Philosophy of Nothingness and Process Theology

Abstract

AbstractThis paper discusses the two representative philosophers of the Kyoto School, Kitaro Nishida and Hajime Tanabe from the perspective of process theology and the Buddhist-Christian dialogue in Japan.The first chapter explicates Nishida’s concept of “pure experience” in comparison with William James’ radical empiricism and with Kant’s dualism of sense and reason. Pure experience in Nishida’s sense is neither a passive reception of objective sense-data given before subjective mental operations, nor the raw material of experience which must be given “form” by experiencing subject. It is nothing but metaphysically ultimate activity from which both the experiencing subject and the whole range of the experienced objects from sense-perception to intellectual intuition emerge as its self-unfolding.The second and third chapters discuss the two key concepts of process theology, “concrescence” and “the extensive continuum” with a special reference to the Mahayana Buddhist concept of “emptiness (sunyata)” and “dependent arising (pratityasamutpada)”. Nishida’s tripartite concept of topos, i.e. a topos of relative being, a topos of relative nothingness, and the topos of absolute nothingness will be applied to process theology in order to explicate the relation of two ultimates in Whitehead’s metaphysics, i.e. the relation of God as the religious ultimate to creativity as the metaphysical ultimate.The fourth and fifth chapters discuss Hajime Tanabe as a critical successor of Nishida’s philosophy of Nothingness. Tanabe is more akin to Whitehead than to Nishida in that Tanabe reformulates Nishida’s concept of Nothingness from the temporal perspective of a finite human existence related essentially to “species” or “society” in the historical world. Tanabe transforms the unity of contradictories in the logic of topos into the contrasted opposites in the historical process of becoming, which involves novelty and discontinuous leaps at points of historical crisis. For him history has become “the overall Koan” in which the metaphysical topology of static being is to be superseded by the innovative principle of nothingness in the historical world.