Incapability or Contradiction? Deguchi’s Self-as-We in Light of Nishida’s Absolutely Contradictory Self-Identity

2.1 Metaphysics of Absolutely Contradictory Self-Identity

The starting point is the concept of the real world (現実の世界). The real world that Nishida investigates is the very world of which we ourselves are a part, the world in which we actually live. According to Nishida, previous philosophical conceptions of the real world are inadequate in that they view it “from the outside, without including oneself within it.”^[4] Nishida points out that, in its true sense, the real world is “the world in which one is born, acts, and eventually dies.”^[5] This world, Nishida contends, is non-dualistic and is not to be confused with the image which our reflective thinking projects onto it and in which there are distinctions such as subject and object or mind and matter. For Nishida, these categories are abstractly separated in thought, and reality as we experience it is something that exists prior to all such binary frameworks.^[6] Nishida’s system of Absolutely Contradictory Self-Identity is an attempt to elucidate the logical structure of such a non-dichotomous reality.

According to Nishida, the real world is poietic in the sense that its development is unfolded as a historical process of production through the interactions of particulars. Active intuition (行為的直観), one of the key concepts in Nishida’s later philosophy, is nothing other than a concept that expresses what the acting subject is within this poietic reality. As we have seen above, the real world, as Nishida understands it, is not an abstract realm but rather a concrete reality in which we ourselves act. Accordingly, as subjects within this concrete reality, we are essentially embodied agents who exist within specific spatiotemporal conditions and engage in interactions with other entities that likewise occupy space and time. Nishida perceived that this poietic aspect of reality is grounded in a kind of self-negation, and what he calls Absolute Contradictory Self-Identity is nothing other than the dialectic such self-negation gives rise to. This dialectic can be understood as consisting of two key moments.

One is the contradictory self-identity of space and time. Nishida’s central claim is that the constitution of the present – here and now – is grounded in its self-limitation through the contradictory opposition of the past and the future. For the purpose of this article, we do not have to consider the details of this doctrine. For now, what is more important is Nishida’s philosophical concern behind it. His point was that only through such a contradictory relationship can one attain a conception of creative reality without falling into either mechanistic determinism (where the present is determined by the past) or teleological determinism (where the present is determined by the future). Thus, we can say that contradictory self-identity was tied with the poietic nature of reality in Nishida’s thought.

The second element of Nishida’s dialectic concerns the constitution of the particular as an acting being. Just as Nishida rejected the two kinds of determinism in his theory of time, he expounds his own view by way of rejecting two mistaken conceptions of the particular.

1. The first is what Nishida regards as the Aristotelian notion of the particular. As Nishida sees it, this view understands the particular only as a delimited part of the whole, defined by a set of universals. However, Nishida gathered that this conception of the particular did not capture the formative nature of the world. If the particulars were merely instantiations of the world’s universal properties, then how can they be acting agents? Besides, it also becomes puzzling how something new can emerge through the interaction of these particulars. Accordingly, Nishida concluded that Aristotle’s conception failed to capture the aspect of the particular as an acting being and that, therefore, it could not explain the dynamic aspect of the world as something constituted through the interactions of individuals.

2. The second conception of the particular which Nishida tried to correct is Leibniz’s monadology. Nishida saw it as taking the opposite approach to Aristotle by starting with the conception of the particular as an acting individual. Characterised by their strict simplicity, i.e. having no parts, Leibniz’s monads are independent entities operating solely through an internal principle of change. However, as is often pointed out, this makes no room for the idea that particulars causally interact, and Nishida regarded this flaw as fatal. As with the Aristotelian conception of the particular, Leibniz’s monadology falls short of accounting for the poietic development of the world through the interaction of particulars.

Thus, according to Nishida, neither of these two conceptions can do justice to the poietic conception of reality. A common feature of the two is the assumption that the underlying substance of reality must be either One or Many, corresponding to the two versions of determinism we saw regarding the philosophy of space and time.

It is to correct this mistaken assumption that Nishida contended that the logical structure of the real world consists in Absolutely Contradictory Self-Identity, whereby the substance of the world is seen to be One and Many. Yet precisely what structure does this amount to? While there has been little research on this question, Deguchi, the other philosopher this article focuses on, has attempted to model it from the perspective of dialetheism.^[7]

Dialetheism – the view that there are true contradictions (dialetheia) – was chiefly developed and defended by Graham Priest^[8] and has since been applied fruitfully in many areas, notably in interpretations of Buddhist philosophical doctrines.^[9] According to Deguchi, Nishida’s Absolutely Contradictory Self-Identity amounts to a three-layered structure consisting of the world, individual selves, and material things, and their relationship involves dialetheia. Items of these categories are connected by non-transitive identity, a non-standard identity for which we cannot deduce x = z even when x = y and y = z .^[10] As Deguchi understands it, Nishida’s active intuition describes the way the individual self is thus connected to the world and material things to form a broader self.

