Notes on No-Thing: John Vervaeke on Nihilism, the Kyoto School, and the Sacred

34:17It's not meaning. And then you have to pretend that you are actually in some kind of community, usually with a bunch of voices in your head that you're not acknowledging in order to make your stand in nihilism a meaningful stand. But if you want a clear, really well done model of somebody who lives in a consistently nihilistic fashion and really understands that meaning has to be shared and that he's and he's not therefore sharing meaning because he's a nihilist dostoevsky's notes from the underground is the perfect portrayal of that the underground man shows you what happens when you try to avoid all these performative contradictions in nihilism about you still valuing your agency, but why should you value it?

35:09Right. And then meaning has to be shareable, but I'm not going to, I can't possibly share with other people because it's just all about me. And you get, you get the underground man. And my, my best way of relating that is when my son Jason wrote, read the book, it was when we were using it in the course on literature and the mean crisis. And he came to me, he goes, I hate the underground man. And I went, good. That's what Dostoevsky wants you to realize. He's tired of the empty word salad arguments that don't actually get down. Because they stay at the level of propositions, they are designed, or at least they thwart us from realizing performative contradictions.

35:53And Dostoevsky says, forget all the propositional argument. Let's give you somebody who is being right authentic in that they are trying to live without those performative contradictions and you get this horrible horrible vile it's not even a person um and then you realize oh right right right now what doesn't help is just like so many of the christian apologists it's like Well, that's nihilism and nihilism is bad. Like, don't do that. That's not, right? This is why Nishitani wrote a whole book called The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism. You have to go into it and you have to work. Don't let yourself be distracted and diverted by mere propositional circulation.

36:46Obviously, propositional arguments matter. But propositional arguments that have to be open to the realization, the acknowledgement and appreciation, the apprehension of performative contradiction. And then the person has to make an existential choice. Do I reject the performative contradiction and then fall into the underground man? Or do I accept it and realize that a change is required? That's, to my mind, what the Kyoto School taught me. yeah i mean i would i will offer uh also the seagull anton chakoff yeah as a very clear example there are many examples of this i think i think i mean we did them in literature in the meeting crisis i i think kurtz in the heart of darkness is an example of he's a beautiful example of the narcissism nihilism he turns himself into a god and then what does he experience the horror the horror, the horror, right?

37:44Like there's so much great literature that I think actually in some ways does a better job than a lot of academic philosophy of getting us to realize this. Yes. Yeah. And similarly, you know, Constantine has, begins the play as this like very passionate, very enraptured, wants to do things, right? And then it's unable to take the criticism and falls from that place of seeing the world of like, look how great it is, a great disillusionment and becomes, what does Nina say? No, Trigorin says this, right? Just like a boy having nothing better to do, kills a seagull and lays it at her feet. So, you know, and there is a tragedy about the kind of careening.

38:37I'm starting to feel less and less satisfied with just calling it nihilism. Because I think the careening between nihilism and narcissism holds it together much better. That's exactly right. I think so. And that's why I've been trying to pair the two together. Because I think another way in which people avoid is they move from one to the other. I've seen people do this in conversations. You push on their narcissism and they defend it with a nihilism. And then you push on the nihilism and they retreat assertively to a narcissism. And you realize, oh, they are hiding from a performative contradiction by doing this aspect shifting, this aspect disguise between nihilism and narcissism.

39:23So can we kick this a little bit to like a… By the way, both narcissism and nihilism are predicated on an idea of meaning that is totally mine, totally non-shareable, right? And so that's very problematic. Okay, so let's take that ground. And then can we sort of like broaden it out a little bit more collectively? Because I have two questions on this front. One is, how are you seeing this careening really show up in our contemporary culture? What is the everyday encounter with it? And the second question on the back of that is actually more of a historical question, which is, to your mind, I know you're not an anthropologist in the stricter sense, but I did anthropology in graduate school.

40:17Okay, great. Okay, great. So you have the relevant expertise, which is great. Sorry about that. I was being presumptuous. But why do you think that there is this convergence, specifically on the Kyoto School, around the addressing of this issue? And I'm trying not to be Orientalist here, but if I'm wrong, I'm wrong about this, right? Well, I mean, I appreciate his work, but the problem, and many people have pointed this out, is that, you know, his critique of Orientalism involves an essentialization of what the West is, as if it's a homogenous and historical blob entity. Right. And so the I think what's going on.

