Sadler's Lectures

Nishitani Keiji, The Self-Overcoming Of Nihilism - Nihilism And The Problem Of The Self

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", which distinguishes several unproductive and inadequate approaches to nihilism, and then frames nihilism as a problem of the self. He notes that the self can be broken into two selves, one which observes and questions, the other which is observed and questioned, but that this bifurcation remains a problem, which then calls to be resolved through actual existence and passionate thinking.

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Duration:: 14m
Broadcast on:: 23 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. Nishitani begins his book, The Self Overcoming of Neelism, which is actually a set of lectures that he gave by noting, I've been asked to speak about Neelism, which has become something of a trend in the post-war era, and he mentions the existential philosophies of Sartre, Heidegger, and others, as he's gonna talk about in this work, which are major elements in contemporary intellectual history. And he says they also have connections with Neelism, and that's probably why people are so interested in the topic. But we have to be kind of careful if we really want to understand what's going on with Neelism and how existentialism is in part a response to it and part of the self-overcoming of Neelism referred to. In the title, we have to approach Neelism in a way that does justice to it, you could say. And this is a typical philosophical concern early on in studying a subject matter. So he warns us, he says, "In so far as the approach to Neelism "is not itself nihilistic, "a sense it may obstruct our understanding "of the matter at hand." And now notice how he is couching this. I sense, he's not saying I know for effect, and he uses model words like could, may. So it's expressing a not mere possibility, but a likelihood. It's not closing things off entirely, but Nishitani is gonna be making the case that we need to adopt an attitude, a approach which is itself going to feel Neelism as a central problem, not just something off there in the distance. So he says that this fact itself is in some sense a symptom of Neelism, and particularly one of the topics he's gonna discuss in this, Neelism in Japan. So he says, "I will begin by focusing on these two points, "one of which we're gonna look at here, "the non-neolistic nature of our way of inquiry." And then, you know, Neelism in Japan, which we'll talk about elsewhere. Now, what is the issue here? Jumping ahead a little bit in this first section of the first chapter, he's gonna tell us that Neelism is essentially a problem of the self, and he says it becomes a problem only when the self becomes a problem, when the ground of the existence, call the self, becomes a problem for itself. Now, that's a little bit tangled there, you might say, well, wait a second, how can the self become a problem for the self? If you've already got a self, you don't really have a problem of the self. Now, and as we're gonna see, well, it is quite possible and it does occur to many selves, not only right now, or in the time that Nishitani is writing, but in the centuries before that as well. And he's going to outline for us successively, a number of approaches that there's nothing wrong with them in themselves, and as he remarks, they work for some other topics, but if we want to understand Neelism, then these are going to be unproductive, they're gonna block the road to our inquiry, they're gonna lead us astray. So the first thing that he cautions us about is what he calls a detached spirit of inquiry, totally appropriate for other intellectual problems. And then he says, now, notice not just Neelism, in the case of existentialism and Neelism, it is inappropriate. And what is this consistent? So he talks about the attitude of wanting to know about Neelism. So looking at it, you could say from a distance, or the desire to know in order to not be left behind in conversation. Everybody's talking about Neelism these days. What is it? I'd better figure out what it is. So that when I go to a party, when I'm chatting with people and they bring up Neelism, I can say, aha, I have some insights about that. I can contribute to the conversation. And now he's going to say something about this, that then shortly afterwards, he's going to shift a little bit. It's not that there's anything wrong with looking at things from the standpoint of society. As a matter of fact, we have to do that when we move on to like the philosophy of history. But he says, from the start, one is questioning from the standpoint of society and not from the self itself. There's the problem. The key thing is not that we have to leave society out altogether and just focus on the self. At the start, where should we begin? Should we think about, oh, we live in a Neelistic age and the new generation, a bunch of Neelists. Let's look at their bad music and t-shirts and memes. No, that's not the way we need to go. We need to actually think about it ourselves as selves. So he goes on and he says, if Neelism is anything, it's a problem of the self. And he says, when the problem of Neelism is posed apart from the self or as a problem of society in general, it loses the special genuineness. That distinguishes it from other problems. It starts to bleed over into other problems and get mistaken for them. Like the problem of rebelliousness or a lack of values or whatever we're gonna call it. It's no longer Neelism then. So he says, thinking about the issue by surveying it as an objective observer cannot touch the heart of the matter. That's one problem. And then he says, all right, to go a step further, even when it is made an important issue intellectually and the self is the locus of the issue, there is still a danger. What is the danger that we transform Neelism into what he calls an objective issue within the self? So this becomes something that would apply to any self whatsoever, not this self, except insofar as this self is a particular instance of this universal or generic thing that we call, let's put a capital S, the self, right? So it can't be treated just as an objective issue within the self in an abstract, generic way. Instead, we need to look at how the