Pod Insights Philosophize This! Episode #216 ... The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism - Kyoto School pt. 1 - Nishitani About this episode Today we look at the work of Keiji Nishitani. We examine Nihilism in a deeper way than we've ever covered on the podcast before. We talk about The Great Doubt. Zen Buddhism. Sunyata. The self as similar to structural linguistics. Hope you enjoy it! :)
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West, this is Philosophize This. Patreon.com/PhilosophizeThis, philosophical writing on Substack at @PhilosophizeThis on there. I hope you love the show today. So, since about episode 211, we've been talking about the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, and the fallout of him supposedly smashing all the idols from the history of Western philosophy with a hammer. Well, the guy we're talking about today is actually comically in line with basically everything we've been talking about on the show since we did that episode. He's a man who was a big fan of Nietzsche's work. In fact, as the story goes, he used to carry around a copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra with him pretty much everywhere he went in the early stages of his life. More than that, he's a man who traveled all the way to Germany to study under the professorship of Martin Heidegger during the 1930s. And
0:45 Speaker 00 even more than that, he's a man that was the principal chair of philosophy and religion at Kyoto University for more than 20 years, a position where he deeply engaged with the mystical tradition of the West we just talked about, with a special focus on the theologian Meister Eckhart. See, it's like I planned it or something, but the man we're talking about today is a member of what's now become known as the famous Kyoto School out of Kyoto, Japan. The guy we're talking about today went by the name of Keiji Nishitani. Now, one of the first questions you might have here is, what is the Kyoto School? And a lot of people might say back to you, describing the Kyoto School, saying something like, "Well, these are eastern thinkers that are engaging with Western ideas, primarily existentialism, where they then blend this east-westness into a nice cornucopia of interesting stuff
1:28 Speaker 00 for everyone out there to enjoy." But I'm here to tell you, a lot of people that are fans of the Kyoto School would hate for it to be described in this way. And my first instinct at the beginning of this was I was gonna talk about the problem of trying to reduce these thinkers down into broad categories like east versus west. My first instinct was to spend some time talking about that at the beginning of this. But rather than grind the pace of this episode down to a complete halt right at the start, my new hope is that by the end of this mini-series we're gonna be doing on the Kyoto School, the problems of only framing things in terms of these east-west labels, the limitations of those labels, will just become evident to you from all the points that have been made throughout the course of this series. We'll have plenty of time to talk about it, is what I'm saying. What I instead want to do, out of respect to the listener of this,
2:11 Speaker 00 is just to get right into the meat of something that was near and dear to the heart of KJ Nishitani, something that fits into this larger conversation we've been having about these different gateways into a more immediate connection to being. What I want to do is talk about nihilism at a different level and in a different way than we've ever gone into on this podcast before. And to understand why nihilism was such an important thing to focus on for someone like Nishitani, I think a useful starting point for this is to talk about what it's like to have a relationship to death as a comparison. How many people out there listening to this have really come face to face with death in an intimate way in your life? Like, have you ever been forced to acknowledge just how much of an ever-present reality something like death is for you at any given moment? Now, the point of asking this is not to belittle anyone's understanding of death.
2:55 Speaker 00 You just don't know death like I do. The point here is to say that we're all at different levels of familiarity when it comes to death. And oftentimes, the level of familiarity you have comes down to situations that have happened to you that you didn't choose. You lost people close to you and were forced to think about it. You were in a war zone and were surrounded by it. Maybe you had a near-death experience yourself. Point is, not everybody's forced to think about death as they go throughout their lives. On the contrary, modern society often shields people from it. And even if you do decide, from a purely philosophical perspective, to dedicate some time to sitting around, "I'm gonna do some death reflection today", even if you spent hundreds of hours doing that over the course of your life, there's no guarantee you're really grappling with it at a serious level. I mean, you can know theoretically you're gonna die someday.
