Accueil
"Nishida Kitarō was born in 1870 and died, of natural causes, in 1945. His first major work, Zen no kenkyū (An inquiry into the good), appeared in 1911 and was enthusiastically received by a large reading public. It remains Nishida’s most widely known work, although Nishida himself was to reject the “psychologism” of its focus on William James’s concept of “pure experience.” The work was not well received, however, by the Japanese academic philosophical establishment, dominated as it was in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth by philosophers working in the German idealist tradition. It is with that tradition, most particularly its neo- Kantian strains, that Nishida critically engaged for the next two decades; in that engagement, of which “Expressive Activity” is exemplary, Nishida’s own thinking became increasingly rigorous and forceful. Between 1935 and 1945 he published some twenty- five major essays (known collectively as the Tetsugaku ronbunshū [Philosophical essays]), which were intended to be in the first instance a systematic exposition of the principal concepts of what had come to be called “Nishida- philosophy” (a group of essays to which “The Standpoint of Active Intuition” and “Human Being” belong), and then to take up discrete questions—the philosophical bases of physics, mathematics, or biology, for example, or the question of Staatsräson, or questions of the philosophy of religion, and similar topics. These essays are thematically heterogeneous and certainly do not constitute a philosophical system, the closure that would be a “theory of everything,” which could only be the object of a reflection after the end of the world." (pp.1-2)
"Nishida implicates himself in the concepts, problematics, and themes of what counts as modern Western philosophy in his critical engagements with, for example, Descartes, Kant, and others on subjectivity; with Hegel on dialectics ; with Leibniz and Herder on singularity ; with Dilthey and Rickert on the “historical world”; with Marx on poiesis and production; with Kant, Schelling, James, and Whitehead on intuition; or with Bergson on temporality." (p.3)
"On the one hand, Marx seems to be in full accord with much subsequent Marxist thought in accepting this distinction between the manual and the intellectual, the material and the immaterial, and thus materiality and ideality in general as not only unproblematic but determinative. In the early pages of the Grundrisse, for example, Marx summarily dismisses all intellectual workers as “lackeys and lickspittles”—servants—of the bourgeoisie, and he does so because immaterial or intellectual work is construed to be unproductive, mere service. Only manual and material labor is considered productive and, therefore, “labor.” Yet in the fragments scattered throughout the remainder of the Grundrisse, and referred to collectively as the “fragment on machines,” Marx develops the concept of the “general intellect” as that which is at once the condition and effect of communication among workers in the “automated system” of the machine that the modern industrial factory had become; as such, the general intellect is indis pensible to all machinic production. It is as such, as Marx demonstrates in chapter 15 of volume 1 of Capital, “Machinery and Large Scale Industry,” that the general intellect is both the possibility and effect of real subsumption, conceived as the global hegemony of the logic of capitalist production. The machine, the automated system that is the industrial factory, is necessarily the transduction of manual and intellectual, material and immaterial labor, the transduction of materiality and ideality. That is, material labor necessarily presupposes intellectual labor as its own a priori condition; intellectual labor in turn necessarily presupposes material labor as its own a priori condition: here there is the original coimplication (or “complication”) of materiality and ideality, which would seem necessarily to imply that materiality and ideality do not constitute a mutually exclusive binary opposition. Ideality is no longer merely immaterial, still less merely a reflection of materiality ; conversely, materiality is no longer merely insensate determination. Indeed, in Marx’s account the worker becomes nothing more nor less than organic consciousness in the service of that “real abstraction” (or virtuality) that is the machine: this constitutes what Deleuze and Guattari called “machinic enslavement.”
In chapter 15 Marx presents this machinic enslavement as the dialectical inversion of the Aristotelian poiesis that had grounded his discussion of the labor process in chapter 7: it is the machine rather than man that has become the master and subject of production; man is merely a tool (organic consciousness) of the machine. But it is important to note that Marx was never an entirely faithful Aristotelian. Certainly, in Aristotelian poiesis, man is master of production insofar as he is the embodiment of that ideality that will be actualized in poiesis : man is homo faber as homo sapiens, homo sapiens as homo faber, and it is thus that man becomes subject, everything else mere object.
