Thesis (M.A.). / Written for the Faculty of Religious Studies. Title from title page of PDF (viewed 2009/06/12). Includes bibliographical references.

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Keiji Nishitani, philosophe de l’École de Kyoto, a développé sa philosophie de la religion en étudiant les sermons allemands de Maître Eckhart à la lumière de la notion du « néant absolu » de Kitarô Nishida. Nishitani applique cette dernière à la « Déité » (Gotheit) exposée dans la prédication d’Eckhart, où il découvre l’idée d’un éveil à la subjectivité originaire dans l’âme humaine. Cet éveil ouvre à l’âme une liberté « en Dieu sans Dieu », accessible à la vraie intelligence religieuse, détachée de tout dualisme. Dans cette perspective, comment pouvons-nous intégrer la métaphysique que Maître Eckhart expose dans ses œuvres latines ? Dans le Commentaire de l’Évangile selon Jean, Eckhart déploie sa vision sur Dieu, Être-Un, « Principe sans principe », et il enseigne à « vivre » l’unité entre « être » et « connaître », en laquelle consiste la béatitude. Notre réflexion s’articule autour de l’idée de « vivre la vie ». Nous essayons d’unifier le détachement dans le « néant de la Déité » selon Nishitani et l’« Être illimité » selon le commentaire biblique, de manière à représenter la pensée eckhartienne comme une synergie de la spéculation métaphysique et de la pratique existentielle pour expérimenter le Transcendant dans notre vie immanente. / Keiji Nishitani, philosopher of the Kyoto School, developed his philosophy of religion, studying the German sermons of Meister Eckhart, in the light of the notion of “absolute nothingness” of Kitarô Nishida. He applies that notion to the “Godhead” (Gotheit) outlined in Eckhart’s preaching, where he discovers the idea of awakening to the elemental subjectivity in human soul. This awakening opens up to the soul a liberty “in Godwithout God”, accessible to the religious intelligence detached from all dualism. In this perspective, how can we integrate the metaphysics exposed by Eckhart in his Latin works ? In the Commentary on the Gospel of John, Eckhart explains his vision of God, Being-One, “Principle without principle”, and he teaches to “live” the unity between “being” and “knowing”, of which the beatitude consists. Our study revolves around the thinking on “live the life”. We try to unify the detachment in the “nothingness of the Godhead” according to Nishitani and the “unlimited Being” according to the biblical commentary, so as to show the Eckhartian thought as a synergy between metaphysic speculation and existential practice to experience the Transcendent in our immanent life.

Two texts by Nishitani, written ten years apart, reflect a very different position on the nietzschean question of the overcoming of nihilism. Although a student of Heidegger's at Freiburg between 1936 and 1939, Nishitani shows no evidence of a heideggerian influence in The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism. In this period (1949), he considers, contrary to Heidegger, that the affirmative aspects of nietzschean philosophy constitute a radical overcoming of nihilism. It is only in What is Religion? (1961) which appears in 1982 as Religion and Nothingness (English translation) that his view changes, reflecting more closely a heideggerian position. Nietzsche's concept of the Will to Power is evidence for Nishitani that Nietzsche enmeshed still in a philosophy of "Being", remains within traditional Western metaphysics. Because in Nishitani's view, Western metaphysics is nihilist, he finally concludes that Nietzsche did not overcome nihilism. / This development in Nishitani's thought is considered, in a concluding perspective of the present text, as evidence of the markedly more profound influence of Heidegger on the later, more mature work of Nishitani.

