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Paper short abstract

The purpose of this paper is to consider the various sets of beliefs appearing in the Heian-period source material as being intimately related, by means of an approach that posits an episteme generating various modes of thought as the unifying centre of their worldview.

Paper long abstract

As part of my PhD project, I aim to demonstrate that beliefs in the "supernatural", such as evil spirits, were embedded in a broader domain of beliefs in pestilence-causing and other harmful deities, and more abstract notions of external influences, which can be collectively subsumed under the term "meta-physical", and were far more integrated into the complex of beliefs and knowledge in the Heian period than is currently recognised. They formed an integral constituent of the relations and modes of interaction between humans and deities and their ritual context. In order to describe the various meta-physical beliefs and ritual responses, the objective is to find an alternative approach that unifies the different spheres of belief, which were almost certainly not distinguished as such at the time, and avoids conventional categories such as "religion" and "superstition" that are not consistent with the Heian-period cosmology.

The proposition is to develop an approach to the Heian-period episteme, as a set of underlying principles deeply rooted in the nobility's mind-set and thought on an unconscious level, which governed certain interpretive structures, and as the unifying centre of their worldview, expressing their ontology. Such an approach seems feasible when considering that the different strands of belief and fields of knowledge were all intimately related and seem to have relied on the same fundamental principles. Some of these reflect their origins in Chinese modes of thought that had been introduced as part of the imported Chinese culture and the adoption of state-building mechanisms. As a consequence, such a model could elucidate the methods of ascribing meaning in specific contexts and explain inherent connections between certain modes of thought that may not be apparent on the surface level. This applies, for instance, to the subset of meta-physical beliefs that represent a disparate set of elements superficially, but appear to be engrained in a particular way in the interpretive models concerning the deities and supernatural forces, and their cosmology as a whole. It will also be interesting to consider the role of Buddhism in this particular understanding, since it was introduced as a fully-fledged system with its own cosmology.

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Paper short abstract

The paper is dedicated to the analysis of "musubi", the key concept in the quite remarkable ideological and philosophical system of Sato Nobuhiro, who belongs to what might be termed the mystical wing of "national learning".

Paper long abstract

Sato Nobuhiro`s ideas are not unique, but, rather, a quite remarkable example of what was typical during Japan's 19th century philosophical eclecticism.

While he belonged to what might be termed the mystical wing of "national learning", he was far less interested in the problems of metaphysics and soteriology than he was in the "real science" - the practices of farming and development of the natural resources that would improve the well-being of the people ("keizai").

Although Sato apparently died in obscurity, some of his ideas about, primarily, the urgent necessity of Japan's territorial expansion and the creation of a paternalistic state became quite popular in post-Meiji Japan. He is largely known to the West from this aspect of his thought.

This unilateral approach has led to the misinterpretation of the complex thoughts of Sato Nobuhiro, who created an impressive and internally consistent ideological and philosophical system that is based on the principle of isomorphic correlativity of multiple layers of existence, known in Western esotericism as correspondences.

He also shared, common to numerous currents of mystical thought, the belief in the "living" totality of all things and creatures that differ only in their degree of "liveliness".

The core of his belief system is the principle of creativity through sexual intercourse in a direct or symbolic form, which he called the "musubi", or "production spirit", following earlier examples of Motoori Norinaga and Hirata Atsutane.

He believed that the cosmogony itself, as well as the successful economic activities of people, are based on the same principle, and all attempts to suppress this sexual energy lead to stagnation. For him, the myth of the birth of the Japanese islands by Izanagi and Izanami is the archetypical representation of "musubi" in action, and the myth itself remains to this day an archetypical example to be actualized every time people are engaged in productive labour.

Thus, it can also be concluded that the ideas of Sato Nobuhiro are based on a traditional notion of cyclical time and the possibility of actualizing any given period and deeds in illo tempore by their reenactment in the present.

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Paper short abstract

What if nature was 'transgender'? This is one of the radically new epistemologies of science that I will bring to the surface via an intellectual history of Modern Japan, read through the works of the transnational naturalist and polymath Minakata Kumagusu (1867—1941).

Paper long abstract

What if nature was 'transgender'? This is one of the radical epistemologies of science that I will bring to the surface via an intellectual history of Modern Japan, read through the work of the transnational naturalist and polymath Minakata Kumagusu (1867—1941). The notion of nature is a contested cultural issue that has shaped the perceptual core of history writing. In the Western philosophical paradigm of modernity, nature has long been perceived through binary gender - mostly female. For example, the 19th-century saw Nietzsche's articulation of 'eternal feminine' where the cycle of life and death was essentialized to women's management since ancient Greek; and the 20th-century history of human emotion was strongly influenced by Freudian hysteria and irrational female analysands as opposed to cultured rational male analysts. Such gendering of nature has long operated as a normalising power that subjugates those whose 'nature' cannot be abided by the dichotomised languages of science. This paper proposes a critical analysis of epistemological knowledge once imagined by the transdisciplinary naturalist Kumagusu that overcomes the normalising social framework and stigma of modernity. I foreground my argument through discussion of his interests in sexology, epistemology, and Esoteric Buddhism imagined through the existential condition of mycetozoa, a type of slime moulds he examined, whose gender transcends male-female binary.

This is a view of nature that occupied intellectual space of alternative modernity, beyond the West-centric paradigm of the history of science and natural philosophy. The paper not only offers new historiography on works of Kumagusu but also proposes a fresh perspective on the ongoing histories of environmental thoughts.