The real meaning of Japan’s ‘men without chests’

“The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defense against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils, we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes.”

-C.S. Lewis, “The Abolition of Man”

A recent article published in Asia Times, written by an author whose pen name is Han Feizi, used a phrase that caught my attention. The author spoke of “men without chests,” a phrase used by Francis Fukuyama in “The End of History and the Last Man.”

The article was the second of a multi-part series titled “Asia without America” and presents a (compelling) case that the American military, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the political and cultural occupation of Japan have been corrupting post-war Japan since the founding of the Liberal Democratic Party in 1955.

The author hopes for the possibility of a “Tang renaissance” in Japan in which a truer and more authentic Japan would emerge if only America’s influence was withdrawn. Han Feizi writes, “Japan has everything to gain from America’s military departure and rebuilding a nation of men with chests.”

If this essay can be understood in any way as a disagreement, it is a subtle one, since I do not seek to contradict Han Feizi’s basic thesis of America’s corrupting influence on the soul of Japanese culture. It is the usage of the phrase “men without chests” where I take particular issue.

When Fukuyama speaks of “men without chests,” he is referring to the middle component of Plato’s tripartite soul, which is composed of the head (logos, reason) chest (thymos, spiritedness) and bowels (eros, appetite).

However, from reading Fukuyama alone, it would be easy to make the assumption that thymos means almost exclusively “ambition” and “desire for recognition.” Fukuyama writes, “Plato’s thymos is … nothing other than the psychological seat of Hegel’s desire for recognition” and that “thymos typically, but not inevitably, drives men to seek recognition.”

The original meaning of thymos in the Phaedrus does indeed include the desire for recognition, but certainly not exclusively so. Fukuyama, perhaps in the interest of supporting his argument, heavily overemphasizes this aspect.

When Socrates was sentenced to death for “corrupting the youth of Athens,” he exhibited no signs of discontent or remorse at the prospect of dying in infamy and disrepute. If Socrates is to be regarded as a role model for Plato’s ideal man, then what he meant by thymos cannot be how Fukuyama interprets it.

Han Feizi, while disagreeing with Fukuyama in other areas, seems to accept Fukuyama’s interpretation of thymos at face value. As a result, the philosophical foundations of Han Feizi’s otherwise incisive analysis may suffer from a kind of linguistic photocopying that strays quite far from the original meaning.

Just as a one-degree difference in direction can determine whether an airplane lands in Rome or Tunisia, the slightest nuance in our definitions can lead us to radically different conclusions.

How we define thymos and “men without chests” directly affects how we understand the cultural situation in Asian countries such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, which are currently experiencing, in Han Feizi’s words, the “nihilism and cultural anomie of end-state capitalism and liberal democracy.”

Since this essay is largely in response to “Part II: Japan’s Tang renaissance,” I also focus here primarily on Japan.

Fukuyama took the phrase “men without chests” from C.S. Lewis’s 1943 book “The Abolition of Man.” It is important to understand that when Lewis advocated for “men with chests” he was never thinking about the relative breadth of one’s pectoral muscles.

The term “men” here referred to general humanity and was not as gender-specific as it would be interpreted today. Insofar as Lewis did specifically refer to men, his vision for masculinity was arguably much more holistic.

For Lewis, “men without chests” were men (and women) who lacked integrated sentiment about reality – what Iain McGilchrist would call a balance between the left and right brain hemispheres, and others may call “emotional intelligence.” “The Abolition of Man” is about the abolition of humanity, not strictly the abolition of masculinity.

Lewis provides the example of Coleridge, who once observed two tourists admiring a waterfall: one said it was “pretty” and the other thought it was “sublime.” For Coleridge, the tourist who called the waterfall sublime had a more proper response.

Lewis does not use this example to be a snob about sophisticated literary vocabulary. He segues from this example to argue that the real purpose of education is to cultivate “proper sentiments” that are appropriate to the contemplated object – a project that Lewis considered inseparable from the cultivation of virtue itself and a necessary component of civilization.

Men (humanity) ought to be moved by a landscape, a narrative or a line of poetry in a certain way; to remain unmoved would be the equivalent to a dead nerve, even a moral defect.

While physicality is not totally irrelevant here, Lewis’s clarion call for broad-chested men was not primarily so that they can bench-press 200 pounds but so that they could accommodate a large heart: that is, to feel and explore all of reality more deeply.

It is not so that they can pursue “Fukuyamian” thymos (like samurais committing hara-kiri) but true Platonic thymos, where the heart serves as the liaison between the head and the bowels.

“Men with chests,” therefore, should not recall the likes of Donald Trump, but rather someone more like Saint Augustine: “Our souls are like a house – too small for You [God] to enter, but we pray that You enlarge it.”

