Into the Breath of Form: Fields of Awareness and Empty Domains

The notion of "place" (basho) lies at the heart of Nishida Kitarō’s philosophy. He develops his polysemic concept of basho (translated as place, field, locus, topos, situs), elaborating on the idea of a “force field” in which self-awareness arises. A principle of invariance, similar to the one leading Einstein to the theory of relativity, leads Nishida to a “place where things exist,” a place that remains unchanged through the continuous flow of things. As the concept of field dissolves the force of gravity into a “curvature” of spacetime, revealing the hidden pulse of the physical world in the entanglement of matter and spacetime, so the concept of basho captures the very breath of self-awareness in the mutual mirroring of the self and the world. Insofar as it grasps the “contradictory nature” of reality, knowledge, and self-awareness, Nishida’s dialectic of basho also accommodates the contradictory nature of modern physics, built on the “contradictory self-identity” of time and space, consciousness and matter, predicates and object. But Nishida’s view may also have inspired, in turn, theoretical work in physics. The main goal of this chapter is to explore a possible resonance between Nishida’s dialectic of “place” and Yukawa’s theory of elementary domains. What Yukawa regards as an “empty domain” is a quantum of spacetime. If energy is associated with an elementary domain, depending on the mode of association, the domain will become identifiable as a variety of different elementary particles. Like a room in a “wayside inn,” even if it is empty, the domain will be there. Thus, the “self-identity of contradictories” finds expression in the simultaneous existence and nonexistence of elementary particles and domains.