Paper short abstract:

My proposal is that Nishitani conceives of mind as a primarily pre-reflective gathering of reality itself qua self-awareness that materially manifests as a living body. This, I think, goes in line with the enactivist trend in the philosophy of mind and contributes to reinforcing its arguments.

Paper long abstract:

Within the broader project of assessing the relevance of Kyoto School's philosophy to contemporary philosophy of mind, the aims of my presentation will be to propose a reconstruction of Nishitani's view of the mind, and to suggest its potential contributions to contemporary philosophical discussions around the notion. This will require a bibliographical inquiry into some of his works, mainly 『宗教とは何か』 (Religion and Nothingness), 「空と即」 ("Emptiness and Sameness"), and 「般若と理性」 ("Wisdom and Reason").

Concerning the first objective, Nishitani's concept of mind is based on an existential approach to the following elements: "spirit" (the "bond of life" that sustains and holds all living things together), self-awareness (自覚　jikaku), and the way that both are related to (true) reality. Basically, for Nishitani the traditional notion of "spirit" points out that, despite its multiplicity, living things do not exist separately, hence (each individual) mind's existence is intrinsically relational from the very beginning; and self-awareness is not purely subjective or purely objective, but previous to the subject/object split. Consequently, on the side of the subject, self-awareness phenomenologically pre-exists and constitutes the self and not the other way around; and on the side of the object, mind is not an epiphenomenon of inert matter. In brief, mind is relational, non-egoic, and real. Even more, imagination and rationality are not reducible to sheer psychological states: they are grounded on reality itself. The place of self-awareness, consciousness, imagination and rationality is not simply the brain nor the body, but reality itself; here, the (living) body is the point where they gather together as mind.

Concerning the second aim of this contribution, I remark that Nishitani's views are congenial to the enactivist trend in the philosophy of mind (v. Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, Andy Clark, etc), according to which the mind continually co-creates itself and its world by enacting both: mind is not "in the brain" or "out there," but in this field of co-creation. I will suggest that the dialog between both sides may help to strengthen the enactivist case.