Buddhist Ethical Self-Awakening and Christian Kenotic Thought: 
State of Affairs in Nascent Global Culture

It seems that, caught in the phenomenon of globalisation, human beings are increasingly prone to casually experience things as such, without too much concern for the place of  what is experienced, be it the historical and cultural contexts, or simply the person to whom we relate. It seems hard to deny that the infiltration of all shapes of technology at all levels and globally, is largely responsible for what some might see as an existential decadence. At the same time and arguably, perceptual experiences of the such-ness of things have traditionally always been associated with Oriental culture and Zen Buddhism in particular. At first glance the similarities are striking. However, what in Western postmodernity can be interpreted as the overcoming of the metaphysics of being and origin has, at an ethical level, a different significance in the Eastern world. The source of this matter of fact comes from the different cultural traditions within which this ethos of disinterestedness springs. 
	This latter and key notion needs to be clarified. In the context of this talk postmodern disinterestedness is a perceptual attitude that correlates with the subversion of traditional Western metaphysics, in the sense that it corresponds to the subject’s disbelief in his or her ability to determine meaning in a grounded way. Disinterestedness, in this particular sense, is therefore essentially nihilistic and should not be understood in the way Immanuel Kant defines it in his Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of judgement) - the Kantian conception being as a matter of fact akin in some regard to the idea of aesthetic perception that Nishida Kitarô described as a form of ‘emptied self’ in the Zen Buddhist sense of the term, initially in 美の説明 (Bi no setsumei: An explanation of beauty) and then in a more elaborate way in his 芸術と道徳 (Geijutsu to dôtoku, Art and morality). 

	However, what this presentation shall attempt to work out is the ethical fundamental that characterises any meaningful existential experience, initially with particular reference to the idea of self-awakening developed by Zen Buddhist thinker Nishida Kitarô (1870-1945), from the Kyôto School, and this in the light of French philosopher Gabriel Marcel’s (1889-1973) catholic ‘kenoticism’. 

