Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious Worldview

by Kitarō Nishida

Nishida Kitarô, Japan's premier modern philosopher, was born in 1870 and grew to intellectual maturity in the final decades of the Meiji period (1868–1912). He achieved recognition as Japan's leading establishment philosopher during his tenure as professor of philosophy at Kyoto University. After his retirement in 1927, and until his death in 1945, Nishida published a continuous stream of original essays that can best be described as intercivilizational, a meeting point of East and West.

His final essay, "The Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview," completed in the last few months before his death, is a summation of his philosophy of religion and has come to be regarded as the foundational text of the Kyoto school. It is one of the few places in his writings where Nishida draws openly and freely on East Asian Buddhist sources as analogs of his own ideas.

Here Nishida argues for the existential primordiality of the religious consciousness against Kant, while also critically engaging the thought of such authors as Aristotle, the Christian Neo-Platonists, Spinoza, Fichte, Hegel, Barth, and Tillich. He makes it clear that he is also indebted to Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Dostoievsky as well as to Nâgârjuna, the Ch'an masters, Shinran, Dôgen, and other Buddhist thinkers. This book--a translation of the most seminal work of Nishida's career--also includes a translation of his "Last Writing" (Zeppitsu), written just two days before his death.

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, Zen, Buddhism, Theology, Japanese Literature, Japan

160 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1993

Reviews

[Floris Meertens]

Als iemand me dit zou kunnen uitleggen zou ik erg blij zijn, want het klinkt briljant maar ik durf niet te zeggen dat ik ook maar 5% van heb begrepen.

[Frank R. · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is my first and last foray into Nishida Kitaro. If I am wrong in my assessment of his writings here, please enlighten me. I treat his statements as I understand them in context of Buddhist and western philosophical traditions and western theologies. I understand that he is answering Kant in his “Nothingness and the Religious Worldview,” but I am looking at this from the standpoint of gleaning a perspective on what he claims to be addressing in his title. Without further ado, here I go with a meager contribution to the dialogue of this book.

My first impression was, I swear, I’m reading Buber when he describes the relational aspect of self-consciousness as it develops in reciprocity with others (I and Thou). My B*llshit-o-meter began to ping as well and I have the feeling that this is sophistry to the highest level that it can possibly go.

Let me show you a bit of what I mean,

“The self-conscious world of each individual human self is a self-determining monadic world; but as such, each self is a self-expression of the historical world. Therefore each self-conscious world is a momentary vector of historical world-space…” (58-59).

Is he not simply saying that the self is akin to Cooley’s “Looking Glass Self” (created by others/society) and though we experience it as our own, it is contrived from the larger socio-historical context in which we’ve been socialized? If so, I’ll stick to social sciences for explanations of the origins of the self. This is nearly mystical and too convoluted for me.

“…the self is to be understood as existing in that dynamic dimension wherein each existential act of consciousness, as a self-expressive determination of the world, simultaneously reflects the world’s self-expression within itself and forms itself through its own self-expression” (64).

Okay…we are reflections of the world’s consciousness because it has made us, through our groups, self-conscious/self-expressive and this monadic ability to be cognitive and self-aware then creates the world (through our acting and speaking and participating in it) which is then reflected back onto us as an image of a world that we created, and this is the self in an unending relational loop of interdependence?

This sounds very Buddhist to me (Law of Dependent Origination) but also a bit of Subjective Idealism… Yogacara meets Berkeley?

He assumes as well that all life contains “self-negation” (life leads to death therefore it is self-negating) and this becomes a major, redundant theme for him. Though, in the unity of interdependent states objects, life is death is life. Therefore, self-negation is an illusion; one cannot negate that which is already negated by its existence as Empty according to Madhyamaka’s Shunyata concept.

I was perplexed by his foray into de-ontology and Nothingness that leads back to Essentialism and the survival of consciousness post-mortem. Unless I’m reading this wrong, I really think he is combining eastern and western systems into incoherence here. His philosophy is syncretic, or at least unbounded and layered with no sense of dissonance allowed (ala Bakhtin);

“When I realize my own eternal death, my eternal nothingness, I become truly self-conscious. I become aware that my very existence is an absolute contradiction. When I become aware of my own eternal nothingness I do not simply make a cognitive judgement. I am simultaneously aware of a deeper subjectivity behind judgement that in some sense transcends death and participates in eternal life. And yet, if I were a being who merely transcended death I would not even be alive” (67-68).

So, Atman-Brahman connection here? Our consciousness pointing to a greater Consciousness (witness consciousness that is the One) or just, no, because if we transcended death, why would we be alive?? I cannot fathom where he’s going here or what he holds to be true.

He then moves to this; “When a relative being faces the true absolute or cannot exist. It must pass over into nothing. The living self….encounters the divine, only through dying”(68). What?! Why the turn into theology?! This reminded me of Exodus 33:20 where Yahweh says none have seen his face and lived. What is going on here? Is he weaving in biblical references? If we’re playing in the realm of theology now and not philosophy, then anything goes. What of his Buddhist experience? Surely, the Buddha’s Sopadhisesa-Nirvana (Nirvana with remainder) which he achieved and lived through in his body to teach of for decades prior to his Mahaparinirvana, stands as another religious example of touching the absolute and living (as a jivanmukti). And what of mystical experience? Moses and the burning bush and seeing God’s back? Of experiencing Jesus (He who has seen the father has seen me, etc)? Kitaro seems to be making his own absolutes here.

When I got to “…to know of one’s own death is to transcend death; and yet a being that merely transcends death is not a living being. To know of one’s own death is already to exist while being nothing. To exist while being absolutely nothing is the ultimate self-contradiction. Yet the true self-consciousness of the self exists therein,” I started to tire of this de-ontological Madhyamaka-informed, Christian-influenced menagerie of theology (not philosophy) (78).

