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

Well, yes.

I mean, the Kyoto School was pivotal for me in my philosophical, existential, spiritual encounter with nihilism.

Like many people, all I initially had was Western thinkers, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre.

and when i read uh nishitani both religion and nothingness and the self-overcoming of nihilism i found a deep alternative to absurdism or existentialism for dealing with the issues around nihilism and i found it very helpful because it also helped me to get out of this is the pilgrimage get out of you know, the framework given to us by the European Enlightenment, the framework of modernity and see not only was the nihilism from sort of the outside, but how the nihilism was bound up with that.

And then, of course, later work, you know, with my good friend William Desmond, that developed from there so Anishatani and that book which I consistently put in the top five books I've read in my life I've gone through it twice individually and with other people that book I think is powerful now we won't be covering that book we'll talk about that book in the argument but I want to do his whole thing about nihilism not just the one book because I've done that already in Beyond Nihilism which is coming out in a book that you and I are working on But the Kyoto School, I think, is a powerful way for people who are addressing nihilism.

And it doesn't cover the usual suspects about how we talk about or philosophically reflect on nihilism.

It doesn't involve, well, here's existentialism, here's absurdism, here's perhaps stoicism, things like that.

This is like, no, no, there's a radical other way of trying to understand nihilism.

which is tremendously fruitful and dovetails very well with sort of bottoming out of the meaning crisis and reorienting towards the advent of the sacred.

And in that sense, it ties in extremely well to between East and West, whereas building very carefully with the help of some really good thinkers, Bloom and Hahn, and especially David Hinton's, astonishingly beautiful book, China Root, that if we properly reroute Zen in Taoism through Chan and we properly unpack the Neoplatonism running through Ibn Arabi and Maestro Eckhart, Islamic, Christian, also Spinoza and Jewish Neoplatonism, we have a profound way of creating a framework in which opponent processing is built right into the very depths and you have convergence and divergence and you've got this powerful way of breaking this vice we're in where we vacillate between narcissism and nihilism.

And they, of course, are just aspect disguised.

They're just two sides of the same coin.

And it's very hard to break out of that within because our culture drives us towards a third person perspective skepticism or a first person perspective solipsism.

And we get locked in.

Those are the only two alternatives.

And ah, and then we The Zen Neoplatonism came in and said, no, you can smash that, right? You can smash that.

You can break through it by getting Chan, Zen, and Neoplatonism as a through line to talk deeply, but to enter into dialogos with each other.

So these two courses, I mean, I will definitely teach this new course, Notes on No Thing, as a standalone course, but it's also very complimentary to Between East and West.

Also for any of you who have been, you know, engaging in any of the work I've been doing about Beyond Nihilism or the Advent of the Sacred, this course is about, again, trying to keep, like, well you know you were there the the between east and west i was like it's on the cutting edge of of the development of my own thinking and not just my thinking my whole way of seeing and being right it's bound up with all of that about trying to find a way to reorient and re-comport ourselves so that something like a completely legitimate And I mean philosophically, scientifically legitimate, but nevertheless deeply transformative contact and conformity, participation in sacredness becomes available for us again.

Because for me, that is the only full response to the problem of nihilism is people who can re-encounter, re-realize, recognize sacredness again.

as active.

This is also overlapping with all the work I'm doing right now on Iris Murdoch and how this is the central core running through her thinking.

I want to do a course eventually on Iris Murdoch, probably as part of this sort of pedagogical program on Zen Neoplatonism.

So yeah, it's just...

It's an opportunity to get a breath of fresh air on these two interlocking issues, nihilism, the meeting crisis, and the related dimension of the advent of the sacred.