Abstract
Two major twentieth century philosophers, of East and West, for whom the nothing is a significant concept are Nishida Kitarō and Martin Heidegger. Nishida’s basic concept is the absolute nothing (zettai mu) upon which the being of all is predicated. Heidegger, on the other hand, thematizes the nothing (Nichts) as the ulterior aspect of being. Both are responding to Western metaphysics that tends to substantialize being and dichotomize the real. Ironically, however, while Nishida regarded Heidegger as still trapped within the confines of Western metaphysics with its tendency to objectify, Heidegger’s impression of Nishida was that he is too Western, that is, metaphysical. Yet neither was too familiar with the other’s philosophical work as a whole. I thus compare and assess Nishida’s and Heidegger’s discussions of the nothing in their attempts to undermine traditional metaphysics while examining lingering assumptions about the Nishida–Heidegger relationship. Neither Nishida nor Heidegger means by “nothing” a literal nothing, but rather that which permits beings in their relative determinacy to be what they are and wherein or whereby we find ourselves always already in our comportment to beings. Nishida characterizes this as a place (basho) that negates itself to give rise to, or make room for, beings. For Heidegger, being as an event (Ereignis) that clears room for beings, releasing each into its own, is not a being, hence nothing. We may also contrast them on the basis of the language they employ in discussing the nothing. Yet each seemed to have had an intuitive grasp of an un/ground, foundational to experience and being. And in fact their paths cross in their respective critiques of Western substantialism, where they offer as an alterantive to that substantialist ontology, in different ways, what I call anontology.
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Notes
References to primary works by Nishida and Heidegger will be given as parenthetical references in the text. Nishida’s works will be identified with Z standing for Nishida Kitarō zenshū (Collected Works of Nishida) followed by the volume number and pagination. The zenshū volumes are of the most recent edition that started publication in 2000 except for Z18 and Z19 which are both of the 1966 edition. Heidegger’s works will be identified either by GA standing for Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe (Collected Works of Martin Heidegger) followed by the volume number and pagination and/or initials of the work title. Often the reference to Heidegger’s GA volume will be accompanied by a reference to the English translation followed by a slash (/) mark. The initials are identified in the reference list. All other works will be referred to in footnotes. Japanese personal names will be given in this essay by following the traditional Japanese ordering of family name first followed by the given personal name. For example, in “Nishida Kitarō,” Nishida is the family name and Kitarō is his personal name. Exceptions will be made for Japanese authors whose English works are very well known in the West, such as D.T. Suzuki.
Earlier and shorter versions of this paper were given as presentations at the 49th Annual Meeting of the Heidegger Circle held in Baltimore, MD; and at the 10th Annual Meeting of the Continental and Comparative Philosophy Circle held in Reykjavik, Iceland, both in May, 2015. And more recently a version was given as keynote address at the 1st International Conference of the International Association of Japanese Philosophy held in Fukuoka City, Japan in October, 2016. I would like to thank the conference organizers of those three events for allowing me to work out my ideas in these venues, and also the participants for providing me with questions and insight. I would also like to thank the blind reviewers of this journal for their helpful comments and suggestions.
The other works were Heidegger’s 1915 habilitation dissertation on Duns Scotus, Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus (Duns Scotus’ Doctrine of Categories and Meaning) and the first edition of Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics) of 1929. See Nishida Kitarō zenzōsho mokuroku (Catalogue of Nishida Kitarō’s entire library), edited and compiled by Yamashita Masao (Kyoto: Kyōto Daigaku Jinbunkeigaku kenkyūjo, 1983) referenced in Ōhashi 1994: 263.n.2. Nishida received the copy of Sein und Zeit from his student Mutai Risaku in 1927, the same year as its publication in Germany (see Z18 327; also Z19 600).
