Comparative Dialectics: Nishida Kitaro's

Logic of Place and Western Dialectical Thought^*

Guy Axtell

1. Introduction: Contrareity and Comparative Philosophy

An emergent theme of Nishida Kitaro's later works was expressed in the complex phrase "zettai mujunteki jikodoitsu"^b, variously translated by Schinzinger as "absolute contradictory self-identity", "the self-identity of absolute contradictories", or more simply as "oneness" or "unity" of opposites. The theory of contrareity or opposition Nishida (1870-1945) worked out between 1927 and 1945 could be taken (and was intended to be taken) as a stimulus for East/West comparative thought. This is so because of the special significance of Nishida's thought, but also more generally because contrareity is itself a prime subject for comparative philosophy.

The emminent philosophical anthropologist Mircea Eliade once said that "the union of opposites" is a basic category of archaic ontology and comparative world religions. Eliade's claim is contentious only in that the reference to "union" subtley provides an imperative for how basic felt oppositions and polarities be conceptualized. The initial fact is that of felt opposition itself; the ensuing demand or problematic is that of a conceptual understanding of contrareity; and the thesis of "union" Eliade refers to is one of the major conceptual responses to this demand, a conceptual means of understanding both opposition itself, and the character of the world through categories based on bi-polar distinctions.

It has been a common temptation in modern anthropology to judge as somewhat archaic and mystical the ancients' dependence on opposites as principles, and their cosmogenies and cosmologies that reflect traditional myths of polarity. This judgment is not unfounded, for the prevalent tendency of humans to begin reflection with the simplest scheme of categories and distinctions is indeed reflective of a primitive state in the conceptual organization of experience. But the problem which such judgments address is only that of comparative levels of development or sophistication in how a thinker deals with his need for organizing his experience; they do not and cannot resolve the questions of the very presence and role of opposites in human thought. The demand for conceptual response to these latter problems is one of the initial demands laid upon a thinker, and one which was of great concern to the learned from an early point of history. Answers to this demand are found in Taoist, Hindu and Buddhist traditions; they are also strongly a part of the Greek roots of Western traditions, as is illustrated by the depth of Greek thought on contrareity found in Aristotle and his predecessors.[1]

The "deep problem about opposites" which Plato recognized and addressed has not left us; but particularly in Western thought it has often been pushed to the side as a concern only for those studying "deviant" logic and "archaic" thought. A common reason given for pushing the issues of contrareity to the background as unhelpful in conceptualizing the relation of language and reality is the work of Aristotle on logic. Aristotle was first among the Greeks to call into question the license of his predecessors to "adopt opposites as principles".

For they all identify the elements, and what they call the principles, with the contraries, although they give no reasons for doing so, but are, as it were, compelled by the truth itself.[2]

Here Aristotle both makes a central role explicit for his own use of opposites or contraries (enantion), and grounds his predecessors' uses of such principles in a seeming mystic insight into truth. But for all his foundational work on the principles of identity, contradiction, and excluded-middle, and for all his revision of earlier abuses of language and logic, Aristotle's theory of enantion remains in many ways at least as wrapped up in metaphysics as those of his predecessors. His own metaphysics is found in the suggestion that discursive thought is a reflection of reality, and that the dependence of intelligible discourse upon basic rules of consistency is a reflection of the essential and self-indentical character of the real. In Aristotle's thought contrareity was far more than the idea of the relation between logical posits, but a cosmic force underlying real change, and informing both the basic human categories of thought and the conditions for intelligible discourse.

Misunderstandings of the dependence of logic both on metaphysics, on the one hand, and on epistemology, on the other, have led many logicians to expect that the foundations of the laws of logic would be independent from an account of contrareity. My point here reiterates one that Bradley found important, that the "laws" or "principles of thought" presuppose rather than explain the presence of opposites in human thought. They organize our understanding of affirmation and negation, identity and difference, hopefully keeping us from falling prey to conceptual fallacies, but are wrongly understood when taken to explain the origin and prevalence of opposites generally to the human mind. It is little wonder then that during the Modernist era in Western philosophy the principles of identity, non-contradiction and excluded-middle were often characterized as actual `laws of thought' which reflect natural limits of discursive thought.