Interestingly, when Lewis writes about what these “just sentiments” should entail, he does not appeal to Platonic thymos or even his own Christian theology but the Tao (道) of Chinese philosophy.

Although Lewis himself was not a scholar of Sinology or the Sinosphere, my own specialization can testify that his invocation of the Tao is quite appropriate. Chinese thought is deeply rooted in what might be called “affect-centered ethics.”

While foundational texts such as Lao Zi’s “Dao De Jing” and Confucius’s “Analects” differ in terms of method, they are nonetheless both in basic agreement that the way to the Tao begins with learning to feel “appropriately.” I need only cite the very first passage from the “Analects” as evidence:

“The Master said: To study and at due times to practice what one has studied, is this not a pleasure? When friends come from distant places, is this not a joy? To remain unsoured when his talents are unrecognized, is this not fitting for a gentleman [junzi]?” [Emphasis added.]

The Confucian method of education advocates rigorous memorization, something that is still widely practiced in China today, as well as many other Confucian-influenced Asian countries. But mere memorization itself was never the end goal.

The end goal could be summed up in that single rhetorical question: “Is this not a pleasure?” It was not pleasure per se that was the goal, but rather proper pleasure cultivated to align with the Tao.

If you have only learned to recite a line of poetry from Li Bai or Du Fu but not learned to delight in it, Confucius would probably say his project had failed.

If, on the other hand, you remain bitter because your talents go unrecognized, it is also a sign that your sentiments have not yet been properly cultivated. You have not become a real “superior person” (junzi). This is true thymos in the original Platonic sense: the education of the heart.

Not only does Confucius’s delight in learning have nothing to do with the drive for recognition, but Confucius even explicitly states that the sign of a true junzi is precisely the absence of this desire.

His vision for the completed junzi was the individual whose natural desires were completely within the bounds of ritual, and therefore needed no suppression or restraint:

The Master said: When I was 15, I set my heart on learning. At 30, I took my stand. At 40, I was without confusion. At 50, I knew the command of Heaven. At 60, I heard it with a compliant ear. At 70, I follow the desires of my heart and do not overstep the bounds.

Lewis, as it turns out, is quite in agreement with Confucius here:

“Those who know the Tao can hold that to call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not.”

One can see from this that the whole discussion of men, with or without their chests, has been missing the point. I blame Fukuyama for this misunderstanding, not Han Feizi.

Fukuyama co-opted the term “men without chests” to mean “men without thymos” and by thymos he meant “the primeval drive for recognition and glory which is present in ancient civilization but is now eclipsed by modern liberal democracy.”

Fukuyama does not see “men without chests” as necessarily problematic – since thymos (under his definition) is the primary cause for history’s bloody wars.

Han Feizi (if I understand him correctly) does since lack of thymos has turned the land of “samurai warriors and hardened salarymen” into “a theme park filled with kawaii anime, Pokemon, Super Mario and schoolgirl manga.”

It is not entirely true that postwar Japan can be reduced to these extremes. No culture is that simple. Neither the wistful regret of Haruki Murakami nor the fiery samurai passions of Yukio Mishimia should be seen as examples of what it means to have a chest or to not have one.

For this reason, it is not clear what Han Feizi means in imagining the Japanese liberated from their “bonsai pot” to become “men with chests” again. If the rape of Nanjing was an expression of Japan’s thymos, we might prefer Fukuyama’s world to it – the world happily denuded of thymos via liberal democracy.

But was this hideous act really a true expression of samurai culture, or a betrayal of Japan’s own Bushidō (武士道) code of conduct? If the latter, we may be much closer to locating the real heart of culture from which we could craft a vision for Japan’s “Tang renaissance.” The final kanji character “dō” (道) is in fact a direct loanword from the Chinese Tao.

If there is anyone who carries the seeds of Japan’s “Tang renaissance,” I suggest Hayao Miyazaki as a candidate, the legendary creator of classic films such as “Spirited Away”, “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Princes Mononoke.”

There is a distinct Confucian flavor in all of these films, one that prioritizes relationships, mutual respect and the balance of reason, intuition and emotion. The heroes and heroines of Miyazaki are not hyper-masculine glory seekers or listless, dispirited recluses. They are real men, and real women, with “chests,” with thymos and eros balanced and directed by Logos, or the Tao.

This was Lewis’s interpretation of Confucius and Plato. Without these kinds of full-chested men so defined, we should not expect Japan or anyone else to experience any kind of real cultural renaissance in our lifetimes.

Raymond Dokupil holds a master’s degree in Asian Studies from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.