Keiji Nishitani
1900-1990 · Modern East Asian Thought · Known
Nishitani was a twentieth-century Japanese philosopher of the Kyoto School. Nietzsche did not go far enough, he argued. European nihilism still leaves a self standing over against a world, so it keeps the split it meant to destroy. Only the Zen standpoint of emptiness dissolves that split and hands each thing back as it is. His Religion and Nothingness stages the meeting between the two traditions.
Signature
The position Nishitani is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Nature of Reality
- leans Unity
- Paradox
- Coincidentia Oppositorum / Existential Leap
Positions on the 4 axes the sources answer
- The Divine
- leans Indescribable (75 on a 0–100 scale from Describable to Indescribable)
- Identity
- leans Changing (75 on a 0–100 scale from Unchanging to Changing)
- Nature of Reality
- leans Unity (25 on a 0–100 scale from Unity to Multiplicity)
- Opposition
- leans Concurrence (75 on a 0–100 scale from Sublation to Concurrence)
16 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Nishitani refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Other
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Highest Good
- Harmony / Other
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Dialectical
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - End of Things
- Indistinct from Present
What is the ultimate end of all things? - Perception
- Non-Dual Awareness
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Intuition
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Virtue
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Agency
- Non-Self
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Beginning of Things
- Indistinct from Present
What is the origin of reality? - Time
- Phenomenological Time
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Paradox
- Coincidentia Oppositorum / Existential Leap
What is the status of paradox? - Death
- Karmic Cycle
What happens at death? - Human Nature
- No-Self
What is human nature? - Primary Bond
- All Beings
What is your primary bond and loyalty?