1. The Place of Dialogue – A Japanese Perspective on Universality

In order to carry out a philosophical dialogue between cultures and traditions, we need to address the question of the very nature of dialogue. In other words, we need to engage in a dialogue about dialogue. It is inappropriate to delineate the conceptual parameters – the horizon of sense and significance – of this dialogue in advance, only then to invite others into this space to speak with us on our own terms. Rather, from the start we need to dialogically address questions regarding the ‘place’, so to speak, in which dialogue is or should be taking place.

It seems that we need a neutral ‘place’, an unbiased universal medium in which various particular cultures could meet, and converse, without one unilaterally playing the role of host while others are compelled to only ever play the role of guest, that is to say, without the purportedly universal meeting place being in fact merely the home ground of one of the particular interlocutors. Yet without immediate access to a transcultural medium, a standpointless standpoint, how are we to conceive of this universal meeting place? How could it be defined, delineated, or circumscribed? We have no view from nowhere. Indeed, were we to have one, it could show us nothing, insofar as forms of being can only be perceived from a determinate and determining perspective. Hence, it would seem that ‘universality’ can only be endlessly approached by way of taking into account as many perspectives or viewpoints as possible. As Nietzsche suggests, given the perspectival nature of perception and knowledge, ‘the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity”, be'.Footnote ¹ This epistemological principle applies not only to particular things, but also to universal matters, matters such as the question of, and quest for, an unbiased medium or neutral ‘place’ in which a genuine dialogue between cultures could take place. Every culture, we can presume, has its particular account of what it considers to be universal. And we can presume that every culture potentially involved in cross-cultural dialogue can contribute to the dialogue a vision of the nature of such dialogue.

What vision of cross-cultural dialogue, and of the universality that makes it possible, might be contributed from Japan? In this essay I reflect on the nature of dialogue from the perspective of thinkers associated with the Kyoto School. The Kyoto School is the most prominent group of modern Japanese philosophers, whose philosophies themselves are enactments of dialogue between Western philosophy and East Asian traditions such as Zen Buddhism.Footnote ² I focus here on two key members of the School: its founder, Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945), and the leading representative of its third generation, Ueda Shizuteru (b. 1926).Footnote ³ I attempt to show not only how these Japanese philosophers invite us to enter into dialogue with East Asian thought and with their own cross-cultural thinking, but also how they invite us to reconsider the very nature of both interpersonal and intercultural dialogue as such.

Let us begin with some questions. What is dialogue? Who are the individuals who speak and who listen, and how are they related both to the cultural-linguistic spheres of the traditions in which they find themselves and to the wider field of intercultural, interlinguistic, and intertraditional encounter? Insofar as dialogue as dia-legein is a ‘speaking across’, how should we understand the space that is traversed here? The Japanese term for ‘dialogue’ is taiwa, which literally implies a ‘linguistic encounter’ between two or more persons. In line with Nishida's ‘logic of place’, according to which two terms are always related on the basis of a third term, namely the place in which their relation takes place, we could ask: What is the place in which this linguistic encounter takes place? It would seem that the space between self and other that is bridged in dialogue must paradoxically be one that both separates and connects, a space that allows for both irreducible singularity and shared community. But how are we to understand this iteration of the age-old question – deeply pondered in the East as well as in the West – of the One and the Many? What is the relation between the one world and the many individuals who inhabit it, or between the universally shared world and the diversity of specific cultural worlds in which, or between which, we live? With these questions we discover that an inquiry into the nature of dialogue is hardly a peripheral matter for philosophers, for it quickly leads us, not only back to basic questions of philosophical anthropology, philosophy of language, and ethics, but also back to the most fundamental questions of ontology or, as it may turn out, ‘meontology’ or ‘kenology’ – a logos of ‘absolute nothingness’ or ‘emptiness’.Footnote ⁴

In order to see how Nishida and Ueda rethink the nature of dialogue, we need to look at how they understand the relation between self and other. We also need to look at how they regard the relation between individual selves and specific communities, which ultimately must be understood in terms of a threefold relation between the individual, the communal ‘species’,Footnote ⁵ and the universal ‘place’ which encompasses both individual and species. They refer to the all-encompassing universal with such locutions as ‘the place of absolute nothingness’ (zettai mu no basho) and the ‘empty expanse’ (kokū). By way of reflecting on the relations between these three terms – individuals, communal species, and the all-encompassing universal place – they develop provocative and possibly compelling new ways of understanding the nature of interpersonal and intercultural dialogue.