But for Marx, as perhaps for Hegel before him, the relation between subject and object is rather more complicated insofar as the relation between man and nature is one Marx nicknamed “metabolism,” Stoffwechsel, a relation of transduction in which subject and object are originally codeterminative. The object— dead, objectified labor—determines the subject, and the subject, thus determined, determines the object: whatever else production produces, it produces subjects and objects; neither subject nor object exists as such before the metabolic process of production, nor, indeed, do they survive production. It is precisely this ontological possibility—that is, the coming- into- being of subjects in production—from which the worker is alienated in the machinic enslavement that articulates the capitalist expropriation of labor power, because the worker is alienated from the (transductive, metabolic, in fact “dialectical”) appropriation that is the constitution of the human altogether." (pp.8-9)
"There is considerable explicit evidence throughout Marx’s texts (and not merely in the “early Marx”) to support the contention that Marx subscribed to the modern humanism of the European Enlightenment. Yet to locate the being of man in production, and the expropriation of human being in machinic enslavement (which is an index of the essential technicity of human being), is to complicate that anthropology in essential ways. If production is necessarily ontologically constitutive for man, if in fact we exist not merely because we make things but only in the making of things (poiesis), then what Marx called a “mode of production” is a materialist nickname for ontology. The concepts of production and of modes of production are therefore concepts of the radical historicity of human being, concepts of being as becoming, concepts of the human as an orientation in production toward a futurity radically other than the present: for Marx, the essence of man is to be without essence. It is thus that poiesis is the condition of political praxis." (p.10)
"We are not done with Marx’s concept of production (and related concepts); on the contrary, the concept in itself is a provocation ; in itself it constitutes a demand for an other thinking, a thinking otherwise." (p.11)
"Although he could not name Marx, it is quite clear from internal evidence that he was reading, at the very least, volume 1 of Capital, the “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts” of 1844 (first published in 1932), and the “Theses on Feuerbach.” The engagement with Marx is not limited to “Human Being,” however, but extends throughout Nishida’s work from the early 1930s until his death in 1945. This is not to argue that somehow, secretly, Nishida was a closet Marxist. It is, however, to argue that in Nishida’s later work there is a sustained and rigorous engagement with Marx’s problematic and that there are profound agreements with the Marx who never abandoned philosophy, least of all in Capital." (p.11)
"There is in Marx and Nishida alike a concept of production as the radical historicity of autotelic becoming. For both philosophers production is the necessary simultaneity of negativity as remainderless destruction with a creativity in which the unforeseeable emerges: being is not the goal of becoming. In this sense, of course, ontology becomes becoming ; production takes the place of ontology, and thus catachrestically becomes “ontological.”." (p.12)
"For Kant “the transcendental” is abstract and ideal—indeed, it is the very possibility of abstraction and ideality, a possibility that is necessarily universal and ahistorical, without empirical determination. Although Nishida rejected the presuppositions and consequences of the idealist formulation, he would remain concerned throughout his life with what was at stake in the Kantian transcendental. Critical he most certainly was of Kant’s idealist humanism, but he was not so philosophically (or politically) naïve as to give up on the universal altogether; concomitantly, he refused to situate the possibility of sense (or reason) in a necessarily ideal essence of the human but sought it in the logos, conceived as the original immanent transduction of ideality and materiality." (p.13)
"Nishida’s considerations of the universal almost invariably took the form of a meditation on the relation between the unity of the One and the innumerable differentiated Many. Attentive though he was to Platonic, Neoplatonic, and Hegelian formulations of the relation, his own thinking was clearly closer to Spinoza and, most particularly, Leibniz ; but his conception is undoubtedly most indebted to Buddhist thought.
