I inserted a missing thought that might help here — the word crippling is where it is. feel free to replace it with whatever

Even if liberalism were to accepting that there are certain claims other than religious ones that are highly controversial, it can might still be argued be claimed that religious ideals and comprehensive doctrines should still be excluded because they are qualitatively different from other controversial ideas, in that because other ideas can be tested empirically. This position is equally as crippling. However, If constitutional justifications laws relying on concepts that are justification outside the realm of Popperian falsification were peremptorily removed sticken from consideration, it would result in the paralysis of the state, because facts are only useful for the creation of policy in the degree to which they help us realize some goal, and goals are intrinsically non not empirical. Without some goal in mind, facts can provide no guideline to legislation. Thus, at the minimum, some small number of non-publically verifiable goals must be given exemption.

It may might then also be proposed that liberalism need only find and allow the use of those goals that are commonly held by all. Alternatively, it may might be proposed that the bare minimum goals needed to establish a liberal state should be found. The first proposed set of exemptions is clearly nonviable, since we know both a priori and from experience that there are no goals held in common by absolutely all. Even goals as strongly and widely endorsed as life and happiness can find some have found their opponents. If there were already a common set of goals held by all, then would already be consensus about the nature of good life, and hence would have no need to implement the liberal compromise. Liberalism is the result of a lack of consensus about the nature of the good life, not a surplus.

The second proposed set of exemptions also fails encounters the difficulty that having because all% goals of one sort or another, no matter how limited in scope or seemingly universal, necessarily puts have outer limits on the acceptable means of pursuing the good life. For example, by having even the goal of allowing people to live without the fear of external violence, would we necessarily prevent those find no quarter among those who believe that the gods demand involuntary human sacrifice from pursuing in their vision of the good life -- for instance, the goals of radical Islam. Though liberal goals have a are small in scope, and consisting in the main of allowing people to live together peaceably, these goals nevertheless necessarily prohibit the pursuit of some other goals which are contrary to them. Therefore, no matter how minimal the set of societal goals proposed, innumerable other of goals will be precluded. Given that some goals must be preclude if others are pursued the pursuit of some goals precludes the opportunity of pursuing others, then we must find some way of determining which set of goals are worth permitting. However, in doing so, we have necessarily created a meta-framework about the sort of goals allowable, thus violating our initial premise that comprehensive doctrines are of a qualitative nature unsuited for justification within a liberal constitution. From this failure we can see that it is quixotic in the extreme to try remove all comprehensive schemes from the justification of legislation for the simple reason that liberal aims are themselves comprehensive in their desire to allow the pursuit of a plurality of individually chosen goals.

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Perhaps the key achievement of early political liberalism was ensuring religious toleration. This was done by divorcing clerical authority from the creation and legitimization of civil legislation. In the aftermath of Europe’s religious wars, philosophers such as Locke and Kant embarked on project to show that such ideological regulation does not result merely in potentially destructive battles against “heretics,” but also that it is contrary to rational morality to attempt to impose a religious lifestyle on others. Perhaps reflecting the perceived success of these efforts, some contemporary moral and political philosophers have additionally sought to limit the acceptable terms of debate within a liberal society to those that can be justified to the public as a whole, rather than merely to those members of public who subscribe to particular religious creeds or other comprehensive doctrines. In this way, it is hoped that the dissociation of clerical authority and civil authority could be extended from a mere formal separation into a complete absence of mutual influence.

At issue is whether it is necessary separate religious ideals from secular ones in public debate in order to prevent the religiously motivated from infringing on the rights of others. To this end, Robert Audi urges the employment of the twin principles of “secular rationale” and “secular motivation.” The former means that all propositions in a public debate should be argued on secular merits, and the latter means that those merits must be a sufficiently compelling motivation for the advocacy lent a particular policy, not a covert religious agenda. John Rawls recommends that debate about constitutional principles be limited to “public reason,” that is ideas which are not the product of any comprehensive doctrine, religious or secular. Opposing them, Philip Quinn and others advocate that only the barest of restraints be placed on public debate. I shall consider each system in turn before advancing my thesis that for both theoretical and practical reasons, it is not only undesirable to exclude “comprehensive doctrines” from public debate, but it is ultimately impossible as well. Instead, there is no method to create and maintain a liberal polity other than cultivating a liberal populace, and having a liberal populace—that is to say, a populace that respects the rights and preferences of minority groups—is in turn dependent on articulating many arguments for liberalism in such a way that each has maximum appeal to a particular segment of the population.

While Audi’s principles may be useful in certain circumstances, it seems odd that his rules are focused exclusively on religion. If it is true that religious arguments should be excluded from public debate because they cannot be accepted all members of society, then certainly there are secular arguments that are similarly controversial, and thus must also be excluded. Audi’s requirement are not strict enough to ensure universal acceptability. A Randian might still object to the public promotion of utilitarianism, a utilitarian might object to the promotion of Kantian values, and so forth. Audi’s view is too narrowly focused on religious views as uniquely controversial.

Accordingly, Rawls treats a wider variety of disfavored speech. He claims the exclusive use of “public reason” ensures that laws are justified in such a way that any rational citizens could accept them, in principle at least. When deciding “constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice,” Rawls maintains that a virtuous citizen would limit the discourse to public reason to ensure universal acceptability. Rawls defines nonpublic reasons as values endorsed only within individuals groups, such as “churches and universities, scientific societies and professional groups,” or whatever else (220). Within these different segments of society, different means and measures are used to resolve questions, so while a scientist might answer the question, “What do we know about human life?” by doing experiments, the clergyman would answer from religious tradition, and the insurance actuary by consulting tables of statistics and policy rates. Each of these methods may be valid within its domain, but in the larger public sphere, a different means of debate is needed. Furthermore, Rawls states that public reason must not rely on the acceptance of any comprehensive doctrine. The language of public reason instead should refer to our shared rights, the principles of reasoning, general beliefs, common sense, and other propositions justifiable to someone in the Rawlsian “original position.”

From the fabric of these means of common reasoning, it may in some cases be easy to make principles to which all can agree. However, in those cases where disagreements persist even having referenced public reason, Rawls states that it is up to each citizen to vote according to his or her understanding of the implications of public reason. Rawls also suggests some limitations on the strict application of public reason. In the case of a less ordered society, it may be necessary to advance the rights of all citizens and ideals of public reason by appealing to popularly held comprehensive doctrines, just as abolition was advanced by appeals to Christian morality in the nineteenth century.

Quinn outlines his case by noting objections to Audi and Rawls. Essentially, Quinn sees Audi and Rawls as proposing a voluntary censorship for those who have political views that cannot be justified in secular terms. For example, Rawls claims in a footnote that the abortion debate can be resolved as a constitutional matter by appealing to public reason. It is a simple matter of balancing the rights of a woman with the good of letting the fetus develop. Thus, concludes Rawls, abortion should not be prohibited. However, the view set forth by Rawls presupposes a comprehensive framework for interpreting the rights of a fetus. In a case such as this, there is no way to make an argument that does not invoke some comprehensive doctrine, since the rights of fetuses (or lack thereof) are not part of a commonly agreed upon framework for debate at this time. Continuing the example of abortion, were someone to oppose a constitutional guarantee of a right to abortion on purely religious grounds, Audi and Rawls would have her bow out of the debate until she can provide a nonreligious and noncomprehensive argument for such opposition. However, to ask a rational member of liberal society to refrain from participating in the dialogue of democracy, it seems that a strong justification is required. Moreover, this exclusion of religiously motivated speech seems even harder to rationalize in light of the eminent controversy of some secular arguments and the apparent universality of some religious doctrines. Quinn asserts there is no basis for excluding certain accepted arguments due to their religious nature while simultaneously allowing more controversial arguments due to their purportedly secular nature. However, to restrict the debate to only universally accepted propositions is to void the debate, since reasonable people disagree about nearly everything. Public reason, argues Quinn, is too weak a foundation on which to build liberal society. Both Audi and Rawls craft exceptions to their exclusionary systems to improve their general acceptability, says Quinn, but it would be easier to abandon the systems all together. Certainly, historically in America, a semi-liberal democracy has held together in spite of whatever pressures have been put on it by those who have used religious language as a part of public discourse. If anything allowing more dialogue is helpful, as it encourages more comprehensive frameworks to incorporate liberal principles independently.

Liberal goals are themselves comprehensive

Even accepting that there are claims other than religious ones that are highly controversial, it can still be claimed that religious ideals and comprehensive doctrines should still be excluded because they are qualitatively different from other controversial ideas, in that other ideas can be tested empirically. However, if constitutional justifications relying on concepts that are outside the realm of Popperian falsification were peremptorily removed from consideration, it would result in the paralysis of the state, because facts are only useful for the creation of policy in the degree to which they help us realize some goal, and goals are intrinsically non-empirical. Without some goal in mind, facts can provide no guideline to legislation. Thus, at the minimum, some small number of non-publically verifiable goals must be given exemption.

It may then be proposed that liberalism need only find and allow the use of those goals that are commonly held by all. Alternatively, it may be proposed that the bare minimum goals needed to establish a liberal state should be found. The first proposed set of exemptions is clearly nonviable, since we know both a priori and from experience that there are no goals held in common by absolutely all. Even goals as strongly and widely endorsed as life and happiness can find some opponent. If there were already a common set of goals held by all, then would already be consensus about the nature of good life, and hence no need to implement the liberal compromise. Liberalism is the result of a lack of consensus about the nature of the good life, not a surplus.

The second proposed set of exemptions encounters the difficulty that having goals of one sort or another, no matter how limited in scope or seemingly universal, necessarily puts outer limits on the acceptable means of pursuing the good life. For example, by having the goal of allowing people to live without the fear of external violence, we necessarily prevent those who believe that the gods demand involuntary human sacrifice from pursuing their vision of the good life. Though liberal goals have a small scope, consisting in the main of allowing people to live together peaceably, these goals nevertheless necessarily prohibit the pursuit of some other goals which are contrary to them. Therefore, no matter how minimal the set of societal goals proposed, innumerable other of goals will be precluded. Given that some goals must be preclude if others are pursued, then we must find some way of determining which set of goals are worth permitting. However, in doing so, we have necessarily created a meta-framework about the sort of goals allowable, thus violating our initial premise that comprehensive doctrines are of a qualitative nature unsuited for justification within a liberal constitution. From this failure we can see that it is quixotic in the extreme to try remove all comprehensive schemes from the justification of legislation for the simple reason that liberal aims are themselves comprehensive in their desire to allow the pursuit of a plurality of individually chosen goals.

Strong, Rawlsian liberalism may now seem self-negating. If the goal of liberal society is to allow pursuit of individual ascribed goals, yet liberalism itself necessarily curtails the freedom to pursue certain goals, the question remains: what precisely can liberalism do? The answer is that while liberalism cannot protect the rights of groups postulated to be antagonistic to liberal principles, liberalism is able to preserve the rights of most actual minority groups within a liberal society, provided that they accept the fundamentals of liberalism as well. While it may first seem a bit disappointing that liberalism is only for liberals, on closer inspection, it seems impossible to imagine how liberalism operate by any other means.

Still, a liberalism that makes life safe for liberals and those not antagonistic to liberalism is not to be undervalued. Recall that the impetus for forming liberalism in the first place was the desire to escape the internecine warfare of the early modern era. The compromise that slowly emerged was the non-interference of government in matters of conscience. At first, this was purely justified on Christian grounds that salvation was an individual matter, not a collective one, so it was counterproductive to enforce membership in particular sects of Protestantism. As time went on, this compromise expanded to the granting of rights not only to minority Christian groups, but to the rights of conscience for other minority religions as well. This sentiment was expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the famous aphorism, “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” In other words, so long as minority groups do not interfere with the public’s pursuit of private goals, it does not matter what internal beliefs they hold. Thus, the rights of the minority to pursue their own perceived goods are protected to the extent that they refrain from interfering with the pursuit of happiness by the rest of the public. However, in those cases where a minority hold beliefs about the good that, if pursued, would interfere with the pursuit of the good by the majority, liberalism necessarily falls into a trap, in which either the rights of the majority or those of the minority must, unfortunately but of logical necessity, be sacrificed.

For this reason, there can be no single formula that ensures the preservation of minority preferences in all cases. Minority preferences cannot be respected in all theoretical circumstances, because it is possible for minority groups to be violently anti-liberal. Should such groups be given free reign, they would necessarily bring about the dismantling of liberal society by our definition of the groups as anti-liberal. This naturally leads to a dilemma about which preferences to respect for which minorities, a dilemma that cannot be resolved a priori. Fortunately, in the empirical world, we are not troubled by theoretical anti-liberal groups, but rather actual groups of indeterminate composition. Such groups may be liberal, non-liberal, or anti-liberal depending on chance and circumstance. Given this fact, it is therefore incumbent upon liberal society to at minimum persuade anti-liberal groups to become merely non-liberal, and preferably to demonstrate to all non-liberal groups the advantages of accepting liberalism. In other words, the only insurance for the continued existence of a liberal state is the promotion of a liberal polity.

Perhaps, as a basic matter of fairness or a pragmatic desire to avoid engendering resentment, protections of liberal society ought not be worked into the constitutional framework of a liberal state itself. Nevertheless, it still remains necessary for a liberal polity to be promoted by either passive or active means as demanded by the situation. Simultaneously, in order for a liberal polity to retain its status as liberal, the majority must heed the demands of actual, existing minority groups in order to keep from obstructing their pursuit of goals, where doing so does not jeopardize the continuation of the state as liberal. Thus, rather than specify in advance that the majority only advance those goals that can be advanced on rational merits alone as Audi’s principles demand, the liberal polity will advance the goals of the majority, so long as those goals do not substantially infringe on the rights of liberal minorities.

It may seem counterintuitive that liberal society must be merely tolerate non-liberals and actively oppose anti-liberals, yet nevertheless it should refrain from enshrining liberal rationales as the only ones acceptable for legislative legitimacy. From a practical perspective, limiting approved speech is likely to be counterproductive, as by stifling the expression of non-liberal sentiments, it potentially converts those sentiments to anti-liberal ones, since even mild censorship feeds a sense of aggrieved martyrdom. The religious majority that sees itself turned away at the ballot box will almost inevitably respond by attempting to express its values through other means. In cases where the majority is imposing on an existing minority, constitutional limitations may hinder the majority, but no constitutional principle can long withstand the determined majority. The result is the dissolution of the liberality of the state in question. Instead, proponents of liberalism must dissuade the majority from actively irritating the minority by persuading them using the strongest means of rational persuasion available.

This line of persuasion will almost certainly come from the private reasoning of the group itself. As Rawls himself notes, “Surely, the most fundamental questions should be settled by appealing to the most important truths, yet these may far transcend public reason” (216). In spite of this, he claims that the diverse nature of society requires that justification be made without respect to any one comprehensive doctrine. However, there is another means to resolving the question of providing justifications to a diverse society. Society can justify itself to each comprehensive doctrine separately. Society is not prevented from doing so by a shortage of scholars willing to craft new arguments, and the result would be a stronger commitment to the ideals of liberal society by adherents of the various comprehensive doctrines. The key is to draw support from within the private reason of the group in order to bolster liberalism as a whole. Audi is doing just this when he suggests from the “Hebraic-Christian tradition” that there is a moral obligation to refrain from endorsing legislation for religious reasons. The result of positively utilizing such activity is that the dream of a monolithic theory of liberalism is cast aside in favor of a thousand liberalisms, each with a justification particular to the group that supports it for their own private reasons. The scientist can be shown that liberalism allows his pursuit of knowledge, the clergyman can be shown that his religious tradition is not only compatible with liberalism but able to embrace it, and the insurance actuary can see that life expectancy in modern liberal states is higher.

The only limitation is that participants accept the fundamental political equality of all human beings such that the non-infringing preferences of minority groups are preserved and that they are willing to debate among other groups rationally. These limitations must not come as preconditions, but as a result of the internal deliberation of each group in particular. Rawls, of course, sees the need for private reasoning to convince groups of the merits of a liberal state prior to its ordering, but he fails to see that this process cannot end with the settling of constitutional principles, but must continue perpetually, bringing forth new liberal commitments from within each comprehensive doctrine, as there is no viable means of imposing liberal commitments from without.

As the search for a monolithic liberal theory is abandoned, it natural to review what is lost in abandoning it. The goal of monolithic liberalism is to make a state that through the logical clarity of its composition must be accepted by all rational parties. It is hoped that by using the right formulation of veils of ignorance and states of nature, that one could rationally force all rational parties to assent to the basic justice and decency of a liberal state so-conceived. Put thusly, it should be readily apparent how clearly the quest for a monolithic liberalism was itself the expression of a comprehensive doctrine: the comprehensive doctrine of permitting the flourishing of all comprehensive doctrines. However, since some comprehensive doctrines preclude other comprehensive doctrines, the flourishing of all is not logically possible. Fortunately, we have an alternative in allowing the flourishing of doctrines which themselves are organically disposed to allow the flourishing of other means of pursuing the good life.

As Francis Fukuyama rightly noted, in the twentieth century, popular sovereignty came to be the theoretical basis for legitimacy in almost every nation on earth. Democracies and even dictatorships all claim their right to lead from the purported will of the people (if not the actual will). The only other model of government legitimacy in wide practice is that in which the leaders claim that their authority comes from God. Given this historical reality, it is unlikely that any liberal state could long endure without a liberal polity. The need for liberal polities in turn shows us the importance of crafting arguments for liberalism that can be embraced by the existing segments of the world today. By premising liberalism organically out from the values of existing traditions, it will be far easier to persuade non-liberal communities of the advantages of liberalism, and to maintain support for liberalism in existing liberal societies. Attempting to construct a monolithic, independent liberalism is tempting, but ultimately foolhardy, as it risks being rejected as competing comprehensive doctrine. As we can see, attempts to integrate liberalism into existing traditions have already succeeded in a variety of cultures around the world. Liberalism arose originally in the Protestant West following the Reformation, but has spread to numerous other cultures by showing its efficacy in preserving social goods favored in those cultures as well. The key is to recognize that each society necessarily has goods that works to preserve, and liberalism should not cripple itself by disallowing public reference to those privately goods, were it even possible to do so. If then the conclusion of the matter is that religious arguments cannot be excluded from the public realm, how is society to keep the religious majority from imposing its views on the minority? By convincing the polity using its own measures of the disaster that results from doing so. In the support of a liberal state, there is no substitute for having a liberal polity.

Perhaps the key achievement of early political liberalism was ensuring religious toleration. This was done by divorcing clerical authority from the creation and legitimiztioning of civil legislation. In the aftermath of Europe’s religious wars, philosophers such as Locke and Kant embarked on project to show that such ideological regulation results not merely in potentially destructive battles against “heretics,” but also that it is contrary to rational morality to attempt to impose a religious lifestyle on others. Perhaps reflecting the perceived success of these efforts, some contemporary moral and political philosophers have additionally sought to limit the acceptable terms of debate within a liberal society to those that can be justified to the public as a whole, and notrather than merely to those who subscribe to particular religious creeds or other comprehensive doctrines. In this way, it is hoped that the dissociation of clerical authority and civil authority can be fully could be extended from a mere formal separation into a complete absence of mutual influence.

At issue is whether it is necessary separate religious ideals from secular ones in public debate in order to prevent the religiously motivated from infringing on the rights of others. To this end, Robert Audi urges the employment of twin principles of secular rationale and secular motivation, the latter meaning that all propositions in a public debate should be argued on secular merits, and the former meaning that those merits must be a sufficiently compelling motivation for the advocacy lent a particular policy, not a covert religious agenda. John Rawls recommends that debate about constitutional principles be limited to “public reason,” that is, ideas which are not the product of any comprehensive doctrine, religious or secular. Opposing him, Philip Quinn and others advocate that only the barest of restraints be placed on public debate. I shall consider each system in turn before advancing my thesis that for both theoretical and practical reasons, it is not only undesirable to exclude “comprehensive” doctrines from public debate, but it is ultimately impossible as well. Instead, there is no method to create and maintain a liberal polity other than cultivating a liberal populace, and having a liberal populace, that is to say, a populace that respects the rights of minority groups, is in turn dependent on articulating many arguments for liberalism in such a way that each has maximum appeal to a particular segment of the population.

