Barbosa, Carlos 2019 Nishitani Keiji's notion of mind -EJJP

Carlos Barbosa Cepeda Universidad Pedagógica Nacional, Bogotá Nishitani Keiji’s Notion of Mind What is Nishitani Keiji’s contribution to the philosophy of mind and cognitive science in our century—if there is any? In the era of neuroscience and artificial intelligence, this question is of crucial importance for an assessment of the contemporary relevance of Kyoto School philosophy specifically and Japanese philosophy in general. In that respect, there has been some interest in the possible contributions of Nishida Kitarō’s thought to the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Yet, as I believe, Nishitani’s philosophy also has a say in this area. Following that line, I will attempt a synoptic reconstruction of his notion of mind. In order to do this, I will first clarify what view(s) of mind he opposes. Next, on that basis, I will articulate what he considers to be the alternative. Finally, I will suggest some questions that his account raises and require further elucidation. keywords: Nishitani Keiji—mind—philosophy of mind—originary— self-awareness—interrelatedness—coprojection—attunement—Kyoto School—cognitive science European Journal of Japanese Philosophy 4 • 2019, pp. 191–216 A t the Second Conference of the European Network of Japanese Philosophy in Brussels, John Maraldo remarked that, if we want to demonstrate the relevance of Japanese philosophy in the twenty-first century, it is necessary to show its value to scholars in other areas, even to scholars of disciplines other than philosophy.1 One of the most interesting lines of research in that direction, in my opinion, is the problem of mind. Such a problem can be addressed when asking the question concerning what Japanese philosophy can contribute to the contemporary world. Our century begins with astoundingly rapid progress in the disciplines of artificial intelligence, bionics, and neuroscience. Inevitably, then, questions arise as to what point mental faculties can be prosthetically extended (issues of bionics or post-humanity), whether human skills can be outdone by computers, to what extent we can be considered computational machines, or to what point we can trust our senses. These are questions with consequences at all levels: ethical, political, or religious as well. Clearly, it is an urgent task for us to reflect on the nature of the mind. In the context of Japanese philosophy studies, it is then relevant, even urgent, to ask: What can the science and philosophy of mind learn from Japanese philosophy? Along that line, several publications have already explored the eventual contributions of Nishida Kitarō to the philosophy of mind. Yuasa Yasuo has called attention to philosophers such as Watsuji Tetsurō, Dōgen, and Kūkai.2 Still, I would like to focus on a thinker rarely mentioned in discussions on the mind in Japanese philosophy: Nishitani Keiji. The particular aim of this paper is, therefore, to elucidate the concept of mind in Nishitani 1. Maraldo 2016. An extended version of his speech was published as an article in 2017. However, his remark was not included. 2. Yuasa 1987. 192 barbosa: Nishitani Keiji’s Notion of Mind | 193 Keiji’s Religion and Nothingness. To be fair, there might as well be more places in his work where he touches upon the issue, but his magnum opus is the place where we can find, as I will try to show, the basic elements of a robust concept of mind. Even though it seems to play a secondary role in the book’s main discursive line, it implies an interesting solution to the problem of the mind’s relation to the world. Put briefly, Nishitani’s engagement with the topic suggests that the epistemic connection between mind and reality is possible because the former is constitutively shaped by the latter and that the mind essentially participates in the formation of reality. The main reason to pay attention to Nishitani’s notion of mind in particular has to do with how it would relate to certain approaches in contemporary philosophy. To begin with, he directly questions all forms of reductionism of mind (such as eliminativism), but also other trends that need not be taken as reductionist, such as physicalism and functionalism. He criticizes these approaches because they tend to fall into one of two traps: they either construe the individual as a self that is isolated from reality, or end up disregarding phenomenal experience. In the first case, the self-confined “I” leaves no room for the possibility of an epistemic connection between the mind and things. In the second case, phenomenal experience is considered irrelevant for the explanation of mind at best or inexistent at worst. According to Nishitani’s line of thought, these two traps originate from the notion that mind and things are intrinsically separate. Initially, there is a mind and there are things out there, hence the question is how the former can have epistemic contact with the latter (that is, how the mind can relate to things in a way that brings about knowledge of them). His response, then, is based on the opposite presupposition that they emerge from an original unity—this way, the question is rather how mind and things become distinguishable when they emerge from a primary unity. Interestingly, this line of reasoning makes it plausible to relate his philosophy to certain alternative approaches in the philosophy of mind, such as enactivism. Whatever the case, a thoroughgoing critical revision of this discussion inevitably raises a number of complex questions (for instance, in relation to the ontological status of qualitative experience, an adequate account of epistemic error and correction, and so on). Such revision, however, goes beyond the scope of this paper. What I can offer here is a synoptic view of 194 | European Journal of Japanese Philosophy 4 • 2019 Nishitani’s concept of mind, which can be reconstructed on the basis of his remarks on the matter. Such careful reconstruction is unavoidably the first step to take in order to address the discussion between his philosophy and the philosophy and sciences of mind. The text is arranged in four parts. The first part is a brief introduction to the viewpoints on the mind that Nishitani appears to reply to, with a particular emphasis on the differences between them. In the second section, I explain the paradigm that Nishitani opposes in Religion and Nothingness. Next, I attempt to reconstruct an alternative on the basis of the clues that he provides throughout the book. Such an alternative is a relational model, wherein the co-constitutive link between mind and thing accounts for the emergence of meaning. Finally, I suggest some lines of conversation and, in general, possibilities of dialogue between Nishitani’s thought and the philosophy of mind, especially (but not exclusively) in relation to a couple of heterodox trends therein. My hope is that this effort can contribute to mutually fruitful conversations between contemporary Japanese philosophy and the sciences and philosophy of mind. Philosophy and the science of mind Before considering Nishitani’s philosophy of mind directly, it is important to clarify some terms usually featured in the controversy over the scope and nature of scientific explanations of the mind. There are two reasons for this. First, in general, it helps us to remember that the degree to which mental phenomena can be