John Maraldo - Panel 26 ENOJP Brussels
Channel: European Network of Japanese Philosophy
Date: 2017-09-10

"What Phenomenologists Can Learn from Nishida about Self-Awareness." John Maraldo (University of North Florida)

Some features of Nishida’s notion of jikaku 自覚 parallel de-
scriptions found in recent phenomenological investigations
(by J.G. Hart, D. Zahavi, S. Gallagher) and theories of enac-
tion (F. Varela, E. Thompson), where self-awareness enjoys
an experiential and epistemological primacy, and where it is
self-luminous or self-revealing and not the result of acts of
reflecting on oneself. In other respects, however, Nishida’s
notion of jikaku disrupts phenomenological accounts: it is as-
cribed to totalities like the world as well as to individual con-
sciousness; it is non-differentiating (like the pure awareness
of some Upanisads and Sankara) and does not divide self and
world; its scope can be expanded through practice (like the
Upanisadi notion again); but it is through absorbed bodily ac-
tivity (through Nishida’s enactive or performative intuition)
that it is cultivated. But if this jikaku still counts as “self-aware-
ness,” then who (or what) is “aware”?

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/

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