Nishida Kitarō | Archive 00001 | Philosophy | Shard 00001 | Excerpt

Self-Determination of the Eternal Now, ⸹ 1 | July 1931*

Translated from the Japanese by Christopher Southward | Rev. November 2023

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Having considered the notion of the fullness of time apropos of St. Paul’s declaration, But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth his Son, St. Augustine concluded that this must mean that time ceases to exist.  Divine Nativity must require that something like that which we call time comes to an end.  But Meister Eckhart saw yet another meaning in the so-called ‘end of time.’  If we were to draw into the present moment all that has occurred and is likely to recur in a span of time, say several millennia, then this would amount to what is known as the fullness of time.  As the eternal now, this is the situation within which, for example, I see things and hear sounds; it is that situation within which we can say that we know all things clearly and anew through God (Meister Eckhart, Von der Vollendung der Zeit [On the Fullness of Time]).  Plato wrote in Timaeus that instead of endowing Creation with eternity, the Creator created “a moving image of eternity;” this image is what we call “time.”  It seems that Plato is thinking eternity here as that which is neither created nor destroyed, which is to say that it transcends time and, being constant and unchanging, is that which already was when time began and that which will remain at its end.  Let us note that there is neither past nor future in the eternal but only the present from which past and future flow; because it transcends human time, we must take care not to think eternity in terms of temporality.  That which is thought as the eternal now (nunc aeternum) must be thinkable as something like what Eckhart described as the result of the elimination, at a point within the present, of infinite past and infinite future.  This must mean that, as on the first day of Creation, God creates the world even now and that time is always beginning anew.

But what is the true nature of time, and how are we to think it?  We can think time as an endless passage of infinite past into infinite future; we can think it as linear progression.  But while the future is that which has yet to come and the past is that which has already appeared, and because it is that which has already passed, we can never know the past of the past; it is only by taking the singular present as our focus that we come to know past and future.  It would seem that when we integrate past into memory by taking the present as our focus and foresee that which has yet to come, the relation past-present-future arises.  Perhaps it is then thinkable that, within the present, there is both that which has already passed and that which has not yet ended as the past, that there is that which is yet to come but already shows its edge, that there is that which is present but already in decline, and that that which we call the relations of time arise because the passage of past into future implies absence.  But we can know that which changes only on the basis of that which does not, and thinking something like infinite past and infinite future from the standpoint of the present requires the work of that which itself gives infinite past and infinite future their content, which informs them. With Augustine, then, we can reject the idea that anything like what we call past, present, and future exists; rather, existing are past-present, present-present, and future-present, so that the structure of the present appears as a continuum: past-present-future. To situate time in the present must be to negate time itself, yet time must be that within which temporal sense is made infinite.  As infinite flow, vectored time is driven by the movement of eternity, which infinitely tends toward the absolute without touching it; it must be thinkable as that within which we are unable to return to even the previous moment, so that when we think the ever-receding horizon of time as that which is entangled in several senses of the temporal, we then discover that time is retrievable.  Not simply a unidirectional, vectored series of events, time is that which always and everywhere transcends that which it contains; time is the absolute horizon of that which is determined as the cognitive epistemological object.  The edge of time must be that which vanishes moment by moment, and this is why there is no eternal return; this is why we cannot grasp the present.  We agree with Augustine that time is embedded in the present, and we add that when we think time in this sense, that which we call time ceases to exist; time is a matter of contradiction in and of itself.  We must ask, then, how time-as-contradiction determines itself.