Let me state at the outset that in this essay I attempt to elucidate and develop what I find most valuable and still viable in the thought of the Kyoto School. There has been much controversy surrounding the wartime political writings of its first two generations.Footnote ⁶ Regrettably, the debate has too often digressed into excessively polemical attacks and overly defensive responses. In other essays I have tried to steer a middle course that neither whitewashes nor vilifies the political thought of the Kyoto School during the war, often by way of engaging in an ‘immanent critique’ that turns the light of their own insights back on their blind spots and missteps.Footnote ⁷ The matter is complicated by the fact that they were often endeavoring – even if in the end unsuccessfully – to reform from within the ultranationalism sweeping over Japan at the time by way engaging in what Ōhashi Ryōsuke calls ‘cooperative resistance’ or ‘oppositional cooperation’ (hantaisei-teki kyōryoku)Footnote ⁸ and what Ueda calls a ‘semantic struggle’ (imi no sōdatsusen), that is to say, a tug of war over the meaning of the catchwords and phrases being bandied about by far a less judicious and scrupulous ideologues of the regime.Footnote ⁹ To be sure, even once we take this into account, there remain some troubling aspects of the erstwhile political thought of the Kyoto School philosophers. Be that as it may, my concern in the present essay is not with discarding this political bathwater but rather with nurturing the philosophical baby. I attempt here to bring out their cross-cultural best, rather than to catch them at their political worst.Footnote ¹⁰

2. Nishida's Dialectical World as Mutual Determination of Individuals and Cultural Species

Nishida saw the 18^th century as an age of abstract individualism, the 19^th century as an age of nationalism and imperialism, and the 20^th century as the first truly world-historical age of global awareness.Footnote ¹¹ The dawning global era that Nishida envisioned would still involve healthy competition, but no longer imperialistic aggression between nations. It would be an age of self-determination through dialogical exchange. Below I argue that, in an important sense, what Nishida calls ‘true individuals’ (shin no ko, shin no kobutsu) are the ultimate agents of intercultural dialogue.

However, we must first take into account Nishida's critique of ‘abstract individualism’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’, and his insistence that concretely existing individuals can never be simply abstracted from their native cultural and ethnic species. Indeed, at times he suggests that ethnic nations are themselves agents of historical development engaged in intercultural competition, and that the current age of global awareness should be understood as one of utmost nationalism rather than cosmopolitanism.Footnote ¹² Yet, more precisely and more compellingly, Nishida argues that it is neither the individual nor the species on its own that is the locus and engine of historical development; it is rather ‘the dialectical universal’, which means for him nothing other than the dialectical interaction between species and individuals. ‘What decides the course of history is neither the individual nor the species but rather that which creatively forms itself. The historical age determines itself’.Footnote ¹³

According to Nishida, ‘the world determines itself in a unique manner [kosei-teki ni]’ both as individuals and as cultural or ethnic species. When the world becomes creative, ‘we ourselves become creative elements of the creative world’; and at the same time, our species ‘comes alive as a self-determining particular’. The individual's self-determination is thus not merely a negation of, or separation from, the species; ‘that the individual becomes creative as an individual does not entail that he or she becomes an isolated individual, but rather that he or she fulfills the destiny of the species as a particular of the universal’.Footnote ¹⁴ We are born and act as unique individuals within the unique specificity of this or that national culture and ethnicity, not in an abstract global space. Were an individual to simply ‘depart from the species and become an abstract individual’, it would not gain but rather ‘lose its self’.Footnote ¹⁵ Thus, Nishida claims, ‘we become true individuals not as cosmopolitans but rather as members of nations’.Footnote ¹⁶ The abstract individualism of the 18^th century, according to Nishida, fails to account for the extent to which individuals are first of all determined by their specific nations and cultures. He would presumably agree with recent communitarians who argue that the liberal or libertarian idea of the ‘atomistic’ and culturally ‘unencumbered’ individual is itself, ironically, the product of a specific, historically developed cultural community.Footnote ¹⁷