Nishida also expressed his negative assessment of Heidegger in 1933 to two younger Japanese philosophers. He told Takizawa Katsumi (滝沢克己) that “Heidegger is not worth your time [tsumaranu; worthless, uninteresting]” and discouraged him from studying with Heidegger (Takizawa 1975: 521; also see 1972: 441; and Sakaguchi 1989: 164). And he also told Miyake Gōichi (三宅剛一) that Heidegger’s work “…cannot answer the deep issues of substance and life” (Z18 489). But based on what Nishida writes of Heidegger, one wonders how much of Heidegger he really understood. According to Takizawa (in the above passages), who was also a Christian theologian, Nishida in addition stated that Heidegger “…does not recognize what is indispensable and decisive, namely, God.” On this see Rigsby 2010: 512 and n.1, 526 and nn.69–71, 546 and n.168. Nishida was certainly not aware of Heidegger’s complex relationship to religion, including the notion of “God”, not only in his earlier phenomenological period but also later in his post-1930 years which is much more nuanced than Rigsby suggests. We also need to keep in mind how Nishida’s own conception of “God” takes as its premise the absolute nothing and in this we might find unacknowledged resonances with Heidegger. On this see, for example, Krummel 2010.
D. T. Suzuki, “Erinnerung an einen Besuch bei Martin Heidegger” in Buchner 1989: 169–172, 170. This was Heidegger’s response to Suzuki Daisetsu (鈴木大拙) (D.T. Suzuki) in a conversation they had in 1953 when Suzuki asked him what he thought of Nishida’s philosophy. It is doubtful that Heidegger was too familiar with Nishida’s philosophy and this judgment was probably based on what he heard about Nishida from his Japanese visitors. On this also see Parkes 1992: 405.n.55.
It seems unwarranted to read this statement as the “highest possible compliment he [Heidegger] could have paid to Nishida” as a result of Heidegger’s supposed “privileging of the Graeco-German primal language” (Rigsby 2010: 540 and n.137). It is more likely that Heidegger—during a period when he was looking to poetry and “thinking” (Denken) as opposed to “philosophy”—was tacitly expressing a negative assessment of Nishida as too caught up in Western metaphysics. Two decades prior to Suzuki’s question, during the 1930s Heidegger was presented with a summary outline of Nishida’s Ippansha no jikakuteki taikei (『一般者の自覚的体系』; The Self-aware System of Universals) published in 1930 by Miyake Gōichi and Yuasa Seinosuke (湯浅誠之助), who were both in Germany studying with Heidegger during that time. According to Miyake, Heidegger gave a brusque reply that “it looks like Hegel, does it not?” On this see Shimomura 1971: 123 cited in Mine 2014: 71.
That is, if we regard the “metaphysics” or at least the metaphysical tendencies in both thinkers—in Heidegger’s pre-1929 discussions of being and nothing, which he himself later acknowledges in his self-critique; and in the language, replete with Western, especially German, philosophical terminology and locution, Nishida himself uses. We will discuss this in the last section of this paper.
Tanabe was a younger colleague and Nishitani was a student of Nishida. Miki Kiyoshi (三木清) and Kuki Shūzō (九鬼周造) are two more notable Japanese philosophers associated with the Kyoto School and who spent time with Heidegger and were influenced by him. Kuki was a colleague of Nishida at Kyoto University and Miki was Nishida’s student.
Tanabe, for example, wrote in his marginal notes to his copy of Heidegger’s Was ist Metaphysik? (“What is Metaphysics?”) that Heidegger’s conception of the nothing is a mere negation of being and thus a “nihilistic nothing” (nihilistisches Nichts). On this see Rigsby 2010: 544. And Nishitani suggests Heidegger dichotomizes being and nothing and hence reifies the latter when he states that the being of the self (Dasein) is suspended over the abyss of nothing, thus representing it as a “thing” (mono もの) that is not, separate from (or external to) being as a distinct “thing” that is. See Nishitani 2001: 108–109, 1982: 96. Nishitani’s point is that Heidegger is taking the nothing as a negative concept vis-à-vis being, yet this is precisely the standpoint Heidegger is at pains to deny is his own. And the standpoint of emptiness Nishitani himself advances in its stead in Shūkyō to wa nanika (What is Religion?), realized as at one with being, often sounds much like Heidegger’s words concerning the nothing in the 1930s and beyond such as in the 1936–38 Beiträge zur Philosophie (Contributions to Philosophy). If anything his critique applies to Heidegger before the 1930s as the later Heidegger himself critiques his pre-1930 discussions of the nothing as still “metaphysical”. Nishitani, no doubt, was influenced by Heidegger when he studied with him in Freiburg from 1937 to 1939. Yet his discussion of Heidegger seems to be based on Heidegger’s earlier works (pre-1930). What is ironic is that analogously to how the first generation of European Buddhologists and nineteenth century European thinkers evaluated Buddhism with its notion of emptiness as pessimistic and negative, it has become the common motif among some Kyoto School thinkers and their descendants that Heidegger had failed to overcome the negative image of nothingness. But if the early Western assessment of Buddhism was based on a misunderstanding, the recent Kyoto School assessment of Heidegger likewise may be a kind of misunderstanding or at least an assessment that ignores Heidegger’s post-1930 works.
