 'pure experience' <1>
Then, what did Nishida mean exactly by the concept of pure experience?
He did not think about the pure experience only from the standpoint of
the consciousness as a phenomenon. It seems to subsume the transcendental
(in other words, super-psychological) content which cannot be elucidated
by a mere psychologism. Only the pure experience is certainly a reality
in Nishida's mind, and his own theory of 'experience', which might be called
a 'reflective' experience from another point of view, is about to be derived
from such a supposition of his.
It is generally considered that the basis of his thinking was an affirmative
of "certain unified thing", or an ultimate concept to him rather
than an experiential fact in a common meaning. Nishida describes the motive
of writing the volume 2 (Reality) in A Study of Good in the preface of
this book as follows:
"I have been thinking that I would like to explain the pure experience as the only reality completely for a long time. First, I read Mach and others, but they did not satisfy me very well. Soon, as I conceived that experience did not occur in an individual, but an individual occurred in experience, I came to be able to escape from solipsism by thinking that experience was more radical than personal distinction. Finally, as I had an idea that I could harmonize with transcendental philosophy after Fichte by considering experience to be active, I wrote the volume 2 of this book. However, it was incomplete needless to say."(13)
This modesty of Nishida seemed to be a greeting of being independent from
James's idea and an excuse caused by his having an interest in Münsterberch's
psychology and Hegel's logic at the beginning of the publication of A study
of Good. However, it, in Nishida's mind, has changed to such self-confidence
as to assume that something to harmonize with the transcendental philosophy
after Fichte transmits the essence of pure experience after its publication.
In the renewed version of A Study of Good in 1936, Nishida described as
follows in the preface:
"This book might be on a standpoint of consciousness and might be
considered to be psychologism if seeing from today. It cannot help being
criticized for that. However, I think that what was hidden in the depth
of my thought when writing this book was not only on the standpoint. My
viewpoint of pure experience advanced to that of the absolute will through
the standpoint of Fichte's Tathandlung in my essay, Intuition and Reflection
in Awareness and then changed radically and came to acquire a conception
of 'place' through the Greek philosophy in the latter half of From One
to Work to One to See. I gained the beginning by which my idea was made
logical there. The conception of 'place' was materialized as 'dialectical
general one' and the standpoint of 'dialectical general one' was made to
be direct as a standpoint of 'intellectual intuition'. In this book, I
came to consider the world of direct experience or the world of pure experience
to be a world of historical reality now. A world of intuition of act or
a world of poiesis is truly a world of pure experience."(14)
What does this tell to us? Nishida and James came to have their own conclusion
which conflicted with each other completely in a certain sense through
the difference of the content which they gave to a pure experience despite
starting from the same phenomenon. James showed the theory of pure experience
by abandoning his ordinary experiential standpoint. An ultimate problem
in James was how to find the activeness of experience as a concrete reality
while denying the assumption of the abstract ego derived from Cartesian
'I think'. From the standpoint to grasp the existence nominalistically
as a particular thing, James could not determine his own way besides the
acceptance of the method of finding a reality in the experience that is
sensible, direct and even physical in the flow of life.
On the contrary, Nishida did not necessarily consider the experience to
be particular. He thought that the pure experience was reconcilable with
a 'unifying one' in the end by the ideas of a Neo-Hegelian H. Green and
others, though confronting with the Neo-Kantianism and the Neo-Hegelism
themselves. The grounds for this should be found in the noteworthy idea
of Nishida who especially doubted if it was absolutely correct to consider
experience and sense to be always concrete and particular.(15) According
to Nishida, considering the concrete experience and sense to be basic was
also derived from 'a kind of logical definition'. Consequently, "what
was an intuition or a living enlightenness by one's own efforts should
be a side of concrete logic" so that the concrete could be called
realistic.(16)
Nishida states he was able to escape from solipsism as he conceived that "experience did not occur in an individual, but an individual occurred in experience", and had an idea that "experience was more radical than a personal distinction". The experience meant by him, nevertheless, was completely different from the one meant by James, that is, the "foreign"(17) one for James.
It is a fact that a close examination of ordinary empiricism easily brings
a solipsism, which may certainly depend on a dogmatic attitude to attempt
to grasp the experience sensuously. It, oppositely, could be said that
the experience came to have to depend on something transcendental as absolute
idealists liked if assuming that it was possible to escape from the solipsism
on the supposition that the experience was radical. Such a statement may
be caused by the logical definition that the experience should be always
concrete according to Nishida. However, according to James, Nishida's concept
of experience might be derived from an idea of Hegel, namely, the concrete
universality, through his way of thinking.
