Nothingness and the Universal Predicate

Reading Nishida Kitarō's "Basho" from a Thomist's Perspective

I have been reading the essay titled “Basho,” by the early 20th century Japanese philosopher from Kyoto, Nishida Kitarō, published in English translation along with another essay in a volume entitled Place and Dialectic. The essay is dense, long, and highly thought provoking, and merits close reading and rereading. The Japanese word basho means something like “place,” but its employment by Nishida is much vaster than physical place/space, and is intended to undergird a whole theory of knowledge, which crosses the borders of both metaphysics and logic in interesting and provocative ways.

As a Thomist by training, with much exposure to Plato, Aristotle, and the Neoplatonic tradition, I of course could not help but read this essay in light of my own presuppositions. In particular, since my particular brand of Thomism has been so influenced by Thomists of the Laval tradition such as Charles DeKoninck, I could not help but be continually comparing the framework offered by Nishida to that offered by someone like DeKoninck, in dialogue of course with my interpretations of Plato, Aristotle, and their theories of knowledge. Nishida too was, of course, deep in engagement with Plato and Aristotle, as well as the whole tradition of Western philosophy — but he was engaging with this tradition from the firm ground of his own rooting in Zen Buddhism. Needless to say, this whole combination of influences makes for a deeply rich and fertile space for thought. I hope to offer some initial reflections and impressions on the “Basho” essay here in light of my exposure to Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, DeKoninck, etc. — but I hope also that my encounter with Nishida will continue to bear fruit in further installments as well.

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Nishida Kitarō, 1870-1945

I will begin by summarizing the main points of “Basho” that struck me, as best as I can. I am still a beginner in reading Nishida’s writings, so what follows is necessarily tentative and subject to correction and clarification. Admittedly, these notes are also largely for my own benefit, as merely the record of my own attempt to understand a difficult text containing many new and complex ideas.

In “Basho,” Nishida essentially proposes to lay down a theory of consciousness as such, which is something that he thinks has not really been done successfully — or hardly even attempted — by philosophy up to the present (the essay was composed in 1926). To be sure, after Descartes’ “inward turn” and especially after Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the issue of human consciousness and subjectivity had definitively entered the stage of human questioning, though it had also been approached by the theories of knowledge proposed by Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greece. More recently, Husserl’s phenomenology had gained some traction as a new approach to consciousness that took it, so to speak, on its own terms, without the “naive” assumptions of the various approaches of the sciences. Yet Nishida asserts that no philosophy of consciousness heretofore has avoided objectifying consciousness, which is to treat consciousness not as consciousness but as one of its objects. Such a consideration does not manage to escape the dualistic frame of the subject-object distinction which has seemingly plagued philosophers since the time of Plato, and it introduces into consciousness an internal division from itself that ultimately fails to explain the acts of consciousness. In another essay written around the time of the composition of “Basho,” Nishida expresses that he hopes, instead, to elucidate not the consciousness that consciousness itself is conscious of, but the consciousness that itself is conscious. The “Basho” essay itself proposes to locate this consciousness beneath or beyond the layer of determinate acts of consciousness, in a realm conceived in spatial terms that envelops the determinate oppositions and dualities embraced by consciousness in the ordinary sense. He calls this plane of consciousness shin no mu no basho, or “the basho of true nothing.”

It is within the plane of this basho that all determinate acts of consciousness, where we tend to separate the world into subjects and objects (which is in fact to objectify consciousness), are ultimately “implaced,” to use Nishida’s suggestive terminology. The basho of true nothing envelops all oppositions within itself and is itself without opposition. Even the opposition of being and non-being is enveloped in this ultimate basho, which is why Nishida calls it the “basho of true nothing.” As he explains:

True nothing must be that which envelops such being and nothing; it must be a basho wherein such being and nothing are established. The nothing that opposes being by negating it is not true nothing. Rather, true nothing must be that which forms the background of being. (Place and Dialectic, 55)

The ultimate ground of all consciousness must have the character of a “true nothing,” for a reason which ultimately resembles something like the impossibility of an infinite regress: the series of oppositions or dualities which, on the surface of consciousness, appear to make up its structure cannot go on forever; that is, consciousness cannot continually be explained by the objectification of consciousness itself, supposed to be the subject of the subject-object duality, but must be resolved to a plane beyond all such opposition — beyond the determination or differentiation that alone gives rise to such opposition. In other words, the ground of all consciousness must be an absolute nothing — and not simply that relative nothingness which is the negation of some determinate being, but a nothingness beyond even such determinate negations: the negation of the negation. It is true and oppositionless nothing.