We can say that all that exists in some or another way exists universally; everything takes its meaning as an extension of the universal Idea.  This quality of extension is the condition of possibility for judging the essence of things; judgment shows itself here as the self-determination of the universal.  As for that which we call the singularity, we note that we can no more think it as a matter of becoming-predicate by virtue of its becoming-subject than we can think that it as an attribute of the predicative universal.  But the universal is the very condition of possibility for thinking the singularity, which is to say that the singularity is thinkable as the self-determination of the universal; I call this quality of the singularity the self-determination of the “place”[1] of the universal; determination of this sort propagates infinitely.  But even if we are now justified in saying that the singularity becomes subject, it doesn’t necessarily follow that its subjective determination should involve transformation.  Perhaps we can say that, being situated within the infinitely propagated universal, the singularity is thus infinitely bound to the chorological determination of being.  Thinking that which we call time demands that we go beyond the limits of that which we call the self-determination of the universal.  The condition of possibility for thinking so-called “time” lies in the chorological determination of nothingness as the self-determination of the self-itself in its becoming-nothingness.  While time is thinkable as that which proceeds as infinite movement, we know that it changes, so that even if we were to assign it a certain vector we would find it impossible to account for that which we call time simply by appealing to infinite movement.  Think time as constant and unchanging, and the horizon of the present recedes far beyond our reach.  And just as we noted above that we must apprehend the present in order to think past and future, we now note that the present isn’t determined by the past but that past and future are determined as the result of the determination of the present by the present itself; without the present, neither is there that which we call time.  This is not to say that thinking that which infinitely changes at the heart of the determined universal allows us to think the so-called self-determination of the present by the present itself; what we mean is that we now can think the self-determination of that which determines the self-itself without that which determines, and this follows from our understanding that time generates contradiction within the self-itself.  That which we call contradiction is unthinkable as an attribute of the determined universal; contradiction is thinkable only in terms of that which lies in the depths of that which, as nothingness, conceals being.  Time understood in terms of the present is not yet the present, for the present is ungraspable and contradiction is unthinkable.  But as for the self-knowing of the self-itself, which is to say for that which we call becoming-conscious, we can say that it is that which, as nothingness, determines being; we can say that it is that situation wherein the present always determines the present-itself.  Even Augustine would agree that past, present, and future pass through the mind’s eye.  Where the self knows the self-itself, there is the present; where the present determines the present-itself, there is the self.  The self has no basis; to think that not-self determines the self would be to think away that which we call the self.  The present has no basis; to think that it does would be to think that the past determines the present and thereby to do away with that which we call time.  We said earlier that all that exists exists through the universal and that rational knowledge is a consequence of the self-determination of the universal, but we might also have said that that which we call the self-determination of the universal is grounded in rational knowledge and that this is where the whole meaning of consciousness lies.  To say that becoming-noematicis at once a becoming-subject and that rationality co-arises with the self-determination of the universal can only mean that the self sees the self from a standpoint within the self.  But becoming-subject must be objective for the noematic consciousness of that which determines the self-itself as nothingness, sothat that which is thinkable as the chorological horizon of the singularity must be that whose meaning lies in the conscious determination of nothingness; human consciousness must be the condition of possibility for thinking something like the singularity, and individual judgment must always find grounding in intuition.  We claim with Aristotle, then, that it is impossible to ground truth in the idea of the singularity whose becoming-subject isn’t at once a becoming-predicate;to do so would leave the establishment of truth to the consciousness of nothingness.  The defining moment of Aristotle’s analysis of truth is the idea that truth is the conscious content of logos.  ‍ ‍

