Bracketing (even) Meaning?

Nishida’s Concept of Pure Experience from the Standpoint of the Husserlian Reduction

抄録

To what extent can pure experience be considered to be “devoid of meaning”(An Inquiry into the Good, trans. M. Abe, p. 8)? It is well known that Nishida elaborated his own concept of “pure experience” in reference to the way it appears in the philosophy of William James. He thus aimed at founding philosophical speculation on a solid ground in a radically new way. It is by putting aside any kind of “meaning”(意味 , imi), that Nishida reaches the realm of pure experience conceived as a strict unity of consciousness: “a truly pure experience has no meaning whatsoever”(Ibid., p. 4). Almost at the same period, in his seminal work, Logical Investigations, and moreover in his Ideas, Husserl attempted a similar move towards the authentic nature of consciousness. However, his phenomenological method of “bracketing (Einklammerung)”, by which the objective world is neutralized, has not conduced him to a suspension of meaning(Sinn)as such. On the contrary, this methodological procedure unveiled the intentionality of consciousness as a pure structure of meaning. If pure experience has to be considered as philosophy’s terra firma, a comparison with Husserlian reduction— or epochè—proves itself to be necessary. It should indeed provide us with a critical insight into what Nishida understands as being the true “content” of pure experience.