3:40 Speaker 00 You can say, "I'm in touch with death", but then something unexpected happens. You know, the harness next to you on the roller coaster doesn't work or something. And all of a sudden, this becomes far more real to you after having that experience. What I mean is, you can fake a relationship that you have with death having never actually even encountered it. Okay, now, consider how possible it is to have this kind of shallow relationship with death. And now, shift this whole question here to the concept of nihilism. Nihilism, being for KJ Nishitani, one of the most important things you could ever possibly think about or understand as a person that's living on this planet. Same question, though. How deeply have you really contended with and faced nihilism? Now, Nishitani, I find it valuable here at the beginning for us to consider what a
4:22 Speaker 00 common person's experience is when they start thinking about nihilism, especially in the sort of Western cultures most people listening to this podcast will be embedded in. What's a common line of thinking for someone to have in the West when they claim to be thinking in a nihilistic way? Well, they'll say something like nihilism means that there's no meaning to life, right? And if there's no meaning to life in general, then why should I ever do anything in my life? And like we touched on briefly in the Nietzsche episode we recently did, what this will often turn into is someone who just in practice chooses to sit around and tries to be as comfortable as they possibly can. This is a common response to feeling nihilistic. You watch content, you play video games, eat comfort food, it could be drugs. The point is, to this person, if there's no meaning to life, then why do anything that's
5:06 Speaker 00 going to be difficult? But as we also talked about on that episode, to someone like Nietzsche, he says choosing to be comfortable all the time like this is not moral nihilism. Comfort is not the default of what a human existence is. No, prioritizing comfort is choosing comfort and security as your set of values, which to him is then going to be choosing a very passive reactive approach to life that denies certain necessary aspects of what a life often is. Now, if Nietzsche was going to criticize this hypothetical Western person's thinking, where they say they're nihilistic, but in practice they're not, one thing he could say to them is that they're really not taking nihilism seriously enough as a philosophical concept, that they're smuggling in values and a moral framework where they supposedly shouldn't be having any. Now, as we know, of course Nietzsche says that to truly contend
5:50 Speaker 00 with nihilism fully means you have to not live in this passive reactive way. No, it's more of an active process. We have to creatively differentiate. We have to create our own values and projects from a place of affirmation. In other words, taking nihilism seriously to Nietzsche means overcoming nihilism via the self and the will. I, the self, create values in each moment moving forward, and this is supposedly going to solve the problem of nihilism that there aren't actually values written into the universe for me to follow. And what we're left with when we do this whole strategy, Nishitani says, is a sort of positive response to nihilism that's a classic kind of response that comes out of a Western style of thinking. The idea is that nihilism is a problem to be solved. That when I'm feeling nihilistic, that's something we need to fix.
6:35 Speaker 00 That's something everybody out there needs to find a way to transcend and overcome. And it's a fair analysis, I think. I mean, we do do this in the West when we care about the people around us. Someone's feeling nihilistic, and what do we want to do? We want to go over to their place and annoy them while they're feeling nihilistic, sitting in their dark apartment, you know? Anti-nihilism Steve's got to walk into your front door. "Why is it so dark in here? Open up the windows, let the sun shine in. See, life isn't so bad, you should just get a hobby." This is the kind of stuff we want to do to the people we love when they feel nihilistic. And on one hand, Nishitani says, "What else would you expect us to be doing as people born into the Western world? We're born into a world that smuggles in spiritual assumptions that we most of the time don't even realize we're making unless if we're intimately aware of our own history."
7:19 Speaker 00 For example, like we talked about on the Nietzsche episode, the history of Western thought, when you engage with the tradition seriously, you realize it's filled with people that are making very monotheistic, Abrahamic assumptions, that there's supposed to be a moral order to the world that's given to us from the outside by a supernatural god. And more than that, if you look around you one day, and if that moral order doesn't seem to be there, "Oh my god, that must be a problem we need to solve." We do this with other things too, though, in this general tradition. We often smuggle in very platonic assumptions in the West as well, about the forms or essences of the things around us. That these things, a tree, a rock, a squirrel, are stable, durable forms. That I am one of these durable forms, and how these stable identities connect together and relate to each other,
8:02 Speaker 00 this is what provides meaning to us in our lives. I mean, the assumption is to view the world not in terms of there being stable identities, but just turn everything into a nebulous blob where nothing means anything. We need forms and essences, or else what are we even doing here? In other words, the idea in the West is usually that when nihilism strikes, that if meaning is missing, then that must mean you got to create some meaning. You have to will yourself to a meaningful life, or you have to chop up the world around you into forms so that you can fix that nihilism as a problem that needs to be solved. Again, the positive response to nihilism. But to KJ Nishitani, this analysis of nihilism,