explained by science has serious implications for religious and humanistic matters. Neurophysiological research challenges, for instance, the belief that we are a soul (immortal or not) that can be separated from our merely material body. What is more, it seems that, if we are a mere material body, all our phenomenal experience loses value. As we will see, Nishitani is interested in such implications and to what extent they undermine the ground of traditional religious views in particular or even spirituality in general. The second reason is, more specifically, that the terms involved in the controversy tend to be confused. Without dispelling that confusion, it is quite unlikely that we can clarify the extent to which we should fear neuroscientific progress. Let us start with reduction. In general terms, reduction can be defined as barbosa: Nishitani Keiji’s Notion of Mind | 195 the operation of conceiving of or explaining a certain range of phenomena in terms of another (putatively more basic) range of phenomena. Simple as this may seem, there is not a unique version of how reduction should be performed. It should also be noticed that its meaning is not univocal. At least three levels of reduction can be distinguished: ontological, epistemological, and methodological. Ontological reduction means to conceive of certain phenomena in terms of another type of phenomena (e.g., to consider living beings and processes as mere combinations of molecules). Epistemological reduction means to explain a certain range of phenomena in terms of another (e.g., biology is a mere corollary of chemistry). Methodological reduction only requires the translation of the methods of one science into the terms of another (e.g., the methods of biology should be translated into the methods of chemistry). Ontological reduction does not imply theoretical reduction. For instance, I can claim that all biological phenomena are chemical, but the latter does imply the former; namely, if biology is a mere chapter of chemistry, it follows that all biological events are chemical events. Reductionism is the philosophical viewpoint that reduction is the model for all knowledge. Here we should notice that philosophers who endorse reductionism are committed to the view that analysis is sufficient as a means to gain knowledge of the world. Indeed, if I can fully understand a certain system by understanding its parts, it follows that knowledge of the whole is at least reducible to knowledge of the parts (epistemological reduction). Some perspectives on the mind are related to reductionism. Eliminativism, for instance, goes even further. The former preserves the existence of the reduced phenomena, while the latter declares that such phenomena do not exist. For instance, an eliminativist would claim that the mind does not exist, only neurophysiological stimuli do.3 In that sense, it is clear that reductionism and eliminativism are not the same. On the other hand, physicalism is usually taken as a form of reductionism, since it reduces all mental phenomena to neurophysiological activity. However, it is possible to claim that, even though all mental phenomena are substantially physical, new structures may arise out of neurons and their interactions; structures that are not reducible to physical ones. To make this point clear, it is possible 3. See Churchland 1986. 196 | European Journal of Japanese Philosophy 4 • 2019 to distinguish two different levels of ontological reductionism4: substance reduction (all things are made of the same stuff, e.g., matter) and structure reduction (all structures and forms are reducible to one basic type, e.g., all structures in nature are reducible to physical interactions between subatomic particles). Thus, physicalism is a form of substance reductionism because it declares that all things are made of matter, but it does not necessarily commit to the viewpoint of structure reductionism because it is compatible with the claim that, as material structures become progressively more complex, new types of structure emerge such that they cannot be reduced to strictly physical structures.5 Finally, reductionism should not be confused with functionalism, either. In fact, many functionalists reject reductionism. For instance, Jerry Fodor is famous for his attack on the reduction of psychology to biology.6 This trend, dominant in the philosophy of mind since the 1940s, declares that the mind can be understood in terms of mental states defined in terms of the relations that they have with other mental states. This implies that mental processes can be described and explained in purely syntactic terms. In other words, the mind is a computer. It is no surprise that the functionalist model for the mind is the computer—or, more specifically, the Turing machine.7 Such a model has at least three consequences of relevance to our discussion. First of all, we can understand the mind by precisely describing the relations between mental states, hence we do not need to pay attention to the ways in which those states are felt by the subject. Thus, phenomenal experience is irrelevant when explaining mental activity. Secondly, the mind is in the brain—what is more, the mind is the brain. If a mind is defined in terms of the syntactic relations between mental states, and all mental states can be located in the cerebral cortex, then the body and the environment only play the role of providing inputs to the “mental machine” (so to speak) and of emitting its outputs. Finally, even if, in their own terms, functionalists reject several forms of 4. See Jones 2013, 13–17. 5. For a defense of nonreductionist physicalism, see Morales 2014. 6. See Fodor 1975. 7. For a more detailed and nuanced explanation of functionalism/computationalism, see Gardner 1985, a brilliant historical introduction to this model and its rise to prominence. barbosa: Nishitani Keiji’s Notion of Mind | 197 reductionism, it can be reasonably claimed that they reduce the mind to the brain. Be that as it may, the functionalist paradigm has been challenged by several heterodox tendencies that vindicate the relevance of phenomenal experience, the body, or even the environment in explanations of the mind. Due to its number and diversity, however, even a cursory introduction to them might steer us too far away from our main topic. Suffice it to mention that Nishitani’s notion of the mind may find among them several amicable interlocutors. My only purpose in this section has been to reconstruct Nishitani’s notion of mind in the context of contemporary discussions of philosophy of mind. As I will argue from now on, to a certain point he succumbs to some of the confusions and argumentative problems that we have hitherto warned against. In order to gain clarity about his own notion of the mind, it is not enough to understand it in its own terms—it is also indispensable to dispel the problems discussed previously. What views of mind nishitani opposes Let us now explain which paradigm of mind Nishitani opposes. He rejects all attempts at reducing the mind to any factor other than itself. Indeed, he tends to diagnose reductionism as part of the problematic nature of the mechanistic worldview that scientific progress brings to the fore. Since, according to this worldview, nothing real has any value, the consequence is the promotion of nihilism. This line of reflection is present in Religion and Nothingness, but it is nowhere as emphatic as in his essay “Science and Zen,” where Nishitani claims: “In science as well as in philosophy, when it assumes the standpoint of ‘scientism,’ all phenomena in the universe are regarded as reducible to mechanical, material processes which are in themselves purposeless and meaningless.”8 The most evident reason to resist reductionism is that it leaves no room for the foundation of value. Nevertheless, his nonreductionist stance is not antiscientific. He even remarks elsewhere how we should be glad about the blessings that modern science and technology have made possible.9 Rather, his point is that this 8. sz 114. 