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Brilliant. And as all predication is in reality self-predication, individuation and contradiction stand hand-in-hand. “Is or is not” becomes “is-and-is-not” (A sive not-A). But, unlike Hegel, this position is never ultimately resolved at a higher level, it remains a contradiction which is entirely self-identical all the way down (jettai mujunteki jikodoitsu, according to NK). The consciousness that accompanies that element, again for NK, is not the self of the object of knowledge, like in Kant, who essentially stopped there, but the I of the self-awareness of reality itself (the place of absolute nothingness).

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A clear exposition from Krummel regarding Kant’s transcendental dilemma and the form of the formless: “Rather than viewing form and matter [..] as two separate entities, [NK] sought on the basis of his notion of self-mirroring self-awareness to regard the formation of unformed matter, the objectification process, from the BROADER perspective of a self-forming formlessness to thus encompass the dichotomized terms of [..] form and matter”. (Place & Dialectic, p.13)

Obviously Nishida’s approach was a logical attempt to go beyond an observed dualism, not an empirical attempt to move towards an unobserved (and unobservable) unity. But there should be little doubt that both arrows point to the same OPPOSITE direction.

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