For instance, let's examine the problem of 'consciousness' which is a
main element in the concept of pure experience. Nishida intends to include
a subliminal object in the range of pure experience. On the contrary, James
asserts that pure experience is seen only in the sensible continuation
of time. A bit of pure experience, for James, is made from what we see
as it is as far as we pay attention to it. This originates in his belief
that the pure experience should be known and reported by the person who
experiences it. Therefore, in the case of James, "the range of pure
experience has to be correspondent to the range of its attention"(18)literally,
and the focus of consciousness has always shifted as the present with a
continuation of time. (In addition, the surrounding of consciousness has
shifted correspondingly, too.)(19)
No matter how the pure experience had a state without the difference between
subject and object as its real nature, James might have concluded that
what Nishida meant by the phrase, "when one is clinging with all one's
might to a cliff"(20) or "when a musician is playing a piece
of tune in the thorough practice(21)" was not a suitable example of
pure experience. Of course, there might be not a logical inconsistency
in the context by which Nishida's example should be seen as a case of pure
experience if it was supposed to be the unspecialized state.
Nishida's example is meaningless for James even if it is understood as
a hypothesis because the pure experience of Nishida is recognized as a
phenomenon of someone that exceeds the person who experiences it although
pure experience has to be known to the person that clings to a cliff or
the musician. (James has a postulate that an experience not only is, but
is also known to us.) This meant that the phrase "when one is clinging
with all one's might to a cliff" or "when a musician is playing
a piece of tune in the thorough practice" was only a description of
the appearance by someone though Nishida would include it in the range
of pure experience.
I think Nishida has supposed someone universal to gaze upon a pure experience.
Nishida might have assumed that the pure experience depended on some apperception
of mind to regard the state of experience wherein subject and object were
undifferentiated as the first empirical stage rather than on the characteristic
of an individual experience.
In addition, Nishida's idea of pure experience comes to expand the difference
from James by conceiving "as if it can harmonize with the transcendental
philosophy after Fichte". This idea has emerged from the first belief
of Nishida that experience can come into existence apart from the individual.
Otherwise, it might consist in his philosophical attitude that tried to
establish his own realism while originating in the logical mind as a starting
point of Nishida. Nishida, as a result, comes to have to find the absolute
even in the empirical as far as he attempts to make the reality of pure
experience well-grounded in the logical problem.
In that sense, another view of pure experience that the activeness of
experience occurs in a positive evaluation of volition comes to be meaningful
by being understood not as an extremely human personal will as James says
but as an absolute will to authorize "the self-identity of absolute
contradiction".
Nishida thought that he could clarify the reality of experience which
he meant by considering the experience to be positive, and, as a result,
his philosophy would be able to "harmonize with the transcendental
philosophy after Fichte" as he had a transcendental view supported
by the absolute will in his ideological background. (22)
ⅢConcerning two theories of 'pure experience' <2>
Setting this aside, Nishida's philosophical ambition was embedded in an
investigation of the logic of a truly concrete reality. He was able to
conclude that a concrete reality was seen only in the particular experience.
For Nishida,
"As Hegel has already said, the individual has to be general and
the general has to be individual, and a subject has to be a predicate and
a predicate has to be a subject in a true concrete logic." (23)
Such a statement might be derived from groping for how to establish a
direct concrete standpoint in the unspecialized state philosophically.
Nishida, at first, moaned the subjectivistic character of pure experience
and found a light in Hegel's dialectical logic through Aristotle's logic.
Then, he denied the concrete reality of the natural scientific standpoint
and tried to establish the logic of concrete reality as his own logic while
denying the objective reality by taking a phenomenological "standpoint
of the intentional experience". Thus, he finally found a basic idealistic
view of pure experience in the conception of experience as a concrete universality.
We can also notice that Nishida's concept of pure experience is Hegelian
in a certain aspects on this occasion. It is doubtful if the conception
of pure experience itself can be derived from Hegel. As Nishida, however,
judged that it was impossible to escape from the solipsism through the
idea of pure experience derived from Mach's sensualistic positivism or
James's pragmatic epistemology, it might be a fact that he needed to compromise
with Hegel's logic or H. Green's absolutism in order to establish the conception
of pure experience supported by his own outlook on reality.
This fact interestingly brought a strange sarcasm of connecting James
with Hegel oppositely.(24) As it was well-known, James opposed Hegel's
philosophy. On the other hand Nishida, who was also friendly to Hegel,
might have read that a Hegelian trait would be found in James's idea of
pure experience in the process of developing his own theory (though James
did not take any notice of it). As a result, Nishida was able to interpret
James's idea of pure experience completely in his own way. As he heard
that James "was converted to the philosophical research,"(25)
Nishida came to pay close attention to James and expect the completion
of James's metaphysics. In that sense, James might have been a philosophical
master of Nishida since then.
