“Kusamakura” by Natsume Soseki (translated by Meredith McKinney)

This short novel by Soseki is narrated by an artist, who is the only visitor to a hot spring inn up in the mountains far off from his home in Tokyo. “Yes, here among these mountains, in immediate contact with the phenomena of the natural world, everything I see and hear is intriguing for me. No special suffering can arise from simply being beguiled like this—at worst, surely, it is tired legs and the fact that I can’t eat fine food…. But why is there no suffering here? Simply because I see this scenery as a picture; I read it as a set of poems. Seeing it thus, as painting or poetry, I have no desire to acquire the land and cultivate it, or to put a railway through it and make a profit. This scenery—scenery that adds nothing to the belly or the pocket—fills the heart with pleasure simply as scenery, and this is surely why there is neither suffering nor anxiety in the experience…. If I picture myself, a sodden figure moving in this vast ink-wash world of cloud and rain shot through diagonally with a thousand silver arrows, not as myself but as some other person, there’s poetry in this moment.”

The unnamed narrator spends much of his time on his retreat contemplating life, worldly attachments, and the beauty of art, “While we live in this world with its daily business, forced to walk the tightrope of profit and loss, true love is an empty thing, and the wealth before our eyes mere dust. The reputation we grasp at, the glory that we seize, is surely like the honey that the cunning bee will seem sweetly to brew only to leave his sting within it as he flies. What we call pleasure in fact contains all suffering, since it arises from attachment. Only thanks to the existence of the poet and the painter are we able to imbibe the essence of this dualistic world, to taste the purity of its very bones and marrow. The artist feasts on mists, he sips the dew, appraising this hue and assessing that, and he does not lament the moment of death.”

At a tea ceremony at the inn, the narrator meets his host’s young nephew, who is about to depart to the war in Manchuria, “I’ve been mistaken to assume that in this little village in the spring, so like a dream or a poem, life is a matter only of the singing birds, the falling blossoms, and the bubbling springs. The real world has crossed mountains and seas and is bearing down even on this isolated village, whose inhabitants have doubtless lived here in peace down the long stretch of years ever since they fled as defeated warriors from the great clan wars of the twelfth century. Perhaps a millionth part of the blood that will dye the wide Manchurian plains will gush from this young man’s arteries, or seethe forth at the point of the long sword that hangs at his waist. Yet here this young man sits, beside an artist for whom the sole value of human life lies in dreaming.”

Finally, our narrator contemplates the life of the aesthete, “Only by bringing myself to this unknown mountain village and steeping myself deep in its late spring world have I at last found within me the attitude of the pure artist. Once I have crossed this frontier, all the beauties of the earth become mine. Though no drop of paint nor iota of brushstroke ever meets the pure white canvas before me, I am nevertheless an artist of the highest order. I grant I do not equal Michelangelo in artistry, nor Raphael in skill, but my artist’s soul can take its place alongside those of the great men of antiquity, proud and equal. I have not made a single painting since arriving, indeed I almost feel that to have brought the painting box along at all was a mere whim. And you call yourself a painter? you may say with a sneer. But sneer though you may, I am for the present a true artist, a magnificent artist.”

“Hojoki” by Kamo no Chomei (translated by Meredith McKinney)

Written at the beginning of the thirteenth century by a Buddhist monk in Japan, who had retreated to a hut on the outskirts of the capital, Kyoto, this is an extremely short treatise on the ways of life. “Death in the morning, at evening another birth—this is the way of things, no different from the bubbles on the stream.” Chomei was originally born into a family with a lineage of Shinto priests, but, through a series of misfortunes, lost most of his wealth and took the tonsure to become a Buddhist monk fairly late in life. Instead of joining a monastery, he set off into the woods to build a solitary hut and live a life alone, reciting sutras, playing musical instruments, and writing. “All human undertaking is folly, but it is most particularly futile to spend your wealth and trouble your peace of mind by building a house in the perilous capital.”

One of Chomei’s major themes is the Buddhist concept of impermanence, “Indeed there are not a few aids to my meditations. In spring I gaze upon swathes of wisteria, which hang shining in the west like the purple clouds that bear the soul to heaven. In summer I hear the song of the hototogisu, and at each call he affirms his promise to lead me over the mountain path of death. In autumn the voice of the cricket fills my ears, a sound that seems to sorrow over a fleeting life so soon cast off. In winter, the snow fills me with pathos. The sight of it piling high only to melt and vanish is like the mounting sins that block our path to redemption, which penitence will erase.”

