This brief Mazda advertisement describes the Japanese philosophy of jinba-ittai, the experience of a rider being one with their horse through the communication of feeling, as the inspiration for Mazda’s automotive design philosophy. I use this clip to demonstrate how Japanese Shinto and Zen Buddhist philosophy treat affective connection as an essential part of our daily lives.
In my Japanese Philosophy classes, students often struggle with Zen Buddhist concepts like “no-self,” the idea that our selves are not fixed, enduring essences, but rather the product of constantly changing relations. The concept of “no-self” is additionally related to the concept of “non-duality,” which presents the differences between persons, objects, and things as a matter of differences between the relations that give rise to them.
Since students are taught to think of their selves, their identities, as enduring, eternal, and separate from the objects that they interact with, they struggle with the idea that the boundaries of the self are porous and that there is no fundamental distinction between the self and the other. The Mazda advertisement above demonstrates that this is not the case with a concrete example of how design language seeks to generate the feeling of oneness.
Additionally, my students often struggle with Shinto ideas of affective communication between ourselves and objects believed to be inanimate. For thinkers like Motoori Norinaga, there is a felt sense of an object, an aware, that gives it a unique identity in the world. Being able to recognize this aware through cultivating our affective sensibilities, or our mono no aware, is key to having a deeper experience of the world in all aspects.
Still further, Norinaga and the Shinto philosophy he relies upon take it to be the case that our experience of the world is primarily through what Thomas Kasulis calls a “holographic engagement” with the world, wherein the kokoro, the feeling heart of an object, communicates with our own kokoro such that we come to understand the world through shared feeling rather than discursive knowledge. For Kasulis and Norinaga, it is this communication that gives rise to art, aesthetics, and even appropriate cultural practice.
To this end, I use the Mazda ad to provide a concrete example of the porousness of the boundaries between the self and the necessity of affective communication in navigating the world. Following the video, taking jinba-ittai seriously means taking seriously the idea that one’s engagement with objects in the world is the establishment of an affective relationship between oneself and the object, such that the boundary between the two vanishes.
After showing the video, I ask students to think about the first thing that they do when they sit down to drive another person’s car, or when they get into their car after someone has driven it. I ask them to think about the ways that their understanding of an object that feels “good” to use or is “easy” to use is the result of how they have established an affective relationship between the object and themselves, such that a boundary between self and object disappears in action.
In doing so, students often find that there are a great many places in their lives where initially abstract concepts like jinba-ittai, mono no aware, and non-duality take center stage and are experienced directly.
Possible Readings
DeBary, William Theodore, ed. 1995. “The Vocabulary of Japanese Aesthetics, I, II, III.” In Japanese Aesthetics and Culture: A Reader, edited by Nancy Hume. State University of New York Press.
Dogen, Eihei. 2006. “Bendowa.” In Shobogenzo, translated by Godo Nishijima and Chodo Cross. Dogen Sangha.
Kasulis, Thomas P. 2022. “The Field of Japanese Aesthetics.” In The APA Newsletter on Asian and Asian American Philosophers and Philosophies 21 (1–2, special double issue on Japanese aesthetics): 99–104.
Miller, Mara. 1998. “Art and the Construction of Self and Subject in Japan.” In Self as Image in Asian Theory and Practice, edited by Roger T. Ames, Wimal Dissanayake, Wimal, and Thomas P. Kasulis. State University of New York Press.
Soho, Takuan. “The Mysterious Record of Immovable Wisdom.” In The Unfettered Mind: Writings of the Zen Master to the Sword Master, translated by William Scott Wilson.
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Johnathan Flowers
Johnathan Flowers is an assistant professor of philosophy at California State University, Northridge. His primary research areas include African American intellectual history and philosophy, Japanese Aesthetics, American Pragmatism, Philosophy of Disability, and Philosophy of Technology. Flowers also works in the areas of Feminist Philosophy and affect theory, with a specific focus on the affective organization of identity.
