Mori Arimasa: A Philosopher in the Making

I. The Text

A distinctly fresh tone of his prose style that characterized Babylon caught the imagination of the younger generation of Japanese readers. It became a bestseller, and inspired countless Japanese youth.

The text is put together as a compilation of letters Mori composed to his confidant friend (whose identity is never revealed). One could argue that it is a sort of literary device. This setup can convey a very intimate personal feeling to the reader, who assumes the position of a privileged reader of Mori’s communication concerning his innermost spiritual journey. Through his frequent travel to various parts of Europe—to Rome, Firenze, and so on, and his visit to major museums and historical sites—the reader was able to enjoy these places vicariously, deftly described by Mori. He traveled extensively, visiting Italy, Spain, England, Germany, Greece, southern France, and other places in between.

Babylon broke ground for a semi-confessional writing as a literary style. What separated Mori’s work from numerous other Japanese predecessors whose work fell into the genre of “I-novels” was the depth of his spirituality, engaged in an existential quest. Unlike St. Augustine’s The Confessions, his work is obviously a secular writing, but it succeeds in conveying the elevation of the spirit from mundane concerns to a higher and deeper realm of being.

Babylon comes in at least four editions with no textual variation:

1. (1) The 1957 edition, published as a single volume by Kōdansha.
2. (2) The 1968 edition, published by Chikuma Shobō. This elegantly bound volume contains two other sequel books, Nagare no hotori ni te (On the shore of the flowing river, first published in 1959) and Jōmon no katawara ni te (By the City Wall of Harran, first published in 1963). This is the edition I used in writing my essay.
3. (3) The 1978 edition compiled as volume 1 of the Mori Arimasa zenshū, (abbreviated MAZ, Collected works of Mori Arimasa), published by Chikuma Shobō. The MAZ, in fifteen volumes, is the comprehensive collection of Mori’s writings, and thus scholarly citations are often made based on this edition. Already owing the majority of Mori’s books published prior to the publication of the collected works, however, I simply cite from my 1968 edition.
4. (4) The 1999 edition compiled as volume 1 of the Mori Arimasa essē shūsei (Mori Arimasa selected essays), in five volumes, published by Chikuma Shobō, in paperback. The Rimer translation is based on this edition.

II. Mori Arimasa’s Family Lineage

Mori was born in Tokyo on November 30, 1911, as the son of Mori Akira, the Protestant pastor, and Yasuko, the third daughter of the Shimizu branch of the Tokugawa family. Mori Akira was the third son of (the viscount) Mori Arinori (1847–89) and the princess Hiroko, the fifth daughter of (the duke) Iwakura Tomomi (1825–83).

To put it otherwise, Arimasa’s paternal grandfather was Arinori, and the maternal grandfather was Tokugawa Atsumori (duke). Iwakura was his paternal great grandfather. We need to unpack this here

Mori Arinori and Iwakura Tomomi were both “founding figures” of Meiji Japan, who rose to prominence during the turbulent years when the political system shifted from the Tokugawa shogunate rule to the emperor as the head of constitutional monarchy. These men became the patriarchs of the illustrious families of Japan’s prewar aristocracy, known as the “kazoku,” a newly created social class, made up of former provincial lords (daimyō) and their relations, on the one hand, and the court nobles (kuge) who served the emperors, on the other. Iwakura was the architect of this new system, and he envisioned these two strands of powerful families—the former warriors and the courtiers—into the new rank of “aristocrats,” modeled after the European system. They soon positioned themselves as the crème de la crème of Japanese society

Mori recalls his childhood environment in which he grew up, and how those aristocratic families lived in the “European” style:

When I was a child, I used to take long walks along the dykes of the Yodobashi Reservoir, accompanied by my servant who held my tiny hand. Sometimes, I was taken to the military training ground in Yoyogi, where the Meiji Shrine stands today. Its construction was yet to begin then [the work began in 1915, and completed in 1920], so it was a wide, open ground.

Aside from these long walks, I used to call on my relatives. My maternal uncle’s home was in Aoyama Minami-chō; the home of my maternal grandfather [Tokugawa Atsumori] was in Sendagaya; my maternal grandmother’s was in Ichigaya [the Ogasawara]; my maternal grandmother’s younger brother’s was also in Ichigaya [Iwakura Michitomo?]. Occasionally, I visited the family home of my paternal grandmother in Shibuya [the Iwakuras]… . My surrounding environment was something solemn and somber… .

On these occasions, I always played Western-style card games with my numerous cousins, and enjoyed wonderful meals… .

At home, my paternal grandmother [Princess Hiroko] often showed me the photo albums. I saw many formal portraits of my grandfather [Mori Arinori], and other relatives of mine. Almost all the gentlemen were dressed in elaborate formal attire worn on special ceremonial occasions, while women were dressed in a Western-style long black dress, which was fashionable among the ladies of high society… .

Before my grandfather [Arinori] joined the Ministry of Education, he served as the chief diplomat to the United States and to the Great Britain. In those days, there were not yet Japanese embassies overseas.

My grandmother [Hiroko] and my father [Akira] both became Christians. Many of my uncles received their education in England.

Thus, I imbibed an old-fashioned aristocratic air as a matter of course … and lived a European lifestyle that was very unusual and unfamiliar to the vast majority of the Japanese people.⁵

As time went on, Mori developed close relationships with many of his relatives and he wove them into his world as his “vertical” connection to his roots. It was especially after he left Japan and lived in Paris that his appreciation grew how his ancestors actually informed his being. Someone who knew Mori Arinori’s accomplishments recommend him to read the biography of his grandfather (it was in 1967; Mori was well into his fifties). He felt that through discovering his ancestors, “time reversed its course and flowed back from the past into the present.” His younger sister, Sekiya Ayako, was especially close to her grandmother, Hiroko, and wrote a detailed account of her experiences growing up in this unique environment. Ayako’s book is a precious information trove of the Mori family and the relatives.⁶

As mentioned earlier, Mori’s discovery and increasing appreciation of his family roots began to form part of his philosophical reflection, as his life in Paris became more settled. The opening paragraph of Babylon in fact anticipates the importance of his family roots as his “destiny.” We read:

Isn’t it the case that how one’s life unfolds and is lived is present, in essence, in one’s childhood? I cannot help but be convinced of this, as I reflect on my present state of affairs and recollect my childhood memories.

