The Basho of Cultural Expressions: Nihility or Nothingness?

Abstract

The kind of Western postmodern unethical nihilism seems to be in sharp contrast with the Buddhist sense of void (無: mu) that is necessary, but certainly not sufficient, for any meaningful cultural expression to be possible, as Kyoto School thinker Nishitani Keiji (1900-1990) saw it. Nishitani argued that the contemporary West attempts to negate any conception of ”reality,” whether from an idealistic or materialistic perspective, making thus the very conceptions of ”self” and ”otherness” ungraspable. In other words, an entity without a ”place,” or, to use Nishida Kitaro's (1870-1945) celebrated concept, an entity without a basho to which it can relate, is no entity at all. On the contrary, a philosophy of ”nothingness” that would understand the ”self” as the very substance of nothingness does not see the ”self,” or any entity, as being unsubstantial anymore. This has, at a cultural level, profound implications. When Western contemporary ”nihility” hides a spirit of subversion and can lead to forms of casualness and unproductive skepticism as well as to the inability for the creative self to dwell in the light of its basho, whether in the visual arts, architecture, or music, the spirit of nothingness advocated by the members of the Kyoto School and Nishitani in particular contains a fundamental ethical dimension. This paper attempts to highlight these differences with concrete examples taken from various forms of cultural expressions in both Eastern and Western contemporary architecture. Even more, it addresses the ethical issue of the cultural manifestations of nihility and nothingness in the context of our increasingly globalising world.