"what is religion?": (re)imagining religion and the self

8/12/2019 "What is Religion?": (Re)Imagining Religion and the Self

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Nolan Harris Jr

Kyoto School

Final Essay Re-do

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The first three sections of KeijiNishitanis first chapter What is Religion?1

concern themselves with Nishitanis discussion of the essence of religion. He approaches

his study from the standpoint of the question What is the purpose of religion? and

weaves an analysis of religion that ultimately reconceives its purpose, its import, and

what he takes to be its deepest significance. Nishitani conducts his examination by

reflecting on the nature of religion, which implicates, in his telling, a deeper critique of

subjectivity. He will then introduce and build on the Zen notions of the Great Doubt and

the Great Death. In this essay, I will explore Nishitanis questions about religion, and

examine the assumptions on which Nishitani believes the ordinary notion of religion

rests. I will also discuss his treatment of the Zen notions of the Great Doubt and the Great

Death as ideas by which Nishitani exhumes the deeper, concealed, nature of religion,

reality and the self, which the aforementioned query What is the purpose of religion?

(or Should I be religious?)tends to obscure.

I.

Nishitani begins his discourse on religion by considering a few questions that

emerge when considering its nature and purpose: (1) What is religion? (2) What is the

purpose of religion for us? (3) Why do we need it? Nishitani thinks the person who poses

the third of these queriesWhy do we need religion?is exactly the person for whom

religion is a necessity, even against the implication reposing within the question that

religion is indeed nota necessity. This is because, Nishitani writes, religion is about life

itself (Nishitani, 2).

Whereas we can ask, for instance, Why do we need sports? and content

ourselves with some account or argument that makes sense of the role athletics play in

human endeavor, we can nonetheless, Nishitani argues, get on without sports. That is, if

athletic competition had never been developed by humans, life could and would still go

on. While we may maintain that in order to live well, humans need the drama, discipline

and excitement that athletics furnish, livingsimpliciter, does not require them. In this

sense, athletics show themselves to be a kind of luxury. Conversely, Nishitani wants to

1My primary text for this essay shall be the three sections of chapter 1, What is Religion?, of Religion and

Nothingnessby Keiji Nishitani. I am responding to question one of the final essay prompt: What

assumptions are entailed in Nishitanis question: Should I be religious? How does Nishitani undo these

assumptions in his discussion of the Great Doubt and the Great Death?


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Nolan Harris Jr

Kyoto School

Final Essay Re-do

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argue that religion is something, at its core, that is about life itself; something about

which we cannot pose the question in terms that, from the outset, doubt its necessity.

Indeed Nishitani claims, those for whom religion is nota necessity are, for that very

reason, the very ones for whom religion isa necessity. There is no other thing of which

the same can be said (Nishitani, 1).

We generally live on a plane of natural and cultural utility, Nishitani notes.

Because we need nutritional food to eat, in order to be healthy and thrive, and education

and the arts to produce music, art, dress, and architecturein a word, culture, our

ordinary mode ofbeing is restricted to these levels of natural and cultural life, Nishitani

writes. However, religion ought not be conceived as a cultural institutionan ensemble

of practices and customsthat, like food and art, serve some utilitarian purpose for

human flourishing. Religions import, in Nishitanis view, arises precisely in breaking

through that ordinary mode of being and overturning it from the ground up, in pressing us

back to the elemental source of life where life itself is seen as useless (Nishitani, 2).

Religion, then, turns out to be a radical calling into question of the

anthropocentricity that asks of religionas with athletics and foodwhat purpose it

serves for us. Religion, Nishitani maintains, is an elemental invitation to perhaps the most

urgent and momentous of all questions: For what purpose do I exist? Upsetting,

unhousing and unsettling the ordinary stance that, echoing Protagoras, suggests that,

Man is the measure of all things, religion calls into question the very meaning and

purpose of the human being. Nishitani explains this Protagorean posturethat so

characterizes much of human life-praxis as a certain orientation, a movement wherein,

we put ourselves as individuals/man/mankind at the center, and weigh the significance

of everything as the contentsof our lives as individuals/man/mankind (Nishitani, 3).

Hence, it is in decentering and de-teleogizing the human being, that religion is the

question of ourselves to ourselves.

