MEDITATIONS: DOKKODO; THE WAY OF ALONENESS XV.

Principle Fifteen

Do not act following customary beliefs. (Miyamoto, Musashi)

Each man is born to a particular time and place, to particular parents who themselves belong to a culture whose values they inherited. This fact explains the “throwness,” “flungness,” and “injustice” felt by many individuals, especially entrepreneurs and artists who do not naturally fit the mold into which they are obligated to fill. But tolerable or not, the unfairness persists as an inescapable facet of reality itself. Human beings are social animals, and they must accept that their ethnic and genetic lineages determine the shape of the course of their lives.

However, acceptance of the fact that one’s values and assumptions are not manifested at will out of the æther does not mean that one is doomed to at in deterministic fashion like an automaton railroaded by his life’s train tracks. Just as one can practice observing himself and his emotional reactions, allowing them to rise and pass without taking action, one can acknowledge his cultural norms, mores, and obligations without becoming a slave to them.

Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols is subtitled Doing Philosophy with a Hammer for this very reason. He argues that all ideals are actually false idols, that the thing-itself is that-which-is, not the thing-in-itself, which isn’t located in the thing at all; nor is it to be found in the realm of forms but in the head of the man who projects his ideal onto the world. This is akin to Buddhist Mara or illusion. These are the “words” and “labels” mentioned by Taoist sage Lao Tzu.

How does the above relate to acceptance without slavery?

Nietzsche’s moral slave is he who, out of a desire for revenge against the world-that-is—that particular time and place described prior—places morality above being itself. Such a man worships the ideal in his mind and will argue that, if life cannot conform to what he feels is right, it ought not to be at all. In this view, existence is made subject and servant to the idea and can be dismissed, discarded, and even destroyed if it is found wanting.

Such an attitude leads one to strive for moral purity, for it has been made guilty of its own “imperfect” existence. No man is without his contradictions, weaknesses, vices, and errors. Because this is the case, every man will always fall short of moral purity. He will see how he fails to live up to his values, many of which don’t belong to him but which have been inherited, and self-destruct as a punishment for his guilt and shame. In this way, he betrays himself for the sake of a cultural ideal which was never real in the first place.

When Musashi advises, “Do not act following customary beliefs,” he is instructing one to accept the fact famous stated by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that the line between good and evil runs across the heart of every man. The way of a people is not the same as his way, which is not the same as the Way itself. What works for one and what is good for one does not always translate to another, and sometimes opposing values bring peoples within and across cultures into conflict. But to deny this conflict is what Zhuangzi called a “double injury.” Real life contains conflict and contradiction; only false ideals are free from dialectics. Therefore, harmony among the ways of self and society and the Way is a voluntary integration of conflict, not the annihilation of it. This is like a game, a competition couched within a greater cooperation.

That is all to say that a man will inevitably have to act in opposition to his culture’s customs in order to maintain integrity between himself and the Way. When he does this, he ought to acknowledge that his actions are a sin among his people. He ought not seek to justify himself and change the society to fit his actions, for then he would be following cultural customs and not the Way itself. Indeed he ought not ever view his actions justified by the consensus of customs. Even when his actions conform to cultural norms, this ought to be a happenstance alignment of the customs with the Way.

In the west, one might say Musashi’s maxim is thus: “Don’t follow the crowd; follow your conscience.”

Miyamoto, Musashi. Dokkodo, translator unknown, 1645.