8:38 Speaker 00 One type of response to nihilism, and while it's not wrong, you could make a case that it is incomplete. That there's more to nihilism than just this, and that there are more reactions that are possible other than just trying to solve nihilism by creating meaning. That this is the nihilism equivalent of in our death conversation saying, "Yeah, I know I'm gonna die someday", but having never actually faced it at the depth you could be facing it. So if that's true then, okay, Nishitani, let's say I wanted to become more familiar with nihilism. How would I start doing that? Well, in his book called "The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism", he thinks it's valuable to start by looking at several other types of nihilism that have been proposed by thinkers in the West. I mean, after all, to him, the West in particular, because it's a place where its spiritual traditions have been thoroughly called into question since the Enlightenment, and even more deeply in the 19th century
9:23 Speaker 00 with people like Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. The West has already faced a crisis of nihilism that's led to a lot of philosophers having valuable things to say about it. And what he's ultimately doing here in the context of post-World War II Japan, a time and place where the culture's facing extreme nihilism after the dropping of the atomic bomb, the failure of the imperialism of early 20th century Japan, when they're doing some soul searching in Japan about where to go next here, Nishitani's a thinker that's looking to other cultures that have gone through something similar in the past, hoping to learn from them by radically engaging with their work. So, all this context is just to say that we have to understand, if Nishitani's goal here is to examine nihilism in a way that's never really been done before, then an important piece of that is gonna be to engage with the tradition of how thinkers in the West
10:07 Speaker 00 are already approaching this problem. And what he sees when he does that are some common tactics that these thinkers use. For example, one way of approaching nihilism is that so often what thinkers in the West will do is they'll try to reduce nihilism down into a rigid definition of some kind. The last question's like, "Well, what exactly are we talking about when we say nihilism? Let's get to a solid definition here before we continue talking about it." They'll look back at history, they'll find examples of when people have claimed to be feeling nihilistic, say after the fall of the Roman Empire, or the French Revolution, and the Reign of Terror. They'll take these examples, and then they'll try to combine them all together into a common description that fits all of them. And again, while this isn't wrong, you could say this is a limited way of understanding nihilism that leaves out something very important.
10:52 Speaker 00 And notice this, as a classic thing people will do, when their goal is to try to reduce things down into an essence. Again, a common thing we do in the Western world, given all that we're spiritually smuggling in from our history. Another thing thinkers will do when talking about nihilism, is they'll try to reduce it into just a static, bad feeling that a conscious self is having, that nihilism at bottom is a feeling of existential despair or something. But Tanishitani is another limited way of approaching what it is we're talking about. For one thing, he says, this is trying to label the self, and nihilism for that matter, as something that's universal, durable, some tangible feeling that everybody has. And again, notice the Western dualistic approach that's constantly at work here.
11:35 Speaker 00 We're putting in a lot of energy, trying to turn these concepts into durable, unchanging things. And while this isn't the wrong way to be looking at it, because Tanishitani to say that would be to imply there's some single right way to be looking at it. If someone was truly interested in getting a more full-bodied picture of what nihilism is, here's what we can be sure of: framing it only in this way will always come preloaded with certain very real limitations. Tanishitani, it will always ignore an entire piece of what people are even talking about when they describe nihilism, the subjective lived experience of nihilism to a particular self that is grappling with it. Because nihilism, he says, in some other important sense, has to also be understood as an experiment that each individual self needs to run for themselves.
12:21 Speaker 00 Let me explain this more, and for the record, this is gonna be a common thread we'll see all throughout Nishitani's work. If we want to get a better understanding of something like death, or nihilism, later on it'll be about religion. But if you want to truly respect something like nihilism and understand it deeply, you can't just take only a piece of it and then pretend like we've arrived at the essence of all of it. Just because in the West, we'd love to find an essence that would make everything really clear for us. When we talk about nihilism, the historical definitions may cover a piece of it. The existentialist talking about the feeling of despair may be a piece of it. But another absolutely crucial one is that it's a highly individualized experiment that needs to be run by a particular self that is encountering nihilism. Meaning, no two encounters with nihilism are ever gonna be the same.
13:05 Speaker 00 And what you experience and call nihilism will without question be unique to your individual experiment. Why is this an important point to him? Because it removes this expectation that, one, there's some sort of static essence or form to what a nihilistic experience will be. And, two, it removes the expectation that we should be able to perfectly describe all of this experience using purely language. Now, notice what's going on here. It's almost like Nishitani is trying to get us to question the otherwise rigid meanings and identities that underlie the way we usually talk about our experience. He's getting us to question, how stable is this idea of nihilism that we're talking about? Is this a universal feeling that everyone has? Is it something you can perfectly define or write about in a book?