If it is indeed the case, this “fact” contains not only painful memories but also offers an infinite sense of consolation… .

As you are familiar, in the Greek myths and in the Old Testament—to which the European spirit always returns whenever it exhausts its inquiry—temple priestesses and prophets made prophecies about those who would bask in glory or about those for whom tragic fate would await.

Why was it possible to make such prophecies, unless the entire life of the person was already essentially present in one’s childhood?⁷

Lest it be misunderstood, let me clarify one thing here. Mori was not a “fatalist” or a “determinist,” but rather, a realist. The knowledge of one’s roots does not necessarily confine oneself to the past, but rather, the recognition of one’s ancestral roots could bring about a new meaning of one’s life—as was the case with him. His ancestral roots affirmed how deep his Japanese cultural roots were, even though (or especially because?) he was living on a foreign soil.

Through this sort of reflection, Mori developed a philosophical view of “time”—the only thing one can change is the past by enriching one’s understanding and appreciation of it. Somewhat counterintuitive at first, this makes sense when we take into account Mori’s experience of finding his ancestors (i.e., the past) and his acceptance and appreciation of what they accomplished. This in turn necessarily opened up a new existential dimension for him, full of a renewed and personalized significance of “heritage” and “legacy.” After all, his ancestors lived during the critical moments of Japan’s transition from the old Tokugawa regime to the new Meiji period, and were the major architects of the new social and educational systems. His great-great grandfather (Iwakura Tomomi) and the grandfather (Mori Arinori) were both men of interculturality, just as Mori himself was now finding that it was to become his destiny as well.

As early as May 10, 1956, Mori observed how temporality is closely connected with the totality of one’s being. “The past flows back into the present; one’s external environment revolves internally, while one’s internal environment develops externally; and all begin to take a new course of ‘flow’ toward the future” (Kako ga gyakuryū shi, soto ga naiten shi, sarani uchi ga gaiten shi, sore ga mirai ni mukatte nagaredasu).⁸ This conviction only got stronger in Mori, as we read his statement in his 1962 essay, “the end point of this ripening of time is for me something spiritual, going beyond the questions of mere epistemology or the nature of experience.”⁹ The future is shaped in this way, but the past that informs the present always accommodates the changing times and blends itself into the new emerging ethos.

In order for the reader to understand and appreciate Mori’s world, I will go further into the specifics of his parents, grandparents, and a few of his close relatives.

III. Mori’s Education and Academic Career

Mori’s parents enrolled him at Gyōsei, one of the most prestigious private schools in Tokyo. It was founded by French Catholic priests, who belonged to the Society of Mary. Thus, at age six, Mori was introduced to spoken French at school. Later, he lived in a dormitory run by the French-speaking fathers. (Incidentally, the famous novelist Natsume Sōseki chose Gyōsei for his two sons so that they could learn foreign languages, but the father’s optimism turned out to be unwarranted.) It was also at Gyōsei Middle School where Mori’s interest in Pascal was piqued, when he heard Father Émile Heck (1867–1943), who enthusiastically spoke about the unique quality of Pascal’s prose. This especially made an indelible impression on the teenage mind.

It was around this time (1927—when Mori was sixteen), the Fifteenth Bank, which was a national bank established with the funds of the members of the “kazoku” (the Meiji aristocracy), went bankrupt, and Mori’s family lost the foundation of its family assets. With the assistance of grandmother Hiroko’s elder sister’s relative (who married into the Matsudaira family), he was able to adjust the family’s financial portfolio, but many changes had to be made to their former style of living. Mori, his younger sister Ayako, mother, and grandmother moved out of their large house in Tsunohazu, in order to rent it out for needed income, and the four downsized in a small but fully functional rented house. The sixteen-year-old Mori came to assume the responsibilities as the head of the family. At this critical time, his father’s friends and colleagues stepped in to render moral support to the family. On the day of Mori’s graduation from the middle division of Gyōsei in 1929, Shimizu Jirō, a member of Naka-Shibuya Church, and who taught at the Peers’ School, took the place of his father Akira as the guardian figure and accompanied him at the ceremony.²⁸

Mori went on to the Tokyo Higher School (which was abolished under the Allied Occupation as being too elitist an institution), where he continued his study of French with the professor Watanabe Kazuo. When he entered the Imperial University of Tokyo, he majored in French literature and resumed his study with none other than the very Professor Watanabe. In his sophomore year, Mori succumbed to tuberculosis, possibly triggered by malnutrition, and he had to take an extended medical leave for four years from the university in order to convalesce (1933–37). When he regained his health, Mori wrote his bachelor’s thesis on Pascal, and graduated from the university. He continued on to the graduate program (in 1938), and worked as a teaching assistant (fukushu). Because of his earlier bout with tuberculosis, and also he narrowly survived a serious case of typhoid (in 1940), he was excused from military service. During the height of the war years, he remained at the university, working as associate (joshu). This is the period described by Katō Shūichi.²⁹ In 1942, at age thirty-one, he married, and his first daughter Masako was born in 1944, but she died after brief illness in her eighth month. Mori never forgot the excruciating pain of losing his first child for the rest of his life.

In the last years of the war, Mori was offered a position of professor at the First Higher School in Tokyo, where he taught from 1944 to 1947. Meanwhile, Japan surrendered to the Allied Forces on August 15, 1945. In the early postwar days, Mori and his wife had their second daughter Toshiko, and a son Ariyuki. In May 1948, he was appointed to the position of assistant professor (with tenure) at the Imperial University of Tokyo. (It was not until the May of 1949 when the “imperial university system” was dismantled under the Allied Occupation, and the prestigious title “Imperial” was dropped from the official title of the national universities.)