On the other hand, however, we should mention the possibility here that Heidegger in turn may have been influenced by Zen conceptions of the nothing through his conversations with Nishitani. Nishitani has recounted how when he was studying in Freiburg, after presenting Heidegger with a copy of D.T. Suzuki’s Essays on Zen Buddhism, he was repeatedly invited to come to Heidegger’s house to discuss Zen. He recounts how they had many conversations about Zen at Heidegger’s home, during which Heidegger would ask many questions about Zen and would note down what Nishitani had said only to “repeat these ideas in his own lectures but without mentioning Zen” (Ban 1998: 186–90, 200–201; See also Parkes 1992: 394–395, 1996: 100; Davis 2013a: 460, b: 161.n.39). If so, Heidegger’s own retrospective 1943 self-critique of his earlier treatment of being and nothing as still “metaphysical” and as made in terms of beings (GA9 306 and n.a/PM 233 and n.1) along with the above-mentioned similarity of Nishitani’s discussions of emptiness with Heidegger’s post-1930 discussions of the nothing may in fact be due to Nishitani’s influence.
See also Heidegger’s 1963 letter to Kojima Takehiko (Buchner 1989) and Heidegger’s reply to Tsujimura Kōichi’s address (for Heidegger’s birthday) in 1969 in Tsujimura, “Martin Heideggers Denken und die japanische Philosophie” (Buchner 1989: 159–166, 166). In the letter to Kojima he emphasizes that “The nothing [das Nichts] talked about there means that which in relation to beings [das Seiende; rendering the singular as plural here] is never any kind of being, and ‘is’ thus nothing, but which nevertheless determines beings as such and is therefore called being [das Sein]” and states that this was understood immediately in Japan when it was published (Buchner 1989: 225). And in his Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache (“Dialogue on Language”) of 1959 appearing in Unterwegs zur Sprache (On the Way to Language), Heidegger has the Japanese character remark that “…we in Japan immediately understood the lecture ‘What is Metaphysics?’ when it reached us in translation in 1930… For us emptiness is the highest name for that which you would like to speak of with the word ‘being’…” The suggestion is that this was because of the Japanese sensitivity to East Asian emptiness (US 108–109/OWL 19). He also makes a similar remark in another letter around 1969 (GA15 414/FS 88). This translation of Was ist Metaphysik? by Yuasa Seinosuke, in fact published in 1931 one year after its appearance in Germany in 1930, was the first published translation of any work by Heidegger in Japanese (see Parkes 1992: 388).
See, for example, Tani 1998: 251.
For the cause as a determinate being with form forces us to inquire after its cause and so on ad infinitum. On this see Kosaka 2002: 60–61.
Perhaps akin to how Jean-Paul Sartre conceived consciousness as a nothing in relation to its objects.
This passage reminds one of the 13th century Japanese Sōtō Zen master Dōgen’s (道元) statement from his Genjōkōan (「現成公案」) in the Shōbōgenzō (『正法眼蔵』) that “to study the Buddha-way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self…” And indeed Nishida often quotes that passage from Dōgen.
See Kosaka 1997: 13.
Tanaka 2000: 54.
