The Nothingness Beyond God: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nishida Kitaro

Rating:
Summary: Something to Say About Nothing
Review: Carter's "The Nothingness Beyond God" is a beacon that opens up for discovery new possibilities of a meaningful dialogue between Eastern and Western philosophical traditions. Dedicating a chapter to each developmental stage, the book clearly illuminates the evolution of the philosophy of Nishida Kitar . Initiating the inquiry with the concept of pure experience, Carter deftly, yet with eloquent brevity, extricates the essential elements of Nishidan thought from a complex of the philosopher's writings. Carter demonstrates how Nishida never lost sight of his founding concept, pure experience, while he continued to tender increasingly more elucidated refinements that saw the genesis of the Logic of Basho and the concept of Self-Contradictory Identity. The refinement eventually produced a philosophical stance which he called The Dialectical World of "Acting Intuition", and of which this edition offers a substantially expanded exegesis. But Carter does not rest here, he suggests that issues of religion, morality and ethics, in short of value in general, can be, and indeed must be, tied to an understanding of the essential unfolding of the individual, without which, these concepts, lacking a form for expression, would be essentially empty.. In other words, what Carter sees as groundbreaking in Nishida is an insight that offers an ontology that can participate in the resolution of contemporary world issues. Ecology and environmental issues now become deep issues that are inseparable from our own well being. In what has clearly secured itself as a masterpiece of comparative philosophy, its contemporary relevance has additionally advanced the endeavour to bridge the gap between East and West. Yet, one of the more salient features of "The Nothingness Beyond God" is its range of accessibility. It is equally stimulating for the neophyte as well as the seasoned comparativist, in that its accessibility does not come at the expense of scholarly exactness. Well done.

Rating:
Summary: Something to Say About Nothing
Review: Carter's "The Nothingness Beyond God" is a beacon that opens up for discovery new possibilities of a meaningful dialogue between Eastern and Western philosophical traditions. Dedicating a chapter to each developmental stage, the book clearly illuminates the evolution of the philosophy of Nishida Kitar . Initiating the inquiry with the concept of pure experience, Carter deftly, yet with eloquent brevity, extricates the essential elements of Nishidan thought from a complex of the philosopher's writings. Carter demonstrates how Nishida never lost sight of his founding concept, pure experience, while he continued to tender increasingly more elucidated refinements that saw the genesis of the Logic of Basho and the concept of Self-Contradictory Identity. The refinement eventually produced a philosophical stance which he called The Dialectical World of "Acting Intuition", and of which this edition offers a substantially expanded exegesis. But Carter does not rest here, he suggests that issues of religion, morality and ethics, in short of value in general, can be, and indeed must be, tied to an understanding of the essential unfolding of the individual, without which, these concepts, lacking a form for expression, would be essentially empty.. In other words, what Carter sees as groundbreaking in Nishida is an insight that offers an ontology that can participate in the resolution of contemporary world issues. Ecology and environmental issues now become deep issues that are inseparable from our own well being. In what has clearly secured itself as a masterpiece of comparative philosophy, its contemporary relevance has additionally advanced the endeavour to bridge the gap between East and West. Yet, one of the more salient features of "The Nothingness Beyond God" is its range of accessibility. It is equally stimulating for the neophyte as well as the seasoned comparativist, in that its accessibility does not come at the expense of scholarly exactness. Well done.

Rating:
Summary: good and bad
Review: For myself, this was a very interesting and informative book. Carter attempts to lay out the philosopy of Nishida Kitaro in a graspable fashion... no easy task... I must say, however, that I was only able to slog through this book because of my own interest in the subject... Carter could have seriously used a good editor, although I expect it must have been difficult to find an editor who was sufficiently ruthless and at the same time sensitive to the difficulty of what Carter was trying to do, let alone wrap his or her brain around the subject... a more closely edited version of this book could have been great... as it is, the stark contrast between the quality and clarity of Thomas Kasulis' forward and the body of the book reflects poorly on Carter.
As I said, however, the book's got a lot of good stuff to offer, and stuff that I have not been able to find elswhere (although I have yet to read the several more English language books on Kitaro that have come out since this)... It has a lot of good stuff to offer IF you can get to it...
The book does, however, have one unexcusable flaw: Chapter Seven. In chapter seven, Carter suddenly shifts from abstract-to-the-the-point-of-being-incomprehensible to "concrete", by relating his discussion to an idealized "Japanese" world in a way that is as... er... bizzare... as it is fanciful. He seems wrapped up in a weird picture-postcard view of "the Japanese" (a term he beats utterly to death) that, for me, utterly undermined the authority of his arguments. By the time he quoted James Clavell's "Shogun" (albiet in a footnote) to illustrate the importance of non-intellectuallized "pure experience" to "the Japanese", I was ready to throw this book in the trash. I didn't, however, and got a lot of good food for thought, or rather, perspectives on thought and non-thought, from it.