Contemporary Japanese Philosophy

A Reader

John W. M. Krummel

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781786600844
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786600868
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

Contemporary Japanese Philosophy: A Reader is an anthology of contemporary (post-war) Japanese philosophy showcasing a range of important philosophers and philosophical trends from 1945 to the present. This important and comprehensive volume introduces the reader to a variety of trends and schools of thought. The first part consists of selections and excerpts of writings from contemporary Japanese philosophers who have made original contributions to Japanese philosophy and promise contributions to world philosophy. Most of these selections appear in English for the first time. The second part consists of original essays written for this volume by scholars in Japanese philosophy on specific trends and tendencies of contemporary Japanese philosophy, such as feminist philosophy, the Kyoto School, and environmental philosophy, as well as future directions the field is likely to take. Ideal for classroom use, this is the ultimate resource for students and teachers of Japanese philosophy.

Part I

Selected Primary Sources

Chapter 1

“Being . . .” and “Doing . . .”

Maruyama Masao¹

I apologize for giving [this talk], for some reason, a title that makes it sound like an exam in English grammar. But rather than starting by generally stating what it means, I would like to proceed by gradually clarifying today’s theme, providing various concrete examples.

When during my student days I attended a lecture on civil law by Professor Suehiro (Izutarō), he explained the institution of the “statute of limitations” in the following manner. His talk was on the following. It seems cruel that a misdirected person who, taking advantage of the fact that he is not being pressed for payment after borrowing money and proceeding to pocket the money, makes a profit while a diffident good man who was the lender suffers loss in the end. But the basis of this stipulation contains the point that those who for a long time are asleep to their rights do not deserve the protection of civil law. While I found this explanation convincing, the phrase “those who are asleep to their rights” in a strange way left a strong impression on me. When I think about it now, the logic behind the statute of limitations seems to conceal something extremely important. That is, as long as the statute of limitations is in effect, one who rests content with merely being [de aru である; to be] a creditor will in the end forfeit the credit unless he/she makes [suru する; to do] a claim.²

Let us for example unpack Article 12 of the Japanese Constitution. It is written therein that “the freedom and rights guaranteed to the people by this Constitution shall be maintained by the constant endeavor of the people.”³ This prescription corresponds to the declaration of Article 97 of the Constitution that fundamental human rights are “fruits of the age-old struggle of man to be free.” But it is neither impossible nor difficult to read therein a spirit conspicuously shared with what we earlier saw in regard to the “statute of limitations.” In other words, if we read this Constitution slightly differently, it amounts to a warning that “the people are now the sovereign, but if they neglect to exercise their rights by being content with the fact of being [de aru] the sovereign, one morning they will awaken to a state in which they are no longer the sovereign.” This is neither an exaggerated threat nor an empty sermon from a textbook. It indeed is nothing other than a historical lesson shown by the bloody course taken by Western democracy in the last hundred years from the coup d’état of Napoleon III to Hitler’s seizure of power.

A certain sociologist of America states, “To celebrate freedom is easy. To defend freedom by comparison is difficult. But in comparison to defending freedom, for the people to exercise freedom every day is even more difficult.”⁴ But one finds fundamentally the same idea here as well. As we go on invoking freedom and proclaiming over and over that our society is free, the reality of this freedom before we know it could become empty. Freedom is not something that is [aru], just there like an ornament. Instead it is something protected by its actual exercise. Or, put differently, we can be free only by trying every day to be [suru] free. In that sense, the freedom and rights of modern society, I am afraid, are extremely burdensome affairs for people who prefer the habits of life and think that it is fine to entrust the decision of things to others as long as they can somehow just spend day-to-day life in peace, or those disposed to remain deeply seated in their armchair rather than getting up.

The phrase “free man” is used frequently. But it is not uncommon for those who believe they are [de aru] free, on the contrary, to indeed be not free of their own biases nesting within themselves. For they tend to ceaselessly neglect inspecting or investigating their own thoughts or conduct. Conversely those who are keenly conscious of the fact that they are “prejudiced,” and always observe their own “inclinations,” by endeavoring to cognize and judge things somehow with more freedom, are given the opportunity to become relatively free. We have a similar relationship to institutions as well.

What we call democracy can become alive only when the public by nature is ceaselessly vigilant against institutions becoming ends in themselves—becoming fetishized—and constantly scrutinizes how the institutions are actually working. In other words, democracy, just like freedom, essentially possesses this sort of character as well whereby it is barely democracy by means of unceasing democratization. Therein lies the innermost significance that democratic thought is to underscore the process more than its definition or conclusion.

Viewed in this way, we might think of the logic that credit is [de ari] credit through its exercise [suru] by broadening it to the institutions and morals of modern society in general, or its “philosophy” that deeply defines our way of judging things.

