On Custom and Fads

by Chōkōdō Shujin

Chōkōdō Shujin argues that custom is the living form of life, shaped by individual actions and environmental responses, distinguishing it from the formless, transient nature of fads.

In a sense, custom is everything in life. In other words, every living thing has a form, and life is a form, but a custom has a form because of what it does. Of course, a custom is not simply a spatial form. The simple spatial form is dead. Custom, on the contrary, is a living form, and as such, it is not simply spatial, but at the same time it is temporal. A life-like form emerges when something that moves in time simultaneously stops in space. Custom is not mechanical, but vital. It is related to the essential inner action of life, which is to create form.

Customs are usually thought to arise from the reversal of the same action. However, it is essential to note that no two human actions are exactly alike. Each act is always accidental. Because our actions are accidental and free, customs are formed. Customs are not the physical result of the reversal of the same thing. What is definite comes from what is indefinite. Customs come about because individual actions are accidental, and customs are statistical regularities of many accidental actions. Insofar as the laws of nature are also statistical in nature, customs can be said to be natural. Just as customs can be considered natural, so custom is habit. However, when we speak of custom, nature must be seen in a tangible form.

Imitation and custom are in some ways opposites and in some ways one. Imitation is said to be the cause of fads, especially as the imitation of something external and new. Custom is traditional as opposed to fad, and what breaks custom is a fad. Nothing can break a custom more easily than a fad. But a custom is itself an imitation. It is an imitation of something internal, of something old. Where the self imitates the self, a custom is created. If fad is the horizontal imitation, custom is a vertical imitation. As custom is already an imitation, one of our actions must be independent of other actions, as if it were external to them. It is a mistake to think of customs as simply continuous. Custom arises when what is discontinuous is at the same time continuous and what is continuous is at the same time discontinuous. In other words, customs manifest the laws of life.

Like custom, fashion is a form of life. Life is a formative action, and imitation is one fundamental method of formative action. The fact that life is a formative action means that it is an education. The significance of imitation for education has often been discussed in the past. In doing so, it is important to consider that a custom is an imitation, and also to consider how a fad, as an imitation, can have great educational value.

Just as fads are defined by their environment, customs are defined by their environment. Customs arise as a working response to the environment of the subject. However, whereas in fashions the subject is more passive in relation to its environment, in customs it is more active. This power of custom is the power of form. But a fad can break a custom because the form of the custom is an apologetic one, arising from the relation between the subject and the environment. This power of a fad is based on the fact that it is in opposition to custom. Fads are characteristic of man, who is said to have the greatest capacity for response. It can be said that fads are intellectual in nature, whereas customs are natural.

A custom is an imitation of the self by the self, an adaptation of the self to the self, and at the same time an adaptation of the self to the environment. Fashions arise from the response of the self to its environment as an imitation of the environment, but fashions are also an imitation of the self by the self. We follow fads because there is something about them that appeals to us. However, while fads are unstable in form, and fads are said to be formless, customs are stable in form. The fact that a custom is stable in form, however, means that it is a technology. The form comes technically. However, fads lack this kind of technological activity.

It is said that it is not reason but other passions that can dominate an idea. In fact, however, it is custom that can dominate an emotion. Where is the power of the passions, so that it is not reason but other passions that can dominate the passions? It is not simply in the passions, but rather in the custom of the passions. Without being formed by custom, the passions have no power. One custom is broken by creating another custom. It is not reason that can dominate a custom, but another custom. In other words, what can truly overcome one form is another form. A fad is only an unstable force until it becomes a custom. Emotions are formless in themselves, and this is also why they are powerless against customs. The domination of one passion over another is based on the power of order created by the addition of the intellect. The passions, as formless, are considered natural. The domination of form over passion is the domination of mind over nature. Custom is not only natural in form, it is already spiritual.

