Episode 216 - Transcript

So since about episode #211… we’ve been talking about the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and the fallout of him supposedly SMASHING all the idols from the history of western philosophy with a hammer. 

Well the guy we’re talking about today…is actually comically in line with basically everything we’ve been talking about on the show… since we did that episode. He’s a man who was a BIG fan of nietzsche’s work: in fact as the STORY goes he used to carry around a COPY of Thus Spoke Zarathustra with him…pretty much everywhere he WENT in the EARLY stages of his life. 

More than that he’s a man who TRAVELED, all the way TO Germany to STUDY under the professorship of Martin Heidegger during the 1930’s. 

And even MORE than THAT he was a man that was the principal chair of Philosophy and Religion at Kyoto University for more than 20 years…a position where he DEEPLY engaged with the mystical tradition of the west we just talked about, with a SPECIAL focus on the theologian Meister Eckhart. 

See it’s LIKE I PLANNED it or something…that the man we’re talking about today… is a member of what has NOW become known as the famous Kyoto School, out of Kyoto, Japan. The guy we’re talking about today…went by the name…of Keiji Nishitani.  

Now one of the first questions you might have here is: WHAT IS the Kyoto School. 

And a LOT of people might say back to you DESCRIBING the Kyoto school saying something like: well, these are EASTERN thinkers…that are engaging with WESTERN ideas, primarily existentialism…where then they BLEND this east/westness into a nice cornucopia of interesting stuff for everyone out there to enjoy. 

But I’m here to tell you: LOT of people that are FANS of the Kyoto School would HATE for it to be described in this way. And my first INSTINCT here at the beginning of this was that I was gonna talk about the problema… of trying to REDUCE these thinkers into BROAD categories like EAST vs WEST. My FIRST instinct was to spend some time talking about that at the beginning.

But rather than GRIND the pace of this episode down to a complete halt RIGHT at the start…my NEW hope… is that by the END of this mini-SERIES we’re doing on the Kyoto school… the problems of ONLY FRAMING things in terms of these east/west labels, the LIMITATIONS of those labels…will just become evident to you from all the points that have been made throughout the course of the series– we’ll have PLENTY of time to talk about it is what I’m saying. 

What I INSTEAD want to do out of respect to the listener of this…is just to get right into the meat… of something that was near and dear to the heart of Keiji Nishitani…something that FITS IN to this LARGER conversation we’ve been having about these different GATEWAYS into a more immediate connection to being. 

What I want to do is talk about Nihilism…at a different level and in a different way than we’ve ever gone into on this podcast before. 

And to understand why Nihilism was such an important thing to FOCUS on for someone like Nishitani…I think a useful starting point for this is to talk about what it’s like to have a relationship to DEATH…. as a comparison.

How many people out there listening to this…have REALLY come face to face with DEATH… in an intimate way in your life? Like have ever been FORCED to acknowledge…JUST how much of an ever present REALITY something like DEATH is for you at any given moment? 

Now the point of ASKING this…. is not to BELITTLE anyone’s understanding of death. You don’t know death like I do! 

The POINT here is to say that we’re ALL at different levels of familiarity when it comes to death. And oftentimes the level of familiarity you HAVE…comes down to situations that have HAPPENED to you… that you didn’t choose. You lost people CLOSE to you and were forced to think about it. You were in a war zone and were surrounded by it. Maybe you had a near death experience yourself. 

Point is: not everybody is FORCED to think about death as they go throughout their lives, on the contrary, modern society often SHIELDS people from it. 

And even if you DO decide, from a PURELY philosophical perspective, to DEDICATE some TIME…to sitting around– I’m gonna do some DEATH reflection today…even if you spent hundreds of hours DOING that over the course of your life…there’s no GUARANTEE that you’re really GRAPPLING with it at a serious level. I mean you can KNOW, THEORETICALLY you’re going to DIE someday, you can SAY you’re in TOUCH with death…but then something unexpected happens, the harness next to you on a roller coaster doesn’t work or something and all of a sudden it becomes FAR MORE REAL to you after HAVING that experience. 

What I mean is: you can FAKE…a relationship that you have with death. Having never actually even ENCOUNTERED it.  

Okay now CONSIDER how possible it is to have this kind of SHALLOW relationship with death…and now SHIFT the whole question here… to the concept… of Nihilism. 

