Creativity in the Topos of Nothingness 1

Creativity in the Topos of Nothingness

Part I: Pure Experience and the Logic of Topos

Yutaka Tanaka

1 . Nishida's theory of Pure Experience

John Cobb and Shizuteru Ueda have pointed out the congeniality of Nishida and Whitehead in their conception of "radical" experience which at least involves three issues: (1) Experience is a unified, concrete whole; (2) experience is prior to the individual; it is from experience that an individual is born and that a subject-object dichotomy comes to be; and (3) experience is active. ⁽¹⁾

Drawing attention to the fact that Whitehead did not use the term "pure experience", Cobb has pointed out the ambiguities of the problematic adjective "pure" used by William James. Cobb contends:

In the first, James says that pure experience is "the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories." This could lead us to think that there are two kinds of experience occurring in succession; first, pure experience, and then, later, reflective experience. Yet in the second quote James says that "the instant field of the present is at all times what I call the 'pure' experience." In that case reflective experience must also be pure since nothing can occur anywhere other than in the instant field of the present. Something of this ambiguity or tension may be present in Nishida as well. Whitehead emphatically agrees that the instant field of the present is where all experience occurs. He calls this concrescence, and concrescence is characterized by sheer immediacy. Speaking reflectively about the multiplicity of concrescences, we find that some of them involve reflection and some do not. But there can be no other locus of reflection than in the immediacy of concrescing experience... .In any case, from Whitehead's point of view all experience is pure experience as defined in the second quote from James. This is by no means an unimportant point. Indeed, I take it that this is at the heart of Nishida's project.⁽²⁾

From this emerge two interrelated problems to be examined. The first is whether we can recognize such ambiguity in Nishida's earliest work as Cobb has pointed out. The second is to what extent the concept of "concrescence", one of the proto-words in Whitehead's metaphysics, is relevant to the contents of Nishida's theory of pure experience, and then, how the logic of Topos as a philosophical development of pure experience is related to the principle of relativity or solidarity in Whitehead's philosophy of organism.

The first problem would be comparatively easy if we accept Nishida's paradigm and realize that we can not stand outside of pure experience : the moment we experience something, the very experiencing subjects that we recognize as ourselves have already been constituted by nothing other than pure experience. We will not recognize any ambiguities of pure experience nor tensions which have t o be re solved in the reflective considerations afterwards. From the traditional non-radical empiricists' viewpoint, however, Nishida's definition of pure experience seems to contain equivocity and even contradiction, as it was criticized by Satomi Takahashi's review of An Inquiry into the Good just after its publication.⁽³⁾

Nishida responded to Takahashi concerning the equivocity of "pure experience", saying that the intent of the first chapter of An Inquiry into the Good was "not to discriminate pure from impure and indirect elements of experience", but "to demonstrate that perception , thinking , will , and intellectual intuition are of the same kind".⁽⁴⁾ Pure experience in Nishida's sense was neither a passive reception of objective sense-data given before subjective mental operations, nor the raw material of experience which must be given forms by an experiencing subject, but more fundamentally was "the subject-object called nature in its activity of self-constructing", if we use the phrase of Schelling's Philosophy of Nature which was referred to by both Whitehead and Nishida.⁽⁵⁾ In order to understand this activity, Schelling must leap to an intellectual intuition of nature which the empiricist would reject as metaphysical, but Nishida did So what comprehend it within the range of pure experience at the outset.

Nishida called pure experience, i.e. "the direct experience before mental operations" is not blind at all in the Kantian sense, for the intuition without categories is blind only when we deny the existence of intellectual intuition and limit human reason (intellectus, Vernunft) to inferior mental operations of understanding (ratio, Verstand).

"Pure experience" is a proto-word (Gruntwort) metaphysically ultimate activity; the whole range of our which signifies the experience, including both sense-perception and intellectual-intuition, is the explicit order of its development. We may analogically say that pure experience has an implicit order of the absolute wealth of all kinds of experience just as pure light without colours contains implicitly in itself all colours in nature. The experience known as the result of reflective analysis is always, an abstract aspect of the self-unfolding of pure experience.

Cobb's identification of pure experience with "perception in the mode of presentational immediacy" is not relevant in this context, though he was not wrong in pointing out that all experience is (the self-unfolding of ) pure experience in the case of Nishida, if we take it as "the instant field of the present".⁽⁶⁾ As pure experience is dynamic activity behind the subject-object dichotomy, it necessarily includes "perception in the mode of causal efficacy" as well as "the perception in the mode of presentational immediacy" in the Whiteheadian sense.

The philosophy of pure experience, as Ueda aptly summarizes, ⁽⁷⁾ contains the possibility of integrating three mutually conflicting tendencies in the modern philosophy, namely, empiricism, metaphysics, and existential philosophy, in both the backward movement going behind the subject-object dichotomy and the forward movement of unfolding pure experience as ultimate actuality and the authentic self. It is noteworthy that Nishida did not think that he succeeded in actualizing to the full extent this possibility in his first work. In the preface to the 1936 edition of An inquiry into the Good, 26 years after he had first published it), Nishida admitted the limits of the theory of pure experience, and the necessity of reforming it in such a way that the world of pure experience should be interpreted as the world of historical reality, or as the world of creative activity (poiesis) and action/intuition in the light of later developments of his philosophy.

An Inquiry into the Good lacks "dialectic of absolute negation" which became characteristic in his later works, but develops the positive theme of pure experience. Its tone seems to us so simple and unsophisticated that we tend to overlook the importance of an original pure positivity in the development of negative dialectic in Nishida's philosophy.

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2. Concrescence and pratityasamutpada

Cobb wrote that while studying Buddhist writers, he came to the conclusion that "what some of them described as pratityasamutpada was what Whitehead called concrescence." ⁽⁸⁾ He agrees to the tradition of Nagarjuna as he has thought that "the distinctive attainment of Buddhist meditation is to realise that one is nothing but the many becoming one". ⁽⁹⁾ As the process of the many becoming one is called "concrescence" in Whitehead's metaphysics, we must explicate the meaning of this key word and relate it to the Buddhist standpoint of radical relationality expressed as the triad of dependent origination, non-substantiality, and emptiness.

"Concrescence" is usually interpreted etymologically as "grow together" (obsolete usage according to OED) , but this reading fails to catch its Christian-Platonistic connotations. Nicolaus Cusanus used the corresponding Latin word (concrescere, concretum) in an analogous sense to signify the dynamism of the absolute infinite which "contracts" itself to a finite concrete thing. ⁽¹⁰⁾ We may say that Whitehead and Cusanus had the same task in the common tradition of a Christian Platonism; they had to avoid the monistic fallacy of the "emanation" theory of Neo-Platonism as well as the abstract transcendentalism which lacked the concreteness of this world. In Cusanus the world is really immanent in everything in the mode of contraction or "concretum" : universum vero est in universis contracte. God is also immanent in everything of the world, but in a way radically different from that in which the world is immanent in everything. Cusanus said, "The world is neither the sun nor the moon, but it is in the sun the sun, and in the moon the moon. God, however, is neither the sun in the sun, nor the moon in the moon" . In other words, God is the principle of self-transcendence of the individual as a focus of the world. In Whitehead, God is "the principle of concretion" as well as "the organ of novelty aiming at intensification".⁽¹¹⁾ God cannot be identified with the world because the concrescing Individual(actual occasion) "prehends" God as the ground of its own subjectivity which transcends the givenness of the actual world.

In a sense Whitehead's attitude towards this world was more radically positive than Cusanus and other Christian Platonists; the dynamic rhythm of "the many becoming one and increased by one" ⁽¹²⁾ involves everything in the actual world, and every ideal entities in the realm of "eternal objects". Even God himself can not be detached from this historical process; God must give totally himself as one of actual entities according to his "superjective nature" . The immortality which Whitehead talked about is not that which the the substantial soul will enjoy in the world beyond , but the "objective immortality" in this world, which is inseparable from "the becoming and the perishing of actual entities".⁽¹³⁾ There is no actual entity that is unborn and immortal enjoying separated existence from this world. Ideas (eternal objects) are not actualities but potentialities of related and definite actual entities. The creature which becomes and perishes is objectively immortal in the Whiteheadian sense. ⁽¹⁴⁾

The radical relationality which Whitehead stressed in PR has something common with the characteristically Buddhistic notion of dependent origination identified with both non-substantiality and emptiness. In the opening part of Mulamadhyamakakarika, Nagarjuna saluted Buddha who preached the dependent origination in the eightfold negations. According to Hajime Nakamura, ⁽¹⁵⁾ the world of incessant flux was paradoxically identified with the "unborn and immortal" realm by Nagarjuna. The eightfold negation was nothing other than the transcendence of the ideal opposites through the dynamism of dependent origination. The relationality signified by "pratityasamutpada" characterizes not only samsara but also the whole reality of samsara/nirvana.

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Recently, Professor David J. Kalupahana presented a new interpretation of Nagarjuna as an empiricist in his translation with commentary to the Mulamadhyamakakarika.⁽¹⁶⁾ Suspecting the validity of the negativistic (prasangika) interpretation of Candrakirti, he adopted a positivistic attitude towards the texts of the Middle Way. He took a fresh look at Kumarajiva's Chung-lun, and found no justification whatsoever in looking at Nagarjuna through Candrakirti's eye when there was a more faithful and closer disciple of Nagarjuna in Kumarajiva.

