According to Nishida, what is directly given to constitutive thought is not what is constituted by thought, such as sensation or perception, but the world of artistic intuition of the unity of master and guest. Our consciousness of reality is not only connected to the world of the object of perception, but is also directly connected to the supercognitive world.
The “time of -” that truly gives direct experience is not a formal “time” as in Kant, but something like Bergson.’s ternary. Underlying conscious phenomena is the consciousness that envelopes and limits it, that is, the intuition of subject-object unity or consciousness of pure activity.
[When we stand in the position of the working self, we are already subject to the superconscious world. What is given directly to constructive thought is this world of infinitely deep intuition.
We tend to think that we intuit only the present, but to recall the past is to intuit the past. In memory, it is not the senses themselves that are repeated, but the development of the extrasensory material that was contained behind the senses.
From the standpoint of true subject-object unity of intuition, everything is the present, and “time” disappears into it. There, God is both “the God who creates and is not created” and “the God who neither creates nor is created.
As described above, this paper deepens the discussion of pure experience and intuition, the fundamental concepts of Nishida’s philosophy, from the viewpoint of “the superconscious underlying the phenomena of consciousness. Although difficult to understand, this is an important essay that goes to the heart of Nishida’s original theory of time and epistemology.
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