Being-Time, or How Traditional Japanese Thought Collided with Western Philosophy and Modern Physics at Hiroshima

Abstract

The atom bomb that annihilated Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, proved Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Mass became energy and the classic Western dialectic of three-dimensional space and linear time was displaced by the integrated concept of spacetime. On that day, modern physics also collided with the traditional Japanese understanding that space and time are interdependent phenomena. This collision speaks to conceptual parallels relating Buddhist thought, modern Japanese philosophy, phenomenology, and the physics of spacetime. The thirteenth-century Zen Buddhist monk Dōgen said that all phenomena are made possible by the universal principle of emptiness and that our existence arises with each moment in what he termed Being-Time, where past, present, and future co-exist. The Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō, along with Tanabe Hajime and Watsuji Tetsurō, saw reality as a multi-dimensional field of space-in-time where the individual subject no longer stood apart from the objective world but instead arose dynamically as contingent activities rather than an autonomous thing. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger rejected the rational binary of subject and object in Western thought and grounded our “being” in phenomena that came from their temporal being-in-the-world rather than representing some preexisting objective reality. The physicist Albert Einstein radically rethought the dialectic of three-dimensional space and linear time, used to schematize the physical world in the West since antiquity, and theorized the relativity of spacetime, in which all phenomena occur in space in relation to their place in time. Interwoven, these intellectual threads stripped the bombing of Hiroshima of its historical inevitability. The story of human experience lost its customary sense of going <i>somewhere</i> predetermined and was revealed instead to be an endlessly discrete accumulation of moments that could go <i>anywhere</i> at every transient and directionless moment in time.