It is a matter for the Buddhist special ists to judge whether this interpretation is historically justified, but such a radical empiricism is important in its own right because the sceptical and negative attitude towards language is meaningful only if there is something absolutely positive at the very outset of experience. Moreover, it is under the strong influence of Nagarjuna through Kumarajiva's translations and commentaries that the tradition of Eastern Buddhism favors the paradoxical identification of the phenomenal world(samsara) with the ideal(nirvana). This tradition of Mahayana Buddhism may explain the popularity of An Inquiry into the Good in Japan. The experience which makes us realize sunyata must be pure in Nishida's sense, and we cannot be content with the negative way(via negativa) of deconstruction but try to discuss "pure experience" just in the same way as Buddha preached "dependent origination". The Middle Way which transcends abstract controversies between opposing views would become nihilistic if we are not enlightened at the very outset by the absolutely positive light, a light defined by Nishida as "pure experience" which, although beyond language, can be a revelation through linguistic conventions (vyavahara) . The task of philosophy is "to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted" according to Whitehead. ⁽¹⁷⁾

The experience which Whitehead's speculative philosophy seeks to clarify must be so radical and pure that it may break through what Nishida expressed as "the contradictory self-identity" of one-many, subject-object, and divine-human.⁽¹⁸⁾ The way in which this contradiction is expressed, resolved or synthesized in the unity of opposites is different among philosophers, reflecting the climate of thoughts which they inherit in their own traditions. Cobb stressed the necessity of dialogue between East and West for the mutual self-transformation, and put forward the thesis of complementarity between Christianity and Buddhism in so far as they are expressed, and crystallized into official dogmas in linguistic forms. A successful dialogue can reveal the nature of pure experience out of which these outer forms are born, signifying a small portion of totality by abstraction. One of the important features of Nishida's later philosophy is the concept of topos (Basho) which Cobb found baffling in his dialogue with the Nishida School. Nishida's logic of topos in his later developments of the theory of pure experience is too large a topic to be discussed in detail here. Instead, I shall present the thesis of complementality between topos and process in both Nishida's and Whitehead's theories in the next section.


(Comments on how to translate "concrescence" in Japanese)
I usually translate "concrescence" into "genjyo (現成)" in Japanese. This word is obsolete in modern Japanese just as "concrescence" is in English; it is the very word that the Zen Buddhist D6gen in the thirteenth century frequently used in Shobogenzo (正法眼蔵 =The Eye and Treasury of the True Law) to signify the actualization of the absolute and infinite in "the here-present" in the concrete act of experience. He said that the ultimate aspect of actuality is "this body, this mind, this world, this wind, and

this rain, this sequence of daily going, living, sitting, and lying down, this series of melancholy, joy, action, and inaction, this stick and wand, this Buddha's smile, this transmission and reception of the doctrine, this study and practice , this evergreen pine and this ever unbreakable bamboo." ("the True Nature of Dharmas" In Shobogenzo)

At the 1985 conference of AAR, Steve Odin pointed out that Whitehead's epochal theory of time has something common with Dogen's "Uji有時=being-time)" in their conceptions of time as "discontinuous continuity". ⁽¹⁹⁾ Time is conceived as a continuous series of discontinuous epoch-making monads; Whitehead and Dogen termed each temporal monad "the concrescence of an actual occasion" in the extensive continuum and "the genjyo of being-time(有時現成) " in the locus of "nikon(而今 = the Now)" respectively.

Dogen was a great exception among other Zen Buddhists in that he was not satisfied with the via negativa in Zen Buddhism, i.e. the tradition of "the direct pointing to the Mind and no reliance on letters"; he had quite a low opinion of the significance of the silence of Vimalakirti, which was generally highly commended in this tradition.

In a glossary of Shobogenzo "genjyo" occurs 262 times in important contexts of Dogen's thoughts whereas "nothingness (無)" and "emptiness (空)" occur only 30 and 51 times respectively. ⁽²⁰⁾ The characteristic usage of "nothingness" and "emptiness" is pejorative in such a way that "(the absolute is) neither being nor nothingness" or "(we must transcend) both emptiness and being" On the other hand, "genjyo" is always used in an absolutely affirmative way as it signifies the actualization of enlightenment (genjyokoan) . This seems to suggest that the proto-word (Grundwort) which transcends the relative opposition of "being" and "nothingness" was neither"(Absolute) Nothingness" nor "(True) Emptiness" but rather "genjyo", the dynamic and concrete activity in " the here-present."

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3. Process Theology and the Logic of Topos

It is remarkable that Whitehead calls his metaphysics "the philosophy of organism"but not "process theology" The reason why the successors of Whitehead have been called "process theologians" is that the ultimate purpose of PR is to elucidate the relationship of the world to God in history. It may be admitted that one of the main chatacteristics of this cosmological essay is the concept of dynamic process as actuality which subordinates the static (objective) beings as potentials, but we must remember that the fundamental theme of the philosophy of organism is to "elucidate the paradox of the solidarity or the connectedness of things:--the many things, the one world without and within".⁽²¹⁾ Process theologians seem to have overlooked the importance of this paradox, i.e. the connectedness of actual entities which are mutually immanent in each other qua genuine individuals . What the philosophy of organism seek to preserve is "the discovery that the, process, or concrescence, of any one actual entity involves the other actual entities among its components".⁽²²⁾

The categoreal scheme of Whitehead's metaphysics was invented to develop " all those generic notions adequate f or the expression of any possible interconnection of things". ⁽²³⁾ In order to elucidate the solidarity of the world, Whitehead introduced "the principle of relativity" as "the one general metaphysical character attaching to all entities, actual and non-actual, that every item of its universe is involved in each concrescence". ⁽²⁴⁾ Whitehead stressed the philosophical significance of this principle as follows:⁽²⁵⁾

The principle of universal relativity directly traverses Aristotle's dictum, "A substance is not present in a subject". In fact if we allow for degrees of relevance, and for negligible relevance, we must say that every actual entity is present in every other actual entity. The philosophy of organism is mainly devoted to the task of making clear the notion of "being present in another entity". This phrase is here borrowed from Aristotle; it is not a fortunate phrase, and in subsequent discussion it will be replaced by the term "objectification".

The concept of substance is often roughly characterized as that which is always an subject, never a predicate(object). This definition is not adequate because it does not articulate two different aspects in the definiens of substance between which Aristotle carefully distinguishes in his theory of Categories. ⁽²⁶⁾ One is the aspect of grammatical predicat ion which is schematized as "to be asserted of a subject (kath' hypokeimenou legesthai), the other is the ontological aspect of immanence which is schematized as "to be present in a subject(en hypokeimenoi einai)". The primary substance (say, Socrates) is defined as "that which is neither present in any subject nor asserted of any subject, whereas the secondary substance (say, animal) is not in any subject but can be asserted of some subject(say dog)". The concept of substance, whether primary or secondary, certainly contains an element of mutual externality or exclusiveness among substances , and this kind o f disconnectedness is the target of Whitehead's criticism against the ontological tradition since Aristotle.

Whitehead replaces the Aristotelian phrase of "being present in a subject" by "objectification" . In this context , the object is always a universal element inherent in a subject and the "objective reality(realitas objectiva)", does not mean the reality of a thing which exists independently of any subject as it usually means in modern philosophy. Rather, it signifies the reality of other entities objectified for and immanent in an actual entity.

According to the principle of relativity, everything can function as an object, i.e. every being has "the potentiality for being an element in a real concrescence of many entities into one actualityt". ⁽²⁷⁾ What makes an entity "actual" is its subjectivity in the process of concrescence and the actuality without subjectivity should be rejected as "vacuous" in Whitehead's system.⁽²⁸⁾ The subjectivity of an actual entity is always self-transcending; it gives itself as one object among others to the universe through the transition from the subjective immediacy to the objective immortality. In order to signify this character of self-transcendence, Whitehead replaces the concept of mere subject by that of "subject-superject". The actual entity is to be conceived both as a subject presiding over its own immediacy of becoming, and as a superject exercising its function of objective immortality in other actual entities. ⁽²⁹⁾

The actual entity as a superject is a universal in the sense of its entering into the constitutions of other actual entities because it has become a "being" and it belongs to the nature of a "being" that it is a potential for every "becoming". ⁽³⁰⁾ The actual entity in its own subjective immediacy is an individual occasion of experience in the sense that the same process of concrescence cannot happen twice on account of "the insistent particularity of things experienced and of the act of experiencing."⁽³¹⁾ The unity of opposites such as the concept of an actual entity as a subject-superject and as an individual-universal is a necessary condition for understanding the solidarity of the universe.

According to Jorge Luis Nobo who has presented a new interpretation of the philosophy of organism, ⁽³²⁾ the concept of the "receptacle" or "the extensive continuum" plays an ultimate role for the solidarity of the universe. Nobo distinguishes the metaphysical extensive continuum from the physical spatio- temporal continuum, and tries to demonstrate that the (metaphysical ) extensive contiuum and the eternal creativity are both sides of the same ultimate metaphysical coin. Extension and creativity will then be understood as distinguishable, but inseparable, aspects of "the one ultimate reality grounding the becoming, the being, and the interconnectedness of actual entities." ⁽³³⁾

There may be some objections to Nobo's interpretation of Whitehead, because Whitehead himself did not include the extensive continuum in the categoreal scheme in the first part of PR, but classified it as one of applications of the categoreal scheme. This fact may refute Nobo's thesis that the extensive continuum and creativity are both sides of the same ultimate reality. Nobo anticipates this criticism,⁽³⁴⁾ saying that the categorial scheme in the first part of PR should be considered neither as a final and accurate formulation of the metaphysical principles nor as the categories of the organic philosophy. I agree with Nobo that Whitehead's system has to be read in the making, but not to be read as a completed dead system, yet the fact remains that Whitehead himself did not include the extensive continuum in his categoreal scheme.

