A Comparison of Nishida’s basho from his Middle Period with Plato’s chóra and the One of Plotinus

Authors

  • Marko URŠIČ University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, Slovenia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.4312/as.2023.11.1.71-90

Keywords:

Nishida Kitarō, Plato, Plotinus, basho, chóra, the One, comparative philosophy

Abstract

In this paper, the principal question is the following: How and to what extent can Nishida’s basho (“place”), as it is outlined in his famous treatise Basho (1926), taken together with the “adjoining” essay The Unsolved Issue of Consciousness (1927), be understood and interpreted from Plato’s and/or Plotinus’ (i.e. Neoplatonic) philosophical viewpoint—and, possibly, also vice versa? What do Nishida’s conception (or rather intuition) of basho on the one hand, and Plato’s quite “vague” concept of chóra in Timaeus and/or Plotinus’ first hypóstasis “the One” on the other, have in common? The main formal similarity between basho and “the One” is that they cannot be “predicated” (in the Aristotelian sense) by anything else—or, to put it in Platonic terms, both are absolutely transcendent. However, there are also several important differences, mainly because of the different frames of thought, which are discussed in this paper.

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References

Dilworth, A. David. 1993. “Postscript: Nishida’s Logic of the East.” In Nothingness and the Religious Worldview, translated with an introduction by David A. Dilworth, 127–49. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Nishida, Kitarō. 1987 [1917]. Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness. Translated by Valdo H. Viglielmo with Takeuchi Yoshinori, and Joseph S. O’Leary. New York: State University of New York Press.

———. 1990 [1911]. An Inquiry into the Good. Translated by Masao Abe, and Christopher Ives. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press.

———. 1993 [1945]. Last Writings. Nothingness and the Religious Worldview. Translated with an introduction by David A. Dilworth. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

———. 2012a. Place & Dialectic: Two Essays by Nishida Kitarō. Translated by John W. M. Krummel, and Shigenori Nagatomo. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

———. 2012b [1927]. “The Unsolved Issue of Consciousness.” Translated by John W. M. Krummel. Philosophy East & West 62 (1): 44–59. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/pew.2012.0013

Plato. 1985. The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters. Edited by Edith Hamilton, and Huntington Cairns. Bollingen Series LXXI, twelfth printing. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Plotinus. 1966–1988. Enneads, vols. I–VI. Greek text with the English translation by Arthur Hilary Armstrong. Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press.

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Published

10.01.2023

How to Cite

Uršič, M. (2023). A Comparison of Nishida’s basho from his Middle Period with Plato’s chóra and the One of Plotinus. Asian Studies, 11(1), 71–90. https://doi.org/10.4312/as.2023.11.1.71-90