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 co...
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Dan Zahavi resumes an old debate about whether the human self discloses itself in thought -- whether I know myself (and so can be sure of my own existence) because of cogito. In its origin, this argument is Descartes vs Hume. In more recent decades, Jesse Prinz (portrayed above) has argued that there is no "experiential quality" that discloses self to self, BUT that consciousness is thoroughly permeated by selfhood. If I understand Prinz, he means that we know our self by a sort of inference, not as directly as Descartes' concise language suggests but more genuinely that Hume's bundle theory can accommodate. Zahavi says that Prinz has rediscovered an element in Kantianism. As Kant put it, "I cannot cognize as an object itself that which I must presuppose in order to cognize an object at all." Zahavi's own view is that self-consciousness, the sort of conscious event that reveals a self, is a particular sort of event, not any-old event and not t...
I've recently come across a book, Existential America (2005) by George Cotkin, a professor of history at CalPoly. A book note here may be a fitting wrap-up for the July 4th weekend. The focus of the book is the big splash that the existentialist movement made as a high-prestige European import right after the war, in the middle of the last century. The people exporting that product were rather disdainful of what they saw as American superficiality and probably thought they were just a fad here -- though a fad they were happy enough to ride in terms of book sales etc. In 1950, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that Americans don't have a concept of evil. "There is no pessimism in America regarding human nature and social organization," -- which was bad news for us. Simone de Beauvoir, similarly, said Americans have no "feeling for sin and for remorse." But, Cotkin thinks, they misunderstood us and misunderstood their own reception. You can read in...