Apart from the problem of his faithfulness to the texts of PR, Nobo's reading of Whitehead is extremely interesting to us, for it will certainly provide the key for the mutual understanding between process theologians and the Nishida School.

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The logic of "Basho (topos or receptacle)" was originally proposed by Nishida in order to overcome essential limitations of the "objective" logic which fails to function in the presence of the contradictions of self-transcending actualities. The logic of Whitehead' s metaphysics is also characterized by the interaction between objectivity and subjectivity in the creative process which grounds self-transcending actualities. The difficult but fundamental problems which are common to Nishida and Whitehead necessitate our reinterpretation or reconstruction of both systems in such a way that it will result in a new synthesis of process theology and the philosophy of topos in Nishida's sense.

The prospects for such reconstruction are bright , because the textual analysis of PR guarantees our reading of Whitehead in the terminology of both process and topos. The first part of PR is a prolegomena of the whole system, the second part is the explication of "the philosophy of organism" In contrast to other philosophers, and the third and fourth parts are "the cosmological scheme developed in terms of its own categoreal notions without much regard to other systems of thoughts".⁽³⁵⁾ The third part, titled "the theory of Prehensions", is the theory of process which contains "the genetic analysis" of an actual occasion. The fourth part, titled "the theory of Extension", is the theory of topos which contains "the extensive analysis" of an actual entity in the "cell theory" of actuality.⁽³⁶⁾ These two parts may be characterized as the real internal constitution of Whitehead's metaphysics which provides the philosophical foundation for "process theology" as the final interpretation of the whole system. Therefore, the structure of PR itself helps us to understand that process theology does need the logic of topos already present in Whitehead's theory of the extensive continuum.

What is the metaphysical role of the extensive continuum, then? The notion of a "continuum" involves both the property of indefinite divisibility and the property of unbounded extension. There are always entities beyond entities, because nonentity is no boundary. ⁽³⁷⁾ The infinite openness of the extensive continuum is the essential characteristic of our "being in the world (in-der-Welt-sein). This openness within the world is referred to by Ueda as "the double structure of Topos (Place)" in his explanation of the horizontal structure of experience. Ueda writes; ⁽³⁸⁾

The horizon moves as we move, but there is no horizon that has no direction beyond wherever we may go. This is because the horizon itself is finite in its essence . . . .People do not always pay due attention to the fact the "beyond the horizon" belongs within the horizontal structure itself. I would like to emphasize specifically this point when it comes to understanding Nishida's thinking. The double nature as such of the horizon and the "beyond the horizon" constitutes the horizon of experience. By this double nature is opened the depth dimension. We cannot comprehend the beyond, but when we understand that it is beyond our comprehension, this "incomprehensible" is an absolute limitation and yet at the same time constitutes in exactly such a manner an avenue leading to the infinite topos (place) .

The depth dimension which Ueda refers to above is indispensable to our understanding Nishida's philosphy, because we realize the meanings of "the unity of the opposites (coincidentia oppositorum)" in this dimension of the logic of topos. The doctrine of the simultaneous interpenetration of all entities which Nishida inherits from Hua-Yen Buddhism would be meaningless if we fail to recognize the paradox of the infinite openness within the world.

Whitehead certainly recognizes this paradox of being-in-the-world , and develops the doctrine of mutual immanence in his philosophy of organism. Although we do not stand in a position of grasping the whole world from without, we "prehend" the whole world from within in a limited sense. We can accept the Hua-Yen doctrine of mutual immanence on the basis of the theory of the extensive continuum. According to Whitehead, the extensive continuum expresses "the solidarity of all possible standpoints throughout the whole process of the world."⁽³⁹⁾ A11 actual entities are related to one another according to the determinations of this continuum; all possible actual entities in the future must exemplify these determinations in relation to the already actual world. The reality of the future is bound up with, the reality of this continuum. This continuum may be called the topos of the creative advance of the actual world , i.e. the becoming , the perishing , and the objective immortality of actual entities. As regards the role of the extensive continuum as the ground of the mutual immanence of all actual entities, Whitehead writes: ⁽⁴⁰⁾

Every actual entity, in its relationship to other actual entities is somewhere in the continuum, and arises out of the data provided by this standpoint. But in another sense it is everywhere throughout the continuum; for its constitution includes the objectifications of the actual world and thereby includes the continuum; also the potential objectifications of itself contribute to the real potentialities whose solidarity the continuum expresses. Thus the continuum is present in each actual entity, and each actual entity pervades the continuum. (italics are mine)

Most process theologians seem to overlook the metaphysical role of the extensive continuum in the above citation. They argue only the unilateral immanence of one actual entity in another, i .e. the immanence in the mode of causal objectification, and thereby do not understand that the philosophy of organism needs the mutual immanence of all actual entities.

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One of the most controversial problems discussed in the dialogue between process theologians and the Nishida School is whether the fundamental relation of the world is "reversible" or "irreversible". Process theologians often criticize the doctrine of mutual immanence or interpenetration in Hua-Yen Buddhism on the ground that the relation of causal inheritance is non-symmetrical in the sense that the past and the future are irreversible. On the other hand , the Nishida School stresses the radically reversible relationality in the concept of sunyata, or pratityasamutpada. Both fail to grasp the significance of Whitehead's theory of the extensive continuum as a mediating link of the dialogue between them.

Yoshinori Takeuchi, an exponent of the Nishida School, criticizes "process" thinkers such as Hartshorne on the basis of Nishida's logic of topos, when he comments on Nishida's notion of the eternal Now:

Bergson and more recently an American philosopher, Professor Charles Hartshorne, think that all events of the past are restored in a metaphysical remembrance. It seems that Nishida thought through the problem above more radically: not only events of the past, but also those of the future, are all present in the eternal Now.⁽⁴¹⁾

Citing the above passage, Steve Odin criticizes Nishida on the basis of the doctrine of cumulative penetration in process theology:

In a symmetric theory of causal relatedness as posited by Nishida, relations are closed or determinate at both ends so that there is virtually no place for creativeness, novelty and freedom in such a framework. Nishida fails to address the critical problem at issue here, but instead ambiguously conjoins the notions of total interrelation and interpenetration with those of creativeness and free self-determination, despite the inherent contradictions which accompany this conjunction.⁽⁴²⁾

Odin's criticism would be fair if Nishida really said that the future events qua concreta are present in the eternal Now. In fact, Takeuchi ' s comments are misleading in so far as Nishida never says that the future and the past have symmetrical relations in the deterministic sense. What Nishida calls "eternal Now" i s neither an object of mystical intuition nor the non-temporal abstraction of determinism, but the very condition for the possibility of spatio-temporal relations. Temporal experience is always and necessarily connected with the direct presence of something eternal which Whitehead calls the extensive continuum and which Nishida calls the "eternal Now" in his logic of Topos. The radically symmetrical or reversible relationality holds in this eternal continuum but not on the level of concrete actuality. It is not correct to regard the irreversibility of time as something like an axiom. Obviously we cannot go back in time, but the very possibility of asserting the impossibility of going back to the past shows that our past is directly present to us in the eternal continuum. If all we have is present images and if the past is not directly present to us, it would be impossible for us to tell what objects of the past these present images represent. Memory and anticipation would be impossible without the communion of the moments of time in the eternal Now, which Whitehead characterizes as the direct presence of the extensive continuum on each occasion of experience.

The point which I want to make is that the communion of the moments of time not only is compatible with the asymmetric structure of time, but also provides a necessary condition for the possibility of a linear temporal series of cumulative experience. On the other hand, the linear temporal series of cumulative experience supplements the elements of concreteness for the eternal continuum, for the concrete always has finiteness against the background of real infinite potentialities.

If Whitehead sometimes goes so far in equating creativity and God with the metaphysical receptacle of the extensive continuum as Nobo suggests, we could certainly make this trend materialize as a synthesis of process theology and the philosophy of topos in Nishida's sense. The extensive continuum presents the ground of the mutual immanence of actual occasions, i.e. finite temporal actual entities, but it cannot guarantee the communion of God and the world in so far as God is conceived as the non-temporal and omnipresent actual entity. The extensive continuum is conceived as "a complex of entities (i.e. eternal objects) united by the various allied relationships of whole to part, and of overlapping so as to possess common parts, and of contact, and of other relationships derived from these primary relationships". ⁽⁴³⁾ The extensive continuum defined in this way may well be called "the topos of relative beings", which Nishida considered as the first of three degrees of the gradually deepening conceptions of topos.

