Relation and Reverse

An attempt at analyzing Nishida’s logic of field through the structure of sentence and the movement of consciousness

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the logic of field advocated by Kitaro Nishida as fundamental way of thinking about the contradictive self-identical self, is the creative expressive logic of being and nothing, through the analysis of the correlation between the inner cross-structure of sentence and the dynamic movement of consciousness. In the first part, “the structure of sentence and the movement of consciousness”, referring to the structural linguistics of Roman Jakobson, I argue that the inner cross-structure of the composition(formation)of sentences through the selection(resemblance)and the combination(contiguity)of words, in other words the crossing of the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes of language, and the moving state of poetic language (metaphor, metonymy)characterized by the supremacy of the equivalence of speech sound and meaning, are sustained by the dynamic relation and reverse movement of consciousness, which corresponds to the coexistence (synchronicity)and succession(diachronicity)of objects. In the second part, “the logic of subjectivity and the relation of subject and object”, I introduce some typical logic in Western philosophy, first Aristotle’s logic of the substance as substratum(subject), secondly, after the establishment of the thinking ego through René Descartes’‘cogito’and Immanuel Kant’s ‘apperception’, Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s logic of the interaction between self(subject)and not-self(object), and thirdly Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s dialectic logic of the absolute through self-negativity. In some views, Hegel’s dialectic logic could be regarded as a kind of logic of field, but Nishida criticizes that Hegel’s logic remains objective and is not the absolute dialectics. And in the third part, “the logic of field and the reverse of subject and predicate”,I examine Nishida’s logic of field, which emphasizes the subsuming function of the predicate as field more than that of the subject as substance in a proposition. This logic of field characterized as predicate logic has a similar structure to the following phenomenological and psychological concepts concerning the actual and potential: Edmund Husserl’s ‘horizon’, Edgar John Rubin ’s ‘figure and ground ’ an d Karl Buhler ’s ‘field’. Further, the logic of field contains and surpasses the one-dimensional structure of the sentence dependent on the subsuming relationship of subject-predicate, and of the judgment dependent on the formative relationship. Therefore I conclude that Nishida's logic of field is the creative expressive logic of being and nothing, according to which the potential is actualized through the reversing appearance of the subject as object (formed thing)and the predicate as horizon(unformed possibility).