This is Nishida’s development of Hegel’s concrete universal.
The term soku-hi connotes the dialectical inseparability and bi-conditionality between contradictories, i.e., affirmation and negation, is and is-not, via mutual reference and interdependence, founded upon the Mahāyāna notion of emptiness (i.e., the absence of ontological independence; non-substantiality). Suzuki developed his notion in his own reading of the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras, especially the Diamond Sūtra.
Schürmann 1990: 3.
This is the text whose discussion of the nothing Heidegger claimed was understood in the Far East after the appearance of its Japanese translation in 1930 as a word for being, while it was misunderstood in Europe as nihilism. See note 9.
On this basis one might still question whether Nishitani’s evaluation of Heidegger’s sense of the nothing was valid when Heidegger conceived it in relation to the ontological difference between being and beings, whereby the nothing cannot be defined as mere non-being in contrast to being. Heidegger states that the nothing is not the opposite of beings but belongs to the being of beings (GA9 120/PM 94).
The Japanese then replies that emptiness is the loftiest name for what the Inquirer means by “being” (US 109/OWL 19). The reference here is presumably to the East Asian Mahāyāna concept of emptiness. Interestingly there is also the mentioning in this dialogue of the open as the empty sky, a reference to that East Asian notion of emptiness (whose graph 空 can also signify “sky” as well as “space”). This East Asian idea, needless to say, is one major source for Nishida’s conception of the place of nothing.
Schürmann 1990: 3.
To state that Heidegger’s ontology is “defined by the opposition of being and nothing” as Klooger does (2013: 2) is thus misleading. While conceding that the “negativity of nothing” in Heidegger has a positive function (2013: 3), Klooger goes on to point out that the designation “nothing” nonetheless evokes all the connotations implied by the concept of the nothing (2013: 12). Heidegger himself was obviously aware of this issue as he struggles with different ways of conveying both “being” and “nothing,” and certainly his interest in language, especially as it comes up in his later works, attests to this. Klooger charges Heidegger’s philosophy for setting up a simplistic dichotomy between the determinacy of beings and the indeterminacy of the nothing with no room inbetween for a partial determination of the nothing or the indeterminacy of beings (2013: 12). In arguing thus, Klooger misunderstands the entire theme in Heidegger of the being of beings, the ontological difference and aletheia, the un/concealment of beings involving the inseparable pairing of concealment and unconcealment. Klooger’s reading misses the subtlety in Heidegger’s thought and ignores the entire context of Heidegger’s project extending beyond Was ist Metaphysik?.
Parkes 1996: 99. Parkes even claims that Heidegger’s Lichtung may be seen as the German version of Nishida’s mu no basho. See Parkes 1992: 393–394. See also Weinmayr’s juxtaposition of two quotations showing this similarity (in Weinmayr 2005: 234): “We actually think that a being becomes accessible when an ‘I’ as subject represents an object. As if an open region within whose openness something is made accessible as object for a subject… did not already have to reign here as well!” (N2 138/N IV 93). And: “In order for consciousness and the object to be able to relate to one another, there must be something that includes both within itself. There must be something like a place in which they can relate to one another” (Z3 417).
I have used this to designate Nishida’ sense of the nothing as what encompasses, without being reduced to, being and its opposite, non-being, i.e., the ontological and the meontological, on (ὄν) and mēon (μήὄν).
This common concern between the two naturally leads to the question of common sources that they may have drawn from for their thematization of the nothing. I will refrain from discussing this topic since this would require another full-length investigation. I have already discussed the sources for Nishida’s concept of the nothing in Krummel 2014b. And for possible Eastern sources for Heidegger’s conception of the nothing, and which may perhaps provide some common ground with Nishida, see May 1996, including Parkes 1996, especially 79–80.
