The Concrete World of Action in Nishida’s Later Thought

Abstract

Nishida’s Fundamental Problems of Philosophy (1934) was the ninth consecutive volume of philosophical writing in his career.¹ The work is itself comprised of two volumes forming one piece: The World of Action (1933) and The Dialectical World (1934). The fact that Nishida never again attempted to formulate a total system supports his own evaluation that in this work he clarified the fundamental structure of his thought. In this essay we shall be concerned with outlining an essential theme of that work — the “concrete world of action.” It is a theme in which Nishida can be observed recasting the central topic of his thought, namely, the “place of true self-consciousness,” in terms of his dialectic of the “topos of Nothing ness” (mu no basho). In so doing Nishida pulled together many of the threads of ideas developed in his earlier writings, particularly his longstanding definition of self-consciousness in dynamic terms, or what he called “the a priori of absolute will.”