Nishitani on Emptiness and Historical Consciousness

Abstract

This essay focuses on NISHITANI Keiji’s 西谷啟治 early and late thinking, in the discourse on world history and modernity during wartime and the postwar meditation on emptiness and historicity in Religion and Nothingness. Following the first part of the analysis, I will trace Nishitani’s critical indebtedness to Heidegger’s existentialphenomenological analysis of historicity in Being and Time, and thereby analyze how Nishitani attempts to solve the aporia of modernity by recourse to the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness. The essay will conclude with some critical remarks that discern the limits and hidden dangers in Nishitani’s philosophical project.