Dancing Through Nothing: Nietzsche, the Kyoto School, and Transcendence

Brian Schroeder

The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 37, Spring 2009, pp. 44-65 (Article) Published by Penn State University Press

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nie/summary/v037/37.schroeder.html

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Dancing Through Nothing

Nietzsche, the Kyoto School, and Transcendence

BRIAN SCHROEDER
I should only believe in a God who knew how to dance. And when I saw my Devil I found him serious, thorough, deep, and solemn: it was the Spirit of Heavinessthrough him do all things fall. Not with wrath but with laughter does one kill. Come, let us kill the Spirit of Heaviness! Friedrich Nietzsche, Z:I On Reading and Writing Here lies the secret of Nietzsches Dionysus: on the outside we see a strong and heroic figure who does not shrink even from a religion of Satan, but on the inside, beneath the exterior garments, lies the heart of a sage overflowing with infinite love. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics The most remarkable feature of Nietzsches religion may be the sound of laughter that echoes through it. He teaches that one can laugh from the ground of the soul, or rather that the souls groundless ground is laughter itself. Nishitani Keiji, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism

Nietzsche and the Early Kyoto School

mong the Western thinkers who have most influenced the thinking of the so-called Kyoto school, especially the philosophies of Tanabe Hajime and Nishitani Keiji, Nietzsche clearly stands in the forefront.1 His proclamation of the death of God, the greatest of events, signals also the demise of traditional conceptions of divinity, self, subjectivity, and transcendence. In full response to Nietzsches herald call for a revaluation of all values, in their respective ways Tanabe and Nishitani advance nonmetaphysical, nontheistic conceptions of transcendence and the self. One finds in them a language freed from many Western metaphysical presuppositions, yet wholly capable of engaging that
JOURNAL OF NIETZSCHE STUDIES, Issue 37, 2009. Copyright 2009 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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very metaphysical tradition from a new hermeneutical perspective, all the while advancing their own cultural, philosophical, and religious commitments and inquiries. They recognize in Nietzsches thinking an attempt to develop a genuine world philosophythat is, a thinking that is not conditioned by and thus confined to the strictures of the predominantly rational metaphysics that had heretofore characterized the movement of Western reflection. Nietzsche thought that few contemporary and future readers (for at least the following century) would be able to understand his philosophical vision, as they were too constrained culturally and linguistically by the very metaphysics he sought to subvert and overcome. Visionary though he was, however, he could not foresee the emergence of the thinking one finds in the Kyoto school, which in its own way is likewise concerned to develop a world thinking.2 The Kyoto school, which has the distinction of formulating the first genuinely comparative philosophy of religion, is characterized primarily by its active engagement with post-Kantian European thinking. Taking its point of departure from the thinking of Nishida Kitaro (18701945), widely considered modern Japans first original philosopher, the Kyoto school came into its own via Nishidas students and successors, Tanabe Hajime (18851961) and Nishitani Keiji (19001990), who through their original contributions helped shape and solidify the schools early identity by their association with contemporary European thinking of the day. Both Tanabe and Nishitani studied in Germany during the years between the first and second world wars (Tanabe in 192224, Nishitani in 193639), engaging the history of Western thought from its ancient through to its modern expressions, with particular focus on Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, and Bergson, mediated by direct encounters with Husserl and especially Heidegger, the very thinkers with whom Nishida had sent them to study. Upon returning to Japan, they commenced the work for which the Kyoto school is primarily known: the interaction of European and East Asian thinking. In contrast to the tendency in modern Western thinking to separate philosophical and religious discourse, Asian philosophy is and has always been generally religious in orientation. This is no less true of the early Kyoto school, whose distinguishing characteristic was its adoption of a decidedly religious orientation at a time when the major currents of European thinking, such as existentialism and phenomenology, were moving away from such a stance. This led many of the thinkers associated with the Kyoto school also to engage seriously the Western theological tradition. Conversely, this engagement exercised a significant influence on certain currents of twentieth-century radical theology, exhibited by an unprecedented openness to and interaction with non-Western traditions, particularly Buddhism, in an attempt to move beyond the pale of comparison by actively incorporating fundamental insights of Buddhism as a means to deepening their own metaphysical and ethical grounds.

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Pioneers in establishing a cross-cultural dialogue based on an essentially comparative approach, the Kyoto school philosophers nevertheless generally assert the superiority of the East Asian tradition over that of the European (primarily with respect to the question of the status of nothingness and the overcoming of nihilism, construed as the fundamental problem of contemporary thought and culture). And while the thinking of the Kyoto school is diverse and resists any particular identification (indeed, there are some associated with the Kyoto school who resist that very nomenclature), several basic themes emerged that have since molded and facilitated its reception in the West: its trenchant analysis and critique of nihilism as the fundamental problem of the contemporary era, its unique interpretation of the individual existent, its recognition of the death of God, and, most important for the purpose of the present essay, its rethinking of the meaning of transcendence.

Kenosis and Nothingness

For Nishitani, as well as for Tanabe, the issue is straightforward, according to Jan Van Bragt: The West has nowhere to go but in the direction of the Eastern (Buddhist) ideal, but it cannot do so except from its own Western (Christian) premises.3 Taking this bold statement as a starting point, let us consider the revaluation of what may well be the greatest casualty of both radical theology and postmodern thinking, namely, the concept of transcendence. Certainly no other concept has been so thoroughly assaulted in the past two centuries, often with justification. The contemporary focus on immanence as opposed to transcendence has provoked many progressive thinkers to dismiss transcendence as the vestige of an oppressive past metaphysics, with the unfortunate consequence of their becoming closed to the potential and actual power that a revalued notion of transcendence can bring. Although transcendence is not a concept one normally associates with Nietzsche, both Tanabe and Nishitani offer readings of his philosophy that help them to advance their own reinterpretations of transcendence. And even if their philosophical approaches differ fundamentally, they share significant similarities due to their common Buddhist orientation as mediated through their incorporation of certain Christian theological concepts. While few philosophers today would identify Nietzsche as a radical theological thinkerthat is, as one in continuity with the intellectual and prophetic currents of ChristianityNietzsches thinking is in fact deeply theological at heart, and the death of God is his most profound and misunderstood theological observation. The kenotic theologian Thomas J. J. Altizer, for one, has long argued this position, having recognized early on, along with several others, the Kyoto schools important contribution in helping to inspire a new theology by means of its insights into such topics as transcendence, dialectic, God, and

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kenosis, stemming from their various Buddhist perspectives.4 The kenosis or self-emptying of the Godhead that constitutes the initial movement of the death of God has been virtually ignored or suppressed by Christian imaginative and theological consciousness, not to mention by philosophy, resulting in the predominance of traditional or orthodox conceptions of transcendence and of Being as divine entity. This is what many, if not most, consider God, and certainly Nietzsches pronouncement of the death of God implies the impossibility or, stated otherwise, the nothingness of such transcendence. Many, if not most, equate or at least connect the notions of transcendence and God. According to Nietzsche, God is the will to nothingness pronounced holy (A 18). Precisely at this juncture, though, Tanabe takes a significant point of departure from Nietzsche, distinguishing the Buddhist will of nothingness from the Nietzschean will to nothingness. Tanabe writes: The will of nothingness is not a will to nothingness that wills nothingness as its goal. The will to nothingness may be a will to being, but this is not the case with the will of nothingness, since the latter is not a will engaged in the quest for nothingness by itself. It is a will that seeks no-thing by simultaneously abandoning its own immediate will and being made to abandon its every immediate desire. This is the very process that takes place in the awakening to Buddhahood.5 This insightful passage underscores that there are diverse ways of interpreting nothingness that overlap and illuminate one another. An important question is whether and to what extent Nietzsches philosophy remains confined to the very metaphysics that he seeks to overcome (berwinden) and just how much Buddhist thinking, especially Zen, signals such an overcoming or breakthrough (Durchbruch). The nothingness that becomes present in the kenosis of the death of God inverts or, rather, radically immanentizes the movement of transcendence, conjoining the abstraction of pure thought with the concretion of lived experience.

