Overcoming Nihilism

Hello everyone! I’m Stephen West! This is Philosophize This!

So the guy we’re talking about today is aligned with basically everything we’ve been covering on these posts lately to the point it’s almost funny.

He’s a man who was a big fan of Nietzsche’s work. In fact, as the story goes, he used to carry around a copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra with him pretty much everywhere he went in the early stages of his life.

He’s a man who traveled all the way to Germany to study under the professorship of Martin Heidegger during the 1930s.

He’s a man that was the principal chair of philosophy and religion at Kyoto University for more than 20 years— a position where he deeply engaged with the mystical tradition of the west we just talked about with a special focus on the theologian Meister Eckhart.

See, it’s like I planned it or something. The man we’re talking about today is a member of what has now become known as the famous Kyoto School from Japan. He’s a man by the name of Keiji Nishitani.

One of the first questions you might have here is: what is the Kyoto School?

And how a lot of people might answer that question is to say these were eastern thinkers working with western ideas and mixing everything together trying to create something new and exciting.

But a lot of people that are fans of the Kyoto School would hate for it to be described in this way. We’ll talk about why many people think it doesn’t really help anyone to try to break down these thinkers in terms of broad categories like east vs. west.

And in service to that I just want to get right into the meat of something that was near and dear to the heart of Keiji Nishitani— something that fits into this larger conversation we’ve been having about these different gateways into a more immediate connection to being.

I want to talk about nihilism at a different level than we’ve ever gone into before.

And to understand why nihilism was such an important thing to focus on for someone like Nishitani, I think a useful starting point for this is to talk about what it’s like to have a relationship to death as a comparison.

How many people out there reading this have come face to face with death in an intimate way at some point in your life? Have you ever been forced to acknowledge just how much of an ever-present reality something like death is for you at any given moment?

The point of asking this is not to belittle anyone’s understanding of death. This isn’t the death Olympics.

The point here is to say that we’re all at different levels of familiarity when it comes to death, and that oftentimes the level of familiarity you have with it comes down to situations that have happened to you that you didn’t choose.

You lost people close to you and were forced to think about it. You were in a war zone and were surrounded by it. Maybe you had a near-death experience yourself.

Point is: not everybody is forced to think about death as they go throughout their lives. On the contrary, modern society often shields people from it.

And even if you do decide, from a purely philosophical perspective, to dedicate some time to sit around and do some death reflection (whatever that looks like) — even if you spent hundreds of hours doing that over the course of your life there’s no guarantee that you’re really grappling with it at a serious level.

You can understand, theoretically, that you’re going to die someday. You can say you’re in touch with death. But then something unexpected can happen, the harness next to you on a roller coaster doesn’t work or something, and all of a sudden it becomes far more real to you after having had that experience.

What I mean is: you can fake a relationship that you have with death having never actually even encountered it.

Well compare this shallow relationship with death to the experience it’s possible to have with nihilism in the modern world.

Nihilism being, for Keiji Nishitani, one of the most important things you could ever possibly think about as a person that’s living on this planet. Same question though: how deeply have you really faced the concept of nihilism?

What’s a common line of thinking for somebody to have in the west when they claim to be thinking in a nihilistic way? They’ll say something like, “Nihilism… means that there’s no meaning to life, right? And if there’s no meaning to life in general then why should I ever do anything in my life?”

And like we touched on briefly in the Nietzsche post we recently did, what this will often turn into is someone who in practice chooses to sit around, and tries to be as comfortable as they possibly can.

You watch content. You play video games. Eat comfort food. It could be drugs— the point is to this person if there’s no meaning to life then why do anything that’s going to be difficult?

But as we also talked about on that episode, to someone like Nietzsche: choosing to be comfortable all the time like this is not moral nihilism. Comfort is not the default of what a human existence is. Prioritizing comfort is choosing comfort and security as your set of values. Which to him is then going to be choosing a very passive, reactive approach to life that denies certain necessary aspects of what a life often is.

