Learning Contemporary Philosophy from Another Angle Comparing the Consistent and the Non-Consistent — Contemporary Philosophy through a Japan–West Cultural Contrast — Neo-Japonism / Neo-Art Nouveau “Ki” and “Aether” that seep into and fill the gaps of heart, spirit, and sensibility — From the Opposition of Logos and Non-Logos —

Learning Contemporary Philosophy from Another Angle Comparing the Consistent and the Non-Consistent — Contemporary Philosophy through a Japan–West Cultural Contrast — Neo-Japonism / Neo-Art Nouveau “Ki” and “Aether” that seep into and fill the gaps of heart, spirit, and sensibility — From the Opposition of Logos and Non-Logos — Introduction: An Alternative Route into Contemporary Philosophy As an entry point into contemporary philosophy, the most important things are post-structuralist relativism and meta-cognition. These are conceptually simple and not too hard to learn. For many people, the real tough nut is structuralism. If you don’t understand structuralism, contemporary philosophy remains at the level of abstract slogans and doesn’t easily connect to concrete analysis or practice. Conversely, once structuralism “clicks,” your way of seeing the world changes dramatically. That said, learning structuralism head-on from textbooks tends to be dry and feels a bit like “ascetic training.” So in this essay I’d like to approach contemporary philosophy from a slightly different route. The theme is simple: Let’s divide the world into “consistent things” and “non-consistent things” and see what we learn. “Consistent things” can be rephrased as logos-like or rational things. “Non-consistent things” are not just contradictions in the strict logical sense, but also everything that does not fit neatly into the yardstick of consistency/contradiction in the first place. Using this simple two-way split, I’ll try to look again at contemporary philosophy—especially structuralism and post-structuralism—through the lens of the cultural differences between Japan and the West. 1. “Consistent Things” and “Non-Consistent Things” The phrase “non-consistent things” sounds roundabout. One might ask: “Why not just say ‘contradictory things’?” We could say that—but then the entire world gets trapped inside the single category of “contradiction.” By saying “non-consistent,” I want to include: Things that are literally contradictory, and Things for which the framework of “consistency vs. contradiction” itself is not the right lens. In other words, “consistent things” form one cluster, and “non-consistent things” means: everything else. This attitude—refusing to too easily accept the Law of the Excluded Middle and the comfort of neat binary partitions—was already present in ancient India in the Buddha’s time (the so-called “Axial Age” in Karl Jaspers’ sense, when many kinds of thought blossomed in India, China, and ancient Greece). Early Buddhist schools, for example, often used expressions like “non-non-X” or “non-non-existence,” consciously playing at the edge of logical simplification. In this essay I will often use the parallel pair: Logos-like things vs. Non-logos-like things (rhetorical, affective, atmospheric, etc.) as a more intuitive label set for “consistent / non-consistent.” 2. Western Modernity’s Chronic Disease: “Losing the Heart” To see what “modernity” is, it’s useful to look at societies that are in the middle of becoming modern. One of the best lenses is Dostoevsky—both the man and his novels. Dostoevsky’s works can be summed up in one phrase: The conflict between the modern and the non-modern. To read him properly, it helps to read good commentaries (for example, books that “decode” Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov), as well as Mikhail Bakhtin’s famous ideas of the carnival and polyphony. In Dostoevsky’s novels, we repeatedly meet people possessed by ideology: Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment Stavrogin in Demons Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov Or even Prince Myshkin in The Idiot People who have been swallowed by a certain ideology become, in a sense, inhuman. This is one of the great themes of modern and contemporary history. Even today, we can see politicians, commentators, and pundits whose faces look somehow different from how they used to. There are many reasons, of course, but some of them may be people whose humanity—the soft part we might simply call “heart”—has been hollowed out by an ideology that has taken over. You may also have people around you of whom you quietly think: “You weren’t like this when you were younger…” 3. Japan and the West as Civilizations: “Heart-Oriented” vs “Heart-Suppressing” Very roughly, we can