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.