Sadler's Lectures
Nishitani Keiji, The Self-Overcoming Of Nihilism - Humanism, Existentialism, And Buddhism
This lecture discusses key ideas from the 20th century philosopher and head of the Japanese Kyoto school, Nishitani Keiji's book, The Self-Overcoming Of Nihilism
Specifically it examines the Appendix to the work, titled "The Problem of Atheism". He analyses two main philosophical atheistic approaches to religion, that of Marxist humanism and that of Sartrean existentialism, and points out inadequacies to both of these positions, particularly when examined in relation to Mahayana Buddhism. Nishitani also suggests that a reappropriated and reinterpreted Buddhism can offer a position that engages with nihilism but also goes beyond it in manners that also go beyond Western self-overcomings of nihilism
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- Duration:
- 22m
- Broadcast on:
- 29 Jun 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
(upbeat music) Welcome to the Sadler Lectures Podcast. Responding to popular demand, I'm converting my philosophy videos into sound files you can listen to anywhere you can take an MP3. If you like what you hear and want to support my work, go to patreon.com/sadler. I hope you enjoy this lecture. In the end of his work, the self overcoming of nihilism, specifically in the last chapter and in the appendix, Nishitani is going to explicitly and thematically talk about Buddhism in light of the significance of nihilism for Japan, and nihilism is both something, you could say, trans-cultural and even trans-historical, but it's also something that is eminently historical and coming originally or worked out thematically in European nihilism. And so Nishitani, in talking about the situation of Japan, will focus on what Buddhism understood in a somewhat different way, as we're going to see, can bring to the proverbial table. So in the final chapter, in the third section of it, the significance of European nihilism for us, towards the very end of it, he's going to talk about creative nihilism. And so this is, you know, nihilism that is self overcoming, nihilism aware of itself, trying to go against the nihilism of despair. And he says, you know, we find this in Sterner, Nietzsche, Heidegger and others. And he tells us that these attempts were efforts to overcome nihilism by means of nihilism. And then he goes on to say, the tradition of Oriental culture in general on the Buddhist standpoints of emptiness, nothingness and so on in particular, become a new problem when set in this context. So that is quite important. And we've looked at this elsewhere. This has to do with reconnection with tradition. In Japan, that tradition included Buddhism, specifically Mahayana Buddhism and Confucianism. And we could look at some other aspects as well. So he tells us then in the section Buddhism and nihilism, which ends that final chapter, that there's been a sort of misinterpretation, right? He talks about Schopenhauer and Nietzsche following him. He says, Schopenhauer's profound concern with Buddhism, Nietzsche makes constant reference to Buddhist ideas in his discussions of nihilism. But is Nietzsche talking about Buddhism as something that could be against the nihilism of despair? No, it's taken as sort of a Eastern example of the nihilism of despair. He says that as Anishitani, Nietzsche picked up Schopenhauer's biases and oversights, especially regarding the Mahayana tradition, which is pretty massive. And to their credit, we could say, while Schopenhauer is writing at a time where a lot of the texts are not as available as they are to us now, the breadth of the Buddhist traditions, multiple is not something that they understand quite as well. And Nietzsche's kind of following along with that as well. So Nietzsche dubs the nihilistic catastrophe about to befall Europe the second Buddhism. And when he's criticizing Christianity, says the sincerity cultivated by Christianity reveals Christianity's falseness. He called the standpoint of everything as false, a Buddhism of doing and considers longing for nothingness, a quasi-Buddhist characteristic. So how does Nietzsche interpret Buddhism as decadence, a complete negation of life and will? And this is clearly wrong. So what do we do with that then? So Nicitani is going then to focus on Nietzsche specifically, who by the way is the other author who gets the lion's share of space and analysis in this work. And what Nicitani is saying is, you know, Nietzsche didn't realize how close some of his ideas were to Mahayana Buddhist ideas. So what are some prime examples of this? Amor Fatih, literally love of one's fate, which by the way, just a side note, people often will attribute this to the Stoics. It's Nietzsche who talks about it in these terms, right? And so Nicitani will say, it was not in his nihilistic view of Buddhism, but in ideas such as Amor Fatih and the Dionysian as the overcoming of nihilism, that Nietzsche came closest to Buddhism and especially to Mahayana Buddhism. For example, as mentioned earlier, he spoke of the Dionysian as a great pantheistic sharing of joy and suffering and a feeling of the necessary