I quit after this set of statements; “…the self exists in that it knows of its own death…one who dies enters into eternal nothingness. Once he dies, a person is eternally dead. The individual never returns…And yet, something that is merely birth and death endlessly transmigrates through the rounds of birth and death…eternal life is gained at the point where birth and death (samsara) and no-birth and no-death (nirvana) are realized as one”(87). I tire of Buddhist “A is not A and therefore it is A” logic being written about as though it were factual and self-evident. Shunyata and eternal life, the eternal self as Nothingness; it all seems to me to be the essentializing of Shunyata, something that occurs in Tibetan Buddhism known as “Shentong.” It seems to me that Kitaro is exploring this positive, substantial, ontological reality of Emptiness as Substance existent in Shentong when he stirs all of these philosophical traditions and views into an attempt at a cohesive ideology.

Oy vey, someone help me out from the mire of Nothingness that is Something which points to Nothing that is eternal! :)

[Esther · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very hard one to rate. It is, on the one hand, one of the most fascinating and provocative studies of religious metaphysics I have ever encounter and draws from so many disparate sources that it could almost be considered a Summa on the subject. And yet the edge of Nishida’s conclusions are dulled by his repeating them ad nauseum along with the same few quotes. Brilliant yet bloated, even for an essay this comparatively brief. The introduction and afterword are first rate though, and were invaluable to my comprehension of Nishida’s text.

[Sarsha Geo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I majored in Nishida Philosophy in University.Because I wanted to know about Japanese identity.
I seeked for the philosophy,for Japanese by Japanese.I found his pholosophy and also his students were really excellent.They wrote many books and they are so excellent.

[William Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is difficult to describe nothing. Its relationship to something is even more difficult, especially if you are a person, which is something, but also nothing. You must already know something about nothing before reading this book. Otherwise, it will read merely as riddles. I’ve been working on nothing for years and still I struggle to find language for it.
This volume helps considerably even if you can’t get to the bottom of it because Nishida makes numerous comparisons and contrasts to related ideas from Heidegger, Kant, the Bible, the analytic philosophy tradition, and Zen. If you know something about those, you can sort of triangulate his meaning.
I can’t say I fully understood the book but that doesn’t stop me from having criticisms. The first is the main thesis that understanding nothingness is intrinsically a religious undertaking. Nishida doesn’t justify that except to emphasize that accommodating nothing is not a rational exercise. That’s true, and perhaps he thinks religious intuition is the only alternative. I’m not so sure about that. I’m not even sure what he means by religion. I would like to find language to describe nothing and its immanence in selfhood that does not explicitly invoke religion and all its accompanying baggage filled with unexamined assumptions.
Secondly, I find Nishida’s conceptualization of ultimate reality, the contradictory unity of nothing and something, unnecessarily complex and even self-refuting. Even if it happens to be right, he cannot say so. The relationship between nothing and something is asymmetrical, from our point of view (the only one we have—we do not have a God’s-eye view). Discourse (any intersubjectivity) occurs on the something side. Nothing says nothing. For Nishida to assert that all reality is a compound of something and nothing leaves him out of his own formula, a rhetorical error at least. The story of nothing can only be told from the something side, a fact the New Testament expresses very well.
Finally, I either didn’t understand, or simply disagree with the idea that God must exercise self-negation to actualize the multitude of life. That seems an unwarranted anthropomorphic personalization of God. It’s true that we must exercise self-negation to access God, but the relationship need not be reciprocal.
Also negation itself is a difficult idea. It’s not wrong, but in English it carries confusing connotations. The process of confronting nothing has a phenomenology like surrender, of yielding oneself rather than intentionally negating oneself. If Nishida meant a purely logical negation, that doesn’t quite work either, because his discussion is not framed in mathematical-logical format. The choice of terms could be a translation issue, but it caused hitches in my thinking.
Overall, this is a profoundly thoughtful book worthy of multiple re-readings.
The introduction by translator David Dilworth is helpful but I recommend reading it last. Start with Nishida’s own voice then go back for help interpreting.

Nishida, K. (1949/1987). Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious View. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 155 pp.

[Sreena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Embrace the infinite possibilities that lie within the realm of nothingness.

Best Part Of The Book
Nishida's ability to seamlessly blend Eastern and Western philosophies. He effortlessly draws from Zen Buddhism, Daoism, and the works of Western philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, creating a harmonious bridge between different intellectual traditions. In doing so, Nishida invites us to transcend cultural boundaries and embrace a holistic understanding of the human experience.

"When we face nothingness, we come face to face with our own essence."

A profound statement encapsulates Nishida's exploration of nothingness as a gateway to self-discovery and transcendence. It reminds us that by embracing the void, we can strip away the layers of societal conditioning and connect with the fundamental truths that lie within us.

[Michael M · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did not read the parts that were not written by Nishida.

The essay in this book, "Nothingness and the Religious Worldview," is nothing short of a masterpiece. It is exactly what the West is missing today in its understanding of God and ultimately, reality. The translation is easy to follow (for those of a philosophical bent), however, I do have an understanding of Japanese so some interesting sentence structure was simple for me to understand.

Read this if you are working on any concept of a metaphysic of non-being and have Christian / Buddhist influences.

[Finlay · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.4 - Incredibly historically important piece, represents the foundation of Japanese philosophy as we know it now. Yet the writing style felt akin to kant or nietzche in that concepts were unnecessarily convoluted. It was also raw and unrefined, useful to understand the thought process of Nishida himself, but difficult to read as a philosophical framework.