by Chōkōdō Shujin

Aug 13, 2024

Chōkōdō Shujin emphasizes the critical need to distinguish true honor from false pride in today’s world, where they are frequently mistaken for one another.

There is nothing more easily misunderstood than the confusion between a sense of honor and a sense of false pride, especially in this modern era of decadent “self-esteem.” And there is nothing more necessary than to distinguish between the two; indeed, it could be said that distinguishing between the two is at least half the wisdom of life. A sense of honor is often misunderstood as false pride, but it is also very easy to change the honorific mind, that is, true pride, into false pride, or vanity. To distinguish between the two in each case, one must naturally be possessed of a good eye.

No matter how strenuous one is in the face of life, the true stoic will never renounce his desire for honor. He will never relinquish his dignity. Rather, the stoic is the one who distinguishes between honor and vanity, and is not tempted by the latter. If one cannot distinguish between the two, claiming stoicism is nothing more than a false pretense. The spirit of false pride is always about society. Honor, on the other hand, is about the self, that is, the individual. Contrary to vain pride, which is worldly, honor is self-reflection regarding one’s own dignity. As Yukio Mishima writes in The Way of the Samurai, “Dignity is the outward manifestation of inviolable self-respect; it is what makes a man a man. It is the firm belief that one would rather die than be despised by others. And the expression of such an attitude in social conduct inevitably causes people to keep their distance.” Modern false pride, having found no cause worth dying for, detests dignity. The writer Saneatsu Mushanokōji, a famously individualistic thinker, expresses a similar sentiment in That Which Conquers Death, “Sometimes we die even though we do not want to die, because we value honor. It is a shame to be alive. Death at such times also reveals the purity and beauty of a person’s heart.”

Every stoic is essentially an individualist. If his stoicism is based on a self-conception of his own dignity, he is an individualist in the positive sense of the word, and if it is a form of falsehood, he is only an individualist in the negative sense. Both the value and limits of stoicism lie in the fact that it is essentially individualistic. Stoicism controls the passions that belong to the self by seeing them as natural objects that have nothing to do with the self, but by doing so, it also establishes an abstract thing called the “self,” or the “personality.” The passion for this abstraction is the essence of this particular morality.

The sense of honor is inseparable from the sense of individuality. One cannot exist without the other. The reason that only human beings have a sense of honor is related to the fact that human beings have a far greater differentiation of personality than animals do. The sense of honor is very much a component of the individual consciousness. The desire to be an individual perhaps is the deepest and highest sense of honor that can be manifested in man. A man without honor is a lowly one, indeed, and it is a shame that such men are rarely despised these days. Honor is traditionally a masculine value, and in this excessively feminine, collectivist society, it is instead the individual who is scorned. In such a perverse era, one could easily make the argument that there is no shame in being despised by such volitionless people; rather, it is they who are shameful.

“Belief is resolution. Resolution must be tested daily over many years,” writes Mishima. “In other words, one must nurture major beliefs in one’s daily life so that at the moment of decision to act they may be carried out effortlessly, spontaneously. Minor beliefs are the philosophy that governs the trivia of day-to-day existence.” It may be said that the sense of honor, like the sense of false pride, is oriented towards society. But even so, in the case of false pride, the other person is the “world,” or more precisely, the “person” who is neither A nor B, but at the same time both A and B, the anonymous “person,” whereas in the sense of honor, the other person is A or B, where each person is an individual who has not lost his own identity. In other words, it is a society in which each person retains his individuality. The spirit of false pride is essentially an anonyme — that is, it is faceless. When man becomes a prisoner of his own vanity, he always loses his sense of self as well as his sense of individuality. By taking an anonymous “person” as his object, he becomes an anonyme himself, and returns to nothingness. In the honorific mind, however, man must stand by his own self and his own independence, as long as he remains truly in his honorific mind without allowing it to be transformed into a sense of false pride.

More than anything else, man imitates out of vanity, and gives himself over to fads. Fads, too, are an anonyme. Therefore, the thing that those with a sense of honor hate the most is the imitation of trends. Honor is all about fighting against anonymity. In terms of development, perhaps a man’s sense of honor arose when he ceased crawling on all fours. The fact that man began to walk upright was the first and greatest act of his sense of honor. By standing upright, man became an abstract being. Then came to him the hand, the most abstract of all organs, which at the same time made it possible for him to think abstractly, and so on — and all of this is about passion for the abstract.

“Although love, hatred, and conflict have recurred endlessly in the history of the world of mankind, there is no other history than the history of human beings,” Yojūrō Yasuda writes in The Meaning of a Good Day. “But it is precisely because, in addition to such history, there was also the history of the supreme good that was accumulated from generation to generation that today, in the age of the most primitive, we are able to learn about the history of the human race. That is where history should be. There is the history of humanity, that this country, our soil and our villages are the scenery of our ancestors’ good deeds.” Honor is an abstract concept, after all, something that can be understood without being seen or touched.

The criteria for a man’s honor is whether or not he has a passion for the abstract. Thus, many things in the world that are said to be the result of a sense of honor are in fact based on a sense of vanity and false pride. Human beings, who have become abstract beings, are no longer able to live in direct fusion with the environment, but rather must live in isolation from the environment and by fighting in opposition to it. Be it in human relationships, the social order, or politics, it seems that the natural order of things is being subverted at every turn. It is the duty of the stoic to preserve honor and tradition. The spirit of honor is the heart of a warrior in every sense of the word. This is related to the fact that in both chivalry and bushido, honor was considered a fundamental virtue.

Name, itself, is an abstract thing. If it were not an abstract thing, there would be no sense of honor, but only a sense of false pride. Nowadays, public reputation is an anonyme. Therefore, concern for one’s reputation is not a matter of honor, but of vanity. Anonymity is not the same as abstraction. It is of the utmost importance to distinguish between the two. All honorific minds are in some way concerned with the eternal. Eternity is an abstraction. It is something that we can never entirely grasp. For example, when we speak of regretting one’s name, the name is a sense of personal dignity, and moreover, it is associated with eternity as an abstraction. The spirit of eminence is, therefore, the most temporal of temporal things. It is through the passion for the abstract that the consciousness of the individual, the most real thing, is established — this is the secret of human existence. Humanity, in other words, is an abstraction. Without a passion for this abstract thing called humanity, a man cannot become a true individual.

In the abstraction of our sense of honor lies its truth as well as its falsehood. He who is destroyed by his sense of honor is destroyed by abstraction, and it is inherent in man that he can be destroyed by abstraction, and this is the reason for his sense of honor. The sense of honor is inseparable from the sense of self, which in this case is an abstraction. Therefore, the sense of honor is not confined to the self, but is always directed outward, into society. Therein lies the contradiction of the sense of honor.

Honor is not about the anonymous society. It is, however, still dealing with the abstract A, the abstract B, that is, the abstract society. The secret of religion lies in the fact that abstract things such as eternity and humanity are the most concrete things there. Religion is what clarifies the limits of our sense of honor. Even though the sense of honor is an abstract thing, in the past society was not as abstract as today’s society, and therefore the sense of honor was still the foundation of it. However, as society has become more abstract, the sense of honor has also become more abstract. In traditional society, the abstract passion of honor was seen as nothing if not a great virtue. In the abstract society of the modern era, such a sense of honor has been reduced to its barest essentials, and the distinction between false pride and honor has become perilously difficult to discern. It is, then, the most sincere duty of the traditionalist to sharpen his eye for such discernment.