Audi begins by reviewing the animating principles of liberal democracy. He names those principles that govern the relation of the state to religion as the libertarian principle, the equalitarian principle, and the neutrality principle (39)†. The libertarian principle is that the state must allow citizens to persist in any religious belief or engage in any religious practice so long as they do not infringe on the rights of others. The equalitarian principle maintains that the state must not promote any one religion over another. The neutrality principle holds that “the state should neither favor nor disfavor religion” (39). Next, Audi argues that liberal interests are best served by ensuring that laws are justified on non-religious grounds. Essentially, he argues that in the “Hebraic-Christian tradition,” believers are obligated to find a “theo-ethical equilibrium” between obligations to their personal understanding of morality and their conduct in society. The key to reaching this equilibrium is, in Audi’s view, to observe the principle of secular rationale and the principle of secular motivation. As previously stated the principle of secular rationale asserts the necessity of grounding any proposed law in secular language, so that all citizens may equally consider its merits. The principle of secular motivation expands on this idea by requiring that the secular justification given for a policy proposal be sufficient to motivate the promotion that it is given. In other words, one should not promote a law unless it is for a reason that is honestly secular and not a pretext covering some deeper religious motivation.

While Audi’s principles may be useful in certain circumstances, it seems odd that his rules are focused exclusively on religion. If it is true that religious arguments should be excluded from public debate because they cannot be accepted all members of society, then certainly there are secular arguments that are similarly controversial, and thus must also be excluded. Audi’s requirements are not strict enough to ensure universal acceptability. A Randian might still object to the public promotion of utilitarianism, a utilitarian might object to the promotion of Kantian values, and so forth. Audi’s view is too narrowly focused on religious views as uniquely controversial.

Accordingly, Rawls treats a wider variety of disfavored speech. He claims the exclusive use of “public reason” ensures that laws are justified in such a way that any rational citizens could accept it them, in principle at least. When deciding “constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice,” Rawls maintains that a virtuous citizen would limit the discourse to public reason to ensure universal acceptability. Rawls defines nonpublic reasons as the values endorsed only within individuals groups, be they “churches and universities, scientific societies and professional groups,” or whatever else (220). Within these different segments of societies, different means and measures are used to resolve questions, so while a scientist might answer the question, “What do we know about human life?” by doing experiments, the clergyman would answer by consulting scriptures the tradition it’s a catholic thing…, and the insurance actuary by consulting tables of statistics and policy rates. Each of these methods may be valid within its domain, but in the larger public sphere, a different means of debate is needed. Furthermore, Rawls states that public reason must not rely on the acceptance of any comprehensive doctrine. The language of public reason instead should refer to our shared rights, the principles of reasoning, general beliefs, common sense, and other propositions justifiable to someone in his “original position.”

From the fabric of these means of common reasoning, it may in some cases be easy to make principles to which all can agree. However, in those cases where disagreements persist even having referenced public reason, Rawls states that it is up to each citizen to vote according to his or her understanding of the implications of public reason. Rawls also suggests some limitations on the strict application of public reason. In the case of a less ordered society, it may be necessary to advance the rights of all citizens and ideals of public reason by appealing to popularly held comprehensive doctrines, such as when the cause of anti-slavery abolition by Christians in the nineteenth century.

Quinn outlines his case by noting objections to Audi and Rawls. Essentially, Quinn sees Audi and Rawls as proposing a voluntary censorship for those who have political views that cannot be justified in secular terms. For example, Rawls claims in a footnote that the abortion debate can be resolved as a constitutional matter appealing to public reason. It is a simple matter of balancing the rights of a woman with the good of letting the fetus develop. Thus, concludes Rawls, abortion should not be prohibited. However, the view set forth by Rawls presupposes a comprehensive framework for interpreting the rights of a fetus. In a case such as this, there is no way to make an argument that does not invoke some comprehensive doctrine, since the rights of fetuses (or lack thereof) are not part of a commonly agreed upon framework for debate. In fact, it is unclear what the content of a commonly agreed upon framework for debate would be. Continuing the example of abortion, were someone to oppose a constitutional guarantee of a right to abortion on purely religious grounds, Audi and Rawls would have her bow out of the debate until she can provide a nonreligious and noncomprehensive argument for such opposition. However, to limit someone’s rights ask someone to refrain from to free speech and her rights to participate in the rational dialogue of democracy, it seems that a strong justification is required. Moreover, this exclusion of religiously motivated speech seems even harder to rationalize in light of the eminent controversy of some secular arguments and the asserted / apparent / claimed / putative comparative universality of some religious doctrines. Quinn asserts there is no basis for excluding certain accepted arguments due to their religious nature while simultaneously allowing more controversial arguments due to their purportedly secular nature. However, to restrict the debate to only universally accepted propositions is to void the debate, since reasonable people disagree about nearly everything. Public reason, argues Quinn, is too weak a foundation on which to build liberal society. Both Audi and Rawls craft exceptions to their exclusionary systems to improve their general acceptability, says Quinn, but it would be easier to abandon the systems all together. Certainly, historically in America, a semi-liberal democracy has held together in spite of whatever pressures have been put on it by those who have used religious language as a part of public discourse. If anything allowing more dialogue is helpful, as it encourages more comprehensive frameworks to incorporate liberal principles independently.

Furthering Quinn’s objections to those who would limit debate, it is worth observing the many ways in which religious and secular matters ultimately are inseparably overlapping. Christian Science claims that modern, secular medicine is essentially a sham. Yet, most liberal states aim to deliver scientifically orthodox healthcare to some or all of their citizens. Islamic extremists insist that Allah’s will is to restore the caliphate and abolish pluralist democracy, yet liberal states continue to insist on their right to be. Jainists claim that any almost action undertaken by a human being is a sin, since most actions increase the suffering in the world by harming plants and animals. Yet liberal states seek economic expansion rather than ataraxia. Moreover, not only do liberal states passively ignore the claims of various religious believers, they actively rebut them. Publicly funded scientists claim that Genesis cannot be considered to have a basis in literal truth. The United States government forced the Japanese emperor to admit his non-divinity. The children of Christian Scientists are forced to take vaccines. These examples are not merely exceptions to the general pattern of religious and secular distinguishability but indicative of the intertwined nature of the two. The majority of religions make claims about the nature of material world as well as the spiritual one, which necessarily leads to conflicts of authority with secular institutions. The religious and secular cannot be disentangled as neatly as one would like to hope.

Moreover, it is not merely religiously held convictions that puzzle society. Some advocates see global warming as looming threat to earth’s habitability, while others dismiss the possibility. Some feel that genetically modified foods should be carefully regulated in order to protect the population Certainly, a large majority of scientists have an opinion about such matters, but this does not stop a persistent minority of population from questioning them. Nevertheless, liberal states act as though perfect consensus exists in these cases, when in fact, the consensus is actually only very strong.

Even beyond potentially ethereal questions of religious injunctions and scientific theories, some citizens question received history such as the Holocaust. Still others see conspiracies surrounding Pearl Harbor, Kennedy’s assignation, and the September 11 attacks. If it is not fair to exclude these views from possibility of use in legislation, though they seem to be quite demonstrably false, then it seems unreasonable to disallow appeals to non-controversial religious propositions from the public forum while beliefs further removed from credulity are available for justificatory use. However, if such unsavory views are preemptively excised from possible use in the public square by fiat, then we run the risk of returning to the pre-Enlightenment age, in which the only way to change the orthodoxy of received thinking within a nation is through revolution. Clearly, this is absurd. The restriction of religious speech in support of a particular law or constitutional composition cannot be proposed on the grounds of its unique controversy, given the free pass allowed to other, potentially even more controversial, positions.

The necessary importance of ends to formulating law Liberal goals are themselves comprehensive

Even ignoring the galaxy of controversial facts, there remains the impossibility of finding use for any raw fact without a system of goals to give it meaning. Facts are only useful for the creation of policy in the degree to which they help us realize some goal. However, having goals of one sort or another, no matter how limited in scope or seemingly universal, necessarily puts outer limits on the acceptable means of pursuing the good life. For example, by having the goal of allowing people to live without the fear of external violence, we necessarily prevent those who believe that the gods demand involuntary human sacrifice from pursuing their vision of the good life. Though the scope of liberal goals is quite have a small scope, consisting in the main of allowing people to live together peaceably, it they nevertheless necessarily prohibits the pursuit of some other goals which are contrary to it them. Therefore, it is quixotic in the extreme to try dispel all comprehensive schemes from the justification of legislation for the simple reason that liberal aims are themselves comprehensive in their desire to allow the pursuit of a plurality of individually ascertained goods. If liberalism limits the majority to only acting legislation for ends that can be assented to by all, then it enacts no legislation, for there are no ends that must assented to by all potential citizens a priori. Even goals as strongly and widely endorsed as life and happiness can find some opponent, in theory at least, for there are no simple goods that are assented to by all. If there were, then would already be consensus about the nature of good life, and hence no need to implement liberalism. Liberalism is the result of a lack of consensus about the nature of the good life, not a surfeit. However, with no goods to implement, there are no laws that can be endorsed, because laws are only enacted as a means to achieve some end. Thus, restricting legislative debate to only those proposals that might gain universal endorsement would inhibit the creation of legislation whatsoever.

Liberalism qua Rawls may now seem self-negating. If the goal of liberal society is to allow pursuit of individual ascribed goals, yet liberalism itself necessarily curtails the freedom to pursue certain goals, the question remains: what precisely can liberalism do? The answer is that while liberalism cannot protect the rights of groups postulated to be antagonistic to liberal principles, liberalism is able to preserve the rights of most actual minority groups within a liberal society, provided that they accept the fundamentals of liberalism as well. While it may first seem a bit disappointing that liberalism is only for liberals, on closer inspection, it seems impossible to imagine how liberalism could be propagated operate by any other means.

Still, a liberalism that makes life safe for liberals, or at least those not antagonistic to liberalism, is not to be undervalued, however. Recall that the impetus for forming liberalism in the first place was the desire to escape the internecine warfare of the early modern era. The compromise that slowly emerged was the non-interference of government in matters of conscience. At first, this was purely justified on purely the purely Christian grounds that salvation was an individual, not a collective matter, so it was counterproductive to enforce membership in particular sects of Protestantism. As time went on, this compromise expanded to the granting of rights not only to minority Christian groups, but to the rights of conscience for other minority religions as well. This sentiment was expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the famous aphorism, “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” In other words, so long as minority groups do not interfere with your pursuit of private goods, it does not matter what internal beliefs they hold. Thus, the rights of the minority to their own beliefs perceived goods are protected to the extent that they refrain from interfering with the public pursuit of the other perceived goods. However, in those cases where the minority hold beliefs about the good that, if pursued, would interfere with the pursuit of the good by the majority, liberalism necessarily falls into a trap, in which either the rights of the majority or those of the minority must unfortunately but necessarily be sacrificed. (shout out to what’s his face) don’t forget

For this reason, there can be no single formula that assures ensures the preservation the of minority preferences in all cases. Minority preferences cannot be respected in all theoretical circumstances, because it is possible for minority groups to be violently anti-liberal. Should such groups be given free reign, they would necessarily institute bring about the dismantling demolishing of liberal society by the very nature of our specification of the group as anti-liberal. This naturally leads to a dilemma about which preferences to respect for which minorities, and this a dilemma that cannot be resolved a priori. However, Fortunately, in the empirical world, we are not troubled by theoretical anti-liberal groups, but rather actual groups of indeterminate composition. Such groups may be liberal, non-liberal, or anti-liberal as lead by depending on chance and circumstances. Given this fact, it is therefore incumbent upon liberal society to at minimum, persuade anti-liberal groups to become merely non-liberal, and preferably to demonstrate to all non-liberal groups the advantages of accepting at least a prima facie liberalism. In other words, the only ensure insurance for the continued existence of liberal states is through the promotion of the liberal polities polity. Amen, bruther. Perhaps, as a basic matter of fairness or a pragmatic desire to avoid engendering resentment, protections of liberal society ought not be worked into the constitutional framework of a liberal state itself. Nevertheless, it still remains necessary for a liberal polity to be promoted by either passive or active means as demanded by the situation. Simultaneously, in order for a liberal polity to retain its status as liberal, the majority must listen to heed the demands of actual, existing minority groups in order to keep from infringing on their rights keep the peace, at least where doing so does not jeopardize the continuation of the state as liberal. Thus, rather than specify in advance that the majority only advance those goals that can be advanced on rational merits alone as Audi’s principles demand, the liberal polity will advance the goals of the majority, so long as those goals do not substantially infringe on the rights of real liberal minorities.

It may seem counterintuitive then that if liberal society must be merely toleratent of non-liberals and actively opposed to anti-liberals, that yet it should nevertheless refrain from enshrining liberal rationales as the only ones acceptable for legitimate legislative standard legitimacy. The practical reason for this freedom, above the impossibility of having liberal consensus without specified ends as mentioned before, is that Practically, to attempt to limit approved speech is likely to be counterproductive, as by stifleing the expression of non-liberal energies, it or potentially converts them to anti-liberal ones mentalities. The religious majority that sees itself turned away at the ballot box will almost inevitably respond by attempting to express its values through other means. In such a case that the reasoning of the majority is otherwise uncontroversial to society, it creates needless strife by antagonizing their values. repetitive… In such a case that the majority is imposing on an existing (non-theoretical) minority, constitutional limitations may hinder the majority, but no constitutional principle can long withstand the determined majority. The result is the dissolution of the liberality of the state in question.

i suggest new paragraph

Instead, proponents of liberalism must dissuade the majority from actively irritating the minority by persuading them using a logic catered to each minority group the strongest reasoning available. This reasoning will almost certainly come from the private reasoning of the group itself. As Rawls himself notes, “Surely, the most fundamental questions should be settled by appealing to the most important truths, yet these may far transcend public reason” (216). He claims that the diverse nature of society ensures that society must be justified without respect to any one comprehensive doctrine. However, Rather than languish in hope that these transcendental truths will be discovered, it seems that society could also must function while justifying itself separately to each comprehensive doctrine. Society is not prevented from doing so by a shortage of scholars willing to craft new arguments, and the result would be a stronger commitment to the ideals of liberal society by adherents of the various comprehensive doctrines. The key is to drawing support from within the private reason of the each group in order to bolster liberalism as a whole. The result of this activity is that the dream of a monolithic theory of liberalism is cast aside in favor of a thousand liberalisms, each with a justification particular to the group that supports it for their own private reasons. The only limitation is that participants accept the fundamental political equality of all human beings such that the non-infringing rights of minority groups are preserved and that they are willing to debate among other groups rationally. These limitations must not come as preconditions, but as a result of the internal deliberation of each group in particular. Rawls, of course, sees the need for private reasoning to convince groups of the merits of a liberal state prior to its ordering, but he fails to see that this process cannot end with the settling of constitutional principles, but must continue perpetually, bringing forth new liberal commitments from within each comprehensive doctrine, as there is no viable means of imposing liberal commitments from without. good, good, though the graph above is still a bit unclear. i hope the excisions will help it be restructured a little

As the search for a monolithic liberal theory is abandoned, it natural to review what is lost in abandoning it. The goal of monolithic liberalism is to make a state which that, by through the logical clarity of its nature constitution, must would be accepted by all rational parties. It is hoped that by using the right formulation of by thinking behind the right veils of ignorance and states of nature, that one could rationally force all parties to assent to the derive the basic justice and decency of the liberal state so-conceived, and thus force the assent of all parties under it. Put thusly, it should be readily apparent how clearly the quest for a monolithic liberalism was itself the expression of a comprehensive doctrine: the comprehensive doctrine of permitting the flourishing of all other comprehensive doctrines. However, since some comprehensive doctrines entail the foregoing of preclude other comprehensive doctrines, the flourishing of all is not logically possible. Fortunately, we have an alternative in allowing the flourishing of doctrines which themselves are organically disposed to allow the flourishing of other means of pursuing the good life, namely those that are conditioned to tolerate minority rights.

As Francis Fukuyama rightly noted, in the twentieth century, popular sovereignty came to be the theoretical basis for legitimacy in almost every nation on earth. Democracies and even dictatorships all claim their right to lead from the purported will of the people (if not the actual will). The only other model of government legitimacy in wide practice is that in which the leaders claim that their authority comes from God. next sentence does not flow from the previous sentence For the world to become a place of toleration for all, liberalism must proceed from uncontroversial premises. By premising liberalism organically out from the values of existing traditions, it will be far easier to persuade non-liberal communities of the advantages of liberalism, and to maintain support for liberalism in existing liberal societies. Attempting to construct a monolithic, independent liberalism is tempting, but ultimately foolhardy, as it risks being rejected as competing comprehensive doctrine. As we can see, attempts to integrate liberalism into existing traditions have already succeeded in a variety of cultures around the world. next sentence does not flow from previous thoughts Liberalism arose originally in the Protestant West following the Reformation, but has spread to numerous other cultures by showing its efficacy in preserving social goods favored in those cultures as well. The key is to recognize that each society necessarily has goods that works to preserve, and liberalism should not cripple itself by disallowing public reference to those privately goods, were it even possible to do so. If then edit that the conclusion of the matter is that religious arguments cannot be excluded from the public realm, how is society to keep the religious majority from imposing its views on the minority? By convincing the polity using its own measures of the disaster that results from doing so. In the support of a liberal state, there is no substitute for having a liberal polity.

Perhaps the key achievement of early political liberalism was religious toleration. (or, if you want, to pacify those the pacifying of those who wished to use the power of the state to promote enshrine a particular religion and sanction suppress others.) This was done by divorcing the ‘divine law’ religious conviction from civil legislation and coercion. In the aftermath of Europe’s the religious wars of Europe, philosophers such as Locke and Kant embarked on a project to show that such ideological regulation results not merely in potentially destructive battles against “heretics,” but also that it is contrary to rational morality to attempt to impose a religious viewpoint lifestyle on others through the application of governmental power. Perhaps reflecting the perceived success of these efforts, some contemporary moral and political philosophers have additionally sought to limit the acceptable terms of debate within a liberal society to those that can be justified to the public as a whole, and not merely to those who subscribe to particular religious creeds or other comprehensive doctrines.

At issue is whether it is necessary to make a wall of separate, formally or informallyphilosophically or politically, between ‘secular‘ and ‘religious‘ arguments ideals in public debate in order to prevent the religiously motivated from infringing on the rights of others. To this end, Robert Audi urges the employment of twin principles consider: “a double standard” of secular rational and secular motivation, the latter meaning all propositions in a public debate should be argued on secular merits and former meaning that those merits must be a sufficiently compelling motivation for the advocacy lent a particular policy, not a covert religious agenda. John Rawls recommends that debate about constitutional principles be limited to “public reason,” that is ideas which are not the product of any comprehensive doctrine, religious or secular. Opposingly Opposing him, Philip Quinn and others advocate that only the barest of restraints be placed on public debate. I shall consider each system in turn before advancing my thesis that for both theoretical and practical reasons, it is not only undesirable to exclude ‘comprehensive‘ doctrines from public debate, but it is ultimately impossible as well. Instead, there is no shortcut method to create and or maintaining a liberal society polity other than having to cultivate a liberal populace, and having a liberal populace is in turn dependent on grounding articulating arguments for liberalism specifically in such a way as to have maximum appeal to all groups.

Audi begins by reviewing the animating principles of liberal democracy. He refers to names those principles that govern the relation of the state to religion as the libertarian principle, the equalitarian principle, and the neutrality principle (39†). The libertarian principle is that the state must allow the its citizens to persist in any religious belief or engage in any religious practice so long as they do not infringe on the rights of others. The equalitarian principle maintains that the state must not promote any one religion over another. The neutrality principle holds that “the state should neither favor nor disfavor religion” (39). With this background in place, After articulating these principles, Audi proceeds to his proposition argues that liberal interests are best served by ensuring that laws are justified on nonreligious grounds, beginning with the idea any notions of religious obligation. Essentially, Audi he argues that from in the “Hebraic-Christian tradition,” believers are obligated to find a “theo-ethical equilibrium” between obligations to personal morality understanding and their public conduct within the state in society. The key to reaching this equilibrium is, in Audi’s view, to observeing the principle of secular rationale and the principle of secular motivation. As previously stated the principle of secular rationale indicates affirms the necessity of justifying grounding all any proposed laws in secular language, so that all citizens can may equally consider the its merits of the law in question. The principle of secular motivation expands this concept idea by requiring that the secular justification given for a policy proposal be sufficient to motivate the promotion that it is given. In other words, one should not promote a law unless it is for an honestly explicitly secular reason.

While Audi’s principles may be useful in certain circumstances, it seems odd that these his rules are focused exclusively on religion. If it is true that religious arguments should be excluded from public debate because they cannot be accepted all members of society, then certainly there are secular arguments that are similarly controversial, and thus must also be exluded. Audi’s standard is too stringent: A Randian might still object to the public promotion of utilitarianism, a utilitarian might object to the promotion of Kantian values, and so forth. Audi’s view is too narrowly focused on religious views as uniquely controversial.