If Nietzsche was going to criticize this hypothetical western person’s thinking, where they say they’re nihilistic but in practice they’re not, one thing he could say to them is that they really aren’t taking it seriously enough as a philosophical concept. That they’re smuggling in values and a moral framework where they supposedly shouldn’t be having any.

And as we know: Nietzsche says that to truly contend with nihilism fully means you have to not live in this passive, reactive way. That it’s an active process. We have to creatively differentiate, we have to create our own values and projects from a place of affirmation. In other words: taking nihilism seriously to Nietzsche means overcoming nihilism via the self, and the will.

Nishitani says what we’re left with when we execute this whole strategy is a sort of positive response to nihilism. A classic kind of response that comes out of a western style of thinking.

The idea is: that nihilism is a problem to be solved.

That when I’m feeling nihilistic that’s something we need to fix. That’s something everybody out there needs to find a way to transcend and overcome.

And on one hand Nishitani asks what else would you expect people to be doing born into the western world? We’re born into a world that smuggles in spiritual assumptions that we most of the time don’t even realize we’re making unless we’re intimately aware of our own history.

For example, the history of western thought is filled with people making very monotheistic, Abrahamic assumptions, that there’s supposed to be a moral order to the world that’s given to us from the outside by a supernatural god.

More than that we often assume that if you look around you one day and that moral order doesn’t seem to be there— that must be a problem that we need to solve.

We do this with other things too in this set of thinking traditions. We often smuggle in very Platonic assumptions in the west about the forms or essences of the things around us.

The things we see: a tree, a rock, a squirrel— we assume these are stable, durable forms. That I am one of these durable forms, and that how these stable identities connect together and relate to each other is what provides the meaning to us and our lives.

The assumption is that if someone were to view the world not thinking in terms of there being stable identities— then that would just turn everything around us into a nebulous blob where nothing means anything!

We need forms and essences or else what are we even doing here?

In other words, the idea in the West is usually that when nihilism strikes—if meaning is missing—then that must mean you’ve got to create some meaning. You have to will yourself into a meaningful life, or chop up the world around you into forms, all of this so that you can fix nihilism as a problem that needs to be solved. Again, the positive response to nihilism.

But to Keiji Nishitani this analysis, while it’s one type of response to nihilism and while it’s not wrong, you could make a case that it is incomplete.

That there is more to nihilism than just this, and that there are more reactions that are possible other than just trying to solve nihilism by creating meaning. That this is the nihilism equivalent of in our death conversation saying, “Yeah, yeah I know I’m going to die someday.” But having never actually faced it at the depth that you could.

Let’s say all of this is true. Then if I wanted to become more familiar with it, how would I start actually doing that?

In his book The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism Keiji Nishitani thinks it’s valuable to start by looking at several other types of nihilism that have been proposed by thinkers in the West.

To Nishitani, Europe was a place where by the 20th century its spiritual traditions had already been thoroughly called into question. First during the Enlightenment, and then even more deeply in the 19th century by figures like Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. Because of this, Europe had already faced a crisis of nihilism that led many philosophers to have valuable things to say about it.

What Nishitani is ultimately doing here—writing in the context of post–World War II Japan, a time and place grappling with extreme nihilism after the atomic bomb—is responding to a moment of national soul-searching about where to go next. He turns to other cultures that have gone through something similar to Japan in their past.

And what he sees when he looks at the history of European thought are some common tactics that they use when addressing the problem of nihilism.

For example, so often what thinkers in the West will do is they’ll try to reduce nihilism down into a rigid definition of some kind. They’ll ask questions. What exactly are we talking about when we say Nihilism? Is there any way to get a solid definition going here?

They’ll look back at history. They’ll find examples of when people have claimed to be feeling nihilistic— say after the fall of the Roman Empire, or the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror— they’ll take these examples, and then they’ll try to combine them all together into a common description that fits all of them.

And again while this isn’t wrong. You could say that this is a limited way of understanding nihilism that leaves out something important. And notice this as a classic thing that people will do when their goal is to try to reduce things down into an essence— a common thing we do in the Western world given all that we spiritually are smuggling in from our history.

