This autumn we're starting our next major reading project, taking us into next year. We'll be reading two big books from the middle of the twentieth century, one written in occupied Paris and one in post-war Kyoto, that both set out to answer the same question - what do you do after you've noticed that the world doesn't come to you with meaning and purpose already built into it? We'll read Keiji Nishitani's Religion and Nothingness from the end of September, and Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness in the new year.
How do we keep on living when God is dead?
Nietzsche's idea of the death of God has less to do with religious belief, and more that European culture had built an enormous structure of values and knowledge on a foundation that it had stopped believing in.
Forty years or so later, Heidegger wrote that our fundamental frame of mind when we find ourselves in the world is not curiosity or wonder or confidence but anxiety - a mood with no object, in which the familiar business of life stops making the sense it normally makes and we are left facing the bare fact of being here at all.
Putting the two ideas together, we're at risk of losing the guarantee that our values are the right ones, and with it the confidence that we know what we are doing when we act on them. We lose the assurance that the ordinary, workable, agreed-upon world is as solid and reliable underneath as it looked.
What remains is the question of how to accept that realisation and carry on anyway, which is where both of these books begin.
Keiji Nishitani spent two years in Freiburg in the late 1930s studying under Heidegger, read Nietzsche about as closely as anyone of his generation, and practised Zen seriously alongside his studies. Religion and Nothingness, which he published in Japanese in 1961, takes on European nihilism from an Eastern perspective. He doesn't try to argue Europe back onto its old foundations, and he has no patience with the suggestion that the problem has been overstated - if anything he thinks it has been understated, because most people who accept it intellectually have not yet felt it. His view is that European thought went into the abyss and then stopped, having taken the first thing it found there for the bottom.
The word he uses for the abyss is nihility - the void that opens up when the world stops meaning anything. It is real, but it is still a nothingness defined against the world it has negated, and there is still someone standing in front of it having an experience of it. As long as there is a spectator at the edge, he thinks, we haven't yet gone over the edge. What lies beyond it he calls by the Buddhist term śūnyatā, usually translated as emptiness - which is not a further loss, but a way in which things are given back. They stop needing an external guarantee in order to be what they are, and so do we. Whether that is a real step beyond Nietzsche and Heidegger, or a very sophisticated way of changing the subject, is one of the things we will be thinking and talking about throughout the autumn.
Jean-Paul Sartre was writing in Paris under German occupation, and Being and Nothingness appeared in 1943. He also takes on the diagnosis of nihilism, but his answer runs in the opposite direction from Nishitani's. Where Nishitani wants to go further into the nothing, Sartre relocates it. On his account, rather than being a void that opens up in the world when meaning fails, the nothingness is what we are. Our consciousness is a kind of gap in the middle of things - always at a slight distance from itself and from everything else. Nothing about us is simply given by nature - no essence is handed to us in advance, which means we are free to make whatever we can of ourselves by what we do - with nobody standing behind us to take the blame or the credit for it.
If our freedom is absolute then we have no honest way to say that our circumstances or our character or our upbringing have forced our decisions. Sartre says that we often avoid taking responsibility for our freedom, in a move that he calls bad faith. He describes some examples of that: the waiter performing the role of waiter a tiny bit too precisely - the woman who lets her hand just stay there on the table when her date takes it - and the person who insists that others should simply be what they are, who turns out to be in bad faith too.
Nishitani argues that Sartre got as close as anyone to escaping from nihilism and still didn't get out, having built a self on top of nothingness and thereby turned nothingness into something to stand on. By reading the two of them together, we can see whether that criticism is fair.
We'll kick off on Wed 30 Sept with an opening session that re-reads the critical passages from Nietzsche and Heidegger - so that we have the original challenge in mind, and we can see how well either Nishitani or Sartre addresses it.
Then we'll start Religion and Nothingness on Wed 7 Oct - aiming to match our pace to the complexity of the material, and finishing in Jan/Feb.
After that, we plan to read Being and Nothingness from February onwards.
You don't need to have read any of this before, and you don't need a background in philosophy - nearly all of us will be reading this stuff for the first time, and nobody in the room is an expert. The evenings are conversations rather than seminars, so the most useful thing to bring is the bit where you got stuck rather than a view you have already settled on. It is a long project, but we'll adapt our pace to the material and to the needs of the group - you can join anywhere along the way.
Look forward to seeing you there - you can sign up through our events page on Meetup, here: https://www.meetup.com/edinburgh-existentialist-philosophy-reading-group/events/