By the way, I doubted if James thought the pure experience was regulated
by something universal as Nishida supposed. According to James, a bit of
pure experience is made of what appears. James did not one-sidedly approve
of such a statement as Nishida said, "While the unifying action is
working, the totality is reality and pure experience."(26) At the
same time a conjunctive function, James thought, should be equally adopted
if it was assumed that a disjunctive function was an important working
of mind in our experience.
A supposition of both these functions, especially, the conjunctive one,
might create a risk to disregard the empirical viewpoint even in James's
anti-intellectualistic thinking. He may be inclined to conceal his own
logical failure by postulating "certain unified thing" even if
it was not so similar to Nishida's meaning anyway. Compared to such an
ambiguous plan of James, the view of Nishida might be said to be an insistence
that took on a color of Hegelian 'absolute idealism' more than a symbolic
description of the psychological fact of consciousness if we accepted what
Nishida, with the intention of clarifying the characteristics of pure experience,
said, "a system of consciousness is what certain unified thing divides,
develops in order and actualizes its totality as in all organisms."(27)
However, when thinking with a broader view, Nishida's idea of pure experience
was similar in a posture of understanding phenomena as a researcher of
life to James's anti-intellectualistic thought. Their pure experiences
were based on the same root, but what they intended and what resulted from
it was somewhat different.
Judging from James's point of view, we can say that James might have criticized
Nishida's pure experience for the reason of not being able to be thorough
about the empirical standpoint and still leaving a waste matter of intellectualism
like the thought of Hegel or Green. If James knew that Nishida had been
creating his own idea of pure experience by being influenced by Wang Yang-ming's
doctrine of the inseparability of knowledge and practice or the stage of
emancipation in Zen(28) rather than by the thought of Hegel, Greene or
Lois, James would have reevaluated Nishida even though he did not feel
the same sympathy for this Japanese philosopher as he had for Bergson.
It is impossible to formulate such a hypothesis from the beginning because
he did not know Nishida. I really wish James has known even a part of the
Oriental thought at least because the idea of 'pure experience', strangely
enough, seems to match with it regarding some points. Daisetu Suzuki says
that 'the mind of the Oriental' is overall, natural, unifying, unspecialized,
a priori, non-systematic, dogmatic, intuitional (emotional), subjective,
mentally individualistic and socially collectively-oriented.(29) It is
not an exaggeration to say that these adjectives should be understood only
in the world of pure experience except a few adjectives.
If I am allowed to mention a hypothesis, James's propaganda might have
had a different direction if he had encountered that Oriental intellects
had easily realized the reality of pure experience while he had struggled
to explicate it. (On the other hand, even though James had actually heard
of Nishida's theory of pure experience, the former would not have paid
attention to the Westernized and intellectualized theory of the latter
at all.)
Anyway, I have paid attention to the fact that two figures in East and West tried to understand the real by using the word 'pure experience' and have conducted its comparative study. Frankly speaking, Oriental as I am, I am not well versed in Nishida's thought.
I am not yet convinced that the mind of non-duality in the Oriental (especially
in the Japanese) is probably materialized by a sort of the Westernized
expression called 'the self-identity of absolute contradictions'. I, nevertheless,
sometimes think Nishida would be certainly supported by this school of
thought. On the other hand, I also cannot help feeling that even the theory
of pure experience of James might be a theoretical premise for interpreting
some existence like the libido theory of Freud in spite of his astonishing
criticism of intellectualism. There is no other theme that pours cold water
over me as a self-proclaimed commentator of thought than the conception
of pure experience.(30)
Notes
(1) Many reviews on 'Nishida' by great thinkers such as Masaaki Kosaka, Torataro Shimomura, Hikaru Yoshida, Munetaka Yamada, Shumpei Ueyama and others are in conformity with Nishida. Therefore, they emphasize that Nishida's theory of 'pure experience' as an original that is different from James's and is Oriental and Japanese in other words.
(2) For instance, Mach says that color is a physic object in the relation of dependence with the source of light and is a psychological object in that with retina, and that what is different between the two areas is not a material but a research report. Refer to chapter 1, Anti-metaphysical Exordium in his book, Analysis of Sense for details. In addition, though it is not completely the same, a similar idea to this is stated in James's A World of Pure Experience.
(3) The Complete Works of Kitaro Nishida(Iwanami Syoten, 1965. <They are written in Japanese and, hereafter, called The Complete Works.>), Vol. 1, p. 210.
(4) Even James himself says as follows: "The greatest empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflection." (The Works of William James: The Will to Believe [Harvard University Press, 1979], p. 21.
