Philosophy beyond Mechanization: Critiquing Economic Liberalism through Nishitani Keiji's Critique of Modernity

Abstract

Nishitani Keiji critiques both scientism and liberalism as standpoints that fail to overcome the nihilism underlying modernity. In his stance against scientism, Nishitani claims that the idealized discourses of scientific rationality has reduced subjectivity to thinking and acting in mechanistic ways. As the world progressively mechanizes, there is a reversal of the controller becoming the controlled, where the laws of nature and the technological machine reassume control over humanity. By being an object of mechanization, subjectivity becomes an object of domination and thus surrenders its own natural propensity for absolute freedom. Liberalism fares no better. Within this standpoint, there is a foreclosure of the totality of individual expression and realization of absolute freedom because it requires subjectivity to submit and therefore attach oneself to an abstract universal law that champions freedom of the will. Demanding equality based on a liberal notion of freedom not only means subjectivity has to give up part of itself in order for freedom and equality to achieved, but also in the very pursuit of making equality for all, subjectivity is often galvanized toward violence in its commitment to policing this universal law, without any awareness of its underlying nihilism. Combined together, Nishitani's critiques of scientism and liberalism point to the various problems of deploying economic liberalism as a philosophical doctrine for justifying global capitalism. Toward that end, this article demonstrates the importance of Nishitani's critiques of modernity for disrupting the "common sense" position in today's hegemonic discourse.

Introduction

It has been thirty years since Fukuyama's well-known article "The End of History" was published in the magazine The National Interest. The article was a prophetical formulation of human history, which claimed that all ideological alternatives of human governance have been negated in the movements of the Weltgeist, with liberal democracy and free market capitalism representing the final stage of our sociocultural evolution. The significance of Fukuyama's revelation is that it marks what Marxist scholar David Harvey once said, "we are all neo-liberals now,"¹ as the common sense position in today's hegemonic formation. However, the 2009 market crash and the ever-present threat of global climate change have brought many scholars to question the legitimacy of Fukuyama's dialectics of history. Despite the mounting evidence that market capitalism cannot sustain the current ways of life, liberal economists nonetheless hold onto this idea that we cannot supersede a pure market economy because, in the end, we are all individuals who are self-interested and rationally motivated to act in the face of scarcity. Even beyond the denial that global climate change and the growing levels of economic and political equality around the world cannot be adequately addressed by the market, the sort of optimism endured by our common sense position further obscures the historical trajectory that has laid the foundation for the fetishization of this standpoint as well as some of the more "hidden problems" this standpoint creates for us in the contemporary global world.

This article demonstrates that Nishitani Keiji's criticisms of both scientism and liberalism can be a resource for launching a critique against the scientific discourses that naturalize the expansion of global capitalism. In Religion and Nothingness (shūkyō to wa nani ka 宗教とは何か) (1961),² Nishitani criticizes modernity for idealizing scientific rationality (or what we call "scientism") because it converts subjectivity into a mechanized object of control, thus foreclosing the human propensity for absolute freedom. Although nihilism is identified as the central problem underlying Western modernity, Nishitani claims that it makes its face appear in the modern autonomous subject, which is a standpoint that "originated in the will to define and realize oneself according to the laws of reason."³ The idealization of scientific rationality is therefore a symptom of nihilism. Needless to say, there are severe consequences that can arise from this: as Steven Heine tells us, without a proper set of ethics, the "age of death"⁴ that looms over contemporary life becomes a constant reminder that the devastation caused by science and technology can lead to the extinction, or at least a drastic reduction, of many life forms.⁵ Heine is certainly correct here about the need for a new set of ethics, but the worst part of living in the "age of death," as this article will demonstrate, comes more from the world's idealization of economic liberalism as a opposed to scientific technology as such—hence the urgency to make explicit the philosophical problems of that standpoint.

Unfortunately, Nishitani himself did not see how scientism, liberalism, and market paradigms has been formulated into a single doctrine called economic liberalism (or what we now call "neoliberalism") even though he had a lot to say about the problems of scientism and liberalism. As a result of this failure, there is indeed a limit as to how far we can extend Nishitani's critique of modernity in the terrain of global capitalism. But then again, this is not entirely his fault given that neoliberalism was not the dominant discourse until the 1980s. At the same time, we have to keep in mind that were philosophical antecedents (found in the Austrian School) that did exist during Nishitani's time, which tells us that his failure to make this connection should perhaps be taken as an unforgiven oversight. Nonetheless, it should be pointed out that Nishitani's criticisms of scientism is a critique of all scientific discourses that seek to reduce subjectivity to a system of objective logic, which in today's context can be found in the discourses comprising economics departments—in particular, the rational economic actor paradigm; and so if we stitch his critique of scientism together with his critique of liberalism, we can view Nishitani's philosophy as a valuable resource for making visible the limitations of economic liberalism as a hegemonic discourse. Toward this end, the central aim of this article is to disrupt the view of economic liberalism as a natural, fundamental, or inevitable form of human governance for today's global world.

