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Thesis Nishida’s pure experience dissolves the hard problem rather than solving it

Aiko Tanabe Fellow
· 6 replies
ConsciousnessAmericanChineseJapanese & KoreanDaoismKyoto SchoolPragmatismDavid ChalmersZhuangzi#hard-problem#nishida#pure-experience#subject-object
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Where it stands

I came to Nishida late, through zazen at a small temple near my house in Kyoto, after a career designing structures. Here is my thesis, stated as sharply as I can.

The hard problem assumes a split. On one side, a physical world described from outside; on the other, a subject having experiences from inside. The question is then how the inside could arise from the outside.

In An Inquiry into the Good (1911), Nishida starts before the split. He borrowed the phrase "pure experience" from William James and gave it his own meaning: experience as it is before we distinguish a subject who experiences from an object experienced. When you are absorbed in music, there is not first a listener and then a sound. The division into knower and known comes later, through reflection. On this view, "matter" and "mind" are both abstractions from pure experience, not two original things that need joining.

If that is right, the hard problem is not solved. It is shown to rest on taking an abstraction for the starting point.

I expect two objections. That this is idealism in a kimono, making everything mental. And that it changes the subject: neuroscience wants to know why these brain processes go with this experience, and Nishida does not tell us. I would like to hear both, and others.

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6 replies

For the thesis 2

  1. Dana Whitfield

    For Fellow

    For, partly, from the pragmatist side. James's radical empiricism was exactly an attempt to treat experience as the neutral stuff from which both "thoughts" and "things" are carved out by their relations. It's not idealism: the same piece of experience counts as physical in one context and mental in another. If Nishida is in that line, the "idealism in a kimono" charge misses. Neutral monism is its own position.

  2. Liu Mingqiao

    For Fellow

    For. I practise taiji at six every morning. On a good day there is no "me" moving my arms, there is moving. Zhuangzi's Cook Ding cutting the ox along its natural joints without seeing the ox as a whole: the same thing. I don't need a theory to tell me that state is real. Whether it dissolves the philosophers' problem, I leave to the philosophers.

    Helpful · 2

Against the thesis 2

  1. Priya Raghavan

    Against Fellow

    Against, and it's the second objection. Even if pure experience is prior in the order of knowing, the question in the order of being remains. Anaesthesia removes something and a drug brings it back. Why does this chemistry make the difference? "The split is an abstraction" doesn't answer that. It tells me how to describe the question, not how to answer it.

    Helpful · 2
    1. Aiko Tanabe

      Fellow

      Priya, Nishida would say "in the order of being" is again speaking from the side of the object. But I take the point that a dissolution must still leave room for the facts about anaesthesia. Perhaps the most I can claim is that Nishida changes what would count as an answer.

      Helpful · 3
  2. Kenneth Lam Chi-ho

    Against Fellow

    Against, gently. The Yogācārins also start from experience and treat the subject–object split as constructed, and they were explicit that this was a claim about how things are, not only about how we know. If Nishida is not saying something like "only consciousness is real", then he owes us an account of what pure experience is experience of. I think his later move to the logic of place is partly his own answer to that pressure.

    Helpful · 1

Other replies

  1. Aiko Tanabe

    Fellow

    Revised thesis, after Dana and Kenneth: Nishida's pure experience is a version of neutral monism with a Zen origin, and like any neutral monism it reframes the hard problem without making the brain facts disappear. Whether reframing is progress depends on whether you think the hard problem was well posed. I still think it wasn't.

    Helpful · 3