Especially interesting is the possibility of a common source of influence between Nishida’s notion of the place of nothing and Heidegger’s notion of the clearing that is a nothing. Lichtung in German customarily means clearing in the woods and Heidegger himself defines it as “…to make something light, free and open; for example, to make a place in the woods free of trees. The open space that results is the clearing” (SD 72). But the Chinese ideograph for nothing (wu 無) that Nishida uses also originally referred to an open clearing made in what was previously covered by thick vegetation (see May 1996: 32). May here cites Morohashi Tetsuji, Dai kan-wa jiten [Chinese–Japanese dictionary], 13 vols. (Tokyo, 1986), entry no. 19113, also 49188, 15783, 15514. Although it is unlikely that Heidegger could have drawn from this source. May (1996: 33–34) speculates that Heidegger may have been familiar with some of the German sources discussing the Chinese concept of wu and that he could have assimilated the East Asian notion of the nothing (From Daoism and Zen) through his acquaintance with East Asian thought and through conversations with his East Asian interlocutors. And of course in addition to Eastern sources, there were certainly Western sources for the notion of the nothing both thinkers were familiar with, for example, Plato’s notion of chōra, the Christian mystical tradition (Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, Jakob Böhme), and German Idealism (Hegel, Schelling). And certainly the Neo-Kantian understanding of the realm of validity qua intelligibility in distinction from being and especially Emil Lask’s notion of domain predicates (Gebietspredikate) or domain categories (Gebietskategorien) was also significant to both thinkers.
As I already alluded to above there is also the interesting issue of a possible influence or fertilization of ideas from one to the other. Parkes suggests that Heidegger may have been influenced by Nishida’s concept of the nothing via Tanabe Hajime, who had been following Nishida’s thought for ten years and who came to Freiburg to study during the early 1920s (see Parkes 1992: 382–383, 1996: 89–90, 92, 97 99). During this time Tanabe was invited to give a presentation on Nishida’s philosophy to a group of German philosophers, including Heidegger, at Husserl’s home. On this see James Heisig’s forward to Tanabe 1986: xi. By 1927, Heidegger had engaged in philosophical dialogue with Tanabe as well as Miki Kiyoshi and Kuki Shūzō, all major philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century Japan, and all of whom were familiar with Nishida, especially Miki who had studied under Nishida. Heidegger would thus have had ample opportunity to learn about Nishida’s concept of the nothing. On the other hand Heidegger seemed to have regarded Nishida as too metaphysical based on the little he knew, as we also discussed above. And there is also the case of Nishitani during the 1930s as discussed above. However I choose not to delve too deeply on this issue, which would take us beyond the purpose of this essay to examine and compare their understanding of the nothing.
Kozyra 2006: 136–137. Tsujimura Kōichi who has been interested in resonances between Heidegger and Zen has nonetheless been critical of this aspect of Angst that emerges in Heidegger in contrast to Zen and also notices a difference between the later Heidegger and Zen as one between “thinking” (shii 思惟) and the “non-thinking” source of thought (shii no kongen 思惟の根源) (Tsujimura 1971: 44–45; 2011: 414–415). Tsujimura sees Heidegger as still confined to the realm of thought without taking a leap into the unthought origin of thought (shisaku de wa nai shisaku no kongen 思索ではない思索の根源) (Tsujimura 1989a: 79–86, 1991: 203) even if it responds to the call of that which is beyond thought, in Schelling’s terms, the “unprethinkable” (Unvordenkliche) (GA77, 146, 231; Tsujimura 1971: 44–48; 2011: 413–418; also see his 1991: 359–360). Tsujimura concludes that Heidegger and Zen are not the same but also suggests that they are complementary (Tsujimura 1971: 47–48, 53, 1989b, 165, 2008: 355, 2011: 417–418, 425). On the above analysis of Tsujimura, also see Davis 2013b. And correspondingly Bret Davis points to the difference between Heidegger’s meditative or commemorative thinking (Besinnung, Andenken) and Zen meditation’s more radical non-dualistic descent into the nothing by way of “non-thinking” (hi-shiryō 非思量) (see Davis 2013a: 466–468). There certainly is a difference between Zen and Heidegger here but we ought not to stray too far from our main purpose of comparing Heidegger and Nishida as both philosophers and their notions of the nothing. And at the same time we might still direct the same observations Tsujimura makes between Heidegger and Zen to the case of Nishida insofar as he is a philosopher who thinks and writes, making use of concepts and words, even if he also was a Zen practitioner for some time. This certainly is not to ignore, or casually dismiss, the profound influence Zen practice and doctrines have had on Nishida’s thinking.
