Bulletin > Volume 49 Nishida and McGilchrist: Consciousness, Complementarity, and Nondualist Reality

Charles-Antoine Barbeau-Meunier

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This essay has been adapted from a seminar presentation titled “Du neuronal au philosophique: conscience et rapport au monde dans la pensée de Nishida et les neurosciences contemporaines,” presented for the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture on 27 October 2023. The contributions of the Kyoto School and its founder Nishida Kitarō mark an unprecedented exchange between the Japanese Zen tradition of thought—based on nondualist reality, non-thinking and direct experience of the world—and Western philosophy, which has traditionally privileged subject-object dualism and the grasping of the world through logical argumentation. This essay invites the reader to pursue this exchange by exploring an unsuspected complementarity between Nishida’s thought, as set out in his earlier work An Inquiry into the Good, and the neuroscientific insights of psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist, laid out in his recent book The Matter with Things.