Contending with Kitaro Nishida: conclusion

So: as I indicated yesterday, Nishida says that the will is free because it is not bound by natural law in choosing the good. [No, that isn't him in the attached photo.]

So: what is the good? I understand Nishida to be saying that the good is the actualization of potential. So long as we are becoming who we really are, we are in the right.

How does this play itself out in particulars where we might really want to know what the good is? Where telling us "it is what your real self would want" is no help? Consider an example Jean-Paul Sartre would later evoke. A young Frenchman has to decide whether to stay home and take care of his frail mother or leave her to her own devices and go join the resistance to the German occupation. Telling him that he should actualize potential seems likely to be of little help.

But Nishida does seem to avail himself of the (very Jamesian) notion that human history is the working out of such conflicts and the progressive development of sort-of-acceptable resolutions. The path of that progress has run through the form of the centralized nation state. But it need not stop there.

Nishida, "If we retrace the development of humankind from the beginning of history, we see that the nation is not the final goal of humankind. A meaningful purpose runs consistently through the development of humankind, and the nation appears to be something that rises and falls in order to fulfill part of humankind's mission." This mission won't require, he adds, that nation-states cease to be, or that they won't continue to have distinctive characteristics. But over time they will become increasingly stable and increasingly at peace with one another, with stronger cross-border ties.

Two pages later he is citing it as a fundamental idea in Buddhist thought that "the self and the universe share the same foundation or, rather they are the same thing." In some such similarly Buddhist sense, then, the individuals and the latest largest human collective, the nation states in which they live "are the same thing." Perhaps but, again, it is very difficult to get advice or rules for conduct out of this. Or even a sense of how an Energetist (Nishida's preferred term for his own ethical views) should vote in a contested election.

He does seem to believe that worldwide institutions will develop that will supplant at least some nation-state functions and that this will be a good thing. But of this he also says: "People frequently confuse the essence of the good with its external shell, so they think that unless one is engaged in a worldwide enterprise involving all humankind, one stands unrelated to the greatest good. But because a person's abilities and circumstances determine what sort of enterprise will be undertaken, it is impossible for all people to pursue the same enterprise."

As near as I can tell, all this means something like: try to live a life such that as you near its end you are without any grave feeling of regret. A defensible principle, I suppose, and one that may sound Zen-like enough to be put in a koan rather than a 32 chapter book, but one at a very high level of abstraction.

And with that observation I expect that I have said all I would like to about Nishida.

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