Nihilism being for Keiji Nishitani…one of the most IMPORTANT things you could EVER possibly THINK about or understand… as a person that’s living on this planet. Same question though: how deeply… have you REALLY contended with and FACED… Nihilism? 

Now Nishitani might find it valuable here at the beginning…for us to consider what a common person’s experience is…when they start thinking about Nihilism…especially in the sort of Western cultures most people listening to this podcast will be embedded in. 

What’s a COMMON line of thinking for somebody to have in the west…when they claim to be thinking in a Nihilistic way? Well, they’ll say something like Nihilism…means that there’s no meaning to life, right? And if there’s no MEANING to life in GENERAL…then why should I… ever… DO anything in MY…life? 

And like we touched on BRIEFLY in the Nietzsche episode we recently did what this will often turn INTO… is someone who just in practice…chooses to sit around… and tries to be as comfortable as they possibly can. This is a COMMON response to feeling Nihilistic: you watch content, you play video games, eat comfort food, it could be drugs: the point is to THIS PERSON…if there’s no MEANING to life…then why DO anything that’s going to be difficult? 

But as we ALSO talked about on that episode to someone like Nietzsche…he says choosing to be COMFORTABLE all the time like this… is NOT moral Nihilism…COMFORT is not the DEFAULT of what a human existence is…no, prioritizing comfort is CHOOSING… comfort and security… AS your set of values…which to HIM is then gonna be choosing, a very passive, reactive approach to life that DENIES certain necessary aspects of what a life often is. 

Now if Nietzsche was going to CRITICIZE this hypothetical western person’s thinking, where they SAY they’re Nihilistic… but in PRACTICE they’re not…one thing he could SAY to them…is that they really aren’t taking Nihilism seriously enough as a philosophical concept– that they’re smuggling in values and a moral framework where they supposedly shouldn’t be HAVING any.

Now as we know: of course Nietzsche says that to truly CONTEND with Nihilism FULLY…means you have to NOT live in this passive, reactive way…no, it’s an ACTIVE process, we have to creatively differentiate, we have to create our OWN values and projects from a place of affirmation. In other words: taking Nihilism SERIOUSLY to Nietzsche…means OVERCOMING NIHILISM… via the self, and the WILL. 

I, the self, CREATE VALUES… in each moment moving forward…and this supposedly is going to SOLVE the problem of Nihilism, that there AREN’T actually values WRITTEN into the universe for me to follow. 

And what we’re LEFT with when we DO this whole strategy Nishitani says…is a sort of POSITIVE response to Nihilism…that’s a CLASSIC kind of response that comes out of a western style of thinking. The idea is: that Nihilism…is a problem to be SOLVED. 

That when I’m FEELING Nihilistic…that’s something we need to FIX, that’s something EVERYBODY out there needs to find a way to transcend and overcome.

And it’s a FAIR ANALYSIS I think…I mean, we DO…DO this in the west when we CARE about the people around us. Someone’s feeling Nihilistic…what do we wanna do? We want to go over to their place and annoy them while they’re FEELING Nihilistic sitting in their dark apartment. You know, Anti-nihilism STEVE’S gotta walk in your front door. Why’s it so DARK in here? Open up the WINDOWS! LET THE SUN SHINE IN! See life isn’t so bad! You should just get a HOBBY! This is the kind of stuff we want to DO to the people we love.

And on ONE hand Nishitani says…what ELSE… would you expect us to be doing as people born into the western world? We’re born into a world…that smuggles in SPIRITUAL assumptions… that we MOST of the time don’t even realize we’re MAKING unless if we’re INTIMATELY aware of our own HISTORY. 

For example like we talked about on the Nietzsche episode: the history of western thought, when you engage with the tradition seriously, you realize it is FILLED with people making very MONOTHEISTIC, ABRAHAMIC assumptions… that there’s SUPPOSED TO BE a moral order to the world, that’s GIVEN to us from the outside by a supernatural God. And that MORE than that if you look around you one day… and if that moral order doesn’t seem to BE THERE, oh my god… that must be a problem we need to solve. 

