Skip to main content

Kitaro Nishida continues: what is the good?


 

At chapter 15 of Kitaro Nishida's book we finally pass into the discussion of ethics and "the good" within human conduct, the long-deferred but titular subject of it all.

Nishida's definition of freedom of the will seems to steer directly into Kantian territory. End of chapter 17, "[The] unifying activity [of consciousness] is not a product of nature; rather, it is because of this unity that nature comes to exist. This unity is the infinite power at the base of reality, and it cannot be limited quantitatively. It exists independently of the necessary laws of nature. Because our will is an expression of that power, it is free and goes beyond the control of such natural laws." 

A few chapters later, after a classification of all other ethical positions and his view of their errors, he gets to his own: goodness is the perfection of this will-beyond-natural law, and so the fullest expression of the underlying unity of consciousness. So at the end of chapter 23 he draws the inference that we can in fact (and must) infer the ought from the is.

"The laws of morality thus come to be included in the laws of reality, and we are able to explain the good in terms of the true nature of the reality known as the self. Internal demands, which are the basis of value judgments, and the unifying power of reality are one, not two. " He references the Upanishads here. 

How does this help us answer any questions about how we ought to act? More tomorrow about this.  



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more