Sadler's Lectures

Nishitani Keiji, The Self-Overcoming Of Nihilism - European Nihilism - Sadler's Lectures

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 his discussion in chapter 1 "Nihilism As Existence", of what he terms "European nihilism". Although nihilism remains in part a trans-cultural and trans-historical phenomenon, it arises in a complex and active way within the ongoing development of modern European culture. A nihilims that overcomes nihilism also arises out of that as well. None of this means that nihilism can be put off as a merely European problem, however, particularly for Japanese culture.

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Duration:: 17m
Broadcast on:: 26 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 part three of chapter one of Nishitani's, the self overcoming of nihilism, we find this chapter called European nihilism. Now, why is he focusing so much on nihilism as a European phenomenon? Because nihilism is indeed this historical thing that arises as we just saw in the previous section. It's not just a problem of the self, but of history and the philosophy of history. And if we want to think about it historically, nihilism is not confined to Europe, of course, but it's going to, you could say, congeal and articulate itself as a problem through a number of different developments that have to take place in a space and time and culture. And for Nishitani, this is that of, as he's going to call it, modern Europe. He'll also talk about the modern spirit of Europe as well. So he says that it was in modern Europe the question of historical reality and its metaphysical ground, the philosophical ground of historical life came to be asked historically. So these have been asked in other times, places, cultures, but there's something, a deepening that's going on here. And he says, we've got a number of different reasons for this. So let's run through these different reasons and see what it is that he has to say. He tells us that first of all, what is called historical consciousness emerged largely from this modern spirit of Europe. How did that, in fact, happen? So there's going to be an emphasis on making sense out of history and the philosophy of history. He says that the connection between metaphysics, what is metaphysics, the inquiry into the ground of being, how it is that things happen? What is the reality that is driving things? How does causality work? We could say, and historical consciousness had been made since the 18th century through what the philosophy of history and the philosophy of history prior to that could be understood in several different ways. We mentioned this in discussing the previous chapter. So on the one hand, there's what we could call teleological history, universal history. Sometimes it's called where is humanity going? How are they developing historically? And where did they come from? And how did this process of development or evolution, whatever we want to call it, how did that get driven? What factors play into that? Then we have the notion of history as just recording what actually took place, a kind of realism about stuff that's also becoming progressively more and more leery of making big sweeping claims. And we have other viewpoints on history at the same time saying that humanity develops historically, so we need to pay attention to that. And we have a really important development that is taking place, namely, to say that principles, and we'll talk about what principles these are, came to be seen as concretely realized only within history. So you can have principles that you can identify, and he talks about Hegel here. So think about Hegel's typical way of going about stuff, saying, well, what happened in ancient Greece with Plato? Plato is a real existing person who wrote texts, who taught, but he also stands for a certain idea, a certain way of approaching things, a certain way in which human consciousness apprehends the world itself, universals, that we often call playtonism, right? And this can go down to the present. We could talk about, well, what about Locke and Barkley and Hume, this whole empiricist thing, and you know, Hegel has stuff to say about them as well, as do plenty of other philosophers of history. So these principles are concretely realized in history, through history, in particular people, in particular places and times. But these principles, as Nishitani says, are at the same time still considered fundamentally trans historical. So on the one hand, they come into being, they get conceptualized, they get worked out at a particular time and place, and at the other end of the spectrum, they've always been there as sort of possibilities for consciousness that maybe God knew about, or they've been waiting for human beings to develop enough, but now we can all benefit from it. We don't have to have a historical concretization or situating in order to appreciate them. And so he's gonna go on and say, this approach reached its consummate expression in Hegel, but before and through Hegel, we saw that this was taking place, and you could have, you know, a trans historical God, who's that? It's Hegel that we're talking about there, as well as many others, or as in the case of Spinoza through nature being equated with God. It doesn't matter so much which ultimate principle you are using to organize all of these principles and saying it flows out of them, in a way that's a bit arbitrary, that's historical, right? It's gonna be explicable in terms of what it is that that person or their culture wanted. Now, what principles are we talking about here? So he mentions nature, what is all of this? What is the natural world or reason? What is it distinctively about the human way of approaching the world, having reason or logos, whatever you wanna call it? Idea, and he says, and so on. So this would include all sorts of other things, including, for example, progress, or society, or the will, or the state. All of these things are principles that are being developed within a history, but because they're considered fundamentally trans-historical, Anishitani is gonna say, we've still got the old metaphysics handed down from the Greeks with its emphasis on contemplating the world of true, trans-temporal being that lay concealed behind the world of temporal becoming. So the world of temporal becoming, that's history, that's things happening in time, but guiding history behind it, however we wanna frame it, we've got this old Greek metaphysics, and he's saying that's the case for Hegel as well, and I think that's pretty good as a interpretation. Then he says that historical consciousness required a second stage of development, and this is going to be post-together, and he says, after Hegel, we saw the rapid collapse of metaphysics and moralities based on God or notions of true being. Now, how fast was this development? Did it happen everywhere? Did people just, you know, get a book of Hegel, read it and then they're like, "Oh, I don't know if I agree with this anymore." Time to move on to post-Hagellian metaphysics and morality. No, it's not quite so simple and straightforward as that, but we can say that there were a lot of different currents going on within Europe in different places, in going from Russia to Scandinavia to Germany to France. You know, later on, we get Spain thrown into the mix, and we can talk about people who we associate into the existentialist spectrum as being part of this. So he goes on and he says, "The worldview that had supported the spiritual life of Europe for more than 2000 years was all at once thrown into question." And again, all at once, maybe