We do this with OTHER things TOO in this general tradition: we often smuggle in very Platonic assumptions in the west, about the forms or essences of the THINGS around us… that these things… a tree, a rock, a squirrel…are stable, DURABLE forms… that I am ONE of these durable forms, and how these stable IDENTITIES connect together and relate to each other… THIS is what provides the MEANING to us and our lives. I mean the assumption is to view the world NOT in terms of there being stable identities…would just turn everything into a nebulous BLOB where nothing MEANS anything! We NEED forms and ESSENCES or else what are we even DOING here?

In other words: the idea in the west is usually that when Nihilism strikes…that if MEANING is MISSING…then that must mean you gotta CREATE some meaning…you have to WILL yourself to a meaningful life…or you have to chop up the world around you into FORMS so that you can FIX that Nihilism as a problem that needs to be SOLVED! Again the POSITIVE response to nihilism.

But to Keiji Nishitani…this ANALYSIS of Nihilism…while it’s one TYPE of response to Nihilism…and while it’s not WRONG…you COULD make a case that it is incomplete. That there is MORE to Nihilism than just this…and that there are more reactions that are possible other than just trying to SOLVE Nihilism by creating meaning. That this is the Nihilism equivalent… of in our DEATH conversations saying yeah yeah I know I’m gonna die someday, but having NEVER actually FACED it at the depth that you COULD be facing it.

So if that’s TRUE then okay Nishitani…let’s say I wanted to become MORE familiar with Nihilism…how would I start doing that? Well in his book the self-overcoming of nihilism…HE thinks it’s valuable to start by looking at several OTHER types of Nihilism that have been proposed by thinkers in the west.

I mean after all to him: the WEST in PARTICULAR… BECAUSE it’s a place where its spiritual traditions have been thoroughly called into question since the Enlightenment—and even more deeply in the 19th century with people like Nietzsche and Dostoevsky—the West has already faced a CRISIS of Nihilism…that’s led to a LOT of philosophers having valuable things to SAY about it.

And what he’s ULTIMATELY doing here in the context of post-ww2 Japan, a time and place where the culture is facing EXTREME Nihilism after the dropping of the atomic bomb, the failure of the imperialism of early 20th century Japan…when they’re doing some SOUL searching in Japan about where to go to NEXT…Nishitani is a thinker that’s looking to OTHER cultures that have gone through something similar in the past…the HOPE being to learn from them by radically engaging with their work. 

So ALL this context is to say: that we have to understand that if Nishitani’s GOAL here is to examine Nihilism in a way that has never really been done before…an important PIECE of that is going to be to ENGAGE with the tradition of how thinkers in the WEST are already APPROACHING this problem. 

And what he SEES when he DOES that…are some common tactics that they use. 

For example: ONE way of approaching Nihilism…is that SO OFTEN what thinkers in the west will do is they’ll try to REDUCE Nihilism DOWN… into a rigid definition of some kind. They’ll ask questions like: well what EXACTLY are we TALKING about when we SAY Nihilism, let’s get a solid DEFINITION going here. 

They’ll look back at history…they’ll find EXAMPLES of when people have claimed to be FEELING Nihilistic…say after the fall of the Roman Empire, or the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror…they’ll TAKE these examples…and then they’ll try to combine them all together into a common description that fits ALL of them. 

And again while this isn’t WRONG. You COULD SAY… that this is a LIMITED way of understanding Nihilism, that it LEAVES out something IMPORTANT.

And notice this as a classic thing that people’ll DO… when they’re GOAL is to try to REDUCE things down into an ESSENCE–again a COMMON thing we DO in the western world given all that we SPIRITUALLY are smuggling in from our history.  

ANOTHER thing thinkers will do when talking about Nihilism…is they’ll try to REDUCE it… into just a static, bad feeling… that a conscious, self is having. That Nihilism, at bottom…is a feeling of existential DESPAIR or something. 

But to Nishitani…this is ANOTHER limited way of approaching what it is we’re talking about…for ONE thing this is trying to label the SELF, AND Nihilism for that matter… as something that’s universal, durable, some TANGIBLE FEELING that EVERYBODY HAS. 

And again NOTICE…the western, DUALISTIC approach that is CONSTANTLY at work here. We’re putting in a LOT of energy trying to TURN these concepts into durable, unchanging things…and while this isn’t the WRONG way to be looking at it, because to Nishitani to say that would be to imply that there is some single, RIGHT way to be looking at it…if someone was TRULY interested in getting a more full-bodied picture of what Nihilism is, here’s what we CAN be sure of: FRAMING it in ONLY this way…will ALWAYS come PRE-LOADED with certain very real limitations.

