Hiromatsu Wataru (1933–1994) What Makes a Pencil a Pencil?
Most of us assume that we are looking at the same world.
We watch the same film.
Read the same book.
Afterward, we talk about what we experienced.
Yet something curious happens.
One person remembers the loneliness of a character. Another notices the way the film was made. One reader carries away a single sentence. Another barely remembers it.
None of this seems strange.
We simply say that people see things differently.
But Hiromatsu Wataru stopped at something more basic.
What does it mean to say that we saw the same thing in the first place?
Take something simpler than a film.
A pencil lies on a table.
You look at it and see a pencil.
This seems almost too ordinary to deserve attention.
But what exactly happened?
Did your eyes first receive colors, lines, and shapes, after which your mind added a meaning and decided, “This is a pencil”?
That is one possible picture of perception.
But it does not seem to describe what we actually experience.
We do not normally see an unidentified collection of colors and shapes and then solve a small puzzle.
We see a pencil.
It appears from the beginning as a pencil.[1]
That small word―as―opens a surprisingly large question.
The object before us is never simply what is physically given.
It appears as something.
A piece of wood appears as a chair.
A voice calling your name is heard as someone calling you.
A movement of someone’s face appears as a smile.
A red light at an intersection appears as something that tells us to stop.
What we encounter and what it means are not easily separated in experience.
Hiromatsu began digging into this seemingly simple fact.
If the pencil appears as a pencil, where does that “as” come from?
Certainly not from the object alone.
Someone who had never encountered writing might see the same physical object very differently.
The meaning “pencil” belongs to a world of language, use, habits, and other people.
Someone taught us its name.
We learned what it was for.
We saw other people use it.
Long before we stopped to think philosophically about a pencil, we already lived in a world in which pencils meant something.
And yet this does not mean that each person simply invents a private meaning.
If I ask you to pass me the pencil, you can usually do it.
We may not experience the pencil in exactly the same way.
You may notice that it needs sharpening.
I may remember who gave it to me.
A child may see something to draw with.
An artist may notice its hardness.
Still, somehow, we can speak about the pencil.
How is that possible?
This question takes us toward what Hiromatsu called the co-subjective structure of the world.[2]
The term sounds difficult.
The experience is not.
We live in a world that is never entirely private.
Words can be understood by others.
Objects can be used together.
Actions can be recognized.
A gesture can be answered.
We disagree precisely because there is something about which we can disagree.
The world appears from somewhere, to someone―and yet it appears as a world that others can also encounter.
At this point, it may seem that the puzzle concerns only the object.
But Hiromatsu pushed further.
What about the person looking at the pencil?
At first, the answer seems obvious.
I am looking at it.
But who is this “I”?
I did not invent the language through which I call it a pencil.
I did not invent writing.
I did not create the practices through which this object acquired its use.
Even the way I recognize and handle it has been learned within a world already inhabited by others.
This does not mean that “I” disappear.
Nor does it mean that everyone sees the world in the same way.
Something subtler is happening.
Just as the thing before me appears as something, I too encounter the world as someone.
As a speaker of a language.
As a member of a particular society.
As a teacher or student.
As a customer, parent, stranger, friend.
As someone living at a particular moment in history.
Hiromatsu tried to describe both sides of this event at once: the thing that appears as something, and the person to whom it appears as someone. This became part of what he called the fourfold structure of experience.[3]
The name is abstract.
The question behind it is not.
When I see a pencil, how much of what is happening belongs only to the pencil?
And how much belongs only to me?
The more closely we look, the harder it becomes to separate the two cleanly.
This was part of Hiromatsu’s larger challenge to a deeply familiar picture of the world.
We often imagine reality as made up of separate things.
A person.
A pencil.
Another person.
A tree.
A society.
First the things exist.
Then they enter into relations.
Hiromatsu became increasingly suspicious of this order.
His concern was not simply that relationships are important.
That would be a much smaller claim.
The deeper question was whether the things we treat as already complete―including the self―can actually be understood apart from the ways in which they appear, function, and become meaningful.
This concern also shaped his distinction between thinking of the world primarily in terms of things and thinking of it in terms of events, situations, and relations―a movement sometimes described through the Japanese words mono and koto.[4]
A pencil seems to be a thing.
But the moment we ask what it is, we find ourselves talking about writing, hands, language, learning, work, other people, and history.
The isolated object begins to open outward.
Something similar happens to the self.
“I” initially seems to be the safest starting point of all.
I see.
I think.
I decide.
I act.
But when Hiromatsu followed those acts closely, the apparently self-contained “I” became harder to isolate.
The language in which I think is not mine alone.
The meanings through which I recognize the world are not mine alone.
The roles through which I act did not begin with me.
Even disagreement with others presupposes a world in which disagreement can be understood.
None of this proves that the individual is an illusion.
Hiromatsu’s question is more demanding than that.
It asks whether we have begun in the wrong place when we assume that the individual is already complete before encountering the world and other people.
Hiromatsu spent much of his philosophical life pursuing this problem.
He engaged deeply with European philosophy and Marx, while trying to move beyond a model built from a knowing subject on one side and an independent object on the other.
His major work, Existence and Meaning, remained unfinished when he died in 1994.
Perhaps that incompleteness is appropriate to the question he left behind.
Return to the pencil.
It is still there on the table.
You are still here, looking at it.
Nothing mysterious has appeared.
And yet the scene no longer looks quite as simple.
The pencil is there―but as something.
You are there―but as someone.
And the simple act of seeing it as a pencil already carries language, learned ways of using it, and a history that did not begin with you.
What looked at first like two separate things―a self and an object―has become difficult to separate from everything that allows each to appear as what it is.
So perhaps the question is not yet whether relations come before individuals.
There is an earlier question.
Before we decide what comes first, can we really say where the thing itself ends―and where everything that makes it what it is begins?
Notes
[1] The “as-structure”
Hiromatsu develops the idea that what is given in experience appears as something beyond the merely sensory given. This becomes an important part of his account of the structure of the phenomenal world. The pencil example here is an explanatory example rather than a quotation from Hiromatsu.
[2] “Co-subjective” ― 共同主観的 (kyōdō-shukanteki)
This term is sometimes rendered in English as “intersubjective.” In Hiromatsu’s philosophy, it means more than people simply agreeing with one another. It concerns the way a world can appear from a particular standpoint while also being experienced as a world available to others.
[3] The fourfold structure ― 四肢的構造
Hiromatsu analyzes experience through a double structure on both the side of what appears and the side of the experiencing subject. The full theory is considerably more technical than the simplified path followed here. A central treatment appears in Sekai no Kyōdōshukanteki Sonzai Kōzō (『世界の共同主観的存在構造』, The Co-subjective Ontological Structure of the World).
[4] Mono and koto
Hiromatsu’s movement from a thing-centered (mono) view toward an event- or situation-centered (koto) view is developed across his work, including Mono, Koto, Kotoba (『もの・こと・ことば』). The Japanese distinction does not map neatly onto a single pair of English words, so it is deliberately left only lightly developed in the main text.
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