Current interest in naturalizing epistemology, however, indicates both a difference between (deductive) logical proof and epistemological justification, and the ultimate dependence of modes of justification upon the actual character and limitations of human thought processes. For those who take this turn a rethinking of the supposed independence of the principles of logic from the problem of contrareity is one of the ensuing demands. Both tables of opposites and correlative reasoning both remarkably emerge quite early in man's development, and any philosophical anthropologiest cannot miss the significance of this fact. In recent years, new philosophical anthropologists have brought renewed interest to bear on the problem of a philosophically adequate account of contrareity. G.E.R. Lloyd's Polarity and Analogy: Two Types of Argumentation in Early Greek Thought,[3] studies the polar and the analogical as two types of reasoning that have typically emerged earliest in primitive and archaic cultures. In Eliade, and others interested in myth and metaphor, one finds sound reasons for suspicion of the tendency, so prevalent in the archaic mind, to reify the products of mental abstraction into cosmic forces and philosophical first principles. Such cross-cultural study of the phenomena of classificatory and explanatory principles underlines alternative ways of conceptualizing the world, and from a philosophical perspective bears strongly on questions of the relation of language to reality.

All of this is by way of introduction to the themes of zettai mujunteki jikodoitsu, and of Nishida's benshohoteki^b logic. O'Leary's commentary on Nishida's later work chastizes Nishida for obscuring his own themes in "complex dialectical language" and bids the comparative philosopher to approach Nishida through `a more strictly phenomenological approach,' --this despite Nishida's own acknowledged protest against non-dialectical `interpretive phenomenology'.[4] While Nishida's influence by existentialism and phenomenology is unmistakable, the present paper will depart from this now-standard comparative methodology. Nishida was himself actively engaged in comparing Aristotelean, Hegelian and Marxist logics (ronri)^c, comparisons which both clarified important differences and cleared conceptual ground for the introduction of his original benshoho (dialectic). In this paper I will attempt to further these goals by moving the context of discussion beyond these historical figures to the arena of contemporary currents in both non-materialist and materialist dialectics. I take Nishida's own studies of contrasting logics as a prime example of the approach I am here calling "comparative dialectics". This is an approach which also has a number of notable forerunners in T.R.V. Murti's and Johnston's comparisons of Nagarjuna with Western dialecticians, in A. Verdu's Dialectical Aspects In Buddhist Thought, and from the Chinese side in Wee Chang-Tan's Dialectica Reconciliae and A.C. Graham's Yin-Yang and the Nature of Correlative Thinking.

Of course, "dialectical" philosophy is far from a homogenous grouping. But it is both the similarities and the differences among those who explicitly claim to espouse a dialectical ontology or meta-methodology which will here provide fuel for discussion. Indeed the first point of this paper is in the comparative methodology developed. While the basic conceptual antitheses that predominated in Eastern thought are different than (though often overlapping with) those of the West, I hope to demonstrate in the sections below Nishida's awareness of a number of meta-methodological issues germane to any dialectical philosophy, Eastern or Western. Identifying such a group of common issues I believe can help the inquirer understand Nishida's notion of concrete dialectical logic, and further one's ability to critically assess the philosophical adequacy of Nishida's benshoho logic as a synthesis of Eastern and Western philosophy. Hence, although I occasionally lean upon differences between `Eastern' and `Western' ways of viewing logic and contrareity that are somewhat artificial from the perspective of such worldly philosophers as Nishida and Aristotle, my intention is to work past such differences toward a common, syncretic ground.[5]

2. Methodological and Ontological Materialism

Nishida is indebted to Hegel for the notion of a "concrete logic" which tries to grasp reality in its historical unfolding. For both men in a sense history is an ascending self-realization of the absolute. For both as well the concept or idea is an act of dialectical formation by self-consciousness. In this movement for Hegel, knowledge becomes the grasping of "der Konkrete Begriff" -the Concrete Concept. Despite Hegel's emphasis on the historical context of self-conscious beings, Marx is commonly credited with `turning Hegel's logic on its head' by (1) replacing its conceptually-oriented basis with a Praxis-oriented one, and (2) replacing its ontologically Idealist basis with a Materialist one. As I interpret Nishida, he follows Marx in the first of these shifts, but resists the polarity of ontological Materialism and Idealism.

