1. shame and guilt culture
Ruth benedict (1887- 1978) is regarded as the founder of the school of cultural model theory in cultural anthropology, but her masterpiece Chrysanthemum and Knife, which is about Japanese cultural studies, shows her unique perspective on personality and psychology in cultural studies. First of all, as a scholar of western culture, she felt strong cultural and emotional differences in the study of Japanese society and Japanese people. This difference is not mainly reflected in Japan's social, political and economic structure, but widely reflected in the strong psychological feelings and internal conflicts behind Japanese society and Japanese behavior. The uniqueness of Japanese behavior lies in a reflective opposition, such as politeness and arrogance. Peace and fierceness, taming and stubbornness, loyalty and rebellion, innovation and stubbornness. This opposition is mainly and directly dominated by emotional factors and sensitivity, and only the emotional way of human beings has this reflexive transformation. Benedict believes that this dynamic cultural form expressed by emotional factors. It is called shame culture, which corresponds to guilt culture in the west.
If the difference between shame and guilt is only emotional or moral, it cannot fully express the dynamic characteristics of Japanese culture. This feature is that Japanese shame culture is forced by a psychological complex, which has become a universal subconscious. Shame in Japanese culture is ubiquitous social sensitivity and external compulsion of public opinion, and it is a social psychological subconscious realized through personal psychological feelings. Therefore, when Japanese people turn from one behavior to another, they will not feel psychological barriers. It is in this sense that it can be called shame culture, not just social psychology. In fact, western culture has no corresponding cultural morphology. Benedict XVI's western "guilt culture" only refers to the correspondence of western religious culture, which can only be called guilt in western religious consciousness, but there are also great differences between them.
With his keen analysis, Benedict reveals the cultural relationship between social phenomena such as kindness, gratitude and human feelings peculiar to Japanese culture and psychological complex. Benedict XVI generally distinguishes between kindness and friendship. The former has historical factors and influences, but Benedict XVI did not study it in depth. She just pointed out that negative gratitude is a common emotion with historical and social significance in Japanese society and people. However, this is fundamentally different from the historical and social concepts in western culture. Negotiation and gratitude have nothing to do with history and society itself, nor with their rational understanding or religion, but mainly with the habitual and fashionable psychological attitudes formed by historical and social processes, which are reflected in Japanese daily behavior and become the unique moral sense and code of conduct of Japanese people, such as friendship and human feelings, which widely exist in social life.
Benedict has keenly captured the unique category of Japanese culture with her vision as a cultural anthropologist. She said that it is impossible to understand Japanese behavior without understanding "friendship", but it is difficult to accurately describe Japanese friendship. The Japanese themselves don't want to explain the meaning of "friendship" to westerners, and even their own dictionaries find it difficult to define the word. Benedict quoted a Japanese dictionary as saying that friendship is "the right way; The way people should follow; Do what you don't want to do to avoid criticism from the world. " (Chapter 7: Friendship is the hardest to accept, Business Edition) This explanation itself is difficult to understand. If the right path is an obligation forced by public opinion, it can be understood that the right path has been moralized by society, but how did it become a common psychological complex that is unwilling to do it, but it is the secret source of Japanese cultural characteristics.
Benedict compared the contractual relationship between kindness and negative kindness, accepting and returning kindness and economic behavior according to his own experience of western culture. Benedict said that the Japanese concept of "kindness" is similar to borrowing to pay off debts, but it is not happy, overdue and the interest increases. However, contract is a direct economic relationship between people, and people have the freedom to choose. Kindness and human feelings are ubiquitous social existence and become an escape compulsion. In Japanese culture, kindness and friendship have absolute moral significance, which is reflected in compulsive moral fashion, habits and behavior norms, and there are no unwilling and unwilling factors. This impermissible compulsion is precisely a psychological and moral self-contradiction.
2. "Soul and Mind"
As a scholar of cultural anthropology, Benedict naturally wants to understand the reasons behind these complex phenomena from a deeper background, but as a western cultural anthropologist, she does not fully understand the profoundness of Japanese cultural and historical origins. She doesn't understand that the incompatibility between China's great cultural consciousness and the integration of Japanese native culture is a fundamental reason for her own opposition in Japanese culture, which has caused all kinds of opposition in Japanese social form that outsiders can't understand, especially its sudden change.