The symptom of nihilism: the science and religion binary

The origins of Nishitani's critique of science and technology can be traced back to his ideas on nihilism. In the book The Self Overcoming of Nihilism (ニヒリズム),⁶ Nishitani identifies nihilism as the central problem afflicting the modern self, appearing when "the self is revealed to the self itself as something groundless."⁷ For Nishitani, the struggle of understanding nihilism as the fundamental issue of existence is due to the failure of the modern view of the self to even recognize nihilism as a problem that transcends space and time, one that is irreducible to psychological or sociological inquiries, because the modern view of the self assumes an objective observer of a world that exists "out there." This is why, as Nishitani says, "nihilism refuses treatment as merely an external problem for one's self, or even contemplation as a problem internal to each individual self," because "nihilism demands that each individual carry out an experiment with the self."⁸ In this sense, nihilism becomes not just an existential problem, but a historical, social, and cultural phenomenon, because it is rooted in the condition(s) of human life.⁹ However, when one is "thrown into nihility," the duality of "existence and nihilism" begins to dissolve, because in the very moment the groundless nature of the self is revealed, one becomes compelled to look at nihilism as a real question. To overcome nihilism means to face it and confront it directly as a philosophical and religious task.¹⁰

By framing nihilism as existential, social, cultural, and historical, as "rooted in the condition(s) of life," it becomes diagnosed as an epistemological problem. Nishitani claims that "the nihilism of various epochs is experientially understood as the problem of the self, and thus … becomes the issue of the philosophy of history by way of philosophical anthropology"¹¹ such that intellectual movements "arose among Europeans in their attempt to understand the being of the self"¹² to overcome the crisis of nihilism. But Nishitani notes that the crisis of nihilism has other historical causes as well:

Among the probable causes we may mention the changes in political consciousness which followed in the wake of the French Revolution, the social anxiety over changes in the economic system resulting from the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of 'liberalism.' At a deeper level, the development of the natural sciences had brought a naturalistic worldview into prominence; the metaphysical worldview that had hitherto held sway was losing its credibility; and belief in Christianity was beginning to totter.¹³

In the end, Nishitani links nihilism to the dominant inquiry of modernity, which cheerleads the view that all reality is classifiable as objective data. Nishitani holds that Descartes introduces this particular worldview in the cogito, where the subject and object become polarized in the framing of the ego (res cogitans) as an autonomous consciousness facing an external world of matter (res extensa).¹⁴ Therefore, the prognosis of nihilism cannot come from any epistemology inaugurating the subject–object binary, because these modes of inquiry insist on maintaining the bifurcation rather than resolving it. For instance, the Marxist aim of resolving alienation through class struggle will fail to overcome nihilism because of its inheritance of the Cartesian duality.¹⁵ Removing the socioeconomic systems believed to be the origins of alienation does not reach the depth of human suffering because the world will forever be viewed as an external substance that needs to be conquered while the self will forever be viewed as an autonomous mode of being that depends on social and economic ideals for realizing its human face.

Nishitani's discussion of nihilism as an epistemological dilemma brings the problem of the science and religion binary to center stage. As Nishitani argues, to disentangle religion and science has irreparable consequences and the reproduction of nihilism is one of them. Nishitani writes: "I am convinced that the problem of nihilism lies at the root of the mutual aversion of religion and science. And it was this that gave my philosophical engagement its starting point from which it grew larger and larger until it came to envelop nearly everything."¹⁶ As Nishitani sees it, the modern period has allowed for an undermining of religion, because nihilism has made room for the development of secularism and scientism to be foundational standpoints for assessing the nature of reality. Although the growth of nihilism and its tandem partners—scientism and secularism—has chipped away at the structure of religious life in Western societies, the irony is that scientism has in many ways reinforced the rigidity of the ideology of religion since modernity because of scientism's tendency to refuse dialogue with religion.¹⁷ In cases such as these, scientism functions more like traditional religions in that it "seems to regard its own scientific standpoint as a position of unquestioned truth from which it asserts itself in all directions."¹⁸

Although scientism thinks of itself as an intellectual movement that broke from Christianity, in the end, it has mimicked its structure by adopting its narrative of linear time. Nishitani explains:

Although the views of history found in Christianity and in the Enlightenment represent diametrically opposed points of view, they both concur in recognizing a meaning in history. From its standpoint of theocratic faith, Christianity sees a divine providence or a divine administration operative in history; the Enlightenment, from an anthropocentric standpoint of reason, locates the telos of history in the consummate rationalization of human life.¹⁹

Nishitani is suggesting that the mimicry of science and traditional religions represents a restrictiveness to the intellectual thought of the modern period, because both are functioning from the same historical basis. Which is to say, the alliance nihilism has with scientism maintains a standpoint of (material) atheism where one's view of the world becomes locked into a dialectical circle of dualities. One either rejects religion altogether or holds onto its own ideological standpoint whole-heartedly. But much of Christianity is at fault here as well, because it looks at modern atheism as something to be eliminated and then seeks to establish its own position as an unquestionable truth. Instead, as Nishitani insists, a new form of atheism must act as a mediator between these opposing positions, because it can address the problem of nihilism in modernity at the same time creating an opening for a new development of religious life.²⁰ Because nondual standpoints are not bound to the same fixations as dualistic standpoints are, like traditional forms of Christianity or scientism, for instance, Nishitani maintains that Zen Buddhism, as this new form of atheism, is the proper self-reflecting tool for overcoming the forces that stifle creative possibilities.²¹

Scientism and the mechanization of the world

One can locate the historical connection between scientific rationality and Christianity in the way science thinks of itself as an objective enterprise, apart from human life. To clarify their shared basis, Nishitani points to the history of scientific rationality and its determination to undermine Christianity as a position of epistemological authority in the modern period and its failure to sever all ties to its logical structure: in other words, modern subjectivity, via reason, sought to erase the personality of God while inheriting the teleological scheme baked into the divine order. The result was a removed dependence on God's will but what was maintained was the power to control the world as a "divine right." In turn, reason began to replace God as the absolute authority (because religion no longer needed God) and subjectivity began to think of itself as truly active and free, and thus qualified to use reason as it sees fit. Without God acting as the creator of the world, all life would become viewed as mere matter, as mere "stuff."²² Eventually, scientism would assume the mantle of this image of the natural world introduced by the scientific method and further confine subjectivity to look at the world as a series of mechanisms, and not as direct sources of spiritual inspiration and meaning.²³ This is because the standpoint of scientism converted the self into an objective position against a world viewed as cold and lifeless. The pinnacle of the secularization process, as mentioned by Nishitani, is the point when "the self-realization of man took the form of the realization of the 'ego'."²⁴ That is, after subjectivity was awakened to be free and autonomous, the modern conception of the self became formulated as an ego that has a variety of ethical and philosophical anxieties, desires, and demands, with a body reducible to a network of mechanistic causes. From this self-centered, egoistic position then, the world of dead matter becomes thought of as resources ready to be plucked, consumed, or ravaged by any moment of desire. The ego, with no mirror to reflect its own living face and the desires that overrun it, therefore remains in a state of self-attachment.²⁵

The subject–object binary that underlies scientism reflects the central problem of modern subjectivity's coalition with "progressive atheism" (shinpotekina mushinron 進歩的な無神論)—a term Nishitani uses to describe the commingling of materialism, scientific rationality, and the idea of progress within a hollowed-out Christian framework.²⁶ As subjectivity puts faith in the narrative of linear progress, the world becomes viewed as passive, raw materials that depend on reason for its power to illuminate. Although scientific rationality thinks of this process as one of garnering truth, the reality is that scientific truth is nothing more than the advancement of certainty.²⁷ In the very pursuit of an unlimited progress, one sees the development of technology as a tool for establishing control over nature: meaning, the knowledge produced by scientific reason has advanced in the form of technology to emancipate subjectivity from the natural world and to further create freedom for the ego away from being bound to the object. This is instantiated by modern subjectivity's use of machines, instruments, and other various technological forms as if the material world is external to the self.²⁸

