Sadler's Lectures

Nishitani Keiji, The Self - Overcoming Of Nihilism - Nihilism, Japan, And Westernization

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". This one examines his discussion of how Japan opened itself up to a crisis of nihilism precisely through modernization and westernization, and what the possibilities for post-World War II are.

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Duration:: 21m
Broadcast on:: 27 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 very first paragraph of his work, the Self-Overcoming of Nealism, Nishitani is going to already begin talking about the significance of Nealism for Japan. He talks about two main points in that section, the non-nealistic nature of our way of inquiry, which we've talked about elsewhere, and the nature of Nealism in Japan, which this reflects. And he'll talk a little bit more about that in that first chapter. But then, at the very end of the work, there is a chapter which is titled The Meaning of Nealism for Japan. And interestingly enough, the very first section of this doesn't talk about Japan, but rather Europe. Why? Well, because Nealism, in a certain sense, historically, we could say, is coming to Japan in an explicit way from Europe. Although, as Nishitani is going to point out, there are dynamics, there are historical developments that are also producing, let's call it an analog to Western Nealism that is coming originally, or not so much coming, but articulated originally within Europe, but then becoming very pressing for Japan. And so, it's going to get talked about from the second section on where the crisis compounded. So, he's asking, well, what is the meaning for Japan of Nealism as a historical actuality of Europe? And so, this is a very complex question with a lot of, as we often say, moving parts, we should probably say, interpenetrating and mutually revealing dimensions to it. So, he says, how are we to determine the meaning of Nealism for us in Japan? And he points out that Japanese culture has become Europeanized to use his term. We could also talk about modernization, Westernization. He's going to use these terms as well, even talking at a certain point about Americanization. Why does he do that? Because he's writing post-World War II, post-American occupation, the rebuilding of Japan after the empire has lost its war against the allies. So, he says, it is true. Our culture and ways of thinking have become Europeanized. Our culture is a recent offshoot of European culture, are thinking a shadow image of European style thinking, but he's going to make some really important distinctions here. What did the Japanese take from the Europeans or from the broader West in general? He's going to make a key contrast here. He says objective realities like institutions, cultural artifacts, academic disciplines, and technologies having to do with objective things. These, as he's going to say, are readily transferable from one place to another. So, you can take a technology, maybe a factory production process with blueprints and trainers, and you can move that from France to Japan or from the United States to Japan. And you can send people off as, indeed, Nishitani, himself did to study in European universities. So, academic disciplines. These sorts of things are part of Westernization. Part of, you could say, a broader Western culture, but in a certain sense, they cease to be distinctively Western after they've left their place of origin. They can be assimilated, whether it's Japan or India or China or Indonesia, pick wherever you want. These can become used. What about things that are deeper within the culture? What did Japan end up taking from the West? Well, Nishitani's going to tell us what they didn't take from the West. He says, "Our importation of European culture never went to the extent of including the Christian faith that is served as the basis and formative power of the European spirit, not to mention the ethics and philosophy that have been developing since the age of the Greeks." And he says, "You know, these are directly rooted within the subject, not readily transferable from one place to another. He's going to sum this up. The spiritual basis of Europe has not become our spiritual basis." And in that sense, a crisis generated from the shaking of these foundations, nihilism in the 19th and 20th century for Europeans has not become a reality for us." And he goes on, he says, "You know, some people could say that nihilism has no way to become a vital issue for us. It's a Western thing. It's not a Japanese thing." Nishitani doesn't really buy into that. And just to give you a little bit of preview in the next paragraph, he's going to say, "What makes the issue still more complicated is the fact that we do not have any spiritual basis whatsoever at present." That is a striking comment to make. And we're going to see how he justifies this in just a moment. The West still has the faith, ethics, ideas, and so forth that have been handed down from Christianity and Greek philosophy. And the integration of these various elements is still the dynamic force behind the formation of the person. No matter how much this basis is now being shaken, and the shaking has been going on for over a century, it is still very much alive and one battles against it, only at the cost of fierce determination. He says, "For us in Japan, things are different." In the past, we're going to see a talk about tradition in just a bit. Buddhist and Confucian thought constituted such a basis, but they've already lost their power, leaving a total void and vacuum in our spiritual ground. He says, "Our age probably represents the first time since the beginning of Japanese history, such a phenomenon has occurred." Now, it's a long-running development, so you can see traces of it working