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Bracketing (even) Meaning ?


Nishidas Concept of Pure Experience from the Standpoint
of the Husserlian Reduction
Vincent GIRAUD, Kyoto University

Published in the Annual Bulletin of the Nishida Philosophy Association (), vol.
9, July 2012, Tokyo, p. 187-200.

The question which will guide us through the first pages of Nishidas Inquiry is that of
meaning. To what extent can pure experience be considered to be devoid of meaning (An
Inquiry1, p. 8)? It is well known that Nishida elaborated his own concept of pure experience
in reference to the way it appears in the philosophy of William James. He thus aimed at
founding philosophical speculation on a solid ground in a radically new way. It is by putting
aside any kind of meaning (, imi), that Nishida reaches the realm of pure experience
conceived as a strict unity of consciousness: a truly pure experience has no meaning
whatsoever (trans. M. Abe, p. 4). Almost at the same period, in his seminal work, Logical
Investigations, and moreover in his Ideas, Husserl attempted a similar move towards the
authentic nature of consciousness. However, his phenomenological method of bracketing
(Einklammerung), by which the objective world is neutralized, did not result in a suspension
of meaning (Sinn) as such. On the contrary, this methodological procedure unveiled the
intentionality of consciousness as a pure structure of meaning. If pure experience has to be
considered as philosophys terra firma, a comparison with the Husserlian reduction or
epoch proves itself to be necessary. It should indeed provide us with a critical insight into
what Nishida understands as being the true content of pure experience.
First of all, it should be noticed that Nishida, at that time, was almost completely
ignorant of Husserls Logical Investigations published at the turn of the century, and of the
phenomenological project in general. It is only immediately after the publication of An
Inquiry into the Good that he started to read the German philosopher. According to Eiichi
Shimomisse2, the first reference to Husserl appears in his article entitled On the thesis of the
Pure Logic schools of Epistemology (published in 1911). Since then, Nishida will constantly
refer to Husserl, sometimes in a critical way, and his work Intuition and Reflection in SelfConsciousness (written between 1913 and 1917) bears witness to this deep interest. My
purpose in this paper is not to give an account of the way Nishida received and understood
Husserlian phenomenology. This would require a thorough consideration of later works. It is
nonetheless of some interest to notice that Nishida, as soon as he got to know Ideen I, took the

1 NISHIDA Kitar, An Inquiry into the Good, transl. M. Abe & C. Ives, (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1990).
2 Quoted in NISHIDA Kitar, Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness, transl. V. H. VIGLIELMO, T.
TOSHINORIAND, J. S. OLEARY (Albany (NY): SUNY Press, 1987), 179, Editors note 45.

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realm of phenomenology as equivalent to that of pure experience3. On that basis, I would like
to consider the Inquiry through the lens of Husserlian phenomenology, in order to clarify
Nishidas position regarding the issue of meaning.
Indeed, with his focus on the questions of experience and consciousness, Nishida fully
belongs to what French philosopher Frdric Worms recently termed the moment 1900 (the
nineteen-hundred moment)4. Reading Nishida thus implies situating his own philosophical
attempt among those of William James, Henri Bergson or Edmund Husserl. But for that same
reason, it has to take into consideration his own comprehension of meaning. In or around the
year 1900 Freuds Interpretation of Dreams (Traumdeutung), Bergsons Laughter with its
significant subtitle: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic and Husserls First Logical
Investigation: Expression and Meaning are all published in quick succession. This is in no
respect a pure combination of circumstances. To make this list even more representative of
this peculiar moment, we could add the names of Gottlob Frege (Sense and Reference, 1892),
Bertrand Russel (On Denoting, 1905) and William James (The Meaning of Truth, 1909).
Through such an impressive series of proper names it becomes obvious that the issue of
meaning, in all its facets, has been elevated to the status of a major philosophical problem.
The question of knowing if that recently acquired dignity must be attributed to Nietzsche as
Deleuze used to think , or Dilthey, or to some other thinker, is a question that I shall here
abandon to the historians of philosophy. It is sufficient for my purpose to have established the
preeminent character of the issue of meaning at the time Nishida writes his Inquiry. And, in
fact, from the outset, the essay presents us with a thesis concerning meaning.
I The reduction to pure experience
For a phenomenologist, the standpoint of pure experience adopted by Nishida shows
many similarities with that of the phenomenological reduction as presented in Ideen I. The
very first words of the Inquiry propose a definition of experience in which any transcendent
content has been neutralized: To experience means to know facts just as they are, to know in
accordance with facts by completely relinquishing ones own fabrications. What we usually
refer to as experience is adulterated with some sort of thought, so by pure I am referring to the
state of experience just as it is without the least addition of deliberative discrimination. In his
attempt to circumscribe the field of experience as such, Nishida is conduced to put aside
subjective or mental fabrications, thoughts and deliberative discrimination. But what
could at first sight appear as a mere isolation of mental facts resulting from a selection
operated inside consciousness actually concerns any act of position of an object outside of the
subject. As such, the standpoint of pure experience can only be termed a standpoint for
methodological reasons, for pure experience excludes any determinate position towards
something as an object, be it purely immanent. And here is precisely the terrain that Nishida

