Can it be otherwise? Could my positive experience with the Japanese somehow relate to what Stephen Toulmin calls "the communication on the non-national levels", labeled by him the true feature of the third phase of Modernity? How are we to understand his call "to disperse authority and adapt it ¼ to the needs of local areas and communities and ¼ to wider transnational functions"1  ? In what way can we abandon the conceptions of the order of society and nature, "dominated by the Newtonian image of massive power, exerted by sovereign agency through the operation of central force"2 ? These are the urgent questions to be answered not only by Lithuania’s intellectuals and politicians, but by the major part of its population which has emerged from nothingness to the world community ten years ago and has to localize itself in it in a meaningful way. These are also issues at stake for everyone who dares "to write on philosophy" at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Engaging in a comparative enterprise, I believe, can be of some help on the way to the search of the solutions.

However, along with scientistic positivism there existed a different philosophy in the West itself. Nishida Kitarô3 , frequently called "the first Japanese philosopher", was among those Japanese intellectuals who welcomed the move from rational to experiential justification in philosophy, initiated by James and Husserl. This tendency Nishida felt related to his own, Zen Buddhist background. As contemporary Japanese philosopher Kazashi Nobuo puts it, "James ¼ transformed the very design of modern Western philosophy in such a way as to, without knowing it, open its stage to the Eastern philosophical tradition"4 . There are also numerous accounts of Husserlian philosophy as bearing strong similarities to Zen Buddhism.

Western philosophy with its iron-clad paradigms of world order has been dominated by rigorous concepts, which have communicated themselves into Western intellectual habits, and by the expectation of total and adequate intellectual possession of world and self that seems to haunt its pursuit. In this situation both Nishida and Merleau-Ponty aim at "opening up of the concept without destroying it" and at confirming that "unity of the human spirit"5  can serve as a basis for the dialogue between Western and Eastern philosophy. My concern here is to show how this radical revision of Western philosophy can be best understood by treating it as an emergence of the new paradigm of order.

The thought of such contemporary philosophers as Husserl, Whitehead, James, Nishida and Merleau-Ponty is profoundly influenced by the changes in contemporary science at the same time in many ways anticipating the scientific ideas to come. "Going to the truth of things," says Nishida, "is neither to conform to traditions in a conventional manner nor to be guided by subjective feelings. It necessarily includes the scientific spirit"6 . Nishida asserts such an approach to be inherent in Japanese culture long before its contacts with the West. In the passages to follow I will try to demonstrate how the new paradigm of order emerges with striking similarity in the early writings of Nishida and Merleau-Ponty, philosophers free of each others influence.

Nishida’s "cosmological project" could perhaps be best called a search for the logic of the East as different from that of the West and an attempt to formulate it in the language that would be acceptable in the western philosophical tradition. Merleau-Ponty had the task of fighting back the reductionist attitudes and la pensée objective of, what he later called "small rationalism" – the scientific positivist ideology of the end of the 19th and the turn of the 20th century that claimed to be able to give the scientific explanations to all the spheres of humanity and also the intellectualism of the philosophers like Brunschvicg and Lachelier, both strongly influenced by Kant7 . With the collapse of the influence of the absolute idealism of Hegel, the philosophical scene witnessed the opposition between the philosophy of positivism and empiricism and their rivals - Lebens-Philosophie and existential philosophy. Both Nishida and Merleau-Ponty were in the situation of the search for a third alternative. It had to be neither positivist science nor Bergsonian vitalism. For Nishida it had to be also the search for a way to synthesize the Eastern and the Western thinking in such a way that the Eastern values were preserved, while at the same time the progressive march of "Western techniques" was justified and properly contextualized. Nishida had a basically favorable view of modernity while rejecting its positivistic self-understanding8 . Merleau-Ponty had faced the need to establish his position between or opposed to the French intellectualism and scientific psychology of his day, represented particularly by "stimulus-response" and "Gestalt" schools. The answer for both early Nishida and early Merleau-Ponty seemed to lie in the realm of experience that is direct for us.

The ways the two thinkers have arrived at the intuition that experience is the primary source of philosophy must have been totally different. Nishida, at the time when he was writing his first independent philosophical work An Inquiry Into the Good (1911), was a practicing Zen Buddhist. It is almost beyond any doubt that Zen meditation provided him with the intuition of "pure experience" as the vantage point for reflections on reality. Readings of William James must have supplied him with the language he could use as an instrument for an attempt to translate his experiences into verbal form close to the Western philosophical discourse though, as we will see later, notable differences exist between James and Nishida. What for Nishida was Zen Buddhism, for Merleau-Ponty must have been the writings of Edmund Husserl. Though he was also influenced by such thinkers as Max Scheler, Jean Wahl, and Gabriel Marcel, the doalogue with Husserl was of profound importance to Merleau-Ponty throughout his career. Merleau-Ponty has himself stated his philosophy to be the prolongation of the Husserlian project, especially the later ideas of the German thinker usually referred to as Lebensphilosophie,. However, both Nishida and Merleau-Ponty can be considered as having followed Husserl’s call "Zu den Sachen Selbst", "to the things themselves"9 .

