The Self-Overcoming Of Nihilism (Keiji Nishitani, 1990)

If you have ever been interested in researching Japanese philosophy, chances are you have probably skipped through many ''orientalist'', easy-peasy books on the subject and ended up reading either some popular Japanese writers such as D.T.Suzuki or Buddhist Americans such as Alan Watts. People who go on into reading actual modern Japanese philosophy such as the exemplified by the Kyoto School are far, far fewer in number and usually academic types with big glasses and a constant migraine. And people fully breaking into the subject of Japanese political philosophy or its conervailing authors are the finest slice of the pie. This book, edited by Graham Parker and Setsuko Aihara, belongs to the second category. It was published in USA around the nineties, even though its source material comes from diverse lectures and seminaries by prominent philosopher and academic Keiji Nishitani [治谷 啓治] (1900-1990), from 1949 and onwards. He himself was part of the so-called Kyoto School; early 20th century philosophers who happened to be working in the same universities at the time and who did not call themselves by that name. The only glue who ended up grouping them together was the strong metaphysical concern with the notion of 無 [Nothingness], and a certain debt [either strong or tenuous] with the seminal figure of Nishida Kitarō [西田 幾多郎], (1870-1945) and his lifetime work on the subject.

Generally deemed as the ''first original modern philosopher of the East'' (something highly subjective), Nishida was for sure among the first avid readers of western philosophy who got to create a syncretic system of thought after pondering both the Buddhist heritage of Japanese traditional thought (since the Shintō tradition lacked vocabulary abstract enough for philosophy, borrowing it from Buddhism instead) and the various modern philosophies from overseas, which he also helped translating. But every philosopher has his bent, and Nishida was a metaphysician, eminently so. Thus, the other two big names among the Kyoto School, Keiji Nishitani and Hajime Tanabe, were also metaphysicians. Their styles are quite apart, and absolutely personal. Nishida, perhaps the most humane and likable among them biographically, is for the most part cerebral, dry and Hegelian in his writing; Nishitani kind of fucked up politically but his writing is clean, engaging and beautiful; Tanabe was as an empty vessel as Plotinus, and his work is self-deprecating and repetitive. All of them acquainted themselves with the different european traditions they perceived as more in contact with themselves; Nishida is very eclectic and borrows from Bergson, Hegel, Plato, Spinoza, Nagarjuna and even authors from the field of mathematics such as Poincaré; Nishitani mostly stays in topic with Nietzsche, Heidegger and the many authors from the Buddhist tradition; Tanabe goes full Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Buddha, also quoting many among the European mystic tradition.

Nishitani, as expected from a generation embroidered in wartime and Buddhist metaphysics, and quoting what Terence McKenna said of Samuel Beckett, ''was not exactly laughing all the time''. Obessed since high school with the problem of death, and reading the romantic literature of the time, such as that of Soseki's, Nishitani's encounter with Nietzsche's Zarathustra took him away from his intention of becoming a Zen monk and into studying philosophy. Thus, he was perfectly adecuate to become Japan's most prominent intellectual in the field of nihilism (reflecting on it way more than Nishida) via these diverse lectures and conversations which later went on to be published under the rubric of ニヒリズム [''nihilism'' in katakana]. This was a major milestone on both Nishitani's lifelong work but also in Japanese philosophy. For Nishitani, it not only made of him the author who best synthesized the issue (and I'd argue this book is in fact the best ever on its subject) but also paved the way for his major work, 宗教とは何か ["What is religion?" in Japanese, translated as ''Religion and Nothingness''], published in 1961. On it he deeply explores the relationship between the Buddhist notion of nothingness and that of the various nihilist philosophies from the West, rising against the dying background of its Christian tradicional background, a process fully inevitable now. For Japan, ニヒリズム presented a clean, ordered and academic exposition of the western tradition of nihilism for the public; while many other authors from the Meiji period had already read Nietzsche and in fact made of him a personal reference (such as Sakae Ōsugi himself), Nishitani came to be known as an expert and published about him on a time during which most Japanese people were more receptive to his ideas, around the 1950s. Without the previous press censorship, and once the jingoistic kokutai ideology [國體] fostered by the State was in tatters after the defeat, nihilism and existentialism came to be not only experienced but read about. This of course would have big implications for the following generation, the 60's and their relentless idealism.