Nevertheless, Nishida also repeatedly stresses that the true individual is not merely a product or representative of a cultural species or nation, since he or she also ‘at times ruptures the species’.Footnote ¹⁸ ‘Although we are born from a species, it must also be the case that we ourselves go on to form the species’.Footnote ¹⁹ While initially being determined by the specific ethnicity or national culture in which they are born and raised, true individuals can also turn around and ‘counter-determine’ (gyaku-gentei suru) these. Individuals are thus not merely products of, but also agents in the historical development of cultural species. As participants in the dialectical movement ‘from what is made to what makes’ (tsukurareta mono kara tsukuru mono e), individuals are both determined by and in turn counter-determine the cultures in which they live.Footnote ²⁰ Whereas in biological life the species determines the individual in a mostly unilateral manner, ‘in historical life, it is possible for the individual to diverge from the species; in other words, there is individual freedom’.Footnote ²¹ ‘In short’, Nishida argues, ‘history is something that humans create and that in turn creates humans’, or, put the other way around, history is something that creates humans and that humans in turn create.Footnote ²² For instance, Shakespeare was shaped by the English world in which he was raised, just as Dōgen was shaped by the Japanese world of his origin; yet both – in part by way of learning foreign languages and customs – in turn also creatively contributed to the development of their respective languages and cultures.

To sum up these points: according to Nishida, ‘while the individual is born and thoroughly determined by the species, it also determines the species’; ‘life is found where there is both the fixed form of a species and the possibility of breaking through this form’.Footnote ²³ ‘Species is form, paradigm. Yet while individuals are born from a species, they also go on to form that species’.Footnote ²⁴ On the one hand, an individual cannot create ex nihilo; he or she must begin with the forms or paradigms into which he or she is – to borrow an expression from Heidegger – ‘thrown’ (geworfen). On the other hand, a species, such as a national or ethnic culture, is only a ‘living species’ insofar as it grants the individuals it determines the freedom to in turn counter-determine it. Specific social, linguistic, and cultural paradigms initially shape individuals' lives; but these paradigms are themselves kept alive and more or less continually recreated by individuals.

3. Radical Cosmopolitanism: True Individuals as Agents of Cross-Cultural Dialogue

In a dialogue with Miki Kiyoshi in 1936, Nishida proposed the development of a ‘new humanism’ that would move beyond the one-sidedness of both atomistic individualism and communal holism by seeing the free individual as a ‘creative element of the creative world’.Footnote ²⁵ Analogously, and also on the basis of implications of some of Nishida's core ideas, I suggest that we can speak of a ‘new cosmopolitanism’ that moves beyond both the excessively libertarian idea of a culturally ‘unencumbered’ individual and the excessively communitarian idea of an individual totally determined by his or her native culture. Nishida and the communitarians are right to reject an atomistic individualism that does not recognize the extent to which individuals become who they are in the context of their native cultures. Yet, insofar as true individuals are never exhaustively defined by their native roots, never entirely restricted to their heretofore cultural determinations, they are not just members of this or that group, not just citizens of this or that nation, but also, and in a still deeper sense, ‘citizens of the world’. This new, radical understanding of cosmopolitanism would not see such individuals as rootless atoms floating around in an abstract global space (and racking up frequent flyer miles along the way!), but rather as ‘creative elements of the creative world’ who, in becoming self-aware of their heretofore determination by their native roots, become able to critically evaluate and thereby enrich these roots by way of branching out into dialogical interaction with individuals stemming from other nations and cultures.

Now, I think that an argument can be made on the basis of Nishida's thought that ‘true individuals’ – as ‘creative elements of the creative world’,Footnote ²⁶ ‘focal points of the creative world’,Footnote ²⁷ ‘self-projections of the absolute’,Footnote ²⁸ and ‘self-determinations of absolute nothingness’Footnote ²⁹ – are the pivotal agents of cross-cultural dialogue. In order to understand why this is the case, we need to bring back into the discussion ‘the place of absolute nothingness’ as the ultimate ‘universal’ in which the mutual determination of species and individuals takes place. Insofar as the individual touches in his or her depths the wellspring of absolute nothingness, as the inherently indeterminate source of self-determination, he or she can exceed his or her determination by the species. This not only means that he or she can rupture and creatively reform the species, but also that he or she can empathize and engage in transformative dialogue with individuals rooted in other species.

