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ONTOLOGY OF PRODUCTION
3 ESSAYS
By Nishida Kitaro
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5180-1
Chapter One
EXPRESSIVE ACTIVITY ("HYOGEN SAYO," 1925)
1
It might be thought that when we speak of expressive activity, we are thinking first of all of something like the movement of the external manifestation of emotion or sentiment. But expression expresses some content. What is expressed in something like external manifestation is the subjective emotion or sentiment of a certain individual, but what is expressed in something like the activity of verbal expression is the content of objective thought that can be understood by anyone. Even though it be something like artistic expressive activity, what is expressed therein is not simply the content of subjective emotion or sentiment; it must possess objective significance. It can be thought that all expressive activity is constituted of three elements; that is, the content of some sort that is expressed, the expressive activity, and the expression itself. One can claim that in something like the movement of external manifestation these three elements become one, but in something like language each is differentiated from the others.
What sort of thing is the content that is expressed? The content of all mental activity must in some sense point to or indicate an Object [taisho]. Be it something like meaning itself or a proposition itself, an objective Object [kyakkanteki taisho] is being thought. It is thought that in something like the exposure of a merely momentary feeling, the content of the activity and the object are one, but it is probable that what exceeds the activity can be differentiated from the activity itself. It is the case both that the expressed content is thought to be objective and that it must necessarily be thought that even what bears the expression belongs to objective actuality, or at least to objective fact. Things like language or artistic works, as objective actuality, all possess the significance of being; and even though they are something like external manifestation, it is movement of the flesh that appears in exteriority. Thereby, even the content that is expressed and expression itself can be said to be objective, in the sense that both transcend our psychological activity. The expressed content belongs to the world of meaning; expression itself belongs to the world of being. Thus, subjective activity becomes what unifies these two. Still, in the case that the activity expresses the content of the self within the self, in something like the movement of external manifestation the three elements can be thought to become one.
2
What sort of thing is activity? What merely changes is not yet what is acting. When we see something changing before our eyes, we cannot immediately assume it is acting. What acts must be what can change of itself. When a certain phenomenon invariably follows a certain other phenomenon, it is thought that the prior phenomenon acts. But cause is not something independent of effect; cause and effect must be interrelated. It is not that red becomes blue but that what was formerly red subsequently becomes what is blue. First of all, we must think that behind two phenomena there is a unity between the phenomena themselves, independent of the [perceiving] self. Here, we first of all think that a thing possesses various qualities, but to say that a thing possesses qualities is not to say that a thing acts. To say that a thing acts is necessarily to say that of itself the thing is continually changing its own qualities. It is said that, there being a thing apart, for the sake of which a certain thing changes its characteristics, the former is cause and the latter effect. Were both absolutely independent, however, it could not even be said that one acts upon the other. Both must exist in a single unity. Thus, if it is posited that the latter is absolutely passive with respect to the former, that is nothing other than to think the latter is subsumed within the former, but what is acted upon must also be that which acts. Thus, to the extent that two things mutually interact, both together lose their independence and are unified by a single force. The concept of the thing is dissolved within the concept of force. More than thinking that a thing acts, it can be thought that a thing is caused to move. To say that a certain phenomenon arises within a certain other phenomenon is to say that force is changing from one state to another. That a thing or phenomenon itself is changing itself is force. And without a certain force being brought to move by another force, we might not even be able to speak of the fact of changing. There must, however, exist an unchanging force that is continually acting. Thus, to the extent that forces mutually interact, they must be unified as a single force.
We must admit the logical contradiction that, at the ground of acting, the one gives birth to the many, and the many constitute the one. Were there not the unity of the one and the many, of course, our very thinking itself could not come into being. That the universal itself determines itself is the fact of our thinking. We might even think that in something like mathematics, a single principle constitutes illimitable truths. In extremely formal knowledges, such as the three laws of thought, activity and the content of activity possess an indivisible relation; but when it comes to something like mathematics, the unity of principle and the activity of thinking can clearly be separated. Activity is a temporal event; principle necessarily transcends time. Even the content of time might be said to consist of the fact that, being multiple, it is one. But the unity of truth and the unity of actuality cannot but be thought to differ in the significance of "unity." What sort of thing is the unity of time? Kant considered time as a form of intuition. The content of our experience is given according to the form of time. It is the fact that the content of our thinking is unified with the content of sense perception according to the form of time that constitutes the actually existing world. But if what we mean by the "content of sense perception" is merely something like the representation in itself, then it must, like the content of thinking, transcend time. Knowledge of what actually exists is not born of the unity of the nonexistent and the nonexistent. We both know things and, knowing knowing, we know the thinking behind our thinking. These two knowledges have fundamentally different standpoints. One might well say that to know knowing is also knowledge; to think the fact of thinking is itself thinking. But these two knowledges must utterly differ in their secondary aspects. If to think the thing and to think thinking are of the same order, then something like the self- consciousness of our thinking necessarily disappears. Even in thinking the thing there must be a principle of unity, on the basis of which a certain thing is distinguished from everything else. But to know such a unity is not this unity itself; it is in the unity of such a unity that for the first time we can know this. Even in something like formal logic, which cannot differentiate the content of activity from the cognitive epistemological object, both aspects must already be differentiated. Time is the form of unity from the standpoint of knowing this kind of knowing. All that is given to us must be given from this standpoint. That even the experiences of sense perception are given to us as the actually existing world must be given from this standpoint. The content of the experience that constitutes the actually existing world is given on the basis of the fact that I see, I hear. We can say that even the fact that we speak of the content of thinking as given is given from this standpoint. It is from this standpoint that thinking and sense perception are unified.
