What Is Thought? The Power to Shift the Very Ground from Which Thinking Arises

This week, I want to ask what thought is.

How would you explain shiso, the Japanese word we translate as “thought,” with its peculiar ring? There are people we call thinkers, but how are they different from philosophers? Few people could answer that clearly.

Thought is the power to shift the very ground from which thinking arises. All of us think every day as we go about our lives, yet we almost never turn our attention to the ground our thinking grows out of, because we assume that feeling and thinking are simply what human beings do.

But if you look at the whole arc, from the moment a thought forms to the moment it is expressed, it becomes clear that what most people call “my own thinking” always rests on something else, whether the world, the nation, society, or simply “somebody.” However much we would like to believe that our thinking belongs to us and is free, the truth is that it is usually shaped by someone else’s.

Why should that be?

It is because the very ground from which thinking arises comes from something other than ourselves. As long as we live, none of us escapes the constraints of our own age. However radically we try to break away, the “outside” turns out to be an illusion, and like a Möbius strip, everything loops back on itself without end. The front is the back, and the back is the front, forever…

People today are worn out by this endless struggle, so how do we move forward? The overcoming of modernity was argued over at length in the middle and later decades of the twentieth century, and yet we remain caught in the midst of a modernity that never ends. That fact alone suggests that our existing modes of thinking, whether transcendence, overcoming, or breaking away, cannot bring modernity itself to a close.

What we need, then, is not a new way of understanding modernity. We first have to shift the ground that gives rise to the thinking that keeps producing and reproducing modernity, and this shifting of the ground is the work of thought. Put differently, thought does not hand a way out to people who have been imprisoned in modern thinking and can no longer move. It displaces the ground from which their thinking arises in the first place. That is the power of thought, and its real promise for opening up the future.

The new ground to which thought moves us has a fundamental influence on the future, on a scale of hundreds or even thousands of years, and it becomes the foundation on which the world we are reaching for can be realized.

As I travel around Japan, I keep meeting people in places where decline is accelerating who are thinking seriously about how to turn things around and working desperately to do it. Whether they are rebuilding their towns, passing on a craft, or finding a way to live alongside nature, such people are scattered all over the country, and they are still thinking about the future in earnest.

People who care, in other words, have not died out. If anything, as though in answer to the worsening of the times, more and more people are thinking about the future of Japan and of the world and acting on it. Why, then, does the world keep accelerating toward ruin? No one has yet answered that question. Why should that be?

It is because we have not managed to shift the ground of thinking itself. With the rise of social media, new ideas and values appear one after another and the whole world is linked in an instant, yet the underlying ground has remained modernity all along. Social media may even be a life-support machine for modernity. New ways of thinking (in truth, interpretations and commentary) are born day and night on the ground of the old world, but because the root itself never moves an inch, the world does not actually change.

Lately I have come to feel strongly that perhaps there is no longer any such thing as a “new idea,” since what we have to face is not anyone else’s discourse. The Anpo protests against the US-Japan Security Treaty and the student movement of the late 1960s proved that it is impossible to transform others. Rather than trying to change the nation, society, or other people, one first sets one’s own heart right. That single point is precisely the answer the Confucian sages reached in the distant past.

It is rarely noticed that Japan and China stand in a context fundamentally different from that of the West. Over several centuries, the West lived through civil revolutions and the liberation of the individual, so for Westerners, transforming the state and society is a reasonable idea grounded in their own history, one they can feel in their bones. The Japanese, however, have lived in a different world, and measured against Western methods, we should not copy them but think in exactly the opposite direction.

Instead of the Western way of fighting the state, society, or big corporations for individual freedom and sovereignty, we turn inward, examine ourselves thoroughly, and transform our own hearts first. Changing one’s own heart is far harder than social revolution or the overthrow of a government, and it is here, in fact, that revolution in China and Japan has its footing. Living as we do in the future, we can now say that the postwar struggles failed because they misread this essential point.

Do not try to change others. Face yourself first. What lies at the very bottom, once you have pushed aside everything that is other, is the ground. Think from that place, and shift the ground itself before anything else.

Context is not, in essence, specific to a nation, a society, or a region. It is specific to a place. Right now, through the Iran war, all of us are witnessing a great historical turn, as an imperialism five centuries long, handed from Western Europe to Britain and then to the United States, finally comes to an end. The multipolarism now rising in its place calls for more than a geopolitical reading. It calls for a way of seeing the plural world of places, and for that, it seems to me, we first need the will and the resolve to face ourselves.

I often think that thought is very like a sea of trees, a forest so dense that it swallows you whole. Once inside, you lose your bearings, and with the sun shut out by the thick growth overhead, you lose your sense of time as well. There is no map and no guide. Even so, if you are serious about the future, the only thing to do is keep walking.

There is no destination ahead, and again and again you are overcome by the dizzy sensation of having come back to the same spot. Still you keep going. And then you come upon traces left by those who entered the forest before you, and the next path opens.

This is, quite literally, a “Forest of Thought.” Even if most people give up, the future will surely open as long as even one person keeps going, and if such a person emerges from every field, a new founding of the nation will follow as a matter of course. The Meiji Restoration was no different. What gave the shishi, the committed activists of that era, their thought was a place, the Mito Domain. Ronin and samurai from all over the country made their way there in search of the thought it nurtured, and over the following decades, the Meiji Restoration came about as a result.

Whether for a person, a company, a society, or a nation, what we need may be thought. Believing that, let us head together toward what lies beyond this turbulent age.