Absolute Nothingness and the Death of God

The Kyoto school first recognized that what conjoins the East and the West philosophically is precisely the issue of nihilism; how the two traditions approach and deal with the question is what separates them. A crucial difference is that between a Buddhist conception of time, which is, according to Nishitani, at once circular and rectilinear, and the thought of the eternal recurrence, which Nietzsche calls the most extreme form of nihilism: the nothing (the meaningless), eternally. The European form of Buddhism (WP 55).6 Nietzsche is, to be sure, fundamentally a Western thinker, but his thinking also marks the Wests deepest moment of radical transformationthe death of Godand it is here that Tanabe and Nishitani can recognize him as a kindred spirit. Both Tanabe and Nishitani retain the prominent concept of absolute nothingness (Jp. zettai mu, mattaku mu) from the teachings of their mentor

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Nishida Kitaro, albeit refining and extending it in unique and at times mutually informative ways.7 This concept derives from and is practically synonymous with the key Mahayana, especially Madhyamika, Buddhist term sunyata (Jp. ku). The various forms of Buddhism that flowered in East Asia, particularly Chan and Zen, in large measure resulted from interaction between Indian Mahayana and Chinese Daoism. The standpoint of absolute nothingness reflects the movement of Dao: doing nondoing or acting nonacting (Ch. wei wuwei), the spontaneous, unconditioned way of natural existence. The simultaneous unity and difference of all entities, absolute nothingness or emptiness, does not mean nonbeing in the sense of the conceptual opposite of being. There is neither a temporal nor a spatial disjunction expressed in the difference between absolute nothingness and being or between absolute nothingness and the relative nothingness of nonbeing. Absolute nothingness is the standpoint (Jp. tachiba)not the ground (Grund)from which all that is and is not emerges as it is grasped by the non-egocentric self. After Nishitanis critical appropriation of it, the term standpoint assumed an important role for some in the Kyoto school, including Tanabe, as it denotes a fundamentally spatial orientation, not a purely conceptual one. The term ground is not adequate to express absolute nothingness, as it is precisely the dominance of reason, or metaphysics, that is called into question insofar as reason postulates the dualism of subject and object. This dualism denotes the field of consciousness, therein reinforcing the sovereign status of the I, the egoistic self that must be broken through in order to actualize the fundamental standpoint of non-ego or no-self (Sk. anatman; Jp. muga).8 As an Existenz of non-ego, says Nishitani, being, doing, and becoming in time all emerge into their nature on the field of emptiness which is their absolute negation. And on this field [Jp. ba] constant doing is constant non-doing.9 Borrowing the terminology of Nicolas Cusanus, absolute nothingness is the absoluta coincidentia oppositorum in and through which the present moment is unfolded [explicata] by time, for nothing is found in time except the now.10 Absolute nothingness signifies the fundamental unity that encloses all differentiation (though, according to Tanabe, this standpoint is only reached dialectically). The field of bottomlessness or the None in contrast to, and beyond the One, absolute nothingness is not the negation that grounds nihilism but, to use a key term employed by Nishida, the locus or place (Jp. basho) wherein there is nothing that is not present;11 in other words, everything exists on its own as it is. In Cusanuss thinking, God is the simultaneous center and noncenter, the absolute maximum and absolute minimum, the infinite ground and finite limitation of all that is. Similarly, claims Nishitani, on the field of sunyata, the center is everywhere. Each thing in its own selfness shows the mode of being of the center of all things. Each and every thing becomes the center of all things and, in that sense, becomes an absolute center. This is the absolute uniqueness of things, their reality. . . . Only on the field of sunyata can the totality of things,

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each of which is absolutely unique and an absolute center of all things, at the same time be gathered into one.12 The field of sunyata (Jp. ku no ba), though not the ground of being, is nevertheless the locus of the circuminsessional relationship wherein each thing is on the home-ground of every other thing even as it remains on its own home-ground.13 Only on this home-ground (Jp. moto) is it possible to apprehend true self-centeredness [as] a selfless self-centeredness: the self-centeredness of a self that is not a self.14 In short, says Nishitani, emptiness is self.15 To realize non-ego is to locate oneself not as a fixed identity but as a process in the greater process of existence, a drop in the sea apart from which the drop could not be. Non-ego is thus neither an ontological nor an epistemological position; it only has meaning in the context of the movement toward self-realization, or nirvana, which is possible only from the standpoint of absolute nothingness.

Nihilism and Paradoxical Ambiguity

Early in his intellectual formation Nishitani follows Nietzsches appraisal of nihilism and the ressentiment that both engenders and issues forth from it. The nothingness that attends nihilism, however, is not absolute nothingness but, rather, relative nothingnessthat is, a concept of nothingness relative to the concept of being. According to Nishitani, Nietzsche approaches the absolute nothingness of Zen Buddhism philosophically, but even his apprehension of the nothing is that of a relative absolute nothingness insofar as he remains tied to a standpoint of will.16 Commenting on both Nietzsche and Heraclitus (whom Nietzsche holds in highest esteem among the Presocratics), Nishitani writes: They do not contain the other-centeredness by which they become empty and make all others their master. . . . They cannot be said to have arrived at the authentic self-centeredness of absolute emptiness that holds all dharmas in its grip, that, master wherever it is, makes wherever it is true. However one looks at it, theirs remains a standpoint of will, not the standpoint of sunyata.17 Given that Nishitani was studying with Heidegger just when the latter was deeply immersed in Nietzsches philosophy, it is no wonder that Nishitani should reflect Heideggers influential interpretation of Nietzsche as the last metaphysician on the grounds that his philosophy culminates a trajectory of thinking beginning with Descartes in its radical subjectivization of the will to power as the will to will.18 Although the stance of the will to power allows us to say that our self is, in fact, that, we cannot say that that in itself is, in fact, our self, writes Nishitani: In other words, although one can speak of a self that is not a self, one cannot yet speak of a self that is not a self. This brings us to a fundamental difference between the position of Nietzsche and the position of Zen.19 Whether this is

