Discussion
Our discussions on Freud’s theories of transience and
mourning and mortality along with some contexts of Japanese philosophy might
have revealed some common threads between them. As there was practically no direct
communication between Freud and Kyoto school, how could we explain them? Also
we might ask ourselves if there is a possibility that they can inform each
other for their further development ?
It is certain that Nishida, Tanabe and Nishitani, all
studied abroad, especially in Germany and got direct contacts with Heidegger,
Husserl and other great thinkers at the time. Then they brought back what they
learned to Japan and developed further their line of thoughts. As they had
their Japanese cultural background before they had contacts with European
thoughts, the crossover of East and West might have occurred and developed further
on in their mind early on in their career as philosophers. Nishida, for example
had direct influence from Bergson and James while forming his idea of pure
experience. We could think that they attained their truth on their own. However
their philosophy that is called “Kyoto school” became unique with quite
different flavor from Western philosophy. It is still wonder why their
closeness to Freudian thinking came about.
Some would say that Freud’s field as psychiatry and Kyoto
School’s field of philosophy are far apart, and the direct comparison between
them is not meaningful. However, Freud’s concerns went far beyond mental
illness and was interested in human science including philosophy, sociology,
and religion. Both Freud and Nishida are interested in reality of the human
mind, and Freud’s idea of mourning was born out of his painful experiences with
his personal losses of important people. He was also devastated by the loss of culture
and civilization due to the war. As we saw above, Freud’s attention shifted from
abstract metapsychological matters to mourning and identification involving
real human being. Nishida had a special concern about the issue of reality and
stated that “reality is the activity of consciousness”. Nishida stressed the
significance of real experience for the individual and asserted that not that the
individual is there to have experiences, but he is there since the experience
occurs. Nishida, Tanabe and Nishitani were all practitioners of Zen meditation
and strived to live their philosophy through their meditative practice.
Let us turn to the second question. What can Kyoto school contribute
to, or inform psychoanalytic theories of mourning and transience? As we saw,
Freud’s notion of transience involved a seed for the “existential paradox”. Hoffman
formulated this paradox as a dialectic between “Awareness of temporal
limitation threatens to divest things of their value and lends them value at the
same time”(R and S, p.49) in his theory of dialectic constructivism. This type
of paradox, as a matter of fact, was used by Winnicott in his rhetoric, such as
“[T]he basis of the capacity to be alone is a paradox; it is
the experience of being alone while someone else is present Winnicott, 1958, P417”
Winnicott, D.W. (1958) The Capacity to be
Alone. International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis, 39:416-420.
I consider that this type of paradox is well formulated better
described in Japanese “Philosophers of Nothingness” (Heisig,2002??) where the
reality is described with the mediators of emptiness and nothingness. Take, for
example the following expression.
In traditional Zen teaching, the basic philosophy was
described as follows.