My Heartmind Hero . . .

(I was going to say "intellectual hero," but that's too one-dimensional) is shaping up to be this Japanese philosopher and bioethicist Masahiro Morioka, whom I've already linked to here (on brain death from the perspective of relationship), here and here (on male sexuality), and here (on "painless civilization" as a kind of living brain death).

Here he is again, defining the new field of "life studies":

Life studies is an attempt to acquire an interdisciplinary, organized knowledge, intellect, and wisdom that help us live our limited lives without regret. . . .

1) My own life as a starting point and the ultimate end

The most important thing for life studies is that one's own life should be both the beginning and the end of life studies. In life studies we should never detach ourselves from the problems . . . Knowledge or discussion completely separated from one's own life should not be included . . . Mere analysis of ethical concepts or social structure cannot constitute life studies. Instead, for example, a private narrative of my own experiences is a good starting point for life studies analysis of human psychology and ethics. . . . . Life studies comes close to literature in this sense. Subjective knowledge is as important as objective knowledge in life studies. We need to explore the ways to share subjective knowledge among us.

(Sounds like a credo for bloggers to me. At least, the sort of bloggers we've got in our pod.)

2) Pursuit of "life without regret"

The pursuit of life without regret is the ultimate end of life studies. . . . We should be aware of the fact that our life in this world is limited. We are all going to die sooner or later. Hence . . . life studies should be an attempt to acquire an interdisciplinary, organized knowledge, intellect, and wisdom that help us live our limited lives without regret.

3) Confrontation with our own desire and evil

Life studies encourages us to keep our eyes on our own "desire" and "evil" that are deeply engraved into our heart. We cannot entirely escape from our own desire and evil. What is needed is not to unconditionally accept them, but to forgive us who cannot escape from them, and to seek ways to continuously try to overcome our tendency to return to them. We have to explore wisdom and social system to support that attempt. Moral imperatives alone cannot change our fundamental attitudes. In the book Painless Civilization I presented the possibility of transforming "the desire of the body" into "the desire of life."

(Morioka doesn't say here what he means by "evil," but judging by his own painful meditation on miniskirts, I'm guessing that a root of it is the common mental operation of turning a person into a thing for our own use or avoidance. Or, in even broader Martin Buber-language, where "person" may not be limited to the human, turning a "thou" into an "it.")

4) Critique of contemporary society, civilization, and scientific technology

A search for the meaning of life usually tends to aim at personal healing and self-realization, but we should go forward to the next important step, the critique of contemporary society, civilization, and scientific technology, because contemporary civilization cleverly takes away from us the meaning of life and the possibility of living a life without regret . . . A transformation of the self without changing society is not the goal of life studies.

5) Inquiry into the world of life

All life on the earth are closely connected with one another. Humans are no exception. We cannot live without killing and eating other creatures. . . . One of the most important features of life studies is to think about the meaning of human life in relationship with other creatures on the earth, and with nature -- the matrix of life. After we die, our bodies return to the earth and the air, that is to say, all parts of our bodies spread back to the matrix of life, hence, the meaning of human life and death should also be considered from the viewpoint of our relationship with nature and the environment. Many creatures on the earth, including humans, share a lot of genes and the process of evolution, hence, our lives without regret cannot be separated from our relationships with other creatures and the natural environment.

And a few of "the guiding concepts of life studies":

1) Painless civilization

The endless tendency in our civilization to eliminate pain and suffering makes us totally lose sight of the meaning of life that is indispensable to human beings. . . .

3) The central axis

. . . There are three layers in personal identity . . . surface identity, deep identity, and the central axis. The central axis is the most basic one, but in everyday life many people forget the layer of the central axis. The central axis is a path by following which I will be able to say, when I die, that I am happy to have been born. One's central axis can be found by dismantling his/her deep identity. This concept is closely connected with that of "life without regret." [Emphasis added]

(!?!)

4) The desire of the body and the desire of life

. . . I distinguish . . . two sorts of desires . . . "the desire of the body" and "the desire of life." While the desire of the body seeks to protect pleasure, pleasantness, and vested interests, the desire of life tries to discard them, dismantle the current self, and open oneself to an unexpected future. It is our "desire of the body" that promotes "painless civilization." This desire of the body takes away from us the deep "joy of life" that could visit us in an unexpected way when we transform ourselves by going through pain and suffering.

6) Relationship and irreplaceability

All beings in the universe, especially all living things on the earth, are incorporated into the web of “relationships.” They can not exist without these relationships. At the same time, every being in these relationships is fundamentally “irreplaceable” to each other. Life studies urges us to view everything from the perspective of correlation between "relationship" and "irreplaceability."

