Adam Loughnane

This paper sets Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Nishida Kitarō in dialogue and explore the interpretations of artistic expression, which inform their similar phenomenological accounts of perception. I discuss how both philosophers look to artistic practice to reveal multi-perspectival aspects of vision. They do so, I argue, by going beyond a “positivist” representational under-standing of perception and by including negative aspects of visual experience as constitutive of vision. Following this account, I interpret artworks by Cézanne, Guo Xi, Rodin, and Hasegawa according to the versions of multi-perspectival vision articulated by Nishida and Merleau-Ponty. I conclude by highlighting a difference between Merleau-Ponty’s “depth” and Nishida’s “seeing without a seer” regarding the extent to which each of their philosophies de-substantialize and de-localize human vision.

This study places Nāgārjuna and Plato in dialogue regarding how both seek to orient philosophy in the face of indeterminacy observed at the elemental level of existence, specifically, the indeterminacy of fire’s light. Looking to the elemental within Chōra and Śūnyatā, a directive becomes discernible for calibrating philosophy to this indeterminacy, and crucial limitations are disclosed, which expand philosophy by enabling a productive relation to the non-philosophical. What emerges are directives for language, which serve to modify philosophy’s violence towards the world by striking a middle way between the binaries of reification and nihilism, speech and silence.

Both Nishida Kitarō and Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote extensively about artistic expression in their early works, yet in the last period of their careers that consideration is put mostly aside as they engage more directly with abstract ontological concerns. As this happens, a curiously overlooked concept becomes prominent in their writings, namely “faith.” While Merleau-Ponty’s is a “perceptual faith”, and Nishida’s is, broadly speaking, a religious faith, neither is strictly secular nor spiritual, yet both entail a remarkably similar ontology of the motor-perceptual body. Unfortunately, their lives ended before they could fully develop these philosophically problematic concepts....

This book presents the first collection of essays on the philosophy of Ueda Shizuteru in a Western language. Ueda, the last living member of the Kyoto school, has fostered the East-West dialogue in all his works and has helped to open up the Western image of philosophy by engaging the Zen tradition. The book reflects this particular trait of Ueda’s philosophy, but it also covers all thematic fields of his writings. Contributions from both young and established scholars and experts from Japan, Europe and the U.S. make this a unique introduction to and reception of Ueda’s philosophy. Readers will discover discussions of mysticism in the East and West, and consideration of modern philosophy topics including self-awareness, nature and poetic language. The book also presents a focussed look at language and nothingness, considering silence and nihilism. Chapters allow the reader to understand the timeliness of a thinking that mediates and transcends the dichotomy of East and West. This volume will appeal not only to scholars of Nishida, Japanese philosophy, mysticism and religious experience in Japan, but also to scholars of Western philosophy, especially those interested in Meister Eckhart, Martin Heidegger and Martin Buber. It makes an ideal introduction to Zen philosophy and presents important contributions to scholarship on language and experience.

John Maraldo’s Crossing Paths with Nishida assembles the life’s work of one of the leading voices in Nishida scholarship. Spanning over three decades, this brilliant collection of essays charts the path not just of Nishida’s philosophy, but also the path of deep inquiry of one of his most incisive commentators. In thirteen insightful essays, each reprinted with a new introduction by the author, Maraldo delves into the most critical issues in Nishida scholarship while rendering his philosophy germane to a host of contemporary issues, such as environmentalism, nationalism, cognitive science, and phenomenology. A variety of systematic topics are explored, ranging from Nishida’s notions of “absolute nothingness” and “enactive intuition” to questions of religion, politics, and Nishida’s relation to Heidegger. This volume is essential reading for the specialist and for any reader with an interest in the most important thinker of the Kyoto School of Japanese philosophy.

