EventsFifteenth Permanent Seminar on Nishida Philosophy: "Nishida, Izutsu, and Nāgārjuna"

The same Buddhist background unites the thought of Nishida, Izutsu, and Nagarjuna. The concepts of “field,” “place,” and “emptiness” are each rooted in their own way in the bodily experience of Eastern awakening. But is this common origin sufficient to allow us to identify certain similarities between these thoughts? Or is it precisely the points of detachment and difference that are most intriguing and thought-provoking? Around these kinds of problems will move the two talks at the fifteenth meeting of the Permanent Seminar on Nishida Philosophy.

20:00-22:00  Presentations

 

Gerard PUIG JORBA（Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona）：Insights to "場": Izutsu Toshihiko and Nishida Kitaro on the dialectics of Absolute Reality

Abstract

During his ten years of lecturing in Eranos, and later in his magnum opus, Consciousness and Essence (『意識と本質』), Izutsu Toshihiko developed the concept of "Field" or「場」to provide a structure for the point of view of "True Reality" or "如実" characteristic of Zen metaphysics, from which all things arise again from nothingness, articulated in their true grounds, and regardless of (or rather precisely due to) how much similar to the ordinary phenomena they may appear to the non-awakened mind. Insofar as Izutsu's analysis acknowledges the aim of Zen to eliminate the subject-object dichotomy in its ordinary sense to gaze at the true aspect of Being, this presentation will try to examine how much in common this approach may have to Nishida's attempts to overcome the "paradox of representation" throughout his "logic of basho" (場所の論理) as, coincidentally or not, they both ended up coining a near identical term, albeit discussing with distinct interlocutors (in the case of Nishida, Western Phenomenology and German Idealism). Other works by scholars who have dealt with the same topic will also be addressed to briefly reflect, on a more general scale, on the relationship between both authors.

 

About the author: 

Gerard Puig Jorba is Master Student at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcellona (Spain)

 

Lucas NASCIMENTO MACHADO（University of Passo Fundo）: Emptiness of Emptiness or Absolute Nothing? On Dialectics and Negation in Nāgārjuna and Nishida

Abstract:

Although, as is well known, Nishida draws deeply from his Zen-Buddhist background to formulate his concept of absolute nothing, one can still ask to what extend Nishida’s understanding of that concept is close to what a certain part of the Buddhist traditions – specially those of the Madhyamika strand – understand to be the concept not of nothingness, but rather of emptiness, Śūnyatā. In fact, if one takes Nāgārjuna’s approach to the concept of emptiness, which sometimes is approximated to a skeptical point of view, emptiness, as the negation of all self-being, of all svabhāva, must be itself empty, i.e., must itself not have any self-being, and thus only be real in interdependence with the phenomena of which it is the emptiness. In other words, Nāgārjuna’s conception of emptiness denies that anything subsists by means of self-determination and in no relationship to anything other than it, emptiness included. On the other hand, Nishida often uses the concept of absolute nothing or of place together with the concept of “self-determination” or of “self-determination of the place”. In fact, according to Nishida, it is by means of the self-determination of the place that the individual and the universal can come to determining themselves and one another. To what extent, however, this idea of self-determination would be compatible with Nāgārjuna’s concept of emptiness and its denial of all svabhāva? This shall be the topic of our presentation. 

 

About the author:

Lucas Nascimento Machado has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of São Paulo (USP) and is one of the grounding members of the Latin-American Network of Intercultural Philosophy (ALAFI). He is also one of the professors of the Specialization on Intercultural Philosophy of the University of Passo Fundo (UPF) and teaches Geisteswissenchaften at the Humboldt School in São Paulo.

 

22:00-22:30 General discussion