9. nkc 6: 327–8. 198 | European Journal of Japanese Philosophy 4 • 2019 blessing comes at a high price. We now face the risk that the human fades out due to a process of constant mechanization of all aspects of life. The ensuing “loss of the human”10 would amount to a loss of all that makes human life significant. Two passages in Religion and Nothingness are especially clear as to how to articulate the rationale of Nishitani’s mind-nonreductionism. First of all, in the opening chapter he discusses how traditional notions such as “soul” or “living bond” should no longer be considered relevant because of scientific explanation. Modern science could have proven that traditional views of spirit are outdated. It would be more than a Herculean task to defend that ancient beliefs in ghosts or spirits account for human agency and mind better than neurophysiological and cognitive science theories do. What is more, an outright opposition to science oriented toward reestablishing the old worldview does not make much sense. However, he remarks that behind the traditional view lies a question whose relevance remains and is not well addressed by a purely mechanical account of facts. There is something that we find in human beings, but also in a wide diversity of nonhuman animals, a factor that distinguishes them from mere objects (such as stones or tables). We realize that we can spontaneously connect with that “something” because, at bottom, we sentient creatures are all interconnected. A “living bond” connects all sentient beings together.11 Even if there is no longer room for hypothesizing spirits or ghosts that transcend material existence, we have no other name for that “something” than “soul” and cannot help noticing a “psychic connection” between us and other “souls.” Nishitani explains this point with the following example: On a summer’s night, a mosquito flies into my room from the outside. It buzzes about merrily, as if cheering itself for having found its prey. With a single motion I catch it and squash it in the palm of my hand, and in that final moment it lets out a shrill of distress. This is the only word we can use to describe it. The sound it makes is different from the howling of a dog or the screams of a man, and yet in its “essence” it is the selfsame sound of distress. It may be that each of these sounds is but vibrations of air moving at different wavelengths, but they all possess the same quality or essence that makes 10. Ibid. 327. 11. rn 11. barbosa: Nishitani Keiji’s Notion of Mind | 199 us hear them as signals of distress. Does not our immediate intuition of the distress in the sound of the mosquito take place on a field of psychic sympathy? Might we not also see here the reason that the ancients believed animals to have souls? In this sense, whatever modern mechanistic physiologists or functionalist psychologists, who are busy trying to erase the notion of soul, might make of it, let it be said that there is something, even in animals, that we have no other name for than the one that has come down to us from the past: soul.12 Science, Nishitani concedes, has overthrown the traditional view of mind as a soul separate from the body (a “ghost in the machine”)13, but the problem underlying such conception remains unanswered. We recognize that there are some entities in nature that have a will, respond to calls, have feelings—in a word, have a mental life—while others simply do not. So, what is it that differentiates between the former entities and the latter? What is the difference between a bird and a piece of clay? What makes the bird a responsive agent and the chunk of clay a mere inert thing? We recognize that we can sympathetically relate to those entities spontaneously, without resorting to complex concepts. Even babies can identify sentient beings, recognize them as agents, and have a relationship with them. They try to communicate with them, interact with them, or avoid them. We observe how sentient beings interact in similar ways with other ones. In sum, the recognition of agents seems not to require complex conscious abstractions or inferences. Still, what accounts for such immediate mutual recognition? Let us remember, again, that this formulation does not require us to presuppose any sort of soul existing apart from the body, nor any other type of “ghost in the machine.” Nishitani’s point rather relies on the fact of our existence. We can have a certain type of phenomenal experience and detect the same type of experience in other entities, which we likewise recognize as fellow sentient beings. Let us follow his own example: distress. The howling of a dog, the shrill of an agonizing mosquito, or the moans of a fellow human being in pain—that is, the sounds emitted by individuals from different 12. rn 12. 13. Gilbert Ryle coined this expression in order to refer to the notion of soul as an entity that is different from the body and cannot be explained by means of the same principles (i.e. mechanical principles). He is famous for his critique thereof in his “Descartes’ Myth” (Ryle 1949). Since then, the phrase has become commonplace in the philosophy of mind. 200 | European Journal of Japanese Philosophy 4 • 2019 species—seem quite diverse when analyzed quantitatively (i.e., when we consider their pitch, range, intensity, etc.), hence it would seem dubious to attribute to them a common form. Yet qualitatively, they share the same form or essence. As Nishitani claims in the passage quoted previously, it does not matter if the sound the mosquito emits when crushed, the shouts of an agonizing pedestrian just hit by a car, or the shrieks of a tortured pig are just physical oscillations of air at different wavelengths. When immediately experienced, we all recognize the same qualitative nature of distress in all of them, their quantitative differences notwithstanding. More generally, even though he claims that “soul” is the only name that we have for the characteristic nature of sentient beings, the one which we rather unintellectually (or preintellectually) and sympathetically recognize in the context of our ordinary lives, it seems evident that he refers to sentience. Such a term indeed allows us to remark that no appeal to a “ghost in the machine” is needed in order to defend the reality of “soul.” To be fair, Nishitani does not clearly identify who he is referring to when discussing the “modern mechanistic physiologists” or the “functionalist psychologists,” whom he accuses of “trying to erase the notion of soul.”14 His statement seems to be an excessive generalization. Is it true that all functionalists or physiologists try to dispense with sentience? In light of what we have observed previously, it seems that not all are committed in this way. So, which scientists or experts did he have in mind? As he does not provide any clues for the latter question, attempting an answer might end up being unproductive. We should, I suggest, rather focus on another issue; namely, what he means by the phrase “erasing the notion of soul?” According to the line of interpretation offered above, to erase the notion of soul means either to deny the existence of sentience or to regard it as a mere epiphenomenon of purely mechanical processes. This ambiguity notwithstanding, his claim is that no explanation of the mind is satisfactory if it disregards the fact that we really see, hear, smell, touch, taste, feel—that is, the fact of phenomenal experience. If Nishitani rejects the reduction of the mind to factors other than itself, it seems evident that the only alternative is to explain it in terms of itself. 