E-Journal of Philosophy of Education:
International Yearbook of the Philosophy of Education Society of Japan, Vol. 1, 2016

First Cry and Dying Breath:
The Door to Transcendence in Education
Katsumi TOBINO
Ritsumeikan University
Abstract
This paper aims to present a single view on the best way to understand the problem of transcendence
in education by adopting a standpoint that regards “the human practice of care for life” as the essenceof education. Taking education as “the practice of care for life,” there exist two poles in life from which
the imputation of its basis and significance must, in principle, depart and to which it must return.
Namely, these are the moments at which each of us, as human beings, are born and then die,respectively, because they are events that transcend our intentions and plans. This paper focuses on
the first cry of a newly born baby and the final breath that accompanies our dying moment, unravelingissues that are involved with the problem of transcendence in education. To be precise, the discussion
is advanced with reference to the possibilities of life when the lessons of knowledge and the guidanceof technology have yet to be established and or when assistance and support are no longer possible,
either physically or psychologically. Education as “the practice of care for life” is, at its root, not an
intentional or planned desire that aims at the realization of a good life as an alternative to the here andnow. Education, in principle, rather than such a “desire” is something that manifests as a “response”
to the summons of a life that is born and passes away in the here and now, before our very eyes.
Education is our “prayer” of limitless devotion at the prospect of a life of hardships that has
transcended our intentions and plans. Transcendence in education is exclusive to the here and now; itis lived in and through the here and now.
Keywords
transcendence, baby’s first cry, the moment of death, the practice of care for life, education as prayer

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On a moonlit night, a button / was left on the strand line. /I picked it up: that it might be useful / hardly occurred to me. /Somehow I couldn’t bear to throw it away; / I tucked it into my sleeve. /On a moonlit night, a button / was dropped on the strand line. /I picked it up: that it might be useful /hardly occurred to me. /I couldn’t throw it at the moon; / I couldn’t throw it at the waves. /I tucked it into my sleeve. /On a moonlit night, the button I picked up /shook me to the fingerends, shook me tothe heart. /On a moonlit night, the button I picked up: / how could I throw it away?
Chūya Nakahara, “Beach on a Moonlit Night”(trans. Mackintosh and Sugiyama)1
1. The “here and now”
To begin, I would like to briefly clarify my own understanding of “an orientation
toward alternatives that are not possibilities in the here and now,” which is positioned asa starting point for the discussion in this symposium. Later, I will proceed to the problemof “transcendence,” which has been marked out to advance the discussion.
When I say “alternatives that are not possibilities in the here and now,” the “here andnow” to which I refer is not some given present moment or particular location. Rather, it
could be a viewpoint reflexively and selectively adopted in view of the ongoingeducational event. By relying on this viewpoint, we consider an instance of education inorder to imbue it with meaning. While the way in which we perceive education in thehere and now varies depending on these acts of reflection and selection, at the same time,envisioned and perceived in each of these acts is an instance of education located in some“beyond” that is not the here and now, which could also be called a “beyond” in relation
to educational possibilities in the here and now.
1