3 Y. NITTA, H. TATEMATSU, E. SHIMOMISSE, Phenomenology and Philosophy in Japan, in Y. NITTA & H.
TATEMATSU (Eds.), Japanese Phenomenology (= Analecta Husserliana t. VIII), (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979), 8.
4 F. WORMS, La philosophie en France au XXe sicle (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 21 sq.

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shares with Husserl: We start out from that which antedates all standpoints: from the totality
of the intuitively self-given which is prior to any theorizing reflexion, from all that one can
immediately see and lay hold of (Ideen I, 20, p. 78)5. But, whereas Nishida lays stress on
the notion of experience, purifying its notion from any additional outward content, Husserl,
in order to prevent any misinterpretation of his thesis and any confusion with that of the
Empiricists, prefers to call this primordial act an intuition: Immediate seeing (Sehen), not
merely the sensory seeing of experience, but seeing in general as primordial dator
consciousness of any kind whatsoever, is the ultimate source of justification for all rational
statements. () Thus for experience (Erfahrung) we substitute the more general intuition
() (Ideen I, 19, p. 76 and 21, p. 78). In fact, the very concept of experience is
somehow misleading: it qualifies the natural standpoint, which is precisely what needs to be
reduced by phenomenological practice. That is why Husserl, on the one hand, speaks of the
experience (Erfahrung) as given to us from the natural standpoint, and on the other hand of
the pure experiences (reine Erlebnisse) (Ideen I, 33, p. 101) that are given through the
epoch. For sure, Nishidas experience refers to Husserlian Erlebnisse, and pure experience
is an intuitive experience (Inquiry, p. 39). One should therefore emphasize the strict
equivalence between pure experience and intuition: intuition is () simply knowledge of
facts just as they are (Inquiry, p. 39).
Once that point has been clarified, it is possible to consider the phenomenological
practice of the epoch: We put out of action the general thesis which belongs to the essence
of the natural standpoint, we place in brackets whatever it includes respecting the nature of
Being: this entire natural world therefore which is continually there for us, present to our
hand, and will remain there, is a fact-world of which we continue to be conscious, even
though it pleases us to put it in brackets. () If I do this (), I use the phenomenological
epoch, which completely bars me from using any judgement that concerns spatio-temporal
existence. (Ideen I, 32, pp. 99-100). Beyond every act of judgment, and free of it all,
Husserl therefore unveils a world of pure facts for consciousness.
In a very similar way, Nishida constantly privileges facts over judgments. If
experience is knowledge of facts just as they are, it is by getting rid of any kind of
judgment: when one makes judgment about it, it ceases to be a pure experience (Inquiry,
p. 4). In Part II, chapter 1 (The Starting point of the inquiry), Nishida clearly exposes his own
procedure of reduction: we must discard all artificial assumptions, doubt whatever can be
doubted, and proceed on the basis of direct and indubitable knowledge. By resorting to the
procedure of radical, universal and hyperbolic doubt, he places himself in the posterity of
Descartes. And, just as Descartes, he sees contents of consciousness as strictly indubitable:
What is the knowledge that we cannot even begin to doubt? It is knowledge of facts in our
intuitive experience, knowledge of phenomena of consciousness (Inquiry, p. 39). Of course,
Nishida would surely deny to what has been thus discovered the right to be called a thing

5 Numbers refer to the pages in the English edition : Ideas. General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, transl.
by W. R. BOYCE GIBSON (London: Collier Macmillan, 1962).