As early as in 1938, Mori had already begun his public career as a writer (as we saw previously). By the time of his appointment to the position of assistant professor at the imperial university, he was already a widely published well-established scholar with much promise. By the fall of 1950, when he left for France, Mori had an astounding number of publications under his belt: over one hundred articles, twenty-three books (that included a Japanese translation of Pascal’s The Provincial Letters, the selections from the Pensées, and a small book on Uchimura Kanzō, the eminent Christian writer and evangelist), several book reviews, and about a dozen roundtable discussions with leading thinkers.³⁰

IV. France: The New Beginning, and Professor Jean Wahl

Following the conclusion of World War II, the French government resumed its fellowship program in 1950. Mori and five other fellowship recipients left Japan on board La Marseilles in August. After four weeks of sea voyage, they arrived at the port of Marseilles. In those days, Japan was still under the occupation by the Allied Forces, and the Japanese government had no sovereign status to issue a passport. Therefore, they each carried with them a piece of paper, which stated that the possessor of the paper was permitted by the Allied Occupation Authority to leave Japan to study in France.

Mori’s initial intention was to complete his doctoral dissertation on Pascal, on which he had been working for some time. He also wanted to initiate an in-depth study of Descartes. However, as the ship neared the Port of Marseilles, his deep-seated anxiety began to surface in his consciousness. Would the kind of scholarship he had been trained in, and mastered, have a universal validity? Would it stand the test of French academia? This question had a deeper root—could one culture accurately communicate with another at the most profound and critical level?

As uncertain as he was, he headed north to Paris from Marseilles, and arrived there on September 25, 1950. His accommodation prearranged, he settled in a room at the Maison du Japon for foreign students. Among the first things he did was to contact the professor Lucien Foulet (1873–1958), the renowned medievalist, who was Watanabe’s mentor. Foulet accepted Mori as a private student and read Montaigne with him once a week, but due to his advanced age, this arrangement terminated after a year and a half. Mori recalls punctuality regulated Professor Foulet’s entire life. He soon found out that if he is early or late to the weekly meeting, even by five minutes, it was not a good idea.³¹

Mori also took the chance of contacting Jean Wahl (1888–1974), a professor of philosophy, without any letter of introduction. Carrying a one-page written research prospectus on Descartes’s thought in his pocket, he knocked on the door of Wahl’s office at the Sorbonne. Professor Wahl, after reading Mori’s prospectus, said: “This is the kind of research I have been wanting to carry out myself. Do you think you can do a better job than I can?” To this, Mori responded: “Yes, I think I can.” Thereupon, Wahl said: “So then, you have this project. I wish you all the best.”³²

With these words, Wahl took Mori under his wings and introduced him to his colleagues—both specialists of Descartes, Henri Gouhier (1898–1994) and Ferdinand Alquié (1906–86) at the Sorbonne. Mori joined the circle of Wahl’s students, who read works by Heidegger, Husserl, and so forth, which met outside the formal university classroom setting.³³ Wahl also invited him to attend talks given at the Collège Philosophique, where Mori heard many cutting-edge philosophical discussions presented by young up-and-coming French thinkers. Through this kind of mixture of formal and informal social–academic interactions, Mori came directly in touch with the dynamic living world of contemporary French philosophy and literature. Mori called Wahl the “onshi, a teacher to whom he is deeply indebted.”³⁴ It is unclear if Mori eventually produced the dissertation for Wahl on Descartes’s notion of “Eternity and Moments,” as his research turned into a much slower-moving project.³⁵ Wahl retired from the Sorbonne in 1967, but he continued to be in Mori’s life, as he invited his daughter Toshiko, for instance, to spend time with him and his wife.

Wahl was a unique thinker and a poet. During World War II, being an outspoken intellectual Jew, he was arrested for his anti-Nazi stance and put in the Drancy Internment Camp. By a miraculous series of events, he was released from incarceration after three months, and fled to the Free Zone in southern France.³⁶ His friends secured him a passage to the United States, and he spent the rest of the war years in New York and Mount Holyoke. Together with other French expatriates, he organized the “university in exile,” which became the lively hub of displaced French intellectuals in the United States. He befriended American poets during his stay there and translated some of their works into French. After the war, he returned to the Sorbonne. He also founded the Collège Philosophique in 1946 in the Latin Quarter, as the alternative venue to the Sorbonne, where nontraditionalist thinkers were able to exchange their ideas.³⁷ Among those who gave their presentations were Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault as well as Emmanuel Levinas, just to name a few.

Wahl’s profoundly humane brand of existentialist philosophy, no doubt reflecting the plight of the war years, is captured in his poem “On Reading the Four Quartets.”³⁸ Published in 1949, it was his response to T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. The poem starts with:

Better than praying on the tomb of the mother,

Is to say yes to this world,

And to seal it with our will.

In this poem, he alludes to his recent harrowing experience, which is not “redeemed, deceived, or healed,” but he chose to embrace the world in its eternal pattern of what it is. In the darkest moments, it was not “renunciation or repentance” but “the taste of some moments preternatural, in nature” that got him through. I especially find the line “knowing the way of dispossession and loving it” stark and heroic at the same time. The poem ends with these lines, which are his reflection on what it means “to be”:

We see the pattern and live it,

We live our own successive deaths,

And this is living our lives.

V. Years of Economic Uncertainty in Paris

When the terms of the French government’s fellowship ended, Mori decided not to return to Japan but to stay on in Paris and continue with his studies. He decided to leave his academic position at the University of Tokyo. Many deemed this move reckless, but Mori was compelled by what he called the “deep inner existential urge” (naimen-teki unagashi). Mori seems to be talking about something of the “intimation of the universal” that he intuited. It is to live life fully and authentically, by reaching out to the full potential of one’s life, for which one is born.

If one is familiar with the “Ten Ox Herding Pictures” of Zen Buddhism, Mori now stood at the very starting point, “looking for an ox.” Not knowing what he was looking for exactly, but sensing that something was missing in his life, he set out on the path of spiritual quest.

In Mori’s case, he wanted to see if he could forget his cultural and personal “baggage” and start out afresh. Is there another way to live one’s life free from the established status quo? He moved into a cheaper apartment hotel (with a kitchenette) in the Quartier Latin, which one could rent per month, and where a tardy payment of rent was overlooked so long as one paid up at some point.

