Nolan Harris Jr Kyoto School Final Essay Re-do

The first three sections of Keiji Nishitanis first chapter What is Religion?1 concern themselves with Nishitanis discussion of the essence of religion. He approaches his study from the standpoint of the question What is the purpose of religion? and weaves an analysis of religion that ultimately reconceives its purpose, its import, and what he takes to be its deepest significance. Nishitani conducts his examination by reflecting on the nature of religion, which implicates, in his telling, a deeper critique of subjectivity. He will then introduce and build on the Zen notions of the Great Doubt and the Great Death. In this essay, I will explore Nishitanis questions about religion, and examine the assumptions on which Nishitani believes the ordinary notion of religion rests. I will also discuss his treatment of the Zen notions of the Great Doubt and the Great Death as ideas by which Nishitani exhumes the deeper, concealed, nature of religion, reality and the self, which the aforementioned query What is the purpose of religion? (or Should I be religious?) tends to obscure. I. Nishitani begins his discourse on religion by considering a few questions that emerge when considering its nature and purpose: (1) What is religion? (2) What is the purpose of religion for us? (3) Why do we need it? Nishitani thinks the person who poses the third of these queriesWhy do we need religion?is exactly the person for whom religion is a necessity, even against the implication reposing within the question that religion is indeed not a necessity. This is because, Nishitani writes, religion is about life itself (Nishitani, 2). Whereas we can ask, for instance, Why do we need sports? and content ourselves with some account or argument that makes sense of the role athletics play in human endeavor, we can nonetheless, Nishitani argues, get on without sports. That is, if athletic competition had never been developed by humans, life could and would still go on. While we may maintain that in order to live well, humans need the drama, discipline and excitement that athletics furnish, living simpliciter, does not require them. In this sense, athletics show themselves to be a kind of luxury. Conversely, Nishitani wants to
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My primary text for this essay shall be the three sections of chapter 1, What is Religion?, of Religion and Nothingness by Keiji Nishitani. I am responding to question one of the final essay prompt: What assumptions are entailed in Nishitanis question: Should I be religious? How does Nishitani undo these assumptions in his discussion of the Great Doubt and the Great Death?

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argue that religion is something, at its core, that is about life itself; something about which we cannot pose the question in terms that, from the outset, doubt its necessity. Indeed Nishitani claims, those for whom religion is not a necessity are, for that very reason, the very ones for whom religion is a necessity. There is no other thing of which the same can be said (Nishitani, 1). We generally live on a plane of natural and cultural utility, Nishitani notes. Because we need nutritional food to eat, in order to be healthy and thrive, and education and the arts to produce music, art, dress, and architecturein a word, culture, our ordinary mode of being is restricted to these levels of natural and cultural life, Nishitani writes. However, religion ought not be conceived as a cultural institutionan ensemble of practices and customsthat, like food and art, serve some utilitarian purpose for human flourishing. Religions import, in Nishitanis view, arises precisely in breaking through that ordinary mode of being and overturning it from the ground up, in pressing us back to the elemental source of life where life itself is seen as useless (Nishitani, 2). Religion, then, turns out to be a radical calling into question of the anthropocentricity that asks of religionas with athletics and foodwhat purpose it serves for us. Religion, Nishitani maintains, is an elemental invitation to perhaps the most urgent and momentous of all questions: For what purpose do I exist? Upsetting, unhousing and unsettling the ordinary stance that, echoing Protagoras, suggests that, Man is the measure of all things, religion calls into question the very meaning and purpose of the human being. Nishitani explains this Protagorean posture that so characterizes much of human life-praxis as a certain orientation, a movement wherein, we put ourselves as individuals/man/mankind at the center, and weigh the significance of everything as the contents of our lives as individuals/man/mankind (Nishitani, 3). Hence, it is in decentering and de-teleogizing the human being, that religion is the question of ourselves to ourselves. This is, for Nishitani, the real thrust of religion. What the non-religious person or the person who poses the question Should I be religious?overlooks is that religion is not merely some thing to be used, employed or leveraged for collective well-being, societal cohesion, or individual life reformation. Religion, at its inmost, is the necessity of which we are made aware only at the level of life at which everything else loses its

