Abstract

Schelling and Nishitani both confront the problem of absolute negation in post-Kantian philosophy and drive it beyond its eventual development into existentialism. This essay seeks not so much to sort out all of the similarities and contrasts between these two thinkers on this issue but rather to consider the issue of absolute negation itself and to consider it in and between the two thinkers as a gateway to an ontological conversion, a transformation into the positive manifestation of beings just as they are. Just as access to Dante’s paradisio demands that one first traverse through the inferno, or as the rebirth in Zen of heaven and earth requires the Great Doubt and the Great Death, we must plunge into the depths of absolute negation. Yet this descent is not an end itself, but rather the opening to a new image of thought and a new sense of philosophy.