Alan Saunders: Hi, I'm Alan Saunders and I'm very glad you've joined me on The Philosopher's Zone, because today we begin a two-part series on philosophy in Japan. Make sure you tune in to our program next week on Japanese animation, better known as anime.

But this week, an overview of some of the ideas and strands that make up Japanese philosophical thinking.

Since the 5th century, Japanese philosophy has assimilated and adapted foreign philosophies to its native world view, picking and choosing ideas about the self, government, and social order, from Confucianism, Buddhism and Western thought.

But does this mish-mash of thinking create a uniquely Japanese philosophy? We're joined today by Thomas Kasulis. Thomas is Professor of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. He's the author of a number of books, including Shinto: The Way Home, and the forthcoming, Engaging Japanese Philosophy.

Thomas Kasulis, thanks for joining us. Now there was a debate in Japan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries about whether pre-modern Japanese thought was philosophy, wasn't there? And the most influential of the disclaimers was Nakae Chomin. What was his argument?

Thomas Kasulis: Well actually he had three arguments. One was that what had occurred in Japanese thought before his time was namely interpreting the ideas of the past, and not doing very much creative thinking. So it was sort of bogged down in kind of sectarian ruminations about other sectarian ideas.

His second point was that philosophy should be theoretical and not practical. It will tell us about human value, but from a very theoretical standpoint, and he thought that much of the thinking in Japan, in a pre-modern period, was practical, rather than theoretical.

And lastly, he said that philosophy must be divorced from what he called religious beliefs. And he said that most of the philosophising in Japan, the pre-modern period, was linked to religion.

I want to sort of frame a couple of points here though, about this. First of all, he didn't say just that pre-modern Japan didn't have philosophy. He didn't think there was any philosophy going on even in his own time in Japan. That point is often lost. Secondly, from my standpoint of looking at the history of Japanese philosophy, I find it peculiar that his name comes up so often, and particularly his statement about there being no philosophy in pre-modern Japan, because Nakae was One, not a philosopher; he took some philosophy courses while he was in France, along with history and language courses. Two, he never taught philosophy. Three, if you look in any biography in any kind of source, Japanese or Western, they'll say he was a journalist and a political activist. And so it would be a little bit like saying Well, what did Cicero say about philosophy? Well Cicero said about philosophy that there isn't a single absurd idea that some philosopher has not advocated.

Alan Saunders: Well he was right there.

Thomas Kasulis: Well he might well be, but the point is that very few philosophy books start with that. That's the first question. So I find it a little bit amusing that we start with Nakae.

Alan Saunders: But despite his own lack of philosophical credentials, was he part of a debate in that period?

Thomas Kasulis: Absolutely, yes. In fact maybe if you would like, let me mention two other figures into debates. You get an idea of the spectrum that might be a useful way to locate his position. Inoue Tetsujiro was the most prominent academic philosopher in Japan. By 'academic philosopher' I mean he had credentials from studying philosophy in Germany, and he was one of the founders of the philosophy department in Tokyo Imperial University. He believed that what philosophy was about was the building of character and insight based on rational understanding of the way the world is, and how we should relate to each other socially. So he explicitly said that all the Confucian philosophy in its 300 previous years, was philosophy. And he wrote books about them, and he used the word 'philosophy' to refer to them. He was not so fond of Buddhism, but that's another story.

Now let's talk about a third figure who was a Buddhist, same family name anyway, but no relation, Inoue Enryo. Now Inoue Enryo had a very different idea of philosophy, because he addressed very specifically the idea of the relation between philosophy and religion, and what he said was that philosophy and religion are like two overlapping circles. Philosophy deals with what is knowable and religion deals with what is unknowable. Philosophy deals with intellect and thought; religion deals with emotions and feelings. Philosophy uses logic, religion uses faith. But his point was that they are overlapping circles because certainly he said, You will find people reflecting and using logic and thinking about ideas within a religious context and also you have philosophers talking about the unknowable and speculating about the ultimate structures of the universe.

In a way that was sort of the most commonsensical approach to it, and so he said that, Let's not be too worried about saying whether it is philosophy or religion, because parts of philosophy are religious and parts of religion are philosophical.

Alan Saunders: Well that certainly seems a rather more nuanced view that Nakae's.

Japan throughout its history has borrowed from foreign ideas and two of the major traditions that had influenced Japan that you've just mentioned, are Confucianism and Buddhism. When they made the transition to Japan, did they become Japanised? Were they changed to a significant degree?