13:48 Speaker 00 Or are there elements to what nihilism is that can only really be understood when they're experienced by a particular person going through this encounter? Notice also, and this is a very important piece of all this, how this whole exercise of questioning the meanings of these things and how stable they are, is in itself an exercise that resembles what our nihilism friend was doing at the beginning of the episode. Because for the sake of having a working example, picture someone born into a Christian home that at some point starts to doubt how stable of a foundation their Christianity is as the objective truth about the universe. The nihilistic exercise of pulling the foundations of this meaning apart might then lead this person to think, oh, wait, there actually isn't a stable foundation there. And this whole religion thing starts... to look more like a sociological construct that's set up by other people,
14:33 Speaker 00 not some durable meaning as ordained by a god. Now, imagine this person does this with other religions and their foundations. Imagine they do this with political ideology. Imagine they do this with any systematized attempt to give the complexity of the world around us some sort of easy way of understanding it. And maybe you can see at this point where all this is going. Now imagine this applied to your own foundational moral values. How stable or universal are those? How about this applied to the identities you occupy in a given society you live in? How static and unchanging are those? You might then start to apply this nihilistic questioning of meaning to the very self that is doing the questioning. How stable or durable is that self when you take a closer look at it? In other words, this experiment of nihilism, if taken really seriously,
15:18 Speaker 00 can be applied to any stable meaning that supposedly exists. And it should be said, if you were to do this, this is a pretty uncomfortable process to be in. When nihilism is not a problem to be solved, like it typically is in the West, but is instead something that you try to steer into, like it can be in more eastern traditions, this new orientation opens up in someone what is described in Zen Buddhism as the Great Doubt. The Great Doubt being a period of utter transformation for a person to Nishitani, because it's a period of recognizing just how deep this well of nihilism can go when you truly doubt, when you truly question the stable forms that you usually make sense of the world with. So while that may sound uncomfortable, there's actually some good news here on the other side of it. If you think of what this means for our friend from before.
16:02 Speaker 00 I mean, from this perspective, a person feeling horrible because they recognize there isn't a god with a plan for them. Well, for one thing, that person, under this view, is just having a very shallow relationship with nihilism, the same way it's possible for somebody to have a very shallow relationship with death. But to Nishitani, this bad feeling that they're feeling is not a sign that they're lost or that they need to create some new meaning quick before they start to feel worse. No, this feeling they're having is actually evidence of the fact that there's somebody who's questioning their reality beyond the conventions they were born into. To him, this is a sign that they're actually one of the people that might press on into the Great Doubt and then arrive at an ...understanding of the nature of being that few people on this planet ever get to experience.
16:44 Speaker 00 The feeling of nihilism, in other words, means you're at the beginning of a journey. See, it's in this way that nihilism, if taken seriously and truly lived experientially, may be another one of these gateways into the more immediate experience of being we've been talking about. Remember to Heidegger, this is going to be the mode of existence that's not constantly mediated by the will and a subject-object framing of things. To the mystics from last time, this is going to be that pushing past the self, where they would then find union with something greater than themselves through intense devotional practice. This is the domain that Nishitani says Mahayana Buddhism, Zen Buddhism as a sub-chapter of it, is talking about. When Western thinkers encountered nihilism during the crisis point of European culture,
17:26 Speaker 00 Western spiritual traditions led them down certain predictable responses to nihilism. Well, here's Nishitani saying how Eastern spiritual traditions, encountering the same class of problem, seem to be equipped in a very unique way to deal with this nihilism that the Western world generally isn't. What comes out of this is that nihilism is not something to run from. It's not a problem to be solved under this framing. Nihility, as Nishitani puts it, think of it as an imminent aspect of being itself. We'll talk more about this, but it's ultimately something to embrace and to learn to be with. And it's something that the stories we create, trying to provide neat dualistic formal structure to things, these stories block our ability to experience it fully. And of course, we know this at some level.