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truly reflective of Nietzsches position is debatable, as concepts such as the will, ego, soul, and even self are highly problematized in his philosophy (see TI Errors 3; WP 488). In any event, this issue will not be resolved here. Nevertheless, Nishitani does maintain that the notion of an absolute nothingness has never been truly grasped by the Western philosophical tradition, including Heidegger, though he acknowledges the advancements of both Nietzsche and Heidegger on this question. Only the mystical thinking of Meister Eckhart and his student Jakob Bhme, who were indirect influences on Nietzsche and Heidegger, approaches the apprehension (not comprehension) of absolute nothingness, an apprehension of the Godhead (Gottheit) of God (Gott) expressed as the groundless (Ungrund ) or abyss (Abgrund ).20 Tanabe also recognizes this but rejects mysticism as a possible way suited to ordinary, ignorant persons such as [himself].21 Both Nishitani and Tanabe want to develop this mystical apprehension in the language of philosophyfor Tanabe, in the realm of dialectics; for Nishitani, in the realm of existential phenomenology and hermeneuticsthereby giving greater philosophical clarity to an otherwise somewhat hermetic discourse. Put another way, each is concerned with developing a philosophy that engages theology and Buddhology, and each proceeds from the field of nihility to advance the relative nihilism of existential atheism in order to arrive at a fundamentally nontheistic religious standpointabsolute nothingness. For Nietzsche, nihilism is an ominous threat because it is a reactive form of the will to power: a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life; but it is and remains a will (GM III:28). Nietzsche recognizes nihilism as both ambiguous and a normal condition and classifies it in two main types: active and passive. Active nihilism denotes an increased power of the spirit, whereas passive nihilism, exemplified by Buddhism, represents a worn out, exhausted spirit (WP 2223). This is a view that Nietzsche held even in his early writing, contrasting the perspective of artistic affirmation, exemplified by the gods Apollo and Dionysus, to a Buddhist negation of the will (BT 7). Tanabe can recognize the historical context of Europe that prompted Nietzsche to proclaim the doctrine of the will to power as an active nihilism that could redeem Europe,22 and Nishitani can observe that 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, and especially to Mahayana.23 Regardless, Nietzsches assessment of Buddhism as a passive form of nihilism is arguably the result of his misunderstanding the concept of nirvana and interpreting compassion (Sk. karuna) as pity (Mitleid [WP 64]). There is no indication in Nietzsches critique that he is aware of the distinction between Theravada and Mahayana, and therefore the subtleties in Mahayana attending the concepts of compassion and dependent origination (Sk. pratityasamutpada) were lost on him.24

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Nishitani and Tanabe are aware of Nietzsches limited understanding of Buddhism, especially in its expression as Zen.25 From this Nishitani concludes that Nietzsche is unable, due to his contextual linguistic and cultural constraints, to fully grasp or realize the essence of nihility as merely the relativizing of absolute nothingness. While Nietzsche is able to locate the I-ego as a grammatical construct, a fiction, a play on words (TI Errors 3), he is unable to grasp nothingness absolutely, as his thinking remains locked in the relativity of the language of affirmation/negation and active/reactive. Hence Nishitani pronounces Nietzsches construal of nothingness as the most reaching account thus produced in Western thinking, a relative absolute nothingness, but one that nevertheless falls short of the Zen Buddhist apprehension of an absolute nothingness that not only dissolves all relativity but paradoxically makes the difference of relativity possible in the first place. Is one to surmise that Nishitani is claiming that the thought of paradox eludes Nietzsche, that his remains bound to the very metaphysics that he seeks to overcome?26 The notion of absolute nothingness is implicit in the paradox of dependent origination (Sk. pratityasamutpada), or what the Buddha called the Middle Way. Another member of the Kyoto school, Abe Masao, decisively frames the question of this paradox with respect to the relation between transcendence and immanence and also the nihilism of metaphysical dualism:
The Middle Way breaks through dipolarity; it is the overcoming of dipolarity itself. In this sense the Buddhist notion of the Middle Way is quite different from the Aristotelian idea of mesotes. The interdependence which is implied in the Buddhist doctrine of dependent co-origination is neither transcendence nor immanence nor a middle position which is of dipolar nature and in which transcendence and immanence as two poles are directly interacting with each other. To realize the Middle Way even such a middle position must be overcome; because, however dynamic the middle point may be, it is involved in the duality of transcendence and immanence. A complete overcoming of dipolarity, including the middle point which attempts to function as a mediator between the two conflicting poles, is essential for the realization of the Middle Way and dependent co-origination.27

Is the paradox of dependent origination implicit, even if unrecognized and therefore unrealized, in Nietzsches crucial observation of the ambiguity of nihilism? Does the ambiguity of nihilism reflect a fundamentally dialectical relation between its active and passive expressions? Does this ambiguity not only allow for but also make possible for Nietzsche the very transformation of a debilitating nihilism into one that is consummate and ecstatic (WP 1055), an active nihilism that enables the actualization of self-overcomingthe future, absolutely affirmative, bermenschliche will? Could this be a revalued or reimagined thought of transcendencea transcendence of transcendence and immanence altogether? These questions will be addressed later.

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Absolute Nothingness and Power

Tanabes philosophy is dialectical in its approach and bears many affinities with Hegels speculative dialectics, especially the concept of mediation. Yet Tanabe shares Nietzsches refusal of any metaphysical teleology.28 Still, it is only through dialectical thinking, Tanabe argues, that one can arrive at the standpoint of absolute nothingness. Tanabes name for the absolute is Other-power (Jp. tariki), which has nothing to do with a transcendent other or the entity God. Rather, since this absolute is the negation and transformationthat is, conversion [metanoesis]of everything relative, it may be defined as absolute nothingness.29 Tanabe elaborates the meaning of Other-power, a notion that he borrows from Shinran (11731262), the founder of True Pure Land (Jp. Jodo Shin-shu) Buddhism: When we speak of Other-power, the Other is absolute precisely because it is nothingness, that is, nothingness in the sense of absolute transformation. It is because of its genuine passivity and lack of acting selfhood that it is termed absolute Other-power. Other-power is absolute Other-power only because it acts through the mediation of the self-power of the relative that confronts it as other. Only to that extent is genuine, absolute Other-power mediated by self-power. In this way, the absolute becomes absolute mediation.30 Absolute nothingness is absolute transformation as well as the necessary condition for absolute transformation. Succinctly stated: Nothingness means transformation.31 For Tanabe, self-transformation is possible via the mediation of Other-power, which in turn is absolute only because of its mediation by the relational relativity of self-power (Jp. jiriki). The concept of self-power is characteristic of the philosophy of Zen adopted by Nishida and Nishitani. Self-power and Other-power are perhaps best interpreted respectively as internal affectivity and external affectivity. In other words, selfpower is the becoming-external of the interior egoistic will that manifests itself as action. Conversely, Other-power is the affectivity exerted on the ego-self to the point of shattering the unity of the individual will, thereby calling the self to question the extent of its own sovereign freedom. This is the realization of selfawareness (Jp. jikaku) on which is predicated metanoesis.32 It is critical to note that Other-power is not to be construed in terms that might suggest the voluntaristic imposition of another will on the self, even though Other-power is associated with infinity.33 Other-power is radically passive and real only insofar as it is perceived by the I-self and allowed to destabilize or break through the resistances of the egoistic will. Though often construed as diametrically opposed, according to Tanabe, what is impossible with jiriki becomes possible with tariki, though both tariki and jiriki remain complementary to one another.34 With respect to the Western tradition metanoetics seeks a middle path between existentialism, exemplified primarily in the philosophies of Nietzsche and Heidegger, and the philosophy of freedom, as found in Schelling.35

