Greek and Japanese Attitudes Towards Self-Perception

THERE is a conundrum that was devised by the philosopher-poet, Epimenides of Knossos, who came from the island of Crete. Between the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, when Epimenides was actively developing his thought, he began to consider the strength of the hypothetical claim that “all Cretans are liars”. He therefore decided to test the veracity of this allegation from a number of different angles until, one day, he realised that if a Cretan were to make such a statement and yet was not actually a liar, he would clearly be lying. On the other hand, if what he said was true then he would still be a liar. Epimenides had stumbled upon a fascinating contradiction, exposing the fact that if a Cretan was a liar and declared that “all Cretans are liars” his claim must also be a lie.

The twentieth-century Japanese philosopher, Nishitani Keiji, made a similar observation about his own countrymen:

“All things have been said of late about the Japanese being no good at anything. If a Japanese says it, how can we trust the statement itself as being any good? The contradiction is plain. Is it merely an irate remark that all Japanese except me are no good? Or is it an act of self-reproach in which I recognise myself as a no-good Japanese? In either case, it is the Japanese who are said to be no good. If those who say so are Japanese, they are among the no-good. But if they speak out of anger or self-reproach, they have reached a self-awareness which has taken them a step away from the current condition of the Japanese.”

Nishitani believed that a development of this kind represents a more well-rounded and three-dimensional approach that echoes the clash of opposites that one finds in Hegelian dialectics and that a philosophical brick wall similar to that discovered by Epimenides may finally be surmounted by a series of self-negations.

Interestingly, until Kyoto School thinkers like Nishida and Nishitani became acquainted with Western thought the Far East had no real experience with this form of logic. As the latter explains, when those in the Japanese world considered something like water a century ago it did “not think of water in its actual form” in the way that a scientist might break it down into two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. Similar to the attitude one finds in Zen, the Japanese

“does not step away from oneself to look at things, but looks at things from a point where one is united with them. Conversely, one does not step away from things to look at oneself; one looks at oneself from a point where things are one with oneself.”

Thinkers such as Nishida would call this the point of absolute nothingness, but I find it ironic that whilst Hegelian dialectics appear to solve the aforementioned problem of an undifferentiated stereotype - in this case, the supposed uselessness of an entire people by the temporary juxtaposition of subject and object - Hegel’s formula results in an absolutist system and the Japanese themselves already bore the seeds of this condition themselves. The beauty of this meeting between the philosophies of East and West lies in the mutual understanding that allowed one side to understand itself better through the other. Indeed, it is rarely the case that such things are possible in the twenty-first century without dramatic compromise on both sides.