When I was a child, my family moved from Washington State to Tokyo, Japan. Since then, I’ve spent about half my life here in Japan. Seattle and Tokyo are equally home to me; when I’m there, I miss here, and vice versa.

One of the biggest cultural differences I noted was the values attached to wealth. Japanese people tended to respect success that came by way of hard work. Americans tended to respect people who found easy ways to wealth.

In general, Japanese did not respect wealth in and of itself. A hard working family man seemed to be the heroic figure. He loved his wife and children although he only spent time with them on the weekends. He respected his employers and bosses and his place of employment served as a second family.

When he wasn’t working, he was collecting experiences with his wife and children. Japanese culture placed a high value on experiences. I had a friend whose motto, which she always signed onto pictures of herself, read, “The one with the most experiences wins.” Life was a contest to gain the most experiences. It was not a contest played against others, but against time. Time progressed relentlessly, attempting to deprive you of experiences; you had to cram in as many experiences as possible to win.

I still have a single photo of her, with that motto written across it. The idea had a profound impact on my life. It seemed so much more attractive than the American, “He who dies with the most toys wins.”

Whenever I go back to America, the culture strikes me as somewhat ill. People will say that they don’t judge others on the basis of their wealth or status symbols, but then they play the stupid game, too. They buy the nice house because they don’t want to be perceived as losers; they buy the nice car to prove they aren’t losers. Why not simply reject that value system altogether? Who cares what others think of you? Drive the car you want to drive; live in the house you want to live in’ spend the money on what you really enjoy.

Japanese today seem to be moving slowly towards the materialism of America, but the average Japanese still travels and obsesses over experiences more than any American I have ever met.

These are the thoughts that first came to mind when reading Nishida Kitaro’s An inquiry into the Good. I began by reading it in English, translated by Masao Abe and Christopher Ives.

Nishida Kitaro (born 1870, died 1945) is considered “the most significant and influential Japanese philosopher of the twentieth-century.” Translator Masao Abe was a professor of religious studies and Japanese philosophy. He died in 2006. Translator Christopher Ives is a professor of religious studies at Stonehill College.

Reading in English seems to give a clearly different impact from reading in Japanese, so I chose to read first in English and then in Japanese for comparative value. The Japanese is not easy reading – the language is not the Japanese one encounters every day – but it does seem to get the point across in a way the English fails to.

Now, on to the review. In the introduction, Masao Abe makes it clear that Japanese philosophy does not draw strict lines between philosophy and religion. In Japan, the two are “undifferentiated and inseparable.” Keep that admission in mind when you hear philosophers comparing Heidegger to Nishida.

Abe goes on:

“Philosophical thought in such cultures as China and Japan does not necessarily require demonstrative arguments and precise verbal expression. Communication of thought is often indirect, suggestive, and symbolic rather than descriptive and precise. The thought process underlying this nondemonstrative approach does not simply rely on language but rather denies it; science, logic, and mathematics did not and could not have emerged from it.”

Arguments, language and logic are the currency of thought; to deny arguments, language and logic is to deny thought. What that denial leaves you with is emotions and instincts, and incoherent wordplay. We’ll get more into that later.

Abe lists three characteristics of Nishida’s “pure experience:”

1. Pure experience is realized prior to the distinction between subject and object.
2. Pure experience is active and constructive.
3. In pure experience, knowledge, feeling, and volition are undifferentiated.

Before moving on to Nishida’s writings, Abe gives us a hint of things to come with the statement that, “the knower and the known are not two but one.” With that little nugget in mind, we’ll move onto the preface and then the book itself.

In Nishida’s preface, he states that, “I wanted to explain all things on the basis of pure experience as the sole reality.”

This smacks of idealism at first glance, but it’s best to withhold judgment on that score for the time being. At this point, we should be curious to know how he Nishida reconciles this statement with the fact that inexperienced objects are indeed real. Nishida goes on:

“Over time I came to realize that it is not that experience exists because there is an individual, but that an individual exists because there is experience. I thus arrived at the idea that experience is more fundamental than individual differences, and in this way I was able to avoid solipsism.”

Now some quotes from the pages of the book, with critical notation from yours truly:

“Knowing and its object are completely unified.”

Unity or singularity is, in many cases, is a thinly disguised moral argument. In many cases, the person drawing the line will appeal to objective facts in order to establish the line, but the valuation attached to that line is purely subjective and for the most part a moral argument.

Take for example the nationalist versus internationalist argument. The nationalist says that the true line of demarcation is along national lines. He points to the common heritage of the people of the nation, their interdependence, their common language, common faith, and common geography. All of those characteristics may be objectively verifiable, but the valuation he attaches to those facts is subjective.