The word for "experience" (keiken), as so many other words, became a philosophical concept in Japan rather late, at the end of the nineteenth century10 . Later it came to be employed as a conceptual bridge between modern Western thought and the Japanese (especially Buddhist) tradition. The most profound and systematic treatment of experience in modern Japan owes a great deal to Nishida: "pure experience" (junsui keiken) was to become a grounding notion of Nishida’s early philosophy thus marking the beginning of original philosophy in Japan. In the preface to his first work An Inquiry into the Good (Zen no kenkyu) Nishida calls "pure experience" "the foundation of my thought" and confesses his long-time wish "to explain all things on the basis of pure experience as the sole reality"11 . The first chapter of the book is dedicated to and starts with the explication of the concept:

by pure I am referring to the state of experience just as it is without the least addition of deliberative discrimination. 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 the color or the sound might be. In this regard pure experience is identical with direct experience. When one directly experiences one’s own state of consciousness, there is not yet a subject or an object, and knowing and its object are completely unified. This is the most refined type of experience12 .

 

It was characteristic for Nishida to overview and correct his philosophical views many times so that they have undergone considerable changes later on, but the notion of pure experience was not to lose its importance throughout his whole life. Twenty-five years after An Inquiry into the Good was first published Nishida wrote in the preface to its third edition: "The world of action-intuition – the world of poiesis – is none other than the world of pure experience"13 .

In quite similar fashion with the other philosophies "of radical doubt", for instance, those of Descartes, Kant, or Husserl, Nishida aimed at rethinking philosophy systematically himself and thus answering the question of how we are to understand True Reality. The answer is to become a grounding principle for Nishida’s new philosophical system: "we must discard all artificial assumptions," writes Nishida, "doubt whatever can be doubted, and proceed on the basis of direct and indubitable knowledge"14 . In contrast with Descartes who arrives at certainty when he discovers the evidence of ego as the subject of reflection and who thus makes cogito ergo sum the first principle of his philosophy, Nishida finds certainty in a fundamentally different way. There is no deceitful Demiurge for Nishida:

From the perspective of direct knowledge that is free from all assumptions, reality consists only of phenomena of our consciousness, namely the facts of direct experience. Any other notion of reality is simply an assumption generated by the demands of thinking. ¼ Assumptions regarding such a reality are abstract concepts formulated so that thinking can systematically organize the facts of direct experience15 .

 

So, the systematic and the strict order is possible in thinking only. To quote Ueda Shizuteru, contemporary representative of the Kyto school of philosophy founded by Nishida, here "certainty is found in that which is given us by breaking through reflection in such a manner as would overwhelm reflective thinking that doubts thoroughly.[¼] (Generally speaking, experience is at once the knowledge of experience and the fact of experience.) This being so, the knower and the known are one from the very start in the ‘fact of direct experience’ and as ‘direct experience’"16 . This direct knowledge of experience is a primitive fact, which is a fundamental basis of all Nishida’s thinking. He is searching for it by "methodically doubting", though this method is overwhelmed by direct experience. Thus this source is existing in a place not to be reached by reflection, it is a pre-reflective and pre-dichotomical state.

This is the assumption that Merleau-Ponty makes the starting point of his own philosophy. Nishida is well aware of the classical treatment of perception as passive and thinking as active. For Nishida pure experience as "direct knowledge" is an active and dynamic state, for this experience is not some passive phenomenon in our consciousness but a phenomenon as our consciousness, a process rather than a thing. In this way, the concept of time as duration of pure experience in Nishida’s philosophy is similar to Edmund Husserl and his "inner perception of time" (inneren Zeitbewusstzein)17 . Time in pure experience can in no way be treated as the abstract chronos of the natural sciences but only as kairotic, inner perception of time as duration. "A truly pure experience has no meaning whatsoever; it is simply a present consciousness of facts just as they are" 18 .

