Short Abstract

This panel approaches modernity from the perspective of "historical receptivity" (Hans Blumenberg), thereby offering a way to understand how modern institutions and ideas were appropriated in Japan and how Japanese thinkers can be interpreted in their historical context without reducing them to it.

Long Abstract

Using modernity as a category of the history of ideas has been useful for organizing Japanese thinkers of the Meiji period and beyond. It has thus become possible to approach these thinkers from various angles, such as ideology critique, effective history, and others. Yet, taking modernity as a fixed historical category obscures what we, drawing from Hans Blumenberg’s “agency of reception [das Organ der Rezeption],” wish to call “historical receptivity.” We argue that from this perspective it becomes possible not only to understand the ways in which “modernity,” its institutions, and ideals were diversely appropriated and contested, but also to interpret modern thinkers within their historical context without reducing them to it.

This panel seeks to demonstrate the merits of the above approach through three case studies. First, we triy to make sense of the unresolved tension between individual and society in Watsuji Tetsurō’s "Ethics" by focusing on Watsuji’s treatment of the institution of the family. Situating Watsuji’s contestation of Hegel’s notion of the modern family—as explicated in the Philosophy of Right—within the discussions around the drafting of a modern Civil Code in Meiji-Japan will help to clarify the presuppositions behind Watsuji’s critique. Second, we take up Arnason’s and Maruyama’s reflections on Meiji to argue that the Meiji reception of logic cannot be accounted for in terms of a simple tradition-modernity binary. Rather, as satisfying Fukuzawa Yukichi’s call for non-relativistic discursive practices, logic can be understood as an attempted realization of and bulwark for the ideals of civilizational reorientation against the ritualistic relativism of nationalist integration. Third, we propose an interpretation of Inoue Enryō’s defense of the soul as parallel to the anti-materialist arguments from contemporaneous “psychical researchers” in the West. This framing can offer a new perspective on the problematic consequences that Enryō drew from his arguments, without reducing his project to an expression of anti-Western nationalism.