In ‘I and Thou’ (Watakushi to nanji, 1932) and subsequent works, Nishida developed his idea of the place of absolute nothingness in dialectical and dialogical terms to account for the co-existence and mutual interaction of ‘true individuals’. ‘Between true individuals’, Nishida writes, ‘there cannot be a so-called universal which includes them’.Footnote ³⁰ Why would he deny that self and other could be encompassed by the same universal? Because, if self and other were related merely as different particularizations of the same universal, this essential sameness would undermine their individuality and mutual alterity, reducing, in Levinas's language, the Other (l'Autre) to the Same (le Même). Nishida does in fact initially say that we must try to think the sense in which ‘I and Thou are determined by the same universal’.Footnote ³¹ The equivocation is cleared up, however, insofar as he makes a crucial distinction between ‘universals of being’ (u no ippansha) and the ‘universal of nothingness’ (mu no ippansha).Footnote ³² Universals of being have specific content, and we can understand what he subsequently (under the influence of Tanabe Hajime) calls a cultural or social ‘species’ as a kind of universal of being. The universal of nothingness is the inherently indeterminate place of absolute nothingness, which Nishida comes to think of not only as the creative source of self-determination but also as the ‘dialectical universal’ that enables the interaction between individual and species, as well as between one individual and another.

Nishida writes: ‘Even while my concept of a dialectical universal is a universal, it does not oppose individual determination or negate the individual. It signifies rather the medium of the mutual determination of individuals’.Footnote ³³ Two individuals truly meet when they interact, not merely as particular manifestations of this or that cultural species or ‘universal of being’, but rather as two ‘focal points’ of the self-determination of the ultimate place (or universal) of absolute nothingness,Footnote ³⁴ that is, as two uniquely ‘creative elements of the creative world’.Footnote ³⁵ Such individuals are not only determined by, but are also – insofar as they directly ‘touch the creative’ source of absolute nothingnessFootnote ³⁶ – able to ‘counter-determine’ their specific cultural universals (i.e. ‘species’).

This is a decisive point, because the capacity to counter-determine one's culture is what testifies, not only to the freedom of self-determination, but also to the possibility of cross-cultural dialogue. If individuals were exhaustively determined by their respective cultural universals (i.e. ‘species’), genuine cross-cultural dialogue would be impossible. If such were the case, even if it were still somehow possible for cultural expressions to be translated and interpretively reflected in the idiom of another culture, these cultures would remain unaffected by this interpretive reflection, and individuals would always only ever see artifacts of other cultures through their own cultural lenses. Granted that this is what largely happens, for example through the media of dubbed television shows and guided travel tours, yet surely it is also the case that cultures are sometimes genuinely transformed though contact with other cultures, and surely individuals are sometimes able translate other idioms into their own by way of letting themselves be translated into those other idioms. Nishida makes room for such possibilities of radical cross-cultural dialogue and exchange with his idea of an unfathomable, all-encompassing universal or place of absolute nothingness, a place which engenders, through self-determination qua dialectical interaction between individuals and species, the myriad cultures of the historical world. Communication can happen between individuals from different cultures insofar as these individuals are not exhaustively determined by their respective cultures – that is to say, insofar as, in their depths, they transcend their cultures and directly touch the creatively self-determining place of absolute nothingness.Footnote ³⁷

Genuine cross-cultural dialogue happens between such ‘true individuals’ who are capable, not just of serving as cultural ambassadors or representatives, but also of stepping beyond the horizons of their native cultures and of expanding these horizons by bringing them into contact with other horizons. Because the true individual can experience him- or herself as a focal point of the self-determination of the place of absolute nothingness, that is, as a singular instance or expression of the all-encompassing ‘universal of nothingness’, rather than merely as a particularization of the ‘universal of being’ of a specific culture, he or she can enter into dialogue with individuals from other cultures. The place of absolute nothingness is thus the dialectically self-determining medium in which cross-cultural interaction and dialogue takes place between singular individuals and, thereby, between communities and nations.

Singular individuals are never, to be sure, free-floating atoms wholly unencumbered by the cultural contexts in which they find themselves; but neither are they ever wholly determined by these contexts. The ultimate place in which individuals abide is the essentially indeterminate place of absolute nothingness, a fecund wellspring of possibilities of self-determination and a nonreductive medium of dialectical interaction; and it is because individuals share this nothingness in common with other individuals who are, for their part, rooted in but never exhaustively determined by their own cultural contexts, that cross-cultural understanding and dialogue are possible. Such dialogue not only enables individuals to enrich and transform their own personal cultural conditioning, it also enables them to counter-determine their respective cultures in ways that enrich and potentially even transform them.

