What is the meaning of being in general? This was the question of being that Heidegger addressed in Being and Time. It was neither a question of beings (question of the “ontic sciences”) nor was it a question regarding the various meanings of their being (question of regional ontology). Rather, it was a question that addressed the unity of the meaning of being in general. In the framework of Being and Time, such question of “fundamental ontology”, as Heidegger called it, was to be sought in the existential analytic of Dasein. Heidegger’s reason for taking Dasein’s being as the necessary starting point of the inquiry into the meaning of being was that Dasein has a pre-ontological understanding of its own being and the being of other entities. Hence, in order to clarify the meaning of being in general, we must explicate or uncover the understanding of being that we are always already in possession of. Consequently, the project in Being and Time takes the form of an interpretation (Auslegung) of Dasein’s being.
Now, amidst the apparent hermeneutical nature of Heidegger’s approach, though less evident, we can also identify a transcendental motif insofar as Dasein’s understanding of being serves as the condition of possibility for the meaning of being in general. Yet this way of phrasing it may raise some eyebrows if for no other reason than that Heidegger simply does not characterize his project in those terms and generally avoids using the language of transcendental philosophy in Being and Time. Nevertheless, let us merely recall that Heidegger later came to explicitly disavow the idea of the transcendental and in doing so, he also had in mind his own project in Being and Time. In fact, many commentators have argued that Heidegger does indeed engage in some kind of a transcendental project in the years surrounding Being and Time (e.g. J. Caputo, S. Crowell, D. Dahlstrom, J. Malpas). And a prominent work highlighting the transcendental aspect of Heidegger’s thought came out in 2007 under the title, Transcendental Heidegger (co-edited by S. Crowell and J. Malpas).
Though I would be quite content to say that my PhD project is to discern the transcendental orientation of Heidegger’s thought in Being and Time, I have set myself up with a rather challenging task of comparing Heidegger’s take on the transcendental with another philosopher’s engagement with transcendental thought, namely that of the Japanese philosopher Nishida. It has often been pointed out that Heidegger’s and Nishida’s philosophy have much in common. They both attempted to revamp the Western metaphysical tradition by questioning various assumptions such as the subject-object dualism. Much of the literature has accordingly focused on comparing Nishida’s idea of “place of absolute nothingness” with later Heidegger’s ideas of the Lichtung, Gelassenheit, Ereignis and Geviert, namely aspects of their thought that is taken to stand in sharp contrast to the Western tradition. Though such studies undeniably highlight an important dimension of the common ground between the two thinkers, there is another aspect which has been less attended to that puts them in continuity with the Western tradition. Namely, their critical engagement with the transcendental tradition.
Nishida’s project throughout his life was to understand the whole of reality from the very ground of our experience. From early on, he identified this ultimate ground in our experience prior to the subject-object split. Our ordinary conception of me as ‘subject’ standing in opposition to ‘objects’ in the world is a derivative form of our relation to the world insofar as we primarily find ourselves embedded in a meaningful context. Much like Heidegger’s idea that we are being-in-the-world, Nishida understood ourselves as necessarily being in a place. This “place” could be our office, university, family or the world taken as the meaningful whole of social and cultural practices. But Nishida saw the “place of absolute nothingness” at the very bottom of the multitude of places. This does not entail some nihilistic idea that ultimately there is nothing but rather, it means that what ultimately makes possible for objects to manifest as meaningful objects and for us to engage with objects and others in a meaningful context is that we empty ourselves in such a way that we make room for things to manifest as they are in themselves. At this point, we can identify, like we can in Heidegger, a transcendental motif in Nishida’s topological thought insofar as the place of absolute nothingness serves as the condition of possibility for – amongst other things – objects in the world.
My comparative project aims to articulate the “transcendental Heidegger” as well as the “transcendental Nishida.” But since both Heidegger and Nishida were also critical to the traditional idea of the transcendental, I will clarify the extent to which it could be said that they respectively work within the transcendental tradition and, furthermore, the way in which they go beyond the boundaries of traditional transcendental philosophy. By comparing their approaches, we will see the interesting overlap between Heidegger’s hermeneutic transformation and Nishida’s topological transformation of the transcendental. I hope these investigations will shed light on a new aspect of their common ground.
Yuko Ishihara/17-05-2016