ABSTRACT
Sharing with predecessors such as Nietzsche a concern with nihilism, the Kyoto School philosophers advocate a response that is not linked to the standpoint of will, to an imagined control over the world. Our life unfolds against the background of nothingness, and yet this need not lead to nihilistic pessimism. For the notion of nothingness functions in a like manner to the concept of the indeterminate Godhead, of which one concrete manifestation is God as love, which we can know as our own existential ground. The Godhead of absolute nothingness can therefore rightly be called ‘nothingness-qua-love,’ and this identification traces an emotion felt by finite mortals to the very ground of being. Love is an ‘other-power’ within, out of which we finite individuals are disclosed; it functions as a condition of possibility for us to take shape as the particular, singular beings that we are, each of us the centre of a distinct reality. Rather than talking us out of viewing our surroundings with loving eyes, Nishida, Tanabe, and Nishitani suggest that only when we occupy this standpoint can we grasp the personal per se. They provide an eclectic and promising conception of what it means to confront nihilism and to live authentically.
