Wang Yangming, the great Confucian scholar (incidentally, Chairman Xi Jinping’s favourite non-marxist philosopher) taught the unity of thought and action; action completes thought, action without thought is incomplete. Some of the philosophers for whose work I have the greatest admiration did or allowed themselves to be associated with dreadful things; Heidegger, Tanabe Hajime, others. By contrast, some philosophers in whose work I have little interest or for whose thinking I have serious criticism did not get involved in supporting shameful behaviour and events. This certainly has much to do with the caprice of history and circumstance and only relatively little to do with personal will. But still, while Heidegger fell, others didn’t . Between profound insight and thought and good action therefore lies a field of practical ethics. It is not enough to realise the depths of one’s own conscious existence in isolation. That is an incomplete – a necessarily incomplete – realisation.
People sometimes find irrational excuses for what is simple expediency, or bowing to popular trends, or just selfishness and lack of interest in forming a clear sighted perspective on events.
The more intelligent the person, often the less rational the excuse. For an intelligent person to come up with a suitably rational and persuasive excuse for doing something, or going along with something silly or malicious is hard work; Hard work to convince themselves, and hence to persuade others.
Therefore, the intelligent person who seeks to excuse their irrationality looks to see the mystical works of Heaven, or God, or the movement of some other great principle in the popular trends they have acquiesced to supporting, though they know those trends go against their own better and more considered judgement.
It happens. I see it. I'm guilty too. It's understandable, but not really excusable. We should try to see clearly. The world may not be realisable in a purely objective way. In fact to believe it could be so is a fundamental error, since objectivity entails the correlative subjectivity. But we are directed towards objectivity for practical and hence ethical activity.
Human beings want a happy and fulfilled life. Humans are social beings. We need resources both to survive and to thrive.
To regard social life we might better apply a Japanese understanding (see Watsuji Tetsuro) of the human person as “inter-person” (ninjen): there is no ‘human being as person’ outside of ‘human beings as people'.
What has been called in the west ‘the individual’ is this ‘inter-person’. Both ‘individual’ and ‘inter-person’ are abstract concepts, but the latter is (I propose) more descriptive of concrete reality. No individual person has ever self-assembled outside of another human being
We are born from other humans, we naturally live and develop amongst other humans. Our body is the body we find ourselves in, but this entity, this ‘inter-person’ contains it’s context. That context is both the supra-human natural world, the living Earth, and the society of human beings. The precariousness of the former due to human activity is a heavily looming threat to the very survival of the latter. The everyday ‘self’ as a centre of relations to others is the essence of ‘our inter-person’. It’s declaration of identity might be thus “they are, so I am. I am, so they are”.
The great philosopher and Zen master Nishida Kitaro said “In the depths of the self there is that which transcends the self. And yet, it is not something merely external to the s something merely other than the self”.
My own vanity and immodesty in wanting to add something more to this insight and thus pretend I have anything more to add must acquiesce to better judgement