unity of creation and annihilation. And so Nicitani is going to say, well, we're not going to do like a complete comparison to Buddhism, but what is clear is that there is, in Mahayana, a standpoint that cannot even be reached by nihilism that overcomes nihilism, even though this may tend in that direction. So what is he actually telling us there? We have a nihilism of despair. We have a nihilism that overcomes nihilism. We have the Mahayana Buddhist tradition and schools, and we should mention that these are multiple. So, you know, a lot of times people will associate Mahayana Buddhism primarily just with, in Japanese, Zen or in Chinese, Chan, right? But that's one of a number of schools. We also have the Pure Land Schools. We have the Flower Garland School. We have the Lotus School. We have a number of different ones, and they're all working out some quite advanced thoughts. So, we've got these three now. And Nietzsche has construed Buddhism as if it's the nihilism of despair, when actually there is a possibility of going even further beyond the perspective of European positive nihilism. And so, you know, he quotes by virtue of emptiness. Everything is able to arise. But without emptiness, nothing whatsoever can arise. And he says, in other words, everything is possible in whom the nature of emptiness arises, right? So, he says, for the present, this standpoint remains buried in the tradition of the past, far from historical actuality. So, in order to recover that standpoint, something more has to go on. It can't just be, well, let's return to Mahayana Buddhism, pick this school, pick this one, pick this text. Everything's going to be great going from that point on. That's not going to work. It's going to require a creative reinterpretation of that tradition. So, moving on to the appendix, the problem of atheism, you notice that there is a discussion of Marxian humanism, Sartrian existentialism, and then finally atheism in the world of today. And so, there is a discussion here about what it is that these different traditions, you know, living traditions at that time can offer. And so, starting out with Marxist viewpoints, he says, as is commonly known, Marxism looks on religion as a way for those unable to come to terms with the frustrations of life-defined satisfaction at the ideal level by imagining a world beyond, in so doing, the argument goes, they nullify the self and transpose the essence of their humanity into the image of God in the other world. And this is not just Marx, by the way. Feuerbach was saying something quite similar. Marx is great for, you know, criticizing everyone who came before him and saying, you gotta go my way. And Marxists do that as well, but this is kind of a common motif. It understands religion to some degree. It works particularly good for Western religion, in particular Christianity. But even there, it might be inattentive to some of the important details. Does this actually work for Buddhism? Nishitani is gonna say, not really. I mean, it could work for certain, let's call them doctrinaire versions of it, institutionalized forms of it, but it's not gonna work for what he is putting forth. And he tells us that according to Marx, atheism is a humanism wrought through the negation of religion. And he says, we can grant that Marxists thought touches the problem of religion at some depth, but it's hard to sustain the claim that he understood its true foundations correctly. So, as a prime example of this, what about suffering? Specifically, human suffering. He says that this is not gonna be adequately grasped by the Marxists. The problem expressed in the term all is suffering is a good example. It is more than a matter of the socio-historical suffering of human individuals. It belongs essentially to the way of beings of all things in the world. The problem of human suffering is a problem of the suffering of the human being as being in the world to profound a matter to be alleviated merely by removing socio-historical suffering. It has to do with a basic mode of human being that also serves as the foundation for the pleasure or the freedom from suffering and pleasure that we oppose to suffering. So, now this is one of the four noble truths of Buddhism, all life is suffering or all life is however you want to translate Dukkha, right? Can Marxism adequately address this? Partly, but partly not. He goes on and also talks about the issue of the non-self nature of the all-dharmas. He says this refers to the non-essentiality of nature and humanity, but this doesn't mean we can reduce the claim to a self-alienating gesture of projecting the essence of our humanity onto God. I mean, what is going to work for that in Buddhism? Oh, some people want to say Buddhism is non-theistic. Well, it's a little bit more complicated than that. So let's set that aside. But there's certainly nothing like what ends up being the Christian view of God to take all of your humanity and project that onto this, as Hegel would call it, a beyond, right? So, Marxist humanism is not really going to adequately address what it is that Buddhism is bringing to the table. He says that, you know, this