Zen and Philosophy

Foreword: A Contemplative Life

Foreword A Contemplative Life It is for me an honor and a pleasant duty to preface this remarkable study. An intellectual biography is neither a mere historical account of the events of one particular person, more or less interesting as they might be, nor is it merely one more chapter in the history of ideas describing the more or less logical connection of one person’s thought to ideas prevalent at a particular time and place. It is more demanding than that, and also more important. To be sure, the intellect expresses itself in ideas, and biography is concerned with the facts of a person’s life. But an intellectual biography seeks to approach ideas as living entities incarnated in a living person. The connections are not only logical but also vital. A philosopher not only has ideas and writes about them; he lives. An authentic philosopher always maintains a measure of reserve about his ideas, conscious of their limitations much in the same way that he is conscious of his own physical limitations. A true philosopher is not a professor of philosophy (as Kant would have it), not a Lesemeister, a teacher of doctrines, but a Lebensmeister, a guide for life (as Eckhart puts it). To attempt an intellectual biography of this sort involves penetrating the very life of the intellect as incarnated by one of those few, as Fichte ironically phrases it, “condemned by God to be philosophers.” I say that it is an honor for me to introduce the work of Professor Michiko Yusa, because it represents the successful completion of a task as demanding as it is fascinating. At the same time, it is not without a certain sense of duty that I accept the honor, having guided the author through her master’s and doctoral work, and even more so for having first drawn the attention of Professor Yusa to the importance of Nishida Kitarö. She is altogether too generous in naming me “the primogenitor of this work,” but I gladly accept the duty of the teacher to Foreword serve one’s students and welcome the chance to underline the significance of the work she has completed. Readers of this book will be quick to recognize the devotion to detail that occupied the attentions of the author throughout the decade of its composition. I am tempted to call her book an outstanding work. Without being an expert in Japanese thought, I had a fair knowledge of Nishida’s philosophy, but I must confess that this book has led me to love the man—and without love knowledge is truncated, to say the least. Professor Yusa’s work blends with exquisite tact the “objective” realm of ideas with the subjective field of the personal life of the thinker. In so doing, she herself exemplifies one of the contributions of Nishida to philosophy: the overcoming of the epistemological dichotomy between objectivity and subjectivity. Nishida is for me a living example of the struggle to rise above the split between theöreia and praxis. It is not that he drew theoretical conclusions from his concrete actions. He was no Marxist. But neither is it the case that his theories moved him directly to action. He was no idealist either. Rather his nondualistic experience, as I would put it, made him realize the falsity of the dichotomy between the two. When Cicero’s Roman spirit translated the Greek theöreia into the Latin contemplatio , he did not mean to reduce the notion to a mere spinning of ideas. The advaitic attitude, a fundamental feature of the Oriental spirit (if I may be permitted a simplification), was nurtured in Nishida’s life through the discipline of Zen. His was indeed a contemplative life. How else could he have kept a balance between the revolution begun by the Meiji Restoration and its unexpected escalation, led by the patriotic militarism that followed it? He embraced the Meiji spirit in opening himself fully to the philosophical influence of Western philosophy in its modern form. But he did not forfeit his Oriental wisdom so as to become a mere Japanese expert in European thought. This may be part of the reason that some of his interpretations of German idealism strike us as not quite hermeneutically accurate by Western standards. Or is this perhaps a felix culpa? Of the many considerations that come to mind, I single out one. It is quite literally a “con-sideration,” since what it attempts is to...