How to Formulate Chinese Modernity and Nationhood

What’s wrong with the Chinese Nation? In The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity, Edmund S.K. Fung examines how Chinese thinkers confronted this question as they encountered and sought to resolve the question of modernity.

In broad philosophy, modernity has been formulated as a Western worldview, centered on Enlightenment, the guiding principle of reason and progress, and the idea of improving both man and the natural world. As Fung notes, this results in ideas of modernity that are not consistently compatible with each other, particularly the opposition drawn between modernity and tradition, which often maps onto a parallel opposition between West and East.1 This has raised the question of how the East experienced and conceptualised modernity, if they did so at all.2

Fung’s overview of the variations of modernity provides a helpful synthesis of both Western and non-Western conceptualisations.3 Foucault’s idea is especially useful here, as it encapsulates this synthesis and relates directly to the themes of nationalism and modernity. Foucault, drawing on Kant, describes modernity as an ‘attitude.’ For him, modernity involves philosophical questioning that interrogates how humans relate to their own time, how they exist historically, and how they constitute themselves as autonomous subjects.4

Within this context, Zhang Junmai (1887-1969), one of the leading thinkers of the NeoConfucianism movement, found that nationalism was crucial in China’s ‘attitude of modernity.’ Writing in a time of crisis where China faced existential threat from foreign aggression, Zhang believed that the freedom of the nation was what offered “the best protection of individual liberty” and that the nation was characterised by a distinctive ‘national spirit’ that sought political and cultural expression.”5

To this end, Zhang developed a nationalism rooted in self-defence and grounded in a ‘usable past.’ As Zhang explains, “in the midst of renewal the old is conserved. That is, creative renewal inherits the past and develops the future.”6 Anderson argues that this creative renewal is needed to create a unified national identity and requires a perpetuation of beliefs and myths about a group’s common past and future.7 However, this act of reinterpreting the past to underline themes of commonality “necessitate collective forgetting or amnesia.”8 Crucially, Zhang built this national consciousness in opposition to the “other” most immediately Japanese aggression, but also in comparison to the West. Thus, in answering the question “What is wrong with the Chinese nation?” Zhang contrasted China with other nations to diagnose its weaknesses: its lack of unity, the absence of a constitutional and legal-rational state, and the widespread absence of education among its people. Zhang then, participation in the attitude of modernity could not exist without the nation state.

  1. Edmund S.K. Fung, The Intellectual Foundatins of Chinese Modernity (Cambridge, 2010), p. 8. [↩]
  2. S. N. Eisenstadt, ‘Introduction’, in Patterns of Modernity, Vol. II: Beyond the West, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt (London, 1987), pp 5–9. [↩]
  3. Fung, The Intellectual Foundations, p. 9. [↩]
  4. Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 39. [↩]
  5. Fung, The Intellectual Foundations, pp 795-99. [↩]
  6. Zhang Junmai, Mingri zhi Zhongguo wenhua (Chinese culture tomorrow), (Shanghai, 1936), p. 123. [↩]
  7. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, (London, 1991). [↩]
  8. Nuala Johnson, “Cast in Stone: Monuments, Geography, and Nationalism,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13:1, (1995): 54-5. [↩]

Derridian Haunting: The Disillusion of Maternal Identity in Japanese Science Fiction

During 20th century Japan, the aftermath of World War II led to sociopolitical instability and growing anxieties about national identity and subjectivity. Raechel Dumas’ article “Monstrous Motherhood and Evolutionary Horror in Contemporary Japanese Science Fiction” explores the idea that motherhood symbolizes a loss of identity between the mother and the child. The framework of motherhood in Japanese science fiction sets up mothers as vessels for forces that exceed or erase the identity of the self. When read alongside Jacques Derrida’s theorization of spectrality and the instability of presence, Dumas’s analysis reveals that the monstrous maternal is not merely a gendered threat but a philosophical challenge to ontological certainty itself. 

