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Inoue Enryo, Kiyozawa Manshi, and Their Theory of the Immortality of The International Inoue Enryo Research 7 (2019): 1–31 © 2019 International Association for Inoue Enryo Research ISSN 2187-7459 INOUE ENRYO, KIYOZAWA MANSHI AND THEIR THEORY OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL Bernat MARTI-OROVAL 0 It is well known that INOUE Enryō 井上円了 (1858–1919) and KIYOZAWA Manshi 清沢満 之 (1863–1903) were contemporaries, both members of the Ōtani Denomination of Shinshū Buddhism, graduated from the University of Tokyo's Department of Philoso- phy, and produced novel philosophical interpretations of Buddhism. While the com- monalities in their thought have been previously investigated, there is still a lot of room for research in their relationship. Hence, in this paper I will take up the issue of their theories of the immortality of the soul. As I explain below, when considered within a wider framework, these ideas on the immortality of the soul in fact constitute a re- sponse to anti-religious and scientific perspectives which arose during the course of modernization. 0 Bernat MARTI-OROVAL, Associate Professor, Sophia University. Translated by Nathanial GALLANT, University of Michigan. MARTI-OROVAL IIR 7 (2019) | 1 1. Nineteenth Century European Materialism and the Negation of the Soul Entering into the 19th century, the "conflict between faith and reason" which began in early modern Europe, that is, the tension between a traditional worldview based in Christianity and the worldview described by science, only deepened; and not Just Christianity but religion itself came to be negated in its entirety by materialism. The debate between materialism and anti-materialism at the time took on a central role in Germany (then the Kingdom of Prussia).1 In short, the Weltanschauung proposed by materialism asserted that only matter exists in the universe (we can call this 'material monism'), and that the mental dimen- sion, the mind and soul, has no substantial existence being nothing more than an epiphenomenon of the body. In addition, as the influence of Romanticism, German Ide- alism and religious worldviews (in particular, pantheism) waned in the post-1840's German-speaking world, a variety of different philosophical interpretations and per- spectives emerged. At that time, the definition of philosophy, as well as its relationship to the scientific worldview and materialism, and the limitations of the scientific stand- point were widely debated. There was thus a significant advance in secularization and anti-Christian perspectives in the Prussian intellectual world. This was not limited to the philosophical context, however, and Prussia as well lead the way in the world of theology, where biblical textual criticism flowered out of the 1830's in which the Bible was treated merely as an historical text, and its creators, the period of its composition, and its structure all became the object of scholarly research.2 Then, during the 1850's some physiologists, psychologists, and chemists, among others, in strict intellectual adherence to the principles of scientific research, put for- ward the theory of materialism. That is to say, they attempted to reduce all mental ac- tivity to its chemical, physical and biological components. In this sense, if we accept their theories, then we would have to conclude that the concepts of free will, God, the soul and so on would be, obJectively, no more than mere superstitions. Among the proponents of this theory is notably the chemist Karl VOGT (1817– 1895), who debated the issue of materialism with the famed anatomist and physiolo- gists Rudolf WAGNER (1805–1864), that aroused great interest in this topic among in- 1 For more about materialism and anti-materialism in Prussia, see Frederick C. BEISER. After Hegel: German Philosophy, 1840–1900 (Princeton University Press, 2014); Frederick C. BEISER. Late Ger- man idealism: Trendelenburg and Lotze (Oxford University Press, 2014). 2 For the development of biblical textual criticism in Germany, in particular the Tübingen School, see Horton HARRIS. The Tubingen School: Historical and Theological Investigation of the School of F.C. Baur (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). MARTI-OROVAL IIR 7 (2019) | 2 tellectuals. Wagner proposed that it was possible to reconcile the results of scientific research on the origin of humanity and the teachings of the Bible. Further, he advanced a dualist theory of mind and matter, warning that a materialist theory of the immortality of the soul would destroy the foundations of moral and political structures. In response, Vogt reJected the biblical narrative of humanity's origin (as starting from Adam and Eve), proposing that "the relationship between thought and the brain is equivalent to that of bile and the liver, or urine and the liver," and thus the mind is no more than a physical activity of the brain, and the immortality of the soul no more than a mere reli- gious superstition.3 Other notable materialists included physician and physiologist Ludwig BÜCHNER (1824–1899), who authored Force