Motoori Norinaga · Philosophy
Motoori Norinaga’s discovery that the heart of <em>The Tale of Genji</em> - and of human life - is <em>mono no aware</em>, the deep sensitivity to the pathos of passing things, and his revolutionary claim that literature is to be judged by whether it knows that pathos, not by whether it teaches a moral.
In the middle of the eighteenth century, a physician and scholar in the castle town of Matsusaka gave a name to something the Japanese had felt for a thousand years but never quite defined: mono no aware. The words are hard to translate - literally something like ‘the aware of things,’ where aware is the catch of the breath, the soft sigh, that a moving thing draws out of us. It is the tender, slightly sorrowful sensitivity we feel before cherry blossoms precisely because they are already falling, before a lover precisely because the meeting must end, before the moon precisely because the night will pass. Motoori Norinaga made this fleeting feeling the center of a whole philosophy of literature and life. To be fully human, he taught, is to be open to the pathos of passing things - to be moved, and to know that one is moved. The person who feels nothing at the fall of the blossoms, who meets birth and parting and death unstirred, has failed at the most basic human task.
It is easy to hear ‘mono no aware’ and think Norinaga is merely praising sentiment, a good cry over the cherry blossoms. But he meant something more precise and more demanding. To know mono no aware is a kind of knowledge - a right responsiveness in which one feels exactly what a situation calls for: joy at what is joyful, grief at what is grievous, tenderness at what is tender. It is to see into the heart of a thing or a person and to be moved appropriately by it. The insensitive person does not merely lack good taste; they fail to grasp reality, because the felt quality of things - their poignancy, their claim on us - is part of what they truly are. This is why, for Norinaga, the cultivation of feeling is not softness but a discipline of perception, and why literature, which trains the heart to feel rightly, matters as much as any philosophy that trains the head to reason rightly.
Norinaga’s theory amounted to a declaration of independence for literature. A poem or a tale, he argued, is not a sermon, a law book, or a work of philosophy; it does its own kind of work, which is to express and communicate mono no aware. Its excellence is therefore measured by the depth and truth of the feeling it conveys, not by the soundness of any doctrine it might be read as endorsing. This freed the Genji from a thousand years of apology. Where earlier critics had to pretend Murasaki was really a moralist in order to justify reading her, Norinaga could simply say: she was the greatest of all writers because no one has ever known and conveyed mono no aware so completely. The immoral affairs are not blemishes to be excused, nor lessons to be extracted; they are the occasions through which the deepest human feeling is shown. Literature, on this view, is answerable to the heart, and to the heart alone.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Norinaga read The Tale of Genji not as a moral warning but as the supreme expression of mono no aware - the sensitivity to the sorrow and beauty of transient things - and held that a work of literature is good insofar as it knows that pathos. Explain mono no aware and Norinaga’s test for literature in…
Leads to Murasaki Shikibu.
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