Breaking Out of the Octopus Trap of Modernity
Hunting the Giant Octopus of Namekawa in Etchu Province from the woodblock print series Dai Nippon Bussan Zue (大日本物産図会)
Japanese Modernity and Its Discontents II
The ideal of modernity, according to Maruyama Masao, is to live in a society that shares a common intellectual and cultural ground while diversifying social functions through myriad interconnected specializations. He termed this ideal a “sasara-type” society, a type which every modern society had aspired to become and yet failed in different ways outside Europe. Japanese modernity had failed to achieve this ideal, resulting in a society which Maruyama compared to an Octopus-trap (takotsubo).
Maruyama’s solution to this problem is as evasive as an octopus in daylight. He seems to say that all we can do is to wake up to the fact that we are living in this failed “modern” society, and he leaves us with the question of how we can break ourselves away from the self-delusion it creates. In an octopus-trap society, everything seems to have an unshakable foundation of meanings to “us,” but once we step outside the foxhole of our little “world-view,” nobody seems to understand them (like Plato’s philosopher in the Cave). How can we wake up from this dogmatic slumber and evade a tsunami of radical nihilism? In this article, I will look at another famous distinction Maruyama makes, between “to be” (dearuである) and “to do” (suru する), as possible grounds on which to answer these questions.
Post-War Japanese Democracy: “To Be” Must Be Based on “To Do”
Preamble of the Japanese Constitution
In his lecture “On ‘To Be’ and ‘To Do’” (1958), Maruyama diagnoses the confusion of these two terms as the central problem of modern Japan. It is worth noting here that his discussion includes not only “modern” (kindai, 1886-1945) Japan but also Japanese society in the post-war period (sengo or gendai, 1945-present). Maruyama begins his talk with an interpretation of Article 12 from the post-war Japanese constitution:
The freedoms and rights guaranteed to the people by this Constitution shall be maintained by the constant endeavor of the people, who shall refrain from any abuse of these freedoms and rights and shall always be responsible for utilizing them for the public welfare.
This article, Maruyama rightly argues, reflects on the statement about universal human rights in Article 97:
The fundamental human rights by this Constitution guaranteed to the people of Japan are fruits of the age-old struggle of humanity to be free; they have survived the many exacting tests for durability and are conferred upon this and future generations in trust, to be held for all time inviolate.
The freedoms and rights of Japanese people, in other words, presume the world “historical process of achieving them” and are “projected onto the future of Japan.” These articles imply that neither freedoms nor rights are granted to Japanese citizens without conditions. In fact, these articles explicitly point out people’s responsibility as citizens of a democratic nation to think about the historical and existential significance of these rights, and also never to forget what it means for these things to be guaranteed in their society. Stated more bluntly, if they “slumber in rights and freedoms” by taking them for granted, they do not deserve them.
Maruyama’s interpretation of these articles in the Japanese constitution stands as a warning to members of any democratic country: “if we celebrate our society as being free, and while celebrating freedom, it is possible that the substance of this freedom has become empty.” That is to say, rights and freedom are not expected “to be” there like any object we can store in our houses or any slogan we can display on the bumpers of our cars. Only when we try “to do” what makes us free every day are we able “to be” free. We are free, in other words, only when we understand its significance and enact it in our individual and communal life.
Japanese Modernization: Moving away from “To Be” to “To Do”
The fact that such a constitution was established after the Pacific War (with the assistance of the GHQ) shows that Japanese society was not previously built on the principle of “doing.” Maruyama observes that the first Japanese philosopher to recognize this problem was Fukuzawa Yukichi 福沢諭吉 (1835–1901) and cites these lines from the Daily Teaching (1871), which he wrote for his two sons:
Those who do difficult things are called noble people and those who do easy things are called ignoble people. To read books, to think about things, and to do what is beneficial for the people and the world are the difficult things. Now, since the distinction of noble and ignoble derives from the difficulty or easiness of the works that they do, daimyō, kugyō, and samurai show their splendid appearance by riding horses or wearing swords, but their insides are as hollow as empty barrels . . . there are many in the world who idly spend their days. There is no reason to see them as the noble people or people with important status. Only because they have inherited money or food from their ancestors, they are showing their splendid appearance, but their true nature is ignoble people.
Fukuzawa’s teachings here are simply today’s common sense: we must measure the value of people based on their actions rather than their social status. But in pre-modern Japan, this wisdom was not so self-evident. Maruyama argues that in the preceding Tokugawa period, Japanese society was thoroughly built on the principle of “to be.” That is to say, the region or family one came from and the social class one belonged to were the decisive factors for making any value judgment about someone’s character. Under such social-ontological conditions, what we are going “to do” does not carry any conceptual or practical bearing on how others see us, but all depends on what we are seen “to be.”
