Nishitani on Nothingness // Sofya
What Keiji Nishitani intends to think in his famous essay Shūkyō to wa Nanika (What is Religion?), originally published in 1961 and translated into English in 1982 as Religion and Nothingness, is beautiful in a way. Firstly, he proposes that all life and non-life form oneself’s being. Nishitani quotes Miso Kokushi: “Hills and rivers, the earth, plants and trees, tiles and stones, all of these are the self’s own original part.” In the modern world, where people are separated from other-than-humans by high walls and busy and noisy oily roads, the need to be connected to “nature” is felt more than ever. And Nishitani proposes to go beyond positivist, scientific thought, rejecting its pretension to know what things are. Thus Nishitani’s thought points to a way of escaping from the modern un-world by jumping out into an unknown, wondrous, and mysterious dimension: a jump from a dis-enchanted world to an enchanted one.
What is it then that unites us all? What is it that enchants the world? The response of Nishitani is nothingness—an “absolute negativity,” an emptying of Being, the nothingness of nihilism itself…
In Nishitani’s view, nothingness is a sort of absolute opening where all contradictions are overcome: in nothingness things are manifested in their sameness, they are the same with everything, and, at the same time, each one is unique and absolutely different from any other one. Nothingness, therefore, is the most inner part of oneself, the closest one to one’s won being, as it is Being itself. Nishitani makes a parallelism with the waves in the sea: waves and the water are the same and simultaneously different. Another example he gives is a stream of light directed to a prism, due to which many colourful lights come out of the former. Like with light, in nothingness everything is potentialized and given in both its sameness and difference. Discovering nothingness, Nishitani argues, is to discover oneself and to discover life.
While finding what Nishitani initially proposes to think somehow beautiful, I cannot but argue against his Buddhist choice, nonetheless. Every thinker chooses a path to think along with, a sort of frame against which her arguments make sense. And Nishitani’s thought does not make sense in my world. I cannot understand but through an unnecessary mysticism his need to think that in order to be, one must not be; and in order live, one must die. What Nishitani proposes is to find the true Being, its multiplicity and its unity in nothingness, in non-Being, in short in vacuity, which embraces and is embedded within Being.
However, the waves in the sea come from a substance, water. The water and the waves are both different and one due to their substance, not due to their lack of it. The same can be said about light and the prism: many colourful lights come from the prism because they share in substance, their share substance being light. What Nishitani argues against, physis—this I defend. Substance potentializes substance. Life comes from life, and what there can ever be is fullness, or life(*). In other words, Nishitani wants to embrace life by abolishing it, and to see things by putting them into darkness. What results from this is a mystical, pseudo-philosophical, death-driven, circular thought-world which, made to escape an un-world, ultimately escapes life itself.
(*) Nishitani claims to avoid thematizing nothingness, but whatever his arguments, he still thinks and writes about it, and thus thematizes it! If something is beyond thought, it belongs neither to life nor to philosophy, and therefore should stand beyond the concern of the living.
On Emptiness and Today’s Politics // Carlos
There is no primordial darkness from which life arises. Unless from a theological perspective which, upon careful examination, proves still reminiscent of the notion of a purely transcendent (unknown) God: Deus absconditus. But haven’t we had enough of it? Do we need it anymore, under the disguise of the Buddhist notion of “emptiness,” for instance? I would like to suggest that it is animism with its revaluation of differences, instead of Buddhism with its emptiness, that we need today to escape modernity’s fulfilment.
Nishitani’s Religion and Nothingness is a perfect example of why Buddhist thought proves, in this sense, so attractive to Western readers; and of why it is, I dare add, politically problematic for us today.
Nishitani is a Buddhist thinker with some, albeit very superficial, background in Western philosophy. Superficial and old-fashioned for someone writing in the 1960s, I mean. Plus too Aristotelian, as well.
For one needs to have a rather-poor philosophical training to confuse Aristotle’s “substance,” Kant’s “thing in itself,” and Plato’s eidos (idea). By “substance” Aristotle means “Socrates himself” regardless, say, of whether he is standing up or sitting down, old or young, etc. Kant’s “thing in itself” is a permutation of Aristotle’s “substance,” but an inaccessible one, since Kant declares that we cannot know what things are in themselves – we can only know, he says, how they appear to us. As for Plato’s eidos, it simply has nothing to do with any sort of “thing in itself,” be it knowable or unknowable.
