Takeshi Morisato on Japanese Philosophy
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This is Philosophy Bites with me, Nigel Warburton. And me, David Edmonds. If you enjoy Philosophy Bites, please support us. For details, go to www.philosophybites.com. What is Japanese philosophy? Takeshi Morisato is a leading scholar brought up in Japan, but now teaching at the University of Edinburgh. He explains that there are several distinct strands within Japanese philosophy.

Shintoism, from China Confucianism and Taoism and of course Buddhism Takeshi Morisato, welcome to Philosophy Bites Thank you so much for having me So the topic we're going to talk about today is Japanese philosophy which is a huge subject and honestly I know almost nothing about it but I feel that's a gap I really want to know more about it So can we just begin with the deep history of Japanese philosophy it's a long history

But obviously there are key schools within Japanese philosophy that have continued to permeate the present. That's a really good question. So the best way to really understand the history of Japanese philosophy is to think about the main traditions that constitute the history of Japan.

One is native Shinto tradition, which didn't have any writing system in its own. It was mnemonic tradition, oral tradition. And then you have Confucianism coming from the Chinese continent with technology of building cities and political system and ethical values. And then eventually the Buddhism came to Japan, which took this position of harmony of three different traditions. And then it went through the entire history from 6th century until today.

19th century, it was very pre-modern. And there's between 17th to 19th century, Japan didn't open its border to the rest of the world. So it kind of developed its own distinct philosophical intellectual tradition. Then modernity and westernization came and major restoration from 19th century. This is when we imported the term philosophy to Japan, Japanese lexicon for the first time.

So does that mean it's religion rather than philosophy? I think it depends how we draw the distinction between philosophy and religion. If we impose this conception of philosophy as reason and religion as historical faith, that sort of deviates from rational structure of explanation,

it becomes very difficult for the specialist of Buddhist philosophy to talk about whether or not Buddhism is religion or not. I would say to a certain extent there are some elements of Shinto native traditions and Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism would qualify as religion even from the Western perspective. But the debate of whether or not philosophy existed before

interpretation or translation of the term philosophy into Japanese philosophy, some argue that no, they are distinct native Shinto or Confucian Taoist Buddhist philosophy in pre-modern Japan.

So the answer to your question is a complicated both yes and no. Naively, I would have thought that from what I know of Buddhism and Confucianism, they have a metaphysics, they have a notion of what the self is or the no-self, they have a sense of forces in play in lives, and they also have moral teaching. So it would seem strange not to think of them as philosophy. Yes. So the distinctions between aesthetical and ethical to religious are

is often talked within the context of Buddhist philosophy, even in 9th century esoteric Buddhism. And they would argue that these three distinctions are not, it's still part of the world. So to have ethical conceptions and try to become religious to overcome these contradictions in the realm of ethics is still operating within the parts of the world. So the Buddhism would argue that we need to move away from

that worldly movement. So they would say, yeah, we are religion in self-awareness, that we reject these three categories of the aesthetics and ethical and religious in Western European philosophical concept. So it's already becoming apparent in this conversation that I'm bringing very Western conceptions and projecting them onto Japanese philosophy. Is that what tends to happen in the kind of connection between East and West on a philosophical playing field?

I think the best example to see is countery traditions, right? When you eat Japanese food, you always project what's the closest food that you can actually have from your background. And that conceptual imposition happens all the time. For instance, Africana philosophy talks about this epistemic convergence or Indian intellectual traditions. They talk about we have a two attitude that we always compare the concept that we have

and self-referentially trying to make sense of what's happening, but in that process you lose everything in its historical and cultural context. That's predominantly not only just problem with the European academia, I think it's in general we haven't translated materials enough because we could just read Plato and Aristotle in English and have these conversations. So many scholars have worked on translation and phonological work,

But in the field of Asian philosophies in general, we haven't even close to covering, I would say, maybe 10% of what's available in intellectual traditions in Asia. So when Japan opened up, there's a kind of freer trade in ideas from the West. So presumably, there isn't the same sense of a kind of purity of a Japanese tradition at that point.