Nolan Harris Jr Kyoto School Final Essay Re-do

necessity and utility (Nishitani, 3). It is only at this juncture, Nishitani argues, the point at which we come to doubt the meaning [and purpose] of our existence, that the religious quest awakens within us (Nishitani, 3).2 Religion from this standpoint, it should also be noted, becomes, then, a journey that is unquestionably individual in nature, and cannot be considered from a dispassionate, displaced point of view. Thus, posing the question in the problematic way Should I be religious? or Why do we need religion? concludes the engagement before it has really begun. When religion is not thought of, again, as some thingsome complex of practices, traditions or customs in the worldbut as the very self-questioning of the self, we can see how Nishitanis earlier curiously contradictory claimthat the person for whom religion is not a necessity is actually just the person for whom it is makes sense. When all that has made life itself meaningful, useful and worth living loses its meaning, utility and value, Nishitani argues, we have come to a point of religious departure. This radical questioning is usually occasioned by what Nishitani describes as death, nihility, or sin (Nishitani, 3).3 Nishitani explains this by having us imagine someone who has become gravely ill, staring down death, or some individual who has staked his all on some project that has utterly failed. What happens to this person after the catastrophic or the absurd has confronted them? In Nishitanis view, all that has given life its purpose and meaning has been hollowed of any significance, and this brings the person to the precipice of the religious quest. Questions crowd in upon one: Why have I been alive? Where did I come from and where am I going? A void appears here that nothing in the world can fill; a gaping abyss opens up at the very ground on which one stands (Nishitani, 3).
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Nishitani might even be said to be proposing an alternative phenomenology (or maybe an antiphenomenology). Husserlian phenomenology takes consciousness as a somewhat static entity to which phenomena appear. This, however, hangs on what Nishitani describes as a mode of looking at and thinking about everything in terms of how it relates to us The phenomenon that appears to consciousness rests at bottom on some Cartesian ego-subject receiving that which is given over to it in experience. Nishitani wants to upset that way of thinking, and one of the ramifications of this challenge is a reimagining of phenomenological experience. 3 Religion as an opening to radical questioning and doubt, as occasioned by nihility, has also been formulated in Jewish thinking. Noted Jewish Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik writes of religion in a similar vein: Religion is not, at the outset, a refuge of grace and mercy for the despondent and desperate, an enchanted stream for crushed spirits, but a raging, clamorous torrent of mans consciousness with all its crises, pangs, and torments.

Nolan Harris Jr Kyoto School Final Essay Re-do

When we have reached this point of radical doubt, of a radical questioningof the loss of meaningNishitani argues that what he terms nihility has emerged. Nihility is that which renders meaningless the meaning of life (Nishitani, 4). When the question of ourselves to ourselves is broached, nihility has broken through the very ground of our existence Nishitani argues. Whats more, until we have become conscious of nihility, we are scarcely aware of the fact that nihility is at the ground of all our ordinary life engagements. This is because we live life as an ever-advancing procession of work, rest, play, pleasure, pain, suffering, healing, argument, heartbreak, falling in love, embracing and releasing. Bills must be paid, children must be cared for, work must get done. But Nishitani believes these activities are cast into doubt when the meaning and purpose they furnish for us is thrown into a kind of zone of meaninglessnessowing, generally, to some tragic loss, utter defeat or dark night of the soul. It is only upon the stepping back from the incessant progression of life events, usually brought on by some very menacing occurrence, that we become the question of ourselves to ourselves. Prior to this (what Nishitani considers) conversion-inducing event, all about us in the world is for us, by us and of us.4 Everything gives life meaning or detracts from it only insofar as at the center of it all reposes the human being. What Nishitani thinks happens with the emergence of nihility, is that this view of taking the world to be for us, by us and of us is overturned, hence the conversion; overturned because no longer do we relate to the world in terms of our own centrality and predominance. That very position of anthropocentricity is cast out, and now the question of religion, the question of ourselves to ourselves, and the quest that ensues, is made manifest in our lives. II. Religion can be conceived in various ways, though it is usually thought of as a relationship of humankind with an Absolutegenerally speaking, God. Nishitani notes that other readings of religion involving ideas of the Holy, the submission of the human will to the divine will, acknowledgement of the fundamental dependence of the human being on divine power and so on, are possible and established angles of approach to the

This notion is evocative of Levinas chez-soi, or being at home in the world with oneself that is eventually disrupted by the face of the other is his accounting.