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The self-overcoming (Selbstberwindung) that Nietzsche advocates is solely a matter of self-power, on Tanabes reading; therefore, it is an affirmation and negation only of being, not of nothingness. Moreover, since Nietzsches philosophy lacks the concepts of nothingness and negation[, it] naturally fails to produce a sense of true discontinuity or authentic transcendence, and cannot escape direct ongoing immanence. That is why, despite similarities in motivation and structure, there are inevitable differences between the orientation of Nietzsches thought and the way of metanoetics.36 These differences and similarities are reflected in Tanabes construal of Nietzsches most terrible and liberating thoughtthe eternal recurrence. Nevertheless, it is evident that for Nietzsche, Tanabe, and Nishitani what is at stake is nothing less than the radical overcoming or transformation of radical nihilism and selfa nonmetaphysical ecstatic transcendence, to use a phrase employed by Nishitani.37

Will to Power and Absolute Negation

Is the will to power, wherein the egoistic self is overcome to make way for a completely new self, tantamount to the actualization of the Buddhist non-ego that makes possible the emergence of the true self ? This rests in part on the degree of value that one assigns to existence. Even though Buddhist philosophy as a whole affirms being as illusory in the sense of being absolutely transient, existence as Buddha nature is fully meaningful as it is. But because existence has for so long in the West been assigned value in relation to a transcendent origin, from a God now dead, for Nietzsche, value, meaning, and truth are only now able to be actually affirmed, created, because there is no meaning in itself to which being can lay claim. Closed to the standpoint of absolute nothingness, Nietzsche tried to make absolute being the basic principle of philosophy, writes Tanabe: He took the idealistic standpoint of reason represented by Kant and converted it into a factual standpoint of life. In place of the metanoetic negation of reason that sees reason as the manifestation of absolute nothingness, he offered an affirmation of life whose basic essence consists in the will to power that seeks to place all things under the control of the self. . . . He forgot that the philosophical position he was espousing is possible only through the absolute negation of reason. Simply to negate reason and reject the abstraction of concepts results only in doing away with philosophy itself.38 This interpretation is somewhat idiosyncratic and difficult to sustain, especially when considering Nietzsches declaration that life itself is the will to power and thus subordinates the self to it, not the other way around: This world is the will to powerand nothing besides! And you yourself are also this will to powerand nothing besides! (WP 1067). But what exactly does the absolute negation of reason mean for Tanabe? From

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the standpoint of metanoetics, it can only mean the complete submission of the self to Other-power. Yet as Tanabe emphasizes time and again, self-power qua Other-power necessarily entails Other-power qua self-power. The dialectic is fundamentally reciprocal; moreover, this is necessitated by the standpoint of absolute nothingness. Tanabes critique of Nietzsche only holds if his premise is true that the Nietzschean self is the full and actual embodiment of the will to power and that the will to power is solely at the service of the self. If Tanabe is on target in apprehending that Nietzsche does not effect an absolute negation of reason in his thinking, perhaps it is because, as Nishitani phrases it, seen from the standpoint of the Great Will, human reason, the principle of secularism, is nothing more than an instrument of the flesh; or, rather, the flesh itself is the Great Reason. For the flesh is more elemental than reason and, as such, belongs to the whole man.39 Here, however, reason is a transfigured reason, a resurrected reason that is the fullness of interdependent existence, a fullness that simultaneously negates and affirms the self, but now the self as the expression of the will to power, not as a will to will. This radical transformation is made possible only through the historical event in consciousness of the death of God. Through this death all nihilism is ecstatically converted in the thought of the eternal recurrence, which takes the form of a religion for Nietzsche: the will to power. Indeed, he refers to the eternal recurrence as a prophecy (WP 1057), as a divine mode of thinking. It is the religion in which sinany distance separating God and manis abolished: precisely this is the glad tidings. Blessedness is not promised, it is not tied to conditions: it is the only realitythe rest is a sign with which to speak of it (A 33). On the plane of Buddhist thought, the affirmation of becoming as eternal recurrence releases one from samsara through its simultaneous dialectical negation and affirmation as nirvana. What for Buddhism was affirmation via acceptance as endurance (passive nihilism) is for Nietzsche, who radically transfigures Christianity through the affirmation of the death of God, affirmation via destruction as the maximization of relative strength (active nihilism [WP 23; emphasis added]).

Eternal Recurrence and Transcendence

Even though Nietzsches thought of the eternal recurrence differs markedly from the recurrence of world processes found in mythical religions, and thus cannot be characterized as ahistorical, Nishitani contends that the ecstatic transcendence of the bermensch, while avoiding the Christian eschatological fulfillment of history (the second coming of Christ), is nevertheless transhistorical in preserving the infinity of time only at the cost of historys inability to discharge its full historicity.40 This is a powerful critique, particularly because it reads

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Nietzsche in full continuity with the Western theological tradition. However, it is precisely at this level that Nishitanis interpretation, despite recognizing the fundamentally eschatological orientation of the bermensch, fails to grasp the apocalyptic, which is to say, the radical theological significance of the death of God.41 Nietzsches thought of the eternal recurrence, predicated on the death of God, signals a break with the archaic concept of eternal return, inasmuch as historical time is now the only time, irreversible and forward moving but only so as the absolute fullness of time.42 The eternal recurrence as apocalypse is the absolute embodiment of the kenosis (or discharge) of the transcendent Godhead in and as history. From the perspective of radical theology, this is concrete actuality, the once-and-for-all historical event of the death of God. This reading strongly challenges Nishitanis concern that the eternal recurrence fails to fully radicalize history because its sense of historicity is grounded transhistorically by the bermensch. In the eternal return, time moves both forward and backward, endlessly creating, destroying, and re-creating itself but all the while remaining bound in its infinite reversibility to an absolute primordial beginning. The death of God signifies a dual movement of diremption and conjoining: a break with the past but also a new nonmetaphysical unity, a bonding of transcendence and immanence, of infinity and finitude, of eternity and space-time. This is evinced most prominently in Nietzsches vision of the eternal recurrence, wherein time is conceived and experienced as irreversible and forward moving, thereby realizing what is impossible for a purely primordial thinking, namely, the radical dimension of futurity. At the heart of this teaching is the relation between the apocalyptic and the eschatological. Is it possible to think of eschatology as the transcendence, or overcoming, of transcendence? Would such a transcendence be also simultaneously a transcendence of immanence or at least of any prior conceptions thereof ? In its most radical interpretation, the death of God is the complete deconstruction of all operative or previously known conceptions of totality, whether conceived in terms of a pure transcendence, a pure immanence, or some intertwining of transcendence and immanence. Is eschatology then a transcendence of every possible totality and the simultaneous death of God and death of the subject? Could this simultaneous death make possible an infinite responsibility to totality, such as one encounters in Nietzsche, that does not render either the Other abstract or the ego-self sovereign? But if the death of God is finally also the transcendence, and thus destruction, of totality, then is the infinite responsibility that one finds, for instance, in the Buddhist bodhisattva ideal itself a negation of totality that destroys every possible totality or at least dissolves the hold of totality in each and every moment that infinite responsibility is recognized? Nietzsches understanding of responsibility, which ushers in a new conception of infinity alongside a new justice (GS 289), is just such an affirmation of totality,

