一到達点としての「私と汝」

人格をめぐる西田の思索

抄録

One of the causes of the difficulty of understanding Nishida’s essay “I and thou” is the ambiguity of his use of the word“thou”. This word means not only a human other to whom I can call, but also means the I of the past, because the I of yesterday, for example, is qualitatively different from the I of now, this moment. The “thou” of Nishida’s philosophical construct extends to the full expanse of the universe. It is not easy to clearly decipher his definition of the term “thou,” used as it is in various contexts, but in the aggregate, it is possible to infer that Nishida intends the term “thou” to refer to the being whose presence gives an individual his true existence, despite that individual’s independence. Nishida emphasizes the fact that all things have their existence only in a transient instant and that in the next moment all things transmute. The thing that is now should not, indeed cannot, be considered as the same thing that it just was. What bridges the thing that was and thing that is? Nishida asserts that what bridges each independent thing is true love which he terms Absolute-nothingness. This love finds new life through its own death.