The Social Self in Zen and American Pragmatism

·期刊原文
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

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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
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  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  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

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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
 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  or concept of no-self
(muga)  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.