As we know, Japan, as an island country, has few choices in the basic environment for survival, and its nationality and language are relatively single, so it lacks more creative conditions in culture. This kind of environment makes people have a strong sense of identity in their own survival and interpersonal relationships, so the Japanese attach importance to the local natural environment and can form a close hierarchical society. However, these innate factors are not shown by history itself, but directly precipitated from the primitive consciousness of nature worship as a kind of social psychological emotion: "the past." Not only that, the kindness they owe is not only for the past, but also for the present, and they increase their own kindness in their daily contact with others. Their daily will and behavior are derived from this sense of gratitude, which is the basic starting point. " (Chapter V, benefactor of history and society) This primitive sense of existence has been constantly strengthened in social life in a concrete and formal way in the development of history. In Japanese culture, kindness and fraternity are intangible norms and norms, which have been embodied as social forms and personal behaviors. But the real problem is that this psychological and cultural form is integrated by a great culture from the Central Plains, which has internal contradictions of psychological and social reflexivity.
Japan is composed of a large number of small countries in history, and the process of political reunification is relatively slow. The input of China culture has brought a sense of cultural unity. However, due to the inconsistency of the local origin of Japanese culture, the abstract spiritual quality of China culture has not been really digested by the Japanese, so when Japan introduced China culture, it lost the real historicity of China culture and the cultural spirit based on it. For example, after the Dahua Reform (645), Japan established a centralized country with the emperor as the absolute monarch, but Japan's feudal political system is essentially different from the real imperial bureaucracy in the Central Plains. There are important cultural differences between the emperors transported by Fengtian and those regarded as descendants of God. The former is supported by the consciousness of cultural unity, so the change of an emperor or dynasty will not affect the cultural unity of super-family and super-nation. This unity is the soul of culture, while the Emperor of Eternal Family is based on the unity of natural history, which has the same natural origin significance as Shinto, a local religion in Japan. Before the Meiji Restoration (1868), Shintoism, a native religion in Japan, was only a folk belief. However, in the Meiji Restoration, Shintoism was regarded as the state religion, and the emperor's bloodline theory could keep pace, which was due to their natural identity. This kind of identity is not the same as cultural integration. The long-term effective existence of shogunate politics under the pre-Meiji rule also shows that there is no central value concept behind Japan's political structure. In contrast, although there have been many political divisions in the history of China, the consciousness of cultural unity and cultural assimilation has always been the central value and driving force to overcome division and move towards unity. Some Japanese people often hide a sense of pride and superiority in their own culture, but they don't understand that this great cultural consciousness comes from the Central Plains culture. The dream of "Greater East Asia Glory Circle" will not be born from the soil of the island country. The island country has a strong sense of its own survival, and it will only be a pirate-like plunder, without Confucian tolerance and self-control, and without political appeasement. The essence of the distinction between China and China in history is the progressive difference in cultural sense, not the political boundary or discrimination. For example, "Confucius said: It is better to die in the summer than to have a gentleman." (The Analects of Confucius Bashu) emphasizes the idea that the etiquette culture of human society is higher than its political system structure, "Zi wants to live in Jiuyi. ..... where the gentleman lives, why not! " (The Analects of Confucius Zi Han) Confucius said: Be respectful to people, be respectful to deacons, and be loyal to people; Although it is destroyed, it cannot be abandoned. "(The Analects of Lutz) refers to the persistence and spread of progressive culture, rather than political aggression and occupation by force or discrimination. China's cultural and economic relations with neighboring countries have been basically handled with this cultural concept in past dynasties. Even in the Han, Tang and Song dynasties, where the national strength was very strong, there was no idea of actively annexing countries in East Asia, South Asia and Central Asia by force. It is the main national policy to unify foreign countries and spread civilization by cultural means. The combination of the ideal of China's great culture and Japanese native culture promoted the historical progress of Japanese culture, but the essence of China's traditional culture could not be accepted by Japanese culture, resulting in narrow expansion ambitions and foreign aggression in modern Japanese history.