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Step 7 of 7~8 min read
Reflection: Before the Split
Locate pure experience in your own life, and what it suggests about the self.
Prompts to consider
- Nishida describes pure experience as the moment of complete absorption in which there is no 'I' who is experiencing and no 'it' that is being experienced, just the activity itself. When in your own life do you come closest to this? What is it like to describe that experience in retrospect, and does the description already re-impose the subject-object structure?
- Absolute nothingness is a ground that functions by having no fixed nature, it does not constrain what arises within it, because it is nothing in particular. Is this a coherent philosophical concept, or does it verge on meaninglessness? Nishida would say the test is experiential, not logical. Is that a satisfying answer?
- The Kyoto School's political entanglement with Japanese militarism raises the question: can a philosophy of absolute nothingness and the dissolution of the ego also underwrite nationalism and imperial ideology? What features of Nishida's framework made it available for that misuse, and what should a politically responsible reading of it preserve?
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