Consider the following diagram.

In this diagram, ω , s i , and m j , respectively, represent the world, individual selves, and material things. They are connected by = , a non-standard relation of identity. Importantly, this gives rise to dialetheism. As = is non-transitive, items indirectly connected through an intermediary item in the higher category remain distinct. Thus, while we have ω = s 1 and ω = s 2 , s 1 and s 2 are not identical. Now, let φ be a predicate “ x is identical with s 1 .” Then, as ω = s 1 , there obtains φ ( ω ) . On the other hand, since s 2 ≠ s 1 and ω = s 2 , substitution lets us infer ω ≠ s 1 , i.e. ¬ φ ( ω ) . Hence, we obtain a dialetheia φ ( ω ) and ¬ φ ( ω ) . Intuitively, what this means is that the world is and is not identical with an individual self, for example, the I. At the same time, as I am connected to the material things I am interacting with and thereby to the world, the part of the structure thus connected (corresponding to the circled portion of the diagram) expresses what Deguchi calls the broad self. According to Deguchi, Nishida’s active intuition is nothing but this broad self, and all the entities in Nishida’s system exist only in the context of active intuition. Thus, Deguchi’s dialetheic model faithfully captures the way the world, the self, and material things interdependently and contradictorily exist in Nishida’s system.

2.2 Ethics and Value Theory of Nishida’s System

Deguchi’s Self-as-We proposes a series of WE-turns in the realm of values. Likewise, Nishida’s system was conceived with an eye to ethical and axiological concerns. To thoroughly compare these two systems, therefore, we need to consider the ethical dimension of Nishida’s later philosophy. Broadly speaking, this is twofold. In the first place, the contradictory nature of the self serves as the foundation of normativity in Nishida’s system. Building on this, Nishida presents a form of value pluralism that allows for the contradictory coexistence of different value systems.

3.1 Principle

First of all, the two systems differ in terms of their principles. The principle underpinning Deguchi’s Self-as-We is the (first) thesis of fundamental incapability. Based on the insight that human beings cannot accomplish anything entirely on their own, Deguchi introduces the concept of multi-agent systems. Of course, to establish Self-as-We, one must posit further assumptions, i.e. doer externalism, an appropriate delimitation of the subject’s scope, and the conception of the self as an agent. However, compared with the first thesis of fundamental incapability, these assumptions serve only a supporting role. In this sense, we can say that the most crucial principle for Deguchi’s Self-as-We is indeed the thesis of fundamental incapability.

In contrast, for Nishida, what serves as the fundamental principle is the claim that the real world and the self are contradictory. As noted above, the “real world” in Nishida’s sense is the world we experience in our everyday lives. Rather than an either/or dichotomy of the subjective or the objective, it is a dialetheic world of both/and that is at once subjective and objective. Because Nishida’s aim is to illuminate the logical structure of precisely this dialetheic world, one must share the intuition that reality and the self are contradictory in order to enter Nishida’s system.

We could say that there is a common feature between the two principles in so far as both Deguchi’s thesis of fundamental incapability and Nishida’s contradictory conception of the world draw on an East Asian view of humanity and the world. However, the nature of each principle appears to differ greatly.

To begin with, note that we can, to a certain extent, examine the validity of Deguchi’s thesis of fundamental incapability by testing its plausibility against empirical facts. Indeed, when explaining this thesis, Deguchi himself provides an argumentation of that sort. What he does is to consider specific actions such as riding a bicycle and thereby to show that their execution presupposes certain affordances such as the production of the bicycle, the existence of an appropriate environment for riding the bicycle, etc. Of course, there are various questions about the precise nature of this demonstration. Nevertheless, we can say that a key feature of Deguchi’s thesis is that its plausibility can easily be examined in light of our ordinary experience.

