Nature and Culture in Human Freedom
Author(s): Seizo Ohe
Source: Ethics, Vol. 77, No. 4 (Jul., 1967), pp. 314-318
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2379167
Accessed: 03/08/2010 14:08
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Ethics.
http://www.jstor.org
NATURE AND CULTURE IN HUMAN FREEDOM
SEIZO OHE
THE philosophic controversybetween determinism and indeterminismis almost
as old as philosophy itself. Aside from this
inconclusive debate, however, everyone will
admit that man has, in any event, a much
wider range of voluntary action than any
other living being on earth. In fact, it is
our everyday experience that we feel ourselves free to make a choice between two
or more possibilities of action-with a light
or heavy heart as the case may be. Man is
neither entirely free nor entirely bound.
This fact of our common experience, and
nothing else, I understood here by "human
freedom."Therefore, I simply say: man has
a much greater "degree of freedom" than
any other kind of higher animal, and that is
all I presuppose for further inquiry.
It is the objective of this paper to examine the actual status of this freedom of
human behavior from a natural as well as
a cultural point of view and to look into the
ways of enlarging it with a view to the
future destiny of human culture.
I
Let us begin with a kind of "imaginative
experiment." Suppose we succeed in exchanging a newborn baby of a Japanese
couple with a newborn baby of an Eskimo
couple without it being noticed by either
couple, so that the Japanese baby is brought
up by the Eskimo parents as their own child
in their primitive Arctic home and the Eskimo baby correspondinglyby the Japanese
parents in a standard Japanese family of today. Let us follow, then, in imagination,
their respective processes of growth and
maturation and see if we can rationally
draw a conclusion therefrom in the light
of contemporaryknowledge of psychology,
sociology, anthropology,etc.
But first, as an aid to our rational reasoning, let us consider two auxiliary examples
that can actually occur: (1) Japanese children who have grown up in a foreign country and (2) human children brought up by
other mammals.
Examples of the first kind we know in
plenty. As in the case of numerous Americans of Japanese ancestry, it is a widely
known fact that their speaking ability in
Japanese as well as any characteristic Japanese temperamental qualities get weaker
and weaker as their family life becomes
more and more Americanizedwith advancing generations. We also have had a few
unhappy cases of the second kind in the
past, and two of them are comparatively
well recorded: "Victor," enfant sausage
d'Aveyron, found in 1799 and enthusiastically taken care of by Dr. J. M.-G. Itard,
and "Kamala," wolf child of India, found
in 1921 and carefully trained in an orphanage by Rev. J. A. L. Singh and his wife.'
In both cases, as is well known, their behavior was more animal than human, and
attempts to restore their human status for
all the efforts dedicated to them were never
fully successful. In short, all that is a priori
given to an offspring of man as an animal
seems to be only the possible upright posture and the ability of learning a language
in his childhood, and everything beyond
that must be acquiredin human companionship. No wonder a man's child couldn't
speak a word, if he had grown up in an
animal herd! In other words, the process of
human growth can be analyzed into a bionatural and a socioculturalprocess.
What will be, then, the result of our
own "imaginative experiment"? Since fortunately the Eskimos resemble the Japanese
very much in physiognomy, the secret of
parentage can be easily kept, though, of
course, our whole experiment is realizable
only in imagination. We may roughly
schematize it in the following way:2
314
DISCUSSION
Japanese baby brought up
by Eskimo parents
Bionatural
growth
Socioculturalgrowth
Eskimo baby brought up
by Japanese parents
Bionatural
growth
Sociocultural
growth
In words: The Japanese baby brought up
by Eskimo parents would naturally learn
to speak the Eskimo language and to play
just like other Eskimo children; thus acquiring the whole Eskimo way of life in
accordancewith his hereditary capacity, he
would grow up as if he were a genuine
Eskimo man. The Eskimo baby brought up
by Japanese parents, on the other hand,
would learn to speak Japanese, be educated
in the Japanese way at home and at school,
and grow into an ordinary citizen of contemporaryJapan, talented or untalented as
his genetic potential would have it.
It is quite understandablethat there are
still not a few Japanese who emotionally
decline such a conclusion as too hasty and
unfounded,because such an experimentcan
by no means be carried out actually. But
our knowledge of contemporary behavioral
sciences seems no longer to allow us such
an evasive attitude toward the positive
reality.
At the same time, however, the very result of our experiment tells us that even
within the same ethnic group of the Mongolians a successful interchangeof offsprings
between two peoples of different cultural
levels, such as the Japanese and the Eskimos, requires all those fictitious arrangements as can only be realized in imagination
and, conversely, that a child brought up
in one established society cannot easily be
incorporatedinto another. In particular,the
national character of a Japanese born and
bred in Japan cannot be altered in a day.