Accordingly, Rawls treats a wider variety widens the varieties of disfavored speech. Rawls claims that ‘public reason’ ensures that laws are justified so that, in theory, any rational person could go along with them. When deciding “constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice,” Rawls maintains that a virtuous citizen will would limit the discourse to public reason, as a means of ensuring the justice of the debate. Public reason is the language in which debate must be conducted in order to ensure universal acceptability. To begin, Rawls defines nonpublic reason as the values endorsed only within individuals groups, be they “churches and universities, scientific societies and professional groups,” or whatever else (220). Within these different segments of societies, different means and measures are used to resolve questions, so while a scientist might answer the question, “What do we know about human life?” by doing experiments, the clergyman would answer by consulting scriptures, and the insurance actuary by consulting tables of statistics and policy rates. Each of these methods may be valid within its domain, but in the larger public sphere, a different means of debate is needed. Furthermore, if public reason is to be given for the consideration of all, Rawls states that public reason must not rely on use as its basis the acceptance of the conclusions of any comprehensive doctrine. The language of public reason instead makes reference should refer to our shared rights, the principles of reasoning, general beliefs, common sense, and other propositions justifiable to someone in the his %’original position‘.

i suggest paragraph here as your mode shifts from description to critique

From the fabric of these common reason , it may in some cases be easy to make principles to which all can agree. However, in those times when disagreements persist even having referenced public reason, it is up to the electorate to vote according to the each citizen’s understanding of the implications of public reason. Rawls does suggest some limitations on the strict application of public reason, however. In the case of a less ordered society, it may be necessary to appeal to commonly held ,i.e. popular and successful, comprehensive doctrines in order to advance the rights of all citizens and ideals of public reason. In other words, it is permissible to use means of reasoning other than public reason if the result of the debate is to create a more ordered society, which adheres more closely to the ideal of public reason.

Quinn outlines his case by noting objections to Audi and Rawls. Essentially, Quinn sees Audi and Rawls as proposing a voluntary censorship for those who have political views that cannot be justified in secular terms. Before examining his view, let us examine to an example of the use of public reason. For example, Rawls claims in a footnote that the abortion debate can be resolved as a constitutional matter appealing to public reason. It is a simple matter of balancing the rights of a woman with the good of letting the fetus develop. Thus, concludes Rawls, abortion should not be prohibited. However, the view set forth by Rawls relies on presupposes a comprehensive framework for interpreting the rights of a fetus. In a case such as this, there is no way to make an argument that does not run aground on the rocks of invoke a comprehensive doctrine. Continuing the example of abortion, were someone to oppose legalized a constitutional enshrinement of a right to abortion on purely religious grounds, Audi and Rawls would have her bow out of the debate until she can provide a nonreligious and noncomprehensive reasoning argument for such opposition. However, to limit someone’s rights to free speech and rights to participate in the rational dialogue of democracy, it seems that a strong justification is required. Moreover, this exclusion of religiously motivated speech seems even harder to rationalize in light of the eminent controversy of some secular arguments and the comparative universality of some religious doctrines. Quinn asserts there is no basis for excluding certain accepted arguments due to their religious nature while simultaneously allowing more controversial arguments due to their purportedly secular nature. However, to restrict the debate to only universally accepted propositions is to invite anarchy void the debate, since reasonable people can and do disagree about nearly every line of argument everything. Public reason, argues Quinn, is {–decidedly-} too weak a foundation for law, and any attempt to build a foundation for liberal society on it is bound to crack under the weight. Both Audi and Rawls craft exceptions to their exclusionary systems to improve their general acceptability, says Quinn, but it would be easier to abandon the systems all together. Certainly, historically in America, a semi-liberal democracy has held together in spite of whatever pressures have been put on it by those who have used religious language as a part of public discourse. If anything allowing more dialogue is helpful, as it encourages more comprehensive frameworks to incorporate liberal principles independently, even as liberalism persists without does not restrict itself recourse to any single justification. recourse is good, see if you can work it back in…

Furthering Quinn’s objections to those who would limit debate, it is worth observing the many ways in which religious and secular matters ultimately are inseparably overlapping. Christian Science claims that modern, secular medicine is essentially a sham. Yet, most liberal states aim at delivering aim to deliver quality scientific healthcare to some or all of their citizens. Islamist extremists insist that Allah’s will is the to restoreation of the caliphate government and the abolition of pluralist democracy, yet liberal states continue to insist on their right to be. Jainists claim that any almost action undertaken by a human being is a sin, for it most actions increaseing the suffering in the world by harming plants and animals among other things, y. Yet liberal states seek economic expansion rather than repose better word. Moreover, not only do liberal states passively ignore the claims of various religious believers, they actively refute rebut them. Publicly funded scientists claim that Genesis cannot be considered to have a basis in literal truth. The United States government forced the Japanese emperor to admit his non-divinity. The children of Christian Scientists are forced to take vaccines. These examples are not merely exceptions to the general pattern of religious and secular distinguishability but indicative of the intertwined nature of the two. The majority of religions make claims about the nature of material world as well as the spiritual one, which necessarily leads to conflicts of authority with secular institutions. The religious and secular cannot be disentangled as neatly as one would like to hope.

Moreover, it is not merely religiously held convictions that puzzle society. Some advocates see global warming as looming threat to earth’s habitability, while others dismiss the possibility. Some feel that genetically modified foods should be carefully regulated in order to protect the population from possible ill effects, while others feel that such concerns are overblown. Is HIV really the AIDs virus? Do cellphones cause cancer? Is it safe to put fluoride into the drinking water? Certainly, a large majority of scientists have an opinion about such matters (yes, no, yes)??, but this does not stop a persistent minority of population from questioning them. Nevertheless, the liberal state seems to be free to acts as though perfect consensus exists in these cases, when in fact, the consensus is actually only very strong.

Even beyond potentially ethereal questions of religious injunctions and scientific theories, some citizens question received {–historical facts-} history such as the Holocaust, though it was observed by millions of witnesses. Still others see conspiracies surrounding Pearl Harbor, Kennedy’s assignation, and the September 11 attacks. If it is not fair to exclude these views from possibility of use in legislation, though they seem to be quite demonstrably false, then it seems unreasonable to disallow appeals to non-controversial religious propositions from the public forum while beliefs further removed from credulity are available for justificatory use. However, if such unsavory views are preemptively excised from possible use in the public square by fiat, then we run the risk of returning to the pre-Enlightenment age, in which the only way to change the orthodoxy of received thinking within a nation is through revolution. Clearly, this is absurd. Thus, The restriction of religious speech in support of a particular law or constitutional composition cannot be proposed on the grounds of its unique controversy, given the free pass allowed to other, potentially even more controversial, positions.

Even ignoring the galaxy of controversial facts, there remains the impossibility of finding use for any raw fact without a system of goals to give it meaning. Facts are only useful for the creation of policy in the degree to which they help us realize some goal. unclear, not sure how you mean this… However, having goals of one sort or another, no matter how limited in scope or seemingly universal, necessarily puts outer limits on the acceptable means of pursuing the good life. For example, by having the goal of allowing people to live without the fear of external violence, we necessarily prevent those who believe that the gods demand involuntary human sacrifice from pursuing their vision of the good life. Though the scope of liberal goals is quite small, consisting in the main of allowing people to live together peaceably, it nevertheless necessarily prohibits the pursuit of some other goals which are contrary to it. Therefore, it is quixotic in the extreme to try dispel all comprehensive schemes from the justification of legislation for the simple reason that liberal aims are themselves comprehensive in their desire to allow the pursuit of a plurality of individually ascertained goods. If liberalism limits the majority to only acting legislation for ends that can be assented to by all, then it enacts no legislation, for there are no ends that must assented to by all potential citizens a priori. Even goals as strongly and widely endorsed as life and happiness can find some opponent, in theory at least, for there are no simple goods that are assented to by all. If there were, then would already be consensus about the nature of good life, and hence no need to implement liberalism. Liberalism is the result of a lack of consensus about the nature of the good life, not a surfeit. However, with no goods to implement, there are no laws that can be endorsed, because laws are only enacted as a means to achieve some end. Thus, restricting legislative debate to only those proposals that might gain universal endorsement would inhibit the creation of legislation whatsoever.

the above is unclear, not sure what the beginning has to do with the end

Liberalism may now seem self-negating. If the goal of liberal society is to allow pursuit of individual ascribed goals, yet liberalism itself necessarily curtails the freedom to pursue certain goals, the question remains: What precisely can liberalism can do? The answer is that while liberalism cannot protect the rights of groups postulated to be antagonistic to liberal principles, liberalism is able to preserve the rights of actual minority groups within a liberal society, provided that they accept the fundamentals of liberalism as well. While it may first seem a bit disappointing that liberalism is only for liberals, on closer inspection, it seems impossible to imagine how liberalism could be propagated by any other means.

A liberalism that makes life safe for liberals, or at least those not antagonistic to liberalism, is not to be undervalued, however. Recall that the impetus for forming liberalism in the first place was the desire to escape the internecine warfare of the early modern era. The compromise that slowly emerged was the noninterference of government in matters of conscience. At first, this was justified on purely the purely Christian grounds that salvation was an individual, not collective matter, so it was non-productive counterproductive to enforce membership in particular sects of Protestantism. As time went on, this compromise expanded to the granting of rights not only to minority Christian groups, but to the rights of conscience for other minority religions as well. This sentiment was expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the famous aphorism, “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” In other words, so long as minority groups do not interfere with your pursuit of private goods, it does not matter what internal beliefs they hold. Thus, the rights of the minority to their own beliefs are protected to the extent that they refrain from interfering with the public pursuit of the good. However, in those cases where the minority hold beliefs about the good that, if pursued, would interfere with the pursuit of the good by the majority, liberalism necessarily falls into a trap, in which either the rights of the majority or those of the minority must unfortunately but necessarily be sacrificed.

For this reason, there can be no single formula that assures the preservation the minority rights preferences in all cases. Minority preferences cannot be respected in all theoretical circumstances, because it is possible for minority groups to be violently antiliberal. Should such groups be given free reign, they would necessarily institute the dismantling of liberal society by the very nature of our specification of the group as antiliberal. This naturally leads to a dilemma about which rights preferences to respect for which minorities, a dilemma that cannot be resolved a priori. However, fortunately, in the empirical world, we are not troubled by theoretical antiliberal groups, but actual groups of indeterminate composition. Such groups may be liberal, nonliberal, or antiliberal as lead by chance and circumstances. Given this fact, it is therefore incumbent upon liberal society to at minimum, persuade antiliberal groups to become merely nonliberal, and preferably to demonstrate to all nonliberal groups the advantages of accepting liberalism. In other words, the only ensure the continued existence of liberal states is through the promotion of liberal polities. Perhaps, as a basic matter of fairness or a pragmatic desire to avoid engendering resentment, protections of liberal society ought not be worked into the constitutional framework of a liberal state itself. Nevertheless, it still remains necessary for a liberal polity to be promoted by either passive or active means as demanded by the situation. Simultaneously, in order for a liberal polity to retain its status as liberal, the majority must listen to the demands of actual, existing minority groups in order to keep from infringing on their rights, where doing so does not jeopardize the continuation of the state as liberal. Thus, rather than specify in advance that the majority only advance those goals that can be advanced on rational merits alone as Audi’s principles demand, the liberal polity will advance the goals of the majority, so long as those goals do not substantially infringe on the rights of real minorities.

left off here

(:title “Parallel Discourse”:)

Perhaps the key achievement of early political liberalism was the pacifying of those who wished to use the power of the state to promote a particular religion and sanctions others. This was done by divorcing religious conviction from civil legislation and coercion. Starting with Locke and his contemporaries in the aftermath of the religious wars of Europe, philosophers embarked on project to show that such ideological regulation results not merely in potentially destructive battles against “heretics,” but also that it is contrary to rational morality to attempt to impose a religious viewpoint on others through the application of governmental power. Perhaps reflecting the perceived success of these efforts, some moral and political philosophers have additionally sought to limit the acceptable terms of debate within a liberal society to those that can be justified to the public as a whole, and not merely to those who subscribe to particular religious creeds or other comprehensive doctrines.

(:title “Frameworks for acceptable debate in a liberal society.”:) (:toc Sections:)

Introduction

Perhaps the key achievement of early political liberalism was the pacifying of those who wished to use the power of the state to promote a particular religion and sanctions others. This was done by divorcing religious conviction from civil legislation and coercion. Starting with Locke and his contemporaries in the aftermath of the religious wars of Europe, philosophers embarked on project to show that such ideological regulation results not merely in potentially destructive battles against “heretics,” but also that it is contrary to rational morality to attempt to impose a religious viewpoint on others through the application of governmental power. Perhaps reflecting the perceived success of these efforts, some moral and political philosophers have additionally sought to limit the acceptable terms of debate within a liberal society to those that can be justified to the public as a whole, and not merely to those who subscribe to particular religious creeds or other comprehensive doctrines.

At issue is whether it is necessary to make a wall of separation, formally or informally, between secular and religious arguments in public debate in order to prevent the religiously motivated from infringing on the rights of others. To this end, Robert Audi urges the employment of twin principles of secular rational and secular motivation, the latter meaning all propositions in a public debate should be argued on secular merits and former meaning that those merits must be a sufficiently compelling motivation for the advocacy lent a particular policy, not a covert religious agenda. John Rawls recommends that debate about constitutional principles be limited to “public reason,” that is ideas which are not the product of any comprehensive doctrine, religious or secular. Opposingly, Philip Quinn and others advocate that only the barest of restraints be placed on public debate. I shall consider each system in turn before advancing my thesis that for both theoretical and practical reasons, it is not only undesirable to exclude comprehensive doctrines from public debate, but it is ultimately impossible as well. Instead, there is no shortcut to creating and maintaining a liberal society other than having a liberal populace, and having a liberal populace is in turn dependent on grounding arguments for liberalism specifically in such a way as to have maximum appeal to all groups.

Review of positions

Audi’s principles

Audi begins by reviewing the animating principles of liberal democracy. He refers to those principles that govern the relation of the state to religion as the libertarian principle, the equalitarian principle, and the neutrality principle (39†). The libertarian principle is that the state must allow the citizens to persist in any religious belief or engage in any religious practice so long as they do not infringe on the rights of others. The equalitarian principle maintains that the state must not promote any one religion over another. The neutrality principle holds that “the state should neither favor nor disfavor religion” (39). With this background in place, Audi proceeds to his proposition that liberal interests are best served by ensuring that laws are justified on non-religious grounds, beginning with the idea of religious obligation. Essentially, Audi argues that from the “Hebraic-Christian tradition,” believers are obligated to find a “theo-ethical equilibrium” between obligations to personal moral understanding and conduct within the state. The key to reaching this equilibrium is, in Audi’s view, observing the principle of secular rationale and the principle of secular motivation. As previously stated the principle of secular rational indicates the necessity of justifying all proposed laws in secular language, so that all citizens can equally consider the merits of the law in question. The principle of secular motivation expands this concept by requiring that the secular justification given for a policy proposal be sufficient to motivate the promotion that it is given. In other words, one should not promote a law unless it is for an honestly secular reason.

Rawls’ public reason

While Audi’s principles may be useful in certain circumstance, it seems odd that these rules are focused exclusively on religion. If it is true that religious arguments should be excluded from public debate because they cannot be accepted all members of society, then certainly there are secular arguments that are similarly controversial, and thus must also be exluded. A Randian might still object to the public promotion of utilitarianism, a utilitarian might object to the promotion of Kantian values, and so forth. Audi’s view is too narrowly focused on religious views as uniquely controversial.

Accordingly, Rawls widens the varieties of disfavored speech. He presents the ideal of public reason as a means of ensuring the use of the state’s coercive power is always justified in such a way that—in principle—all rational citizens could accept it. When deciding “constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice,” Rawls maintains that a virtuous citizen will limit the discourse to public reason, as a means of ensuring the justice of the debate. Public reason is the language in which debate must be conducted in order to ensure universal acceptability. To begin, Rawls defines nonpublic reason as the values endorsed only within individuals groups, be they “churches and universities, scientific societies and professional groups,” or whatever else (220). Within these different segments of societies, different means and measures are used to resolve questions, so while a scientist might answer the question, “What do we know about human life?” by doing experiments, the clergyman would answer by consulting scriptures, and the insurance actuary by consulting tables of statistics and policy rates. Each of these methods may be valid within its domain, but in the larger public sphere, a different means of debate is needed. Furthermore, if public reason is to be given for the consideration of all, Rawls states that it must not rely on the acceptance of any comprehensive doctrine. The language of public reason instead makes reference to our shared rights, the principles of reasoning, general beliefs, common sense, and other propositions justifiable to someone in the original position. From the fabric of these, it may in some cases be easy to make principles to which all can agree. However, in those times when disagreements persist even having referenced public reason, it is up to the electorate to vote according to the each citizen’s understanding of the implications of public reason.

Rawls does suggest some limitations on the strict application of public reason, however. In the case of a less ordered society, it may be necessary to appeal to commonly held comprehensive doctrines in order to advance the rights of all citizens and ideals of public reason. In other words, it is permissible to use means of reasoning other than public reason if the result of the debate is to create a more ordered society, which adheres more closely to the ideal of public reason.

Quinn’s objections

Quinn outlines his case by noting objections to Audi and Rawls. Essentially, Quinn sees Audi and Rawls as proposing a voluntary censorship for those who have political views that cannot be justified in secular terms. Before examining his view, let us examine to an example of the use of public reason. Rawls claims in a footnote that the abortion debate can be resolved as a constitutional matter appealing to public reason. It is a simple matter of balancing the rights of a woman with the good of letting the fetus develop. Thus, concludes Rawls, abortion should not be prohibited. However, the view set forth by Rawls relies on a comprehensive framework for interpreting the rights of a fetus. In a case such as this, there is no way to make an argument that does not run aground on the rocks of comprehensive doctrine. Continuing the example of abortion, were someone to oppose constitutional enshrinement of a right to abortion on purely religious grounds, Audi and Rawls would have her bow out of the debate until she can provide non-religious and non-comprehensive reasoning for such opposition. However, to limit someone’s rights to free speech and rights to participate in the rational dialogue of democracy, it seems that a strong justification is required. Moreover, this exclusion of religiously motivated speech seems even harder to rationalize in light of the eminent controversy of some secular arguments and the comparative universality of some religious doctrines. Quinn asserts there is no basis for excluding certain accepted arguments due to their religious nature while simultaneously allowing more controversial arguments due to their purportedly secular nature. However, to restrict the debate to only universally accepted propositions is to invite anarchy, since reasonable people can and do disagree about nearly every line of argument. Public reason, argues Quinn, is decidedly weak, and any attempt to build a foundation for liberal society on it is bound to crack under the weight. Both Audi and Rawls craft exceptions to their exclusionary systems to improve their general acceptability, says Quinn, but it would be easier to abandon the systems all together. Certainly, historically in America, a semi-liberal democracy has held together in spite of whatever pressures have been put on it by those who have used religious language as a part of public discourse. If anything allowing more dialogue is helpful, as it encourages more comprehensive frameworks to incorporate liberal principles independently, even as liberalism persists without recourse to any single justification.

Objections to the limiting public discourse

The existence of other controversial claims

Furthering Quinn’s objections to those who would limit debate, it is worth observing the many ways in which religious and secular matters ultimately are inseparably overlapping. Christian Science claims that modern, secular medicine is essentially a sham. Yet, most liberal states aim at delivering quality healthcare to some or all of their citizens. Islamist extremists insist that Allah’s will is the restoration of the caliphate government and the abolition of pluralist democracy, yet liberal states continue to insist on their right to be. Jainists claim that any almost action undertaken by a human being is a sin for it increasing the suffering in the world by harming plants and animals among other things, yet liberal states seek economic expansion rather than repose. Moreover, not only do liberal states passively ignore the claims of various religious believers, they actively refute them. Publicly funded scientists claim that Genesis cannot be considered to have a basis in literal truth. The United States government forced the Japanese emperor to admit his non-divinity. The children of Christian Scientists are forced to take vaccines. These examples are not merely exceptions to the general pattern of religious and secular distinguishability but indicative of the intertwined nature of the two. The majority of religions make claims about the nature of material world as well as the spiritual one, which necessarily leads to conflicts of authority with secular institutions. The religious and secular cannot be disentangled as neatly as one would like to hope.

Moreover, it is not merely religiously held convictions that puzzle society. Some advocates see global warming as looming threat to earth’s habitability, while others dismiss the possibility. Some feel that genetically modified foods should be carefully regulated in order to protect the population from possible ill effects, while others feel that such concerns are overblown. Is HIV really the AIDs virus? Do cellphones cause cancer? Is it safe to put fluoride into the drinking water? Certainly, a large majority of scientists have an opinion about such matters (yes, no, yes), but this does not stop a persistent minority of population from questioning them. Nevertheless, the state seems to be free to act as though perfect consensus exists in these cases, when in fact, the consensus is actually only very strong.

