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Hi everyone, and welcome back to 【Let's Philosophize】.欢迎回来《知乎哲也》, and welcome back to the studio TJ.

Hi，Lulu. Thanks for having me.

So what are we going to talk about today？

Well, I was thinking last time we talked a lot about the meaning of life, different theories about the meaning of life. I thought this time we could talk a little bit of a Ikigai(生き甲斐) by Ken Mogi.

Yeah，it's a Japanese concept，isn't it？

Right. Maybe you know more than me about Ikigai. This is my first experience of it. But it's interesting to see the way another culture, it's approaching the same kind of questions we were talking about last time in terms of what meaning is in life, and how we can understand the way that we behave in our lives.

Yeah. So first of all，for our listeners，if they've never heard of this idea，Ikigai is from Japanese; and iki- means living or life, and then -gai is the reason or the meaning. So it's a Japanese concept meaning a reason for being就是生命的价值或者活着的价值.

I don't know about the book that you've actually read，because I don't believe I've read that one. But based on what I know about，Ikigai is the four circles, so you have what we love，what we are good at, and what the world needs, and what we can be paid for; and the four circles in the middle will be Ikigai.

图片

If you meet all the four circles，you can find your meaning of life, so to speak reason for being.

Yeah, I've seen that picture as well, it’s usually rendered in like very beautiful colors.

I think the thing that attracted to me to this book because there's a million books claiming to try and help you understand your life. But this Ken Mogi is very，very popular in Japan. He's a neuroscientist at the University of Tokyo. He's authored 100 books. He seems like he's got a real interesting mind, it's not just writing to try and sell a book. It seems like he spent his life really trying to understand meaning in life and maybe it's interesting to think of it from another culture's perspective，but also from a scientific perspective too，right？He really understands how our minds work...

Yeah.

...in a practical kind of sense.

I would say this is quite surprising. I would think that you would say he's a philosopher， he's actually from a science background, neural science.

He's a scientist, and I think science is quite new. It was only in the 1800s that we started to use this word scientist.

For a very，very long time, Science was just called natural philosophy, and it was just part of philosophy. So like Aristotle and people like that, Francis Bacon，they didn't see a division between science and philosophy.

I don't see a distinction there either, they should complement each other, I think.

Both would require logical minds.

Sometimes, I do also think that emotion is important in philosophy as well，but that we can only do another podcast on that.

Exactly. So tell us about this Ken Mogi's book of Ikigai，what's his angle？

He divides Ikigai into five parts, he tries to make it very，very clear. So the book I would say if the listeners want to read something in English，but they find it a bit difficult, this is a very good book to start with because it's really straightforward English.

Like easy read.

Yeah, really, really easy read. I read it in like an afternoon，just very，very quickly. And he really tries to make this part of life. So he's talking about the details of the meaning of life, and he's talking about anecdotes and how to do it.

It's not very abstract or theoretical. It's very down to earth, and I think that was the main thing that attracted to me. So he divides it into five pillars.

Five pillars.

So like a pillar is like the holds of a building, or five foundational principles I guess you could call them. So I was thinking that we could talk about them，maybe talk about some examples in the books, and also just about your life or my life, and the way that we understand these kind of ideas.

Sounds fantastic. You already got me hooked. So I'm curious to know about these five pillars.

I guess we'll just start with number one. He says that there's no order that you could start with any of them. And then，they're all interconnected, but we may as well start with the one that he does first，right, that's “starting small”, that we do something well because of a personal standard that we have, and that we pay attention to each step of the process. And he uses a Japanese word here “Kodawari”.

Oh, 【こだわり】 Kodawari , I think it's like a precision, 有点像中文里面 “精益求精”的这种感觉.

So pursuing perfection in the smallest details.

Right. If all the details are perfect，I guess the big thing will be perfect too. I guess this is the idea that we start from having something good at the foundation. There's a western writer who is very popular at the moment called Jordan Peterson，and he always tells people to clean their room. And this is the same idea，I think you start from the basic if you have a clean room then...

You have a clear mind.

Exactly, and you can work and you can find the books you need to write your essay, or you can find the ingredients you need to make food for your family.

You know what you can see traits of that in the entire Japanese culture. That's why Japanese they have the world's most famous decluttering experts，就这种收纳专家什么的，清理屋子整理屋子的这些专家, they're usually Japanese. I think it's the same vein，isn't it？It's the same idea of paying attention to small details to sort of clear your life.

Yeah, it's incredible the social rules and things like that. I've never been to Japan，but when I studied in Beijing，my class and my dormitory were all full of Japanese people, I quickly realized how every single word that they used was carefully chosen, that when they say good morning to different people，they would say good morning a different way for each person，depending on if they were older or younger，if they were a boy or a girl, and all of these different considerations.

And it was very，very careful and very，very detailed，whereas I would just wave at the whole class and say hi.