It was out of economic necessity that he took up translation work. A big commission soon came his way thanks to the staff at the Japanese embassy—a translation into French of a novel by Serizawa Kōjirō, Pari ni shisu (Dying in Paris). This offered him a lump sum payment in cash.³⁹ It appears Mori’s translation was further edited by a professional French translator, before it was published by Robert Laffont in Paris with the title, J’irai mourir à Paris (1953).

In the spring of 1952, or thereabout, the professor Nanbara Shigeru, the former president of the University of Tokyo, visited Paris on his way back to Japan from the Netherlands where he attended an international conference. He stopped by in Paris specifically to talk to Mori and to persuade him to return to Japan. Nanbara pointed out that it was his moral duty to return to Japan for the sake of his family (Mori had his wife and two children back in Japan) and for the university, but Mori had his reasons to remain in Paris. In the end Nanbara respected Mori’s decision.⁴⁰ Effective March 31, 1954, Mori’s position at the University of Tokyo was officially terminated, as he requested.

Mori’s life was now firmly in his hand. The following is a glimpse of his daily routine shaping up in Paris in 1953, when he was putting his life in order. He found the time to go into the detailed description of his routine, when he was in London on his Christmas holiday:

I get up at 5:30 a.m. with the ring of my alarm clock. I quickly wash, make coffee, and drink it along with a piece of bread. Then, until 8:30 a.m., I toil away on my translation into French of some writings on eastern medicine [a work commissioned by a medical doctor at the Army Hospital]—this is to earn income.⁴¹ As soon as I finish this, I go out and have a cup of café au lait for thirty francs at my usual café in the neighborhood. Then, at the corner of the Rue Saint Jacques and Gay-Lussac, or from in front of the Luxembourg Station, I take a bus, number 21, 27, or perhaps 81. I get off at the Palais Royale, walk on the Boulevard Richelieu, and enter the Bibliothèque Nationale. There I work until 6 p.m. on my research on Descartes.

For lunch I sometimes go to a small cafe nearby for a sandwich and a cup of coffee; sometimes I take my own lunch with me and eat it while seated at my chair in the Bibliothèque. Unless I leave to listen to lectures at the Sorbonne, or the Collège de France, or attend the talks at the Collège Philosophique, I always remain at my desk at the Bibliothèque Nationale, doing my research.

When I finish my work at 6 p.m., I board the bus again and get off at the Quartier Latin, where I eat at an inexpensive restaurant or simply cook for myself in my room. Then, from about 10:30 to 11 p.m., I use my time as I wish—preparing articles for various Japanese newspapers or magazines, writing letters, or reading books that interest me.

Once a week, I go to the Institut Panthéon for my lessons in French composition; twice a month, I go to the home of Madame M (an acquaintance of Professor Wahl) on the Rue Jacob to read Heidegger’s text [Sein und Zeit] in German.

This is my routine from Monday through Friday, leaving me with Saturday and Sunday completely free to make use of as I wish… .

The simpler and more regular my routine becomes, the more productive I am [in my work]. That my life has settled into this kind of rhythm after my coming to France three years ago, and that I’m now in London for a visit for the first time, is significant for me, because I know that I can transfer this routine from Paris to London with no problem.⁴²

VI. More Settled Life in Paris

In 1955, Mori landed a position to teach a course on the history of Japanese literature at the Sorbonne. He was also offered a position as a Japanese language teacher at the École Nationale des Languages Orientales Vivantes—facilitated by the professor René Siefferet. Things were looking up.

His marital situation back home had become unworkable by this time, and eventually the couple decided to divorce. Mori assumed his parental responsibility and summoned his daughter Toshiko to Paris. In order to make this happen, he needed the requisite funds to show to the French immigration authorities that he was able to afford a family member living with him. For this reason, he signed a contract to translate the short stories of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, for the UNESCO translation series. This work paid him in advance, which enabled him to fund his daughter’s move to Paris in 1958. Mori found an apartment large enough to accommodate his daughter to live with him.⁴³ This seems to have given him the joy of family life in Paris, after so many years.

As for the translation of Akutagawa, he initially completed the draft in 1957, but no sooner than he thought he was done with it, he was dissatisfied with it.⁴⁴ Snatching back the draft from the secretary of the UNESCO, he ended up toiling over the translation for the next several years, going over one draft after another. Rashōmon et autres contes (Rashōmon and Other Stories) was finally published by Gallimard in November 1965.

Through this work experience, Mori realized that in order to make a good translation, the translated work must read as if it had been originally written in the target language. In order to reach this level of readability, Mori mobilized his young friends and students—native speakers of French—who would read aloud to him the translation, while he fingered along the Japanese text. So long as both texts cohered, it was a good sign; when they did not, they had to stop to rework on the translation, until wrinkles were smoothed out. Ultimately, he realized that putting together the original and the translation side by side was the best (and the only) way to finalize a work of translation. Moreover, the key was not so much the choice of correct words (in a lexical sense), but rather to pay attention to the color and the nuance that each word conjures up, so as to convey the scenes and the atmosphere of the original work in a translation.

This is a familiar problem for many scholars whose work involves translation. Should one be faithful to the original, or can a freer translation be made? Mori found that it was necessary to go beyond a literal translation in order to find the “resonance” that could do justice to the original text.⁴⁵ I, however, tend to maintain that this is not necessarily applicable to philosophical texts, in which the train of thought of the thinker is more important than the color and the sound of words that conjure up images and evoke a certain atmosphere.

VII. Language Acquisition: A Bodymind Activity

While Mori honed his linguistic sensitivity, his awareness of the importance of language deepened. In his early days in Paris, he already knew that fluency in French was the precondition for engaging in serious academic work. He was quite fluent in his French, as he had been exposed to the language since he was six years old. But his French was not a “living and breathing” French, as he put it. Facing this fact squarely, he thought about the reason:

When I began my research in France, what mattered foremost was that I improve my proficiency in French, even before I concentrated on my specialized field of research… .