Even beyond potentially ethereal questions of religious injunctions and scientific theories, some citizens question received historical facts such as the Holocaust, though it was observed by millions of witnesses. Still others see conspiracies surrounding Pearl Harbor, Kennedy’s assignation, and the September 11 attacks. If it is not fair to exclude these views from possibility of use in legislation, though they seem to be quite demonstrably false, then it seems unreasonable to disallow appeals to non-controversial religious propositions from the public forum while beliefs further removed from credulity are available for justificatory use. However, if such unsavory views are preemptively excised from possible use in the public square by fiat, then we run the risk of returning to the pre-Enlightenment age, in which the only way to change the orthodoxy of received thinking within a nation is through revolution. Clearly, this is absurd. Thus, the restriction of religious speech in support of a particular law or constitutional composition cannot be proposed on the grounds of its unique controversy, given the free pass allowed to other, potentially even more controversial, positions.

The necessary importance of ends to formulating law

Even ignoring the galaxy of controversial facts, there remains the impossibility of finding use for any raw fact without a system of goals to give it meaning. Facts are only useful for the creation of policy in the degree to which they help us realize some goal. However, having goals of one sort or another, no matter how limited in scope or seemingly universal, necessarily puts outer limits on the acceptable means of pursuing the good life. For example, by having the goal of allowing people to live without the fear of external violence, we necessarily prevent those who believe that the gods demand involuntary human sacrifice from pursuing their vision of the good life. Though the scope of liberal goals is quite small, consisting in the main of allowing people to live together peaceably, it nevertheless necessarily prohibits the pursuit of some other goals which are contrary to it. Therefore, it is quixotic in the extreme to try dispel all comprehensive schemes from the justification of legislation for the simple reason that liberal aims are themselves comprehensive in their desire to allow the pursuit of a plurality of individually ascertained goods. If liberalism limits the majority to only acting legislation for ends that can be assented to by all, then it enacts no legislation, for there are no ends that must assented to by all potential citizens a priori. Even goals as strongly and widely endorsed as life and happiness can find some opponent, in theory at least, for there are no simple goods that are assented to by all. If there were, then would already be consensus about the nature of good life, and hence no need to implement liberalism. Liberalism is the result of a lack of consensus about the nature of the good life, not a surfeit. However, with no goods to implement, there are no laws that can be endorsed, because laws are only enacted as a means to achieve some end. Thus, restricting legislative debate to only those proposals that might gain universal endorsement would inhibit the creation of legislation whatsoever.

The limits of liberalism in preserving minority rights

Liberalism may now seem self-negating. If the goal of liberal society is to allow pursuit of individual ascribed goals, yet liberalism itself necessarily curtails the freedom to pursue certain goals, the question remains what precisely liberalism can do. The answer is that while liberalism cannot protect the rights of groups postulated to be antagonistic to liberal principles, liberalism is able to preserve the rights of actual minority groups within a liberal society, provided that they accept the fundamentals of liberalism as well. While it may first seem a bit disappointing that liberalism is only for liberals, on closer inspection, it seems impossible to imagine how liberalism could be propagated by any other means.

A liberalism that makes life safe for liberals, or at least those not antagonistic to liberalism, is not to be undervalued, however. Recall that the impetus for forming liberalism in the first place was the desire to escape the internecine warfare of the early modern era. The compromise that slowly emerged was the non-interference of government in matters of conscience. At first, this was justified on purely the purely Christian grounds that salvation was an individual, not collective matter, so it was non-productive to enforce membership in particular sects of Protestantism. As time went on, this compromise expanded to the granting of rights not only to minority Christian groups, but to the rights of conscience for other minority religions as well. This sentiment was expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the famous aphorism, “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” In other words, so long as minority groups do not interfere with your pursuit of private goods, it does not matter what internal beliefs they hold. Thus, the rights of the minority to their own beliefs are protected to the extent that they refrain from interfering with the public pursuit of the good. However, in those cases where the minority hold beliefs about the good that, if pursued, would interfere with the pursuit of the good by the majority, liberalism necessarily falls into a trap, in which either the rights of the majority or those of the minority must unfortunately but necessarily be sacrificed.

For this reason, there can be no single formula that assures the preservation the minority rights in all cases. Minority preferences cannot be respected in all theoretical circumstances, because it is possible for minority groups to be violently anti-liberal. Should such groups be given free reign, they would necessarily institute the dismantling of liberal society by the very nature of our specification of the group as anti-liberal. This naturally leads to a dilemma about which rights to respect for which minorities that cannot be resolved a priori. However, fortunately, in the empirical world, we are not troubled by theoretical anti-liberal groups, but actual groups of indeterminate composition. Such groups may be liberal, non-liberal, or anti-liberal as lead by chance and circumstances. Given this fact, it is therefore incumbent upon liberal society to at minimum, persuade anti-liberal groups to become merely non-liberal, and preferably to demonstrate to all non-liberal groups the advantages of accepting liberalism. In other words, the only ensure the continued existence of liberal states is through the promotion of liberal polities. Perhaps, as a basic matter of fairness or a pragmatic desire to avoid engendering resentment, protections of liberal society ought not be worked into the constitutional framework of a liberal state itself. Nevertheless, it still remains necessary for a liberal polity to be promoted by either passive or active means as demanded by the situation. Simultaneously, in order for a liberal polity to retain its status as liberal, the majority must listen to the demands of actual, existing minority groups in order to keep from infringing on their rights, where doing so does not jeopardize the continuation of the state as liberal. Thus, rather than specify in advance that the majority only advance those goals that can be advanced on rational merits alone as Audi’s principles demand, the liberal polity will advance the goals of the majority, so long as those goals do not substantially infringe on the rights of real minorities.

The need for liberal state to have organically liberal polities

It may seem counterintuitive then that if liberal society must be merely tolerant of non-liberals and actively opposed to anti-liberals, that it should nevertheless refrain from enshrining liberal rationales as the only ones acceptable for legislative legitimacy. The practical reason for this freedom, above the impossibility of having liberal consensus without specified ends as mentioned before, is that to attempt to limit approved speech is likely to be counterproductive, as by stifling the expression of non-liberal energies, it potentially converts them to anti-liberal ones. The religious majority that sees itself turned away at the ballot box will almost inevitably respond by attempting to express its values through other means. In such a case that the reasoning of the majority is otherwise uncontroversial to society, it creates needless strife by antagonizing their values. In such a case that the majority is imposing on an existing (non-theoretical) minority, constitutional limitations may hinder the majority, but no constitutional principle can long withstand the determined majority. The result is the dissolution of the liberality of the state in question. Instead, proponents of liberalism must dissuade the majority from actively irritating the minority by persuading them using the strongest reasoning available. This reasoning will almost certainly come from the private reasoning of the group itself. As Rawls himself notes, “Surely, the most fundamental questions should be settled by appealing to the most important truths, yet these may far transcend public reason” (216). He claims that the diverse nature of society ensures that society must be justified without respect to any one comprehensive doctrine. However, it seems that society could also function while justifying itself separately to each comprehensive doctrine. Society is not prevented from doing so by a shortage of scholars willing to craft new arguments, and the result would be a stronger commitment to the ideals of liberal society by adherents of the various comprehensive doctrines. The key is drawing support from within the private reason of the group in order to bolster liberalism as a whole. The result of this activity is that the dream of a monolithic theory of liberalism is cast aside in favor of a thousand liberalisms, each with a justification particular to group that supports it for their own private reasons. The only limitation is that participants accept the fundamental political equality of all human beings such that the non-infringing rights of minority groups are preserved and that they are willing to debate among other groups rationally. These limitations must not come as preconditions, but as a result of the internal deliberation of each group in particular. Rawls, of course, sees the need for private reasoning to convince groups of the merits of a liberal state prior to its ordering, but he fails to see that this process cannot end with the settling of constitutional principles, but must continue perpetually, bringing forth new liberal commitments from within each comprehensive doctrine, as there is no viable means of imposing liberal commitments from without.

As the search for a monolithic liberal theory is abandoned, it natural to review what is lost in abandoning it. The goal of monolithic liberalism is to make a state which by the logical clarity of its nature must be accepted by all rational parties. It is hoped that by using the right formulation of veils of ignorance and states of nature, that one could rationally force all parties to assent to the basic justice and decency of the liberal state so-conceived. Put thusly, it should be readily apparent how clearly the quest for a monolithic liberalism was itself the expression of a comprehensive doctrine: the comprehensive doctrine of permitting the flourishing of all comprehensive doctrines. However, since some comprehensive doctrines entail the foregoing of other comprehensive doctrines, the flourishing of all is not logically possible. Fortunately, we have an alternative in allowing the flourishing of doctrines which themselves are organically disposed to allow the flourishing of other means of pursuing the good life, namely those that are conditioned to tolerate minority rights.

The best way to do so is informally insisting that all members of society accept for some justification the political equality of all human beings, though not necessarily the same one. Civil society has no business regulating the beliefs of others or the reasons for those beliefs, but liberal democracy only works on the premise that its citizens accept the political equality of mankind and the need for rational debate. Members of society may hold alternate opinions, and though government may not specify the means by which this conclusion is reached, it is in fact within the bounds of its authority to promote respect our equality. It is our equality which insists that no one religion use civil authority to promote its own interests above those of others. Accepting the equality of people means accepting their equal right to choice their religious beliefs, whether we agree or not. Furthermore, in accepting people’s equality, one also accepts that the state cannot promote one’s own religion without promoting other religions by the same principle. It is for this reason that liberal societies renounced government control of religion in the first place. History has shown that equality and debate are sufficient guides to human conduct to ensure the continuation of liberal government, and therefore these principles are sufficient to ensure the preservation of rights within society and those of all rational members of society.

Conclusion

As Francis Fukuyama rightly noted, in the twentieth century, popular sovereignty came to be the theoretical basis for legitimacy in almost every nation on earth. Democracies and even dictatorships all claim their right to lead from the purported will of the people (if not the actual will). The only other model of government legitimacy in wide practice is that in which the leaders claim that their authority comes from God. For the world to become a place of toleration for all, liberalism must proceed from uncontroversial premises. By premising liberalism organically out from the values of existing traditions, it will be far easier to persuade non-liberal communities of the advantages of liberalism, and to maintain support for liberalism in existing liberal societies. Attempting to construct a monolithic, independent liberalism is tempting, but ultimately foolhardy, as it risks being rejected as competing comprehensive doctrine. As we can see, attempts to integrate liberalism into existing traditions have already succeeded in a variety of cultures around the world. Liberalism arose originally in the Protestant West following the Reformation, but has spread to numerous other cultures by showing its efficacy in preserving social goods favored in those cultures as well. The key is to recognize that each society necessarily has goods that works to preserve, and liberalism should not cripple itself by disallowing public reference to those privately goods, were it even possible to do so. If then the conclusion of the matter is that religious arguments cannot be excluded from the public realm, how is society to keep the religious majority from imposing its views on the minority? By convincing the polity using its own measures of the disaster that results from doing so. In the support of a liberal state, there is no substitute for having a liberal polity.

†Sadly, the page numbers referenced here are specific to a booklet composed by the professor of my “Law, Justice and the State” class and time constraints prevent me from cross-referencing them.

Before saying more about the nature of haiku itself, it is helpful to define an central important (just my preference, to hedge bets…) division within Western thought, the division between the broadly Platonic and Aristotelian traditions in philosophy. Plato‘s found a way through solution to the dilemma of the many and the one [dilemma? this essay hasn’t mentioned any dilemmas yet. horse before cart :-)] using used a concept notion first elucidated devised (abhor the word elucidate) by his teacher, Socrates. His idea, “The Forms”, are explained the eternal patterns that give shape to the world by reference to a real plane of eternal ideas (purely a suggestion). Everything in the world is only a particular, temporal instance of many general, eternal Forms. interesting. just my opinion: i don’t think socrates in the end would allow for more than one form, namely the good, in which everything participates. to my mind, the word should not both be capitalized and plural. there is only Form Objects of the world are constantly shifting from participation in one Form to participation in another though formal change over a basic substance is an aristotelian idea. this has The Physics written all over it. perhaps something like ‘Things we see and hear are made intelligible by their participation in form, not by their contingent, changing characteristics. This allows objects to be both subject to change and difference, yet acknowledges their underlying sameness, without which classification is impossible. An iron bar may change from reflecting the eternal aspect of iron to reflecting the eternal aspect of rust, and so forth. hmm this is again aristotelian territory. aristotle treated class, but plato treated understanding… really plato might not have been interested to explain how a table might change to a chair, for the same reason continentals don’t discuss whether the current king of france is bald. Similarly, human actions are either skillful or poor imitations of justice, courage, moderation, and wisdom, the four key virtues.

Before saying more about the nature of haiku itself, it is helpful to define an central important (just my preference, to hedge bets…) division within Western thought, the division between the broadly Platonic and Aristotelian traditions in philosophy. Plato‘s found a way through solution to the dilemma of the many and the one [dilemma? this essay hasn’t mentioned any dilemmas yet. horse before cart :-)] using used a concept notion first elucidated devised (abhor the word elucidate) by his teacher, Socrates. His idea, “The Forms”, are explained the eternal patterns that give shape to the world by reference to a real plane of eternal ideas (purely a suggestion). Everything in the world is only a particular, temporal instance of many general, eternal Forms. interesting. yet i don’t think socrates in the end would allow for more than one form, namely the good, in which everything participates. to my mind, the word should not both be capitalized and plural. there is only Form Objects of the world are constantly shifting from participation in one Form to participation in another formal change over a basic substance is an aristotelian idea. this has The Physics written all over it. perhaps something like ‘Things we see and hear are made intelligible by their participation in form, not by their contingent, changing characteristics. This allows objects to be both subject to change and difference, yet acknowledges their underlying sameness, without which classification is impossible. An iron bar may change from reflecting the eternal aspect of iron to reflecting the eternal aspect of rust, and so forth. this is again aristotelian territory. aristotle treated class, but plato treated understanding… really plato might not have been interested to explain how a table might change to a chair, for the same reason continentals don’t discuss whether the current king of france is bald. Similarly, human actions are either skillful or poor imitations of justice, courage, moderation, and wisdom, the four key virtues.

This basic notion of a dual-natured universe, in which the temporal world is a subset of an eternal order, has troubled some Western philosophers since Plato, and many attempts have been made to overturn it. Notably, Plato’s own student Aristotle is held thought (again, hedging bets) to represent the first departure from the notion of a separation between the eternal and our ability to experience it. Forms exist only to the extent that they are the properties of objects and have no meaning apart from their embodiment in a particular. There is no general “Form of Iron” or “Form of Rust;” there are just a number of historically existing objects that can be classified as either iron-type objects or rust-type objects. this sounds like nominalism, not aristotelianism. man oh man, while my nominalist professor never ventured so far to claim this is what aristotle really meant, you could see it in his eyes sometimes. “Concepts are names we give to things and have no meaning beyond that.” We were taught Aristotle had a more interesting view: forms are a counterpart to matter without which matter does not exist, for matter can only exist in some form. In his phrase, “matter is potentiality, form is actuality.” Whereas form for aristotle is quite real, what is written above says, matter is actuality, form is a name. As a fellow syncretist i see exactly what you’re shooting for, and i think some modifications would protect you against the impression of superficiality. Since all that exists is the world as it exists, one should not commit oneself to studying the rational aspects of a hypothesized eternal nature, but one should be committed to observing the actual happenings of empirical events and use experience to inform one’s model of the world.

to my mind anyway, the disagreement aristotle had (which made plato dear but the truth dearer to him) had at its root a misinterpretation of the platonic notion of form. A lot of people accept his account of what Plato thought… However, since you do not have time for this, I guess some actually useful advice would be to have them disagree over the location of form, not whether it exists in an important way. Aristotle thought matter was in form, so forms are pretty much lying about everywhere — here’s a form, there’s a form — and plato thought we have primarily intellectual contact with Form. Anyway, at least aristotle should not be made to say that the forms are mental classifications. Certainly they can be used as such, but forms for aristotle are what are actually ‘there’. Form is actuality…

Before saying more about the nature of haiku itself, it is helpful to define an central important (just my preference, to hedge bets…) division within Western thought, the division between the broadly Platonic and Aristotelian traditions in philosophy. Plato‘s found a way through solution to the dilemma of the many and the one [dilemma? this essay hasn’t mentioned any dilemmas yet. horse before cart :-)] using used a concept notion first elucidated devised (abhor the word elucidate) by his teacher, Socrates. His idea, “The Forms”, are explained the eternal patterns that give shape to the world by reference to a real plane of eternal ideas (purely a suggestion). Everything in the world is only a particular, temporal instance of many general, eternal Forms. interesting. yet i don’t think socrates in the end would allow for more than one form, namely the good, and in which everything participates. to my mind, the word should not both be capitalized and plural. there is only Form Objects of the world are constantly shifting from participation in one Form to participation in another formal change over a basic substance is an aristotelian idea. this has The Physics written all over it. perhaps something like ‘Things we see and hear are made intelligible by their participation in form, not by their contingent, changing characteristics. This allows objects to be both subject to change and difference, yet acknowledges their underlying sameness, without which classification is impossible. An iron bar may change from reflecting the eternal aspect of iron to reflecting the eternal aspect of rust, and so forth. this is again aristotelian territory. aristotle treated classes, but plato treated understanding. really plato might not have been interested to explain how a table might change to a chair, for the same reason continentals don’t discuss whether the current king of france is bald. Similarly, human actions are either skillful or poor imitations of justice, courage, moderation, and wisdom, the four key virtues.

to my mind anyway, the disagreement aristotle had (which made plato dear but the truth dearer to him) was a misinterpretation of the platonic notion of form. However, since you do not have time for this, I guess some actually useful advice would be to have them disagree over the location of form, not whether it exists in an important way. Aristotle thought matter was in form, so forms are pretty much lying about everywhere — here’s a form, there’s a form — and plato thought we have primarily intellectual contact with Form. Anyway, at least aristotle should not be made to say that the forms are mental classifications. Certainly they can be used as such, but forms for aristotle are what are actually ‘there’. Form is actuality…

Before saying more about the nature of haiku itself, it is helpful to define an central important (just my preference, to hedge bets…) division within Western thought, the division between the broadly Platonic and Aristotelian traditions in philosophy. Plato‘s found a way through solution to the dilemma of the many and the one [dilemma? this essay hasn’t mentioned any dilemmas yet. horse before cart :-)] using used a concept notion first elucidated devised (abhor the word elucidate) by his teacher, Socrates. His idea, “The Forms”, are explained the eternal patterns that give shape to the world by reference to a real plane of eternal ideas (purely a suggestion). Everything in the world is only a particular, temporal instance of many general, eternal Forms. interesting. here is perhaps where i should write an essay that would clarify how plato means the forms: i don’t think socrates in the end would allow for more than one form, namely the good, and in which everything participates. which is why the word should not both be capitalized and plural. there is only Form Objects of the world are constantly shifting from participation in one Form to participation in another formal change over a basic substance is an aristotelian idea. this has The Physics written all over it. perhaps something like ‘Things we see and hear are made intelligible by their participation in form, not by their contingent, changing characteristics. This allows objects to be both subject to change and difference, yet acknowledges their underlying sameness, without which classification is impossible. An iron bar may change from reflecting the eternal aspect of iron to reflecting the eternal aspect of rust, and so forth. this is again aristotelian territory. aristotle treated classes, but plato treated understanding. really plato might not have been interested to explain how a table might change to a chair, for the same reason continentals don’t discuss whether the current king of france is bald. Similarly, human actions are either skillful or poor imitations of justice, courage, moderation, and wisdom, the four key virtues.

