The ‘Fighting Philosopher’, who has come to mind death less and less, has gradually come to realise the illusion that ‘I am inside this body’
//Summary - Level-C1//
The “Fighting Philosopher,” now 80 and physically disabled after a cerebral haemorrhage, reflects on ageing, isolation, and mortality. Although he often feels depressed and detached from others, he finds that thinking less about death has made life easier. Drawing on Zen Buddhism, Kant, and Nishida Kitarō, he argues that the belief that the self exists inside the body is an illusion. The true “I” is not an individual entity but a universal consciousness that gives meaning to the world. Because language can only approximate reality, the mind ultimately remains mysterious, transcending both physical explanations and conceptual descriptions.
1)
When my body is paralysed, my mind becomes terribly gloomy. Fortunately, I can still manage to speak, but when I think about the future, I feel utterly hopeless and become depressed.
Even in this state, I have no intention of seeking medical help. First, I don’t really trust doctors. It’s all very well for surgeons to heal physical wounds, but they surely can’t understand matters of the mind. I have absolutely no faith in psychiatry whatsoever.
In the mornings, I find myself wishing the sun wouldn’t rise. Even when I force myself to get up, my wife gets angry about this and that. I do realise, though, that looking after me must be a great burden for her. At night, I don’t have to do anything, so it’s a relief.
2)
I’ve come to mind the death less, and things have become easier than before:
I find myself wondering why I’m still alive like this. However, perhaps things have become easier than before simply because I’ve come to mind the death less.
I’m already 80, so no matter how I look at it, I reckon I’ll die within the next ten years. When I see them talking on the telly about the ‘2050 problem’ and such, I’ve come to think that by then I’ll probably be dead anyway. It strikes me once again that this is how older people must feel as they watch the news every day.
That said, I try to hold on and not let myself be swept away entirely. Not that I have any particular hopes, mind you.
3)
The other day, I went on a three-day, two-night short stay at a nearby care home, but I ended up staying shut in my room the whole time. Because I didn’t want to see anyone, I spent all three days in my room reading books and watching television. The food was awful and didn’t agree with me.
I dislike seeing groups of 10 to 20 older adults gathered in the dining room. It even strikes me as somewhat grotesque. Mind you, this has been the case for a long time; I dislike other people as a whole.
Right now, my left leg is numb, so I use a walking stick or a walking frame, but I still envy those who can walk normally.
4)
I wonder what other people are doing at my age
My weight has dropped to 52 kilos, which is quite frightening. I used to weigh 60 kilos before I collapsed. But even when I go to the hospital, they just put it down to old age and don’t take me seriously. They brush me off, saying, ‘You’re 80, aren’t you?’
I find myself wondering what other people are doing at my age. Normally, people aren’t dabbling in philosophy, are they?
I suppose I’m still better off, as I’m simply running a philosophy study group. It would be rather a struggle to sit around doing nothing in a six-tatami-mat room in a care home until I die, wouldn’t it? But when I think about what will become of the philosophy study group, I lose the will to keep living. I suppose I’ve only got a few more years left, though.
5)
I don’t want to do anything else. I don’t want to go back to Vienna, where I used to live, nor to Kyoto or Nara; just the thought of taking the Shinkansen puts me off. There’s nowhere worth the trouble of travelling to. I don’t want to see anyone, and I don't fancy eating anything delicious.
Even meeting my editor isn’t enjoyable. I only do it because I feel it's my duty. I regard it as part of my job. The only thing I worry about is what would happen if my wife were to die, or if my elder or younger sister were to die.
6)
Given this way of thinking, I suppose I wouldn’t get on with people even if they came to visit. After all, saying things like this would only put everyone off.
Talking online is the most comfortable for me. That way, the other person can’t attack me. No matter what happens, I won’t get hit. It’s just a verbal exchange, after all.
7)
The idea that ‘I’ am inside this body is, in fact, an illusion:
Now, I’d like to talk about ‘I’ this time.
I imagine you all believe that ‘I’ am inside this body. In fact, that is an illusion. Many people have been saying this for a long time.
8)
Dōgen and Rinzai say, ‘Abandon the “I”’ and ‘Detach yourself from the “I”’. Rinzai’s teaching includes the phrase: ‘the true person without rank’. Both suggest that the true self isn't inside my body. That said, it isn’t located anywhere else either.
In the past, reading such things left me quite unmoved, but over the last few years I have gradually come to understand it. That said, in my daily life I still tend to think of this ‘me’—who has lived for 80 years—as ‘me’.
That is undoubtedly ‘me’ too, but it is merely superficial. The argument is that the deeper reality is quite different.
9)
The word ‘I’ itself is a general term. You, too, are an ‘I’. It is the person who understands this word who becomes the ‘I’. In other words, the concept of ‘I’ is mediated by the universal. Whilst the ‘I’ associated with this body will eventually die, that universal ‘I’ is not something that dies or lives.
Kant’s ‘transcendental apperception’ is similar to this. It is the ‘I’ that imbues the world with meaning. Even statements such as ‘the moon has risen’ or ‘the sun has set’ are merely ‘I’ saying so. It may feel as though the world exists out there, independent of ‘I’, but without ‘I’, the world itself does not exist.