In process theology, the dipolar God has been conceived either as a non-temporal actual entity or as a personal society of divine occasions. According to the logic of topos, I would like to present an alternative idea of God as the topos of relative Nothingness which is the transcendental ground of relative beings. The concept of God as the topos of the world is necessary to the Whiteheadian panentheism because "it is as true to say that the World is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the World".⁽⁴⁴⁾ God is not only an actual entity but also the topos of both ideal (eternal) and actual entities . Accepting the ontological principle of seeking every reason in actualities, Whitehead postulates that the whole realm of unrealized disjunct potentialities should be in the primordial nature of God as an actual entity. The Whiteheadian God as " the unconditioned conceptual valuation of the entire multiplicity of eternal objects"⁽⁴⁵⁾ is the topos of eternal objects as pure potentialities : this topos must be more fundamental than the extensive continuum as the topos of real potentialities. Therefore, the dipolar God can be reinterpreted as the topos of relative Nothingness, as God is both the ground of actuality (in His primordial nature) and a chief exemplification of actuality (in His consequent nature).

In Whitehead's metaphysics, neither the extensive continuum as the topos of relative beings nor the dipolar God as the topos of relative Nothingness is the metaphysical ultimate (the universal of universals) which can include both God and the world as the "contrasted opposites". This ultimate is termed by Whitehead "creativity" ⁽⁴⁶⁾; even "God is its primordial , non- temporal accident." In Nishida's philosophy, the metaphysical ultimate is called the topos of absolute Nothingness, in the true awareness of which there is neither God nor the Ego." ⁽⁴⁷⁾ Whitehead need not include the extensive continuum in his categoreal scheme because creativity and God are analogous to the topos of absolute Nothingness and that of relative Nothingness in Nishida's later works. The mutual immanence of God and the World is characterized by the reciprocal dynamics of creativity in such a way that what is done in the World is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the World. The solidarity of God and the world as contrasted antistrophes ⁽⁴⁸⁾ is grounded in, the topos of absolute Nothingness, the dynamics of which Whitehead calls "creativity". The fathomless ground of God's self turns out to be the ground of ourselves in the dynamic creative process of the "inverse correlationality (逆対応)" because of "the absolutely contradictory self-identity" of the God-World relation.

Creativity in the Topos of Nothingness References

References

NW : The Complete Works of Kitaro Nishida (西田幾多郎全集) ; lwanami Shoten, Tokyo, 1949.
T W : The Complete Works of Hajirne Tanabe (田辺元全集) Chikuma Shobo , Tokyo, 1964.
NKW: The Selected Works of Keiji Nishitani (西谷啓治著作集) Sobunsha, Tokyo, 1986.
PM : Philosophy as Metanoetics, by Hajime Tanabe, Translated into English by Takeuchi Yoshinori, Foreword by Jafnes Heisig, University of California Press, 1986.
PR : Process and Reality(Corrected Edition) by Alfred North Whitehead; Free Press, 1979.
CN : The Concept of Nature by Alfred North Whitehead; Cambridge University Press, 1964.
AI : Adventures of Ideas by Alfred North Whitehead; Free Press (1961).
SMW : Science and the Modern World by Alfred North Whitehead ; Macmillan , 1925

(1)　Shizuteru Ueda, "Experience and Language in the Thinking of Kitaro Nishida "
(U) presented a t the 1989 meeting of the American Academy of Religion , p.106 .
(2) John B. Cobb Jr. , "Response to Ueda"(RU) , presented at the 1990 Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, p. 1.
(3) Satomi Takahashi, "The Fact of Conscious Phenomena and Its Meanings; A Review of An Inquiry of the Good", contained in his The Standpoint of Wholeness, Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo, 1932, pp.393-432.
(4) NW1:1-301
(5) Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, Cambridge University Press, 1964, and NW1:l4.
(6) John B. Cobb Jr., op. cit. p.2.
(7) Shizuteru Ueda, op.cit.,p.101-18.
(8) John B. Cobb Jr., Beyond Dialogue: Toward a Mutual Transformation of Christianity and Buddhism, Fortress Press, 1982, p.146.
(9) RU-4
(10) Nicolaus Cusanus, De Docta lgnorantia, Nicolai de Cusa Opera Omnia I, Felix Meiner, 1932, 2-4.
(11) Sh(W: 208. PR:67.
(12) PR:21. (13) PR:xvi (14) PR:82
(15) Hajime Nakamura, Nagarjuna, Kodansha, 1980, pp. 167-175.
(16) David J.Kalupahana, Nagarjuna; The Philosophy of the Middle Way, State University of New York Press, 1986, p.4.
(17) PR:3. (18) NV 9:214-221.
(19) Steve Odin, "Discontinuous Continuity as the Foundation of Authentic Selfhood in Nishida Kitaro and A.N. Whitehead" presented at the 1985 meeting of AAR.
(20) A Glossary of Shobogenzo, ed.by Sakurai and Kato, Meicho-fukyukai,two volumes, revised edition, 1987.
(21) AI:293. (22) PR:7. (23) PR: xii. (24) PR:22. (25) PR:50.
(26) Aristotle, Categoriae, Ib. (27) PR:22. (28) FR: 167. (29) PR: 29.
(30) PR: 22. (31) PR:43.
(32) Jorge Luis Nobo, Whitehead's metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity, State University of New York Press, 1986, p.12.
(33) op.cit. p.207. (34) op.cit. p.400.(35) PR:zii. (36) PR:219. (37) PR:66.
(38) Shizuteru Ueda, op.cit.1-2, p.11. (39) PR:66. (40) PR:67.
(41) Yoshinori Takeuchi, "The Philosophy of Nishida" in Japanese Religion 3, 1963, p.21.
(42) Steve Odin, Process Metaphysics and Hua-Yen Buddhism, SUNY, 1982, p.80.
(43) PR:66. (44) PR:348. (45) PR:31. (46) PR:7. (47) NW-5:182. (48) PR:348.

Philosophy as Metanoetics 1

Part II: Philosophy as Metanoetics

Yutaka Tanaka

１　Subjectivity In the Historical World

In Nishida's logic of topos transcendental subjectivity as pure activity is grounded on the topos of Absolute Nothingness as the contradictory self-identity. As we have seen in Part I, this logic must be complemented by the dynamic creative principle of the historical world. In this respect the examination of Tanabe's philosophy is necessary, because Tanabe reformulates Nishida's concept of Nothingness from the temporalistic perspective of a human existence related essentially to the contemporary society in the historical world. In Tanabe's conception, transcendental subjectivity should be characterized as primordial temporality operating as the dynamic principle of self-transcendence, and then this transcendence should be transformed into the immanent principle of the historical world through the mediation of primordial temporality with spatiality. His arguments always start from the relative to the absolute as the Ideal that regulates a finite human being's practice, though always beyond his or her reach. Whereas Nishida starts from Absolute Nothingness as the universal topos, and then considers history as "a self-determination of the dialectical universal", Tanabe starts from the experience of an individual which is irreducibly temporal, and then tries to relate the individual self to the contemporary society in the dialectical historical world.

In this section I shall discuss Tanabe's treatise , titled From the Schematism of Time to the Schematism of the World, which in 1932 he wrote after he had returned from Germany. This treatise may be considered as a synthesis of Nishida's metaphysical topology and the temporalistic analysis of human existence propounded by the young He idegger , whom Tanabe encountered at Freiburg in the early 1920s.

Nishida has shown that an individual's subjectivity is not a substance but an event which occupies place in the universal Topos of Absolute Nothingness. Heidegger has reformulated the Kantian schematism of time and transcendental imagination in such a way that a human being's subjectivity is not due to the atemporal pure ego but transcendence characterized an event of self-affection which takes time because transcendence is primordially temporal. Then , Tanabe's task may be as showing that transcendental subjectivity should be redefined as inter-subjectivity in the sense that the self of an individual is essentially both existential and social, and that its subjectivity takes time and place in essentially dialectical unity in the historical world.

Another aspect of Tanabe's treatise is that his philosophy is, as the theme of Kant's First Critique was, both of science and of religion; he combines the existential analytic of Heidegger with the contemporary revolution of science, especially the new discoveries of relativity physics which break through the limit of Newtonian principles presupposed by Kant.

Tanabe's philosophy is noteworthy in that it aims at synthesizing two mutually conflicting trends of modern philosophy, i.e. existential philosophy on the one hand and scientific philosophy on the other. In this respect Tanabe is very similar to Whitehead. And Tanabe himself, in agreement with Science and the Modern World , cites Whitehead in the important context of his treatise on Heidegger.

In From the Schematism of Time to the Shematism of the World, Tanabe discusses and criticizes Heidegger's revisionary reading and reformulation of Kant's theory of transcendental imagination in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Tanabe, appreciating Whitehead's theory of relativity and metaphysics of Process and Reality, replaces the Kantian theory of schematism of time by the schematism of space-time as the extensive continuum in relativity physics , thus criticizing Heidegger ' s concentration on transcendental imagination and primordial time which, according to Tanabe, essentially suffers from the limitations of subjective idealism.

In Critique of Pure Reason Kant proceeded from the thesis that "there are two sources of human knowledge which probably spring from a common, but to us unknown root, namely, sense and understanding." ⁽⁴⁹⁾ He proposed to begin his transcendental inquiry only from the point at which the common root of our faculty of knowledge divides and throws out these two stems. But what is the origin of these two components of human knowledge? If sense and understanding have a common root, we could comprehend them only when we discover wherefrom they spring. Identifying this common root with the transcendental imagination implanted in primordial time, Heidegger concludes that time is not only the form of the objects of experience but also that of the experiencing self; and that temporality is not the mere characteristic of empirical objects but essentially the ground of the free transcendence of the subject.

