Sadler's Lectures

Nishitani Keiji, The Self - Overcoming Of Nihilism - Nihilism And Reappropriating Tradition

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 chapter 9, "The Meaning of Nihilism for Japan". Nishitani claims that nihilism has become a significant cultural problem in post-World War II Japan, and that merely returning to a previously robust tradition undergirded by (Mahayana) Buddhism and Confucianism will not be by itself sufficient. Instead, that tradition has to be reappropriated and reinterpreted from the point of view of the present and the future in order for it to possess any genuine potentiality

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Duration:: 17m
Broadcast on:: 28 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 second to last chapter of his work, The Self Overcoming of Nealism, which is titled The Meaning of Nealism for Japan, Nishitani is going to sketch out a very interesting idea of a tradition that one could in certain ways access, but not in a simply direct way where you pick it up and just model yourself after it. Instead, it requires being thought out again in the present with an orientation towards the future and not just a replication of the past. Now, why is this particularly important? Because of the fact that he's sketching out that Nealism has become a problem, but not an adequately understood one, not just for European culture, but also for Japanese. And so he's going to talk really on, this is in the second part of it called The Crisis Compounded about Buddhism and Confucian thought. So he's going to say in the past, Buddhism and Confucian thought constituted or provided a basis, a spiritual basis that went beyond mere technology or academic subjects that permeated a culture. And which for Japan provided something that wasn't there, wasn't coming from Western culture in the process of Westernization, which was Christianity and Greek philosophy and the faith ethics ideas that had been handed down from them, right? So Japan had its own spiritual basis. And so he says, unfortunately, they have already lost their power. And what happens as a result? They leave as he's going to say a total void and vacuum in our spiritual ground. And he says our age probably represents the first time since the beginning of Japanese history that such a phenomenon has occurred. And he provides a history of it, which we've discussed elsewhere. So what do you do in a situation like that? What is Nishitani advocating? Well, he says that the Japanese really do need to grapple with European nihilism so that they can understand the crisis of nihilism that they are caught within. And by looking to European examinations, grappling with even solutions in the face of nihilism, there are some models which can be adopted and adapted for the Japanese context. And he's going to talk about Friedrich Nietzsche. So what does he tell us that Nietzsche has put forth? And remember that Nietzsche gets a lot of discussion in this work, in fact, entire chapters. So he says that where free will or Nietzsche's primordial will should be, in Japan right now, there's only a deep and cavernous holowness. So what does Nietzsche have to offer? He says, Nietzsche stresses a sense of responsibility towards the ancestors. Now, is this merely a looking backwards and saying, well, everything was great back then. We need to be like those ancestors. We need to worship them. We need to model ourselves after them. It's not quite so simple as that, even in Nietzsche. So he calls this a thinking through the succession of the generations and bearing the accumulation of every possible spiritual nobility of the past. Then he tells us that his nihilism, Nietzsche's nihilism, a radical confrontation with history was backed up by responsibility toward the ancestors for what? To redeem what is noble in the tradition. So you're not just going to say, well, our ancestors used to fish with fish hooks that didn't have barbs on them. So therefore, we'll do that and life will clear itself up. All of our problems will go away. No, no, is it noble to fish with fish hooks without a barb on them? And I'm just making up this example, but we could come up with countless examples. Is it noble to enforce traditional gender roles? We could get a little bit broader and more political with that. Well, we have to ask that question. Was it noble then? Is it noble now? Or is that just stuff that was passed matter to those people but can't really reach us at this point? He goes on and he says that what's noble in the tradition calls for a returning to the ancestors. Why? To face the future. Or to put it the other way around. Now, this is a really interesting phrase, prophesying towards tradition. So generally we think of prophesying as something that's predicting the future, but actually the broader sense of prophesying means to speak for God. And it could be talking about a return to the past. Think about the prophets of Israel. They weren't always saying, well, this bad thing is going to happen. If you don't clean your act up or something like that, they did plenty of that. But they were often saying the bad thing is going to happen because you deviated from where you should have been and you deviated by abandoning. They don't necessarily use this term. The noble, what was actually valuable and good? So, you know, you could think in terms of social justice. Think of Amos and the condemnation of the Israelites for abandoning and exploiting the poor. I mean, that's way back in biblical times. And we could talk about a similar prophesying towards the tradition as, you know, sort of judging and trying to cultivate what's important in it. So, Nietzsche's not just advocating tradition for its own sake in a unquestioning way. There has to be a will that is doing that. So, Nishitani now is going to talk about this as a will towards the future. He says without a will toward the future, the confrontation with the past cannot be properly executed. So, you can engage the past. But if you're engaging the past just to say, "Oh, things were so much better back then, let's go back to that tradition." It's not really tradition. It's an imagination that you're working with. It has to be oriented towards the future. It has to be a will towards the future. He goes on and he says, "Nor is there a true will towards the future without responsibility to the ancestors. Your will to the future cannot just be you, the isolated individual orienting yourself to the future, saying, "I'll take from the past whatever I can find." You have a sense of responsibility towards what you're re-appropriating or you're just kind of a ghoul. Somebody going around in ruins and grabbing relics and not understanding what they are and making use of them to scratch your back or something like that. Again, that's something that Nishitani says but could fit in with his perspective. So, he says that for the Japanese now, the recovery of this primordial will represents our most fundamental task and European nihilism will reveal its significance for us. And he details a number of ways in which European nihilism, the