Ethical Self-awakening 

For Nishida ‘religious’ experience more than aesthetic or moral ones come close to pure self-awakening (自覚, jikaku), and whose fundamentals rest on the notions of love, negation, and dialectical relationship with its place. Nishida provides us with a profound analysis of the degrees to which these ‘facets’ relate to each other. As previously mentioned, there are however some obvious, and some less obvious, common grounds with Western Christian conceptions of the formation of the self in such experiences. The talk, once again, shall focus on the ethical dimension in the experience of self-awakening from the perspectives of both Kyôto School Buddhism and catholic ‘kenoticism’. 
	As a matter of fact several ‘members’ of the Kyôto School came strongly under the influence of Christian philosophy, directly or indirectly. Some took it on board to elaborate systems of thought of a syncretic tendencies. For instance and amongst others, Tanabe Hajime (1885-1962) who was critical of Nishida’s use of Zen Buddhism, which he saw as a mystical way of understanding perceptual experience by stressing its unmediated and therefore inefable nature, suggested an alternative to the kind of disinterestedness that went with Nishida’s concept of ‘pure experience’ by bringing together various aspects of Shan Buddhism, Christianity and Marxism in his analyses. Miki Kiyoshi (1897-1945), also a student of Nishida and who was initially deeply influenced by the religious humanism of Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), took the path of Marxism until he came back to a more liberal type of thought toward the end. Kuki Shûzô (1888-1943) brought into Japanese aesthetic theory much of Martin Heidegger’s onto-theological imageries, and the same type of influence characterises the thought of Watsuji Tetsurô (1889-1960), the author of 風土。人間学的考察 (Fûdo. Ningengaguteki kôsatsu. Tôkyô, Iwanami shoten, 1935). What Watsuji strove in fact to redeem were those specifically Japanese cultural features in order to free the Japanese soul from the domination of the West. Needless to say, this cost him to be thought as a nationalist. Other ‘Kyôto thinkers’ were either exposed to kenotic Christian philosophy or took it on board in their philosophy, such as Nishitani Keiji (1900-1990), Abe Masao (1915-    ), Hisamatsu Shin’ichi (1889-1980), and Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki (1870-1966)]    
	As far as Nishida is concerned, and this shall be our point of departure, the origins of the ethical dimension of his thought comes as much from Zen Buddhism and Confucianism, as from the reading of the work of American idealist philosopher Josiah Royce (1855-1916), who had actually also deeply influenced Marcel. (There is, to my knowledge, no evidence of Nishida and Marcel being aware of each other’s works). This might explain what look like similarities between aspects of Nishida’s and Marcel’s philosophies. However, these similarities can equally be contingent and have very different origins. Such is the case for dialectics, which plays a crucial role in both thinkers’ ethics. For instance, in Marcel’s thought the dialectical dimension has undoubtedly its origins in the influence of Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968), who was one of the dominant philosophical academic figures in France in Marcel’s early years and whose Hegelianism overwhelmed French intellectual life. If Nishida’s dialectical approach to ethics owed much to Hegel because of his relatively early interest in German idealism, it was subsequently the Buddhist conception of ‘soku’ (即) as expounded by Nâgârjuna and according to which something ‘is’ through its own negation, that played the most significant role. 
	In Nishidian philosophy the awakening of the self through its absolute emptying (絶対無の自覚: zettai mu no jikaku) is an affirmation of the self by means of its self-retraction. In other words, the absolute emptying of selfhood in the light of the Thou at the same time enables the shaping of the I. This means that the self acquires its unity in an act of ‘loving’ that is also an act of self-negation, and one’s own discovery consists in ‘dying’ in the light of the Thou. The process is reciprocal in the sense that the Thou acquires its unity in the light of the I. This is why the self finds its unified ‘continuity of discontinuity’ (非連続の連続 : hi renzoku no renzoku). 
	Thus, Nishida considers two traditionally separated poles through the reciprocity of their self-determinacy. This applies to the personal and the outer worlds, that is, the I and the Thou. Importantly, they are mutually self-determined within a particular location, or place, that brings them together. On the one hand, the place of the formation of the I is the Thou that one loves through self-negation, and on the other hand, the very relationship between the I and the Thou can only be against a common ground, or universal, which one might call the invisible place of its occurrence. This is to say that the shared relationship is founded on the mutual acts of absolute self-negation (絶対自己否定: zettai jiko hitei). 
	By evoking the self-awakening of the I in the light of the Thou, and the self-awakening of the Thou in the light of the I, Nishida suggests that the affirmation of the personal and independent character of the self lies within an act of mutual consideration. Even further, the I becomes the I by emptying itself with the light of the Thou – a relationship whose reciprocal dimension is the very advent of an inter-personal relationship between free individuals. The awakening of the self is an absolute self-retraction with regard to the absolute Thou and which, when mutually experienced, constitutes the very substance of a responsible and creative relationship between the two. The seemingly paradoxical combining between availability and freedom is, it should be stressed, equally a central theme not only in Marcel’s thought but also amongst French Personalist philosophers influenced by catholicism such as Emmanuel Mounier (1905-1950) or Maurice Nédoncelle (1905-1976).
	To understand Nishida’s ethical concerns it is important to stress its two folds, made apparent in ‘Self-love, love of the Thou, and dialectics’ (自愛と他愛弁証法: jiai to taai benshôhô). The emergence of the self’s life lies on its very well-disposability to die as an act of self-love (自愛: jiai) as much as love of the Thou (他愛: taai). This is to say that ‘self-love’ and ‘love of the Thou’ relate to each other dialectically. The way Nishida, in a difficult first section, defines self-love is by removing any ambiguity with the mere satisfaction of desire (欲求: yokkyû), although he acknowledges at the same time that there is no possible formation of the self (我: ware) without relating to desires in one way or another. 