The pure finite self has in itself a temporal character, and the fundamental determination which Kant provides for transcendenta1 perception must, according to Heidegger, first become intelligible through this temporal character. "Time and the I think are no longer opposed to one another as unlike and incompatible: they are the same"⁽⁵⁰⁾ In the Kantian perspective the ego is not "in time" though this does not mean that it is a-temporal. Rather, "the ego is so temporal that it is time itself and only as such in its very essence is it possible at all."⁽⁵¹⁾ Tanabe agrees with Heidegger that the ego is not "in time" just because it is time itself, or "projects" time, but objects that Heidegger does not understand Kant's argument against subjective idealism added in the second edition of CPR. Temporality without spatiality is an abstraction, and the laying of the foundation of the phenomenal world exclusively on the basis of primordial time tends to be idealistic in the subjectivist sense; there would be no such thing as the external world. The ego is not only temporal but also spatial in its dialectical unity, and Kant stressed in his refutation of idealism the fact that the temporal determination of myself is possible only through my knowledge of spatial (external) objects in the environment. In other words, the relation between time and space is more fundamental than that between time and myself as a spatial object. Temporality and spatiality constitute the extensive continuum as inseparable wholeness, though they are irreducible to each other. Time as pure self-affection is inseparable from external things in space . The relation between time and space must be dialectically reciprocal in such a way that both constitute space-time as the extensive continuum in which subjectivity of an individual self should be regrasped as inter-subjectivity of the social self. The contemporary world, essentially spatially related to but causally independent of the self , is irreducible to the actual world temporally related to the self. The external but communal character of contemporary actual entities is constituted by the schematism of the extensive continuum, or what Tanabe calls the schematism of the world. Concerning the relation between the causally independent but communal contemporaries and the creative advance of the actual worlds, Tanabe cites Whitehead; ⁽⁵²⁾

When the events belong to the contemporary domain (Zwischengebiet), they constitutes the other worlds causally independent of me. . . . In Whitehead's philosophy of organism actuality is considered as process as the inner development of events which are monads of becoming as the synthetic unity between space and time. These events are independent as monads (in the contemporary domain) and at the same time new individuals temporally constituted by the creative advance of totality.

Philosophy as Metanoetics 2

Kant was the philosopher who first, fully and explicitly, introduced into phi losophy the conception of an ac t of experience as a constructive functioning, transforming subjectivity into objectivity. The purpose of the schematism of the world was to make this functioning reciprocal and more dynamic; for the subjective idealist the process whereby there is experience is a transition from subjectivity to apparent objectivity only; Tanabe complements this analysis with the inverse affectation of the world on an individual and also explains the process as proceeding from objectivity to subjectivity as well, thus making the relation between an individual and the world completely dialectical.

Independent of Heidegger and Tanabe, Whitehead stresses both the epoch-making character of the temporary ego and the importance of its environmental world in this way: ⁽⁵³⁾

Decartes' "cogito ergo sum"was wrongly translated, "I think, therefore I am." It is never bare thought or bare existence that we are aware of. I find myself as essentially a unity of emotions, enjoyments, hopes, fears, regrets, valuations of alternatives, decisions---all of them subjective reactions to the environment as active in my nature. My unity---which is Descartes' "I am"---is my process of shaping this welter of material into a consistent pattern of feelings. The individual enjoyment is what I am in my role of a natural activity, as I shape the activities of the environment into a new creation, which is myself at this moment; and yet, as being myself, it is a continuation of the antecedent world.

Whitehead characterizes the philosophy of organism as the inversion of Kant's philosophy. Whitehead "seeks to describe how objective data pass into subjective satisfaction, and how order in the objective data provides intensity in the subjective satisfaction; for Kant, the world emerges from the subject: for the philosophy of organism the subject emerges from the world---a superject rather than a subject".⁽⁵⁴⁾ The word "object" thus means an entity which is a potentiality for being a component of feeling; the word "subject" means the entity constituted by the process of feeling, and includes this feeling. This inversion of Kant would be meaningless unless the concept of transcendental subjectivity in the Kantian schematism of time is replaced by the Whiteheadian concept of subject-superjectivity in the schematism of the world, i.e., the extensive continuum.

The extensive continuum is a necessary prerequisite of Whitehead's concept of society as a spatio-temporal nexus of actual occations; "a set of entities is a society in virtue of a defining characteristic shared by its members, and in virtue of the presence of the defining characteristic being due to the environment provided by the society itself." ⁽⁵⁵⁾ The point here is that a society mediates temporal subjectivity with spatial objectivity in such a way that the nexus of actual occasions constitute "public matters of fact". In the same way the schematism of the world is closely related with "the logic of species" which Tanabe first launched in the celebrated paper, "The Logic of Species and the Schematism of the World". What Tanabe means by the logic of species is "the logic of social being" which dialectically mediates individual existence and universal topos. The temporalistic analysis of the subjectivity of an individual existence should be combined with the topological synthesis of the subject-superjectivity of the same individual essentially as a social being.

Philosophy as Metanoetics 3

2 Tanabe's Philosophy of Science after Metanoetics 　

Yoshiharu Hakari, one of the representative scholars of Non-Church Christianity in Japan, has propounded the thesis that grace cannot complete nature without abolishing it, thus overcoming both the Thomistic principle that gratia non tollit naturam sed perficit and the Kantian principle of the religion within the limit of mere reason. ⁽⁵⁶⁾ This thesis may be considered as the retrieval of the leit motif of Tanabe's Philosophy as Metanoetics. The completion of nature through its annihilation is considered by Tanabe as the paradox of grace. ⁽⁵⁷⁾ According to him this paradox is a fact in the transcendence of natural reason (metanoesis ) as the self-power which, through the absolute repentance (metanoia) of guilt, has experienced death-resurrection by the grace of the "Other Power", i.e. Nothingness-qua-Love. The range of metanoetics is wide enough to include both Christianity and Pure Land Buddhism; metanoetics can be viewed not only as the modern version of Shinran's Kyogyoshinsho but also as "dialectics of Christianity" because it is "the philosophy which is not a philosophy" having abolished the self-power of natural reason.⁽⁵⁸⁾ Neither is metanoetics theology nor buddhology as the dogmatic science based on any religious authority. It may also be viewed as the philosophy of religion which is not a religious philosophy based on any theological or buddhological dogmas of a particular denomination.

Keiji Nishitani points out that the unique characteristic of metanoetics consists in the absolutely critical use of "reason resurrected from death by grace", which does not come from the merely religious attitude of a penitent person.⁽⁵⁹⁾ Metanoetics has its own dialectics in order to "dig" to a deeper foundation which grounds both religion and philosophy. Nishitani recommends us to read Tanabe's books on the philosophy of science written after Metanoetics if we are to understand the full scope of the dialectic of Tanabe's philosophy as metanoetics. ⁽⁶⁰⁾

Tanabe has written many treatises on the philosophy of science after he retreated to Karuizawa; "An Essay on the Philosophy of Dynamics", "The Development of Mathematical Philosophy from the Perspective of Historicism", "A New Methodology of Theoretlcal Physlcs", "The Dialectic of Relativity Physics", etc.. Although the titles of these works do not seem to have any relevance to the philosophy of religion, Tanabe himself considered them as "summing up his lifelong philosophical thoughts". In order to understand the significance of these works, we must know what Tanabe means by " the philosophy of science" . Just as the philosophy of religion should be distinguished from theology or a religious philosophy, in the analogous way the philosophy of science in Tanabe's sense should be distinguished from "scientific philosophy" which logica1 positivists advocated in the 1930s. As Hans Reihenbach emphasized in The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, logical positivists reduced the task of philosophy to the logic of science and the linguistic analysis of moral language. ⁽⁶¹⁾ As theology and metaphysics were deprived of cognitive meanings, "scientific philosophy" in this sense tends to be ancilla scientiae which announces the end of philosophical speculations in the age of technology and science. Although the influence of logical positivism has declined , " the philosophy of science", even when distinguished from "scientific philosophy" in the above sense, means a special branch of philosophy whose task is to analyse philosophical problems of a scientific inquiry ; it is usually considered as a philosophical study which is supposed to be self-sufficient branch of quite independent of and indifferent to the problems of "the philosophy of religion."

On the contrary, Tanabe assumed that the philosophy of science is complementary with the philosophy of religion in such a way that the former mediates science with religion, whereas the latter religion with science. ⁽⁶²⁾ Both science and religion would remain incomplete without our philosophical reflections on their common but unknown foundation. In what way, then, should we seek this foundation after the Kantian critical philosophy has proven the existence of the inevitable paradoxes and antinomies involved in such trials? If we apply a scientific method to the problems of religion, or a religious criterion to the scientific discussions in the naive and unreflective manner, then the result would be disastrous both to religion and science; it is a grave mistake to assume that science supercedes religion or religion anticipates science because they do not provide competing accounts of the same subject matter. According to Tanabe, the common but unknown root of science and religion could be unearthed only when we are aware of the basic limitations of our faculties in both science and religion; he interprets the paradoxes and antinomies of "pure reason" in the Kantian sense not only as the limitations of a finite human reason, but also as that which shows the very path of historical practice through a radical self-denial of theoretical reason to the Real that mediates two incommensurables. In the essay, titled "Science, Philosophy, and Religion", Tanabe writes: ⁽⁶³⁾

The critical spirit of philosophy cannot remain in a neutral standpoint concerning the relation between science and religion. The coexistence of religion and science considered as independent of and indifferent to each other is not a satisfactory situation. Philosophy has to break through the "statics" of theoretical reason and to undertake its own ideal in a humble awareness of its own self-contradictions in the "dynamics" of historical praxis . . . Reason must affirm its own destiny to walk the way of "action-faith-witness" after having been abolished theoretically but "resurrected" practically in the depth of antinomies and paradoxes . . . . The task of philosophy is to mediate, i.e.,to establish something like analogia entis between science and religion which do not admit any direct unification.