I had carried with me a certain method of language learning, which consisted in two “bags”—one bag was the world of Japanese language, into which I was born and raised. The other bag was French that existed as secondary to my first “bag.” I was able to translate French literature into Japanese, but I could not compose a literary work in French with natural ease. French literature was something that I read by consulting my French-Japanese dictionary and my French-Japanese phrase books.

It turned out that this method of correlating two languages “bags” relied on my Japanese language; and the second bag (i.e., French) was not a living language in the proper sense of the word. I think I was reading French as a sort of sign (fuchō)… .

I had to discard this old method in order to make my French come alive and enrich it. I needed to mature linguistically and present myself as a meaningful member of society.⁴⁶

Language acquisition is a gradual and living process. Mori had already noticed as early as in 1957 that he no longer needed to translate familiar French phrases into Japanese because they made immediate sense to him.⁴⁷ How does this “progress” take place? He observed the following:

For a long time I used to think that it was my rational faculty—that is, the intellect or the reason, and the power of memorization—that was paramount in learning French. But no. It became clear to me that learning French was like transplanting an organ. From the moment when a cell of little French is transplanted in me, and it successfully takes roots, this little French begins to imbibe the French language that is floating around me to “nourish and stabilize” itself within me, and it starts to grow. There is no other way to learn French, unless one is satisfied with the method of language learning like “a translation machine.”⁴⁸

VIII. Language Teaching and Philosophizing: A Mutually Enriching Circle

Mori began to make his annual visit to Japan in 1966, as his life in Paris found its equilibrium. On October 11, 1968, during his stay in Japan, he looked back on his career of teaching Japanese in France, and thought about how it was related to his study of philosophy. Mori noted that contrary to what one may think, “my language teaching not only did not interfere with philosophizing but also it has given me much food for thought.”⁴⁹

Teaching one’s own native tongue to a nonnative speaker is not a mechanical work, but it requires a well-balanced approach of clear explanation of grammar combined with rich and insightful presentation of cultural information related to the lexical items. To teach and learn a language is also a kinetic and rational activity at the same time. A philosophical perspective of how the mind works in this process is actually beneficial in language teaching. In particular, Mori’s classes on the history of Japanese literature gave him the opportunity to read the original texts in ancient, medieval, and modern Japanese, and analyze them by being guided by philosophical questions. In this way, he discovered the perennial quality of the way of Japanese thinking in the works of the nativist scholar Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), who struck Mori as a highly original thinker. He also discovered the writings of the Buddhist master Dōgen (1200–53) to be full of philosophical implications. Through his language teaching, Mori was unexpectedly developing a unique organic and concretely systematic way of thinking. The study of the history of Japanese literature turned into a history of Japanese thought—this kind of crossing boundaries resulted in their mutually enrichment for Mori.

His reading of Dōgen was especially helpful for him to understand the modern Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945). Mori’s diary entries of 1968 are especially full of such references:

February 14, 1968: Upon reading Nishida’s writings, I realized that having read Dōgen in order to prepare my lectures, I actually deepened my understanding of Nishida. This came as a real surprise. From now on, whenever I talk about “experience,” I must reexamine the writings by Dōgen and Nishida carefully.⁵⁰

February 17, 1968: I gave my 8 a.m. lecture on Dōgen at the Sorbonne. I’m growing ever more enthusiastic about reading Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō. His view of time is surprisingly profound, especially when I consider the fact that it was intimately connected with his meditation practice.⁵¹

IX. Mori on Nishida—Philosophy of “Pure Sensation” vs. “Pure Experience”

Mori’s interest in Nishida Kitarō’s philosophy began a few decades back. One of the earliest mentions of Nishida by Mori is his criticism of Nishida’s notion of “pure experience.” In his diary of January 27, 1957, we read:

The one glaring essential shortcoming of Nishida’s philosophy is that he postulated what he called “pure experience” as something a priori. But today, we have lost sight of this reality [and we no longer possess it].⁵²

This curious passage indicates that Mori was laboring under the assumption that Nishida’s notion of pure experience was some sort of socio-historical construct. This type of interpretation of “pure experience” as a “special (privileged) spiritual awareness” was an interpretation commonly held among the students of philosophy, going back prior to the publication of Nishida’s first book, An Inquiry into the Good (Zen no kenkyū), in 1911. Nishida’s former student from the Fourth Higher School, Kihira Tadayoshi, introduced Nishida as someone who sat zazen (seated Zen meditation) for a decade, in the Journal of Philosophy (Tetsugaku zasshi).⁵³ Born in the year 1911, the same year Nishida’s An Inquiry into the Good was published, Mori may have carried a remnant of the air of the Meiji period; it is possible that he uncritically inherited the old-fashioned interpretation of what “pure experience” might mean, possibly understanding it as something akin to the “spirit of bushido” or the experience of “satori” (Zen enlightenment)—the sort of mental attitude which was still alive and embodied by many Meiji–Taishō intellectuals, statesmen, and those who belonged to the former “samurai” class. Mori was most likely looking back on the traditional samurai mindset that was no longer present in the postwar (i.e., post-1945) Japan.

Setting this quibble aside, Mori introduced Nishida to the French reading public in his essay in spring 1958, which he was invited to contribute by the editor of the journal L’Age Nouveau, who was among his acquaintances.⁵⁴ In this essay titled “Cheminement et direction de la pensée au Japon dans sa nouvelle génération d’apprès-guerre” (The direction of thought in Japan among the new postwar generation), Mori singled out Nishida as the most original Japanese thinker, who went beyond the usual Japanese academic practice of merely studying western ideas as a “philosophical” activity. He recognized in Nishida the profound attempt to fuse “rationality” and “existence,” to reach the bedrock of philosophical insight that was in harmony with the native cultural sensitivity, where metaphysics and human existence fused into one:

[In Nishida’s thought] as the result of his indefatigable pursuit into the roots of affectivity and metaphysical passivity, rationality and naked human existence came to be fused. As far as I know, Nishida is the only one who deepened (approfondir) this specific tendency of Japanese thinking that penetrated into the core of that culture’s metaphysical foundation.⁵⁵

Mori continued to read Nishida as part of his personal philosophical studies. A striking remark is found in his diary of October 16, 1965, which starts out with the mention that the day before, Professor Wahl had invited him to attend a dissertation defense held at the Sorbonne for the doctoral candidate Mr. S, who presented his dissertation on Nishida. Mori’s diary continues:

As the defense was nearing its end, the chairman of the committee, Professor Lacombe, asked me to say something about Nishida. I basically said that we needed to clarify sociologically why he set out with the idea of “pure experience” as his starting point. As for the relationship between Nishida and Western thinkers, I mentioned that he dealt with Western philosophers only insofar as he needed to define his own philosophical stance.