(5) The Complete Works, Vol. 1, p. 9.
(6) ibid., p. 7.
(7) The Complete Works, Vol. 18, pp. 59-60. This is a part of a letter to Daisetsu Suzuki.
(8) The Complete Works, Vol. 17, p. 148.
(9) I should have argued on James's 'pure experience'. But as I have already reported in Some Problems of James's Empiricism(Horitsubunkasya, 1983<written in Japanese>) I, here, introduce only a definition he gives as follows: "'Pure experience' is the name which I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories." (The Works of William James: Essays in Radical Empiricism [Harvard University Press, 1976], p. 93.) This "pure experience" theory develops into "radical empiricism". Refer to the chapter 2 in my book for details. Moreover, refer to page 104 of the chapter 4 for this paper.
(10) A Nishida's pupil, Torataro Shimomura describes in Kitaro Nishida - The Personality and Thought(Tokai University Publication Association, p. 54.<written in Japanese>) as follows: "The conception called pure experience might have originated from the empirical philosophy of James and others that was popular when I was a student. However, the thought itself has never originated from this philosophy although many suggestions and refinements, of course, have been given for the psychological analysis and the conceptual explanation by it. I suppose that it has been produced by the means of Zen meditation essentially. The pure experience of A Study of Good certainly is more connotative and deeper than that of James and others."(p. 54.)
(11) The Complete Works, Vol. 1, p. 7.
(12) The Works of William James: Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 32.
(13) The Complete Works, Vol. 1, p. 4.
(14) The Complete Works, Vol. 1, pp. 6-7.
(15) Torataro Shimomura discerns Nishida's pure experience as follows:
"A bit of pure experience has a living, active and self-progressive character. Therefore, there exist some progressive aspects in it. There is a difference between the consciousness of the most naive infant and the consciousness of the deepest religionist in the aspect. Both of them are the same pure experiences without differentiation between subject and object. What is important in this case is that the lowest consciousness is identified with the highest consciousness as a bit of pure experience. This is not a simple identification. This makes the originality of Nishida's thought, or a traditional Oriental speculation in general. The idea that the most ordinary or the simplest consciousness is common to the highest consciousness is a traditional thought peculiar to the Oriental." (Torataro Shimomura: Kitaro Nishida - The Personality and Thought [Tokai University Publication Association<written in Japanese>, p. 184.)
(16) This idea is shown in detail in the exordium written by Nishida himself in Iwao Takayama's Nishida Philosophy.
(17) James, who considered the history of philosophy to be that of a clash of human temperaments, had an interesting custom of thought that he approved or disapproved of the thoughts different from his by depending on whether they were 'intimate' or 'foreign' to his own temperament rather than by criticizing them logically.
(18) The Complete Works, Vol. 1, p. 11.
(19) Refer to paragraph 6 in chapter 2 of Some Problems of James's Empiricism.
(20) The Complete Works, Vol. 1, p. 11.
(21) ibid.
(22) As described above, James also considered experience to be active. However, James might insist that he did not need to get in contact with 'the super-individual' or 'the systematic', which was a word that Masaaki Kosaka used when interpreting Nishida's pure experience, in order to make experience active. The concept of pure experience certainly seems to have a logic that reminds us of the idea of 'wholeness'. James, nevertheless, did not have an intention to import the idea of 'the absolute', not to speak of 'the element-theory'. Refer to chapter 2 of Some Problems of James's Empiricism in this context.
(23) Iwao Takayama, Nishida Philosophy, Kadokawa Pocket Edition<written in Japanese>, p. 4.
(24) Therefore, Masaaki Kosaka says that Nishida is planning a synthesis of James and Hegel in The Life and Thought of Professor Kitaro Nishida, Kobundo<written in Japanese>.
(25) The Complete Works, Vol. 17, p. 147.
(26) The Complete Works, Vol. 1, p. 14.
(27) ibid.
(28) Refer to Yoshitomo Takeuchi's Kitaro Nishida -A Thinker of Modern Japan, The University of Tokyo Publication Association(written in Japanese).
(29) Daisetsu Suzuki Collective Works, Iwanami Syoten<written in Japanese>, 1970, Vol. 26, p. 512. Incidentally, speaking of "the mind of the Occidental", the following words are used: analytic, classifying, discriminative, functional, individual, intellectual, objective, scientific, summarizing, conceptual, systematic, non-human, lawful, organizational, authoritative, self-centered, intrusive and so on.
(30) This paper is based on William James and Kitaro Nishida in The Fringe of James's Empiricism, Horitsubunkasya<written in Japanese>, 1986.