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The tension between individual and society is central to Watsuji’s "Ethics." Relating Watsuji’s critique of Hegel’s concept of the modern family to the discussions on the family in the Civil Code in Meiji Japan opens a path for interpreting that tension in the wider context of Japanese modernity.

Paper long abstract

In the relevant scholarship, characterizing Watsuji Tetsurō as a “communitarian” is widespread. In Watsuji’s ethical thought, so we are told, the individual is subordinate to society. Critics like Tetsuo Najita and Harry Harootunian argue that Watsuji belongs to a group of philosophers in early Shōwa Japan who carried out a “revolt against the West.” For historically contextualizing Watsuji’s communitarianism, some authors go back as far as to Motoori Norinaga (Robert N. Bellah), whereas others relate him to the war-time project of “Overcoming Modernity” (Koyasu Nobukuni). While these attempts of historical contextualization open useful perspectives of Ideologiekritik, they are external to Watsuji’s philosophical thinking. With this qualification, I do not wish to advocate an ahistorical reading of Watsuji—on the contrary.

As I will suggest, in his "Ethics," Watsuji conceptually grasped the tension between individual and society as it was experienced in the modernizing society of Japan. To corroborate my claim, I will relate Watsuji’s elaboration of the family in the "Ethics" to the discussions about the legal status of the family in relation with the drafting of a modern Civil Code in Japan by Inoue Kowashi and Gustave Emile Boissonade de Fontarabie during the second half of the nineteenth century. My aim is to show that Watsuji articulates a mode of self-understanding, the self-contradictory structure of which was characteristic for how, in Japanese modern life, individuals normatively related themselves to society. This contradictory self-understanding is, so I argue, displayed in the Civil Code. Methodologically, I will employ as a heuristic tool Terry Pinkard’s appropriation of Charles Taylor’s notion of humankind as “self-interpreting animal” for his reading of Hegel. Hegel is important for interpreting Watsuji not only because he developed his notion of the family in direct confrontation with Hegel’s "Philosophy of Right," but also, and more importantly, because Hegel’s account of the historical path dependency of human self-understanding provides the conceptual means for situating Watsuji within the history of modern Japan without either suffering the shortcomings of Ideologiekritik, or committing the fallacy of historical determinism.

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By reading Fukuzawa and Nishi through the lens of “procedural realism,” this presentation contends that the Meiji reception of logic was a bulwark for universal ideals against the particularism of nationalist integration, moving beyond a simple tradition-modernity binary.

Paper long abstract

Modern logic’s introduction in Meiji Japan was an instance of neither Westernizing imitation nor modernizing convergence but involved, to borrow Hans Blumenberg’s (1985) expression, an “agency of reception.” An adequate appreciation of this requires attention to the alternatives against which logic was comprehended and legitimated. Scholars agree that the reception of modern logic in Japan was mediated by Nishi Amane, whose intervention should be situated within the broader project of the Meiji Enlightenment. So contextualized, Nishi’s legitimation of “modern” logic has been comprehended as a methodological rebuttal of “traditional” Confucian learning (Saigusa 1935; Funayama 1966; Fujita 2018). Yet, the contrast between “tradition” and “modernity” does not quite capture how philosophical discourse unfolded over the course of Meiji. As Thomas P. Kasulis (2018) observes, “What was thought about was certainly different, but how it was thought did not change nearly as much.”

This presentation contends that the Meiji reception of logic is better understood within the framework characterized by Johann P. Arnason (1997) in terms of nationalist integration and civilizational reorientation. To begin situating the reception of logic, I first build on Maruyama Masao’s (1986) reading of Fukuzawa Yukichi’s 'An Outline of a Theory of Civilization'. I argue that the latter’s reflections on method, as well as his critique of political ritualism, can be understood as articulating and motivating a civilizational ideal for discursive practices. Next, to unpack how modern logic could satisfy this, I draw on Christine Korsgaard’s (2010) notion of “procedural realism,” namely, that knowing reality is possible without relativistic consequences, but correct (non-skeptical and non-relativistic) conceptions of reality are those achieved through correct procedures. From this perspective, the philosophical consequences of Fukuzawa’s argument come into view. Due to their implicit relativism, ritualistic practices are to be rejected in favor of modern logic. The framework of procedural realism not only makes sense of Nishi’s editorial decisions in introducing logic. More importantly, I contend, it reveals logic as, less a battleground between “tradition” and “modernity,” more an attempted realization of and bulwark for the ideals of civilizational reorientation against the particularistic proceduralism of nationalist integration.

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This paper aims to unpack the complicated web of concepts pertaining to modernity, Westernization, rationality, and militarization with regard to the modern Buddhist thinker Inoue Enryo's theory of the afterlife as it is developed in "Popular Lecture: On the Immortality of the Soul."

Paper long abstract

In “A Popular Lecture on the Immortality of the Soul (1899),” the Meiji-era Buddhist thinker Inoue Enryō laments the “nearsightedness” of the Japanese people, stating that Western studies has caused them to lose sight of spiritual truths, like the immortality of the soul. Enryō then borrows several Buddhist arguments related to causality, merit, and reincarnation to claim that not only is belief in life-after-death metaphysically parsimonious, but that it is necessary for establishing an ethical society and strong army. (Marti-Oroval 2019; Schulzer 2023)

This state-of-affairs seems to support the view that Enryō was a Buddhist-nationalist, who appealed to abstract rationality to argue that Buddhist philosophy could help bring about the centralized moral values needed to establish a modern Japanese society. (ex., Figal 1999; Snodgrass 2003) However, both this narrative and Enryō’s own preamble likely simplify the circumstances in which he makes his arguments about the afterlife, as well as the complexity of these arguments themselves. If nothing else, the idea that Enryō merely attempted to unilaterally expound upon the truth of Buddhism overlooks the fact that he was aware of Western “psychical researchers,” like William James and Henry Sidgwick, who explored scientific/philosophical explanations of the afterlife in the same period

This presentation will ask, then, how we should understand Enryō’s argument for the afterlife in relation to Westernization and Modernization in Japan, and answer by claiming that – rather than rebelling against the West – he is actually reproducing the same kind of debates held by his Western contemporaries against their materialist counterparts through the shared argument that scientific materialism is naught more than a metaphysically unmotivated dogma. The presentation will thus not only affirm previous research (e.g., Marti-Oroval, 2019) that claims Enryō developed these ideas in response to the Japanese materialists of his own day, but also note that this reformulation entailed a need to answer doubts about how the West would view an “irrational (i.e., non-materialistic)” society, as well as the practical benefits of his own view, thereby leading him to derive philosophically unsound – and, somehow, militaristic – consequences from his own argument.