The internationalist points out the commonality of world resources – the oceans, the air we breathe, etc – and the humanity common to all peoples. Again, these characteristics are objectively verifiable, but the valuation the internationalist attaches to those facts is subjective.

In Nishinda’s case, he would have us believe that the right place to draw the line is in a way that places the knower and the object known on the same side of the line. But, like the nationalists and internationalists, that’s just one place we could draw the line, and he hasn’t offered us a compelling reason to draw the line in the first place.

I’m not saying the line we typically draw is correct – there is no “correct” or “incorrect” in drawing of lines. But we do have a compelling reason to draw the line along established subject-object lines; that compelling reason being in that it helps us to avoid the pitfalls of idealism.

“When we think critically,” – wouldn’t critical thinking be an adulteration of pure experience, I wonder – “we realize that reality does not exist apart from the facts of pure experience and we can explain the characters of these notions psychologically.”

Here I have to wonder. He seems to be confusing knowing a thing with the thing itself. Ages ago, folks in Europe did not know of the people in America. Does that mean that the Native Americans didn’t exist? It seems to me that Nishida is confusing thoughts with the objects of those thoughts.

“Knowing and the will are simply two ways of referring to one phenomenon by separating the distinctive aspects.”

Nishida, dude, chill. You’re attempting to obliterate very meaningful distinctions humans have drawn as they have recognized various functions of the mind. Yes, knowing something does involve an act of the will, but the two concepts are not coextensive. I may be willing to know how women think without ever actually knowing how women think.

“We now must ask whether truth ever exists totally separate from the subject? From the standpoint of pure experience, there is no such thing as an object divorced from the subject.”

This seems confused. There’s two ways of reading this; one is trivial and the other is not trivial, but wrong. Truth is an attribute which attaches to statements which accurately correspond with reality. So objective reality may exist for eternity, but if nobody makes any statements, truth cannot attach to anything. In that sense, we need the subject to utter statements about reality for truth to exist. A wrong-headed interpretation would say that the subject then can create truth independent of the object.

“If for the sake of argument we were to posit the existence of an external world completely independent from consciousness, then a conscious anticipatory representation in volition could not be considered the cause of the movement in the world, for all we could say is the two phenomena parallel each other.”

So we either have free will and no external world exists, or the external world exists and we have no free will. Interesting choices, but I think I’ll choose from a different menu.

“The standard of truth is not external.”

This statement launches a tirade of idiocy wherein Nishida confuses mathematical principles and the like, statements of which are not truth-apt, with the truth, while denying that external reality is a standard by which truth is to be judged.

“Reality consists only of phenomena of our consciousness, namely, the facts of direct experience.”

Already commented on this perspective. Soon after this comment, he denounces Locke and Kant and aligns himself with Berkeley and Fichte.

“The laws of logic and mathematics, for example, are the fundamental principles by which the phenomena of the universe come into being.”

No, logic is the human schema constructed for the purpose of understanding the universe.

“Universal reason runs throughout the base of our minds… each person’s spirit is simply one cell in of the social spirit.”

“As I have stated many times before, the so-called objective world does not come into existence apart from our subjectivity.”

The philosophy of Nishida Kitaro is, in summary, nonsense. Nishida has confused language with reality in a manner reminiscent of the Pre-Socratics.

Parmenides is considered by many to be the luminary of the Pre-Socratics. Gordon H. Clark calls him “the Greatest of the Pre-Socratics.” Daniel W. Graham writes, “Parmenides was the great watershed of Presocratic thought.” F.M. Cornford, in From Religion to Philosophy, identifies Parmenides as the “discoverer of logic,” an identification which doesn’t bode well for logic. Raymond Tallis thinks Parmenides was the “fountainhead of a new phase in human self-understanding.” Even Plato, through the word he places in the mouth of Socrates, calls Parmenides “venerable and awesome.”

I don’t wish to disagree with any of those evaluations. Rather, I’ll use them against the proponents of rationalism. Before we address that, let’s give credit where credit is due. Parmenides was the first to discover that the earth is a sphere; that the moon gets its light from the sun; and that the morning star and the evening star is the same planet (Venus). He also, above all other Pre-Socratics, demanded logical consistency.

To nibble on the philosophy of Parmenides, a quote:

“Thou canst not know what is not — that is impossible — nor utter it; for it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be.”