There is a famous saying: “We will not know the taste of pudding unless we eat it.” But whether we think of the taste as inhering in the pudding as, so to speak, its “property,” or whether we think that its deliciousness or contrary is verified each time through the actual act of eating, are ways of thinking that constitute two poles when judging, roughly, the value of social systems, human relations, or institutions. The dynamics of the modern spirit that “questions” the actual function and utility of authority that had been accepted as “natural” in a variety of realms, such as politics, economics, culture, and so on, by overthrowing class society, turning conceptual realism into nominalism, and sifting every possible dogma through the sieve of experiment, was indeed something born of the aforesaid transfer in relative emphasis from the logic of “being X [de aru]” and value of “being X [de aru]” to the logic of “doing X [suru]” and the value of “doing X [suru].” If “to be or not to be” was the greatest issue for man in the period of Hamlet, we might say that the question of “to do or not to do” is instead increasingly becoming a great matter of concern for the people of modern society.

Of course systems and methods of value judgment founded on “‘being’ [de aru] X” (for example, blood relations or racial groups) cannot possibly disappear in the future. Neither is it the case that the principle of “‘doing’ [suru] X” is something that ought to be eulogized indiscriminately in every realm. However by assuming these two schemata we can derive from them a criterion for measuring affairs such as the concrete degree of substantial progress in the “democratization” of the nation’s politics, economics, and other social realms, or the gap between institutions and intellectual customs. Not only that, it may provide us with a key for reflecting upon the issue of contemporary Japan that, for example, in certain aspects is extremely non-modern while in other aspects is also forbiddingly post-modern.

In order to further clarify that kind of paradigmatic contrast, let us next take a society, such as of the Tokugawa period, as an example. Needless to say, factors such as birth, lineage, age (seniority) therein bear decisive roles in social relations, and in each case possess a significance that we are unable to change with our actual conduct. Therefore in such societies the important criterion for value judgment, whether in power-relations or morals, or even on the basis of things in general, becomes what one is [de aru] more than what one does [suru]. Daimyōs [feudal lords] and warriors [bushi] in general were thought to have the right to govern over farmers and merchants not because they provide the latter with some sort of service. Instead the official position was that they govern naturally—inherently—due to the “attribute” of their class, of being daimyōs or samurais.

Here as well the modes of behavior and intercourse among people, so to speak, “flow” naturally from the fact that they are [de aru] X. The fundamental morality here is that a warrior must act like [rashiku らしく] a warrior, a merchant must act in a way proper to [fusawashiku ふさわしく] a merchant. The requirement vital for maintaining the order of such a society, far from being a “struggle for right” [struggle for law] (Jhering),⁵ is for each person to be content with the “part” appointed to each. In such a society, fixed relations like coming from the same province or belonging to the same clan or class are the heart of human relationships, and in practice one was not often involved in a variety of relationships with strangers in work or purposive activities. And there is the tendency, even in a relationship founded upon “‘doing’ [suru] X,” to try to approach the relationship of “‘being’ [de aru] X” by taking it, as far as possible, as the model.

In societies such as of the Tokugawa period one’s mode of behavior is decided spontaneously by the fact that one is a daimyō or a village head. Consequently the primary requirement for the establishment of communication in such a society is the outward discernment of the other party as who that person is, whether as a samurai or a merchant, etc. For if one could not comprehend with a glance the other party’s rank or class by his/her clothes, appearance, diction, and so on, one would have no clue as to the etiquette for relating to that person. But conversely put, in such a society, if it is mutually clear who the other is in a gathering of people—and although we would rarely see there an assembly of strangers—the conversation of its own would get on the right track by following the morality of “[being] X-like” [rashiku], even without necessarily constructing a procedure or rules for debate or fostering a “spirit of conference.”

If we were to put this differently, morals among complete strangers here would rarely develop nor would there be any necessity for their development. So-called public morality is this morality among complete strangers. For example, if we look at the fundamental relationships of man in Confucianism, which are the well-known principles of five relationships, they involve the relations of lord-vassal, father-son, husband-wife, older and younger brothers, and companions. The first four relations are taken to be vertical top-down relations and only companionship is a horizontal relationship. And horizontal relations between strangers, transcending even friendship relations, do not enter into the fundamental human relationships of Confucianism. In short, this is telling of the fact that Confucian morality is a paradigmatic morality of “being [de aru] X,” and of the fact that the society that gave birth to Confucianism and societies in which Confucian morals are taken to be the pivot of human relationships are paradigmatic societies of “being [de aru] X.”

By contrast when the need to mediate the relationships among complete strangers themselves increases, the character of organizations and of institutions begins to change and morals can no longer be settled merely by the morality of “being [de aru] X.” On the one hand at the same time that it goes on engendering the division of labor within society among various functions, such as politics or economics or education, the interior of the organization or institution of each field in turn becomes specialized as the department of X or the division of X in response to its operations. When this happens the same person is at the same time within various relationships and must perform all kinds of distinct roles depending on the situation. That is to say that human relationship to that extent is no longer a relationship of wholes but changes into a relationship of roles. Today, even in cases when one calls on an acquaintance at his/her home, one first states one’s role. Unless one says, “let’s talk as friends” or “I came today, representing the director,” the other person would not know for what business and with what role or capacity one came. It must have been a few years ago when Mr. Nishio Suehiro was chief secretary of the Socialist Party that his conduct caused a problem. At that time Mr. Nishio responded that he “did this as an individual who is the chief secretary,” and this in turn becam...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART I: SELECTED PRIMARY SOURCES
• PART II: ESSAYS
• Index