It is definitely a cultural trait. But how does that appeal to you？I mean how does that particular “starting small”, this first pillar, how does that work in your life？

Yeah, in my personal life，I think it's something that I've learned from living in China and being around Chinese people. I think Chinese people also have this ability to enjoy things. There's a tendency in the UK to just focus on results or the big things，right？Your house or your car or your... and some Chinese people do that too，but a lot of the Chinese people I knew would really enjoy going shopping. They would spend a lot of time looking at each individual apple and deciding which apple they want to eat. This was not a chore，right？This was something that they enjoyed, just like I would enjoy picking something else like maybe a video game when I was a child going to the store, and picking a video game would be enjoyable, but being able to find that in... especially food, so over the past couple of years，when I've been back in the UK, I've been making food for my dad every night. At first this seemed like a very hard task.

A chore.

Yeah，because he's getting older, and I want to make him healthy food，not just something from a can，so I buy all these fresh vegetables, I have to chop them up and spend a long time doing everything carefully.

At first, I really wouldn't like this. But over time you kind of start to think of this like a dance，something that you do，right？You have this choreography and you move around

Yeah, choreographed dance.

And start to appreciate it. Now often when I come home，I think I enjoy going into the kitchen because I know nobody can annoy me. I can just be alone with the food. It's become something that I enjoy.

Yeah, I totally understand about the cooking was just to feel every ingredient and to really communicate with that. To me, that is how I feel alive and that is also a healing process for me, that's how I always see it.

Yeah, so this also reminds me we've been talking a little bit about being in China and Chinese people. I think this reminds me of that quote from the《道德经》, this journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step.

千里之行始于足下。

Yeah, instead of looking at the thousand miles, looking at that individual step, if you can enjoy each step, then you will enjoy the journey. But if you think about the whole journey, then you will probably be very, very sad every time you take a step, right?

Yeah.

But if you just look around at the leaves, it says autumn now in both here and in China. And if you just enjoy the leaves flying around, then very quickly you find you got to where you want to go, you know.

What about you? Lulu you must have something small that you enjoy in your life.

Yeah, recently I've started to knit and crochet.

So knitting is one of those things, it seems very, very small. Each time I use the needle to knit, that for me, it's something that's very down to earth. It's something that I…It's one particular detail that I pay attention to.

I see. That's um… something that my grandma used to do a lot.

I know, it's very much an old lady hobby, I know.

Yeah, I'm glad someone keeps it alive, you know, someone has to do it, who will make the socks for the children.

Exactly.

So that's the first pillar, what about the second?

The second, he calls this “releasing yourself”, and this sometimes sounds a little bit like going to a party, releasing yourself. But when he talks about it, he's talking about letting go of your ego, so the example uses in the book is living in a Buddhist temple and you let go of your identity.

So you're not focused on yourself, you're just focused on what you're doing. So he says you shave your head, you wear the same clothes, you do the same things every day. There's no way to be special in a temple, just have to focus on what is in your life.

有点像放下世俗所有的这些包袱，放空的感觉。

So basically all of the attachment, all of the attacks, the labels you get rid of.

Right, right, and I think that is something that …that people learn, I know that my friends tell me that this is something that they learn when they have children, but I've only had the experience of having a puppy in my house and the puppy, again, he doesn't care how much money you have, he doesn't care about anything, he only cares about…

Playing

If you play with him, right, if you play with him, if he has food, if he needs a toilet, basically he only cares about that.

Yeah, I sometimes think, you know that I'm a pet owner myself, so I truly think pets keep you humble, because they really don't care about your achievement, they don't care if you live in a big house or a small hut, their view of the world is very different, isn't it?

Right, and that means that you kind of have to let go of something, you have to let go, you can't say to your dog，you can't say do you know how busy I've been today, do you know what university I went to, because he will never understand, right?

Exactly.

Yeah, I think that's a good example, right?

Is there anything in philosophy that is attached to that kind of feeling to letting go of all of these attachments, your ego?

So there's a lot of the early 20th century psychologists like Eric Fromm(弗洛姆思想的特色便是调和佛洛伊德的精神分析学跟马斯洛的人本主义学说), for example, and they have this idea that we really have to overcome our ego and that is really what it is to grow, so that you have this opposition between an ego bound man who is structured by the principle of having something and getting something. And the freedom is to overcome this eccentricity.

Of course this kind of idea has been in eastern philosophy for a very, very, very long time in China, India, and Japan. It's something that becoming more and more popular in the west, that idea that we need to restructure the way that we view ourselves.

Just stop being so egocentric, I do like what you're saying about these ego-bound men only whose existence is structured by the principle of having.

So you're defined by how much money you have, how many possessions you have, but that shouldn't be the things that define you. Ultimately, if you're bound by those, you will never really get freedom.

Right, right.

In today’s 【Let’s Philosophize】 TJ and I talked about “Ikigai”, or the Japanese philosophy about “meaning of life”.

Have you ever heard of this concept? Leave us a comment in the comment section, we’re gonna continue with this topic in our next episode of Let’s Philosophize. We’ll see you next time.