Episode #217 ... Religion and Nothingness - Kyoto School pt. 2 - Nishitani

Hello, everyone. I'm Steven West. This is Philosophize This. So I always get emails after an episode's released. But after last episode, there's a notable increase in two specific kinds of emails I get. One was an increase in the number of people saying the episode led them to a pretty deep shift in the ways they're thinking about about things. That Keiji Nishitani is opening them up to a whole new interesting way of exploring what it is to exist. The other was an increase, and the number of people saying they don't quite get it. That while they appreciate it and are sticking with it, that it's such a different way of thinking that it's difficult to wrap my mind around what's truly being said here. Just felt the need to acknowledge this before we talk about Nishitani's views on religion today. I mean, I know I must sound like a broken record lately. Be sure to listen to every episode from 02/2011 up until this one if you wanna understand what's being talked about. But look, it's not like I'm trying to annoy you or to be overly complicated. It's just a gift I have, really. No. But there's episodes of this podcast where we're doing something different. Some Some episodes are trying to cover things a little more broadly across a thinker's entire work. It casts a wide net. That's what some of the episodes we do do. But those are always gonna be episodes that can never hit you as hard as when we talk about more the context of where our thinker's coming from, their influences, the deeper conversations that they were embedded in. I mean, just for example, you know, it's been said by some Buddhists before that, look, you can explain all of Buddhism to someone in just three sentences. You can say, emptiness is form, form is emptiness, the two are not separate. And you can imagine someone hearing it and saying, oh, yeah. I I guess I get it then. I mean, I understand those sentences in the English language, so I guess I now understand all of Buddhism, don't I? But you can also imagine this person thinking that they get it, but not quite getting it. You You can imagine those three sentences when understood at a deeper level with a bit more context have the ability to not just sound really nice to you, but maybe to change you at a deep level. And short of apologizing for going a bit deeper into this stuff from building, from episode to episode, to take these ideas into deeper waters, I'm hoping there's enough of you out there that are still enjoying this exploration into the limits of dualistic thinking, of trying to access this more immediate connection with being. From the tragic perspective, to Heidegger, to the mystics, to Nishitani, they're all talking about something here that's overlapping. Well, what is it? And is it a mistake to …