Background
Nishitani, Keiji was born on February 27, 1900.
philosopher of religion Zen philosopher
Nishitani, Keiji was born on February 27, 1900.
Nishitani was a leading figure in the Kyoto School °f Japanese philosophy, a non-sectarian Zen Buddhist philosopher profoundly concerned with lr|terconnecting, first, Christian and Buddhist dhics and, second, the Buddhist ontology of XUn}’ata with European ontologies of nothingness. A student of Martin Heidegger from 1936-1939, significantly he attended •he latter’s lectures on Nietzsche and nihilism at Freiburg University. One of the most outstanding non-European commentators on both the mys- '•cal tradition in German theology and the works °f Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger, Nishitani was also a renowned translator into Japanese. °ne of his principal achievements being the translation of Schelling’s Essence of Human Freedom. The hermeneutic axiom ‘questioning one’s n^n from the perspective of the foreign’ describes Nishitani’s lifelong preoccupation with nineteenthand twentieth-century European existent'alist thought as offering a means to articulating and philosophically reappropriating the central c°nceptions of Zen thought. Nishitani commenced his philosophical career exclusively preoccupied with thinkers of the continental European existential and phenomenological tra- '|ion. Not until his discovery of the philosophy of >shida did Nishitani, far from abandoning his °rrner interests, see them as a means to reengage 'v*lh the Zen tradition of religion and philosophy, ike Nishida, Nishitani focuses primarily upon 116 problem of nihilism and Zen's capacity to accept and yet positively transform an ontology of Nothingness. Some brief contextual remarks will uminate the circumstances appertaining to 'shitani’s fusion of aspects of European with Philosophical tradition. Japanese cultural tradition tends not to attribute to individualism the same value as ccidental culture. Although unusual for a apanese, it was not personally inappropriate that a ter the death of his father and the onset of a ^fious tubercular affliction the young Nishitani °uld turn in his sense of hopelessness and. esPair to arch-European analysts of the suffering mdividual consciousness, namely. Nietzsche, lerkegaard. Dostoevsky and Heidegger. And i1 despite their unJapanese individualism, key ernents in these thinkers made them curiously accessible to Nishitani. The aesthetical-existential dimension of Japanese tradition emphasizes the aesthetic as the meaningfully sensed and emotionally appropriated and the existential as that which affects the very substance of one’s personal being. A terser summary of Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s aspirations for philosophy could not be found. Their high regard for aesthetic intuitions of the meaningfully ‘disclosed’ irrespective of volition is clearly paralleled in the Japanese understanding of the aesthetic. Furthermore, the highly indeterminate character of the Japanese language, which lends itself to allegory and allusion, finds a curious resonance in the styles of Nietzsche and Heidegger, who more often than not convey their meaning not by the utterance of pure statements but by allowing the unspoken reservoirs of meaning behind the said to be resonated by what is said. Given such hermeneutical 'crossovers’, it is perhaps not so surprising that Nietzsche's and Heidegger’s examination of nihility should profoundly strike Nishitani’s philosophical imagination, nor that he should be able to offer such a lucid and pertinent critique of their analysis as he does, but from the philosophical perspective of Zen Buddhism. The underlying motif of Nishitani’s thinking is religious in the special Zen sense of refusing to distinguish between the religious and philosophical quest. When Nishitani writes that religion is the existential exposure of the problematic which is contained in the usual mode of self-being, so would he equally accept Tillich's assertion that the proper role of philosophy is to advance existential interests, to existentialize humanity’s mode of being. The transition from ‘the usual mode of selfbeing’ to ‘fully existentialized human existence’ is in Nishitani’s terms the journey from the Great Doubt to the Great Affirmation, from the traumatic discovery of the emptiness of selfcentred being to the ecstatic insight that such a loss of selfhood is a condition of realizing what was in fact always the case: that one is neither set apart from nor set against the universe but intertwined with all of its aspects. The presuppositions of this transformative argument are eightfold. First, all things are becoming as they are nothing or lack an essence. Second, the world is therefore an emptiness. Third, the things which make up the world must be considered not as stable identities but as fields of force or energy, the character of which perpetually change according to mutual density and proximity. Fourth, Nishitani equates this Nietzschean 576 N'Krumah ontology with the Buddhist notion of ‘networks of causation’, thereby linking the Sanskrit conception of karma with Nietzsche's amor fati. Fifth, adapting the Heart Sutra’s contention that the ‘hindrance of ignorance’ is the principal cause of suffering, Nishitani contends pace Nietzsche that egoistic self-preoccupation, the fictions of pyschology and the ‘metaphysics of grammar' prevent us from seeing that ‘self that is not a self’, namely the ‘original self’ which has its ecstatic ‘home-ground’ in the interconnectedness of all those fields which constitute sunyata. Sixth, Nishitani then embarks upon a critique of Western technology not so much because it presupposes the fiction of the self as detached cognitive subject but because mechanistic explanation renders redundant the very subject which it supposedly serves: ‘at the basis of technological thought lies the.. "dehumanization" of humanity.. With regard to a human being, the dimension out of which a "thou" confronts an "I" is completely erased’. Seventh, what Nishitani fears within the process of ‘dehumanization’ is the irrevocable appearance of what Nietzsche would call ‘passive nihilism’. Technology’s subversion of the existential ‘why?’ with the purposeless ‘how’ of mechanistic explanation suggests that the ultimate ‘for-the-sakeof-which’ may be for the sake of nothing at all. Western science and philosophy thus lead for Nishitani to the crisis of nihilistic despair. However, eighth, the Japanese term for crisis none the less also implies an opportunity and it is at the moment of the Great Doubt that Nishitani comes into his own. Nietzsche’s solution to passive nihilism is active nihilism. If there are no meanings in themselves, not only can the world not be condemned as meaningless but we are free to create our own meanings and perspectives. Nishitani correctly perceives that Nietzsche’s active nihilism requires that one pass through passive nihilism. That, however, implies that active nihilism cannot fully overcome its passive forerunner since the act of creating ‘new’ values presupposes precisely the gulf between subject and world which sets the oppositional basis for the problem of passive nihilism in the first place. Having exposed the cul de sac in the Western analysis of nihilism, Nishitani turns back via Nishida to the Zen tradition but armed with European philosophical techniques capable of rendering into reasonable and meaningful words the wordless wisdom of Zen. The result of that return is that nihilism can be made to overcome itself. For Nishitani, ‘religion is an existential exposure to the problematic in the usual mode of self-being’. Within Buddhist dialectics, the Great Doubt can transform itself into the Great Affirmation. Returning to the concept of essenceless networks of causation, Nishitani remarks: On that field of emptiness, each thing comes into its own and reveals itself in a sellaffirmation, each in its own possibility and virtus of being. The conversion to and entrance to that field means, for us men, the fundamental affirmation of the being of all things, and at the same time of our own existence. The field of emptiness is nothing but the field of the great affirmation. One could not be more removed from Nietzsche s active nihilism than here, for whereas the latter distances the creative individual from those who cannot overcome the rancours of passive nihilism. Nishitani’s position offers via ‘the waters of nihilism’ an ecstatic reconcilation of the ‘empty or ‘purified’ self with all other beings that constitute the ‘field of emptiness’ that is the world. Nishitani’s philosophical mission is undoubtedly rendered all the more difficult because of his standing both within and without his tradition, and yet precisely because he attempIS to ‘question his own through the eye of the foreign' we—the European foreigner—obtain an extraordinary ‘eye into our own’.