The Great Doubt

Nihilistic questioning can be applied to any stable meaning, leading to an uncomfortable process of doubt.

In Eastern thought, leaning into nihilism can trigger the "Great Doubt," a period of profound transformation through questioning established worldviews.

Transcript:

Stephen West

The nihilistic exercise of pulling the foundations of this meaning apart might then lead this person to think, oh wait, there actually isn't a stable foundation there. And this whole religion thing starts to look more like a sociological construct that's set up by other people, not some durable meaning as ordained by a god. Now imagine this person does this with other religions and their foundations. Imagine they do this with political ideology. Imagine they do this with any systematized attempt to give the complexity of the world around us some sort of easy way of understanding it. And maybe you can see at this point where all this is going. Now imagine this applied to your own foundational moral values. How stable or universal are those? How about this applied to the identities you occupy in a given society you live in? How static and unchanging are those? You might then start to apply this nihilistic questioning of meaning to the very self that is doing the questioning. How stable or durable is that self when you take a closer look at it? In other words, this experiment of nihilism, if taken really seriously, can be applied to any stable meaning that supposedly exists. And it should be said, if you were to do this, it is a pretty uncomfortable process to be in. When nihilism is not a problem to be solved, like it typically is in the West, but is instead something that you try to steer into, like it can be in more Eastern traditions, this new orientation Opens up in someone what is described in Zen Buddhism as the Great Doubt. The Great Doubt being a period of utter transformation for a person to Nishitani, because it's a period of recognizing just how deep this well of nihilism can go when you truly doubt, When you truly question the stable forms that you usually make sense of the world with.

Philosophize This! • Episode #216 ... The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism - Kyoto School Pt. 1 - Nishitani