This basic notion of a dual-natured universe, in which the temporal world is a subset of an eternal order, has troubled some Western philosophers since Plato, and many attempts have been made to overturn it. Notably, Plato’s own student Aristotle is held thought (again, hedging bets) to represent the first departure from the notion of a separation between the eternal and our ability to experience it. Forms exist only to the extent that they are the properties of objects and have no meaning apart from their embodiment in a particular. There is no general “Form of Iron” or “Form of Rust;” there are just a number of historically existing objects that can be classified as either iron-type objects or rust-type objects. this sounds like nominalism, not aristotelianism. oh man, my nominalist professor never ventured so far to claim this is what aristotle really meant, but you could see it in his eyes sometimes. “Concepts are names we give to things and have no meaning beyond that.” Aristotle had a more interesting view: forms are a counterpart to matter without which matter does not exist, for matter can only exist in some form. In his phrase, “matter is potentiality, form is actuality.” Form for aristotle is quite real, whereas what is written above says, matter is actuality, form is a name. As a fellow syncretist i see exactly what you’re shooting for, and i think some modifications would protect you against the impression of superficiality. Since all that exists is the world as it exists, one should not commit oneself to studying the rational aspects of a hypothesized eternal nature, but one should be committed to observing the actual happenings of empirical events and use experience to inform one’s model of the world.

the trouble with large papers like this is they tend to ‘abuse’ rather than ‘use’ philosophers like plato and aristotle. this paper is a difficult (and inspiring) project. so what i want to emphasize is that in my own class on aristotle and especially in my class on plato, one of the things i learned was that my wikipedia notions of ‘what they basically thought’ were severly distorted straw men. have you played that game where people pass a message through a line by whispering in each other’s ears?

the disagreement aristotle had (which made plato dear but the truth dearer to him) was, to my mind, a misinterpretation of the platonic notion of form. However, since you do not have time for this, my more useful advice would be to have them disagree over the location of form. Aristotle thought matter was in form and so forms are pretty much lying about everywhere — here’s a form, there’s a form — and plato thought we have only intellectual contact with Form. Anyway, at least aristotle should not be made to say that the forms are mental classifications. certainly they can be used as such, but forms for aristotle are what are actually ‘there’. form is actuality

the trouble with large papers like this is they tend to ‘abuse’ rather than ‘use’ philosophers like plato and aristotle. this is a difficult project. see, in my own class on aristotle and especially in my class on plato, one of the things i learned was that my wikipedia notions of ‘what they basically thought’ were severly distorted straw men. have you played that game where people pass a message through a line by whispering in each other’s ears?

this is all nice

Watson, Burton. Saigyô: Poems of a Mountain Home. Columbia University Press, 1991.

this is all improved

blue

Haiku is one of the shortest poetic forms, but also surprisingly effective at arresting and engaging the thoughts of the reader. In this paper, I will argue that one key to this ability is the strength gained by appealing to, what I will call, both our rational and empirical understandings of the world. In seventeen syllables, a good haiku can recreate an entire slice of human experience as both a particular situation and a generalized abstraction.

Of course, by haiku, I do not mean merely any poem conforming to a 5•7•5 syllable structure (many such poems should properly be classified as senryû 川柳), but those poems that embodied the particular style perfected by poets like Matsuo Bashô 松尾芭蕉, Yosa Buson 與謝蕪村, and Kobayashi Issa 小林一茶. These masters and their disciples were able to create profundity and nuance from seemingly basic formal elements. Strictly speaking, a haiku should have groups of 5 then 7 then 5 syllables divided by a cutting word and containing a seasonal element, but in practice even these simple rules can be discarded as needed for effect. When employed properly, these rules allow the creation of a poem that transcends the eternal and temporal aspects of the life. This ability to serve as such a bridge between the hdblue%mpirical is one of the most important properties of a great haiku and a distinguishing difference between haiku and other kinds of Japanese verse.

Brief history of haiku

To understand the ability of haiku to connect the temporal and eternal aspects?, it is useful to have an understanding of its literary origins, which allow it to make allusions to past works and encourage yet breaking with reader expectations. It is also helpful to contrast haiku with other forms of Japanese poetry, in order to see the uniqueness of its ability to make such a connection.

Haiku inherits a long tradition of Japanese literature. One of the earliest forms of Japanese poetry was waka 和歌. Waka consisted of alternating lines of 5 and 7 syllables followed by an ending line of 7 syllables. One form of waka— the tanka 短歌, a short 5•7•5•7•7 verse— became especially popular, and nearly synonymous with waka as a whole. Eventually the writing of tanka was adapted into renga 連歌, a sort of poetic game in which a group of authors go back and forth composing verses of 5•7•5 and 7•7. In renga, poets displayed their wit by creating a verse that takes the verse before and casts it in a different light. Thus, each verse in the series could be read as a pair with either the verse before it or after it, with the verse taking on completely different meanings depending on its pairing.

Renga, in turn, evolved into haikai no renga 俳諧の連歌, a playful variant on the traditional style of renga from which haiku emerged. While renga was still constrained by the topics, associations, and language of the older waka form, haikai cut itself loose and used colloquial or vulgar language along with Chinese loan words and other terms banned by the rules of waka. Collectively, these once forbidden words are known as haigon 俳言 (Poetics 62). However, the long tradition that existed before haikai, stretching back over a thousand years by the time of Bashô, proved vital to the composition and understanding of haiku.

Haikai, like other forms of renga, was composed in a group with different poets taking turns creating verses of either 5•7•5 or 7•7. By this time also, the initial verse in the sequence, the hokku 発句, had taken on special significance. While all other verses in a haikai or renga series were meant to connect to a verse either before or after it, the hokku was also meant to stand on its own. Accordingly, other verses were known as flat verses or hiraku 平句, since these verses were incomplete without a verse before or after it to give it context. Stylistically, what distinguished the hokku from hiraku was its independence. Though a hokku had a successor verse, it was not dependent on it. What formally distinguished hokku from hiraku was their inclusion of a cutting word, kireji 切れ字, and a seasonal element, kigo 季語. Writing hokku existed as a sub-discipline within the art of haikai for hundreds of years before Masaoka Shiki popularized the use of the term haiku 俳句 in the Meiji Era to refer to hokku taken out the context of linked verse. Hereafter, the terms haiku and hokku will be used more or less interchangeably, but it is important to first note that the heritage of haiku in hokku gives it a dual nature as both an connected, opening verse and an independent poetic seed.

The other key facet to note about haiku’s heritage is that haikai no renga was a playful, comic form. Like all forms of comedy, haikai was reliant on its ability to surprise the reader with an unexpected connection, be it between refined or vulgar subject matters. By juxtaposing suggestive allusions, puns, double entendres, and references to classic works, haikai masters were able to keep their patrons amused by the playful twists and turns of the verse that they made together.

(the haikai thing in blyth)

Bashô was born into this tradition, and became a master in the Danrin style as a young man, but distinguished himself when he broke off from his peers and more seriously devoted himself to his art by moving to an isolated hut away from central Edo (Bare Branch 63). The very name “haikai” suggests easygoing fun, but Bashô changed the course of the discipline by taking a serious approach to his fun. His poetry retained the suggestive illusions and comic breakages with expectation, but rather than employ these for the end of mere amusement, Bashô aimed for the higher goal of using these juxtapositions to increase the expressive capacity of haiku itself.

About Rational and Empirical Understanding

The Rational

this is fine — this is good — i’m just feeling creative. take your pick.

well, i’m also worried about the philosophy here. see what you think.

Before saying more about the nature of haiku itself, it is helpful to define an central important (just my preference, to hedge bets…) division within Western thought, the division between the broadly Platonic and Aristotelian traditions in philosophy. Plato‘s found a way through solution to the dilemma of the many and the one [dilemma? this essay hasn’t mentioned any dilemmas yet. horse before cart :-)] using used a concept notion first elucidated devised (abhor the word elucidate) by his teacher, Socrates. His idea, “The Forms”, are explained the eternal patterns that give shape to the world by reference to a real plane of eternal ideas (purely a suggestion). Everything in the world is only a particular, temporal instance of many general, eternal Forms. interesting. here is perhaps where i should write an essay that would clarify how plato means the forms: i don’t think socrates in the end would allow for more than one form, namely the good, and in which everything participates. which is why the word should not both be capitalized and plural. there is only Form Objects of the world are constantly shifting from participation in one Form to participation in another formal change over a basic substance is an aristotelian idea. this has The Physics written all over it. perhaps something like ‘Things we see and hear are made intelligible by their participation in form, not by their contingent, changing characteristics. This allows objects to be both subject to change and difference, yet acknowledges their underlying sameness, without which classification is impossible. An iron bar may change from reflecting the eternal aspect of iron to reflecting the eternal aspect of rust, and so forth. this is still aristotelian territory. it was aristotle who was interested in classification, plato in understanding. really plato might not have been interested to explain how a table might change to a chair, for the same reason continentals don’t discuss whether the current king of france is bald. Similarly, human actions are either skillful or poor imitations of justice, courage, moderation, and wisdom, the four key virtues.

For the purposes of this paper, “rational understanding” is defined as any means of seeing the world that shares with Plato the tendency to begin by first postulating a schema which underlies our experience of it and attempting to derive understanding by working from that schema to our personal experience of the world. The Rational are those who divide the world into essence and accident and those who work from system to sensation.

The Empirical

the ‘subset of an eternal order’ bit is spot on

This basic notion of a dual-natured universe, in which the temporal world is a subset of an eternal order, has troubled some Western philosophers since Plato, and many attempts have been made to overturn it. Notably, Plato’s own student Aristotle is held thought (again, hedging bets) to represent the first departure from the notion of a separation between the eternal and our ability to experience it. Forms exist only to the extent that they are the properties of objects and have no meaning apart from their embodiment in a particular. There is no general “Form of Iron” or “Form of Rust;” there are just a number of historically existing objects that can be classified as either iron-type objects or rust-type objects. this sounds like nominalism, not aristotelianism. my nominalist professor never ventured so far to claim this is what aristotle really meant, but you could see it in his eyes sometimes. “concepts are names we give to things and have no meaning beyond that.” aristotle had a more interesting view: forms are a counterpart to matter without which matter does not exist (for it can only exist… in some form). in his phrase, “matter is potentiality, form is actuality.” form for aristotle is quite real. what you just said was, matter is actuality, form is a name. as a fellow syncretist i see exactly what you’re shooting for, and i think some modifications would protect you against the impression of superficiality. Since all that exists is the world as it exists, one should not commit oneself to studying the rational aspects of a hypothesized eternal nature, but one should be committed to observing the actual happenings of empirical events and use experience to inform one’s model of the world.

the trouble with large papers like this is they tend to ‘abuse’ rather than ‘use’ philosophers like plato and aristotle. this is a difficult project. i had a a class on aristotle and two on plato, and one of the things i learned was that my wikipedia notions of ‘what they basically thought’ were severly distorted straw men. have you played that game where people pass a message through a line by whispering in each other’s ears?

the disagreement aristotle had (which made plato dear but the truth dearer to him) was to my mind a misinterpretation of the platonic notion of form. however, since you do not have time for this, you could easily have them disagree over the location of form. aristotle thought matter was in form and so forms are pretty much lying about everywhere — here’s a form, there’s a form — and plato thought we have only intellectual contact with Form. whatever you do, at least do not have aristotle say that the forms are just classifications. certainly they can be used as such, but forms for aristotle are what are actually ‘there’. form is actuality

For the purposes of this paper, “empirical understanding” is defined as any means of seeing the world that shares with Aristotle the tendency to begin by first cataloging our experience of the world and only by working from that experience drawing inferences about what, if any, substructure supports that experience. here again, hmm. aristotle was not an ‘empiricist’ in the english tradition like this. he does metaphysics, in the Metaphysics, and for instance talks about ten nonsensible nonempirical exhaustive categories of existence, prime matter, the nature of god, etc… it’s not like this. Platonism v. empiricism or eternal v. temporal is what you’re shooting for. The Empirical are those who fuse the world into a solitary realm of the actual.

man i should study. l8r

On the utility of the distinction

The skeptic may ask about the virtue in creating the distinction between the eternal and temporal used here and accuse this paper of creating an arbitrary binary for the sole purpose of speciously proceeding to “find it” precisely where I left it. However, I argue that this distinction is not wholly unique to the author, though it goes by many names. Its applications are practical both personally and philosophically. First, let us quote Blyth’s Preface to Haiku.

Though Blyth has been much criticized, and rightly, for his pseudo-mystic interpretations and his Zen-centric distortion of Japanese cultural history (Review 459–462), there remains much to be admired in his approach to life and poetry. Here, Blyth has summarized for us the same two approaches to life which this essay is engaged in finding in haiku. The escape from the world is the eternal, and the return to it is the temporal. Both perspectives are necessary to understand the world fully. Although these terms were not used by the poets under consideration, nevertheless, it is fair to consider the ways in which their poems engage in the same questions, because their poems are structured in a way that clearly speaks to the basic condition of humans as simultaneously seeking to understand the eternal and temporal aspects of the world.

Though it goes out of the scope of this paper to satisfactorily demonstrate it here, the Shintô emphasis on eternal Gods and seasons and the Confucian emphasis on fixed ‘right relations’ between people can be taken as an influence towards eternal perspective, and the Zen emphasis on immediate, unmediated perception can be taken as an influence towards temporal perspective. Thus, it is appropriate to see the connection between the eternal and temporal parts of a haiku and explore the ways that these parts strengthen its impact.

Dynamics of haiku

Haiku exists by dividing a season word, which represents the unchanging and rational aspect of the world, from a sketch of the temporal world by means of a cutting word. Due to the history of haiku, part of its basic definition is to combine these two ways of seeing into a simultaneous tension. The seasonal element presents an eternal picture, while the rest of the haiku creates a specific scene. The genius of haiku is that neither perspective crowds out the other, but both perspectives should be seen by the reader.

The eternal aspect in haiku

The eternal can be seen in haiku in the extent to which haiku incorporate Shinto elements. Though Blyth downplays the importance of Shintô on Japanese thought in his study Haiku, devoting just three pages to it, Shintô is in fact a central influence on the nature of haiku. It is possible that Blyth’s omission was a reflection of the unpopularity of Shintô sentiment following the war. Of course, Blyth is right that Shintô is very rarely the explicit subject of haiku. However, when understood as a folk religion (rather than as the state religion imposed during much of Blyth’s lifetime), Shintô circumscribes the topic under consideration but not the propositions within that context. Thus, Shintô should not ordinarily be a topic for particular examination. Rather, Shintô is the means by which particular topics are manifest.

In particular, the kigo that is required for haiku is a topic advanced in part by Shintô considerations. A comment by Robert Hass in Essential Haiku suggests a primordial connection between the kigo and the animism of Shintô. Contrasting English and Japanese terms for rain, he explains that haiku,

(:quote:)”bears the traces of an earlier animism, when harusame and kirishigure and yûdachi were thought of as nature spirits, particular beings. To some extent, in any case, the suggestive power of these poems depends on this stylization” (225). (:endquote:)

Thus, to understand haiku, we must see that to a certain degree kigo are the inheritors of the Shintô tradition of kotodama 言霊, words with the magical power to invoke the kami 神 (gods or spirits). Seen from this perspective, we see that the choice of words in haiku is not merely a product of human convention, but it is also dependent on the will of the eternal spirits that haiku is able to summon. Seen through the lens Shintô belief, the world is not just a temporal ground in which hills arise and mountains erode. More than that, the hills and mountains of the world are the inhabited manifestations of the kami that act on this world. Each mountain has a name, and that name works by invoking the spirit of the mountain. The motion of spirits is seen as a vital aspect of language. Since the earliest eras in Japanese poetry, nature and man’s relation to it has been a central theme, almost to the exclusion of all else. That haiku also focuses on nature more acutely than, say, love, shows the degree to which it is an inheritor of this Shintô tradition. (More about the rice planting calendar as a center of life in the four seasons.)

Haiku is to a certain extent an attempt to understand the world by invoking the spirits that eternally reside within it. Much has been said about the this-worldliness of Shintô, however, the act of neglecting the afterlife merely gives Shintô more space in which to draw the spiritual into the earthly.

Seasons can only be understood to exist at all if one allows that the particular weather of a particular day is in actuality the manifestation of a larger trend in the workings of the climate.

The temporal aspect in haiku

Their simultaneous tension

Haiku’s background as a comic art gives it the requisite skill for seeing two things at once, and it was the genius of Bashô to direct this skill not toward merely punning kakekotoba 掛詞 (pivot words) as in the old waka, but allowing even a single interpretation of a single poem to cleave into two perspectives of the world.

Significantly, the hiraku in renga and haikai no renga is meant to change meanings as it changes groupings. The poem can be interpreted as being set in morning or evening, fall or spring, under happy or sad conditions depending on the framework established by reading it along with the poem either before or after it. The intriguing fact of haiku is that its masters were able to take a single hokku and condense dual perspectives of hiraku pairs into one verse.

Change your interpretation, says the monkey.

Take as an example, the second poem in Bashô’s Oku no Hosomichi and the first in which Bashô has begun his journey: Yuku haru ya/ tori naki uo no/ me wa namida 行春や鳥啼魚の目は泪^[1]. The base section in this poem is, “tori naki uo no/ me wa namida.” Literally, this means, “Birds cry and the fish’s eyes have tears.” Clearly, this is a very dynamic scene, in which the very calls of the birds and wet eyes of fish around the marketplace all suggest to the author his sorrow at departing. This clearly embodies what can be called a Zen or Empirical theory of poetry. The poet does not suggest any characteristics outside of those that he observes from his not terribly objective vantage point. Because his emotional state leaks out onto the subjective world, the cries of the birds are lamentations, and the eyes of the fish are filled with sorrow, so he records just this. However, the superimposed section is radically different in its conception. Though, “yuku haru ya,” means only, “going-spring-ah,” in an overly literal manner, it is rife with allusion when considered in the context of the language of haiku. “yuku haru,” had been used since ancient times to convey the grief that one associates with the passing of the spring. In particular, it is known for the crying of birds (Poetics 85). Like the association of justice with virtue or families with filial piety, this relationship is extratemporal. Though the base section refers only to those specific events experienced by the author, the superimposed section creates a context for this perception within the wider world of eternal verities. Thus, Bashô creates a poem in which the reader moves from the initial timeless, Rational world of dwindling springs and sorrowful partings into the concrete and Empirical world of his own departure from the bustling markets of Edo, in which the birds circle above and the fish glisten from vendors’ stalls all reflect his own sorrow. The mind of the reader must grasp both the eternal and ephemeral aspects of the poem in order to gain its full significance.

Similar analyses can be performed on most haiku by seeing the connection between the static base section and the active superimposed section. Since most haiku have a seasonal element, there should be at least a Rational aspect to any haiku. The inclusion of a more ephemeral section in the haiku is not as mandatory, but many of the good haiku juxtapose such an image, while the great haiku create a space for the mind to use both means of seeing non-exclusively.

Now, in order to understand the uniqueness of haiku as literature, it is worth contrasting these two haiku of Bashô with a waka by a poet who inspired him, the monk Saigyô: Kokoro naki/ mi nimo aware wa/ shirarekeri/ shigi tatsu sawa no/ aki no yûgure こゝろなき身にも哀はしられけりしぎたつさはの秋のゆふぐれ^[1]. Burton Watson translates it, “Even a person free of passion/ would be moved/ to sadness:/ autumn evening/ in a marsh where snipes fly up” (Saigyô 81). Besides the simple quality of being too long, and thus saying what should be left unsaid, such a poem could never qualify as a haiku because it lacks the necessary tension between the eternal and the temporal. The poem begins by discussing a body without a heart and declares that it too would come to know sorrow. Then it presents a sorrowful image of a snipe (or snipes) rising up from the marsh as the daylight fades away. Though both images are moving, and the poem as a whole is a masterpiece, it cannot be considered an especially long haiku, because it only concerns itself with the eternal and never with the temporal. One might suggest that the snipe flying up is a temporal scene, but clearly this is not the case, for this same scene is recommended to any and all heartless people who wish to be moved to sorrow. It is not that haiku must be shasei 写生, pictures drawn from life, since many haiku contain imagined or invented scenes. It is that haiku can be such a sketch, whereas the older waka cannot, because the haiku can be fleeting where the waka must be solid. Partially, the timelessness of the image of a snipe rising from the marsh is a result of the fame that this poem accumulated over the years, making it seem natural through familiarity. However, the flying frog of “Furuike” is just as famous as the snipes of Saigyô, if not much more so, but it retains its existence as a particular scene observed by a particular person. Even if the pond in the poem is total myth and Bashô never observed what he described, there remains something concrete about the invented scene. The specificity of haiku is of course, partially just a matter of the conventions that the reader brings to the interpretation process, but it also goes deeper. Saigyô rhetorically asked for an image that would move even the hardest of hearts and then delivered such an image. Bashô presented the stillness of an ancient pond and then rather than showing a noiseless leaf, a silent breeze, or some other reinforcing image, he has a noisy frog splash in. Haiku is centered on contradiction, and though the images of classical waka are undeniably beautiful and moving, they cannot match haiku in terms of dynamism, since they do not move so rapidly between the world of the Rational and the Empirical, but confine themselves to a single conception of the world.

Note however that the images shown in waka are not always static and eternal. Sometimes, waka is intensely personal. Consider the following translation of Saigyô, “What else/ could have made me/ loathe the world?/ The one who was cruel to me/ today I think of as kind^[2]” (Saigyô 180). The poem is clearly concerned only with the personal experience of the author, and not the eternal implications of such feelings. Thus, this poem is centered wholly in the Empirical and never provides a bridge by which the reader can consider both the eternal reverberations of the poem as well as the merely temporal ones. Saigyô, though a truly masterful poet, is not a haiku poet.