Finally, much of Chomei’s essay concerns the physical description of his dwelling, “My mere passing shelter has remained tranquil and safe from fears. Small it may be, but there is a bed to sleep on at night, and a place to sit in the daytime. As a simple place to house myself, it lacks nothing. The hermit crab prefers a little shell for his home. He knows what the world holds. The osprey chooses the wild shoreline, and this is because he fears mankind. And I too am the same. Knowing what the world holds and its ways, I desire nothing from it, nor chase after its prizes. My one craving is to be at peace, my one pleasure to live free of troubles…. I love my tiny hut, my lonely dwelling. When I chance to go down into the capital, I am ashamed of my lowly beggar status, but once back here again I pity those who chase after the sordid rewards of the world.”

“Also A History of Philosophy Vol. 3” by Jurgen Habermas (translated by Ciaran Cronin)

Habermas’ final edition to his history of philosophy begins with the Scottish philosopher, David Hume. “By consistently maintaining that our only contact with the world is through our impressions, Hume makes short shrift of the concept of these two substances – mind and matter…. Hume uses subtle arguments to show that, under empiricist premises, the primary qualities ascribed to bodies in space and time as objective – i.e. the properties of motion, extension or weight – can also be traced back to subjective sensations. And just as there is no material substance, so there is no mental substance. If all that is evidently given to us are ephemeral sensory impressions, and if all individual contingent impressions, which are in turn suppressed by other perceptions, are different both from each other and from the objects reflected in them, how can such an impression represent a substance?” Habermas continues by detailing Hume’s skepticism, "The rejection of the substantialization of mind and body is a consequence of Hume’s epistemologically grounded scepticism concerning ontological statements about the constitution of the world…. Hume shares the common-sense notion of a world that exists independently of consciousness, but concerning the intrinsic constitution of which we can only speculate. Scepticism about cognitive access to nature as it is in itself does not forbid us from assuming the existence of nature in everyday life…. Hume aligns the psychology of cognition, which is supposed to explain the subjective conditions of possible knowledge of causal relations – and the meaning of causality itself – with the model of modern empirical science.”

Next, Habermas contrasts Hume with Kant, “Kant continues to treat the question of the human vocation and practical self-understanding as the central problem of philosophy. Now, however, this question has to be answered without the basic concepts of metaphysics and the corresponding fallacious inferences from ‘is’ to ‘ought’…. For him philosophy of religion and enlightenment are one and the same subject…. The enlightened person lives in an awareness of the tension between the indispensability of the exacting demands of reason and the finiteness of his capacities. Kant’s way of thinking is shaped by the unavoidability of this excessive demand on oneself and the awareness that human beings are dependent on the encouragement of their own powers. The centre of gravity of his work, therefore, is the tenacious struggle against the defeatism of reason and the equally tenacious search for stabilization through a ‘rational faith’ that inspires self-confidence…. In order to make room for practical knowledge, this theoretical cognition must be restricted to the realm of objects of possible experience and refrain from answering metaphysical questions, while rational orientation in action, in order to be able to count on justifiable practical knowledge, must be limited to well-defined questions of justice…. The subject can only ascertain the spontaneity of its independent thinking and of the autonomy of its actions in the light of its ‘self-made ideas’ and the laws it gives itself…. For the transcending power of reason, Kant paid the price of an abstract opposition between intelligible and phenomenal nature, an opposition reflected in the noumenal-empirical duality of human nature. This tension inevitably perturbs practical reason, which is now aware not only of its own finitude but also of the resistance of natural motives…. Kant believed that he could establish a ‘faith’ on the basis of practical reason…. With its power to transcend experience, reason first teaches human beings the limits of what they can know theoretically; then, with its normative power, practical reason challenges them to follow the moral law and to use their autonomy to morally overcome the resistance of their inner nature and to work politically to bring about a cosmopolitan condition…. This confirms the point on which a genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking turns: the questions of religion and metaphysics that continue to resonate are, as it were, the tuning fork that produces the triad of rationally justified answers in the subject, who is completely reliant on himself and his ability to think for himself.” Kant states, “So far as morality is based on the conception of the human being as one who is free but who also, just because of that, binds himself through his reason to unconditional laws, it is in need neither of the idea of another being above him in order that he recognize his duty, nor, that he observe it, of an incentive other than the law itself.”

