From the time of “Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness,” Nishida’s thinking gained in depth by pondering the problem of self-awareness. In his later years, however, the viewpoint from which he grasped self-awareness was not the same anymore as before. Self-awareness, earlier defined as “the self seeing the self within the self,” came to be rethought as “the self seeing the absolute other in the bottom of self, and seeing the absolute other as the self”. Now, knowing the other in the self is the reality of self-awareness. Nishida, then, clarified this “structure of the self-awareness” by the concept of “representation (expression).”
Nishida borrowed the meaning of the concept “expression (representation)” from Leibniz and understood it as “the one reflecting the other, when a durable relationship between the one and the other originates.” From there, Nishida spoke of the self seeing the absolute other in the bottom of the self as the absolute other reflecting itself in the bottom of the self, and thus interpreted the other that is reflected in the bottom of the self as the representation (expression) of the absolute other. In the same line, he then came to understand the self as “a point of self expression of the world,” which reflects the world within itself ; in other words, as an individual self. This kind of self-grasp is what Nishida now understand by “self-awareness”
The relationship involved in the structure of self-awareness manifests the relationship in religion between immanence and transcendence, this shore and the other shore, I and Thou. The characteristic of this relationship is that there does not exist an outside (or third party) to grasp both from the outside ; in other words, that the relationship can only be grasped from the inside. Here lies the reason why the religious relationship are “irrational” imprevious to reason, and inseparably linked to scandal (stumbling block for reason) and faith. In other words, self-awareness contains the problems of irrationality, scandal, and faith within itself.
In the attempt at clarifying the relationship proper to the notion of representation (expression), as involved in self-awareness, I first wanted to look for the clues of understanding outside Nishida, before engaging Nishida’s own texts. I refer to the later Nishitani’s “image-ination of emptiness” and “diaphanation of being,” Descartes’ “idea of God”, Heidegger’s “Herstellung,” Soga Ryojin’s “Primal Vow as watershed,” and Levinas’ “dire”. In their reflections on these themes, these different thinkers all pursue the structure of self-awareness, each from a different perspective.
In the present essay, I have tried to shed some light on the matter which Nishida endeavored to grasp through the concept “representation”, by way of an investigation of the above-mentioned strains of thought. This “matter” is the idea that the self is itself by reflecting in itself that which transcends the self.
