4-Modern Japanese Philosophy (1868-1945)
By convention, the modern period in Japan is considered to have begun with the demise of the Tokugawa shogunate and the formal restoration of the emperor to power in 1868 till the current time. However, it can be divided into two phases: the first ends by 1945, which marks the end of the Pacific War, and the second from 1945 to the beginning of the twenty-first century. The first phase is characterized by increasing emphasis on the acceptance of Western philosophical theories along with Western technologies and social institutions. The intellectuals proudly referred to their time as the "Meiji Enlightenment."
However, the appropriation of Western philosophy in Japan came about through a translation movement associated with a transformation of the Japanese language. The encounter with Western philosophy in the late Tokugawa and the Meiji Periods, stretching from about 1853 to 1912, occasioned a new way of articulating thought that allowed the Japanese to make philosophy their own, a discipline proper to the continual formation of their culture. This appropriation redefined Japan's past intellectual traditions as well, interpreting them in the light of Western philosophical concepts and problems. John Marlado describes the early stage of these transformations as follows,
Beginning in the 1720s, with relaxed government control, Japanese scholars established "Dutch Studies" to translate Dutch texts, absorb new concepts such as science. Consistent with its interest in technology and science, Dutch Studies (also called "Western Learning") reflected the Japanese Confucian penchant for practical thinking. Scholars rendered the relatively few writings on liberal arts that made their way into Japan with a mix of Confucian terms and untranslated Dutch words. Only one instance of a native philosophical treatise is known from that era: the medical and military scholar Takano Choei's "Theories of Western Sages" of 1835, a brief and very incomplete survey of ancient Greek and modern European philosophers and experimental scientists. For all its Confucian residues, however, Dutch Studies prepared the way for the next momentous change.
The next stage followed through translation of Western sources and study it in view of the traditional works,
Philosophical texts began to stream into Japan in the 1860s and 1870s and, soon afterward, were studied by Japanese scholars visiting Europe or America. To understand the logic and language of these texts meant once again to learn and partially adapt a foreign language. In the 1870s, several scholars schooled in Confucian texts and trained in Dutch Studies established a society called Meiji Six (named after its founding in the sixth year of the Mejii era) to discuss newly imported ideas and to urge state officials to modernize Japan. Many of its members helped form Japan's first university out of their private academies, taught at the University of Tokyo, and became government functionaries. Collectively, they became known as the keimo gakusha (scholars of the Enlightenment).
(John Marlado, 'The Japanese Encounter with and Appropriation of Western Philosophy').
The translation movement in this period was led essentially by Nishi Amane, according to John Marlado,
No one was more adept than Nishi Amane (1829-1887) in creating new words to express alien Western concepts, "philosophy" among them. The word Nishi eventually settled on to translate "philosophy" was the Confucian-sounding neologism, tetsugaku , (roughly, the learning of the sages), tetsujin . Nishi had encountered this strange kind of learning in the course of his Dutch studies and initially deemed it superior even to Zhu Xi's "explanations of the principles of human nature and life." Understanding the methods and content of "philosophy" required some sort of mediation, and Confucian ideas, particularly the concept of ri served as the medium of comparison. Nishi spent much effort in making sense of the ri of the East Asians and the rationality of the Europeans. Polysemous as it was, ri (meaning pattern, principle, reason, or truth) served as a bridge term that allowed Nishi and others to move between the Confucian ground on which they were raised and the European ground they confronted.
Nishi deepened his understanding of philosophy during two years of study at Leiden University in Holland, where he encountered August Comte's system of positivism unifying all sciences and John Stuart Mill"s utilitarian ethics and system of inductive logic. These were the philosophical schools he introduced to Japan, along with Western legal and economic theories and military science - all consonant with his predilection toward studies that had practical consequences. Ultimately, he included Chinese thought in the province of philosophy and suggested that "objective contemplation," the forte of Western philosophy, needed to be supplemented by the "subjective contemplation" in which Eastern philosophers have excelled. (John Marlado, 'The Japanese Encounter with and Appropriation of Western Philosophy').