There is a hidden cost to all of this, however. Nishitani asserts that scientism's view of the world sets the conditions for the mechanization of human life (kikai no seiritsu 機械 の成立). That is to say, in the culmination of the technologicalization of the world, subjectivity begins to embody and appropriate the laws of nature within its own interior.²⁹ By internalizing the laws of nature, one "mimics" mechanization by living and acting out in mechanistic ways to the point where human life becomes transmuted into a purified form of the machine itself (sorenojūnsuikeitai ga kikai to iu monoda それの純 粋形態が機械というものだ).³⁰ Although the term "poiesis" is not used here, Nishitani is indeed invoking this concept by formulating the process of mechanization as one of a mimetic relationship in which the subject makes, and then becomes, the object in the act of imitation. But there is something passive in the mechanization of human life as well: what Nishitani calls "a process of inversion" (kankei no masashiku gyakuten 関 係のまさしく逆転) refers to the shift or movement of the controller becoming the controlled, where the laws of nature reassume control over humanity (who is normally thought of as the one who controls nature), because in the very pursuit of controlling the laws of nature, subjectivity relinquishes its own agency and allows itself to be converted into an object of mechanization.³¹ In other words, by becoming an object of mechanization, one not only thinks of itself as an object of desire, one becomes an object of desire (to someone else). To be controlled by the desires of others is to passively accept the fate of one's existential domination. Therefore, when the self becomes part of the machine, it "forfeits" or "surrenders" its own subjectivity and thus loses the possibility of attaining "absolute freedom."³²

The paradox to all of this is that the self finds itself "captive and subordinate to this law of infinite desire,"³³ as a slave to the technological machine in the quest for a utopia built for an insatiable ego. Genuine relationships are destroyed in this process because science in itself lacks moral direction, while the technology developed along the way becomes its own raison d'être for maintaining the imaginary wall between the self and the world. This is because scientism is self-affirming such that its course of inquiry is to continuously search for answers in the mechanisms of nature, society, and consciousness, rather than within the existential search for one's relationship to science and the cosmological world.³⁴ The existential repercussion of mechanization is not only the abyss of nihilism, but the self-imposed limits to one's own ability to "play" (遊ぶ) in the world. This is why Nishitani describes the life of a mechanistic society as a "fish caught in a net" and that "no matter how much it vigorously hops and flops around, it is [still stuck] in the net."³⁵

Nishitani is positing a view of domination that is both relational and mimetic. What this means is that the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed is one where the subject voluntarily gives itself up to be dominated by the object, in exchange for what is thought to be a free and autonomous subjectivity—which in the modern world means a freedom to control the world through scientific rationality with unlimited desires. However, the mechanization of modern life renders subjectivity into an object of control by the desire to mechanize, so that when the desire to mechanize spreads mimetically, the impulse is to objectify oneself and the other. This occurs by virtue of the modern subject's compulsion or obsession with controlling what is outside of itself to the point where external objects become reified, only to become a controller of the inner being of subjectivity. Eventually, this process expands and radiates outward into cultural, political, and social institutions, where technology and mass consumption become the ideal sources of meaning in the world, and the result becomes a mimetic interplay of objectified selfs. But in a world of reciprocal objectification, nihilism is never confronted or revealed.

Nishitani's critique of scientism is not just about the problem of the controller becoming the controlled, it is about the pre-emptive dismissal of religion as a source for resolving the problem of nihilism. Science, with its commitment to finding the causes of temporal things, reinforces standpoints that idealizes material reality. By seeking meaning and value within this particular matrix of life, a linear notion of time that is the foundation of progress becomes a naturalized view of the world—a view of time that conflicts with the Zen perspective of circular time. For Nishitani, history is not an objective movement from beginning to end, because there is no beginning or end to time itself.³⁶ Therefore, to search for meaning in a movement of objective time is to act as if time is outside of subjectivity. But the externalization of time assumes that the self is the center of the world, which makes an anthropocentric and egocentric view of the world appear as "common sense." What is foreclosed in the externalization of time is the nihility at the ground of human existence—the crisis of existence that generates the science and religion binary. And if one fails to enter the void of nihility, to enter into the "field of emptiness" (śūnyatā), as Nishitani argues, then there is no opening up of being, where one can confront the desires to flee into material progress or to flee into the false security that drives exclusionary fundamentalism.³⁷ There is only the constant danger, as Masao Abe tells us, of a "complete mechanization of humanity."³⁸

Nishitani points to the intensifying problem of nuclear weaponry in the post-WWII era and the tendency among communist countries to move toward totalitarianism with the use of technology as instantiations of this instinct to mechanize political and social institutions.³⁹ Mechanization has even found its way into our cultural view of work with our life becoming a world of "endless busyness" because of this need to maximize efficiency. As the logic of mechanization goes: the body becomes viewed as physical waste when it is no longer able to perform its labor function.⁴⁰ The fact that we are conditioned to detest idleness, even after the body is exhausted, demonstrates we have become part of the serfdom that is in debt to the blueprint of a rational, technological world.⁴¹ The relevance of Nishitani's point in contemporary life can be illustrated beyond these examples as well: the 2011 nuclear disaster in Fukushima reflects par excellence how scientism continues to reproduce and maintain the distance between the self and the world, because in the face of crises that emerge from scientific technology is the acceptance that the annihilation of life, and perhaps the world as well, is indeed a possible scenario that is worth the cost.⁴²