In this essay I place choreographer Natalie Heller in dialogue with Merleau-Ponty on issues of motor-perception, expression and bodily faith. I analyze her new work First Impressions to demonstrate how she responds to a similar impulse that drove Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, particularly in his last writing, The Visible and the Invisible. Both Heller and Merleau-Ponty seek to go beyond the representational understanding of motion and perception in order to articulate and experiment with a type of expression, which is beyond the distinctions between motion and motionlessness, activity and passivity, visibility and invisibility. While Merleau-Ponty writes about this form of expression, Heller’s performers show that beyond these binaries is a form of expression that is ambiguously situated between impressing and being impressed upon, and that to engage the world or the city as such, requires a motor-perceptual form of faith.

So numerous are the aspects of Dōgen’s writings that reflect the structures of vision that we might consider his philosophy “ocularcentric”. While recent scholarship scrutinizes both Greek and Mahāyāna forms of ocularcentrism, I argue that the hazards reside not in the prioritization of sight to the neglect of other senses, but in the latent positivism visual metaphor tends to, but need not, reinforce. I cast Dōgen as a “negative ocularcentrist” for his construing vision according to the Mahāyāna notion of emptiness (śūnyatā). Rather than positivist ontology, epistemology or soteriology structured metaphorically as progressing from darkness into light, Dōgen inflects seeing with the visually negative, incorporating darkness, blindness, delusion, invisibility, and what he calls “dim sightedness” (gen’ei 眼翳), which are “obstructions” (keige 罣礙), but not the sort that can or must be overcome; For Dōgen, darkness is essential for illumination, delusion part of enlightenment, obstruction not an impediment for realization, but one of its conditions. I claim that implicit to Dōgen’s notion of “obstruction obstructing obstruction” (礙は礙を罜礙する なり、これ時なり) is a form of reflexivity, which if extended from language to vision distances his thought from both the positivism of ocularcentrism and challenges the ascription of realism to his mysticism.

In Merleau-Ponty and Nishida, Adam Loughnane initiates a dialogue between two of the twentieth century's most important phenomenologists from the Eastern and Western philosophical worlds. Loughnane guides the reader through the complexities and innovations of Nishida's and Merleau-Ponty's theories of artistic expression and their rarely explored concepts of faith. The intricacies of both philosophers' views are illuminated by analyses of artists, including Cézanne, Sesshū, Rodin, Hasegawa, and other major figures of European, Chinese, and Japanese art history, who enact a radical form of expression that Loughnane calls the practice of "motor-perceptual faith." He argues that the artist's motor-perceptual body, as poetically articulated in Nishida's and Merleau-Ponty's early works, enacts a form of faith that can be parsed in the final writings of both philosophers. The concept of faith is enlarged through its enactment by the artist, while the concept of artistic expression is broadened by casting it as a motor-perceptual conception of faith. Merleau-Ponty and Nishida is an exciting new intercultural reading of these philosophers' writings that opens up under-explored areas of their projects. It forms an important conceptual bridge between the two, while challenging distinctions between art, philosophy, and religion, and ultimately philosophy East and West.

This essay places Nishida Kitarō in dialogue with Maurice Merleau-Ponty regarding motor-perceptual aspects underlying their theories of artistic expression. The analysis begins by comparing their interpretations of negation as articulated in their later works and seeks to understand their poetic renderings of artistic practice as proposing a mutual and reciprocal form of negation. By analyzing their conceptions of negation as implicit to their depictions of artistic expression, this essay looks to expand their concepts of negation from a perceptual to a motor-perceptual form of negation. Just as perceptual negation results in a multi-perspectival form of perception, motor-perceptual negation renders motion as a multi-volitional event outside and beyond the individuated body, and diffused throughout the motor-perceptual fabric. The artist is an exemplar for both Nishida and Merleau-Ponty because of their ability to create works that express themselves within this form of motor-perceptual negation. Doing so, expressing oneself as a motor-perceptualy negated body entails a bodily form of faith. This study thus expands Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “perceptual faith” (foi perceptive) to disclose its implicit motor aspects, while demonstrating how the expanded conceptions of expression and negation resonate with the faithful form of expression put forth in Nishida’s concept “interexpression” (表現的関係).