Philosophical Conceptions of Cultural Space in Russia and Japan: Comparing Nishida Kitarō and Semën Frank

Abstract

Jean-Luc Nancy notes that the community, since it is no absolute subject (self, will, spirit), is by its nature not inscribed in any logic metaphysics. In spite of this, or indeed because of this, Western philosophy has persistently tried to interpret the community through precisely these metaphysical terms (Nancy, 1986, page 18, La Commonauté désoevrée, Christian Bourgeois, Paris). Some thoughts about Russian and Japanese notions of community and space will show that characteristics pointed out by Nancy and Kant are binding only for societies that function within a Western intellectual framework. I want to introduce and compare the thought of Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945) and Semën L Frank (1877–1950), who develop the notions of basho and sobornost’ as alternative philosophical concepts of space. Both Nishida and Frank attempt to overcome what they consider a typically ‘Western’ idea of individual ‘I's as materialized ‘objects’. Procedures like Einfühlung or intuition are inefficient because all they do is to transform the other, from the point of view of the ‘I’, into an object. Finally, for the Eurasianist, the state organization had at its center a personal god, and the ‘symphonic personality’ of Russia-Eurasia represented a nonegoistic, communal consciousness.