This is the new, dialogically cross-cultural cosmopolitanism that can be developed on the basis of some core elements of Nishida's thought. This new cosmopolitanism would be ‘radical’ both in the sense that it would maintain a recognition of the proximate rootedness of individuals in specific cultures, and in the sense that it would entail an awareness that the deepest roots of individuals extend down beneath the topsoil that sustains their specific cultures, down into the unfathomable depths of the earth that tacitly nourish and bond together the entire ecosystem of humanity.

4. Between I and Thou, the Bow: Ueda on Interpersonal Dialogue

Among Kyoto School philosophers, it is Ueda Shizuteru who most clearly and explicitly articulates a Zen Buddhist understanding of the dialogical relation between persons and, by extension, between cultures. And so, in the second half of this essay I turn mainly to his writings on the topic of dialogue.Footnote ³⁸

Ueda uses the Japanese greeting of the bow (ojigi) as a concrete example to illustrate how mutual self-negation – the emptying of egocentric presumptions and agendas – returns us to the abyssal ground of an originary nothingness that we share in common beneath the culturally determined roots of our personal being. In a passage on bowing from his essay called ‘I and Thou’ (Watakushi to nanji, 2000), Ueda writes:

Nishida's student and Ueda's teacher, Nishitani Keiji (1900–1990), explains what Ueda calls here ‘unilateral egoism’ (‘ga’ kara no ippōsei, literally ‘from the ego unilaterality’) in terms of the ‘infinite drive of karma’, that is to say, the egoistic will to power that propels and perpetuates the stream of unenlightened existence.Footnote ⁴⁰ Insofar as ‘one ceaselessly strives to expand one's volitional power, one's power of control’, one remains self-enclosed. ‘The manner of being defined by an egoistic will can never go beyond its own self-extension or the expansion of its own power, and thus can never really encounter the other’.Footnote ⁴¹ Only by way of emptying the self, giving the self to others and upholding their being, can we realize a true interconnectedness with them and thereby attain our own self-standing by being upheld in turn by them. The true self is not the self-enclosed ego driven by its will to self-expansion and power over others, but rather the self that is open to its interconnection with others. This true self is realized by way of a self-emptying of its egocentric will, and this non-egocentric way of being is implied in the central Buddhist teaching of anatman (in Japanese, muga), a term that is translated in various contexts as no-self, no-soul, non-ego, or egolessness.Footnote ⁴² In Zen, it is no contradiction to say that the true self is no-self, insofar as this is understood to mean that the true being of the self is a non-egocentric and dynamic mode of existence (or ek-sistence) that cannot be reified as an independent substance.

Ueda understands the Buddhist teaching of anatman as a radical negation of egocentric manners of being a self as well as reifying interpretations of the being of the self. Yet, for Ueda, the teaching of anatman best serves as an antidote to our tendency toward egoistic self-assertion and self-reification, since, taken on its own, the doctrine can lead to the opposite problem of a mere absence or dissolution of our sense of self. The experience of anatman should be understood rather as the second moment in the dialectical movement of the true self, that is, of the self who affirms itself only by way of negating itself. The self-identity of such a self can be expressed as ‘I, in not being I, am I’.Footnote ⁴³ In other words, Ueda understands the Buddhist teaching of anatman as calling attention to the crucial moment of ‘in not being I’ that breaks open the karmically driven closed circuit of the ‘I am I’ and enables the self to be itself by way of not being itself.

The true self, for Ueda, is realized as the dynamic entirety of this circling movement through self-negation and self-reaffirmation: I, in not being I, am I. Problems with the self arise when this process is short-circuited: either by leaving out the moment of self-negation and misunderstanding oneself as a self-sufficient cogito that can monologically say to itself ‘I am I’, or by getting stuck in the moment of self-negation, for example by misunderstanding the doctrine of anatman to be a total denial of the existence of the self (in this regard we should bear in mind that the Buddha clearly rejected nihilistic and annihilationistic views of the self and misinterpretations of the anatman doctrine). These two pitfalls, of either attachment to, or loss of, self, are related to two heteronomies: in the former one is ruled by internal ‘karmic’ impulses, and in the latter one is ruled by external forces. The true dynamic of the self, by contrast, entails two kinds of freedom: freedom-from-the-self and freedom-for-the-self, both of which are realized in and through genuinely dialogical encounters with others. Of these two types of freedom as they are manifested in dialogue, Ueda writes the following:

Using Huayan Buddhist and Zen master Linji's (d. 866) language of ‘host’ and ‘guest’, Ueda remarks: ‘The free exchange of the role of host is the very core of dialogue’.Footnote ⁴⁵ In other words, for a genuine dialogue to take place, one must be able to both listen as ‘guest’ and speak as ‘host’. In the proper time and place, the ‘host’ takes center stage and commands the attention of the audience; but he or she must not fixate on this role so as to monopolize a discussion and turn what should be a dialogue into a monologue. The audience or ‘guest’, for its part, must be able to silently and attentively listen, yet without abandoning the response-abililty to speak up and assume, in the proper time and place, the role of host. Sometimes it is proper to speak (for example when one is giving a lecture), sometimes to listen (for example when one is attending a lecture), and sometimes to alternate between speaking and listening (for example when one is participating in a discussion after a lecture). The ability to freely and responsibly alternate between these roles of host and guest depends on one's letting go of attachments to both oneself and others, to both activity and passivity, to both sovereignty and servility.

5. Conversing through Silence: Ueda on Being Together in a Twofold World

Let us return now to the question of cross-cultural dialogue, which in many ways is a most radical form of encounter between self and other. What would it mean to develop a philosophy of cross-cultural dialogue on the basis of Ueda's account of interpersonal dialogue? Can we bridge the abyss between Eastern and Western forms of cultural being only by first mutually bowing into the ocean of absolute nothingness that lies between us? Can we learn to play in turn both roles of host and guest with others and their other cultures?

Let us recall the importance of ‘place’ in the encounter between self and other. Dialogue always takes place in some ‘place’. That place is typically a horizonal world determined by the specifics of culture, language, and tradition.Footnote ⁴⁶ The question, then, is how a dialogue could take place between such cultural-linguistic worlds, between, in Heidegger's terms, different linguistic ‘houses of being’.Footnote ⁴⁷ In what place could a dialogue between such places take place? In other words, what is the topos or chora that would be crossed in a diatopical conversation between different cultural-linguistic topoi?Footnote ⁴⁸ What is the ‘world of worlds’, the ‘region of regions’, or the limitless ‘open-region’ that surrounds every one of our horizons of intelligibility? Borrowing a Buddhist term that metaphorically refers to an ‘empty space’ that envelops all things without getting in their way, Ueda calls this the ‘empty expanse’ (kokū).Footnote ⁴⁹ He suggests that it can only be experienced through silence at the edges of language. The passing experience of the empty expanse, like the turn of the breath, is an experience of both the limits and the provenance of linguistic horizons. Ueda speaks of this experience in terms of a bidirectional movement of ‘exiting language and then exiting into language’ (kotoba kara dete, kotoba e deru).

Ueda develops his philosophy of what he calls ‘being-in-the-twofold-world’ or a ‘two-layered being-the-world’ (nijūsekainaisonzai) in relation to this irreducibly twofold yet ultimately inseparable experience of ‘exiting language and then exiting into language’. Since it will take us to the heart of the question of cross-cultural dialogue, let me quote at length here a key passage from his essay, ‘Language in a Twofold World’.

As long as I remain completely immersed in the cultural-linguistic determinations of ‘my world’, there is no possibility of entering into a genuine dialogue with others, who for their part may remain immersed in their worlds. If there is ‘nothing outside the text’ (to borrow a phrase from Derrida), it is only by passing through this nothingness that I can encounter others on their own terms. If they reciprocate, mutual understanding may take place. This need not occur as a complete ‘fusion of horizons’ (to borrow a phrase from Gadamer); the common ground found or formed through dialogue may serve rather as a bridge between cultural continents, a bridge that connects the horizons of self and other while at the same time holding them apart and preserving their differences. Dialogue, and especially cross-cultural dialogue, could be understood then as a ‘linguistic encounter’ (taiwa) that proceeds by way of speaking across (dia-legein) the nothingness or ‘empty expanse’ between linguistic worlds, a bridging that preserves as well as traverses cultural differences.

