Someone correct me but I was kinda disappointed a little in this thread. Not saying his character doesn't deserve scrutiny but you can only say "lol, he was le fagget" so much.
Does anyone have any good refutations of his philosophy? I don't have direct quotes and anything too coherent but I feel like Sun and Steel gets christmogged a bit with some of G.K. Chesterton and CS Lewis. One thing these ubermensch types always get wrong is the will to power can be applied to literally anything. Within the mindset starting a genocide, collecting stamps, and stapling rats are all equal as long as you are essentially doing them hard enough. Will to power comes off as valuing intensity without any consideration to where it is applied therefore it becomes meaningless. Also, there's the idea of giving yourself up to looks, but if you do that you will just live a thousand deaths before they actually plant you. Mishima's solution to this would be to die young, but there is no good justification for this other than "dude it would be so epic to die young."
My take is his ideas can be useful in your own personal dialectic. "Being a bookcel isn't good please go outside a little and take care of your health." But the intensity of his ideas if taken wholeheartedly will not create goodness.
I dunno, discuss if I'm wrong or not.
Sorry, I’ve been in a whole other universe this week.
I’ve touched on his philosophy but haven’t fully dived into it yet. I’m going to let you know that I don’t give a fuck to quote him properly. I’m too tired to be bothered.
Anyways, I honestly care little about his takes on how to improve oneself through physical and mental discipline and falling back on the bushido code and other pre-Westernization. In my opinion, it feels like a huge cope. He's a very staunch imperialist who draft dodged using Pneumonia/Tuberculous (?) to do so. You’re going to have some major hang-ups about essentially cheering from the stands while other people die for a cause he backed during and after the war. I’m not going to commend him for hanging onto his imperialist nonsense. However, he earns points for admitting that he didn’t want to die and that he felt guilty because of it.
When it comes to the wannabe alpha males taking his words at face value, I’m not shocked. Ironically, Mishisima’s biggest gripe was people misconstruing his work so wildly. Not just making a point to make it consumer-friendly but also treating his philosophy and work as a whole act of irony. In this case, these dumbasses took it at full face value. Of course, not because they actually give a shit about his character and philosophy. They just want to be the illusion of a peak, aggressive masculinity due to their own perceived personal shortcomings. It's literally like people pouring themselves over Sigmund Freud, and walking like he’s god’s gift to mankind. There’s literally no fucking way they read that and made a point to make it their whole personality.
My specific issue with him is his philosophy on human nature and his obsession with beauty. I do agree that people are vain and very controlling of what is and isn’t subjectively beautiful. I genuinely do believe that there is inherent beauty in nature, and that one's artistic creations cannot be brute forced into one sole satisfying objective. However, I’m going to beat on him for his double standards between women and men when it comes to manufacturing or accentuating one’s physical beauty. Obviously, dude is a faggot, men are just more attractive than women. But the pages and pages he goes on about women being, in simpler terms, hedonistic money-seeking attention whores are obscene. Of course, he turns around and bakes that into his male characters and proclaims it to be desirable attributes, which is just tiring on the spot. He’s so close to being onto something profound, then shits the bed. Once again, he prefers women over men. But he made a point to focus on human nature and beauty, yet somehow looped back into projected self-hatred and self-absorption. He’s such a vain person, but doubles down by overcompensating for his own self-awareness of it. It's so ironic to have someone so obsessed over their physical appearance, then watch them slap the conceited label onto someone else. Motherfucker, you practically wrote a book on physical improvement and the attractiveness of it.
I’ll give him this though: the moment someone gets wrapped up in their own physical or artistic beauty through other people’s insistence is the moment one starts looking for themselves in other people. Not in the sense that you want someone who is just as beautiful, but someone who is going to hold a mirror up to you. Someone who is going to feed into your vanity and need perpetual reassurance. You want someone or something that is going to be the accessory you always needed, like new money and Lamborghinis. It doesn't matter how shitty it is as long as its gold plated and makes a statement.
This probably isn’t your idea of a rebuttal, but, in the end, you’re just going to end up bitching anyway. There’s probably more I can whine about, but I can’t be bothered. This thread wasn’t made to rebut his philosophy and wax poetic about how we’re right and he’s wrong. It was made to bully this man for being such a huge obnoxious faggot—both literally and socially. He’s genuinely such an annoying fucking person that I can’t be bothered to use every single post to tear him apart philosophically. The man’s work and the people who cling to it are a cautionary tale in and of themselves.