41:07Is Japan plays a really central role. And and when you and these three thinkers. Right. Are like that's like the Shida is basically around, you know. Around World War One and thereafter. after. And Japan is sort of part of the West at that time. And then it starts moving away in the 30s. And Japan starts to become... And that's also a criticism. And Tanabe is going to pick up on this, on how Zen and its association with militarism, the Bushido Code, gets wrapped into Japanese militarism. And there's been some very good critiques, not just criticisms, critiques of Zen and its association that way.

41:57We talked about this in between East and West. And so Japan, and then you got the devastating loss. And when Japan loses in World War II, Japan isn't just losing a war. Japan is losing a religious way of being. It's losing the divinity of the emperor. It's losing an entire structure. It's losing the way in which Japan had been asserting itself in contrast to the West, because it gets defeated, of course, primarily by the Americans, but also by the British. Right. And Burma and things like that. And so and then Tanabe really picks this up. And then this means that there is this wrestling with the West, the nihilism that is apparent in the West, and the Shida sees it, and then the nihilism that starts to arise in Japan when that religious framework gets very seriously disillusioned.

43:06And I mean it in both senses of the word. And so I think Japan, I'm sorry, I don't want to instrumentalize Japan. We benefit from, and we should be grateful for the fact that Japan went through this, and also we should be very critical of the horrific things the Japanese did, for example, in China and in Southeast Asia. But all of that being said, the fact that Japan goes through this arc means they have this in-out, other-than-is-us relationship with the West. And then the members of the Kyoto school, they are deeply committed to Japanese culture and to Zen and pure land Buddhism, two of the largest forms of Buddhism in Japan, very dominant in their historical period.

44:04but they also travel, they learn from the West. Nishita, it's, you know, James is one of his biggest influences, other people. Nishitani, it's Heidegger. I believe Tanabe's also, I have to check this. I think Tanabe also studied under Heidegger. Nishitani definitely did. And so, like, you couldn't ask for a better sort of framework for asking people how to help with nihilism because they have an other-than-us relationship, and yet they have their own nihilism that is other than ours. Yet, of course, it will share structural similarities, processing similarities. They are the perfect dialogical partner for trying to bring about a mutual liberation from the straitjackets of narcissism and nihilism.

45:03And because they have a different culture, they aren't, they don't, they, so the narcissism isn't an individualistic narcissism. It's a collectivistic, militaristic, nationalistic narcissism. And it's often a kind of counter-racism to the racism that had been projected, exercised against them by Britain and the United States and Russia. And so it's like they have this intricate history. history. And then you have these courageous, sensitive thinkers who literally pilgrimage, right? Do theory and contemplation. They're doing mindfulness practices and they're actually doing literal pilgrimage going from one culture to another.

45:52And like, you couldn't ask for a better group of people to help give us, you know, dialogical partners by which we can perhaps breakthrough right see deeper through breakthrough as you said the narcissism nihilism um we need a negative a good single noun for that negative vacillation but yeah great so you named um this piece of there being a different flavor of nihilism um in western society and there's a There's an inkling that I have around the ways in which it's sort of showing up in our contemporary culture. Could you pick up that question as well? Yeah. So, I mean, so first of all, I mean, I know that Tanabe, especially Nishitani, are deeply familiar with Nietzsche, the influence of Heidegger.

46:47I think Nishita is too. I think in the last religious writings, he talks about it. I'd have to go back. But so Nietzsche's got this argument that Christianity ossifies into the two-world mythology. It gives us an absolute vertical dichotomy. And then we're taught that this, the lower world, the natural world, has no inherent value. It's only instrumentally valuable for getting us there. It has no intrinsic realness. It's only about getting us there. And then when this becomes absurd to us, as all dichotomies eventually do, we then go, oh, well, that upper world doesn't exist. But then we're left with this world that we've been enculturated to soak into our bones.

47:36It has no intrinsic value. There is no such thing as objective value. It has no intrinsic value. and whatever realness it has, it's not the kind of realness that the supernatural had. It's not a realness that can give us any deep sense of transcendence and so forth. Now, I think Nietzsche is right and wrong about that. I think that's right, that there's a particular kind of nihilism that comes out post-Christian. I think he doesn't take enough into account the way modernity replaces that functionality with an inner-outer dichotomy. The subjective-objective dichotomy is just as absurd as the natural-supernatural dichotomy.

48:18And he doesn't quite see that, although he's very hostile to Kant. But he's mired in a kind of perspectivalism that takes subjectivity, the subjectivity-object dichotomy, to be at least one part of Nietzsche. It's hard to talk about Nietzsche because he has so many voices. But people have picked up on that. And because Nishina, Nishitani, and Tanabe are not post-Christian, their nihilism isn't born out of the collapse of that religious framework and of that understanding of the sacred as the supernatural, right, that is dichotomized from the natural world. Now, they have a collapse of a religious framework, right?

