Overcoming Nihilism

Hello everyone! I’m Stephen West! This is Philosophize This!

So the guy we’re talking about today is aligned with basically everything we’ve been covering on these posts lately to the point it’s almost funny.

He’s a man who was a big fan of Nietzsche’s work. In fact, as the story goes, he used to carry around a copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra with him pretty much everywhere he went in the early stages of his life.

He’s a man who traveled all the way to Germany to study under the professorship of Martin Heidegger during the 1930s.

He’s a man that was the principal chair of philosophy and religion at Kyoto University for more than 20 years— a position where he deeply engaged with the mystical tradition of the west we just talked about with a special focus on the theologian Meister Eckhart.

See, it’s like I planned it or something. The man we’re talking about today is a member of what has now become known as the famous Kyoto School from Japan. He’s a man by the name of Keiji Nishitani.

One of the first questions you might have here is: what is the Kyoto School?

And how a lot of people might answer that question is to say these were eastern thinkers working with western ideas and mixing everything together trying to create something new and exciting.

But a lot of people that are fans of the Kyoto School would hate for it to be described in this way. We’ll talk about why many people think it doesn’t really help anyone to try to break down these thinkers in terms of broad categories like east vs. west.

And in service to that I just want to get right into the meat of something that was near and dear to the heart of Keiji Nishitani— something that fits into this larger conversation we’ve been having about these different gateways into a more immediate connection to being.

I want to talk about nihilism at a different level than we’ve ever gone into before.

And to understand why nihilism was such an important thing to focus on for someone like Nishitani, I think a useful starting point for this is to talk about what it’s like to have a relationship to death as a comparison.

How many people out there reading this have come face to face with death in an ...