Nishida's Theory of Experience and Consciousness

Pure Experience
Starting with An Inquiry Into the Good, Nishida's early work calls into question two basic presuppositions of most modern epistemology: the assumptions that experience is individual and subjective, and that it leads to knowledge only via a corrective process with input from the mind or other individuals. For Nishida, experience in its original form is not the exercise of individuals equipped with sensory and mental abilities who contact an exterior world; rather it precedes the differentiation into subject experiencing and object experienced, and the individual is formed out of it. The moment of seeing a color or hearing a sound is prior not only to the thought that the color or sound is the activity of an external object or that one is sensing it, but also to the judgment of what the color or sound might be (Nishida 1990a, 3). Pure experience names not only the basic form of every sensuous and every intellectual experience but also the fundamental form of reality, indeed the one and only reality from which all differentiated phenomena are to be understood. Cognitive activities such as thinking or judging, willing, and intellectual intuition are all derivative forms of pure experience but identical to it insofar as they are in actwhen thinking, willing, etc. are going on. The experience of a running horse, for example, underlies the judgment that the horse is running, and the activity of judging is an exercise of pure experience prior to a subsequent judgment that I am now judging. Objective phenomena likewise derive from pure experience; when unified they are called nature, while spirit names the activity of unifying. Pure experience launches the dynamic process of reality that differentiates into subjective and objective phenomena on their way to a higher unity, and the recapture of our unitary foundation is what Nishida means by the Good. Nishida would deny that his position is a kind of idealism, either subjective or transcendental, because no subjective mind, human or divine, is the origin of what is taken as reality, and no personified or ego-aware spirit is its beginning or end. His notion of pure experience clearly shows the influence of William James, Ernst Mach, and others, but it differs from their notions as well as from twentieth-century expositions of pre-reflective experience by its emphasis on the non-individuated character and the seamless development of such experience. It is the pre-individual basis of a systematic and all-comprehensive process. If we call his view a theory of experience, we should be aware that from his standpoint the theory is a natural outgrowth of unitary experience and not a reflection on it proceeding from a different source. The question of how pure experience grounds reflective knowledge would occupy Nishida in works composed after An Inquiry Into the Good. The directness, relative simplicity, and systematic approach of this book made it perhaps the most accessible and popular of his works; and many commentators have tended to emphasize it more than later writings, despite Nishida's own misgivings about its latent psychologism. Indeed Nishida's initial position anticipates several developments in his later thought. For example, the early statements of experience prior to a subject experiencing and an object experienced are re-formulated in the late 1920s as seeing without a seer, hearing without a hearer. The nullification of the self in pure experience is later expressed as seeing the self from the perspective of the world, where world is understood phenomenologically as a determining horizon of 1

experience. The notion of the individual as determined by the universal concealed within (Nishida 1990a, 18) pre-figures Nishida's later adaptation of Hegel's concrete universal; the later works speak of the individual as the self-determination of the universal. Finally, the ways in which pure experience can be said to be most concrete, to enfold all reality and indicate its undifferentiated ground, reflect methods that characterize Nishida's philosophy as a whole.

Self-Awareness
The question of how reflective thought is grounded in pure experience finds a tentative answer in Nishida's next essays. How can pure experience develop into reflective thought that would seem to interrupt and interpret it from an external vantage point? The self-reflection known as self-consciousness or self-awareness (jikaku) provides an answer. There is a form of consciousness that inherently reflects or mirrors itself within itself, so that there is no difference between that which reflects and what is reflected. In self-awareness, immediate experiencing and reflection are unified. In epistemological terms, knower and known are the same, and this instance of unity serves as the prototype of all knowledge. Two points may prevent a misunderstanding of Nishida's position here. First, his talk of self-awareness and selfreflection does not imply the pre-given existence of some personal self that at times may be self-conscious. Secondly, if consciousness is not placed in a pre-given self, it also is not placed in the objective world as a complex of brain cells or as the effect of material objects on the mind or brain. As in modern phenomenology, consciousness for Nishida means simply that which makes manifest or, to use a visual metaphor, that which illuminates. To emphasize its non-objectifiable character, Nishida later will place consciousness in nothingness, that is, consider it a form of nothingness, and will eventually consider this a form of relative or oppositional nothingness, a nonbeing with respect to beings. In the meantime, he formulated it as the activity that precedes but ultimately unifies self and world. Knowledge of things in the world begins with the differentiation of unitary consciousness into knower and known and ends with self and things becoming one again. Such unification takes form not only in knowing but in the valuing (of truth) that directs knowing, the willing that directs action, and the feeling or emotive reach that directs sensing. In this stage of his work Nishida, influenced by Fichte and Schopenhauer, considered absolute will as the preeminent form of self-awareness and saw it as the source of acts of moral decision and of the creation and appreciation of art. Since the activity of the will eludes reflection, however, Nishida eventually abandoned this formulation of a unitary source.