Here is an English version written in a tone suitable for SP 2025, and also clear enough for an American friend.
It preserves your cadence, your metaphysics, and your late-Kikujirō smile.
**Kikujirō in His Later Years:
How He Looked at Emotion (SP 2025)**
First, let me be clear:
I am not saying that emotion is unimportant.
I am saying that emotion is not that important.
The irony, of course, is this:
emotion is often the only experience we truly have.
(Which explains why psychotherapy tends to overemphasize emotion.)
(Psychoanalysis is somewhat better, but not that much better.)
(Consider depression: it is, in many ways, the existential birthplace of philosophy.
Yet we so often miss that opening—and end up as depressed patients who simply keep taking medication.)
This is to say:
our existence itself is not that important.
(What matters is the meta—Freud’s metapsychology, or what used to be called metaphysics.)
(A courageous psychoanalysis, a courageous psychotherapy, must confront its own metapsychology.
A courageous philosopher must confront metaphysics.)
Metapsychology happens in the darkness of emotion,
in the small crack of light that this darkness unexpectedly opens in our existence.
Metaphysics happens in the squalor of the everyday,
in the ordinary vulgarity that opens toward something higher—
a possibility, faint but real.
Once you understand this,
you may begin to look at emotion
with a slight, almost affectionate smirk.
Not dismissing it—
but no longer taking it too seriously either.
And at that moment,
you may recall Kikujirō in his slippers.
I imagine Kikujirō would say:
Horse racing is what matters most.
Which is why I now say,
with a straight face and full conviction:
The roulette wheel matters most.
If you’d like, I can also prepare:
- a more polished, journal-ready version,
- a shorter poetic version, or
- a spoken-version draft suitable for your SP 2025 talk.
Just tell me which one you prefer.