Other thinkers who participated in the translation movement include, Nishimura Shigeki (1828-1902), according to John Marlado,
Nishimura Shigeki who was a fellow scholar of the Meiji Six Society, imitated Nishi's penchant for inventing terms and echoed his view of the strengths and weakness of Western and Eastern thought. He wrote that thinkers of the Zen School and Chinese Confucians like Wang Yangming excelled in "inner contemplation" (naikan) and in synthesis (sogo), whereas thinkers in the West excel in "outer contemplation" (gaikan) and analysis (bunseki)—all either neologisms or old words with new meanings. Nishimura's discussion seems future-oriented, and in fact it foreshadows contemporary debates about the nature of consciousness.
And Nakae Chomin (1847-1901), according to Marlado,
Nakae Chomin advocated Rousseau's egalitarian philosophy and derided University of Tokyo philosophy professors as epigones and elitists. His Digging Up the Hidden and Profound Truths of Philosophy, published in 1886, was the first popular outline of philosophy in Japan. It mixed some terms that eventually became standard with invented and unusual sinograph compounds to treat various "isms" such as sensationism (kankaku-setsu), idealism (isho-setsu), pantheism (shinbutsuittai-setsu), mysticism (shinjinkango-setsu), materialism (jisshitsu-setsu), and skepticism (kaigi-setsu philosophy). There was, he famously proclaimed, "no such thing as but past Western philosophers who believed in God in Japan," or immortality were also deluded.
In addition to, Onishi Hajime (1864-1900), according to Marlado,
The gifted Christian philosopher Onishi was conversant with Chinese and Japanese classics; gained facility in English, German, French, Latin, and Greek; and published a history of Western philosophy in 1895. In 1898, he visited Wilhelm Wundt’s Institute for Experimental Psychology in Leipzig. His Logic, written somewhat earlier, presents the discipline as universal and autonomous, unaffected by experimental sciences. It includes a critique of deductive argumentation and detailed analyses of Buddhist and Confucian reasoning (or the lack of it). He sought a universal position in his Ethics as well and forcefully argued against the authoritarian Confucian ideology still evident in the new Japanese state.
(John Marlado, 'The Japanese Encounter with and Appropriation of Western Philosophy').
During the same period (i.e., between 1860s and 1945), a few Japanese philosophers concentrated their efforts on developing specific philosophical topics through their studies of Western sources. Maraldo introduces four Japanese thinkers who took such route.
The first is Fukuzawa Yukichi, who placed efforts to formulate theories of civilization. Maraldo describes his work as follows,
In the Foreword to An Outline of Theories of Civilization Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835-1901) refers repeatedly to the sudden jolt and massive disturbance Japanese people experienced when they encountered the startlingly different culture and superior technology of America and European nations in the 1850s. Fukuzawa took personally this rude awakening on a national scale and decided to learn all he could about these alien peoples and their exotic ideas. By the time he published An Outline in 1875, he was a recognized expert in the "conditions of the West", the title of three popular books he wrote between 1867 and 1870. He had produced an English-Japanese dictionary in 1860 by adding Japanese pronunciations to a Cantonese-English phrasebook he found in San Francisco earlier the same year.
He made a case for individualism, a free and competitive exchange of ideas, and methodic doubt and selective judgment-all ideas that challenged authoritarianism in general and what he saw as Confucian practices in particular. But the treatise called An Outline of Theories of Civilization also questioned assumptions commonly held in the premier academy of Dutch Studies, where Fukuzawa had studied. It denigrated reliance on Buddhist and Shinto beliefs and customs as well. It was a broadside -if cautious- attack on nearly all intellectual traditions in Japan.
The second is Kato Hiroyuki, who worked on the evolution of the individual and human rights. Maraldo describes his work as follows,
Kato Hiroyuki (1836-1916) was born into a samurai family, steeped first in Confucian classics and then in Dutch Studies, and participated in the discussions of the "Meiji Six" Enlightenment thinkers. Unlike Fukuzawa, he drew his ideas primarily from German texts, eventually became a government functionary and advisor, and served as an administrator of the academy of Western studies that became the University of Tokyo, where he taught and served as president. He was, in turn, loyal to the Tokugawa shogunate at the end of its reign, supportive of Japan's opening to the West, and an advocate of a strong, central government in the Meiji Era. His primary questions included the proper role of government; the origin and nature of morality, laws, and rights; and the method for establishing the truth about the nature of human beings. In the late 1870s, he was exposed to the theory of evolution and its purported relevance for social development, and he became convinced that the proper method for establishing truth was empirical science; it alone could explain all matters of significance. On the way to this position of naturalism - the reduction of philosophical issues to the "facts" established by the natural sciences - Kat was forced to frame his questions in terms that were by no means transparent to his readers.
