堂々巡りの対話から抜け出すEscaping the Circle of Endless Argument
No matter how many words we spend, no matter how we shift our position to explain, no matter how we listen to the other side's case, in the end we return to the same place. Inside this answerless circling we come to feel that any further effort is wasted. Usually we grow impatient to produce an answer, offer the excuse of "compromise," and conclude that the other is wrong or that the other has no will to understand. At this moment we place the cause of the failure to understand on the other side and justify ourselves and talk ourselves into it.
But is that truly the road to mutual understanding? In the very moment we feel we cannot understand one another, we often make our own side alone the sole correctness without realizing it. No, in nearly everything we do this. We tie the world we see to the world itself and affirm it, and in the end we regard the other as an inferior being who has strayed from it. The trap of dualism typical of right and wrong or good and evil is always a problem of the self. It is not a problem of others or society or government or the world. The more certain we become that we are right and that we are good, the narrower the world actually grows. The more we believe this is correct, the more suffocating it becomes. Certainty was supposed to be taught to us as strength, yet it inverts and works as a cage that locks us in.
The worst form of this is when blind faith that one alone is good and right leads a person to cut off the very existence they assume as their counterpart. This cutting off always happens when one's own world has narrowed to its limit. It never happens because that world is universal. When the world has narrowed to its limit, such people mistake whatever clear thing remains for something they must protect, so they inevitably close off dialogue themselves. By closing off dialogue, they can preserve the self-serving convenience that the other is evil and the other is wrong.
For some reason people do not notice this inverting action. To those who look at history, or who have spent a lifetime refining how to receive and how to dialogue with the discomfort of an entirely different cultural sphere, the sight of people trapped in this inverting action is hard to comprehend. We were taught that the human being is a noble form of life, but the reality is nothing of the sort. There is the single relation between you and me that modernity has erased. That single relation holds high density and concentration, and heat dwells there, and a soul dwells there. For this single relation to work, a place is needed. Because a place is born first, you and I can face each other sincerely from the heart and bring forth a single relation through great struggle. That place is the precondition for a relation to be born, and it is created in the relation of heart to heart.
If people had truly grasped correctness and goodness as they claim, then why do they become not free but cramped, or to put it more precisely, narrow-minded? Why has the present age become something like a den of the narrow-minded? They hold no answer to this question. The reason is plain. They are searching for truth as something that lies outside themselves. Somewhere there is a single truth, and if you discover it and grasp it, everything is solved. This is not conviction but blind faith, and without noticing it people go off to search for truth in the outer world. To beautify this, a story is prepared. For things, for others, for society, for the state, and for the world. Yet in fact the more we go searching for truth on the outside, the further we move from ourselves, and the chance to grasp the fruit of life never arrives to the end. And this is the wasted toil of a life.
Let me put it another way. The closer we draw to the world, the more we fall into the inverting action of moving away from ourselves. This is a principle and an inevitability. And the further we move from ourselves, the more the world narrows to match. Anyone who has tried even a little to explore the spiritual world in their life will have some memory of this strange and delicate discomfort as an unnameable and curious sensation. Yet one truth is suggested here. Why does drawing closer to the world move us away from ourselves? Why does moving away from ourselves narrow the world? If you press through to this question, the truth becomes unexpectedly clear. What is misunderstood is the idea that the closer we draw to the world, the more our own existence is fixed. This widespread way of thinking is plainly wrong and false. What we must consider is by what this inverting action is caused.
When you take a bird's-eye view of the present world, you notice that people blindly believe they are right even as they rush about in search of "something." Viewed calmly, nothing is stranger or more foolish than this. After all, people somehow justify themselves even though they do not know what the "something" they seek even is. And without realizing it they force this so-called correctness on people of a different cultural sphere and disturb the order of that different cultural sphere. Even from my own experience, this is hard to avoid from the standpoint of crossing cultures, and however conscious we become it cannot be completely dissolved. The reason is that the context each of us was born and raised in is different. The world is not one, humanity is not one, and not everyone is a friend. Such things are obvious. This is not illusion or fiction or story. It is simply obvious.
For the context to differ means that the whole of the history, spirit, culture, conduct, and daily activity one takes on is different, so we never reach the state that "mutual understanding" means in the way the term is used now. Because at that dimension "mutual understanding" is not possible. The mutual understanding we assert is in the end nothing more than something realized by setting someone's standard as the implicit or deliberate default value and then excluding, unconsciously or consciously, whatever deviates from it. This is not mutual understanding, and it is not a dimension in which the existence of the other is acknowledged in the heart. Because the foundation remains dualism as ever.
