Reviews for Religion and nothingness

The average rating for Religion and nothingness based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-08-16 00:00:00 Robert Bayham Telling Japanese I had spent years studying their culture earned me no points, telling them I had read this book had them looking at me w/awe and admiration. Nishitani is one of the foremost Japanese philosophers and this is NOT an easy read, it makes Foucault look like child's play. In fact according to my professor (one of the foremost scholars on the topic at the time, he has now passed away) I was one of the only student in the class to understand it, and that was because my boyfriend at the time was a Ph.D student in Buddhism and he spent hours trying to make me understand it. Nishtani does NOT use straight-line western logic, but rather circular/fuzzy logic that consists of grays -- the sort of stuff that advanced physics is now starting to accept as a more accurate portrayal of the universe. This is not a book you read once and put down, its the sort where you read it, re-read it, and then go over it with a fine tooth comb de-constructing single paragraphs.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-10-16 00:00:00 Arick Solan Nihilism is a historically situated problematic in the Western philosophical tradition as much as it is a kind of virtual ground beneath our everyday interactions that constantly threatens to make an unwelcome appearance. According to Keiji Nishitani, the only way to overcome nihilism is to brave through its purgatory flames. In Religion and Nothingness, he entrusts nothingness with the task of reorienting the Dasein to the direction of overcoming nihilism's double negation (the annihilation of the content of meaning and the annihilation of any transcendent frame of reference from which this content is derived). But this overcoming does not connote a return to plain old theism whose transcendent authority has suffered heavy defeat at the hands of nihilistic techno-science. Nor does it express a nostalgic desire to reinvigorate the world with meaning. However, it does involve taking up a certain religious, or more specifically, existential-phenomenological attitude in persisting in the very banality of our lives. This is radically different from philosophical reflection with its air of theoretical detachment that betrays the lived urgency of daily life into which we are continually being thrown. For Nishitani, following the footsteps of late Heidegger (Der Spiegel), thought of religion as the only level at which authentic encounter with being can take place. The field of this encounter is nothingness or sunyata, as the self-emptying emptiness that allows things to become manifest in their own “suchness”. It is the end-point of nihilism, which having thus butchered open the transcendent order, is now in turn being butchered open by a more elemental ground that is always-already beneath us, and to which we must “step back”. The movement transpires across three fields: we begin with the belief in the transcendent order, followed by a dismal awareness of the groundlessness and the unreality of the world which we have taken from granted, which in turn is followed by a nullification of this nihility in the radically open horizon of absolute nothingness in which the boundary between interiority and exteriority is dissolved. As such, it is matter not of transcending our current life but of “trans-descending” to the absolute near side, which because it is nearer to us than our own subjective ego, is simultaneously very distant from us. Like the Tao, which is everywhere and so nowhere in particular, sunyata is concealed in its very disclosedness and disclosed in its very hiddenness. My only complaint is that Nishitani repeats himself often and heavily.