自由とは何かWhat Is Freedom?

Freedom has been questioned countless times throughout history. Because it has been expounded from so many directions, we have convinced ourselves that we know what freedom is.

Everyone agrees that Enlightenment thought is a remarkable body of ideas. But what matters is that the human freedom born through the Enlightenment took indigenous root only in parts of Europe, or more broadly in parts of the West. Because the modern world still operates under the strong hegemony of the Western universalist consciousness, it remains difficult to notice that this freedom is in fact regulated by place.

Freedom that was originally born under the regulation of a specific place was sublimated into a universal for all humanity, packaged, and exported and shared with peoples beyond the boundaries of that place. But this is only the generous way of putting it. For peoples in different places who carry their own historical and cultural contexts, it was not enlightenment. It was coercion and nothing else. The universalized freedom then merged with the concept of liberation. But the problem is that once it crosses into a different place, there is no guarantee that the freedom one believes in is legitimate.

In other words, a freedom universal to all humanity can never be realized through any method that has been attempted so far. It can only be thought about within the limits of the place where the Enlightenment occurred. This indigenous character runs through the foundations of Enlightenment thought: reason, liberty, equality. But the moment an individual ignores or loses awareness of this dimension of place, what they are doing will inevitably contain an element of coercion for the other side. This has been raised as a problem before, yet it does not appear to have been genuinely internalized.

That said, freedom as mediated through the Enlightenment connects to the civic consciousness of liberty against the state, and on this point its effectiveness is beyond question. What must not be misunderstood is that the issue is not a blanket critique of freedom. The essential point is that the exteriority of the concept of freedom is always subject to the regulation of place. Lose sight of this and freedom becomes a confusion.

If we focus on this exteriority of freedom, the following becomes clear. For peoples living in countries that have not historically passed through the stage of restraining the state by the power of citizens, even if not through a full citizen revolution, and who do not carry a Western context, the freedom they hold is probably not the same as what the majority of people today understand by the word. This is a truth. But truth is not a single absolute universal answer. Nothing is more subject to transformation by place than truth. My view is that truth is pluralistic. Move the time or the place and truth changes easily.

The problem is that the freedom most people unconsciously assume they know is not necessarily freedom at all. This harbors a great contradiction. As with truth, my view is that freedom is profoundly pluralistic. If I were to state just one thing about the essence of freedom it would be this: the only question is whether freedom exists within your own heart. Everything returns to this point.

Here a fissure opens in how freedom is understood. If we think of freedom as a collective problem concerning large groups, then freedom in the Enlightenment context is certainly the most effective framework. But even that cannot become universal, as the state of the world today makes plain. At a minimum, what our experience tells us is that the only question that ultimately deserves to be asked is whether freedom exists within yourself. Everything else is exteriority, and the two must not be treated as the same. In the post-Enlightenment mode of thinking premised on separation, collective consciousness compressed into exteriority will inevitably invert toward defending the interests of the community. Rather than the antiquated class struggle that locates the problem in the exterior, there is no means of transforming exteriority other than relentless introspection directed at oneself.

If freedom inevitably inverts when brought into the exterior, nothing embodies this tendency more starkly than the Enlightenment itself. The Enlightenment's own beginnings were confined to the places within which Rousseau and Montesquieu could communicate. Whether it was the French Revolution or the Glorious Revolution in England before it, this quality is exactly the same.

The descendants of people who situated this kind of thought at the core of their tradition do indeed have this species of freedom rooted in them. For those who inherit a place this is only natural. And when these descendants of a given place still constitute the majority at the civic level, the regulation of place will always transmit its memory to the people as a quality of the land. Those who carry this invisible inheritance of place-spirit with particular strength do not easily waver no matter how the era shifts. They stand on soil and they have grown from roots planted in that soil.

The current attack on Iran by the US and Israeli governments is a case in which the strength of indigenous freedom rooted in place is strikingly visible. That place is Spain. While leaders around the world fall silent before the recklessness of the US government, Spain has maintained a firm refusal to permit the use of US military bases on its territory as Washington has requested. The Gulf Arab states have taken similar measures, but it is clear that their motivations are overwhelmingly political. Spain's refusal is not political. Seen through the lens of the inheritance of indigenous place-spirit, it is an attitude without parallel in the contemporary world.

The Trump administration has responded by declaring full trade sanctions against Spain and other retaliatory measures. But what matters is that the Spanish side possesses the power to exercise indigenous freedom as an act at the national level. This indigeneity is of course not ethnic in nature. It derives from the robust indigenous character of each dispersed place.

Meanwhile, Japan's Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has officially announced that she will absolutely refrain from commenting on the merits or demerits of the Trump administration's initiation of the Iran war. Because it was President Trump who underwrote the LDP's landslide victory last month and thereby guaranteed her own political position, the Japanese prime minister has announced a posture of saying nothing about the invasion of Iran as an act of repayment. She has forgotten that Japan more than any other country is obligated to advocate for peace in the face of the US government's rampage. In the interest of her own vested interests and self-preservation she has effectively endorsed the invasion.

Every country has expressed its own stance, but this single incident alone makes visible the absence of universality in external freedom. And the fact that the strongest force in the present era consists of peoples who have continued to faithfully inherit the spirit of their place is something that probably offers light to all of us who have reached an impasse. At this juncture, freedom must never be universalized. It is a freedom nurtured by the particular character of a particular place, and it does not hold equally once it crosses that place's boundaries. Its wellspring lies in the thorough rootedness of freedom within the individual interior.