So pure experience is the way of being firmly rooted in the present moment, but different from thinking of the present moment; as soon as we start thinking about the present moment, it is no longer present. Referring to Jamesian definition of the present consciousness Nishida states that "for a present as a fact of consciousness there must be some temporal duration"19 . This temporal duration can not be perceived in any other way than as some inner dynamism, some flow, for otherwise it gets objectified and will be cast away into the chronological scale. Time is called by Nishida "nothing more than a form that orders the content of our experience," but this is not enough, because "the content of consciousness must first be able to be joined, be united, and become one in order for the idea of time to arise."20  One of the most important aspects of pure experience is its being an important base for a non-dichotomic, dialectical thinking that Nishida will develop in his future works.

It is usually thought that subject and object are realities that can exist independently of each other and that phenomena of consciousness arise through their activity, which leads to the idea that there are two realities: mind and matter. This is a total mistake. The notions of subject and object derive from two different ways of looking at a single fact, as does the distinction between mind and matter. But these dichotomies are not inherent in the fact itself21 .

 

 

[¼] the so-called objective world does not come into existence apart from our subjectivity, for the unifying power of the objective world and that of the subjective consciousness are identical; the objective world and consciousness are established according to the same principle. For this reason we can understand the fundamental principle constitutive of the universe by means of the principle within the self. If the world were something different from the unity of our consciousness, we could never make contact with it. The world we can know and understand is established by a unifying power identical to that of our consciousness22 .

 

In the chapter called "Nature" Nishida radically rejects the idea of a "purely objective nature"23 . In a quite similar fashion to the Lebenswelt phenomenology asserting the inescapability of the "horizon" of experience, he calls the conception of nature without a subjective aspect in it "the most abstract and most removed from a true state of reality"24 . If the unifying activity of consciousness is removed from concrete reality, what remains is "nature" that is "moved from without according to the law of necessity, and it cannot function spontaneously from within."25  The linkage of natural phenomena, if the subjective aspect of the consciousness observing them is erased, is an accidental unity in time and space. Merleau-Ponty asserts a similar thing in The Structure of Behavior, especially in the chapter , "Structure in Physics", to which we will return later.

The consciousness of a newborn infant is most likely a chaotic unity in which even a distinction between light and darkness is unclear. From this condition myriad states of consciousness develop through differentiation. Even so, no matter how finely differentiated those states may be, at no time do we lose the fundamentally systematic form (katachi) of the consciousness. Concrete consciousness that is direct to us always appears in this form.[¼] Like any organic entity, a system of consciousness manifests its wholeness through the orderly, differentiated development of a certain unifying reality (tõitsuteki arumono)"(italics mine)26.

 

It is interesting to compare Nishida and James here. For James his own philosophy is "a mosaic philosophy" in which "the pieces are held together by their own bedding" instead of, as David Dilworth puts it, the connections being guaranteed by Substances, transcendental Egos, or Absolutes27. Whereas James says that his "description of things [¼] starts with the parts and makes of the whole a being of a second order," For Nishida "What James considers to be the relation between experience and experience seems somewhat external." In his own opinion, "the way in which experience develops might not be so much a gradual combination of fragmental elements as something like a gradual differentiation / unfolding of the one"28.

However, one of the most important questions remains unanswered: Is the state of pure experience a nebulous, nondiscriminating condition similar to that of an animal or has it something to do with the "more human" realm of meanings and judgements? Such thinkers as Wilhelm von Humboldt or Ernst Cassirer maintained that words were the only key to reality (which is, according to them, totally symbolic). In a quite different manner Nishida asserts that "meanings and judgements derive from distinctions in the experience itself" and that "these distinctions are not imparted by the meanings or judgements: experience always includes an aspect of discrimination"29. 30 

Further he is even more radical: "Meaning or judgement [¼] does not add anything new to experience."31  They mark the moment of disunity in the experiencing consciousness: when the strict unity of pure experience is broken "and a present consciousness enters into a relation with other consciousness it generates meanings and judgements"32 . The latter aspect notwithstanding, the consciousness never loses its profoundly systematic character; it is implicit in the nature of consciousness to develop in such a systematic manner. Nishida calls this "the great network of consciousness" which is the condition for meanings and judgements to arise as the connection between the present consciousness and "other consciousness" – the previous one. This process of definition of the position of the present consciousness within the network of consciousness generates meaning: "meaning is determined by the system to which consciousness belongs. Identical consciousness yields different meanings by virtue of the different systems in which they participate." The Great Network of Consciousness varies in degree of unity. According to Nishida’s observation, "there is neither completely unified consciousness nor completely disunified consciousness"33 . However, there is a correspondence between the sphere of judgements and the sphere of pure experience. When a judgement is refined and "its unity has become strict, the judgement assumes the form of pure experience."34  Nishida’s example here, in a quite similar fashion with Merleau-Ponty, is a person who matures in an art: for him "that which at first was conscious becomes unconscious"35 . A contemporary example could be a driver and his/her driving experience. Further Nishida calls the most unified state of consciousness "intellectual intuition." It can be observed not only in fine arts, "but in all our disciplined activity"36 .

