The 3rd ENOJP conference in Paris just ended a few days ago, but I didn’t get around to write about it until now. I am still a bit jet lagged after a week in Europe, and concentrating on teaching and on the interaction with the students when your body is telling you to go to sleep is no easy task… Plus, I wanted to let everything sink in, so I can ruminate on things quietly and thoroughly – the three days of the conference were full to the brim with intellectual stimuli and my brain needed a rest to absorb and process all the information. Not to mention that we were at the INALCO and at the Sorbonne!
I listened to several insightful presentations, and I attended the best keynote lecture ever – it was undoubtedly a real treat for everybody in the auditorium. It was a true tour de force in which the speaker did not lose his verve even for one second, conducted (superbly!) a wonderful philological argument with almost flawless articulations, rigorous and entertaining at the same time, while keeping the audience alert and engaged for well over one hour. A wonderful experience, and a great demonstration of how you should present the results of your research.
But the highlight of the conference for me this time was undoubtedly the unofficial part, the informal discussions with friends and colleagues I only see once a year. I had a particularly stimulating conversation with a fellow researcher (and friend) from a university in Switzerland who, like me, has been working for some time on a Japanese premodern philosopher. We talked about Confucianism, the transmission of truth in Buddhism, the evolution of “Nature” as a philosophical concept in Japan and many other things, but the main point of our discussion was the necessity to clarify your own understanding of philosophy before you engage with the ideas of a thinker (especially a premodern one).
This is a topic I have been thinking a lot about lately, as I feel the need to articulate clearly my own take on philosophy before I start saying that Andō Shōeki or Yamagata Bantō are philosophers, or before I start debating the difference between the terms shisō 思想 and tetsugaku 哲学.
I have a background in literature. I began studying Japanese because I wanted to read literary works in the original, I wrote my BA graduation thesis on Genji monogatari, I translated several novels by modern and contemporary authors, and I taught literature courses for many years. And then at some point something piqued my curiosity and I started reading philosophy, and what seemed like a minor bifurcation at first has now become the thickest part of my research and career.
Yet I feel that, to a certain extent, my approach to philosophy is quite similar to my approach to literature. When I read a good literary piece, I don’t expect answers from it – I want questions. The more, the better. I consider a novel or a short story or a poem to be good if it makes me think, if it leaves me wondering, if it makes me ask questions about the world, about us, about me. And I realized that I read philosophy much in the same way, looking for questions, expecting new questions, and not answers. I don’t believe that philosophy has to (or can, for that matter) provide answers, it just has to ask the questions that make us think about other questions. It just plows the land, and then it’s up to us to plant the seeds. And then when we feel we are about ready to crop, we have to start all over again from tilling.