Thomas Kasulis: Yes, basically enough so that when I first was studying Japanese Studies back in the late '60s and early '70s, many of the textbooks would, page after page in talking about the Confucianists or the Buddhists in Japan saying, Well the Japanese misinterpreted Confucianism and they said this. And the idea there was is that it took a little time for the scholars to catch on, that they actually knew what they were doing: they were changing the tradition to make it fit more their point of view. So it wasn't that they misunderstood Confucianism or Buddhism, is that they knowingly changed it. And in various ways.

For example, one of the things that's stronger in Japanese Confucianism than Chinese Confucianism, and these are huge generalities. We have to remember that there was many kinds of Confucianism as they are Christianity for example. But one of the differences that we see is in a Japanese context, the affective, the emotive aspect, is more strongly pronounced than in most of the Confucians from China. That is, Japanese found it very difficult to talk about anything that was intellectual without some kind of affective side to it. So that we care about what we think, and we think about what we care about. And so therefore to talk about thought independently from feeling, they thought was a rather strange thing. And whenever they encountered that, whether it was in Buddhism of Confucianism, we can find a subtle change going on in the Japanese context.

Alan Saunders: Would it be correct to say that while Confucianism provided a hierarchical model for social and political order, Buddhism actually with its emphasis on disciplined contemplation and introspective analysis, that sounds like the sort of thing the Japanese would like. Did it help to define the Japanese sense of the inner self?

Thomas Kasulis: Very much so. And in fact Buddhism played that same role in China to a certain extent as well. The inner self, what we might call philosophical psychology, was basically something that the Indian tradition was very strong in all of its traditions, and when Buddhism came from India to China, this was something that the Chinese really latched on to and enriched. And in Japan, I think it works pretty much the way that you've characterised it, that that social structure, what we might call kind of a social responsibility, everything from the idea of etiquette to ethics usually has a kind of Confucian basis, whereas understanding of either the inner self, or even to a certain extent the idea of what reality is like, that it's impermanent for example, lacking in substantiality, always in flux, are contributions of Buddhism to the way most Japanese think about things.

Alan Saunders: When you wrote to us here at The Philosopher's Zone about your forthcoming book, Engaging Japanese Philosophy you use a nice analogy that I'd like to repeat here: 'The easiest way to think of the difference between Western and Japanese philosophy is to ask who better knows clay, the geologist or the potter?' Now for the most part, modern Western philosophy sides with the geologist. While for the most part Japanese philosophers have studied with the Potter. Both traditions recognise both kinds of knowing, but there is a marked difference in emphasis as to which is the more profound.

Thomas Kasulis: That's right, and that's why I call the book Engaging Japanese Philosophy because I think that in modern Western, mediaeval Western is kind of interestingly different in some ways, and some ways also the ancient traditions, or some of them, but in the modern West, what we might consider from 1600 on and certainly since the enlightenment, from 1800 on, that Western model has been one of objectivity, detachment, observation, and logical reflection. Whereas in many cases Japan's model has been one of engagement.

Both traditions agree that both are kinds of knowing, I think. I don't think there's any problem there. But the issue is which is the really important kind of knowing? And I think this goes back through in the Ancient Greeks where they thought there was a big difference between episteme kind of knowledge, epistemology kind of knowledge, in wisdom, 'sophia,' and this runs throughout the mediaeval tradition. But as 'philosophia', philosophy, gets into this modern period in the West, it tends to be something more like philo-episteme or something, and becomes a wissenschaft.

And I think this is actually - we always have to look at the historical context - when Berlin University set up the curriculum that is basically the model for curriculum in universities almost everywhere now in the world, the way we have departments and specialisations and so forth, the idea was that every department should be a wissenschaft, a science, a study of something. And so philosophy because of that, being a department became no longer this sort of meta thing about what wisdom do we gather from all these kinds of knowledge, but became a kind of knowledge itself. And what was its object? In the West it increasingly became perception, language and logical categories. And that's what, it's sort of logic-ology.

Alan Saunders: Well let's look at a particular, I suppose we could call it a practical form of knowledge, or perhaps it would be better to say a moral code: one area where Buddhist and Confucian ideas were combined was in the idealised code of the samurai warrior, or 'bushido'. Now they're Confucian virtues and a Zen Buddhist emphasis on discipline and regimentation, are combined to create an idealised way of living, even for non-samurai, and even in times of peace. So first of all, what exactly is bushido? What constitutes bushido?

