Nishitani on nihilism: you have to go through it, not around it
I came to the Kyoto School late, through zazen at a small temple near my house. The book that has helped me most this year is Nishitani Keiji's Religion and Nothingness, read slowly in Japanese with the English translation beside it.
Nishitani, who studied with Heidegger in Freiburg before the war, took European nihilism completely seriously. In an earlier book on the self-overcoming of nihilism he read Nietzsche and others as people who had looked into the abyss honestly. He did not think the answer was to retreat to older certainties.
His proposal, as I understand it: nihilism is the experience of relative nothingness, the nothingness that negates meaning and stands opposed to being. It is real and must be lived through. But if one goes all the way through it, one arrives at what Buddhism calls emptiness, śūnyatā, which is not the opposite of being but the field in which both being and nihility appear. From there, things are seen again, as themselves, without the need for a foundation.
I find this persuasive in practice. In sitting, there are periods that feel exactly like nihilism, when nothing has weight. And then sometimes the tea tastes like tea again.
But I am an engineer, and I worry I am turning a philosophical argument into a personal experience. Is Nishitani's "going through" an argument, or only a testimony? I would like to hear from others who have read him, and from those who think nihilism needs no overcoming.