If time arises from the determination by the present of the present-itself, then the determination of the present-itself by the present would have to co-arise with the determination by nothingness of nothingness-itself, and it must be in this co-arising that we discover the significance of consciousness.  We can think that which we call time as the self-determination of the universal that determines the self-itself as nothingness; in other words, we can think it as the conscious determination of absolute nothingness.  Everything pertaining to the self-determination of the universal is grounded in the conscious determination of absolute nothingness, and while this self-determination remains hidden, we see that that which determines the self-itself as nothingness, namely the presentin its determination of the self-itself, is grounded in the conscious determination of absolute nothingness.  And because that which we call the actual determination of the self-itself by the present is the same as that which we call the ungraspable instant, also determined then is something like the instant that we say establishes the self-itself as the conscious determination of absolute nothingness; freedom lies in inhabiting the space of that instant.  Because the determination of that which we call freedom happens as the chorological determination of absolute nothingness, we can say that each embodied self has its own internal time and that, as such, we each have our own time.  Absolute time is usually thought as that which flows from eternal past into eternal future; it is thought as the absolute horizon of our existence.  But we noted above that taking this viewpoint prevents us from thinking that which we would call true time.  Time arises from the determination of the self by the self; it begins with the determination of the present by the present.  Where there is the individual self, there too is that which we call individual time.  We do not belong to time, rather, time belongs to us; so-called absolute time is a purely academic notion.  What is first determined then is that which determines the self-itself as nothingness, which is to say that which is determined as the noetic determination of the consciousness of absolute nothingness; it is that which is determined as chorological determination.  We might even go so far as to say that free is the one who actually determines the self-itself as nothingness.  The one determined by the nothingness of the absolute can only be free, and this is why that which determines the self-itself as nothingness appears to us as something like an infinite circle that hides infinite dialectical movement in the depths of the self; freedom is a circular determination that secrets time away to the self-itself.  Pascale speaks metaphorically when he says that God is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere, but we can also think that which we call the conscious determination of absolute nothingness as an infinite circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere (Pascale’s sphere seems appropriate, but I’ll deal with the circle for now).  The determination of the circle that infinitely determines the self-itself as nothingness is thinkable as an attribute of God’s spherical omnipresence, so that even the self of absolute nothingness exists within this circle, which fact leads to the diversification of our species in its determination and makes us marvel at the infinite coming-into-existenceof time as a multiverse of authentic presents.  If to say that the present determines the present is to say that it bears all time within itself, then we should also be able to think that which we call the absolute-present which determines all time; we would then be able to think the conscious determination of absolute nothingness whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.  From this it follows that that which we are trying to think as the absolute present begins everywhere as the rupture of the instant; it is that which we call the eternal now, or the drawing-in of infinite past and infinite future to a single point in the present, and it is on this basis that we can think time as co-arising with the self-determination of the eternal now.Being nothing like that which Plato thought in terms of immutable form, we find worthy to be called the eternal now only that which can eliminate infinite past and infinite future from a standpoint situated within every single point in the present; it must be thinkable as something like that which we call the consciousness of absolute nothingness––the condition of possibility for the beginning of time instantaneously and at all points.  Even Plato’s so-called world of eternity is determined by and withinthe consciousness of absolute nothingness as the eternal now.  Being unbound yet everywhere centered, that which we call the conscious aspect of absolute nothingness must be thinkable asthe condition of possibility for both the beginning and the end of time instantaneously and everywhere; as the absolute, it must be thinkable as that which bears life and death in one and the same face.  That is, if the self-determination of absolute nothingness is thinkable as the noetic determination by which it conceals infinite time, then so too is it thinkable as the noematic determination by which it both gives rise to infinite time and completely negates it.  It turns out that time is completely negated by being hidden in that which we call the present of the determined absolute, and we can now think the self-determination of the unbound circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere as the self-determination of an infinite circle that encompasses all.  There is neither movement nor life there; in fact, we should no longer even call it the present, for that which we call time ceases to exist there.  We can only think that which we call absolute time if, for that which we are calling an infinite circle, the self-determining aspect of singular-absolute nothingness is an aspect of that which we are thinking as our world of cognitive epistemological objects; we can think absolute time as the flow of eternal past into eternal future only because we understand it as the present of eternity determined by the eternal now, which is to say that we can think it in terms of both the self-determination of that which determines the self-itself by absolutely nullifying time and that which is determined by the eternal now as the eternal present.  But as stated above, that which we call time cannot be thought as the self-determination of the determined universal, which is to say that we cannot think time as the self-determination of the world of cognitive epistemological objects.  Rather, we must think time as the self-determination of the universal that determines the self-itself as nothingness.  In claiming that we can now think that as determined that which we call absolute time, we find ourselves in search of an instant even deeper than the instant; to think absolute time is necessarily to grasp the ungraspable instant, and this must imply that the center of the infinite circle has convened upon a point, all of which is impossible except through the mind of God.  And what is determined is something like the circle that determines the self-itself as nothingness; determined then is the self-determination of the infinite circle, which is to say that which we call the present that determines the self-itself.  Where we manage to grasp the ungraspable present there arises that which we call time.  Each of us, by determining the self-itself as nothingness, can finally think the encounter with true time at the horizon of the instant, which is to say that we can think the experience of absolute time, and this means that, here, at the outer limits of the ego, we encounter God, and it is through God that we discover that that which is within is already that which is without.  But if we can think a present that once and for all determines the present itself, then we can also think a present that endures everywhere it goes; we can then think the self-determination of the enduring present as the noematic consciousness of nothingness, which means that we can think something like the conscious determination of the universal self.  The self-determination of that which determines the self-itself as nothingness must be thought as the self-determination of the fleeting instant; it is here that we can think something like the self-determination of the determined present; here, we can think the so-called eternity of Plato’s forms.  Somewhere along this path, we might even stumble upon a limit-point from which to think the atemporal.    

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[1] Nishida brackets the term “place”「場所」[basho] here: a foundational concept within his philosophical system.

*Additionally archived at Binghamton University Libraries, The Open Repository @ Binghamton (The ORB): https://orb.binghamton.edu/comparative_literature_fac/45/. Revision © 2023 Christopher Southward; All Rights Reserved.