14. rn 12. barbosa: Nishitani Keiji’s Notion of Mind | 201 This means to explain sentience in its own terms, as any phenomenological explanation would certainly intend. This is true to a certain point, but it contains a problem related to the constitution of modern subjectivity, of which the Cartesian cogito appears paradigmatic. In this respect, the second passage that we should highlight concerning Nishitani’s mindnonreductionism appears just a couple of pages after the first one. Nishitani accepts the Cartesian claim that the “I think” (cogito) is the most evident of truths, but deems it problematic to try to elucidate it from the standpoint of the cogito itself, his nonreductionism notwithstanding: I do not have it in mind for the cogito to be explained through anything else at all, from “above” it or “below,” and ultimately reduced to that something else. Rather, I want to turn to the ground of the subjectivity of the cogito and there to consider its origin from a point at which the orientation of the subject to its ground is more radical and thoroughgoing than it is with the cogito.15 Nishitani rejects a subjectivist account of mental activity and calls for a more “elemental” inquiry of subjectivity, mainly because it is a mistake to consider the mind in isolation from the rest of existence. He never explicitly denies that psychophysiological data or theories can be brought to bear upon the explanation of the mind. However, in connection with the first passage quoted previously, such data and theories do not suffice. Thus, he rejects both the purely self-confined standpoint and the purely reductionist account. Consequently, if an explanation of mind from the inside and an explanation from the outside are equally rejected, that is, a purely subjective and a purely objective explanation are equally insufficient, what is the alternative? We need an alternative to a subjectivist account because, even though the cogito is the most evident of truths (e.g., I might not know for certain what I am, or whether my thoughts and sensations correspond to or indicate something real out there, but I think and feel for certain), it would be a serious error if we tried to elucidate the nature of the cogito by considering it entirely confined within itself. The Cartesian doubt as it has been traditionally interpreted stops right where I reach the certainty that “I 15. rn 14. 202 | European Journal of Japanese Philosophy 4 • 2019 think.” The problem, Nishitani judges, is that the Cartesian “I” thinks about itself by mirroring itself. This is the standpoint of consciousness. The “I” thinks about itself by reflecting its own self-conscious thinking onto itself. This is what we do, for instance, when we wonder what we are in terms of our virtues and flaws, or in terms of those beliefs we consider most important to our identity. But how do we come to believe that we have, for instance, such and such virtues or flaws, such and such preferences and priorities? And why do we really believe what we believe? In the field of consciousness, all those self-conscious thoughts appear self-evident. However, if we continue doubting, if we ask where those conscious mental contents come from, we become clueless. There is no way self-consciousness can find a single clue about these matters because its very tendency to mirror its own contents leaves it self-confined. The self-conscious “I” barely knows its true nature. We find a stark expression of such condition, I suggest, in Christopher Columbus’s failure to relate to the novelty of several phenomena that he had observed during his trips to the New World. For instance, when he reports on manatees for the first time in his journal on 9 January, 1493, he writes: “on the previous day, when the Admiral went to the Rio del Oro, he saw three mermaids, which rose well out of the sea; but they are not so beautiful as they are painted, though to some extent they have the form of a human face.”16 Tzvetan Todorov remarks that, in many other opportunities, Columbus is predisposed to find cyclopes, Amazons, and other fantastic creatures he has read about before.17 More in general: Columbus is not a modern empiricist at all: the decisive argument is an argument of authority, not of experience. He knows in advance what he will find; the concrete experience is there to illustrate a truth that one possesses, not to be interrogated, according to the pre-established rules, with the search for the truth on sight.18 Even though this is a dramatic example, it illustrates a more general trap that we all fall into more than occasionally. We tend to anticipate 16. Columbus 2013, 218. 17. Todorov 1982, 24–5. 18. Ibid. 25. barbosa: Nishitani Keiji’s Notion of Mind | 203 what we will experience in such a way that we end up confirming what we already expected to find, instead of really being in touch with things. Such is the conundrum of self-mirroring self-consciousness. In virtue of its confinement, it ends up relating to itself more than truly connecting with reality through experience. And experience, as a result, becomes falsified. In sum, solving the conundrum of the nature of consciousness requires a standpoint beyond self-consciousness. We have so far examined Nishitani’s negative elucidation of this conundrum. Now is the time to explore how he attempts a positive response to it. Nishitani’s view of mind For Nishitani, the investigation of the self requires to leap into an originary (or elemental) level: The self-consciousness of the cogito, ergo sum, therefore, needs to be thought about by leaving its subjectivity as is and proceeding from a field more basic than self-consciousness, a field that I have been calling “elemental.” Of course, when we say “think about,” we do not mean the ordinary type of objective thinking. Thinking about the ego from an elemental field means that the ego itself opens up in subjective fashion an elemental field of existence within itself…. This way of thinking about the cogito is “existential” thinking: more elemental thought must signal a more elemental mode of being of the self. On this view, the Cartesian cogito, ergo sum can secure its own truth only when the field of self-consciousness breaks open to the more elemental field of the elemental self.19 “Elemental” (or originary, 根源的) refers to the level where the self emerges just as it is, the level at which it originates. Due to the operation of self-consciousness, such originary character of the self becomes concealed by distinctions and generalizations. To “open up an elemental field within itself ” means for the self to break through the tissue of self-conscious contents so as to regain access to the way that it originates in experience. This discourse might be taken as a call to explore the depths of our unconscious life, and thus it is tempting to perceive it as oriented in the same direction as psychoanalysis. However, Nishitani does not refer to 19. rn 15. 