This is, for Nishitani, the real thrust of religion. What the non-religious person

or the person who poses the question Should I be religious?overlooks is that religion

is not merelysomethingto be used, employed or leveraged for collective well-being,

societal cohesion, or individual life reformation. Religion, at its inmost, is the necessity

of which we are made aware only at the level of life at which everything else loses its


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Nolan Harris Jr

Kyoto School

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necessity and utility (Nishitani, 3).It is only at this juncture, Nishitani argues, the point

at which we come to doubt the meaning [and purpose] of our existence, that the

religious quest awakens within us(Nishitani, 3).2

Religion from this standpoint, it should also be noted, becomes, then, a journey

that is unquestionably individual in nature, and cannot be considered from a

dispassionate, displaced point of view. Thus, posing the question in the problematic way

Should I be religious? or Why do we need religion?concludes the engagement

before it has really begun. When religion is not thought of, again, assome thingsome

complex of practices, traditions or customs in the worldbut as the very self-questioning

of the self, we can see how Nishitanisearlier curiously contradictory claimthat the

person for whom religion is nota necessity is actually just the person for whom it is

makes sense.

When all that has made life itself meaningful, useful and worth living loses its

meaning, utility and value, Nishitani argues, we have come to a point of religious

departure. This radical questioning is usually occasioned by what Nishitani describes as

death, nihility, or sin(Nishitani, 3).3Nishitani explains this by having us imagine

someone who has become gravely ill, staring down death, or some individual who has

staked his all on some project that has utterly failed. What happens to this person after

the catastrophic or the absurd has confronted them? In Nishitanis view, all that has given

life its purpose and meaning has been hollowed of any significance, and this brings the

person to the precipice of the religious quest. Questions crowd in uponone: Why have I

been alive? Where did I come from and where am I going? A void appears here that

nothing in the world can fill; a gaping abyss opens up at the very ground on which one

stands (Nishitani, 3).

2Nishitani might even be said to be proposing an alternative phenomenology (or maybe an anti-

phenomenology). Husserlian phenomenology takes consciousness as a somewhat static entity to which

phenomena appear. This, however, hangs on what Nishitani describes as a mode of looking at andthinking about everything in terms of how it relates to us The phenomenon that appears to

consciousness rests at bottom on some Cartesian ego-subject receiving that which is given over to it in

experience. Nishitani wants to upset that way of thinking, and one of the ramifications of this challenge is a

reimagining of phenomenological experience.3Religion as an opening to radical questioning and doubt, as occasioned by nihility, has also been

formulated in Jewish thinking. Noted Jewish Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik writes of religion in a similar vein:

Religion is not, at the outset, a refuge of grace and mercy for the despondent and desperate, an enchanted

stream for crushed spirits, but a raging, clamorous torrent of mans consciousness with all its crises, pangs,

andtorments.


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When we have reached this point of radical doubt, of a radical questioningof

the loss of meaningNishitani argues that what he terms nihilityhas emerged. Nihility is

that which renders meaningless the meaning of life (Nishitani, 4). When the question of

ourselves to ourselves is broached, nihility has broken through the very ground of our

existence Nishitani argues. Whats more, until we have become conscious of nihility, we

are scarcely aware of the fact that nihility is at the ground of all our ordinary life

engagements.

This is because we live life as an ever-advancing procession of work, rest, play,

pleasure, pain, suffering, healing, argument, heartbreak, falling in love, embracing and

releasing. Bills must be paid, children must be cared for, work must get done. But

Nishitani believes these activities are cast into doubt when the meaning and purpose they

furnish for us is thrown into a kind of zone of meaninglessnessowing, generally, to

some tragic loss, utter defeat or dark night of the soul.It is only upon the stepping back

from the incessant progression of life events, usually brought on by some very menacing

occurrence, that we become the question of ourselves to ourselves. Prior to this (what

Nishitani considers) conversion-inducing event, all about us in the world is for us, by us

and of us.4Everything gives life meaning or detracts from it only insofar as at the center

of it all reposes the human being. What Nishitani thinks happens with the emergence of

nihility, is that this view of taking the world to be for us, by us and of us is overturned,

hence the conversion; overturned because no longer do we relate to the world in terms of

our own centrality and predominance. That very position of anthropocentricity is cast out,

and now the question of religion, the question of ourselves to ourselves, and the quest

that ensues, is made manifest in our lives.

