The Many Senses of the One World

Reflections on Nishida’s and Heidegger’s Thought in the 1930s and the Environmental Crisis of Today

Abstract

This article contrasts the meaning of “one world” as it is represented in current discussions of the environmental crisis, with the sense of “one world” in writings of Nishida and Heidegger from the 1930s. A review of the current geopolitical situation and the environmental crisis shows not only that the world has changed and that our view of the world has changed, but also that the very concept of one world has changed. This new concept, as it is assumed by scientists and philosophers like Peter Singer, remains bound to naturalism, the predominant worldview that ultimately all things can be explained by scientifically discovered laws of nature and are subject to human control. Nishida’s “Logic and Life”(論理と生命)and Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy(Beiträge zur Philosophie)show that the world envisioned by naturalism is an abstraction and a curtailment of creativity. World as creative source expresses Nishida’s notion of the one “historical world” in its productive interplay with our many individual, bodily selves, as well as Heidegger’s notion of “world” in tension with “earth.” Today we may be facing not simply an environmental crisis, but an historical crisis, jeopardizing our very ability to conceive of the one world as creative but deeply vulnerable.