Nishida has drawn the fire of numerous dialectical materialists for statements such as this from "The World of Action" (1933-4): "...to define dialectics materialistically, as do present-day Marxists, is ultimately to negate dialectics and to revert to physical science."[6] The point can be illuminated if we consider a distinction Joachim Israel draws in The Language of Dialectics and the Dialectics of Language[7]: The distinction between "methodological" and "ontological" Materialism. Israel's distinction and outlook is illuminating of Nishida's own view. A methodological materialism in Israel's sense begins not from transcendental reflection, but from thought in its action-orientation in the social-historical world. Though `methodological materialist' may not capture Nishida's position, this notion does help explain the centrality of action-orientation in Nishida's account. For Nishida the starting place for reflection is social consciousness; the life-world is an historical world and provides the starting point for philosophical reflection. The unity of acting and sensuous intuition means for Nishida that the world of actuality in which we all live and die is a world of action. "Action-intuition" is emphasized to indicate that there is no action without intuition and no intuition without action. "We act through seeing, and we see through acting."[8] Action-intuition is the ground for the subject/object distinction, which Western epistemology so often takes as primary.[9]

To a great extent then, as testified by his own discussions of Hegel and Marx, Nishida follows Marx to a dialectical logic which is also a dialectic of theory and praxis --to a "concrete" dialectical logic which relates the "concept" not to the absolute but to the prevalent "style of productivity."[10] Hegel of course already thought his logic to be "concrete" in contrast to that of the schoolmen of his age. Indeed he objected also to Kant's understanding of the "antinomies of pure reason", which seemed to him to imply

"that Thought or Reason, and not the World, is the seat of contradiction. It is no escape to turn around and explain that Reason falls into contradictions only by applying the categories. For this application of the categories is maintained to be necessary."[11]

But understanding Hegel's idealist conception of the "World", we see that this is a criticism of Kant's ahistorical or pure a priori reason rather than a materialist view of dialectical contradictions; it is in Lawler's terms a criticism of the abstract understanding's framework for understanding contrareity, and rightly places Kant within this Aristotelean tradition. But this was not enough for Marx, who saw Hegel's analysis as essentially still one of conceptual definition. In shifting this basis to the concept in its action-orientation Marx more closely affirms Nishida's contention that "The unity of our consciousness is essentially grounded on action. Our action is not merely movement. Action must have the significance that we see something through it."[12] Israel's recent distinction thus helps make sense of Nishida's praxis orientation, as well as his insistance that we disentangle what is true in Marxian dialectic from its materialist base. Nishida would side with neither Hegel nor Marx on the metaphysical issue, and approaches a more adequately dialectical account to the extent that he is able to consistently extricate himself from the debate and demonstrate the shared assumptions at its base.[13]

3. The Teleological and the Mechanical

The Kantian background of the antinomies and Fichte's `Kantian' philosophy of antinomical Materialist and Idealist systems is deeply reflected in Nishida's later writings. Many of the theoretical oppositions Nishida develops, such as the "Teleological" and the "Mechanical", and "Subjectivity" and "Objectivity", reflect a period of formulating his dialectic in the terms of the Fichtean opposition between the systems of the Ego and the Non-Ego, or "Idealism and Dogmatism".

At the same time, however, Nishida is fully aware of the ways in which Fichte's views militate against dialectical philosophy. Fichte had changed the epistemological focus from the opposition of consciousness and things to an opposition within the "I" itself. The unavoidable contradiction of Materialist and Immaterialist ways of conceptualizing the world meant for Fichte that a non-logical choice had to be made between these two monistic systems, regarded as exclusive and exhaustive. As Ilyenkov commented in Dialectical Logic concerning Fichte's demand for a "personal" choice between the two systems,

From two different, dualistically isolated halves, having no connection at all with each other, you could not create a single, integral system. What was needed was not dualism, but monism, not two initial principles but one only.[14]

But for Nishida, Fichte's apparent antinomy arises from an acceptance of an abstract logic which makes the ego and the non-ego, and hence the contrary systems inspired by the privileging of each, appear unconnected and independent. Nishida reaffirms Fichte's central thesis that reflection upon self-consciousness can proceed in either of two radically different directions; it can proceed in the direction of the determination of the physical world by the self, or of the self by the physical world. The one direction is portrayed by Nishida as leading to a monistic and teleologically dependent worldview, and the other to an atomistic, mechanical worldview. Both systems are really abstractions out of a single world of actuality. Both reflect "aspects" of the concrete life-world.[15]

Hence the philosophy which Nishida counterposes answers `Neither/Nor' to Fichte's demand for an Either/Or choice between the metaphors of the teleological and the mechanical. The move reveals a significant part of what Nishida has taken over from phenomenology and Lebensphilosophe. In Nishida's words,

Many people first presuppose opposing worlds of subjectivity and objectivity or immanent and transcendent worlds, and then consider the actual world as the mutual determination of such worlds. But it is not that such opposing worlds exist independently, for such worlds are always to be conceived from this actual world as two directions of this actual world.[16]