II.

Religion can be conceived in various ways, though it is usually thought of as a

relationship of humankind with an Absolutegenerally speaking, God. Nishitani notes

that other readings of religion involving ideas of the Holy, the submission of the human

will to the divine will, acknowledgement of the fundamental dependence of the human

being on divine power and so on, are possible and established angles of approach to the

4This notion is evocative of Levinas chez-soi, or being at home in the world with oneselfthat is eventually

disrupted by the face of the other is his accounting.


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Kyoto School

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question of religion. Nishitani, however, wants to take a different angle and pursue

another viable reading of religion. He wants to interpret religion as mans search for true

reality in a realway (that is, not theoretically and not in the form of concepts, as we do in

ordinary knowledge and philosophical knowledge), andattempt an answer to the

question of the essence of religion by tracing the process of the real pursuit of true

reality (Nishitani, 6).

When considering the question of reality, or true reality,Nishitani notes that it

can be very difficult to determine, after serious reflection, just what we mean by the term.

Philosophy itself has been besieged by the questions of what reality iswhether or not an

external world actually exists and if so, how can we know, if at all, that it doesfor

centuries. Nishitani makes mention of the fact that for a scientist, a metaphysician and a

commoner, what is taken to be real, to constitute reality, may not overlap with any

harmonyin fact, often what each of these regards as reality do not. Furthermore, what

is generally taken to be real, Nishitani thinks, does not include nihility and death. Both of

these, in his view, must be captured in any robust notion of reality since they are real.

While they each signify the negation of natural and cultural existence and biological life

respectively, they both must be real in some sense, and it is in keeping with this broader

notion of reality, or the real, that Nishitani wants to frame and interpret the question of

religion.

This deeper sense of the real, of reality, is what Nishitani thinks religion reveals to

us. Similar to the effect of the ever-advancing procession of life mentioned above, the

deeper, fuller, richer sense of reality is something we miss according to Nishitani. There

are moments, however, when this true reality breaks through, akin to the surge of

awareness of nihility that breaks the procession of life, and when this happens, Nishitani

argues we truly get in touch with the reality of the world around us. It is extremely

rare for us so to fix our attention on things as to lose ourselves in them, in other

words, to becomethe very things we are looking at (Nishitani, 9). The dissolution of the

received, rote, normal view and experience of lifecharacterized philosophically

speaking by the subject-object disjunctionis effected at these moments of the breaking

through of true reality.

Because we are accustomed to seeing things from the standpoint of the self,


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Kyoto School

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rarely, if ever, do we experience the true reality of which Nishitani writes. The self is

constructed in a way that renders it a citadel within which the ego-self reposes, and

from which it looks without, encountering and experiencing the field of vision, light, and

the objects these give over to the self. Put another way, human consciousness is a

divided, but dependent, system of withinnessand withoutness, or subjectivity and

objectivity, and this fundamental separation, or disruption necessarily puts off the true

reality as it is in itself because, as Nishitani argues, on the field of consciousness, self

always occupies center stage (Nishitani, 9).

Implicated in this divided consciousness also is a fundamental, immanent division

of the self. The self takes its desires, feelings, fears, and thoughts to be objects that

although thought of as part of its interiorityare separate and different from it, and this,

for Nishitani, is reason to suspect that the reality of the self is even out of range for us.

This would mean that even the reality of who we are as persons is not properly speaking

known, or experienced. Self-consciousness, in Nishitanis account, would then only

amount to taking the self, the subject, to be the object of consciousness; recapitulating the

disjunction of withinness and withoutness, over against itself. Precisely because we face

things on a field separated from things, and to the extent that we do so, we are forever

separated from ourselves,(Nishitani, 10) Nishitani writes. In effect, then, trapped in the

withinness of the self, the self is never conscious of a real reality Nishitani would argue.

A solipsistic self is what, at bottom, the self is; immured in its own interiority.

