Wisdom World

It is a profound and complex philosophical text that explores profound questions about knowledge, consciousness, self, and different modes of existence or "worlds." As I understand it, here is a summary of the main ideas

• The author distinguishes between different kinds of “general persons” - the judgmental general person, the conscious general person, and the general person of intellectual intuition. Each builds on and transcends the previous one.

• There are three levels of “the Wisdom Self” within the general person of intellectual intuition - intellectual, artistic, and moral, corresponding to the ideas of true, beauty, and good, respectively. But even the moral self, the highest wisdom self, contains within it a contradiction.

• To truly transcend this, one must enter the realm of religious consciousness, “the place of absolute nothingness. Here Subjective and Objective, what is known and what is known are transcended in a state of mystical union. The phenomenal world of the Wisdom Self is seen as a limited projection of this Absolute.

• However, the true position of philosophy is not identical with religious experience itself, but rather reflects on it from the outside. From this meta-perspective of “absolute zero,” philosophy seeks to elucidate the structure and foundations of knowledge itself. It gives each mode of knowledge and being its unique position and seeks to clarify their interrelationships.

• In this way, the author attempts to provide a foundation for metaphysics while avoiding confusion between the different meanings of “existence”. It is a problem that has plagued metaphysical systems in the past. The goal is an exhaustive critical philosophy that gets to the root of how knowledge is possible.

The text addresses the deepest questions of ontology, epistemology, and philosophy of religion in a uniquely East Asian language strongly influenced by Buddhist and Neo-Confucianism, in addition to Western thinkers Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and others. It represents a profound contribution to comparative philosophy and to the global dialogue between philosophical traditions.

This page is auto-translated from /nishio/叡智的世界 using DeepL. If you looks something interesting but the auto-translated English is not good enough to understand it, feel free to let me know at @nishio_en. I’m very happy to spread my thought to non-Japanese readers.