As Ueda points out, it not enough to overcome egoism with communalism, to break out of ‘my world’ only to remain stuck within the closed horizon of a communal ‘our world’. Nishida also says that the world truly becomes world-like only when the third person ‘he’ (kare) is recognized, since without regard for the outsider, the I-Thou relation can easily mutate into a communal egoism.Footnote ⁵¹ This is the pitfall of nationalism, ethnocentrism, religious fundamentalism, and, we must add, philosophical Ameri-Eurocentrism. Despite, or rather because of their all-inclusive aspirations, these remain dangerously parochial universalisms. The true universal cannot be defined in terms of a particular culture, language, or tradition. The true universal is not literally a ‘uni-versal’; it is not a One toward which or around which all particulars turn. As Nishitani suggests, it is not a One, but a None;Footnote ⁵² it is not an absolute being, but absolute nothingness. It is a circumferenceless sphere in which the center is permanently and exclusively nowhere and potentially everywhere.Footnote ⁵³ Each true individual is a focal point of the self-determination of this place of absolute nothingness, a focal point which is both determined by, and in turn counter-determines, the horizonally delimited sphere of his or her culture, language, and tradition. Yet insofar as each individual can experience, not only the world as it is shaped by the horizon of his or her culture and language, but also – at least in passing moments of silence – the radical openness of the undelimited sphere of absolute nothingness, he or she can also empathize with other individuals and learn to see the world in terms of their otherwise culturally and linguistically delimited horizons.

Communication within a delimited cultural sphere takes place largely by way of a shared language, which easily degenerates into what Heidegger calls ‘idle chatter’ (Gerede). A genuine cross-cultural encounter not only requires but also enables us to return to the originarily shared silence covered over by such idle chatter. Insofar cross-cultural or ‘diatopical’ dialogue must bridge the topoi of two or more cultural-linguistic spheres, it must ultimately take place within the encompassing empty expanse of absolute nothingness. And it must proceed by way of an ongoing and mutual experience of ‘exiting language and then exiting into language’. That is to say, a genuine cross-cultural dialogue must also involve what we might call a ‘diasige’, a mutual passing through silence. Indeed diasige necessarily accompanies any genuine dialogue. We must learn to con-verse, to turn toward one another, to reach out to one another, not only through speech but also, on a still deeper level, by passing through the ocean of silence we share beneath our islands of language. For it is on the basis of an implicit mutual understanding of the radical openness that underlies our cultural-linguistic horizons, and on the basis of a trust in our mutual ability to traverse the silent expanse – the ‘nothing’ that, beneath everything, we share in common – that we can learn to build ever more explicit and reliable dialogical bridges between us.

6. Cross-Cultural Dialogue and Diasige

Genuine dialogue, and especially cross-cultural dialogue, thus happens by way of a mutual and ongoing process of ‘exiting language and exiting into language’. If exiting language is a matter of dying into the silent ocean of absolute nothingness, exiting into language is a matter of rebirth out of that absolute nothingness into linguistically articulated delimitations of being. Here again we find a three-part dynamic of affirmation through negation, in this case: the speaker, by way of not speaking, speaks. And the listener, by way of not listening merely in terms of his or her pre-established linguistic horizon, listens. Self and other converse by way of a mutual and ongoing process of bowing down into and rising up out of absolute nothingness.

Here we might understand the place of absolute nothingness or empty expanse as the unfathomable field of cultural and linguistic possibilities which gives rise to – and is as such covered over by – the actualization of this or that particular cultural-linguistic world. It is necessary to radically step back to, and to pass through, this self-concealing origin of cultural possibilities in order to understand other manifestations of language and culture, and to truly communicate with others who inhabit those other languages and cultures.

This process is exemplified by the experience of learning a foreign language. In my mind there are two astonishing things about linguistic diversity. The first is the radicality of the differences between linguistic worlds or ‘houses of being’, differences that are disguised rather than dissolved by translation. English and Japanese, for example, can seem to be worlds apart, oftentimes precisely when one is confronted with a ‘correct’ translation. The second astonishing thing about linguistic diversity, however, is that humans do in fact have the capacity to learn a foreign tongue. To be sure, if one insists on remaining within one's own language, the best one can do is rely on ready-made translations, that is to say, the best one can do is to ‘shake hands’ and trade words and expressions that are understood in terms of their nearest equivalents in one's own tongue. Everything, of course, can in some fashion be translated; but translation is always, more or less, transformation (if not indeed ‘betrayal’, as the Italian saying ‘traduttore, traditore’ [translator, traitor] has it). Yet it is also possible to immerse oneself in another language until one begins to take part in it and it becomes part of oneself. Indeed such translation of oneself into a foreign language is necessary for any original translation to be made from that language. To really enter into a foreign language, which means to let it enter and thus alter oneself, one has to let go of one's native language and bow down into what in Zen is called the ‘beginner's mind’ of a child; one has to become like a child if one is to learn another mother's tongue. In the openness of this childlike beginner's mind, we return to what Daoists call ‘the uncarved block’, here symbolizing the uncharted and unchanneled wellspring of linguistic potentialities.

