- Length
- 336 pagesVan Bragt, Religion and Nothingness, University of California Press, 1982
- Reading
- HardPresupposes texts it does not explain; a guide helps
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
Religion and Nothingness
A Japanese philosopher who had spent two years with Heidegger takes Nietzsche's diagnosis of European nihilism at full strength and argues that Zen Buddhism has the resources to answer it. It is the book through which Buddhist philosophy entered Western argument as a participant.
- Date
- 1961
- Author
- Nishitani Keiji
- Region
- Kyoto
- Language
- Japanese
- 1982 English, Jan Van Bragt The standard English version, which supplied the title; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Compiled
- Method
- Phenomenological — Description of experience as it is given
- Transmission
- Translated — Reached its later readers in another language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 74 years
The most read Kyoto School work in the West, and the one that made Buddhist philosophy an interlocutor for European thought rather than an object of study.
What the book says
A book that takes European nihilism as a real problem rather than a foreign one, and argues that Buddhist emptiness is the way through it. Nishitani begins where Nietzsche left off: the ground has gone from under the values a civilisation lived by, and the response has been either to look away or to despair. He treats this as the necessary condition of any serious religious question - religion begins, on his account, not when things go well but when a person's own existence becomes a question to them, which is why it cannot be argued for from outside. The book then works through three standpoints. The standpoint of consciousness, where a subject faces objects, is where the trouble starts. Nihility is the recognition that this whole arrangement rests on nothing, and it is an advance rather than a failure. Emptiness, the third, is not a deeper nothing but the dissolution of the arrangement itself: on the field of emptiness a thing is what it is precisely because it has no self-standing essence, and a self is most itself when it is not a self set over against everything. Fire does not burn fire.
What it argues
That nihilism must be gone through rather than around, and that emptiness is what lies on the other side. Nishitani's three standpoints are stages of a single movement. On the standpoint of consciousness, a subject confronts objects and asks what grounds them; the honest answer is nothing, and nihility is the name for having taken that seriously. But nihility is still conceived from the subject's side, as an abyss that a self looks into - and the further step is to see that the self was never the kind of thing that could stand outside and look. On the field of emptiness the opposition dissolves in both directions: a thing is not deprived of reality by lacking an essence but is fully itself, and a person is most themselves when they are not defending a self against everything else. Religion, on this account, is not a set of beliefs but this movement completed.
What it answered
Nietzsche on nihilism, and the assumption on both sides that Eastern and Western philosophy are separate subjects. Nishitani engages Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre as opponents and colleagues rather than as material, and uses Zen sources in the same way - which is what made the book a landmark. He is also answering the scientific worldview, which he treats as producing nihility rather than dispelling it, since a universe fully explained is one in which nothing has any standing of its own.
How it argues
By moving between traditions without translating one into the other. Nishitani will take a problem from Descartes, restate it in terms a Zen text would recognise, and show that the restatement changes what the problem is - and the method depends on his being genuinely at home in both, which he was. The prose is difficult in the way phenomenology is difficult, circling and restating, and the difficulty is compounded in English by terms with no equivalent. The book is a set of essays rather than a treatise and does not build in a straight line.
The moment
Nishitani studied under Nishida, went to Freiburg in 1937 to work with Heidegger, and returned to a Japan at war. He belonged to the intellectual circles associated with the wartime discussions of overcoming modernity, and was removed from his chair during the American occupation, returning in 1952. These essays were written in the years after that, by a man in his fifties who had lived through the collapse of a national project and had the European vocabulary for what collapse means.
How it travelled
West, twenty years after publication, and further than any other Kyoto School book. The 1982 translation reached philosophers of religion, comparative philosophers and theologians, and Nishitani became the standard reference for anyone arguing that Buddhist thought is philosophy rather than religion in the sense that excludes argument. The Buddhist-Christian dialogue of the 1980s and 90s ran substantially through him.
The strongest objection
That the resolution is announced rather than argued, and that its own terms prevent it being anything else. Nishitani holds that the field of emptiness cannot be reached by reasoning from the standpoint of consciousness, since the standpoint is what has to go - so a reader who does not already recognise what is being described has no way in, and the book's central claim is protected from every objection by the same move. This is the standard difficulty with any philosophy whose conclusion requires a conversion, and Nishitani would say the difficulty is the subject rather than a defect in the account. That is a fair reply and it means the book cannot do the argumentative work its European interlocutors would want. The separate objection concerns the Kyoto School's wartime record and whether a philosophy of the dissolution of the self-standing individual was politically innocent in the Japan of the 1940s.
Why read it
The chapter on nihility and emptiness, which is the philosophical core and can be read alone with some effort. It requires either some Nietzsche and Heidegger or some Buddhist background, and is much easier with both. It is the most rewarding book in this section for a reader who wants to see two traditions actually meet rather than be compared.
- First printed
- 1961
- First in English
- 1982
- Digitised
- No
Nishitani studied under Nishida and Tanabe and spent two years with Heidegger in Freiburg from 1937. His involvement with wartime intellectual circles led to his removal from his post during the occupation, and he returned to Kyoto in 1952.
Jan Van Bragt's 1982 English is the standard and is in copyright, as is the Japanese.
Where it stands
Live. Nishitani is read in philosophy of religion, in comparative philosophy and in work on nihilism, and the account of emptiness as something other than a deeper nothing is the part most often taken up.
On quoting this book
In copyright in Japanese and English. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether Nishitani's emptiness is faithful to Nagarjuna's or is a modern reconstruction shaped by his European training is argued by Buddhist scholars. Whether the Kyoto School's wartime associations bear on the philosophy is a live and uncomfortable question, and Nishitani's own postwar position on it was reticent. And whether the book's method genuinely brings two traditions into contact or restates Buddhism in a Western idiom that alters it is the standing question about comparative philosophy generally, of which this is the most discussed case.