November Nihilism with Keiji Nishitani
I want to use this post to expand on something I said as part of Weeknote 43/2024 about existentialism and “existence preceding essence.” Today, while running, I listened to Episode 216 of Philosophize This! (audio / transcript) which was about the Kyoto School, and in particular the work of Keiji Nishitani. I’d highly recommend giving it a listen if you’re at all interested in philosophy.
Nishitani was influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, to the extent that it is said that he used to carry around a copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. What’s interesting to me about Nishitani is that he sits at the confluence of existentialism, nihilism, and buddhism.
Stephen West, the host of the podcast, does a fantastic job of explaining that the ‘nothingness’ discussed by existentialists, nihilists, and buddhists is usually understood by western minds as something negative. However, the Indian philosophical concept of Śūnyatā, usually translated as ’emptiness’ is probably a better fit.
“Nothingness” is generally forced into a relationship with “being” and made to serve as its negation, leading to its conception as something that “is” nothingness because it “is not” being. This seems to be especially evident in Western thought, even in the “nihility” of nihilism. But insofar as one stops here, nothingness remains a mere concept, a nothingness only in thought. Absolute nothingness, wherein even that “is” is negated, is not possible as a nothingness that is thought but only as a nothingness that is lived. (Nishitani, 1982, p.70)
This emptiness has at its core the doctrine of Pratītyasamutpāda, something I’ve discussed before on this blog as part of my Systems Thinking studies. Usually translated as ‘dependent origination’ it is the idea that everything is one because everything depends upon everything else. A nihlistic approach to the world does not, therefore, have to be destructive; it could be enlightening.
Nihilists are usually portrayed as despondent people who need cheering up. After all, if they believe that life is fundamentally meaningless, where does hope for the future come from? What’s the point of doing anything?
Nishitani would say that Śūnyatā, or emptiness, is a deeper level of our current reality. Without an understand of, and connection to, this we place too much focus on our own actions and importance. We try and categorise the world and understand it through an objective ontology that does not actually exist.
All things that are in the world are linked together, one way or the other. Not a single thing comes into being without some relationship to every other thing. Scientific intellect thinks here in terms of natural laws of necessary causality; mythico-poetic imagination perceives an organic, living connection; philosophic reason contemplates an absolute One. But on a more essential level, a system of circuminsession has to be seen here, according to which, on the field of Śūnyatā, all things are in a process of becoming master and servant to one another. In this system, each thing is itself in not being itself, and is not itself in being itself. Its being is illusion in its truth and truth in its illusion. This may sound strange the first time one hears it, but in fact it enables us for the first time to conceive of a force by virtue of which all things are gathered together and brought into relationship with one another, a force which, since ancient times, has gone by the name of “nature” (physis). (Nishitani, 1982, p.149)
Instead of trying to shoehorn the world into our imperfect mental categories, we should understand that existence precedes essence and, as such, we should approach the world in a spirit of Pratītyasamutpāda. In other words, we should recognise that everything is connected, and temporary. West gives a great example of this in terms of the meaning of words in linguistics.
For me, it’s a great time of the year to be listening to something like this. I am never more nihilistic and existentialist than in November, so this podcast episode made perfect sense to me in terms of using a buddhist lens to see things in a new light.
References
- Nishitani, K. (1982). Religion and Nothingness (J. Van Bragt, Trans.). University of California Press.
Image: hulkiokantabak