Kitaro Nishida

I am reading a book by Kitaro Nishida, a Zen-tinged Japanese philosopher who was prominent a century ago. 

An Inquiry into the Good. 

That title reminds me a bit of Spinoza calling his masterwork Ethics. Spinoza had ethical points to make, but wanted to ground that in comprehensive premises about the world and our place in it. Nishida likewise has a (quite Zen) conception of the good to convey, but wants to start at the beginning.

 The beginning is a very Jamesian place, as Nishida acknowledged. His beginning is the fuzzy boundary between cognitive psychology and epistemology. 

"As psychologists say, we can will a movement simply by recollecting a past memory; if we direct our attention to the memory, the movement will follow naturally.  From the standpoint of pure experience the movement itself is but a continuation of the sensation of movement in recollection....We tend to think of the will as some special power, but in fact it is nothing more than the experience of shifting from one mental image to another.  To will something is to direct attention to it."

The point of that brief passage is to show that some dichotomies that seems important to us in some stages of study can disappear on a more careful look. To will to move my arm and to remember having moved my arm seem very different things. One is prospective, the other retrospective.  One is active, the other is passive. 

But no.  For an infant a lot of arm and leg movements are just ... done. Nerves fire, the living healthy baby writhes about while awake.  In time, these movements become intentions, so that what was once a happenstance becomes a plan. And if the thought of an arm movement is the only thing in my mind, if there is no extra inhibitory suggestion in there, then (given also an intact healthy nervous system) my arm will move. No distinct "make it so" is required. 

The will is nothing more than the experience of shifting from one mental image to another.  Indeed. "the activity of the will," our author also says, "distinctly approaches the activity of knowledge." In some circumstances they are continuous with one another.  I know that the cue ball will move forward across the surface of the pool table in a second because I am even now thinking of moving my arm, which holds the cue stick, in a way which experience tells me will have that result. The self-consciousness of a pool player is as likely to see this as willingness to move the cue ball as to see it as willingness to move the stick so as to cause a movement of the cue ball.

Whatever it is, as the matter unfolds we see it as an act of knowledge: I knew the cue ball would go there! The will and knowledge are one: as in Zen, archery, and motorcycle maintenance.