So far, this is a woefully inadequate summary of the thesis, but I want to press on already to reflect on the logical dimension of Nishida’s theory of the basho of true nothing. Nishida uses an explication of the structure of judicative acts to elucidate what it means for an individual act of consciousness to be “implaced” in the basho. In particular, the subject-predicate relation forms an essential part of this elucidation, and it is here that I think there are some fascinating and perplexing (in a positive way!) comparisons to be made with the Aristotelian-Thomistic framework. Nishida himself is developing his thesis in direct engagement with — indeed as a response to — the Aristotelian tradition, which seeks to locate the basis of all knowledge in the subject of a judicative statement, which expresses the category of substance — i.e. the individual entity. This is based on the Aristotelian conviction, which is also emphasized in the Thomist tradition, that substance is the first instance of being itself, which is the prime object of the intellect. That is, to be is to be knowable, and what it means to be is above all to be a substance. Presumably, Nishida regards this as yet another form of objectification, which cannot explain the root of consciousness itself. Whatever one thinks of this characterization of Aristotle (I suspect there is some oversimplication here, but a common and therefore forgivable simplification), Nishida’s alternative framework deserves to be taken seriously even from an Aristotelian point of view.

On Nishida’s alternative proposal, the root of all consciousness is to be located in what appears at first to be the opposite direction of the objectifying tendency, which is expressed in the Aristotelian preference for the grammatical subject of judicative statements. That is, for Nishida, the root of all consciousness — the basho of true nothing — is actually to be found in the direction of the predicate of a judicative statement. Thus, he writes at multiple points in the essay:

If we take consciousness-in-general—conceivable as the subject for epistemological objects—as consciousness as well, we must consider it as distinct from the object of consciousness. From the standpoint of judgment we have no choice then but to say that it is that wherein the object is implaced, the predicate. It is by means of this that the consciousness of judgment is established. (Place and Dialectic, 95.)

This predicate-plane is what we may conceive to be the world of our consciousness. To be that which I am conscious of means to be implaced in such a predicate-plane. The object of thought is implaced in it as well and so is the object of perception. (96)

Although even judgment itself is unable to become an object of judgment, insofar as we are conscious of judgment, there must be a consciousness that is over and beyond judgment. We thus have no choice but to seek this plane of consciousness in the direction. (97)

This initially counterintuitive suggestion (for an Aristotelian) actually makes a great deal of sense if one remembers that this is almost exactly what Aristotle himself claimed that Plato was doing, by seeking for the cause of both being and intelligibility in the direction of the universal categories of being, i.e. the Platonic Ideas — and ultimately the Idea of the Good, or the One. While it would also be a simplification to claim that Nishida is merely reproducing Plato’s theory of knowledge, the comparison helps to shed light on how natural this preferential instinct for the universal really is. The basho of true nothing is found by pressing onward and upwards through the many planes of predication, towards that which envelops them all as an absolutely undifferentiated universal, where the dualities and oppositions typically perceived within the plane of judicative consciousness melt away in the unity of the most universal concept:

In the plane of judicative consciousness, we are likely to distinguish between objects and meanings as well as between objects without opposition and oppositional objects. When arriving at the simple predicate-plane by transcending the extremity of self-identity [though], we can regard these distinctions as having disappeared and become equivalent. (98)

One cannot help but think that Nishida is implicitly recommending a certain kind of intellectual or dialectical praxis here, a sort of meditation that presses upwards through every series of predicates, traversing every degree of universality, until it breaks through the very summit into a plane of oppositionless universality. This plane of oppositionless universality, the upper limit of the entire series of universal predicates, is identified by Nishida as the true ground of all acts of consciousness. It is the true basho.

Interestingly, while the structure of this theory of consciousness obviously resembles the Platonic doctrine of Ideas (which are themselves universal predicates) leading to “the One” of Neoplatonism, Nishida also likens the basho to the khôra (χώρα) or “receptable” of Plato’s Timaeus, which is usually compared more to matter than to form. Why Nishida makes this comparison might be difficult to discern, but my best guess is that he means to emphasize the indeterminate and undifferentiated quality of basho as a kind of nothingness. It is in itself undifferentiated, but it is also self-differentiating (or “self-mirroring” in Nishida’s language), which is the origin of the complex layers of intermediate bashos or less universal acts of consciousness which are implaced in it. Such less universal acts of consciousness, which are embodied in determinate predicates in judicative statements, are “cut out” as it were from the undifferentiated plane of the basho of true nothing. The provocative suggestion, then, is that it is in the direction of undifferentiation, which is equivalent to universality, that the ultimate ground of consciousness is to be found.

