Nothing and nowhere East and West

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Notes

1. A careful reading of Dionysius’ original writings will show that most of the references to “nothing,” “absolute being,” and “being beyond being” end up being careless translations of terms that could never be translated back into the Greek originals for those terms.

2. For additional textual references, see Heisig, “Nishida's.”

3. I have adjusted Peter Erb's original translations throughout.

4. For one of the most exciting ventures in this direction, see Keel.

5. Nishida's interpretation is clearly confirmed in Cusanus's 1444 dialogue between a Christian and a Gentile, where the affirmation that God is Urgrund of being and non-being alike is immediately negated in favor of the contradiction (Cusanus 16–19).

6. The most striking example of this is Dilworth's rather liberal translation of the final essay, which introduces the name of Cusanus at each point (Nishida, Last Writings 53, 76, 89, 95), misrepresenting Nishida's own reference to it as “medieval.”

7. For a treatment of the images of the circle in literature ranging from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, see Poulet.

8. I have provided further details on Nishida's use of the metaphor and its connection to the Liber XXIV philosophorum in Heisig, “Response.”

9. The texts and historical references here are drawn from the immensely suggestive collection of Carlo Ossola published in 1997. I have omitted treatment of “no one” here, although clearly it needs to be brought in to examine parallels to the Buddhist notions of “no-self” that figure so strongly in Kyoto School philosophy.

10. This kind of play on words is impossible in Chinese and Japanese, which have no words for “no one.” Nor do they have a word for “nowhere.” From what I know of the history of the glyph pronounced mu in Japanese and wu in Chinese and generally rendered in English as “nothing” or “nothingness,” a cause could be made that this term covers the affirmative sense of negation for “no one” and “nowhere” as well.

11. From here on the quotes originate from Ossola, with the original author and date of publication indicated in parentheses.

12. “I know only that I know nothing.” This is a Latin aphorism based on Plato's Apology 21d, where the pun does not work.

13. Not too much should be made of this one sentence. Elsewhere the same text likens “being” in God to the heat of the sun: just as the sun is not “hot” in a formal sense but only in an eminent sense, so God is not formally but can be referred to as Being in an eminent sense. In this sense God is presented as a “middle term” between Nothing and Being (Ossola 157).