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question of religion. Nishitani, however, wants to take a different angle and pursue another viable reading of religion. He wants to interpret religion as mans search for true reality in a real way (that is, not theoretically and not in the form of concepts, as we do in ordinary knowledge and philosophical knowledge), andattempt an answer to the question of the essence of religion by tracing the process of the real pursuit of true reality (Nishitani, 6). When considering the question of reality, or true reality, Nishitani notes that it can be very difficult to determine, after serious reflection, just what we mean by the term. Philosophy itself has been besieged by the questions of what reality iswhether or not an external world actually exists and if so, how can we know, if at all, that it doesfor centuries. Nishitani makes mention of the fact that for a scientist, a metaphysician and a commoner, what is taken to be real, to constitute reality, may not overlap with any harmonyin fact, often what each of these regards as reality do not. Furthermore, what is generally taken to be real, Nishitani thinks, does not include nihility and death. Both of these, in his view, must be captured in any robust notion of reality since they are real. While they each signify the negation of natural and cultural existence and biological life respectively, they both must be real in some sense, and it is in keeping with this broader notion of reality, or the real, that Nishitani wants to frame and interpret the question of religion. This deeper sense of the real, of reality, is what Nishitani thinks religion reveals to us. Similar to the effect of the ever-advancing procession of life mentioned above, the deeper, fuller, richer sense of reality is something we miss according to Nishitani. There are moments, however, when this true reality breaks through, akin to the surge of awareness of nihility that breaks the procession of life, and when this happens, Nishitani argues we truly get in touch with the reality of the world around us. It is extremely rare for us so to fix our attention on things as to lose ourselves in them, in other words, to become the very things we are looking at (Nishitani, 9). The dissolution of the received, rote, normal view and experience of lifecharacterized philosophically speaking by the subject-object disjunctionis effected at these moments of the breaking through of true reality. Because we are accustomed to seeing things from the standpoint of the self,

Nolan Harris Jr Kyoto School Final Essay Re-do

rarely, if ever, do we experience the true reality of which Nishitani writes. The self is constructed in a way that renders it a citadel within which the ego-self reposes, and from which it looks without, encountering and experiencing the field of vision, light, and the objects these give over to the self. Put another way, human consciousness is a divided, but dependent, system of withinness and withoutness, or subjectivity and objectivity, and this fundamental separation, or disruption necessarily puts off the true reality as it is in itself because, as Nishitani argues, on the field of consciousness, self always occupies center stage (Nishitani, 9). Implicated in this divided consciousness also is a fundamental, immanent division of the self. The self takes its desires, feelings, fears, and thoughts to be objects that although thought of as part of its interiorityare separate and different from it, and this, for Nishitani, is reason to suspect that the reality of the self is even out of range for us. This would mean that even the reality of who we are as persons is not properly speaking known, or experienced. Self-consciousness, in Nishitanis account, would then only amount to taking the self, the subject, to be the object of consciousness; recapitulating the disjunction of withinness and withoutness, over against itself. Precisely because we face things on a field separated from things, and to the extent that we do so, we are forever separated from ourselves, (Nishitani, 10) Nishitani writes. In effect, then, trapped in the withinness of the self, the self is never conscious of a real reality Nishitani would argue. A solipsistic self is what, at bottom, the self is; immured in its own interiority. What we experience as the self, then, is a chimera. Nishitani does not mean to deny the reality of feelings, desires, the self and other objects that are generally taken to be the stuff of human experience. The reality of these he accepts. He does mean to say, however, that the in ordinary field of consciousness, where the self is the center of Being, from which all of Being is experienced and represented in knowledge, and where the self is taken to be separate from the things of Being, the self is not getting in touch with the true reality of these phenomena because of the separational nature of ordinary consciousness. So long as the field of separation between within and without is not broken through, and so long as a conversion from that standpoint does not take place, the lack of unity and contradiction spoken of earlier cannot help but prevail among the things we take as real (Nishitani, 10). This observation Nishitani terms the self-contradiction