Consciousness, as stated earlier, is fundamentally a single system; its nature is to develop and complete itself. In the course of its development various conflicts and contradictions crop up in the system, and out of this emerges reflective thinking. But when viewed from a different angle, that which is contradictory and conflicted is the beginning of a still greater systematic development; it is the incomplete state of the greater unity. In both conduct and knowledge, for example, when our experience becomes complex and various associations arise to disturb the natural course of experience, we become reflective. Behind this contradiction and conflict is a possible unity37.

 

The systematic character of consciousness is reported by Nishida throughout all of his first work. What is the conclusion to which it would seemingly lead? A first important conclusion concerns the problem of truth (shinjitsu). The relationship of pure experience with truth helps us to understand better his concept of order as well. Truth is again linked by Nishida with unity. "There are various arguments about what truth is, but I think," writes Nishida, "truth is that which comes closest to the most concrete facts of experience."38  This statement sounds almost identical with the statements of great Indian Buddhist logicians, Dignâga or Dharmakîrti39 , though in the early stage of his creative career Nishida hardly refers to Asian philosophical traditions.

Truth has nothing to do with abstract commonality, but is something abstracted and constructed out of the facts of pure experience, and its true unity lies in direct facts. Therefore, "Perfect truth pertains to the individual person and is actual." That is why "it cannot be expressed in words [¼]"40 . Even in such abstract disciplines as mathematics, the foundational principles lie in our intuition, in direct experience. Thus the standard of truth is not some external fact, but lies in the state of pure experience. However, humans are not usually satisfied with just direct experience – they demand a universal system of consciousness that transcends the individual person. These demands are called by Nishida "demands of reason." He is reluctant to see the laws of reason and the tendency of the will as completely different or even contradictory. "[¼] when we consider them carefully," says Nishida, "we see that they share the same foundation. The unifying activity of the will functions at the base of all reason and laws"41 . This unifying activity, "the intuitive principles at the base of reason," are unexplainable, because "to explain is to be able to include other things in a single system. That which is the very nucleus of a unity cannot be explained; thus it is blind"42 .

Intuition is proclaimed by Nishida a conditio sine qua non for any order as it lies at the base of all relations. But, even when the act of pure experience is over, and reason is at work in search of a greater unity, such an activity of reason is possible only with some basic intuition of unity beneath it: "However far and wide we extend our thought, we cannot go beyond basic intuition, for thought is established upon it"43 . This intuition is "the power of thinking, not simply the static form of thought"44 . This point is crucial for understanding the phenomenon of "order" itself or, to be more precise, the possibility of any order. Such a view, though seemingly lacking in exactitude, is somewhat closer to reality (as supported by contemporary investigations in psychology) than the Kantian table of categories with a fixed and limited number of a priori unifying agents behind perception.45 

That consciousness must be someone’s consciousness simply means that consciousness must have a unity. The idea that there must be a possessor of consciousness above and beyond this unity is an arbitrary assumption. The activity of this unity – apperception – is a matter of similar ideas and feelings constituting a central hub and as such unifying consciousness. From the standpoint of pure experience, this unity of consciousness (ishiki no tõitsu) never entails absolute distinctions between itself and other such unities of consciousness. If we acknowledge that my consciousness of yesterday and today are independent and at the same time one consciousness in that they belong to the same system, then we recognize the same relationship between one’s own consciousness and that of others46 .

 

At the same time Nishida rejects the application of the law of causality47  to explain the phenomena of consciousness. "That a specific phenomenon accompanies another," says Nishida, "is the fundamental fact given directly to us, and contrary to expectation, the requirements of the law of causality are based on this fact"48 . He calls the law of causality "a habit of thinking that derives from changes in our phenomena of consciousness"49 . This tendency to abandon the law of causality when addressing the problem of consciousness matches well the overall tendency of contemporary science to abandon strict causal laws for statistical laws, less strict but closer to the workings of reality. To paraphrase the words of Hans Reichenbach, a scientist should say "I don’t know" where he or she does not know instead of providing a fluent but false theory – "a credible story", a sort of Platonian Timaeus. In a chapter dedicated to his concept of physics – "Nature" – Nishida, in a very Humean manner, points to the vacuous character of the causal explanation of natural phenomena: "The laws of nature, attained through the law of induction, are simply assumptions that because two types of phenomena arise in an unchanging succession, one is the cause of the other. No matter how far the natural sciences develop, we obtain no deeper explanation than this one, which becomes ever more detailed and encompassing"50 .

