Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Thanks to everyone who supports the

podcast on Patreon, patreon.com slash philosophize this. I hope you love the show today. So since about

episode 211, we've been talking about the work of Frederick Nietzsche and the fallout of him

supposedly smashing all the idols from the history of Western philosophy with a hammer.

What the guy we're talking

about today is actually comically in line with basically everything we've been talking about on the show

since we did that episode. He's a man who was a big fan of Nietzsche's work. In fact, as the story

goes, he used to carry around a copy of the Spokesarathustra with him pretty much everywhere he went

in the early stages of his life. More than that, he's a man

who traveled all the way to Germany to study under the professorship of Martin Heidegger during the 1930s.

And even more than that, he's a man that was the principal chair of philosophy and religion at

Kyoto University for more than 20 years, a position where he deeply engaged with the mystical

tradition of the West we just talked about with a special focus on the theologian Meister Eckhart. See, it's like I planned it or something,

that the man we're talking about today is a member of what's now become known as the famous Kyoto

school out of Kyoto Japan. The guy we're talking about today went by the name of Kiji Nishitani.

Now, one of the first questions you might have here is what is the

Kyoto School? And a lot of people might say back to you, describing the Kyoto School,

saying something like, well, these are Eastern thinkers that are engaging with Western ideas,

primarily existentialism, where they then blend this East-Westness into a nice cornucopia of

interesting stuff for everyone out there to enjoy. But I'm here to tell you, a lot of people that are fans of the Kyoto School would hate for it to be described in this way.

And my first instinct at the beginning of this was I was going to talk about the problem of trying to reduce these thinkers down into broad categories like East versus West.

And my first instinct was to spend some time talking about that at the beginning of

...