A promise exists to be kept. Despite the scale theory that says a promise is something that makes each side step back from the point of maximum profit and forces the other side to do the same, thereby creating balance, I wondered whether another interpretation might be possible and asked my students to write about it. One student turned in the following piece. That student still seems to be under the illusion of living in the world of the living. There are no children here, and there is no play. Even a newborn has only just arrived here. That does not mean it is ignorant of how the world works. The analogy is wrong. I thought I had lived long enough, but perhaps I still have to live even longer before I can see the world properly. I am making the full text public as a warning to that student. I sincerely hope no one will make the foolish attempt to hold on to the viewpoint of that world in order to artificially hasten, even by a little, the natural phenomenon of being born again into the world of the living. I can say with certainty that until every embodied rule from the world of the living has been forgotten, that world will not be reachable even in a dream. Still less should anyone resort to the cheap trick of stirring nostalgia for that place in others. That is not a mistake. It is an act approaching crime. Without the protection of a professor, a student would be locked up at once. What follows is the full text written by that student. Since I have written this myself as a warning, I will not reveal the student’s name.
If one promises never to open one’s eyes, no matter what happens in the world, when is it permissible to break that promise? At what point is the promise voided? Or at what point is immunity for violating that promise silently allowed? If, not from the standpoint of fact but from the standpoint of thought, one opens one’s eyes in a state of darkness where nothing can be seen, and thereby comes to know that the whole world is dark, has one still broken the promise? Is a promise not to see anything different from a promise not to open one’s eyes? Or, because one ultimately saw nothing, has the promise been kept? What if one’s eyes were covered? Is the promise not to open one’s eyes still valid? Suppose that despite the blindfold, something is visible through a gap, and when one opens one’s eyes, one realizes what one was not supposed to see. But if one acts well enough, the other person will not know the promise has been violated. In that case, the promise has not been violated. But if one opened one’s eyes and still saw nothing because of the blindfold, that would be a violation of the promise, yet because nothing happened as a result, one would be granted immunity.
We are thinking now not at the level of law but at the level of children’s play. Even so, it is not simple at all. Although the words and concepts children use are simple, the various concepts they call forth are so simple in themselves that applying them to reality becomes more difficult. Let us return to the beginning. If one promises never to open one’s eyes no matter what happens in the world, with whom is that promise made? If it is a vow made to oneself, it does not matter if one breaks it. There may only be the possibility of regretting, again and again, one’s own lack of will. But even that is only a possibility. Self-exemption requires no mutual agreement, so it is always possible. If the other person dies, I will automatically be released from the promise.
But what if Medusa is in front of me? If the premise was that I must not open my eyes in order to stay alive, then the promise was made by the other person for my sake, and there is no outcome that is unilaterally advantageous to the other person simply because both sides keep it. If, while trying to protect me, the other person met her eyes and turned to stone, I would have to keep the promise in order not to turn to stone myself. If Medusa is waving a sword around, I will die either way. But if Medusa is also in a petrified state, and the promise was made because meeting her eyes even then would kill me, then the ultimate goal of not opening my eyes is only not to look at Medusa. Therefore, I do not need to keep my eyes shut. I only need to look at the ground. I simply need to have no interest whatsoever in what is on the ground, what the ceiling is like, or what decorations are on the walls. I should have been told to care about nothing except keeping my balance while looking at the ground. Since the promise itself was flawed, it does not matter if I break it. However, this could only be argued if the other person were still alive. If that person has already disappeared, I will be released from the promise automatically. But even if the promise was flawed, the moment I free myself from it and lift my head, I may turn to stone, and the promise will have failed in what it set out to accomplish. Of course, this would be a matter of urgent danger, so it would not really become an issue at the moment of entering a cave where an actual statue of Medusa has been placed. Everyone would turn to stone before having time for such concerns.
Now that we have looked briefly at the middle and the end, let us look at the beginning. No matter what happens. What can happen? What cases were imagined, and what minimum and maximum expectations were set, for one to be able never to open one’s eyes? What about a spider crawling over the back of one’s hand? Something is crawling there, and yet one is told to keep one’s eyes closed. If, at the time of making the promise, the situation was life or death as before, the reason for saying not to open one’s eyes even if something touches one’s skin was most likely to prevent panic. In that case, one should simply keep one’s eyes closed. But suppose the other person somehow knew one’s birthday, prepared a cake, and seems to be about to show it. Then, while one’s eyes are closed, instead of a spider on the back of the hand, there is the sound of a cup breaking, and the other person says “Ah!” and seems to have collapsed onto the floor. May one open one’s eyes? Since whether the other person is injured has much greater value than the intended goal, that would be a sufficient condition for immunity. If it was not a cake but a gift of jewelry, and if the cup did break but the sound was not the other person falling, only the cake splattering onto the floor along with the cup, then the other person may be angry when one opens one’s eyes. But because we were born into a world that holds human beings to be most important, we can force immunity on the grounds that we were made to worry. The other person should apologize for creating a situation in which one could misunderstand that they might have been hurt, not argue over whether the promise was kept.