study of it, the understanding of it, can be quite useful within the Japanese context. He talks about post-war, Japan, post-World War II Japan and he tells us that we're in the opposite situation of the high achievements of Meiji culture, which we're drawing on that power that represented a Zenith in Japanese cultural history. They were at Zenith, now we're at the lowest point and he says that this is not simply because the war put an abrupt end to the process of becoming a strong nation. That did happen, that was important. That really threw a lot of Japanese people for a loop but he says it is rather due to the fact that the wisdom and moral energy that people in the Meiji era inherited from the tradition were no longer there. The Western civilization in which they had innocently believed began to show conspicuous signs of an inner crisis even to their eyes. So, you've got a problem from the outside but you've also got a problem from the inside. What is the wisdom and moral energy inherited from tradition? What it was that Buddhist and Confucian thought were actually offering to Japanese culture and in fact, broader Asian culture, East Asian culture we can talk about. So, he's gonna talk then about what can be learned from European nihilism and this is towards the end of part three of this chapter. It says European nihilism teaches us what? To return to our forgotten selves and it's interesting that that's plural, right? It's not just a forgotten self, some mythical self of the ancestor of Japanese culture. Real selves, forgotten selves, selves that don't actually recognize and know themselves and so returning to forgotten selves and reflecting on the tradition of what's translated here is oriental, probably we could say East Asian culture. So, that is going to be important, this tradition. Now, how do you get this tradition? So, can you just look backwards? Can you read a lot of history books or something like that or become a history buff as we often say here in the States? No, why not? The past is dead as he says. You can't go back to the past. He says, there is no turning back to the way things were, what is past is dead and gone only to be repudiated or subjected to radical criticism and this is the problem of some of the post-war people. They want to either just deny the past, oh, Japan has always been this great place. Of course, we were in a war while we lost the war or they just want to kind of appropriate, let's call it a ideology of the past, not a reality of the past. You have to work through real history. So, he goes on and he talks about an orientation towards the future instead. The tradition he says must be rediscovered from what? The ultimate point where it is grasped in advance as the end or escaton he uses, which is the Greek word for end but it has this sense of like the last thing of what? Of our westernization and of Western civilization itself. So, the end of Japan but also the end of Japan as westernized, as engaged with the West, as unable to simply return to an older set of traditions and close itself off. Now, this is interesting 'cause the future's involved in two ways. The end, some sort of future point, grasped in advance, in the present. Lurking in the background here, I think you can see some aspects of Heidegger and his approach to temporality where past, present, future and language are coming together in very important primordial ways by coming back to Nishatani. So, we've got this tradition as rediscovered from the ultimate point, grasped in advance. And what is this going to allow us? He talks about appropriating tradition. How? From the direction in which we are heading as a new possibility. Now, doesn't that sound at odds with most people's conception of tradition? A new possibility? How can that be traditional? How can that exist within the framework of an old tradition that outlined what the possibilities were already in advance? Well, what it shows us is that any living genuine or re-appropriated tradition always is more than it pretended to be or that people thought it to be. This is a renewal. And he's gonna use the word creativity here as well. But you've gotta do this by engaging nihilism in the modern world. So here he's gonna talk about creative nihilism, which again, he's attributing to Nietzsche, but also here, Sterner, Heidegger, and others. So his creative nihilism was an attempt to overcome the nihilism of despair. And these were in Nietzsche's words, efforts to overcome nihilism by means of nihilism. And here he goes on to invoke something that has perhaps been lost. He says that we have a new problem, which is being posed by East Asian culture and by Buddhism. And when he talks about Buddhism, he means in particular, myahana Buddhism, which as we're gonna see in a different examination, Nietzsche and Chopinhauer and others didn't quite get. They grasped Buddhism more generally, but they didn't see the resources. And let's call it specificity and peculiarity of myahana Buddhist thought. So he says that the tradition of East Asian culture in general and Buddhist standpoints of emptiness, nothingness, become a new problem when set in this context. This leads, as he says, to a new orientation towards the future and towards the past. The future, he says, is Westernization. The past is tradition, and what can we do with that? He says, the point is to recover the creativity that mediates the past, that connects these things together to the future and the future to the past, but not he's gonna specify to restore a bygone era. So future and past have to be intelligently, thoughtfully, but also in the very depths of one's soul, reconnected. And he says, European nihilism makes this possible for us. And then a little bit later, this is in the fourth part, which is titled Buddhism and nihilism. And this is a good place to close. Are there other models available for understanding the problem of nihilism and the ways in which tradition might be understood and appropriated that the Japanese could take as directions to go? Well, it's natural in a post-World War II world to look to the two great powers that are still left politically, economically, and who are they? The United States of America and the USSR. So Nishitani says, today non-European powers like the United States and the Soviet Union are coming to the fore. They are the players who have stepped up onto the stage of history to open up a new era. History is very important, right? And then he says, neither Americanism nor communism is capable of overcoming the nihilism that the best thinkers of Europe confronted with anxiety, the abyss of nihility that opened up in the spiritual depths of self and the world. For the time being, they're managing to keep the abyss covered over, but eventually, they will have to face it. They will have their own problems to face and they don't actually have much to contribute to how Japan, Japanese people, can engage in this creative re-appropriation of tradition in the present oriented, not just from the past, but towards the future. 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) (gentle music) (gentle music)