Another thing European thinkers have done when talking about nihilism is they’ll try to reduce it into just a static, bad feeling that a conscious self is having.

They’ll imply that nihilism, at bottom, is a feeling of existential despair.

But to Nishitani this is another very limited way of approaching what it is we’re talking about. For one thing this is trying to label the self, and nihilism for that matter, as something that’s universal, durable, or some tangible feeling that everybody generally has.

Notice the Western, dualistic approach that is constantly at work here. We’re putting in a lot of energy trying to turn these concepts into durable, unchanging things.

Again, this isn’t the wrong way to look at it—because to Nishitani, saying that would imply there’s a single right way to look at it. But if someone were truly interested in getting a more full-bodied picture of what nihilism is, here’s what we can be sure of: framing it in only this way will always come pre-loaded with certain very real limitations.

To Nishitani, it will always ignore an entire piece of what people are even talking about when they describe nihilism: the subjective, lived experience of nihilism to a particular self that is grappling with it.

Because nihilism in some other important sense has to also be understood as an experiment that each individual self needs to run for themselves.

Let me explain this more. And for the record this is going to be a common thread we’ll see all throughout Nishitani’s work. Say you wanted to get a better understanding of something like death, or nihilism— later on it will be about religion. If we want to truly respect something like nihilism we can’t just take only a piece of it and then pretend like we’ve arrived at the essence of all of it.

When we talk about nihilism, the historical definitions may cover a piece of it, the existentialists talking about despair may be a piece of it, but another absolutely crucial one is that nihilism is a highly individualized experiment that needs to be run, by a particular self, that is encountering it.

Meaning no two encounters with nihilism are ever going to be the same. And what you experience and call nihilism will without question be unique to your individual experiment.

Why is this an important point? Because it removes the expectation that:

1. There is some sort of static essence or form to what a nihilistic experience will be.

2. It removes the expectation that we should be able to perfectly describe all of this experience using purely language.

Notice what’s going on there! It’s almost like Nishitani is trying to get us to question the otherwise rigid meanings and identities that underlie the way we usually talk about our experience.

He’s getting us to question: how stable is this idea of nihilism that we’re talking about? Is this a universal feeling that everyone has? Is it something you can perfectly define or write about in a book? Or are there elements to what nihilism is that can only really be understood when they are experienced by a particular person going through this encounter?

Consider how this same line of questioning can be applied to the stability of the meaning of other important things. Picture someone born into a Christian home that at some point starts to doubt how stable of a foundation their religion is at providing the objective truth of the universe.

This nihilistic exercise of pulling the foundations of that meaning apart, might then lead this person to think of religion as more of a sociological construct. Imagine this person then does this with other religions and their foundations, and then with political ideology. Imagine they do this with any systematized attempt to give the complexity of the world around us some sort of easy way of understanding it.

Maybe you see at this point where all this is going.

Now imagine this applied to your own foundational, moral values. How stable or universal are those?

How about this applied to the identities you occupy in the given society you live in. How static and unchanging are those?

You might then start to apply this nihilistic questioning of meaning to the very self that is doing the questioning. How stable or durable is that self when you take a closer look at it?

In other words, this experiment of nihilism if taken really seriously can be applied to any stable meaning that supposedly exists.

And it should be said: if you were to do this then this is going to be a pretty uncomfortable process.

When nihilism is not viewed as a problem to be solved, but is instead something that you try to steer into, the way it’s seen sometimes in more Buddhist traditions, this new orientation opens up in someone what is described in Zen Buddhism as: the great doubt.

For someone like Nishitani the great doubt is a period of utter transformation for a person. It is a period of recognizing just how deep this well of nihilism goes when you truly begin to doubt— when you truly question the stable forms that you usually make sense of the world with.

And while that may sound uncomfortable there’s actually some good news here on the other side of it if you think of what this means for our nihilistic friend from before.

From this new perspective, a person feeling horrible because they recognize there isn’t a god with a plan for them; well, for one thing that person under this different view is just having a very shallow relationship with nihilism— the same way it’s easy for someone to have a shallow relationship with death.