Kozyra 2006: 136–137.
See Ueda 1992: 58–59.
Parkes 1992: 387–388.
Ueda 1992: 64.
Ueda 1992: 59.
The charge (made such as in Niigata 1998: 232, 240) that this “essential thinking” still objectifies the nothing simply by virtue of being a kind of “thinking” after the fact seems to ignore what Heidegger’s arguments are attempting to say and amounts to a “straw man” argument. If thinking “after the fact” necessarily objectifies, then no philosophy, not even Nishida’s, can escape this fault.
Another possible key to solving the issue of how to depict being/nothing non-metaphysically may be in Reiner Schürmann’s schematization of the different modes of the ontological difference, taking off from, and developing, Heidegger’s ontological difference: difference as metaphysical (being as universal beingness vs. the particular entity), difference as temporal (being as presencing vs. the present entity), and, finally, difference as symbolic (being by doing or being vs. the object of thought). The final mode of difference seems to hint at one way of authentically characterizing being in distinction from its objectification or reification. See Schürmann 1978: 199, 207, 221, 1979: especially, 103.
See Karatani 1995. Nevertheless—to continue with Karatani’s idea of “architecture as metaphor”—the nothing uncovered in that attempt to erect a foundation, Nishida’s very own place of nothing, would ultimately destabilize, unground, that construction, that is, metaphysics itself.
Graham Parkes in fact suggests that it is Heidegger’s encounter with East Asian texts such as the Laozi and the Zhuangzi that had the effect of changing his style of prose to the poetical locutions of his later works. See Parkes 1992: 392. But we have to also remember, as Parkes himself mentions in 404.n.49, the effect of German poets like Hölderlin on Heidegger.
Ueda 1992: 62–63. Ueda remarks that every horizon emerges from and disappears into its “yonder” that is an endless or boundless open (Ueda 1992: 101–102, 106, 139). While being perhaps the last significant representative of Kyoto School philosophy, Ueda, may be the one who comes closest to successfully synthesizing the thoughts of Heidegger and Nishida with his own conception of being-in-the-twofold-world whereby man’s being-(t)here (Dasein) is implaced in the world that is in turn implaced in the nothing (e.g., Ueda 1992: 50–51, 57). On Ueda’s synthesis of Nishida and Heidegger, see Krummel forthcoming. Other Kyoto School philosophers, who I should mention here, who show an appreciation of Heidegger, with an understanding of his later works, and have noted the resonances between Heidegger’s and Nishida’s thoughts, along with differences, are Takeuchi Yoshinori (武内 義範) (1991a) and Ōhashi Ryōsuke (大橋 良介) (1994). And of course we cannot forget to mention here Tsujimura Kōichi, a Kyoto School philosopher who is known, within the Kyoto School, for his interpretations of Heidegger’s philosophy. See, for example, Tsujimura 1989b and 2008. His own synthesis of Zen, Nishida, and Heidegger is expressed in Tsujimura 1977 and 2011. However Ueda may be the one who had successfully managed to synthesize key concepts from Heidegger’s and Nishida’s philosophies in a creative manner. It is also interesting to note that these Kyoto School philosophers who expressed greater appreciation for Heidegger’s thought were third generation (Takeuchi, Tsujimura, and Ueda) or fourth generation (Ōhashi) members of the Kyoto School, while Tanabe and Nishitani who had studied with Heidegger but were harsher on Heidegger’s treatment of the nothing were of the first generation (Tanabe) or second generation (Nishitani). It may be that the later generation had more time to study and absorb Heidegger’s later thought as it unfolded through the decades after the World War. But this is not to ignore that this later generation did have its differences with Heidegger (as in Tsujimura’s contrasting of Heidegger and Zen as discussed in note 31).
On this see Krummel forthcoming.
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