This poem was famously composed immediately after the death of Chūya’s elder son, Fumiya, at the age of two.
At that time, the poet was still reeling from the mental anguish brought on by his lingering grief. A button washedon a beach by a wave catches the narrator’s eye by chance in “Beach on a Moonlit Night.” This button becomes anobject of obsession that the narrator simply cannot toss away. Viewing the poem in terms of the thesis put forwardin this essay, a perfectly ordinary button encountered on a beach (representing a “here and now”), simply by virtue
of its overwhelmingly commonplace and nondescript element, opens the door to the transcendence of involvementwith the lost Fumiya. It is simply by the virtue of Chūya’s way of being in the “here and now,” of not being able totoss away the button, that the door to what lies “beyond” the “here and now” is opened and the image of Fumiya,lost forever to the “here and now,” can nevertheless be touched in the “here and now.”
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It is my belief that this “beyond” is not some “next stage” indicated on the basis ofsome fundamental prospective outlook related to an overall process of change andtransition, such as is found in human development theory or progressive views of history
related to social and humanistic values. This “beyond” is not a “here and now” of adecisively different character in response to the continuous and gradual changes andtransitions similar to progress or development; it is always something other than what lies
next to the “here and now” in either time or space. The academic study of education,
while devoting its inquisitive gaze to the pursuits of teaching/cultivating andlearning/growing in the “here and now,” has attempted to pursue the very wellsprings ofthe forces that fundamentally drive such changes and transitions in the possibilities forhuman life. Through this effort, it has likely honed its sensibility to a “beyond” after the“here and now” that is reached by breaking through the gradual standards of what lies
“next” in both time and space.
However, I am somewhat hesitant to connect the problem of the involvement
between such education and the “beyond” directly with a discussion on a “desire” thatyearns for a “different kind” of education. This is because I am concerned that the idea of
a “different kind” could be perceived as “a new situation that has dismissed pursuits in
the here and now.” This concern is linked with the faint but not easily dispelled feeling of
discomfort over the fact that when I rely on this way of perceiving “difference,” the“beyond” in education also comes to be positioned as an object for research with visible
and concrete form, the significance and challenges of which are then discussed criticallyas a matter of course. The feeling of discomfort, for me, seems to have a close relationshipwith the problem of determining the ideal way to think about “transcendence” in thecontext of particular educational events.
Keeping in mind this understanding with regard to “alternatives to the here and now,”
I describe some of my own narrow insights on a view that finds the transcendent ineducation and the ways it is given significance.
2. Education as “the practice of care for life”
There are likely a variety of standpoints with regard to where we should look to findthe core of an educational event. Our pursuits in contemporary society increasingly
strengthen the tendency to functionally differentiate, with mutual interrelations as astandard of social utility and economic efficiency. Education, too, is understood, analyzed,
and explained from such a perspective of utility and efficiency as a social function that is
exercised in constant relation to various other social phenomena. Under such
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circumstances, it is not easy to question what education is without any restrictions as toits primal character or wholeness, that is, without interrogating it from the standpoint ofeducational philosophy. As soon as you begin to answer what education is in the firstplace, the varied series of phenomena therein labelled as “education,” from whatever
perspective or standard, are discerned at that moment in relation to various other social
phenomena that exist in close proximity; this directly and certainly leads to the critiqueon whether these phenomena can also be defined as “education” in the contemporary
academic study of education.
I certainly cannot deny the current validity or significance of such a critique for the
study of educational philosophy. Nevertheless, in the present paper, given that I seek athorough and rigorous critical redefinition of the concept of “education” and am awareof being possibly accused of bias in terms of the refinement of my themes and theroughness of the texture of my polemics, I would like to propose, somewhat audaciously,
a consideration along the following lines. I wish to posit that education is, in its moststraightforward and essential sense, “the human practice of care for life.” Here, “life”2
refers to the complete whole of our lived existence as humans, founded through aperspective that fully comprises the dimension of our own lives and lifestyles3 as well as
life in its biological, social, historical, and even cultural, moral, and religious modes.
Similarly, by “care,” I refer to the whole body of human pursuits fully comprising theways in which we express solicitude and outreach to the lives of others. In this sense, carecan be expressed in a variety of activities: from protection, upbringing, tuition, andguidance to assistance and cooperation, encouragement and sympathy, or even nursing
and palliative care.
Posited thusly as “the practice of care for life,” it is evident that education is a pursuitthat may take place both inside or outside home or school and, in principle, over an entire
2

As distinct senses for the term inochi (“life”), the Nihon Kokugo Daijiten cites terms such as seimei (“life”), jumyō(“lifespan”), shōgai (“lifetime”), isshō (“whole life”), unmei (“destiny”), tenmei (“fate”), yuiitsu no tanomi (“the last
recourse”), sonomono dokutoku no yosa (“a unique good in itself”), and shinzui (“essential core”), and traces the
etymology of the term from roots that include i-no-uchi (“the substance of breath”) and iki-no-uchi (“the substanceof being alive”), and inochi (in the senses of “the substance of spirit,” “breath-route,” “breath-force,” and “life-spirit”).
Although I have not been able to do so in the present essay, should the opportunity arise, I would also like to attempta consideration that follows up the threads offered by these various senses and etymologies.
3
As a point of departure for the humanistic questions related to the various dimensions of meaning surrounding theword “life” (inochi), Shizuteru Ueda offers a distinctive discussion of the structure of the “self-awareness of ‘living’
implicit within the three closely related words seimei, sei, and inochi” (1991: 47) and “the associations among thethree qualities of living, namely seimei, sei, and inochi” (1998: 19). While I cannot, in this paper, enter into a detailed
explanation of the features of Ueda’s understanding of “life” (inochi), I acknowledge that my conceptualization of
the idea in this essay has been inspired, in part, by Ueda’s discussion. Although Manabu MURASE’s “life studies”(Murase 1991, 1995) can also be cited as another inspired discussion, I will leave consideration of Murase’s views
to another time.
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lifetime. The basis of this notional supposition is constituted by a view of “life” thatconsiders that even as we, as humans, are absolutely unique entities, the events of ourlives over the course of our lifetimes form our mutual solicitude and outreach for eachother. That is to say, life, while taking individually separate forms, through the entire
process of its unfolding, can be understood as being lived out together in a relation ofcaring and being cared for by each other.
3. A view of education and the poles that confer meaning
When we understand the essence of education as “the practice of care for life,” what
we may call life’s two poles become manifest. These poles are two points from which
how we see the pursuits of education that are lived out in daily life and how we give them
meaning repeatedly depart, both in principle and in a symbolic manner, and to whichthese perspectives always return. In other words, these two poles are the moments of ourbirth and death as individual human beings.
Witnessing the moment a baby vocalizes its first cry in the world or the moment
someone draws their dying breath invokes powerful, irrepressible emotions in people—
particularly immediate family members and other loved ones—and makes them deeply
aware of the fact that life fundamentally comes into being and disappears in every eventand that it is education that encourages our involvement with such matters.4
The moments of birth and death represent life events at their most extreme. They are
the points by which the pursuit of education as “the practice of care for life” is firstencouraged and to which it finally gets. Further, the significance of these extremes is thatlife events, in principle, transcend all of our intentions and plans.
Although we have the freedom to decide when to have a child, we do not choose togive birth to a specific child and no other; similarly, this limitation extends to the child as
well, who is born to be a specific child and no other. In addition, although we can makeplans to provide long-term nursing care for elderly parents by fully utilizing existing
information and knowledge, we cannot choose when the final day will come. In the faceof birth and death, we unconsciously enter into the most primordial and fundamental
ways of practicing “care for life,” transcending the dimensions of intentional involvement
4