To Nishitani: it will always IGNORE an entire piece of what people are even TALKING about when they DESCRIBE Nihilism: the subjective, LIVED experience of Nihilism…TO a particular SELF that is grappling with it. Because Nihilism…he says…in some OTHER important sense…has to ALSO be understood as an experiment… that EACH individual SELF…needs to run FOR themselves. 

Let me explain this more. And for the record this is gonna be a common thread we’ll see all throughout Nishitani’s work. If we want to get a better understanding of something like death, or Nihilism…later on it will be about religion…but if you want to TRULY respect something like Nihilism and understand it deeply…you can’t just take only a PIECE of it…and then PRETEND like we’ve arrived at the essence of ALL of it… JUST because in the west we’d LOVE to find an ESSENCE to it that would make everything really CLEAR.  

WHEN we talk about Nihilism…the historical definitions may cover a piece of it…the existentialists talking about the FEELING of DESPAIR may be a piece of it…but another absolutely CRUCIAL one… is that it is a highly individualized experiment that needs to be run…BY a PARTICULAR SELF…that is encountering Nihilism. 

Meaning: no two encounters with Nihilism are EVER going to be the same… and what you experience and CALL Nihilism… will without question be unique to your individual experiment. 

WHY is this an important point? Because it REMOVES this EXPECTATION…that ONE: there is some sort of static essence or form to what a Nihilistic experience will be– and TWO…it removes the expectation that we should be able to perfectly describe ALL of this experience using purely language.

Now NOTICE what’s going ON there. It’s almost like Nishitani…is trying to get us to question the otherwise rigid MEANINGS and IDENTITIES that underlie the way we usually talk about our experience. He’s getting us to question: how STABLE IS this idea of Nihilism that we’re talking about? Is this a universal FEELING that everyone has? Is it something you can perfectly define or write about in a book? Or are there elements to what Nihilism is that can ONLY really be understood…when they are EXPERIENCED by a PARTICULAR person going THROUGH this encounter? 

Notice ALSO… and this is a VERY important PIECE of all this: how this whole EXERCISE of questioning the meanings of these things and how stable they are…is in ITSELF…an exercise that RESEMBLES what our Nihilism friend at the beginning of the episode was doing…you know the one that says hey, I’m thinking about things around me and DOUBTING whether there’s a meaning to life…so if there ISN’T then why not just sit around and be COMFORTABLE all the time. NOTICE the similarities here. 

Because for the sake of having a working example: picture someone born into a Christian home…that at some point starts to DOUBT how stable of a foundation their Christianity is…as the objective truth about the universe. 

The NIHILISTIC exercise… of pulling the FOUNDATIONS of this meaning apart…might then LEAD this person to think that, oh wait, there actually ISN’T a stable foundation here…and this WHOLE RELIGION starts looking more like a sociological CONSTRUCT that’s set up by other people…not some DURABLE meaning as ordained by a God. 

Now IMAGINE this person does this with OTHER religions and THEIR foundations. Imagine they do this with political ideology. Imagine they do this with ANY systematized attempt to give the complexity of the world around us some sort of easy way of understanding it. 

And maybe you see at this point where all this is GOING. 

NOW imagine this applied to your OWN foundational, moral values…how stable or universal are those? How bout this applied to the identities you occupy in the given society you live in, how static and unchanging are those? You might THEN start to apply this nihilistic questioning of meaning…to the very SELF that is doing the QUESTIONING…how stable or durable is THAT self…when you take a closer look at it? 

In other words this experiment of Nihilism…if taken REALLY seriously…can be applied to ANY stable meaning that supposedly exists. 

And it should be said: IF you were to DO this….then this is a pretty UNCOMFORTABLE PROCESS. When Nihilism is NOT a problem to be SOLVED like it typically is in the west…but is INSTEAD something that you try to steer INTO like it can be in more eastern traditions…this new orientation…opens up in someone what is described in Zen Buddhism as: The Great Doubt.

The Great Doubt being…a period of UTTER transformation for a person to Nishitani…because it is a period of recognizing… JUST HOW DEEP this well of Nihilism GOES…when you TRULY DOUBT…when you TRULY question the stable forms that you usually make sense of the world with. 