49:05But it's a form of sort of Buddhism and Shinto mixed together. And so it shares some structural similarities. They are both suffering, as many nihilists in the West do, from a deconstruction of a religious framework that has taught them that only the religious aspects give true value. That's how you're educated into nihilism by religion. it's the risk you take when you commit to a religion but because it's not christian it's not post-christian disillusionment it it's also fundamentally different so it's the same but different which is what you need for good right for for a good dialogical relationship yeah yeah that makes a lot of sense to me like there is a there's almost like a benevolent decoupling, where nihilism is allowed to in a way like look at on its own terms.

50:06And I can't remember who said this, but I, I, I was reading something along the lines of, there is a difference between the Western experience of shame and Eastern by in this context, you know, a Japanese experience of, of shame. Yeah, yeah. And so, guilt is, there's two different ways of talking about this. One way is, like, guilt is I feel bad about what I've done or what I've fought. And shame is I feel bad about what I am. um and so in the west guilt and shame and we that's why we often use them interchangeably although they're not exactly the same and you can also feel shame you feel bad about what you are even though you have not done anything worthy of guilt you haven't done anything immoral like if you've done something like you're in high school and you trip and you spill juice over the the most attractive young female, like you just, oh, you just want to crawl away in a hole and die, right?

51:16That's deep shame. You feel bad about what you are. I'm a clumsy, awkward, like, you know, I don't belong. You haven't done anything immoral. So it's not guilt. So now the thing is, when you're in an individualistic culture, though, if you experience shame, you will experience it individualistically, right? Like, so you are the total place in which like feeling bad about what you are is taking place. When you're in a collectivist culture, the shame is distributed, right? And therefore it, and both of them have different kinds of like traumatic or toxic effect. The Western shame, I want to crawl away in a hole and die.

52:08And then in the collectivist one, what it means is our shared framework of meaning is somehow shameful or should to be rejected. And so this is oversimplistic. So it's just for the points of clarity. In the West, it would be what's wrong? what is what's wrong with john right well what's what's wrong with being john what is it to be john in japan it's like what's wrong with being japanese what like what is it to be japanese like how's this gone so wrong like what is it to be japanese uh it becomes um and so So, again, that's oversimplistic. There aren't permanently partitioned essentialist cultures.

53:00I'm doing that for the point of just trying to bring out a potential contrast of possible emphasis. Right. And so there's a sense in which we in the West haven't done the shared grieving of the loss the way the Japanese had to, to some degree. And Tanabe represents that. And he actually turns to Christianity and Kierkegaard and Metanoia in order to do that. In the West, here's what I would say to you, and I owe this also to discussions I've had with Bruce Lehman and with Bruce Lehman and Lehman Pascal, not Bruce Lehman, Bruce Alderman, and Lehman Pascal. We have not collectively grieved the death of God.

53:54We haven't done what I said earlier. We haven't gone to the depths of the grief, regrown around it, and turned it into an aperture of aporia rather than just a painful lack. We haven't turned the exposure into the virtue of vulnerability, to use some of Guy Senstock's very helpful way of talking. And so we are just still bumbling around and we're nihilists. Look, look at the hole in my chest where God used to be. And I hurt and I hurt. And I hurt, but I'm okay with my hurting because, you know, me, it's my hurting. It's like, okay, I get that. That's okay for a bit. And I'm not, again, saying all nihilists are like that.

54:38We're talking now about that affective nihilism. But what I would say to the philosophical nihilist, right, like the one who is, you know, perhaps influenced by existentialism or absurdism is, well, look for the performative consciousness. contradiction. Look for how you're still validating, you're still identifying, you're still valuing the normative conceptual structure given to you by modernity, like the subjective versus objective, the fact value dichotomy, all of that stuff. And the idea that your private personal experience can be private, personally meaningful to you, which I don't think makes any sense, actually.

55:19And so that, again, that's a different thing. But the fact that we are highly individualized means that we haven't, I mean, it's funny because Nietzsche even talks about, where are the games? He means like the Greek games that they used to have when somebody died. Where are our games? Like, what have we done? Right? We haven't done the collective thing. Now, I think that Nishitani, Nishida, and Tanabe can help us acknowledge that and process it and go through it. So I want to please hold that thought about the going through it, because I think I want to first point out, I think, what you might be kind of pointing at, which is a kind of comorbidity between the individualistic and the collectivistic.