By contrast, Nishida’s philosophy, though it is claimed to be about the world we directly experience, begins with an intuition that is rather elusive and, accordingly, difficult to subject to reflective scrutiny. According to Nishida, the various dualistic distinctions we conventionally accept are nothing more than projections of reflective thinking onto the world. Conversely, the primordial fact that the world of direct experience is non-dualistic cannot be captured by discursive intellect. Of course, this does not mean that Nishida’s philosophy thereby becomes an irrational doctrine based on a mystical intuition. The sort of intuition Nishida discusses is immanent in our acting (or “working” to use Nishida’s preferred term), for he repeatedly emphasises that the “real world” he speaks of is about the most commonplace, everyday experiences. Indeed, rather than a mystical experience, paradigmatic examples Nishida provides are the experiences of a carpenter or an artist engaged in creating something. Hence, the dialetheic nature of Nishida’s real world is something we can purportedly grasp by carefully observing ordinary, everyday reality.

3.2 Method

The difference in principles affects how each system is to be expounded. We can say that this divergence is a difference in methods in view of the word’s original sense, i.e. the manner in which an investigation is carried out.

In the case of Deguchi’s Self-as-We, each of the assumptions is formulated and made explicit as a separate proposition.^[29] Accordingly, Deguchi’s system is structured step by step, allowing anyone engaging with it to move from recognising fundamental incapability to successively considering a series of value proposals for social transformation. In this specific sense, one might say that Deguchi’s Self-as-We is constructive.

One reason for Deguchi’s choice of this argumentative style is strategic. If we are to let the East Asian conception of the self enter the stage of contemporary philosophy, it must speak our language so that the audience can critically evaluate it. Hence, it must be reconfigured in a way that admits rational critique and examination. Otherwise, a holistic, embodied, and non-dualistic self can easily appear as an esoteric doctrine of mysticism. That might be a subject of curiosity for a historian or an anthropologist, but one cannot seriously engage with it. In any event, compared with the arguments of East Asian philosophers from whom Deguchi gets certain inspirations, his Self-as-We stands out for its style of building up a constructive line of reasoning in a step-by-step manner.

In contrast, Nishida does not appear to develop constructive arguments in the same way as Deguchi does. Indeed, Nishida’s philosophy often gives the impression of being quite the opposite of the clarity found in Deguchi’s Self-as-We. Why might this be? And in any case, does this difference in how the arguments are developed simply reflect a stylistic divergence, or does it point to a substantial difference in each philosopher’s inquiry, i.e. something that cannot be reduced to style alone? For instance, if Nishida’s arguments could be reconstructed in the same manner as Deguchi’s, one might conclude that the difference between them is purely one of style. If not, conversely, then what the methodological gap might mean shall be the subject of our examination.

To shed light on why Nishida’s system can be so challenging to grasp, we shall begin by systematically examining the potential reasons. Generally speaking, when one wishes to advance a constructive line of argument in the way that Deguchi does, the method is to first identify and articulate the fundamental topic or problem at issue, then formulate theses that address it, break them down, clarify the demonstrative structure among the resulting propositions, and finally synthesise them into a coherent framework. What, then, of Nishida’s approach?

First, when it comes to specifying the central theme or problem, it is not always clear precisely what Nishida has in mind. To be sure, as we have observed in our overview of Nishida’s system, he explicitly states that his central task is to elucidate the logical structure of the real world in which we ourselves are situated as acting agents. Thus, it is not wholly accurate to claim that Nishida fails to define his fundamental question. Nevertheless, one can still argue that it remains uncertain what, strictly speaking, Nishida takes his principal problem to be.

One aspect of this uncertainty involves Nishida’s style. He does not proceed by explicitly declaring his primary question and then systematically articulating his argument. In our own overview, we have identified Nishida’s central problematic by examining his scattered comments in various essays, lectures, and letters, interpreting them in light of the context in which his philosophy developed. Nishida himself does not, for instance, clarify at the beginning of “Absolutely Contradictory Self-Identity” what exactly the issue is.

While this can be seen as a matter of style (and amenable in principle to critical reconstruction), there are also elements that cannot be explained simply by style. Specifically, the problem we have extracted from Nishida’s works occupies a highly abstract plane, and it is not obvious that such abstraction can be resolved by analysis alone. For instance, clarifying the logical structure of the world we immediately experience is itself an undertaking that raises meta-metaphysical questions of various kinds. Although enumerating these questions may help us pinpoint, to a certain extent, the issues Nishida treats, his discussion remains at a high level of abstraction and thus does not necessarily dispel the aura of abstruseness.

Moreover, when Nishida indicates that he deals with a world that includes us as acting agents, he is challenging any metaphysics that locates the cognising subject outside the world. Yet, we only discover how this challenge takes shape in light of Nishida’s reinterpretations of Western philosophical figures like Aristotle or Kant. Inevitably, such an inquiry operates within Nishida’s unique conceptual space, so we only move within a hermeneutic circle. Hence, we cannot merely reduce the difficulty of grasping Nishida’s central concern to his distinctive style. Rather, part of the difficulty supposedly lies in the nature of the problem itself.