Tanabe compares the prime task of the philosophy of science with the solving of the Koan of science in the same way that Zen practitioners concentrate themselves on solving "Koan", which means the Truth manifested as a religious paradox. In A Personal View of the Philosophy of Shobogenzo, Tanabe signifies by Koan the universal Truth that cannot be manifest without paradoxes, which has been suggested by Dogen's usage of "Genjyo Koan '' (Manifesting Truth) , thus including coincidentia oppositorum of sclence as well as of religion. ⁽⁶⁴⁾

Philosophy as Metanoetics 4

Tanabe meant his Philosophy as metanoetics to be an answer to the ethico-religious Koan which he had to face at the time of Japan's defeat in 1945. ⁽⁶⁵⁾ Anticipating the coming unconditional defeat of Japan, he asked Nishida to send his message to the ex-prime minister and member of the ImperiaI House, Konoe , who had been a student of Nishida at Kyoto University. In this message Tanabe tried to persuade the Imperial House to decide to give all its properties to the people for the reconstruction of the nation after the war at its own initiative rather than from the compulsion of the A1lied Powers, so that the Imperial House might be the true symbol of the unity of the people by its self-negating decision. ⁽⁶⁶⁾ Although his message was rejected by Nishida as unrealistic, this episode shows how Tanabe, having repented his tacit agreement to imperialistic policies, felt responsible for the disastrous results of the "holy" war, the war which he could not have prevented during the period of ultra-nationalism. The leitmotif of Tanabe's Philosophy as Metanoetics was to criticize radically the totalitarian ideology of the wartime Japan through metanoia (repentance) of its crimes.

What makes Tanabe distinct among the Kyoto school is that he has thought through the problems of history and ethical practice from the standpoint of Nothingness. He criticizes and reformulates Nishida's philosophy of Absolute Nothingness so that clearly he can reject any monistic or totalitarian interpretation of this philosophy.

According to Tanabe, philosophy cannot begin from a self-determination of wholeness because the totality of beings cannot be an object of our intuition. Rather, we can only move from "the microscopic and local" analysis to " the macroscopic and universal" synthesis, from " the differential " equations to "the integral " solutions as Tanabe often

characterizes his own methodology in terms of mathematical physics. ⁽⁶⁷⁾ In his philosophy of science, Tanabe compares Nishida's conception of absolute Nothingness as topos analogously with Lorentz's or Newton's idea of absolute space as something like sensorium dei. Tanabe prefers Einstein's "relative and local" approaches to Lorentz's "absolute and universal" because the latter remains to be a mere dogma whereas the former has a firm foundation in our experiments and observations.⁽⁶⁸⁾ Einstein's theory has its own concept of absolute existence, but this absolute is neither mere-space nor mere-time, but space-time as the four dimensional manifold which we can describe only through our experimental measurements, or what Tanabe calls "action-realization" although we cannot "Intuit" the totality of space-time. ⁽⁶⁹⁾ One of the important amendments which Tanabe has made concerning Nishida's logic of topos is that Tanabe has considered "the contradictory self- identity" as essentially temporally mediated rather than as the absolute principle of immediate intuition. Tanabe criticizes Nishida's metaphysical topology of Nothingness for its lack of dialectics of dynamic temporal activity: philosophy based on the unity of opposites without temporal mediation would remain to be a "speculative" mysticism without any positive principle of historical practice. In the Logic of Species and the Schematism of the World, Tanabe writes; ⁽⁷⁰⁾

Although (Heidegger's fundamental ) ontology of temporal existence needs synthesis with spatial elements if it is to become a concrete ontology of a social being through the schematism of the world, these spatial elements should not be considered as the spatial expression of the infinite topos of Nothingness, or the Eternal Now.. . . Coincidentia oppositorum in the topos of Nothingness conceived as the mere spatiality is nothing more than the static unity of mystical intuition and cannot be the dynamic unity between time and space; this unity would be possible through the mediation of a subject's practice rather than through an immediate intuition of the substratum.

Tanabe transforms the unity of contradictories in the logic of topos into the contrasted opposites in the historical process of becoming which involve novelty and a discontinuous jump in crisis. ⁽⁷¹⁾ For him history has become "the overall Koan" in which the metaphysical topology of a static being is to be superseded by the innovative principle of nothingness i n the historical world. Nothingness considered as mere spatiality which abstracts somewhat from a temporal becoming is the mere concept of pure nothingness which Hegel has identified with the pure being in his dialectics; therefore this is not to be confused with Absolute Nothingness which Tanabe considers essentially as the creative principle of self-transformation. ⁽⁷²⁾

Nothingness as the transformative principle of mediation is a key to our understanding of Philosophy as Metanoetics: just as Pure Land Buddhists of Jyodoshinshu, abandoning their own self-power, calls on the name of Amida Buddha as the savior and mediator of sentient beings for their attainment of Freedom (nirvana) , in the same way Tanabe , underscoring the essentia1 finitude of human existence, recommends both metanoia (repentance) and metanoesis (transcendence of reason) as the necessary means by which we are permitted to attain freedom through dying to and being resurrected from the historical world by the grace of the Other Power. If we were able to observe history sub specie aeternitatis, repentance and hope would be meaningless because it would be a folly to care about what has been determined in the past or will necessarily be in the future, as Spinoza clearly states in his Ethics. ⁽⁷³⁾ But we cannot really observe history as if it were an object of our intuition be cause our existence itself has a temporal "ecstatic" structure which is always going beyond or overcoming a previously determined self; it is a "thrown projection" as well as a "projected thrownness" that conforms to and mediates the determination of the past, a transformation of the determined into the determining, and therefore it has to be seen as "an opening up to nothingness". Concerning the relation between the historicity of human reason and metanoesis, Tanabe writes: ⁽⁷⁴⁾

Human reason must be driven through the impasse of contradiction to its own death. And, there, mediated by the transformation of absolute nothingness, it must be restored to a middle way that belongs to neither pole of the contradiction but develops in a new theory as a synthesis of both. This is a circular movement of creativity, a "revolution-qua-restoration" that forms the basic structure of history. . . .In metanoesis the past is not merely a "thrownness" that has passed away and is out of our control, but a present incessantly renewing its meaning and caught up in an unending circularity in accord with the future that mediates it. We might say that "thrown project" is transformed into a "projected thrownness" .

Whereas Heidegger considers death as the ultimate possibility for Dasein, representing the utmost horizon of its existential projection of future potentialities, Tanabe, complementing "thrown project" with "projected thrownness", provides a dialectical category for "the existential communion" which the mere existential analysis of Dasein does not recognize between the dead and the living. In this respect , Tanabe' s dialectics of "thrown project" and "projected thrownness" in the existential communion is quite similar to the Whiteheadian concept of subject-superject, and, therefore, to the concept of "objective immortality" whereby what is divested of its own living immediacy becomes a real component in other living immediacies of becoming. ⁽⁷⁵⁾ In Either Ontology of Life Or Dialectic of Death dedicated to Heidegger on his 70th birthday, Tanabe criticizes Heidegger's existential analysis of being- toward-death ( Sein zum Tode ) as a "non-relational (unbeztügliche )" solipsistic singularity f or its ignoring the essentia1 relatedness of the living with the dead.

Tanabe underscores the existence of communio sanctorum⁽⁷⁶⁾ which the living hold with the dead. Whereas Heidegger dealt with death as a singular point of his ontology of life, Tanabe may be said to have resolved and redeemed this singularity into life in his dialectics of death. Just as Mahayana Buddhists transformed the Hinayana concept of nirvana as absolute death into the saving principle of life in their conception of aparatisthita-nirvana(the nirvana that does not remain in absolute nirvana on account of great karuna ), Tanabe has transformed Heidegger's solipsistic concept of absolute death into an essentially communal one, thus expanding the context in which we can dialectically discuss both death and resurrected life.

References

References

(49) Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg, 1956, B29:A15
(50) Martin Heidegger , Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics , Translated into English by James S. Churchill, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and London, 1972, p.197.
(51) Martin Heidegger, op.cit., p.198.
(52) TW6:24. (53) MT:166. (54) PR:88. (55) PR:89
(56) Hakari Yoshiharu, Kant's Philosophy as a Philosophy of Religion, Keiso Shobo,Tokyo, 1990, pp.291-298.
(57) TW6:17(PM:2) (58) T16:4(PM:1). (59) NWK9:259.(60) NKW9:259
(61) Hans Reihenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, The Regents of the University of California, 1951. (62) TW11:305. (63) TW12:134. (64) TW5-490. (65) TW6:123(PM:126).
(66) Isaku Yanaibara, "Recollections of Prof. Tanabe", in Hajime Tanabe: His Thoughts and Recollections, Chikuma Shobo, 1991 ,314-318.
(67) TW12:3-58.(68) TW12:6.(69) TW12:4. (70) TW6:240. (71) TW12:226. (72) TW6: 183. (73) TW9: 184(PM: 194) . (74) TW9:67-79(PM:62-74). (75) PR;xiii. (76) TW13:528.