Thomas Kasulis: This is another one of those unfortunately the back story has to somehow contextualise it. It means literally, the way of the warrior. It's meant to be the kind code of ethics that the samurai class embodied and valorised. Now the problem that comes up is that this whole idea of this being some kind of distinct tradition for Samurai, independently of other things, and sort of a tradition of its own, really does not come about until around 1900. And in fact if there is any one sort of starting point we can point to in it, it was the book by Nitobe Inazo written, interestingly, in English called Bushido: The Soul of Japan in 1899. And within a couple of years after that, Inue Tesojiro, the man I have already mentioned before, came out with his book in Japanese called Bushido. And from that point on, there was the idea that Oh well, there actually was a system here, a moral system that the Samurai believed in, and it was a system of accepting death and being fearless in the face of death. In fact a first line from an early text called The Leafy Shadows written in 1716, the first line says 'To be a samurai is to die', and the idea was that if you go into battle and think of yourself as already dead, then you'll be able to fight fearlessly and with concentration, because you fear nothing. So that's one value. The other value was loyalty and a third value is honour. And those three things certainly those were values among the samurai, but they were values among a lot of people in Japan, but it's only in the sort of 20th century reconstruction of Japan's past that they get sort of formalised as some kind of code of the warrior who supposedly goes back to ancient times.

Alan Saunders: Rightly or wrongly, these warrior ethics have become very prominent in the Western imagination, and that may be the fault of the Japanese authors you mentioned. It figures in how we think for example, about Japanese soldiers, especially in World War II, and even the Japanese population more broadly. Have Westerners misunderstood samurai ethics and their place in the broader culture?

Thomas Kasulis: Somewhat, but not as much as you might think, because what happened is, after those books came out in Japan, that was the time that Japan was modernising, establishing public education for all children and they wrote morality books. Morality was a subject that one studied in school. And the morality was based on these guys' formulation of what the samurai ethics were, and the way of the samurai. So all these kids grew up from the early 1900s all the way to 1945 thinking that this is what makes Japanese Japanese, this is how the values we should have, whether we're working in peacetime or as warriors, and so that in fact it became legitimately a characteristic of the way the Japanese think about themselves and about behaviour.

Alan Saunders: Well, we've been talking about world views. I want to look now at the indigenous philosophy of Japan. In many ways, Shinto was overshadowed by Buddhist and Confucian thought, but around the 18th century, there was a revival with the development of native studies. The scholar Motoori Norinaga was the driving force behind his. Can you tell us a little about him and his thinking?

Thomas Kasulis: Yes. He was first of all religiously strongly Shinto, down to the point of he believed that his parents who didn't have a child had prayed every day at a Shinto shrine and out of that he was born and seeing his very birth as sort of an act of the kami, or the gods. But the thing about him, in terms of sort of his thinking, is that he was trained as a philologist and a great scholar of the earliest forms of Japanese literature, much of which had been written in a writing system that most Japanese, in fact 99% of Japanese could have no idea what it said. And he sort of decoded this ancient language as a philologist and did remarkable work. But the reason he did this was, and this goes back to sort of his philosophical ideas, is that because he believed that language when it starts, is somehow this kind of conferring with reality, rather than referring to it. And if we could get at the original sense of what words meant, we could feel this kind of animistic immersion in what he called kokoro, a traditional Japanese word.

Kokoro is a kind of responsiveness that's built into everything. We are responsive, things are responsive, and even words are responsive. So that when we write a poem, it's somehow the coming together of my responsiveness, the subject matter's responsiveness, and the word's responsiveness. And this idea that became a basis for both his aesthetics and religious point of view, is that what we have to do is engage in this kind of responsive field, so that we can confer with and express reality with reality.

Alan Saunders: Well it sounds as though kokoro is not a word that lends itself to easy translation.

Thomas Kasulis: That's right. I mean the best I could do if I have to translate it, and I usually try not to, is to call it something like either a field of responsiveness, or from the personal standpoint of a person would be something like the mindful heart. So that there's the mist on the mountain, and you have to be aware of that mist, be mindful of it, and the mist is calling out to be expressed, and you have to be open to doing that, and then somehow the words come to you of their own.

Alan Saunders: Would you say that he thought that kokoro was the essence of Shinto and of being Japanese?

