Yukio Mishima - The Philosophy of Sun and Steel

a great deal of the world's mystical Traditions focuses on the ecstatic that is to say the experience of ecstasy in which the inner pure and true self is catapulted out of the physical existence of the bodily generally taken to be somehow illusory to an immediate experience of Ultimate Reality that term ecstasy ecstatic is from the ancient Greek meaning something like to stand outside of specifically the illusion of sensation the physical world and the temporal embodied existence more generally certainly this experience of ecstasy characterizes a great deal probably the Lion's Share of the world's mystical traditions and the Technologies to achieve this state are frankly as varied as The Human Experience itself however in what may be a truly occult a hidden subcurrent of mystical theory and practice or mysticisms of radical embodiment anti-extasis mysticisms which reject the Flight of the soul to some Eternal Unity the dejection of the physicality is somehow lesser than in the search for the Absolute Elsewhere anywhere other than the pure corporality of Flesh muscle and Bone one of the most radical articulations of such a mystical encounter with the absolute through pure embodiment was articulated by one of the greatest writers of the 20th century Yukio Mishima in his 1968 essay sun and steel Toyota tetsu Mishima would expound on this encounter with the absolute through the careful cultivation of his physical body through weight lifting its fruition and the tragic ideal of communal erotic suffering and the necessity of death as the culmination of the height of this aesthetic mystical experience of course viewing his own essay in light of his death through ritual suicide following a failed coup attempt only two years after the publication of the essay only further deepened and reveals its profound gravity as a statement of mishima's commitments to those very ideals ideals which remain foreign controversial even shocking today over 50 years later if you're interested in the history of mysticism or the academic study of the occult make sure to subscribe and check out my other topics on content and esotericism also if you want to support this work of providing accessible scholarly and free content on topics and as a terrorism here for free on YouTube actually in a place where you can find very little reliable content like this I'd hope you consider supporting my work on patreon with a one-time donation with the super thanks option you can find below the video or with some merch that you can find over at the store tab on the channel but now let's turn to one of the most radically anti-extatic philosophies of mysticism the mysticism of muscle and Yukio mishima's son and steel I'm Justin Sledge and welcome to esoterica where we explore the Arcane in history philosophy and religion [Music] [Music] thank you now to be sure this episode is not going to be an introduction to the life and works of Yukio Mishima this channel just isn't an introductory level channel in general but I've included a link in the description to a really wonderful BBC documentary if you want a more full introduction to the life and works of Mishima but needless to say he was among the most important Japanese writers of the post-war period he very nearly won the Nobel Prize on several occasions and his works are marked by A peculiar even Eerie uncanny aesthetic in which Beauty eroticism and death are seamlessly mingled in a style marked by metaphor and obscurity I'm even told that in the original Japanese works his language is marked by the use of extremely obscure kanji even requiring printers to cut and you type in some cases with Mishima rejecting the popular realism of his day for a more quasi medieval mythological feel and it is as a writer and a writer in the fullest sense of that word that we encounter Mishima toward the end of his life in his 1968 essay sun and steel sun and iron I think more literally the essay is like Mishima difficult to categorize it's part autobiography part philosophical speculation it's something that he calls confidential criticism but it is certainly the greatest insight into the underlying philosophical and spiritual issues in their complex interactions through mishima's life and ultimately through his death that proved to be the inner engine that drove both his literary production but also his physical development as a bodybuilder a martial artist and even even an amateur Soldier son and still is often a difficult text precisely because of what makes it so very important it's just so wrapped up in Michigan's biography that teasing out anything like a continuous argument is profoundly difficult Mishima was a novelist primarily not a philosopher and life just doesn't take the form of philosophical argumentation and certainly a life is complex as mishima's isn't going to be linear and uncomplicated but sun and still begins in mishima's first memories of experience itself experiences which he admits are highly idiosyncratic to himself unlike most of us most people for whom experience comes first only to be followed much later by words for Mishima it was the world of words that came first with physical experience being a distant second his embodied physicality very much appeared after his encounter with words and at least at first it was a deeply a deeply unwanted encounter Mishima like most intellectuals took the physical body to be just a kind of impediment to the Mind something to be escaped maybe even something to be loathed in the court of classic platonic tradition thus the admittedly frail and even sickly Mishima took refuge in the world of ideas and Words which he links with the night physical weakness and power pale skin thus issuing physicality and