Kitaro Nishitani

Early Life and Formation

Kitaro Nishitani was born on February 27, 1900, in Noto-cho, Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan, into a family with samurai roots. His early childhood was marked by the illness and death of his father and his own severe tuberculosis, experiences that gave him an early and intimate acquaintance with death and existential fragility. He studied at Kyoto Imperial University under Kitaro Nishida, graduating in 1924, and became one of Nishida's most devoted students and eventually his intellectual successor as the dominant voice of the Kyoto School.

In 1937–1939, Nishitani studied in Germany with Martin Heidegger at the University of Freiburg — an encounter that profoundly shaped his philosophical vocabulary and his confrontation with nihilism, though he came to judge Heidegger's analysis as philosophically incomplete from a Buddhist perspective. He also studied Meister Eckhart intensively during this period, finding in the medieval mystic's concept of Gelassenheit (letting-go) and the Gottheit (Godhead) beyond God resonances with Zen's concept of śūnyatā.

Professor and Controversies

Nishitani returned to Kyoto and taught at Kyoto Imperial University from 1943, becoming professor in 1943. Like Tanabe, he was associated during World War II with the 'Overcoming Modernity' (kindai no chōkoku) symposium of 1942 — a gathering of Japanese intellectuals who discussed the philosophical basis of Japan's war aims and its critique of Western modernity. This association brought him under scrutiny after the war, and he was temporarily removed from his academic position under Allied occupation authorities. He returned to his professorship in 1952 and remained at Kyoto until his retirement in 1963, continuing to write and lecture until old age.

Religion and Nothingness: The Central Work

Nishitani's Shūkyō to wa nanika (Religion and Nothingness, 1961; English translation, 1982) is his masterpiece and one of the most important philosophical works produced in Asia in the twentieth century. Its central question is: what is religion, and why does it remain philosophically unavoidable even after the dissolution of traditional religious frameworks by science and modernity?

The Problem of Nihilism

Nishitani begins with what he takes to be the defining spiritual situation of modernity: nihilism. Following Nietzsche (whom he engages deeply throughout), he identifies nihilism as the condition in which traditional values, meanings, and the sense of grounded selfhood have collapsed — not merely as a philosophical theory but as an existential reality felt in the 'great doubt' that haunts modern life. The self that was once felt to rest on God, nature, or reason now finds no ground beneath it.

But Nishitani's response to nihilism is not Heidegger's — he does not propose authentic Being-toward-death as the solution — nor Nietzsche's will to power. His diagnosis is that both remain within the field of the ego-self (jiko), unable to move beyond the standpoint from which nihilism arises.

The Three Fields: Consciousness, Nihility, Śūnyatā

Nishitani develops a phenomenology of three 'fields' or standpoints:

1. The field of consciousness (shiki): ordinary everyday awareness, in which the self stands over against objects in a subject-object dualism. This is the field of science, ordinary rationality, and pre-nihilistic religious experience.

2. The field of nihility (mu): the nihilistic breakthrough in which the ground falls away from under the self and object — the experience of nihility as the abyss under all beings. Nishitani distinguishes this from Buddhist śūnyatā: nihility is still a ground (an abyssal one) experienced from the ego-self's perspective. It is Nietzsche's nihilism, Heidegger's Angst, the modern experience of meaninglessness.

3. The field of śūnyatā (emptiness): the breakthrough through nihility to a standpoint in which both self and things are encountered in their 'suchness' — not as objects for a subject but as they are in themselves, mutually interpenetrating, without fixed essence or self-nature. At this level, the ego-self is not destroyed but transformed: the 'self that is not-self,' which can be at home in the world precisely because it no longer grasps at a fixed identity.

Śūnyatā and Circuminsessional Interpenetration

For Nishitani, śūnyatā (drawing on Nāgārjuna and Hua-yen Buddhism) is not mere emptiness in the nihilistic sense but an affirmative, dynamic 'emptying' — the release of all things into their mutual interpenetration and their individual distinctness simultaneously. He uses the concept of engi (dependent origination) and develops the image of circuminsessional interpenetration (each thing contains all others while remaining distinctly itself) as the ontological structure revealed at the field of śūnyatā.

Science, Technology, and Buddhist Response

Nishitani was also a major interpreter of modern science and technology from a Buddhist philosophical perspective. He argued that modern science's objectifying stance toward nature — seeing things as mere objects for manipulation — is both an expression of the ego-self's grasping and a source of the nihilistic condition it paradoxically generates. The Buddhist response is not anti-science but a transformation of the relationship to things — encountering them in their śūnyatā rather than as objects of exploitation.

Encounter with Christianity and the Question of God

Throughout Religion and Nothingness and his other writings (including The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, written 1948, published in English 1990), Nishitani engaged extensively with Christian mysticism — particularly Meister Eckhart — and with the theistic traditions more broadly. He argued that genuine religious experience in both Buddhist and Christian traditions points toward a 'field' beyond the personal God of theism — the Gottheit (Godhead) in Eckhart's terms, or śūnyatā in Buddhist terms — and that true religion requires passing through the death of the God of metaphysical theism.

Legacy

Nishitani died on November 24, 1990. Religion and Nothingness has become one of the most read and discussed works of Asian philosophy in Western academic contexts. His philosophical engagement with nihilism is regarded as one of the most searching responses to the predicament of modernity — one that takes both the depth of the nihilistic challenge and the resources of the Buddhist tradition with equal seriousness.