An Inquiry into the Good - Nishida Kitarō

Attempting to synthesize the rational approach of Western philosophy with the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum truths of the eastern Zen tradition, turn-of-the-century philosopher, and founder of the Kyoto school, Nishida Kitarō explores direct experience and what it tells us about how to live a full human life. For Nishida it is not that there are experiences because of individuals, rather, individuals are the result of experience. This seemingly innocuous inversion open the pathway to a philosophy wholly divergent from most of the western approach (certainly from such thinkers as Augustine and Descartes).

Nishida speaks of a philosophy premised upon pure experience - doing away with the a priori or forms, or other realms acting upon reality. For him reality is most satisfactorily explained by interrogating that which is actually experienced. Rather than rely on the comfortable division between subjective and objective, what is seen as perhaps the primary offspring of western rationalism, Nishida preempts such division by casting it as little more than a construction the mind places upon a just-experienced reality. As is mentioned  in Pirsig (probably echoing Nishida), there is a lag between reality as we experience it in the present, and our intellectual unpacking of the world around us, which can only really deal with the past - no matter how recent our lens focuses. This time lag is, for Nishida, not an inconsequential aspect of our existence, for it is in the passage between present and future that our intellectual concepts go to work to carve up experience. It is in this passage that mind and matter become distinguishable. Rather than having the subject meet the object, the two become abstracted from pure experience; therein lies the difference. For Nishida consciousness is an activity, one in which we are inseparable from that which we study.

Nishida interrogates this unity of people and the world under the heading phenomena of consciousness. For Nishida the world is made by and in the minds of people, while people are made by the world they live in. Once a person understands that these are nothing but the same thing they are reaching towards the unity required of a person to live in accord with experience, which is itself the phenomena of consciousness. Here we can see that Nishida is not so far from the western tradition after all. It was the Oracle at Delphi who instructed Socrates only to "know thyself." Nishida agrees. For he sees reality as the good, and an understanding that reality is constantly an event that we produce means that the good is both with and around us. This is the unity of consciousness. When world and the individual are seen to be resultant of the same process of development and completion, morality and reality can bear upon one another; existence and value are fundamentally one.