Sadler's Lectures

Nishitani Keiji, The Self-Overcoming Of Nihilism - Nihilism And Philosophy Of History

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", focused on how human beings are situated in history, and how nihilism arises not just as a trans-historical possibility, but within a particular historical context, that of modern Europe. This requires that not only does nihilism need to be understood from within a philosophy of history, but that it must also enter into and inform that philosophy of history itself, transforming it in the process.

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Duration:: 13m
Broadcast on:: 24 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. Section two of chapter one of Nishitani is the self-overcoming of Nealism, is titled Nealism and the Philosophy of History. And the philosophy of history is one subdivision of philosophy, but it's going to take on an important role here for Nishitani. And it bleeds over into other domains as well. We're gonna see metaphysics talked about quite a bit. Also philosophical anthropology being referenced and there's a sort of a question about how should the philosophy of history orient itself towards Nealism and how should it be in return oriented by Nealism in the presence era that we're in. So he says, we've got this sort of two-sided, two-dimensional nature of Nealism if we think about it historically. So he says, on the one hand, Nealism is a problem that transcends time and space and it's rooted in the essence of human being. It's an existential problem in which the being of the self is revealed to the self itself as something groundless. And he talked about that a little bit in the previous section. And I think that's fairly easy to wrap your head around if you know something about existentialism and modern thought and developments like that. So it's revealed as something that could happen at any time in any place, but just in fact didn't happen in a lot of them. But we can look back in history and say, oh, that seems nihilistic. There are certain ways of living or thinking that maybe we're precursors to what we identify in 19th and 20th century Europe as being Nealism. Then he goes on and he says, on the other hand, it is a historical and social phenomenon, which means it is an object of the study of history. And he says, well, what does this study reveal? Nealism shows that our historical life is lost, it's ground as objective spirit. Now, objective spirit, that may be a term where you're like, oh, I'm not sure what that signifies. So that's sort of a reference to the Hegelian and post-Hagalian way of looking at things. That there is like a development that's taking place in time, the past and the present and the future are indeed quite different from each other because of historical development. But it's something that we can look back on and wrap our head around. He says, the value system which supports this historical life is broken down. The entirety of social and historical life has loosened itself from its foundation. So Nealism can be understood as something that is both historical and, in a certain sense, a universal possibility, right? So he says, viewed in this way, we might say that it is a general phenomenon that occurs from time to time in the course of history. And he gives us an example. The mood of post-war, post-World War II, Japan would be such an instance. Then he says, if we integrate these two perspectives, we get a third motif. He says, when we investigate Nealism as a historical phenomenon, right down to its philosophical ground, it becomes an object of the philosophy of history. And he says, this third step is unavoidable. That's where we necessarily are. Why? Well, he goes on and says, as soon as the ground which has supported historical life, both within and without, begins to be perceived as something unreliable. Now, notice this. Let's pause here for just a moment. It's not that Nealism arises when everything goes wrong in a society and people have thrown their hands up and they're like, there is nothing we can rely upon anymore. No, you don't have to have perfect philosophical arguments for nothing having any ground or permanent or uncontested meaning. All you need is this perception of things as being unreliable, and Nealism starts to erode the, as he says, meaning of existence, right? And he goes on and says, what happens then? An immense void opens up. Now, this is really interesting. A void opens up where? In the self, yes, in the self. In values, yes. In our scale of them, yes. But also in history itself. It's not just something historical. It's something about history. So he says that profound anxiety shakes the foundation of human being, right? And the more foundational the supporting ground had been, the greater the void, the deeper the anxiety. So the more successful you previously were, the better your integrated systematic value system and way of life was, the deeper the void, the deeper the anxiety that's going to occur. And he says that if the ground is an ultimate one, if it had to do with a goal for human existence, a direction of life, a doctrine on the meaning of existence, or any similarly basic metaphysical issue, well, then it's loss results in a abysmal knee-hility at the basis of human history. So an abyss is emptiness already, then the knee-hility, what is going to confront it. So this is what the historical situation is like. And he says, being is now transformed into a problem. Up until this point, human existence had a clear and eternal meaning, a way in which to live. That's probably overstating it a little bit. And he said to follow this way or that, or not was a matter of personal choice, but now existence is deprived of such meaning. It's been strip naked, a question mark for itself. And this transforms not just the self, but the world into a question, which then he says, means that the fabric of history is rent asunder and the world in which we live reveals itself as an abyss. We don't know as much as we think we do. We