and Matter (Germ. Kraft und Stoff), a famous work presenting scientific materialism which critiqued teleological thinking, interpreted the mind as a mere secretory function, and called for a philosophy of atheism. The main goal of this work was to refute the Christian worldview, in addition to claiming that, provided that the soul was no more than an aggregate of materials, free-will was incon- ceivable, much less the immortality of the soul. These theories of materialism quickly lead to the acceptance of the theory of evolution, which had then only recently been in- troduced into Prussia.4 However, there were some notable thinkers in Prussia who, unlike Wagner, did not confront materialism from a Christian perspective. For example, Adolf TRENDELENBERG (1802–1872), Hermann LOTZE (1816–1881), and Eduard von HARTMANN (1842–1906) opposed the increasingly popular theories of materialism and Darwinism, proposing a novel version of idealism based in new scientific discoveries. In other words, a perspective which is simultaneously metaphysical, vitalist, and tries to be scientific in its view of the universe. This position can be called "scientific ideal- ism." While these three thinkers have been largely forgotten today, they were widely read in Europe and the United States at the time and considered maJor philosophers. 3 Cited in ŌHASHI Ichirō 大橋容一郎 .「反哲学と世紀末」 [Anti-philosophy and the end of the century], chapter in『哲学の歴史』[The history of philosophy], vol. 9, ed. by SUDŌ Norihide 須藤訓任 (Tokyo: 中 央公論新社, 2007), 388. 4 In England as well, anti-religious theories related to the advance of scientific research developed around the secret dining club known as the "X Club," formed by nine scholars. The club's founder, the physiologist Thomas Henry HUXLEY (1825–1895) proposed the theory of epiphenomenalism, saying that all spiritual matters were epiphenomena of the brain. On the relationship between Enryō and the X Club and its members, particularly Herbert SPENCER, see HASEGAWA Takuya 長谷川琢哉 「スペンサーと円了」[Spencer and Enryō], International Inoue Enryo Research 3 (2015): 152–63; and HASEGAWA Takuya 長谷川琢哉.「ヴィクトリア時代英国における不可知論と井上円了」[Enryō and the theory of the Unknowable in Victorian era England], Annual Report of the Inoue Enryo Center 25 (2017): 43–69. MARTI-OROVAL IIR 7 (2019) | 3 Further, as I will show below, the influence of their thought extended to the philosophi- cal world in Japan. The intellectual trends of Europe during late 19th and early 20th centuries, that is, the above-mentioned materialist and atheist perspectives (the anti-religious world- view), together with the scientific idealism, were all simultaneously introduced to Japan. On the other hand, thinkers who supported Christianity as well as thinkers with pantheistic perspectives critical of Christianity left their mark on the Japanese intellec- tual world of the time, contributing to the formation of the unique intellectual milieu of MeiJi Japan. Among the intellectuals known as the "MeiJi Six Society" 明六社 for in- stance, TSUDA Mamichi 津 田 真 道 (1829–1903), FUKUZAWA Yukichi 福 沢 諭 吉 (1835– 1901), TOYAMA Masakazu 外山正一 (1848–1900), and KATŌ Hiroyuki 加藤弘之 (1838– 1916) all took positions that were closely associated with materialism. Further, beyond the MeiJi Six Society, MOTORA Yūjirō 元良勇次郎 (1858–1912) and NAKAE Chōmin 中江 兆民 (1847–1901) were thinkers with a particular interest in materialism.5 Accordingly, in 1898, as Enryō laments in Refuting Materialism『破唯物論』, materialism was a sig- nificant trend in the MeiJi period: "lately, those who are considered the great men of MeiJi have been in large part swept up in this wave, and the flag of materialism has been more and more unfurling among my great, middling and lesser predecessors. This trend is like the saying 'if one dog barks at nothing, a thousand others will raise the alarm' [a single lie can easily spread and become an accepted truth], and when these voices of blind repetition have finally become a chorus, it is no longer possible for me to continue sitting and watching in silence" (IS 23: 523).6 Thus, as I will expand on be- low, for Enryō and Manshi refuting materialism and proving the existence of the soul became an essential task. From a contemporary perspective, materialism's firm rootedness within science might lead us to the hasty conclusion that the religious thought of Enryō and Manshi was no more than a reactionary response to the anti-religious scientific world-view 5 For the history of materialism in Japan, see NAGATA Hiroshi 永田広志.『日本唯物論史』[The history of materialism in Japan] (Tokyo: 新日本出版社, 1983); Gerard Clinton GODART. " 'Philosophy' or 'Reli- gion'? The Confrontation with Foreign Categories in Late Nineteenth-Century Japan," Journal of the History of Ideas 69.1 (2008): 71–91. 6 While there were those among the Japanese intellectual elite, particularly around the Meiji Six Soci- ety, who were materialists and proposed that there was no real basis behind religion, as a matter of fact most of them still acknowledged the moral function of religion and thus its necessity for main - taining social order.
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