Nolan Harris Jr Kyoto School Final Essay Re-do

of reality. This ordinary standpoint that so dominates our way of relating to ourselves, others and the universe, finds its provenance, Nishitani argues, in the thinking of the father of modern philosophy Rene Descartes. It was famously with Descartes that the stubborn mind-body dualism (and the equally influential cogito, ergo sum) took on a life of its own, and since his explication of it, we in the West have been so given to this standpoint. Nishitani commends this Cartesian development for the scientific and technological progress these, in part, set on their way. However, it did so, in Nishitanis view, at a very high price. The separation of res cogitans (immaterial consciousness, spirit, thought) and res extensa (physical reality and objects, matter) privileged the mind, the immaterial consciousness, and signified it as the most important element of the dyad. This left the physical world devoid of life, meaning, dynamism. It rendered physical life, even the physical human body, cold, inert, dead, and merely the contingent expression of spirit, mind, or consciousness. For Nishitani, it is this sort of reductive, mechanistic standpoint that, while commendable in the way of science and technology, is tragically contemptible for its disruption of the pre-scientific and pre-Cartesian, sympathetic affinity [that] was thought to obtain between one mans soul and anothers. This sympathy was meant to bespeak a contact prior to and more immediate than consciousness (Nishitani, 11). Even after laying out this powerful set of observations, Nishitani does not want to espouse a renaissance of, or return to, this pre-scientific, pre-Cartesian, and even preconscious sympathetic affinity where all of life is connected in a dynamic unity. Instead, Nishitani maintains that to get in touch with the true reality, to actually break through the ordinary standpoint, we need to pursue an alternative way. A conversion must be effected. III. What is to be borne in mind then, from Nishitanis account, is that while the Cartesian cogito, ergo sum is a basic, and most evident fact, it is merely, one possible way of looking at that fact (the cogito), one philosophical position among others (Nishitani, 14). The Cartesian ego, however, characterizes the self-centered mode of being, the modern, pervasive, anthropocentric standpoint mentioned above, and as such this ego arises in a field where self-consciousness mirrors itself at every turn (Nishitani,

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14). This Cartesian ego then, the fundamental issue that founds the problematic posing of the question Should I be religious? is actually locked in on itselfhence the separation of withinness from withoutness mentioned above. Eventually questions like Should I be religious? turn in on the ego itself, and the self-centered immurement of the ego is called into question. What Nishitani argues is that the most stable of truthsthe cogitois eventually destabilized, and, on a more fundamental level, turns into doubt (Nishitani, 15). This is a fundamental impasse for the Cartesian cogito, and in Nishitanis estimation, there must be a breaking through to what he calls an elemental self. Thinking about the ego from an elemental field means that the ego itself opens up in subjective fashion an elemental field of existence within itself (Nishitani, 15). It is the province of both ancient philosophy and, in a special way, Nishitani writes, religion to point out this issue with ordinary self-being. Thus, where philosophy has been thought to come in with the power of cautious reason and intellection, and clarify, demystify and set in order the chaos of Being and human experience, it turns out philosophy as conceived and practiced in the West, since Descartes, has actually effected a kind of selfimposed arresting of any assistance it might offer on the question of religion as Nishitani conceives it. This is because the Cartesian subject is imprisoned it in its own subjectivity, disallowing any philosophical breaking through based on the cogito as its been largely considered in the West. The doubt that the ego experiences of itself, eventually leads to what Nishitani identifies as the Zen notion of the Great Doubt. This Great Doubt involves a breaking through of consciousness and self-consciousness. These are the very things that preclude the getting in touch in a real way with the true reality. The Great Doubt, for Nishitani, involves the self-presentation of nihility [as] a real presentation of what is actually concealed at the ground of the self and of everything in the world (Nishitani, 17). The problem with consciousness and self-consciousnessconceived as they are in the Cartesian mode, rent in two by the withinness and withoutness of the subjectis that on [this] field of consciousness this nihility is covered over and cannot make itself really present (Nishitani, 17). As mentioned above, the self obstructs its own way to the deeper reality, because it commands center stage.