"primarily a coordinated harmony – or mean – between various activities. Our conscience is the activity of consciousness that harmonizes and unifies the activities. ¼ Simply saying that the good is the harmony or the mean, however, does not sufficiently clarify its meaning. What meaning do harmony and the mean have here? Consciousness is not an assemblage of sequential actions but a single unified system. Accordingly, harmony or the mean does not carry a quantitative connotation; it must signify a systematic order "51 .

 

The activity of reason is very important in this system – at the point of "articulation of non-differentiation"52  - however, it does not acquire its true meaning as "human reason" if it is conceived in the abstract, as a "device" that provides "merely a formal relationship with no content whatsoever."53  In other words, "pure reason" is a rather vacuous concept without an idealistic element in it – the indefinable volitional center, the intuitive unifying activity of the consciousness which guarantees the processual character of the reason. Instead of being a rigid mechanical structure (its function powered by "biochemical reactions in the brain") and conceived of in spatial terms only, this system always contains an unexplainable energetic residue – an intuitive element that is precisely the "unifying power" at the base of consciousness. This applies even in such seemingly rigid discipline as geometry; even "geometric axioms are not elucidated solely through the power of formal understanding; rather they derive from the character of space. The deductive inferences of geometry result from applying the laws of logic to a fundamental intuition of the character of space"54 .

Algis Mickunas comes very close to the above point when he states that "the studies of lived worlds manifest, at the very least the following principle: permanent compositions are describable in their essence while flux, also in its essence, cannot be delimited without residua. [¼] full description of flux would reduce it to a structure"55 . However, the inclusion of movement or flux into the description of the world is an extremely difficult task very often contradicting firmly established thinking habits. One of the well-known critics of Nishida’s philosophy and one of the earliest proponents of phenomenology in Japan56  – Tokuryû Yamanouchi – is right to observe that "Philosophers in quest of a system, however finely honed their idea of development and however the key role they give to movement, are still thinking of system in terms of spatial modes of completeness"57 . According to Yamanouchi’s point, any philosophy that seeks to be systematic is doomed to face the problem of "rigid order," that is - system without energetic residue that would guarantee its closeness to lived reality. This is a far cry from Cartesian obsession with "the enumerations so complete and the reviews so general that I should be certain of having omitted nothing"58 .

The motive of the open system - the "infinite openness" - comes more and more to the fore in Nishida’s later philosophy. This circumstance notwithstanding, An Inquiry into the Good remains a work of utmost importance as a first attempt in Japan to formulate an original philosophical system. In the words of Nishitani Keiji, this work "is an original tour de force that would have assured it a place among other great systems of thought even if Nishida had not developed further"59 . But this book was to be followed by more than thirty years of an extremely productive philosophical career with a major piece of writing appearing every year or so. In his later development Nishida did not give up his idea of unity, but only sought to overcome the difficulties posed by his "philosophy of pure experience," which was blamed as being too psychologistic and mystical, and to give his philosophy a more solid epistemological grounding. Some researchers assert that he "radically transformed" his religious philosophy "in the later stages of his career"60 , but one might rather say that the main themes of his philosophy remained very close to his initial intention throughout the whole of his life.

Against the background of Nishida’s early ideas, let us proceed to address the philosophy of another important thinker of the 20th century in whose theories the new paradigm of order emerges, the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Merleau-Ponty once said the philosophical problem of his time was "to explore the irrational and to integrate it with the enlarged reason." The philosophical development of Merleau-Ponty is remarkably consistent in trying to fulfill this task. "Officially," his first important work La structure du comportement (The Structure of Behavior), published in 1942, is treated as a point of departure, "the first step in Merleau-Ponty’ phenomenological program"61. From this very first philosophical book, Merleau-Ponty makes his point clear: his aim is to look for an alternative in trying to overcome the natural attitude, which he calls la pensée objective, or "objectivist thinking" – the same "object logic" that Nishida was also struggling with. In the introduction to The Structure of Behavior Merleau-Ponty describes the situation in which his work is to be carried out as follows:

among contemporary thinkers in France, there exist side by side a philosophy, on the one hand, which makes of every nature an objective unity constituted vis-à-vis consciousness and, on the other, sciences which treat the organism and consciousness as two orders of reality and, in their reciprocal relationship, as "effects" and "causes"62.

 

Given all the differences between the empiricist position of the natural sciences and the intellectualism of the French philosophy of his day, Merleau-Ponty nevertheless asserts these positions to be similar in sharing the same natural attitude, the function of which, he says in his later work, is "to reduce all phenomena which bear witness to the union of subject and the world, putting in their place the clear idea of the object as in itself, and of the subject as pure consciousness. It therefore severs the links which unite the thing and the embodied subject."63 What then is the alternative?