What I want to raise here is this. The world that we who have undergone modernity speak of is in fact only a minority position when seen across humanity, and the overwhelming majority of the humanity that exists on the earth now does not share the world we speak of. This is the first point. People still speak calmly of the world and humanity and the human being, yet they are not aware of this fundamental problem. Whether or not one has undergone modernity matters more than people think, and however one defines modernity, it lies at a base layer that must be considered seriously. And now, in a time not of modernity but of the collapse of modernization, we who have undergone modernity inevitably speak with this world as our premise. Unfortunately that is blind faith and falsehood, not truth. Because the greater part of humanity, entirely apart from how we wish to believe, has not undergone modernity. Of course there are differences of degree. And what matters is that modernity is by no means right or good. The very idea that this is the world exposes the grounds for why we cannot understand one another, yet a design to keep us from seeing that is at work socially and at the level of the state. Seeing through this far is not easy, and that vast matrix cannot be changed. For people in certain regions that hold the historical context of civil society some kind of transformation may be possible, but even that is only a small part of the earth and not the world. The correctness or goodness within one's own context holds only within that context, and it must never be taken outside it. This is the principle of invasion. Mutual understanding in its present meaning is therefore invasion and deprivation, and it must be treated as a quite serious problem.
When people fall into this inverting action, they always affirm their own world reactively, justify it, treat it as good, and then force it on the other without fail. In earlier eras this hardly surfaced. It was relatively confined to areas such as international politics and diplomacy, so there was room to examine it in contexts like post-colonialism. But now this entanglement caused by the inverting action has been taken over by countless people who are neither politicians nor diplomats. The symbol of this is the tourist. Unfortunately only a handful of tourists face this question and confront other countries and other cultures with awareness. Most give it no thought and, without knowing, erode and strip away other countries and other cultures. Even if the other's culture and spirit are lost, to them it is no concern. This is the principle of the invader. The invader is by no means an obvious evil. The terror of the good person lies here. And the problem is how this designation of the good person has come to be decided.
The Confucian Analects holds an old teaching. It is the line [郷愿は徳の賊である], that the village worthy is the thief of virtue. The village worthy is the good and upright model student who does nothing bad, makes no waves, conducts a social life, and lives a well-rounded life. In short, it is the person who tips into hypocrisy out of an excess of trying to be a good child and to be virtuous. Confucius warned that the standard of good and evil is gutted by such people. He argued that the supreme human good that Confucianism has prized as "virtue" is stolen by these good people. In other words, obvious evil can be guarded against, but the true problem is the hypocrite wearing the face of a good person. They eat away at the whole while no one guards against them, and in the end it always collapses. This old teaching of more than two thousand years now echoes within me.
Now that travel is no longer a privilege, contact with other cultures has been opened to many people. Indeed, when you watch the flood of tourists, they are not evil. By the world's definition they are good people, and precisely for that reason they are the problem, yet this is never asked in liberal spaces. In tourism the problem of the hypocrite wearing the face of a good person sets off a destructive chain of "cultural deprivation." What invaders once did in the colonial era is now carried out by hypocrites wearing the face of good people. This is the problem, yet it is never asked. Because they think of themselves as good people. The true phase of the problem comes down to the fact that these very people are not facing the world. And this is reflected not only in tourism but across every domain called the world. Everyone will share the sense that we are now in an unprecedented crisis, but at its fundamental position lies the presence or absence of introspection. That is where I place myself.
What I recall here is what Wang Yangming called Ryochi [良知]. To put Ryochi in my own words, truth does not lie outside the self but is immanent within the self. So to set the self aside and idly seek truth in the outer world is the original error. The primal experience can come to anyone. It comes through no privilege of birth or station, and in this it is the same as what Wang Yangming saw. Yet whether it has already come is another matter, and the world is in fact filled with those to whom it has not yet come.
Yet the response to this truth is accepted by the hypocrites wearing the face of good people described above as "knowledge understood inside the head," and Wang Yangming's words are not there. The modern hypocrite wearing the face of a good person has a good head. Their level of comprehension is high, and their ability to grasp logically what the other is saying is high. But this is exactly why they are the problem. Why did Confucius call them hypocrites wearing the face of good people? The core of it lies here. And Wang Yangming gouged out this point most vividly.
What on earth does this mean?