In order to say that a thing changes, there must be at its ground the knowing of knowing. It is from this standpoint that the linear succession of such a "time" that cannot return comes into being, and it is within the category of such a "time" that we see change. Were that not the case, then we would see nothing but different things. However much a certain schema may be independent within itself, and however infinitely inexhaustible its content may be, it is not what changes. When we speak of knowing the fact of knowing, we can say we know something above or beyond the mere cognitive epistemological object; that is, activity knows activity itself and, in contradistinction to knowledge [that belongs to the faculty of] judgment, intuitive knowledge comes into being. From this standpoint, the self, transcending the thinking self, sees a unity unattainable by thinking, and even the contents of sense perception enter into the unity of the self. Sense perception [in itself] is completely irrational. But if sense perception entered into no unity whatever, then even the consciousness of sense perception could not come into being. In fact sense perception is sense perception because sense perceptions relate to each other on the basis of memory (in the broad sense). So memory is possible from the perspective of the self knowing the self. Here, thinking is united with immediate awareness, and we can speak of conceiving that of which we are immediately aware. The constitutive categories of thought come into being in self-awareness.
There is a supraconscious unity at the ground of our self- awareness. Our unity of consciousness is established on this basis. Notwithstanding the fact that it can be thought that between the consciousness of the I of yesterday and the consciousness of the I of today there is a rupture, they are immediately unified. This unity cannot be explained by anything else; it is the condition of possibility for the constitution of knowledge. What we call our "intuitive unity" is the unity of this standpoint. From this standpoint, our intuition moves from the one to the many. Because this standpoint transcends the consciousness at work in judgment, from this standpoint, in contradistinction to the consciousness at work in judgment, the infinitely irreversible, unrepeatable linear succession of "time" comes into being. Time is the footprint of the transcendental self. From this standpoint, not only do one and another mutually differ, but one can see a changing from one to another. Were we, however, to take such change to be merely change within the orbit of our unity of consciousness, no matter how often it might recur, it could not act. What acts is not a unity within time but must be what stands in a standpoint that transcends time; it must be the ground of our self- awareness, that upon the basis of which our self- awareness comes into being. Force is what has transcended time; force is time that possesses positive content.
3
There are various senses of "acting." We call the case where a certain phenomenon necessarily accompanies another phenomenon, with absolutely no end or telos whatsoever, mechanical activity. Such are things like physical phenomena. Although it be the same natural scientific phenomenon [as in physics], when it comes to something like biological phenomena, although each of its processes can be seen as mechanical activity, the totality is thought to be unified on the basis of a single end or telos; that is to say, the totality constitutes teleological activity. Even our psychological phenomena are thought to possess a single unity within the totality, but because that unity is immanent within the phenomenon itself, it differs essentially from natural phenomena. What does it mean to render unity immanent? In biological phenomena that unity is given from without. It is from without that thus we see; I do not know if an organism's unity is also contingent, but we cannot even know the end or telos of the biological activity of the self. Contrariwise, in psychological phenomena, process and unity are in an inseparable relation; we can say that the unity is prior to its elements. Even if it is a matter of simply one sense perception, it makes no sense without the premise of its relation to other sense perceptions. Consciousness cannot come into being without such a unity.
In all mental phenomena the unity must be immanent; that is, someone must be conscious of a mental phenomenon. But in mental phenomena we are capable of differentiating between what is teleological and what is not. Something like sense perception, it might almost go without saying, is involuntary, even in something like the association of ideas. The greater parts of our mental phenomena are involuntary; any teleological unity is never rendered conscious. It is only in the activities of thinking or in willing or in the activity termed apperception that for the first time the teleological unity is rendered conscious, and our mental activity is considered to be free. Even our mental phenomena belong to the world of second nature in opposition to the self; it is in this objective world that we continually actualize the end or telos of the self. Situated therein, only the activity that follows the desire of the self can be considered teleological. It may be that we can consider all mental phenomena to be teleological in the sense that biological phenomena are teleological. In mental phenomena in which the unity is considered already immanent, however, what is teleological is that the unity must return to the unity itself; the unity is necessarily the becoming- objective of the self itself. Both thinking and willing are considered to be active apperception, but we might well say that, in the strict sense, only in willing does the activity make of activity itself the end or telos. We can conceive, moreover, that in thinking, the end or telos is outside the activity, but in willing, the end or telos is truly within the activity itself.
It is thought that in mental phenomena the unity is internal: I must attempt to think about this point. As Aristotle said, in order to say that a thing changes, there must be that which changes. Voice does not become black or white; it is necessarily color that becomes black or white. If the question "What is color?" is taken to be merely a universal idea, we do not expect the universal idea to become either black or white. If so, and one were to try to think, as do physicists, that behind [a phenomenon] there is mechanical activity, I would ask, with Plotinus, how it is that pushing and pulling gives birth to such varied hues of color. Aristotle claims that what changes changes into its opposite; but the more two qualities are opposed, the more must there be an identity that grounds them both. In short, even all the discriminations of color must be based on this. That can be thought as the thing in itself that becomes the logical subject with respect to judgment but does not become predicate: our mental phenomena are no more than the development of such a unity. Even to posit the cognitive epistemological object as immanent in mental phenomena likely expresses no other sense than this. What is differentiated is immediately that which differentiates; and it is necessarily the case that between the two no sort of mediation is either authorized or required. It is for this reason that the more sensuous qualities are in opposition, the greater the clarity of sensuous consciousness, and thought becomes more rigorous, based on the law of contradiction.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from ONTOLOGY OF PRODUCTION by Nishida Kitaro Copyright © 2012 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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