For while both Aristotle and Kant make claims about how the world is, or how it looks like, Plato does something altogether different. His philosophy focusses on the use of language in the context of the polis – that is to say, of the living together of which the city provided him the model. What Plato wants is to show his fellow citizens that what they call virtues and pretend to know technically (that is to say, in terms of management without truly thinking on them) are nothing without some implicit idea of goodness that they variously express; for when we say, for example, that something is just, or brave, or noble, etc., we mean to say that it proves to be the best in a given domain under certain circumstances. Thereby, Plato suggests that, seemingly, such idea of goodness must strangely exceed all possible determinations (this particular good, that particular good…); and he finds this paradox both theoretically enthralling and politically subversive, as it delegitimises any willingness to make one’s own particular views normative.
Turning Plato into a negative theologian by approaching him to Meister Eckhart – the 13-to-14th-century Christian mystic, quoted by Nishitani, who said that “it is in darkness that one finds the light” – is an unpardonable mistake. If, once transposed to a different (theological) realm, Aristotle’s logical distinction between what is “in itself” (the “substance”) and what is “in another one” (its “accidents”) became crucial in the Middle Ages, as it helped Christian and Muslim theologians alike to distinguish between the monotheist God and his creatures, but without Aristotle’s own distinction losing its sense of being a distinction, we could say, between two different types of things, the Christian and Islamic theological transformation of Plato’s political philosophy of language entailed its complete distortion. Nishitani merely adds to it – like Heidegger, in a way.
Besides, maintaining any sort of distinction between “what physical things are in themselves” and “how they appear to us” makes little if any sense in our times, for we know that things are inherently multiple depending on the relational perspective by which they come into the fore: if in a rainforest, I will be a sort of monkey for any jaguar, and my blood manioc beer, to quote two well-known Amazonian indigenous statements. Yet it is such distinction that Nishitani keeps at all costs, if somewhat playfully. Thus his proposed distinction between “a fire that burns and a fire that does not burn,” or “water that wets and water that does not”; a distinction by which Nishitani intends to leave room for the intangible (an essential water supposedly existing beyond all factual water and mysteriously empty of all watery qualities) against the appropriation and control of the tangible (this or that particular water). In this way, Nishitani protests against modern instrumental rationality, which is led by the principle of utility (and its offshoot: profit). Very well. But must we really distinguish between “water that wets and water that does not wet” for things not to be appropriated and controlled in order to be turned serviceable and profitable? Besides, which water has to be freed from its instrumental appropriation? A supposedly essential water, that is to say, “a water in itself that does not wet,” or the very waters which are transformed into natural resources?
If any difference must be made today between different types of water, it is not between “water in itself” and any “particular water” – which is an absurd idealist distinction to begin with, as there is nothing in itself prior to its particular manifestations. It is rather between commodified and non-commodified water: between the water that is bottled and commodified, on the one hand, and the water that still runs free through the streams of the forest, drops on your face when it rains, or forms waves when the wind blows on the surface of the lake or the sea. Nishitani’s distinction proves politically blind at this point.
Furthermore, for things to be commodified they must be emptied of their being, in the first place. In other words, they must be obscured as to what they are in order to be exchanged as, say, buyable bottles of water. Put otherwise: things must be made nothing, to begin with. In this context, Nishitani’s emphasis on the supposed virtues of emptiness proves not only politically blind, but also extremely dangerous.
Similarly, one does not fight capitalist semiotics by embracing darkness against the supposed rationality by which modernity pretends to illuminate the world. Our times – which Paul B. Preciado defines as those of “punk capitalism” – are also those of an unworlded world from whose darkness we must rather escape – a darkness in which everything has been fatally enclosed. This is for all of us, in fact, a matter of life and death.
Let me put it bluntly, then: Where can we escape today’s unworld but into the light (or rather the lights, in the plural) capable of bringing all things back to be seen and cared-for? As I have written elsewhere, animism proves here a potential ally for us – animism, not Buddhism. For animism sings the richness of the world instead of emptying things of their inherent being. And if, drawing on the Buddhist correlation between emptiness and compassion (karunā), anyone should argue that the Buddhist notion of emptiness may nonetheless help us to embrace what does not conform to the modern standards of being and living, let me say that love and tenderness vis-à-vis the excluded is less inspired by any form of emptiness than by the fragile powerfulness, but powerfulness all the same, of what is lovely and pure and noble despite its exclusion – hence admirable and inspiring in its own right(*).
(*) For, on the other hand, what can be inspiring but that which is admirable in one way or another? It would be interesting perhaps to recall Hölderlin here: Man kann auch in die Höhe fallen, so wie in die Tiefe (“One can fall [upwards] into the heights, just as one can fall [downwards] into the depths”).
Persian traditional tile representing water’s liveliness and life-producing qualities.