Cases in which this awareness of individual inner freedom penetrates all the way to the collective level of the citizenry are rare today. But Catalonia appears to stand as the foremost and perhaps singular example. For people living in places where this quality of place has been largely lost, the movement inevitably turns toward forming a freedom that has been detached from place. It is here rather than elsewhere that the derivatives of Enlightenment thought are most visible. But these do not hold on a planetary or species-wide scale.

What must be recognized above all is that the very way the question is posed has been abstracted into universal freedom. "Human freedom," "the freedom of humanity," "individual freedom" and so on. The word "individual" as used here has itself been universalized, and caution is needed.

And yet without all this labored elaboration, every one of us already knows at the level of our own lives that this is the truth. Those who have lived deeply in cultural spheres different from their own feel this awareness far more viscerally. Because they know from their own experience that truth changes when you move from one place to another.

Here I personally believe that moving from one place to another must not be an act of escape. Escape is certainly necessary from the standpoint of survival. But escape always lacks the intensity of introspection, and it therefore carries the inverted risk of moving in order to fill anxiety and loneliness. A person who has remained in their own place without being buffeted by the conditions of the era and the environment, who has carried out relentless introspection by their own will, knows the freedom I am speaking of here better than anyone. Because they move from place to place carrying that will. In other words, such people harbor doubts about universal freedom in the sense it is commonly assumed.

The question of whether freedom existed outside the Western context cannot be answered in the negative. Certainly, when viewed narrowly through the lens of the Enlightenment, the specific freedom realized on a collective scale may appear absent among peoples living in regions like East Asia where the influence of Confucianism has been strong.

But that perspective itself is a fundamental error regarding freedom, and to be more precise it is a way of seeing that overlooks place. Since the essential question is whether freedom exists within the heart of each individual, it cannot be said that freedom was absent in the historical context of East Asia. The same can be said of every place in the world.

If one knows Confucianism only to the degree that everyone knows it, then it is understandable that the Western side would consider Confucianism an anti-freedom philosophy. Because that view is nothing more than an assumption held from outside Confucianism. Certainly, looking at peoples living in the nations of East Asia today, collective freedom does not exist. Whether as citizens, as nationals, or as individuals, freedom does not exist. And the meaning of "individual" here refers to individuals who have lost their faces through socialization (social agents).

But this way of seeing arbitrarily erases place and views things within a monolithic space. It is a textbook example of viewing things as though place did not exist. That looking at things on a collective scale itself overlooks place has still not been fully recognized. It should go without saying that in Japan, China, and Korea, if you look inside individuals one by one, it is clear that people who possessed freedom have been present in large numbers throughout history.

In my view, freedom is something created internally by the individual who has not been socialized. To say "freedom exists within the individual" risks inverting into a universalist worldview. But freedom is something created. It is never something realized toward the exterior. Freedom realized in the exterior always has at its source a chain of freedoms created within the interiors of individuals, and there is always the factor of place linking that chain. This is why culture can only be born from place.

What remains at the end as the essence of freedom is here. On the basis of whether or not one understands this, the next important question is whether or not one has been alienated from oneself. The original self that has not been self-alienated exercises the freedom that has been created internally. The density of a life always seems to converge on this point. Whether or not one expresses that freedom externally is in fact an entirely separate question. We celebrate the leaders of movements who declare their freedom externally and achieve great freedoms. But it is precisely because we have looked only at such people that the wars of today exist.

What we must truly look at now are the quiet historical figures who did not express their freedom externally, who understood the essence of freedom, and who in every era carried through its exercise as a matter of their own interior without exception. Such people are usually not historically famous. But they exist in every country without fail.

To move toward freedom at the level of the communal illusion, the level of society, the state, or the ethnicity, is not necessarily a path to fulfillment. I feel that this is something we must understand deeply at this very moment.

In the first place, freedom in Japanese is jiyu (自由). This compound means "to arise from oneself" and refers to living with one's own heart and truth as the foundation. In other words, freedom was never originally something sought in the exterior.

The etymology is sometimes traced to the Buddhist lexicon and said to derive from the Sanskrit "svayam". On the Chinese side the compound jiyu appears in the Book of the Later Han, and on the Japanese side an early example of its use is found in the Shoku Nihongi. It also appears in the Nihon Shoki and the Tsurezuregusa. The concept is considerably old and cannot be attributed to Buddhism alone. It is most likely a concept in which multiple lineages have merged.

When modernization began in the Meiji period, however, Yukichi Fukuzawa assigned jiyu as the Japanese translation of the Western terms Liberty and Freedom. At that moment it was inverted into a collective meaning heavily charged with the modern nuances of liberation and the absence of restraint. Yet the difficulty Fukuzawa described in arriving at this translation hints at the essence of freedom itself.

Fukuzawa confessed that translating Liberty into Japanese was extraordinarily difficult. No matter how long he thought about it, he said, no word existed in either Japanese or Chinese that could express the significance of the original term. This was because during his time studying abroad he had sensed that Liberty was a concept created under the regulation of a specific place. When he returned to Japan and tried to convey the same thing, he found that he could not. Since that would not serve the purposes of scholarship, he provisionally assigned jiyu to both Liberty and Freedom. At this point Western readers should be able to understand that the jiyu we Japanese think of is a distinctly modern concept born from the conflation of two terms, Liberty and Freedom, without prior knowledge of either.

My own view is that there is no need to stall in this kind of muddled modern scholarly posture. On the Japanese side we need only return to jiyu, "to arise from oneself," as it has been understood since long ago. But the current of that era, which insisted on adjudicating all things by the Western standard, dismissed this as an antiquated feudal notion and would not accept it.

The deeper the era descends into confusion, the more powerfully I feel that there is nowhere for us to go other than jiyu, to arise from oneself.