In other words, to be a Japanese in full,
it does not suffice for a man to be merely
an offspringof Japanese parents; he has to
be brought up in Japan. In the same way,
315
->(Grown-up man)
("Eskimo" man)
(Grown-up man)
)("Japanese" man)
to be human in full we have to be not only
born of human parents but also brought up
by them. In this respect, the jus solidof
U.S. citizenship is very well founded, because the so-called national character of
the people is to be regarded as essentially
a function of their sociocultural process of
growth quite independent of their bionatural process of growth.
II
By our "imaginative experiment" in the
previous section we have separated two
fundamental processes which are inextricably interwoven in the actual process of
human growth: bionaturaland sociocultural
processes, as we have named them. Consequently, the degree of freedom characteristic of human behavior must also be examined from these two angles of relative
independence. Human behavior with its
characteristic degree of freedom must be
grounded,first of all, in its bionaturalbasis,
that is, in the physioanatomical structure
of the human body, in particular, its highly
developed cerebral cortex. On the other
hand, however, it is also substantially
molded by the sociocultural conditions of
individual human environment, especially
through education and learning in the
broadest sense of the words.
In general, we act with a certain degree
of freedom, referring to some appropriate
knowledge, driven by some emotional feeling. Thus human behavior is in principle
conditioned by two entirely different kinds
of psychological mechanisms: the intellectual-mediation mechanism and the emotional-control mechanism. We do what we
think is right and pleases us. But we usually
316
ETHICS
do not do what we know is right if we do
not like to do it. In this sense, we can say,
we have in our emotional feeling the final
control mechanism of our free (i.e., not
coerced) voluntary action and in our reference to acquired knowledge its intellectualmediation mechanism.In the whole process
of human growth, both the emotionalcontrol mechanism and the intellectualmediation mechanism are gradually built
up, forming types of personality, individual,
social, or national.
If we follow the result of our "imaginative experiment" and separate the process
of human growth into a bionatural and a
socioculturalprocess, there is no doubt that
within the bionatural process the basis of
our emotional-controlmechanismlies in the
sensations of pleasure and pain which we
seemingly have in common with other higher animals. But in the socioculturalprocess
this emotional-controlmechanism of action
is gradually transformed from its basic
senso-emotionalpattern of pleasureand pain
into the higher ideo-emotional pattern of
joy and sorrow. An animal may simply be
urged to action by the sensation of pleasure
and inhibited by that of pain. A human
child may still be encouraged in action by
pleasure and discouraged by pain. But a
grown-up man can well endure pain with
joy and often feel sorrow in pleasure. There
are many cases, of course, where joy coincides with pleasure and sorrow with pain.
As a rule, however, we can say: human
action is encouragedby joy and discouraged
by sorrow.3While the sensations of pleasure
and pain, being physiologically determined,
seem to be more or less unanimous among
human beings, the feelings of joy and sorrow vary considerably from person to person, from culture to culture, etc.
Therefore, if we think about how to enlarge the degree of freedom in human action, we have to focus our attention on the
joy-sorrow pattern of the emotional-control
mechanismof human behavior which is first
to be formed in the sociocultural process of
human growth and is uniquely characteris-
tic of human beings. In the course of time,
however, a concrete traditional pattern of
joy and sorrow of an established culture
may well be set up in individual minds as a
stereotyped frame of emotional control,
which can only be broken off by unbridled
passion, say, of an artist often in revived
contact with the original sensation of pleasure and pain.
Such being the case, we could say without any pretension to precision: culture
frees man from nature, and nature frees
man from culture.
Let us now turn from the emotional to
the intellectual aspect of human behavior.
Every time we encountera new problem,we
tend first to refer to some appropriate
knowledge already acquired and then, if
there is none available, we try to solve it
by some self-made devices. By and large,
acquired knowledge is the result of our sociocultural learning, and self-made devices
are the product of our creative thinking
based upon a binatural function of the
human brain. A civilized society such as
we live in is undoubtedly a product of
accumulated creations of ingenious men,
certainly offering to those who share its
benefits a higher degree of freedom. At the
same time, however, such an emancipating
creation of human intelligence, once institutionalized in society, can work as a stereotyped frame of mind demandingconformity
from the individuals, not seldom against
their free, creative activity. "Learningwithout thinking is blind, but thinking without
learning is not safe," reads a famous Confucian dictum. Learning as cultural heritage
and thinking as intellectual creativity thus
constitute as a whole the intellectualmediation mechanism of behavior of a
civilized man, ever widening the scope for
human intelligence. The more civilized a
society is, the larger may well be the range
for human existence, but often the smaller
will be the freedom for individual minds.
An established culture always has its own
public body of knowledge and ideas in one
form or another, whose rigid frame needs
to be broken from time to time by creative
DISCUSSION
intelligence, say, of a scientist or a philosopher with natural originality.