	What is perceived in an unmediated fashion, directly, cannot be an abstraction, and therefore attracts a certain form of personal ‘interest’. However, to the latter does not correspond the ‘realisation’ of desire itself, but its ‘expression’ (表現: hyôgen). What exists directly for us is neither a ‘thing’ (物: mono), nor a ‘feeling’ (感情: kanjô), nor a ‘representation’ (表象 hyôshô) that would lead to the satisfaction of realised desires, but is the ‘expression’ of such desires. Thus, the perception of ‘expressed contents’, that is to say, of things and representations as such, or equally the experience of feelings as such, are the perceptual experiences of self-determinations, which are that of expressed desires. These quasi-selfless forms of perceptual experiences are therefore not about the realisation of desires, but their expression in the self-emptying acts of both self-love and love of the Thou. 
	It goes without saying that the ‘realisation’ of desires involves the ‘body’ (身體 : shintai). At the same time, Nishida, faithful to his Buddhist dialectics of soku, suggests that there is a complementary mutual relationship between the ‘realisation’ and the ‘expression’ of desires. One doesn’t go without the other, from which we can safely deduce that different degrees of emphasis characterise, let us say, the experience of the agreeable in the Kantian sense of the word (for instance the ‘realisation’ of desires when we drink a glass of wine that delights our pallet); or the perceptual experience of the beautiful (when we look at the ‘expression’ of a content as such, without purpose). 
	The experience of the expression of desires is not for Nishida confined to the aesthetic, but also typifies thinking itself, which is clearly not about the bodily realisation of desires, although it relates to it in a complementary differential way. Thus, the body can function as a place (場所: basho) for the realisation of what is expressed, as in Nishida’s own words ‘[w]hat is expressed realises itself in the body, that is to say awakens to iself’, and ‘[o]ur desires must be the content of the body .... The body is the hypokeimenon [i.e. substratum/underlying thing] of desires, ...’. And just as the ‘realisation’ and ‘expression’ of desires are mutually self-determining, such are desires and the body: ‘.... conversely, desires create the body. There is no desire without body. There is no body without desires.’ 
	So, from one angle, the body acts as a basho for the expression of desires to be realised, in other words, for the formation of a self-identity (自己同一: jiko dôitsu) to take place. This self-identity can only be expressed and therefore perceived in an immediate and direct manner, that is to say as such, if one relinquishes his or her bodily desires in an act of self-love and love of the Thou. Thus, it is not either possible to conceive love without desire, and desire without love, but, once again, insofar as we conceive them in terms of mutual complementary differentials. 
	It is really in the second section of the essay (‘Genuine love as a negating discovery of the self’), that Nishida addresses the issue of the meaning of ‘genuine love’. Following Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677) in ‘Concerning the Origin and Nature of Emotions’, the joy that accompanies desires is that of a passage ‘from a lesser to a greater perfection’. In other words, to the joy triggered by the satisfaction of desires corresponds a transcendent movement. This, for Nishida, cannot apply to genuine or ‘pure’ love, whose joy is to be found in the very negation of the self. He tells us that unlike desires, such a love can only be of persons as we do not become self-awakened in the light of objects, or more literally, ‘we do not discover ourselves in mere things’. It is therefore truly ‘agape’ as opposed to ‘eros’, (ἀγάπηagape, in the Christian sense of ‘charity’ as opposed  to the ἔρος, or ‘eros’ of sexual or earthy love). 
	Genuine love between persons is equally to be distinguished from the experience of the beautiful. If the kind of pleasure triggered by the latter is not about the satisfaction of desires, and here the kinship with Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgement in distinctio from the ‘judgement of the agreeable’ (Urteil über das Angenehme) is striking, it does not lead either to pure self-awakening. We have here to understand that Nishida sees the experience of the beautiful as being directed toward an ‘object of pleasure’, and although the self remains ‘disinterested’ in the Kantian sense of the word (ohne Interesse), during such an experience there is always a concrete external element to which it lends itself and that prevents it from self-awakening through absolute emptying. This is presumably why Nishida writes that on such occasions ‘the self gets lost’.
	 The unity of the self cannot be achieved by seeking to satisfy one’s desires, which are always stimulated by their objects. The awakening of the self through its absolute emptying is precisely about relinquishing its condition as a subject that relates to something or somebody as an object. Self-love (自愛:jiai), which is one of the conditions for the possibility of self-awakening, is about making one’s self available to the Thou. At the same time the negation of the self cannot be confused with an obligation to be subsumed to, or fascinated by the Thou. The emptying of the self in the light of the Thou is its very affirmation. When self-love is at the core of the determination of the person in a free and responsible world, the love of the Thou is the necessary place of the social world’s self-determination (自己限定: jiko gentei). Even more, at one level, love is the basho (場所) of the mutual self-determination of the personal and the social worlds. Love with Nishida becomes once again the occasion of a dialectical relationship, or mutual inclusiveness between two poles, which are the I and the Thou. As he puts it, ‘[t]here is no love of the Thou without self-love. But there is no genuine self-love without genuine love of the Thou. We usually think of love as a mere union between the self and the other, but it is however consideration that must be its core. The mere union between the self and the other is only a kind of impulsive drive and not love.’ This is a very important sentence, as it shows a meeting point between what grounds Nishida’s ethical conception of self-awakening and Marcel’s kenotic conception of the creative self, that is to say ‘consideration’. At the same time, the general mood of their writings as a whole cannot but betray two diametrically opposed backgrounds of tradition. The former’s standpoint is ‘emptiness’ when the latter’s is ‘being’.