But as I think about what I said, I realize I left out one crucial point, namely, that Nishida’s philosophical endeavor was a pursuit to give a coherent expression to the easterner’s experience, to give it a rigorously constructed logical expression. As such it was a vast and profound, passionate, and almost an impossible task.

Nishida himself stated something like that in the preface to his book, Hataraku mono kara miru mono e [From that which acts to that which sees]. If I dare say, his attempt was comparable to those of medieval scholastic philosophers, who tried to give a logical expression to the Judeo-Christian experience.

Viewed in this manner, Nishida’s philosophical attempt looms large indeed. That is, he attempted to raise the legacy (isan) that the eastern people inherited from their ancestors into a rational realm, and ultimately to a universal dimension. Who could deny then that whatever our ancestors accomplished had great value?

Nishida looked back to these [cultural and historical] roots in order to move forward. This “looking back” [as a posture] raised misunderstandings, [as it could be taken that Nishida looked to the past]. I think the true value of Nishida’s thought will become clear slowly but gradually, and this must be so. I’m convinced of this. We should not overlook his profound inner urge that spurred him onto his work. If we overlook his inner urge, then I would imagine that any scholarship on Nishida would just be a pile of learned husks, full of empty analyses. It took me thirty years to reach this level of appreciation of Nishida’s philosophical endeavor.⁵⁶

Apart from Nishida’s From That Which Acts to That Which Sees, Mori was reading other works by Nishida (including his lecture notes, “Introduction to Philosophy”), but I will pass over these for now.

In short, Mori came to revise his understanding of Nishida considerably over time. He came to define Nishida’s “pure experience” as “the primary reality of the unity of subject and object” (shukyaku gōitsu no genshoteki jijitsu), as we find in his lecture he gave at International Christian University around 1970.⁵⁷ This, however, still does not do full justice to Nishida’s philosophy of pure experience, but I will not go into this point at this time.

Instead, as an extended footnote, let me point out a few facts concerning Nishida’s notion of “pure experience.” The expression “pure experience” is actually something Nishida adopted from William James, who had described Henri Bergson’s philosophy as one of “pure experience,” and began to describe his [i.e., James’s] own philosophical position as that of “pure experience.” Two letters by James to Bergson are most illuminating on this point. On December 14, 1902, James wrote to Bergson, by giving his reaction to the latter’s work, Matière et mémoire (Matter and Memory). James writes that the ideas presented in that work “were so new and vast” that it required him to go back to it for the second time, four years later. James informs Bergson that he just accomplished this task, and goes on:

It is a work of exquisite genius. It makes a sort of Copernican revolution as much as Berkeley’s Principles or Kant’s Critique did, and will probably, as it gets better and better known, open a new era of philosophical discussion… . The Hauptpunkt acquired for me is your conclusive demolition of the dualism of object and subject in perception. I believe the “transcendency” of the object will not recover from your treatment.⁵⁸

In the next letter of February 25, 1903, to Bergson, James writes:

I am convinced that a philosophy of pure experience, such as I conceive yours to be, can be made to work, and will reconcile many of the old inveterate oppositions of the scholars. I think that your radical denial … of the notion that the brain can be in any way the [maker] of consciousness, has introduced a very sudden clearness, and eliminated a part of the idealistic paradox.⁵⁹

Nishida was closely following James and Bergson, as his own philosophical interest was developing along the line of the “philosophy of pure experience,” as James put it. Nishida used the term “pure experience” interchangeably with “direct experience,” and he referred to the phenomena of consciousness under this term. A direct sensory datum, freshly given to the bodymind, gets filtered through the individual’s consciousness. The state of pure unity, prior to subject–object distinction, does get separated into subject and object in the subsequent moment of reflection of consciousness, with the rise of the awareness of the presence of one’s body as “here,” and the source of the sensory datum “out there.” I want to make clear that Nishida’s philosophy of “pure experience” did not start out with the religious experience of “satori,” or it represented some specific idea, such as the warrior’s spirit (“bushido”), as Mori might have understood it to mean.

Another point I want to bring up is that “pure experience” has two directions—that of unification (including the unity of subject and object prior to reflection), and that of diversification and development. Mori came to recognize the former direction of unification in his later work, but the latter direction of dynamic unfolding somewhat fell out of his purview. Had he realized Nishida’s philosophy of pure experience in its two aspects, Mori might have agreed with him and accepted the notion of “pure experience” as dealing with the same problem that Mori was pursuing in terms of “pure sensation,” which he came to develop somewhat systematically.

Moreover, soon after Mori’s death, three sets of typed manuscripts of French translation of Nishida’s writings were discovered among his unpublished papers. Nakamura Yūjirō, a Japanese philosopher, who was well acquainted with Mori, was asked to identify what they were. It turned out they were French translations of book 2 “On Reality” (Jitsuzai), and book 4 “On Religion (Shūkyō) ”—both from the Inquiry into the Good. The third set of translations was a segment of Nishida’s final essay, “The Logic of Topos and the Religious Worldview” (1945).⁶⁰

This episode had a non-dramatic ending. These translations turned out to be the work of Professor Frédéric Girard, which somehow ended up among Mori’s papers. A segment of Girard’s translation was published in a special issue of Cahiers pour un temps (December, 1986).⁶¹

X. Mori: A Philosopher in the Making

In this section I will choose two areas in which Mori was developing his own philosophical system. Not included in this discussion is his study of Descartes. A few remarks Mori made in his last years, however, indicate that his understanding of Descartes was moving beyond the model of usual Cartesian dualism, and moving toward the philosophy of “bodymind” as a unit. Wahl’s reflections on this point seemed to have played an important role in Mori’s interpretation.⁶⁷

