In the winter of 2022, the late Mickey Weems invited me to contribute to a symposium on the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro. Mickey provided the panelists with a selection of quotations, and asked us to comment on whichever aspects of Nishida’s thought we found noteworthy from the viewpoint of our respective religious traditions. It was designed as an experiment: What happens when people from diverse religious backgrounds, who don’t know the Kyoto School, read Nishida? What follows is the text of my contribution to the discussion.
As an historian, I am generally skeptical of the possibility of meaningful conversations across religious or philosophical traditions. Particular traditions, it seems to me, are what make such conversations among their respective adherents possible across space and time. Nevertheless, I cannot escape the conviction that my own religious tradition, Islam, posits a common basis for humanity. This conviction necessarily tempers my skepticism and, moreover, requires me to engage those with whom I disagree in good faith. With that in mind, for my contribution to the discussion, I chose to focus on the following two passages from Nishida’s Inquiry:
God is not something that transcends reality, God is the base of reality. God is that which dissolves the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity and unites spirit and nature. (Nishida, Inquiry, 79. Emphasis added.)
In what forms does God exist? From one perspective... God is all negation, whereas that which can be affirmed or grasped is not God... From this standpoint, God is absolute nothingness. God is not, however, mere nothingness. An immovable unifying activity clearly functions at the base of the establishment of reality, and it is by means of this activity that reality is established... God is... the unifier of the universe, the base of reality; and because God is no-thing, there is no place where God is not, and no place where God does not function. (Nishida, Inquiry, 81. Emphasis added.)
Frankly, the first passage only deepens my reservations about interfaith dialogue. While God (the necessary existent) is certainly the grounds for existence in Islam, what does Nishida mean by “reality”? Since it is nonsensical to say something that exists (namely, God) is not something that transcends existence, I can only presume Nishida means God is not something that transcends the world. If that is correct, then I cannot agree. In Islam, God is both transcendent and immanent: “There is nothing like him” (Quran 42:11) and “[He] is closer to [man] than his jugular vein” (Quran 50:16). That is the inner meaning of the expression “May my mighty Lord be exalted [above all things] and may he be praised [with all things],” which Muslims say repeatedly in their ritual prayers (see further Muḥammad Ḥusayn Ṭabāṭabāʾī, A Shiʿite Anthology, trans. by William C. Chittick (Albany: SUNY Press, 1981), 24).
More broadly, knowledge of existence (including God) is entirely dependent on the intellect’s capacity to transcend phenomena. This philosophical teaching is encapsulated in an exquisite couplet by Mīr Taqī Mīr (d. 1810):
mawwāj āb sā hai va leykin uRe hai khāk
hai mīr baḥr-e be tehey hastī sarāb sā
The waves are like water and yet dust fills the air;
Mir, this shallow sea of existence is like a mirage.
Commenting on this couplet, the contemporary Pakistani scholar Ahmad Javaid said:
The couplet revolves around the idea that the affirmation of the cosmos entails its negation. In other words, phenomena must be acknowledged even as they must be denied. Otherwise, there can be no knowledge of existence—to know existence is to affirm phenomena in order to deny them. To be connected to its reality, form requires the negation of itself, not the affirmation of its independent existence. The affirmation of form is accidental whereas its negation is essential. Without negation, form remains dissociated from its reality. The intellect is what gives form the element of transcendence. Transcendence is the negation of form—it is not the denial of the phenomenon nor the denial of the experience; it is the rational denial of form.
Perhaps if I knew more about Nishida’s ontology and his epistemology, I could find common ground, but, as it stands, things are not looking good.
The second passage seems more familiar to me. The statement “[That] which can be affirmed or grasped is not God” reminds me of what ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib says about God in the Nahj al-Balāghah:
Praise belongs to God, whose praise cannot be rendered by speakers, whose bounties cannot be counted by reckoners, and whose rightful due cannot be discharged by those who strive. Grand aspirations cannot perceive him and deep-diving perspicacities cannot reach him. His attributes have no determined limits, no existing description, no fixed time, and no extended term. He created the cosmos by his power, loosened the winds by his mercy, and fastened the shaking of his earth with boulders.
The first step in religion is knowing him. The perfection of knowing him is believing in him. The perfection of believing in him is professing his unity. The perfection of professing his unity is sincerity toward him. And the perfection of sincerity toward him is negating descriptions of him because every description attests to the fact that it is not the same as what it describes and everything described attests to the fact that it is not the same as the description.
Whoever describes God, may he be exalted, has joined him to something. Whoever joins him to something has called him one of two. Whoever calls him one of two has divided him into parts. Whoever divides him into parts does not know him. Whoever does not know him has pointed to him. Whoever points to him has delimited him. Whoever delimits him has enumerated him. Whoever says, ‘What is he in?’ has enclosed him and whoever says, ‘What is he on?’ has excluded him from certain things.
He is a being but he did not come into being. He exists but he was not preceded by non-existence. He is with everything but he is not joined to anything. He is different from everything but he is not separate from anything. He is active but his action involves no movement or instrument. He was seeing when there was nothing to be seen. He was alone when there was nothing with which to be intimate and nothing whose absence could cause him to feel alone (Ṭabāṭabāʾī, A Shiʿite Anthology, 29–30. The translation is by Chittick, but I have made significant changes based on al-Sayyid ʿAbbās ʿAlī al-Mūsawī, Sharḥ Nahj al-Balāghah (Beirut: Dār al-Rasūl al-Akram, 1418/1998), 1:14–21).