Hayathology as Anthropo-Theology 1

Hayathology as Anthropo-Theology

Yutaka Tanaka

I. Irreversibility in Takizawa's conception of God-with-us

Let me begin my paper by making a distinction between the primordial and the consequent senses in which we talk about the divine-human relationship. I owe this distinction to the late Prof. Takizawa who elaborated his philosophy of religion as an anthropo-theology on the basis of humanity irrespective of the cultural and historical differences between Christianity and Buddhism. Takizawa expressed the primordial divine-human relationship as Emanuel ( God-with-us) in the primary sense, and the consequent divine-human relationship as Emanuel in the secondary sense.⁽¹⁾ Borrowing this evangelical terminology from Karl Barth, Takizawa used it quite differently from Barth, to whom Emanuel (Gott mit uns) primarily means Jesus Christ, the mediator between God and man, and secondarily signifies the consequent historical community of believers in Jesus Christ. ⁽²⁾ Though Takizawa was an admirer of Barth, he did not follow Barth in this point, and insisted that God-with-us should hold in every human being, both within and without the Christendom, irrespective of his or her religious creed, even in the case of an atheist. So far as the primordial divine-human relationship is concerned, we are on the same level whether we are aware of this fact or not. The different aspects of religious belief appear on the level of the consequent divine-human relationship which depends on our own personal decision and response to the primordial fact. So the task of anthropo-theology is, according to Takizawa, to clarify and describe the distinction between these two kinds of divine-human relationship.

It has been often pointed out that Takizawa's distinction is an analogue of that between the primordial Enlightenment and the inceptive enlightenment in the traditional Mahayana Buddhism, as we find, for example, in the Awakening of Faith in Mahayana attributed to Ashvagosha. Takizawa himself admitted this similarity, and made it one of the common bases on which the dialogue between Christianity and Buddhism becomes possible⁽³⁾ It should be noted that some western scholars of Mahayana Buddhism shared the same problematic independently of Takizawa. For example, the Rev. Timothy Richard, translator of the Awakening of Faith wrote:⁽⁴⁾

If it be, as it is more and more believed, that the Mahayana Faith is not Buddhism, properly so called, but an Asiatic form of the same Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, in Buddhist nomenclature, differing from the old Buddhism just as the New Testament differs from the Old, then it commands a world-wide interest, for in it we find an adaptation of Christianity to ancient thought in Asia, and the deepest bond of union between the different races of the East and the West, viz., the bond of a common religion.

As the religious thought of the Awakening of Faith has exerted a great influence on Japanese spirituality, it might be suspected that Takizawa applied it to the central doctrine of Christianity just in the same way in which Mahayana Buddhists claimed that all sentient beings could get salvation through the primordial Enlightenment.

It should be noted, however, that Takizawa kept his mind, not on the medieval vestiges of Buddhism and Christianity, but on the coming age of the post-modern world characterized with an atheistic tendency. The exterior authority of medieval religiosity has collapsed under the impact of modern man's claim for human autonomy. The traditional forms of religion can not sustain themselves without reflecting the ultimate structure of human existence and the origin of the so-called human autonomy. Takizawa's main motive was not the comparison of peripheral phenomena between Christianity and Buddhism, but the primordial fact which decrees the constitution of each religion This fact reveals itself in the depth of our own personal existence as the "miraculous Emanuel", i.e. the fact that God is with us absolutely antecedent to our own subjectivity, before all our thoughts, words, acts, and even negligence. We, human beings, can not be separated from God, however independent and autonomous we may think of ourselves. Awakening to this primordial relationship, a finite human being can begin to participate as an authentic self in the process of realizing the primordial relationship. The historical process of realization, i.e. the consequent divine human relationship, was called by Takizawa "Emanuel in the secondary sense." Though the similarity between Takizawa's Emanuel and the Mahayana Buddhist treatment of Awakening is conspicuous, a subtle but very important difference appears when we analyze more carefully both the structure of God-with-us in the original context of Christianity and that of awakening in the Mahayana context. Whereas the primordial fact of Christianity signified by Emanuel was ultimately characterized as God's self-revelation through Jesus Christ, Buddhists did not presuppose such an transcendent deity when they emphasized the Enlightenment or Awakening to the dependent-coorigination (pratitya samutpada) and nothingness (sunyata).

How was it possible that Takizawa discussed God's self-revelation and human's self-awakening at the same time? Takizawa's answer to this type of question was so radical to Christianity and to Buddhism that his impact on both religions has not been accepted without being diluted. He has been ignored for a long time both by Christian and Buddhist specialists because he seemed, on the one hand, to deny the unique and absolute role of God's only Son in Christian theology, and seemed, on the other hand, to discuss the experience of Awakening without practicing Zen meditation and Koan exercise under an authoritative Zen master. Even though we admit that these objections may have some reasons, we can not but say in the same breath that Takizawa was consistent in his criticism of the traditional forms of Christianity and Zen Buddhism in so far as the primordial divine-human relation, as he insisted, should not be localized only within the Christen-dom, nor only within the Zen monastery because it lies, as the undeniable fact, in the constitutional principle of humanity irrespective of religious creed.

Takizawa's standpoint may be considered as a generalization of Christology to anthropo-theology, for the non-dual but non-identical relation which Christian theology recognizes between God and Jesus Christ should also hold, as Takizawa insisted, in the case of every human being. Every man is in a position of realizing the primordial non-dual but non-identical relation in which God's self-revelation and human's self-awakening simultaneously take place.

It would be our misunderstanding if we brand Takizawa's view as a variant of idealistic philosophy or as a "gnostic herecy". Although adopting the non-dualistic approach to the central problems of Christianity, he also put special emphasis on the non-identical aspect of the divine-human relation so that Christianity might not degenerate into the metaphysical monism in which the distinction between God and the World would be overlooked.

Takizawa was a disciple of Nishida, one of the most influential philosophers of modern Japan. When he got a scholarship to study philosophy in Germany, he was advised by Nishida to take a theological course under Karl Barth. So Takizawa had an opportunity of discussing such theological problems as the unity of divinity and humanity in the person of Jesus Christ.

In this inter-religious encounter between the Japanese philosopher with a Buddhistic background and the representative Protestant theologian, Takizawa repeatedly asked Barth concerning the nature of identity when Barth asserted that Jesus Christ is God, a very man and very God. This question did not come from the non-Christian philosopher's intellectual curiosity. It was a necessary one from the problematic of Nishida's philosophy, for the crux of this philosophy was concerning the paradoxical unity of our human nature with Godhead.

Hayathology as Anthropo-Theology 2

Takizawa regarded Nishida's work as "a philosophy of metanoia which bears testimony to the true God in the language of this specific country in this specific age"⁽⁵⁾ and tried to persuade Barth to believe that the triune God can reveal himself outside the "wall" of Christendom, indeed at every time and everywhere in so far as the primordial divine-human relationship can not be localized to a particular age and country.⁽⁶⁾

Though Barth flatly denied such a possibility of God's revelation outside the Bible, Takizawa insisted that the historical event of Jesus, his life and death, was a Biblical testimony to the primordial fact (Urfactum) , implicitly going beyond Barth's Christ-centrism where the Jesus event was neither a testimony to nor a sign (Zeichen) of the Fact (Sache) but the primordial fact itself. According to Takizawa, the danger of pharisaims always hovers about us if we are blind to the Fact which has decreed the life and death of Jesus even when we worship him as the Savior, saying that there is no salvation without Jesus Christ. He often cited those lines of the Gospel which recorded that Jesus himself was not pleased to be an object of idol-worship (Matt. 19-17) though he proclaimed his divinity before the high priest (Matt. 26-64). Jesus was not an exception but a chief exemplification of the paradoxical unity of God-human nature.
The difference between Jesus and his followers consists in the modes of awakening to this Fact. While Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom of God as a witness of the Truth (John 18-37) , his disciples worshipped him as the Savior. So the consequent divine-human relations were different between them. This difference reflects that of modes of awakening to the primordial fact. Whereas Jesus awakened to it through a unique and original awareness of his own historical role as Messiah in the New Testament age of Judaism, his disciples awakened to the same Fact through believing in the paradoxical event of Christ's death and resurrection. In recognizing the fundamental identity behind the apparent differences between the founder and the followers of Christianity, we may say that Takizawa discovered an anthropo-theology of Awakening on the basis of the primordial fact.

Takizawa's anthropo-theology was developed through his confrontation with the so-called FAS Zen Buddhism of Shin'ichi Hisamatsu, another disciple of Nishida and one of the most radical Buddhist thinkers in the modern Japan. Hisamatsu insisted that we should not seek for Buddha as an exterior authority, nor as the Other Power, because Buddha is nothing but the "Formless Self" who awakens in our innermost subjectivity. The Formless Self should not be localized to a particular person, but He should be universalized to All mankind as the authentic subject of forming history from the Supra-historical standpoint.⁽⁷⁾

Takizawa's christology had a remarkable similarity with Hisamatsu's conception of the Formless Self. Takizawa admitted that Hisamatsu was radically consistent in rejecting both the Other Power of the Pure Land Buddhism and the unilaterally transcendent God of Christianity as legacies of pre-modern religiocity, and was even sympathetic with Hesamatsu's atheology in so far as it swept away any vestige of idol-worship in Christianity and Buddhism. Takizawa, however, objected that there should be an irreversible order in the primordial divine-human relation, and insisted that a personal experience of enlightenment, however deep it may be, should not claim finality in the primordial sense.

