Mu無is because mu無is not Nothingness (mu無) as a space of Nishida's Pure Experience in his process of self-imagination
Abstrakt
Kitarô Nishida (1870 - 1945) is one of the founders of the so called Kyôto-School which was established in 1913 in Japan. The young Nishida was a cross-border philosopher influenced by the philosophy of German Idealism as well as anglo-saxon thinkers and the beginnings of Field Theory.
To overcome his metaphoric problem of space (basho場所), which was already found in his early thinking, he adapted the term "Pure Experience" from William James. Later, from 1926 onwards, Nishida further developed the problem of space to consolidate it into his "logic of space".Nishida was not only a philosopher between the continents, but was also influenced by his middle-school friend Daisetzu Suzuki - a pious zen-buddhist.
Aside from his philosophical works, Nishida left more than about 280 calligraphies. A lot of them show us his own self-expression (hyôgen 表現) about the kanji mu無 - nothingness.
His main idea in the early period, which is the main focus here, was to overcome the subject-object distinction of western philosophy. In Jame's understanding of Pure Experience he found a description of a consciousness-level that is characterised by a state that is not yet split into subjective and objective judgement.
Furthermore Nothingness mu 無 is a space in which both, subject and object, form a unit by dialectically neutralizing each other. So nothingness could be called meontology.
The process of acting creates the "self" through itself and all things we conduct we do by our self-imagination. Our self acts through reflecting imaginations, which need the space of nothingness to see a reflection of the things themselves.
This movement is an active process of building and rebuilding our own self which Nishida calls the "self-identity of absolute contradictories" (mujunteki jikodôitsu). This transfer, that all imaginations are empty and we just follow constructions of our self.
With the 'self-identity of absolute contradictories', self-identity in general is a state where logic is communicated as a mean to attain a sudden unification.This lecture picks up the term Pure Experience and transfer its meaning into Nishida's calligraphies. It tries to get a first insight into the process of self-imagination as well as the meaning of reality.
How do we create reality and why is the pure reality a formless form? A short excursus to the Negative Dialectic, which forms the basis of the "inner world", is necessary to get the meaning of Nishida's logic of space (basho no ronri 場所の論理) where we might find an answer for what mu is because it is not.