The similarity between Nishida’s statement and ʿAlī’s exposition notwithstanding, talking about God demands restraint in Islam. It is said that a learned man once asked ʿAlī, “When was your lord?” to which ʿAlī replied, “May your mother be bereaved of you! When was he not that it could be said when was he?” (al-Mūsawī, Sharḥ Nahj al-Balāghah, 1:17). I imagine ʿAlī’s response to the question “In what forms does God exist?” would have been equally stern.
Second, if God exists, then he cannot be “all negation.” Moreover, although “there is no place where God is not, and no place where God does not function,” the House of the Prophet taught us that God is a thing. In one ḥadīth, al-Ḥusayn b. Saʿīd asks Imam Muḥammad al-Jawād if it is possible/permissible to say that God is a thing and the Imam replies, “Yes, [saying so] removes [God] from the two extremes: taʿṭīl (a negation of his existence and the existence of his attributes) and tashbīh (a similarity between the existence of God and the existence of creation). In another ḥadīth, Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq says, “[God] is a thing different from all other things… He is a thing in the true sense of thingness, but he is not a body or a form” (see al-Kulaynī, al-Kāfī, Kitāb al-Tawḥīd, Bāb 2).
Based on the teachings of the House of the Prophet, Twelver Shīʿī theologians held that thingness and existence are coextensive—non-existence has no thingness. This position set them apart from some Muʿtazilī theologians (namely, the Bahshamiyyah), who believed that some non-existents are things. Furthermore, if one believes in the primacy of existence (as opposed to the primacy of essence), then it is only logical to believe that thingness and existence are coextensive (see ʿAlī al-Shīrwānī, Durūs Falsafiyyah fī Sharḥ Bidāyat al-Ḥikmah, trans. by Ḥabīb Fayyāḍ (Beirut: Dār al-Hādī, 1416/1995), 137–142). But even the Bahshamiyyah would have balked at Nishida’s claim that God is absolute nothingness, wa-l-ʿiyādhu billāh. It brought Quran 19:89–90 to mind: “How terrible is this thing you assert: it almost causes the heavens to be torn apart, the earth to split asunder, the mountains to crumble to pieces.”
I take the view that nothingness and non-existence are coextensive, and there is a substantial discussion about the properties of non-existence in Islamic philosophy (see al-Shīrwānī, Durūs, 125–174). For the purposes of this short essay, it is sufficient to highlight one of these properties, namely: unqualified non-existence cannot be the subject of any proposition (al-maʿdūm al-muṭlaq lā khabara ʿanhu). (Obviously, “unqualified existence” is the subject of this proposition. For the solution to this problem, see al-Shīrwānī, Durūs, 150–152). For something to be the subject of a proposition (al-mukhbar ʿanhu), it must exist in actuality; otherwise, we could not say the proposition is true or false. At the very least, it must exist in the mind. But unqualified non-existence is an expression for pure nothingness, which does not exist at all. Because it has no actuality in the world or the mind, we cannot say anything about it (al-Shīrwānī, Durūs, 149–150). The God of Islam is not like that. “He is God the One, God the eternal. He begot no one nor was he begotten and no one is comparable to him” (Quran 112).
I grant that Nishida was grasping for an explanation of his experience and I do not deny that direct experience is the surest way to know God. As anyone with a taste for qawwālī knows:
ʿāshiq nashudī jalvah-e jānān keh shināsī
tā sar nah dahī himmat-e mardān keh shināsī
You have not loved, what do you know of the beauty of the beloved?
Until you lay down your life, what do you know of the resolve of men?
But direct experiential knowledge of God has no vector—it is, by most accounts, simply overwhelming. In the Masnavī, Maulana Rūm says:
ʿeshq jān-e tūr āmad āshiqā
tūr mast-o-kharrā mūsā ṣāʿiqā
Lover! It was love that gave life to Sinai;
the mountain swooned and “Moses fell down unconscious.”
Revelation and reason direct experience so that it brings us closer to truth. Moreover, words matter. When the face of the beloved is unveiled and we express that vision in writing, it is first and foremost an aesthetic practice addressed to the faculty of imagination (quwwat-i takhayyul). But abstruse language is not beautiful. Furthermore, it is the interplay between heresy and orthodoxy, as defined by particular traditions, that enables such expressions to capture something of the intensity of the original vision. For example:
lam yalid pe merā emān hai leykin yā rabb
tere ghar se kisī bachche kī sadā āti hai
I believe “He begot no one,” but what can I say, my lord—
I hear the cries of a newborn coming from your house.
I will also freely admit that something got lost in translation, but isn’t that the point? It is precisely because God is ultimately unknowable that Muslims prefer to speak about God (and to God) in God’s own words and the words of those whom God has chosen.
che nisbat ast bih rindī salāh-o-taqvā-rā
samāʿ-e vaʿẓ kujā naghmah-yi rubāb kujā
What have virtue and piety got to do with a rake?
Hearing admonition is one thing, the melody of the rebec another.
sag-e Ali
Boulder, Colorado
24 January 2022
This post is dedicated to the memory of Mickey Weems.