Wang Yangming's school is generally called Wang Yangming thought, and though it was born in China it has a history of being taken up more actively on the Japanese side. The Wang Yangming view that knowledge understood only in the head is meaningless and that one cannot be said to truly know unless action accompanies it has in the end been dissolved into mere knowledge for the highly comprehending hypocrites wearing the face of good people. But for Confucius and Wang Yangming, "knowledge" was never simply an insistence on action. The core lies in being moved. I do not read Wang Yangming's words as the practice of action. I place them in being moved. Whatever the source of the knowledge you take in, whether a book or anything else, the true matter lies in your having been moved from the heart, and that being moved is itself the acquisition of the true knowledge Wang Yangming speaks of. In other words, knowledge without being moved may as well not exist, and the accumulation of such knowledge is nothing but harm to people. Through this accumulation of harmful knowledge, people broke and the world broke. The words of elites and intellectuals can do nothing for the present world because they themselves cannot understand this cause.
I would like you to look back on your own life for a moment. Knowledge merely taught at a university and knowledge that moved you from the heart are the same word, yet they differ in dimension. Knowledge learned merely to raise your social career and knowledge gained through your own body are the same word, yet they differ in quality. Why is it that you now devote your whole life to "that"? There must always have been a "primal experience" behind it. And what I now thoroughly value lies in this primal experience.
Whether it is culture, history, religion, politics, medicine, or anything else, the question is whether a primal experience lies at the root of the motive for taking that path. The presence or absence of this transforms a human life more than one imagines. People who have no primal experience and chose their path merely for the sake of a social career are good people socially, yet they eat away at the whole and become the cause of eventual collapse. This was the reality Confucius saw. It is the same today. People who hold a primal experience, whatever their field, reach a strong will that does not easily fall in with what is wrong or unconvincing, because that experience is the motive and the conviction of their own life. The former take on no responsibility, postpone every problem, and do nothing but make excuses. Because the primal experience ripens into a mission, the latter take on responsibility themselves, do not postpone problems, make no excuses, and do all they can for the world and for others.
The former are given important roles in society, so they can invest a fair sum in experiences such as travel. But they hold no primal experience and have no "experience" of being moved. However much money they pour in and time they spend for the sake of that experience, they have in fact learned nothing. They can accumulate knowledge and put it to some use in their social career, yet they never truly know anything and know nothing across their whole life. Socially, however, they are defined as knowing more than anyone.
The latter rarely get the chance to be given important roles in society. The strength with which the former are elevated rises mostly in eras when bureaucracy grows strong, because avoiding responsibility, prioritizing one's own career, and postponing problems become the rule in society. But for the latter, when the existing society and system collapse and enter a stage of chaos, the chance to rise inevitably arrives. The former have a high general problem-solving ability for peaceful eras (university knowledge), but they have no ability to respond to problems not taught at a university. To put it another way, they have no ability for the problems of any world other than the world they blindly believe in. They have in fact done nothing.
By contrast, the latter have a high ability to solve the problems of this side. Because they hold a primal experience and fulfill their life through being moved, they can be moved by a single passage in a book, a conversation with someone dear, a daily scene, or history, without spending money to travel the world. That being moved is what decides their destination. Because being moved always carries action with it, and the eternal process of that action is itself the true knowledge. They act at once, seek out the one fit to receive what moved them, and master knowledge.
The "knowledge" of the former and the latter is entirely different. The former understand logically in the head that other cultures differ, but because they have no experience or knowledge grounded in being moved, they understand only when it is written out as a matter of law or ethics. It becomes ideology. Their understanding is moreover extremely shallow. It never becomes the power to accept other cultures, people of other countries, or people of different roots and backgrounds. It does no more than force the diversity, acceptance, and understanding inside their heads onto the other side in order to reflect it socially.
The latter instead act on the driving force of a primal experience of being moved that holds no expiration date, so there is no logical understanding of the kind the former think up in the head, and they face the other "heart to heart." True diversity cannot be realized unless it stands on this ground. The liberal diversity carried out over these past decades depended fundamentally on the former, so it failed completely and is now being driven out by reactionary forces. The reason is plain. The ideology of diversity thought up with knowledge understood only in the head was not diversity for people who share the primal experience of being moved. It served only to force the premise that one's own world is right and good onto the weaker other and to remove the otherness of that other side.
This is why, in this world, skin color, figure, hair texture, eye color, dress, faith, educational background, and career must all be spelled out in words. A world that has to spell out "this is a minority" or "this is discrimination" is not the true world. To my eyes, a world where an utterly absurd farce passes calmly under the guise of "ethics" is terribly alien. This world smeared with falsehood is now beginning to collapse, and by Confucius this is only natural. This collapse is not caused by evil in the way people today imagine. There is therefore no logic by which we regard ourselves as good and must destroy evil. The world is collapsing through those virtuous hypocrites, and it is their own responsibility, yet because they always evade their own responsibility they never arrive at that problem. As a result the world accelerates its collapse.