The first step is the reduction of the natural attitude. The most common example of reduction concerns a visual experience: for instance, seeing a cube64. The natural attitude takes it for granted that a cube before me is a completely separate and independent entity, as a set of juxtaposed and self-contained features. But, Merleau-Ponty argues, only a completely disembodied and unlocated consciousness would actually take a cube as an independent six-sided figure. A concrete, embodied consciousness sees it as a profile, which announces the cube in its entirety, but without actually revealing it all. Thus our perception of thing is a "thing spread out in time," to use Nishida’s term. The various profiles of a thing get fluently united in time and thus "thing" arises.

There is a notable difference in the language that is used by Merleau-Ponty and Nishida in describing the similar phenomena of the relationship between consciousness and nature. In The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty is using the language of science; the philosophical presupositions of which he criticizes, though later, according to Gary Brent Madison65, he sometimes sounds like a "mystic of nature." Nishida, on the other hand, launches his project as a religio-philosophical one, though he does not hesitate to make use of the scientific, particularly the psychological, findings of his contemporaries in the West. However, in The Structure of Behavior Merleau-Ponty uses the arguments of the science itself to demonstrate the invalidity of the objectivist standpoint of scientific psychology. The systematic and the active character of perception is what Merleau-Ponty is arguing for from the very first pages of The Structure of Behavior. The intertextual resonance with Nishida’s early position here is more than evident.66 

Particularly notable here is the concept of form.67  "Form" is to become the central notion in which Merleau-Ponty defines the "indecomposable structure of behavior." According to Merleau-Ponty, forms are "total processes whose properties are not the sum of those which the isolated parts would possess [¼] there is form whenever the properties of a system are modified by every change brought about in a single one of its parts and, on the contrary, are conserved when they all change while maintaining the same relationship among themselves"68 . Thus form is the spontaneous but systematic arrangement of the consciousness never loosing its unity.

It has to be noted here that form in this context has nothing to do with the stable spatial formation that can be easily contemplated as "separate" by an abstract consciousness (that is, the consciousness that is detached from the concrete situation); it is a pattern (or a profile, to use Merleau-Ponty’s term) rather than a firm structure. What is clear from the above quotations is the author’s refusal to treat consciousness as a mosaic of different and separate "psychic elements" – the attitude that would be brought about by the objectivist standpoint (that at the time when Merleau-Ponty was writing was that of a "stimulus-response" school of psychology) maintaining the reality to be a collection of facts, or objects, or psychic elements, external to each other and bound together by causal relationships. Here the call of Descartes to "divide each of the difficulties ¼ into as many parts as possible"69  would prove inefective for what Merleau-Ponty proposes is a system of a totally different kind. For him order is like "in a soap bubble" or "in an organism, what happens at each point is determined by what happens at all the others"70 . Perceiving self is not an observer and a divider of it, but rather an integrated and inseparable part of the process of perception or, in Nishida’s case, of "the pure experience."

Neither Nishida nor Merleau-Ponty have developed anything of this kind of "artistic metaphysics", but the way they are use metaphors derived from art for explaining their notions of the unified structure of consciousness is telling. We have seen that Nishida deliberately chooses first to examine Western rationality from within Western rationality itself; only in the latest phase of his creative work does he make use of the Eastern religious sources. However, the examples from the world of art are reported throughout both by Nishida and Merleau-Ponty. Their common example is that of the state of consciousness of the musician performing the piece of music71 . Thus art comes to be an important sphere of human activity where the unity of perception is best demonstrated. Nobuo Kazashi calls the way both philosophers deal with "’dialectical’ interpenetration between the immanent and the transcendent" artistic. According to Kazashi, we can "recognize an "art-model" for understanding socio-historical reality" in the philosophies of later Merleau-Ponty and Nishida72 .

On the physical order one of the main insights of Merleau-Ponty is that all the laws of physics are the expressions of "structure and have meanings only within this structure"73 . For instance, "the law of falling bodies expresses the constitution of a field of relatively stable forces in the neighborhood of the earth and will remain valid only as long as the cosmological structure on which it is founded endures"74 . The following quotation will help to elucidate what he means by structure on the physical level:

Without even leaving classical physics, corrected by the theory of relativity, one can bring to light the inadequacies in the positivist conceptions of causality, understood as an ideally isolable sequence even if de facto it interferes with others. What is demanded by the actual content of science is certainly not the idea of a universe in which everything would literally depend on everything else and in which no cleavage would be possible, but no more so is it the idea of a nature in which processes would be knowable in isolation and which would produce them from its resources; what is demanded is neither fusion nor juxtaposition, rather it is structure75 .