not, but certainly there's a lot of body blows happening over the course of the 19th century and into the 20th century. He says, "Faith in God and the eternal world and their accompanying conceptions became no more than historically conditioned ideas." So what do we have going on here? Instead of just saying, "Well, you know, we've got these principles or ideas, these really important things and they are trans-historical, but they are realized through history." And we can maybe look back at that from the vantage point of the present. We're saying, "Hey, man, it's all historical. It's all contingent." None of this actually had to be conceptualized the way that it has been. We can certainly trace out a kind of limited necessity based on how things did, in fact, develop. That's where we can do the history. But none of it possesses the kind of necessity that metaphysicians and moralists have been ascribing to it. So what happens now? An abysmal Neility. And again, he uses that phrase opened up at the ground of history and self-being and everything turned into a question mark. And here he's gonna talk about the value of sincerity. This is really quite interesting. We could also call this authenticity, right? And he's going to say that it's possible to live in sincerity with the situation of nihilism. He says, "To disclose the nihility at the ground of the self is to live in sincerity and within such sincerity, the self becomes truly itself." So he's sketching as we're gonna see a way forward. But let's look at what else he says about this. What do we first and fundamentally have to be sincere about? Despair, despair at what? At losing all of these certainties, all of these foundations that are now revealed as gone sinking into this abyss, this nihility that he's identified. And so he tells us, "What are you gonna do in the face of despair? You could try to hide from it. You could try to deny it." And he says, "Everything turned into a question mark sincerely to acknowledge this kind of despair as despair and at least to try to live in sincerity without avoiding or diverting it or going beyond this, we could look at Nietzsche, who he's gonna devote them in a lot of the book to." He says, "To carry out its consequences voluntarily and thoroughly on one's own, to seek to confront the spirit that controlled all of history up until then, that would be nihilism." So not avoiding the despair and not trying to divert oneself from it. That is to be nihilistic in a way. So he's going to go on and talk about the possibilities that this is going to open up for us. And then some of this is gonna come through. He mentions a sort of passionate examination at a few points. And he's going to say that it's possible now for us to have a fundamental inquiry into history for the first time. So what does this mean? What are the implications of this? Yes, we've had history for a long time. We've even had the philosophy of history for a long time. We even have historians making histories about how history is done, historiography. All of that has been around, but now we can actually fully or more fully understand what we're doing as we're looking into history. But there's something more as well. He says that for the first time, the self can overcome its reflective duality and be unified, but what is it required to be unified? Full existential pathos. Now, that's the affective dimension of human being that he's already talked about as being there in Heidegger, as being there in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. And here he's gonna bring up three figures. Once again, Nietzsche is absolutely central for this. He says this kind of self-conscious and resolute nihilism appears in its greatest and profoundest form in Nietzsche. But there's two other figures to each of which he's gonna devote a chapter in this work who are also doing this Heidegger later on, and Mac Sterner before Nietzsche. So it's very interesting to see that Nishitani recognizes the similarities between Sterner, who's still using a very Hegelian kind of language for what he's doing, and Friedrich Nietzsche, who's coming later and doing something decidedly non- Hegelian. So this disclosure of nothingness opens up some possibilities for us. And then he's gonna finish up this section by saying, "nealism, as we understand it today, is the product of a particular epoch, the modern period in Europe. It represents the current achievement of the European spirit. So we find ourselves sort of back at the beginning again. And this raises some interesting issues. So what about us who aren't Europeans? Where can we just say, "Well, you know, nihilism, that's a European problem." No, because Europe historically came to influence the rest of the world through this, and we could say that the world has become Europeanized or Westernized as another way to talk about it. Modernization is another phrase that gets used, and modernization often means taking on some of the problems and baggage of the modern period, Europe. So he goes on and he says that, "The problem of how to live came to be fused with the problem of how to interpret history, in particular, European history." And so this is the state of affairs that came to light in nihilism, whose standpoint is philosophical, not in spite of it being historical, but because of it. Now, does that mean, ah, we're all in despair? We have to succumb to this. No, because one of the other developments that is taking place in European nihilism, in part because we've got this long, long, you know, development of it, is, as he says, a dual quality as nihilism that overcomes nihilism, which is the title of the entire work as a set of lectures. The self overcoming of nihilism carried out within nihilism. And so he goes on and he says that we can make a distinction between an active nihilism whose basic critique undermined the ground of history and the self, so we're all familiar with that. On the other hand, this nothing, without God or truth, harbored within itself, the seeds of a turn to a great affirmation in which existential nothingness replaces God as creative force. And who do we see this taking place in? Nishitani is gonna bring up two figures in particular, one of whom is going to get his own chapter and one's gonna get quite a few. Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche. Dostoyevsky and Russia, Nietzsche, German language, writing, you know, in sometimes in Germany, sometimes in Switzerland. And he says that he was in these two that European nihilism was first articulated in this full and fundamental sense. So both of them are going to provide us with, if we examine their works, not just clues, but we might say sketches of a program for having this not just active nihilism, but some sort of affirmation within nihilism that overcomes nihilism itself. And so can we say, well, thanks for the handoff Europeans, we'll take it from here. Nishitani is writing this as a Japanese person in Japan who's studied for a while in Europe and saying, no, no, we can't do that. We actually do have to go back and see how nihilism was developed through European thinkers, but that doesn't make it solely European. You could say the European problem, all of our problem as we either move into the modern or late modern age or years later, we're born into it and simply inherit it. So this is a clarification of the historical importance, the relevance of nihilism developing in Europe in such a way that the problem can be articulated, re-articulated, made more complex and existentially grounded at each point. - 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) (gentle music)