XI. The Final Phase of His Life

By around 1969, Mori sensed that his inner and outer world had arrived at a new state of equilibrium, as his experience of life in Paris had fully matured, and things were coming together. He felt he was at the threshold of a new chapter of life.⁷⁸ He was a living witness to his own experimental hypotheses that experience is not a closed system but open—something that can grow and ripen. Experience is after all another word for life. He returned home to Paris from his three-month stay in Tokyo on November 2, 1967, with the new sensation that his world now began to draw an oblong shape (daen) with two foci—Paris and Tokyo, France and Japan, and more broadly, Europe and Asia.⁷⁹

From 1968 to 1969, Mori talked about a radical mutation that was taking place within him. This intimation of something new marked the final phase of his life. In 1969, he was appointed to the position of visiting professor at International Christian University in Mitaka, Tokyo, where his duty was to give an intensive series of lectures annually. This academic appointment created a new rhythm of life, as he now had a reason to return to Japan annually, which rekindled many old ties he had once left behind. His reputation of a thinker-author with an international perspective, was reaching celebrity status. The beautifully bound edition of Babylon and its sequel volume (published in 1968 and 1970), no doubt played an important role in enhancing the image of Mori in the minds of Japanese readers.

In Paris, his years of contribution to the field of Japanese studies were duly recognized. He was appointed to the directorship of the Maison du Japon in 1973—the very same place he began his sojourn in Paris in 1951, and this time as its director, not as a lodger. His children were all growing up, including his French daughter, conceived out of his brief second marriage to a French woman.

He began to look forward to his postretirement phase, when he could finally devote himself to his philosophical work on Descartes and to his organ playing. He was translating (into Japanese, I presume) Descartes’s last work, The Passions of the Soul (Les passions de l’âme, 1649), which went beyond the body–mind dualism to a “third realm” (Wahl), which had as its sui generis principle the unity of spirit and matter (or the bodymind).⁸⁰ Mori’s health began to falter around this time, however. He was unable to quit his lifelong habit of smoking. He first suffered from a major stroke in the summer of 1970, while in Sapporo. This dissipated his intellectual energy, needed to complete the project on Descartes. Jean Wahl died in Paris on June 19, 1974, at age 86, and Mori died two years later, on October 18, 1976, at age 65. He was surrounded by his family and devoted friends. His body was cremated at the Cemetery of Père Lachaise. The ashes were brought back to Japan by his daughter Toshiko, and interned in the family grave at Tama Cemetery in Tokyo. Mori thus concluded his long journey and returned “home” to rest alongside his parents. He was “able to die his own death, without fearing death.”⁸¹

Augustin Berque, a geologist, who had Mori as his professor of Japanese at the Center for the Oriental Languages in Paris, 1967 to 1969, recalls that Mori was a popular professor among his French students, as he took delight in illustrating grammar points with cultural information, which he had at his fingertips. His students lovingly called him “Professor Savant.” Berque, a recipient of illustrious prizes and honors, is now a retired professor of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. When Mori was in Sapporo for his second visit in 1971, Berque also happened to be in Japan, and on one afternoon he and Mori had a leisurely witty conversation over a glass of beer.⁸²

Notes

1.Entry March 24, 1956; Mori Arimasa, Babiron no nagare no hotori ni te [On the shore of the river flowing through the region of Babylonia] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1968). This edition contains three works: Babiron no nagare no hotori ni te (first published in 1957), 1–130; Nagare no hotori ni te [On the shore of the flowing river] (1959), 131–298; and Jōmon no katawara ni te [By the city wall of Harran] (1963), 299–397.

2.Blaise Pascal, Pensées, est. Léon Brunschvicg, ed. Dominique Descotes (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1976), 459. There are at least three main methods of identifying Pascal’s passages of the Pensées adopted by different editions: B = Brunschvicg edition, L = Lafuma edition (the English translation by A. J. Krailsheiner, 1966 was made based on this edition), and S = Sellier edition. Because L (translated into English) and B (in French) benefit from the existence of the “concordance,” I refer both to L and B to identify the passages.

3.Pascal, Pansées, 1966, 312.

4.Mori Arimasa, Sabaku ni mukatte [Heading into the desert] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1970a), 47–49. This is the sequel to Babiron no nagare no hotori ni te (1968).

5.Entry of January 5, 1954; Mori, Babiron, 68.

6.Sekiya Ayako, Ippon no kashi no ki—Yodobashi no ie no hitobito [The lone oak tree—People associated with the house in Yodobashi] (Tokyo: Nihon Kirisutokyōdan Shuppankyoku, 1981).

7.Entry of October 8, 1953; Mori, Babiron, 3.

8.Mori, Babiron, 107.

9.Entry of September 20, 1962; Mori, Babiron, 223–37.

10.Kimura Tadashi, (1889). Mori Sensei-den [A biography of Mr. Mori Arimasa] (Tokyo: Kinkōdō Shoseki, 1889).

11.Mori, Sabaku, 172–73, quoted in Kimura, Mori Sensei, 7.

12.John van Sant, ed., Mori Arinori’s Life and Resources in America. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), xviii–xix.

13.van Sant, Mori Arinori’s Life, xxii.

14.van Sant, Mori Arinori’s Life, xxx.

15.Sekiya, Ippon no kashi no ki.

16.Hagiya Yukiko Wīn ni Rokudan no shirabe—Toda Kiwako to Burāmusu [The vibrating tune of “Rokudan” in Vienna—Toda Kiwako and Brahms] (Tokyo: Chūōkōron-shinsha, 2021), 164–72.

17.Sekiya, Ippon no kashi no ki, 19.

18.Entry of September 28, 1959; Mori, Sabaku, 377.

19.Mori, Babiron.

20.Mori Arimasa, Ikiru koto to kangaeru koto [To live and to think] (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1970b), 25.

21.See their website: https://kyojokai.com/about.

22.Sekiya, Ippon no kashi no ki, 168–69.

23.Mori Arimasa, Furui mono to atarashii mono [Things old and new] (Tokyo: Nihon Kirisutokyōdan Shuppankyoku, 1975), 193.