It is the modern mechanical enlightenment that says that form can only be represented in spatial form, and thus in material form. Rather, the spirit is the form. Classical Greek philosophy believed that matter is an indefinite material and spirit is a form. Modern philosophy of life, on the contrary, regards spiritual life itself as an unlimited flow. In this respect, philosophy of life is also influenced by the modern mechanical conception of form. However, Greek philosophy, which considered the spirit to be a form, represented the form almost spatially. The traditional culture of the East can be said to be a culture of custom. Just as customs are natural, the basis of Eastern culture is a certain nature. And just as customs are not simply natural, but cultural, the nature of the East also has the meaning of culture. In contrast to the culturalist West, where form is represented spatially, the naturalistic Eastern culture has instead pursued a truly spiritual form. But can a form be purely spiritual if it is already a form? Just as a custom is seen as nature, a spiritual form must also have a natural meaning. Custom is neither a simple spirit nor a simple body, but a concrete internal law of life. Custom is something natural that can be found even in purely spiritual activities.

I don’t know if Hume’s explanation of the category of thought in terms of habit is as laughable as modern epistemology would have us believe. I don’t know if there is a more appropriate way to explain a category of thought than by explaining it in terms of custom, if we want to think about its ontological meaning instead of its merely logical meaning. In this case, however, it is necessary to avoid the mechanical viewpoint that assumes that customs are simply the result of experience. Experience theory is mistaken because it is a mechanical theory. The overthrow of experience is always inadequate to explain the essence of custom. Even if a stone were thrown a million times in the same direction and at the same speed, it would not form a custom because of it; customs are an internal tendency of life. The theory of prior experience, which opposes the theory of experience, usually equates experience with the senses, which is not influenced by custom. Is there any "content" of knowledge that is not influenced by custom, which appears as an effect of the action that arouses the senses? Custom also acts in thought.

The morality and authority of custom as a social practice does not depend solely on its social nature, but rather on its form as an expression. Any form always has a transcendent meaning. The essential action of life, which is to form, shows the transcendent tendency inherent in life. But to form is at the same time life’s denial of itself. Life lives by form and dies in form. Life lives by custom and dies in custom. Death is the extremity of habit.

He who is free to practice his customs can do many things in life. Customs can be free because they are technical. Most customs are unconscious techniques, but morality lies in consciously freeing them technically. Cultivation is such a technique. If customs were merely natural, they could not be moral. It is important to understand that all morality is technical. Custom is the thing closest to us, the means within our power. Just as habit is technology, all technology can be truly technology by becoming customary. No genius can accomplish anything except through habit.

Traditionally, cultivation was a method of moral formation in the societies of the age of tools. The society of this age was organic and limited. Today, however, the tool age has given way to the machine age, and the environment in which we live has changed completely. For this reason, cultivation alone is no longer sufficient in morality. Just as machine technology relies less on custom and more on knowledge than tool technology, so knowledge has become particularly important in morality today. But it must also be noted that morality cannot leave the organic body, and that custom also works in the intellect.

Decadence is not an indefinite meaning of the passions. Decadence is a special habit of the passions. The root of decadence lies in the fact that human behavior is technical. Decadence arises from the fact that passion becomes customary and technical. The explosion of natural passion is rather the breaking of custom, which is the opposite of decadence. Does not every custom have a whiff of decadence? We die by custom because custom becomes decadence, not because it is quiet. By custom we become free, and by custom we are bound. But the remarkable thing about custom is not that it binds us, but that it contains decadence within it.

The moralists are always talking about how many strange customs there are in the world. That shows how easy it is for customs to fall into decadence. Just as there are many strange arts, there are many strange customs. But this also shows that customs, like art, are subject to conceptual power. In contrast to customs, fads are viewed as more intelligent. There is no similar decadence in fads, it is often argued. Therein lies the vital value of fads. However, when a fad itself becomes a decadence, that is the most frightening thing. A fad is unstable because it has no deeper form to support it. Because a fad is directly connected to emptiness, its decadence has no limit.