So while that may sound uncomfortable…there’s actually some GOOD NEWS here in the other side of it if you think of what this means for our friend from before. I mean from THIS perspective…a person feeling horrible… because they recognize there ISN’T an God with a plan for them…well for ONE thing THAT person…under THIS view is just having a very shallow relationship with Nihilism…the same way its easy for someone to have a shallow relationship with death. 

But to Nishitani…this BAD FEELING that they’re FEELING…is NOT a sign that they’re LOST… OR that they need to create some NEW meaning QUICK before you feel WORSE…No, this FEELING they’re having…is actually EVIDENCE of the fact… that they’re someone who’s QUESTIONING their reality beyond the conventions they were born into. To HIM this is a SIGN… that they’re actually one of the people… that might PRESS ON, INTO the great doubt… and then arrive at an understanding of the nature of BEING that few people on this planet ever get to experience. The feeling of Nihilism in other words means you’re at the BEGINNING of a journey.  

See it’s IN this way that NIHILISM…if TAKEN SERIOUSLY and truly LIVED experientially…MAY BE another one of these GATEWAYS into the more immediate experience of being we’ve been talking about. 

Remember to Heidegger…this is gonna be the mode of existence that’s not constantly mediated by the WILL and a subject/object framing of things. To the Mystics from LAST time…this is going to be that pushing PAST the SELF…where they would then find union with something greater than themselves through intense devotional practice. 

THIS IS the DOMAIN…that Nishitani says Mahayana Buddhism, ZEN Buddhism as a sub-chapter of it…is TALKING about. 

When WESTERN thinkers encountered Nihilism during the crisis point of European culture…WESTERN spiritual traditions led them down certain predictable responses to Nihilism. Well here is Nishitani saying how EASTERN spiritual traditions encountering the SAME class of PROBLEM…seem to be EQUIPPED in a very unique way to DEAL with this Nihilism…that the western world generally isn’t. 

What comes OUT of this is that Nihilism…is not something to RUN from. It’s not a problem to be SOLVED under this framing. Nihility, as Nishitani puts it…think of it an immanent ASPECT… of being itself. We’ll talk MORE about this but it’s ULTIMATELY something to embrace and to learn to BE with…and its something that the STORIES we create trying to provide neat, dualistic, formal structure to things… these stories BLOCK our ability to experience it fully. And of course we KNOW this at some level…isn’t that kind of the POINT of why we MAKE many of these stories in the first place?

But in KEEPING with our larger DISCUSSION here…you know, JUST HEARING this, just THEORETICALLY understanding the point that he’s making here…doesn’t mean that you KNOW this fact at a LIVED EXPERIENCE level. Again: there’s a LOT to Nihilism that HAS to be discovered through the particular experiment of the individual self…LIVING it. 

And ironically…the NEXT STEP I think if we wanted to go ANOTHER layer DEEP into taking nihilism more seriously…is going to be to do what I’ve already ALLUDED to here…we have to call into question…the supposedly stable foundation to what it is we call “the self” in the west. That’s the next doorway we have to GO through.

Now there LOTS of different ways you can DO this. And I’m not going to be able to do it FOR you. What I CAN give you are some thoughts and examples that might help you as a small PART of your journey. Nishitani certainly has a lot to say about it. 

I mean people will spend years in contemplative practices trying to QUESTION this conditioning that we are totally SEPARATE from the things that are around us. And you know much like we were saying on the Mysticism episode: having the guidance of a religious practice or even just religious language to help you navigate it can DEFINITELY be an AID in DOING this. 

What seems clear to Nishitani though: is that one of the big barriers in the way of being able to question the foundations of the self…is just ordinary language. 

The WAY we talk about things…USUALLY tries to say something about what things ARE…by COMPARING them to the things that they’re not— our languages STRUCTURE our reality dualistically with subjects always relating to objects. 

But Nishitani and others say there are ways you can start to see OUTSIDE of this typical framing of things. Meditation definitely can help loosen things up. There are things called Koans that are commonly used in Zen Buddhism…this is a thought exercise where you contemplate something…that will BLUR these dualistic lines and get you seeing things maybe more along the lines of how a baby sees the world. Common examples of these will be things like what is the sound of one hand clapping? Think about that for a while. Or another one is if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. Again these are designed to get us thinking OUTSIDE of the typical rigid essences we FRAME things in terms of and they start to make more sense the more you think about what they’re really saying. 