204 | European Journal of Japanese Philosophy 4 • 2019 “the ‘unconscious,’ since the unconscious is not yet separated from the field of consciousness.”20 The former is continuous with and defined in terms of the latter.21 He rather prefers to speak of a transconsciousness, which is at the bottom or root of consciousness, without being different from it. Transconsciousness as the root of consciousness is not a substance that constitutes its foundation, but the very fact of consciousness grasped just as it originates, just as it spontaneously and immediately occurs. Yet at the same time, it is, paradoxical as it may sound, a non-consciousness. An elemental non-consciousness lies at the root of all consciousness, behind all sight there is a fundamental blindness without which the former can never occur—the eye does not see the eye, and that is precisely why it can see something at all. Likewise, the self is the self because it is not the self. Reaching the certainty of the cogito (I think/feel/experience, therefore I am something) does not allow me to stop doubting. I need to continue doubting. From the mere fact that I feel and think—that is, I experience—concluding that I am a certain self endowed with a fixed nature would be premature. Here, I should ask the question: what am I? What is this self that experiences? In Nishitani’s words, the doubt should be made entirely radical and only then does it provide its own resolution.22 This doubt is radically different in nature from Cartesian doubt. In the latter case, the I (i.e., the self ) can always self-confidently take its own existence for granted while judging about this or that experience. The I is a subject over against diverse objects of experience. However, when the doubt becomes more radical, it turns back at the I itself and forces it to participate entirely in the process of doubting. It is not just an intellectual operation, but an exertion that compromises the self as a whole—that is, as a body and mind. By thus doubting its own existence, the I finds itself exposed to the fact that its existence cannot be separated from non-existence because it is impermanent, fluctuating, and always at the brink of dissolution.23 20. rn 20. 21. See rn 153. 22. rn 15–16. 23. rn 3–4. barbosa: Nishitani Keiji’s Notion of Mind | 205 Nishitani calls this fact nihility and defines it as “absolute negativity with regard to the very being of all [things and phenomena].”24 The confrontation with nihility exposes me to the apprehension that it is at the bottom of my own existence. I realize that my self is fully immersed in the stream of impermanence. From an ontological standpoint, this means that my identity continually disperses in all directions.25 Yet this indicates merely a negative apprehension of the self. Seen in a positive sense, my self is grounded by the existence of all beings.26 Of course, this viewpoint unavoidably implies that my self is also the ground of all other beings.27 Nothing exists in isolation. In general, for Nishitani the basic form of reality is interrelatedness (circumincessional interpenetration, 回互的相入). Every single thing exists in relation to all other existing things. This point has two senses. First, every part of me is in relation to something else (be it other parts of me or other entities). Secondly, everything is in relatedness. The place where being is possible is relatedness, not the other way around. If we apply this conception to mind, the result is that mind is in interrelatedness. It can only exist that way. Accordingly, Nishitani would reject both the reductionist and functionalist accounts of the mind because his approach presupposes that the mind is essentially sentient and is articulated from a relational view of reality. Here, we start to have a glance at how, according to Nishitani, we can address the question of the nature of mind and the question about how it should be explained. To be fair, the functionalist psychologists who Nishitani accuses of being “busy trying to erase the notion of soul”28 could reply that they are actually nonreductionists. Their attempt, they might claim, is to show that the mind should be explained in terms of the relations between the different states that constitute its life (that is, they should be explained functionally), hence the working of the mind cannot be explained merely in terms of its concrete 24. rn 7. 25. rn 143–5. 26. rn 147–9. 27. Ibid. 28. rn 12. 206 | European Journal of Japanese Philosophy 4 • 2019 physical realization. Jerry Fodor presented this case in nonreductionist terms that, basically, any functionalist would agree with.29 Nevertheless, Nishitani would still find problems with this approach, as it does not leave any room for circumincessional relationality. The functionalist theoretical model for the mind is the computer (or more precisely, the Turing machine). This implies that an individual mind can be defined in terms of its internal states, the relations between them, and the way the whole system operates over certain inputs in order to render certain outputs. Here, the inputs simply modulate the system’s operation, but do not change its basic structure. Yet a relational model claims that the mind is not simply modulated by external stimuli, but also effectively shaped by the external things it interacts with. Otherwise, we fall into the trap mentioned above: a self-confined view of the mind that blocks an understanding of how it can epistemically relate to reality. Therefore, functionalists are nonetheless structure reductionists in a very specific sense, in that they reduce the mind to computations. However, before being able to properly understand the type of relationality at stake in mental phenomena and how it integrates sentience, we need to address it in the context of self-awareness (自覚). As is well known among scholars in contemporary Japanese philosophy, Nishitani introduces the notion of real self-awareness of reality in order to articulate an answer to the question of the essence of religion.30 However, I would like to focus here on his method of developing this notion throughout Religion and Nothingness and how this commits him to a view of reality and knowledge that views the two concepts as essentially being linked together. When it is a real event, self-awareness is both the appropriation (grasping) of reality and the realization (actualization) of reality. It is a becoming aware of reality that at the same time amounts to reality itself becoming real.31 This is, of course, quite different from appropriation in the sense of intellectual cognition, wherein a distance always remains between the knower and the act of knowing. In self-awareness, the knower and the act of knowing are aspects of the same event. Is it not strange, however, to claim that reality becomes real when it is 29. See Fodor 1975. 30. See rn 6. 