Of course, bridging the tensions between the Rational and the Empirical by providing a means for the reader to enter into both aspects of the poem is only one of many characteristics that make haiku so intriguing. Diction, word choice, humor, brevity, and insight all play a role along with the shear surprise of providing dueling interpretive frameworks within which to view the poem. However, properly conducted, a haiku can in its few short syllables take a reader from the heavens to the earth and back again, as we consider afresh not just what we see before us or the patterns that are followed by what we see, but how both perspectives are vital to a full conception of life in this world. In order to full capture the experience of life in this world, haiku must use and then cast off both Empirical and Rational dogma in order to grasp more firmly the world as a whole.

The distinction drawn in this essay also has utility for the student of philosophy in particular. To be engaged in philosophy today is to be invited to make camp with partisans of one group or another, be they the children of Plato and Aristotle or Nietzsche and Russell. Allowing haiku to draw us into both aspects of reality reemphasizes for us the importance of acknowledging the truth of both descriptions of reality. Without the Forms, we cannot describe the world, and without describing the world, we cannot know the Forms.

Suppose for instance, that one wishes to pursue Rational thinking to its furthermost limits. In doing so, one must reject all experiences that come prior to cognition as potential sources of error. However, human cognition is itself an experience of the thinker, and thus doubt must remain in the thinker’s mind, because human thinking itself is a potentially untrustworthy experience.

The problem is elucidated by Robert Carter, who compares James and Nishida Kitarô and explains that pure experience is “undifferentiated, undichotomized, conceptually neutral, ambiguous, and prior to subject/object distinction” (Nothingness 4). Since experience is prior to either Rational or Empirical understanding, neither is capable of independently and accurately assessing the world. The key then is “to take two perspectives at the same time—the ‘double aperture in knowing’” (32). Haiku’s background as a comic art gives it the requisite skill for seeing two things at once, and it was the genius of Bashô to direct this skill not toward merely punning kakekotoba 掛詞 (pivot words) as in the old waka, but allowing even a single interpretation of a single poem to cleave into two perspectives of the world.

Plato presents a criticism of the poet in Book X of The Republic. Socrates asks how it is that a poet can write about horses without being a horseman? The gods know the form of riding a horse, and a horseman can approximate that knowledge. The cobbler and the metalworker can learn from the horseman if the tools they make are good or not, but the painter and the poet is almost without hope, imitating as three times removed from real source of things by copying the outward form of real horses. Surely, to write poetry about all subjects in the world, there must be something that the poet has knowledge of. Yet, Socrates cannot find what it should be and in the end, he concludes that poetry must be banned from the Republic until a reasonable defense can be made for this dangerous art that overwhelms reason, potentially giving reign to the basest part of the soul with no real knowledge to guide it.

An answer to Plato’s riddle is more obvious when we contemplate the arrival of the era of the novel. What the novel did is show us what life is like from the eyes of a protagonist. What the poet in a general sense is able to do is to put us into the mind of a person. What the poet knows is nothing more or less than his or her own heart. So, while a novelist writing about sailing who has never seen the ocean will inevitably get some details of the activity wrong, what a keen novelist can capture is how the heart that is stirred by such activity. What haiku in particular captures is the way our world experience can be split into Rational and Empirical aspects which are simultaneously manifest.

Watson, Burton. Saigyô: Poems of a Mountain Home. Columbia University Press, 1991.

The distinction drawn in this essay also has utility for the student of philosophy in particular. To be engaged in philosophy today is to be invited to make camp with partisans of one group or another, be they the children of Plato and Aristotle or Nietzsche and Russell keep it to the two. Allowing haiku to draw us into both aspects of reality reemphasizes for us the importance of acknowledging the truth of both descriptions of reality. Without the Forms, we cannot describe the world, and without describing the world, we cannot know the Forms.

Though Blyth has been much criticized, and rightly, for his pseudo-mystic interpretations and his Zen-centric distortion of Japanese cultural history (Review 459–462), there remains much to be admired in his approach to life. Here, Blyth has summarized for us the same approaches to life which this essay is engaged in finding in haiku. The escape from the world is the Rational, and the return to it is the Empirical. Both perspectives are necessary to understand the world fully. Although these terms were certainly unknown to the poets under consideration, nevertheless, it is fair to consider the ways in which their poems engage the Rational and Empirical, because these means of understanding are also in evidence in the influences on the poets. Though it goes out of the scope of this paper to satisfactorily demonstrate it here, the Shintô emphasis on eternal Gods and seasons and the Confucian emphasis on fixed ‘right relations’ between people can be taken as a Rational influence, and the Zen emphasis on immediate, unmediated perception can be taken as an Empirical influence. Haiku exists by dividing a season word, which represents the unchanging and rational aspect of the world, from a sketch of the temporal world by means of a cutting word. ok, so here is where you need to defend your thesis, or at least describe it in more detail. i still don’t know what it is about haikus that bridges the subject and object, but the paper seems to think i do. The combination of these two ways of seeing is part of the basic definition of haiku, so it is appropriate to see the connection between these parts and their Western analogs and to explore the ways that these parts strength the impact of the haiku.

i mean, is it that the form of haiku allows us to speak in such a way as to get around the subject and object? or is it that zen philosophy does? it would be good to answer these questions before the examples

my problem is that this does not evince (key word is evince) enough understanding of aristotle/plato to convince me. these sound like what a philosophic encyclopedia would say. philosophers hate those things. they’re, in a rare example of a true sweeping generalization, totally worthless. i think the section should be a lot stricter, clearer, crisper. this is a crucial section i think, so the bar is higher. alternatively you could to put in some refs to plats and tots, like c.f. Republic ch3, c.f. De Anima ch2, etc, but i think just a crisp version of the above would do you best.

For the purposes of this paper, “Eempirical understanding” scientific would be better… modern empiricists wouldn’t equate science with empiricism, because even the scientific method presupposes a metaphysic… i think this is also a result of post-kant. is defined as any means of seeing the world that shares with Aristotle the tendency to begin by first cataloging our experience of the world and only by working from that experience drawing inferences about what, if any, substructure supports that experience. The Empirical are those Empiricists who fuse the world into a solitary realm of the actual i like that, that’s pretty good, don’t smother it with another clause and those who work from sensation to system.

On the utility of the distinction deCapitate your section heds, deCapitate analytic, continental, etc

this next part is unclear… after this, i can’t follow What is the virtue in creating this distinction?, asks the skeptic. Have I created an arbitrary binary distinction only so I can speciously proceeded to “find it” precisely where I left it? No, this distinction is not wholly unique to the author, though it goes by many names. Its applications of this are practical both personally and philosophically. First, let us quote Blyth’s Preface to Haiku.

This basic understanding notion of the a dual nature universe, in which the temporal world is a subset of an eternal order, has underpinned troubled Western philosophyers in all the centuries since Plato,. though Many attempts have been made to overturn it. Notably, Plato’s own student Aristotle was the first to attempt to escape?? the dualism very debatable, if not flat out wrong, that plato was a dualist… c.f. strauss especially. try something lighter, such as “idealistic notion of ideas” of his master, if only in a limited way. The Forms, contended Aristotle contended SVO, cannot exist in an eternal realm separate from human experience ‘divorced from our experience of them’ is more philosophically strict. Forms exist only to the extent that they are the properties of perceived objects and have no meaning apart from their embodiment in a particular. There is no general “Form of Iron” or “Form of Rust;” there are just a number of historically existing objects that can be classified as either iron-type objects or rust-type objects. Since all that exists is the world as it exists, one should not commit oneself to studying the rational aspects of a hypothesized eternal nature, but one should be committed to observing the actual happenings of empirical events and use experience to inform one’s model of the world.

my problem is that this does not demonstrate (key word is demonstrate) enough understanding of aristotle or plato to convince me. work on this a lot to make it stricter, clearer, crisper. this is a crucial section i think, so the bar is higher than normal. alternatively you could to put in some refs to their books, like c.f. Republic ch3, c.f. De Anime ch2, etc, but i think just a crisp version of the above would do you best.

For the purposes of this paper, “Eempirical understanding” scientific would be better… modern empiricists wouldn’t say this, because even the scientific method presupposes a metaphysic. remember we’re post-kant. is defined as any means of seeing the world that shares with Aristotle the tendency to begin by first cataloging our experience of the world and only by working from that experience drawing inferences about what, if any, substructure supports that experience. The Empirical are those Empiricists who fuse the world into a solitary realm of the actual i like that, that’s pretty good, don’t smother it with another clause and those who work from sensation to system.

On the utility of the distinction section heads don’t need Caps

These two perspectives on the world have been the traditional dividing line for philosophers; from the ancient Academics and Peripatetics to the early modern Rationalists and Empiricists to the twentieth century Analytics and Continentals, much of Western thought can be classified associated through its affinity for either Plato or Aristotle. The Rational, broadly speaking, start from an objective understanding of the eternal; the Empirical start from a subjective experience of the emprical. The Rational are theologians, and the Empirical are scientists.

this is unclear… What is the virtue in creating this distinction?, asks the skeptic. Have I created an arbitrary binary distinction only so I can speciously proceeded to “find it” precisely where I left it? No, this distinction is not wholly unique to the author, though it goes by many names. Its applications of this are practical both personally and philosophically. First, let us quote Blyth’s Preface to Haiku.

The very poetic form of haiku has the potential to bridge what the West divides into eternal and temporal. Taken seriously, haiku could provide a solution to a vexing philosophical difficulty. This difficulty is first found in the Greek metaphysical controversies… continue from here

Comments in blue.

Haiku is one of the shortest poetic forms, but also surprisingly effective at arresting and engaging the thoughts of the reader. In this paper, I will argue that one key to this ability is the strength gained by appealing to what I will call our rational and empirical understandings of the world. the rationalist/empiricist controversy is seen as somewhat quaint in a post-Kantian world. ‘It’s over’. Consider other language, if you can think of some. … Also, whenever you introduce new language, define it quick, usually in the next sentence. Make clear what you mean by rational and empirical. If doing that cramps this graph’s style, consider introducing these words later and calling the bridge a ‘philosophic distinction’ at this point. In the space of just lays it on too thick for my ear… seventeen syllables, a good haiku can expertly recreate an entire slice of human experience as both a specific particular? situation and an generalized abstraction.

I’m thinking paragraph here. you switch topics

By haiku, I do not mean merely any poem conforming to a 5•7•5 syllable structure (many such poems should properly be classified as senryû 川柳), but those poems that embodied the particular style perfected by poets like Matsuo Bashô 松尾芭蕉, Yosa Buson 與謝蕪村, and Kobayashi Issa 小林一茶. These masters and their disciples were able to create a profound poetic form of startling profundity and nuance from seemingly basic formal elements. just my ear: Strictly, A strict haikus consist of seventeen syllables grouped 5•7•5 with a cutting word and a seasonal element; but in practice even these simple rules can be discarded as needed for effect. When employed properly, these techniques can create a verse transcendent of both the eternal and temporal aspects of life and “bridging the worlds of Plato and Aristotle.” save plato, aristotle for when you introduce the rational and empirical. no sense giving synonyms to the poor reader, that just confuses him. btw i think “eternal and temporal” are the words you’re looking to replace rat/emp. This ability to serve as such a bridge between the rational and empirical i disagree with the Caps except for platonic forms and deities (is there a difference? discuss) is one of the most important properties of a great haiku and a distinguishing difference between haiku and other kinds of Japanese verse.

Watson, Burton. Saigyô: Poems of a Mountain Home. Columbia University Press, 1991.

Comments in blue. Disclaimer is that I may tell you some things you already know.

Haiku is one of the shortest poetic forms, but also surprisingly effective at arresting and engaging the thoughts of the reader. In this paper, I will argue that one key to this ability is the strength gained by appealing to what I will call our rational and empirical understandings of the world. As you may know, the rationalist/empiricist controversy is seen as somewhat quaint in a post-Kantian world. It’s just sort of ‘over’. Consider using other language, if you can think of some. … Also, whenever you introduce new language, define it in the next sentence. Make clear what you mean by rational and empirical. If doing that cramps your style, consider introducing these words later and calling the bridge a ‘philosophic distinction’ at this point. In the space of just lays it on too thick for my ear… seventeen syllables, a good haiku can expertly recreate an entire slice of human experience as both a specific particular? situation and an generalized abstraction.

I say paragraph here. you switch topics

By haiku, I do not mean merely any poem conforming to a 5•7•5 syllable structure (many such poems should properly be classified as senryû 川柳), but those poems that embodied the particular style perfected by poets like Matsuo Bashô 松尾芭蕉, Yosa Buson 與謝蕪村, and Kobayashi Issa 小林一茶. These masters and their disciples were able to create a profound poetic form of startling profundity and nuance from seemingly basic formal elements. just my ear: Strictly, A strict haikus consist of seventeen syllables grouped 5•7•5 with a cutting word and a seasonal element; but in practice even these simple rules can be discarded as needed for effect. When employed properly, these techniques can create a verse transcendent of both the eternal and temporal aspects of life and “bridging the worlds of Plato and Aristotle.” save plato, aristotle for when you introduce the rational and empirical. no sense giving the poor reader synonyms, that just confuses him. btw i think eternal and temporal are the words you’re looking for, rather than rat/emp. of course you could save those for later too… This ability to serve as such a bridge between the rational and empirical i disagree with the caps except for platonic forms and deities (exists there a difference? discuss) is one of the most important properties of a great haiku and a distinguishing difference between haiku and other kinds of Japanese verse.

Haiku is the inheritor inherits a long tradition of Japanese literature. One of the earliest forms of Japanese poetry was waka 和歌. Waka consists of alternating lines of 5 and 7 syllables followed by an ending line of 7 syllables. One form of waka— the tanka 短歌, a short 5•7•5•7•7 verse— became especially popular, and nearly synonymous with waka as a whole. Eventually the writing of tanka was adapted into renga 連歌, a sort of poetic game in which a group of authors go back and forth composing verses of 5•7•5 and 7•7. In renga, poets displayed their wit by creating a verse that takes the verse before and casts it in a different light. Thus, each verse in the series could be read as a pair with either the verse before it or after it, with the verse taking on completely different meanings depending on its pairing. this graph is good

Renga, in turn, evolved into haikai no renga 俳諧の連歌, a playful variant on the traditional style of renga from which haiku emerged. While renga was still constrained by the topics, associations, and language of the older waka form, haikai cut itself loose and used colloquial or vulgar language along with Chinese loan words and other terms proscribed by forbidden by, disallowed by, contrary to… the rules of waka. Collectively, these once forbidden words are known as haigon 俳言 (Poetics 62). However, the long tradition that existed before haikai, stretching back over a thousand years by the time of Bashô, would prove vital to the composition and understanding of haiku.

Haikai, like other forms of renga, was composed in a group with different poets taking turns creating verses of either 5•7•5 or 7•7. By this time also, the initial verse in the sequence, the hokku 発句, had taken on special significance. While all other verses in a haikai or renga series were meant to connect to a verse either before or after it, the hokku was also meant to stand on its own. Accordingly, other verses were known as flat verses or hiraku 平句, since these verses were incomplete without a verse before or after it to give it context. it occured to me it would be good to begin the history section with something telling why the history will be important. just a sentence saying something like, ‘the good thing about haikus can best be introduced through their history…’ Stylistically, what distinguished the hokku from hiraku was its independence. Though a hokku had a successor verse, it was not dependent on it. What formally distinguished hokku from hiraku was their inclusion of a cutting word, kireji 切れ字, and a seasonal element, kigo 季語. Writing hokku existed as a sub-discipline within the art of haikai for hundreds of years before Masaoka Shiki popularized the use of the term haiku 俳句 in the Meiji Era to refer to hokku taken out the context of linked verse. Hereafter, the terms haiku and hokku will be used more or less interchangeably, but it is important to first note that the heritage of haiku in hokku gives it a dual nature as both an connected, opening verse and an independent poetic seed.

The other key facet to note about haiku’s heritage is that haikai no renga was a playful, comic form. Like all forms of comedy, haikai was reliant on its ability to surprise the reader with an unexpected connection, be they it between the refined and the vulgar or the mundane and esoteric. Comedy generally works by establishing a natural path of expectations for the viewer’s mind to follow, then violating those expectations. Haikai did so through a variety of techniques. By juxtaposing suggestive allusions, puns, double entendres, and references to classic works, haikai masters were able to keep their patrons amused by the playful twists and turns of the verse that they made together. add an example

About rational and empirical Understanding

Before saying more about the nature of haiku itself, it is helpful to review a basic understanding of a central division within Western thought, the division between Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. About twenty-five hundred years ago…

as it stands this is a breezy introduction to greek philosophy. “about twenty-five hundred years ago” is a little over the top. also some people (namely me… um… and my favorite professor…) might deny plato says what you say he says. easiest thing to do is change it from a history to a review of important points. but instead of saying “reviewing” say the following…

The very poetic form of Haiku has the potential to bridge what the West divides into eternal and temporal. Taken seriously, haiku could provide a solution to a vexing philosophical difficulty. This difficulty is first found in the Greek metaphysical controversies… continue from here

Plato was born into a philosophical debate between those who held that nothing ever changed and those who held that nothing ever remained the same. Parmenides denied that anything could come to be, since it must then come from what is not, which is impossible, or from what is, which means that it has not come to be but already was. Heraclitus drew the opposite conclusion. Looking out at the world, he saw a world of fleeting perceptions that come and go in an instant. Like Buddha Gautama, he declared that everything changes and nothing stays the same. The only constant is logos, the set of laws that, like karma, governs the eternal flow of elements.

For the purposes of this paper, “rational understanding” is defined as any means of seeing the world that shares with Plato the tendency to begin by first postulating postulating is the right word. it’s a cardinal sin right now among contemporary empiricists… i think you should make more use of it. a schema which underlies our experience of it and attempting to derive understanding by working from that schema to our personal experience of the world. The Rational are those who divide the world into Essence and Accident and those who work from system to sensation.

I will begin here tomorrow

(:title “The Rational and the Empirical in the Dynamics of Haiku.”:) (:toc Contents:)

Haiku is one of the shortest poetic forms, but also surprisingly effective at arresting and engaging the thoughts of the reader. In this paper, I will argue that one key to this ability is the strength gained by appealing to, what I will call, both our Rational and Empirical understandings of the world. In the space of just seventeen syllables, a good haiku can expertly recreate an entire slice of human experience as both a specific situation and a generalized abstraction. Of course, by haiku, I do not mean merely any poem conforming to a 5•7•5 syllable structure (many such poems should properly be classified as senryû 川柳), but those poems that embodied the particular style perfected by poets like Matsuo Bashô 松尾芭蕉, Yosa Buson 與謝蕪村, and Kobayashi Issa 小林一茶. These masters and their disciples were able to create a poetic form of startling profundity and nuance from seemingly basic formal elements. A strict haiku consists of seventeen syllables grouped 5•7•5 with a cutting word and a seasonal element, but in practice even these simple rules can be discarded as needed for effect. When employed properly, these techniques can create a verse transcendent of both the eternal and temporal aspects of the life and “bridging the worlds of Plato and Aristotle.” This ability to serve as such a bridge between the Rational and Empirical is one of the most important properties of a great haiku and a distinguishing difference between haiku and other kinds of Japanese verse.

Background

Brief History of Haiku

Haiku is the inheritor of a long tradition of Japanese literature. One of the earliest forms of Japanese poetry was waka 和歌. Waka consists of alternating lines of 5 and 7 syllables followed by ending line of 7 syllables. One form of waka— the tanka 短歌, a short 5•7•5•7•7 verse— became especially popular, and nearly synonymous with waka as a whole. Eventually the writing of tanka was adapted into renga 連歌, a sort of poetic game in which a group of authors go back and forth composing verses of 5•7•5 and 7•7. In renga, poets displayed their wit by creating a verse that takes the verse before and casts it in a different light. Thus, each verse in the series could be read as a pair with either the verse before it or after it, with the verse taking on completely different meanings depending on its pairing.

Renga, in turn, evolved into haikai no renga 俳諧の連歌, a playful variant on the traditional style of renga from which haiku emerged. While renga was still constrained by the topics, associations, and language of the older waka form, haikai cut itself loose and used colloquial or vulgar language along with Chinese loan words and other terms proscribed by the rules of waka. Collectively, these once forbidden words are known as haigon 俳言 (Poetics 62). However, the long tradition that existed before haikai, stretching back over a thousand years by the time of Bashô, would prove vital to the composition and understanding of haiku.