What we experience as the self, then, is a chimera. Nishitani does not mean to

deny the reality of feelings, desires, the self and other objects that are generally taken to

be the stuff of human experience. The reality of these he accepts. He does mean to say,

however, that the in ordinary field of consciousness, where the self is the center of Being,

from which all of Being is experienced and represented in knowledge, and where the self

is taken to be separate from the things of Being, the self is not getting in touch with the

true reality of these phenomena because of the separational nature of ordinary

consciousness. So long as the field of separation between withinand withoutis not

broken through, and so long as a conversion from that standpoint does not take place, the

lack of unity and contradiction spoken of earlier cannot help but prevail among the things

we take as real (Nishitani, 10).This observation Nishitani terms the self-contradiction


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Kyoto School

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of reality.

This ordinary standpoint that so dominates our way of relating to ourselves, others

and the universe, finds its provenance, Nishitani argues, in the thinking of the father of

modern philosophy Rene Descartes. It was famously with Descartes that the stubborn

mind-body dualism (and the equally influential cogito, ergo sum) took on a life of its

own, and since his explication of it, we in the West have been so given to this standpoint.

Nishitani commends this Cartesian development for the scientific and technological

progress these, in part, set on their way. However, it did so, in Nishitanisview, at a very

high price. The separation of res cogitans(immaterial consciousness, spirit, thought) and

res extensa(physical reality and objects, matter) privileged the mind, the immaterial

consciousness, and signified it as the most important element of the dyad. This left the

physical world devoid of life, meaning, dynamism. It rendered physical life, even the

physical human body, cold, inert, dead, and merely the contingent expression of spirit,

mind, or consciousness. For Nishitani, it is this sort of reductive, mechanistic standpoint

that, while commendable in the way of science and technology, is tragically contemptible

for its disruption of the pre-scientific and pre-Cartesian, sympathetic affinity [that] was

thought to obtain between one mans soul and anothers. This sympathywas meant to

bespeak a contact prior to and more immediate than consciousness(Nishitani, 11).

Even after laying out this powerful set of observations, Nishitani does not want to

espouse a renaissance of, or return to, this pre-scientific, pre-Cartesian, and even pre-

conscious sympathetic affinitywhere all of life is connected in a dynamic unity.

Instead, Nishitani maintains that to get in touch with the true reality, to actually break

through the ordinary standpoint, we need to pursue an alternative way. A conversion

must be effected.

III.

What is to be borne in mind then, from Nishitanis account, is that while the

Cartesian cogito, ergo sumis a basic, and most evident fact, it is merely, one possible

way of looking at that fact (the cogito), one philosophical position among others

(Nishitani, 14). The Cartesian ego, however, characterizes the self-centered mode of

being, the modern, pervasive, anthropocentric standpoint mentioned above, and as such

this ego arises in a field where self-consciousness mirrors itself at every turn (Nishitani,


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14). This Cartesian ego then, the fundamental issue that founds the problematic posing of

the question Should I be religious? is actually locked in on itselfhence the separation

of withinness from withoutness mentioned above. Eventually questions like Should I be

religious? turn in on the egoitself, and the self-centered immurement of the ego is called

into question. What Nishitani argues is that the most stable of truthsthe cogitois

eventually destabilized, and, on a more fundamental level, turns into doubt (Nishitani,

15).

This is a fundamental impasse for the Cartesian cogito, and inNishitanis

estimation, there must be a breaking through to what he calls an elemental self.

Thinking about the ego from an elemental field means that the ego itself opens up in

subjective fashion an elemental field of existence within itself (Nishitani, 15). It is the

province of both ancient philosophy and, in a special way,Nishitani writes, religion to

point out this issue with ordinary self-being. Thus, where philosophy has been thought

to come in with the power of cautious reason and intellection, and clarify, demystify and

set in order the chaos of Being and human experience, it turns out philosophy as

conceived and practiced in the West, since Descartes, has actually effected a kind of self-

imposed arresting of any assistance it might offer on the question of religion as Nishitani

conceives it. This is because the Cartesian subject is imprisoned it in its own subjectivity,

disallowing any philosophical breaking through based on the cogitoas its beenlargely

considered in the West.