Abstract: At Kyoto University, since Japan’s opening to the West at the Meiji Era, a great intellectual work stablished a productive dialogue between Eastern and Western thought in the ambits of philosophy and religion, the so called “Kyoto School”, founded by Nishida Kitaro (1870 – 1945) and his disciples Tanabe Hajime (1885 – 1962) and Keiji Nishitani (1900 – 1990). The Kyoto School opened a new discussion, from the problem of Nothingness, between the fundaments of religion and its confrontation with the nihilistic crises of values. In Keiji Nishitani’s work Religion and Nothingness, a profound reflection is stablished from the concepts of Emptiness and Deity taking them as a dialogue with the thought of Meister Eckhart and providing a fruitful encounter between Zen Buddhism and Christianity. In this sense, the Nothingness is a question for philosophy and religion accordingly to the Nishitani’s thought and consists in an experience marked by a confluence of factors such as: a widening of the world view through a trans-conceptual understanding of reality, which is identified by the thinker as The point of view of Emptiness. Thus, our work’s aim is to understand to what extent Nishitani’s thought allows us, in confluence with Eckhart’s thought, to rethink the religious condition of man and its relation with the divine in the context of the work of the Kyoto School’s philosopher. / Na Universidade de Kyoto, a partir da abertura do Japão para Ocidente na Era Meiji, um grande trabalho intelectual estabeleceu um diálogo produtivo entre o pensamento oriental e ocidental nos âmbitos da filosofia e da religião, a chamada “Escola de Kyoto”. Iniciado por Nishida Kitarō (1870 - 1945) e por seus discípulos Tanabe Hajime (1885 - 1962) e Keiji Nishitani (1900 - 1990) a Escola de Kyoto abriu uma nova discussão, a partir da problemática do Nada, entre os fundamentos da religião e seu confronto com a crise niilista dos valores. Na obra A Religião e o Nada de Keiji Nishitani estabelece-se uma profunda reflexão a partir dos conceitos de Vacuidade e Deidade, tomando-os como interlocução com o pensamento de Mestre Eckhart (1260-1328), proporcionando um frutuoso encontro entre o Zen-budismo e o Cristianismo. Neste sentido, o Nada como uma questão posta para a religião e para a filosofia, de acordo com o pensamento nishitaniano, consiste em uma experiência marcada pela confluência de fatores como: um alargamento da visão de mundo mediante a compreensão transconceitual da realidade, identificada, pelo pensador, como O ponto de vista da Vacuidade. Nosso trabalho tem como finalidade, portanto, compreender em que medida o pensamento de Nishitani permite, em confluência com o pensamento eckhartiano, repensar a condição religiosa do homem e sua relação com o divino no contexto da obra do filósofo da escola de Kyoto. / São Cristóvão, SE

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This paper examines the role played by death in the philosophy of Nishitani Keiji, through the nondual logic of contradictory identity developed by his teacher and founder of the Kyotoschool of philosophy, Nishida Kitarō. I explore Nishitani’s understanding of how Nothingness, nihility, through our awareness of death penetrates and nullifies existence itself, how the irreality of all being comes to the fore to make being itself unreal. The nullifying nothingness of nihility, however, is still nothingness represented as a something; it is a reified nothing, defined as the antithesis to being and thus still seen as a corollary of being itself. A truly absolute nothingness, what Nishitani calls Śūnyatā, emptiness, must be a nothingness so devoid of being as to not even be nothing; it must be absolutely nothing at all, and thus nothing else than being itself. The final chapter of my paper seeks to apply this nondual understanding of being and nothingness to the question of death itself; to understand the ontological meaning of death - the passage from being to non-being - when being and non-being have been one from the very beginning. The paper also seeks to blur the lines between what has traditionally been considered philosophy and religion, using the thinking of the Kyoto school to point to the deeper ties between the two in the borderland that is buddhist philosophy.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T15:12:18Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 AmandaSFP_DISSERT.pdf: 654256 bytes, checksum: b4f10e1b559371eca5e0c4d71310de30 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-04-18 / Coordena??o de Aperfei?oamento de Pessoal de N?vel Superior / The dialog between the East philosophy and the Western thinking allow us to think the problems inherent to our time from several point of views. Nishitani Keiji, from the Kyoto School, sees the contemporaneity, or the time of the technic, for Heidegger, as derivation and as an immediate consequence of perspective introduced in the modern era form the Cartesian s cogito which creates a barrier that separates man and world. Scientific thinking that dominates our era was created from the thinking that ennobles human reason to the detriment of the others things in the world, determining that the knowledge just can be produced by the man himself and his set of rational powers. However, alerts us Nishitani, this point of view derived from modern thought which imposes subjectivity egocentric type besides not apprehend things in their truth, neither achieves the true self of man. In an attempt to overcome the abuses produced in modernity and that reverberates in our way of be until today, our philosopher will propose the point of view of the nothingness (śūnyatā) as a way to trans-descendance, that is, to overcome the traditional thinking overvalues the reason for the encounter with the original face of man, which by no longer impose its cognitive power can know all things in their true, in the tathatā / O di?logo estabelecido entre a filosofia Oriental e o pensamento Ocidental nos permite pensar os problemas inerentes ao nosso tempo a partir de ponto de vistas diversos. Nishitani Keiji, representante da Escola de Kyoto, percebe a contemporaneidade, o tempo da vig?ncia da t?cnica, nas palavras de Heidegger, como deriva??o e consequ?ncia imediata da perspectiva introduzida na era moderna a partir do cogito cartesiano a qual cria uma barreira que separa homem e mundo. O pensamento cient?fico que domina a nossa Era nasceu de uma constru??o de pensamento que enobrece a raz?o humana em detrimento das demais coisas do mundo, determinando que o conhecimento somente deve ser produzido a partir do pr?prio homem e seu conjunto de compet?ncias racionais. No entanto, nos alerta Nishitani, este ponto de vista derivado do pensamento moderno que imp?e uma subjetividade do tipo egoc?ntrica al?m de n?o apreender as coisas em sua verdade, tamb?m n?o alcan?a o verdadeiro eu do homem. Na tentativa de suplantar os abusos gerados na modernidade e que reverberam em nosso modo de ser at? hoje, nosso pensador, ir? propor o ponto de vista da vacuidade (śūnyatā) como um caminho de trans-descend?ncia, ou seja, de supera??o do pensamento tradicional que supervaloriza a raz?o para o encontro com o rosto original do homem, o qual ao n?o mais impor seu poder cognitivo pode conhecer todas as coisas em sua verdade, em seu tathatā