Or again,

...It is not that subjectivity and objectivity unite, and are then actual. Both can be conceived from a dialectical reality, i.e. from a dynamic reality which is self-determining. Self-determining reality, i.e. dynamic reality, must be self-contradictory. Subjectivity and objectivity may be regarded as different directions of that self-contradiction.[17]

Like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, Nishida seems to be calling us out of the different directions in which self-reflection naturally leads, to the pre-reflective or concrete life-world from which these reflections originate. Meta-methodologically, Fichte's pseudo-antinomy is avoidable because the plurality of available reflective approaches should lead us to acknowledge alternative meta-logics of inquiry, which while individually limited, can yet be seen as developments of mutually-complimentary systems of thought.

Israel makes a point that is related to the attempt of dialectical thinkers to reconcile and move beyond the "isms" of Western philosophy. For he insists, as might Nishida himself, that though dialectical philosophy is neither of the reductionistic alternatives of Materialism or Idealism, it is also strictly speaking neither a form of dualism nor of "neutral monism". Israel argues that "neutral monism" is a mischaracterization in that it fails to exhibit the essential uniqueness of the dialectical understanding of inter-relation within a system. For Nishida too it seems, the one who understands the self's "absolutely contradictory self-identity" understands also the dialectic of the One and the Many, and is posing a radical alternative to all monistic/dualistic metaphysical stances.

In Chapter III of "The Dialectical World", Nishida represents Western metaphysics as having taken the direction of "reality as form", in contrast to Eastern approaches which have treated it as "formless". The Aristotelean identification of individual substance with "Being" --with form and self-identical existence-- expresses the assumption of grounding metaphysics in the substantial union of matter and form. Hegel's metaphysics too reflect this affirmation of Being. Nishida sees Hegel as still following Aristotle in the notion of a "substance that becomes subject" which leads to a "logic of the subject". For Nishida the concrete universal is developed as the universal of "mu" or "nothingness". His logic is characterized as a "logic of the predicate" that cannot become subject. Yet to Nishida the "form" and "formless" characterizations of reality have an intriguing degree of parity. Each mode of conceptualization seeks transcendence of the historical life-world, but achieves it only through a kind of reduction, carried through on the shoulders of contrasting metaphors of the spatial and the temporal.

To conceive of the ground of the world in the direction of its spatial determination from the actual spatial-temporal world is the idea of being. To conceive of it in the direction of its temporal determination can be said to be the idea of nothingness. The former conceives of the world in an objective direction, the latter in a subjective one...the one sought the eternal and changeless by transcending the actual temporal-spatial world in the direction of objectivity, of spatial determination; the other sought it in the direction of subjective determination, of temporal determination.[18]

Like Bergson, Nishida's own philosophy and logic are laid out in terms largely derived from the metaphor of the temporal, and most of his criticisms are addressed to thought dominated by the metaphors of the spatial and the mechanical. Yet on my reading there is a striking sense in which Nishida is indicating the need for a deeper pluralistic or perspectivalist account of self-reflection as a basis for mutual East/West understanding. Each of the two directions of self-reflection taken separately may be inadequate to the whole. In the development of this notion Nishida's benshoho begins to pull him beyond even his deep commitments to the Buddhist framework. For there is no explicit suggestion that either the idea of being or the idea of nothingness is cognitively privileged. Indeed, "...The dialectical world cannot be conceived only in the aspect of negation. For the world (also) determines itself in the form of self-identity".[19]

4. Via Negativa and Religious Consciousness

Nishida's pluralistic ontology, which admits of both a via negativa and a via affirmativa, is more fully developed by Nishida in the context of religious consciousness. The problem of finding common ground for understanding religious consciousness has been of major concern to the Kyoto School and to comparativists in theology. Nishida has been widely interpreted as synthesizing the Buddhist "sunyata" with the Christian kenotic tradition of self-emptying into agape. In "The Logic of the Place of Nothingess and the Religious Worldview" (1945), he developed an understanding of this dialogue on the religious consciousness based on a new conception of his logic of the place of nothingness, or "mu no basho ronri". The great importance Nishida laid on understanding his logic involves this claim that mu no basho ronri is a vehicle to the deepest levels of the existential self and conciliates the sunyata and kenotic traditions as variants. David Dilworth's recent translation and commentary on Nishida's Nothingness and the Religious Worldview[20] is an important effort in this direction. He emphasizes that for Nishida the incentive to the negative theology as the character of this religious worldview is to be found in the nature of relationality itself.[21] The self and the absolute stand in a paradoxically non-dual relationship, from whence man derives his own essentially self-contradictory identity. But this means also that a transcendent and unchanging God cannot be the real absolute since it would stand over against, rather than contain, the immanent.[22]