Accounts bearing witness to the events of birth and death are too numerous to mention. Here, it will suffice toquote the following passage by Itsurō Yamanouchi, who describes the moment of a baby’s first cry from the uniqueperspective of a pediatrician: “Then, with the final contraction, as though squeezed out, the entire body emerges. For
an instant, it grabs at the empty air. It struggles, spreading its arms wide. Frowning, sobbing, it sucks in a big breath… Here is the first breath. In the next instant, it is expelled with a strong wail. The child is born. Now it breathes.
Now it lives!” (Yamanouchi 1986:1).
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and deliberate engagement. To a newborn child, we teach neither letters nor numbers. We
are determined simply to shower it with overflowing love, to cradle the child and whisper
to it without care as to whether or not our words are heeded. Similarly, an elderly parent
who has just passed away will neither respond nor nod when we speak to them. We may
repeatedly attempt to speak to them, half-knowing that no answer will ever come—that
our nods will not be returned. When these attempts finally and unavoidably disappear
into the void, we cannot but stand still at the bedside, bowing our heads in the companyof our overwhelming grief. Such are the possibilities for “the practice of care for life” atthe moments of birth and death and the possibilities for “a life that cares and is cared for”
that appear therein. In the context of this paper, these moments are the poles for how“education” is viewed and conferred with significance.
This position taken by the present paper, which regards “the human practice of care
for life” to be the essence of education, thus presents a renewed perspective by focusing
on life in terms of its extreme moments of birth and death. The paper is an attempt todiscover the primordial and fundamental character of education, especially in thepossibilities of care at these extremes of life. If we can, for the moment, understand theconcept of “desire” in the context of the “pedagogical desire” (that has been raised as a
topic for discussion) to be an emotional dynamic that attempts to engage with an object
in an intentional or planned fashion so as to render the involvement with the object
desirable to oneself and that attempts to realize or achieve some change in the object
commensurate with the said intention or plan, it would be extremely difficult to call the
pursuit of education as “the practice of care for life” a form of “desire.”
While it is, after all, impossible for us to deliberately select or intentionallycontemplate with regard to births and deaths in this world, life is even still inevitably
engendered through us: it motivates us and propels us toward this “care.” If we pay
attention as we are shot through with irresistible torment, it is life that engages andinvolves us. In this way, when we understand the life we encounter in the context of “thepractice of care for life,” education, more than “desire,” is likely rather a “response to life”
in the form that implicitly follows on from the requests that emanate from the respective
events of life themselves. Furthermore, it could be argued that this “response,” just as
conceivably as for the aforementioned embrace of the newborn child or attempt to speak
to a parent, who has just passed away, could keep being extended without any concern as
to whether the life we seek can acknowledge or reply to our follow-on response. In thissense, education as “the practice of care for life” is also a “prayer to life.” I say “prayer”
because the aim is not to acquire something from the object or to fulfill something in theobject but to dedicate ourselves entirely to the object without the expectation of return.
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4. The “here and now” and transcendence at the moments of birth and death
The pursuit of education as “the practice of care for life” holds the point in time when
tuition and guidance (whether of knowledge or technique) have yet to be established andthat when help and support (either physical or emotional) are no longer possible as thetwo polar extremes of life in which we are involved and engaged. By repositioning theways in which we view and give meaning to education toward the beginning and end ofsuch life manifestations, it will be possible for the door to what lies “beyond” the “hereand now” to be opened in the pursuit of education.
Nevertheless, the births and deaths of our loved ones are certainly also life events inthe “here and now” in that they take place in this world. In that sense, even when facedwith such life extremes, we can still speak of education as “the practice of care for life”
in the “here and now” in each case. At the same time, however, does this not stir ourthoughts about the situation of life before birth and the abode of life after death?5 While
we see birth as the beginning of life, the view that apprehends this as the beginningconsiders birth as a beginning that is, at the same time, the end of something. While we
see death as the end of life, the view that apprehends this as an ending considers death asan ending that is, at the same time, the beginning of something new. As we embrace aninfant as though to wrap it up in the instant after its first cry and as we stroke the withered
hand of a loved one who has just breathed her final breath as though in thanks, it isthrough the life events of birth and death in the “here and now” that we think of endings
and beginnings of “the practice of care for life” somewhere “beyond” the “here and now.”
The events of birth and death, even though they take place in the “here and now,” also
invite and open us to a world that transcends the “here and now”—toward our
involvement “beyond” the “here and now.” From this paper’s standpoint, when education
is said to have turned its gaze upon and become devoted to “different” and better life
possibilities not found in the “here and now,” these possibilities are not present as a reality
in some separate space isolated from the “here and now.” Education as the “practice ofcare for life” found along the journey of life, with its two poles of birth and death, is atestament to the fact that our lives, simply by virtue of their pursuit in the “here and now,”
5

