'What Is Japanese Philosophy'?

Introduction: ‘What is Japanese Philosophy’? 459 Introduction: ‘What is Japanese Philosophy’? Raji C. Steineck and Elena Louisa Lange Remarks on the History of a Problem Until very recently, a first inquiry about ‘Japanese Philosophy’ could end up right in wonderland. Depending on which book or expert one turned to for general orientation, one would either learn that a) ‘Philosophy’ has never existed in Japan;1 b) ‘Philosophy’ was evident in Japan from the earliest written sources;2 or c) ‘Japanese Philosophy’ started with Nishida Kitarō’s Study of the Good (1911).3 To make things even more mind-boggling, experts and books upholding proposition b) – philosophical thought is evident in Japan from the earliest written sources – would either assert that it was b’) essentially the same as in the West, or b’’) essentially different from Western, and even from Indian and Chinese philosophy. The publication of a monumental sourcebook in Japanese Philosophy which contains materials from the 8th to the 20th century,4 and the introduction of pertinent articles in standard philosophical encyclopaedias such as the Routledge and the Stanford Encyclopaedias of Philosophy have changed the situation somewhat in the Western world, giving pre-eminence to variants of position b). But position a) is still upheld by many, 1 The locus classicus is Nakae Chōmin’s statement: ‘Since olden times to this day there has been no philosophy in Japan’, quoted recently eg. in Clinton, ‘“Philosophy” or “Religion”?’, p. 75. Godart adds: ‘This view, that there is no such thing as Japanese thought before 1868 which can be labeled “philosophy”, has become prevalent in Japan. In other words, retroactive designa- tions of indigenous thought as “philosophy” have never gained wide acceptance. The term tetsugaku is used almost exclusively for Western-style philosophy. This means that in modern Japanese, there is a distinction between philosophy (tetsugaku) and pre-Meiji indigenous intellectual production, the latter usually expressed in the term shisō (thought). This is not merely a matter of nomenclature: it suggests that pre-Meiji “thought”, by current Japanese standards, has no place on the stage of “world philosophy”.’ Sueki Fumihiko in his recent book on ‘the actual site of philosophy’ (!) again quotes Nakae Chōmin and re-confirms that tradi- tional Japanese thought contains little that might be termed ‘philosophy’ – which, to him, means that using the term tends to obfuscate possible Japanese contributions to global ‘thought’. Fumihiko Sueki, Tetsugaku no genba, p. 11. 2 Blocker and Starling, Japanese Philosophy; Heisig et al., Japanese Philosophy. 3 Dilworth et al., Sourcebook for Modern Japanese Philosohy: Selected Documents. 4 Heisig et al., Japanese Philosophy. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004360112_016 460 steineck and lange not least in Japan, and has put the discipline in the defensive in recent strug- gles about Japanese university reforms. What is it in the combination of the words ‘Japanese’ and ‘philosophy’ or their conceptual and material referents that has produced such different views, and are they really as contradictory as they seem? How do the views relate to both the intellectual history and the intellectual and philosophical historiogra- phy of Japan? Indeed, as will be shown in the following pages, the first question can partly be answered by semantical differentiation, but a full explanation of why, over time, there has been so little adaptation between the various views, will have to resort to responding to the second one. To start with the polysemous semantics of ‘Japanese philosophy’, one impor- tant divergence exists between a minority of authors like Gregor Paul, who take the first part of this double term to be merely a geographical indicator5 and the majority of the literature both in Japan and in the West, which under- stands the qualifier ‘Japanese’ to indicate some essential (i.e. philosophically meaningful) specificity. These attitudes are related (in a logically weak but his- toriographically strong sense) to diverging conceptions of philosophy: the ‘locational’ interpretation of ‘Japanese’ ties in with a universalist understand- ing of philosophy (understood by its main proponent Gregor Paul basically as the critical application of logical reason and common experience to matters of principal import.6) This stance expects and finds philosophy in Japan from the earliest texts on, wherever it detects passages that display logical reasoning, an orientation towards values that may be interpreted as universal, and due regard for common human sense and experience. On the other hand, it excludes texts and ideas that do not share these traits, whatever their intent and level of intellectual sophistication. The ‘essentialist’ interpretation of ‘Japanese philosophy’, on the other hand, connects to a pluralist vision of philosophy, and most often (but not necessar- ily), also to culturalist ideology. A deflated version of this view would simply state the expectation that the specific constellation of historical, social, politi- cal and linguistic factors shared by Japanese philosophers at a given time would have a significant impact on their selection, formulation and treatment of philosophical problems – although the measure of this impact and its rele- vance will have to be discussed for each work. In the stronger culturalist view, which has dominated historiographical discourse, these factors are attributed both determining and normative status. To the culturalist mind, a Japanese 5 Gregor Paul, Philosophie in Japan, pp. 14-15. Paul chooses to speak of ‘philosophy in Japan’ instead of ‘Japanese philosophy’. 6 Ibid., 4-6..

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