Felipe Ferrari Gonçalves - Panel 30 ENOJP Brussels
Channel: European Network of Japanese Philosophy
Date: 24/08/2017

"A Place for Reality: The Phenomena of Consciousness in the Light of the Absolute Nothingness" 
Felipe Ferrari Gonçalves (Nagoya University, Japan)

In his essay Basho, Nishida states that all that which is must be implaced in something else. It means that, if a thing is to be understood as an existing being, there must be some place (basho) 
 here it exists in. Hence to exist is the same as to be somewhere. At first glance, to say that all material things exist in a determinated place, or else in a portion of space, may be understood as an obvious statement, however Nishida does not talk on the places that things occupy in physical space, but rather on the place where the very existence of such things, as well as the relationships between distinct things are implaced. In this way, since material things occupy a certain place in space, there is no mistake in saying that such a place, as beeing an existing phenomena in itself, must also have a basho wherein its existence is implaced. And the same is also true for the all the non-corporeal phenomena alike. Having previously (in the Zen no Kenkyū) classified the natural things external to the self and the emotions, volitions and all sorts of internal sensations under the same category of “phenomena of consciousness”, Nishida indentifies the consciousness as the ultimate basho wherein all the existing phenomena are implaced. Such consciousness is not that characteristic usually considered to be intrinsic to the particular individuals, but rather a field that is shared by all the encompassed phenomena and in which even the self and its inner consciousness themselves are ultimately implaced. Thus, the experiencing self is, as all the experienced things, also a part of this experienced system of reality that is limited by a force field that Nishida calls the “field of consciousness”. This presentation will be focused on how Nishida deals with reality according to a system in which all the existing phenomena have their places inside such a field of consciousness.
Our main concern will be the matter of whether Nishida’s 
philosophy is able to accept reality as being independent from the experiencing self or if it, in a non-dualistic way of thinking, it deals with the existence of the physical world solely as a projection of the mind of the self in the field of consciousness.

This talk took place at the Second annual conference of the European Network of Japanese Philosophy [ENOJP] 7–10 December 2016, Université libre de Bruxelles [ULB].

For more informations:
http://enojp.org/
http://chisokudopublications.com/

Art Direction: Choplair (CC-BY 3.0)