And to Nishitani this bad feeling that they’re going through is not a sign that they’re lost, or that they need to hurry up and create some new meaning before they start to feel worse.

No, this feeling they’re having is actually evidence of the fact that they’re someone who’s questioning their reality beyond the conventions they were born into. To him, this is a sign that they’re actually one of the people that might press on, into the great doubt, and then arrive at an understanding of the nature of being that few people on this planet ever get to experience.

The feeling of nihilism means you’re at the beginning of a journey.

If it is taken seriously and truly lived experientially, nihilism may be another one of these gateways into the more immediate experience of being we’ve been talking about.

Remember to someone like Heidegger this is going to be the mode of existence that’s not constantly mediated by the will and a subject/object framing of things. To the mystics from last time this is going to be that pushing past the self, where they would then find union with something greater than themselves through intense devotional practice.

This is the domain that Nishitani says Mahayana Buddhism, Zen Buddhism as a sub-chapter of it is talking about.

When Western thinkers encountered nihilism during the crisis point of European culture, Western spiritual traditions led them down certain predictable responses to nihilism. Well, here is Nishitani saying how Eastern spiritual traditions when encountering the same class of problem, seem to be equipped in a very unique way to deal with this Nihilism that the Western world generally isn’t. (Bear with me on the east vs west language for the moment. Its time is coming.)

What comes out of this is that nihilism becomes not something to run from. It’s not a problem to be solved under this framing.

Nihility, as Nishitani puts it— think of it as an immanent aspect of being itself. Nihility is ultimately something we should embrace and to learn to be with, and it’s something we never experience fully as long as we live in the stories we create trying to provide neat, dualistic, formal structure to everything.

We know this at some level. And isn’t that kind of the point of why we create many of these stories in the first place?

But in keeping with our larger discussion here: just considering Nihilism at a theoretical level can give you no guarantees that you understand it at a lived experience level. That there’s a lot to Nihilism that has to be discovered through the particular experiment of the individual self living it.

And ironically the next step I think if we wanted to find another layer of taking nihilism as seriously as we can, is we have to call into question the supposedly stable foundation to what it is we call “the self”.

Now there are lots of different ways you can do this. And I’m not going to be able to do it for you.

What I can give you are some thoughts and examples that philosophers have given over the years that might help you as a small part of your journey.

People will spend years in contemplative practices trying to question this conditioning that we are totally separate from the things that are around us. And much like we were saying on the mysticism episode: having the guidance of a religious practice or even just religious language to help you navigate it can definitely make this whole process a lot easier for you.

What seems clear to Nishitani though is that one of the big barriers in the way of being able to question the foundations of the self is the ordinary language we use to describe our day to day life.

Because the way we talk about things usually tries to say something about what things are by comparing them to the things that they’re not. And our languages often structure our reality dualistically with subjects always relating to objects.

But Nishitani and others say there are ways you can start to see outside of this typical framing of things.

Meditation definitely can help loosen things up. There are things called koans that are commonly used in Zen Buddhism. This is a thought exercise where you contemplate something that will blur these dualistic lines and get you seeing things maybe more along the lines of how a baby sees the world.

Common examples of these will be things like what is the sound of one hand clapping?

Or another one is if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.

These are designed to get people thinking outside of the typical abstractions and rigid essences that we typically frame things in.

But there’s another exercise Nishitani says can be useful here. He talks about the practice of questioning the questioner.

Just for a second: do something that’s actually pretty common for us to do as humans and just reflect on the nature of the self. Think about you as a self, and ask the question: what is that exactly that you’re reflecting on right now? Here’s a better question: when you’re thinking about that self— what is the part of the self that is the object that’s being questioned? And what is the part of the self that is doing the questioning?

Again, do this exercise for a while and try to get to the bottom of what exactly makes up this self thing that we’re talking about.

Nishitani says when you do this what you’ll realize is that what’s at the bottom of the self is nothing.

In fact, the foundations of the self, actually start to look a bit like the foundations of religious ideology or political ideology— like something you’ve believed for a long time was far more durable than it actually was. Nishitani says what you realize is that what characterizes the self is a sort of nothingness. Or you might even think of it as a “no-thing-ness”.