Haikai, like other forms of renga, was composed in a group with different poets taking turns creating verses of either 5•7•5 or 7•7. By this time also, the initial verse in the sequence, the hokku 発句, had taken on special significance. While all other verses in a haikai or renga series were meant to connect to a verse either before or after it, the hokku was also meant to stand on its own. Accordingly, other verses were known as flat verses or hiraku 平句, since these verses were incomplete without a verse before or after it to give it context. Stylistically, what distinguished the hokku from hiraku was its independence. Though a hokku had a successor verse, it was not dependent on it. What formally distinguished hokku from hiraku was their inclusion of a cutting word, kireji 切れ字, and a seasonal element, kigo 季語. Writing hokku existed as a sub-discipline within the art of haikai for hundreds of years before Masaoka Shiki popularized the use of the term haiku 俳句 in the Meiji Era to refer to hokku taken out the context of linked verse. Hereafter, the terms haiku and hokku will be used more or less interchangeably, but it is important to first note that the heritage of haiku in hokku gives it a dual nature as both an connected, opening verse and an independent poetic seed.

The other key facet to note about haiku’s heritage is that haikai no renga was a playful, comic form. Like all forms of comedy, haikai was reliant on its ability to surprise the reader with unexpected connections, be they between the refined and the vulgar or the mundane and esoteric. Comedy generally works by establishing a natural path of expectations for the viewer’s mind to follow, then violating those expectations. Haikai did so through a variety of techniques. By juxtaposing suggestive allusions, puns, double entendres, and references to classic works, haikai masters were able to keep their patrons amused by the playful twists and turns of the verse that they made together.

Bashô was born into this tradition, and became a master in the Danrin style as a young man, but distinguished himself when he broke off from his peers and more seriously devoted himself to his art by moving to an isolated hut away from central Edo (Bare Branch 63). The very name “haikai” suggests easygoing fun, but Bashô changed the course of the discipline by taking a serious approach to his fun. His poetry retained the suggestive illusions and comic breakages with expectation, but rather than employ these for the end of mere amusement, Bashô aimed for the higher goal of using these juxtapositions to increase the poetic capacity of haiku itself.

About Rational and Empirical Understanding

The Rational

Before saying more about the nature of haiku itself, it is helpful to review a basic understanding of a central division within Western thought, the division between Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. About twenty-five hundred years ago, Plato was born into a philosophical debate between those who held that nothing ever changed and those who held that nothing ever remained the same. Parmenides denied that anything could come to be, since it must then come from what is not, which is impossible, or from what is, which means that it has not come to be but already was. Heraclitus drew the opposite conclusion. Looking out at the world, he saw a world of fleeting perceptions that come and go in an instant. Like Buddha Gautama, he declared that everything changes and nothing stays the same. The only constant is logos, the set of laws that, like karma, governs the eternal flow of elements.

For the purposes of this paper, “Rational understanding” is defined as any means of seeing the world that shares with Plato the tendency to begin by first postulating a schema which underlies our experience of it and attempting to derive understanding by working from that schema to our personal experience of the world. The Rational are those who divide the world into Essence and Accident and those who work from system to sensation.

The Empirical

For the purposes of this paper, “Empirical understanding” is defined as any means of seeing the world that shares with Aristotle the tendency to begin by first cataloging our experience of the world and only by working from that experience drawing inferences about what, if any, substructure supports that experience. The Empirical are those who fuse the world into a solitary realm of the actual and those who work from sensation to system.

On the Utility of the Distinction

These two perspectives on the world have been the traditional dividing line for philosophers; from the ancient Academics and Peripatetics to the early modern Rationalists and Empiricists to the twentieth century Analytics and Continentals, much of Western thought can be classified through its affinity for either Plato or Aristotle. The Rational, broadly speaking, start from an objective understanding of the eternal; the Empirical start from a subjective experience of the emprical. The Rational are theologians, and the Empirical are scientists.

What is the virtue in creating this distinction?, asks the skeptic. Have I created an arbitrary binary distinction only so I can speciously proceeded to “find it” precisely where I left it? No, this distinction is not wholly unique to the author, though it goes by many names. Its applications of this are practical both personally and philosophically. First, let us quote Blyth’s Preface to Haiku.

(:quote:) The history of mankind, as a history of the human spirit, may be thought of consisting of two elements: an escape from this world to another; and a return to it. Chronologically speaking, these two movements, the rise and fall, represent the whole of human history; and the two take place microcosmically many times in people and nations. But they may be thought of as taking place simultaneously or rather, beyond time, and then they form an ontological description of human nature. (4)

Though Blyth has been much criticized, and rightly, for his pseudo-mystic interpretations and his Zen-centric distortion of Japanese cultural history (Review 459–462), there remains much to be admired in his approach to life. Here, Blyth has summarized for us the same approaches to life which this essay is engaged in finding in haiku. The escape from the world is the Rational, and the return to it is the Empirical. Both perspectives are necessary to understand the world fully. Although these terms were certainly unknown to the poets under consideration, nevertheless, it is fair to consider the ways in which their poems engage the Rational and Empirical, because these means of understanding are also in evidence in the influences on the poets. Though it goes out of the scope of this paper to satisfactorily demonstrate it here, the Shintô emphasis on eternal Gods and seasons and the Confucian emphasis on fixed ‘right relations’ between people can be taken as a Rational influence, and the Zen emphasis on immediate, unmediated perception can be taken as an Empirical influence. Haiku exists by dividing a season word, which represents the unchanging and rational aspect of the world, from a sketch of the temporal world by means of a cutting word. The combination of these two ways of seeing is part of the basic definition of haiku, so it is appropriate to see the connection between these parts and their Western analogs and to explore the ways that these parts strength the impact of the haiku.

Take as an example, the second poem in Bashô’s Oku no Hosomichi and the first in which Bashô has begun his journey: Yuku haru ya/ tori naki uo no/ me wa namida 行春や鳥啼魚の目は泪^[1]. The base section in this poem is, “tori naki uo no/ me wa namida.” Literally, this means, “Birds cry and the fish’s eyes have tears.” Clearly, this is a very dynamic scene, in which the very calls of the birds and wet eyes of fish around the marketplace all suggest to the author his sorrow at departing. This clearly embodies what can be called a Zen or Empirical theory of poetry. The poet does not suggest any characteristics outside of those that he observes from his not terribly objective vantage point. Because his emotional state leaks out onto the subjective world, the cries of the birds are lamentations, and the eyes of the fish are filled with sorrow, so he records just this. However, the superimposed section is radically different in its conception. Though, “yuku haru ya,” means only, “going-spring-ah,” in an overly literal manner, it is rife with allusion when considered in the context of the language of haiku. “yuku haru,” had been used since ancient times to convey the grief that one associates with the passing of the spring. In particular, it is known for the crying of birds (Poetics 85). Like the association of justice with virtue or families with filially, this relationship is extratemporal. Though the base section refers only to those specific events experienced by the author, the superimposed section creates a context for this perception within the wider world of eternal verities. Thus, Bashô creates a poem in which the reader moves from the initial timeless, Platonic world of dwindling springs and sorrowful partings into the concrete and Aristotelian world of his own departure from the bustling markets of Edo, in which the birds circle above and the fish glisten from vendors’ stalls all reflect his own sorrow. The mind of the reader must grasp both the eternal and ephemeral aspects of the poem in order to gain its full significance.

Now, at the risk of being drowned out by the sound of a thousand other scholars splashing into this same pool, let us examine briefly Bashô’s most famous poem: Furu-ike ya/ kawazu tobikomu/ mizu no oto 古池や蛙飛び込む水の音^[2]. Like the last poem, this one begins with its superimposed section, “Furu-ike ya,” meaning “old-pond-ah.” Again, pausing here, the reader is filled with an image not of a particular pond but of all ancient ponds, and thus with the stillness that is naturally associated with them. The next word, “kawazu,” signals that this stillness is to be broken by a frog. Of course, the natural means by which a frog can break the stillness of a pond is to croak for its lover in the fading light. However, Bashô dashes these expectations, as befits haiku’s origin as comically linked verse. The frog does not croak, but flies into the pond and is followed by the sound of the water. So, the pond whose stillness we had been contemplating on the first line is now the source of the sound that so intrigues us on the final one. Again, notice how the base section is specific to a single observable event, that of a particular frog entering a particular pond, where the superimposed section is concerned primarily with the web of associations cloaking all old ponds. The mind of the reader is caught in the tension between the world of the Rational and the world of the Empirical, and must shuffle back and forth between the two in order to make sense of the poem.

Now, in order to understand the uniqueness of haiku as literature, it is worth contrasting these two haiku of Bashô with a waka by a poet who inspired him, the monk Saigyô: Kokoro naki/ mi nimo aware wa/ shirarekeri/ shigi tatsu sawa no/ aki no yûgure こゝろなき身にも哀はしられけりしぎたつさはの秋のゆふぐれ^[1]. Burton Watson translates it thus, “Even a person free of passion/ would be moved/ to sadness:/ autumn evening/ in a marsh where snipes fly up” (Saigyô 81). Besides the simple quality of being too long, and thus saying what should be left unsaid, such a poem could never qualify as a haiku because it lacks the necessary tension between the eternal and the temporal. The poem begins by discussing a body without a heart and declares that it too would come to know sorrow. Then it presents a sorrowful image of a snipe (or snipes) rising up from the marsh as the daylight fades away. Though both images are moving, and the poem as a whole is a masterpiece, it cannot be considered an especially long haiku, because it only concerns itself with the eternal and never with the temporal. One might suggest that the snipe flying up is a temporal scene, but clearly this is not the case, for this same scene is recommended to any and all heartless people who wish to be moved to sorrow. Partially, the timelessness of the image of a snipe rising from the marsh is a result of the fame that this poem accumulated over the years, making it seem natural through familiarity. However, the flying frog of “Furuike” is just as famous as the snipes of Saigyô, if not much more so, but it retains its existence as a particular scene observed by a particular person. The specificity of haiku is of course, partially just a matter of the conventions that the reader brings to the interpretation process, but it also goes deeper. Saigyô rhetorically asked for an image that would move even the hardest of hearts and then delivered such an image. Bashô presented the stillness of an ancient pond and then rather than showing a noiseless leaf, a silent breeze, or some other reinforcing image, he has a noisy frog splash in. Haiku is centered on contradiction, and though the images of classical waka are undeniably beautiful and moving, they cannot match haiku in terms of dynamism, since they do not move so rapidly between the world of the Rational and the Empirical, but confine themselves to a single conception of the world.

Of course, the images shown in waka are not always static and eternal. Sometimes, waka is intensely personal. Consider the following translation of Saigyô, “What else/ could have made me/ loathe the world?/ The one who was cruel to me/ today I think of as kind^[2]” (Saigyô 180). The poem is clearly concerned only with the personal experience of the author, and not the eternal implications of such feelings. Thus, this poem is centered wholly in the Empirical and never provides a bridge by which the reader can consider both the eternal reverberations of the poem as well as the merely temporal ones. Saigyô, though a truly masterful poet, is not a haiku poet.

Of course, bridging the tensions between the Rational and the Empirical by providing a means for the reader to enter into both aspects of the poem is only one of many characteristics that make haiku so intriguing. Diction, word choice, humor, brevity, and insight all play a role along with the shear surprise of providing dueling interpretive frameworks within which to view the poem. However, properly conducted, a haiku can in its few short syllables take a reader from the heavens to the earth and back again, as we consider afresh not just what we see before us or the patterns that are followed by what we see, but how both perspectives are vital to a full conception of life in this world. In order to full capture the experience of life in this world, haiku must use and then cast off both Aristotelian and Platonic dogma in order to grasp more firmly the world as a whole.

Philosophically

The distinction drawn in this essay also has utility for the student of philosophy in particular. To be engaged in philosophy today is to be invited to make camp with partisans of one group or another, be they the children of Plato and Aristotle or Nietzsche and Russell. Allowing haiku to draw us into both aspects of reality reemphasizes for us the importance of acknowledging the truth of both descriptions of reality. Without the Forms, we cannot describe the world, and without describing the world, we cannot know the Forms.

Suppose for instance, that one wishes to pursue Rational thinking to its furthermost limits. In doing so, one must reject all experiences that come prior to cognition as potential sources of error. However, human cognition is itself an experience of the thinker, and thus doubt must remain in the thinker’s mind, because human thinking itself is potentially untrustworthy.

Even ignoring this uncertainty, no understanding of the relation of ideas, no matter how detailed, is of any value if such a schema cannot be correlated with the external world in a meaningful way . For example, it is a widely held ethical belief that “it is wrong to murder.” However, great confusion persists about the exact meaning of the term “murder.” Some hold that it is murder to abort a fetus, others object. Some say that killing in war is justified, others dispute. Some approve of euthanasia, others disapprove, and no universal consensus exists about whether the relevant factor in categorizing of murder is the intelligence of the victim or the victim’s genetic status as human. Even if such consensus did exist, there are no doubt still further complications and edge cases to be considered, all of which pointing to the fact that to hold a simple statement as true is of little use without a stable means of determining the relevance and relationship of that truth to present experience.

Now suppose that one seeks to devote one’s self exclusively to the Empirical, with no statement accepted that is not the subject of experience. Here, the problem raises itself again: how can we affix labels onto undifferentiated experience? To even say, “I am looking at a sunset today,” presupposes the categories of “I,” “looking,” “sunsets,” and “today,” even before one should like to extrapolate, “I will probably see another sunset tomorrow.” What experience tells us that “red discs on the horizon are sunsets”? How can we even say that “red is red” and “discs are discs” without already presuming something from outside of mere experience itself? Without our evolved pre-categorizations for the world, there are only sounds and colors without names. We are left wordless in William James’s “big blooming buzzing confusion.”

The problem is elucidated by Robert Carter, who compares James and Nishida Kitarô and explains that pure experience is “undifferentiated, undichotomized, conceptually neutral, ambiguous, and prior to subject/object distinction” (Nothingness 4). Since experience is prior to either Rational or Empirical understanding, neither is capable of independently and accurately assessing the world. The key then is “to take two perspectives at the same time—the ‘double aperture in knowing’” (32). Haiku’s background as a comic art gives it the requisite skill for seeing two things at once, and it was the genius of Bashô to direct this skill not toward merely punning kakekotoba 掛詞 as in the old waka, but allowing even a single interpretation of a single poem to cleave into two perspectives of the world.

Personally

Plato presents a criticism of the poet in Book X of The Republic. Socrates asks how it is that a poet can write about horses without being a horseman? The gods know the form of riding a horse, and a horseman can approximate that knowledge. The cobbler and the metalworker can learn from the horseman if the tools they make are good or not, but the painter and the poet is almost without hope, imitating as three times removed from real source of things. Surely, to write poetry about all subjects in the world, there must be something that the poet has knowledge of. Yet, Socrates cannot find what it should be and in the end, Socrates concludes that poetry must be banned from the Republic until a reasonable defense can be made for this dangerous art that overwhelms reason, potentially giving reign to the basest part of the soul with no real knowledge to guide it.

An answer to Plato’s riddle is more obvious when we contemplate the arrival of the era of the novel. What the novel did is show us what life is like from the eyes of a protagonist. What the poet in general is able to do is to put us into the mind of a person. What the poet knows is nothing more or less than his or her own heart. So, while a novelist writing about sailing who has never seen the ocean will inevitably get some details of the activity wrong, what a keen novelist can capture is the heart that is stirred by such activity. What haiku in particular captures is the way our world can be split into Rational and Empirical essences which are simultaneously manifest.

As the Zenrinkushû says of the poet, “入林不動草、入水不立波,” meaning, “Entering the forest, he does not disturb a blade of grass; Entering the water, he does not cause a ripple” (Blyth 27) . The poet does not disturb the world around, because the poet enters not through body, but through mind. Though the mind does not have full knowledge of either itself or the world, by playing (the meaning of haikai) but playing seriously (as per Bashô’s example), we can gain knowledge, not of the external, but of the internal. Through haiku, the two modes of experience are superimposed in dynamic tension. It is through poetry that we are allowed to experience two modes of thinking simultaneously via the double aperture.

In our own lives, we lose ourselves in abstract theory, and we lose ourselves in routine. Haiku, as a bridge between those realms, has the ability to bring the poetic into our lives. Haiku, in its simplicity, invites participation. Indeed, no hokku by the great masters was meant to be complimented by other renga poet-participants.

Reading haiku encourages us to see the eternal reflected in our lives, and in doing so, allows human beings a means of escaping the merely animal and temporal aspects of our nature. At the same time, neither does haiku allow us to neglect our mortal natures. We must reflect upon what is happening to us in this “Zen” (in the loose contemporary sense) instant of time before our eyes, ears, and nose. We capture what we see, hear, smell, and touch in verse, but realize that what we experience itself can never be captured.

Works Cited

Kato, Kazumitsu. Review: Zen and Zen Classics, Vol. VII by R. H. Blyth. Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 82, No. 3. (Jul. - Sep., 1962), pp. 459–462.

(:title "Bashô can solve / is a solution to Platonic dualism: The Dynamics of Haiku.":)

Haiku is one of the shortest poetic forms in the world, yet it is also one of the most complex. In seventeen syllables, a good haiku can recreate a slice of human experience, through both a specific situation and a generalized abstraction. A haiku is not simply any poem conforming to a 5•7•5 syllable structure (many such poems should properly be classified as senryû 川柳), but those poems that embodied the particular style perfected by poets like Matsuo Bashô 松尾芭蕉, Yosa Buson 與謝蕪村, and Kobayashi Issa 小林一茶. These masters and their disciples were able to create a poetic form of startling profundity and nuance consisting of relatively basic formal elements: seventeen syllables grouped 5•7•5, a cutting word (kireji 切れ字) and a seasonal element (kigo 季語). However, in practice even these simple rules can be discarded as needed. The key to this flexibility, this paper argues, is the emergence of haiku from haikai no renga 俳諧の連歌 tradition, which claims to transcend both the eternal and temporal aspects of life. This distinction resembles the basic Western distinction of the rational, formal dimension and the contingent, empirical dimension, or as this paper will argue, the broad philosophic traditions derived from Plato and Aristotle. This ability to serve as such a bridge between the rational and empirical is one of the most important properties of a great haiku and the distinguishing difference between haiku and other kinds of Japanese verse.

(:title "Relating Bashô to Plato and Aristotle: The Dynamics of Haiku.":) (:*toc Table of Contents:)

Introduction

Haiku is one of the shortest poetic forms in the world, and yet paradoxically it is also one of the most complex and nuanced. In the space of just seventeen syllables, a good haiku can expertly recreate an entire slice of human experience as both a specific situation and a generalized abstraction. Of course, by haiku, I do not mean merely any poem conforming to a 5•7•5 syllable structure (many such poems should properly be classified as senryû 川柳), but those poems that embodied the particular style perfected by poets like Matsuo Bashô 松尾芭蕉, Yosa Buson 與謝蕪村, and Kobayashi Issa 小林一茶. These masters and their disciples were able to create a poetic form of startling profundity and nuance from seemingly basic formal elements. A strict haiku consists of seventeen syllables grouped 5•7•5 with a cutting word (kireji 切れ字) and a seasonal element (kigo 季語), but in practice even these simple rules can be discarded as needed for effect. When employed properly, these techniques can create a verse whose surface is sharp and clear but whose depths can be fathomless and murky. The key to this flexibility, I will argue, is its the emergence of haiku from haikai no renga 俳諧の連歌 tradition, which provides its ability to transcend both the eternal and temporal aspects of the life and bridge the worlds of Plato and Aristotle. This ability to serve as such a bridge between the rational and empirical is one of the most important properties of a great haiku and the distinguishing difference between haiku and other kinds of Japanese verse.