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Charles DeKoninck, 1906-1965

I want to speak now about this theory in light of the Aristotelian-Thomistic theory of knowledge, with a view to discerning not only the differences but some possible convergences between them. In the previous post, I wrote about Charles DeKoninck’s doctrine on the “dialectic of limits,” which he situates within the Thomist method of metaphysics. The limitations of the human intellect ensure that the first concepts by which we come to know anything are universal, but also vague and confused — that is, undifferentiated; and thus, what they possess in the universal scope of their application they lack in the power of their representation. In other words, the more universal the concept, the less clearly, distinctly, and specifically can it represent the object of knowledge — the less clearly, distinctly, and specifically can it represent all the particulars which are embraced in its universal scope. For example, I do not comprehend “circle” and “polygon” and “triangle” and “square” in all their specificity and determinacy by way of the universal concept which applies to them all, namely “figure.” Nor do I know very much of what it is to be a square by way of the concept “figure.” For distinct knowledge of the square as opposed to a circle, I need a distinct concept for each. Thus, in a passage I cited in the earlier post, DeKoninck writes:

In fact, distinct knowledge requires in us a multitude of cognitive means directly proportioned to the multitude of objects we know. This dispersion of our means of knowing is due to the empirical nature of our mind. Any finite intellect, knowing things in its own mode, requires a manifold of intelligible species, but the number of species, the extent to which the intellect is broken up and scattered about within itself, will be in proportion to its specific degree of perfection. Thus, if our mind were of a more exalted nature, a single concept such as figure might well represent simultaneously the several irreducible kinds of figure with even sharper distinction than that attainable by separate concepts used in succession. Indeed the Divine Intellect knows all things by means of the single intelligible species which is Its indivisible Essence. (“Concept, Process, and Reality,” in The Writings of Charles DeKoninck: Volume Two, 408-409.)

Consequently, the universal concept — or what Aquinas calls the universal in predication — does not lend itself with total adequacy to knowledge. It needs to be completed and supplemented by continual recourse to particulars. It is in this continual recourse to particulars that the method of the “dialectic of limits” comes to bear. In brief, the dialectic of limits is a tool by which the mind seeks to overcome its own limitations in order to approximate the type of concept that only an angel or God may possess in actuality, namely a concept that is “universal in power.” The method may be compared to the mathematical calculus of a variable ordered to a limit: as the series 1, 1+1/2, 1+1/2+1/4, approaches (though never attains) identity with 2, so does the series of all the concepts of all known objects approach identity with the concept which is universal in representative power — ultimately with the concept that is absolutely and unconditionally universal in power, namely the concept that is identical to the divine essence by which God knows all things (including both being and non-being) in himself. In effect, what this method accomplishes is to clarify the undifferentiated universal by bringing it into continual contact with the differentiation and specification of particulars.

Now, in what appears to be a marked contrast from this Aristotelian theory, Nishida Kitarō’s concept of basho is interesting because it locates the ultimate ground of consciousness precisely in that universal which is the most undifferentiated and indeterminate: the absolutely universal — and therefore paradoxically unsayable — predicate. Nishida would thus seem to be vulnerable to a critique which Juvenal Lalor, one of Charles DeKoninck’s students at the University of Laval, levels against Ernst Cassirer: namely, that such a theory makes confusion itself (i.e. the undifferentiated universal) to be the direction of knowledge — which seems obviously absurd.

But that the undifferentiated universal, or “true nothingness,” should be the ground and summit of all consciousness is certainly not a surprising position for one who, like Nishida himself, was steeped above all in the deeply “apophatic” tradition of Zen Buddhism. The concept of basho as a pure nothingness is almost certainly an expression of the Zen concept of nothingness (Japanese: mu). Nishida’s particular philosophical expression of this idea is, however, unique even for one rooted in the Zen tradition. The practitioners of Zen are not usually inclined to the intellectual discipline of philosophy, and in this respect Nishida is a definitive exception. Indeed, Nishida’s philosophical expression of Zen is even more remarkable in that it attempts to express the essence of “Zen consciousness” in terms borrowed from the Western philosophical tradition, in particular through an engagement with Western categories of logic. This is what makes his characterization of basho in terms of the universal predicate so unique.

But the initial appearance of a conflict between basho and the Aristotelian-Thomist dialectic of limits should not be passed over too lightly. Can they be reconciled? In the previous post, I noted that even in the Aristotelian-Thomist method, the originally Platonic drive for the universal is still present, but in a corrected — and I would say clarified and intensified — form. The “universal in representative power” which is approximated by the dialectic of limits is, if anything, more universal than the simple universal predicate, precisely because, unlike the latter, its ability to represent the particulars which it embraces is proportionate to the scope of its embrace. That is, it is more universal than the mere universal predicate precisely because it represents all of its own particulars actually, and not merely potentially: the angel by means of a single universal concept, say “figure,” could thereby grasp all the differences between circles and polygons.