This is awesome stuff, to my heartmind -- a bold attempt to take off the costumes of received wisdom and confront life naked, direct, anew. It's one of the boldest attempts I've seen to redo for an age of science the work that has conventionally been done by religion. And sure enough, Morioka has also written on How to Live in a Post-Religious Age, his most beloved book in Japan, written after the Aum Shinrikyo cult's sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subway:

After this tragic event, mass media began to criticize the madness and cruelty of Aum Shinrikyo. However, several researchers, including me, realized that this was a kind of pathology of the modern age, and that all of us share this pathology with the members of Aum Shinrikyo. The members of Aum Shinrikyo and I shared the same aspiration, that is, aspiration to get the real meaning of life. They believed in religion, and used advanced scientific technology as a tool for acquiring enlightenment. But I did not become a scientist, nor I did not believe in religion. Instead, I coined the words "life studies," in which we can seek the meaning of life, death, and nature without using religious language. . . .

When I entered the university, my major was physics, just like Aum's young researchers. I thought that the mystery of the universe and humans would be fully solved by physics and mathmatics. However, I realized that this idea was completely wrong. I was disappointed by science, and changed my major to philosophy. I became interested in religious approaches, but in the end, I found that I could not believe in religion. In Chapter 1, I described my inner journey from physics to religion, and made clear why I decided to follow the third way between science and religion.

Most of the table of contents is worth reproducing, it's so tantalizing (I've left out only some specific discussions of Japanese music):

Preface

Chapter 1 How to Live in a Post-religious Age
Section 1 Sense of Discomfort with "Religious Belief"
Section 2 A New Way of Thinking about Life and Death
Section 3 Why did Scientists in the Making Become believers in Aum?
Section 4 Disappointment of Science
Section 5 Something that Science cannot Deal With
Section 6 How "New New Religions" Invited scientists
Section 7 The Reason Why I cannot Believe in Religion
Section 8 Problem of "Spirituality"
Section 9 A Message for You

Chapter 2 What is Mysterious Experience
Section 1 Meaning of Mysterious Experience
Section 2 The Idea, "I Change Myself, I Change the World"
Section 3 Yearning for Enlightenment
Section 4 Desire for Power
Section 5 Between Mysterious Experience and Religious Belief
Section 6 My Mysterious Experience
Section 7 Experience in a "Kiko" Community
Section 8 Psychology in a Closed World
Section 9 Sweet Temptation of Thinking That "Only We are Right"
Section 10 Enemy Resides within Us
Section 11 Philosophy of Worldly Desires

Chapter 3 (Mostly about Japanese musician Yutaka Ozaki, including a section "Rock'n'roll as Healing")

Chapter 4 Courage for Me to be Myself
Section 1 Prescription that does't Work
Section 2 Method other than Religion
Section 3 Gap between Religion and Reality
Section 4 "Blindfold Structure" on this Side
Section 5 Question Feminism Poses
Section 6 The Real Meaning of the Aum Incident
Section 7 Releasing Myself to a "Mystery"

I've quoted so much of it in the hope of getting you to go there and read more. He's doing his own English translations, and says he needs an editor. I'm seriously considering volunteering. Here is a heartmind that's out there where I want to go.

- amba

Comments

[Richard Lawrence Cohen]

Sounds potentially great. You should definitely try to be his editor. As I read it so far, there's a lot of Buddhism in his viewpoint, but he departs from Buddhism in valuing the individual self. I find that extremely congenial. Some people would probably find his idea of life studies too narcissistic and not rigorous enough -- where's the data? -- but that doesn't bother me. My question, coming from the other side, would be how his approach differs from what artists and some subjectivist social thinkers already do.

[karen]

I can't pretend to understand it's depth. In all honesty, he sounds like he's trying to replace religion... with a God at it's center, for a new religion with himself in the center. Ourselves. Is that a qualifier for narcissisim? I would think it would get pretty lonely after awhile. Not to mention boring. If I spent so much time on me, my kids would be even more unruly!! And if one were to live with no regrets, does that mean nothing is considered sinful? I suppose sin is a Christian thing anyway. Jewish, too? Anyway, yes I'm pretty ignorant of the cultural realm. Post religion? Wishful thinking . Or, is that called reletivism? One more thought. If one had no regrets, what learning curve would this leave us to imprint upon our children?

[amba]

That's not how I understand him when he talks about "regrets." If you read what he writes about male sexuality, it's obvious that he has a lot of regrets of that kind. I think he means "regrets" about not having lived fully, about having pursued pleasure instead of reality. (See what he says about "the desire of the body" versus "the desire of life", and about having to be mindful of our own "desire and evil.") That is not narcissistic, and it is even fully compatible with putting God at the center, though perhaps by another (or no) name. I think he is putting the emphasis on our own lives more as laboratories of truthful living than as an end in themselves.

Anyway, I found his comments more tantalizing than fully fleshed out. For instance, I want to know more about what he means by "the central axis."

[karen]

OoooHHHhhhhhh. I didn't read it yet, so I'm sorry to jump to that conclusion. The way you put it, it sounds very healthy. He's still deep. I remember reading what he said about abortion, sorta paraphrase-wise; how the awareness of what a woman is doing is admitted and subconsciously understood. Maybe I got that wrong, too, but found that to be a courageous angle. I have a hard time with the "blob", non-human conception that people use to defend abortion. I can see the desperation or the annoyance or the not-great-timing reasoning... but, admit what exactly is being done. Does that make sense? Anyway, thank you for explaining this deep-thinking philosophy to me. I'll eventually understand :)