This essay is being published in six installments.
PREVIOUS INSTALLMENTS:
#1 Introduction
#2 Modernity and Postmodernity: Two Types of Nihilism
The BIBLIOGRAPHY will be included in the sixth installment.
IV. On Nishitani’s Anti-Nihilism
According to Nishitani, we must start with the distinction between an objectifying view of the world and a non-objectifying view of the world. In our everyday dealings with the world, we routinely divide our environment into objects. We speak of this chair, that car, a building, a swarm of sparrows, an ant colony, or another forest. Even compound entities like families or colonies are treated as single entities. The categories that we routinely apply derive from our practical dealings with the world. However, they also give rise to the homogenizing idea “that every day is exactly the same,” or the materialist and mechanistic idea that the universe is a gigantic machine entirely built out of mindless matter and extrinsic causal forces, in which our lives unfold deterministically or indeterministically in quiet or not-so-quiet desperation:
In this kind of nihility, “being” itself is now transformed into a problem. Up until this point human existence had a clear and eternal meaning, a way in which to live. To follow that way or not was a matter of personal choice. But now existence is deprived of such meaning; it stands before nihility as having been stripped naked, a question mark for itself. And this in turn transforms the world itself into a question. The fabric of history is rent asunder, and the “world” in which we live reveals itself as an abyss. (Nishitani, 1990: p. 4)
Or, as put more concisely by Nine Inch Nails in their 2002 song Every Day is Exactly the Same:
I believe I can see the future / Cause I repeat the same routine
In existential nihilism, one’s subjectivity becomes a burden. We experience the unbearable heaviness or lightness of being and feel as if we are condemned to live our lives as if were free, but actually aren’t, hence we cannot but feel overwhelmed and underwhelmed at the same time. We are overwhelmed because the universe offers no meaning; yet, the drabness and instrumental repetition forced on us by modern life opens up a feeling of unfulfillment that begs to be filled and remedied. Both tendencies converge in a nihilism that is irresolvable. Due to the scientistic and mechanistic sociocultural forces that high modernism unleashed, the inevitable result is that people constantly experience unfreedom and the lack of vitality. We feel that we fail to grasp an entire dimension of existence because we are trapped in an endless routine of demands, instructions, and imperatives, the total meaning of which is unclear. Or—and this is a thought that we continually avoid—it might also be that we do not want to look too closely to the totality of meaning that underlies modern life. It could be that it is more horrifying that even our wildest dreams could imagine.
A central problem that gives rise to existential nihilism is that the self is grasped only by means of “an objectifying gaze.” The self is then treated as a mere object alongside or among other mere objects. In doing so, we reduce anything we encounter into an object for either the senses or the understanding. It is worth noting that Nishitani’s predecessor in the Kyoto School, Kitaro Nishida, had argued vigorously against what he called an “object logic.” In Nishida’s view, to try to objectify the world is to disrupt and tear up the continuity of lived experience, making distinctions where there shouldn’t be any made in the first place. In taking up this orientation, Nishida followed in the tradition of Hegel (whose works he read closely) and Henri Bergson, and emphasized the inherently organic nature of cognition, and indeed of social life itself. Implicit in Nishida’s critique is the Hegelian thesis that turning an entity into a mere object is radically to oversimplify and underestimate it. An object (let’s say a tree) can be regarded as an individual organism, a plant; as the inhabitant of a forest, an ecosystem; as a source of energy, released as fire; or as a quantity of unprocessed wood awaiting logging and processing by means of manufacturing. However, none of those descriptions does full justice to the tree-as-such or to its multifaceted relations to the world. In whatever way we objectify the tree, we always miss out on its nature as such. Correspondingly, in Buddhism, that which can be fully appreciated in the tree goes by the name of “suchness.” It is unrepresentable in purely discursive terms, since any conceptual or propositional description of it would unwittingly and inevitably fall back into the trap of the “object logic.”
For us to access phenomena or entities in their suchness, we require a non-objectifying gaze. To illustrate what that gaze is like, Nishitani approvingly quotes an example from Dostoevsky:
As Dostoevsky himself tells us, [the Kirghiz steppes] is the only spot at which he saw “God’s world, a pure and bright horizon, the free desert steppes”; in casting his gaze across the immense desert space, he found he was able to forget his “wretched self.” (Nishitani, 1983: p. 8)
But for such commonplace things to become the focus of so intense a concentration, to capture one’s attention to that almost abnormal degree, is by no means an everyday occurrence.… [T]hings that we are accustomed to speak of as real forced their reality upon him in a completely different dimension. (Nishitani, 1983: p. 8)
Once we succeed in enacting a non-objectifying gaze, the experience strikes us as not only bewildering or even terrifying, but also as intensely alive and vital. When the world around us manifests itself as “more real than real,” then we see all things around us in their “suchness.” They simply are, in such a way, and with such a force and vivacity, that transcends the objectifying mundanity of everyday life. Every object is seen in a new light, thereby uncovering an entirely different qualitative level of perception and experience. Dostoevsky describes how in such experiences, even the smallest things reflect eternity: the cry of a baby, the rising sun on a leaf, the colours of a butterfly’s wing…. All these things communicate “a mystical order that rules over all things, so that God can be seen in any of them” (Nishitani, 1983: p. 9).The topos of God is everywhere, spatial infinity and temporal eternity both immanently reflected in a drop of water.
We find similar conceptions of the immanent infinity and eternity of the world in the work of Eastern Orthodox theologians. For instance, Symeon the New Theologian stressed that “the Kingdom of Heaven” is not a future world unreachably located in the afterlife, but instead a state of affairs that is fully attainable here on Earth (Meyendorff 1983: 75). Symeon describes his conversion as “being pulled suddenly out of the mud and being shown the beatitude of the Kingdom.” Elsewhere, he argues that the idea of resurrection is the idea of being brought to life again in a new mode of being (Meyendorff, 1983: p. 75).
In the so-called “Hesychast controversy,” we find variations on the same thought. The Eastern theologian Gregory Palamas held that God could be directly experienced once one practiced a psychosomatic method of meditative prayer, called Hesychasm. By praying intensely in the prescribed way, the soul achieved attentiveness (prosōche), and thereby opened up to receive God in a direct experience (Meyendorff, 1983: p. 76). Palamas held that God’s essence is inaccessible to us, but that nevertheless humankind could still participate in the divine energy: a sort of life-giving principle that seems not far removed from the infinity and eternity reflected in a drop of water that Dostoevsky ecstatically perceived.
Both Symeon and Gregory Palamas speak in terms of “participating” in God. Essentially, the entire creation is suffused with God Himself, although grasping His essence intellectually is out of the question. So, on the one hand, God is immanent throughout His creation, but simultaneously, He transcends all preconceived forms of knowledge or philosophical categories. The way to get access to God is therefore non-discursive, and therefore fully engaged. We must participate in God because that is the only possible and meaningful way of somehow getting access to Him. And since God is spatially and temporally omnipresent—i.e., present throughout His creation, as Palamas says—we cannot help but participate in God. But simultaneously, God is discursively unknowable, and even our capacity for experience seemingly falls short of fully comprehending Him.
Here, the philosophy of The Kyoto School touches on the core teaching of apophatic theology, according to which the divine as such is unknowable. Yet, in order to experience the divine, attentiveness or concentration (called either prosōche or samāhdi) is required in order to activate what Palamas calls the “noetic light.” We have the “natural light” (for the Empiricists) of our senses and (for the Rationalists) of our reason, but Palamas holds that there is a level of human experience that radically surpasses these capacities. In this passage he describes it as follows:
Saint Nilus teaches us that most of these [illuminations] are symbols of this [noetic] illumination, saying: when the noûs has put off the old self and shall put on the new one, born of grace, then it will see its own state in the time of prayer resembling sapphire or the colour of heaven; Scripture calls this “the place of God” that the elders saw on Mount Sinai. In the same way, we hear Saint Isaac say to us: the noûs, when grace acts on it, sees its own purity in prayer, like the celestial colour which the community of Israel called the Place of God when it appeared to them on the mountain. (Amis, 2016: pp. 66-67)
Like Eckhart, Palamas conceives of noetic illumination as “the place of God,” as an entrance into the sphere where the divine resides. But, as we have seen, this place is not some transcendent place or afterlife, but instead the very same manifestly real world that we inhabit and that we have to learn to appreciate anew. Our sense of creative piety encounters its own purity through an act that we can only describe as “grace,” since we lack the concepts to express it adequately and fully.
In such experiences, Being itself manifests some portion of its nature to us in a way that is beyond the objectifying gaze. Objects and entities do not merely subsist or retain their composure in the boring, grey, and dull order of modern life, but instead their Being becomes active: all of a sudden, we vividly see why “to be” is a transitive verb that transcends the definition of merely existing over prolonged periods of time. Again, this thought surfaces in Eastern Christian theology as the concept of a dynamic interaction between the Creator and the created. The world is not an “ontologically autonomous” object that God has made, rather it is always already an active participant in the divine force that gives it vibrance, vividness and life (Meyendorff, 1983: pp. 130–134).
At the same time, the other side of Being enters the scene. If Being is one side of the coin, then Absolute Nothingness is the other. And in the experience that Dostoevsky describes, we suddenly see how everything is essentially shot through with Nothingness. This is why there is something mystical about the experience: time in its usual sense of temporal succession seems to fall away, and the “suchness” of what we see becomes manifest and overpowering in a scene that seems slowed down and suffused with a curious stillness. But in this perspectival shift, we perceive an order—both Eckhart and Dostoevsky mention it—that cannot be represented by discursive reason and propositional language. It can be aesthetically apprehended, or it can be felt as an emotion that surpasses all propositional linguistic expression, but it exceeds by far the descriptive potential of the conceptual. And, if one follows either Buddhism or Eastern Orthodoxy, one requires a radically new point of view (called sunyāta) or capacity (called noetic light) in order to experience it.
Therefore, we must investigate a particular feature of Nothingness. We cannot treat Nothingness as if it were “a something.” We cannot think of it as an object with properties. Doing so would amount to turning Nothingness into “a something.” So, by whatever means we use to represent Nothingness in a conceptual, discursive, or propositional way, we always thereby pull it in the realm of Being. Again, in Nishida’s terms: we cannot utilize an “object logic” in order to think about Nothingness, or rather in order to experience it. At this very point, we run directly into a related Kantian theme: if we contrast the various kinds of cognitive attitudes that Kant discusses in the third Critique, we notice that aesthetic or artistic attitudes grant us access to a territory that is closed off to the theoretical or scientific mindset.
The aesthetic or artistic attitude relies on a sensitivity and openness that expands well beyond the confines of the theoretical or scientific mind. The 18th and 19th centuries’ fascination with the sublime finds its roots here: one may apprehend something beyond the horizon of facts or states of affairs, but one cannot grasp it in the usual manner that is supported by theoretical reason. This unnerving quality prompted Burke quite early on to attribute the attitude of horror to the sublime. This realization was worked out in Romantic art but received its full existential impact only in the thought of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Kafka. In Schopenhauer, it gives rise to the demonic dimension of metaphysics: the blind, ceaseless Will that is always striving to objectivate itself, yet is insatiable. In Kierkegaard, this demonic dimension takes on a religious hue: the leap of faith is the confrontation with an abyss, as we already find it Goethe’s Sonnette:
Dämonisch aber stürtzt mit einem Male
Ihr folgen Berg und Wald im Wirbelwinden
Sich Oreas, Behagen dort zu finden
Und hemmt den Lauf, begrenzt die weite Schale.
(Goethe, 2019: p. 195)
Here, Nothingness confronts us with an abyss that exists as such, but that extends well beyond any propositionally structured language or experience we usually utilize to speak about Being, objects, or emotions.
In the strictly logical sense, I use the term Nothingness to denote the opposite of Being. We can represent that type of Nothingness by utilizing our everyday theoretical attitude and its associated concepts and language. And even so, we can grasp Nothingness only in a negative way, as a contrastive phenomenon as opposed to Being. But simultaneously, we cannot grasp Nothingness by using a theoretical attitude, because there is simply nothing to grasp. If there were, it would not be talking about Nothingness, but about “a something.” And that “something” would fail to be Nothingness, simply by virtue of being located in the realm of objects.
Correspondingly, Absolute Nothingness is not the opposite of Being: rather, it is that abyss which is as real as Being, but which cannot be represented in terms that have to do with theoretical reason, sense perception in the propositional sense, or object logic. It is the non-ground from which everything issues forth, but which—and this the main point—is therefore always at the very ground of all the things that issue forth. We can see this clearly in the example of personhood that Nishitani utilizes in his seminal work Religion and Nothingness (Nishitani, 1983).
For Nishitani, the notion of person is closely associated with the notion of a mask, as per the Greek word persona. However, where we usually think of the mask as something that hides the real person, Nishitani claims that
(i) the mask is a front for Nothingness itself—there is nothing behind the mask, and
(ii) the mask and Nothingness are actually one and the same entity. (Nishitani, 1983: 94)
For many or even most contemporary philosophers, these statements will seem unsound at best and nonsensical at worst. They do not make sense in terms of logic and theoretical reason. But if we remember the experience described by Dostoevsky, or Gregory Palamas’s observation that God is beyond all knowing, Nishitani’s thinking is not so very strange after all. We use the term “person” to think about ourselves and others by using an objectifying gaze. Or we think about “the self from within the confines of the self” (Nishitani, 1983: p. 95). In other words, we turn the self into an object among objects, and thereby we already foreclose the possibility of regarding ourselves with the non-objectifying gaze that Dostoevsky so movingly describes. Thus our self-presentation takes place either on “the field of the senses” or “the field of reason”: that is, is guided either by sensibility or by reason. There is in principle nothing wrong with thinking in this way, but it cannot provide answers to our most pressing questions, and in particular those that relate to our own subjectivity and to our capacity for creative piety.
To see with creative piety is to see in the way that Dostoevsky, Palamas, and Nishitani describe. It is to see the eternal in the temporal; to see all things as part of a large, encompassing whole. It is at this point that our unique subjectivity as such begins: it bursts forth from the realization that Absolute Nothingness underlies Being. And consequently, set off against this seemingly bleak background, Being itself receives its intense vitality, its sense of being truly alive. In its very finitude, it burns more intensely than ever. Again, we find accounts of this reversal throughout the Christian tradition, in particular in the Medieval mystics, who must have been greatly puzzled by it. It is also from this realization—that Absolute Nothingness lies at the heart of Being—that the classical recommendation memento mori (“remember your death”) derives. Only in the realization of our finitude and fragility, can the perspectival shift towards creative piety (and moral or religious piety) take place. It is for this reason the one of the prayers of John Chrysostom reads: “give me tears and remembrance of death.” This prayer is not meant to request sorrow and pessimism, but instead to come to terms with our finitude by placing it Nothingness at the heart of our very lives, instead of trying to push it to the cognitive periphery, from where it inevitably returns as nihilism, the attitude or doctrine according to which there is no meaning, purpose, or value in our lives or in the world. But remembering and living our finitude engenders a new set of habits, namely, the willingness to give life up, instead of clasping it in a clenched fist. And at the moment of letting go, of overcoming one’s immediate desires, we become truly pious and religious:
The resignation of the religious stage is exactly this: the awareness that you will lose everything and the willingness to give up everything here and now – because you will regain everything. Not in the future, in the hereafter, but in the here and now, in your own self. (Gerber, 2021)
The resignation and detachment of the religious mindset have nothing to do with defeatism and quietism: they are intensely vital and vivid, and related to living life to the fullest, just as the Sakura flower is at its most beautiful when decay has just set in.
So far, I have discussed how nihilism in either its Existentialist or relativist variety deals with the heaviness or apparent futility of Being as such. I have also discussed how, by sharp contrast to that, detachment is required to regain one’s equilibrium from the paralyzing influence of nihilism. Once the new quality of stillness is allowed to grow, one can begin to use one’s existential agency: the core of one’s being. However, this initial step of detachment is not enough. We saw that we must perceive all things as shot through with Nothingness, and that only against this background can we truly experience the self. Once we accomplish this, we can see ourselves to be the agents that we are. But at the same time, a reversal or Gestalt switch takes place: when we see Being as suffused with Nothingness, then our acceptance of our own finitude enables us to see the world with new eyes.
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