draw a contrast between Japanese and Western cultures: A culture that pushes the heart vs. A culture that suppresses the heart Of course, things are not that simple, nor should we oversimplify them. Japanese culture has many TPOs where emotions must be controlled; Western culture also has scenes where the heart is expressed and valued. But at a deep level, there is such a tendency in the cultural “base layer.” In Japan, there is a tendency to accept and follow what is felt in the moment—the feeling that wells up. In Western culture, there is an underlying principle: when what you feel conflicts with a rule or principle, you must suppress or negate it. If we radically simplify the image: The inside of a Japanese person is full of feelings, fleeting impressions, and emotional movements. The inside of a typical Western person is full of God and rules/texts (ideology). Everything else is, so to speak, vacuum. Why vacuum? Because various systems—religious, social, psychological—work to forbid emotional immersion in anything other than the one God: The ban on idolatry The rule that nothing other than the one God may be regarded as sacred The strict separation between the Creator and the created world: you must not treat created things as sacred There is also a more “pastoral” explanation: the psychology of pastoralists and herders. You cannot afford deep emotional attachment to livestock when you must: Sell them Kill them Eat them Use their bodies as material for daily life If you reacted to livestock as you do to pets or fellow humans, life would become impossible. So emotional restraint in relation to “things” becomes a survival tactic—and then a culture. In any case, constantly running this kind of distinction in everyday life makes one’s inner world materialistic in a certain sense. From this perspective: Marx, whose grandfather was a rabbi and who grew up in the trajectory of Jewish emancipation and modernization, did not have to invent materialism from scratch. The strongly text-centered, rule-centered forms of Judaism and Protestantism are already deeply materialistic in how they treat the world. By contrast, Catholicism permits icons and saints, and in some respects it is closer to Japanese sensibility among the Christian traditions. So, when Protestantism, rationalized Christianity, and modernized Judaism start to exert influence, their worldview can feel sharply opposed to Japanese sensibilities. 4. Western Culture: Materialist and Ideological Let’s call an idea that has been made as logical and explicit as possible an ideology. Not everything is rigorously formalized as in modern symbolic logic. But ideology is a cluster of thought that aspires to consistency and clear articulation. Seen that way, ideology is about the content and types of logos. Our world is built out of many ideologies: Politics, law, institutions Religion, ethics, morality Science, technology, industry And even many forms of art and cultural theory These often appear with suffixes like “-ism”, “-ism/-ization”, “-law”, “-principle”, “-doctrine”, “-theory”, “-logic” and so on. Where ideologies function as logos, they tend to aim at consistency. They are the “hard” parts of what we call human nature and society. Ideology = representative of the consistent layer Everything else in the mental and social world = non-consistent layer Research on consistent things can rely on powerful tools like logic and foundational mathematics. In recent decades, however, logic itself has developed systems that explicitly deal with inconsistency: Paraconsistent logic Dialetheic logic Relevance logic Many-valued logic Non-monotonic logic Paracomplete logics Knowledge-base-oriented extensions Fuzzy logic, etc. From this angle, we could say: Logic handles the consistent layer. These non-standard logics are attempts to touch the non-consistent layer within the realm of thought. But even then, what is handled is still thought, not emotion or desire. In that sense, thinking—especially the kind that pursues consistency—is easier to handle than affectivity. Everything that doesn’t fit neatly into this consistent layer—feelings, affects, impulses, atmospheres—gets pushed into the “non-consistent” side. 5. The World Is Built Around the “Consistent” as Protagonist The human mind and human society are both constructed around non-contradictory things—or at least things that aspire to be non-contradictory. Perhaps that is because we instinctively want to put “truth” and “justice” in that role. The Bible, taking over the Greek philosophical tradition, boldly declares at the beginning of John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word (Logos).” In other words: God is Logos. For Japanese people, this line can feel deeply alien. Western civilization, with the Bible and Greek philosophy as its OS, tries to construct and analyze the world with logos. Individual pieces of logos are ideologies; thus logocentrism is also ideology-centrism. Logos values consistency, coherence, and non-contradiction. Ideology inherits this hardness. It becomes: Truth Justice Authority This is why, in rabbinic Judaism, Pharisees—professional interpreters of scripture—were so powerful, and why Jesus, who spoke “with authority,” was such a scandal. Logos-centrism + materialism is one way to describe Western modernity from a Japanese vantage point. 