The Recursive Shadow: Nishitani's Śūnyatā and the Return of Substantialism — Epoche C2
The charge, and what would be needed to make it stick Nishitani Keiji's Religion and Nothingness — published in Japanese in 1961 as Shūkyō to wa nanika , "What is Religion?", and translated by Jan Van Bragt in 1982 — sets out a "field of emptiness" on which things are said to be what they are without being grounded in any substance, and the question this essay pursues is whether that field is itself a substance in disguise. The suspicion is easy to state and hard to adjudicate. If śūnyatā , emptiness, is described as the ultimate field on which everything stands, then the description appears to name something that stands under everything else while itself standing under nothing — which is what a substance is, and which is exactly what Nishitani's whole enterprise was meant to escape. The charge is that the escape is recursive in the bad sense: the exit is built out of the same material as the room. To make the charge stick, three things are needed, and the version of this argument published earlier supplied none of them cleanly. First, an accurate statement of what Nishitani's field is, and how it differs from the nothingness of his predecessors. Second, an accurate identification of whose objection is being borrowed, because the objection this essay uses is a real one, made by a real philosopher, against a real target — but the target was not Nishitani. Third, a hearing for the specific device Nishitani built to defeat this exact objection, since an argument that ignores the defence has not engaged the position. Once those three are in place, the charge changes shape: it fails as an objection to Nishitani's ontology and succeeds as an objection to his method. Nishitani's three fields, and why the third is not the negation of the first Nishitani's exposition is organised by an ascent through three standpoints, and the middle one is what the earlier version of this essay left out, with the result that the third became unintelligible. The field of consciousness ( ishiki no ba ). Things stand over against a subject as objects of representation. This is the standpoint of ordinary cognition and, for Nishitani, of modern science and of the philosophy built on the subject–object relation. The field of nihility ( kyomu no ba ). Van Bragt renders kyomu as "nihility" precisely to keep it distinct from emptiness. Nihility is the abyss that opens beneath things when their being is felt to have no ground: it is a nothingness, but a relative one, defined by opposition to being and therefore still inside the logic it seems to refute. Nihility is what Nishitani takes European nihilism to have reached. His criticism of Heidegger's Nichts is exactly this: for all its depth, it retains a residue of representation, standing over against beings like a bottomless ground beneath them, and a nothingness that stands over against anything has not left the field where things stand over against one another. The field of emptiness ( kū no ba ). Reached only by passing through nihility rather than around it, and characterised by the refusal of the very opposition that made nihility possible. The passage from the second to the third is not argued in the ordinary sense; it is a conversion, and its pivot is the Great Doubt, daigi , which Nishitani takes from the Zen tradition. The Great Doubt is not doubt about something. It is the state in which the doubter has become the doubt — in which there is no residual self left over to be doubting, because the self was among the things that fell into nihility. The Zen formula for what is found on the far side is the "original face", honrai no menmoku , the face one had before one's parents were born. A terminological correction is due here, and it matters for the argument. The earlier version called the field of emptiness kū no basho . Nishitani's word is ba , field; basho , place, is Nishida Kitarō's word and carries a doctrine attached, which brings us to the essay's central error. Whose logic of place? A correction The published version of this essay stated that Tanabe Hajime "developed the 'logic of place' ( basho no ronri )". That is wrong, and wrong in a way that reverses the argument's polarity. The logic of place is Nishida's, from his 1926 essay "Basho"; Tanabe's philosophical career was in large part an attack on it. Nishida (1870–1945), Tanabe (1885–1962) and Nishitani (1900–1990) belong to three successive generations of the loose grouping later labelled the Kyoto School, and, as Robert Carter's introduction to the school stresses, what holds the grouping together is a shared problem — how to think an absolute that is nothing — rather than a shared doctrine, since on doctrine they disagreed sharply and in print. Nishida's own development runs through three phases that should not be conflated. An Inquiry into the Good (1911) is built on "pure experience", the immediate experiential unity prior to the split into subject and object. The middle work turns on jikaku , self-awareness. The logic of place arrives only in 1926, and it is a distinct doctrine. Its move is a deliberate inversion of Aristotle. In the Categories , primary substance is what is neither said of a subject nor present in a subject: the argument runs down the chain of predication to an ultimate subject . Nishida runs the chain the other way and asks after the ultimate predicate — the field of predication that can never itself become a grammatical subject, that in which things are, for which he invokes Plato's receptacle in the Timaeus as a precedent. He then arranges these places in a series: the place of being, the place of relative nothingness (which is the field of consciousness), and, enveloping both, the place of absolute nothingness. This makes the substantialism charge sharper than the earlier version could. Nishida's whole point in choosing the predicate rather than the subject is that a place is not a thing. If the objection is that treating absolute nothingness as a place makes it a substance