The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Instead, Kuhn said (and like many good ideas it seemed obvi- ous after he said it), scientists are men (usually men, at least in the past) of their times, sharing a world view with the majority of their fellow citizens, and differing from them primarily in having access to a more refined and technical understanding of that world view's implications, and by knowing more about how to expand the state of their knowledge. But their work is not done on a blank slate, but on the basis of a paradigm: a set of assump- tions about how the world works. Gradually, as knowledge accu- mulates through the work of scientists, philosophers, and others, anomalies arise to disturb the seemingly smooth explanatory power of the paradigm, and questions arise as to its validity. When a sufficient number of anomalies accumulate, the para­digm loses its claim on peoples' minds, and a new one forms to take its place. This model explains, for example, how the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic model of the universe endured for almost a century after Copernicus published his first hypotheti- cal challenge to it; only with the work of Galileo [42] and Newton did the old paradigm collapse in the face of insupport- able contradictions that they pointed out.

Kuhn showed that science is neither value-free nor immune to the cultural context in which scientific investigation takes place. His work has been used in recent years by some radical critics of science to argue that science is incapable of discover- ing truth in any objective sense, and that ali scientific results are merely expressions of cultural assumptions. Kuhn never said that, however, and he rejected the assertions of those who tried to use his theoretical work in that way. He was convinced, as any physicist would be, that science can and does discover truth; but he argued that within a given paradigm some truths cannot be discovered (which is why there will always be para­digm shifts). The question of the reliability of science has been central to the so-called culture wars of our time.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a serious book, but there is nothing in it to deter a general reader who brings to it a willingness to think seriously. It is an eye-opening study of how we, as a civilization, have come to know what we know about the universe, and of the factors that will condition the expansion of our knowledge in the future.

J.S.M.

131

MISHIMA YUKIO

1925-1970

Confessions of a Mask, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

Although both Tanizaki [114] and Kawabata [120] published extensively after World War II, in effect Mishima was Japan's first true postwar writer. Excused from military service during the war on medicai grounds (a source of shame that plagued him throughout his life), he burst upon the postwar literary scene in 1949 with the publication of Confessions of a Mask.

Confessions is a highly autobiographical work about a young man growing up as a homosexual, and the "mask" he needs to don to protect himself from social scorn. Mishima^ own mask was that of hypermasculinity; he became a bodybuilder obsessed with sculpting himself into a form of perfect beauty, a latter-day samurai obsessed with a largely made-up version of the warriors cult of the sword, and an actor whose roles were virtual parodies of noble manhood. At the same time he was a sadomasochist fascinated by suicide and self-sacrifice; it seems likely that his bodybuilding was related to a desire to create himself as a perfect sacrificial victim, and to prepare his body to be a beautiful corpse. He liked to pose for homoerotic- masochistic photographs in such roles as a dead shipwrecked sailor washed up on the rocks, as St. Sebastian riddled with arrows, and as a samurai committing seppuku (ritual suicide).

But for what cause was he to sacrifice himself? Here again one finds contradictions. Mishima was in some respects a play- boy and a materialist; he lived in a luxurious Western-style house, dressed in Western clothing, and had cosmopolitan interests. At the same time he became increasingly devoted to a cult (of his own devising) dedicated to restoring Japan's samurai spirit, expressed as reverence for the emperor. He recruited a private army, the Shield Society, of handsome young men, and drilled his troops both in his ideology and in traditional martial arts. On November 25, 1970, he led some of his followers onto a base of Japan's National Self-Defense Force and addressed the soldiers, calling upon them to join him in an uprising to restore the emperor to power. His speech was met with derision, whereupon he drew a sword, slit open his abdфmen in ritual fashion, and was decapitated by his chief lieutenant: the ultimate acting-out of fantasies that had driven his intensely troubled but also brilliantly creative life.