That smacks somewhat of the ontological argument offered by Anselm, eh? But many commentators draw the line from Parmenides to Platonic forms to Spinoza and Hegel. Bradley and Leibniz are also included in that list by Bertrand Russell.

With those points of reference in mind, let’s hear the argument. Heraclitus claimed that only change is real. Parmenides claimed that nothing changes.

Is water an entity? Of course. Is air an entity? Of course. Then water and air are both the same thing and one, “an entity.” To assert that something is is to assert that is an entity. If water is, and air is, then we are asserting that water is the same as air, it is.

Does this logical analysis lead to a denial of all entities? No, to the contrary, all that is necessarily is, and it is one. The entity exists, and it is one, because to say that something else is an entity is merely to say that is also in the one. If one thing differed from another, then one thing would exist and the other, being different, would not exist.

Next, we may ask if entities change. Of course not. For something that exists to change would mean that it would cease to exist. Entities are entities, they are not non-entities. Can the entity come from something else? If an entity exists, something else is then non-entity. Something cannot come from nothing; nor can something change into anything else because something else would be non-entity.

Whatever exists then is singular, immutable, changeless, motionless and indivisible.

Now you say, that doesn’t correspond to reality as I know it. That is your weakness. When reason and sensation come into conflict, sensation must give way to reason. That is the absurdity known as rationalism. We see the same rationalism in many arguments today, and many arguments leading up to today. Hegel’s idealism is perhaps the most well known argument of this sort, but there are others.

Bertrand Russell, in his essay, Language and Metaphysics, identifies this sort as “those who infer properties of the world from properties of language.” Rationalism reverses the order of knowledge. First, we know reality; language is a fallible attempt to communicate knowledge. Rationalists, in a frenzy of absurdity, assume that language knows the truth and reality doesn’t.

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, under the entry for Pythagoreanism, reads thus:

The ethical and religious teachings were broadly puritanical, often bizarre, and of little philosophical interest.

Now if only the had the cojones to put that under the entry for Martin Heidegger.

Little in known about Pythagoras himself. Variation occurs in the different accounts of Pythagoras, but what doesn’t change is the mysticism and claims of a supernatural nature.

Of philosophical interest is the mathematical cosmology, the idea that all things consist of numbers. Since there are two classes of numbers – even and odd – the Pythagoreans adopted a type of dualism. (One might think that adoption of numbers as the substance of reality would leave monism as an available option, but they chose not to take that route.) The dualism can be seen here:  Right=Male=Good; Left=Female=Bad. Anybody want to take a guess as to the gender of most Pythagoreans?

Justice is represented as the number four. Five is marriage. Is this numerology or philosophy? I’d say it never was philosophy, but we treat it as such because of the influence the Pythagoreans had on Plato.

Heraclitus was a Milesian at heart, but geography denied him that title. Heraclitus was born around 525 B.C. (See Gordon H Clark, Thales to Dewey) and died around 475 B.C. His philosophy could be summed up thus:

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

All things change, nothing exists but the law of change. Heraclitus comes off sounding like a mystic, and indeed Bertrand Russell uses that word to describe Heraclitus. His anti-intellectual rants evoke Nietzsche; his quasi-mysticism evokes Heidegger. Bertrand Russell writes:

“The doctrine of perpetual flux, as taught by Heraclitus, is painful, and science, as we have seen, can do nothing to refute it.”

Bertrand Russell supports this conclusion by pointing out that atoms are not indestructible. The assertion almost begs one to ask, with a due amount of vulgarity, “So what?”

The universe is in perpetual motion, and it doesn’t seem to ruin my day. Drawing unsupported conclusions from the fact of perpetual motion may be dangerous; but the fact of perpetual motion itself is no threat to human existence, epistemology or theories of truth.

Was Thales a philosopher? We’d have to define philosophy in order to answer that question.

What is philosophy? The search for truth, it will be said. So if I desire to know the truth about my wife’s infidelity, what I am doing is actually philosophizing? No, that hardly seems accurate.

Then it is a truth about specific topics? The universe, for example. No, that’s cosmology. How about the study of how we think, certainly philosophers deal with that? No, although philosophers deal with that, the topic by itself would be psychology.

Philosophy, it will be seen, provides the foundations of thought, and only the foundations. Philosophy isn’t interested in whether Bob is guilty of killing his unfaithful wife; philosophy is interested in what constitutes guilt.Particulars do not interest philosophy; only the general principles do.

In what way, though? It could be said that philosophy seeks to reconcile two realities – conceptual and physical. Metaphysics attempts to reconcile conceptual claims with physical in a very obvious way; but what about epistemology, ethics and logic?