The set of relationships operating on the level of the vital order are goal-oriented. "The unity of physical systems is correlation, that of the organisms a unity of signification. Correlation by laws, as the mode of thinking practices it, leaves a residue in the phenomena of life which is accessible to another kind of coordination: coordination by meaning"76 . Thus it enables us to say that the behavior of an animal has meaning (sens). The world for this organism becomes the world that poses problems to be resolved. However, the integration of the organism into the world-order can by no means be treated mechanically – in this way it would come to coincide with the formation of causal reflexes. The organism constitutes the environment suitable for its living itself. Meaning is here understood by phenomenology as given for the consciousness.

The human order is marked by the symbolic character of behavior. Here we find the above-mentioned example with the musician, the musical instrument, and the piece of music dialectically participating in one structure and encounter the first definition of perception: "Perception is a moment of the living dialectic of a concrete subject; it participates in its total structure and, correlatively, it has as its original object, not an "unorganized mass", but the actions of other human subjects"77 . This moment has the dimension of intentionality and is more a lived experience rather than objective knowledge; it is the generator and the provider of meaning. The notion of form again proves useful; for instance, the baby perceives its mothers face not as a collection of qualities, but as an active centre of expression as some form. The capacity to grasp this form is not pregiven as some Kantian a priori, for a baby first conceives meaning and not separate sensory data which are ordered and organized by some agency in consciousness.

 

Aided by the notion of structure or form, we have arrived at the conclusion that both mechanism and finalism should be rejected and that the "physical," the "vital" and the "mental" do not represent three powers of being, but three dialectics78 .

 

It is quite obvious that the path of experience alone, "the path leading to the things themselves", cannot solve all the greatest problem of our times that was called by Fritjof Capra "the crisis of perception". However, it could be one of the strategies in contemporary philosophy and in every other sphere of human life helping one to avoid becoming blind "to the unavoidable complexities of concrete human experience"79  . It could help to avoid too rapid solutions and decisions to the human problems based on prejudices and guided by "the small rationalism" Merleau-Ponty was combating. The revised rationality could also help us to discover "the musicality of the Other", instead of just subscribing to the ideologies showing the Other as "this" or "that", "American", or "Muslim", "progressive" or "underdeveloped". The recent writings of Lithuanian philosophers such as Arvydas Sliogeris, Tomas Sodeika or Rita Serpytyte, or the younger generation, Dalius Jonkus, Rasa Davidaviciene and Nerijus Milerius, shows a strong tendency towards "experiential perspective". This can be expected not to cease in the future.

1. Toulmin, S. Cosmopolis: the Hidden Agenda of Modernity. – Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990, p. 206.

 2. Ibid., p. 209

 3. Japanese names here are presented in the Japanese way: family name first.

 4. Kazashi, N. "Bodily Logos: James, Merleau-Ponty, and Nishida". – In Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World, ed. D.Olkowski and J.Morley. – New York: State University of New York Press, 1999, p. 108.

 5. Merleau-Ponty, M. "Partout et nule part". – In Eloge de la philosophie et autres essais. – Paris: Gallimard, 1953-1960, p. 167.

 6. Quoted from: Feenberg, A. "Experience and Culture: Nishida’s Path ‘To the Things Themselves’". – In Philosophy East and West, 1999 , vol. 49, no.1, p. 2.

 7.Bannan, J. F. The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. – Harcourt: Brace & World, 1967, p. 27.

 8. Feenberg, 1999, p. 275. For "Nishida and Modernity" also see Kasulis, Th. P. "Sushi, Science, And Spirituality: Modern Japanese Philosophy And Its Views Of Western Science" . – In Philosophy East & West, Apr 95, Vol. 45 Issue 2, 1995, pp. 227, 22.

 9. Ibid.

 10. Ibid., p. 276.

 11 Nishida K. Zen no kenkyû. – Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1987, p. 89.

 12. Nishida K. An Inquiry into the Good (Zen no kenkyû), trans. Masao Abe and Christopher Ives. – New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990, p. 3-4.

 13. For the comments on action-intuition see the footnote by Masao Abe Ibid., p. xxxiii.

 14. Ibid., p. 38.

 15. Ibid., p. 42.

 16. Ueda, Sh. (1991) "Experience and Language" in The Thinking of Kitarô Nishida, trans.T.Nobuhara . – In Zen bunka kenkyûjô kiyô dai 17 go nukizuri, 1991.05.31, p. 110.