Economics as contemporary scientism

As one might gather at this point, Nishitani's critique of scientism reads a lot like Max Horkheimer's critique of instrumental reason. Horkheimer argues that the formalized rationality inherited from the Enlightenment has been transformed into something "irrational" and "immoral" in modern life because the reification of reason has become a weapon for the repression of human nature.⁴³ In other words, subjectivity became subjugated in the very privileging of reason, because the inner nature of human existence has been reduced to instrumental functions, to the point where its "outer nature" is turned into a meaningless obstacle in the path of technological and industrial activity. Horkheimer writes:

The human being, in the process of his emancipation, shares the fate of the rest of his world. Domination of nature involves domination of man. Each subject not only has to take part in the subjugation of external nature, human and nonhuman, but in order to do so must subjugate nature in himself. Domination becomes internalized for domination's sake.⁴⁴

Horkheimer is telling us that instrumental rationality has ushered in a mechanized view of the world to which everything is sacrificed, including the domination of oneself and others, because of morality's subordination to the operations of calculated reason. The resemblances between Horkheimer's critique of Enlightenment rationality and Nishitani's critique of scientism is in the characterization of modernity as the consummation of a technologicalization of the world where instrumental rationality is thought to enable the growth of an unchecked technocracy, creating a morally bankrupt world that naturalizes domination. This is all to say that Nishitani's point couples well with one of Horkheimer's central claim in "Mittel und Zwecke" [Means and Ends], which laments the problem of instrumental reason to lead subjectivity to evaluate the cost of our actions on the basis of maximizing self-preservation instead of being concerned with the morality of our decisions.⁴⁵ There are other moments where Nishitani agrees with Horkheimer, particularly with the claim that the fetishization of scientific rationality culminating in utilitarianism, where individualized egos anxiously seek to universalize abstract ideals that are often violent in nature—like in the case of Hitler's brutal vision of the world.⁴⁶

There is a clear difference in terms of what drives the obsession of scientific rationality between Nishitani and Horkheimer, however: the former locates the madness of this pursuit in the denial of nihilism while the latter locates this within Enlightenment rationality's relationship with capitalism. Nevertheless, by deploying Nishitani's critique of both scientism and liberalism in the service of critiquing economic liberalism, one can make a similar argument to Horkheimer's critique of the link between technological rationality and the production of capital. In fact, one of the most fundamental assumptions underscoring economic liberalism is that society is made up of an aggregate of atomized individuals who naturally pursue their self-interest. Individuals, whose human nature is governed by an a priori form of reason, are therefore motivated to calculate each decision or "opportunity cost" to maximize pleasure and minimize pain in a world that persistently faces the problem of scarcity. From this standpoint, however, the world is understood as an object independent of subjectivity, while individual consciousness is "conceived as a 'pleasure machine' adjusted to seek ever gradients of pleasure."⁴⁷ To be sure, there have been attempts within economics to branch outside of homo economicus, but for the most part, economic liberalism has come to instantiate a contemporary form of scientism because it reduces the complexity of human reality to idealistic models of logic that are mechanistic in frame—using mathematical equations, graphs, and algorithms to illuminate and predict economic behavior. Even though economics has been criticized for quite some time for trying to imitate the methodologies of the natural sciences, it continues to think of itself as scientific because it develops its theoretical formulas on the basis of causal connections or "essentialized determinants."⁴⁸ Finally, even if the theoretical reduction of economic liberalism is not to physical processes as such, its application in the domain of technology and scientific progress generally is, and its assertion of rationality as the discursive modus operandi of human life mistakes the interiority of subjectivity for mechanistic behavior.

In Science and Zen (kagaku to zen 科学と禅), Nishitani advances a similar claim, insisting that mechanistic logic is common place to all of the social sciences. He writes:

parallel to the natural sciences other new branches such as the social sciences, sociology, psychology, anthropology, etc. have sprung up to undertake the study of the various mechanisms of society and its history, as well as the mechanisms of the various phenomena of consciousness. … Consequently, a confusion as arisen and still prevails today, in virtue of which those sciences all too often mistake man himself for a mechanism. These sciences in turn have led man to make the same mistake about himself, and in this way have played a role in dissolving the substantial form of "man," in annihilating the essence of man.⁴⁹

