Nishitani Keiji 1900 – 1990

Nishitani Keiji was a Japanese philosopher and one of the principal figures of the second generation of the Kyoto School. A student of Nishida Kitaro at Kyoto and of Heidegger at Freiburg, he combined Mahayana Buddhist thought, especially the Zen concept of emptiness, with the Western philosophical tradition in works such as The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism and Religion and Nothingness. His central concern was the problem of nihilism in the modern world and the religious response to it through what he called the standpoint of emptiness or absolute nothingness.

Nishitani Keiji was born in 1900 at Noto on the Sea of Japan coast, the son of a small-town merchant. He took his degree in philosophy at Kyoto Imperial University in 1924 under Nishida Kitaro, the founder of the Kyoto School, and stayed on for graduate study. After early academic posts he spent two formative years at Freiburg with Martin Heidegger from 1937 to 1939.

He held a chair at Kyoto from 1943 until the postwar Allied purge removed him in 1947 because of essays associated with the wartime 'overcoming modernity' discussions; reinstated in the 1950s, he taught at Kyoto and at Otani University until well into his eighties. His major books include The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism (1949), Religion and Nothingness (Shukyo to wa nani ka, 1961), On Buddhism, and the four-volume Collected Works.

Nishitani brought together the Mahayana Buddhist tradition of emptiness (sunyata), Zen practice, and the European tradition from Eckhart through Nietzsche and Heidegger to address what he called the contemporary 'standpoint of nihility', and to argue that the deeper standpoint of emptiness alone could see modern science, personhood, and the sacred truly. He is the central second-generation figure of the Kyoto School. He died at Kyoto in November 1990.