3-The basic themes of Japanese Philosophy
Thomas Kasulis describes how Japanese philosophy introduces different philosophical categories that lead to a different philosophical treatment from those prevailing in the West, as follows,
In the final analysis, for any tradition, whether German, British, Chinese, or Japanese, I think we can find, as Wittgenstein would say, a family resemblance among the target group. Hence, I put forward the thesis that most major Japanese philosophers, classical and modern, share such a resemblance. Of course, not all members of any family share some single defining characteristic (shape of nose, type of hair, height, shape of face, general physiology, etc.) that distinguishes them from members of other families. Yet, we still often see a so-called family resemblance. How is that possible? Basically because, Wittgenstein explained in his Philosophical Investigations (no.67), of a long list of possible physical characteristics, members of the same family share a larger number of those characteristic than do members of other families.
Therefore, to identify a family member (or a philosophical tradition), we should not seek a single defining quality or even a set of two or three qualities that all members of the group share. There is no essential "Japaneseness" in philosophy (or anywhere else, I maintain). Instead, we should compile a list of qualities that perhaps no single member of the Japanese (philosophical) family possesses completely, but as a group the (philosophical) family members share a large number (a larger number than people from other philosophical families). I will be more specific.
Philosophical traditions build on elements that are discovered, engineered, combined, and adapted to meet the needs of their particular systems. For its elements, western philosophizing has depended mostly on primary concepts like
things, facts, stuff, sensations, subject, object, being, substance, essence, attribute, quality, cause, effect, agent,
and so forth. As that list of elemental concepts has become standardized, it has served as a glossary for future thinking and further philosophical initiatives. Western philosophers may discover or even craft new elements, but they do so against that preexisting background, like filling gaps within the periodic table.
The elemental concepts of most Japanese philosophizing are strikingly different: of itself or auto ( jinen), generative force (ki), pattern (ri), event-words (koto), the midst (aidagara), cultural/ethnic embeddedness ( fudo or minzoku sonzai), the interpenetration of thing with thing ( jijimuge), conditioned co-production (innen), absolute nothing (zettai mu), "howzit" (inmo), as-ness (nyoze), inter-responsive field (kokoro), the performative intuition (koiteki chokkan), true working of nonworking or true meaning of nonmeaning (mugi no gi), no-I (muga), no-mind (mushin) and so forth. Such terms reveal the conviction that philosophy arises from the philosopher's being situated within a field of interrelated processes, not a network of externally related things. So, it is not only that the western and Japanese traditions have different pictures of reality; they also use different conceptual media to create those pictures.
The western list can be seen as more readily generating what questions and the Japanese list how questions. If I want to grow a plant, the western categories might serve me well in determining what is its species and what nutrients and conditions it needs to grow. On the other hand, the Japanese categories may be more helpful in asking how I can help a particular bonsai to flourish, how to interact with it and nurture it so that it finds its own ideal shape. The difference is one of a detached knowing that aims to control reality and of an engaged knowing that works with reality. It is like the contrast between how a geologist and a potter know clay. (Thomas Kasulis, 'Japanese Philosophy? No Such Thing: Japan's Contribution to World Philosophizing', P.139).
The Subject-Object Relation
The above discussion using the family metaphor suggests that we shouldn't make full generalizations of the basic themes of Japanese philosophy, may be with the exception of its position from the problem of the subject-object relation. Kasulis sums up his view as follows:
The Japanese philosopher typically views reality as a complex, organic system of interdependent processes, a system that includes us as the knowers. As a result, we cannot begin our analysis with a separation of knower from known; to know reality is to work with it and within it, not as a discrete agent, but as part of a common field, a kokoro. The person and reality work together in the discovery of knowledge. In Japanese philosophy, the world is often more like light for the photographer than light for the physicist, more like words for the poet than words for the philologist, more like breath for the meditator than breath for the pulmonologist. This distinction between detached and engaged knowing is not unique to Japan, of course. Consider, for instance, this statement from the opening pages of Henri Bergson's Introduction to Metaphysics written in 1903: "Philosophers, in spite of their apparent divergencies, agree in distinguishing two profoundly different ways of knowing a thing. The first implies that we move round the object; the second that we enter into it." (Kasulis, 'Japanese Philosophy? No Such Thing: Japan's Contribution to World Philosophizing', P.140).
Bert Davis confirms such a general view to Japanese philosophy, he points out that,
Heisig, Kasulis, and Maraldo make the following generalizations about Japanese philosophy: a preference for internal rather than external relations; a tendency to think in terms of a holographic relation of whole and parts; argument by "relegation" (i.e., "opposing positions are treated not by refuting them, but by accepting them as true, but only true as part of the full picture"); and a preference for philosophizing in media res, that is, by beginning "in the gaps left by abstract concepts about reality" and seeking to uncover an "experiential ground out of which the abstractions of philosophy emerge and to which they must answer."
Expanding on and adding to these generalizations, Bert Davis continues,
we could say that many Japanese philosophies criticize and/or provide alternatives to ontological and epistemological subject-object dualisms, view human beings as intimately related with one another and with the natural world, and espouse process rather than substance ontologies. Many are suspicious of the reifying and dichotomizing effects of certain kinds or uses of language, if not of language as such, and many are informed by and/or articulate a metaphysical or religious sensibility that inclines toward what Nishida calls "immanent transcendence" (naizai-teki choetsu), as distinct from both a dualistic transcendence and a reductive immanence. (Bert Davis (Ed.), Introduction – the Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy, 2019)
In the same vein, Toshihiko in his study of the relation between Consciousness and Essence in Japanese philosophy extends this feature, i.e., rejecting subject–object dualisms to its limits. He writes,
I am not trying to exhaust Sankara's profound non-dual monism with such a simple description. I only want to indicate that the idea of an absolutely unique "essence" common to all entities that I mentioned just now presents a paradigmatic intellectual form in the essentialism of Eastern philosophy in general. This standpoint that all thing-events of the empirical world share in a single "essence" and that, indeed, by means of this they are not nothing instead but being, in fact, is one paradigm for experiencing and thinking reality in the East, and repeatedly appears in different forms in different places in Eastern philosophy. The doctrine of the unity of being of the school of Ibn Arabi in Islam is an example as well. (Toshihiko, Contemporary Japanese Philosophy- a reader, p.73).
Therefore, most Japanese philosophers have assumed the relation between knower and known is an interactive conjunction between the two rather than a bridge spanning the disjunction between what is in the knower's mind and the known which stands outside it. The Japanese philosopher is thus more likely to be viewed as a person who tries to comprehend reality by working within it rather than one who tries to understand it by standing apart from it. In other words, the Japanese philosopher's project more often involves personal engagement than impersonal detachment. This applies to all fundamental problems in philosophy, such as the mind/body problem, the individual/social group relations, the Language and Meaning, etc.
works Cited
- Davis, Bert (Ed.). 2020. "Introduction-the Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy".
- Kasulis, Thomas P.2019. 'Japanese Philosophy? No Such Thing: Japan's Contribution to World Philosophizing', International Journal of Asian Studies , 16, 131-142.
- Toshihiko, Izutsu . 2019. 'Consciousness and Essence', p. 59-77, in John W. M. Krummel (ed.) "Contemporary Japanese Philosophy- a reader", Rowman & Littlefield.
Internet Resources
The International Association of Japanese Philosophy
European Network of Japanese Philosophy
Readings
Being And Doing-Maruyama Masao
Edited By: Samir Abuzaid