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However, when nihility is made manifest, Nishitani writes, everything that was taken for external and internal reality at the field of consciousness becomes unreal in its very reality: it is nullified but not annihilated. Self-being and the being of all things combine to make one question; all being becomes a single great question mark (Nishitani, 17). For Nishitani, this is the elemental aspect of subjectivity that, nonetheless, cuts deeper than the ipseity and security of the Cartesian cogito. This is the breaking through of the divided subjectivity, that forever walls off this movement, in the Cartesian subject. When self-existence and the being of all things are transformed into a single question mark beyond the distinction between within and withoutthat is when we may speak of the self as doubting (Nishitani, 17). It is the dissolution of the division, the duality, that separates withinness and withoutness that constitutes the Great Doubt. When the distinction between the doubter and the doubted drops away, when the field of that very distinction is overstepped, the self becomes the Great Doubt (Nishitani, 18). Nishitani terms this doubt Great because, in contradistinction to doubt as generally conceived, the Great Doubt is not a doubt of things, objects, or externality, by a subject, confined in this way. The Great Doubt comprehends the subject and objects taken together, the distinction is extirpated, it drops away. The Great Doubt then is not merely a state of consciousness because it upsurges from the very ground of the self and of all things. This constitutes the reality of the Great Doubtand, as mentioned above, the question of ourselves to ourselves, or religion, involves this deeper breaking through, this conversion, wherein the self becomes Doubt itself (Nishitani, 18). What sets the Great Doubt off against the doubt Descartes enacted to convey him to the cogito standpoint is that the Descartes was a methodical doubt. Recall that for Descartes the quest is one of founding belief and knowledge on some unshakable foundation, and in order to do this there must be, at bottom, some impregnable belief, principle, or element of knowledge that can be demonstrated to be reliable, clear and stable. This methodical doubtcasuistic, or ad hoc doubtisnt the same as the Great Doubt. Nishitani maintains that this Cartesian doubt sets up and maintains division, one that cannot be the sort of doubt in which the self and all things are transformed into a single Doubt (Nishitani, 19). What the Cartesian ego takes a razor to and splits asunder, the Great Doubt reconvenes, re-wholes, and combines

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into the one, single question mark. The Great Death, then, emerges as another way of speaking of the Great Doubt. Radical Doubt of the sort Nishitani has in mind, in Zen Buddhism, is also considered the Great Death because, we press our doubts (What am I? Why do I exist?) to their limits as conscious acts of the doubting self (Nishitani, 21). The Great Doubt then, is not, as with the questions with which we earlier began (Should I be religious? Why do we need religion?), in service to us, as it was to Descartes, because it comprehends the doubter and the doubted in that great, single question mark mentioned above. It is no longer appropriate to ask of the doubted its purpose for us, because even our own purpose is thrown up as a question that emerges from the nihility at that ground of Being. The Great Death is the Great Doubt, and vice versa, because it represents not only the apex of the doubting self but also the point of its passing away and ceasing to be self (Nishitani, 21). Hence, the conversion from the modern, Cartesian standpoint that equips us so to ask the problematic questions about the use, purpose, and value of religion. The Great Death is a dying unto a new being, which encounters the nothingness of the self, and overturns the human beings relationship to and with the world. Decentering and deteleogizing the human being, it is here to which the true reality is broken through, and the religious aspect of the self is genuinely discovered.

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