Meaning it’s not a fixed, durable form or essence that’s at the bottom of the self. The self really gains whatever meaning it has to us in terms of how it relates to everything else around it.

When you do this exercise you start to realize that the self is something that is constantly changing and moving. You realize the typical boundaries between you and the ecosystems of ideas or things that you depend on are really just a matter of convention, or a matter of the ways that our languages typically organize sentences to be able to express things.

And if that all sounds very weird to you: well, seeing things more in this way is no doubt going to be a process.

The common example that you’ve no doubt heard along these lines is a common quote. (Maybe you were scrolling through a bunch of clichés on Pinterest or something when you heard this.)

“Enlightenment is when the wave realizes that it is the ocean.”

You ever heard this one before?

Now this is a misleading metaphor when it comes to Nishitani, but it might help us to start thinking at least a bit more in this direction.

If what you are is something like a wave, a temporary, constantly moving formation, where everything about you was determined by forces in the ocean that you have nothing to do with. And that if that wave for some reason had the capacity for self-reflection and could realize that everything it has ever thought of itself as ultimately depends on this larger process that it’s a part of. Well then that, in the Pinterest board or the Instagram feed, is the definition of enlightenment. You’re officially a really spiritually enlightened wave if you can recognize that fact.

Again, ultimately this is too simple of a metaphor to describe Nishitani’s point. But it does illustrate a concept described in Mahayana Buddhism known as dependent origination that is going to be very helpful here.

Dependent origination centers on the idea that there is nothing about that wave, or anything for that matter, that is magically independent, or self-causing, or self-sustaining with its own essence.

That wave is only a thing because of everything else that it relates to and depends on in a complex network it’s a part of. That the supposed boundary between the wave and the ocean, or the wave and the gravity that moves it, or the wave and all the other waves before or after it— these are all in reality pretty superficial boundaries to be obsessing over. That at a deeper level these things are actually connected and interdependent. Or in other words: they are dependent in their origination.

This is how we also have to be thinking about the self to Nishitani.

See, it’s not that the self is a total illusion to him. The durability of the self is an illusion. The essence at the foundation of the self is an illusion.

Let’s go into this more deeply with a better metaphor. Instead of thinking of the self as a wave in the ocean, try thinking of the self as similar to the way that the meanings of words work in structural linguistics.

Think of what a word is. A word gets its meaning not because somebody came up with a meaning for it one day and wrote it down in the dictionary. No word has a fixed essence to what its meaning is where it will always have that meaning no matter what happens.

The meanings of words are constantly changing based on how they’re being used in a particular linguistic community. And the meaning of any given word doesn’t lie inside the word itself somewhere, but it lies in the relationships that exist between it and all the other words around it in a network.

Take the word squirrel, for example. The word squirrel doesn’t have any sort of fixed meaning to us. It gets its meaning based on how we use it in relation to all the things that it is not: it’s not a cat, it’s not a bird, it’s not a rat.

The meaning of the word “squirrel” then comes from its place within this web of distinctions.

Now obviously words get even more complicated than this. Because let’s say tomorrow, a comedy movie comes out and in that movie there’s a joke where for whatever reason there’s some old dudes that like to play pickleball at the gym, and people in the movie start calling them “squirrels.”

And let’s say it catches on in culture: people everywhere start calling old men that play pickleball a bunch of “squirrels,” similar to what happened with the word cougar.

Well the meaning of the word squirrel would change if that were to happen.

If scientists discovered some new kind of squirrel, some squirrel that lives underwater somewhere, aqua-squirrel— the meaning of the word squirrel would have to change again to account for this new relationship.

And this process is always going on.

To Nishitani the point is: it’s not that the word squirrel doesn’t exist, it’s not that it doesn’t point towards something at this particular moment. Same way it’s not like the self doesn’t exist for him where it’s also pointing to something in this moment.

It’s that if you were to ask: what is the essence of the self (or of the word squirrel) at its foundation— well, there isn’t one really.