Interestingly, Maruyama argues that this rigid social structure comes from medieval Confucian ethics, where the nexus of social relations (or what Watsuji called “betweenness” in the 1930s) defines the ways of being human. In this ethics of betweenness (aidagara 間柄), we are always expected to behave in a certain way as X in relation to Y. If you are a ruler to your subordinates, you should always behave as a ruler in your relations with others as the subordinates. If you are a father to a son, you are expected to act in a certain way to fit the inter-subjective pattern of the father-and-son relationship. Your status of “being” ruler or father defines the parameter of your actions as a ruler or a father. Hence, “to be” precedes “to do” in this static framework of human existence. Pace Fukuzawa, Maruyama argues that pre-modern Japanese society was built on the false stereotypes of “to be” and largely neglected how the substance of one’s social and ontological value comes from one’s actions as an individual.
The Problem of Doing Too Much in Japanese Modernity
Maruyama argues that the problem of Japanese modernity is not simply the “persistence of premodernity” in modernity. It is not that “to be” just remained after the process of modernization and nothing was done to change that. Rather, where “to do” is most required (such as politics), our willingness to act self-critically is remarkably lacking. On the other hand, in areas where there should be some room for the stable significance of “to be”—such as intellectual discourses (which should be built on the history of ideas) or urban design (which should pay attention to the cultural and natural history of the city)—we have seen short-span changes that are made for the sake of quick economic gain or for the sake of changes themselves. When we try to measure everything based on the principle of “to do,” it is harder to see the value of tradition. As a result, a sustained study of the classics sounds outrageous to many students who have no choice but to take out student loans. It also becomes harder to find new buildings that reflect aesthetic values specific to the history of the place where they stand.
This prioritization of “to do” at the cost of “to be” is consistent with the image of modern Japan as an octopus-trap in “On the Ways of Thinking” (1957). On the one hand, Maruyama says that Japan had inherited the diversified “to do” of various academic disciplines from modern Europe while failing to see the foundational “to be” that binds these particular systems of knowledge. But at the same time, Maruyama also says the rapid internationalization of each social group has made it appear that there is room for critical assessment of preestablished values. In other words, we don’t simply lock ourselves in a fixed boundary of our specific viewpoint (namely, “to be”) but we “do” apply the world perspective to bolster the legitimacy of our viewpoint (whether it is a particular set of moral values or an academic discipline). However, the busy-ness of our “to do” in this case is never designed to question seriously the soundness of our particular “to be.”
For example, suppose I belong to a specific group of scholars in Japan, and I only speak the language that is intelligible to this group of intellectuals. Then, my interaction with other scholars from around the world (thanks to the internationalization of academia) solidifies my conviction that we speak the language of universal truth. Our practice of intellectual discourse, therefore, is built on the false assumption that it “is” the only way of understanding the world. While it may appear to us that we are breaking out of the preestablished value systems of the past, in reality our whole process of “doing” suffers from a sophisticated confirmation bias that never fundamentally challenges the premodern system. Thus, the clear distinction between these two terms—“to be” and “to do”—felt in the writings of Fukazawa in the early Meiji period, is no longer perceived clearly in post-war Japan. This is precisely when we find ourselves in an “octopus trap.” Our “doing” seems to be free from the static social narrative of the grand “to be” of the past. Instead, it is entrapping us in the ever-smaller understandings of “to be,” as if each of them were the grand narrative.
What Are We “To Do” to Escape the Octopus Trap?
Maruyama argues that we have to be able to tell which “to do” is the legitimate and effective way by which we can materialize the meaning of “to be.” The confusion of these two terms means that “‘to do’ pervades through the area of ‘to be’ in which the latter has some values, and simultaneously that the latter sits in the place where it should be criticized by ‘to do.’” So, freedom from the Octopus-trap means a movement of double critique, which Maruyama says is like a “pause in music.” We must first take time to think about whether or not what we are doing enacts the values our society holds. Then, we must refrain from doing what is dictated by the value of “to be” without first questioning its meaning. If, for example, the value is freedom, we have to ask what we mean by “freedom,” where it comes from, and whether it is a worthy thing to value.
An octopus trap
If we absolutize a value and if there is no room for critical questioning of its legitimacy, then the logic of “to be” is probably already in full swing. Heidegger was right when he said “faith without a possibility of doubt is a convenience.” At the same time, we cannot reject everything that we believe in (or else this activism of “just do it” will be our next blind faith). What we have “to do” to escape entrapment in problematic “doing” based on the false assumptions of “being,” then, is to carry out an inconvenient act of “neither/nor.” We should refrain from trusting either term at the cost of the other, while always carefully weighing their significance in relation to each other. It might appear we are doing nothing to those who actively pursue either the conservation of “to be” or the progression of “to do.” But only through this double critique can we remain attentive to both our ways of being and doing, thus fulfilling our responsibility as free members of a modern society.
Takeshi Morisato, PhD, is a Visiting Researcher at KU Leuven in the Department of Japanese Studies.