Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) is one of the towering figures of Japanese intellectual history, a scholar of ancient Japanese literature, a Shinto philosopher, and the founder of the Kokugaku (National Learning) movement that sought to recover the authentic spirit of pre-Buddhist, pre-Confucian Japanese culture from beneath centuries of continental influence.
His central scholarly project was the recovery of what he saw as Japan's indigenous philosophical-aesthetic sensibility, a sensibility he believed had been distorted by the importation of Chinese ethical categories (Confucian rationalism and moralism) and Buddhist metaphysics. For Norinaga, the ancient Japanese spirit was characterized by natural spontaneity in feelings, an immediate, unsystematic openness to the world's beauty, sorrow, and wonder, that the artificially clever frameworks of Chinese philosophy had suppressed.
Norinaga's greatest scholarly contribution is also his greatest philosophical one: his detailed, lifetime commentary on The Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari, c. 1010 CE), the world's first novel, written by the court lady Murasaki Shikibu. In the course of this commentary he developed the concept of mono no aware (物の哀れ), the single most important concept in Japanese aesthetics and among the most subtle concepts in any philosophical tradition.
Mono no aware is typically translated as "the pathos of things" or "a sensitivity to ephemera." More precisely: aware means deep feeling, sensitivity, or pathos, a quality of emotional resonance that arises from genuine attention. mono means "things", the concrete particular things of the world. Mono no aware is the pathos of things arising from their transience, the bittersweet awareness that comes from perceiving the beauty of things precisely in their impermanence.
The paradigmatic example Norinaga gives is the Japanese response to cherry blossoms (sakura): their beauty is inseparable from their brevity, they bloom for a week and fall. To be moved by cherry blossoms is to be moved by beauty and by the fact of its passing simultaneously. This double awareness, aesthetic and elegiac, is mono no aware.
To know mono no aware is to have a shrewd understanding and consideration of reality and the assortment of occurrences present; to be affected by and appreciate the beauty of cherry blossoms was an example of this knowledge.
— Wikipedia, 'Mono no aware' (2005); based on Motoori Norinaga, Tale of Genji commentary
But Norinaga's concept goes deeper than a pleasant melancholy before impermanence. He argues that the ability to be moved by things, mono no aware as a capacity, is a form of knowledge. To truly know the Tale of Genji is not to understand its plot or its social setting but to feel it, to allow its emotional world to move you. The reader who approaches Genji with philosophical detachment, analyzing its moral lessons or historical context, has missed the point. The reader who is brought to tears by the scene of Genji's exile has understood something true.
This is a philosophy of affective cognition, the thesis that deep emotional response is a mode of knowing, not merely a reaction to knowing. The heart-mind (kokoro) in Norinaga's account is both the rational and the affective capacity of a person, it is the organ of genuine understanding. Understanding (shiru) and feeling (kanjiru) are not separate operations in kokoro; to truly understand is to be affected, and to be genuinely affected is to understand.
Norinaga explicitly contrasts the kokoro of mono no aware with what he calls the "artificially clever heart" of Chinese learning, the heart that substitutes abstract principles and moral categories for genuine responsiveness to particular things. Confucian ethics tells you that grief is appropriate in some circumstances and inappropriate in others, governed by rules. Mono no aware is the capacity to simply feel what is there, the grief of the grieving thing, the beauty of the beautiful thing, without filtering it through pre-established categories.
For the philosophy of literature and aesthetics, Norinaga's account remains among the most powerful defenses of the cognitive value of literary experience: great literature does not merely entertain or moralize, it develops in you the capacity to feel truly. Is a form of knowing truly.