I think there was more of a confusion of what is this thing that the Western people are calling a philosophy. This is 1857.

when they coined the term tetsugaku, and suddenly you translate from Plato to almost like Nietzsche in one setting. So you didn't gradually went through this historical progression of ideas. It's just entire Western tradition came to Japan. And then Chinese intellectuals today uses the same term for philosophy because they borrow the translations the Japanese conducted in relation to philosophy. So in some ways, there was more of confusion of philosophy

Is this philosophy a Western endeavor, a Western project? To some extent, I think some argue that that's the case and therefore we don't have a philosophy because philosophy is a Western project. But then much later 20th century thinkers would say, if the philosophy is a process in which we try to understand about the world and ourselves, it would have to be cross-cultural because I'm a Japanese intellectual.

So I totally understand European projects, but we also have to pay attention to our traditions that shapes our language and culture and value system.

What does that mean when it comes to understanding from outside Japanese philosophy? Because you've described a problem when Japan opened up of here's this strange alien tradition coming in, and yet you can recognise some commonality in the sense of trying to understand our position in the world. That's a sort of basic level of philosophy. What happens when

Westerners try and understand Japanese philosophy. Is there a route into Japanese philosophy and to get some of the richness of it without losing its authenticity?

So when I teach Japanese philosophy to undergraduate students, I usually teach from understanding of the European existentialism. European existentialism is the postmodern arrival of this awareness that the historical Christian model of thinking about the relationship between theology and philosophy has collapsed. Suddenly there's death of God, there's a lack of eclipse of divine transcendence.

And I teach my students that that's the starting point of Buddhism. Buddhism started out with this very nihilistic self-awareness that the world is full of suffering, that we can't impose any fixed identity to things. And in the process of trying to impose, we suffer from this delusion. So I tell them that to some extent, if you can almost feel at home,

in the sense of alienations that you experience from postmodern existentialism, that would be a very good entry point for reading Japanese philosophy.

That's intriguing because as I understand French existentialism, there's a huge assertion of the self. You make yourself through your own choices. It's almost the opposite of Buddhism in that sense. I can see the alienation being in free fall when you suddenly realise that there are no pre-existing values. You're just here and you have to create them. But the existential solution is to choose, do things, act as if the world's watching you, make an impact on the world, not wait for something to be done to you.

Interesting. So I think in relation to Buddhism, from the perspective of Mahayana Buddhism, they would argue that the earlier form of Buddhism precisely made the same move. But it didn't provide them enough foundations to be able to overcome nihilism. And so the solution to the problem is not this postmodern self-absorption as this super individual ubermensch, but capacity to recognize your existence as betweenness.

So they talk about intersubjective constitution of who we are. I don't have a fixed identity that I can subscribe to myself from my own concept.

that doesn't mean that I don't have any sense of self. The sense of the self is always interrelations to all the other things, including natural environment and other animals, as well as all the community of humans. This sort of intersubjectivity became one of the pinnacle or the central concept that helps us conceive of what is to be human being. So the term human being in Japanese is "Ningen" and then "Watsujiyan"

Japanese ethics often talked about what distinguishes the Japanese conception of humanity from the European conception of humanity is the betweenness. Because the character is full of this intersubjectivity to describe who we are as a Ningen, in opposed to the conception that humanity has this man, this anthropos that's trying to think about its own self-identity. That's not the way that we overcome nihilism, according to Buddhist philosophy.

At the jipa level though, doesn't Mahayana Buddhism tell us that there is no self, that there's just flux? So when we make the statement of no self, we immediately have this sort of reaction from the students like, "Wow, does that mean that my sense of identity is destructible, transient, incapable of holding on to this sort of some kind of eternal universal value?" Buddhist philosophers would say, "Yes."

that's not who you are what constitutes who you are your interrelations with your family friends so the human community but also natural environment and why you actually how you live your life that between us is always in flux but that doesn't mean that you don't have any characteristic as who you are it's just not going to be permanent

Interesting. So he talks about the Buddhist conception of self or no self, but what about the older tradition, the Shinto tradition in Japan? So Shinto tradition is characterized with this conception of animism, very pan-deistic conception of the world that all things could become divine. Everything has this divine principle and a life force is that

very connects the human existence to the rest of the world. And it has a very strong orientation toward rapport with the natural environment and a revering of the nature. So if you watch very famous Miyazaki Hayao films as Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro,

These films really feature this sort of like a primordial conception of a connection to natural environment, which survived in our adaptation of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism.

So Japan's historical relationship with China has been complex, delicate, fraught, terrible in some situations, but Confucianism has nevertheless played a part in Japanese philosophy. Could you say how a Confucian approaches the question of what a self is and what the implications are?