But anyway when it COMES specifically to doing this with the SELF…there’s ANOTHER exercise Nishitani talks about. He talks about questioning the questioner. 

Like just for a second: do something that’s actually pretty common for us to do… and just reflect on the nature of the self for a second. Think about you AS a self…and ask the question: what IS that exactly that you’re thinking of right now?

Now, here’s a better question: WHEN you’re thinking about that self…what is the part of the self that is an OBJECT that’s being QUESTIONED? And WHAT is the part of the self that is doing the QUESTIONING? Again contemplate this for a while and try to get to the bottom of what EXACTLY makes up this SELF thing that we’re talking about. 

And when you DO this Nishitani says…what you MIGHT find is if you peel back the layers and try to get to the BOTTOM of what the self IS…what you’ll REALIZE is that what’s at the BOTTOM of the self…is nothing. 

In fact it actually starts to look a LITTLE bit like…the foundations of religious ideology or political ideology…what you REALIZE is that what CHARACTERIZES the SELF, IS a sort of NOTHINGNESS. A No-THING-ness. 

Meaning it’s not a fixed, durable form or essence at the bottom of the self. The self REALLY GAINS whatever meaning it HAS to us in terms of how it relates to everything else around it. You realize the self…is something that is CONSTANTLY changing and moving. You realize the typical boundaries between YOU and the eco-systems of ideas or things that you depend on…are really just a matter of convention… or a matter of the ways that our languages typically manage to express things. 

And if that all sounds very weird to you…well, seeing things more in this way is no doubt going to be a process…and the common example that you’ve no doubt heard along these lines…maybe you were scrolling through a bunch of cliches on Pinterest or something…the example is a common quote. The quote is that Enlightenment… is when the wave realizes that it is the ocean. You ever heard this one before?

Now this is a MISLEADING metaphor when it comes to Nishitani… but it CAN help us to start thinking more IN this direction.

The thinking is… that if what YOU are is something like a wave, a temporary, constantly moving formation, where everything ABOUT you CAME from and was determined by forces in the ocean that you have nothing to DO with…and that IF that wave had the capacity for self reflection and could REALIZE that everything it has ever thought of itself as, ultimately DEPENDS on this larger PROCESS that it’s a part of…well then THAT…in the Pinterest board or the Instagram feed is the definition of Enlightenment. That’s gonna be an example of a really spiritually enlightened WAVE if it can recognize that fact.

Now again ultimately this is too simple of a metaphor…but it DOES illustrate a concept described in Mahayana Buddhism called dependent origination. Dependent origination says that there is NOTHING about that wave… or ANYTHING for that matter…that is magically INDEPENDENT, or self CAUSING, or self-sustaining with an essence…that wave and EVERYTHING else… is only a THING…because of everything else that it RELATES to and DEPENDS on, that has made it a thing in a complex network that it's a part of. That the supposed boundary between the wave and the ocean, or the wave and the gravity that moves it, or the wave and the other waves, these are all pretty superficial boundaries, at a DEEPER level these things are actually connected and interdependent. 

DEPENDENT…origination…well THAT’S how we have to ALSO think about the self to Nishitani.

See it’s NOT that the self is a TOTAL illusion to him. The DURABILITY of the self is an illusion…the ESSENCE at the FOUNDATION of the self is an illusion. 

Let’s go into this more deeply maybe with a better metaphor…because the OCEAN…is just not RADICAL enough to do Nishitani’s point here justice. What he’s actually saying is something FAR more bizarre… and maybe something far more beautiful to some of the people listening. 

What I mean is: the OCEAN is something that’s possible to think of as a physical WHOLE. Right?

There’s only so much SPACE that the ocean occupies…and there’s only so much water that can fill it up. And THEORETICALLY…if you hired 100 billion oceanographers, you know you went on task rabbit one day to try to STUDY the ocean in FULL…it’s POSSIBLE to THINK that one day… you might have a full PICTURE of the entire OCEAN, that WAVE being one PIECE of this larger WHOLE.  