goes for other things as well, the meaning of life and death, the impermanence of all things. These cannot be reduced without remainder. There's a key term there. Without remainder to a matter of economic self-alienation. And so, you know, Marx has got a lot to contribute. He says that Marx argues emphatically through work, human beings, conquer nature, change the world, give the self. It's human face, great. That's probably right. But deep in the recesses behind the world of work lies a world whose depth and vastness are beyond our kin. A world in which everything arises only by depending on everything else. That's going to be dependent origination, right? As we're going to see. So, what about another possibility? Sartrean existentialism. He says modern atheism also appears in the form of existentialism. He's going to use Sartreas kind of like a stand-in for that. Understanding, of course, that there are other existentialists. And by the way, he's writing at a time when Heidegger has, you know, said, well, if Sartre is going to define existentialism, I'm not an existentialist myself, right? So, he tells us that the sharp and total opposition that separates existentialism and Marxism in general applies to their respective forms of atheism. How is Sartrean existentialism different? It is individualistic. It doesn't say that we don't exist in socioeconomic matrices, and that, you know, work doesn't form the human being and society. It doesn't say that history doesn't matter, but it affirms the centrality of the individual as a locus of freedom and choice within all of those structures. So, the way in which the critique of religion is going to be understood is going to be different in these. Marxist critique of religion begins from the self-alienation of human beings, redefines it as economic self-alienation and then deals with religion in terms of its social functions. Sartre understands the relationship between God and humanity of each individual relating to the essence of self-being itself. So, he's going to go on and say he begins from something like an ontological self-alienation implied in seeing human beings as creatures of God. And, you know, if you're familiar with Sartre, you know this kind of stick. If God exists, then we can't be free. So, there can't be a God in the picture if we want to actually preserve human freedom. Now, how should this be understood from the perspective of Buddhism? Well, Nishitani tells us, Sartre's notion of existence, according to which one must create oneself continually in order to maintain oneself within nothing, so far so good, remains a standpoint of attachment to the self. So, Buddhism teaches that ultimately, whatever it is that we take to be the self, is not. It's not the self. There is no such thing as the self. And, it's just a bundle of different things that happen to have a certain continuity over time. There is consciousness there. That consciousness is not the self either. And, notice this. He says, not only is it a standpoint of attachment to the self, indeed the most profound form of this attachment, and as such is caught in the self-contradiction, this implies. So, he says, this is not just ordinary self-love in which the self is willfully attached to itself. Now, that's a problem, and Buddhist, in their ethics, identify that and discuss that. It's a question of the self being compelled to be attached to itself willfully. To step out of the framework of being and into nothing is only to enter into a new framework of being once again. And, he goes on to say this self-contradiction constitutes a way of being in which the self is its own prison. Now, notice what he's gonna bring up here, which amounts to a form of karma. Karma is what traps the person within this vast universe in which they keep being born and reborn over and over again. And so, from the Buddhist perspective, Sartrean existentialism is kind of a dead end, right? Karma manifests itself, he says, in how people ground themselves on their affirmations of freedom. He says, this is not true freedom, and karma manifests itself through all of this, and he says, as Sartre himself says, his standpoint of existence is a radical carrying out of the cogito ergo sum of Descartes. The Cartesian ego shows us with a modern mode of being actually is. So, you know, as he's going to point out, Sartrean's existence retains a sense of attachment to the self and the nothingness of which he speaks remains a nothingness to which the self is attached. And we could say, are there multiple nothingnesses here? And the answer would be, well, certainly different ways of understanding that nothingness, some of which keep us stuck here. Now, we come to a central problem in the next section, where we can say, well, both of these forms of modern atheism are going to be insufficient to what we're actually looking for in the self overcoming of nihilism. Buddhism is offering something else. So, what Buddhism does this mean? Just go to a Zen temple and start participating things, maybe become a monk or a nun and everything fixes itself, nihilism is no longer a problem. And this is, you know, something that