embodiment which he links with the sun he recalls with profound confusion the sight of men carrying portable Shinto shrines through the streets bearing the physical weight and an almost rhythmic dance their eyes locked in Rapture at the blue sky above them this contrast was to the physically weak the isolated the nocturnal Mishima who could only appreciate the same blue sky but mediate always through words a barrier which might describe that sky but it could never really experience it though even as a young person it seems that Mishima had a sense that the world of ideas and especially words provided him with a means of expression but it also again barred the door to experience itself perhaps worse than that words he likened to tiny white ants which gnaw away at experience that words themselves had a kind of acidic corrosive impact on experience such that the very Act of description in literature the thing that he was good at was destructive of that experience that literary mediation was the ultimate annihilation of experience itself for an intellectual a writer or a philosopher of such Intuition or better Revelation was this Revelation was extremely concerning we often conceive of art such as literature and especially poetry as capturing something profoundly true in The Human Experience but what if the opposite were the case that's mishima's anxiety what if art especially the literary Arts only sunk us further further into alienation worse Mission began to suspect that the intellectual priority of the nocturnal the dejection of the physical body and the reveling in the intellectual world of metaphor and abstraction was just a kind of spiritual sickness that manifested in the body that the power the flabby flesh the hunched posture and physical physical weakness he saw in himself and other nocturnal intellectuals were all symptoms of metaphysical illness whereby the white ants of words had been allowed to consume experience itself ironically ironically under the guise of Art and Truth but a writer he was and a damned good one and so this Paradox dwelled within the young Mishima that is until his first true encounter with the Sun aboard a photon drenched ship in Greece in 1952 Mishima now in his late 20s made what he called his hands Shake of reconciliation with the sun and he like many struck by an existential Paradox pendulated wildly shifted in his experience with the white ants of words and the embodied physicality of the world of the Sun as he called it he became a member of another race this may be a reference to author rambone from a season in hell he embraced that very physicality the Sun tanning him and thus making him no longer part of the nocturnal world of mere words but what did the turn to the Sun mean in terms of actual experience well for him it could mean one thing and one thing only as the nocturnal night of words was the cultivation of the abstract the immaterial Mind through disaction as words the world of the sun on the other hand must be the cultivation of the concrete material world of the body in action through steel the culmination of the nocturnal world was the literary production the form of which Mishima felt that he had basically solidified through his specific style but he found the initial culmination of the world of the Sun there in photon drenched Greece as well and the statues of the classical Greeks he witnessed the physique physical physique which was the expression of the world of pure action the World of Heroes with bulging muscles that had no need of words whatsoever but upon which the most beautiful words in all of history had been heat in epic poetry it was the physical form of the classical hero that represented the apex of the world of the Sun a wordless physicality born through the experience of muscle and steel and not mind and words and in the cultivation of the solar form of physical muscularity with no mediation through words or thought Mishima began to seek the absolute of experience and the experience of the absolute this is truly a mysticism of muscle thus just as ordinly as he cultivated himself as a writer he threw himself into the world of weightlifting and the martial arts and it was specifically in the realm of the martial arts especially the Japanese art of fencing or Kendo that he first perceived at the cultivation of the physical body as a means by which to encounter the absolute that entailed a further Paradox a deeper Paradox still the work of literature could describe Beauty and even pretend to a kind of faux Beauty a pseudo Beauty itself but it had the advantage of endearing eternally at least in some sense but this eternal faux beauty of words could only describe but never experience it was by definition an abstraction which really served to distance the intellectual from the experience of beauty all the while luring them into believing that this alienation was actually itself Beauty and beautiful as Mishima points out the eternally beautiful flower must by definition it must by definition be artificial anything Eternal must be artificial the Eternal world of word and thought could long endure but only because of its fundamental unreality here just how radically anti-platonic this is and this is a point that mishma himself drives home on several occasions however the perfected body cultivated by Sun and steel could only have the most precarious temporal kind of existence its ontology was marked by always just barely coming to be and existing only in those moments beyond all contemplation or interiority the moment you realized it was there it was gone much less verbal expression it was the experience of in fleshed muscularity as apophasis thus the Apex solar muscular physique appeared in those rare moments when the Steeler action born of