On Negative of “Expression”

Phenomenological Theory of Truth in Nishida’s “Philosophical Collected Papers Vol.3”

Abstract

Nishida has sought for the unified structure of all knowledge over the direct experience thoroughly without assuming some substantive object in the back of the experience and regarding correspondence of judgment with that object as truth. Therefore his attitude could be called “phenomenological”, because the phenomenological thinking means to describe phenomenon as they appears and elucidate the structure of phenomenon from inside of phenomenon instead of setting the principle of phenomenon outside phenomenon. As he investigated the measure of the truth over the direct experience, his philosophical viewpoint became deepened from “pure experience” to “self-consciousness”, and from “self-consciousness” to “field”. And the late Nishida’s thought starts by asking for the structure of the historical world where individuals who represent the world are born and die. The important key word he refined to research the structure of the world and the formation of the self in unified way is “expression”. So this paper will explore phenomenological features of the late Nishida’s truth- theory by paying attention to the negative structure of the word “expression” used in “Philosophical Collected Papers Vol.3”.