Searching for the Logic of Reality

Nishida and Whitehead

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.