SOURCE: "Thinking the Thought of That Which Is Strictly Speaking Unthinkable: On the Thematization of Alterity in Nishida-Philosophy," in Human Studies, Vol. 16, 1993, pp. 177-92.

In the following essay, Haver examines the notion of alterity, or otherness, in Nishida's works from the 1930s.

Any theoretical practice which would aspire both to identify itself as a practice and to be in fact a practice, a determinate historical and political intervention, must undertake rigorously to acknowledge its own non-transcendence, to theorize the limits of its enabling rationality. If it does not undertake that acknowledgment, any theoretical labor (or "philosophy") must resign itself to an ineffective and inconsequential transcendental subjectivity putatively situated outside of history. In order to acknowledge its non-transcendence and the limits of its enabling rationality, it must have some sense of that nonsense which exceeds or is situated "beyond" its own proper limits; it must, that is to say...