themselves out. It's not a radically new thing in the 1950s, but the overall crisis, according to Nishitani, is something new for Japan. So he is going to provide us with a historical sketch here. Now, why is this so important? Well, we saw earlier on that nihilism is a historical phenomenon, as well as a transcultural phenomenon that we can find at multiple times and places. It's a problem of the self. It's a problem of history. And this is where earlier on in the work, he said nihilism can't be understood adequately without itself being historical, without being part of the philosophy of history. So we have to look into the history of Japan, and that is going to be a history not of some isolated culture, or just an Asian culture engaged with China and Korea or things like that, but a culture that westernized more successfully, at least for a certain time than any of the other cultures within the area. So he begins by talking about up into the middle of the Meiji period, a spiritual basis, and highly developed tradition was alive in the hearts and minds of the people. And what does this basis look like? So he talks about, as we just mentioned earlier, Buddhism, which he's going to spend a good bit of time talking about a little bit later, Confucianism. We could also mention Shinto as being part of this as well. And what is the Meiji period? If you don't know about this, this is often called the Meiji Restoration. So Japan moves deliberately into the modern age, adopting things selectively from the west and becoming a dominant power, but doing so by stressing the centrality, the importance of Japan itself as a locus. We could say that, you know, religiously, so Confucianism is embedded in the educational system. Shinto becomes sort of prioritized. It existed in a very interesting and complicated relationship with Buddhism. So he says there was a spiritual basis and highly developed tradition. Now, this is exactly why Japan was able to take on the western, you know, accoutrements of culture so confidently, so easily. They're riding high, you could say, in terms of cultural power. So, you know, whatever they're going to take from the west isn't going to undermine their foundations. So he talks about Europeanization and then in parentheses and Americanization proceeding. So the Americanization is not just after the war, although that radically accelerates it because of the occupation. But it is happening along with the Europeanization earlier as Japan becomes embedded within global politics. And he says that as this proceeded, the spiritual core began to decay in subsequent generations. Now, is this because Japan was not a western culture and they took in the seeds of their own destruction in accepting western technology or, you know, academic disciplines or institutions? That's not what Nishitani is saying. Although that certainly played some role within it. The rot began from within. So he says that Japan being cast on the stage of world politics during the Meiji Restoration was the greatest change in the history of the nation. But if we look at the change from the point of view of spiritual history, the greatest spiritual crisis in the nation's history was also taking place. And they did not realize that it was a crisis. And even now our crisis is being compounded by our continual lack of awareness of this spiritual void. And he says, this is why it's hard to take European nihilism seriously as an issue. And he says that one of the factors of this, and he's going to quote Karl Luevith here, who had Japanese students studying with him. Luevith has a essay European nihilism with an appendix for Japanese readers, where he says that the time at which the Europeanization of Japan began coincided with the period when Europe began to experience itself as an insoluble problem. When Japan made contact with Europe, it took in European progress with energy and speed, but European culture had actually decayed internally. And the Japanese did not confront Europe in a critical manner. So he talks as well, and this is Nishitani summarizing Luevith, the undiscriminating nature of the Japanese, comparing that with the free mastery of ancient Greeks when they adopted neighboring cultures. So he says that the Luevith claims that modern Japan is a living contradiction, and Nishitani says, well, that's actually right. But how should we understand this contradiction? So he talks about this westernization as emerging from a national resolution. Another way of putting this is it was a matter of changing policy, changing policy from the ground up, being isolated at first and then saying, no more isolation, we are going to take whatever we can get from these westerners, and that will make this state much stronger. So he talks about a powerful will from within, which is, you know, the government and all of the ministries of it, which include ministries of culture and education and things like that. That's one of the key factors along with the, we could call it, processes of globalization, or as Nishitani is going to call it here. He says that westernization was forced on us from outside by the enormous progress of world history. So there is some external factors, and at the same time, impelled by a powerful will from within. So these two things are going hand in hand, and what we're going to find is that the, let's call it spiritual force of the culture is hollowed out from within as a result. He says, moral energy and spiritual core began to weaken and disappear, and a self-splitting took place in the will of the subject. So what is this self-splitting? We get two divergent paths, which could play off against each other. He says, on the one hand, the ideas of the cultured person and the civilized lifestyle that began to appear during that period, harbored at bottom some measure of