56:14because the collectivistic experience of something like shame is, in my experience particularly, true is a kind of retreating and an isolating which doesn't afford the reclamation of agency, the reclamation of one's place in the world and the dialogical process of rehoming and going, okay, wait, where are we now, right? And then I see that as almost the collectivistic becoming even more individualistic and it creates all sorts of segregations across the board. Now, I still wonder, I think, and maybe this is a proposal, that the individualistic part of that is the, oh, I have this gauze-shaped hole in my chest.

57:04Save me, right? Like, save me now. Well, that's the narcissist. That's definitely the narcissist. Or it's... And or. And it's funny how the show showed the two. It's the zombie. It's that what I'll do is I'll wander with others because that's the only collectivity that's still available to me, the wandering with others, right? Yes. So what you get, so I'm asking everybody for charity here. I'm trying to compress a lot into one thing, but you basically get narcissists leading zombies around, leading them around. and that's kind of where we're at right now and it's very problematic for that reason.

57:53It's interesting that we seem to also, and this is something the Kyoto School was very prescientive, especially as I'm getting older and death looms, I'm really trying to not only find short books, I'm trying to find thinkers who were tremendously prescient because if they're tremendously prescient on X and Y, I'll look to what they have to say about Zed or Z if you're American or whatever. Right. And they are too, because, you know, I'll be talking to him soon. Paul Antleitner has his new book out based on a true story where he thinks we're going through what he calls a vibe shift. We sort of bottomed out.

58:38like think about think about zeinfeld zeinfeld is the epitome of narcissism and nihilism in fragmentary oscillation that never coheres into anything it's not even it's it's about nothing it's not a story and there's no character development and these are all wretched people and they all end up being told how wretched they are and you realize i don't want them in my life and yet you sit down in front of the TV and watch them religiously. And so, right, and we're bottoming out, and we're getting this shift. I want to talk to him. First of all, Paul, thank you. You cite my work a lot in your book, and I appreciate that.

59:17And he's talking about this vibe shift. And I think the Kyoto School is about the advent of the sacred. It's not just about nihilism. It's about the advent of the sacred, A new way of understanding God, a new way of understanding sacredness, a new way of understanding religion. Look at the title of his masterpiece, Religion and Nothingness. They're there together in the title with the priority given to religion. What could a post-nihilistic religion look like or mean? Nishitani, right, all of them give up. Well, it could look like Nishito Sench of Basho, the place of no place in which all meaning takes place.

59:57It can look like the self-realization of reality of Nishitani. It can look like the fantastic metanoetic pilgrimage of Tanabe. That's what the sacred can look like. I think this is deeply prescient. And so they're also there. And I think Paul's right. I mean, more and more people I talk to from different disciplines, domains, orientation, religious or secular wisdom traditions they're all saying yeah there's something happening things are coming together something is trying to presence itself and take shape uh right now and so i think the kyoto school's also about that because i i mean i think where when nihilism becomes the shared welt guy the shared zeitgeist i should say the spirit of the times then the Weltgeist, the ground, the living ground of intelligibility and meaning will respond.

1:00:56And I think that respond is the advent of the sacred. And I think in the Kyoto school, you can see both of them co-present and woven together. And I had only recently, I've only recently started to see the second part. I was only seeing the first part, the meaning crisis, right? But Nishitani had place the seed in me the sheeta to last religious writings that book and then religion and nothingness is like oh this is a totally different way i mean i was going to ask you what you thought the kyoto school will offer as an alternative and i think you've uh yeah very much yes very much so it's like there's like a mutual anticipation of like where we're going so you know on the back of that like what do you hope that people who come to participate in this course will actually get uh in a way get a sense of or come out of it with you know let's call it like learning outcomes more more broadly right but like what are you hoping for students to encounter a profound way of re re-aspectualizing, repositioning, re-identifying,

1:02:12restructuring the perspective and person that you are in the experience of nothingness from a nihilism to the no-thingness that is luminous, that is the Tao, that is that which is most religious in which the meaning of religion, of course, has been changed. So that you can learn to not transform it as if it's like in the Matrix. It's not the spoon that bends. It's yourself that bends. You're not transforming the nothingness. You're transforming yourself. And insofar, the nothingness goes from being a wound to being an opening into a new way of being, a new way of seeing, in which sacredness becomes totally viable, a lived option, a live option for you, and philosophically respectable.

1:03:15And along the way, you'll learn about these key notions of Basho from Nishida, the self-realizing of reality. That's Nishitani's definition of religion, the real self-realization of reality. Or from Tanabe, philosophy as metanoetics. What does that mean? What does that mean? And what does it mean from somebody who's outside the Christian tradition, but is looking deeply back into it and appreciating it, who's doing what I call genuine pilgrimage? That's what the Course will give you. And it will help you. I hope, I think it's reasonable to help you individually. It'll help you in the lives your life touches.