In fact, to even ask that question seems to misunderstand the way that words even work. It’s in a word’s ability to change: the constantly evolving, nebulous, interdependent, relational existence of a word that really defines what it is.

So too with a self if you’re Nishitani. To him, the bottom of the self when you really pull back the layers is nothingness. No-thing-ness. Formlessness. Meaninglessness. Or if you wanted a word that could describe all of these things Mahayana Buddhism already has one.

The word is sunyata. The most direct translation of this word is going to be: emptiness.

Because if you wanted to try to put this term sunyata into more traditional Western, metaphysical terminology you would say that to Nishitani: the metaphysical foundation of being is nothingness.

But of course this would be the wrong way to put it. This wouldn’t be something that can be adequately described using ordinary language, and of course we’d never want to imply that there is some sort of durable foundation of nothingness that he’s building this worldview on top of.

The other big problem with saying it in this way is that it’d be very easy for people coming from the Western world to hear the word nothingness, and instantly think that it means something negative. That nothingness must mean that there’s a void or something. Someone could think that maybe what Nishitani is saying is that nothing really exists.

But this is incorrect. Again, this is a radically different kind of nothingness. The no-thing-ness that he is talking about is calling into question any kind of durable contrasts that supposedly exist between beings.

Remember the concept of dependent origination we just talked about. Nothing exists totally independently of anything else.

For example, think of a fire that’s burning in the woods at a campfire. What really is the difference between the wood that’s burning, the fire itself, the oxygen feeding it, and the atmosphere surrounding it?

Of course we do make distinctions here for the sake of language, and language does ultimately work by marking contrasts, describing things based on what they’re not. It’s useful for us to mark a contrast between the wood, the fire, the oxygen, the heat and everything else.

But to Nishitani at some deeper level these things are all interconnected. They really only arise in relation to one another.

What sunyata or emptiness is saying is not that none of these things exist. It’s that none of these things has a fixed, independent existence like we typically cordon them off. That there’s this deeper layer to reality that exists beyond these abstractions. Not unlike someone feeling nihilistic who thinks beyond the certainty of the stable meaning of their own religion or political ideology.

Sunyata then, in Nishitani’s work, is not some metaphysical realm somewhere else out there— like a “heaven” or any of the otherworlds that people like Nietzsche criticize. You could say it’s at a deeper layer of this reality. That Sunyata is an immanent aspect of our very existence; it is our birthright. It is something that is always there and available to us, but something is usually blocking our ability to be able to experience it.

So here we circle back to something that starts to sound like Heidegger and the mystical experiences we’ve been talking about.

It’s only by recognizing the groundless ground of the self and getting access to this more immediate connection to being that we can find another form of connection to the things around us—one that is interdependent, and free, because there’s not some fixed essence that we have to conform to or else not be “fulfilling our true purpose,” whatever that means.

So you can see the difference here from the approaches that we talked about from the more European side of things.

If his book is called The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism. And if typically in the West we encounter nihilism and then use the self as a way of willing ourselves onto reality to solve the problem of nihilism. Then here’s Nishitani saying that when you view nihilism as an experiment that’s being run by a particular self— nihilism when more fully experienced eventually overcomes itself. It becomes a critical, co-constituting aspect of what our relationship to being even is.

One thing that needs to be said though is that as much as I’m trying here as a writer to come up with metaphors to help paint a picture of these ideas like sunyata or nihility— there’s a sense in which to someone like Nishitani, I could sit here all day trying to explain this and there is no metaphor that would ever be able to fully capture what it is he’s talking about.

Language and theoretical abstractions are always going to be insufficient at some level. Which is part of the reason Western philosophy has neglected sunyata and nihility for so long.

The same way you can sit around and think about death from a theoretical perspective, but still not fully understand what it is— things like sunyata and nihility are things that need to be lived and experienced to be even partially understood as well.

But all of this we just talked about in this book is only to set up what became the most famous book ever written by Nishitani. We’ll talk about it next time where we go on a similar sort of journey examining the concept of religion at this deeper level.

Thanks for reading. Talk to you next time.