 17. Quite possible that Nishida’s "pure experience" is analogous to Husserlian "primary impression" (Urimpression).

 18. Nishida, K. An Inquiry into the Good (Zen no kenkyû), trans. Masao Abe and Christopher Ives. – New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990, p. 4.

 19. Ibid., p. 5.

 20. Ibid., p. 60.

 21. Ibid., p. 49.

 22. Ibid., p. 62.

 23. Ibid.., p. 68.

 24. Ibid.

 30. Nishida, 1990, p. 8.

 31. Ibid., p. 9.

 32. Ibid.

 33. Ibid.

 34. Ibid., p. 10.

 35. Ibid.

 36. Ibid., p. 32.

 38. Ibid., p. 26.

 39. TH. Stcherbatsky in his "Buddhist Logic" puts it as follows:"Only the present, the "here", the "now", the "this" are real. ¼ Ultimately real is the present moment of physical efficiency". In Stcherbatsky, 1994, pp. 69-70.

 40. Ibid.

 41. Ibid., p. 28. This statement is followed by an interesting reference to Schiller: "As Schiller and others have argued, even axioms originally developed out of practical need; in their mode of origination, they do not differ from our hopes." (Ibid.)

 42. Ibid., p. 29.

 43. Ibid., p. 33. One would be tempted to apply Nishida’s theory of unity only to the sphere of art and religion (which is frequently done by the Japanese philosopher himself), but his insights in many ways remind us of the Husserlian search for the firm base for exact sciences – the same symptom of the crisis of rationality.

 44. Ibid.

 45. For a critique of Kant see Jaspers, K. Kant [from The Great Philosophers, Vol. II – San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1962, pp. 26 - 27.

 46. Ibid., p. 44.

 47. For the differences between modern conception of "causality" andthat of Aristotle see Richard Cole, "The Logical Order and the Causal Order," in The Concept of Order, pp. 111-121.

 48. Ibid., p. 45.

 49. Ibid.

 50. Ibid., p. 69.

 51. Ibid., pp. 128-129.

 52. Ueda, Sh. "Experience and Language" in The Thinking of Kitarô Nishida, trans.T.Nobuhara . – In Zen bunka kenkyûjô kiyô dai 17 go nukizuri, 1991.05.31, p. 125.

 53. Nishida, ibid., p. 130.

 54. Ibid., p.113. For a similar concern of "later" Husserl with "the origin of geometry" see Husserl, E. L’Origine de la Geometrie, Traduction et introduction par Jacques Derrida. – Paris: PUF, 1962.

 55. Mickunas, A. "Permanence and Flux". – In Phenomenology: Japanese and American, ed. Burt C. Hopkins. – Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990, p. 258.

 56. Refer to footnote 4, page 198 in Nishitani Keiji, Nishida Kitarô, trans. by Yamamoto Seisaku and James W. Heisig . – Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

 57. Yamanouchi T., Taikei to tensô [System and Development], – Tokyo, 1937, pp. 6-7, quoted from Nishitani Keiji, Nishida Kitarô, trans. by Yamamoto Seisaku and James W. Heisig. – Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, p. 199.

 58. Descartes, R. "Discourse on the Method". – In Key Philosophical Writings, trans.

 59. Nishitani, K. Nishida Kitarô, trans. Yamamoto Seisaku & James W. Heisig. – Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, p. 96.

 66. Madison, G. B. La phénoménologie de Merleau-Ponty. Une recherche des limites de la conscience. - Paris: Klincksieck, 1973, p. 23.

 67. Form (Jap. – katachi) is also the term that Nishida uses in the similar context to define the way in which "concrete consciousness which is direct to us" appears.

 68. Merleau-Ponty, M. The Structure of Behavior. – Boston: Beacon Press, 1963, p. 47.

 69. Descartes, R. "Discourse on the Method". – In Key Philosophical Writings, trans.

 70. Merleau-Ponty, M. The Structure of Behavior. – Boston: Beacon Press, 1963, p. 131.

 71. Nishida, 1990, ibid., p. 6

 72. Kazashi, N. "On the ‘Horizon’ Where James and Merleau-Ponty Meet," – In Analecta Husserliana LVIII, ed. A-T. Tymeniecka and Shoichi Matsuba. – Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998, p. 5.

 73. Merleau-Ponty, M. The Structure of Behavior. – Boston: Beacon Press, 1963,

 74. Ibid.

 75. Merleau-Ponty, M. The Structure of Behavior. – Boston: Beacon Press, 1963, p. 140.

 76. Ibid., p. 156.

 77. Ibid., p. 166.

 78. Ibid., p. 184.

 79. Toulmin, S. Cosmopolis: the Hidden Agenda of Modernity. – Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990, p. 201.