The one thing that united all these disciplines under a single heading is their purpose – the discovery of truth, which is itself the reconciliation of conceptual and physical realities.Ethics, or moral philosophy, attempts to reconcile our beliefs that some acts are wrong and others are right with reality, and that’s one difficult task, but as long as people are offended by some acts and not by others, moral philosophy will not be abandoned to the garbage heap where it belongs.

With this said, now I may be able to put forth an opinion on what constitutes philosophy: Philosophy deals not with the discovery of truth itself, but with fundamental principles which govern the discovery of the truth.

So, by what right is Thales considered a philosopher?

According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Thales (circa 624 BC – c. 546 BC) predicted a solar eclipse which occurred on May 28, 585 B.C. This was the first recorded prediction of a solar eclipse in the Western world. Why should a prediction of this kind matter to a philosopher?

It shouldn’t. The claim is made Thales was a pioneer of critical thought because he rejected the idea that the gods were causing eclipses. Fine, so he was a pioneer of critical thought; that doesn’t make him a philosopher.

Well, before we dismiss the idea of Thales being a philosopher, there is that other thing to consider. You know, the material monism. In Thales’ case all the cosmos was believed to be water (so much for the “pioneer of critical thought” title); for Anaximenes, air; for Anaximander it was apeiron, “the unlimited,” an unknown and unknowable single substance.

So there you have it, a theory of the fundamental nature. The Milesians were philosophers after all, albeit silly ones.

Thinking about Thales, a few questions pop into mind. First, why did the Milesians all of the sudden begin to think critically? Socrates, Plato and Aristotle get all the credit, but it was the Milesians, and Thales in particular, that got the ball rolling. Why and how did that happen?

One way to approach this it to look at other communities, where the ball never got rolling. Even today, some promitive communities exist. For example, there are indigenous people whose language does not include the numbers “three,” “four,” etc; they count “one,” “two,” and then “many.” How is it they have failed to come up with the number three, while Thales was able to predict a solar eclipse?

The most striking difference between ancient Greek and the under-developed primitive societies is one of insularity. The primitive cultures are highly insular; the ancient Greeks were not. And of the ancient Greeks, Miletus was especially not insular. At the time it became the intellectual center of the world, Miletus in Ionia was busy international sea port catering to sailors and merchants of a variety of cultural backgrounds.

I think that’s the most plausible explanation. After all, if you look at the different enlightenment eras and golden ages of thought, they always occur in the midst of cultural exchanges.

There is another possible explanation. It could have been social upheaval which led the men of Miletus to question their basic assumptions. The historian Michael Rostovtzeff writes of the civil unrest:

“Thus at Miletus the people were at first victorious and murdered the wives and children of the aristocrats ; then the aristocrats prevailed and burned their opponents alive, lighting up the open spaces of the city with live torches.”

Using your fellow man as a candle to light the streets could prove thought-provoking to man people.

Another question that comes to mind is, why would Thales and his fellow Milesians adopt material monism in the first place? What motivated that absurdity?

Monism was extremely popular back in the day. Aristotle writes:

“Thales… says the principle is water (for which reason he declared that the earth rests on water), getting the notion perhaps from seeing that the nutriment of all things is moist, and that heat itself is generated from the moist and kept alive by it (and that from which they come to be is a principle of all things). He got his notion from this fact, and from the fact that the seeds of all things have a moist nature, and that water is the origin of the nature of moist things.

“Some think that even the ancients who lived long before the present generation, and first framed accounts of the gods, had a similar view of nature; for they made Ocean and Tethys the parents of creation, and described the oath of the gods as being by water, to which they give the name of Styx; for what is oldest is most honorable, and the most honorable thing is that by which one swears. It may perhaps be uncertain whether this opinion about nature is primitive and ancient, but Thales at any rate is said to have declared himself thus about the first cause.”

(W D Ross translation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Part III.)

Cicero may be more enlightening; he writes in The Nature of the Gods:

“Thales the Milesian, who first inquired after such subjects, asserted water to be the origin of things; and that God was that mind which formed all things from water.”

Aha! So you seek a unity in the universe in order to accommodate your god concept! Maybe. I don’t know. It seem to me, however, that philosophers who attempt to superimpose harmony or unity or one-ness on the universe or society or nature, where none exists, are usually motivated by either a god concept or by a collectivist moral theory.

It is said that the Pythagoreans  exposed the absurdity of the material monism. Surely they did; but it was Parmenides who seriously reduced monism to absurdity, although he did so unwittingly, by showing that unity does not allow for change, parts or motion.