Nishida, Aesthetics, and the Limits of Cultural Synthesis

In this chapter, my aim is to give a brief outline of the aesthetics that forms part of the Nishida tetsugaku(Nishida's philosophy) and draw from it a more general lesson. In aesthetics as in the whole of the rest of his philosophy, Nishida has a special value for students of comparative thought. As my Japanese colleagues have told me repeatedly, Nishida was one of the last Japanese to be brought up in what they call the old Japanese way of thinking. What is unique to him is his sustained attempt, carried on at the highest level of philosophical endeavor, to try to articulate his interpretation of experience, an experience formed by Zen and centrally dependent on the ideas of the prajñaparamitāsutras, in terms of categorial frameworks drawn from the western philosophies that so fascinated him. What emerges from this lifelong task is a philosophy that, though articulated in different categorial frameworks, is manifestly unchanged in its essentials.¹ It is a philosophy that (I would argue) articulates a view of experience that is simply incommensurable with that which informs the mainstream of western thought, especially as the latter derives from Aristotelian logic. It is a deeplydifferent way of understanding the world and of being human. What makes the case of Nishida so uniquely valuable is precisely that he illuminates this deep difference by pushing western philosophical categories to their limit. In the end, he found that in order to say what he had to say, he had to disagree with western assumptions at their most basic level, including the law of identity and the principle of contradiction, among the bedrock laws of Aristotelian thought.

To reinforce the case for incommensurability, at appropriate points below, I will refer to aesthetic theories developed by western thinkers, especially those with an idealist cast that might at first look quite similar to that of Nishida. The reason for doing so is to demonstrate that in fact the relation between Nishida's view and close western analogues is in fact never, in the last analysis, one of identity. Ultimately, I will suggest that for reasons deep in metaphysics there must remain a final difference between an aesthetic based on Nishida's premises and any based on what I term Aristotelian, individualist assumptions.