“It would be better for one to believe in a self as great as Mt Sumeru than to give rise to the vain and empty view of nothingness’
Thus speaks the Buddha in the Lankavatara Sutra. Here he is pointing to the dangers of nihilism in regard to the teaching of no-self, no-other, of the emptiness of phenomena. The context of this utterance is in his discussing the trap whereby a practitioner who believes they have transcended/abandoned all attachment to views has merely fallen prey to attachment to another view. The ‘attachment to views’ in question is in the Buddhist context a form of grasping and reifying what is unreal, turning what is simply illusion into delusion. Along with this delusion it is implied, in the Buddhist context, comes all the other causes of suffering.
Even outside of the Buddhist context, nihilism, far from being an absence of views is a very definite view. It can also be a particularly intense, passionate (in a negative sense) view. In lesser instances, nihilism can appear as contrarianism. Western nihilism has been conditioned historically by an absence of the kind of thorough familiarity with notions of illusoriness, emptiness, non-being, and non-dualism which have very long histories with humanity in Asia.
In the absence of this traditional familiarity, the nihilism that arose in western philosophy after it’s breaking through the strictures of medieval scholasticism and early modern theology and philosophy had a powerful reactionary tendency, or in other words, a passionate, antagonistic view of and relationship with society and it's progress. The birth of the new post-enlightenment, post-clerical domination philosophical worldviews in Europe and America was a very painful one, in keeping with the Marxist recognition that the character of a society’s ideas is shaped by the material conditions of that society. And the material conditions of 17/18/19th century Europe were anything but peaceful.
From the historical crisis of consciousness which appeared post-enlightenment in the west, we can perhaps tease out a credible narrative of how the particularly western form of nihilism arose. European ‘intellectual/cultural’ life, very , very broadly speaking, went from philosophy rooted in various paganisms, to developed Hellenistic philosophy and theology, to a recharacterisation as Christianity, to the Enlightenment. From a sacralised world of nature, through a radical transcendentalising of the sacred and despiriting of nature, through a personal monotheism whose deity was characterised with an almost human subjectivity and with neo-Aristotelianism as it's dominant philosophy, thence to a break with this break itself in the Enlightenment. Coupled with this, (perhaps actually causing this) were profoundly impactful advances in the modes of production and in scientific knowledge. And immensely destructive wars. Thus the encounter with nihility could not have but produced instances of such a painful embrace of a passionate nihilism in it’s intellectual class.
Such crises have led to fundamental doubt in the west, where doubt is seen as something that should and could be eliminated. In one famous instance, it led to Descartes and to Cartesianism.
But since we can recognise the universal commonality of humanity, we needn’t be fixed into the problems and obsessions in one particular period in the history of the philosophy of one particular portion of global humankind. The appropriateness of the remedy is determined by its effectiveness, not in it’s sourcing. To the sore of western nihilism then let us apply the balm of the eastern understanding of nothingness.
What are we? What is the ‘self’?
It's bound up with the very question of life and meaning. And surely, if there is meaning, our idea of what constitutes ourselves, the self, is intimately involved. One could say, it is a totally unavoidable fact of experience through which everything else is mediated.
There are many explanations, or descriptions, and even narratives concerning the ontology of human selfhood. I suspect that what the waking consciousness is is only a surface phenomenon of a deeper dynamic consciousness, and of the surface consciousness itself, the phenomenon of ‘selfhood' is only a part. I would think the entire universe is an extremely intricate holistic dynamic of forces which could be thought of as expressions of a unifying principle. An Other Power , other to this ephemeral self. If some call it God, or Atman, or the Buddha Mind, then so be it. Therefore, from a profounder perspective, all of this we see and seem, is just a surface shimmer of a very deep water. Differentiation comes at our surface level.
I think there is only one real ‘being’. So, when we look at this world, when we operate with the consciousness that divides things into dualities such as subject to object, all subsequent divisions, we see only a very limited reflection. Of that reflection, you and I, and all identities and fractional categories, all the ‘great sagas’ and the ‘reasons’ for the horrific cruelties of the world, all the inventions of nationhood, ethnicity, race, etc are nothing more than mirages and excuses for why we won’t give up engaging in the cruelties.
I think in fact, this reification of the ‘ego’ and it’s collected identities (a problem which the social media age and it’s obsessive identitarian culture has made infinitely more burdensome) is a giant, reality-obscuring cataract over our collective eye.
The fictions we weave and are ensnared by, the stories of the waking world, vanish away from us every time we fall asleep, or unconscious, or when we die. That is, or should, be a sobering realisation. What remains, what lies beneath, is something far closer to a natural way. Or at least it is a mode of being where all these imposed (by us, ‘the world’) divisions and distinctions dissolve into the real.
The ordinary self is generally taken to be the logical subject, expressed in language : the ‘I do, I am, I think, I want”. That subject emerges in the context of a living body interacting self-consciously in a world of people and things.
But what more is there to this ordinary self? For instance, we’re not conscious, let alone self-conscious of the intricate processes of our bodily functions. Even less are we aware in a cognitive way of the very ground out of which consciousness emerges. Realizing this basic ignorance, why then do we insist such ephemeral attributes of identity like ‘ethnicity, nationality, culture, etc ‘ constitute more than a very, very relative aspect to our being?
As we have said, historically the west has been lacking in the concept of the distinction between a relative, conventional self, and the common unity of ground upon which that self is assembled. It is either the ‘self-conscious subject’ or nothing. Either I am, or I am nothing.
Eastern philosophy however did address itself to that distinction, and did so quite early on history. The ‘nothingness' at the root of the self-conscious subject is not a nothingness is the western sense of non-being. It is in fact, a deeper, more unifying ground: a non-self behind the self. This non-self can either be taken as the Absolute Self, the atman of Vedantic thought, or the non-ego Buddha-mind of some influential schools of Buddhism.
Either way, the absolute reifying of the relative, self-conscious ego is avoided. Non non-ego is not the ‘western void': it is ‘Being’, before the distinctions of subject and object, before the ego and it's devices, before all the trouble - avoidable and un-avoidable.
What have been the effects of a long-standing insistence on the relative-self as absolute? Well, a society of aggressive self-serving, a fragmentation of society into self-serving sovereigns, a trascendentalising of relative concepts like ‘ethnicity, nationality, sovereignty'- all fixed onto an ego, or collection of egos which each represent only the most outer shell of each consciousness. Wealth-worship, power-worship, culture-worship, celebrity-worship. Ego-worship.