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which thinks6, for such an assumption would already involve a kind of judgment. It is still
true, however, that the activity of the ego that Descartes reaches through self-perception is
composed of diverse phenomena of consciousness which belong to pure experience.
Husserl, when exposing the method of disconnection and bracketing permitting a radical
alteration of the natural thesis, will also refer to Descartes. Now, in the context of the Ideen,
this reference does not solely make possible a neutralization of any kind of judgment, it is,
furthermore, and in a far more radical way, a suspension of the natural thesis itself7. Even on
this level, it is possible to find a correspondence with Nishidas purpose. What stands for the
natural thesis in the Inquiry are the correlative spheres of subject and object. According to
Nishida, Cartesian doubt, if pursued until its ultimate end, leads to a neutralization of the
subject-object relation. Nishida never claimed that there were no objects at all, he neither
considered the object as produced in the judgment: what remains then once judgments have
been abolished if not the natural thesis, that is, the belief in a world of objects posited in front
of a subject? The Nishidian reduction goes as far as the Husserlian epoch in as much as it is
led to the conclusion that, on a primary level, there are no such things to be experienced as
subjects and objects.
II Forgetting meaning?
Relying on pure experience thus conceived as the vanishing point at which every
judgment on objects, and even objects themselves are obliterated, Nishida consequently
refuses to see in it any sort of meaning: A truly pure experience has no meaning whatsoever;
it is simply a present consciousness of facts just as they are. (Inquiry, p. 4). The reality
obtained by the reduction is a mental phenomenon without any meaning. This is a rigorous
result of pure experience thought as completely unified (Inquiry, p. 4). Indeed, meaning as
such always includes a discrepancy between two non-homogeneous terms: the meaning of a
word is the thing or reality it is pointing at, the meaning of an action refers to its goal, etc. In
all these cases, word and reality, action and its goal are distinct entities, and meaning is
precisely what is filling or bridging this gap between the signifier and the signified. If there is
no such gap, as in the case of pure experience, all meaning disappears for the reason that there
is no room for it. What is left of Nishidas phenomenological gaze is a pure presence devoid
of meaning. And, in fact, the increasing use of the word present in the first pages of the
Inquiry rests on a radical disqualification of meaning as a component of experience in its
reduced state, which itself consists in present consciousness (Inquiry, p. 4). In this regard,
Nishida goes further than Husserl ever did in what Derrida, in his essay of 1967 Voice and

6 Cf. Descartes, Meditations, II : But what then am I? A thing which thinks. What is a thing which thinks? It is
a thing which doubts, understands,[conceives], affirms, denies, wills, refuses, which also imagines and feels.
7 Cf. Ideas, 31, p. 96-97 : The General Thesis according to which the real world about me is at all times
known not merely in a general way as something apprehended, but as a fact-world that has its being out there,
does not consist of course in an act proper, in an articulated judgment about existence. () We can treat the
potential and unexpressed thesis exactly as we do the thesis of the explicit judgment. A procedure of this sort,
possible at any time, is, for instance, the attempt to doubt everything which Descartes, with an entirely different
end in view, with the purpose of setting an absolutely indubitable sphere of Being, undertook to carry through.