But this ISN’T what Nishitani is saying…he’s actually saying something far more nebulous than that…the self is not connecting to some larger WHOLE of existence that the self is at one with. What Nishitani’s SAYING is: FORGET UNITY with a whole altogether…it is POSSIBLE to be INTERDEPENDENT with EVERYTHING around you for what you are…but NOT interdependent with EVERYTHING there possibly is.

See THIS is why the metaphor dissolves and why I think a better metaphor for the way Nishitani views the self is NOT the ocean…but maybe the way that the meanings of words work in structural linguistics. 

Think of what a word is. A WORD gets its meaning…NOT because somebody CAME UP with a meaning for it one day and wrote it down in the dictionary…where that word has a FIXED ESSENCE to what it’s MEANING is… and it will ALWAYS have that meaning no matter what happens.

No the MEANINGS of words…are CONSTANTLY changing based on how they’re being USED right this second in a particular linguistic community. And the MEANING of any given word doesn’t lie inside the word ITSELF somewhere…but it lies in the RELATIONSHIPS that exist…between IT and all the OTHER words AROUND it… in a NETWORK. 

Take the word SQUIRREL, for example. The word SQUIRREL… doesn’t have any sort of fixed meaning to us. It GETS its meaning…based on how we USE it in RELATION to all the things that it is NOT: it’s not a cat, it’s not a bird, it’s not a rat. The meaning of the word “squirrel” comes from its PLACE within this web of distinctions.

Now obviously words get even MORE complicated than this: cause let’s say tomorrow, a comedy movie comes out… and IN that movie there’s a JOKE where for whatever reason in the movie…there’s some old dudes that like to play pickleball at the gym…and people in the movie start calling them “squirrels.” And let’s say it CATCHES ON in culture…people start calling old men everywhere a bunch of “squirrels.” similar to what happened with the word COUGAR. 

Well the meaning of the word squirrel… would CHANGE in that case. 

There’s MORE examples of this though…if scientists discovered some NEW KIND of squirrel…some squirrel that lives UNDERWATER somewhere, AQUA-squirrel…the meaning of the word squirrel would have to change AGAIN to account for this new RELATIONSHIP and this process is ALWAYS going on. 

The POINT here is: to Nishitani…it’s not that the word SQUIRREL doesn’t exist…it’s not that it doesn’t point towards SOMETHING at this particular moment. Same way it’s not like the SELF doesn’t exist for him where its ALSO pointing to something. 

It’s that if you were to ask: WHAT IS the ESSENCE of the self…or of the word SQUIRREL… AT its foundation…well there ISN’T one really. In fact to even ASK that question SEEMS to misunderstand the way that words even work. It’s in a word’s ability to CHANGE…the CONSTANTLY evolving, nebulous, interdependent, relational existence of a word…that really DEFINES what it is. 

Well so TOO with a self  if you’re Nishitani. The BOTTOM of the SELF when you REALLY pull back the layers…is NOTHINGNESS. NO-THING-NESS. Formlessness. Meaninglessness. Or if you wanted a word that could describe ALL of these things…Mahayana Buddhism already HAS one. The word is Sunyata. Some people say Sunyata. 

The most DIRECT translation of this word is going to be: emptiness. And by the way FINALLY…after ALL these layers we’ve gone deeper into Nihilism in this episode so far…NOW we’re starting to get to some SERIOUS levels of nihilism. This is starting to be like having an understanding death by actually almost DYING. 

Because Sunyata…Emptiness…if you wanted to TRY to put this into western, metaphysical terminology like something we might be more USED to hearing…you would say that to Nishitani…the metaphysical FOUNDATION of BEING is NOTHINGNESS. But this would be the wrong way to PUT IT…because again this would IMPLY that there is some sort of durable FOUNDATION of NOTHINGNESS that he’s BUILDING this worldview on TOP of. 

More than that if I SAID it that way…it’d be VERY EASY for people coming from the Western world to HEAR the word nothingness…and INSTANTLY think that it means something negative. Where Nothingness…must mean that there’s a VOID or something…you might think that what Nishitani is saying… is that NOTHING really EXISTS. 

Well no again this is a radically DIFFERENT kind of nothingness. The no-thing-ness that HE is talking about is calling into question: ANY kind of durable contrasts… that supposedly EXIST between BEINGS. 