In any case, the formal assertoric exposition is relatively straightforward. The One, in and as its unity, is neither prior to nor does it survive its differential articulation in and as the innumerable Many; conversely, the Many in and as the infinite proliferation of the constitutive differences of multiplicity, is only ever the Many of the One. The One is nothing apart from its immanence in the Many; conversely, the Many is nothing apart from its immanence as the One. Multiplicity and difference are therefore not the dispersion of a prior unity, nor are they destined to be overcome in any eschatological redemption as the reunion of the One with itself. Nishida specifies the relation as the “absolute contradictory self- identity” (zettai mujunteki jiko dōitsu) of the One and the Many. Or, in a terse formulation inherited from Buddhist philosophy, he will refer to “One soku Many, Many soku One” (ichi soku ta, ta soku ichi). Here, soku could be read as “qua” (which is the term for which I have opted throughout these translations), as “or” or “as,” or even as “is.” In fact, Nishida’s reader is presented with exactly the same difficulty as confronts the reader of Spinoza’s use of sive in the formulation “Deus sive Natura.” What is at stake in both Nishida and Spinoza is the contradictory coimmanence of the One and the Many, identity and difference, ideality and materiality. But the coimmanence of the One and the Many, which implies that totality is present in all singularity precisely as exception to totality, is not merely an assertion in Nishida but an argument.
It is an argument to which Nishida returned almost obsessively (as he himself acknowledged in a 1939 preface to the third volume of his Philosophical Essays), and is constituted in a consideration of singularity (kobutsu). Nishida’s concept of singularity is necessarily constructed as a contradiction. On the one hand, singularity is a concept of a radical empiricism for which all that is are singularities. A singularity is first of all that which resists predication absolutely (singularity is neither a predicate, quality, or characteristic of anything else, nor is it possible to predicate anything of a singularity save its singularity); a singularity is never a symptom or example of a universal; singularities are not divisions of the universal ; singularities are not particulars subject to subsumption within the universal. Neither can singularities be deduced from universals, nor can universals be inferred from singularities. It makes no more sense to ask what causes singularities than to ask what came before the big bang or what is inside a black hole; like Spinoza’s God, singularities are causa sui, causes or determinations of themselves, autonomous in the strongest sense of the term. Singularities are not what they are; they are that they are. On the other hand—and this is what constitutes the contradiction, of course—singularities can only be conceived in terms of what they are not ; they can only be conceived in the crossing out of predicates, in negating their determination by universals. Singularities can only be conceived as nothing but exceptions, as the very movement of separation. So singularities are that they are, and cannot be conceived in terms of what they are not, but they can only be conceived in terms of not being what they are not. It is as exception or separation that singularities are the differential articulation of the universal; the universal is nothing but its presence in and as singular exception to universality. (In this sense, of course, the universal is nothing but exception to itself or separation from itself.) This means, to cut a very long story very short, that the transcendental universal is only ever immanent in what is. That is, Nishida does not seek the possibility of sense anywhere other than in what he called the “historical world.”
To situate sense and its possibility in the historical world and nowhere else—Nishida’s historical world is not the narrative of Reason alienated from itself in Nature and destined to a reunion with itself at the end of History—means both that what makes sense for us is merely relative and that the sense that we make and its possibility are necessary and absolute. Aristotle did not merely believe the earth is two hundred miles from the sun ; he knew it as fact. Descartes did not merely believe the earth to be at least thirty earth diameters from the sun; he knew it as irrefutable fact. And for us it is not a matter of faith or superstition that the earth is ninety- three million miles (more or less) from the sun; we know it. And this is because it is not by mere fiat (divine, mechanistic, whatever) that sense, knowing, and their possibility vary from epoch to epoch but because sense is made. The possibility of sense is “given,” to be sure, but it is given as the made. This much currently counts as common sense for significant sectors of the social sciences and humanities. What we sometimes do not acknowledge, however, and was of correlative importance for Nishida when it was a question of the historical determinations of sense and its possibility, is that for us the sense that we make and its possibility are also both necessary and absolute. We make our own sense, but we do not make it just as we please. We can recognize that for Aristotle the fact that the earth is two hundred miles from the sun made sense, and we can even to a certain extent grasp the (historical) transcendental universal possibility of sense according to which the statement made sense for Aristotle. But it does not thereby make sense for us that the sun is two hundred miles from the earth. For us, the fact that the earth is ninety- three million miles, more or less, from the sun, and everything that sustains the truth of that fact, is absolute and necessary. Ultimately, nothing, absolutely nothing, can bridge the historical distance between Aristotle and ourselves; there are no round trips, Nishida was wont to say, in history. We cannot imagine how far the earth will be from the sun a hundred or a thousand years from now.