This circling of responsibility evasion always requires an imagined enemy. For the latter, nothing is more absurd, foolish, and dangerous than this. The latter notice what the former do not. It is that truth is immanent within the self. In fact no truth exists apart from this, and all the rest is illusion. What matters most is not to understand in the head that truth is immanent within the self. There is no way but to know it in one's own primal experience. However much one insists that truth is immanent within the self, it means nothing. Many people misjudge this point because they do not notice the existence of the primal experience they hold. This is why Wang Yangming embodied this point at the risk of his own life. The world of the one who holds a primal experience and the one who does not is entirely different. Even when they use the same terms, the words differ in dimension. So even if you can convince the other, when that other holds no primal experience and is skilled only in the ability to understand logically in the head, in the end it does not reach them. It is always used instead as knowledge for making a living.
This kind of problem is something history has carried all along. There is in fact only one way to break through it. The one who knows through primal experience that truth is immanent within the self gives their all for "a single person." There is no other way, and it cannot be conveyed to many people. The history of religion proves that even when it resonates as a somewhat diluted thought and reaches a fair number of people, it is hollowed out in an instant. This is unavoidable. This is precisely why the one who takes on the responsibility of conveying it to someone has no choice but to keep conveying it to "a single person" rather than to an unspecified many. This is the future, the possibility, and a horizon that is not modernity. There is no other way to stop the breath of modernity. There is no meaning in rejecting modernity. We must open a new place that buffers modernity and coexists with it. We must not reject the world. We must open a new place that buffers the world and coexists with it.
Truth is immanent within the self. This means that the world is in fact immanent within the self and that the world we assert does not exist. Yet the nonexistent world behaves as if it exists, and there are also behaviors in which such a realm of illusion takes on substance. In the West fiction and story are placed among the nonexistent, but from the Japanese standpoint illusion carries substance. Because of this bidirectional action, beings that became the roots of the yokai such as mononoke [もののけ] were born across the land. The principle that the world does not exist becomes self-evident the moment one reaches the world immanent within the self. Illusion has Self Illusion, Pair Illusion, and Communal Illusion, and each illusion acts and works by a different principle. Within this structure of illusion the world is pluralistic. So it is obvious that the world of each one of us is different, and when one reaches a thorough awareness of this, what opens is not the world inside the head that liberalism has spoken of as diversity but a domain grounded in primal experience. That is [相反共存] (a way of being together that I call living face to face with the stranger).
For those whom being moved has carried to the realization that truth is immanent within the self, this way of thinking is obvious. The world differs from person to person. The moment it is set as the foundation of the mutual understanding of virtuous hypocrites, that power is lost. The one who holds in primal experience that each person's world is different becomes aware through primal experience that the other holds a world. The quality of this awareness is what matters. In this case, since each person holds a world, mutual understanding does not hold. Because it inevitably ends in the removal of difference, and the one who decides its basic axis is always the privileged.
But [相反共存] lives within itself. Just as the genes of each person differ, no totality called humanity exists. The one who gazes thoroughly at the earth, gazes at the daily, and faces a single other does not try to fill in difference and does not try to solve it through understanding. They confront the other with the principle of being a different existence set as the axis. It is easily misunderstood, but facing a single person is not as gentle a thing as a counselor's work.
When the samurai of old Japan faced each other, the contest was already decided without drawing a sword. To face a single person is an act that stakes one's life, and it rests on the premise that the other is a thoroughly different and alien enemy. There is no mutual understanding there. Such thinking has now vanished, but the original way of tea was the very site of it. The host who receives a guest into the tea room extends thorough hospitality to the visiting guest (an alien existence), yet this is an act for the sake of that single guest alone and a highly developed art of hospitality for avoiding opposition and combat with the other. When samurai faced each other, they did not burn with hatred for the enemy as evil. They paid sincere respect to the other, faced each other in earnest within that respect, and proceeded under the resolve that neither could complain whichever of them was cut down. Such a thing is naturally never spelled out in words. The moment it is spelled out, that resolve is lost. The samurai vanished through modern war, and the way of tea vanished through being spelled out in words.
Each one of us is already a single world.
As I have said again and again, this means nothing as knowledge understood in the head. One must arrive at the moment of reaching it as primal experience. That is what we study for, that is why we sometimes need the encounter with a mentor, and that is why we move. When this inverts, it becomes mere self-satisfaction, and one can live for no one. To live for someone is not the loose thing spoken of in the present world. Life and death are always involved there. To face a single person even at the risk of one's life. There is no way to transform this world but the accumulation of that. Because revolution is not carried out against society or the state, still less to change others. Revolution is always carried out against oneself. It does not end in a single round. It continues eternally from birth to death.