ZEN AND WESTERN PHILOSOPHY - ALEXIS KARPOUZOS

Abstract

The Mystical Experience of East and West In the broader history of mystical experience in East and West, Japanese Zen occupies a distinctive position, not because it proposes yet another doctrine of the Absolute, but because it radically questions the very need to seek the Absolute as a supreme principle, a transcendent essence, or the final destination of consciousness. Shaped by the encounter of Indian Buddhism with the Chinese Chan tradition and by the profound influence of Taoist thought, Zen shifts the question from what lies behind phenomena to the way phenomena themselves appear when attachment to conceptual distinctions recedes. Emptiness (śūnyatā, kū) does not signify a metaphysical void, nonexistence, or an abyss concealed behind the Cosmos, but the absence of any independent, immutable essence in things, since every form emerges within an inexhaustible web of interdependencies. Awakening (satori or kenshō) is neither the acquisition of supernatural knowledge nor a passage into a second world, but a radical transformation in how the already present Cosmos is experienced when consciousness ceases to confine it within the opposition between subject and object, knower and known, sacred and everyday. Seated practice (zazen), the paradoxical pedagogy of kōan, silence, and simple daily action do not aim at acquiring an object of knowledge, but at release from the very will to possess. Here an essential affinity emerges, without historical or doctrinal identity, with the apophatic theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, the stripping away of the soul in Meister Eckhart, Taoist non-imposition (wu wei), and certain expressions of Sufi mystical experience: in all these traditions, under different theological and philosophical terms, the search encounters the 1 paradox that what it seeks cannot be conquered by methods of possessive knowledge. Yet whereas the Christian mystic may orient himself toward union with a personal or transpersonal God, and the Sufi toward overcoming egocentric self-sufficiency within the divine presence, Zen presupposes neither a creator God nor a transcendent essence as the ultimate foundation of phenomena. This very distinctiveness explains its profound, but also problematic, encounter with contemporary Western thought, particularly Martin Heidegger. Heidegger’s critique of the metaphysics of presence, representational thinking, and technical objectification displays remarkable analogies with Zen’s refusal to turn the Cosmos into an aggregate of available objects. Gelassenheit, the free relinquishment of calculative willing, can enter into dialogue with Zen nonattachment, while Heidegger’s search for a thinking that allows things to reveal themselves without exhausting them in its determinations meets the priority of direct, nonpossessive experience. Heidegger’s contacts with Japanese intellectuals, particularly Tomonobu Imamichi and Suzo Tezuka, as well as the dialogue with a Japanese interlocutor included in On the Way to Language, attest to an actual field of philosophical encounter, without justifying the simplistic claim that his thought constitutes a Western version of Zen. Heidegger’s inquiry into the meaning of Being is not identical to Buddhist emptiness, just as Gelassenheit is not identical to zazen. The encounter becomes deeper through the Kyoto School, with Kitarō Nishida, Hajime Tanabe, and Keiji Nishitani, who sought to elaborate philosophically the Buddhist experience of emptiness in dialogue with Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Nishitani in particular, in Religion and Nothingness, approaches European nihilism not merely as the collapse of traditional values, but as the possibility of a deeper shift from the nothingness that threatens the human subject toward an emptiness that releases existence from its claim to self-foundation. Meanwhile, the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, emphasizing embodiment and prereflective experience, Derrida’s deconstruction, questioning full presence and final meaning, and Deleuze’s philosophy of difference, prioritizing genesis over fixed identities, open distinct possibilities of dialogue with Eastern traditions without permitting their reduction to a single mystical worldview. The essential contribution of this encounter lies not in discovering a supposedly shared teaching of East and West, but in the possibility of revising the very presuppositions of philosophical inquiry: might the search for the Absolute reproduce precisely the distinction between seeker and sought that mystical experience seeks to overcome? Might the Absolute, insofar as it is conceived as something definitive, self-sufficient, and attainable, be the ultimate projection of the human desire for foundation and certainty? And might the deepest meaning of mystical experience be not a transition from the relative to the Absolute, but a transformation of their very relationship, so that the infinite is no longer sought beyond the finite, the timeless beyond time, and the invisible behind the visible? From this perspective, contemporary Western thought can encounter the great mystical traditions not by abandoning critical thinking in favor of unmediated certainty, but by recognizing that thinking is not exhausted by grasping, representation, and determination. Mystical experience then ceases to be treated as privileged access to a transcendent world and becomes a radical question concerning the limits of subjectivity, language, and knowledge; the possibility of a relation to the Cosmos that does not presuppose possessing it; and, ultimately, an openness in which mystery is not a temporary deficit of explanation but the inexhaustible capacity of the Cosmos to exceed every definitive image we form of it. 3 Heidegger and Japanese Zen The encounter of contemporary Western philosophy with Japanese Zen, Buddhism, and Taoism is neither simply an episode of intercultural exchange nor an attempt to supplement European rationality with the supposed spirituality of the East. It is one of the twentieth century’s most profound philosophical undertakings, because it brings into confrontation different ways of understanding thought, language, consciousness, temporality, and the human relationship with the Cosmos. The decisive question is not whether Eastern and Western thought arrive at the same truth, but whether the fundamental distinctions through which Western metaphysics constituted its field—subject and object, identity and difference, presence and absence, knowledge and experience, finite and infinite—possess universal validity or are historically formed ways of articulating the Cosmos. The encounter becomes especially fruitful when the different traditions are treated not as ready-made systems to be reconciled but as questions that mutually transform their own presuppositions. Martin Heidegger stands at the center of this encounter because his philosophy seeks to free thinking from the tradition that treats things as stable presences available to knowledge and calculation. His critique of metaphysics does not stop at questioning particular philosophical theories; it turns toward the very way Western thought understood truth as correct representation, knowledge as the subject’s mastery over the object, and the Cosmos as a collection of determinable entities. His question concerning the meaning of Being, despite the transformations it undergoes throughout his work, seeks to open a thinking that does not exhaust what it encounters in concepts, categories, and technical determinations. From this standpoint, a remarkable affinity with Zen appears, not because Zen asks the same question, but because it challenges the claim of discriminating consciousness to grasp the whole of experience through the oppositions it itself produces.