Nishitani Keiji Quotes on Knowledge
Nishitani Keiji (1900–1990), the principal philosopher of the second generation of the Kyoto School after Nishida Kitarō and Tanabe Hajime, gave twentieth-century Japanese philosophy its most ambitious engagement with the European tradition in works such as The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism (1949) and Religion and Nothingness (1961). The framework treats the European nihilism diagnosed by Nietzsche and Heidegger as the symptom of an unresolved Western metaphysical predicament whose constructive overcoming requires the philosophical appropriation of the Buddhist standpoint of emptiness (śūnyatā). Knowledge on this view is achieved through the existential conversion to the "field of śūnyatā" — the standpoint at which both subject and object are encountered in their non-substantial, interrelational reality.
Quotes
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Attributed to Nishitani Keiji:
“Religion is the place where one comes to know oneself.”
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“In the religiosity of Zen Buddhism , demythologization of the mythical and existentialization of the scientific belong to one and the same process.”
Zen Skin, Zen Marrow (Oxford: 2008), p. 134. -
“Previous ideals and values undermine themselves and collapse into nothing precisely as a result of the effort to make them consummate and exhaustive.”
p. 104. -
“Summarizing Nietzsche ’s views, p. 109.”
Through the sincerity cultivated by Christian morality the values and ideals established by that morality itself are revealed as fictions. -
“In principle, when we distinguish being from beings, we transcend the realm of things that are. It is not that we go to some other world beyond the world we know, or enter into some different realm of beings. Such notions constitute, for Heidegger, a vulgar form of metaphysics with which true philosophy (metaphysics as science) has nothing in common. Philosophy does not go beyond beings ontically to other beings that dwell beyond or behind. It transcends beings ontologically in the direction of being.”
p. 163. -
“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 Mahāyāna.”
p. 180.