Motoori Norinaga's 'Aware o Shiru' as Affective Cognition and Ethical Judgment — Epoche C2
What Norinaga actually argues, and against whom Motoori Norinaga's Genji monogatari tama no ogushi is a commentary on The Tale of Genji whose second book asks what the tale is for and answers, against every prior authority, that it exists to convey and cultivate mono no aware — and not to teach anyone how to behave. Norinaga had made the same case some three decades earlier in Shibun yōryō of 1763, a treatise he did not print; the commentary was complete by 1796 and was printed before his death in 1801. (An earlier version of this essay dated it 1795–1801, which conflates the work with the span of its author's last years.) The argument of that second book is the whole basis of the reading offered here, so it is worth stating in the form Norinaga gives it rather than in the form his reputation has given it. His target is specific. By the eighteenth century the tale came wrapped in a commentarial apparatus — the standard annotated edition in Norinaga's day was Kitamura Kigin's Kogetsushō of 1673 — which read it under two doctrinal grids. The Confucian grid took the tale to operate by kanzen chōaku , the encouragement of good and the chastisement of evil, so that Genji's catastrophes were the punishment his transgressions had earned. The Buddhist grid took it as an admonition against attachment, its beauties set out in order to be renounced. Both readings share a structure: the tale's affective surface is a means, and its meaning is a doctrine lying behind that surface, which the commentator supplies. Norinaga denies the structure, not merely the particular doctrines. That this was the settled shape of the tradition, and not a straw man of his own devising, is easy to check against the millennium of Genji commentary that Harper and Shirane assembled in translation in 2015, where the doctrinal readings run continuously from the medieval glossators to the Edo editions Norinaga had on his desk. His counter-argument is textual and turns on an inconsistency. If the tale rewarded good and chastised evil, its distribution of sympathy would track its distribution of transgression. It does not. Genji's affair with Fujitsubo, his father's consort, is by any Confucian reckoning among the gravest offences the tale contains; the narration nevertheless renders it, and its consequences, with an attention that invites the reader to feel with the participants rather than to convict them. Norinaga's image for this is a pond dug for growing lotuses, into which foul water is deliberately gathered: the muddy water is not there to be admired and not there to be condemned, but because the flower will not grow without it. The transgressions are the mud; aware is the flower. Whoever reads the mud as the point has misidentified what is being grown. From this Norinaga draws a second, sharper claim. The tale does have a vocabulary of good and bad — yoshi and ashi — but it is not the Confucian one. Within the tale, the good person is the one who knows aware , and the bad person is the one who does not; a character may transgress and remain, in the tale's own reckoning, admirable, while a character of blameless conduct who is unmoved by what should move him is not. That the tale is capable of theorising itself in this way is not Norinaga's invention: the 'Hotaru' chapter contains a defence of fiction, put into Genji's mouth, arguing that tales hold what the official histories leave out. Norinaga takes that defence at its word and builds on it. What the word 'knowing' is doing The phrase at issue is mono no aware o shiru , to know the aware of things, and everything turns on the verb. Before that, though, the noun has to be freed from an association it acquired later. Norinaga's philological analysis takes aware to have originated as the joining of two exclamations, sighs of a heart moved; and he is explicit that it therefore covers the whole range of deep movement — delight, amusement, admiration, longing — and not sorrow alone. Sorrow occupies the foreground of the term only because grief moves the heart most deeply, not because the term means grief. The popular gloss of mono no aware as a melancholy relish for transience is thus not a simplification of Norinaga's view but a narrowing of it, and the narrowing matters for the argument that follows: a concept restricted to sorrow could not plausibly be a general capacity for getting situations right, whereas one that ranges over every deep response can be. Now the verb. To say that one knows aware , rather than that one feels it, is to say that the response can be got right or wrong. The Heian vocabulary the tale itself uses supplies the failure term: to be kokoro nashi , without heart, is not to be calm or stoical but to have failed to register what the occasion contained. Failure of this kind is not the absence of feeling but the presence of the wrong one, or of none where one was called for. It follows that the response is answerable to something outside the respondent, and that is the minimal condition on anything we are willing to call knowledge. The person who is unmoved by a friend's disgrace is not exercising a different taste; he has missed something that was there. This is also where the tale's descriptive texture earns its place in the argument, and it explains why Norinaga's commentary is so minutely concerned with words rather than with themes. A response has correctness conditions only if its object has features that make one response fitting and another not. The scattering of cherry blossom warrants what it warrants because of what it is — brief, at its fullest just as it ends — and the tale's business is to render objects finely enough that the question of fit can arise at all. The seasonal notations, the gradations of light, the exact register of a letter's calligraphy are not ornament laid over a plot; they are the specification of the object to which a response is answerable. Strip them and the ethical vocabulary loses its grip, because there is then n