The true absolute does not merely transcend the relative. If it did, it could not avoid being a mere negation of it and, on the contrary, would become relative, too. Hence I have argued that the true absolute must face its own absolute negation within itself.[23]

Seen from the side of the self rather than from the logic, Nishida says that the self, reaching out, confronts the absolute, but this is experienced only as a reaching into one's own inner depths.[24] By `transcending immanently' (nazai teki choetsu), the paradoxical non-duality of the immanent and the transcendent, or of self and absolute may be experienced.

The universal of mu is the universal of the true existential and religious self. Mu no basho Nishida sometimes depicts as the most enveloping of all universals, that which envelops even the intelligible world. "...It may be called the place of absolute nothingness". Here reality is grasped in the way of unity of opposites. The conception bears similarity with some Neo-Platonic conceptions of the absolute which were influential also to Hegel.[25] But here also one finds the creative act in the determination of the present moment. Nishida uses "action-intuition" in this context as well to remind us that "truth arises from that standpoint where the point of departure of cognition is not lost at any point; truth always returns to its point of departure in the immediately given."[26] Mu no basho is thus also representative of the fullness of the existential moment, for "...the world which moves itself through contradictions, as unity of the many and the one, always contradicts itself in the present; the present is the place of contradiction".[27]

There is always a sublimation and a retention (Aufgehoben) of the past in the present. But although the present is an ever renewed synthesis, the conflict is never fully resolved. Nishida sometimes characterizes his dialectical logic as "negative", (and his acount of religious consciousness as a "via negativa",) to emphasize that he is not attempting to construct a synthesis that resolves opposition. The favouring of what Dilworth calls the "agonistic", "paradoxical", or Kierkegaardian formulations of the religious self towards which Nishida leans, is illustrative of much of the character of Nishida's benshoho in this particular sphere.[28] It is meant to illustrate to the reader that the contradictory identity of self and absolute refers us to a relation that is unmediated by concept.

In this paradox of God - that is, our face to-face relation with the absolute in a dialectic of presence and absence - there is the Zen celebration of ordinary human experience. It is the dimension of absolute freedom, as the self-determination of the absolute present itself.[29]

5. Logical and Dialectical Contradiction

The central term of negation in Zen accounts of contrareity, "mu", cuts radically across the divide between linguistic and real opposition. As was the case with Hegel, most of the examples of "contradiction" presented by Nishida aren't primarily propositional but indicate something more general and experiential, like felt "tension", opposition", "contrast" or "polarity". One prime example is the conflict of life and death that is made representative of the character of contradictions at the base of the self. The concrete character of the oppositions that Nishida says make up our contradictory self-identity are amply illustrated in his insistence that self-reflection begins when the self comes face to face with death and realizes its own finitude.

This quite general use of "mu" makes it difficult, as was noted above, to be clear when Nishida's meaning has reference to linguistic utterances or to the character of experience. These difficulties aside, the concrete character of "contradictions" in Nishida philosophy indicates a deep reflection of logic to experience. Our understanding of his benshoho, and of the seriousness of his claim of mu no basho ronri as a logic, may be aided immeasurably by close attention to a distinction Hegel understood as that between "dialectical" and "logical" contradiction. Dialectical contradictions can be broadly construed as the experienced quality of opposition or conflict.

It is often thought that Hegel viewed the formal-logical laws of non-contradiction and excluded-middle as eliminable because they held metaphysical views forbidding change and development, and thereby denatured the ontological principle of the universal contradictoriness of things and phenomena. But while Hegel did oppose such metaphysics, he did not ontologize the formal-logical principles in this way. He rather considered himself to be avoiding confusion of discursive laws with the nature of the real by critiquing the understanding of `laws of thought' by the "schoolmen" of his time. The distinction between logical and dialectical contradictories was one which Hegel developed in order to extricate himself from their confusions. Hegel's critique of the laws of thought, as found in his Science of Logic (1812), is not a criticism of the validity of rules per se, but of the status accorded to them by the "abstract understanding".[30]

This "abstract understanding" of logical contradiction Hegel describes himself as critiquing and "re-interpreting" dialectically. Dialectical contradictions are different from both the abstract and the concrete understandings of logical contradiction.[31] As Lawler summarized in "Hegel on Contradictions -Misinterpretations",

