Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook

Mori Arimasa

1047 Mori Arimasa 森 有正 (1911–1976) Mori Arimasa was baptized a Christian at the age of two and tutored in French from the age of six, and by his early teens had been exposed to English, Latin, and classical Greek as well. He graduated from the department of philosophy in Tokyo Imperial University in 1938 with a thesis on Pascal. In the following years, he published a number of translations and essays, mainly on Pascal and Descartes, and held teaching posts at Tokyo Women’s Christian University and later at Tokyo University. After the wartime ban on study abroad was lifted, he went to Paris where he decided to remain, tendering his resignation to Tokyo University in 1952. While in France he lectured on Japanese language and literature, returning frequently in later years to Japan as a guest lecturer. He passed away in Paris shortly after deciding to return permanently to Japan and assume a post at the International Christian University. The excerpts that follow are taken from a series of lectures delivered in 1970 and 1971 at that university and later gathered together in a work entitled Experience and Thought. Here Mori lays out his theory of the distinctive quality of the Japanese language and its reflection of human relationships in Japanese social structures and modes of thought. He does this by showing how the concluding verb in a sentence is “inflected” without being conjugated according to grammatical person. Although the dense but somewhat repetitive style of his prose has been tightened up here in translation, it was precisely his at once provocative and readable style of philosophizing that endeared him to later generations of young Japanese struggling to adjust to the mindset and linguistic barriers of life abroad and, in the process, deepening their affection for the peculiarities of their own culture. [jwh] Experience, thought, l anguag e Mori Arimasa 1972, 84–106 In Japanese, polite or honorific language holds an important and specially privileged place. Indeed, it is in this particular aspect that the actual social life of the Japanese and their linguistic space come into intimate contact and provide an emotive quality that makes the essentially Japanese structure of society flow directly into (or subtly “slip into”) honorific language. In this way the community relationships in Japanese society are faithfully reproduced in the language. Honorific language is not just one dimension of Japanese. It is rooted in the innermost recesses of the mechanisms of the language. The various degrees of 1048 | c u lt u r e a n d i d e n t i t y positive and negative expression give concrete vitality to the linguistic expression that has seeped deep into the social hierarchy of the community and determined its usage. Given this situation, “neutral” forms of expression are rather an exception for the language.… As a rule, Japanese linguistic expression adds postpositional terms between major elements of a sentence and (particularly in contemporary usage) concludes the whole with a verbal inflection. Since these inflections add a subjective determination concerning the party to whom the statement as a whole is being addressed, they are first person in nature. For example, the word is in the sentence “this is a book” serves as a functional inflection in Japanese and appears at the end of the sentence, where it can take the basic forms desu, da, or the more polite de gozaimasu. I have indicated that the choice reflects a firstperson decision, but matters are not quite so simple. Grammatically speaking, there is no second or third person involved, but neither is it quite right to speak of the statement as “impersonal.” What we have here is a prime example in the language of what I call the “slipping in of reality.” In the “bipolarity” set up by the speaker and the one spoken to, it seems to me we can see a reflection of social hierarchies. Not that the main content of the sentence “this (is) a book” becomes different in the process, but that the relationship between the two persons is manifest in the choice of inflection at the same time as meaning is communicated as to whether the content is affirmed, negated, or otherwise asserted. Here the one spoken to is not an independent recipient but is located within the consciousness of the speaker, so that the coexistence of the two forms part of the meaning. It is on this basis that varieties of nuance having to do with probability, doubt, and the...