The third is Inoue Tetsujiro, who tried to formulate a historical and systematic philosophy in Japan. Maraldo describes his work as follows,
Inoue Tetsujiro (1855-1944), along with the unrelated Inoue Enryo (1858-1919), deserve credit for formulating Japanese intellectual traditions as "philosophy" and for developing philosophical systems of their own. Both appropriated Western philosophical categories to recast old traditions and renew them as relevant for a modernized Japan. Inoue Tetsujiro also shared some interests with Kato Hiroyuki, his senior professor and administrator at the newly renamed Imperial University of Tokyo. Like Kato, he was concerned with the nature of morality, the role of government, and the proper method for establishing truths about human beings and the world they live in. He, too, became an outspoken advocate of state power over individual rights. Inoue's theory of a "national morality", his increasing nationalism, and his construction of bushido or the "way of the samurai", are topics that deserve separate treatment. This general endeavor culminated in a monumental three-volume work suggesting a tripartite division in Japanese Confucian schools: The Philosophy of the Japanese Wang Yangming School (1900), The Philosophy of the Japanese Zhu Xi School (1906) - both focusing on Japan's versions of traditions we now call Neo-Confucianism - and The Philosophy of the Japanese Ancient Learning School (1902), focusing on thinkers like Ito Jinsai and Ogyu Sorai who returned to ancient Confucian thought and analyzed its basic concepts in their lexicons. Inoue's organization of Western philosophy served both to appropriate Eastern thought into the domain of tetsugaku and to define the position he staked out as his own.
The fourth philosopher is Inoue Enryo, who tried to perform a construction of Buddhism as philosophy and philosophy as Buddhist theory
Inoue Enryo (1858-1919) equaled if not surpassed Inoue Tetsujiro in casting the net of philosophy over Japanese traditions and defining new fields in Japan's modern academic institutions. He promoted "pure" or theoretical philosophy and refashioned Buddhist thought in its terms. He was already well-versed in Chinese classics and "Western learning" and proficient in both English and German by the time he entered the newly established University of Tokyo in 1881 to study philosophy under Ernest Fenollosa, among other foreign professors. German speculative philosophy, along with Herbert Spencer's evolutionism, had by then replaced positivism and utilitarianism as the predominant interest of Japanese intellectuals and came to inform the philosophy that Enryo defined as his own.
Enryo shared Tetsujiro's nationalism and advocation of national morality and paralleled Tetsujiro in rejecting Christianity as unscientific. Yet he considered religion in a much more positive light. Within Asian traditions, his focus was on Buddhism in general, not Japanese Confucianism, and he made Buddhism into philosophy not so much by historicizing it as by systematizing it in nontraditional terms. Both Inoues proved adept at classifying tetsugaku and defining it as a way of reaching truth retrospectively applicable to Eastern thought. And both forged their own syncretic philosophies. Eventually, Enryo claimed a priority for Eastern philosophy's "logic of mutual inclusion" - actually his own position that he also called "enryo philosophy", after the sinographs for his Buddhist name, meaning "circle" and "complete". Along with Inoue Tetsujiro, Enryo not only classified the various branches of Western philosophy but also defined and promoted "pure philosophy". In contradistinction to the practical interest of nearly all premodern Japanese philosophers, "pure philosophy" meant purely theoretical philosophy. For Inoue Enryo, pure philosophy is the field that investigates "the principles of the various disciplines, the truth of things, the rules of thought, and the like". Its goal is to "demonstrate and elaborate the foundations and principles of ethics, psychology, and other disciplines", in a word, to "investigate" the truth of all matters.
(John Marlado, 'The Japanese Encounter with and Appropriation of Western Philosophy', the Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy)
works Cited
Marlado, John C. 2020. 'The Japanese Encounter with and Appropriation of Western Philosophy', in Davis, Bert (Ed.) "the Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy".
Internet Resources
The International Association of Japanese Philosophy
European Network of Japanese Philosophy
Edited By: Samir Abuzaid