Hegel distinguished between logical contradiction, including logical contradiction understood dialectically, and dialectical contradiction properly speaking. It is only by understanding the more fundamental concept of dialectical contradiction that it is possible to comprehend the "place" or relative importance of (formal) logical contradiction (or the law of noncontradiction) in scientific thought.[32]

Nishida's development of a "concrete" logic depends, like Hegel's earlier effort, on a new conception of the relation between logical and dialectical contradiction.[33] Thus Nishida writes,

From the standpoint of abstract logic, it is impossible to say that things which contradict each other are connected; they contradict each other just because they cannot be connected. But there would be no contradiction if they did not touch each other somewhere. Facing each other is already a synthesis. Here is the dominion of dialectical logic.[34]

In an illuminating volume of articles concerned with Hegelian and Marxist views of these issues, Dialectical Contradictions (1983), Mussachia denies that the principles of logic have any necessary ontological implications for the manner in which object-hood or self-identity must be understood. He argues instead that they have only a delimiting implication, a "minimal empirical or ontological `import,' which can be summed up in the assertion that reality is whatever it is --that it is `consistent,' whether we regard it as essentially static or as changing or whatever".[35] Neither, he beleives, should the ontological principle of the contradictory development of knowledge be taken to imply any `failure' of the logical principles, rightly understood. As Narski too insists,

...the formal-logical law of contradiction forbids precisely formal-logical, but not dialectical, contradictions, and therefore should not and cannot conflict with the law of universal dialectical contradictoriness.[36]

The ontological status of dialectical contradictions has recently resurfaced as a point of debate between Hegelians and dialectical materialists. H. Horz characterizes characterizes the materialist position thusly:

Dialectical contradictions are the objectively existing unity of interacting opposites. The recognition of the objective existence of opposites distinguishes materialist dialectics from all other forms of dialectics...[37]

The uniqueness of Nishida's account I see as centering on an understanding of the "objectivity" of experienced contradiction quite different from both Hegel and Marx. In the final two sections I will develop my reading of Nishida's account of contrareity, focusing first on the role of opposites in human thought processes, and on aspects of their philosophical status.

6. Apposite Opposites and Dimensions of Experience

In the philosophical anthropology G.E.R. Lloyd's develops in Polarity and Analogy, three reasons are considered for the ancients' common uses of opposites as "causes at work" and as "principles of explanation."[38] One of these is the simplicity and conceptual clarity which opposites afford. A second reason is the apparent comprehensiveness of bi-polar arguments and classificatory schemes. Of course, discerning philosophers such as Lloyd would not take these as cogent reasons or as an epistemically sound basis for selection of theoretical nomenclature. Indeed it is important to see that they are both philosophically suspicious reasons for taking opposites as principles. Both lead to obvious problems. "Simple" classifications may be ill-suited to the complexity of phenomena and lead to gross hypostatization. The "apparent comprehensiveness" of pairs of opposites for classificatory purposes is likely to mask the implicit adoption of a dualistic metaphysics by the classifier, and a confusion of conventional boundaries with the limits of thought and possibility.

But the third reason Lloyd gives is quite philosophically intreaguing: conceptualization in terms of pairs of opposites he argues helped the Greeks define "regions" or "dimensions" of experience. "Any pair of opposites...defines a dimension." This presents a more fruitful way also to approach Nishida's account of contrareity. A central theme of Nishida's benshoho is that "there is always identity at the root of mutual contradictories."[39] Nishida uses "absolute" to mark the ontological implications of the aspects opposed or identified. "Self-identity" is not static as in abstract logic, but is the identity-in-difference of the permanent flow --or of the infinite whole of the process. Identity-in-difference is explored by Nishida through his contention that what he calls "absolute contradictories" have a relation like "species" within the same "genus". As he put this in "Fundamental Problems",

Mutual contradictories must be absolutely different, on the one hand, yet very similar, on the other. They must exist in the same genus. Colours and sounds are not contradictories.[40]

The concept of dimensions of experience is important since it forces us to return our focus from reified "aspects" or determinations of a "genus", to the primary phenomena of the dimension itself. For example, it may shift focus from judgments of objective "goodness" or "evilness" to the ethical dimension of of experience or action itself.[41] Ogden makes a similar point in logic when he notes that mere difference does not create opposition; and according to U.C. Ewing `There are no opposites that are completely isolated as separate and unrelated entities.' Israel explains this by arguing that to state that two things are contradictory is arbitrary: One ought to say rather that two things are contradictory "within a specified totality." According to Nishida too,

