Status Updates From Japanese and Continental Ph...

Heidegger’s “conversation on a country path” in which a scientist, a scholar, and a guide converse their way down a path toward “releasement” as the authentic way of being human; and ... the classic Zen text, The Ten Ox-herding Pictures, which illustrates and comments on a search for the elusive “Ox” that represents one’s true self or “Buddha nature”—a provisional image which is itself cast aside along the path...

On Theology, Being, Ground: “The Christian philosopher Jean-Luc Marion and the Buddhist philosopher Nishida, as vast as their diferences may be, both have proposed alternatives to thinking of God in terms of being, and being in terms of ground.”

TOC if anybody is curious about this:

[Ueda’s self] exists in “twofold being-in-the-world.” ... the self exists simultaneously in a concrete, contingent place, as well as in the “infnite openness of Nothingness,” Ueda’s phenomenology of the self is both a phenomenology of the life-world and paradoxically a phenomenology of “that which does not appear”—namely, the all-embracing place of emptiness or absolute nothingness.

... Nishitani’s project of “overcoming nihilism by way of passing through nihilism,” ... Whereas Nietzsche primarily sought to affirm the ubiquity of the will to power after the death of God, Nishitani claims that Zen’s “Great Death” takes one beyond all standpoints of will to a rebirth of non-egoistic freedom and compassion.

‘Aesthetic sensibility knows that la part maudite is also a worthy object.’

‘Meaning is the ineluctable diminution of pure experience.’

‘Pure experience is not an experience of something. It is not intentional in structure. Rather, it is the undivided continuum, the plenitude of the Good. From the beginning, Nishida links pure experience to Schelling’s intellectual intuition: “there is no distinction between the subject and object in any state of direct experience-one encounters reality face to face”’

‘Elsewhere, Nishida insisted that the starting point of Greek thinking was Being, while Japanese thinking proceeds from nothingness (mu)’

...and hearing the sound of the soundless. Our minds are compelled to seek for this.”

From Nishida’s 1927 work, From the Actor to the Seer:
“It goes without saying that there are things to be esteemed and learned from in the brilliant development of Western culture, which regards form (eidos) as being and formation as the good. However, at the basis of Asian culture, which has fostered our ancestors for over several thousand years, lies something that can be called seeing the form of the formless...

‘The stones are silence expressing itself from itself.’

‘Schopenhauer’s embrace of “Buddhism” as a tonic to the agony of the will is in large part a figment of his own projection....
Graham Parkes also rightly argues that Nietzsche had no inkling of Zen, which he would have found “much to his own taste”.

‘And: “Ironically, it was not in his nihilistic view of Buddhism but in such ideas as amor fati and the Dionysian as the overcoming of nihilism that Nietzsche came closest to Buddhism, especially to Mahayana.”

‘’As Nishida’s student Nishitani Keiji argued in his early study of nihilism: “Even though there may be in Nietzsche a radical misunderstanding of the spirit of Buddhism, the fact that he considered it in in relation to nihilism shows how well attuned he was to the real issue.”

‘...one could say that “Buddhism”, either in its decadent metaphysical exhaustion or its current New Age practices of relaxation and the auto-obfuscation of reason, speaks as perceptively of the Buddhadharma as japonisme speaks of the roots and soil of Japanese art.’

Nice.

‘Hegel is the first thinker to philosophically realize the death of God and, depending on one’s interpretation, he consequently advances either a pantheistic or atheistic perspective.’

‘Derrida’s critique of giving, and his attempted rescue of the gift from the circle of exchange by proclaiming its givenness to be impossible, alike presuppose an ontology of radically independent beings....
Buddhist ontology proposes that no beings are self-sufficient in any way; all are interdependent and co-arise....”Dana means simultaneously giving and receiving”’

‘Movement is our immortality, and our redemption is diving into the Dionysian flow of Being and making it our home-this is the floating and mutually influencing home-ground of all beings.’

‘Nietzsche and Nishitani challenge us not to just focus on the elements of the world themselves such as plants, animals, rocks, soils and water as if they are somehow out there, but rather to assemble ourselves within the matrix of multitudinous relationships created by those plants, animals, rocks, soils, and water.’

Quoting Gadamer:
“Hegel’s dialectic is a monologue.”

So awesome