Nishitani's comparison between the social sciences and the physical sciences is certainly an exaggeration. One rarely finds "mechanistic logic" in anthropology, for instance, but there is a point that can be rescued here: that is, the failure of the social sciences to start from an epistemological foundation that fully rejects mechanistic logic, which, as this article argues, is the reason for why the rational economic actor paradigm is today's scientism (and perhaps today's "common sense").⁵⁰

From a Nishitanian critique of scientism, the propagation of economic rationality around the world will continue the domination of subjectivity because, as the "common sense discourse," it defends mechanization as a natural and desirable project. Instead of looking inward toward the ground of self-existence and to see how the ground is ultimately groundless, the self looks outward for meaning and searches for pleasure and fulfilment in the material world. However, like a dog chasing its own tail, the observing self never captures its own empty nature; it only reifies itself as another substance that depends on the rational pursuit of material self-interest. As another substantive being in search of uninterrupted pleasure and satisfaction, all objects outside of itself are captured and then placed under the control and domination of one's desire, rationalized as "morally necessary" for one's self-preservation. This is why the power of technology that is harnessed and then used against nature in the "name of progress" ends up depleting many of our life forms, and why the global climate change crisis is dominated by the optimistic postures of armchair economists and the greed of wealthy business men (and women). Although the concern discussed thus far is speaking mostly about the drift toward mechanization within a paradigm that reduces consciousness to formal rationality, there is still the lingering question about Nishitani's linking of nihilism to liberalism.

Liberalism and the attachment to the law

The historical origins of liberalism and its connection to modern economics, according to Nishitani, can be found in the Protestant Reformation. The emphasis on freedom and human rights can therefore be seen as Christian at its foundation.⁵¹ But Nishitani claims that despite the good intentions liberalism has to protect subjectivity from outside violence, it does little to address the problem of nihilism and to move subjectivity into a deeper realm of freedom. In The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, for instance, Nishitani discusses how nihilism is historically rooted in liberalism,⁵² and toward the end of Religion and Nothingness, he briefly goes on the offense against liberalism for insisting on a view of freedom that assumes a reified ego at the ground of being. Nishitani remarks as such in the following passage:

Subjective freedom, which is the cornerstone of so-called liberalism, is not yet rid of the self-centeredness mode of being of man himself. … True equality is not simply a matter of an equality of human rights and the ownership of property. Such equality concerns man as the subject of desires and rights and comes down, in the final analysis, to the self-centered mode of being of man himself.⁵³

Nishitani states that liberalism imagines freedom within a frame of equality—in terms of human rights and property ownership—but such is not a true freedom, because it prioritizes the freedom of the will above all else.⁵⁴ Instead, as Nishitani claims in "The Awakening of Self in Buddhism," the idea of "human rights" in the age of secularization advances the doctrine of liberty and equality, leaving the standpoint of an autonomous ego intact, without a deep component of love.⁵⁵ What is left untouched within this viewpoint then is the idea of the innermost mind as a moving force in society. The transformation of subjectivity and the transformation of society are not mutually exclusive projects: social transformation can arise from the internal transformation of the mind of subjectivity—as demonstrated in the Buddha's ontological and ethical break from the Brahmanical caste system.⁵⁶ Therefore, in order to have true freedom, as Nishitani argues, there must be a truly realized self that has managed to turn itself into a selfless nothing while doing the task of serving others.⁵⁷ Otherwise, what one is left with is an idealized democratic liberal doctrine that romanticizes equality to the point of erasing individual uniqueness in exchange for a conformist society based on mediocrity.⁵⁸

Apart from his critique of liberalism, Nishitani launches a critique against the "progressive" movements that dominated Western intellectual history throughout the twentieth century. The argument Nishitani puts forth is that "progressivism," especially that of Marxism, saw the crisis of atomic warfare caused by capitalism as only resolvable through a social revolution, which ultimately creates a black and white vision of the future that reverses the roles of the exploiter and the exploited. By elevating the proletarian and subordinating the bourgeois, the exploited in the previous arrangement becomes the new exploiter in the emancipated relationship because any notion of emptiness that could serve as the source for radically transforming the proletariats and bourgeois from the inside-outward is papered over.⁵⁹ When change is forced outward, the motivation is less about freeing all sentient beings from suffering, but rather ensuring that the exploiters will experience justice under a new universal law or new socio-political arrangement.