that steel so purified it that thought itself became impossible thus in the Split Second moments when the shout emerged from the gut in the Kendo Chennai the fencing sword split the air when thought was exactly impossible or when the body groaned under the agony of the steel being lifted against gravities insistence otherwise only in those briefest metaphysical infinitesimals could the solar experience of the absolute be had but there was a catch still the impending and certain deterioration the deteriorating quality of the body the the body's falling apart no matter the Embrace of sun and steel simply put the body was falling apart all the time and there would be a moment at which it could no longer be perfected and Mishima lamented that while modern Bourgeois society and that's the language he uses had allowed for the cultivation and even Perfection of the nocturnal world of words it had done so largely through a social piece which meant that a powerful foreclosure upon solar perfection was completed it was impossible at some level muscles were no longer really needed to defend your tribe or engage in Warfare and worst of all the physical Perfection of the embodiment was bereft of the only thing that could ensure its most perfect expression heroic death because the solar coming to be of the physique could only reach its apex in a very very narrow window in life and then it only just barely existed then it became Central for Mishima that the culmination of the solar experience of the absolute could only be culminated in a purely fatal autoeroticism of a certain kind that heroic death at the very peak of physical cultivation through sun and steel that alone gave the ultimate expression of the solar self while the nocturnal self-seeks eternality through ideation and words the solar self must undergo Annihilation through action and ultimately heroic death of course the encounter of sun and steel pre-figured that moment through the pain of physical training the imitation of fatal combat in the martial arts are actually just in eroticism more generally but avoiding that final culmination in physical annihilation okay for Mishima it was tantamount to betrayal and an Ultimate Surrender to the white ants of the words the nocturnal self abstracted away for fear of it the solar self-craved Annihilation and direct proportion to the beauty that they had cultivated precisely in their physique and in this Mishima began to reject what so many intellectuals simply take for granted for instance he rejected the priority of depth for cherishing what he called surface profundities literally the outermost layers of skin superficial Beauty the most superficial aspect of Beauty relishing in the beauty of the body he had built for himself modeling in magazines and even playing like Yakuza gangsters and movies and stuff he was clearly aware that this would appear completely comicals to Outsiders but of course non-heroes will always mock Heroes because they cannot or will not cultivate their own heroism they turn to the only Power they have resentment and mockery the strong admire the spectacular physiques and actions of themselves and others more importantly Achilles admired Hector but it's the weak that relish and the sad passions that Spinoza had it of mere verbal disdain and yes if you're hearing some Nietzsche and some batai at this point good for you you're on the philosophy train Mishima read both of them and admired them deeply so this is definitely infused with the kind of Battalion nietzsianism to be sure no matter what you think of that now you may think that given all this Mishima would just have abandoned his literary Pursuits altogether I mean he's part of the race of the solar people now well quite the contrary he simply took it that his role as a writer was just as much of truth about him as his development of his solar physique the important distinction was that he no longer relied on words for an experience of the absolute he could see the words for what they were thus he could just cultivate his literature simply for what it was in fact he argues that he's in all the better of a writer precisely because he no longer needed needed to dwell within the nocturnal world of words or rely on them for anything other than what they were good for descriptions of beauty not Beauty itself unlike the tendency toward realism which dominated the authors around him mishima's own work maintained and even reveles in a kind of dreamlike quality more akin to the no theater in fact he wrote plays for the very ancient no theater of Japan and the world of medieval Legends and myths that he could live and thrive in two such parallel and seemingly contradictory Worlds the nocturnal world of words and the solar world of muscle was possible at some level because he appealed to the very long-held Japanese tradition of Bunbury Odo are the harmony of pen and sword whereby martial and literary skill should be completely combined and harmonized in a true warrior this is part of the larger idea of Bushido as captured by texts like hagakore but this harmony was beset by the reality that Mishima himself was growing older and at the Apex of his literary and his physical development while pin soared night and day could find some temporary Harmony some detaunt the way of the warrior was ultimately still death or to dwell forever in an increasing Twilight necessary more and more distant from his solar perfection and Within These contemplations Mishima began to make his final set of realizations that the nocturnal world of words was bereft of yet another core element the group this is a very non-itchian point in fact The Cult of Knight centers on the individual genius on subjectivity and interiority it's a world saturated with individual pathos