r0b’s Reviews > Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School > Status Update

‘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.’

‘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.