The issue Nishitani is highlighting here falls in line with the same complaint he has with any standpoint that seeks to justify ideals through an "attachments to law."⁶⁰ That all theories, ideologies, and laws are subject to the fundamental problem the Buddha lectured on—namely the problem of ignorance around one's attachment to self and other. The progressive movement is no exception, especially because there is nothing genuine nor authentic about coercing subjectivity into an absolute state of equality. Nishitani's point is that in the very pursuit of making an absolute state of equality a reality for all, socialism can quickly turn into totalitarianism because "when subordination to a universal proves incapable of absorbing the totality of the freedom of the private, individual self, we may find the very breath being squeezed out of individual freedom in the irate attempt to enforce equality."⁶¹ This is exactly what happens in revolutions where violence is used to force the ideas of history.⁶²

However, one can see this problem of "attachment of law" in the case of liberalism as well: that in the very demand for enforcing a system of human rights is the universalization of a law that requires the subordination of the individual's will. The problem emerges when the freedom of subjectivity is further and further emphasized to bring unity to the universal law. If the universalization of liberalism is to be enacted and preserved, the state, reason, or God must act as the mediator between individuals, which means subjectivity has to give up part of itself so that freedom and equality can be achieved. Within this arrangement, freedom and equality are forever imperfect because "the power of the state and its laws can never fully succeed in transforming the wolf into a sheep, and from time to time the wolf will act as a wolf."⁶³ This is a classic case of prioritizing the universal at the expense of the particular. Nishitani insists there is a "natural logical slip" to move from the liberal doctrine to that of anarchy in the pursuit of justifying the freedom of subjectivity within the universal frame of equality and freedom, which would require a conceptual raising or elevation of subjectivity to a higher plane to make the universal exist in reality. But the "natural state" of individual freedom within an anarchist formation is really just a weakening or dissolution of the law based on a liberal view of the self. Without the internal transformation of subjectivity to an existence that transcends attachment or reification, there is no possibility to attain freedom that is absolutely individualized.⁶⁴ The promise of freedom within any abstract or idealized model expects too much from a finite subjectivity—which at times acts "civilized" and at other times acts as a "wolf"; therefore, as Nishitani suggests here, in the state of "unfreedom," like in any liberal (or Marxist for that matter) formation, subjectivity is often driven to violence in its commitment to policing universal laws, without any awareness of its underlying nihilism.

Conclusion: from global economic liberalism to global philosophical pluralism

This article argues that Nishitani's attacks on scientism and liberalism can be deployed as a critique against economic liberalism, because the discourses circulating the discipline of economics have a history of reducing the interiority of subjectivity to logics that proliferate systems of objectification. Nishitani, with his reversed Hegelian search for an original ground that unifies being, points toward the need to fundamentally revise subjectivity's relationship with nature, because both scientism and liberalism present nature and the world as a canvas for the rational subject to create and shape in accordance to its own desires and fantasies, instead of looking at nature as part of the fabric of God that makes subjectivity possible. Keep in mind that Nishitani's notion of God reads more in step with Schelling's view of God and nature, and as such, brings forth a view of nature that is not outside of subjectivity and thus deemed fully alive and personal.⁶⁵ This is what Nishitani is getting at when he writes that "the mechanistic worldview of science, which reduces all things (or phenomena) to material processes … nullifies not only the substantiality of visible things but also of life, soul, and spirit."⁶⁶ Thus, to treat nature as an object of rational control, like in economic liberalism, amounts to one treating its own subjectivity as an object of rational control, robbing one's own life-spirit and will to exist. This is why, in the article "Technology from the Standpoint of Sunyata," Alessandro Tomasi argues that the relationship between subjectivity and the technological machine within a Nishitanian framework should not be conceptualized within a master–slave relationship, because developing one's relationship with technology from within the standpoint of Buddhist emptiness is a halfway meeting point that reduces the destructiveness of a mechanized world.⁶⁷ Recall that Nishitani is not opposed to science and technology as such but to the anthropocentric and egocentric tendencies of scientific rationality. The idea is that if one were to confront nihilism from a standpoint of emptiness, then technology can enrich one's relationship with nature and the world instead of it being used as a means to control everything in it because emptiness supports compassion by virtue of framing the world as sources of wonder and delight.