31. See rn 5. barbosa: Nishitani Keiji’s Notion of Mind | 207 known? Does reality not preexist the act of knowing? How can there be an act of knowing with nothing to be previously known? As I view it, Nishitani cannot help conceding that reality preexists our awareness of it in the following sense: if there is an awareness of something, there must be reality before the event of awareness. If he denies this, he would be affirming an idealism of self-confinement, so to speak. However, he appears to look for a viewpoint to overcome both idealism and realism.32 As he declares: Materialism, no less than idealism, does not even begin to open up a field on which immediate contact with the very reality of things through praxis would be possible. Both materialism and idealism lose sight of the basic field where the reality of things and praxis initially come about; they lose sight of the sort of field where things become manifest in their suchness, where every action, no matter how slight, emerges into being from its point of origin.33 It is then a mistake to consider things only from the viewpoint of the subject, as we have already pointed out (idealism). Yet, in the opposite direction, it is also a mistake to consider them only from the viewpoint of the object (materialism). In the latter case, “the covert inclusion of a relationship to the subject is unavoidable.”34 Both idealism and materialism amount to the one-sidedness of the self-confined I that does not allow the reality of things to appear in their suchness. Nonetheless, the question remains: does Nishitani mean that there is no reality before the act of knowing? Would it not amount to a new form of self-confinement, since only the I that knows makes things real? As it seems, we cannot overcome self-confinement without accepting that reality preexists our act of knowing. I would claim, however, that, from Nishitani’s viewpoint, we can accept such a presupposition without departing from his identification of the appropriation and the actualization of reality, as long as we concede that reality is not something given. Reality is a process in constant motion. It is a constantly moving process rather than a static given. Thus, the event of selfawareness represents that instant in the constant evolution of reality, when it not only becomes real, but also becomes known. Precisely, knowing emerges out of the self-unfolding of reality in the field of self-awareness. Thus, 32. See rn 109–10. 33. rn 121. 34. Ibid. 208 | European Journal of Japanese Philosophy 4 • 2019 Nishitani claims that “the identity of ‘being’ and ‘knowing’ is more primal than traditional metaphysics has taken it to be.”35 And also that “to know things such as they are is to restore things to their own home-ground.”36 The act of knowing fully participates in the process of reality becoming real. As a consequence, no matter how much I strive for it, I do not achieve knowledge merely by my own efforts. If reality does not manifest, my efforts to grasp it are in vain. What I can rather do is to put myself in the right disposition to allow reality to manifest. Only then does reality make knowing possible through itself. This is why Nishitani calls the root of the latter a knowing of nonknowing: “at the ground of all knowing from the standpoint of the ‘subject,’ there lies an essential non-knowing.”37 This nonknowing is nonreflective (非対象的) and nonrefractive (非反省的).38 The terms “reflective” and “refractive” refer here to the type of knowing wherein the self is “caught in its own grasp in the act of grasping itself, and caught in the grasp of things in its attempt to grasp them.”39 Here the self is in a state of self-confinement. As mentioned above, such is the field of consciousness, where the I knows itself by mirroring its own contents onto itself, completely unaware of its own originary nature. Likewise, the I also knows things other than itself by projecting itself onto them. In this way, it might be asserted that, in its act of self-conscious knowing, the I knows more about its own self-conscious image than about things as they truly are (as in the case of Columbus). In this respect, the whole point finds an eloquently succinct articulation in a passage of the “Genjōkōan,” a chapter of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō. He writes that “to practice and confirm all things by conveying one’s self to them… is illusion: for all things… to advance forward and practice and confirm the self, is enlightenment.”40 The obvious question is: how is it possible to put ourselves in the right disposition for the emergence of knowledge? What can we do in order to find ourselves in the right occasion for knowing to appear? More specifically, 35. rn 162–3. 36. rn 162. 37. rn 154. 38. rn 154–5. 39. rn 155. 40. Quoted in rn 107. barbosa: Nishitani Keiji’s Notion of Mind | 209 in what type of circumstances do things “advance forward” and show to the self what they truly are? Nishitani develops his response to these problems by articulating the notions of attunement and coprojection.41 Here, we finally arrive at the core of Nishitani’s notion of mind and the specific way in which interrelatedness manifests in mental life: coprojection of mind and thing. The specific type of interrelatedness that conditions the existence of mind appears in chapter 5 of Religion and Nothingness, where he introduces the concepts of the coprojection of mind (心) and thing (事). He introduces this notion by explaining the meaning of 心得, a Japanese expression that can be translated as “understanding the meaning of something.” He points out that it literally reads “obtaining the mind of.” This is not to presuppose, however, that things have a mind (i.e., he is not endorsing panpsychism). Rather, Nishitani explains that in Japanese the meaning of a certain matter or thing can be called its “mind” (心). He writes: To “obtain the mind”… of a given koto (“matter”), to apprehend its ratio or logos, is for the reality that has become manifest as that koto (“matter and word”) to transfer essentially, just as it is and in its suchness, into the man who understands it; and for the man who understands it to be transferred into that reality.42 Understood in this sense, meaning is not merely something in me. Yet it is not out there, either. Meaning only emerges, so to speak, in the middle. It only emerges in the lively coprojection between mind and thing, the knower and the known. This lively relatedness can only be grasped by the intellect in abstraction. The intellect might take static snapshots of what is essentially a dynamic process, hence never the real thing. For example, imagine going to an amusement park and taking some photos while enjoying the diverse attractions. The pictures help us explain to our friends the meaning of what it is like to be in an amusement park (supposing they have never been to one), but it never completely conveys the experience as such. Here, we should repeat that coprojection does not need to be interpreted as a sort of panpsychism, that is, it does not imply that things have a mind. At least that is not, I believe, what Nishitani tries to say. Such a notion 41. rn 128–9. 42. rn 178. 