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Phenomenon, used to condemn as a metaphysics of presence that is, the unquestioned
thesis that all phenomenon pertaining to meaning leans on an assumption of presence as life
(Lebendigkeit) or, even better, living present (lebendige Gegenwart).
However, if Derridas critique of Husserl is convincing when it concerns the concept
of sign and its cognates (Sinn, Bedeutung, Zeichen, Ausdruck, Anzeichen) as they appear in
the first Logical investigation, it becomes much more problematic when addressing the notion
of meaning (Sinn) as used in Ideen I, where Husserl speaks of meaning without any reference
to signs (Zeichen) or expressions (Ausdrcke). I shall not engage here in a debate with Derrida.
From this point on, all my effort tends to show that meaning is conceived by Husserl as a
formal condition of presence itself. Through the practice of epoch, and as its term, it is not
only presence that is reached, but presence as meaning. The flow of experience
(Erlebnisstrom) (Ideen, 78, p. 202) or the stream of cogitations (Cartesian Meditations,
II, 14, p. 30) obtained as a result of the phenomenological reduction is only to some extent
comparable to the stream of thought, stream of experience or cogitations, stream of
personal conscious life that Nishida found in the philosophy of James, or to Stouts
perceptual train, both terminologies he used for his own purpose. In reality, for Husserl,
every Erlebniss accessible to the phenomenologist, every single fact of conscious life is
constituted. If Husserl and Nishida both consider original facts of consciousness as
singular moments of an immanent presence, their respective comprehension of what is to be
understood as a fact differ dramatically. According to Husserl, () the ontic necessity of
the actual present experiencing () is the necessity of a fact (Faktum); it is called necessity
because an essential (eidetische) law is involved in the fact, and here indeed in its existence as
such (Ideen I, 46, p. 131). Every fact of consciousness is thus bonded to an eidetic structure
by the means of which it is present to consciousness. As a consequence, there are no pure
facts or experiences if by pure we understand the mode of being of what is considered
independently of its each time specific mode of presentation to consciousness. Every
Erlebniss presents us with a specific constitution its essence, or eidos and it is precisely
the task of phenomenology to describe and elucidate these essences as pure modes of
givenness (Gegebenheit). All conscious fact is given, but it is given according to the
intentional activity of consciousness in as much as it is a meaning-giving consciousness
(sinngebendes Bewusstsein, Ideen, 55, p. 153 our translation). By asserting that any
Erlebniss whatsoever any fact of consciousness is constituted, Husserl gets to the
formulation of one of the most profound thesis of phenomenology: All real unities are
unities of meaning (Einheiten des Sinnes) (Ideen, 55, p. 152). If, as Husserl had already
put it in 1907 (The Idea of Phenomenology, Hua. II, 50, 30-32 our translation), the
givenness of a reduced phenomenon (die Gegebenheit eines reduzierten Phnomens) in
general is an absolute and indubitable one, there is no givenness (Gegebenheit) to be found
which would not be in the same time a giving of meaning (Sinngebung) (Ideen, 55, p.
152). Because every present (Gegenwart) consists in a presentation (Gegenwrtigung)
(Ideen, 99) pertaining to the intentional activity of consciousness operating by means of its

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own essences (Wesen, eidos), every fact, every phenomenon of consciousness is already, as
such, the bearer of a particular meaning.
Husserls phenomenological reduction conduces to see every content of
consciousness as pure meaning pure, because constituted entirely a priori with its own
eidetic features. The German philosopher is ceaselessly emphasizing this meaningful
dimension of phenomena. Let us pick up one evocative formula among many others. In Ideen,
129, Husserl says: We start from the ordinary equivocal phrase: the content of
consciousness. Under content we understand the meaning of which we say that in it or
through it consciousness refers to an objective as its own. () Every noema has a content,
namely, its meaning, and is related through it to its object (p. 333). Phenomenological
reduction is a reduction to meaning. Would it be possible that his own investigations left
Nishida unaware of the meaning content of conscious phenomena? If one considers the first
pages of his Inquiry, it seems to be so. Whereas, as we just saw, Husserls conception of
presence is always underpinned by its determination in terms of meaning, Nishida contrasts
presence and meaning as two different levels of experience, reserving only for the former the
qualification of pure. Keeping in mind the equivalence between pure experience and
present experience as expressed in the first chapter of the Inquiry, the following lines unfold
all their strength: When a representation is detached from the unity realized in the present
and related to some other consciousness a memory, for instance? it is no longer present
experience, for it has become meaning (Inquiry, p. 7). Such an assessment requires further
explanation. First of all, Nishida speaks here of a representation, which is already an
abstract stage of the content of consciousness: in pure experience, there are no
representations at all but just facts. This means that a representation is necessarily a piece
detached from experience, conceived as pure conscious content in the present.
Representation emerges when one compares, juxtaposes or, more generally, relates the
present content to some other. This is surely also a kind of consciousness we could call it
intellectual but it has lost its purity because of the interference of one or several nonpresent states of consciousness. The present content thus modified by this intrusion is
endowed with additional features. To speak properly, this supplement is not exactly added to
the original content, which already comprised it as a part of its intimate unity. Nishida says
that it is derived (Inquiry, p. 8) or brought about (, okoru) from it. Be this as it
may, in the state of pure experience, the present content is given as a pure fact without any
connection to some other data and, consequently, with no meaning at all. For instance, when I
hear a sound, the pure experience of the sound would be the fact of the sound as it occurs, the
pure event of the sound as such. At the moment I identify it as the sound of this or that, of a
bell or of a bird, I immediately abandon the reign of pure experience. What happened? I
compared this sound to those I have heard in the past, I added to the sound the idea of the bell
and identified it according to its source. I can now name it and say I hear the bell (or the
bird). The pure hearing has been replaced or, at least, affected by the notion of its nature
or of its cause. It has become an object endowed with a proper meaning. In order to become a
meaning, a conscious content, requires memories or notions, or even more complex

