心中論 1On Shinju, Part 1

Chikamatsu Monzaemon abandoned his samurai status by his own will, resolving to live among the newly rising townspeople. He moved between the two great cultural axes of Joruri and Kabuki, becoming the driving force that elevated both from medieval stagnation to a new artistic realm. I view Chikamatsu Monzaemon as a rare figure who explored the location of his essence through his own existence, gouging out the real of that time more than anyone else. Even now, three centuries after his death, Chikamatsu Monzaemon occupies an overwhelming position in worlds such as Ningyo Joruri, and his brilliance continues in the realm called traditional culture. However, the devastation of traditional culture has reached a disastrous extreme. Those involved cling so tightly to traditional norms that they have fallen into a state of forgetting its cultural essence. Consequently, few people now know Chikamatsu Monzaemon, and cultural devastation has progressed to the level where even those who know him do not know his works.

Since the decline of traditional culture is an unavoidable tide, I cannot do anything about it, but I pride myself on grasping what Chikamatsu Monzaemon tried to do more than anyone. This means that while I know nothing of norms such as manners or habits regarding traditional culture, I grasp the heart of Chikamatsu Monzaemon. Culture is something where, even if the form later perishes, the heart survives by changing shape. This is not understood by those who cling to traditional culture, but it applies to all Japanese culture, not just Joruri or Kabuki. In other words, what is truly important for us is not to learn the norms of traditional culture, but to grasp the heat held by that singular cultural prosperity called Genroku culture (1688-1704). The attitude of observing the heat of this era is something I consistently hold in every consideration, and I premise that this grasping and expression is more important than anything. Genroku culture was a tide that occurred about a century after the beginning of the Edo period, so it was the sublimation of complex energy born from the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate, forming mainly in the urban areas of Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto. Chikamatsu Monzaemon was a human born of the samurai class who abandoned that status in the midst of that era, performed trial and error while entering among the townspeople living with heat, and lived through it to the end. It should be the issue what kind of world this heart saw.

One hint lies in the problem of death set as the theme of Chikamatsu Monzaemon. Death has been discussed by countless people, but only one thing is certain for us. That is that death for humans is an extreme form that cannot be earnestly constructed in the mind as one’s own matter, whether it is one’s own death or the death of others. Here I am discussing the mind and do not view physiological death as the problem. The root of the impossibility of the mind constructing death is that individual illusion and pair illusion are eroded by communal illusion in an extreme form in death. Takaaki Yoshimoto actually argues that we can define death mentally as the state where human individual illusion and pair illusion are eroded by communal illusion in an extreme form. What is important is that since this is a mental definition, the mode of death transforms depending on the cultural sphere of each place and region. Therefore, it is natural that even looking at the single problem of death from the global world of the 21st century, the difference in that death appears too stark depending on each region. The cause of this difference is that the illusion of death is formed by being cultivated over long years, but human migration lies at the base of the ancient layer of that propagation. Human migration continuous from ancient times is the power that composes cultural space.

The limit of modern people discussing physiological death for ancient people is that their death cannot be captured in a position separated into something physiological, and possesses a state undifferentiated from the mode of illusion. Therefore, death for them differs from the death we think of. This is because physiological death occurs synchronically when communal illusion, which is the commonality as a community, completely erodes the world of individual illusion or the pair illusion formed by the connection of individual illusions. Since they are not separated in illusion and possess an undifferentiated mode, both lead to the same conclusion whether it is illusory death or physiological death. This principle of death itself is something universally held everywhere in human history. However, a change occurs in this structure in the process of civilization developing. That is that communal illusion begins to occur independently in a separated position relative to the phase of individual illusion and the pair illusion of the pair relationship. This is because separating from the chaotic mode of illusion guarantees interests such as the survival and development of the community. In a sense, this can be said to be an indispensable stage to continue realizing the interests of the bloating community, but a troublesome problem occurs here simultaneously.

