ABSTRACT
One meaning of the Greek concept ethos is "to dwell" (for instance, in Heraclitus' (ca. 544 483 B.C.E.) famous dictum, ethos anthropoi daimon, or, following Heidegger's translation, "the (usual) place where humans dwell is the openness where the god (as the un-usual) can appear"3). If the Japanese ethos is three-fold, 1 would say that the traditional Western dwelling is two-fold or "meta-physical," namely the world of sensory experience and the world of sensible experience or, in Plato's (427-347 B.C.E.) terms, the lopos aisthetos (sensory place) and the topos noetos (rational place). The modern version of this division is the Kantian conception that we are dwellers of two worlds, namely the physical world which is strictly deterministic and the world of "ends in themselves" or the "kingdom of ends" (Reich der Zwecke). The latter is the basis of what he calls "human dignity" (Wiirde) as different from things that have just a value (Wen). Human dignity is grounded in the human capacity of going beyond our natural being because we are also "rational beings" Kant uses the neutral term vernunftiges Wesen by giving ourselves univcrsalizablc laws of action and by freely obeying them.4 The moral excellence of human beings consists in being capable of acting on the basis of such selfgiven, universalizable reasons or "maxims." This capacity is grasped, following Kant, in the practical experience of the categorical imperative. Kant postulates the existence of such a place, the kingdom of ends, where rational beings dwell but which remains theoretically unknowable.