Habermas stresses the roles of culture and language in forming common knowledge, “The emerging economic and social sciences registered the increasing tendency of capitalist economic cycles to develop a life of their own and the emergence of new social classes and class conflicts. These developments reveal the weakness of a philosophy of the subject that was insensitive to the distinctive social-ontological character of the historically experienced reality of symbolically structured lifeworld contexts and had assimilated this reality of society and culture to that of nature as objectified by natural science…. Herder, Schleiermacher and Humboldt took up and developed Johann Georg Hamann’s basic idea that language, viewed as coeval with reason, possesses world-constituting power.”

For Habermas, Hegel is a return of philosophy to the metaphysical realm, “Hegel does not suppress the ritual core of the sacred, but makes the philosophical interpretation of the figure of Jesus – i.e. the earthly embodiment of the one and invisible God in the Son of Man – the fulcrum of the dialectical self-movement of an absolute spirit, which in turn comprises subjective and objective spirit within itself. With this understanding of the incarnation of the absolute as a simultaneously natural and symbolic embodiment, he lays the groundwork for an idealism that appropriates, in an individualizing Christian way, the Plotinian, but performatively interpreted, figure of thought of the self-externalization of the One – and thus merges the ancient understanding of the world with the modern self-understanding influenced by Christianity…. Hegel is the first philosopher to take ‘history’ seriously as the resistant medium in which the formation processes of finite rational beings take place. Starting from crises of social integration, he understands practical reason as a mediating force between the particular and the universal, which also overcomes the divisions [Entzweiungen] of modernity in the ethical figure of the modern constitutional state.”

Perhaps undervalued, and predating Hegel and Herder, Vico also stressed the roles of particularity, culture, and language in forming reason and common knowledge within a peoples, “Vico (1668–1744) had already understood why the social-ontological constitution of the object domain is such that the scientization of history cannot conform to the pattern of the objectification of nature as interpreted by the philosophy of the subject. His bold anti-Cartesian project for a ‘new science’ – the first edition of Vico’s Scienza Nuova appeared in 1725 – emphasizes that the historical formations of society and culture are object domains created by human beings themselves according to their own concepts…. An empirical science of the rise and fall of cultures must not assimilate the conceptually realistic structure of the human world to the nominalist natural scientific conception of nature…. The cultural and social objects of experience encountered in the lifeworld – communication processes, languages, documents, narratives, texts, works of art, styles and general cultural traditions, not to mention artefacts, procedures and technologies, actions, contexts of interaction, conventions, rights and institutions, and organizations and systems – are inherently conceptually structured…. Culture and society consist of symbolic products of subjective mind, congealed into objectivity, so to speak.”

Habermas returns to Hegel, “Hegel is a postmetaphysical thinker insofar as he no longer takes totality as such as his object – in the form of being, or the one, or of God-and-the-world – but conceives it in the shape of the performance [Performanz] of the acts of ‘sublation’ through which all the transitory particularizations and individuations of the universal are mediated in the concrete universal. The universal marks the semantic shape of the contents of thought…. Hegel understands the unity of thoughts and thinking in turn as the cycle of continuous steps of reflection of an all-encompassing subject…. Hegel now transforms the metaphysical idea of the ontological difference between the unifying and inherently infinite totality of that which is, on the one hand, and the many finite entities in the world, on the other, into the idealist notion of a process of reflection that runs through everything that exists in the world; this process in its entirety takes the place of the absolutely one and infinite subject…. He conceives of the comprehension that creates unity in performative terms, as the execution of a logical concatenation of all the individual steps of thought, progressing through affirmation and negation and ending in absolute knowledge.”Hegel, himself, states, “There lies in empiricism this great principle that what is true must exist in actuality and be there for perception. This principle is opposed to the ought, with which reflection inflates itself and looks down on actuality and the present in the name of a beyond, which is supposed to have its seat and existence in subjective understanding alone.”