What does the basho of Nishida Kitarō have to do with this? The description of basho as an “undifferentiated universal” seems to resemble the vague and confused universal that, in the Aristo-Thomist framework, represents an imperfection of knowledge, rather than its summit. At one point, Nishida even suggests that at the level of this totally indeterminate universal, “we can think of being and nothing as one in the manner Hegel conceived” — the point being that he uses the term being, qualified of course by its equivalence to nothing, to name this most universal concept. In this, he echoes Aquinas’s assertion that being as such lies outside of any genus: that is, it lies outside any particular determination of beings. Yet while for Aquinas it is precisely for this reason that the concept of being represents an imperfect stage in the pursuit of knowledge, for Nishida it is precisely this indetermination of being that makes it the summit of consciousness, in the manner that mu (nothingness) is the summit of Zen consciousness.

On the other hand, while the basho is a kind of mu, a nothingness, and thus a totally undifferentiated universal, he also describes it as a universal that embraces the totality of particular contents that may be grasped by lesser, differentiated, and opposed universals. At the level of such lesser, differentiated concepts, the human mind requires a variety of acts; but as these concepts are unified by pressing onwards and upwards towards yet more universal concepts above them, we begin to think of a unity of acts:

As we classify our empirical content into various kinds and unite them with concepts, we distinguish various acts. Consequently, as various universal concepts become further unified by universal concepts above them, we think of the unity of acts. If we continue advancing forward thoroughly in the direction of such unity of universal concepts, we would eventually arrive at the universal concept unifying all empirical content. (Place and Dialectic, 100.)

This language is highly suggestive precisely because it begins to resemble DeKoninck’s Thomistic language, according to which the imperfection of the human mind resides precisely in the fact that it requires a variety of acts in order to know a variety of objects; and that the dialectic of limits is intended to overcome, or approach the overcoming, of exactly this imperfection, trending evermore towards a single act — that is, a single concept universal in representative power, that is capable of unifying all particular content beyond their opposition. For DeKoninck, it is not possible for the human mind to actually arrive at such a concept, yet such a concept can be approximated by the process of dialectic, which continually oscillates between more and less universal concepts.

Nishida’s language appears at first sight to be more confident in the ability of the mind to “eventually arrive at the universal concept unifying all empirical content,” but what exactly this means would seem to be open to interpretation. Does Nishida think that such a concept can be actually attained? Or does not the naming of such a concept as absolute nothingness seem to indicate exactly that there is no concept that may be attained, as if it were itself something determinate? In the end, I think this latter interpretation is more consonant with Nishida’s insistence that the ultimate basho must be a basho of true nothingness. The only way to “arrive” at the universal concept unifying all particular/empirical content is the process itself of continually pressing onward without end towards ever-greater levels of universality — that, or the termination of this process in a kind of trans-dialectical silence: a place beyond consciousness itself, a void of consciousness, where there is no longer any conscious subject that may be concretely identified. Where consciousness is what Nishida elsewhere calls a “seeing without a seer.”

Even according to the Thomistic account, if there could be any actual end to the process of the dialectic of limits, it could not be the universal in representative power as actually achieved (not, anyhow, before human nature is glorified by the Beatific Vision in the next life), but merely the sigh of one who feels the infinite distance of the abyss that still yawns between himself and the knowledge of the Creator — the untraversable distance between his own desire for complete and absolute knowledge, and the absolute knowledge that is possessed by God alone. Faced with this still infinite distance, he must either press on still, knowing that the end will not be attained, or he must fall silent, submitting in a way to the luminous obscurity — a luminous undifferentiation — that seems to swallow up the progress of all his previous intellectual endeavors. Not that those endeavors were strictly in vain, but that they were the preamble to a more humbling and silencing recognition of the infinite obscurity that the divine Intellect must ever remain to man’s meagre powers of comprehension.

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It is beyond question, whether coming from a Platonic or Aristotelian perspective, or from a Thomistic or Nishidian perspective, that a kind of nothingness — indeed, the most absolute nothingness — is the only conceivable end and summit of the intellectual life. Not only is it the case that, to the limited powers of the human mind, God can ultimately only be understood as nothingness, because he is entirely beyond every determined category of being — which is to give a logical reason for this ultimate identification of being and nothingness in God; but also, on a more ontological or metaphysical consideration, if indeed the whole world were created by God ex nihilo, it would be absurd to stipulate that before the dawn of the world there had been a great void or nothingness apart from God. In other words, before the dawn of creation, there was not on the one hand God and on the other hand nothing. There was only God. For God to create all things from nothing is for God to create all things from nowhere else but himself. To melt into the oppositionless nothingness that is beyond all being — the nothingness that is even beyond the opposition of being and non-being, the basho of true nothing — is thus the only way to melt back into God himself.