Just Will

I have heard it said of Plato’s writing that he can hide the trivial in serious sounding rhetoric, while disguising the serious as the trivial . Socrates’s (the character of Socrates as written by Plato) in the Phaedrus dialogue -possibly his most mystical and certainly a beautifully crafted mythological piece about the re-ascension of the soul to it’s  divine home by means of love of the beautiful described as the regrowth of the soul's wings. Similarly, in the Symposium he concludes his extensive oration on the subject of love thus-

“So you may call this my eulogy of Love, Phaedrus, if you choose; if not, well, call it what you like”

Words and concepts can point to the aspects of reality- even to the ultimate reality- but beyond the pointers ‘is’.. well….

Nishida Kitaro, a favourite of mine wrote a treatise on what can be called “Neo-Kantianism”, basically philosophy informed by both Kant’s original insights and Schopenhauer’s development of these. For Kant, everything in the world of experience is phenomenal; all of it has already been conditioned by the forms of our perception and cognition. Therefore, all previous attempts to enunciate reality by philosophers were necessarily only relatively accurate, or rather, were bound to an a prioi conditioned appearance of ‘the world’ and so were not competent to pierce the noumenal being-in-itself of reality. Schopenhauer took this paradigm, but he believed that the noumenal being-in-itself could indeed be posited with more than purely negative content (ie, by saying it is completely beyond reach). He pointed at the foundation of our own subjectivity which is identical (in being prior differentiation and distinction) with the noumenal being-in-itself of all the world. He called this being-in-itself the will.

Kitaro develops Schopenhauer’s bare realisation of will as this inner, unconditioned, foundation by weaving it into his own Zen experiences. In a sense, this is a contradiction; adding more concepts and words to describe that which can only be encountered through the riddance of concepts and abstractions. But what emerges from Kitaro’s apparent complication of the subject is in fact an even more powerful cutting away of the mess of illusory concepts and confusions.  Much like Plato in the dialogues, Kitaro doesn’t slap dogmatic pronouncements – at least, not as the non plus ultra of his thought. He rather opens a gate in the mind, a heavy iron gate marked with the word ‘ego’-

“over time I came to realise that it is not that experience exists because there is an individual, but that an individual exists because there is experience, I thus arrived at the idea that experience is more fundamental than individual differences, and in this way I was able to avoid solipsism”

-An Inquiry into the Good, Nishida Kitaro

 Kitaro still holds that will is the foundation of phenomenal existence, including the phenomenon of our own empirical ‘self’. But in the above quote, simply and without ponderous terminology, Kitaro cuts off the last bolt-hole of the ego from pretending to be the ultimate reality (think of Max Stirner’s ego-philosophy), while revealing the presence (and hence our access to) the ultimate reality – not beyond and out of reach – but right here, right now, and within.

I suppose we could call that the beginning, the end, the answer to all philosophical and spiritual search.

If not, well we can call it what we will!