Abstract
The Summary presented paper deals with three subjects. The
first point to be made is that Nishida Kitaro and A. N. Whitehead share the same origin, called the fact
of pure experience or immediate experience, in
spite of no direct academic exchange between them.
They regard the pure experience as the sole starting-point of any thought in which the reality discloses itself as a non-dualistic unity. The problem
they face there is whether they can describe the insight gained in that experience. They solve it by
reaching at the same idea that the reality expresses
itself and its self-expression takes form of a sort of
logic.
The second point is to show that their conclusions
are different from each other. At the beginning, both
philosophers regard the fact of pure experience as a
flux. And then, they formulate it into the idea of
process. Nevertheless, because the pure experience
refuses any seat to the substantial self, which is
still held in the idea of process, Nishida abandons
this idea and searches for a deeper logic. It is a sort
of topology that implies a paradoxical content. He
finds our own selves in their vanishing point, in
which our relative selves encounter with the absolute.
In contrast, Whitehead searches for the emerging
point of our own selves in his immediate experience.
His conclusion puts no emphasis on the idea of nothingness but evidently on that of process.
The third point suggests the possibility to construe
Whitehead's philosophy not only as a process philosophy but also as a topological philosophy comparable to Nishida's. As Nishida watches the vanishing
point of our own selves in order to reveal the depth
of reality, Whitehead describes the perishing of actual entities in order to discover the principle of
universal relativity of the universe. To perish is to be
objectified, and to be objectified is to be present in
another, and the presence in another is the main subject
of topology. In conclusion, we can say that Nishida's
approach to the reality and that of Whitehead are
complement to each other.