Habermas stresses the lineage implied by the concept of postmetaphysics, “The genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking will come down to the practical alternative between whether, following the historical traces of the learning process of finite subjects and aware of our fallibility, we can still try to make autonomous use of our reason, guided by self-given norms, in order to retain some shaping practical influence, however exiguous, on our social existence; or whether there is no scope for such an exercise of autonomy, so that we are forced to come to the fatalistic or ‘realistic’ realization that all we can do is use technologically exploitable objectifying scientific knowledge to skillfully adapt given preferences to the self-generated social complexity of uncontrollable systemic contexts…. Under the conditions of postmetaphysical thinking, these two dependencies of which the subjective mind becomes aware in reflection – on its own organism, on the one hand, and on history, culture and society, on the other – stand out against the resistant objective world of sense experience which has always been thematized by the philosophy of the subject…. It experiences its lived bodily [leiblich] existence performatively in an intersubjectively shared sociocultural form of life as a form of dependence on organic and spiritual resources that empowers from behind.”

Finally, Habermas concludes with Peirce and pragmatism, “The idea of a definitive agreement on what is true and what is false, to be reached in the long run, only makes sense if the collective research process itself has characteristics that justify the prospect of a progressive elimination of errors and a cumulative learning process. The spontaneous achievements of the transcendental subject are replaced by the cooperative search for truth by empirical subjects, so that the expectation of a continuous increase in knowledge can only be justified by the procedural rationality of the research process in conjunction with the categorial framework of the language in which reality is represented…. It is crucial for the progress of knowledge that the current generation of the community of investigators is not confronted with a tabula rasa, but is embedded in a context of past interpretations to which it can refer when forming its hypotheses…. The logical framework of the forms of inference is thus intended to regulate a practice consisting of background beliefs, discourses, interpretations and tests in such a way that the unfinished sequence of constantly revised interpretations can be understood as the expression of learning processes of the community of investigators….. This is more reminiscent of the hermeneutic approach, which seeks to gain a better understanding of a text of which we have a prior understanding – to exhaust its potential for meaning more thoroughly.” Peirce states, “The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of an indefinite increase of knowledge.”

“Kokoro” by Natsume Soseki (translated by Meredith McKinney)

This is a short novel about the relationship between a college student who by chance meets an unnamed mentor, whom he only refers to as Sensai. “Now, when he is dead, I understand at last. He had never disliked me, and the occasional curt greetings and aloofness were not expressions of displeasure intended to keep me at bay. I pity him now, for I realize that he was in fact sending a warning, to someone who was attempting to grow close to him, signaling that he was unworthy of such intimacy. For all his unresponsiveness to others’ affection, I now see, it was not them he despised but himself. Needless to say, I returned to Tokyo fully intending to visit Sensei…. I visited Sensei quite often thereafter. He was always at home when I called. And the more I saw of him, the sooner I wanted to visit him again. Yet Sensei’s manner toward me never really changed, from the day we first exchanged words to the time when our friendship was well established. He was always quiet, sometimes almost forlorn. From the outset he seemed to me strangely unapproachable, yet I felt compelled to find a way to get close to him.”

Sensai was a man of leisure and of means, but he was also well-educated. “Sensei was indeed a philosopher, it seemed to me, but a potent reality seemed woven into the fabric of his philosophy. Nor was his thinking grounded in anything remote from himself, observed only in others. No, behind his convictions lay some keenly felt personal experience.”

The last third of the novel takes the form of a letter Sensai writes to his protege, who is away from Tokyo, visiting his dying father in the countryside. “Being, as you know, quite isolated from human intercourse, I have not a single truly binding obligation in my life. Whether intentionally or by nature, I have lived so as to keep such ties to an absolute minimum. Not that I am indifferent to obligation. No, I spend my days so passively because of my very sensitivity to such things—I lack the energy to withstand the toll they take on my nerves.”

Finally, Sensai reveals why he has lived his life in the manner he has chosen, “I resolved that I must live my life as if I were already dead. How many years has it been since I made that decision? My wife and I have lived in peace together all that time. We have in no way been unhappy, quite the opposite. But this one thing in me, this thing that for me is so vital, has always been for my wife a place of incomprehensible darkness. The thought fills me with pity for her…. I have not written from mere personal whim. My past, which made me what I am, is an aspect of human experience that only I can describe. My effort to write as honestly as possible will not be in vain, I feel, since it will help both you and others who read it to understand humanity better.”