Norinaga's scholarship was never purely aesthetic. The recovery of mono no aware was simultaneously the recovery of what he believed was Japan's authentic cultural spirit, a spirit that had been buried under centuries of continental cultural dominance.
The Kokugaku ("National Learning") movement, of which Norinaga is the central figure, began as a scholarly project: the rigorous philological study of ancient Japanese texts, the Kojiki, the Man'yōshū, the Tale of Genji, to recover their authentic meaning before Buddhist and Confucian interpretive overlays had transformed them. Norinaga spent thirty-five years on his Kojiki-den, a monumental commentary on the Kojiki, arguing that its cosmogonic narrative was not mythology to be allegorized or rationalized but the genuine account of Japan's divine origins.
His philosophical-cultural argument was this: the ancient Japanese spirit, as expressed in the Kojiki, the Man'yōshū, and The Tale of Genji, is characterized by natural spontaneity (magokoro, "true heart"), immediate responsiveness to things, and the capacity for mono no aware. Chinese learning had introduced rationalistic abstraction and moral systematization that overlaid this spontaneity with artificial categories. Buddhism had introduced metaphysical frameworks that redirected attention from this world to abstract otherworldly concerns. The authentic Japanese spirit, the spirit of kotodama and mono no aware, was submerged but recoverable.
This project produced some of the most beautiful literary scholarship in Japanese intellectual history. It also contained the seeds of a nationalist ideology. The insistence on Japanese cultural uniqueness, the valorization of Shinto divine origins, and the privileging of indigenous spontaneity over imported rationalism were all available for appropriation by later nationalists who turned Kokugaku's cultural recovery into a political program, eventually feeding into the Meiji-era construction of State Shinto and the ideology of Japanese ethnic and spiritual superiority that prefigured twentieth-century militarism.
Norinaga himself was not a political nationalist in the modern sense, his project was scholarly and aesthetic, and his politics were conventional for his era. But the structural logic of his argument, authentic native spirit vs. foreign distortion, direct feeling vs. rational mediation, proved philosophically and politically portable in ways he did not anticipate.
For contemporary philosophical engagement with Norinaga, the challenge is to honor what is genuinely profound in his philosophy of affective cognition and kotodama, insights about the cognitive value of feeling, the phenomenology of impermanence, the spiritual dimension of language, while maintaining critical awareness of the nationalist uses to which the native spirit framework has been put. This is not a unique problem: virtually every philosophy that grounds truth in authenticity and feeling rather than in universal reason faces the risk of being appropriated by particularist and nationalist politics.