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one that is also, and by virtue of, an affirmation of nihilism or the dissolution of totality. Such a sense of responsibility is grounded, or rather ungrounded, on the affirmation of the apocalyptic death of God, the death of transcendence itselfa divine way of thinking (WP 15)and on the eschatological embodiment of that affirmation and responsibilitythe bermensch.43 Now the mantle of responsibility lies solely and fully on the shoulders of humanity and is of a purple that will fade with time but for that reason must be continually dyed and mended.44

Critical Transcendence and Embodiment

The minjung mask dance, an old Buddhist ritual, the significance of which has been revitalized by contemporary Korean liberation theology, serves as a model of an existential, embodied approach for realizing transcendence. A difficult term to translate, minjung is a combination of two Chinese wordsmin (people) and jung (masses)and appropriately applies to any individual or group of individuals that are oppressed either politically, socially, or economically, through the prejudices of sex, race, color, nationality, or creed. The minjung aspire to what Hyun Young-hak calls critical transcendence, a concept that signifies both negation and going beyond.45 Nishitani describes transcendence in a similar manner, linking it to absolute nothingness, which represents the endpoint of an orientation to negation. It can be termed an absolute negativity, inasmuch as it is a standpoint that has negated and thereby transcended nihility, which was itself the transcendence-through-negation of all being. It can also be termed an absolute transcendence of being, as it absolutely denies and distances itself from any standpoint shackled in any way whatsoever to being.46 In other words, only from the standpoint of non-ego on the field of emptiness is it possible to simultaneously enact the absolute negation requisite for an absolute transcendence of existence as it is here and now so as precisely to be fully embodied in the here and now.47 The minjung experience a critical transcendence as they participate in the mask dance. In the nineteenth century the mask dance was transformed into a play performed for the sake of the minjung. In the dance, the villagers are able to vent their frustration and rage toward their oppressors. The mask dance takes the form of a sociopolitical satire in which the minjung are able to poke fun at and ridicule their rulers, both political and religious, as well as themselves and their own fate in the world, thereby displacing the negative, destructive internal energies associated with the nihilistic feelings of social and political powerlessness. Hyun writes:
In and through the mask dance, the minjung, the ordinary folks, experience and express a critical transcendence over this world and laugh at its absurdity . . . the

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minjung lament their lot but do it with humor. They laugh at and make fun of their own fate in this world, thereby transcending their own conditions. They find themselves standing over and beyond the entire world, which includes not only the rulers and leaders but also themselves and their own religion. They not only see correctly the reality of the world, which neither the rulers nor leaders can see because of their obsession with or separation from the world, but also envision another reality over against and beyond this one which neither the rulers or leaders can see either.48

In the mask dance, a sense of objectivity is thus afforded to the minjung. This objectivity or critical transcendence is not given to the people from the outside; it emerges from the experience of the minjung themselves. One of the central concerns of the minjung is the utilization of the energy manifest in the critical transcendence of the mask dance for bringing about the state of justice. The conscientization of the minjung about their oppression, which explodes into reality in the dance, provides the necessary impetus for the transformation of a potentially self-destructive energy (Kr. han) into a viable praxis.49 What is critically transcended in the mask dance is han: the accumulated, suppressed, unresolved sense of resentment and revenge against the injustices suffered by the minjung.50 The force or energy of han can manifest itself in two ways: either as a destructive negating force or as a positive affirming force. It is the latter that the minjung hope to channel and utilize for the purpose of social transformation. Han is characterized primarily as a feeling; it is not a mere theoretical concept. It is embodied feeling that may express itself artistically as in the mask dance or, in the words of minjung theorist Suh Nam-dong, as a tendency for social revolution brought on by a feeling with a tenacity of will for life.51 Han can manifest itself as fearful han, as a destructive, violent, vengeful force capable of negating to the point of self-destruction. In order to transform han into an affirmative force, the critical transcendence afforded to the minjung needs to be actualized. This is accomplished through the mechanism of dan, meaning literally to cut. Accumulated han must therefore be met with continuous dan.52 Dan is self-denial, a detachment of oneself from the vicious circle of han. What is denied, though, is not the yearning for individual rights and freedoms or the place of the individual in society; rather, dan is a willful commitment to place unselfishly the needs of the society, of the minjung as a whole, before the needs of individual existence. Dan does not signify the complete negation of the individual ego or will. Rather, dan both preserves and negates the individual self, thereby making community a genuine possibility. According to Nishitani, Lack of selfishness is what is meant by non-ego, or emptiness (sunyata).53 In terms of praxis, in order to reverse the oppressive structure of top-down politics, there must be a denial of the sovereignty of the individual will in order to realize the greater subjecthood of the community.

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Neither han nor dan is a once-and-for-all event; rather, they are part of a process that functions as a release valve at times for the built-up pressure of accumulated resentment, anger, and even hatred and at other times as a fuel for social transformation or praxis. There is a fundamental unity between han and dan that allows han to be transfigured by dan, thus raising han to a higher, more positive level of power. Does the play between han and dan offer a key insight toward tackling the problem of nihilism? Han and ressentiment are two names for the same phenomenon, yet they differ insofar as han is recognized and understood by the minjung (hence the development of the mechanism of dan), whereas ressentiment develops, for the most part, without being detected until it is too late. This is due largely to the individualistic nature of ressentiment, which follows suit with the Western history of ideas, reinforced in the Enlightenment ideals that to this day still govern much social, ethical, and political discourse.

