Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook

Nishitani Keiji

713 Nishitani Keiji 西谷啓治 (1900–1990) Nishitani Keiji was born 27 February 1900 in a small town on the Japan Sea. He was fourteen when his father died of tuberculosis, a disease from which Nishitani himself suffered as a young man. As a high-school student, Nishitani was attracted to Zen through the writings of D.T. Suzuki* and at the same time read widely in western sources outside the curriculum. Drawn to philosophy by a volume of Nishida Kitarō’s* essays, he enrolled in the department of philosophy at Kyoto University where he studied under Nishida and Tanabe Hajime*, graduating with a thesis on Schelling. In the ensuing years he translated two of Schelling’s works and published a range of essays on a variety of philosophical questions from Plotinus to mysticism to Kant. In 1932 he was appointed lecturer at Kyoto University and in that same year published his first book, A History of Mysticism. Four years later he began a practice of Zen that was to last for twenty-four years. In 1943 he was given the lay Buddhist name Keisei, “voice of the valley stream.” At thirty-seven he set out for two years of study under Martin Heidegger at the University of Freiburg, his initial plan to study under Henri Bergson having been frustrated by the latter’s failing health. During his time in Germany he prepared and delivered a talk on Nietzsche and Meister Eckhart, and carried these interests back with him to Japan, convinced that the mystics had brought religion and philosophy together in a way wholly compatible with eastern modes of thought. As one of the rising generation of young philosophers, Nishitani was drawn into roundtable discussions of the wartime ideology (see pages 1059–84) and indeed was encouraged by his teachers, Nishida and Tanabe, to take part in the intellectual resistance against the irrational tendencies of the time. These efforts drew him further and further away from his philosophical and religious interests, with the result that he cast his first original philosophical work, A Philosophy of Elemental Subjectivity, in such a way as to include a political philosophy, one he would later abandon entirely. In 1943 he was appointed to the chair of religion, but was relieved of his post at the end of the war three years later, judged “unsuitable” by the Occupation authorities. The years that followed were difficult ones for Nishitani, but he managed to produce a number of important philosophical works, among them The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism. In 1952 he was reinstated in the chair of religion, conceding it six years later to Takeuchi Yoshinori* while he himself moved to the chair of the history of philosophy. In 1961 he published his masterpiece, Religion and Nothingness. 714 | t h e k yo t o s c h o o l In 1963 Nishitani retired from Kyoto University but retained a lectureship at Ōtani University, where he also served as chief editor of the English-language journal founded by D.T. Suzuki, The Eastern Buddhist. Meantime, he not only continued to write and lecture within Japan and abroad, but also kept up a lively exchange with scholars from around the world. The selections below include the bulk of an essay on the meaning of nihilism for Japan, passages dealing with the conversion from a standpoint of nihility to one ofemptinessž (śūnyatā) from the opening chapters of Religion and Nothingness, and passages from a late essay on the logic of emptiness. È See also pages 1197–1200. [jwh] The meaning of nihilism for ja pa n Nishitani Keiji 1949, 175–86 (173–81) The Crisis in Europe and Nihilism Nihilism is a recognition of the presence of a fundamental and universal crisis in modern Europe. It is a crisis in the sense that people began to feel a quaking underfoot of the ground that had supported the history of Europe for several thousand years and laid the foundations of European culture, thought, ethics, and religion. More than this, it means that life itself is being uprooted and human “being” itself turns into a question mark. Since the latter half of the nineteenth century, this sense of crisis or nihilism, combined with a sense of pessimism and décadence, has been attacking Europe sporadically. In fact, this sort of thing can and does occur regardless of time or place. The sense that life is groundless and human existence without meaning can arise in connection with the religion and philosophy of...