Thus, the possibility of sense is not merely logos, the necessary conjunction of speech and reason, but nomos, the way (or “law”) of the world, the way the world is taken to be. We cannot simply “choose” to think otherwise, which is to say that the nomos is determinative. This is not to assume, however, that that determination, which is economic (the nomos of the oikos) in the contemporaneity of the last instance, is mechanistic, impervious to human praxis. We make sense, and in the making of sense, we create the possibility itself of making sense. Possibility is situated nowhere above, behind, below, outside of, or prior to its actualization. Sense, in its essential possibility, is utterly anarchic ; as Nishida repeatedly insisted, the ground of rationality is the irrational. The possibility of sense is in the historical world but only because that possibility itself is something made." (pp.13-16)
"What makes what Marx called the “general intellect” or the real abstraction of the “machine” possible? How is it that the general intellect or the machine is necessarily constituted as such in and as the circulation of sense ? Furthermore, how is it that real subsumption—the hegemonic extension of the logic of capitalist production not only to all of production but to the social altogether—possible ? In fact, these questions come from the empiricist’s astonishment that sense is possible at all. This, again, is the question of the transcendental as such. But the problem has become: how can we conceive the logos, as the possibility of sense, in the specificity of its his historicity ? In “Expressive Activity” the answer is “language.” Three aspects of Nishida’s reflections on language bear emphasis.
First, language belongs to that without which our species could not be ; it is “essential.” In this sense language belongs to the technical prostheses—tools—that are indispensible to the survival of the species. For Nishida language can be said to be instrumental, on condition that instrumentality is irreducible to merely a means to an end; language is not merely the means, transparent or opaque as you will, for the communication of meaning: it is the material support of sense—but only on condition that sense can never be divorced from its support.
Second, then, “language” belongs to—is—the coimmanence of ideality and materiality. Ideality and materiality are mutually transductive in language. That is, there is no sense that does not presuppose material expressivity as its possibility, and there is no materiality innocent of sense. “Ideality” and “materiality” are inextricably bound each to the other ; each is the determination or possibility of the other. Sense is, in fact, this coimmanence, this transductive relation of mutual determination. Materiality and ideality do not constitute a mutually exclusive opposition, such that materiality would be the mere actualization of ideality, or that ideality would be the mere reflection of materiality. It is on the basis of this argument that Nishida is able to argue in later essays that what has been made, tsukurareta mono, is of the logos.
Third, consequently, sense and the logos that is the possibility of sense are constituted in a radical exteriority; for Nishida there is no more private sense than there is private language. Sense is sense only by virtue of its exteriority. Indeed, Nishida holds to the radical position that consciousness itself is in no case a subjective phenomenon, because it has no existence apart from its material supports, its materiality. There can be, on Nishida’s account, no phenomenology of language, sense, or consciousness. Nishida rejects phenomenology—with considerable impatience—ultimately because it does nothing to disturb the presuppositions of the Kantian transcendental. Language and sense circulate, and they are language and sense because they circulate; language is an in exhaustible resource that “belongs” to anyone because it belongs to no one, and in that sense is “something public” (ōyake no mono). “Expressive activity,” then, is not something that we happen to do, either by inclination or necessity. It is that activity, that doing, as which what is exists. It is not that I engage in expressive activity but that expressive activity is the very power to be, that differential articulation that now and again produces effects that sometimes, according to various historical logoi, are nicknamed “I.” Not all machines are capitalist." (pp.16-18)
"Clearly, in all this Nishida took extraordinary pains to distance himself from Kant, Hegel, and their epigoni, and this with respect to four principal points. First, the complications of the relation of “the Many and the One,” and which Nishida was at great pains to think, as I have just attempted to sketch, in terms of “absolute contradictory self- identity,” is resolved in Kant and Hegel alike into the essential coherence of a unified, closed totality of universals and merely exemplary particulars; no longer is there cause for thought in the idealist formulation ; it is the occlusion of all singularity, ultimately the foreclosure of any possibility of heterodox sense.
