善悪と自他 (第五百號記念特集號)

Abstract

There is a sense in which to say 'everybody is an egotist' should be a sheer platitude, indeed. And to say 'values of things measured in an egocentric perspective are necessarily biassed' may also be an age-old truism. But the actual fact we now witness and live through, seems to be the paradoxical one that the unprecedented self-righteousness among all of us, individual as well as collective, prevails hand-in-hand with radical relativism apparent in every facet of the human life to-day. This may well occasion us to ask whether or not there be any essential bearing of self on the intrinsically or unconditionally good. The first thing here to be said is that the self and the good, properly understood, are by nature inseparable and somehow complementary. To the extent that selves claim to have the right to exist at the sacrifice of all others or of the whole world (which is more or less implied by anyone's armament with H-Bomb), the intrinsically good cannot but be in eclipse, not only for those human selves who pretend to be the sole good, but also for the inhabitable world as threatened to be annihilated. The anxiety for survival necessarily produces wholesale relativism in respect of cultures, moralities, ideologies and the world-religions altogether. My second point concerns our possibility of being members of a community wherein the relativist worlds are to have been vanquished by selves' unconditionl surrender to the Sole Good (which must be mediated by the Personal Truth). ----It is suggested that the so-called peaceful, not military, uses of nuclear energies should first and immediately be abolished. The rest of this paper examines the meaning of 'the self', in proper correlation with 'the other(s)' or with 'the world(s)'.