Mori Arimasa’s Concept of <i>Experience</i>

Abstract

The article introduces and reconstructs the main ideas of the book Experience and Thought by Mori Arimasa. Released in the form of journal publications in 1970–1972, it has never been translated into European languages. The Japanese philosopher who spent a large part of his life in France undertakes a comparative analysis of the socio-cultural and linguistic foundations of the experience of the Japanese and Europeans. The article examines the main aspects of Mori’s concept of experience: understanding experience as a reality and as a subject, separation of two forms of experience — universal and personal, the relationship between experience and language and between experience and thought, the theory of binary connections and second person world, designed to identify and explain the underlying prerequisites that determine the specific character of the experience of the Japanese. The author of the article shows that Mori confirms his own thesis that the primary experience of a person is conditioned by original cultural deep predisposition and linguistic affiliation. Notwithstanding his life abroad and passion for Western philosophy, Mori thinks in about the same way as his fellow philosophers who lived in Japan, sharing their empiricism, understanding the subject as a relatum, perceiving an individual subjective experience as a segment of the universal experience, interpreting a subject as a sum total of relations. In conclusion, Mori’s ideas are assessed in terms of ethno-epistemological approaches. Undoubtedly, Mori’s analysis of the experience provides arguments for epistemological pluralism. It allows us to talk about the variability of the perception of reality in different cultural and historical contexts and about the possibility of different ways and perspectives of its comprehension, the spatial and temporal dynamics of epistemological terminology, despite the apparent commonality. Mori Arimasa taking experience as the starting point and the main task of his analysis, by his own example, demonstrated the importance of the empirical form of acquiring knowledge for Japanese epistemic culture, along with its inherent specificity of understanding experience. His linguistic studies of the structures of the native language resulted in the creation of a memorable image of the second person world and outlined the field of joint collective experience without a clearly expressed single autonomous subject of cognitive activity. Mori demonstrated an approach to cognition, in which the knower feels oneself a part of the cognized reality, and is not alienated from it, as a result the cognition turns into self-cognition of reality.