Second, for Nishida the possibility of sense is radically parasubjective ; possibility lies in that which lies outside and alongside the subject, in the technical instrumentality of tool and language. For Nishida consciousness itself is not a subjective phenomenon; subjectivity happens but only as an effect, never as cause. For Kant and Hegel, of course, reason (as the possibility of sense) is a faculty of the subject that, in fact, constitutes the subject as such.
Third, those particular versions of appropriation we call perception, apperception, and cognition are not for Nishida merely inscriptions on an essentially passive epistemological or phenomenological subject but modes of an active, aggressive, appropriation, driven by a daemonic potentia, the power to be. Here there is an implicit return to the early Greek sense of aisthēsis as both the sensuousness of the senses and the sense of sense. In aisthēsis both senses of sense bespeak the inescapable embodiment of sense. [...]
Fourth, and consequently, there is here a rejection of idealist cosmopolitanism and of the pretension of global citizenship (which is also— and immediately—the “freedom” of the worker to contract to alienate his capacity for labor in the abstract universality of “labor power,” you will recall). It is important in this regard to emphasize that Nishida in sists that his dialectic is essentially Heraclitean rather than Hegelian ; for Nishida there is no sublation that would subsume negation within the positivity of a teleology. Negation is absolute, not simply a ruse of Being. The past has passed, and there is nothing to be salvaged." (pp.18-19)
"In 1938 Nishida opens an essay on “singularity in the historical world” with a reading of Leibniz’s Monadology, it is not because singularities in Nishida’s thought are monads, because they are not (for one thing, as substance, monads are metaphysical singularities without beginning or end, and are therefore not “historical” at all), but because a concept of singularity irreducible to that of particularity is at stake in both the monad and the kobutsu. It is at the level of the problem—always a question of the possibility of making sense in its formulation—that certain of Nishida’s most important formulations rhyme with the “seventeenth century.” I will simply mention four of these rhymes. The first is a thought of the coimmanence and coimplication of the many and the one in Nishida, Spinoza, and Leibniz, with the consequence that difference is never overcome in the one and that the one is never anything other than its articulation in difference from itself. The second concerns the doubt that precedes the formulation of the Cartesian cogito, which, Nishida frequently argued, did not take reflection far enough. Pursue that reflection to its limit and one is faced with the radical impossibility of proving the existence of the self (as Nishida argued in 1936). The third is therefore a question of Spinozist potentia as the power to be, the anarchic force of being and the conatus (which in Nishida figures as the daemonic, or as desire) that drives all aisthēsis and knowing. Finally, there is a common questioning of the transcendental, the possibility of making sense, which for Nishida is situated otherwise than for Spinoza and Leibniz, and most clearly otherwise than for Descartes." (pp.19-20)
"Allow me to venture a preliminary, certainly inadequate, definition. Active intuition is a mutual appropriation between that which will have been said to be perceived and that which will have been said to be what perceives. It is logically prior to—without being merely a primitive developmental stage of—the constitution, in reflection, of the subject who perceives. Active intuition is a sensuous relationality (that relationality or metabolism, Stoffwechsel, that is sensuousness as such) that is prior to and constitutive of its relata (subjects and objects) and that does not thereby simply disappear into the relata. That is, concepts of subject and object are essentially inadequate accounts of what is at stake in active intuition. Active intuition is therefore irreducible to the mutually exclusive binary opposition of passive and active but is nevertheless the possibility for that opposition. Active intuition is appropriation as a relationality of forces, and it is as appropriation that it is the condition and possibility of production.
