What is it about?
Philosophy is sometimes defined as a distinctly European and Western project, but in this project the idea that philosophy is found in all world cultures is promoted. In this particular essay, the author tries to identify a basis that makes it possible to compare the German philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, with the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō. This is done by arguing that the three philosophers assess the basic concepts of meaning, reason and freedom in relation to three basic phenomena, identified by Cassirer as that of "I", "activity" and "work".
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Why is it important?
The overall project is important in that it tries to meet the demands of our times, the age of fluid modernity, on several levels: the level of philosophical dialogue between cultures; the level of research into the interconnection between philosophy, religion, politics, and everyday culture; and the pedagogical and didactive level of teaching philosophy on both a basic and and advanced level. This essay addresses in particular the problem of how to compare cultural specificities through textual analysis of a philosophical kind, connected to "grand modern categories", such as "meaning, "reason", and "freedom".
Perspectives
Writing this essay was a great challenge. I had to come to terms with the fact that, even though I have been reading Nishida Kitarō since the early 1990ies, I don't' know Japanese and have only been following the research in the field intercultural philosophy sporadically. Luckily, the editors and the contributors to this unique volume are all in on the new, intercultural spirit of philosophy, and so this essay has benefited from the generosity of people engaged in the project of furthering philosophy "in a new key" in what I call "the provisional last of the modern worlds". I hope this essay will make people think that philosophy can make a difference, if it takes an intercultural turn and takes itself serious in this regard, and that it spurs interest and curiosity as to what happened in "Davos 1929".
Ingmar Meland
Norwegian University og Science and Technology
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This page is a summary of: From the Problem of Meaning via Basic Phenomena to the Question of Philosophy after Metaphysics: Cassirer, Heidegger, and Nishida, December 2023, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004680173_012.
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