Nihilism and Self-Overcoming

The way to overcome the nihilism attending the thought of eternal recurrence, Zarathustra declares, is through laughter and dance, an embodied activity of Yes-saying (Ja-sagen). Only thus is the reactive egoistic consciousness overcome while simultaneously affirmed anew as the active will to power. As Maurice Blanchot incisively observes, Nihilism would be identical with the will to overcome nihilism absolutely.54 Nihilism is overcome then in its very affirmation, not in the extreme nihility of pure negation. But what form will such an affirmation take? Nishitani locates in Nietzsche a religious laughter, which invites comparison with the same in Zen Buddhism: A paradigmatic example of a religion that has attained the stage of being able to laugh is Zen Buddhism, the history of which also reverberates with laughter of different kinds.55 Is this laughter the very affirmation that will overcome nihilism? Both Zen Buddhisms sense of play and Zarathustras dancing levity expose the ego, the I, the self, for the illusion and trickster that it is and in so doing overcome the ignorance (Sk. avidya) that promotes so much suffering (Sk. dukkha) in the first place. Indeed, even a thinker as serious as Tanabe (in both tone and subject matter, not to mention personal life) recognizes that the egoism that lies directly on the surface of Nietzsches will to power is nothing more than a disguise. Though the mask be that of a devil, the reality is that of a sage.56 The expression of the Great Affirmation of Buddhism bears close affinity to Nietzsches affirmation of the seeming nihility of the eternal recurrence. But if Nishitani could state in his early writing that the will to power as amor fati represents an essentially affirmative, creative perspective, he later qualified his stance and correlated the eternal recurrence with the

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mythical idea of an unending transmigration that would deny the possibility of an absolute freedom or creativity, implying only an ecstatic transcendence to nihility.57 In a crucial passage, Nishitani writes:
With Nietzsche we find a turnabout on this nihilism that results in the standpoint of Eternal Recurrence as a disclosure of the Will to Power. . . . Nevertheless, insofar as the Will to Power comes down in my analysis to a worldview of Eternal Recurrence, it is my view that the meaning it gives to history as its last and final ground, on the field of ecstatic transcendence, is only based on a negative pole. Yet we must not overlook the positive pole in Nietzsches thought. Within the perspective available from the standpoint of the Will to Power, all meaning in history that had been transformed into meaninglessness in nihility was tentatively restored in an affirmative manner in conjunction with the reaffirmation of all world interpretations as attempts of the Will to Power to posit values. The standpoint of the Will to Power and Eternal Recurrence is a standpoint of the Great Affirmation, which could only appear after a nihilistic Great Negation.58

Despite their similarities, Nishitani locates a certain type of nihilism in Nietzsche that is not completely vanquished inasmuch as time is confined to the negative pole of historical time. In other words, according to Nishitani, Nietzsche strives for the release of time from the nihility of historical temporality, a release that overcomes the nihilistic hypothetical transcendent unity posited over against becoming. Yet while he locates a radical difference and alterity within space-time, Nietzsche fails to realize the simultaneous oneness and uniqueness of all entities, namely, absolute nothingness. In this sense, Nishitani maintains, Nietzsches thinking remains confined to the standpoint of a relative absolute nihilism. Are Nishitanis absolute transcendence of being and Nietzsches selfovercoming of ressentiment one and the same? On Nishitanis account, non-ego is actualized as self-denial, whereas for Nietzsche self-overcoming is the affirmation of the illusory nature of the ego and the nihility of the eternal recurrence.59 Are they so far apart at this point? Nietzsches pronouncement of the death of God also marks the death of the self and ushers in the carnivalesque play of postmodernity.60 Ressentiment is overcome or ecstatically transcended through the playfulness of donning masks, of creating anew identities and meaning for life. Seen from the field of absolute nothingness, non-ego (Sk. anatman)the true self manifest in dependent origination (Sk. pratityasamutpada)means every self, since there is no persisting substantial individual self. The self is a mask, and every mask, as Nietzsche states, is merely a mask for other masks, an infinite procession of masks with ultimately nothing behind them. In this sense, claims Nishitani, the field of emptiness is a field of absolute transcendence . . . [and] at the same time an absolute immanence.61 The play of the mask is like the play of Zen, the standpoint where non-ego is self, where the true self emerges into its nature from non-ego.62 To embrace the element of the mask, as Nietzsche recognizes, is to affirm that existence is a constructed reality and because of that is able to be transformed and ecstatically transcended. Thus

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are laughter, satire, and irony grasped as essential and necessary for breaking through the paralyzing effect of nihilistic ressentiment and effecting, according to Tanabes interpretation, a radical conversion of both self and culture, a metanoesis predicated not only on a profound realization of ones limitations but equally on the joy of an absolute Yes-saying, possible only in the light of Gods death.

Great Affirmation and Ecstatic Trans-descendence

Whether in Zarathustras laughter, the minjung mask dance, or Zen practice, the transcendence of ethical or compassionate being emerges as at once an accumulation of strength and a renunciation of it.63 Is this the point, as Nishitani seems to contend, where the Zen Buddhist ethic breaks with Nietzsches ethic of revaluation based on the will to power? Or is Zarathustra in his unique way also a master of Zen? Even Tanabe, who refuses the path of Nietzsche and the Zen masters due to a kind of self-centered elitism that makes it impossible for them to pass beyond into the freedom of absolute nothingness by renouncing and letting go even of the noble self, is able to recognize that the way of Zen, which seeks to awaken people to the Buddha nature latent within them, is close to the thought of Zarathustra here in its teaching of the will to power and affirms in a move undoubtedly surprising to most Western readers Nietzsches proclamation of the bermensch as evocative of the Buddhist bodhisattva-ideal.64 What is most striking in the end is that Tanabe and Nishitani recognized long before most Western readers that the embodiment of active will to power in Nietzsche is not that of a tyrannical will but, rather, of a will determined by what Zen knows as self-power.65 Both Tanabe and Nishitani ultimately refuse Nietzsches philosophy on the grounds of being too firmly rooted in a conception of self as will and therefore of being. If this is so, then could it be that Nietzsches revalued notion of self is the very expression of ecstatic transcendence, of what Nishitani incisively terms ecstatic trans-descendencethat is, the affirmation of transcendence in immanence?66 If a hallmark of the philosophy of the future (GS 289, 343, 372 [and also of radical theology and what Schelling called philosophical religion]) is the progression toward a genuine world thinking, one that not only opens itself to other world perspectives but also grounds and reveals itself in the immanence of this worldly existence, then it is imperative that the concept of transcendence not be relegated to the graveyard of obsolete metaphysical jargon. Rather, if it is to be truly transformative and meaningful for a postmetaphysical world, then transcendence needs to be fully and absolutely actualized or, in other words, embodied. This does not mean, however, that Zen or Buddhism presents, as Hisamatsu Shinichi writes, some kind of [human] deificationa nave figment of the modern

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imaginationnor does it posit a transcendent God, as does dialectical theology. The critical focus of Zen is the affirmation of the sacred in [humankind] by retrieving the sacred from the realm of the transcendent and returning it to that of human subjectivity. Zen is not simply a rational position. It is a rational position paradoxically identical with the nonrational. It is not simply an immanent position, but one of transcendental immanence. Zen and Mahayana Buddhism must be seen in this light.67 In thinkers such as Nietzsche, Tanabe, and Nishitani, one finds not only the theoretical resources but also the will to ecstatically trans-descend the nihilistic abyss left by the death of God. In such ecstasy is made possible the Great Affirmation of an absolute Yes-saying to life here and now, but an affirmation inseparable from the equally great responsibility to the Earth and its inhabitants that ensues from the metanoesis of self-overcoming. Jetzt bin ich leicht, jetzt fliege ich, jetzt sehe ich mich unter mir, jetzt tanzt ein Gott durch mir (Z:I Vom Lesen und Schreiben).
Rochester Institute of Technology bxsgla@rit.edu

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Christa Acampora, Silvia Benso, Claudio Ciancio, Bret Davis, Lissa McCullough, Maurizio Pagano, and Graham Parkes for their comments and editorial suggestions on this and earlier versions of the essay. Part of this essay was published previously as Trans-discendenza estatica. Religione e metanoesi in Nietzsche, Tanabe, e Nishitani, trans. Silvia Benso, Annuario Filosofico 23 (2007): 397420, and is reprinted with permission.

