Rethinking Autonomy: A Critique of Principlism in Biomedical Ethics

Chapter 3 Autonomy and Japanese Self-Concepts

Chapter 3 Autonomy and Japanese Self-Concepts Only when one lets go of the mind and ceases to seek an intellectual apprehension of the Truth is liberation attainable. Enlightenment of the mind through the sense of sight and comprehension of the Truth through the sense of hearing are truly bodily attainments. To do away with mental deliberation and cognition, and simply to go on sitting, is the method by which the Way is made an intimate part of our lives. —Dôgen (in Tsunoda et al. 1958:248) 3.1. Self and Other Dôgen’s comments on the path to Enlightenment tell us much about the Japanese approach to mind and body. In many areas of activity, such as martial arts, when Japanese work to master a skill they attempt to clear the mind and be as a body, rather than attempting to exert control over the body. There is not a sense of mind over matter; quite the contrary, it is matter over mind. Or, put another way, the aim is to eliminate feelings of separation between mind and body. Western observers such as Herrigel (1971) have picked up on this idea in a variety of areas of Japanese life, most notably in martial arts, which aim at centering self on doing, rather than thinking, as a means to gain mastery of a particular skill or set of skills. Despite Herrigel’s problematic and romanticized rendering 63 64 Rethinking Autonomy of Japanese archery (cf. Yamada 2009), he does manage to convey the fact that there is an aesthetic sense to archery found in the coalescing of mind and body achieved through singular doing/non-thinking as opposed to thinking about doing. In many ways, the focus on doing in the mastery of a skill generates an inward turn as one attempts to release the tendency of clinging to thought and simply be a body. But there is also a strong social component of doing in the fact that what one does inevitably affects others, and this is where the moral content of this approach lies. The ideology of the person in Japan is not one that sees the individual as isolated, but as a being who does what he or she does in concert with and relation to others. As Csordas (2002:97) argues, the very manner in which a human becomes a person in Japan is viewed quite differently from what is typical in the United States, where there is usually a sense of some defined starting point at which a person comes into being—even while that point is debated as to whether it occurs at birth, conception, or somewhere in between. For Japanese, “becoming a person is neither a matter of conception nor of birth, but a gradual ontological process” (Csordas 2002:97) through which one moves “bit by bit into the social world of human beings” and experiences a “densification of being” that then thins as one grows old and eventually enters into ancestorhood and later Buddhahood (LaFleur 1994:33). In other words, not only is the nature of the human being conceptualized somewhat differently in Japan as compared with the United States, the emphasis on how humans relate to each other and how those relationships comprise part of what it is to be human also has important differences. In many cases, these differences have been erroneously interpreted, resulting in stereotypes of Japan as a groupist society as opposed to the (equally stereotyped) individualist West (read American society),1 stereotyping that creates difficulties in understanding how Japanese conceptualize ethics. 1. In Chapter 2, I focused on the emphasis on atomism within moral and political thinking about the relation of individuals to groups and the emphasis on autonomy. However, it should be noted that Americans are quite capable of very groupist behavior. One need only look to the football stadium at a university on game day to see Americans shedding their individualist personae in favor of group identity. The fact that American ideology emphasizes individualism and that moral theorists emphasize an atomistic view of the person should not be taken as implying that Americans always necessarily act in this way, just as the fact that many Japanese moral and ideological perspectives emphasize belongingness should not be interpreted as meaning that Japanese have no sense of individuality or individualism. 65 Autonomy and Japanese Self-Concepts In this chapter, I focus on the Japanese concept...