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The Search for the Archaic in Tokugawa Intellectual Thought

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The Search for the Archaic in Tokugawa Intellectual Thought The Search for the Archaic in Tokugawa Intellectual Thought Nicolas Audet East Asian Studies, McGill University, Montreal December 2016 A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts © Nicolas Audet, 2016 Audet 1 Table of Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 3 Section I: Tokugawa Ideological Foundations ............................................................................... 7 Section II: Ogyū Sorai .................................................................................................................. 16 II A: Sorai and the Zhu Xi School ......................................................................................... 16 II B: Sorai, Language, and the Way ...................................................................................... 20 Section III: The Mito School ........................................................................................................ 31 III A: Confucian Foundations and New Directions in Politics ........................................... 31 III B: The Dai Nihonshi and the Organization of History .................................................. 33 III C: Aizawa Seishisai and the Shinron ............................................................................... 38 Section IV: Nativism (Kokugaku) ................................................................................................. 45 IV A: Departure from Confucianism: Nativist Thought and the Archaic ........................ 45 IV B: Kamo no Mabuchi: Poetry as a Solution .................................................................... 50 IV C: Motoori Norinaga: The Shifting Notion of the Emperor.......................................... 53 IV D: Norinaga’s Politics and the Historical Ideal .............................................................. 56 IV E: Hirata Atsutane: Cosmology in Favor of Texts ......................................................... 61 Concluding Remarks and New Directions .................................................................................... 69 Audet 2 Abstract This essay seeks to survey the intellectual history of thought of the Tokugawa period (1603-1868) by focusing on important intellectuals of this period and integrates prevailing interpretations by major modern-day scholars. The purpose of this survey is to compare and contrast differing views of history and the archaic, and to see how language and classical texts influenced the Tokugawa intellectuals’ views of the archaic and to understand why they idealized it. Ce mémoire essaie de retracer l’histoire intellectuelle de la période Tokugawa (1603-1868) en examinant les intellectuels influents de cette période et intègre les interprétations prévalentes des experts modernes. Le but de cette enquête est de comparer et contraster les différents points de vue sur l’histoire et le concept de l’archaïsme, et de voir comment les langues et les textes classiques ont influencé les intellectuels de la période Tokugawa à percevoir l’archaïsme et comprendre pourquoi ces intellectuels ont idéalisé la période ancienne. Acknowledgements Professor Gavin Walker’s help as the supervisor of this project is greatly appreciated. The works which he recommended me to read during my undergraduate degree helped to develop an interest in this topic; furthermore he has helped me develop the ideas found in this paper. His advice for the structure, wording, and terminology was of great help as well. Audet 3 Introduction Many scholars of Japanese intellectual history present the middle of the Tokugawa period (1603-1868), the eighteenth century, as a period of moral crisis where previous moral assumptions and visions were no longer tenable and where ideological readjustments were needed to overcome disharmony.1 At the beginning of the eighteenth century there existed some faith in the existing social order and natural economy rooted in a body of ethical and political ideas. Categories of time, place and status previously believed to be harmonious and interrelated were questioned during the course of the eighteenth century, and rather than justify the existing social order, intellectual power was used to discuss historical change.2 Responding to immense social change and socioeconomic turmoil, eighteenth century thinkers turned to history and precedents to find solutions. Searching for alternatives to the failing Neo-Confucian order, the thinkers analyzed in this essay believed that a certain way of life had been lost over time, leading to the degradation of morals and behavior, and causing confusion that led to the current crisis. By locating an ideal society and community in ancient times and wishing to find a means to obliterate history and make the present like the past, the concept of history and how one saw oneself in relation to the processes of historical change shifted during this period. This essay will trace the thought of several thinkers belonging to different schools of thought and examine how they looked for solutions and how these solutions placed historical precedent at the center of their arguments. Intellectually, the eighteenth century proved to be a turning point in Japanese thought, as several positions came into being, which according to Naoki Sakai created a rigid partition between the “interior” (of Japanese society) and its “exterior.”3 This resulted in a homogenization of the 1 Najita, “Method and Analysis in the Conceptual Portrayal of Tokugawa Intellectual History”, 19. 2 Najita, “The Conceptual Portrayal of Tokugawa Intellectual History”, 20-21. 3 Sakai, Voices of the Past, 17. Audet 4 interior, which in turn entailed the positing of absolute incommensurability between the interior and the exterior. For Sakai it was at this moment that “Japanese” as a linguistic and cultural unity was born. As a homogenized and monolithic collectivity did not exist, eighteenth century writers had to posit the interior as what Sakai calls an arche, an idealized communality of ancient origin. These thinkers critiqued their contemporary social reality by contrasting it with this archaic commune, the arche, viewing the former as a loss in immediate communality. 4 By using Sakai’s description of how eighteenth century Tokugawa thinkers posited unities out of the present and past, this essay will attempt to show how these thinkers created different kinds of unities out of their idealized versions of antiquity. As Jeffrey Marti argues, much of the writing on the intellectual climate of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century Tokugawa period, spearheaded by the scholar Maruyama Masao (1914-1996) and his disciples, outlines the development of modern Japanese thought in a Hegelian fashion; it situates a genealogy of thinkers and analyzes their thought in order to “ascertain how the process of disintegration of the Zhu Xi school made way inwardly for the formation of a uniform mode of thought known as National Learning.”5 Marti’s remedy to this problem is to analyze history in a synchronic manner, and uncover the purpose behind an individual’s thought by examining the social discourse of the time.6 Although this essay is one that establishes a linear genealogy of Tokugawa intellectual history, the examination of these thinkers’ concept of history and how they dealt with the problems of historicity and the social discourse of 4 Sakai, Voices of the Past, 17. 5 Marti, “Intellectual and Moral Foundations of Empirical Agronomy in Eighteenth Century Japan”, 41. 6 Marti, “Intellectual and Moral Foundations of Empirical Agronomy in Eighteenth Century Japan”, 42. Audet 5 the time, is by no means the examination of problems that are peculiar to the individual himself, as Marti remarks.7 New modes of discourse centered around language emerged during this period due to the perception that Neo-Confucianism had become overloaded by sensory data and unable to name and order things according to fixed principles of explanation. This mode of thinking envisaged the world in categories of similitude inspired by a cosmological imagining.8 Naoki Sakai, described as having outstripped his mentors, Harry Harootunian and Tetsuo Najita,9 takes Harootunian’s argument in his work Voices of the Past a step further, writing that this imagining of a homogenous interior only became possible when historical time was constructed through a new reading of classics. Therefore, the issue of textuality in the reading of classic writings was directly connected to the formation of the idea of the interior, a social imaginary that opened up new possibilities of social praxis. The assumption of inhabiting the interior made it possible for one to believe that inhabiting this space enabled one’s immediate comprehension of events happening in that space, and that anyone not belonging to that interior was unable to have immediate access to such events and comprehension. Positing an assumed interior communality made it difficult for one to see the misunderstanding, conflicts and disorders within a collectivity, which leads Sakai to claim that the formation of the interior created an incommensurability between the interior and exterior. By conceding to this supposed unity—this interior—one would forget that the recognition of incommensurability could happen only in the process of learning and reaching out toward the Other.10 7 Marti, “Intellectual and Moral Foundations
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