NOTES
1. The appellation Kyoto school, which appears to have originated sometime in the early 1930s, refers to approximately two dozen philosophers associated with the Kyoto Imperial University and connected through their association with the thinking of Nishida Kitaro and Tanabe Hajime. For a history and critical overview of the Kyoto school, see James W. Heisig, Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001); Bret W. Davis, The Kyoto School, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (2006), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/. I will follow the East Asian convention of indicating the surname first (e.g., Nishitani Keiji), except when citing works in which the authors name is given following the Western practice of placing the given name before the surname. 2. See Bret W. Davis, Introducing the Kyoto School as World Philosophy, The Eastern Buddhist 3, no. 4/2 (2002): 14270. 3. Jan Van Bragt, Translators Introduction, in Religion and Nothingness, by Keiji Nishitani, trans. Jan Van Bragt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), xxxvii. 4. For Nishitanis views on kenosis and ekkenosis, see Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, trans. Jan Van Bragt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 25, 5859. See also Thomas J. J. Altizer, Kenosis and Sunyata in the Contemporary BuddhistChristian Dialogue, in Masao Abe: A Zen Life of Dialogue, ed. Donald W. Mitchell (Boston: Charles E. Tuttle, 1998), 15160; Buddhist Emptiness and the Crucifixion of God,

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in The Emptying God: A BuddhistJewishChristian Conversation, ed. John B. Cobb Jr. and Christopher Ives (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1990), 6978; Emptiness and God, in The Religious Philosophy of Nishitani Keiji: The Encounter with Emptiness, ed. Taitetsu Unno (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1989), 7081; and Buddhism and Christianity: A Radical Christian Viewpoint, Japanese Religions 9, no. 1 (March 1976): 111. For a comparison among Nishidas, Nishitanis, and Altizers views of kenosis, see Steve Odin, Kenosis as a Foundation for BuddhistChristian Dialogue: The Kenotic Buddhology of Nishida and Nishitani of the Kyoto School in Relation to the Kenotic Christology of Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Eastern Buddhist 20, no. 1 (1987): 3461. 5. Tanabe Hajime, Philosophy as Metanoetics, trans. Takeuchi Yoshinori (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 119. 6. Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 219. 7. The following abbreviations will be used to designate the etymological origin of various important Asian terms: Ch. = Chinese, Jp. = Japanese, Kr. = Korean, Sk. = Sanskrit. All macrons and other diacritical marks for these terms have been removed. 8. Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 9. Nishitani prefers to translate anatman as nonego rather than use the standard rendering of no-self or nonself in order to more forcefully differentiate the Buddhist notion of a self that is not a self (Religion and Nothingness, 216) from the ego-self of Western metaphysics, determined in large measure by the Cartesian cogito (Religion and Nothingness, 300). For the sake of consistency, the term non-ego will be used throughout this essay. A problematic term to translate, in Buddhist thinking anatman does not denote the mere dialectical opposite of self as nonself. T. R. V . Murti writes that anatman is the denial of substance (atman), of a permanent substantial entity impervious to change (cited in Hans Waldenfels, Absolute Nothingness: Foundations for a BuddhistChristian Dialogue, trans. James W. Heisig [New York: Paulist Press, 1980], 11). Buddhism does not deny the existence of the ego-self, only that it is originary in its individuated manifestation or is the transcendental condition for the possibility of knowing. All beings are interconnected and therefore exist in a state of contingent mutual codependency or dependent origination (Sk. pratityasamutpada). The teaching of anatman expresses this nonhierarchical state of differentiated unity. 9. Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 252. 10. Nicolas of Cusa, The Layman: About Mind (Idiota de Mente), trans. Clyde Lee Miller (New York: Abaris, 1979), 73. Cusanuss protomodernism (that is, the notion of a mathematically defined universe) melds with mysticism at this point, drawing on the conception of the eternal now grasped by Meister Eckhart and later Kierkegaard, among others, and revived by modern Zen thinking. 11. Nishitani Keiji, Science and Zen, trans. Richard D. Martino, in The Buddha Eye: An Anthology of the Kyoto School and Its Contemporaries, ed. Frederick Franck (Bloomington, Ind.: World Wisdom, Inc., 2004), 125. 12. Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 146. 13. Ibid., 150. 14. Ibid., 249. 15. Ibid., 151. 16. Ibid., 66. 17. Ibid., 265. 18. See Martin Heidegger, The Word of Nietzsche: God Is Dead, in Off the Beaten Path, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 15799; and Who Is Nietzsches Zarathustra? trans. Bernd Magnus, in The New Nietzsche, ed. David B. Allison (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 6479. See also Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 235. 19. Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 216.

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20. See ibid., 67. What stands out in Eckhart for Nishitani is that nothingness is accorded a salvific and not an ontological function. This point cannot be sufficiently underscored, as it is essential for Nishitanis own attempt to reconcile the differences between Asian and European thinking, a reconciliation that engages not only philosophy but religion as well. On Eckharts relationship to Zen, see Ueda Shizuteru, Nothingness in Meister Eckhart and Zen Buddhism with Particular Reference to the Borderlands of Philosophy and Theology, trans. James W. Heisig, in Franck, The Buddha Eye, 15769. 21. Tanabe, Philosophy as Metanoetics, 90. 22. Ibid., 104. 23. Nishitani Keiji, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, trans. Graham Parkes with Setsuko Aihara (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 180. 24. Dependent origination is a fundamental metaphysical concept common to all schools of Buddhism. Along with the concept of karma (literally, action or deed), it forms the Buddhist conception of causality, stating that all phenomena arise together in a mutually interdependent nexus of cause and effect. Because all phenomena are thus conditioned and transient or impermanent, they have no real independent identity and thus no permanent, substantial existence, even if to the ordinary mind this is not apparent. All phenomena are therefore fundamentally empty (Sk. sunya). 25. See Tanabe, Philosophy as Metanoetics, 103. 26. For a view that Nietzsche moves beyond the standpoint of simply recognizing the inherent contradiction and ambiguity in Western philosophy and embraces a paradoxical discourse, see Rogrio Miranda de Almeida, Nietzsche and Paradox, trans. Mark S. Roberts (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006). 27 Abe Masao, Mahayana Buddhism and Whitehead, in Zen and Western Thought, ed. William R. LaFleur (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985), 157. 28 Tanabe, Philosophy as Metanoetics, lvilvii. 29. Ibid., li. 30. Ibid., 18. 31. Ibid., 22. 32. The term metanoesis (literally, from the Greek: meta, after or other than, noesis, rational thought) means conversion (Jp. tenkan) or transformation of ones attitude, thoughts, and feelings to the point of repentance (Jp. zange) and assumes a central and critical importance especially for Tanabe in his later work. The very notion of conversion or transformation draws Tanabe and Nishitani into close proximity with Nietzsche and each other, although not necessarily into the same standpoint. 33. See Kiyozawa Manshi, The Great Path of Absolute Other-Power, trans. James W. Heisig, in Franck, The Buddha Eye, 24145. 34. Tanabe, Philosophy as Metanoetics, 9; also see 25. 35. Ibid., 151. 36. Ibid., 1067. 37. See Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 33, 55, 93, 171, 21112, 232, 24546. 38. Tanabe, Philosophy as Metanoetics, 1079. 39. Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 233. 40. Ibid., 211, 213. 41. I have written elsewhere: The terms apocalypse and eschatology are often conflated in meaning even though in actuality they are significantly different. Both terms convey, however, a sense of terminus. What distinguishes their respective meanings though is the dimension of knowledgespecifically, knowledge of the end of history. That is to say, even though both concepts connote a teleological dimension, only apocalypse truly conveys this meaning insofar as it posits a telos able to be comprehended as such. Eschatology, on the other hand, makes no determinative proposition