Chomsky suggests that humans are born with an innate ability to learn all human languages. Be that as it may, attempts to make explicit the specifics of our so-called innate ‘universal grammar’ have been criticized for privileging European languages and especially English. Chomsky himself derides Diderot's claim that French is the language most appropriate for the sciences insofar as it is purportedly ‘unique among the languages in the degree to which the order of words corresponds to the natural order of thoughts and ideas’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Of course, it is only natural that speakers of any language will find the syntax of their own language to correspond to the natural order of their thoughts and ideas.

It seems to me that, while we share a capacity to learn one another's languages, there is no universal grammar, no ur-language, no common verbum interius, no divine Logos that can be revealed as such. For the Hindu Mimamsa scholars, Sanskrit is the perfect language and the mother of all other tongues. According to other religions, the language of their scripture is the privileged language of God. Some try to argue that English has become the global lingua franca for linguistic and not merely political and economic reasons. For Heidegger, English is a hopelessly unphilosophical language and ‘When [the French] begin to think, they speak German’.Footnote ⁵⁵ All of these claims are subject to the criticism of what we might call ‘ethnologocentrism’. Hence, rather than speaking of an ur-language, perhaps we should practice listening to an originary silence, a fecund emptiness or indeterminacy teeming with potentialities for learning to understand and speak a multitude of languages. By loosening ourselves from our attachment to our own culture and language, perhaps we are able to step back to and through the pregnant stillness from out of which an irreducible plurality of cultural-linguistic worlds is born.

We can relate this to Nishida's thoughts on globalization. If there is a goal to world history, a direction in which globalization should proceed, it is not, he clearly states, a matter of realizing a universal global civilization that would cancel out the uniqueness of individual cultural traditions. A culture that has lost its particularity, he says, is no longer a culture. Rather, he suggests that ‘the various cultures, while maintaining their own individual standpoints, would develop themselves through the mediation of the world, whereby a true world culture would be formed’.Footnote ⁵⁶ This ‘true world culture’ would be a place of cross-cultural dialogue, a dialectically interrelated unity-in-diversity, wherein differently developing cultures would be open to interaction and exchange with one another while maintaining their own authenticity and autonomy.

According to Nishida, even though ‘until now Westerners have thought that their own culture is the most superior human culture that exists, and that human culture inevitably develops in the direction of their own culture’, in fact the West will subsume the East no more than the East will subsume the West. ‘Rather’, he goes on to say, ‘East and West are like two branches of the same tree. They are divided in two and yet supplement one another at the base and roots’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Even if humanity does share a common root – what Nishida calls, borrowing a manner of expression from Goethe, an ‘ur-culture’ (genbunka) of multiple possibilities – the development of its branches and leaves is a matter of diversification, not homogenization. Globalization should thus be thought of, in Nishida's vision, as many branches of the same tree supplementing one other on the basis of both their deep-rooted commonality and their irreducible diversity.Footnote ⁵⁸ But unlike Goethe, who was tempted to diagram and thus give determinate form to the Urpflanze from which all plants are produced, Nishida suggests that the roots of this ur-culture remain buried in the ground of an essentially undisclosable absolute nothingness, a formless origin of all cultural forms.

If the manifold of contrasting and complementary cultural differences is united by a common root of humanity, according to the Kyoto School thinkers we have discussed this essentially self-delimiting and thus self-concealing origin is better thought of as an originary indeterminate nothingness rather than a fundamental determinate being. In this sense we are a global community of those who share – in a radical sense – nothing in common, and it is by returning to this formless absolute nothingness that we can begin to truly understand the form and being of others.Footnote ⁵⁹ In dialogue, and especially in cross-cultural dialogue, it is only through mutually bowing down into to the silence between us that we can begin to hear what one another has to say. Genuine dialogue must be accompanied by diasige.

Let me give to Ueda the last word about the silences that are essential to dialogue.