6. When “Heretics” Become the Mainstream: Japan’s Peculiarity Of course, Western civilization is not only materialist and ideology-centric. It also has rich non-logos layers. Likewise, no human society exists without ideology. Any group with language and culture will develop some kind of hard structure—its “bones.” What is striking about Japan, however, is this: That which is heretical in the West often becomes orthodox in Japan. For example, in the Western tradition, there is a very strong tabu against projecting feelings into objects—against treating anything other than God as sacred. In Japan, by contrast, projecting feelings into things, empathizing with things, infusing them with heart is given primary value. This applies to people, nature, tools, and sometimes even concepts. In other words, what Western modernity labeled as “superstition,” “idolatry,” or “irrationality” is treated in Japan as: Primary Foundational Desirable This is precisely what is now drawing the world’s attention. The world that we feel to be “so Japanese” may be made up of the “feel” (non-logos) that fills the gaps between Western structures (logos) —along with various forms of “authorized non-sense” that were historically marginalized or deemed heretical in the West. 7. Logos and the Non-Logos That Fills Its Gaps The world can be roughly divided into: Logos-like things, and Non-logos-like things. Logos-like things have clear shape and are easy to see. They are: Laws, systems, religious doctrines Scientific theories Ideologies with “-ism”, “-law”, “-principle”, “-doctrine”, “-theory” attached Non-logos-like things are the media that fill the gaps: Air Aether Dao (Tao) Emptiness (śūnyatā) Mood Ba (場, “the field” or “situation”) They seep into spaces where logos is absent and quietly fill them. In this sense, the world has no vacuum: wherever logos is not, some kind of non-logos is already present. If we look through the lens of Gestalt psychology’s Rubin vase: Figure = Logos (systems, rules, theories) Ground = Non-logos (field, air, mood) —training yourself to reverse figure and ground allows you to acquire a completely different worldview. 8. Logos-Centered West, Non-Logos-Rich Japan The heirs of biblical and ancient Greek culture—today’s Western civilization—have relentlessly developed the figure side: theology, law, political philosophy, modern science, contract theory. All of these are attempts to give the world sharp contours through words. Japan, on the other hand, has thickened the ground side: Less “explicit assertion,” more “air.” Less “logical debate,” more “atmosphere of the situation.” Less “contract document,” more “unspoken mutual understanding.” Typical examples are: Sentence-final particles like ne, yo, sa, kana They don’t add new information; they adjust the temperature and distance in the conversation. Onomatopoeia like kachi-, fuwatto, jinwari They fill the gaps of logos with exceedingly fine-grained sensibility. Honorifics/keigo Even when subject and object are omitted, keigo can still conjure up who is treating whom how and what kind of field/ba is present. From a linguistics viewpoint, Japanese honorifics overlap with: Voice (active, passive, middle) Mood (indicative, imperative, subjunctive/irrealis, etc.) In older grammar books, some of what are now called “humble/exalted” or “deferential/polite/beautifying” forms were lumped together under labels like “respectful-style honorifics.” In newer frameworks, we explicitly distinguish: Respect language Humble language Polite language Deferential language Beautifying language That is, beyond “speaker” and “hearer,” “subject” and “object,” there is also something like a field/ba that is being tuned. Some honorific forms do not so much raise or lower persons as polish the atmosphere itself. All this suggests: Japanese language and culture have long specialized in handling the non-logos, field-like layer that surrounds explicit logos. 