Brief History

Haiku is the inheritor of a long tradition of Japanese literature. One of the earliest forms of Japanese poetry was waka 和歌. Waka consists of alternating lines of 5 and 7 syllables followed by ending line of 7 syllables. One form of waka— the tanka 短歌, a short 5•7•5•7•7 verse— became especially popular, and nearly synonymous with waka as a whole. Eventually the writing of tanka was adapted into renga 連歌, a sort of poetic game in which a group of authors go back and forth composing verses of 5•7•5 and 7•7. In renga, poets displayed their wit by creating a verse that takes the verse before and casts it in a different light. Thus, each verse in the series could be read as a pair with either the verse before it or after it, with the verse taking on completely different meanings depending on its pairing. Renga, in turn, evolved into haikai no renga 俳諧の連歌, a playful variant on the traditional style of renga from which haiku emerged. While renga was still constrained by the topics, associations, and language of the older waka form, haikai cut itself loose and used colloquial or vulgar language along with Chinese loan words and other terms proscribed by the rules of waka. Collectively, these once forbidden words are known as haigon 俳言 (Poetics 62). However, the long tradition that existed before haikai, stretching back over a thousand years by the time of Bashô, would prove vital to the composition and understanding of haiku. Haikai, like other forms of renga, was composed in a group with different poets taking turns creating verses of either 5•7•5 or 7•7. By this time also, the first verse in the sequence, the hokku 発句, had taken on special significance. While all other verses in a haikai or renga series were meant to connect to a verse either before or after it, the hokku was also meant to stand on its own. Accordingly, other verses were known as flat verses or hiraku 平句, since these verses were incomplete without a verse before or after it to give it context. Stylistically, what distinguished the hokku from hiraku was its independence. Though a hokku had a successor verse, it was not dependent on it. What formally distinguished hokku from hiraku was their inclusion of a cutting word, kireji 切れ字, and a seasonal element, kigo 季語. Writing hokku existed as a sub-discipline within the art of haikai for hundreds of years before Masaoka Shiki coined the term haiku 俳句 in the Meiji Era to refer to hokku taken out the context of linked verse. Hereafter, the terms haiku and hokku will be used more or less interchangeably, but it is important to first note that the heritage of haiku in hokku gives it a dual nature as both an connected, opening verse and an independent poetic seed.

Philosophical Underpinnings

Before anything can be said about the nature of haiku itself, it is helpful to have a basic understanding of a central division within Western thought, the division between Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. About twenty-five hundred years ago, Plato was born into a philosophical debate between those who held that nothing ever changed and those who held that nothing ever remained the same. Parmenides denied that anything could come to be, since it must then come from what is not, which is impossible, or from what is, which means that it has not come to be but already was. Heraclitus drew the opposite conclusion. Looking out at the world, he saw a world of fleeting perceptions that come and go in an instant. Like Buddha Gautama, he declared that everything changes and nothing stays the same. The only constant is logos, the set of laws that, like karma, governs the eternal flow of elements.

Seeing the absurdity of each declaration, but also the logical arguments that compelled both conclusions, Plato found a way through the dilemma using a concept first elucidated by his teacher, Socrates. “The Forms” are the eternal patterns that give shape to the world. Everything in the world is only a particular, temporal instance of many general, eternal Forms. Plato answers Parmenides assertion that nothing could come into being from non-being, by concurring that nothing exists now that was not already in existence as a Form. Similarly, Plato agrees with Heraclitus that everything we perceive is subject to change, because the objects of the world are constantly shifting from participation in one Form to participation in another. An iron bar may change from reflecting the eternal aspect of iron to reflecting the eternal aspect of rust, and so forth. Similarly, human actions are either skillful or poor imitations of justice, courage, moderation, and wisdom, the four key virtues.

This basic understanding of the dual nature universe, in which the temporal world is a subset of an eternal order, has underpinned Western philosophy in all the centuries since Plato, though many attempts have been made to overturn it. Notably, Plato’s own student Aristotle was the first to attempt to escape the dualism of his master, if only in a limited way. The Forms, contended Aristotle, cannot exist in an eternal realm separate from human experience. Forms exist only to the extent that they are the properties of objects and have no meaning apart from their embodiment in a particular. There is no general “Form of Iron” or “Form of Rust;” there are just a number of historically existing objects that can be classified as either iron-type objects or rust-type objects. Since all that exists is the world as it exists, one should not commit oneself to studying the rational aspects of a hypothesized eternal nature, but one should be committed to observing the actual happenings of empirical events and use experience to inform one’s model of the world.

These two perspectives on the world have been the traditional dividing line for philosophers; from the ancient Academics and Peripatetics to the early modern Rationalists and Empiricists to the twentieth century Analytics and Continentals, much of Western thought can be classified through its affinity for either Plato or Aristotle. The Platonists, broadly speaking, start from an objective understanding of the eternal; the Aristoteleans start from a subjective experience of the emprical. These distinctions can also be used in understanding Shintô, Confucianism, and Buddhism, the three main religious influences on haiku.

Influences in Haiku

R. H. Blyth in his landmark series, Haiku, downplays the importance of Shintô on Japanese thought, devoting just three pages to it. It is possible that Blyth’s omission was a reflection of the unpopularity of Shintô sentiment following the war. Of course, Blyth is right that Shintô is very rarely the explicit subject of haiku. However, the power of Shintô over the Japanese mind almost always acts in a near subconscious manner, framing a debate rather than endorsing a position. A comment by Robert Hass in Essential Haiku suggests a primordial connection between the kigo of haiku and the animism of Shintô. Contrasting English and Japanese terms for rain, he explains that haiku,

(:quote:)”bears the traces of an earlier animism, when harusame and kirishigure and yûdachi were thought of as nature spirits, particular beings. To some extent, in any case, the suggestive power of these poems depends on this stylization” (225). (:endquote:)

Thus, to understand haiku, we must see that to a certain degree kigo are the inheritors of the Shintô tradition of kotodama 言霊, words with the magical power to invoke the kami 神 (gods or spirits). Seen from this perspective, we see that the choice of words in haiku is not merely a product of human convention, but it is also dependent on the will of the eternal spirits that haiku is able to summon. Seen through the lens Shintô belief, the world is not just a temporal ground in which hills arise and mountains erode. More than that, the hills and mountains of the world are the inhabited manifestations of the kami that act on this world. Each mountain has a name, and that name works by invoking the spirit of the mountain. The motion of spirits is seen as a vital aspect of language. Since the earliest eras in Japanese poetry, nature and man’s relation to it has been a central theme, almost to the exclusion of all else. That haiku also focuses on nature more acutely than, say, love, shows the degree to which it is an inheritor of this Shintô tradition. (More about the rice planting calendar as a center of life in the four seasons.) Haiku then is to a certain extent an attempt to understand the world by invoking the spirits that eternally reside within it. The analogy to the Platonic description of the world should is clear. Much as Plato hoped to understand the messy realities of life by grasping the separate world of the Forms through reason and understanding, so too does Shintô seek to conduct life properly within the mortal world through the invocation and appeasement of the kami. When haiku inherited the traditions of earlier waka and religious incantations and incorporated them into kigo and other conventional phrases, it also inherited Shintô attitudes about the eternal spirit realm that coexists with our own, causing haiku to absorb a kind of oriental version of Platonic dualism. Much has been said about the this-worldliness of Shintô, however, the act of neglecting the afterlife merely gives Shintô more space in which to draw the spiritual into the earthly.

Confucianism also contains clear dualistic tendencies. The goal in Confucian thought is to ensure that one’s relationships always properly reflect the obligations of the five great relationships, those of fathers and sons, rulers and subjects, husbands and wives, older and younger brothers, and friend and friend. An understanding of these relationships does not come from observation of the ways in which they are usually fulfilled at the present time. Rather, in order to properly understand and fulfill these obligations, one must strive to conform one’s words and actions to those used in a lost “Golden Age.” (More about how the golden age is a platonic form.) Confucian ethics mostly inform haiku through the poetics of its pronouncements. The poet Bashô was trained in Confucian values in his youth as the son of a samurai, and in his masterwork, Oku no Hoso-michi 奥の細道, he explicitly makes reference to the Analects of Confucius when praising the honesty of an innkeeper. Blyth further explains the connection between haiku and Confucianism, “Though apparently so far apart, Confuciansim and haiku have this in common, that both aim at a life of perfection…” (Haiku 79). The analogy between these eternal rules for the perfection of human behavior and the eternal Platonic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and moderation is obvious. Thus, from both Shintô and Confucianism influences, haiku is infused with a Plato-like dualism. That is to say, both show a desire to see not just the world that is but also the world that should be.

Though both Shintô and Confucian ideals have a profound, if subtle, influence on the tone of haiku, the influence of Buddhism and particularly Zen Buddhism on haiku is quite explicit. At its most basic level, Buddhism is the teaching that everything in the world continually undergoes change, and therefore one will suffer in life as objects of desire pass away, if one does not abandon all desires and attachments. To this observation, Zen Buddhism adds the insight that all language must ultimately fail to describe the world, since a reference can never be truly identical to its referent. Because of this, our attachment to particular words, terms, or concepts will, like other attachments, ultimately hinder our progress toward enlightenment, since static words can never capture the flowing world. Buddhism places its emphasis on the reality of both the world and our suffering within it, and its conclusions about human suffering are drawn from empirical observation rather than theoretical deduction. Like Aristotelian thought, Buddhism insists that as residents of the real world, not the ideal world, we must focus our efforts on understanding the world as it is through observation, instead of dreaming of a perfect world that can never come to be.

(More from Blyth about Zen & haiku.)

Dynamics of Haiku

Having seen the relationship between the religious influences of haiku and Platonic and Aristotelian thought, we can now examine the relationship between those religious components and haiku in more detail. Because of its stress on the pragmatic over the theoretical, Buddhist sensibility in poetry is usually expressed by stating, “what is,” without any embellishment or metaphoric projection. Though Buddhist poems do sometimes use metaphors to make some doctrine clear— such as Bashô’s “The whitebait/ opens its black eye/ in the net of the law” (Essential Haiku 11)— this is the exception rather than the rule. Instead, the focus is on shasei 写生, sketches from life as it is. Like “haiku” itself, the term was a coinage of Masaoka Shiki (Poetics 52). Since a haiku was meant to provide the setting for another verse, on its own it can be very open ended. Composed entirely of seemingly concrete images, haiku leaves an impression of aloofness or otherworldliness in its wake. This impression is also bolstered by the influence that Zen has had over many practitioners of haiku, particularly Bashô. Since the aim in Zen art is to capture life “as it is” without any input from one’s own intetionality, many scholars have therefore emphasized the transcendent profundity of haiku to the exclusion of understanding haiku as an expression of an individual’s personality. Hass refers to this tendency in haiku interpretation as the “rush to their final mysteriousness and silence” (Essential Haiku xv). While haiku can be somewhat esoteric, this does not change the fact that many haiku have very mundane origins as occasion marking verse. Thus, examination of a haiku is best informed by beginning with its particular description of a concrete set of experiences before proceeding to reflect on its general message about the nature of the universe. As Hass later notes, “One returns to their mysteriousness anyway” (Essential Haiku xv). In The Poetics of Haiku, Koji Kawamoto denies the possibility that words can truly capture life “as it is.” He explains that “Shiki errs in assuming that [external] objects can be incorporated into a poem merely through some process of identifying them by name” (53). Just listing what we see before us is not enough to capture the world as it exists. No matter how we try to capture life, the mere act of naming glosses over fine details and some of an experience must be lost. Of course, Shiki and those influenced by Zen realized this as well, but he fell short in his explanation of it. The goal in haiku is not merely to sketch what is, but to create a collection of words that are able to create inside the mind of the viewer a scene as rich with detail and meaning as that held by the author, even if it is impossible to recreate it with anything approaching exactness.

Recreating the whole of an experience might be an impossible task for a mere seventeen syllables, except that haiku is aided by the great backlog of associations from traditional waka. For example, hearing the phrase “autumn nightfall” in a haiku, brings to mind the wealth of waka poetry written on the set phrase “autumn dusk,” and in particular the “Three Dusks” of the Shinkokinshû (Poetics 34). With this in mind, the “language of haiku” is not just the Japanese language per se, but all of Japanese culture as well. Without reference to the classics of Japanese culture, or at least a general feeling for their content, one is unable to properly understand the full dimensions of haiku. Only as a whole matrix of associations can the “language of haiku” be understood. As we saw before, kigo are not just words that happen to name parts of the season, but rather names that evoke the kami present in those seasons. The kigo and waka allusions present in haiku are key components to Kawamoto’s theory of a base and superimposed section in haiku (Poetics 73). The base section is the dynamic part of haiku that creates a scene or an event, whereas the superimposed section is one in which the scene is given a context through a surprising juxtaposition of an evocative phrase. The base section is the part over which Zen insistence on showing the world as it is holds forth. The superimposed section is the section in which the invocation of a set phrase calls into mind some eternal precept. Together, as we shall see, they create a dynamic interplay between the world of perception and the world of the mind.

Examples

From Haiku

Take as an example, the second poem in Bashô’s Oku no Hosomichi and the first in which Bashô has begun his journey: Yuku haru ya/ tori naki uo no/ me wa namida 行春や鳥啼魚の目は泪^[1]. The base section in this poem is, “tori naki uo no/ me wa namida.” Literally, this means, “Birds cry and the fish’s eyes have tears.” Clearly, this is a very dynamic scene, in which the very calls of the birds and wet eyes of fish around the marketplace all suggest to the author his sorrow at departing. This clearly embodies what can be called a Zen or Aristotelian theory of poetry. The poet does not suggest any characteristics outside of those that he observes from his not terribly objective vantage point. Because his emotional state leaks out onto the subjective world, the cries of the birds are lamentations, and the eyes of the fish are filled with sorrow, so he records just this. However, the superimposed section is radically different in its conception. Though, “yuku haru ya,” means only, “going-spring-ah,” in an overly literal manner, it is rife with allusion when considered in the context of the language of haiku. “yuku haru,” had been used since ancient times to convey the grief that one associates with the passing of the spring. In particular, it is known for the crying of birds (Poetics 85). Like the association of justice with virtue or families with filially, this relationship is extratemporal. Though the base section refers only to those specific events experienced by the author, the superimposed section creates a context for this perception within the wider world of eternal verities. Thus, Bashô creates a poem in which the reader moves from the initial timeless, Platonic world of dwindling springs and sorrowful partings into the concrete and Aristotelian world of his own departure from the bustling markets of Edo, in which the birds circle above and the fish glisten from vendors’ stalls all reflect his own sorrow. The mind of the reader must grasp both the eternal and ephemeral aspects of the poem in order to gain its full significance.

Now, at the risk of being drowned out by the sound of a thousand other scholars splashing into this same pool, let us examine briefly Bashô’s most famous poem: Furu-ike ya/ kawazu tobikomu/ mizu no oto 古池や蛙飛び込む水の音^[2]. Like the last poem, this one begins with its superimposed section, “Furu-ike ya,” meaning “old-pond-ah.” Again, pausing here, the reader is filled with an image not of a particular pond but of all ancient ponds, and thus with the stillness that is naturally associated with them. The next word, “kawazu,” signals that this stillness is to be broken by a frog. Of course, the natural means by which a frog can break the stillness of a pond is to croak for its lover in the fading light. However, Bashô dashes these expectations, as befits haiku’s origin as comically linked verse. The frog does not croak, but flies into the pond and is followed by the sound of the water. So, the pond whose stillness we had been contemplating on the first line is now the source of the sound that so intrigues us on the final one. Again, notice how the base section is specific to a single observable event, that of a particular frog entering a particular pond, where the superimposed section is concerned primarily with the web of associations cloaking all old ponds. The mind of the reader is caught in the tension between the world of Plato and the world of Aristotle, and must shuffle back and forth between the two in order to make sense of the poem.

From Waka

Now, in order to understand the uniqueness of haiku as literature, it is worth contrasting these two haiku of Bashô with a waka by a poet who inspired him, the monk Saigyô: Kokoro naki/ mi nimo aware wa/ shirarekeri/ shigi tatsu sawa no/ aki no yûgure こゝろなき身にも哀はしられけりしぎたつさはの秋のゆふぐれ^[3]. Burton Watson translates it thus, “Even a person free of passion/ would be moved/ to sadness:/ autumn evening/ in a marsh where snipes fly up” (Saigyô 81). Besides the simple quality of being too long, and thus saying what should be left unsaid, such a poem could never qualify as a haiku because it lacks the necessary tension between the eternal and the temporal. The poem begins by discussing a body without a heart and declares that it too would come to know sorrow. Then it presents a sorrowful image of a snipe (or snipes) rising up from the marsh as the daylight fades away. Though both images are moving, and the poem as a whole is a masterpiece, it cannot be considered an especially long haiku, because it only concerns itself with the eternal and never with the temporal. One might suggest that the snipe flying up is a temporal scene, but clearly this is not the case, for this same scene is recommended to any and all heartless people who wish to be moved to sorrow. Partially, the timelessness of the image of a snipe rising from the marsh is a result of the fame that this poem accumulated over the years, making it seem natural through familiarity. However, the flying frog of “Furuike” is just as famous as the snipes of Saigyô, if not much more so, but it retains its existence as a particular scene observed by a particular person. The specificity of haiku is of course, partially just a matter of the conventions that the reader brings to the interpretation process, but it also goes deeper. Saigyô rhetorically asked for an image that would move even the hardest of hearts and then delivered such an image. Bashô presented the stillness of an ancient pond and then rather than showing a noiseless leaf, a silent breeze, or some other reinforcing image, he has a noisy frog splash in. Haiku is centered on contradiction, and though the images of classical waka are undeniably beautiful and moving, they cannot match haiku in terms of dynamism, since they do not move so rapidly between the world of Plato and Aristotle, but confine themselves to a single conception of the world.

Of course, the images shown in waka are not always static and eternal. Sometimes, waka is intensely personal. Consider the following translation of Saigyô, “What else/ could have made me/ loathe the world?/ The one who was cruel to me/ today I think of as kind^[4]” (Saigyô 180). The poem is clearly concerned only with the personal experience of the author, and not the eternal implications of such feelings. Thus, this poem is centered wholly in the Aristotelian and never provides a bridge by which the reader can consider both the eternal reverberations of the poem as well as the merely temporal ones. Saigyô, though a truly masterful poet, is not a haiku poet.

Of course, bridging the tensions between Plato and Aristotle by providing a means for the reader to enter into both aspects of the poem is only one of many characteristics that make haiku so intriguing. Diction, word choice, humor, brevity, and insight all play a role along with the shear surprise of providing dueling interpretive frameworks within which to view the poem. However, properly conducted, a haiku can in its few short syllables take a reader from the heavens to the earth and back again, as we consider afresh not just what we see before us or the patterns that are followed by what we see, but how both perspectives are vital to a full conception of life in this world. In order to full capture the experience of life in this world, haiku must use and then cast off both Aristotelian and Platonic dogma in order to grasp more firmly the world as a whole.

Practical Applications

What is the virtue in this, asks the skeptic. Have I created an arbitrary binary distinction and then speciously proceeded to “find it” where I left it? No. The applications of this are practical both personally and philosophically. First, let us quote Blyth’s Preface to Haiku.

(:quote:) The history of mankind, as a history of the human spirit, may be thought of consisting of two elements: an escape from this world to another; and a return to it. Chronologically speaking, these two movements, the rise and fall, represent the whole of human history; and the two take place microcosmically many times in people and nations. But they may be thought of as taking place simultaneously or rather, beyond time, and then they form an ontological description of human nature. (4) (:endquote:)

Though Blyth has been much criticized, and rightly, for his pseudo-mystic interpretations and his Zen-centric distortion of Japanese cultural history, there remains much to be admired in his approach to life. Here, Blyth has summarized for us the same approaches to life which this essay has been engaged in finding in haiku. The escape from the world is Plato, and the return to it is Aristotle. In our own lives, we lose ourselves in abstract theory, and we lose ourselves in routine. Haiku, as a bridge between those realms, has the ability to bring the poetic into our lives. Haiku, in its simplicity, invites participation. Indeed, no hokku by the great masters was meant to be left without compliment from other renga poet-participants. Reading haiku encourages us to see the eternal reflected in our lives, and in doing so, allows human beings a means of escaping the merely animal and temporal aspects of our nature. At the same time, neither does haiku allow us to neglect our mortal natures. We must reflect upon what is happening to us in this “Zen” (in the loose contemporary sense) instant of time. We capture what we see, hear, and touch in verse, but realize that what we experience can never be captured.

The distinction drawn in this essay also has utility for the student of philosophy in particular. To be engaged in philosophy today is to be invited to make camp with partisans of group or another, be they the children of Plato and Aristotle or Nietzsche and Russell. Allowing haiku to draw us into both aspects of reality reemphasizes for us the importance of acknowledging the truth of both descriptions of reality. Without the Forms, we cannot describe the world, and without describing the world, we cannot know the Forms. Postmodernism is another system that shows us that the Forms are in an important sense man-made. However, despite the artificiality of the systems which bind us, resistance to them frequently only strengthens their normative value. The only escape is the escape offered by haiku. Through haiku, the two modes of experience are superimposed in dynamic tension. … more …

Works Cited

Blyth, R. H. Haiku: Vol. I Eastern Culture. Hokuseido Press, Tokyo, Twenty-third printing, 1976.

Hass, Robert. The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashô, Buson, & Issa. Harper Collins, NY, 1994.

Kawamoto, Kôji. The Poetics of Japanese Verse. trans. Steve Collington, Kevin Collins, and Gustav Heldt. University of Tokyo Press, 2000.

Watson, Burton. Saigyô: Poems of a Mountain Home. Columbia University Press, 1991.