1:04:07It'll also help you to catch the vibe that's growing and maybe find it within yourself to take up the participation in reverberating the vibe, resonating with it. genuine heroism isn't doing just brave things or killing the monster or rescuing the father, all that stuff. For me, I have a Socratic idea of heroism. Heroism is to widen the field of human experience for other human beings. That's what I aspire to. And that's, so you can, in that sense, not in the narcissistic or the hubristic sense, You can also become more heroic in your own life. I mean, one of the great, it's not necessarily a great movie, but it was a great line about people sort of bumping into nihilism was, you know, the cider house rules.

1:05:06I don't know if I'm the hero of my own life. It's like, that's, wow. First of all, very honest, very powerful. What might it be such that to be the hero of your life doesn't mean that you are going out and doing the potentially hubristic or violent thing. But what if it means that you become a, you become resonant in a way that helps other people recover and widen the field of human experience again? I think that's a valuable thing. And it's not highfalutin. This can touch the people's, all the people touch your life and the lives your life touches in the day-to-day minutia, the problems they face.

1:05:54The only thing that we have good evidence helps us be resilient in the face of our fate, our finitude, our failures, our faults, our foolishness, is an ever-deepening meaning. Eudaimonia, having a good daemon, that good living spirit. And that's what I'm hoping. And again, to get people to see that the resources that are frequently offered by their culture, especially popular culture, are not necessarily all or even the best approaches. I really hear what you're saying is that the Kyoto school offers a profound kind of stillness that that stills the vacillation between nihilism and narcissism and affords the seeing through and the going through of that.

1:07:05Yeah, it involves a stilling of the way we vacillate, and this is just part of the same vacillation between busyness and bullshit and boredom. It stills us from there, but it also opens us up to a vibrancy and a vitality that have also been lost and are often only understood in terms of our affect not in terms of the ideas we entertain in our mind. Yeah stillness is not static. No. It's a flow. It's more like I'm stilling going in this direction so that I can turn and flow in that direction. Yeah and I like your quotes. I'll give you two back. you know one is from the seagull earlier where the play begins with this line i am mourning for my life oh is it i am mourning for my life and then also not not the best not the best cinematic masterpiece but this line was great from uh wonder vision which is um what is grief if not love persevering yes yes and i'm hearing i'm hearing a real sense of like you know if you are mourning for your life, perhaps we can learn to love, learn to let love persevere through the grief.

1:08:32So, I really appreciate this. Thank you. Yeah, I mean,

1:08:40they are inter-defining things, the death of God and domicile. And we cannot address one without properly addressing the other. And most Most people have come to a dawning realization that nihilism and the new atheism, first of all, they don't sit well with each other. And secondly, the new atheism was just persevering in the same logic of standard theism and not offering any alternative. Let us agree that the supernatural sky wizard that gives out gifts for people who are enslaved to him such that they acquire supernatural fire insurance for everlasting time isn't a good model. Let's agree on that.

1:09:40Let's move on from that, please. Let's move on to something else. And the Kyoto School is another way of moving on to something else.

1:09:54That seems like a perfect place to close. So for all of you who are watching this, whatever time this has been since we've recorded it, if you go down to the show notes, registration is open for notes on no thing. So please, we'd love to see you on the lectern. It's going to be an amazing course. And again, if you haven't taken between East and West, don't worry about it. It's not a sequel. we have to go back to that course at a later time as well and then experience Xen Neoplatonism, at least the argument for Xen Neoplatonism. And I think it'll be really interesting to see the two cohorts of students, of course, there'll be overlap, having a deeper dialogue on the back of these.

1:10:35I welcome that. I hope that actually happens. I mean, of course, I want people to continue on, but I'm really interested for people who have not taken between East and West to take this course and and get into good conversation yes thank you very much everybody we'll see you on the lectern ciao thank you my friend

1:11:17Are you noticing your car insurance rate creep up even without tickets or claims? You're not alone. That's why there's Jerry, your proactive insurance assistant. Jerry handles the legwork by comparing quotes side-by-side from over 50 top insurers so you can confidently hit buy. No spam calls, no hidden fees. Jerry even tracks rates and alerts you when it's best to shop. Drivers who save with Jerry could save over$1 ,300 a year. Don't settle for higher rates. Download the Jerry app or visit jerry.ai slash libsyn today. That's j-e-r-r-y dot a-i slash l-i-b-s-y-n.