The Social Self in Zen and American Pragmatism.

The Social Self in Zen and American Pragmatism.
The Social Self in Zen and American Pragmatism. By Steve Odin. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Barry D. Steben
Philosophy East & Weast Volume 48, Number 4 P.656-661 @ 1998 by University of Hawai'i Press
P.656 Quite a number of studies of East Asian thought or comparative philosophy, including Steve Odin's earlier writings, have drawn attention to the usefulness of American pragmatism and its extension into process metaphysices for making sense of Confucian or Buddhist philosophy in term already known within Western thought. In regard to Zen or Confucianism, a few studies have built on this apparent affinity to promote an intimate East-West dialogue wherein each tradition is used not only to illuminate the other but to propel it toward further development. The Social Self in Zen and American Pragmatism, however, is the first indepth study to incorporate modern Japanese philosophy and social. P.657 psychology fully into this dialogue, drawing them into a commom frame-work with Western theories of the social self on the basis of George Herbert Mead's theory of the self as a dialectic between a socially created "Me" and a creatively responsive "I." Odin joins voices with philosophers like John Dewey, Alfred
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North Whitehead, Jurgen Habermas, Hans Joas, and Ernst Tugendhat ans sociologists like Peter Berger, John Baldwin, and Kathy Ferguson in regarding Mead's conception of self as a momentous achievement, ranking him along with Martin Buber and John Macmurray as a paradigmatic figure in what Joas calls the "social turn" in Western thought in the twentieth century. Following Habermas, Odin sees Mead as representing a paradigm shift in Western thought from a subjectivist, Cartesian model of self to a bipolar theory of the social self arising through an interaction between the individual and society, viewing this as a great advance over the German tradition of philosophical anthropology ending in Heidegger because it viwes the process of individual no longer as prior to, but as simultaneous with the process of socialization. As the development of French postastructuralism was founded upon Saussure's semiotic concept of the arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified, the pragmatic concept of the self as socially constructed was founded on Charles S. Peirce's semiotic notion of personhood as intersubjectively constituted by a sign process of linguistic communication in a community. Odin demonstrates the intimate relationship among Peirce, James, Royce, Dewey, Cooley, Whitehead, and Mead in the development of the semiotic communication model of personhood, while he also takes pains to clarify the distinctions between their respective philosopies. Seconding scholars of Japanese society such as Takie Lebra, David Preston, Robert J. Smith, and David Plath regarding the usefulness of Mead`s theory for understanding Japanese concepts of self, Odin also undertakes a systematic examination of the most important developments in the Japanese philosophy of self in the twentieth century. In the process, he makes it apparent that many of the same influences that gave rise to the philosophy of the contextual self in the West were also actively involved in the development of Japanese theories of self in the samecrucial period between the 1890s and the 1930s. Both Watsuji Tetsuro (1889-1960) and Martin Buder (1878-1965) , for instance grounded their concepts of self as "betweenness" on similar critiques of the individualism of German philosophical anthropology ending with Heidegger. Both Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945) and Buber recognized the epochmaking significance of Feuerbach`s 1843 turn from a monological to a dialogical
concept of personhood, regretting that later philosophers had generally missed the significance of this insight and fallen into one or another of the extremes of individualism or collectivism. P.658 Both Watsuji and Nishida were deeply influenced by Mead's teacher, William James, in the earlier stages of their thought. Both Watsuji and another of Mead's teachers, Josiah Royce, were deeply influenced by Watsuji's teacher Nitobe Inazoo through his book Bushidoo: The soul of Japan, and Nishida in turn was deeply influenced by Royce. In the post-war period, one of the major influences on the amae-centered Japanese social psychology theory of Doi Takeo was Mead's theory of self. Thus it seems clear that the rise of the dialogical model of self in Japanese thought as well was not simply a linear continuity from pre-twentieth century Buddhist and Confucianist thought w allowing Odin to argue that East Asia has also seen a paradigm shift toward an intersubjective communication model of the self. (If both were paradigm shifts, however, it seems to me they are shifts of a different nature, one in which the substantialist concepts that were at the core of the tradition were discarded, and one in which the core concepts of the tradition were rearticulated with the aid of Western philosophical concepts). It is ironic, however, that the concepts of the interrelationa self developed by these Japanese thinkers have all been used as core building blocks in the extensive literature on Japanese uniqueness that is often subsumed under the category of nihonjinron. If they are so similar to concepts of the self that have been articulated for about the same length of time in the West, even in the paradigmatic "land of individualism" that is supposed to be the polar opposite of Japanese society, and on the basis of the English language, then there would seem to be something not totally objective in their being used to define the unique characteristics of the Japanese self. In view of the preponderance of West-to-East influences over those in the other direction, it might not be overly difficult to argue that these Japanese concepts of self are essentially Western derivations that have been disguised by admixture with