The experience of enlightenment, in so far as it takes place at some time and somewhere, should be considered as an inceptive event on the level of the consequent divine-human relation rather than as the unconditional unity with the Absolute. Every Buddha, i.e. every awakened one, is primordially on the same level as an ordinary human being, and the apparent monistic attitude of an atheistic Buddhist has, according to him, a tendency of self-delusion due to the lack of in-sight to the subtle structure of the divine-human relation.

The life of Buddha, as well as the earthly life of Jesus, was considered by Takizawa as an "exemplary complete reflection" of the primordial fact on the level of the consequent divine-human relation. We can not say that Takizawa's standpoint was pantheistic, because he recognized the irreversible order between God and Man, and denied apotheosis of a finite self in any experience of awakening. We need not transcend the limit of humanity because such a trial would be a misplaced one from the beginning. Takizawa's polemic against Hisamatsu was concerning the subtle distinction between a finite self and the Formless Self. Hisamatsu did not talk much about the "practice after awakening" because his emphasis was on the primordial Enlightenment which transcends the limit of space and time.

So the problem of Hisamatsu Zen, if any, was that the status of a finite self had not been explicated enough in the actual historical situation. It would be far from the truth to say that a finite self becomes the Formless Self through awakening, because the self-identity between before and after an experience of awakening should be strictly distinguished from the paradoxical unity of a finite self with the Formless Self in the primordial Enlightenment. The essential finitude of human existence cannot be ignored even in the case of an awakened one. Neither would it be persuasive to deny the reality of a finite self, pace the theory of non-self in the traditional Buddhism, once we enter the realm of social and ethical practice where it is not the Formless Self but always a finite self that has to take the moral responsibility of its own decision among other finite selves.

Takizawa's emphasis on irreversibility in the divine-human relation caused debates among Zen Buddhists and Christians.8 Though the concept of irreversibility is familiar to Christianity, most Zen Buddhists have felt uneasy about it especially when applied to the structure of primordial Enlightenment. Abe, for example, objected against Takizawa that the ultimate religious relation should be absolutely reversible and said "the standpoint m which an element of irreversibility remains is not a thoroughgoing one " from Zen Buddhism.9 On the other hand, Takizawa's concept of God-with-us seemed unsatisfactory, at least to some Christians in that the aspect of reciprocity between God and man was totally ignored, and the mystery of Christ's passion and death on the Cross cannot be explained away on the standpoint of Awakening to the primordial fact. We need something more than Awakening if we are to grasp not only the words of Jesus but also his life and death in the Gospel.

In the original context of the New Testament, God-with-us means the retrieve of the lost bond between God and man in the history of salvation, and does not signify a non-historical universal relation. Takizawa considered historical aspects of the divine-human relation as consequent on the primordial fact, and stressed the irreversible order between the non-historical and historical relations though they are inseparable. If historical elements are essential to Christianity, then it is insufficient to the understanding of such elements to assert unilaterally the irreversible order between the primordial and consequent relations. The God whom we encounter in the consequent divine-human relation is no less important than God-with-us in the primordial relation, and the concept of irreversibility seems insufficient if it is applied to the eternal and historical aspects of the divine-human relation.

The controversies which Takizawa aroused in his later years showed that we must further his project of anthropo-theology in more satisfactory fashions though we owe to him a great insight into the universal non-historical character of the divine-human relation which has made it possible for Christians to enter into dialogue with Buddhists.
The second section of my paper is concerning the philosophical foundation of anthropo-theology. As both Takizawa and Hisamatsu are Nishida's disciples, the latest stage of Nishida's philosophy, especially "the Logic of Topos and Religious World-View" will first be discussed, and then my own standpoint which is called hayathology (the theory of Becoming) will be propounded as a project of the syn-thesis between ontology (the theory of Being) and sunyatology (the theory of Nothingness) .

Hayathology as Anthropo-Theology 3

II. Retrieving Reciprocity from the Standpoint of Hayathology

The purpose of Nishida's latest philosophy was, as he wrote to Daisetsu Suzuki in 1945, to explicate the paradoxical structure of human personality from the standpoint of Wisdom Sutras (prajnya paramita) , and to integrate it with the actual historical world on the basis of the logic of Topos. As Suzuki explicated in "the Fundamental Thoughts in Lin Chi" , "the true person with no title" played a central role in Lin Chi Zen, and the inter-personal relation between a Zen master and his disciples was undoubtedly essential to the understanding of a Zen dialogue. The structure of the "true person" was described by Suzuki as "the self-transcending individual " who is on account of not being himself. This structure of self-transcendence was expressed in terms of the non-dual but non-identical relation which was called "soku hi " In Wisdom Sutras. Nishida was keenly aware of the fact that the logic of "soku hi" could not easily be conceptualized within the stock of philosophical terminology then available to him .

Western philosophy had a long tradition of ontology which asked the meaning of Being in the ultimate sense, but its conceptual framework was insufficient to the understanding of the philosophical core of Mahayana Buddhism where nothingness rather than Being was emphasized. The development of Nishida's philosophy can be considered as the "documents of great struggle" with the fundamental problems of Nothingness. He aimed at constructing the truly universal philosophy beyond the contrasted differences between East and West rather than characterizing a provincial concept of "Oriental Nothingness". The origin of Western metaphysics, especially the problematic of Plato and Aristotle, attracted his attention because it suggested to him how the priority of Being (Form) to Nothingness (the Formless)was established in Western philosophy. In Plato's Timaeus, he discovered a key concept of Topos (chora) as the missing link which might be helpful to the understanding of Nothingness. The paradoxical unity between a being (rupa) and emptiness (sunyata) in Wisdom Sutras can be expressed by the complementarity between an entity and its topos. The relativity of being and nothingness, however, signifies the absolute field of totality which includes every kind of opposition. This absolute field of totality was called by Nishida "the Topos of Absolute Nothingness." In his work, "From the Actor to the Seer", three kinds of Topos were discussed, i.e. the topos of relative being (physical topos as the space-time continuum) , the topos of relative nothingness (the field of consciousness) , and the Topos of Absolute Nothingness.⁽¹¹⁾

These three kinds of topos are known consecutively through trans-descendence.⁽¹²⁾ One finds oneself first in the topos of relative being, interacting with other entities in one's environment. Next one knows oneself as the experiencing subject which can not be an object in the topos of relative being. In order to know oneself as the transcendental subject, one has to trans-descend the depth of the first topos.

The transcendental subject, in the Kantian sense, can not reach the core of religious experience. One has to trans-descend again the depth of the second topos through radically abolishing the dichotomy of subject and object. In Nishida's logic of Topos, the metaphysical ultimate was Absolute Nothingness, which is indirectly characterized as the universal which is always a predicate, and never a subject. We may compare Nishida with Aristotle concerning the metaphysical problems. In the Aristotelian tradition, metaphysics was closely related with ontology, i.e. the study of being which, though said in many ways, has the central focal meaning in the concept of substance (ousia) . Asking the relation of the Platonic Forms to the fluent world, Aristotle ended his metaphysics by finding the unmoved mover, the substance as Absolute Being.

Nishida's approach to metaphysics may be characterized as sunyatology, i.e. the study of nothingness which, no less equivocal than being, has the central focal meaning in the concept of topos. Asking the non-dual but non-identical relation between an entity and its topos, Nishida continued his metaphysical inquiry through the procedure of trans-descending until he found the total process of inquiry had been grounded in the topos of Absolute Nothingness. As the explicans of religious experience in Zen Buddhism, Nishida's approach to metaphysics was successful and illuminating. Nishida, however, wanted to have his philosophy of Topos accepted not only as applicable to a special religious experience but also as available to the explicans of the general structure of reality.

Neither was he satisfied with the standpoint of "contemplation" of the Absolute, as his disciple Tanabe misunderstood him, because contemplation and practice are inseparable m his concept of "action intuition". The problem of practice in the historical world gradually became a center of Nishida's concern. How is it possible to deduce the historical world and human practice from the standpoint of Absolute Nothingness?
This problem was a leitmotif in the later development of Nishida's philosophy.
Hisamatsu also tackled this problem, and furthered Nishida's philosophy toward a more existential and historical direction. Hisamatsu grasped nothingness as subjectivity as well as topos. The negative receptivity of nothingness as topos was complemented by creative activity of nothingness as subjectivity. ⁽¹³⁾

As Takizawa contrasted what Hisamatsu called Formless Self as Absolute Subjectivity with God in the primordial Fact in his anthropo-theology, his polemic against Hisamatsu showed a tension between Christianity and Buddhism concerning the ultimate reality. The dialogue between them was succeeded by many scholars in Japan, and it was the problematic of irreversibility that they have mainly discussed. In the first section of this paper I asked a question concerning the compatibility between a Christian's concept of God and a Buddhistic awakening to pratitya samutpada and Nothingness. The problem of irreversibility must be considered in this broader perspective. The standpoint which I adopt may be called hayathology i.e. the theology of Becommg. ⁽¹⁴⁾ "Haya" is the Hebrew word which means becoming.