Nishida Kitarō's Philosophy of Life by Tatsuya Higaki (review)

In Nishida Kitarō's Philosophy of Life, Tatsuya Higaki offers a highly novel and compelling reading of Nishida's philosophy by placing it in dialogue with the life philosophy of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. The philosophical core of the book consists of six chapters, chronologically proceeding from Nishida's early work on "pure experience" in 1911, through middle and late-middle period concepts like "self-awareness," "place," "absolute nothingness," and "acting intuition," and finally to his late-period work on "absolute contradictory selfidentity" before his death in 1945. Despite this terminological diversity, Higaki reads such "slogans" together in terms of Nishida's more fundamental orientation towards "one problem": "the problem of thinking the 'I' that exists in this world from the perspective of practice" (p. 37). According to Higaki, it is in taking up this one problem--how to consider the holistically unified codeterminative and co-constitutive activity by which self and world emerge in and through each other--that Nishida emerges as a "co-runner" in life philosophy alongside the above Bergson and Deleuze.

From the vantage point of life philosophy, Higaki implicitly delineates two broad stages in Nishida's thought. The first stage, that of Nishida's early and middle period solutions to this "one problem" (up through early iterations of absolute nothingness), charts much the same ground as Bergson's work from the late-1880s and '90s. Key here is the fact that early Bergson and Nishida both begin by attending to the fluidity of the present moment, and in doing so, both open onto a holistic background of virtual infinity--resulting in the concepts of pure duration and pure experience, respectively.

Bergson and Nishida also bear similarities in their attempts to resolve the various problems associated with such a framework of purity. "There is a tendency in theories of 'purity,'" Higaki notes, "to regard the infinite expansion of relationships, or the whole, as a flat expansion of the experience of the present" (p. 61). Higaki's analyses of "self-awareness" and "place" emerge with particular clarity in this respect. Though the text that is perhaps most central to self-awareness--Intuition and Reflection in Self-Awareness--was translated into English more than 30 years prior, it has received comparatively scant treatment in Anglophone scholarship. Referencing Bergson's theory of "pure duration" and the process by which memory is transformed into an image, Higaki demonstrates self-awareness as a successor concept to pure experience--an attempt by Nishida to explain how the undifferentiated flow of infinite "pure experience" actualizes and determines itself as something concrete and manifest. Within this analysis, Higaki's treatment of mathematics is noteworthy not only because it remains an understudied topic in English-language scholarship on Nishida, but also because it contextualizes Nishida's rather intractable use of mathematics as central to the problem of fluid, holistic development that he engages in this period.

Higaki's lens of life philosophy also allows for a new perspective on Nishida's concept of place--a text/slogan that has, contrarily, received sustained attention in Anglophone scholarship. In John Krummel and Shigenori Nagatomo's comprehensive introduction to their translation of "Place," the authors' juxtapose Bergson's theory of "pure duration" in contradistinction to the concept of place owing to the former's "purely linear-temporal analysis." For Higaki, however, place is associated not with Time and Free Will but with Matter and Memory, and in particular the concept of "pure memory." Higaki's claim is that Bergson's analysis of pure memory as a "difference in nature" from the actualized present owing to its virtual structure of totality resonates with Nishida's theory of an "infinitely deep" "supra-conscious" activity that lies behind and makes possible the actualized present. He illustrates this resonance by comparing Bergson's multi-strata cone and Nishida's multi-layered place. Just as "the various strata of memory, illustrated by [Bergson's] cone, each display their own degree of generality and individuality"--with...