Certainty Is a Cage
On Why We Cannot Understand One Another
No matter how many words we spend, no matter how we shift our position to explain, no matter how we listen to the other side’s case, in the end we return to the same place. Inside this answerless circling we come to feel that any further effort is wasted. Usually we grow impatient to produce an answer, offer the excuse of “compromise,” and conclude that the other is wrong or that the other has no will to understand. At this moment we place the cause of the failure to understand on the other side and justify ourselves and talk ourselves into it.
But is that truly the road to mutual understanding? In the very moment we feel we cannot understand one another, we often make our own side alone the sole correctness without realizing it. No, in nearly everything we do this. We tie the world we see to the world itself and affirm it, and in the end we regard the other as an inferior being who has strayed from it. The trap of dualism typical of right and wrong or good and evil is always a problem of the self. It is not a problem of others or society or government or the world. The more certain we become that we are right and that we are good, the narrower the world actually grows. The more we believe this is correct, the more suffocating it becomes. Certainty was supposed to be taught to us as strength, yet it inverts and works as a cage that locks us in.
The worst form of this is when blind faith that one alone is good and right leads a person to cut off the very existence they assume as their counterpart. This cutting off always happens when one’s own world has narrowed to its limit. It never happens because that world is universal. When the world has narrowed to its limit, such people mistake whatever clear thing remains for something they must protect, so they inevitably close off dialogue themselves. By closing off dialogue, they can preserve the self-serving convenience that the other is evil and the other is wrong.
For some reason people do not notice this inverting action. To those who look at history, or who have spent a lifetime refining how to receive and how to dialogue with the discomfort of an entirely different cultural sphere, the sight of people trapped in this inverting action is hard to comprehend. We were taught that the human being is a noble form of life, but the reality is nothing of the sort. There is the single relation between you and me that modernity has erased. That single relation holds high density and concentration, and heat dwells there, and a soul dwells there. For this single relation to work, a place is needed. Because a place is born first, you and I can face each other sincerely from the heart and bring forth a single relation through great struggle. That place is the precondition for a relation to be born, and it is created in the relation of heart to heart.
If people had truly grasped correctness and goodness as they claim, then why do they become not free but cramped, or to put it more precisely, narrow-minded? Why has the present age become something like a den of the narrow-minded? They hold no answer to this question. The reason is plain. They are searching for truth as something that lies outside themselves. Somewhere there is a single truth, and if you discover it and grasp it, everything is solved. This is not conviction but blind faith, and without noticing it people go off to search for truth in the outer world. To beautify this, a story is prepared. For things, for others, for society, for the state, and for the world. Yet in fact the more we go searching for truth on the outside, the further we move from ourselves, and the chance to grasp the fruit of life never arrives to the end. And this is the wasted toil of a life.
Let me put it another way. The closer we draw to the world, the more we fall into the inverting action of moving away from ourselves. This is a principle and an inevitability. And the further we move from ourselves, the more the world narrows to match. Anyone who has tried even a little to explore the spiritual world in their life will have some memory of this strange and delicate discomfort as an unnameable and curious sensation. Yet one truth is suggested here. Why does drawing closer to the world move us away from ourselves? Why does moving away from ourselves narrow the world? If you press through to this question, the truth becomes unexpectedly clear. What is misunderstood is the idea that the closer we draw to the world, the more our own existence is fixed. This widespread way of thinking is plainly wrong and false. What we must consider is by what this inverting action is caused.
When you take a bird’s-eye view of the present world, you notice that people blindly believe they are right even as they rush about in search of “something.” Viewed calmly, nothing is stranger or more foolish than this. After all, people somehow justify themselves even though they do not know what the “something” they seek even is. And without realizing it they force this so-called correctness on people of a different cultural sphere and disturb the order of that different cultural sphere. Even from my own experience, this is hard to avoid from the standpoint of crossing cultures, and however conscious we become it cannot be completely dissolved. The reason is that the context each of us was born and raised in is different. The world is not one, humanity is not one, and not everyone is a friend. Such things are obvious. This is not illusion or fiction or story. It is simply obvious.
For the context to differ means that the whole of the history, spirit, culture, conduct, and daily activity one takes on is different, so we never reach the state that “mutual understanding” means in the way the term is used now. Because at that dimension “mutual understanding” is not possible. The mutual understanding we assert is in the end nothing more than something realized by setting someone’s standard as the implicit or deliberate default value and then excluding, unconsciously or consciously, whatever deviates from it. This is not mutual understanding, and it is not a dimension in which the existence of the other is acknowledged in the heart. Because the foundation remains dualism as ever.
What I want to raise here is this. The world that we who have undergone modernity speak of is in fact only a minority position when seen across humanity, and the overwhelming majority of the humanity that exists on the earth now does not share the world we speak of. This is the first point. People still speak calmly of the world and humanity and the human being, yet they are not aware of this fundamental problem. Whether or not one has undergone modernity matters more than people think, and however one defines modernity, it lies at a base layer that must be considered seriously. And now, in a time not of modernity but of the collapse of modernization, we who have undergone modernity inevitably speak with this world as our premise. Unfortunately that is blind faith and falsehood, not truth. Because the greater part of humanity, entirely apart from how we wish to believe, has not undergone modernity. Of course there are differences of degree. And what matters is that modernity is by no means right or good. The very idea that this is the world exposes the grounds for why we cannot understand one another, yet a design to keep us from seeing that is at work socially and at the level of the state. Seeing through this far is not easy, and that vast matrix cannot be changed. For people in certain regions that hold the historical context of civil society some kind of transformation may be possible, but even that is only a small part of the earth and not the world. The correctness or goodness within one’s own context holds only within that context, and it must never be taken outside it. This is the principle of invasion. Mutual understanding in its present meaning is therefore invasion and deprivation, and it must be treated as a quite serious problem.
When people fall into this inverting action, they always affirm their own world reactively, justify it, treat it as good, and then force it on the other without fail. In earlier eras this hardly surfaced. It was relatively confined to areas such as international politics and diplomacy, so there was room to examine it in contexts like post-colonialism. But now this entanglement caused by the inverting action has been taken over by countless people who are neither politicians nor diplomats. The symbol of this is the tourist. Unfortunately only a handful of tourists face this question and confront other countries and other cultures with awareness. Most give it no thought and, without knowing, erode and strip away other countries and other cultures. Even if the other’s culture and spirit are lost, to them it is no concern. This is the principle of the invader. The invader is by no means an obvious evil. The terror of the good person lies here. And the problem is how this designation of the good person has come to be decided.
The Confucian Analects holds an old teaching. It is the line [郷愿は徳の賊である], that the village worthy is the thief of virtue. The village worthy is the good and upright model student who does nothing bad, makes no waves, conducts a social life, and lives a well-rounded life. In short, it is the person who tips into hypocrisy out of an excess of trying to be a good child and to be virtuous. Confucius warned that the standard of good and evil is gutted by such people. He argued that the supreme human good that Confucianism has prized as “virtue” is stolen by these good people. In other words, obvious evil can be guarded against, but the true problem is the hypocrite wearing the face of a good person. They eat away at the whole while no one guards against them, and in the end it always collapses. This old teaching of more than two thousand years now echoes within me.