18:08 Speaker 00 Isn't that kind of the point of why we make many of these stories in the first place? But in keeping with our larger discussion here, you know, just hearing this, just theoretically understanding the point that he's making here, doesn't mean that you know this fact at a lived experience level. Again, there's a lot to nihilism that has to be discovered through the particular experiment of the individual self living it. And ironically, the next step, I think, if we want to go another layer deep into taking nihilism more seriously, is going to be to do what I've already alluded to here. We have to call into question the supposedly stable foundation of what it is we call the self in the West. That's the next doorway we have to go through. Now, there's a lot of different ways you could do this, and I'm not going to be able to do it for you.
18:50 Speaker 00 What I can give you are some thoughts and examples that might help you as a small part of your journey, though. Nishitani certainly has a lot to say about it. I mean, people will spend years in contemplative practices trying to question this conditioning that we're totally separate from the things that are around us. And you know, much like we were saying on the mysticism episode, having the guidance of a religious practice, or even just religious language to help you navigate it, can definitely be an aid in doing all this. What seems clear to Nishitani, though, is that one of the big barriers in the way of being able to question the foundations of the self is just ordinary language. The way we talk about things usually tries to say something about what things are by comparing them to the things that they're not.
19:30 Speaker 00 Our languages structure our reality dualistically, with subjects always relating to objects. But Nishitani and others say that there's ways you can start to see outside of this typical framing of things. Meditation definitely can help loosen things up, apparently. There are things called koans that are commonly used in Zen Buddhism. This is a thought exercise where you contemplate something that will blur these dualistic lines and get you seeing things maybe more along the lines of how a baby sees the world. Common examples of these things will be like, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" Think about that for a while. Or another one is, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." Again, these are designed to get us thinking outside of the typical rigid essences we frame things in terms of, and they actually start to make more sense the more you think about what they're really saying.
20:13 Speaker 00 But anyway, when it comes to specifically doing this with the self, there's another exercise Nishitani talks about. He talks about questioning the questioner. Like, just for a second, do something that's actually pretty common for us all to do, and just reflect on the nature of the self for a second. Think about you as a self right now, and ask the question, "What is that exactly that you're thinking of right now?" Now, here's a better question. When you're thinking about that self, what is the part of the self that is an object that's being questioned? And what is the part of that self that's doing the questioning? Again, contemplate this for a while and try to get to the bottom of what exactly makes up this self thing that we're talking about. And when you do this, Nishitani says, what you might find is if you peel back the and try to get to the bottom of what the self is.
20:58 Speaker 00 What you realize is that what's at the bottom of the self is nothing. In fact, it actually starts to look a little bit like the foundations of religious ideology or political ideology. What you realize is that what characterizes the self is a sort of nothingness, a no thingness. Meaning it's not a fixed durable form or essence at the bottom of the self. The self really gains whatever meaning it has to us in terms of how it relates to everything else around it. You realize the self is something that's constantly changing and evolving. You realize the typical boundaries between you and the ecosystems of ideas or things that you depend on are really just a matter of convention or a matter of the ways that our language is typically managed to express things.
21:40 Speaker 00 And if it all sounds very weird to you, well, seeing things more in this way is no doubt going to be a process. And the common example that you've no doubt heard along these lines, maybe you're scrolling through a bunch of cliches on Pinterest one day. The example is a common quote. The quote is that enlightenment is when the wave realizes that it is the ocean. You ever heard this one before? Now, this is a misleading metaphor when it comes to Nishitani's work, but it can help us to start thinking more in this direction. The thinking is that if what you are is something like a wave, a temporary, constantly moving formation, where everything about you came from and was determined by forces in the ocean that you have nothing to do with. And that if that wave had the capacity for self-reflection and could realize that everything it's ever thought of itself as
22:23 Speaker 00 ultimately depends on this larger process that it's a part of. Well, then that in the Pinterest board or the Instagram feed is the definition of enlightenment. That's going to be an example of a really spiritually enlightened wave if it could recognize that fact. Now, again, ultimately, this is too simple of a metaphor, but it does illustrate a concept described in Mahayana Buddhism called dependent origination. Dependent origination says that there is nothing about that wave, or anything for that matter, that is magically independent or self-causing or self-sustaining with an essence. That wave and everything else is only a thing because of everything else that it relates to and depends on that has made it a thing in a complex network that it's a part of. The supposed boundary between the wave and the ocean,
23:08 Speaker 00 or the wave and the gravity that moves it, or the wave and all the other waves, these are all pretty superficial boundaries. At a deeper level, these things are actually connected and interdependent, dependent origination. Well, that's how we also have to think about the self to Nishitani. See, it's not that the self is a total illusion to him. The durability of the self is an illusion. The essence that's at the foundation of the self is an illusion. Let's go into this more deeply, maybe with a better metaphor. Because the ocean, at the end of the day, it's just not radical enough to do Nishitani's point here justice. What he's actually saying is something that's far more bizarre, and maybe something far more beautiful to some of the people listening. What I mean is, the ocean is something that's possible to think of as a physical whole, right?
