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7 Ueda Shizuteru’s Phenomenology of Self and World: Critical Dialogues with Descartes, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty Steffen Döll No account of the Kyoto School is complete without reference to Ueda Shizuteru , the central figure in the School’s current third generation. A direct student of Nishitani’s and the successor to his academic post, Ueda is one of today’s leading authorities on the philosophy of Nishida as well as an expert in Zen Buddhist literature. It was Ueda’s original work on Christian mysticism —especially his comparative studies on Meister Eckhart and Zen—that first earned him recognition in the West, and his numerous publications illustrate how engaging in a critical dialogue with other patterns of thought and experience is essential to the formation of his philosophy.1 This is apparent , for example, in his masterful interpretations of Otto Friedrich Bollnow and Martin Buber.2 Ueda consistently manages to highlight and clarify the central issues at stake in the philosophies of his dialogue partners, while relating these to his own central concern with developing a phenomenology of self and world. Ueda’s philosophical standpoint is characterized (1) by a severe critique of the modern understanding of the self as subject; (2) by a logic of locus (basho no ronri) which he develops in reference to Heidegger’s topological ontology; and (3) by an endeavor to lay a philosophical foundation for the soteriology of Zen practice.3 These three characteristics find their paradigmatic formulation in Ueda’s core concepts of “being-in-the-twofold-world” and “self as not-self.” Also crucial is his original understanding of the central Kyoto School notion of “absolute nothingness” or “absolute negation.” Following Ueda’s own accounts, we can give the following preliminary sketch of the core concepts of his thought (see USS 9: 22–23): Ueda Shizuteru’s Phenomenology of Self and World |   121 • The world is essentially and primordially a twofold world. The self always finds itself in a specific “world” (sekai), that is, in a concrete situation. But at the same time, this world is in turn located in an “infinite openness,” an “invisible nihilum” as the locus of all loci. And so the self and its specific world are surrounded and permeated by nothingness. • In accord with this invisible twofold structure, Ueda formulates the notion of a “self that is not a self,” or more concisely, a “self as not-self.” Such a “true self” has its identity in constantly negating itself. Being within a specifically determined world, the aspect of “self” dominates; in nothingness , the aspect of “not-self” does. That being so, we can state that “the invisible twofoldness of the world is incarnated in a visible twofoldness” (USS 9: 22), insofar as the aspect of “self” is, in fact, visible. • When the underlying deeper dimension of world and self is forgotten, the invisible twofold structure seems to collapse into a superficial onefoldness ; the world is mistaken as being merely “the (specific) world,” the self as merely “the ego.” • The position of authentic twofoldness then is usurped by fictitious dualities (subject/object, self/other, etc.), which are taken to be constituted by mutually independent substances. These fictitious dualities rule our everyday thought and conduct. • When these illusions of duality and the underlying misconception of self and world are given up, that is, negated, the twofold structure of the world self-actualizes itself in the self-awareness of the self as not-self and as “being-in-the-twofold-world.” This transition from delusion to truth is the vector along which Ueda’s philosophy is projected. Negation, for Ueda, first and foremost holds soteriological possibilities. This essay attempts to clarify these central concepts of Ueda’s philosophy by focusing on his dialogue with two major figures in modern European philosophy : Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger. These philosophers’ at-times strikingly similar criticisms of Descartes’s conception of the self will provide us with a starting point for our inquiry. The first part of this essay (sections 1–3) is devoted to explicating Ueda’s concept of self, and it moves from the Cartesian cogito to Merleau-Ponty’s tacit cogito and finally to Nishida’s theory of pure experience and its spontaneous self-unfolding. The second part (sections 4–7) is concerned with Ueda’s conversation with Heidegger’s thought. The idea of being-in-the-twofoldworld will emerge more clearly via an analysis of the concepts of world, noth- [3.144.189.177] Project MUSE...

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