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Between the ideal and reality: two conceptions of idealism in early Meiji Japan

2023; Routledge; Volume: 36; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09555803.2023.2183977

1469-932X

Junichi Kasuga,

Japanese History and Culture

AbstractAbstractThis article examines the reception of idealism in Japanese philosophy during the earlier half of the Meiji period, focusing on the work of two pioneering philosophers of that time: Inoue Tetsujirō and Ōnishi Hajime. Due to their disputes over the Imperial Rescript on Education, the two philosophers are commonly understood as standing in a dichotomic relation in terms of their political ideologies: Inoue as a nationalist and Ōnishi as a liberal. Contrastingly, their respective philosophies are both often loosely identified as belonging to the genealogy of the theory of phenomena qua reality. This article examines whether it is tenable to attempt an identification of the nature of their philosophies notwithstanding their political allelism. By examining the notions of ‘the ideal’ and ‘reality’ in their metaphysics, it is concluded that the two thinkers have opposing conceptions of idealism: for Inoue, idealism is the reduction of the ideal into reality; for Ōnishi, idealism is the pursuit of the ideal. In this sense, this article shows that their conceptions of idealism can be understood more coherently if the analysis takes into account their political perspectives.Keywords: Japanese idealismthe Theory of Phenomena qua RealityInoue TetsujirōŌnishi Hajime AcknowledgementsThis article was originally prepared for a project organised by Professor Colin Tyler and Dr. Terao Hanno. I am grateful to the organisers for offering me the opportunity to explore this topic, as well as to Professor Fukagai Yasunori, Professor Kiyotaki Hitoshi, and Dr. Mori Tatsuya for their comments in earlier stage of this research. Also, I appreciate insightful comments of editors and two anonymous reviewers of the journal.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). Additional informationNotes on contributorsJunichi KasugaKasuga Junichi is an associate professor at LEC Graduate University. He was awarded his Ph.D. by Cardiff University, Wales, for a thesis entitled ‘The Formation of R. G. Collingwood’s Early Critique of “Realism”’. In addition to his expertise in the fields of British idealism and Collingwood studies, his specialist interests include such topics as the history of analytic philosophy, the reception of idealism in modern Japanese philosophy, and the philosophy of history. He may be contacted at: kasugaj@gmail.com.Notes1 Regarding ‘Idea or ri as mold, Matter as melting iron’, Nishi traces the origin of Plato’s theory of Idea: ‘the word kannen […] is the translation of Idea in English, Idée in French, both of which came from idein in Greek signifying “seeing”. It thus denotes existences in the images of things, as well as the ideal in the broad sense appearing in the mind’ (Nishi 1960 Nishi, Amane. 1960. Nishi Amane Zenshū [Complete Works of Nishi Amane]. Edited by Toshitaka Ōkubo. Munetaka Shobō. [Google Scholar], 30). Here, Nōtomi emphasises the fact that risō co-occurred with kannen upon the very first use in Japanese (Nōtomi 2012 Nōtomi, Noburu. 2012. Puraton risōkoku no genzai [Plato: The Ideal State Now]. Tokyo: Keiōgijuku Daigaku Shuppankai. [Google Scholar], 172).2 In this respect, Nōtomi points out: ‘As it was difficult to strictly distinguish the two terms, they were mixed up in actual uses. In fact, as in Inoue Enryō and Kiyosawa Manshi, Idea tended to be translated into risō…’ (Nōtomi 2012 Nōtomi, Noburu. 2012. Puraton risōkoku no genzai [Plato: The Ideal State Now]. Tokyo: Keiōgijuku Daigaku Shuppankai. [Google Scholar], 173).3 On the other hand, it is also true that this understanding of the tendencies of Japanese philosophy at that time has been modified in recent studies. For instance, Fujita (2018 Fujita, Masakatsu. 2018. Nihon tetsugaku shi [The History of Japanese Philosophy]. Kyoto: Shōwadō. [Google Scholar], 47–54) and Uehara (2020 Uehara, Mayuko. 2020. “Nihontetsugaku no renzokusei [The Continuity of Japanese Philosophy].” In Vol. 8 of Sekai tetsugaku shi [A History of World Philosophy], by Kunitake Ito, Shirō Yamauchi, Takahiro Nakajima and Noburu Nōtomi, 209–228. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō. [Google Scholar], 209–224) re-evaluate Nishi’s philosophy as an original contribution to philosophy rather than a mere introduction of Western philosophy to Japanese readers.4 Originally published in Kyōiku Jiron, no. 284, 1893. For the details of their disputes, see (Hirayama 1989 Hirayama, Yō. 1989. Ōnishi Hajime to sono-jidai [Hajime Ōnishi and His Time]. Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Sentā. [Google Scholar], 175–188).5 Another similar understanding of the two philosophers is provided by Miyagawa (1961 Miyagawa, Tōru. 1961. Kindai nihon no tetsugaku [Modern Japanese Philosophy]. Tokyo: Keisō Shobō. [Google Scholar], 73). In opposition to these traditional frameworks for understanding the relationship between Inoue and Ōnishi, some recent scholarship attempts to overcome it. For instance, Morishita criticises the ‘one-sided, naïve dichotomy’ as follows: [Inoue and Ōnishi] have been understood not by their studies in ethics and metaphysics, but solely by their political strife over the Imperial Rescript on Education. […] It was Kōsaka Masaaki of the Kyoto School who put forward this framework for the first time after the [Second World] War. On the other, Maruyama Masao, taking a different political stance from Kōsaka, also amplified the similar stereotype, illustrating the genealogy originating from Fukuzawa Yukichi, through Ōnishi and Miki Kiyoshi, to the post-war democracy. Much literature following the stereotypical dichotomy has been thus written in only shedding a light upon Ōnishi. As a result, up until the present day, Inoue’s works representing Meiji philosophy have continuously been ignored and have not been rightly treated. (Morishita 2015 Morishita, Naotaka. 2015. “Inoue Tetsujirō no < dou = jou > no keijijōgaku: kindai “nihon tetsugaku” no paradaimu” [Tetsujirō Inoue’s Metaphysics of “Uni-Pathy” the Paradigm of Modern “Japanese Philosophy”]. Hamamatsu Ikadaigaku Kiyō [ippankyōiku] 30: 1–43. http://hdl.handle.net/10271/2874 [Google Scholar], 3)In my view, the relationship between the two philosophers should indeed be approached from a different perspective, but Morishita’s comment that Inoue’s philosophy has been ignored in comparison to Ōnishi’s is not necessarily accurate. For example, the recently published The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy Davis (2020 Davis, Bret W., eds. 2020. The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]) contains numerous references to Inoue and only one to Ōnishi. This book captures the growing interest in Inoue’s work in the field of Oriental philosophy, at least in the Anglophone scholarship on Japanese philosophy. By contrast, Ōnishi’s philosophy has scarcely featured in such scholarship.6 One of the sources of the view that Ōnishi developed his evolutionistic idealism under the strong influence of T. H. Green is Tsubouchi Shōyō’s retrospect: ‘You [Ōnishi] were, it is said, always advocating … based on theories of the likes of Green’ (Tsubouchi 1977 Tsubouchi, Shōyō. 1977. “Ōnishi Hajime.” In Vol. 12 of Shoyō senshū [Selected Works of Tsubouchi Shōyō], edited by Shōyō Kyōkai, 441–446. Tokyo: Daiichi Shobō. [Google Scholar], 445). Hirayama is sceptical of this view, pointing out that it was after the substantial formation of Ōnishi’s idealism that Green’s philosophy became widely known among Japanese intellectuals, introduced by Nakajima Rikizō, who had just come back from Yale, around 1891–1892.7 Kosaka highlights this point: In general, what struck us in this essay is that yuibutsuron (materialism) and realism and the theory of mind-only and idea-ism have been used without clear distinction. … despite that materialism and the theory of mind-only should be the ontological positions and realism and idea-ism the epistemological, Inoue uses these terms mixing up the epistemological problems (problems of knowledge) with the ontological problems (problems of existence). (Kosaka 2013 Kosaka, Kunitsugu. 2013. Meiji tetsugaku no kenkyū [A Study of Meiji Philosophy]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. [Google Scholar], 346)8 Maraldo describes Inoue’s conception of idealism as yuishinron, referring to its Buddhist origin: As a traditional term, yuishin referred to the Buddhist theory that the world ordinarily perceived is a projection of one’s own deluded mind. Inoue used the term kannenron to denote the more inclusive position which, in its various versions, proposed that the objective world is a product of the knowing subject, in contrast to the view of the realist school (jitsuzaiha). In other words, Inoue’s yuishinron or ‘idealism’ was but one type of what we generally designate as philosophical idealism. (Maraldo 2020 Maraldo, J. C. 2020. “The Japanese Encounter with and Appropriation of Western Philosophy.” In The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy, edited by Bret W. Davis, 333–363. New York: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar], 353n.)9 It was Kuwaki Gen’yoku who suggested using these two terms in a way that clearly distinguished their respective qualities, pointing out that