Nishida Kitarō's Chiasmatic Chorology: Place Of Dialectic, Dialectic Of Place by John W. M. Krummel (review)

John Krummel's Nishida Kitarō's Chiasmatic Chorology: Place of Dialectic, Dialectic of Place is a welcome addition to the growing literature of comparative philosophy that seeks to articulate Japanese and other Asian philosophical traditions using terminology that is more familiar to Western scholars, while attempting not to distort the nature of the philosophy. The purpose of the book is to explicate Nishida's unique philosophy with reference to the different traditions that influenced his work in a way that better allows his philosophy to be a part of the global philosophical conversation in general, and continental philosophy in particular.

Krummel's main thesis claims that Nishida, although influenced by Hegelian and Buddhist philosophy, developed his own philosophy which cannot be reduced to either. In presenting his argument, Krummel hopes to show the value of Nishida's philosophy and present a case for a greater role for Nishida's philosophy in philosophical discourse. The book is divided into three parts. Chapters 1 and 2 cover the philosophy that preceded Nishida and exerted an influence on his thought. Chapters 3 through 7 discuss the chronological development of Nishida's unique dialectical philosophy. Finally, in chapters 8 through 11, Krummel draws conclusions from and expounds upon the earlier chapters, seeking to bring Nishida into the wider philosophical discussion.

Chapter 1 discusses Nishida's understanding of the various philosophical theories with which he was familiar. The chapter lays out, among others, Nishida's understanding of Aristotle, Neo-Kantianism, and Hegel. Krummel claims that Nishida's philosophy is a response against the dualism between the subject and object in such systems. Chapter 2 focuses on the influence of Hegel's dialectic and the Mahāyāna school's nondualism in Nishida's philosophy. Krummel argues that Hegel's dialectic had its greatest influence on Nishida's early work, when Nishida was first working out his own philosophy of place (basho 場所), as evidenced by Nishida's heavy reliance on Hegelian terminology. With regard to the Mahāyāna school, Krummel discusses how the concepts of nothing and the logic of both A and not-A influenced Nishida's thought and how there are important differences between it and Hegel's dialectic.

The second part of the book starts with Nishida's early dialectic in the 1910s and 1920s. This includes Nishida's first attempt at unifying the epistemological subject and object, a duality that is prevalent in Western philosophy, through the notion of pure experience. Krummel relates the notion of pure experience to Hegel's notion of a concept. He goes on to correlate the driving force of the dialectic, the will, with those of Schopenhauer's metaphysics of the will and Fichte's "fact-act" (Tathandlung), which has led many to argue that the early Nishida had strong idealist inclinations.

Chapter 4 covers the late 1920s to the early 1930s and includes works such as the essays compiled in From the Working to the Seeing (Hatarakumono kara mirumono e 働くものから見るものへ). It is during this period that Nishida develops the notion of an epistemology of place (basho 場所), a fundamental development in Nishida's philosophy. Nishida posits overlapping places going from the concrete, the undetermined absolute nothing, to the abstract, the grammatical subject of judgment. In particular, Nishida introduces three major basho: the place of being, the place of oppositional nothing, and the place of truth. Krummel points to Nishida's use of the term "nothing" in relation to place as the first hint that what Nishida was trying to argue for in his philosophy is not the same as Hegel. However, Krummel claims that during this period, Nishida's philosophy was still focused on mind, consciousness, and experience from a Western philosophical perspective.

Chapter 5 details the next stage in the development of Nishida's philosophy: the 1930s to the 1940s. This stage of Nishida's philosophy sees Nishida connect his concept of basho with the sociohistorical world. Nishida...