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regarding the nature of the end or completion of time and/or history, or even whether it will of necessity occur. (Apocalypse, Eschatology, and the Death of God, in Nietzsche and Levinas: After the Death of a Certain God, ed. Jill Stauffer and Bettina Bergo [New York: Columbia University Press, 2009], 236) Also see my Altared Ground: Levinas, History, and Violence (New York: Routledge, 1996), 14247, for a development of these themes as they pertain to Nietzsches philosophy. 42. On the difference between the eternal return and the eternal recurrence, see my Blood and Stone: A Response to Altizer and Lingis, New Nietzsche Studies 4, nos. 34 (20002001): 2941; and Absolute Atonement, in Thinking Through the Death of God: A Critical Companion to Thomas J. J. Altizer, ed. Lissa McCullough and Brian Schroeder (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 6587. 43. On this point, see my Can Fig Trees Grow on Mountains? Reversing the Question of Great Politics, in Difficult Justice: Commentaries on Levinas and Politics, ed. Asher Horowitz and Gad Horowitz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 14871. 44. The preceding two paragraphs also appear (with some revision here) in my Apocalypse, Eschatology, and the Death of God. 45. Hyun Young-hak, A Theological Look at the Mask Dance in Korea, in Minjung Theology, ed. Commission on Theological Concerns of the Christian Conference of Asia (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1981), 5054. 46. Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 97. 47. The theme of embodiment is central to Daoist, Buddhist, and Zen philosophy. On the relationship among Daoism, Buddhism, and the cultivation of inner strength (Ch. chi or qi; Jp. ki), see Huai-Chin Nan, Tao and Longevity: MindBody Transformation, trans. Wen Kuan Chu (York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1984); Yuasa Yasuo, The Body, Self-Cultivation, and Ki-Energy, trans. Shigenori Nagatomo and Monte S. Hull (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993). Responding to Yuasas work and branching off Nietzsches declaration in Zarathustra that the body is a great reason, Nagatomo articulates a theory of bodily attunement with respect to Dogen Kigens philosophy (a fundamental source for the Kyoto school, especially for Nishitani and Abe) and phenomenology in Shigenori Nagatomo, Attunement Through the Body (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). On the relationship between Zen and humanism, also with reference to Dogen and phenomenology, see T. P. Kasulis, Zen Action/Zen Person (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1981), especially 14254. 48. Hyun, A Theological Look at the Mask Dance in Korea, 50. 49. Ibid. 50. See Suh Nam-dong, Toward a Theology of Han and Historical References for a Theology of Minjung, in Commission on Theological Concerns of the Christian Conference of Asia, Minjung Theology, 5568 and 17880. Also see Suh Kwang-sun David, A Biographical Sketch of an Asian Theological Consultation, in Commission on Theological Concerns of the Christian Conference of Asia, Minjung Theology, 2328, for an introductory commentary on Suh Nam-dongs articles. 51. Suh, Toward a Theology of Han, 58. 52. Ibid., 6465. 53. Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 60. 54. Maurice Blanchot, The Limits of Experience: Nihilism, in Allison, The New Nietzsche, 126. 55. Nishitani, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, 66. 56. Tanabe, Philosophy as Metanoetics, 112. 57. Nishitani, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, 4850; Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 244, 246. 58. Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 21112.

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59. On this issue, see Graham Parkes, Nietzsche and Nishitani on the Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, International Studies in Philosophy 25, no. 2 (1993): 5160. 60. See Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 3451. 61. Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 265. 62. Ibid., 264. On the relation between self and mask, see Graham Parkes, Facing the Self with Masks: Perspectives on the Personal from Nietzsche and the Japanese, in Self and Deception: A Cross-Cultural Philosophical Enquiry, ed. Wimal Dissanayake and Roger Ames (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 287313; and Facing the Masks: Persona and Self in Nietzsche, Rilke, and Mishima, MOSAIC: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 20, no. 3 (1987): 6579. 63. Despite its long and well-known stance on the primacy of compassion, the question of philosophically grounding, or articulating, an intersubjective ethics has been historically a difficulty for Buddhist thinking. This difficulty is not lost on thinkers such as Nishitani and Abe Masao, another figure associated with the Kyoto school. In fact, because of Japans long interest in this century in Western thought, this problem is more pronounced than ever. Still, neither Nishitani nor other Kyoto school thinkers proffer a viable solution to this problem, often finding themselves confronted with the same barriers to resolving this issue that existentialism and phenomenology encountered. Quoting extensively from Abe, Hans Waldenfels summarizes his critique of Buddhist ethics on three basic points: First, there seems to be a tendency, especially in Zen, to not fully recognize the positive and creative aspects of human thinking, thus leading, knowingly or not, to a degeneration of nonthinking as a not thinking. Second, Buddhism has failed to answer the question of the grounding of [human] ethical responsibility and of [our] social and historical behavior. And third, a future task for Buddhism [is] to actualize the possibility of embracing scientific rationality in terms of Non-discriminating Wisdom (Waldenfels, Absolute Nothingness, 9697). Nishitanis task with regard to the issue of ethics, notes Waldenfels, is to provide an entry into this question through the standpoint of absolute nothingness. Ultimately, however, the problem hinges on the status of the historicity of time. For Abes views on Nietzsche, see his Zen and Nietzsche, in LaFleur, Zen and Western Thought, 13551. 64. Tanabe, Philosophy as Metanoetics, 114, 113. Meaning literally from the Sanskrit enlightened (bodhi) existence (sattva), this term is the central concept of Mahayana Buddhism, referring to an awakened being (buddha) that compassionately refuses to enter nirvana in order to continue to assist with the awakening or enlightenment of other beings. 65. For an incisive treatment of the question of will, see Bret W. Davis, Zen After Zarathustra: The Problem of the Will in the Confrontation Between Nietzsche and Buddhism, Journal of Nietzsche Studies 28 (2004): 89138. 66. Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 17172, 17476. Nishitani borrows the term from Takeuchi Yoshinori, another member of the Kyoto school. 67. Hisamatsu Shinichi, Zen as the Negation of Holiness, trans. Sally Merrill, in Franck, The Buddha Eye, 171; translation modified slightly.