[DeepL Translation - needs review] The latest book in the collection of Koichiro Kokubun, author of "The Ethics of Leisure and Boredom," which has sold over 500,000 copies!
This is a philosophical book for a new era that seeks true freedom, based on "mesodynamics," which is neither active nor passive.
Do you fall in love with someone? Is this active or passive? It is not that we try to like someone or that we are forced to like someone. Words that only recognize "doing" by oneself and "being...
More readable pop philosophy
This book is a popular philosophy exploration of the idea that the loss of the grammatical "middle voice" present in Proto-Indo-European and down as far as classical Greek has resulted in our having an "active versus passive" paradigm that affects how we think about ideas like free will and responsibility.
A lot of the early part of the book is devoted to what the middle voice actually is as a piece of grammar and how it disappeared. I think this is important: as the author says, if you treat "middle voice" as a mystical lost concept without engaging with the linguistic history then your argument is built on very shaky foundations. But if you don't enjoy reading about language (including discussion of example sentences in Greek and Latin) then you might not like this book.
Overall I enjoyed this but I think I would suggest the author's other book 暇と退屈の倫理学 as the better place to start.