Je voudrais aborder du point de vue de la «rencontre» mes liens avec la philosophie de NISHIDA Kitarō. Ma rencontre à ce philosophe se fit à travers quatre médiateurs :（ 1） Le Groupe de recherches sur la philosophie de Nishida（ Nishida kenkyūkai） ;（ 2） le philosophe KUKI Shūzō ;（ 3） le penseur Augustin BERQUE ; ainsi que（ 4） le philosophe YAMANOUCHI Tokuryū. Mes liens que j’entretiens avec Nishida naquirent à travers ces trois premiers auteurs lors d’un séjour d’études à Paris（l’année 2002）. Ils se fortifièrent à partir de retour au Japon par la connaissance de celui que j’identifie comme le quatrième médiateur（ 4）. Ces diverses occasions ont ensemble beaucoup nourri les réflexions qui me conduisirent à l’élaboration de trois ouvrages portant sur la mésologie. À travers l’écriture du dernier, Logique de la rencontre（ 2017）, j’ai acquis la certitude que la tâche de la philosophie japonaise n’est finalement que l’accomplissement de la «rencontre» entre l’Orient et l’Occident, telle que la poursuivait lui-même Nishida.

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　　Kitaro Nishida declared, “The emotion which drives us to philosophical thinking must be not ‘surprise’ but profound sorrow for our life.” He had regarded “the self-awareness of death” as the most important subject of philosophy consistently. The death was not other people’s affairs but “the most concrete and individual event” for him. Whenever the past is recalled with regret in “the self-awareness of death”, the meaning of our life must become questionable. Since 1930, Nishida had searched after the meaning of our life by using the expression “the self-determination of eternal now”. According to Nishida, the self-awareness which must be thought ultimately as the self-awareness of absolute nothingness contains a contradiction. It means that present passes away as it stands still. Therefore, the self-awareness should be interpreted as “the self-determination of eternal now”. In my article, I would like to clarify the structure of “the self-awareness of death” from the viewpoint of Nishida’s theory of time.

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　　What is the “eternal now” in the context of Kuki’s philosophy? In responding to this problem, two lines of approach are possible. The first of these is to ask about the nature of the “eternal now” established within “recurring time.” Here, the “eternal now” that constitutes our problematic is the instant in which a given matter is repeated indefinitely, maintaining its oneness — an instant that Kuki considers a metaphysical and mystical experience. The second approach is to ask about the nature of the “eternal now” revealed at the root of contingency. According to Kuki, this “eternal now” is a “élan vital” that underlies our normal experience of the flow of time, making our reality possible. In the present when we encounter contingency, we perceive a “élan vital” when we know that the reality is “what it is.” 　　In this paper, after analyzing these two “eternal nows,” I clarify their mutual relationship from the problematic of poetic language, and of rhyme in particular. For Kuki, poetry expresses the present as qualitative time, and rhyme is considered particularly excellent for such expression. Rhyme, rather than merely a form of wordplay based on a coincidence of sound, is something in which we feel astonishment, through our experience of this coincidence of sounds and words, that words have been given as “what it is.” Then, as this astonishment becomes more profound with the repetition of this oneness of rhyme and rhythm, we become able to approach the living heartbeat underlying our present, which is to say the “eternal now.” For Kuki, rhyme is a way to connect the contingent present when we encounter words not with an ephemeral moment, but with an eternity that transcends time.

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　　Im vorliegenden Aufsatz vergleiche ich, unter Berufung auf die Gedanken Martin Heideggers, die Überlegungen von Nishida Kitarō und Kuki Shūzō zum Wesen des ewigen Jetzt. 　　Kuki bezeichnet die phänomenologische, von Heidegger als Zeitlichkeit explizierte Struktur der gewöhnlichen Zeit als horizontale Ekstase. Davon unterscheidet er die vertikale Ekstase, auf deren Grundlage seine eigene metaphysische Idee der kreisförmigen, wiederkehrenden Zeit erst denkbar wird und die es uns ermöglicht, unser eigenes, zufälliges und einmaliges Leben in seiner ewigen Bedeutsamkeit ernsthaft zu erfassen. 　　Diese Auffassung hat offensichtliche Parallelen zu Nishidas Idee der Selbstbestimmung des ewigen Jetzt als absolutes Nichts: Dort meint dieser Begriff nämlich, dass nur in einer “vertikalen” Selbstbestimmung das zufällige und einmalige Einzelne erkannt werde, das über jegliches Allgemeine hinausgehe. Dieses vertikale Moment der Zeitlichkeit ist aber auch für Heideggers Zeitlehre wesentlich, der zufolge das Dasein erst dann im eigentlichen Sinne, nämlich als eigentlich vereinzeltes, existiert, wenn es seinem eigenen Nichts, d. h. seinem Tod, gegenübersteht. 　　Nishida und Heidegger erkennen in der vertikalen Richtung der Ekstase das Phänomen des Nichts, in dem die horizontale Ekstase der Zeitlichkeit insgesamt verschwindet und aus dem heraus sie erneut entsteht. In diesem Prozess erweist sich ihre Unumkehrbarkeit. Dagegen hält Kuki die vertikale Ekstase gerade für den Grund der Umkehrbarkeit der Zeit. In der folgenden Diskussion versuche ich zu zeigen, dass Kukis divergierende Deutung darin begründet ist, dass seine metaphysische Zeitlehre zum ästhetischen Genuss und zur “Ideation” der Zufälligkeit und Einmaligkeit des eigentlichen Einzelnen tendiert.

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　　Tanabe Hajime （1885‒1962） started developing his philosophy of religion which he dubbed ‘philosophy as metanoetics’ since the autumn of 1944. In December of the same year, Nishida Kitaro （1870‒1945） criticized his understanding of the philosophy of religion, pointing out that its core concept of ‘repentance’ （zange） reduces to a mere ethical notion. Is this criticism justified? 　　This paper aims to answer this question by indicating that Tanabe’s philosophy of religion is synthesis of ethics and religion, rather than a reduction of the latter to the prior. That is, I will clarify the relation between Tanabe’s notions of salvation （to which he referred to with the term ‘resurrection’） and existential communion （a term pertaining to social ontology that stands for the community of people who have been resurrected）. 　　For Tanabe, resurrection occurs when our practical reason is faced with an antinomy of duties and fails to find a solution; we are thus ‘resurrected’ by the Absolute. Resurrection leads naturally to new antinomies, which bring about higher demands for salvation. In this continuous process, we can gradually come to mediate the antinomies between oneself, others and entire communities. On the one hand, we can only realize existential communion by continuing ethical practices in our community. On the other, our salvation is attested only by existential communion. In this way, ethics and religion are inseparable in Tanabe’s philosophy of religion.

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　　This paper compares the philosophical projects of Ernst Cassirer and Nishida Kitarō in order to establish a shared place in which a dialogue between Cassirer and Nishida might take place. It argues that the common philosophical aim of Cassirer’s and Nishida’s projects is to overcome the entrenched dualism of the Western metaphysical tradition, and that this was to be achieved through a paradoxical synthesis of the two antithetical philosophical perspectives of transcendental philosophy and Lebensphilosophie. The paradoxical nature of their projects is brought out through a comparison of their respective critiques of Bergson. The paper then examines how Cassirer and Nishida trace the root cause of this dualism back to Greek philosophy in general and to Aristotle’s concept of substance in particular. The paper then compares the essential elements of their philosophical projects through their respective engagements with Hegel. The paper ends by way of a comparison of Cassirer’s concept of sheer possibility and Nishida’s concept of absolute nothing in terms of a reversal of the ontological categories of energeia and potentia.

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