西田哲学会第 22 回年次大会

パネル発表Ⅰ

Nishida’s Mahāyāna Buddhist Rethinking of Sittlichkeit in 「絶対矛盾的自己同一」「私の今日の考が多くのものをヘーゲルから教へられ、又何人よりもヘーゲルに最も近いと考へると共に、私はヘーゲルに対して多くの云ふべきものを有つて居るのである」（西田幾多郎）

Steve Lofts 「南山宗教文化研究所研究員(ローチ基金研究員)」
Abstract:
Along with "The Position of the Individual in the Historical World" 「歴史的世界に於ける個物の立場」(1938), "Absolute Contradictory Self-Identity" 「絶対矛盾的自己同 一」(1939) isarguably one of Nishida’s most important texts in which we find beginnings of his maturephilosophy. Throughout this text, Nishida repeatedly references Hegel in defining his position,
focusing primarily on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right [Recht]. “Right” [Recht], for Hegel, refers to
the existence of freedom realized in the historical world of actuality. A philosophy of “right”[Recht] is thus a philosophy of freedom and history whose central aim is to provide an account of
the ground of freedom and how the Idea of freedom is actualized in our ethical relations withothers as these relations are embodied in social and political institutions. Ethical life (Sittlichkeit)
is the logic and content of the normative framework of duties and values that guide our common
everyday practical reasoning in the self-actualization (Selbstverwirklichung) of our sociopolitical world as the objective manifestations of the Idea of freedom. It is not so much aquestion of establishing the "good life" as "living the good" (PR §142), living according to ashared sense of life that forms the living ethos of the central socio-political institutions by which
the Idea of freedom is actualized: namely, the family, society, and the state. In this sense,
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right [Recht] might have been called An Inquiry into the Good. While
there is no shortage of legitimate objections to Hegel’s socio-political views — they are
manifestly patriarchal, Euro-centric, anti-democratic, and the list goes on — our current sociopolitical reality demands that we return to rethink and revitalize the notion of "ethical life."
Freedom has largely become synonymous with "being able to do as one wants" (PR § 15), which
is precisely the notion of freedom Hegel (and Nishida) rejects. A second issue concerns whatRawls calls "the fact of pluralism." Do we today have a common social experience that can form
the framework for communal living? Is it possible to speak of a common ethical life that could
function as the ground for a worldly world? Furthermore, our current world is dominated by apolitical discourse of "personal rights" and lacks a discourse of "personal duties" towards theother or the world. However, for Hegel (and Nishida), the self-actualization of individual
freedom and the commitment to the duties and virtues of Sittlichkeit are co-originating andreciprocal conditions. To be free, individuals must accept the duty (constraints on freedom) torecognize the other’s freedom and the virtue of putting the other’s interest before yours when it isrational. If we are not to sink into a 'state of nature’ as a war of all against all, the individual can1

西田哲学会第 22 回年次大会

パネル発表Ⅰno longer live as if they constitute a 'tribe of one.' We must actualize ourselves as members of
ethical institutions. It is not so much a "continuous preference for the public interest over one’sown," to speak with Montesquieu, as to recognize that the public interest is one’s own. My"right" to wear or not wear a mask during a pandemic must be balanced by my "duty" to public
safety, which is the safety of others and myself. The constraint on freedom must be an internal
telos of practical action, not an external limitation. We cannot have a legal society that lacks ashared commitment to the Idea of freedom as a living ethos that animates such a legal polis. In
other words, for Nishida, "an actual existing society is always comprised of both Gemeinschaftand Gesellschaft dimensions. It begins as a center that is a contradictory self-identity." (NKZ 12:425) The common critique of Hegel is that in his account of ethical life, the individual is entirelysublated into the relationality of the ethical institutions, which are entirely sublated into AbsoluteSpirit such that only Absolute Spirit is truly free. This traditional critique of Hegel has beenchallenged by many Hegel scholars today. The important point is that the self-actualization ofethical life in the socio-political world depends on our understanding of nature and the ground offreedom. Beginning from the Mahāyāna tradition of Buddhism, for Nishida, the individual isradically individual in that they face or oppose absolute nothingness and radically relational inthat they face or oppose the other and their social environment, forming a contradictory selfidentity; and only as this contradictory self-identity can the individual be creative and thus free.
This paper undertakes a reading of "Absolute Contradictory Self-Identity" as a reworking of the
project of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right from the perspective of the logic of Mahāyāna Buddhism,
specifically based on its logic of the soku (即) and the notion of emptiness as co-dependent
origination. It argues that "Absolute Contradictory Self-Identity" is the framework of Nishida’ssocio-political theory, and we must assess Nishida’s political views based on a reading of thistext and not from a series of isolated quotes often taken out of context.

2