Of course, one should not accept everything Nishitani presents as a critique of Western modernity without a proper trial. Critics claim there are limitations to Nishitani's critiques—for example, this overemphasis of characterizing Western modernity as a logic of being and all of Japanese intellectual history as a logic of nothing,⁶⁸ in addition to this underemphasis on discussing the social and political underpinnings of Western modernity.⁶⁹ Nishitani frames the root of the problem from the standpoint of existence, and so what is socially constituted gets reworked through the language of the personal.⁷⁰ Therefore, as Niklas Söderman tells us, one cannot help but wonder then what a social theory would look like if the locus of existential meaning were to be reconfigured within a view of Buddhist emptiness, especially if there is no reason to believe there is an irreconcilable difference between the need to address the social and political problems of the modern world and the need to resolve one's existential or spiritual hunger. To ignore or dismiss the political and social problems of modern life in favor of self-realization could end up resuscitating a view of individualism as the ground of reality, which is ironically what Nishitani claims to be arguing against.⁷¹ The critics, like Söderman for instance, raises important points here, because there are indeed overgeneralizations in Nishitani's philosophy, which make his critiques lose potency. On the other hand, Söderman's particular claim that Nishitani fails to develop a "social theory" is not entirely true either. Nishitani's "I-Thou relationship," which derives from Zen Buddhist views of interdependency, is an attempt to develop an account of sociality without abandoning the fundamental notion of emptiness. According to Nishitani then, there is no need to think of political and social problems as separate from the problem of self-existence, because the co-arising of self and world, as theorized in Buddhism, implicates every aspect of life. Whenever a problem (what we may call "social" or "political") emerges, it becomes the responsibility of the self to resolve it. The "I-Thou" relationship refuses any attempt to atomized subjectivity in this regard. But the fear of an ideological assault on subjectivity that manages to reduce the frame of Buddhist emptiness to self-realization without concerns for the social or political remain, nonetheless.

Even if there are limitations to Nishitani's characterization of Western modernity, there is still space for his critiques, specifically in the arena of discourses that seek to justify global capitalism. What makes Nishitani's critique of modernity valuable is that it fits in with the more general attitude among the Kyoto School thinkers who very much questioned the universalization of the Western particular, offering alternative views and critiques of reality that are born from a different intellectual trajectory. For Nishitani, as well as his teacher, Nishida, overcoming the particulars of both the East and the West requires both a resistance to Western imperialism as well as the building of a cosmopolitan world that encourages a communality of nations, cultures, and ethnicities.⁷² Not unlike Nishida, who warns against converting religion into an object of rational investigation where it is subsumed in a hierarchy of epistemic and cultural judgment, Nishitani claims that the logic of religion functions as a site of critical privilege because it operates on a deeper level than the principles of rationality, and as such, has the capacity to move a personal, national, and cultural particular toward a world-of-worlds (also translated as "global world") (sekaiteki sekai 世界的世界). Instead of feeding the parochial proclivities of the modern nationstate, in the like of imperialism or colonialism, all nations, Japan included, should break from nationalism by developing a standpoint of nonego that can open up a horizon of globality.⁷³ Although, to be sure, at certain points Nishitani would overstep the case by self-proclaiming Japanese leadership in the role of creating a Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere (daitōakyōeiken 大東亜 共 栄圏)—this cultural and economic cooperative bloc free of Western powers, there is indeed a distinction between what Japan's leadership means in the Coprosperity Sphere and the imperialist model of securing a network of colonies that was practiced by Western countries throughout modernity.⁷⁴

The idea of a global world is significant here because it does not seek to represent a point in history where one universal represents all particulars; rather, the global world seeks to bring forth a global space where all particulars find their place in a world order by cultivating a "spirit of the present."⁷⁵ What makes this point relevant to the central point of this article is that Nishitani's critiques of scientism and liberalism, as part of this move to undermine Western modernity and bring forth a global standpoint based on a unity-in-difference, provide us with an alternative view of how to evaluate the relationship between the mission of Western rationality and its links to imperialism. In the case of today's global world, economic liberalism has become the discourse of "common sense," and so in this regard, we not only see a mechanization of subjectivity through the fetishization of economic rationality, but we also see a universalization of a Western particular in the world space. If there is anything that we can take from Nishitani's critiques of both scientism and liberalism in today's context then, it is that there is a danger in allowing economic liberalism to become the foundational discourse of the world, especially because economic rationality is really just one standpoint among many others.⁷⁶ The concern here though extends beyond the limitations and problems associated with the operating assumptions of the economic discipline, a concern articulated by Silja Graupe in the book Basho of Economics: An Intercultural Analysis of the Process of Economics,⁷⁷ because if economic liberalism becomes the hegemonic discourse of the global world, then not only is Nishitani's and Nishida's vision of a global world foreclosed, but a new kind of cultural imperialism can arise from the very assumption that (economic) rationality, as an expression of a Western particular, is foundational and irreplaceable to critical thought. If we can reinterpret Nishitani's critiques to judge the state of the contemporary world, then what we are calling "global capitalism" is really just another form of cultural imperialism masquerading as a discourse of reason that seeks to free subjectivity from the tyranny of objects outside itself, but in the end, it is taking its own self and other hostage in the pursuit of making this fantasy a reality.