Comparing The Great Doubt By Keiji Nishitani And Nihilism

Keiji Nishitani’s biographical background does in fact work as an efficient cause for his views especially concerning Nihilism and the Buddhist “Great Doubt,” because of the loss of his father, his own illness, the profound despair he felt from a young age and the influence of Japan before and after the War. Nishitani himself states, “He (Nishitani) describes his decision to study philosophy as the natural outcome of his own struggle with nihilism and despair as a young man (Hab/Col, 395).” Nishitani’s background has a direct correlation to not only his choice to pursue philosophy, but also the subjects he has chosen to pursue during his career. At the young age of sixteen Nishitani lost his father to tuberculosis. It was

The ‘absolute emptiness’ that is also known to the Buddhists as, “The Great Doubt.” It can be compared to some degree to what we know now as depression “…it is reported that, from an early age, Nishitani was afflicted by profound feelings of despair. These experiences brought him face to face with the possibility of his own demise and gave him a general sense of life’s impermanence and uncertainty (enotes, 1).” The Great Doubt is another area that Nishitani followed in his career after his time with the Kyoto School. Nishitani describes this doubt, “...as a growing bean seed that begins to crack and break apart the shell of the ego (“I,” “Me,” “mine,” imagined as an entity separate from the rest of the world), awakening this ego from its blissfully ignorant slumber and making it aware of its radical finitude, its nothingness. (Hab/Col, 396).” This Great Doubt is the step further into the core of one’s being it becomes the Great Death, or the death of the ‘small self.’ All of which Nishitani has seen though out his life and career. (The Great Death will lead eventually to a “mode of being characterized by total openness and freedom... (Hab/Col,

During this time Japan is undergoing what is supposed to be restoration, but it was a cover up for modernization, some of the Japanese government wants to keep up or surpass Europe, it caused drastic changes in areas such as, political system, social structures, military organization and agricultural technologies. It also causes a rise in Ideology of the Emperor and the adoption of Shintoism as a religion. These drastic changes brought untold suffering to many Japanese whose traditional ways of livelihood no longer had a place in a new era. A part of the intellectual endeavors of the Kyoto School, a group of philosophers at Kyoto University, was the insight that a coherent and workable worldview had to include an understanding of the ways modernization affected culture. It was a very trying time for many philosophers and people who had ties to the ‘old ways.’ The War was an area that was especially trying for many. Some of these changes would lead to Keiji actually losing his job at the university, “In December 1946, after the defeat in the war, he was obliged to take a leave of absence from the university, and the following July was designated “unsuitable” for teaching by the Occupation authorities. Relieved of his position in the university, he was banned from holding any public position on the grounds of having supported the wartime government