Motoori Norinaga · Philosophy
Norinaga’s Shinto: the world as given by the <em>kami</em>, the deities, and lying beyond the reach of human reason - a call to accept what cannot be explained, including the sorrow of death, without theodicy or rationalizing, in humble trust rather than moral system-building.
Out of his decades of work on the Kojiki, Norinaga drew a religious vision he claimed was Japan’s original and true one: the Way of the kami, the deities. On this view the world is not a self-explaining machine, nor the unfolding of a rational principle, but something given - brought into being and governed by the kami, whose acts lie behind all that happens. The ancient records tell how the gods made the land, the world, and the imperial line, and Norinaga took this not as allegory but as the deepest available account of reality. Crucially, this Way has no elaborate doctrine, no commandments, no philosophical system. It is not a set of teachings to be argued for but an order to be received. To live rightly is to accept the world as the kami have given it, to honor them, and to feel and act with a true heart - not to master existence through theory, but to trust and revere a reality one did not make and cannot fully understand.
To understand the Way, one must understand what Norinaga meant by kami - a word often translated ‘god’ but far wider and stranger. A kami is not necessarily a supreme being or a moral ideal. Norinaga’s famous definition casts the net remarkably wide: the kami include the deities of the ancient records, but also the spirits enshrined in shrines, and beyond that, anything - a person, a bird or beast, a tree, a mountain, a sea - that possesses some extraordinary, awe-inspiring quality out of the ordinary. What makes something a kami is not goodness or power in the moral sense but its capacity to strike us with awe, its uncanny excess over the everyday. Crucially, this includes things that are frightening, malignant, or destructive: a raging storm, a deadly force, an evil that fills us with dread can be kami too. The sacred, for Norinaga, is not the same as the good. It is the awesome - whatever exceeds and overpowers ordinary human measure, for weal or woe.
At the center of Norinaga’s religious thought is a refusal that can look, at first, like a failure - the refusal to explain. Confronted with the world’s evils and injustices, the great philosophical and religious systems typically respond with a theodicy: an account showing that, rightly understood, the suffering serves a purpose, fits a moral order, or will be redeemed. Norinaga rejected all such accounts as presumptuous. The world contains real evil and real sorrow; these come, in some sense, from the kami, including malignant ones; and why the gods made things so is simply beyond us. To construct a scheme that justifies it all is to claim a god’s-eye understanding that no human possesses. The properly humble response is to acknowledge the limits of our reason, to accept the world including its griefs as given, and to feel honestly within it - reverence toward the kami, sorrow at what is sorrowful, gratitude at what is good. Not knowing why, for Norinaga, is not a gap to be filled by theory but a truth to be lived.
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’s Way of the kami treats the world as given by the deities and beyond the reach of human reason, and calls for humble acceptance of what cannot be explained - including the sorrow of death - rather than theodicy or moral rationalizing. Explain this view and how it differs from a philosophy th…
Leads to Zhuangzi.
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