Discussions relevant to this thesis are those of Shūji Wada (1995, 2002), whose key concept of “the courage toeducate” derives from a spirited engagement with the difficult challenge of making “a thorough reflection of postwar
education,” which he undertakes with the intention of restoring trust and hope in modern education. Wada suggeststhat what inspires us with the “courage to educate” by directing us from the wellspring of its existence toward
education that looks beyond nihilism is “solidarity with and responsibility to unborn children and the dead” (Wada
2002: 97).
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are secretly yet certainly in contact with an everlasting moment that lies “beyond” the“here and now.”
Transcendence in education must truly be said to lie in the “here and now” and,moreover, to be lived through the “here and now.”6

References
Hachiya, Kei. 1983. Seikatsu shidō ni okeru shūdan shidō no kiso riron [Basic Theory ofCollective Leadership in Guidance]. Tokyo: Meiji Tosho
Hachiya, Kei, ed. 1985. Kyōiku to chōetsu [Education and Transcendence]. Tokyo:
Tamagawa Daigaku Shuppanbu.
Murase, Manabu. 1991. “Inochi” ron no hajimari [The Dawn of “Life Studies”]. Tokyo:
JICC.
Murase, Manabu. 1995. “Inochi” ron no hiroge [The Spread of “Life Studies”]. Tokyo:
Yōsensha.
Nakahara, Chūya. 1993. The poems of Nakahara Chūya. Translated by Mackintosh, Pauland Sugiyama, Maki. Leominster, Herfordshire: Gracewing.
Nihon Daijiten Kankōkai, ed. 1973. Nihon Kokugo Daijiten[Comprehensive Dictionaryof the Japanese Language], vol. 2. Tokyo: Shōgakkan.
Ueda, Shizuteru. 1991. Ikiru to iu koto: keiken to jikaku [Living: Experience and SelfAwareness]. Kyoto: Jinbun Shoin.
Ueda, Shizuteru. 1998. Ningen no shōgai to iu koto [On What We Call Life]. Kyoto:
Jinbun Shoin.
Wada, Shūji. 1995. Kyōiku suru yūki [The Courage to Educate]. Tokyo: Tamagawa
Daigaku Shuppanbu.
Wada, Shūji. 2002. Kyōiku no hondō [The Main Road of Education]. Tokyo: Tamagawa
Daigaku Shuppanbu.
Yamanouchi, Itsurō. 1986. Shinseiji [Newborns]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.
6

In connection with my provisional conclusion for this discussion, I would like to cite the research conducted by
Kei Hachiya, who discusses “transcendence in education” from a unique perspective and conceptual framework(Hachiya 1983, 1985). Through his learnings with the educational philosopher Motomori Kimura, a member of the
Kyoto School, Hachiya notes that to regard human beings as technologically proficient beings who strive to live
better by applying themselves to their environment is also to regard the basis of education, in the broadest sense, as
the transmission of technology. He argues that this world of technology is supported by a transcendent world within
which it is structurally encompassed; he further holds that “for human beings to live in the world of technology isfor them to also have a world of transcendence” (Hachiya 1983:34).
Symposium: The Alternative as Pedagogical Desire: How Do We Seek for Transcendency in Education?