Remember the concept of dependent origination from before. NOTHING exists totally INDEPENDENTLY of anything else. For example think of a FIRE that’s burning in the woods at a campfire. What REALLY is the difference between the wood that’s burning, the fire itself, the oxygen feeding it and the atmosphere surrounding it? I mean we DO make distinctions here for the sake of language…and language DOES ultimately WORK by marking CONTRASTS…DESCRIBING things based on what they’re not. We like to mark a CONTRAST between the wood the fire the oxygen the heat and everything else…but at some deeper level to Nishitani…these things are all interconnected…they really only ARISE in relation to one another. 

What sunyata or emptiness is saying is NOT that none of these things exist. It’s that none of these THINGS…has a fixed, independent existence like we typically cordon them off. That there’s this DEEPER LAYER to reality that exists BEYOND these abstractions. Not unlike someone feeling Nihilistic…who thinks BEYOND the certainty of the stable meaning of their own religion or political ideology.

This is the paradox of śūnyatā though: this is an absolute nothingness… that negates this supposed separateness and fixed identity of beings… but it is SEEING that negation… that allows you to REALIZE that the fire we’re talking about, or YOU for that matter…is not a separate “thing” that is transcending the world…it is ENTIRELY OF this world. 

It only exists, changes, or grows THROUGH the interplay of the conditions of here and now. So the here and NOW… an IMMEDIATE experience of being… becomes the only way to access it. 

And Sunyata then in Nishitani’s work… is NOT some metaphysical realm somewhere ELSE out there, like heaven or any of the OTHERWORLDS that people like Nietzsche criticize. You could say it’s at a DEEPER layer of THIS reality. Sunyata is an immanent aspect of our very existence, it is our BIRTHRIGHT. It is something that is ALWAYS THERE and available to us…but something is usually blocking our ability to experience it.

So here we circle BACK to something that starts to sound like Heidegger and the mystical experiences we’ve been talking about. It’s ONLY by recognizing the groundless ground of the SELF…and getting ACCESS to this more IMMEDIATE connection to being…it’s in this place that we can FIND ANOTHER form of connection to the things around us– one that is interdependent, and free because there’s not some fixed ESSENCE that we have to conform to or else not be “fulfilling our true purpose” whatever that means.  

So you can see the difference here from the approaches that we talked about from the more European side of things. IF his book is called the Self-overcoming of Nihilism. And if typically in the west we encounter Nihilism…and then USE the SELF as a way of WILLING ourselves ONTO reality to create meaning that then SOLVES the problem of nihilism. Then here’s Nishitani saying that Nihilism…when you VIEW it as an EXPERIMENT that’s being run by a particular SELF. Nihilism…when truly EXPERIENCED…eventually overcomes itself. It becomes a CRITICAL aspect of what our RELATIONSHIP to being even IS. 

One thing that needs to be said though…is that as much as I’m TRYING here as a writer to come up with metaphors to help paint a picture of these ideas like Sunyata or Nihility…there’s a sense in which to someone like Nishitani: I could sit here all day trying to EXPLAIN this…and there is NO METAPHOR that would EVER be able to fully CAPTURE what it is he’s talking about. Language and theoretical abstractions are ALWAYS insufficient, which is part of the reason western philosophy has NEGLECTED Sunyata and Nihikity for so long. 

The same way you can sit around and think about death from a theoretical perspective, but STILL not fully understand what it is: Sunyata, Nihility…these are things that to Nishitani need to be LIVED and EXPERIENCED to be even partially understood. There’s an ACCESS point to this that HAS to be an experiment that YOU as a self are running FOR yourself. 

So several QUESTIONS remain here at the END of this. What is BLOCKING this access to Sunyata– it should BE all AROUND me if I’m looking for it right? How does RELIGION factor into all this and how does Nishitani think of religion— VIEWING what it’s trying to DO through this very unique lens he’s set up? If all of this is true: then did Friedlrich Nietzsche just NOT understand Buddhism? Did he just not realize how CLOSE many of his ideas WERE to concepts in Mahayana Buddhism in particular? What does the term EASTERN…even really MEAN in the context of all this? Are we talking about China? India? Japan? The middle east? Are we just talking about Buddhism, Confucianism, Shinto? All of this is gonna be coming up on the next podcast in about a week. Keep your eyes peeled.