Later Nishida on Self-awareness:Have I lost myself yet?

In this paper, I argue that later Nishida's analysis of self-awareness (jikaku) provides a new perspective on the nature of self-awareness as understood in the philosophical literature today. I argue that the contemporary literature deals with two kinds of self-awareness; the higher-order theory understands self-awareness to be an objectified awareness and the phenomenological tradition generally understands self-awareness to be, at least primarily, a non-objectified awareness. In light of this, I first give an account of Nishida's ‘acting-intuition’ with reference to the ‘historical body.’ Then I argue that later Nishida's analysis of self-awareness depicts the inadequacy of the two kinds of self-awareness as both being stuck in the subject-object dichotomy which, according to Nishida, is but one mode of experience, namely the mode of difference. Nishida provides an account that ultimately foregrounds the experiential mode of unity that negates any sense of differentiation between the subject and object.