Things that resist or conflict with one another presuppose the same underlying generic concept. For they oppose one another in the determination of the same universal concept.[42]

The meaning of Nishida is captured in part by a distinction Archie Bahm's discusses between "inapposites" or merely different "posits", and "apposite opposites" which are thematic pairs such as hot/cold, or wet/dry. Why exactly do some terms rate as natural contraries? The "good reasons" we have for assimilating two terms as a natural pair of opposites is again that they are opposing determinations or aspects of the same dimension of experience. According to Bahm this notion of natural "apposition" cannot be reduced to a contrast between conceptual definitions:

Appositeness pertains to a closeness of relationship between two opposites which, in spite of their negation of each other, share something in common which is essential to the nature of each as a posit...It is this commonness which constitutes them a pair...This something, which apposite opposites share in common, is to be found wholly in neither of them..."[43]

This problem is treated by both Bahm and Nishida as deeply involving the relation of particulars and universals. This also accords with Errol Harris' recent work Formal, Transcendental and Dialectical Reasoning (1987).[44] Harris develops a systems-theoretical explication of dialectical reasoning, in which the ground of both identity and difference is understood as the structure of the relational system to which both belong. "As every phase in the scale is a provisional whole premonitory of the ultimate totality, it must be evident that both forms are really but two aspects of one relationship: that between the universal and its particulars." Similarly in Nishida's thought the starting point for philosophical reflection and for logic is the "dialectical universal", "that which, contradicting itself, is yet identical with itself".[45]

For Nishida, an Aristotelean "logic of the subject that cannot become predicate" would be a reflection of a world of essential kinds. But in a world characterized by mutual inter-dependence and co-dependent arising, a logic of the predicate that cannot become subject is demanded. On the dialectician's view essentialism reifies opposites into transcendental or universal categories by treating them in isolation from the concrete experiential dimensions in which they arise.

This problem has had most discussion in Western circles where it involves debate between logics based on "extrinsic" and on "intrinsic" relations. In substance metaphysics, the starting point is the discretely existing particular or primary substance. If there is a comparison between relata to be made, both relata are viewed as independent, definable without refence to one another. The problem with the thesis of extrinsicality is that it conflates logical and ontological questions. This is seen in the understanding of "truth conditions" in Aristotelean logic. That "A is true just if not-A is false" and "A is false just if not-A is true", the Aristotelean asserts, is necessarily true. But lacking the notion of analyticity and an understanding of conventionality in definition, the necessity that Aristotle asserts for principles of identity and non-contradiction is considerably overstated. It is important to recognize that these "truth conditions" are conventions for definitions of A and not-A as linguistic subjects and predicates. Such truth conditions are a matter of analytic rather than synthetic a priori reasoning, and their tautologous character is recognizable only within a system of two-value logic.[46]

Israel argues that all dialectical logic is a logic of intrinsic relations, and contrasts dialectical logic with the extrinsic relations characteristically recognized in Aristotelean substance metaphysics. In Israel's systems theory, intrinsicality of relations is a reflection of systematicity and of inter-relatedness of definition within a system. Relata are what they are only in relation to one another and in the context set by the system in which they arise. The starting point is the system itself --the totality or dialectical whole which is the ground for both the identity and difference of its own aspects.

7. Opposition, Negation and Mediation

Some of the questions I have raised lead into the familiar debate between realism and nominalism on the relation of language to the real. Does language, including and especially those terms of opposition which so often find their way into the most basic levels of classification, `cut reality at the joints', or do they cut it at best in conventional ways reflecting only the user's cognitive abilities and interests? Philosophical anthropology has again provided interesting new insight into perennial questions by drawing consequences from cross-cultural studies of primitive and archaic classification. Lloyd for instance uses his conclusions to defend a version of nominalism. C.R. Hallpike similarly considers the cross-cultural prevalence of binary and dualistic classification at early stages of social development in (Foundations of Primitive Thought), yet argues to a strongly realist metaphysics:

...the prevalence of dualistic classification is not principally a manifestation of a binary property of the human mind, imposing itself on a neutral range of phenomena, but rather an accomodation to a dualistic reality.[47]

Nishida can be interpreted as intending to take the middle path between these alternatives as he did with Materialism and Idealism. Both the "in the mind" and "in reality" options are extreme positions, to be avoided via Nishida's recourse to the primacy of experience. Such an interpretation might place him closer to the view Levi-Strauss advocated:

...Perhaps it must be acknowledged that duality, alternation, opposition and symmetry, whether presented in definite forms or in imprecise forms, are not so much matters to be explained, as basic and immediate data of mental and social reality which should be the starting point of any attempt at explanation.[48]

We can take Nishida's account of the fundamental opposition between the One and the Many as representative of his notion of the self-identity of absolute contradictories. Here as before, neither the whole nor the parts can be said to be real accept in relation to one another. All conceptualization in terms of opposites proceeds as abstraction of aspects out of dialectical wholes. "At the base of the world there are neither the many nor the one." What is real is rather a unity or dialectical whole which contains in itself the conditions for its own diffusion. In the dialectical whole, the particular and the universal are fully interfused. The contradictory self-identity of a dialectical whole reflects a mode of being that is at once already a unity of the actual and the possible, the particular and the universal.

At the base of the world, there are neither the many nor the one; it is a world of absolute unity of opposites, where the many and the one deny each other...in the depth of the world there are neither one nor many, and ... through mutual negation of the one and the many the world is from the formed to the forming.[49]

Our central concern in this paper, contrareity as a problem shared across East/West boundaries, thus returns to the focus. Nishida's uniqueness in his approach to contrareity involves a novel conception of the roles that opposites play in human thought: as forms of mediation between self and the environment. The generation, maintenance and criticism of opposites in conceptual thought is necessary as a form of mediation with the world. "Productivity through action-intuition means: the individual confronts transcendence, confronts the absolute, has an mediation the unity of opposites."[50]

Nishida says both that the individual confronts the absolute unity of opposites (that is, confronts the absolute) and that he has the unity of opposites as his form of mediation with the absolute.[51] But this ambiguity must be seen within the context of logic concretely understood. It does not cast Nishida into the camp of either nominalism or realism. Rather, Nishida is insisting that the experienced world is not a world already fully formed for us. Identity cannot be understood apart from negation; negation is an initial creative act of self-reflection that makes possible both identity and difference. The self must become active and creative in the process of the formation of his world. "Seeing the world through action-intuition implies forming the world through action-intuition." Only in this creative act do we as forming factors become true individuals in and over-against a world. Here again the cognitive method of active intuition is concrete logical, for "Concrete logic is just where we as historical-productive Self progressively grasp reality."[52]

8. Afterword

On the view I have developed, the concern to articulate and disambiguate the relationships between language and reality, or logic and experience, is strongly shared across the divisions between Eastern and Western traditions. What I have objected to in characteristically Western approaches to the subject since Aristotle is its detachment from the problem of contrareity. This, I have argued, shows the need for a philosophical anthropology of contrareity and for the project I have called "comparative dialectics". The disregard for the problem of contrareity is correctable by a closer examination of such sources as Aristotle's own thought on contrareity, Nishida's syncretic philosophy, and the work of a wide range of contemporary thinkers in the West who hold affinity for dialectical meta-methodologies.

In an afterward to Nishida's final work, "The Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview", Nishida reflects upon his benshoho as a form of thinking intended to "clarify ...the historically formative act from the standpoint of the historically active self itself." He emphasizes the central importance of this logic to the understanding of his thought, and says that those academics who brush aside a logic of contradictory identity as `not a logic at all', have only proliferated misunderstandings rather than clarified issues.

"Logic" is a term that has too often connoted a strictly deductive way of thinking at the exclusion of ampliative or non-deductive thought processes. Yet discursive thought is far too complex and inventive to be contained within deductive models. Our epistemology therefore must attend to the actual form(s) of human thought, and "The standpoint of theory of knowledge, where subject and object confront each other, must be examined critically. Knowledge, too, is a happening in the historical-social world".[53]

I end therefore in agreement with Nishida that logic(s) must be understood in the broadest sense as the discursive form(s) of our own uniquely human thought processes. "Logic is the discursive form of our thinking. And we will only be able to clarify what logic is by reflecting on the form of our own thinking."[54] A more pluralistic conception of logic would seem to be one outcome of the undercutting of a priori foundations for epistemology. And our analysis of various ways of understanding logical principles has underlined this implication. Yet Nishida's comparisons of different logics in the development of his benshoho serves the more syncretic goals embraced in the search for a common basis for inter-cultural understanding. A philosophically and cross-culturally adequate understanding of contrareity is a precondition for such a common basis. Logic and epistemology on a concrete footing may yet succeed in attaining just this unity in the account of contrareity, a unity that Nishida makes clear cannot be secured by allegiance to the abstract understanding.

Notes