The Human and the Absolute in the Writings of Kuki Shūzō

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Kant’s diagram of disjunctive judgment is instructive here:

a

b c

d e

In a disjunctive judgement, x, which is contained within a, is contained either within b, or within c, etc.

2. Kuki’s term has passed out of use. “Disjunctive judgement” is translated in the Philosophical Dictionary 『( 哲学事典』, Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1977), for example, as sen- genteki handan 選言的判断.

3. “Ein Urtheil ist disjunctiv, wenn die Theile der Sphäre eines gegebenen Begriffs einander in dem Ganzen oder zu einem Ganzen als Ergänzungen (complementa) bestimmen” (K ant 1924, 106, 108).

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Kant gives an example of this kind of judgement in his Critique of Pure[pic 6]

Reason:

Take, for instance, the judgment, “The world exists either through blind chance, or through inner necessity, or through an external cause.” Each of these propositions occupies a part of the sphere of the possible knowledge concerning the existence of a world in general; all of them together occupy the whole sphere. (Kant 1929, 109; b­99)

Thus Kant uses the term disjunctive to talk about relations between judgements, whereas Kuki uses it to think about relations between humans, between human beings and other living beings, and between humans and the whole. Indeed, Kuki enlarges the meaning of the whole to embrace the metaphysical whole, as we shall see further below.

Let us follow Kuki’s reasoning. To begin with, a human being is merely one part of a whole, a partial being that never coincides completely with the greater totality. In this sense, the human individual lacks an absolute identity and is therefore a contingent being. At the same time, if by defi­ nition the whole cannot lack any of its parts, the whole does possess an absolute identity.

Secondly, to the extent that human beings are viewed as partial beings, there is absolutely no clear basis for their existence. A person may won­ der why she was not able to choose her parents before she was born or why she could not have been born as someone else in a different country. Kuki writes:

Indeed, we could have been Americans, Frenchmen, Ethiopians, Indi­ ans, Chinese, or any other nationality. It is entirely by accident that we are Japanese. We could equally well have been insects, birds, or beasts. It is absolutely by accident that we are humans, and not insects, or birds, or beasts. (ksz 2: 205–6.)

This passage shows that Kuki takes the political community as a given beyond the individual will of a person at the time of birth, and that it is a given governed purely by chance. It also shows that Kuki understands the concept of a living being to include mankind, insects, birds, beasts, and so forth, and that these living beings are on an equal plane with ever ything else classified as a living being. Let us cite a poem from the

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famous eighth­century collection known as Man’yōshū that Kuki himself uses to illustrate his point of view:[pic 7]

If, in this present life, I were happy,

In my next life,

Even an insect or a bird

I would become.4

The poem is inspired by the notion of spiritual transmigration that prob­

ably came to Japan with the introduction of Buddhist thought.5

Kuki thus demonstrates the contingent nature of the human social and existential situation at the moment of birth, and he defends the idea of contingency in the sense of a partial or relative existence that is not self­ made. But being born human does not mean being born worthless. On the contrar y, being born in human form is a rare and happy stroke of good fortune.

The example that Kuki introduces to explain the point is taken from a Buddhist text that illustrates the extreme rarity, though altogether happy possibility, of being born human. Kuki picks up the metaphor of an immense blind sea turtle whose life expectancy is infinite. The turtle comes to the ocean’s surface only once every hundred years. Floating on the sea is a piece of driftwood with one hole in it. The rarity—though not impossibility—of a human birth is said to be comparable to the like­ lihood of the turtle touching the hole in that piece of driftwood. This metaphor was used by the Buddha in a dialogue with a disciple. The scriptural account of this conversation relates the joy of the disciple at the revelation.6 What attracted Kuki to the image, I believe, is its stress

on the rare and precious gift of human birth.

4. Man’yōshū 348, poem by Ōtomo no Tabito: この世にし 楽しくあらば 来む世には 虫にも鳥にも 吾はなりなむ. The Japanese transcription follows Omodaka 1983, 3: 319.

5. The official introduction of Buddhism into Japan is considered to date from

552. The transmigration of the spirit is a belief still held by a significant number of Japanese. There is a popular genre of television programme in contemporary Japan in which people use their gifts to “see” someone’s previous lives.

6. Cf. Zō agon-kyō 雑阿含経, t. 2: 15–406, 108.

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Authentic Existence[pic 8]

To view Kuki’s definition of the human from a different philosophical angle, we may examine another of his texts, “The Philosophy of Authen­ tic Existence” (ksz 3: 50–94), where the human being is defined as actual being.

The essay opens with a demonstration of the impossibility of defin­ ing being (sonzai 存在). To do that, Kuki claims, you would have to say “being is such and such a thing.” But being is already implied in the

copulative is as well as in the attribute thing. Neither is it possible to talk about being in terms of the concept of non­being, since this latter presupposes a concept of being. The concept of being thus