日本京都學派的西谷啟治曾表示，對他而言其哲學的根本課題就是「通過虛無主義的虛無主義之超克」。然而，「虛無主義」一詞並非單純只表示某種失去生命中最重要的價值時所產生的「虛無感」；在哲學上它還指向在特定時期，即產生於19世紀歐洲地區的精神危機，以及試圖解答此危機的各種哲學思想。但更重要的問題是：既然虛無主義是歐洲所產生的思想產物，為何會成為身為日本人的西谷啟治的哲學起點？虛無主義與西谷啟治的思想彼此之間的關係是什麼？ 若從外在的動機而論，雖然歐洲虛無主義並非產生於東亞，然而對西谷啟治而言，在日本明治維新之後，盲目追求西化的結果，導致自身的精神與文化的傳統被忽視，逐漸地失去生命力。同時對於西化的嚮往也反過來導致了自我厭惡。如何在這西化的潮流中，回顧自身的傳統，找到自身的定位，同時得到內在的安心，從而迎向未來，就成了西谷對歐洲虛無主義的關注動機。此外，西谷啟治選擇了禪佛教作為他的解答：從禪佛教的立場，重新檢視歐洲虛無主義產生的原因，並且對西方的種種哲學思想提出批判。

Helmut Lachenmann’s theory of perception highlights musical moments that step out of a coherent stream of self-contained musical logic and challenges established categories of musical experience. The penultimate scene (No. 23: Shō) of Lachenmann’s »opera« The Little Match Girl (1991-96/2001) and the airy chords in the final section of his large ensemble work Concertini (2004/2005) arguably represent such moments of fundamental musical alterity in the composer’s recent output that are characterised by a specific auratic emphasis. Closer examination, however, suggests that these sections are also multiply mediated by self-references with the larger musical structure of these extensive works. This article provides a loosely connected series of discussions on how a balance between alterity and self-referentiality is achieved in these two examples. The discussions acknowledge the distinction between »extra-opus« and »intra-opus« references derived from cognitive science and music theory and focus on pitch organisation, sectional time structure, narrativity and interculturality. The Japanese mouth organ shō that figures prominently in the opera scene and, according to the composer, provides the »scale« for the concluding sounds in Concertini, without doubt symbolizes a moment of fundamental alterity due to its unique timbre, its unalienated sound and a basic articulation derived from the Japanese court music repertoire tōgaku. A detailed analysis of fingerings and pitch organisation, however, reveals a »double-coding« of Lachenmann’s material: on the »extra-opus« realm it refers to or »deconstructs« both Japanese and European musical conventions, on the »intra-opus« realm it connects to the framing scenes of the opera and forms part of a large-scale »cadence sound« that reconsiders the complete spectrum between pitched and unpitched sounds within the three closing scenes. The »utopian« shō-chords played by wind instruments in the final section of Concertini, in contrast, create a more fragmentary type of »cadence sound« due to their short durations, but nevertheless exert a »magnetic« attraction that temporarily assembles the heterogeneous »sound families« of the piece into transient sonic entities. A detailed overview of the sectional time structures reveals that in both cases the music follows a rather rigid sequence of proportions derived from Fibonacci series and the golden section, and includes several quasi symmetrical time layers. In both examples this time structure supports pivotal formal processes: in the shō-scene from the Little Match Girl it suggests a shift from the predominance of shō-sounds to their increasingly independent orchestral »resonances«, in Concertini the symmetrical position of the »shō-chords« within the final section emphasizes their cadential function and »magnetic« effect. The concluding discussions on narrativity and interculturality suggest that – partly in contrast to the preceding arguments of this essay – the analysed sections tend to subvert the conventional closure concept of a »cadence« and rather create open endings. The self-referential elements in the Little Match Girl’s construction of the shō and its inclusion in a re-invented type of »celestial mechanics« discloses non-essentialist, polyvalent strata of musical meaning that match Lachenmann’s concept of nonconventional musical narrativity and non-exploitative musical interculturality (a concept that he has critically discussed at length in a recent article). This is especially cogent when his shō-music is compared to other recent works for the Japanese mouth organ that recontextualize its sounds by »demythologization« in a much more obvious, arguably didactic manner. Finally, Lachenmann’s key idea of »liberated perception« is associated with this discussion on interculturality and traced back to moments in Keiji Nishitani’s philosophy – leaving this article open to further research.