Keiji Nishitani quotes

In principle, when we distinguish being from beings, we transcend the realm of things that are. It is not that we go to some other world beyond the world we know, or enter into some different realm of beings. Such notions constitute, for Heidegger, a vulgar form of metaphysics with which true philosophy (metaphysics as science) has nothing in common. Philosophy does not go beyond beings ontically to other beings that dwell beyond or behind. It transcends beings ontologically in the direction of being. (Keiji Nishitani)
People give names to persons and things, and then suppose that if they know the names, they know that which the names refer to. View quote
Keiji Nishitani
Previous ideals and values undermine themselves and collapse into nothing precisely as a result of the effort to make them consummate and exhaustive. View quote
Keiji Nishitani
In the religiosity of Zen Buddhism, demythologization of the mythical and existentialization of the scientific belong to one and the same process. View quote
Keiji Nishitani
Through the sincerity cultivated by Christian morality the values and ideals established by that morality itself are revealed as fictions. View quote
Keiji Nishitani
A crisis is taking place in the contemporary world in a variety of forms, cutting across the realms of culture, ethics, politics, and so forth. At the ground of these problems is the fact that the essence of being human has turned into a question mark for humanity itself. View quote
Keiji Nishitani
From the perspective of Buddhism, Sartre's notion of Existence, according to which one must create oneself continually in order to maintain oneself within nothing, remains a standpoint of attachment to the self – indeed, the most profound form of this attachment – and as such is caught in the self-contradiction this implies. View quote
Keiji Nishitani
Ironically, it was not in his nihilistic view of Buddhism but in such ideas as amor fati and the Dionysian as the overcoming of nihilism that Nietzsche came closest to Buddhism, and especially to Mahāyāna. View quote
Keiji Nishitani
On the one hand, nihilism is a problem that transcends time and space and is rooted in the essence of human being, an existential problem in which the being of the self is revealed to the self itself as something groundless. On the other hand, it is a historical and social phenomenon, an object of the study of history. The phenomenon of nihilism shows that our historical life has lost its ground as objective spirit, that the value system which supports this life has broken down, and that the entirety of social and historical life has loosened itself from its foundations. Nihilism is a sign of the collapse of the social order externally and of spiritual decay internally - and as such signifies a time of great upheaval. Viewed in this way, one might say that it is a general phenomenon that occurs from time to time in the course of history. View quote
Keiji Nishitani