210 | European Journal of Japanese Philosophy 4 • 2019 would also be incompatible with his stance toward science. Previously, I remarked that, even though he insists that words such as “soul” and “living bond” point to a fact beyond what mechanical science explains, reverting to the traditional accounts of life in terms of spirits or ghosts (supernatural, immaterial entities) is not an option. In some passages, Nishitani clearly states that religion (in general, we can extend this to premodern traditions) needs to go through the purgative fires of mechanical science, that is, tradition needs to accept and embrace the mediation of science in an effort to move toward a new form of development.43 This implies that panpsychism does not seem, at least at first, an appropriate answer to the problem of mind. Coprojection must mean something else. Nonetheless, Nishitani does not endorse the viewpoint of mechanicism, either. Accepting that reality can be explained mechanically is one thing, but to claim that it can be fully explained in mechanical terms alone is another. He concedes the former stance, but not the latter, the one that we should properly call mechanicism. He claims that there is room for mechanical explanation and that the whole of reality can be regarded as mechanical. Even so mechanicism alone cannot account for the “soul,” or sentience (or animacy). Thus, the concept of mechanism does not resolve the problem regarding how to distinguish those entities with a mind from those without a mind because the concept deals only with inert phenomena, hence it abstracts from any sort of animacy. We notice that obtaining the mind of a given fact or thing is also expressed as apprehending its ratio or logos. When Nishitani speaks of the mind of a given fact, he means the logos (ratio) of its being. Therefore, understanding consists of the fact’s ratio transferring into an individual mind, and this mind’s ratio transferring into the fact. From this perspective, what is wrong with self-confinement in the field of consciousness is not the sheer fact that the self projects itself onto the thing, but rather that the opposite movement (projection of the thing onto the self ) is blocked, hence only the self ’s ratio comes to the fore and, instead of the thing being grasped in its suchness, a mere representation stands before the subject. This way, the subject deludes itself into thinking that it knows the thing itself, but it only contemplates an 43. See rn 57 and sz 116, 133. barbosa: Nishitani Keiji’s Notion of Mind | 211 image made in its own likeness. It fails, so to speak, to see the real manatee instead of a reflected mermaid. The point that Nishitani brings to the fore when speaking in terms of mind-fact coprojection is not that mind is everywhere, but rather that mind is not simply something that is “in me.” The place where meaning arises is not merely in my brain. Nor is it the case that the mind is in my whole body. Meaning emerges in the lively interrelatedness between the body and a certain fact—i.e., in the coprojection of mind and thing. He elucidates this point by commenting on the following words of the poet Bashō: From the pine tree learn of the pine tree, And from the bamboo of the bamboo.44 The way he comments on these lines relies on an understanding of “learning” that does not have to do primarily with carefully observing facts or studying them scientifically. Bashō, he claims, rather “calls on us to betake ourselves to the dimension where things become manifest in their suchness, to attune ourselves to the selfness of the pine tree and the selfness of the bamboo.”45 For Nishitani, the term “to learn” in Japanese ( 習う) correspondingly means to make “an effort to stand essentially in the same mode of being as the thing one wishes to learn about.”46 The link between me and a fact that allows me to learn about it (thus know something about it) involves my own existence. Knowing is not a sheer cognitive operation that a mind performs in abstraction from (hence at a distance from) facts to be known, but requires that the mind engages with things and allows them to permeate it. Knowing requires that the mind attunes with facts. It requires mind’s engagement and attunement with facts. This notion suggests that there is no way to find or construct a certain abstract theory encompassing all things in the universe. A true theory of everything is not possible. Such a theory cannot fully explain a priori all the things in the universe, hence replace our concrete attunement to each 44. Quoted in rn 128. 45. Ibid., emphasis added. 46. Ibid. 212 | European Journal of Japanese Philosophy 4 • 2019 individual thing. This conclusion amounts to a rejection of reductionism. Indeed, reductionism is based on the hope that we can obtain a full conceptual picture of reality wherein we can accommodate all particular things and facts, or at least on the hope that this is possible in principle. For Nishitani, this is not truly possible because, in order to know a particular thing, one cannot circumvent concrete contact and attunement with its particularity. Attunement is possible because, at bottom, our very existence is connected to things in the universe. Our mind essentially holds the disposition to project itself to the outside, while things from the outside project onto the mind. If we want to recover contact with reality—that is, if we want to know reality—we need to return to that originary (根源的) point of contact. Let us now explain how the soul and the living bond (mentioned in the first section) can be integrated in our picture of reality. As discussed previously, the word “soul” points to the fact of sentience. Sentience is not a merely subjective phenomenon, even though it is not objective. No one would deny that my particular sensations associated with perceiving a flower, for instance, do not emerge from the flower itself. Yet they are not simply in me, either. Meaning emerges in the middle ground of mind-fact coprojection as much as in the qualitative properties of things. The quantitative properties of things also manifest in such a middle ground. Following that line, it may be suggested that quantum and quale are but two inseparable sides of the thing as it appears to us. In fact, Nishitani explicitly claims as follows: That fire is hot is a sense datum belonging ontologically to the category “quality.” As a quantity measurable on a thermometer, it can be said to belong to the category of “quantity.” But the fact of heat, at the point of its facticity, is a primary fact that cannot be grasped by the categories of quality and quantity…. The fact of heat manifests itself ecstatically as a primary fact on the yonder side (actually the hither side) of the categories of quality and quantity.47 Fire as it truly is (to follow Nishitani’s own example), as a “primary fact,” does not exist as a certain quality that we perceive or a quantity (temperature) 47. rn 126, emphasis added. barbosa: Nishitani Keiji’s Notion of Mind | 213 that we can measure. In our experience, the fact of fire reflects as one or the other, depending on what perspective we focus on (correspondingly, sensation and reason). Negatively considered, the fact in its suchness is beyond quality and quantity, but yet it encompasses both. From a rather positive angle, quality, not only quantity, can manifest knowledge of the thing as long as we attune with the thing in coprojection. Finally, the “living bond” can be interpreted as the originary coprojectional connection between sentient beings, hence as a special case of coprojection. In this special case, the fact that we attune with is not an inert thing, but a fellow living (sentient) thing. The significance of such interpretation is, as I have suggested, that it integrates animacy back into our picture of reality and