The doubt that the ego experiences of itself, eventually leads to what Nishitani

identifies as the Zen notion of the Great Doubt. This Great Doubt involves a breaking

through of consciousness and self-consciousness. These are the very things that preclude

the getting in touch in a real way with the true reality. The Great Doubt, for Nishitani,

involves the self-presentation of nihility [as] a real presentation of what is actually

concealed at the ground of the self and of everything in the world (Nishitani, 17). The

problem with consciousness and self-consciousnessconceived as they are in the

Cartesian mode, rent in two by the withinness and withoutness of the subjectis that on

[this] field of consciousness this nihility is covered over and cannot make itself really

present(Nishitani, 17). As mentioned above, the self obstructs its own way to the deeper

reality, because it commands center stage.


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Kyoto School

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However, when nihility is made manifest, Nishitani writes, everything that was

taken for external and internal reality at the field of consciousness becomes unreal in its

very reality: it is nullified but not annihilated. Self-being and the being of all things

combine to make one question; all being becomes a single great question mark

(Nishitani, 17). For Nishitani, this is the elemental aspect of subjectivity that,

nonetheless, cuts deeper than the ipseity and security of the Cartesian cogito. This is the

breaking through of the divided subjectivity, that forever walls off this movement, in the

Cartesian subject. When self-existence and the being of all things are transformed into a

single question mark beyond the distinctionbetween within and withoutthat is when

we may speak of the self as doubting (Nishitani, 17).It is the dissolution of the division,

the duality, that separates withinness and withoutness that constitutes the Great Doubt.

When the distinction between the doubter and the doubted drops away, when the field of

that very distinction is overstepped, the self becomes the Great Doubt (Nishitani, 18).

Nishitani terms this doubt Great because, in contradistinction to doubt as generally

conceived, the Great Doubt is not a doubt of things, objects, or externality, by a subject,

confined in this way. The Great Doubt comprehends the subject and objects taken

together, the distinction is extirpated, it drops away.

The Great Doubt then is not merely a state of consciousness because it upsurges

from the very ground of the self and of all things.This constitutes the reality of the

Great Doubtand, as mentioned above, the question of ourselves to ourselves, or

religion, involves this deeper breaking through, this conversion, wherein the self

becomes Doubt itself (Nishitani, 18). What sets the Great Doubt off against the doubt

Descartes enacted to convey him to the cogitostandpoint is that the Descartes was a

methodical doubt. Recall that for Descartes the quest is one of founding belief and

knowledge on some unshakable foundation, and in order to do this there must be, at

bottom, some impregnable belief, principle, or element of knowledge that can be

demonstrated to be reliable, clear and stable. This methodical doubtcasuistic, or ad hoc

doubtisnt the same as the Great Doubt. Nishitani maintains that this Cartesian doubt

sets up and maintains division, one that cannot be the sort of doubt in which the self and

all things are transformed into a single Doubt (Nishitani, 19).What the Cartesian ego

takes a razor to and splits asunder, the Great Doubt reconvenes, re-wholes, and combines


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Kyoto School

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into the one, single question mark.

The Great Death, then, emerges as another way of speaking of the Great Doubt.

Radical Doubt of the sort Nishitani has in mind, in Zen Buddhism, is also considered the

Great Death because, we press our doubts (What am I? Why do I exist?) to their limits

as conscious acts of the doubting self (Nishitani, 21).The Great Doubt then, is not, as

with the questions with which we earlier began (Should I be religious? Why do we need

religion?), in service to us, as it was to Descartes, because it comprehends the doubter

and the doubtedin that great, single question mark mentioned above. It is no longer

appropriate to ask of the doubtedits purpose for us, because even our own purpose is

thrown up as a question that emerges from the nihility at that ground of Being. The Great

Death is the Great Doubt, and vice versa, because it represents not only the apex of the

doubting self but also the point of its passing away and ceasing to be self (Nishitani,

21).

Hence, the conversion from the modern, Cartesian standpoint that equips us so to

ask the problematic questions about the use, purpose, and value of religion. The Great

Death is a dying unto a new being, which encounters the nothingness of the self, and

overturns the human beings relationship to and with the world. Decentering and de-

teleogizing the human being, it is here to which the true reality is broken through, and the

religious aspect of the self is genuinely discovered.

"what is religion?": (re)imagining religion and the self

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