In this connection, the same paradoxical
pronouncementof the preceding paragraph
may well be here in place again: culture
frees man from nature, and nature frees
man from culture.
III
The subtle and complex interplay between nature and culture in human freedom
as has been revealed in the previous section
is further complicated by another no-lesssubtle one between the emotional and the
intellectual in human nature. Everyone
knows that a fully acquired knowledge or
a newborn idea can alter the emotional
attitude of a person, while a strong feeling
may well modify his intellectual activity.
With this understanding, let us try to
somehow look into the creative dynamism
inherentin this interrelationbetween nature
and culture with special reference to human cultural development. The following
rather figurative formulation will, in principle, cover both the emotional and the
intellectual aspects:
The first move of human existence from
the state of nature to the state of culture
means, in the phraseology of our Section
II pronouncement, that culture frees man
from nature; but cultural creation, in the
course of time, inevitably becomes institutionalized and restrictive of freedom, and a
return move from culture to nature in one
form or another must take place, which
means in our phraseology: nature frees man
from culture. This returnmove from culture
to nature, however, must tend to culture
again making a leap to a new higher state
of culture. If it ends up in nature without
reattaining or even aspiring to culture, it
would be mere decadence. But with a sound
cultural development the movement will
go on and on, repeating the moves and the
return moves one after another, as it were,
in a slowly ascending spiral movement
toward greater realization of human freedom.
317
With the risk of some repetition, I will
go again through the whole process of such
a sound cultural development in plain
words.
On the emotional side, we may start
with the observationof wild human children
brought up among animals. Since all of
them were reported to have shown no trace
of human feeling in attitude and action,
their behavior, like that of their non-human
companions, must have been exclusively
controlled by the original sensations of
pleasure and pain. In order to become humans in the full sense, it is not at all enough
for us to be born of human parents; we have
to be brought up by humans. Then and
only then, we humans are no longer blindly
bound to the sensations of pleasure and pain
and are able to act in free enjoyment of
joy overriding the strongest pain or to refrain from sensuous pleasure in deep-felt
sorrow. Unfortunately, however, our thus
freely cultivated human pattern of an emotional-controlmechanism of joy and sorrow
tends to grow into a rigid frame of a definite
pattern of feeling, demanding conformity
and forbidding any free-felt dissent from
the traditional norm even in matters of personal conscience. Hence, time and again a
"return to nature" is desired so as to keep
the creative dynamism going. This is why
eighteenth-century France had a Rousseau
and ancient China needed a Lao-tse besides
Confucius.
On the intellectual side, a new knowledge
or a freely invented device always emancipates us from naive ignorance or old prejudice. In general, a new culture assures us a
wider field of free thinking and activity,
but, once established and institutionalized,
it blinds human minds to other possibilities
of intellectual mediation and binds human
behavior to a definite pattern. Every novel
idea has to suffer from such intellectual persistence, and the greater the novelty, the
greater will be the suffering. This history
of science is full of such evidences. Here
again we have to "return to nature," to
resort to the creative intelligence nature
318
ETHICS
has given us, breaking through established
norms culture has built up in us and aspiring to ever new creations. So the cycle
of creative dynamism will go on and on.
To be sure, man's freedom is not great,
but without this bit of freedom he has
there is no life worthy of man. Fortunately,
the history of human development tells us
how many and how great are the things
this little freedom has done; and it also
shows us how to enlarge this freedom of
ours. There are two classic ways of importance for its realization. The first one
is by expanding the intellectual-mediation
mechanismof human behavior,in particular
by developing science and technology. The
second one is by constantly striving for a
perfect command of the emotional-control
mechanism of human behavior through
personal exertion. In the main, the West
has taken the first way and the East the
second. To heat rooms in cold winter and
cool them in hot summer, that is the Western way. To train body and soul to defy
heat and cold is the Eastern way. As a matter of fact, we humans need both ways. To
remove by means of science and technology
external obstacles which make us suffer is
no less important for human existence than
to attain internal strength which gives us
immunity to any sufferings. Eastern and
Western wisdom should now be integrated
into the whole of human wisdom. The future destiny of human culture will largely
depend on its success. East and West are
destined to meet.
NOTES
1. Cf. Jean M.-G. Itard, Rapports et memoires
sur le sausage d'Aveyron (Paris, 1894); Arnold
Gesell, Wolf Child and Human Child (New York,
1941).
2. For details see the Japanese version in chap.
vii of the author's Sekai no naka no Nihon
("Toward a Unified History of Human Culture
with Special Reference to Japan") (Tokyo: Nans6-sha, 1965).
3. See S. Ohe, "Toward a More Concrete Ethics,"
Personalist, XXXVIII, No. 2 (1957), 159, for
further orientation in the author's related ethical
ideas.