Status Updates From Zen no kenkyū

精神


Note.
The Japanese term seishin, rendered here as “spirit,” is roughly equivalent to the German term Geist and therefore might also be rendered “mind” or “psyche.” Due to the religious connotations of seishin found later in this work, we have translated it as “spirit".

Nature as a truly concrete reality does not come into being without having a unifying activity. Nature therefore possesses a kind of self, too.

Although there is only one reality, it appears in various forms in accordance with differing views of it. Nature conceived of as an objective reality totally independent of our subjectivity is an abstract concept, not true reality. The noumenal aspect of nature is the fact of direct experience in which subject and object have not yet separated.

At the same time that reality is a unified whole, it must include opposition.


Even psychology construes the self as the unifier of consciousness.