9. Why Is the World Now “Accepting” Japan? Why the current “Japan boom”? There are many factors, but one big reason may be this: The inner worlds of Japanese people and people in Western cultures have moved much closer together. In our earlier terms: The Japanese inner world is filled with heart in a broad sense. Not only empathy for humans, but also affect toward non-human and even non-living things—sometimes even toward abstract entities. These are not logos, not “words” or “ideology.” They are: Non-consistent, Or things we don’t usually evaluate in terms of consistency at all, Or the miscellaneous “everything else” that fills our mental life. They do not need consistency, coherence, stability, uniqueness, or identity. They are not protagonists, but rather air, background, environment, field. In quantum field theory, a “field” is something that pervades spacetime, from which particles appear and disappear. If we map this onto our theme: Particles = ideologies (hard logos) Field = non-logos, the atmospheric “everything else” Because the field is everywhere, it is rarely noticed. It has no “scarcity,” so economics wouldn’t count it. It is, as with air and safety, something we only notice when it is missing. What seems to be happening now is: Western culture has stopped so rigidly denying this field-like, “heart” layer. Pure, doctrinaire strands of scriptural monotheism demanded a kind of materialist inner life: nothing but God is sacred, everything else is “just stuff.” That tradition will not vanish overnight. But it was only about a thousand years of history; before Christianity, pre-Christian Europe might actually have had a deep layer of culture quite compatible with today’s Japanese sensibility. Books like Sophie's World, and many other histories and introductions to Western thought, have given Western readers tools to look at their own tradition more relativistically. They can now see Christianity and their own logos-centrism from the outside. On the Japanese side, we have also internalized a great deal of Western logos: Materialism Monotheism-like respect for a single principle A willingness to separate “heart/affect” from “thinking/acting” During the high-growth era, we sometimes “monetized” Japanese-ness and Japanese tradition. During the “lost decades,” under US-led globalization and neoliberalism, those who survived and thrived often had “psychopathic” traits in the neutral sense: the ability to separate affect from decision-making. In that process, the mentality of Japanese elites grew closer to Western patterns. At the same time, the global appetite for “otaku culture” can be seen as a reaction against globalism and neoliberalism: A hunger for expressions driven by deep, non-rational passion and obsession, which do not fit into simple monetary rationality. In that climate, Japanese cultural exports—anime, games, subcultures, and the peculiar mixture of logos and non-logos that underlies them—are being welcomed not only as “exotic” goods but with genuine empathy. 10. Contemporary Philosophy as a Tool to Read This Situation If we summarize this whole story in the language of contemporary philosophy: The Western tradition is logos-centric, Ideology-centric, Materialist in its everyday spiritual hygiene. Japanese culture has cultivated the non-logos field, The atmospheric, The affective and relational “everything else”. We live in an age when: The Western side is beginning to relativize its own logos-centrism, and The Japanese side has taken in a great deal of logos/ideology as well. The result is a strange and fertile in-between zone: The consistent and the non-consistent, Logos and non-logos, Ideology and field, Heart-suppressing systems and heart-pushing sensibilities are now forced to co-exist inside each of us. To navigate this, we need exactly what contemporary philosophy offers: Structuralism: tools for analyzing and mapping the hard skeletons of ideology and logos. Post-structuralism and Buddhist emptiness (śūnyatā): tools for relativizing, loosening, and re-placing those structures. And above all, meta-cognition: the habit of watching how our own mind flips between figure and ground. In this essay, I have proposed one extremely simple device: Look at the world as made of “consistent things” and “non-consistent things,” and notice which side you have been unconsciously privileging. Once you do that, Japanese culture and Western culture no longer appear as opposites or curiosities, but as: Two different ways of tuning the ratio between logos and non-logos, between ideology and field. And from there, a more supple, 21st-century version of “Neo-Japonism” and “Neo-Art Nouveau” may begin—not as a design trend, but as a way of living that lets logos and non-logos breathe together.