Then let us look again at the whole sentence. No matter what happens, one must never open one’s eyes. The degree to which performance of the promise is compelled is determined by the gravity of the thing that happens. The phrase “not opening one’s eyes” can be diversified, implicitly, from the degree of physical exposure of the eyeballs to a point where it is enough that the image is not actually interpreted through the optic nerve. And the sentence ends with “must not.” What is hidden there is reward and punishment. If a punishment for violation and a benefit for compliance are given, one can infer from them the reason one must not open one’s eyes, and that reason is closely tied to the degree of compulsion behind performance. Therefore, even this simple sentence must be interpreted by grasping the conditions before and after it from context, considering the situation, and including implicit matters such as one’s relationship with the other person within that context. Children’s play works by resetting countless things and making interpretation extremely simple. If the interpretation is wrong, no one is hurt and no money is taken. The difference is only like the rules of Go-Stop, which vary by region. But if one looks even a little more closely, it becomes possible to enlarge and dissect this too, much as looking through a microscope reveals that what seemed inanimate is actually something like soil for microorganisms.
If “not opening one’s eyes no matter what happens” is reduced to the extreme, it becomes “Do not open your eyes.” Here the concluding “do not” is presented only as a vague instruction, a promise, and the consequences of following or not following that instruction can be roughly guessed as two things: “There is a higher chance it will be fun,” and “You will be blamed for making it no fun.” It is pressure to keep the promise in order to avoid blame, but there is only the expectation that it may be fun, not any certainty. Still, not every game is fun every day, and if something is to become exciting enough that time seems to pass quickly, one must cooperate to some extent with actions that raise that possibility. This promise is no more than one part of that. The obligation is only this much: a level of implicit and moral pressure within agreement, the ordinary kind applied to the rules of most games.
The action itself is to close one’s eyes. The purpose of this is not so much to avoid the danger of opening one’s eyes as to reduce the ordinariness of seeing with open eyes. In children’s play, closing or covering the eyes usually serves the purpose of laughing at the state of not being able to see ahead and therefore not being able to move in the intended direction. Thus it belongs less to an emotional or physical device for protecting the child with closed eyes than to an auxiliary condition of the game. Yet not every game becomes more exciting when the eyes are closed. Just as hide-and-seek would require additional devices if played blindfolded, closing the eyes often makes things more cumbersome. Usually, when a game requires someone to close their eyes, the person whose eyes are covered is likely to have a relatively safe role with little need to move. Therefore, in games where closing the eyes is important, being able to see naturally adds an effort to secure safety that would otherwise not need to be secured, and the game becomes dull.
Lastly, there may rarely be cases in which someone is made unable to open their eyes in order to tease them. The target may be covering their eyes or keeping them closed for one of the purposes listed above, while the others are actually using that purpose as a pretext to observe the target waiting and reacting. In such cases, the time it takes for the target to realize the truth varies greatly. Sometimes the target realizes immediately because nothing happens when the game should begin. Sometimes everyone says they are about to begin, then takes advantage of the fact that the target cannot open their eyes and leaves, so that the target spends a long time asking whether it is all right to open their eyes. There are countless cases in between, but the closer it gets to the latter, the more it becomes something like bullying rather than play. When the purpose is not shared by all participants, a minority with a different purpose may be made into the target of bullying, and this happens so naturally that the target too often dismisses it as a joke.
Although I have carried out simplification quite forcefully, there are still too many possible cases, and they do not organize themselves well. Perhaps the boundary grew wider precisely because I simplified it. I hastily assumed that children would have a narrow range of thought about actions, but in fact, as said above, if what is involved is only simple play without subtle violence or ostracism, that range does not become especially narrow just because it is children’s play. Pure play has a fixed frame, and actions that consider only simple fun tend rather to decrease as one becomes an adult, so it can be inferred that the total breadth is similar.
“I will not open my eyes, no matter what happens in the world.” In fact, this sentence is too heavy for children to use. It is absurdly heavy, so heavy that each word is perfect for use in a joke through exaggeration. A way of speaking like “I will not eat carrots, no matter what happens in the world” brings a smile to adults’ lips. But when used in play, it becomes an amusing sentence that merely adds one more rule. What about on a battlefield? Depending on what rule and what background are made, tens of thousands of cases arise, and according to each of them, the appropriate action, that is, what it means to faithfully keep the promise, can differ. In one case, the act of keeping that promise may mean trampling on the same promise in another. Every case in human affairs has its own chains, and words keep watch without rest, judging whether to fasten the chains around the wrists or around the ankles of those cases. A promise is a promise no matter what happens, but it is not something that must be kept no matter what happens. Promises are not always kept, but as long as something is called a promise, it is useful to both sides to act as fittingly as possible according to the case.
Korean original: 약속의 경계