To begin with, the phases of individual illusion, pair illusion, and communal illusion differ from each other. The undifferentiated period was the majority of human history and passed through long years where each illusion mode was not completely separated. But since entering modern society, it is unavoidable that complete separation occurs here. Therefore, death for people living in countries that succeeded in modernization is forced to shift to a position different from its former meaning. At this time, death for humans who experienced modernization comes to mean only the extinguishment of individual illusion or pair illusion itself. In other words, independent extinguishment of individual illusion or pair illusion itself, without the erosion from communal illusion experienced throughout human history, comes to represent death. We must not overlook that here lies the ground on which the modern world could set the primitive as an axis. Bringing discrimination in the modern sense into this kind of problem will certainly lead to misunderstanding.

For people living in a pre-modern state, this erosion of communal illusion is an extremely critical problem, and it is directly connected to the problem of death. Therefore, there is soil here where already systematized religious faith or logic can be established. However, when crossing the node of the realization of modern society, the effects and functions held by conventional religion are no longer valid if they are pre-modern. At this time, religion holds the defect of having to be deployed newly in a completely different position, but major religions until then cannot keep up with the deployment conforming to this threshold of the modern, and rapidly lose that religious strength held until the pre-modern. This means losing trust. Atheism that occurred in Western countries that succeeded in modernization earliest seems to be a symbol of this, and the proliferation of various ideologies can be said to be things that rapidly acquired the trust lost by pre-modern religion. Passing through the modern creates a phenomenon where people who lived with deep faith until then can no longer place trust in actual acts in religious faith, and they face the process of being gradually torn from that faith itself. The moment this separation becomes exposed, the anxiety of death and disappearing, where the erosion of social communal illusion renders individual illusion and pair illusion to zero, loses mental intensity. This is because communal illusion and individual illusion or pair illusion are separated, and direct relational action is lost.

At this moment, communal illusion grows in a completely separated position, but what is important is that it has already changed into a mode where human individual will does not act or work. When communal illusion and individual illusion or pair illusion become non-contact, the religious authority that held the function of maintaining this undifferentiated state weakens. Another feature occurring in this modernization is that when communal illusion enters the stage of developing independently where it is completely cut off from individual illusion, the individuals and pair relationships leading lives in society sharpen the phenomenon of withdrawing increasingly inside. This is the expression of individualism in the modern context. When modernization separating communal illusion and individual illusion occurs, it can acquire new power to compose communal illusion as society or state. It can be said that new technology was acquired, but the inevitable reaction due to that cost occurs in the individual and pair relationship. Here one heads inward to the state of "individual as individual" and "individual as pair relationship" completely separated from the conventional "community and pair relationship and individual," so it is transformed here into a problem structure premised on separation asking how the individual participates in the society that is the community. However, this is a trap.

Takaaki Yoshimoto points out as a maxim that communal illusion and individual illusion stand in opposition. In short, the interests of the community held by communal illusion are always opposed to individual interests and do not match. This assertion gouges out the core of an inconvenient problem for the modern. Because this has not been seen through until today, the modern has been able to prolong its life permanently. That is the cold hard fact that it is impossible to transform the community itself even if individual interests are consciously realized inside the individual and generate the modern ego. Positioning the individual as a force to transform the state or society happens daily even now, but actually this is a fallacy and the structure of illusion itself remains invisible. In this state, whatever practical action is taken, the conclusion is always that transformation of the state or society can be nothing other than violent revolution. This is because even if this is idealized as non-violent revolutionary action, it will never be realized because communal illusion and individual illusion stand in opposition in the illusion dimension. But if we ignore this illusion as unscientific, we can hallucinate that this transformation is indeed possible. This hallucination ignores the illusion of the community, so the community is perverted into substantive structures like laws and institutions and is perceived as something capable of renovation and dismantling. Since individual illusion is also ignored simultaneously, anyone can disguise the possibility that social interests incurred by the individual transform the interests of the community. But this is just a hallucination, like the vision everyone experiences when walking around in mountains exhausted. This is because even if one tries to transform modern society, communal illusion and individual illusion are deployed in completely different places, so they never produce the same quality of work where they reflect synchronically as action like in the pre-modern.