As a young man, I used to carry Thus Spoke Zarathustra around with me wherever I went. It was like my Bible. (...)  among things Japanese I liked best Netsume Sosdeki and books like the buddhist talks of Hakuin and Takuan. Through all these many interests, one fundamental concern was constantly at work, I think... In the center of that whirlpool lurked a doubt about the very existence of the self. something like the Buddhist ''Great Doubt''. So it was that I soon started paying attention to Zen

Among the many reasons this book is an excellent crash course on nihilist philosophies, is the very fact that Nishitani himself was personally affected by it that makes him such a good voice on this. When he was fourteen his own father died of tuberculosis, an illness which afflicted him for a long time and had him sent to cold Hokkaidō to be cured; exiled, alone and incapable of joining a university, he later recollected: ''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''. The long time of isolation, coupled with a taste for sentimental literature (and not scientific publishing, the kind of learning Nishida had drown himself into) and ascetic Buddhist reflection, gave Nishitani a measured and elegant style, for a phenomenon quite new in Japanese life, as Graham states in the prelude:

Things in nature are what they are, and do what they do ''without why'' (...) in the realm of natural phenomena, in the midst of the grand cycles of nature, nihilism is not even possible, let alone actual (...) In a city where such a huge population does so much -and so much moving- in the course of a day, and in an environment so distanced from the natural, nihilistic moods are more likely to arise (...) In the ineluctable awareness of the active presence of multitudes of one's fellow human beings devoting their energies toward work and recreation -both as means to survival and distraction- the question of the point of it all is more apt to arise with some force.

Nishitani's analysis of Western nihilism is vastly improved by his deep knowledge of the Buddhist tradition, also deeply rooted on a mistrustboth of both the permanent existence of eternal subtances and the existence of the Ego. For one direct assumption by poor readers of Nietzsche is that his rejection of the metaphysical entails a glorifying of the psychological ''me'' and its desires; this also happens to bad readers of Stirner and his ''egoism''. Nishitani masterfully explains Nietzsche down to his most fundamental standpoint, in which the personal ego is itself dissolved in the body itself and its fundamentally a-rational ground; where fixed personality is itself revealed as an arbitraty generalization from tiny, contradictory, striving bits of lived experience, each one of them as absolute as many others. As he said in the aforementioned quote, both nihilism and Buddhism hold hands on an absolute critique of the self, of personality and eternal essence.

While the first half of the entire work consists on a detailed analysis of Nietzsche's thought, it also includes Bauer, Fehuerbach, Schopenhauer, Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. The next important section deals with Stirner alone, ''Nihilism as Egoism'', comprising his political and philosophical works swiftly and masterfully. The next section goes at large about ''Nihilism in Russia'', with Turgenev and Dostoevsky as prominent figures. Here Nishitani, a well reader of Dostoevsky, is nevertheless skewed towards a literary analysis of nihilism in Russia, leaving behind its vast political and social implications. And this is a quite trademark among the various philosophers of the Kyoto School: they just won't deal with the political and usually prefer a fully metaphysical takedown of, as an example, Marx himself  (on grounds of his limited understanding of human nature and its inner universe) rather than addressing his political or economic philosophy. Since the topic at hand is nihilism as such it can be forgiven; but the next author on the list is Heidegger himself, his section being entitled ''Nihilism as Philosophy''. While it constitutes an excellent analysis of the heideggerian standpoint, it could be perceived as problematic; Nishitani's lectures date back from 1950, a decade during which Heidegger recluded himself in the woods and did not renounce his Nazi party membership card. At the time Nishitani's job at the academy had also been frozen by the American administration due to his former participation in the infamous Chūōkōron conference [中央公論], during which he justified Japanese expansionism on grounds of historical necessity and political righteousness, also using some race-charged words (something you have to go around and about to do in Japanese, which does not have abvious, ''easy'' terms to do it unlike most languages]. He also got to visit Heidegger and study with him in Germany, given the fact that Henri Bergson (Nishida's recommendation) was sick at the time. Therefore, the lack of political commentary on Heidegger's philosophy should not be that surprising, since he himself was under sctrutiny on similar grounds, and a personal admiration erased his critiques of Heidegger himself; eventually, Nishitani was able to return to his teaching duties at Kyoto University.

All in all, and ignoring what it does-not-adress, this is a fundamental volume on its subject of inquiry, and one every philosophy student or nihilism-afflicted soul should read at some point in my opinion. Its title alone, ''The Self-Overcoming Of Nihilism'' not only addresses the different strategies adopted by the various historical figures themselves, but also the inner logic of nihilism as such, and its psychological necessity of a breaking point by means of its own logic. Whether it takes the form of an absolute distancing oneself from discourse and reason, recessing to an aesthetic contemplation such as that of Buddhism or Daoism, or the active creation of new provisional values in the face of the falsehood of all earthly authority and order (and here Nishitani brings to mind some mischievous Zen masters), the resolution of nihilism and the means to effectively achieve it are only contained in nihilism itself. Thus the necessity of having it, as Nietzsche states, ''behind onself, beneath oneself, outside of oneself''