It is not uncommon, of course, for philosophical systems throughout history to deal with problems of such abstraction, and that level of abstraction directly affects how the arguments unfold. In other words, it is not simply for stylistic reasons that Nishida’s system evades the kind of constructive demonstration we observe in Deguchi’s Self-as-We. Additionally, in examining Nishida’s argumentation, we must recall that he presupposes his own version of dialectic. Although the notion of dialectic itself is subject to discussion, Nishida’s case is especially noteworthy, given that he develops his own notion under influences ranging from Hegel and Marx to Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky. We need not elaborate on all such details here, however. As long as our concern lies in the argumentative structure, it suffices to note that Nishida’s use of dialectic reflects his conviction that negation is essential to the logical structure of reality or concepts and that any attempt to clarify their development must proceed through a staged unfolding of contradictions. This dialectical method inherently complicates the presentation of Nishida’s system, as it traces the logical movement of concepts or realities through a series of contradictions, rather than simply accumulating one demonstration after another. In this sense, too, Nishida’s system is difficult to comprehend for reasons that cannot be reduced to mere stylistic choices.

Considering all these factors, while it may not be theoretically impossible, reconstructing Nishida’s philosophy of Absolutely Contradictory Self-Identity into a constructive system of argumentation akin to Deguchi’s Self-as-We is likely to face significant hurdles. To be sure, as we have attempted in earlier sections, one can provide a partial reconstruction that offers some measure of clarity, but this does not mean we can reorganise Nishida’s thought as neatly as Deguchi does for his own system. If, therefore, the methodological discrepancy between Nishida’s system and Deguchi’s cannot be reduced to style alone, we must ask what precisely this implies. Before addressing this point, let us examine the difference in the scope of the issues each system aims to tackle.

3.3 Scope

Concerning the range of the problems the two philosophical systems address, one striking difference between Deguchi’s Self-as-We and Nishida’s system is that, while a substantial metaphysics of time and space underlies Nishida’s thought, such an account is notably absent from Deguchi’s discussion. Why is this so?

In our earlier overview of Nishida’s system, we have already briefly discussed why Nishida develops a philosophy of time and space. We noted that he addresses space-time because it is inextricably tied to the world’s poietic development. Accordingly, his discussion on space and time directly belongs to his principal task of clarifying the logical structure of the real world. To make the contrast with Self-as-We clear, observe that this point can also be framed in terms of his concept of the acting individual. Acting, after all, consists of concrete, creative operations unfolding in space and time, and the individual, possessed of consciousness that experiences the present, is built through the contradictory formation of space-time that Nishida advocates. In fact, according to Nishida’s notion of the real world, its creative development is effectively equivalent to individuals interacting together within that world, for it is such interactions that give rise to the poietic evolution of the world. In short, one could say that Nishida’s distinctive account of space and time assumes special importance because, in his view, it is a central component of the logical structure of the acting individual.

From this perspective, it is noticeable that Deguchi’s Self-as-We does not address the task of clarifying the logical structure of individual agency. Rather, he adopts what he calls metaphysical minimalism, and thereby deliberately remains uncommitted to the question of what the individual or action is, or the ontological basis on which such phenomena are grounded.^[30]

Deguchi’s stance seems to be as follows: that the individual self exists, or that we are acting subjects, is an apodictic fact. Taking this as a given, if one can demonstrate the theses of the Self-as-We system, then the WE-turn of the actor as well as the subsequent series of axiological WE-turns can proceed without introducing any metaphysically rich structure. Of course, one may freely add such extra premises, but Deguchi would maintain that this is something best left to those who engage with his system.

This strategy appears reasonable. Of course, it needs to be noted that this rests on the assumption that adding further premises (notwithstanding the meta-philosophical difficulty of specifying what truly counts as “additional”) will not affect the content or implications of the theses that Deguchi defends. Since a comprehensive vindication of this implicit assumption is unrealistic, we should rather take Deguchi’s adoption of metaphysical minimalism as effectively declaring that it is an assumption. In any case, however, we can say that Deguchi strategically adopts metaphysical parsimony, and that is certainly an effective strategy in advocating a holistic conception of self.

Yet, if the sort of metaphysical parsimony Deguchi adopts is indeed an available option, we might in turn be tempted to ask what motivates Nishida to marshal the kind of full-fledged metaphysics we find in Absolutely Contradictory Self-Identity. In the next section, we shall suggest that this is rooted in the foundational nature of Nishida’s attempt.