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procedures of identification. This is the reason why Nishida always relates meaning to
judgment: Meanings or judgments derive from the connection of a present consciousness to
past consciousness (Inquiry, p. 9). When this intrusion of the past into the present occurs,
pure experience has already been lost. Nishidas way of reduction results in the promotion of
a temporal concept of meaning thought as a disjunction of the present as found in pure
experience. Nishidas concept of meaning is nothing but a rupture of the present in its
primary form, and is therefore bondde to the concept of time. Meaning and time share the
same place of emergence (cf. p. 60-61).
This may appear as a new common ground with Husserl. In his famous lessons On the
phenomenology of the consciousness of internal time, had not Husserl spoken of a streaming
living present? The question of time would of course require further elaboration beyond the
scope of this paper, but let it be said only on that matter that, for Husserl, even the present is
intentionally constituted (through the acts of retention and protension) and would in no
case be treated by him as a pure given free of any intentional meaning, of any Sinngebung.
From that standpoint, Nishidas concept of meaning as a break of the present under the action
of judgment would lean on a somehow nave comprehension of the present. If such an
hypothesis turns out to be true, Nishidas concept of meaning would collapse along with its
conceptualization of the present. By forgetting meaning in his preliminary account concerning
pure experience, Nishida could not escape from the pitfall of an intuition that fails to be an
intuition of essences.
III Founding meaning
It is true that where Nishida sees no meaning at all, Husserl would have been
prompted to isolate a full variety of essences, that is: of meanings. The examples presented in
this first chapter of the Inquiry are eloquent enough. The climbers determined ascent of a
cliff and the musicians performance of a piece that has been mastered through practice
already involve many sorts of intentionality such as the experience of time, the conscience of
an effort or, on the contrary, of a specific kind of joyful easiness, the floating but determinate
representation of a goal (the top of the cliff, the end of the piece of music), and so on. Insofar
as Nishida does not see in such cases any kind of meaning, it must be asked if that which
would be considered under Husserlian premises as an unforgivable mistake due to a
superficial spirit is imputable to the Japanese thinker. My answer to this delicate question will
be that Nishida did not want to see meaning as a proper term of the reduction as he
experienced it. One may well conclude that Nishida has a somewhat shallow comprehension
of phenomena, but it would not do justice to his unique attempt at unveiling a field of
consciousness where meaning has no place. There is indeed another way to apprehend
Nishidas pathway towards pure experience. I assume that it in no case constitutes a failure in
seizing the true term of the reduction as phenomenology will promote it, but that the Inquiry
proposes as its starting point something that is located beyond what the Husserlian epoch
could ever reach.

