C.O. Scharmer: Professor Ohahsi, I’d like to hear about your story, the journey that brought you to philosophy and Nishida. What’s the journey that got you here?

Ryosuke Ohashi: I was born in Kyoto; that’s my home city... One day in my second year of high school, I went to a bookshop and quite accidentally, I found a philosophy text–Heidegger’s Being and Time. I was very surprised to see that someone in the world treated the same problem that I had...

I studied, as I said, for two years in Kyoto and wrote a thesis, and I believed that I understood Heidegger. And in ’69, I went to Germany. It was Heidegger’s 80^th birthday, and I was able to visit him...

Heidegger says that language is the house of being...

I read Nishida’s text, but I couldn’t understand a word. But somehow, I felt an affinity with him...

At any rate, pure experience means for Nishida that subject and object are not yet divided... For example, when I play a sport such as baseball, the ball is not an object; when a pitcher throws the ball, the batter thinks the ball is not an object...

But pure experience can also mean religious experience for Nishida, where subject and object are no longer divided...

Later Nishida abandoned the words "pure experience", because these words were too psychological for him... for the oneness between subject and object is not [only] a reality in the consciousness, but the reality as itself.

The task Nishida has had is to grasp true reality. Reality is something that can be felt, that can be expressed somehow. What is the reality of this world? What is the reality of this history? What is the reality of my own existence?

The thought of place is the thought of nothingness in Eastern meaning...

The philosophy of substance and the first phase of systems thinking can be described as a philosophy of being. Being, the last being or the ultimate being is substance, according to Aristotle. According to Plato, ideas... According to Marx, das Kapital. According to Nietzsche, the Will to Power. All these are examples of different philosophies of Being...

Our self is something alien to us. ... The system in which the individual is free and unique, is not closed, but open. That means that system must have something absolutely alien within it. The same can also be said to our own self...

My own existence is thrown into this world. Something which is quite alien to me enables my existence...

The first basho is about being in space. The second basho, the place of mere nothingness, is about our consciousness... But this place of consciousness, or place of mere nothingness, is still too psychological. The third basho, the place of absolute nothingness can be reached when this–in German, "Ich-heit"–I-ness can be broken, can be broken through...

The self is nothing. One example. You know a hurricane. That is will. The center, the eye of the hurricane, is always quiet. Without this quietness, the hurricane cannot move. So driving force in the center of will is nothingness... The subject must go. Subject must melt and vanish...

I gained three main insights from the conversation in Kyoto. One was an understanding of Nishida’s emphasis on pure experience as the oneness of subject and object. The second was that the reason he later abandoned that concept concerned his attempt to articulate a different relationship between part and whole, microcosm and macrocosm. In the traditional type of that relationship the part is determined by its position in the already existing whole. A new type of that relationship would give much more freedom to the parts. In this mode, the parts would not only reflect but also enhance and co-create an emerging new whole (see also the interview with Henri Bortoft on this topic). The third insight was that in order for this to happen, I must discover that "there is something alien in my self that allows me to exist." This "alienness" in our own self is the gate through which the new can "break through" into the present moment.