Hallucinating the End of History: Nishida, Zen, and the Psychedelic Eschaton by Cunningham, Eric (review)

Eric Cunningham’s Hallucinating the End of History: Nishida, Zen and the Psychedelic Eschaton is an adventurous, original, and illuminating work that with deep insight undertakes an East-West comparative analysis of Zen Buddhism, the modern Japanese philosophy of Nishida Kitarō, and the psychedelic paradigm of Terence McKenna. Since this work explores points of convergence between Zen, Nishida, and psychedelic experience, it is guaranteed to be extremely controversial. But the spotlight on psychedelia also makes this work extremely interesting or even shocking, like a jolt to the mind and senses.

To begin with, Cunningham’s work is an informative study of Nishida Kitarō (西田幾多郎, 1870–1945), founder of the Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy. In this work Cunningham analyzes how Nishida’s early concepts of pure experience, will, self-awareness, action-intuition, nothingness, and basho or place, were reformulated into his later notion of the “historical world” (rekishiteki sekai 歴史的世界). He clarifies that for Nishida the historical world is a temporal process moving from the created to the creating by unification of the many into the one. Moreover, Cunningham develops the “eschatological” (shūmatsuronteki 終末論的) doctrine of history in Nishida’s modern Zen doctrine of time. According to Cunningham, Nishida’s eschatological vision of the historical world culminates in an overcoming of modernity via a dissolution of the modern world in an ego-negating fusion of subject and object in pure experience through an apocalyptic transcendence of history at the end of time with the realization of Zen nothingness in an eternal now or absolute present. What makes this work somewhat astonishing, however, is Cunningham’s radical claim that Nishida’s eschatological view of history is best understood in terms of a psychedelic paradigm based on the visionary hallucinogenic plant shamanism of Terence McKenna. A key thesis of his work is thus announced: “Among the main propositions of this book is the notion that we can enrich our understanding of Nishida’s historical philosophy by exploring its resonance with psychedelic experience” (21).

The work consists of six chapters: chapter 1, “The Problem of Nishida Kitarō’s Historical Philosophy and Introduction to the Psychedelic Paradigm”; chapter 2, “The Zen Nexus between Nishida Kitarō and Modern Psychedelic Experience”; chapter 3, “Experience and the Self: The Early Phase of Nishida’s Thought (1911–1931)”; chapter 4, “Nishida Kitarō’s Historical World (1931–1945)”; chapter 5, “A Psychedelic Paradigm of History”; and chapter 6, “Hallucinating the End of History: Reflections on Myth, the Eschaton, and the Problem of Overcoming Modernity.”

Chapter 1 claims that existing interpretations of Nishida’s historical philosophy have left us with an inadequate understanding of its long-range significance. One of the contributions of Cunningham’s book is that it endeavors to demonstrate the value of Nishida’s later philosophy of the historical world. He cites leading scholars who dismiss Nishida’s historical philosophy as the “weakest” area of his thought. But Cunningham argues for the importance of Nishida’s historical philosophy when viewed in terms of its eschatological dimension culminating in an overcoming of modernity. Postwar Nishida studies have been divided between scholars who celebrate his contributions to East-West philosophical dialogue versus critics who vilify Nishida for his apparent ultranationalism and support for Japan’s imperial way ideology bordering on fascism. At his best Nishida views Japan’s world-historical mission as establishing a new synthesis of Eastern and Western philosophical traditions, including a Buddhist-Christian interfaith dialogue grounded in a Zen paradoxical logic of nothingness. At his worst Nishida describes Japan’s world-historical mission as leading the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere by uniting the nations of the earth under one roof, whereupon by a dialectic of mutual negation the many empties into the one and the one empties into the many in the place of absolute nothingness with the Japanese emperor and imperial household at its sacred center. After considering both sides Cunningham takes a postmodernist approach based on structural homologies between the eschatology of Nishida and McKenna’s psychedelic model of...