the focus of the individual on reinforcing that very alienation which forever removes them from the experience of the absolute at least according to Mishima thus turning to the solar the cultivation of the individual must be sublimated into the group whereby all individuality is utterly erased and it was the warrior band that Mishima thought had accomplished this role most historically again this is tied to his notion of tragic heroic death the Erasure of individuality in the shared suffering of carrying that Shinto Shrine again remember allowed the bearers of that Shrine to see the blueness of the sky that the weakling Mishima could only describe in words in fact nishima is part of the on-ramping to this experience would go on to carry just those shrines one wonders if he saw the Blue Sky he was hoping for but it would be in his martial training that he would reach the near Pinnacle the Pinnacle really in some sense of his solar existence he pulled some connections in the military and was actually allowed to undergo basic training under his birth name and apparently went unrecognized through the process by his peers the guys that were training for the military just didn't realize they were training with a near Nobel Prize winner for literature Mishima himself had been rejected from military service a mistaken diagnosis of consumption this is something that dogged him his whole life surprise surprise he had wanted to train for the special attack units which became known to history as as the Kamikaze but it was in those moments training and shared fatigue soaked through with cold rain blending into one corporate body through the physicality of marshall training that Mishima affords us his most impactful momentary word-free experiences of the absolute that language of the absolute that hegelian language that's his own usage indeed it was during his training in Flight in a Lockheed f-104 Starfighter jet that he records one of his only moments where his literary world of thought and the solar of world of action would meet an experience he describes how the cultivation of meditative thought needed to endure the G training for his flight was eventually coupled with that actual flight into the upper reaches of the sky more than 45 000 feet up at Mach 1.3 a world at the very limits the very limits of human survival it's ultimately ensconced on all sides by immediate death and it's there surrounded by life and death that the two worlds met in fact there in those Heights he perceived the experience as a Titanic snake consuming its own tail the image of the alchemical oral boros where opposites reconcile and night and day fused mental words and physical actions were unified for perhaps The Once and only moment of his short life hitherto son instills a work of mysticism I would argue a mysticism very nearly unique in the history of mysticism itself a mysticism which not only rejects words and thoughts which many mysticisms do that's just apathetic mysticism but it's what he Embraces it's one that Embraces radical physicality as cultivated by tremendous focus on the cultivation of the muscular physique it's a true mysticism of Flesh mishima's experience in the upper air while profoundly recorded in sun and steel we're clearly clearly not enough for him however even such a limit experience was not and could not be the culmination of Pure Solar embodiment Mishima transformed himself into a work of art his physical body became a work of art and like all works of art they must be curated to be properly exhibited and thus appreciated but this work of art was to prove truly ephemeral because remember on mishima's reasoning it must come to its aesthetic Apex precisely in annihilation like many others I suspect that mishima's attempted coup with members of his militia the tatanokai or Shield Society was him simply and very finely curating that very Annihilation that heroic death that he had searched out the Sun and night steal in words culminated in a final day whereby Yukio Mishima having neatly concluded the nocturnal words of issue of fertility tetralogy transformed himself into a solar headless God and a kephalos that despite the sounds of jeering soldiers and frankly botched attempt at seppuku reality just always impedes upon even the most careful curation in the end as I said mishima's sun and steel is a fascinating and frankly at times terrifying glimpse into not only the development of one of the most important literary figures of the 20th century but also an insight into a radical self-described anti-platonic mysticism whereby the absolute is experienced precisely and only through the development of embodiment and not just through embodiment but the deliberate cultivation of that embodiment through years of difficult and painful training only to have it culminate in its intentional Annihilation as pure aesthesis now I'm certainly not arguing that we should in any way emulate nishima but as he is appreciated in the world of literature I think sun and steel must come to be appreciated equally as a work of philosophy and as a work of mysticism in fact a work of mysticism that has very little in the way of parallels and in that way it's certainly just worthy of attention by Scholars and practitioners of mysticism so with all that said I'm gonna go uh it's deadlift day it's leg day around here so I'm gonna go do the right thing and not Skip Leg Day going to take this tie off and um I'm gonna go enjoy some sun and steal myself until next time I'm Justin Sledge and thank you for watching esoterica where we explore the Arcane in history philosophy and religion

Channel: ESOTERICA

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Length: 29min 22sec (1762 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 04 2023