Christian Kenoticism

Love as the source of the formation of the self is thus central to Nishida’s ethical thought, and is something that bears striking similarities with some aspects of Marcel’s catholic kenoticism. Just like with Nishida, Marcel evokes a conception of love that is seen as being distinguished from his notion of ‘realisation’ of desires as previously explained. But there isn’t in Marcel the same logic of the basho that underlines much of Nishida’s philosophy. The French philosopher does not highlight the complementary differential relationship between love and desires (whether in their ‘realisation’ or ‘expression’). His conception of love is presented as being unrelated not only to bodily desire, but also to what drives one towards an ‘object’. Genuine love therefore is strictly not for Marcel about relating to a ‘loved object’, whereby the loving relationship between the subject and the object would depend on whether the latter corresponds to the former’s idealisation. On the contrary, love appears as a proper renunciation of such a desire to see in the other one’s idealisation, that is to say the image of the omnipotent self. Moreover, the Marcelian conception of love as it is developed in Homo Viator is pared with that of ‘hoping’. 
	Genuine love involves the experience of hoping that the loved one will go beyond what the one who loves finds disappointing in the other, and this in the light of the one who loves. Loving implies therefore a certain degree of ‘fidelity’, and it is noteworthy to mention that its kinship with ‘hoping’ is actually a conception that we can retrieve in the Aryan etymology of the word ‘believe’, which did at some stage relate to ‘love’. At the same time, it is fundamental to bear in mind the necessary reciprocal nature of a loving relationship in Marcel’s philosophy, if the idea of renunciation of the desiring self is not to be confused with either submission or subjectivism. To love is not to blindly accept what one finds unacceptable in the other, but to hope that this other will equally find the hopeful will to empty him or herself in the light of myself. 
	As for subjectivism, if it is true that the first section of one of Marcel’s early works - the Journal Métaphysique, strongly emphasises the notion of self-creation through love, there is no doubt that what come afterwards eradicate any symptom of such a ‘subjectivism’ by focusing on once again hope and reciprocity. In fact, Marcel is so wary to defuse any trace of subjectivism that such a conception of human love becomes that of a kenotic experience of divine love, whereby, as suggested by theologian Walter Kasper, eternity, self-love, love of the Thou, and God are brought together in diversity and unity.
	There is no doubt that, at first glance, Nishida’s conception of ‘genuine love’ in terms of ‘negating discovery of the self’ smacks of the early Marcel’s conception of creative self through renunciation. At the same time, the ethical dialectics that Nishida deploys removes any possibility for his description of the fundamental function of love to be interpreted in terms of subjectivism. What subsequently differs between the two thinkers’ conceptions of ‘genuine love’ is not their content but their form, or, more precisely, it is not their function but their axial direction. Genuine love for Marcel involves, or rather is textured by hope, which makes it thus transcendent towards the Thou, in a typically Christian fashion. For Nishida genuine love is a negating movement whereby the self is awakened by emptying itself. In a typically Buddhist fashion, the self tends towards absolute nothingness in a movement that makes the act of loving immanent in the light of the Thou. 
	The same transcendent character can actually equally be found in French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’ conception of the experience of ‘Goodness’ in the face of the Other’s ‘infinity’. It might be argued that the dialectics at work in both Marcel’s and Levinas’ philosophies overcomes the seemingly unidirectional transcendent character of the relationship between the I and, respectively, the Thou and the Other. It might equally be sustained that Nishida’s dialectics of soku enables him to conceive such a relationship as being vitally reciprocal. In fact, there is a fundamental aspect of Nishida’s philosophy of I/Thou that, at one level, makes it so different from that of Marcel - and therefore from that of Levinas. Indeed, Nishida’s logic of the inclusive basho allows immanent love to become transcendent, depending precisely on the standpoint of the basho. Transcendence can act as an inclusive place for immanence, and vice versa. As Nishida puts it in 哲学論文集第七 (Tetsugaku ronbunshû daishichi: Philosophical essays 7),