It is not merely that active intuition is “a kind of” appropriation but that active intuition is at work in all appropriation; active intuition is the condition and possibility of all appropriation and production. What is at once the effect and object of appropriation is called “property.”." (pp.20-21)
"The Aristotelian subject of poiesis is never implicated in nor complicated with the nature of the object; the Kantian subject of reason is constituted in the distance from the object of perception and is never complicated with the empirical. For Nishida, Marx’s subject of “sensuous human activity, practice” is essentially complicated with its objects in a constitutive original transduction, a mutual appropriation (or “metabolism”)." (p.25)
"Active intuition is “intuition” insofar as it is an immediate apprehension logically prior to any distinction between apprehending subject and apprehended object ; the apprehension of active intuition has a certain essential resemblance to Whitehead’s “prehension” (hence Nishida’s continued interest in Whitehead’s work): there is a seeing, for example, that is neither the exercise of a subject’s faculty nor, therefore, the perception of an object. Active intuition is the transcendental condition of possibility for subjects and objects altogether, but it exceeds at all points that relation and therefore does not simply disappear into any subject- object relation. But active intuition, or prehension, does complicate the subject-object relation, which itself does not simply disappear in some supra epistemological ecstasy. Active intuition necessarily implies the original transductivity from which what will be called subjects and objects emerge. This prehension or intuition is precisely the sensuousness of the dialectical metabolism of “man” and “nature.”." (pp.24-25)
"For Marx this sensuousness, this metabolism, is entirely bound up with material practices and praxis. For Nishida, as well, this intuition is always “active” (kōiteki). The acting that makes this intuition active is, as the Japanese word kōi suggests, intentional. Active intuition is always “interested,” nonneutral, even partisan. Nishida referred to this intentionality of active intuition in “Expressive Activity” as “transcendental will”; ten years later, he rejected that formulation because the “will” is an abstraction. Increasingly, in later years, he would refer to “desire” and to the “daemonic.” As such, transcendental will is a force of which I am neither the cause nor origin; what is at stake here is a physics rather than a psychology. Before there is that which moves, there is movement (what else could it mean to speak of singularities such as the big bang or black holes ? What else could it mean to speak of creation ex nihilo ?). More elemental than Bergsonian élan vital, it is perhaps closest to Spinoza’s “affectivity,” the capacity to affect and to be affected. Ultimately, the “transcendental will,” or desire, or the daemonic in Nishida is nothing other than the potentia, the will- to- be of the nonneutrality and therefore the nontranscendence, of singularities. Whatever his terminology, it is of first importance to recognize that this intentionality, this passionate intuition, is not that of an already existing subject: there can be no phenomenology of the intentionality of active intuition, for this is an intentionality unaccompanied by any reflection. A subject will emerge from active intuition to be sure, but it will bear no essential resemblance to the epistemological and phenomenological subjects of modernity; reflection there will be, but it will be reflection implicated in the affirmation of negation, the affirmation of nontranscendence, the affirmation of becoming (which we will see in his brief but important reflections on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky at the end of “Human Being”; he was to return to these themes in his reading of Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death in 1940 in “Prolegomenon to a Philosophy of Praxis”)."
"Time and space are not the transcendental objects of active intuition. But if they are not given a priori, then neither are their concepts apodictic. So, how do we know that there is time and space ? How is it possible to have a sense of time ? Logically, the concept of time can only be presented as a contradiction. On the one hand, there must be a pure duration of an array of singular instants ; but if time were nothing but that pure duration, it would be impossible to think that there is “time.” Time cannot be conceived as mere discontinuity. So time must be conceived as the continuity of discontinuities, and the array of singularities must be conceived as a succession. It is only on that basis, logically, that there can be a concept of time. But yet again, to conceive time simply as a succession of singularities, merely as the continuity of discontinuities, is not yet to have a sense of the radical rupture according to which the differentiation of past, present, and future is conceivable. The instant, as singularity—and if it is to be truly singular rather than merely particular, not merely a part of the universal called “time”—must not only be an extreme point of the determination of the universal, but it must also be that which surpasses the universal. The concept of the singular instant as the absolute rupture that gives a sense of the radical difference of past, present, and future is at once the possibility and limit of time. As limit, it is, in fact, spatial. The concept of time necessarily assumes this spatiality as possibility and limit ; the concept of space necessarily assumes this temporality in turn as its possibility and limit.