uses of the terms were very obscure in 1900. He defines idea-ism as ‘the position that asserts the external world is my ideas’ and the theory of mind-only as ‘the position that asserts reality is mental’ (Kuwaki 1900 Kuwaki, Gen’yoku. 1900. Tetsugaku gairon [An Introduction to Philosophy]. Tokyo: Tokyo Senmon Gakko Shuppanbu. [Google Scholar], 315–316).10 Maraldo, characterising it as ‘the Confucian and Buddhist flavor’, points out that Inoue’s theory of mind-only as the Japanese term corresponding to idealism was replaced by idea-ism by the 1920s (Maraldo 2020 Maraldo, J. C. 2020. “The Japanese Encounter with and Appropriation of Western Philosophy.” In The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy, edited by Bret W. Davis, 333–363. New York: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar], 353). However, it should be noted that the theory of mind-only and idea-ism in Inoue, as we have seen, are not precisely identical.11 Kosaka, noting that Inoue also calls it ichinyo [oneness] as a Buddhist term, points out that this notion of reality in Inoue is close to the ‘concrete universal’ in Hegel (Kosaka 2013 Kosaka, Kunitsugu. 2013. Meiji tetsugaku no kenkyū [A Study of Meiji Philosophy]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. [Google Scholar]).12 For the political background of Inoue’s philosophising, see (Guo 2017 Guo, Chiyang. 2017. “Philosophical Discourses in Meiji Era and Nation and Society: Tetsujirō Inoue’s Theory of Phenomena Qua Reality.” The Komaba Journal of Area Studies 21: 39–63. doi:10.15083/00077209.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 50–51): … Inoue emphasised ‘kōteichūshin’ [filial piety, obedience, loyalty, and sincerity] and ‘kyōdōaikoku’ [cooperation and patriotism] not solely from his nostalgia for the ‘premodern’ … In the dog-eat-dog age of competing nation-states, he expected those virtues to be ‘the only principles’ for ‘the unification of people’s minds’ in the state as an individual—namely the unification of the nation; those virtues were indispensable for protecting his own state against the invasion of foreign states, since the unification affects the strength of the state.13 Cf. For this point, see (Waki 2016 Waki, Takaharu. 2016. “Ōnishi ni okeru jinrin no keijijōgaku” [Metaphysik der Sitten bei Ohnishi Hajime]. Tetsugaku Nenpō 75: 21–41. https://doi.org/10.15017/1650962. [Google Scholar], 36).14 Nōtomi assimilates Ōnishi with Inoue in arguing that the two philosophers share ‘the trust in the reason that aspires after the dynamic progress towards the good’ and ‘the expectations for the human beings’ realising it in the society’. Furthermore, he detects in Ōnishi’s argument ‘an exclusivist logic which could turn out to be a “totalitarianism” under the name of “idealism”’, pointing out that Ōnishi does not clearly speak of what the substance of the ideal is (Nōtomi 2012 Nōtomi, Noburu. 2012. Puraton risōkoku no genzai [Plato: The Ideal State Now]. Tokyo: Keiōgijuku Daigaku Shuppankai. [Google Scholar], 194). In order to judge whether this is right, it is necessary to examine not only Ōnishi’s positive arguments for the notion of the ideal but also his social criticisms as negative manifestations of it.15 Mineshima (1971 Mineshima, Hideo. 1971. “Meijiki ni okeru seiyōtetsugaku no juyō to tenkai-6- Ōnishi Hajime ni okeru rinri to shūkyō” [The Introduction and Development of Western Philosophy in the Meiji Period (6) -Ōnishi Hajime’s View on Ethics and Religions]. Waseda Shōgaku [The Waseda Commercial Review] 229: 61–80. http://hdl.handle.net/2065/4494 [Google Scholar], 5) detects the same point in Ōnishi’s An Essay on the Origin of Conscience.16 For instance, Kosaka locates Ōnishi’s philosophy thus: They both [Inoue and Ōnishi] can be regarded as belonging to the genealogy of the theory of phenomena qua reality which is peculiar in Japanese philosophy. What is common in Japanese philosophy is a tendency to understand the individual and the universal or phenomena and reality as ittaifuni [one and not two], or as in inseparable relation; this peculiarity can be clearly seen in the thoughts of Inoue Tetsujirō, Ōnishi Hajime, and Nishida Kitarō. (Kosaka 2013 Kosaka, Kunitsugu. 2013. Meiji tetsugaku no kenkyū [A Study of Meiji Philosophy]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. [Google Scholar], 197–198) In this sense, Funayama’s view might have unduly generalised views of these philosophers. For an exceptional case regarding this point, Guo (2015 Guo, Chiyang. 2015. “Kindai shisō no shikinseki: Ōnishi Hajime ‘hihyō’ shisō no keisei” [A Touchstone of Modern Thought: The Formation of Ōnishi Hajime’s ‘Critical’ Thought]. Shisoushi Kenkyuu 22, 119–139. [Google Scholar], 127) only hints at the difference.