can't trust as much as we have been in the past. And this is something in time. This is something that develops historically. So he goes on and he says that the world and the self together become a question. Now, what kind of question? A historical and a metaphysical question. Not just a psychological question. Not just a cultural question, a historical question. Where are we going? What happened? How are things connected together? Is there a point towards which we're moving? So he says, such a fundamental question belongs to the philosophy of history. But is the philosophy of history, actually, in the way that it's been done, adequate to addressing this? And he talks about the need to go beyond, because they are part of the problem, the very nature of the philosophy of history and its previous standpoint. So what does the philosophy of history look like before? One big part of it was saying, you know, there's a point to all this stuff that's happening. You know, and you could have it be like Hegel's end of history with absolute spirit. It could be progressively making human beings freer and freer. It could be whatever it is that you want, but there's a telos, there's a goal. That's being taken away, that's being eroded. It could also be history is really telling things how they truly happen. That's a sort of conception of history that was popular in the 19th century and then got called into question. Can we really know how things actually happened? We can get beyond the biases and assumptions and the partial recordings in texts that we have. So he goes on and he says, the philosophy of history must dig down to its ultimate ground. There it will question the metaphysical and transcendent ground of history rooted in human existence. And with this, the metaphysical foundation of history itself becomes a problem. And he goes on and he says, here's how we could do it wrong or insufficiently. The nihilism of various epochs is experientially understood as the problem of the self. The issue of nihilism becomes the issue of the problem of history by way of what he's calling philosophical anthropology. That's not a term that we use an awful lot. So we think of anthropology as being one of the human sciences. And yes, that did come out of philosophical anthropology and inquiry into what it is that human beings are, what makes us human beings. And then how it plays itself out in different times, epics, cultures, whatever it is that we're focusing on. And so he says, nihilism is disclosed as a universal phenomenon. So we go back to the one side, right? Appearing, for example, at the end of the ancient period or the medieval period in the West and in Japan and the mopel thinking of the Kamurkara period and he invokes Karl Yaspers characterizing different stages and forms of nihilism. So this is one approach that you can take. That's not enough according to Nishitani. Why not? He says that we need to go on further, right? So we can't treat it as merely a universal phenomenon. We need to treat it as something that is actually historical itself. So he says that inquiry in the philosophy of history is remained within the standpoint of reflective observation. The one who observes and the one who observed have been separated as he talked about just in the earlier chapter with the self. And then he says, though traditional philosophy of history may approach its subject matter from out of the lived experience of the self, it's standpoint remains one of observing. What will take us beyond this? So he says in the fourth place. So we had two sides, philosophy of history in the older sense as the third thing. In the fourth place, there must be a way of inquiring into history that is fundamentally different from the way the philosophy of history has been done up till now. What is this going to be like? The questioning itself must be historical and it takes account of the philosopher, the inquirer of history. And these have to be opened up, he says, within the self of the inquiry. The inquiry has to be unified in history. What else? The inquiry, as he says, has to be conducted with passion and existentially. Now that might make us think, okay, so we have to focus on our own standpoint and how we feel about it. That's cool, we can bring in our own point of view and any of us can be like the locus where philosophy gets done or historicizing gets done. That's kind of liberating. That's really nice in a way. We can have a lot of different viewpoints and we don't have to be tied to any one of them as the universal viewpoint. Well, yes and no. So he goes on and he says, the relationship between essence and phenomenon is realized existentially and thoroughly within historical existence. In other words, as he's going to put it, the great historical problems have to become, they must find a place of passionate confrontation within the self. So it's not so much as like, oh, well, I'm gonna tell the story of my background and my little bit of history. No, you are, just as everybody else is, a locus of existence and you are within history, but you're still caught up within this groundless abyss of nihility that inhabits the very history that you're examining. So he says, in such an existential understanding of history, the fundamentally historical nature of human existence, what Nietzsche calls its essentially temporal existing in time, nature discloses itself for the first time and the true significance of history is the locus of the transhistorical, what exceeds history and metaphysical comes to be realized. We shift away, says, from observation and history becomes a locus of existential encounter. So we're doing philosophy of history in a new way motivated by the very problem of nihilism, which is arising within history as both something historical and as something potentially universal. So this suggests a new way forward to Nishitani. - Special thanks to all of my Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. You can find me on Twitter @philos470 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)