As the singularity, as the absolute rupture that exceeds universal determination, as that which is both “of” time and exceeds the temporal, the instant is spatial, which is to say it is the simultaneity of the mutual affectivity of things, that is, of force. It is this force and movement that is the material determination of the temporal- spatial altogether. Movement and force do not happen within a priori temporal and spatial coordinates ; rather, it is movement and force that in fact create material time and space (hence Nishida’s interest in contemporary physics). Furthermore, that a thing affects another thing, that force and movement happen, determines temporality- spatiality as an original orientation toward the radical discontinuity of futurity ; it is this material, active anticipation, rather than passive recollection, that is the possibility of the concept of time. Active intuition is precisely the always original appropriation that constitutes actual time and space. In this respect, then, our concepts of time, space, and their necessarily transductive (or dialectical) opposition are in fact concepts of force, movement, and resistance. In short, our concepts of time and space are the most rigorous conceptualizations of what is called materiality." (pp.25-27)
"For Kant time and space are pure idealities. For Nishida and for Marx time- and- space—materiality—is the transcendental object of a priori active intuition or appropriation, irreducible to any phenomenology." (p.27)
"Production is the movement from the already- worked- on (Marx’s objectified or dead labor), which is the very materiality of the historical logos (as the possibility of sense), to the creation of something new, that is, the creation of something that is neither merely the reproduction of what has been made (as the “given”) nor the realization of a plan, which would be merely the extension of the present into a determinable future, Aristotelian poiesis. This is a difference that will make all the difference.
What is first of all at stake in the movement from the made to the making is a process of the differential articulation of singularities as such ; it is the process by which a singularity comes to possess itself in its identity to itself. It is that movement by which the singular would appropriate itself as such; it is always a movement of separation by which the singular would exceed all subsumption within the universal One but that, in fact, is the coimmanence of the One and the Many. This is a process Nishida called “idiosyncratic constitution” (koseiteki kōsei). Of course, if idiosyncratic constitution is truly idiosyncratic, truly original, truly singular, it must be radically anarchic. To the extent that production is creative, rather than merely reproductive, it is necessarily mediated by a radical transcendental negativity, by the “absolutely absolute” as futurity in its essential indetermination. All production, all creation, necessarily transpires in the transduction between the logos, what has been made as the material possibility of sense, and the radical singularity of the new. This process of idiosyncratic constitution or differential articulation is necessarily imperfect (in the scholastic sense, where “perfection” is the completion of production); production is, then, a vector, the nonaccomplishment of singularity; production is in this sense a tendency toward singularity, always a becoming." (p.28)
"In the becoming of production, in the transductive metabolism between worker, tool, and “nature,” there is formed a subject (shutai) that is neither the Aristotelian master of time and nature nor the Kantian subject (shukan) of essentially passive perception, knowledge, and judgment. The shutai, subject of production in and as creativity, is constituted in the anticipation of the new; more, the shutai, in the material engendering of the new, affirms a futurity that is the negation of the present in its entirety. This affirmation is, in fact, the affirmation of the negation of an essential reflection that emerges in production. The shutai—“man”—is thus itself necessarily a vector, a tendency, as part of a radical historicity, a becoming. For Nishida, “man” in his species being is in fact man only insofar as he exceeds the possibility of essence. The essence of man is to be without essence. “Man,” then, is nothing more and nothing less than an anticipation or orientation qua production toward the transcendental negativity of the “absolutely absolute,” toward futurity. The subject that emerges in production is a subject that is defined as such not insofar as the subject interprets the world but because he changes it. Poiesis is the condition of possibility for all praxis. As Nishida was to argue at length in his essays of 1940, the relation between poiesis and praxis is transductive ; that is, each is the necessary presupposition of the other. There is no praxis that is not also, and essentially, poiesis; there is no poiesis that is not also, and essentially, praxis. This, of course, sabotages a tradition of political philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle through the present, that has been concerned to present poiesis and praxis, labor and political agency, as mutually exclusive, and the further mutual exclusion of both praxis and poiesis from thēoria, construed as a more or less passive contemplation— and all this in the interest of political order altogether. To argue, then, that poiesis and praxis are, in their very possibility, each contaminated by the other is also to acknowledge that the mutually exclusive opposition between the active and the contemplative, the “active” and the “passive,” is also contaminated by their essential coimplication or complication of one with the other. But to maintain that praxis and poiesis, and the active and passive, as well, are from the very beginning essentially implicated each in the other is to divorce praxis from its presumptive teleological determinations (such as the Good, in the Nicomachean Ethics). Praxis-poiesis becomes not a means to an end but an end in itself, as the articulation of the power- to- be of singularities. This is the force of Nishida’s readings of Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Kierkegaard (especially his concept of “despair”): to be without hope—to act without the presumption of any continuity between the present and the future—is precisely to affirm the radical negativity of an inappropriable futurity, the affirmation of singularity in its nontranscendence. But this is to orient praxis-poiesis not toward what should be (the Good) but toward what we want, a more profoundly disturbing question than that of the Good; no wonder that political philosophy has for so long avoided the possibility that we may not want what is said to be the Good. And although Nishida declined to say anything substantive about this “new humanism,” this is undoubtedly why the proletariat is possessed of historical consciousness and thereby is the subject that bears within itself the potential of a revolutionary praxis." (28-30)
"But Nishida never said that the proletariat is possessed of historical consciousness and thereby becomes the subject that bears within itself the potential of a revolutionary praxis. Nishida was to maintain repeatedly that the subject of praxis and agency, formed in the poiesis of production, itself conceived as an essential orientation to the absolute negativity of futurity (futurity’s radical difference from the present), was nothing other than the minzoku. Minzoku can be translated as “people,” “race,” “nation,” or “ethnos”; at the time of Nishida’s writing it would undoubtedly have been read as the identity of people, race, nation, and ethnos. For Nishida the minzoku was within and was the self- formative, autotelic agent of Gemeinschaft (after Tőnnies, “community,” characterized as a fundamental agreement or social will, formed in and by custom). [...] A Gemeinschaft for Nishida is both a singularity and the human cultural equivalent of the biological concept of species. With these formulations, of course, immediate problems and questions proliferate. Logically, how is it that a Gemeinschaft or a minzoku, which is nothing if not a nearly infinite concatenation of predicates, be construed as a singularity, of which one can predicate nothing save its tautological singularity ? My question is not rhetorical, because in any more nearly adequate consideration of the question we would have to entertain the possibility that Gemeinschaft or minzoku is not simply a logical and grammatical subject, of which one might predicate this or that property, but singularities as infinite concatenations of predicates, the effect of which is Gemeinschaft or minzoku ; that is, the concatenation of predicates is prior to and constitutes the being of community or race rather than conceiving community or race as being without properties. Perhaps. But it would still be not at all certain that Gemeinschaft or minzoku are exemplary singularities (again, how can there be “examples” of singularity; does that not reduce singularity to particularity ?). And why race/nation/people/ethnos rather than class ? And what of class within race/nation/people/ethnos ? All of these questions are questions of the logic of the argument. The political questioning would begin in asking whether this concept of Gemeinschaft is not simply a familiar romantic nostalgia for what Marx (following Montesquieu and Hegel) called precapitalist modes of production (for which Marx himself entertained no nostalgia whatever), or more generally for the “premodern.” We would also ask, given the historical appropriations of such nostalgia for fascist apologetics, what is at stake in such romantic nostalgia such that it is entangled with the desire of many of those who have no sympathy for the political forms that affirmation of Gemeinschaft has taken in both the twentieth century and the twenty- first." (pp.30-31)
-William Haver, Introduction à Kitarô Nishida, Ontology of Production, Duke University Press, 2012, 208 pages.
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-Kitarô Nishida, Ontology of Production, Duke University Press, 2012, 208 pages.
