Keiji Nishitani: Nothing

Keiji Nishitani was Japanese philosopher. Explore interesting quotes on nothing.
Keiji Nishitani: 22 quotes6 likes

“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.”

Keiji Nishitani

Source: The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism (1990), p. 163

“Previous ideals and values undermine themselves and collapse into nothing precisely as a result of the effort to make them consummate and exhaustive.”

Keiji Nishitani

Source: The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism (1990), p. 104

“"Nothingness" is generally forced into a relationship with "being" and made to serve as its negation, leading to its conception as something that "is" nothingness because it "is not" being. This seems to be especially evident in Western thought, even in the "nihility" of nihilism. But insofar as one stops here, nothingness remains a mere concept, a nothingness only in thought. Absolute nothingness, wherein even that "is" is negated, is not possible as a nothingness that is thought but only as a nothingness that is lived. It was remarked above that behind person there is nothing at all, that is, that "nothing at all" is what stands behind person. But this assertion does not come about as a conceptual conversion, but only as an existential conversion away from the mode of being of person-centered person. Granted what we have said about the person-centered self-prehension of person as being intertwined with the very essence and realization of the personal, the negation of person-centeredness must amount to an existential self-negation of man as person. The shift of man as person from person-centered self-prehension to self-revelation as the manifestation of absolute nothingness - of which I shall speak next - requires an existential conversion, a change of heart within man himself.”

Keiji Nishitani book Religion and Nothingness

Source: Religion and Nothingness (1983), p. 70

“From the perspective of Buddhism, Sartre’s notion of Existence, according to which one must create oneself continually in order to maintain oneself within nothing, remains a standpoint of attachment to the self – indeed, the most profound form of this attachment – and as such is caught in the self-contradiction this implies.”

Keiji Nishitani

Source: The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism (1990), p. 187