23:52 Speaker 00 There's only so much space that the ocean can occupy, and there's only so much water that you can use to fill it up. And theoretically, if you hired 100 billion oceanographers, you know, you went on TaskRabbit one day and tried to study the ocean in full, it's possible to think that one day, you might have a full picture of the entire ocean, that wave being one piece of this larger whole, just in theory. But this isn't what Nishitani is saying. He's actually saying something far more nebulous than that. The self is not something that's connecting to some larger whole of existence that the self is at one with. What Nishitani's saying is, forget unity with a whole altogether. It is possible to be interdependent with everything around you for what you are, but not interdependent with everything there possibly is.
24:36 Speaker 00 See, this is why the metaphor kind of dissolves, and why I think a better metaphor for the way Nishitani views the self is not the ocean, but maybe the way the meanings of words work in structural linguistics. Think of what a word is. A word gets its meaning not because somebody came up with a meaning for it one day and wrote it down in a dictionary. You know, that word has a fixed essence to what its meaning is, and it will always have that meaning, no matter what happens. No, the meanings of words are constantly changing, based on how they're being used right this second in a particular linguistic community. And the meaning of any given word doesn't lie inside the word itself somewhere, but it lies in the relationships that exist between... It and all the other words around it in a network. Take the word squirrel, for example.
25:20 Speaker 00 The word squirrel doesn't have any fixed meaning to us. It gets its meaning based on how we use it in relation to all the things that it is not. It's not a cat, it's not a bird, it's not a rat. The meaning of the word squirrel comes from its place within this web of distinctions. Now, obviously, words get even more complicated than this. Because, let's say tomorrow, a comedy movie comes out. And in that movie, there's a joke where, for whatever reason in the movie, there's some old dudes that like to play pickleball at a gym. And the people in this movie start calling these dudes squirrels, right? And let's say that catches on in the culture we're in. People start calling old dudes everywhere a bunch of squirrels if they play pickleball. Similar to what happened with the word cougar. Well, the meaning of the word squirrel in that case would change.
26:05 Speaker 00 There's more examples of this, though. If scientists discovered some new kind of squirrel, some squirrel that lives underwater somewhere, aqua squirrel. The meaning of the word squirrel would have to change again to account for this new relationship. And this process is always going on. The point here is, to Nishitani, it's not that the word squirrel doesn't exist. It's not that it doesn't point towards something at this particular moment. Same way, it's not like the self doesn't exist for him, it's also pointing to something. It's that if you were to ask, what is the essence of the self? Or of the word squirrel at its foundation? Well, there isn't one, really. In fact, to even ask that question seems to misunderstand the way that words even work. It's in a word's ability to change.
26:46 Speaker 00 The constantly evolving, nebulous, interdependent, relational existence of a word that really defines what it is. Well, so too with a self, if you're Nishitani. The bottom of the self, when you really pull back the layers, is nothingness. No-thingness, formlessness, meaninglessness. Or if you wanted a word that could describe all these things, Mahayana Buddhism already has one. The word is shunyata. Some people say sunyata. The most direct translation of this word is going to be emptiness. And by the way, finally, after all these layers, we've gone deeper into nihilism in this episode so far. Now, we're finally starting to get to some serious levels of nihilism. This is starting to be like having an understanding of death by actually almost dying.
27:31 Speaker 00 Because shunyata, emptiness, if you want to try to put this into more Western metaphysical terminology, like something we might be more used to hearing, you would say that to Nishitani, the metaphysical foundation of being is nothingness. But this would be the wrong way to put it. Because again, this would imply that there's some sort of durable foundation of nothingness that he's building this worldview on top of. More than that, if I said it in that way, it'd be very easy for people coming from the Western world to hear the word "nothingness" and instantly think that that means something negative. Or "nothingness" must mean that there's a void or something. I mean, you might think that what Nishitani's saying here is that nothing really exists. Well, no, again, this is a radically different kind of nothingness. The "no-thingness" that he's talking about
28:14 Speaker 00 is calling into question any kind of durable contrasts that supposedly exist between beings. Remember the concept of dependent origination from before? Nothing exists totally independently of anything else. For example, think of a fire that's burning in the woods at a campfire somewhere. What really is the difference between the wood that's burning, the fire itself, the oxygen feeding it, and the atmosphere surrounding it? I mean, we do make distinctions here for the sake of language, and language does ultimately work by marking contrasts, describing things based on what they're not. We like to mark a contrast between the wood, the fire, the oxygen, the heat, and everything else. But at some deeper level, to Nishitani, these things are all interconnected. They really only arise in relation to one another.