Religion must be through and through immanently transcendent, and, conversely, it must be through and through transcendently immanent. Religion is given in the standpoint of the self-identity of contradictories: of the dialectical circular reciprocity of immanence = transcendence and of transcendence = immanence. 
	(Nishida, NKZ 11, p. 459)

 Nishida goes as far as to suggest that a religion of the future should be thought in terms ‘immanent transcendence’. Even further, Nishida evokes the possibility of a new order, where the different cultural identities would be determined in a self-contradictory and therefore mutual way within the basho of the world. And whether it is Buddhism or Christianity, such religions should be thought as complementary differentials and not in incompatible terms of either immanence or transcendence, respectively. This is where the scope of Nishida’s philosophy goes perhaps beyond that of Marcel together with any form of transcendental kenoticism. This is also where the axiological conception of immanence in Buddhism is presented in a new light, that makes it indeed open to dialogue.
Beside studies on the phenomenon of inculturation in Japan such as 日本とイエスの顔 (Nihon to Iesu no Kao: The face of Jesus in Japan, 1982) by Inoue Yoji, or numerous more encompassing ones on Asian religions, the ethical confluence between Christian kenoticism and Kyôto School Zen Buddhist conception of the experience of emptiness was explored by Hans Waldenfels in Absolutes Nichts. Zur Grundlegung des Dialogs zwischen Buddhismus und Christentum (1976), as well as in Faszination des Buddhismus. Zum christlich-buddhistischen Dialog (1982). Waldenfels moves beyond the archetypical dualistic separation between Western Christian conception of ‘being’ and that of Buddhist ‘nothingness’. In Absolutes Nichts in particular, he seeks to establish a point of contact via Saint Paul’s kenoticism and in the light of the thought of one of the most important figures of the Kyôto School, Nishitani Keiji. It is clear from the passage on Christian kenotic thought and Waldenfels’ interpretation of Karl Rahner’s study on the subject, that genuine love is both that of a transcendent God and aimed at a transcendent God. Christianity has it that Jesus Christ is, if I dare use Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s image in such a case, the chiasm between the self-emptying of God and the self-emptying of human being. The self-determinations of the former and the latter therefore only take place in a dialectical kenotic relationship, but which is always nonetheless and ultimately depending on the will of God. For Saint Paul, human beings should adopt the same attitude as Jesus Christ, who in spite of his divine nature, emptied himself to the point of ‘assuming the condition of a slave’. And for Rahner, human being is ‘the self-utterance [Selbstäusserung] of God in his self-emptying [Selbstentäusserung], because God expresses himself when he empties himself’; And, ‘[i]f God wills to become non-God, man comes to be, that and nothing else, we might say.’ 