So the writing system of Japanese language is totally dependent upon Chinese writing system. So unless the Confucianism...

came to Japan, we wouldn't have the writing system that we have today. So if you use kanji, the characters are essentially Chinese characters. So the relationship between Chinese philosophy and Japanese philosophy, I always tell my students that if you really want to understand Japanese philosophy, you do have to study Chinese philosophy, just because we imported

so many things from China. And as I mentioned, the translation of the term philosophy into Japanese language became the basis for Chinese intellectuals to talk about philosophy in their language. So there's a little bit of reciprocal relationship between the two cultures. Confucianism often plays this role of how do we conceive of the conception of

human relations and politics and family relations are sort of like linked together. So if we organize ourselves and cultivate these virtues, we should be able to actually live fulfilling life. It's almost like Aristotelian virtue ethics, basically. And then Taoism comes in, and I said, that's too optimistic. It's not capable of overcoming these problems. In fact, look around you, there's so many tyrants.

That you should pay attention to the Tao, the principle of the universe that moves us, which is not part of the city, but it's a part of the nature. And then Buddhism was translated from Sanskrit Pali to Chinese. They imported very Taoistic conception of nothingness. And so the terms of emptiness, nothingness,

really resonates from Daoist tradition. So if you read Japanese philosophy from today, we kind of have to have that background information of Confucianism, Daoism, and especially if you do Buddhism. Does that mean that with contemporary Japanese philosophers now, they are explicitly of one school or another, or is there a sense in which this is their intellectual background and it feeds through in multiple ways? The distinctions among the intellectuals in Japan are less significant

divided down in Europe, I would say. So if you belong to the continental philosophy and analytic philosophy, we don't really read each other. I think in the context of Japanese philosophy, even if you specialize in phenomenology, you have a tendency to read somebody who is writing about philosophical topic from the perspective of analytic philosophy, perhaps because they have a tendency to do translations, so that each academic has a tendency to publish

of translation of monographs in addition to their own books. So my impression of the ways in which philosophy is conducted in Japan have a tendency to become more like 19th century old academia. Yeah.

And from my naive Western position, what can I learn from Japanese philosophy? You are in a great position to tell me because you not only have grown up in a Japanese tradition, you've been in a European continental tradition and been influenced by analytic philosophy too. So you know what I don't know. So tell me, what can I learn? One of the best benefits of reading Asian and Japanese philosophy is

and specifically Japanese philosophy in this context, would be a way to understand the creative elements of negative tension. So when you're conducting certain philosophical research and you spend five years, ten years on some project,

and you sort of hit this deadlock. It's like, am I doing the right thing? I feel like there's something really missing. Or sometimes you could feel, I don't associate myself to the subject of the study, that I don't feel comfortable in the space that I'm actually studying.

I think the Japanese philosophy can offer that type of person a lot. Because the history of Japanese philosophy is trying to understand the identity of Japanese philosophy, which has been impossible. Native Shinto tradition doesn't have a writing. It's oral tradition. So the Chinese Confucianism came in, helped us try to articulate, but then you contaminate the native Shinto tradition with the Chinese tradition.

Confucian concepts, right? And the Buddhist comes in with Sanskrit Pali and Chinese translations then entering into Japanese Buddhism. So if you become a Japanese Buddhist thinker,

Am I Japanese? Am I Chinese? Am I Indian? So if you are feeling, as you study the history of European philosophy, perhaps because of your mixed background or perhaps because of the generational gap between 21st century to 19th century, for instance, you started to feel there's some dissonance between the subject that you study to the subject that actually doing the study is.

And I think Japanese philosophy can offer you a lot to see how they try to mitigate these differences and how do we harmonize these different elements to move on. So if we enter this postmodern modernity and say God is dead, there is no divine transcendence from which we can actually build universal metaphysics.

we are in this sort of like crisis mode. But then if you look at the East Asian philosophy, they've been operating on that principle for more than 2000 years. So you can actually pay attention to these elements that are available there that feel in exactly the same way as this, some sort of angst with your self-referential self-understanding. Takeshi Murasatsu, thank you very much. Thank you so much. You've been listening to Philosophy Bites.

This episode was made in association with the Institute of Philosophy and supported by the Ideas Workshop, part of Open Society Foundations. For more Philosophy Bites, go to philosophybites.com.