28:59 Speaker 00 And what shunyata, or emptiness, is saying is not that none of these things exist. It's that none of these things has a fixed, independent existence like we typically cordon them off. That there's this deeper layer to reality that exists beyond these abstractions. Not unlike someone feeling nihilistic, who thinks beyond the certainty of the stable meaning of their own religion or political ideology. This is the paradox of shunyata, though. This is an absolute nothingness that negates this supposed separateness and fixed identity of beings. But it is seeing that negation that allows you to realize that the fire we're talking about here, or you for that matter, is not a separate thing that is transcending the world. It is entirely... of this world.
29:42 Speaker 00 It only exists, or changes, or grows through the interplay of the conditions of the here and now. So the here and now, an immediate experience of being, becomes the only way to access it. And so Shunyata, then, in Nishitani's work, is not some metaphysical realm, somewhere else out there, like a heaven, or like any of the other worlds that people like Nietzsche criticized. You could say it's at a deeper layer of this reality that we're in, that Shunyata is an imminent aspect of our very existence. It is our birthright. It's something that is always there and available to us, but that something's usually blocking our ability to experience it. So here we circle back to something that starts to sound like Heidegger and the mystical experiences we've been talking about.
30:25 Speaker 00 It's only by recognizing the groundless ground of the self and getting access to this more immediate connection to being, it's in this place that we can find another form of connection to all the things around us, one that is interdependent and ultimately free, because there's not some fixed essence we have to conform to, or else we're not fulfilling our true purpose, whatever that means. So you can see the difference here from the approaches we talked about from the more European side of things. If his book is called The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, and if typically in the West we encounter nihilism, and then use the self as a way of willing ourselves onto reality to create meaning that then solves the problem of nihilism, then here's Nishitani saying
31:05 Speaker 00 that nihilism, when you view it as an experiment that's being run by a particular self, nihilism, when truly experienced, eventually overcomes itself. It becomes a critical aspect of what a relationship to being even is. One thing that needs to be said here, though, is that as much as I'm trying here as a writer to come up with a bunch of metaphors to help paint a picture of these ideas like Shunyata or nihility, there's a sense in which, to someone like Nishitani, I could sit here all day trying to explain this stuff to people, and there is no metaphor I'm ever going to come up with that's going to ever be able to fully capture what it is he's talking about. Language and theoretical abstractions are always going to be insufficient, which is part of the reason Western philosophy has neglected Shunyata and nihility for so long.
31:49 Speaker 00 The same way you can sit around and think about death from a theoretical perspective, but still not fully understand what it is, Shunyata, nihility, these are things that to Nishitani need to be lived and experienced to be fully understood. There's an access point to this that has to be an experiment that you as a self are running for yourself. So several questions remain here at the end of this. Like, what is blocking this access to Shunyata? I mean, from what you're saying, it should be all around me if I'm looking for it, right? How does religion factor into all this we're talking about? And how does Nishitani think of religion viewing it from this very unique lens that he's set up? More than that, if all of this is true, then did Friedrich Nietzsche just not understand Buddhism?
32:29 Speaker 00 Like, did he just not realize how close many of his ideas were to concepts and Mahayana Buddhism in particular? What does the term "eastern" even really mean in the context of all this? Are we talking about China, India, Japan, the Middle East? Are we just talking about Buddhism, Confucianism, Shinto? All of this and more is going to be coming up on the next podcast here in about a week. Keep your eyes peeled on your respective feeds. Thank you to everyone who appreciates this podcast as a resource and helps keep it going at any level on Patreon. Patreon.com/PhilosophizeThis. And as always, thank you for listening. We'll talk to you next time.
Next Episode #217 ... Religion and Nothingness - Kyoto School pt. 2 - Nishitani Page updated November 7, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated