Keiji Nishitani

Keiji Nishitani
西谷 啓治
Born	(1900-02-27)February 27, 1900 Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan
Died	November 24, 1990(1990-11-24) (aged 90) Kyoto, Japan
Education
Education	Kyoto Imperial University
Philosophical work
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Japanese philosophy Buddhist philosophy
School	Kyoto School
Institutions	Kyoto Imperial University
Main interests	Philosophy of religion, nihilism, nothingness, emptiness, mysticism
Notable works	Religion and Nothingness

Keiji Nishitani (西谷 啓治, Nishitani Keiji; February 27, 1900 – November 24, 1990) was a Japanese philosopher. He was a scholar of the Kyoto School and a disciple of Kitarō Nishida. In 1924, Nishitani received his doctorate from Kyoto Imperial University for his dissertation "Das Ideale und das Reale bei Schelling und Bergson". He studied under Martin Heidegger in Freiburg from 1937 to 1939.

Biography

Nishitani was born 1900 in a small town in the Ishikawa prefecture. He was fourteen years old when his father died of tuberculosis, a disease he suffered from too as a child. Nishitani received most of his schooling in Tôkyô where he lived with his mother after his father's death. He did not pass the physical examination of the prestigious Daiichi High School and waited another year to attempt to enroll after recovering that year in Hokkaidô. That year he indulged in the works of Natsume Sôseki. His works inspired some of Nishitani's interest in Zen.

In a memoir he writes that he was afflicted by great suffering after the loss of his father. Facing this despair, he decided to take up the study of philosophy. He writes:

My life as a young man can be described in a single phrase: it was a period absolutely without hope... My life at the time lay entirely in the grips of nihility and despair... My decision then, to study philosophy was in fact – melodramatic as it might sound – a matter of life and death.

In his highschool period he became interested in Zen and especially D. T. Suzuki's interpretation of Zen Buddhism and was less interested in grades. He not only read Japanese works but concerned himself with Western resources. He read works from authors like Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Emerson, Carlyle, Strindberg and was intrigued by works like the Bible and Nishida's "Thought and Experience."

Inspired by Nishida's works, he enrolled into the philosophy department of the Kyoto Imperial University, where he studied under Nishida Kitarō and Tanabe Hajime, both philosophers categorised into the Kyoto School. In comparison to their work, that tended to be more abstract, Nishitani included his own experiences with Zen Buddhism in his work. Another point of distinction is that he did not just use the language of Western philosophy to better articulate his thoughts; he criticised Western ideas from a Buddhist perspective.

After his graduation in 1924 he taught philosophy at local highschools for eight years and assumed a lectureship in the Ôtani University until 1935. In that time he was interested in Schelling and composed a number of works about him and translated two works of Schelling into Japanese.

At the age of 37 he received a scholarship to study under Bergson, but because of Bergson's poor health he was the appointed to go to the University of Freiburg, where he spent two years studying under Heidegger.

Nishitani held the principal Chair of Philosophy and Religion at Kyoto University from 1943 until becoming emeritus in 1964. He then taught philosophy and religion at Ōtani University. At various times Nishitani was a visiting professor in the United States and Europe. His themes of teaching did not differ in the philosophy and religion department, because in Japanese thought these are not easily distinguishable. As years passed he focused more and more on Buddhist themes and rather used Western ideas to elucidate them.

In the years after the Second World War Nishitani's interest with the topic of nihilism coincided with a resurgence of concern in Europe with the very same topic. In 1949 Nishitani discussed the topic of nihilism in a small group and shortly after composed more and more writings about the topic resulting in his book nihirizumu.

According to James Heisig, after being banned from holding any public position by the United States occupation authorities in July 1946, Nishitani refrained from drawing "practical social conscience into philosophical and religious ideas, preferring to think about the insight of the individual rather than the reform of the social order."

In James Heisig's Philosophers of Nothingness Nishitani is quoted as saying "The fundamental problem of my life ... has always been, to put it simply, the overcoming of nihilism through nihilism."

Thought

On Heisig's reading, Nishitani's philosophy had a distinctive religious and subjective bent, drawing Nishitani close to existentialists and mystics, most notably Søren Kierkegaard and Meister Eckhart, rather than to the scholars and theologians who aimed at systematic elaborations of thought. Heisig further argues that Nishitani, "the stylistic superior of Nishida," brought Zen poetry, religion, literature, and philosophy organically together in his work to help lay the difficult foundations for a breaking free of the Japanese language, in a similar way to Blaise Pascal or Friedrich Nietzsche. Heisig argues that, unlike Nishida who had supposedly focused on building a philosophical system and who towards the end of his career began to focus on political philosophy, Nishitani focused on delineating a standpoint "from which he could enlighten a broader range of topics", and wrote more on Buddhist themes towards the end of his career.

Nishitani's thoughts are also shaped by his study of Western philosophy from the perspective of an outsider, being a person who has grown up in Japan. This enabled him to view Western philosophy in a distanced mode with respect to his own culture. In the essay "Philosophy in Contemporary Japan" (1967) he writes:

We Japanese have fallen heir to two completely different cultures [...].This is a great priviledge that Westeners do not share in [...] but at the same time it puts a heavy responsibility on our shoulders: to lay the foundations of thought for a world in the making, for a new world united beyond differences of East and West.

Criticism of Western philosophy

In Nishitani's view most Western philosophy deals superficially with phenomena of consciousness, and thereby fails to comprehend the depth of our interactions with people and things. In Nishitani's thought there are three fields: the Field of Consciousness, the Field of Nihility, and the Field of Emptiness. These fields are always present alongside each other and each deeper field encompasses the one before. The Field of Consciousness is the field we experience the world in our everyday life in, the Field of Nihility the one in which we confront death and the Field of Emptiness the one in which both life and death are integrated. Nishitani's criticism of Western philosophy is that it has always been conducted on the Field of Consciousness, where there is no access to a thing in itself but only a representation of it. This is because we take ourselves as a subject looking upon something as an object in our consciousness. On the Field of Emptiness, that Buddhist practice aims towards, things are encountered on their home-ground.

Furthermore, he sees Kant's thought as emblematic for Western thought and its cultures and civilisations. Kant divides reality into immaterial, invisible, subjective consciousness and material, visible objectivity. This introduces a dualism into the Western thinking, that Nishitani rejects. This dualism is most apparent within Christianity in the ethics of an absolute good and absolute evil, right versus wrong and other sharp distinctions. In Nishitani's Buddhist inspired thinking the concept of dependent arising plays an important part: everything is dependent on countless other causes and conditions.