HPhil Seminar: May 26, 2022

The HPhil (History of Philosophy) Research Group of the Centre of Philosophy of the University of Lisbon announces the 2021/22 edition of its permanent seminar on the history of philosophy, devoted to the reading and discussion of seminal philosophical works, as well as to the presentation of conferences by renowned specialists, aiming to promote the permanent training of the academic community.

In this session, Enrico Fongaro (Nanzan University) will give a lecture entitled “Zen and consciousness – On Nishida’s concept of consciousness as “place”” (abstract bellow).

The session will take place on May 26, 2022, exceptionally at 2 PM (14h, Lisbon time), via Zoom (click here). All are welcome.

 

Abstract

Zen and consciousness – On Nishida’s concept of consciousness as “place”

Focusing mainly on two texts, Place (1926) and The Unsolved Issue of Consciousness (1926), I will try to outline the concept of consciousness delineated by the Japanese philosopher Kitarō Nishida (1870-1945) in the middle period of his philosophical production.

Being the result of the encounter between the tradition of Eastern thought, in particular Zen Buddhism, and Western philosophy, Nishida’s philosophy is known for its intercultural potential. From the very beginning Nishida sets his thinking on the basis of consciousness, in this sense following modern thought on the one hand and Mahayana conscientialism on the other. What we call “reality” are for Nishida phenomena of consciousness, but this reality manifests itself first of all in an immediate adual experience of reality (in the subjective and objective sense of the genitive) on which Nishida bases all his philosophical thought. In his first works, between Bergson and Kant, Husserl and the neo-Kantians, Nishida tries to interpret consciousness as “will”, which leads him to the problem of “intuition” as the privileged moment of the self-manifestation of reality as it is. If on the one hand Nishida interprets the immediate adual experience of reality as it is as an “intuition”, on the other hand he tries to conceive consciousness essentially as “will”, in line with the modern metaphysics of will (Heidegger ) to whose conceptuality Nishida constantly refers. On the one side, consciousness must essentially be will; on the other side, the most immediate and true experience of reality as it is, which for Nishida coincides with an artistic or rather religious intuition (the Buddhist awakening), is not a question of will, but of intuition.

In the middle phase of his thought, with the creation of the concept of “place” (場所, basho), Nishida tries to overcome the aporias that characterized the first phase of his thought. In my speech I will try to explain what the Nishidian attempt to conceive consciousness as a “place” consists in, and how this attempt is connected to the Zen Buddhist background vision that animates Nishida’s thought.

Reference texts

Nishida, ‘Place’, in: K. Nishida, Place and Dialectic – Two Essays by Nishida Kitarō, translated by John W.M. Krummel and Shigenori Nagatomo, Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 49-102.

K. Nishida, The Unsolved Issue of Consciousness, translated by John W.M. Krummel, Philosophy East and West 62-2 (Apr. 2012).