In this paper, the late philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, which criticized the Western of “cogito” thought and emphasis on rationalism, and “experience” in Japan (in this case, primarily the philosophical conception represented by Nishida Kitaro’s “pure experience”), with which it shares similarities, will be compared and contrasted. Through this, the paper aims to abstract one trend in “experience”/ practice in Japan.
The starting point of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the body argues that we need to start with a discussion of the body, not consciousness. This is a criticism of Descartes, and leads to the “flesh” thought of the late Merleau-Ponty. In the late thought, rather than basing his arguments on the Cartesian “cogito”, Merleau-Ponty instead explains human existence by focusing on the ambiguity of the body, which of course exists as part of the background of “cogito”. Here we can see his originality. And here, in at least one sense, he overcomes a traditional issue that had not, until that point, been overcome. However, his interest in the body as the antithesis to cogito, and his criticisms of and even overcoming of cogito, remains within the Western arena. In addition, while his theories about the body and flesh may seem to also be criticisms of the subject that is assumed by body and flesh, it must nevertheless be said that the body is in fact the subject, and that the body is prerequisites to the world.
On the other hand, in the modern confrontation with Western thought, in order to criticize the Cartesian mind-body dualism and the premised idea of cogito, Nishida initially labeled the condition in which a split has not yet occurred between subjective and objective that of “pure experience”, and criticized taking as the starting point a situation in which the subjective has already been separated from the objective. Nishida expanded the concept of pure experience, and sought for explanation principle in directions other than subjectivity, such as in the location one reflects. In his late thought, Nishida created concepts such as that of “act intuition” and “absolute contradictory self-identity”. Unlike the dialectic of Hegel, which is said to have influenced Nishida, and which argues that historical development occurs through a process in which a contradiction and its contradiction, or thesis and antithesis, are synthesized, Nishida’s contradiction is not a contradiction that has to be resolved or synthesized. In Nishida, unlike Hegel, where the contradiction is seen as a process in which it is unified, it is considered to be a concept similar to the “logic immediately non” Suzuki Daisetsu found in Zen. It is not possible to find here the concept of subject that Merleau-Ponty assumes.