self is going to be divided against itself and what follows from that. And we're gonna get to that in just a moment. Skipping ahead or skipping down in this, he tells us that Neelism refuses treatment as merely an external problem for one's own self or even contemplation as a problem internal to each individual self. He says that each individual self has to carry out an experiment within the self. Neelism has to become a problem, not for the self coming from the outside, from society or from the self as a particular instance of a generic conception of self. It has to be grasped as a problem for my own self or your own self or Nishitani's own self for whoever is going to encounter it. There is a particularization and this is why existentialism is able to grapple with this so successfully. So now we come back to his remark about the self and he tells us that Neelism and existence break down the standpoint of the observing self in which the self that sees and the self that is seen are separated. So we could think of the self as, whether it's mine or yours or anybody else's. You've got the part of you that sees, he's gonna say a little bit later, that questions and then we have the part of our self and it's sort of, this is the subjective, this is the objective side that is seen. That is questioned, that is in some way subjected to the greater self, right? And in a lot of earlier philosophy, we'd see the whole idea of like, sort of like the transcendental or the universal, that's on this side and then we've got all of our particularity, you know, our body and our history, our as John Paul, so I would call it facticity. The self, if it is a self, isn't two different selves, one of which is observing and one of which is observed. There has to be a kind of unity, but you can't just assert this because we do in fact, experience this bifurcation. We say, what the hell was I thinking when I did this thing, when I wrote this thing, who the hell is that, that has these emotions, that has these desires? We're talking about ourselves there. So he goes on and he says, when this existence of the self becomes a question mark, an unknown X, when the hility is experienced behind the existence of the self or at its ground, one can no longer afford to have two separate selves, the questioning self and the self that is questioned. Now, notice the interesting ways in which he frames this. There is a compelling, not a compulsion, but a compelling, the self is compelled to become one and the self resolves not to conceal or evade this and in this resolve of the self, the self becomes one. So something is compelling, something is resolving. What is doing that? The self becoming itself, making itself itself, but never completely, never in a perfect unity, never totally resolving the question. And if there's lots of ways in which people try to do this, think to classic examples from existentialism, I'm just gonna be a waiter, this is John Paul Sartre, and I'll be the best waiter I can possibly be. I'll lose myself in this social role. Well, you can try that, but there's still part of yourself that knows that you're in bad faith, faking it while you're engaging in that. And that's part of yourself as well. So he goes on and he says, "Only here does the actual existence of the self "become the question of the self." So our way of existing is to be questioning, to have problems. He says to put it in another way, I stand on the standpoint of actual existence, which makes my own self an ex. Now, this leads to some thinking about how should we make sense of this? What is the approach that we should take? Should we just adopt psychology and a scientific attitude towards it? You can do that, that's only gonna get you so far. Here we can take some cues from the existentialists who Nishitani is going to discuss in this work. He brings up Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. He says, "You can follow them in calling it "a matter of thinking with passion, light and shaft leak." And that also, that invocation of that German term, passion, yes. And it gets back to the original Greek of pathos, right? Which we often translate as emotions. Oh, passions are things that we feel or we're driven by. It's things we suffer. It is suffering. And then he talks about Heidegger. When he tries to understand being through moods or pathos, Stimmung Masig, right? And he says, "Here subjectivity in the true sense "appears for the first time." The standpoint arises in which one strives resolutely to be oneself and to seek the ground of one's actual existence. But what does that ground turn out to be? This is where the problem of nihilism emerges. We don't actually have some sort of foundation, some sort of ground, some sort of universal essence that we can rely on. It is a nihility. It is a nothingness that is at the ground of our very existence and our very selves. The fact that most people don't notice this or try to hide from it or, you know, take refuge and all sorts of ready-made solutions to this doesn't erase the fact that that's there if we're actually looking, if we're adopting a nihilistic approach to nihilism. So, you know, he goes on and says, "By being thrown into nihility, "the self is revealed to itself. "Only in such encounters does nihilism like death "become a real question." Now, notice death, nihilism can become questions, but in a way that aren't real questions, that aren't questions for the actual individual concrete self that is seeking them out. This is why he says, towards the end of this portion, "nealism demands each individual carry out "an experiment within the self." And that experiment is something philosophical, but not just philosophical in the sort of old-fashioned abstract sense. Existentialist philosophy is the way to go with this. And that is, you know, with a few additions, he's gonna talk about Mahayana Buddhism. He's also gonna talk about a few philosophical figures who are not existentialists, but figure in here somehow. That is the approach that Nishitani is sketching out for us. So, very important, you could say, methodological and existential considerations at the very beginning of this work. - 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. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (gentle music)