We simply rarely perceive it that way.
10)
Dōgen says, ‘To learn of the self is to forget the self.’ This means that forgetting this ‘I’ is precisely how one comes to understand the true ‘I’.
Since one’s true self is not bound by time or place—such as ‘now’ or ‘here’—no words can describe it; I believe it is something akin to what Christianity calls God.
This may sound complicated, but Daisetsu Suzuki said, ‘Enlightenment is ordinary.’ By ‘ordinary’, he means ‘something quite commonplace’. The very fact that, right now, in this world, only this ‘I’ is conscious is, in itself, a most wondrous thing. Enlightenment is simply realising this, isn’t it?
11)
Words about the mind are, so to speak, ‘all lies’:
When we learn a language, we tend to think conceptually, but that's not true.
Even if someone says, ‘There are glasses on the desk’, unless we are actually looking at the situation, we cannot know exactly what sort of glasses or desk they mean, yet we tend to feel as though we have somehow understood. Conversely, is there really a word that describes the unique pair of glasses right in front of us?
Understanding through language is precisely this sort of understanding. We need to abandon the notion that things exist independently of language.
12)
The concept of ‘red’ itself is not red, is it? Yet we feel as though it represents the colour red. That is precisely why we can read novels; if it says, ‘A woman wearing a red dress came in’, we feel as though we understand, even though we are actually reading only words.
Words such as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are the same; when you get right down to it, you can't define them. The same applies to life and death; we arbitrarily decide that a beating heart means ‘alive’.
Words concerning the mind are, in a sense, lies—they have all been reduced to a material understanding.
13)
Kant’s ‘transcendental idealism’ is also based on the same fundamental idea. It is the notion that this ‘I’ constitutes the world and gives it meaning.
Yet we are ordinarily convinced that even if we die, the world will remain exactly as it is. However, we cannot know the world's true nature apart from our own perception. Kant refers to this as the ‘thing-in-itself’.
14)
I have absolutely no understanding of the world after my death, nor of the thing-in-itself:
In other words, the truth of the matter is that we do not know. And this very fact—that ‘I have no understanding of the world after my death, nor of the thing-in-itself’—is, in fact, a form of salvation.
Dōgen also says: ‘Practice and realisation are the same’. ‘Practice’ refers to spiritual training, and ‘realisation’ to enlightenment. One does not attain enlightenment through spiritual training; rather, the very act of practising is enlightenment itself.
Even the fact that I am speaking to you now—and that, upon reflection, you intuitively realise, ‘Yes, that’s true; it’s quite simple’—is, in itself, enlightenment. So, in truth, everyone already knows it.
15)
In this regard, Western philosophers' perspectives differ considerably. Because the West has Christianity, with Greek philosophy as its backdrop, the argument tends to be that something ‘real’ exists on the other side, and that ‘I’ merely reflects it.
It was Kitarō Nishida of the Kyoto School who explored this ‘relationship between the self and the world’. His concept of ‘absolute contradictory self-identity’ also fits within this context.
He argues that whilst ‘I’ and the world are absolutely distinct, they are also identical. ‘I’ and the world are completely different, yet they are the same. This may sound like a notion that disregards logic.
16)
Furthermore, in Zen, the term ‘mu’ (emptiness) emphasises this functioning of consciousness. ‘I’ does not exist. Yet, the invisible function of consciousness is certainly at work. This is referred to as ‘active emptiness’. It is conceived as being ‘nothing’ in form, yet possessing tremendous power that sustains the world.
Sartre’s *Being and Nothingness* makes a similar point: for example, even if you take a photograph of a room, the distinction between ‘there is no cat here’ and ‘there is no dog here’ does not appear in the image. Yet humans can understand ‘absence (nothing)’ through language.
17)
Our world is filled with ‘nothing’:
‘This is neither red, nor blue, nor round’—one could list an endless number of attributes of ‘nothingness’. Through the workings of such invisible language, our world is filled with ‘nothingness’.
Even when we move our bodies, in most cases the body moves first, unconsciously. Explaining this afterwards by saying, ‘I got up because I intended to’, is rather strange, but linguistically we have no choice but to put it that way. When you think about it that way, perhaps ‘consciousness’ itself does not even exist.
18)
Recalling past events in the present is also mysterious. After all, those events should ‘no longer exist’ in the present. There are people in the world who suffer from memory disorders, and others with multiple personalities. I myself suffered a cerebral haemorrhage that left me physically disabled, which made me keenly realise just how dependent human beings are on the brain.
Yet at the same time, even after sustaining such damage to my brain, I did not lose my ability to think. Conversely, this has led me to realise that ‘the view held by medicine and society at large—that the structure of the brain is everything—is, after all, nothing but a lie’.
As for the mind, we really do not yet understand anything about it. It is not a matter of the brain's physical structure; it is a matter of an entirely different dimension. Because this has only recently sunk in, I have actually found it easier to think about things than before.
The ‘Fighting Philosopher’, who has come to mind death less and less, has gradually come to realise the illusion that ‘I am inside this body’
https://toyokeizai.net/articles/-/959625?display=b