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The key to the comprehension of Nishidas purpose lies in the seminal concept of
unity or unification that I have so far intentionally neglected to consider. It is present from the
very beginning of the book: When one directly experiences ones own state of consciousness,
there is not yet a subject and an object, and knowing and its object are completely unified.
This is the most refined type of experience (Inquiry, p. 4). Or, again: The directness and
purity of pure experience derive not from the experiences being simple, unanalyzable, or
instantaneous, but from the strict unity of concrete consciousness (Inquiry, p. 6). And,
finally: what makes an experience pure is its unity, not its kind (Inquiry, p. 7). If one
connects this thesis with the one that declares that pure experience is an intuition of facts just
as they are and that it is devoid of meaning (Inquiry, p. 8), one obtains the philosophical
postulate that unification does not require the mediation of meaning in order to achieve its
task. Nishida refuses to consider unity as being primarily a meaningful unity and this is a
genuine philosophical decision, implementing what Bergson would call a philosophical
intuition8, on the basis of which proceeds every philosopher. Any reader of Nishida has to
take this intuition as it is: a starting point, without judging it, neither accepting it nor refusing
it. The only question is to know how far this hypothesis will lead the philosopher, and if he
will by this means succeed in his elucidation of the true nature of reality.
With respect to this original intuition or initial thesis, and despite a similar usage of the
reduction9, Husserls position takes place at the complete opposite end of the philosophical
spectrum. We have seen that every content of consciousness supposes the intentional act of a
meaning-giving consciousness. It is now possible to take a step further: for Husserl, any unity
of a single conscious content originates from this intentional constitution by way of meaning.
Three passages in the Ideen, at least, testify to such a correlation between unity and meaning.
At 84, Husserl identifies unification and intentionality: It is intentionality which
characterizes consciousness in the pregnant sense of the term, and justifies us in describing
the whole stream of experience as at once a stream of consciousness and unity of one
consciousness (Ideen, 84, p. 222). And to complete it, 85 adds that intentional
experiences are there as unities through the bestowal of meaning (used here in a very wide
sense) (Ideen, 84, p. 227). But 131 is even more relevant, because it sketches the form of
the intentional object as a pure unity of meaning in the noema: Thus in every noema there
lies as point of unification a pure objective something (). The meaning (Sinn) () is this
noematic object in its modal setting (dieser noematische Gegenstand im Wie). () Through
the bearer of meaning, which (as an empty X) belongs to meaning (), not only has every
meaning (Sinn) its object, but different meanings refer to the same object, just in so far as
they can be organized into unities of meaning, in which the determinable Xs of the united

8 Cf. H. BERGSON, Lintuition philosophique , in La pense et le mouvant (Paris: PUF, 2009), 120: Nest-il
pas visible que la premire dmarche du philosophe, alors que sa pense est encore mal assure et quil ny a rien
de dfinitif dans sa doctrine, est de rejeter certaines choses dfinitivement ?
9 Even if it is obvious, as T. OGAWA puts it, that Nishida lacks the consciously formed methodology, such as
is found in Husserls phenomenological reduction. (The Kyoto School of Philosophy and Phenomenology, in
Y. NITTA & H. TATEMATSU (Eds.), Japanese Phenomenology, op. cit., p. 219).

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meanings coincide with one another and with the X of the total meaning of the unity of
meaning under consideration (Ideen, 131, p. 339). One may now express the
philosophical quintessence of these technical sentences in more lapidary terms: where there is
unity, there is meaning; and unity is nothing other than what is engendered by a meaninggiving intentionality. On the contrary, Nishida conceives meaning as a rupture of the primary
unified content of consciousness, thus giving birth to unities of a lower kind. Transposed into
Husserlian terminology, one could this time state Nishidas problem as follows: how is the
true nature of consciousness to be conceived in order to ensure a unification absolutely free of
any sort of meaning that is to say, without the slightest noetico-noematic correlation?
Moreover, is it not that such noetico-noematic correlations themselves require, to be effective,
some deeper unity of consciousness? Along with the voluntarists, Nishida calls will this
fundamental form of consciousness (Inquiry, p. 8): apart from this unifying activity, there
is no distinctive phenomenon called the will. In fact, the zenith of this unifying activity is the
will (Ibid.). By situating the unity of consciousness in the will rather than in the intentional
life of the ego, Nishida frees himself from the sphere of objects, and from objectivity in
general. So doing, he radically breaks through the Husserlian conceptual frame, unleashing
experience and anticipating the critiques that later phenomenologists Heidegger, but also
Merleau-Ponty, and moreover Michel Henry with his material phenomenology will soon
address to the father of their own discipline.
As a result, what seemed at first sight to reveal a phenomenological weakness turns
out to be a major contribution to the philosophical problem of consciousness and to that of
experience. To remain on a phenomenological standpoint, let us say that Nishida makes
possible a return to the very conditions of phenomenality. Husserls emphasis on the
constitutive activity of consciousness has a cost. What is left aside are the sensory contents of
reduced experience themselves, all these data of color, touch, sound, which we shall not
confuse with the appearing phases of things, their color quality, their roughness, and so forth,
which rather exhibit themselves experientially through their means (); sensile impressions
of pleasure, pain, tickling, etc. and also the sensile phases of the sphere of impulses (Ideen,
85, p. 226). For all of them, regarding their proper mode of givenness, Husserl made no
room in its grandiose construction. As soon as he has mentioned them, he is at a loss to know
how to think them and finally encompasses them altogether in a more general sphere of
intentional meanings: Such concrete data of experience are to be found as components in
concrete experiences of a more comprehensive kind which as wholes are intentional, and
indeed so that over those sensile phases lies as it were an animating, meaning-bestowing
(Sinngebende) stratum (or one with which the bestowal of meaning (Sinngebung) is
essentially bound up) a stratum through whose agency, out of the sensile-element, which
contains in itself nothing intentional, the intentional experience takes form and shape (Ideen,
85, pp. 226-227). On a methodological ground, naturally, pure hyletics finds its proper
place in subordination to the phenomenology of transcendental consciousness (); and from
the functional viewpoint, it wins significance from the fact that it furnishes a woof that can