Buddhist and Confucian concepts or by their apparent derivation from distinctive words in the Japanese language, and thus to impugn the originality of the Japanese thinkers who put them forward. Deeply conscious, however, of how all philosophical positions are syntheses of the ideas of many other thinkers, Odin is careful to give full credit to the specific points of originality in the thought of each thinker he deals with. Thus, without minimizing the distinctive characteristics of Japanese thought or demeaning it all as ethno-ideology in disguise, he takes up the task of expanding Mead's intersubjective model of the social self into an East-West contextualist model of personhood that can integrate all the various insights into the social construction of self within a single coherent framework. If his study thus undermines the overly ethnocentric and particularistic aspects of nihonjinron, it does so not in a confrontational, deconstructionist, or condescending manner (like Peter Dale's The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness). but through the promotion of P.659 dialogue and the patient demonstration of the fact that "I am in you and you are in me," each of us leading the other to a fuller realization of ourselves. It was Mead himself, after all, who taught that inferiority and superiority complexes are overcome by social feeling and social dialogue. This respect for the Other is one of the salutary results of Odin's unabashed preference for the pragmatist version of the decentered self over the French deconstructionist version, whose dissolution of the self into a differential network of empty traces and floating signifiers, he charges, means nothing less the "total liquidation of the human subject." Yet regard for the Other must be integrated with the fundamental mission of philosophy to articulate universally valid ethical norms. Thus, after clarifying the content and development of the Japanese thinkers' concepts of the social self and defending them against misinterpretations, Odi does not shrink from the task of subjecting them to the same judgment to which he subjects all the thinkers whom he takes up. Do their conceptions of the dialogical self strke a proper balance between the
individual and society so that the individual is properly integrated with both his social and natural environment, but without totally submerging his identity into the collectivity? Viewed in this light, he concludes, Watsuji and his school have failed to solve the problem of individualism versus collectivism because the individual pole of his dual self ultimatedly dissolves into the social pole. Consequently, Watsuji's identification of Buddhist emptiness with the absolute totality, which is further identified with the deified Japanese state or kokutai, ends up falling into a totalitarian idelolgy. Nishida, he finds, comes closer to establishing a middle position with his emphasis on the irreducible self-creativity of the I, tough this is still undermined by his political writings, where he identifies the imperial house as the empty but unifying center of the totality that is the true self, the center that establishes the order of world history. Most postwar Japanese intellectuals would agree with Odin that a sound theory of the self must incorporate an idelolgy critique of the sort of oppressive power relations that threaten to smother the autonomous dimensions of selfhood. In Odin's analysis, Mead's model of self not only reveals the self as a mutually constitutive dialogue between self and other, but also as a mutuallly constitutive interaction between human beings and nature, and a mutually constitutive interaction between mind and body, Enriched and elucidated by the insights of other philosophers of the social self, therefore, this model can point the way to the healing of the various pathologies that have arisen from concepts of self that alienate the subject from other selves, from nature, and from the body w all three of which are now recognized to be part of the unbounded field of interconnected existence that grounds and sustains the self. By the same P.660 token, this model can point the way to the full development of the person in all its dimensions that has been the goal of philosophy and religion from time immenmorial. In this connection Odin affirms the interpretation of Confucian self-cultivation developed by David Hall and Roger Ames in Thinking Through Confucius, wherein the achievement of authoritative personhood consisits in the realization (as
both understanding and achievement) of the self as contextually and dialogically constituted, a realization achieved through creative acts of ethicoaesthetic signification that respond to and are structured by the ritual forms of our sociocultural context (tatemae). "The locus of the self is therefore neither in the subject nor in the object but in a 'situtation' unified by pervasive aesthetic quality arising through the valuative transaction between organism and environment" (p. 194) In attempting to rearticulate via the media between two one-sided but persistent views of the self, Odin is taking up a mission shared by all of the other philosophers of the social self that his book discusses, whether in Europe, America, or Japan, for all made a similar claim that their theory of self was the one that best preserves the proper balance between the two extremes. This is a mission that parallels the effort of phenomenological sociologists like Alfred Schutz (1899-1959) to rescue the concept of individual autonomy from the deterministic tendencies of Durkheimian organicism and Parsonsian " structural functionalism . " Moreover, as Maruyama Masao shows in his study of " Orthodoxy and Legitimacy in the Kimon School " (translated by this reviewer in Sino-Japanese Studies 8 [2] and 9 [1]), it is essentially the same mission that underlay the continual rearticulation of the orthodox interpretation of the Way (Tao-tung) aginst heterodoxies on both sides throughout the history of both Chinese and Japanese Confucianism. At the same time, of course, it is a mission cotinuours with the original core of the Buddhist tradition w the articulation of a middle position between an eternalist or substantialist concept of the self and and annihilationist concept that denies the continuity of karmic causation through the past, present, and future. It is just this middle concept of the self w or concept of no-self (muga) w that has consistently proven itself to provide the foundation for a responsible and positive personhood capable of acting integratively to overcome the inertia of the past while gratefully affirming all of the determinative causes and conditions of its cultural, familial, social, and ecological field. I have only minor criticisms of this book. The typographical errors and cases of incorrect romanization of Japanese terms may perhaps be overlooked, but more serious is the fact that
only a portion of the Japanese terms mentioned in the text are listed in the glossary, to the frustration of the reader who needs the characters to identify the terms. The book as a whole, moreover, contains rather too much repetition, which P.661 if cut down would have have reduced the book to a more manageable size. If this repetitiveness has a good side, however, it is that in many cases chapters or sections could more or less stand alone as reading assignments, without the necessity of reading the whole book. In view of the length of the book and its excessive level of difficulty for most under-graduate students, this relative lack of "dependent co-existence" of its various parts may well turn out to be an advantage.

The Social Self in Zen and American Pragmatism.

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The Social Self in Zen and American Pragmatism.