For Minoru Otsuka1
Although much of Wisdom as Moderation was written more than ten — or even twenty or thirty years — ago, it states what I still believe. Living to my advanced age of 93, and being still able to think vigorously, have their advantages, one of which is that one has had ample time to work out what one’s innate endowment and family background has given one the capacity to discover about reality. Even two decades ago at seventy-three I knew what kind of philosophy I was capable of believing. The precise logic of this kind of philosophy, and some of its applications, are clearer to me now than even in 1987, but they do not contradict what I wrote three or four years ago.
A recent play by Arthur Miller, our famous American playwright, in a modernized version of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, makes fun of a politician who boasts of his “moderation in all things,” but who really means his refusal to care strongly enough to act when comfortable people in his society refuse to be bothered by truths unfavorable to their social positions. Moderation as I use it does not conflict with deep emotions of loyalty to truth and attention to probable long run consequences of current actions or failures to act. Environmental problems are now being badly neglected. Population pressures in the long run threaten non-human animals generally more and more seriously, and threaten our species also through environmental degenerations, even without nuclear war.
I feel vividly what my discussion of (coffee and) tea may mean to Japanese. I cannot, however, be persuaded that ancient drinking habits fit the requirements of our worldwide technological situation. There is no solid evidence that the human organism needs caffeine in any form, and land for agriculture and forestry is becoming dangerously inadequate to supply materials that we do need. Nature produces liquids that really nourish and are harmless. The notion that there are better drinking liquids than milk, fruit juices, and uncontaminated water seems to me unfounded, and technology could, I hope, make these in principle available at all seasons and everywhere.
In several prolonged visits to Japan my wife and I have been made well aware of the ritual significance of tea in Japan. Social changes are always painful to some. We know for certain that future changes there must be; our job is to try to distinguish between changes for the worse and changes for the better, and to try to minimize the former and maximize the latter. As Reinhold Niebuhr, our greatest recent theologian, put it:
“God give us strength to endure what cannot be changed,
courage to change what should be changed,
and wisdom to distinguish one from the other.”
This leads me to discuss the religious question with special reference to Japan, and to Shinto, Buddhism, and still other religious forms in the great island country. A leading scholar on the history of religion, Nakamura if I recall correctly, wrote recently that polytheism was better than monotheism, because the latter tends to be arrogant and intolerant. Historically there is a strong case for this view. One should not forget, however, that in ancient Greece polytheists brought about the death of Socrates, and that atheistic governments in Russia and China have not demonstrated that intolerance is peculiar to theism. Nakamura did admit that not all monotheists are intolerant. The Bengali School of Hinduism, a small minority religion, has been in no position to be intolerant and its doctrines are close to mine in some basic respects. I’ve known two of its monks, and we could easily appreciate each other’s positions.
We are all only animals with the gift of speech and the kinds of understanding that speech makes possible. In this context I raise the question of the rights of women.
Girls learn speech as easily and well as boys. Therefore females are as truly human as males. Through Dorothy, my gifted wife, I came to know the important fact that Japan long ago had an empress, a higher position for a woman than my country has yet had. She not only allowed the Prince-regent, Shotokutaishi, to inspire and guide her rule but, after his death, ruled well without him. Alas, however, the Confucianism that came to Japan later was much less kind to women than Buddhism has been. An American Chinese scholar tells me that, bad as Aristotle was in the West on the capacities and rights of women, Confucius was worse. In this matter, worse than Aristotle is very bad indeed! Plato was better, and Socrates better still. So were the Epicureans and Stoics.
Forgive me, but I take the basic truth on this question to be simply this: we humans surpass the other animals primarily by our unique capacity for spoken and written language. Only by a very weak metaphor can the other animals be said to have this capacity. Enormous differences of degree are important, and indeed importance itself is a matter of degree. There is nothing like Shinto in the other animals. Then too Shinto somewhat exalts women, and so do some of the unorthodox Japanese sects.
One other point. My religious faith not only is not basically Western rather than Eastern, it is not even European as against African. I have been delighted to learn from an African theologian that belief in the extension of human careers beyond death is not a native African belief. Social immortality, for which they have a special word, is all the Africans claim. My belief in what Whitehead calls “objective immortality” in God is simply social immortality with God as supreme Socius, the ultimate posterity. This form of permanence applies to all animals, as well as to us; our privilege being only that we can consciously know about or believe in it. It can inspire and encourage us to think of our experiences, with whatever inner beauty they have, as lasting gifts to others and to God.