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enter into intentional formations (Ideen, 86, p. 233). Enclosed in the field of intentional
meanings that only, according to the phenomenology of the Ideen, can present it to
consciousness as a phenomenon, the white of this paper is always seen by Husserl as the white
of this paper. There are no sensory data apart from intentional life. But what Nishida has been
seeking from the very first lines of the Inquiry is precisely to accede to the claims of this
sensible content as such: The moment of seeing a color or hearing a sound, for example, is
prior not only to the thought that the color or sound is the activity of an external object or that
one is sensing it, but also to the judgment of what color or sound it might be (Inquiry, p. 3).
For that reason, he had to discard meaning, and this bracketing of meaning itself might well
be his most profound and authentic phenomenological move.
Meaning, therefore, is always derived (Inquiry, p. 15) analytically10 from a more
fundamental kind of consciousness conceived as a pure feeling (Inquiry, p. 4) of the present.
This specific consciousness might be called either pure experience, will or feeling 11
it is of lesser importance here: because Nishidas work in its entirety can be read as the
ceaseless effort to find the right term or concept capable to express it fully and faithfully.

With his concept of pure experience, Nishida unveiled the primary immediacy of
consciousness as empty of meaning. Thus, he did not only make possible an approach of
phenomena which Husserlian phenomenology will soon fail to take into consideration, but he
also provided materials for a foundation of meaning. It would be too simple to just repeat after
him that pure experience is devoid of meaning; one has to consider it above all as the
unifying and sensitive nucleus from which unfolds a true genesis of meaning: Pure
experience and the meanings or judgments it generates manifest two sides of consciousness:
they are different facets of one and the same thing (Inquiry, p. 10). If we take a look back on
the pages we just read today, and which actually give its impetus to the whole book, it will
appear that Nishidas main discovery lies in this generation of meaning springing from
meaningless thus opening a new way to understand human selfs intertwinement with
phenomena.


10 Cf. NISHIDA Kitar, Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness, op. cit., 43: The judgment This thing is
black arises from the analysis of a synthetic totality which is first given. The content black which is its
predicate is not an isolated, fixed concept standing outside the subject, but is the constructive power of
immediate experience (). It has to be noted that Nishida, a few ligns below, mistakes the true nature of
Husserlian essence which is always intentional when he he assimilates it to its own concept of color,
conceived as pure immediate content of consciousness: This thing is black is constituted by the force of the
content black itself, which imposes itself as a Husserlian essence.
11 Cf. NISHIDA Kitar, Affective Feeling, transl. by D. DILWORTH & V. H. VIGLIELMO of Problems of
Consciousness, Chap. 3, Section 3 (NKZ, vol. 3, 61 sq.), in Y. NITTA & H. TATEMATSU (Eds.), Japanese
Phenomenology, op. cit., 223-247. A phenomenon of consciousness cannot be a mere compound; it must be a
unity. The reality of a phenomenon of consciousness lies not in its elements but in its unity. () Feeling is the
fundamental unity, in which we discriminate an indefinite number of qualitative differences. () The content of
each phenomenon of consciousness is an act. The highest a priori which unifies these acts is personal unity, the
content of which is precisely that of feeling. (224-225).

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