into our concrete lives. From that perspective, we are not relatively stable bunches of preprogrammed cells and neurotransmitters, but dynamic, organic participants in the constitution of the environment that also constitutes us. Nishitani and contemporary reflection on the mind Naturally, the synoptic overview just articulated raises a number of questions that require further elucidation. First of all, mainstream epistemology might find it abstruse to argue that the qualitative side of our experience has the same epistemic weight as the quantitative one. Even though modern epistemology does not necessarily demand an outright rejection of qualitative experience, it is still grounded on the assumption that there is an essential asymmetry between quantitative and qualitative features of phenomena. Only the former reflect what real things are like, while the latter only show what they look like to us. We do not need to dispense with the notion of sentience, but it is widely argued that it has no significant epistemic role. That is why functionalism, for instance, even if it does not attempt to explain the mind in purely syntactic terms, reduces sentience (and all meaning in general) to mechanical operations. For Nishitani, however, the qualitative side of phenomena is as epistemically significant as the quantitative one. To the extent that he clearly departs from mainstream Western epistemology, this point demands further elucidation and discussion. A second issue has to do with the role of neurophysiological research of mental phenomena. I believe that Nishitani does not need to be against it. 214 | European Journal of Japanese Philosophy 4 • 2019 He may even agree that neurophysiological explanation is necessary for an understanding of the mind. The problem is that this kind of account does not suffice for an understanding of how the mind connects to the world. The problem is that several accounts of the mind assume that mind and world are two distinct things and then seek to answer the question regarding how this mass of cells can know and relate to things outside. From a standpoint like Nishitani’s, we should rather invert the assumption. First, we assume that this mass of cells that we call a mental entity is shaped from the very beginning by its relatedness to things outside. Therefore, the question should be how the mind arises out of such relatedness. If we assume this starting point, we cannot allow any form of reductionism because we are presupposing from the start that the mental entity and its environment are constantly shaping one another. In sum, neurophysiology in itself is not wrong. The problem is how we interpret the evidence and the insight that it provides. Finally, another question is to what extent Nishitani’s approach relates to the philosophy of mind today. Probably the most evident point of contact between both sides is enactivism, which already endorses the view that the mind is not simply within the brain, but rather consists of a double relation between the body and things outside. In their notable study, The Embodied Mind, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch argue that the mind does not preexist its activity. Rather, mental life consists of the constant coemergence of mind and world. They explicitly recognize the affinities between their approach and Nishitani’s philosophy.48 They also share with Nishitani a very critical stance toward traditional functionalism. It seems natural to compare enactivist mind-world coemergence with Nishitani’s mind-fact coprojection. Yet a better case for comparison is Peter Hobson’s The Cradle of Thought: Exploring the Origins of Thinking. The book is important here for two reasons. One is that Hobson is not a philosopher. He is an expert in neurophysiology and autism. Second, the concept of relatedness is central to his account of thinking. The originary place of human cognition in childhood is, he claims, the emotional relations that children establish with other human beings from the very first day of their birth. As he 48. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 2017, 239–43. barbosa: Nishitani Keiji’s Notion of Mind | 215 declares: “it is only because of what happens before thought that thought becomes possible.”49 This recalls the argument of Nishitani’s related to the knowing of nonknowing. Major differences are nonetheless noticeable. For Nishitani, knowing rests on a “nonknowing” at any stage of human life, not just in its early years. Hobson, on the other hand, discusses affective relatedness between humans, not between an individual human and facts. That being said, Hobson, and also Varela, Thompson, and Rosch attempt to situate the emergence of cognition in a middle ground between subjectivity and objectivity, thus suggesting that such a dichotomy is not originary, but rather derived from the unfolding of mental activity. This variety of problems and possibilities evince that a thorough inquiry into the notion of the mind from Nishitani’s philosophy demands very detailed and nuanced elaboration, especially if we expect to make fruitful connections to accounts given in contemporary philosophy of mind. References Abbreviations nkz sz rn 『西谷啓治著作集』[Collected writings of Nishitani Keiji] (Tokyo: Sōbun- sha), 26 vols. “Science and Zen,” trans. by Richard de Martino, in Franck, Frederick, ed., The Buddha Eye: An Anthology of the Kyoto School and its Contemporaries (Boulder, co: Shambhala, 2002). Religion and Nothingness, trans. by Jan Van Bragt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). Other sources Churchland, Patricia 1986 Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain (Cambridge, ma: mit Press). Columbus, Christopher 2013 Journal of the First Voyage of Columbus. Wisconsin Historical Society. Web. Accessed 30 Apr. 2019. http://www.americanjourneys.org/pdf/AJ-062.pdf. Fodor, Jerry 1975 “Introduction: Two Kinds of Reductionism,” in The Language of Thought (New York: Crowell), 1–26. 49. Hobson 2013, 29. 216 | European Journal of Japanese Philosophy 4 • 2019 Gardner, Howard 1985 The Mind’s New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution (New York: Basic Books). Hobson, Peter 2004 The Cradle of Thought: Exploring the Origins of Thinking (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Jones, Richard H. 2013 Analysis and the Fullness of Reality: An Introduction to Reductionism and Emergence (New York: Jackson Square Books). Maraldo, John 2016 “What Phenomenologists Can Learn from Nishida about Self-Awareness.” Presentation at the 2nd European Network of Japanese Philosophy Conference, Brussels. 2017 “What Phenomenologists Can Learn from Nishida about Self-Awareness,” in Japanese Philosophy in the Making 1: Crossing Paths with Nishida (Nagoya: Chisokudō Publications), 299–349. Morales Otero, Juan Diego 2014 The Emergence of Mind in a Physical World (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia). Ryle, Gilbert 1949 “Descartes’ Myth,” in The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson). Todorov, Tzvetan 1982 La conquête de l’Amérique: La question de l’autre (Paris: Editions du Seuil). Yuasa Yasuo 1987 The Body: Toward an Eastern Mind-body Theory, trans. by Thomas Kasulis and Nagatomo Shigenori (Albany: suny Press). Varela, Francisco, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch 2017 The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, ma: mit Press).