Nishitani has been stressing a number of times. We can't just go back to the past. That is not going to work. So, what do we have to do? How do we have to rethink these things? So, he says, okay, let's look at what it is that atheism, Marxism, existentialism are aiming at. He says, they share in common the attempt to repudiate the traditional location of the human in order to restore human nature and freedom. You could say that what they're doing is saying, we want the human, it's been misunderstood in the past, either because of not understanding how freedom works or having God in the picture, or not dealing with human suffering and projecting the human essence on to God, whatever explanation you have. We want to restore a genuine human nature and freedom. Nishitani is going to say there is a schism between the standpoints of Marxism and existentialism. Why? The axis of the existentialist standpoint is a subjectivity in which the self becomes truly itself. Marxism does not go beyond the view of the human being and as an objective factor in the objective world of nature or society. Each of them comprehends human being from a locus different from the other. And so we have a conflict here between the objective world and subjective being. And he says, the two main currents in modern atheism correspond respectively to these two coordinates, the soul and the world. So you're not going to successfully bring these two together. Each of them seeks to ground itself from the start to finish in actual being related to the denial of God in that the full engagement of the self in actual being requires a denial of having already been determined, right? And then he says, do these standpoints really engage actual being to the full? And by the way, you could say, well, you know, Nishitani was writing in an earlier time when people were taking Marxism and existentialism really seriously. We've moved past that. We had in addition to those two things, just think about France, we also had structuralism and then post structuralism, right? We've got all sorts of other interesting isms in the mix. Nishitani would say, yeah, sure, that's fine. Still going to be the same fundamental problem. You're not getting away from it that easily. So he says that, I suggest that as long as Marxism and existentialism continue to hold to the standpoint of the human, they will never be able to give a full account of actual human being. Why? They leave a gaping void at the foundations of whatever you want to call it, meaning, humanity. And he says, since the human mode of being consists in life and death, we must pass beyond the human standpoint to face the problem of life and death squarely. And so he says, I proposed earlier the consideration of the locus of Buddhist emptiness in this regard. Now, is emptiness the same thing as the nobility that he's been talking about or nothingness? There's a lot of common ground, but you could say that what's really important about this is not just the concept itself, but what that concept is also connected to. So he goes on and he says, in this locus of emptiness beyond the human standpoint, a world of, and we talked about this before, dependent origination is opened up in which everything is related to everything else. Seen in this light, there's nothing in the world that arises from self-power, and yet all self-powered workings arise from the world. Existence at each instance starts self-creation as human. The humanization in which the self becomes human. All of these can be said to arise ceaselessly as new accommodations from a locus of emptiness that absolutely negates the human standpoint. From the standpoint of emptiness, it is at least possible to see the actuality of human being in its socio-historical situation in such a way that one does not take leave of actual time and space. And he invokes this Zen master saying, when acting apprehend the place of acting, when sitting apprehend the place of sitting, we can put that aside for the moment, but this is where Nishitani is gonna close the work, suggesting that Buddhism and specifically, Mahayana interpretations of Buddhism properly reinterpreted from the standpoint of the present looking to the future. Also rooted in the past, recovering the past, the tradition of the past could take us beyond the problematic attempts to overcome the situation of nihilism that Europe has fallen into. By the way, he does remark a little bit earlier on, America and the Soviet Union are rising as powers. Neither of them are actually gonna provide a solution out of this problematic, but properly reinterpreted Mahayana Buddhism, perhaps could. And Nishitani is proposing this, interestingly, for a Japanese audience. But possibly, this could be of relevance outside of Japan to people all over the world. Special thanks to all of my Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. You can find me on Twitter at philosopher70 on YouTube at the Gregory B. Sadler channel and on Facebook on the Gregory B. Sadler page. Once again, to support my work, go to patreon.com/sadler. Above all, keep studying these great philosophical works. (gentle music) (gentle music)