Thomas Kasulis: Yes. It's the essence of Shinto but it's also the essence of human. He believes everybody has kokoro. However, the Japanese have been fortunate, he says, and somehow, and he gives historical reasons of sort of by chance being able to preserve this tradition. So Japanese should be able to express this, and when other people see it, they will naturally resonate with it and it will become an idea that all people will recognise as part of their humanness.

Alan Saunders: So for the first time now, Shinto becomes a major intellectual force in Japanese society?

Thomas Kasulis: Right. And right after him, in this succession of people, this very quickly gets tied into as you were implying, ethnocentricity, and the Japanese as being special, and the Japanese as being better. Norinaga just said the Japanese were different, in fact he even said it was because 'we so stupidly wrote these things down in a language we couldn't read, that it ended up being preserved.' Because every time there's a sacred text and somebody re-copies it, they change it a little to make it make more sense and fit their ideas. But we wrote it down so it was like a time capsule we were able to open up back to the very beginning of time.

Alan Saunders: Just finally talking about the uniqueness of Japan, or the Japanese perception of their culture as being unique, you write that 'understanding goes beyond knowing, it includes feeling and imagination, the capacity to project ourselves into the place of the Japanese, to imagine at least for a fleeting moment, what it is like to be Japanese'. What have you come to understand about the philosophy of the Japanese, and in fact have you managed to imagine what it is like to be Japanese?

Thomas Kasulis: Good question. First of all, before we get too caught up in the Japanese situation, I mean I have to be able to imagine a little bit about what you are like for me just to be able to have a conversation with you. We use imagination all the time to think about people who are different from us. So this is not some kind of special quality, this is something we do on an everyday level.

However, when we're dealing with something as different from us as Japanese culture, it takes extra effort and I think this is what's behind your question. How do you do that? Because for example, in my book on Shinto, Shinto - The Way Home, what I say there is that yes, I'm not Shinto, and I don't particularly want to be Shinto and most Shinto people don't want me to be Shinto. However, I can in certain circumstances, feel Shinto, and then I have a list of experiences I've had outside Japan. I mean seeing a sunset over the Rocky Mountains and feeling a sense of awe, and that there's something here and is the sun out there - no, I'm not a scientific observer of the sunset, there was a kind of field there of responsiveness and inter-responsiveness. As a kid walking by a cemetery at night and the hairs of my neck stand up to a creepy sound in it. That's also a kind of awe, and Shinto also valorises and emphasises those kinds of experiences.

So how Shinto people feel, they're not something that's so different from how we feel. The object is quite different. As I like to say, my wife's favourite food is chocolate, and my favourite food is popcorn. Now chocolate is nothing like popcorn, but I can understand her feeling to the extent of, I know what it is to have a favourite food. And that's the point at which we can use our imagination, not in the what of Shinto, but in the how of Shinto, we can relate to the how of experiences in our lives, and that's how we can connect.

And what my study of Japan has done for me and my own thinking, is that because Japanese have emphasised this so strongly, these affects and fields and so forth, it has given me in my own thinking, a philosophical vocabulary for talking about things for which we don't have a very good philosophical vocabulary in our own language: words like kokoro.

Sometimes I've said I've actually been able to experience some feelings that I could not have experienced if I had not studied Japan. The feeling of 'mono no aware', a kind of sad poignancy of the passing of things, that's positive, you know seeing the cherry blossoms blow away in the wind is a sort of classic Japanese example of that.

I before that would see the changing of the leaves in my backyard and think how wonderful that was, and wouldn't it be nice if they were always that colourful and how great it was. And the idea of seeing them fall on the ground gave me a kind of sadness, but not this positive sadness; of the reason why I appreciate the changing of the leaves is because it is impermanent, because it only lasts for a while. And that there are Japanese words for all of those things has enriched my understanding of that and my ability to think about it in my own mind and talk about it and even try to find ways to talk about it in English.

Alan Saunders: Thomas Kasulis, thank you very much.

Thomas Kasulis: Thank you.

Alan Saunders: Thomas Kasulis is Professor of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. He's the author of a number of books including Shinto - The Way Home and the forthcoming Engaging Japanese Philosophy.

For more about this program or to listen to any of our past shows go to our website. And don't miss next week's show on the philosophy of that very Japanese art form, anime.

PROMO: Mankind, you are an ignorant race; how foolish it is to believe that your kind rules the earth. Know now that you are not alone.

Alan Saunders: This week's show was produced by Jeanavive McGregor and Charlie McKune was the sound engineering samurai. And I'm Alan Saunders.

MUSIC Yoshida Brothers