24.Sekiya, Ippon no kashi no ki, 148–49.

25.Entry of February 16, 1954; Mori, Babiron, 74–75.

26.Sekiya, Ippon no kashi no ki, 151–53.

27.Entry of October 2, 1959; Mori, Babiron, 380–87.

28.Sekiya, Ippon no kashi no ki, 179.

29.See the Rimer essay in this volume.

30.See Takahashi Hiroshi, “Mori Arimasa chosaku mokuroku” [Comprehensive list of writings by Mori Arimasa], Hokusei Gakuen Joshi Tanki Daigaku Kiyō 22 (1983): 67–82.

31.Mori Arimasa, (1967). Harukana Nōtoru Damu [Notre Dame in the distance]. (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1967), 155–56.

32.Sekiya, Ippon no kashi no ki, 230–33.

33.Mori Arimasa, (1969). Tabi no sora no shita de [Under the traveler’s sky] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1969), 194–95. This volume contains several essays (e.g., “Bunka no ne to iu mono ni tsuite” [The “roots” of culture] (Dec. 1955), 149–73, and “Kotoba ni tsuite” [Reflections on language] (1968 October 11, 133–148.

34.Mori, Sabaku, 255.

35.Entry of January 12, 1966; Mori, Sabaku, 96.

36.W. C. Hackett, Outside the Gates. (Brooklyn, NY: Angelico Press, 2021).

37.Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 55.

38.Jean Wahl, “On Reading the Four Quartets,” Poetry 73, no. 6 (March 1949): 317.

39.Mori, Ikiru koto, 44.

40.Mori Arimasa, Tōzakaru Nōtoru Damu [The Notre Dame becoming more distant] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1976), 125.

41.Mori Arimasa, Kigi wa hikari o abite [Trees busking in the sun] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1972), 13.

42.Entry of December 26, 1953, in London; Mori, Babiron, 57–58.

43.Mori, Ikiru koto, 44; and Mori, Tōzakaru Nōtoru Damu, 16.

44.Mori, Harukana Nōtoru Damu, 154; and Mori, Sabaku, 88.

45.Mori, Sabaku, 142.

46.October, 1966; Mori, Harukana Nōtoru Damu, 143.

47.Entry of September 22, 1957; Mori, Babiron, 239.

48.Entry of December 5, 1965; Mori, Sabaku, 80.

49.Mori, Tabi no sora, 133.

50.Mori, MAZ 13: 447.

51.Mori, MAZ, 13: 449

52.Mori, MAZ, 13: 55.

53.See Michiko Yusa, Zen and Philosophy: An Intellectual Biography of Nishida Kitarō (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002), 87–88.

54.See entries of March 14 and May 5, 1958; Mori, Babiron, 282, 296.

55.Mori Arimasa, “Cheminement et direction de la pensée au Japon dans sa nouvelle génération d’apprès-guerre” [The direction of thought in Japan among the new postwar generation],” L’Age Nouveau, nos. 101–102 (April-May): 83; Mori, MAZ, 15: 89–90. Original French text and translation into Japanese by Ninomiya Masayuki are compiled in Mori, MAZ, 15: 63–84.

56.Entry of October 16, 1965; Mori, MAZ, 13: 272–73.

57.Mori Arimasa, Keiken to shisō [Experience and Thought] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1977), 18–19.

58.Ralf Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Briefer Version) (New York and Evanston, IL: Harper & Row, 1935), 341–42.

59.Perry, Thought and Character of William James, 343. Emphasis in the original.

60.Nakamura Yūjirō, “Mori Arimasa ga nokoshita mono—sono messēji o dō uketomeru ka” [Unpublished writings left behind by Mori Arimasa: How do we receive their message?], Tenbō 236 (August 1978): 132–33.

61.Nakamura Yūjirō, Nishida tetsugaku no datsukōchiku (Deconstructionist elements present in Nishida’s philosophy), (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten), 153-54.

62.Yusa, Zen and Philosophy, 17–18.

63.Yusa, Zen and Philosophy, 35.

64.Nishida Kitarō, Nishida Kitarō zenshū [Collected Works of Nishida Kitarō] vol. 17 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten 1980), 13 (Hereafter, NKZ); and Yusa, Zen and Philosophy, 84, 106–7.

65.Nishida Kitarō, 1980. Diary, December 29, 1909, NKZ 17.233.

66.Sugimoto Haruo, 1982, 4; also see Takahashi Hiroshi, 2010.

67.Mori, Kigi wa hikari, 52.

68.Mori, Babiron, 130.

69.Entry of July 14, 1956; Mori, Sabaku, 32.

70.December 25, 1786; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe’s Travels in Italy together with his Second Residence in Rome and Fragments on Italy, trans. A. J. W. Morrison and C. Nisber (London: George Bell & Sons, 1885).

71.Mori, Sabaku, 288–89.

72.Mori, Tabi no sora, 210, 217–18, et passim.

73.Entries of June 16 and June 18, 1967; Mori, Sabaku, 225, 238.

74.Mori, Tōzakaru Nōtoru Damu, 31–32.

75.Mori, Tōzakaru Nōtoru Damu, 68–69.

76.Mori, Kigi wa hikari, 196–205.

77.Mori, Kigi wa hikari; Mori, Tōzakaru Nōtoru Damu; and Mori, Keiken to shisō.

78.Mori, Tabi no sora, 147.

79.Entry of November 3, 1967; Mori, Sabaku, 282.

80.Mori, Kigi wa hikari, 50–53.

81.Entry of October 8, 1953; Mori, Babiron, 3.

82.Personal communication with the author, February 10, 2023.

83.See David Chandler, “Paul Mus (1902)-1969): A Biographical Sketch,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Winter 2009) 149-191. Online: jstor.org/stable/10.1525/vs. 2009.4.1.149.

84.Paul Mus, “Paysans et paysages: Ense et aratro” [Peasants and landscapes: With service both in war and in peace], Esprit 353, no. 3 (March 1967): 461–67.

85.Mori, Sabaku, 153, 159, and 259–60, et passim.

References