self-contempt, some self-contempt against what? Against the outsider who's also becoming the insider, the overwhelming influence of European culture. On the other hand, there is a sort of unthinking irrational nationalism that arises. He says, national moral energy gradually metamorphized into the violence of exclusionist and uncultured patriots as a reaction against this loss of self. So modernity and modernization is producing this Japanese nationalism, and we could even call it a form of fascism as well. And so he says, both of these extremes are one-sided and represent a falling away from the spirit of free mastery of being able to be oneself among others. And what ends up there? A deep and cavernous hollowness. So nihilism begins to take hold by the end of this history without people really fully understanding it. Just having a sense that something is wrong and jumping into or being tempted to jump into Japanese nationalism, which becomes a kind of foreclosed possibility, at least on the large scene with the loss in the Second World War. So where does Nishitani think people could go from there in Japan after the war? So his basic claim is that European nihilism can actually serve some purposes for the Japanese if they want to take it on. And that's what he's offering them study of in this work. So he talks about recovery of a primordial will towards the future. Primordial sounds rather high to Gary and a will towards the future rather than merely turning back to the past. He says that, you know, we can draw from Nietzsche that we need to have this radical confrontation with history backed up by responsibility towards the ancestors to redeem what is noble in the tradition. But this means that you actually have to figure out what the hell the tradition is. You can't just jump into nationalism and say, ooh, you know, we're going to make a new tradition or we're just going to go right back to that. So what is the advantages of grasping nihilism? Well, he's going to tell us several different things. So first of all, in order to deal with a crisis, you have to realize there is a crisis there to begin with. So he talks about making the Japanese aware of their historical situation that there is a nihility, a nothingness within. So he tells us that this is a nihility that has become our historical actuality. This then can lead to a positive nihilism, like that of Nietzsche, he says. And then he says, the essential thing is to overcome our inner void. Here, European nihilism is of critical relevance in that it can impart a radical twist to our present situation and thereby point away towards overcoming this spiritual holiness. So it's not just that you say, oh, well, we found that everything is groundless and there's a void within us. Well, that's a problem, but that's not yet moving towards a solution. And the situation of nihilism affords this as a solution. And, you know, models of European nihilism could be quite helpful for this. Then he's going to go on and talk about why it's important to study what happened in European culture. So he says, the reason why the Japanese at the time, we're not aware of the extreme anxiety leading European thinkers we're feeling about themselves. And about Europe was that they were not interested in spiritual depth, but with more or less external matters. Politics, economics, military concerns, that might help the strength of the country. And so the result was an oblivion to the problem of inner spiritual depth. This is not so much a problem as long as the wisdom and spiritual energy that had been cultivated in the tradition still held sway. But now we're in the opposite situation, he says, radically different from the Japanese of the Meiji era, era, not just because the war put an end to the process of becoming a strong nation. It's because we really have a void at the center of things. So what has to happen? A recognition of the crisis in Western civilization, which means having to study Western civilization. And thereby recognizing the crisis that takes place, not in the West, but in places that are westernized, including primarily Japan. So to study the Japanese crisis, some study has to happen of the European crisis, in part because the European crisis brought in seeds of that, but also provides models for how to deal with this. And what is the dealing with? So Nishitani is going to say, there has to be a return to our forgotten selves and reflecting on the tradition of what's translated here, Oriental culture, the culture of Eastern Asia. And he says, this tradition has been lost to us moderns and is something to be recovered, to be rediscovered, which is a kind of stronger term than merely recovering. And he says, there is no turning back to the way things were. What is passed is dead and gone. And the tradition must be rediscovered from the ultimate point where it is grasped in advance as the end of Westernization and of Western civilization itself. Our tradition must be appropriated from the direction in which we're heading as a new possibility. So a very interesting approach to the solution, partial solution at least, a future one of recovering tradition. But not in an antiquarian way, a way that is actually looking forward. So this is how we can answer that. Question that we began with, well what is the meaning for Japan of nihilism as a historical actuality of Europe? It is also a historical actuality for Japan. But it's going to take looking at what happened in Europe and what possibilities there are, bringing them back and thinking them within a Japanese context to really figure out what the meaning, the multiple meanings of nihilism are for the Japan that Nishitani is writing and telling all of this since these are essentially addresses or discourses with it. 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.