In other words, if modern individuals abandon the sense of being separated from this community in the dimension of illusion while leaving it vague, or rush into transformation while remaining abstract, the effect will always reverse. It is likely the habit of modern people to want to think that their direct practical actions transform society or the state, but actually this leads immediately to the limit established at the beginning of the modern that individual illusion cannot transform communal illusion. Therefore, we hold conflict here. I view that possibility lies precisely in this internal conflict.

When we grasp that this limit is the modern, what do we realize? It is that even if communal illusion appears as religious semblance or as institutional or ideological semblance, the task remains that all these communal illusions must be extinguished if we focus on the most radical essential task of human existence. So to speak, if an individual seeks true transformation, the most troublesome problem that implies one must extinguish this communal illusion itself becomes a problem for everyone living in countries that achieved modernization. And the biggest problem is that this cannot be overcome absolutely in the modern. Attention is required simultaneously that if one tries to deploy transformation directly through practical action assuming the setting of abstract existence like human or mankind, the communal illusion works to dissipate kinetic energy by immediately abstracting the individual existence that truly desires transformation. We often see scenes where large-scale social movements dissipate energy without time durability and the parent body of the movement itself scatters even if they are deployed, but this is because the will of the few people who truly aim for transformation is always abstracted by the trap of the modern in the relationship where communal illusion and individual illusion stand in opposition. In other words, this kind of social movement deployed in the modern heads toward the conclusion that the trend of transformation is nothing other than violent revolution the longer it extends. I am not saying that non-violent revolution is only an ideal, but that the action of being entangled is already prepared in the mode of illusion itself which is not substance.

Particularly when one begins discussion or practical action raising the semblance of communal illusion itself as a point, it becomes nothing but a virtual image created from the misconception of understanding it substantially without seeing through that it is already illusion. Even if one takes any transformation action against a virtual image, it never acquires practical results because it is only a virtual image from the beginning. If individual existence truly wishes to live from the heart, the most radical method in the transformation of communal illusion is always nothing other than the extinguishment of communal illusion. But almost all movements deployed by hypothesizing the state or society hostilely do not think as far as completely extinguishing the community itself, such as the existing state or society, even if they raise transformation as a major premise. This is because sweetness remains that does not reach the radicalness of extinguishing these, since they universalize communities such as the state and society which are merely products of the post-modern, even though a world where individual interests pass will not open unless communal illusion is extinguished. Therefore, the modern does not perish and has reached the point of immortality rather than just prolonging life. In this case, what approaches the complete extinguishment of communal illusion would be nothing other than anarchism in its most radical form, but since executing that on a collective scale is impossible, we understand that actually we humanity already possess no solution method.

This is because the framework of the modern itself possesses the character of independent transformation in separated communal illusion, so the day the modern ends will not come unless the separation is resolved. And now this communal illusion due to separation has gone far away when viewed from us individuals, driving us into a situation where we can no longer touch communal illusion itself. It is stained into everything, causing the illusion that the air we breathe is already the subsuming realm of communal illusion, and we face the limit where we cannot reform society or the state no matter how we try as individuals in the individualistic sense, and we face the most desperate generation.

If so, must we end everything without any means while despairing at this situation? Or can we only keep waiting for something eschatological? I assert that is wrong. Actually, there is a mode of illusion that confronts communal illusion even though communal illusion and individual illusion stand in opposition. And this method is the only thing that can actively create a realm where humans truly live as existence without even needing to extinguish communal illusion completely or needing to transform communal illusion itself. In the second part, I will look at Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who expressed that urgency most brilliantly, while suggesting the future confronting this communal illusion.