Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to highlight the platonism in Nishida's early concept of time by contrasting it with a zen concept of time as illustrated in Hakuin's Dokugo shingyō. It will be suggested that the overcoming of platonism in Nishida was supported by a concept of time based on bodily experience

Paper long abstract:

The philosophy of Nishida is always presented as an intercultural combination of Western philosophy and Buddhist, i.e. Zen, thought, but if one looks to the first works of Nishida, in particular Zen no kenkyū (An Inquiry into the Good), and analyzes the concept of time Nishida developed there, it should be clear that a strong platonistic trait characterizes his ontology, despite the zen influences. This becomes evident if one compares Nishida's early concept of time with that of Hakuin, as it appears from a passage of Dokugo shingyō (Zen Words for the Heart) that Nishida himself quotes in Shisaku to taiken (Thought and Bodily Lived Experience). Hakuin is presented there by Nishida as someone who understood perfectly the essence of time, but if one tries to superpose Hakuin's thought of time to Nishida's one, it becomes clear that the features of future, represented by Hakuin through the "guest" who will come to visit, seem to be completly absent in Nishida's concept of time, where eternity is thought as atemporal presence. A critic of Nishida's early thought in its moral and ontological aspects becomes then possible by adopting some concepts developed by Jacques Derrida in his later works (Specters of Marx, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, Echographies of Television, Aporias, Of Hospitality, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas), for example the concept of the "coming guest", that involves not only an ethic of hospitality (like in Levinas), but also an "ontology of ghosts" or "hantologie", alternative to Western traditional platonic metaphysics of presence, in which Nishida's early thought seems to be entrapped. At the same time, by doing so it becomes also possible to gain some hints about the development of Nishida's thought of time based on bodily experience. In fact, it is possible to find already in Zen no kenkyū some traces of a different experience of time, neither platonistic nor bergsonian, which is able to open to a concept of eternity that not simply destroys the possibility of guests/ghosts, but leaves to the dead a chance of meaningful survival.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I will critically examine Ōmori Shōzō's theory of the past and point out some essential difficulties it faces. Starting from this analysis, I will further seek to develop an alternative approach to the thematic of the past.

Paper long abstract:

Philosopher Ōmori Shōzō 大森荘蔵 (1921-1997) developed in his later years a "recollection theory of the past" (想起過去説), which has formed a background for contemporary Japanese discourse on history and narrative. In this paper, through a critical reading of this theory of Ōmori, I will point out some essential difficulties it faces and thereby suggest a new approach to the thematic of the past.

Rejecting the conventional view of recollection as a reproduction of past perception, Ōmori argues that recollection is a linguistic experience - mediated by the past tense of the verb - that entirely differs in nature from perception. On this basis, he sets forth the anti-realist thesis that the past does not exist independently of recollection, but resides precisely in the linguistic meaning of recollection, or, briefly put, that "to be past is to be recollected."

A close inspection shows, however, that Ōmori's argument not only focuses on the concept of the past as recollected, but also contains the notion that "the past has disappeared without trace" - a notion which is in discord with the former. Furthermore, in contrasting recollection and perception as two heterogeneous modes of experience, he unwittingly introduces past perception as something past and yet perceptual, thus not linguistically recollected. In this way, Ōmori's theory of the past becomes undermined from within by the very ideas designed to support its position.

This aporia of Ōmori's theory may be reconceived, however, as a starting point for developing an alternative view of the past. My analysis shows how the generality of linguistic recollection (e.g. a recollected pain) stands in a dynamic conflict with the singularity of the past event (e.g. that pain beyond recollection). That is, a recollection is surpassed by a singular past event, which in turn is reappropriated by a new recollection, and this alternation between the two poles may indefinitely repeat itself.