Three basic facts are involved in the question of feminism. Women have no demonstrably innate inferiority in the combination of capacities that make us superior to all other animal species; what handicaps women is not what they are innately unable to do but what they alone can and some of them must do, if the species is to go on; finally, science, hygiene, sanitation, technology, by greatly lowering the death rate in infants and young people, have brought the earth’s populations to such high levels as to make it desirable for there to be much lower birth rates (far fewer pregnancies and births) and in addition have enabled many women to long outlive the child-bearing age. Thus the factors that made patriarchy natural and almost inevitable for thousands of years make it less and less natural and more and more a no longer reasonable response to the human condition. I often wonder what proportion of men have ever sat down and, for at least a few minutes, thought calmly and carefully about these facts. Even in my country we seem to have trouble thinking of a lady president. England and India are ahead of us in this, and so was ancient Japan.
In travels to many countries and nearly all the states of my country I have yet to find any country or state that is in no respect better than my state of birth and childhood, Pennsylvania, or than my country, U.S.A. All show human weaknesses, and each has something more appealing to offer than the others. For an example, close to my favorite recent musical composer was the blind Japanese Koto player Miyagi. One of his compositions utterly delights me. I could give scores of other Japanese examples. Another is the novel I Am a Cat. Or the novel, The Sisters, by a man but about women. Or Lady Kurasaki’s Genji-Monogatari, the first great novel in the world, so far as I know.
There is another difficulty for a philosopher of religion brought up as a Christian, though a very liberal form of that faith. Anti-semitism has manifestly some of its roots in the New Testament. Not only am I anti-anti-semitic, in some ways I find myself closer to both ancient (Book of Job) and many modem Jewish writers than to many main-line forms of Christianity. Even Niebuhr is less close to my view of dual transcendence than is Rabbi Abraham Heschel with his succinct, “God is the most moved mover,” and his remarks about the necessity to attribute feeling perception, and volition as well as knowledge or wisdom to deity. No theologian that I have met has seemed to me more saintly and sound than he did when I talked to him and his wife in his apartment in New York.
Finally I wish to quote a recorded saying of Jesus when someone called him good: “Why callest thou me good? It is God who is good.”
Human self-exaltation takes many forms. Collective egoism or arrogance is still egoism or arrogance. Our “neighbors” now are world-wide, inter-cultural and inter-religious. Also inter-animal. God cherishes all creatures. Not that the other animals are our equals; they are not that, but there is a complication which ought to humble us: if we, at our best, are much better than the other animals, at our worst we are much worse than they. We are the only truly wicked species; wife abuse, child-abuse, murder, war, one could go on. That the other animals are there only for our benefit is a view I do not attribute to Jesus, and have never in my life, I think, accepted. In addition, I take very seriously the beliefs of many scientists that our planet must be far from the only one in the vast cosmos that is inhabited by higher life forms.
Concerning the Aquinas Lecture, I wish to say that I am still happy about every statement in it with one qualification, which is that I now dislike, as do many feminine readers of philosophical or theological works, the use of masculine pronouns or nouns, where both women and men are in question, or when God is referred to. For me motherhood is a much better symbol for deity than fatherhood. This is a principal reason why I hesitate to identify myself as a Christian. Alas, language itself, as we have it from the past, is patriarchal. I do not know what Japanese can do with this difficulty. I understand that in Chinese pronouns are neutral between genders as spoken, though not as written. I do believe, as Jesus seems to have, that the two “Great Commandments,” Love God with all your being and your neighbor as yourself, sum up religious requirements. For the rest we must look to science and good common sense, and to what we can learn from the history of ideas as accessible to us. The most perfect example in my life of living according to these requirements has been my own mother, so far as the two Commandments define them. Her Episcopal clergyman father and Episcopal clergyman husband were for their times admirable examples of the other resources. But among large populations the Japanese in some ways put the people of my country to shame in some aspects of their behavior.
One final word. Among the theologians I have personally met as well as read who seemed the most free from the defects I find in scholasticism and also the most saint-like in his person as I talked to him in his apartment in New York City was Rabbi Abraham Heschel. It was he, and not any Christian, who said what most needed to be said about our main-line philosophico-theological tradition, “God is the most moved mover.” I add only two words after most: and best. If Christianity must be anti-semitic to be orthodox then insofar I am a heretic.
I rather like C. S. Peirce’s phrase, “Buddhisto-Christian.”
Note
1. Charles Hartshorne’s preface to Minoru Otsuka’s Japanese translation of Hartshorne’s book Wisdom as Moderation: A Philosophy of the Middle Way (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987). Hartshorne, who was born in June 1897, mentions his age as 93, which means that the preface was written sometime during the latter half of 1990. —Donald Wayne Viney
HyC