Philosophy
1730 to 1801, Matsusaka, Japan
The scholar who found the Japanese heart in the pathos of things, and spent thirty-five years reading it back out of an ancient text.
Start learning Motoori →Motoori Norinaga’s discovery that the heart of The Tale of Genji - and of human life - is mono no aware , the deep sensitivity to the pathos of passing things, and his revolutionary claim that literature is to be…
Norinaga’s program of kokugaku (‘national learning’) - the attempt to recover the ancient Japanese Way by philology, against karagokoro , the ‘Chinese mind’ of Confucian rationalism and mor…
How Norinaga’s patient, decades-long commentary on the almost unreadable Kojiki of 712 CE became a philosophical method in its own right - letting the ancient words speak without forcing them into Chinese categori…
Norinaga’s Shinto: the world as given by the kami , 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 rationali…
Why, for Norinaga, composing waka is not ornament but the practice of knowing mono no aware - poetry as the natural overflow of a heart that cannot contain its feeling, and the Isonokami sasamegoto ’s defense of p…
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