The disappearance of the kenotic attitude in the West, which at the beginning of the essay was defined in terms of disinterested postmodern condition, (once again ‘disinterestedness’ is not here to be understood in the Kantian sense), is obviously an extremely complex phenomenon that might well be attributed in part to the culture of transcendence. Such a culture might have well prepared a favourable ground for the rejection of the kenotic attitude in the West, albeit unconsciously, as its transcendent nature intrinsically and unavoidably induced acts of submission, which, coupled with a blind belief in the Enlightened ideal of reason, could only ultimately lead to its rejection by means of unethical nihilism. At the same time the impact, abuses, and misuses of technology has without doubt made matters worse, which Martin Heidegger foresaw, if not at an ethical level, at least at an existential level, in his Die Frage nach der Technik (The question concerning technology). 
	There is little doubt regarding the need to bear in mind that cultural experiences in their particular dimension are by necessity related to a situating field or ‘other’. And vice versa, it is fundamental to remain aware that the formation of the perceiving self owes its integrity to its readiness to be available to the one who speaks, be it an author, an entire community, or even a period that belongs to the past. All these are parts of what Nishida defined in terms of basho (場所), to which one must be willing to respond as an appeal precisely in order to be meaningfully creative. 
As previously suggested this vital ethical condition for a meaningful existence is increasingly obliterated in our nascent global culture, and as far as the Western world is concerned not only because of the impact of technology but also because it still unconsciously, if not consciously, in the process of overcoming metaphysics in whatever shapes. In a way, such an on-going process has provided the West with a justification for relativism, which leads too often to cultural dilettantism. However, when Nishida on the other side of the globe highlights in 美の説明 (Bi no setsumei: An explanation of beauty), that the experience of the such-ness of meaning, (that is to say the beautiful: 美, bi), is willingly self-less (無我, muga: selflessness) he is certainly not evoking dilettantism. He implies that it is also to a certain degree ethical. This stance has far-reaching consequences beyond the boundaries of what is usually understood in terms of the experience of the beautiful, at least as far as the cultural sphere is concerned. Cultural experiences are obviously not confined to Zen Buddhist ones of the kinds that induce selflessness, anymore than they are limited to the eighteenth century European conception of beauty to which a Kantian idea of disinterested attitude would do justice. 
An aspect that seems to have crucially survived from Nishida’s studies and which ought to be held as a universal value, is that for any cultural experience to be meaningful at all, whether as an act of authorship or as a receptive attitude, it must be ethical. As a matter of fact, one could also argue that there are elements in Kant’s description in his Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of judgement, 1790) of the a priori conditions for the so-called aesthetic experience to be possible, that are still highly relevant to nowadays cultural experiences. The ethical dimension in the Kantian conception of ‘disinterestedness’, which Nishida brought close to the Buddhist notion of ‘selflessness’ in 美の説明 (Bi no setsumei: An explanation of beauty), might well constitute the necessary condition for any such experiences to be meaningful at all. The very mediation through art, or more generally culture, would lead to what might be called concrete self-awakening. It goes without saying that for cultural experiences to be ethical does not mean that they fall in the category of normative morality, or that they are subsumed to categorical imperatives. The ethical attitude at work is what Gabriel Marcel would call a well-disposability to respond to the appeal of the Thou, which must obey a principle of mutual ‘inclusive situatedness’ to escape falling into either submission or inconsiderate attitudes. These latter attitudes are nowadays induced by what would be fair to call the catacombs of meaning. 
	
	What this presentation has attempted to do is simply to highlight some ethical fundamentals through the lenses of Buddhist ethical self-awakening with Nishida and Christian kenotic thought with Marcel – ethical fundamentals that seem to be falling into the abyss of forgetfulness at a worrying speed in the context of our nascent global culture.

Prof. Gerald Cipriani, PhD
Tama University
Tôkyô, Japan
cipriani@tama.ac.jp