Dumas uses the Parasite Eve to illustrate how the material body transforms and unravels identity. The mother figure Kiyomi experiences dream sequences that describe a “womb-like warmth” consumes Kiyomi and makes her identity indistinguishable from her parasitic child Eve.¹ This dissolution of the maternal body is a dramatic retelling of Derrida’s concept of hauntology which is the condition in which the present is never whole or self-sufficient but is unsettled and in conflict with what comes before and after it.² Kiyomi’s dreams illustrate losing boundaries and becoming inhabited by the parasite Eve. This metamorphosis mirrors Derrida’s claim that identity is always impacted by ghosts or external forces that aren’t fully one’s own. Kiyomi’s maternal body becomes the site where the past overtakes the present, demonstrating Derrida’s assertion that the living present is always “disjoined” by those who are “no longer or not yet there”.³ The maternal process creates a disillusion of identity that portrays motherhood as a figure of excess, inseparable from external forces that affect the women themselves. 

Derrida’s ideas of logic are clearer in Dumas’s reading of Queen of K’n-yan, where the mother is not merely a biological threat but a spectral manifestation of historical trauma. The alien queen in this story is portrayed as a combination of human and alien forms caused by Japanese grotesque wartime crimes. Japan’s imperialist crimes that were “forgotten or culturally repressed” illustrate Derrida’s ideas concerning homogeneity.⁴ Through the use of the media, societal structures, and academia, Derrida claims that one’s identity is tied to the political and societal structures influential in one’s life.⁵ Dumas notes that Derrida’s haunting “belongs to the structure of every hegemony” and the past returns as a monstrous mother whose reproductive excess literalizes the return of the repressed.⁶ The mother in K’n-yan becomes a hauntological figure who embodies a presence that is never fully present but rather is an unstable identity that refuses containment. K’n-yan’s mother illustrates both biological horror and ontological crisis.⁷ Overall, motherhood is shown to dissolve identities of bodies, histories, and identities which echoes Derrida’s claim that the self is always already inhabited by others and not the self.

Ultimately, through examining Dumas’ reading of Japanese science fiction parallels between motherhood and Derrida’s hauntology becomes obvious. Both Parasite Eve and the Queen of K’n-yan illustrate how monstrous motherhood illuminates anxiety about identity’s dissolution whether that be personal, familial, or national. By reading Dumas’ article this loss of identity through the lens of Derrida, the maternal becomes a site for Japan to be haunted by its own repressed histories and unstable futures.

 

  1. Raechel Dumas. “Monstrous Motherhood and Evolutionary Horror in Contemporary Japanese Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 45, no. 1 (2018): 26-27.
  2. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, Routledge, 1994.
  3. Dumas (n 1) 42.
  4. Ibid.
  5. Derrida, Jacques, and Bernard Stiegler. “Spectographies.” The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, edited by María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, Bloomsbury, 2013, pp. 37–52.
  6. Dumas (n 1) 41.
  7. Ibid. 43.

Confucianism as a World Philosophy: Is This East Asian Tradition Portable to the West?

There is a belief that the Confucian tradition can only be understood under an East Asian context—that only by being raised in East Asia, could one truly understand Confucianism. However, the existence of the Boston Confucians contradicts this assumption. The demonstration of how aspects of Confucianism are present within Boston (and, more widely, America), such as in Robert Neville’s connection between ritual propriety and pragmatic semiotics and the articulation of ren and filial love, which can be related to Christianity, illustrates how Confucian tradition is apparent in Western culture, ultimately proving that it is possible as a world philosophy.

In his book, Boston Confucianism: Portable Tradition in the Late-Modern World, Neville draws a link between li, or “ritual propriety”, and pragmatic semiotics.1 By highlighting this connection, Neville reveals Confucian virtues that relate to Western philosophies. Furthermore, this relation exemplifies the West’s ability to conceive Confucianism; thus, it emphasizes Confucian’s possibility as global philosophy. In order to recognize this relationship, let us look at Neville’s definition of both, ritual propriety and pragmatic semiotics. The deeper meaning of ritual propriety to Neville is that it ‘creates culture, is conventional, and is a particular kind of harmony’.2 In other words, rituals are not simply having “good manners” and following some grand exhibition of rites. Rather, ritual propriety should be understood as simpler and common. For instance, rituals transform procreation into the concept of a family. Certain actions which indicate a family dynamic, like parents caring for the wellbeing of their children, are culturally understood. Hence, ritual propriety is communicated through socially acceptable demonstrations of larger concepts, such as family, friendship, and respect.

Pragmatic semiotics holds a similar definition. Pragmatism views language and interpretation as the creation of meaning rather than mirroring reality. Moreover, pragmatic semiotics studies how signs and symbols constitute meaning.3 For example, the difference between mere cooperation and a close friendship are the signs, like a person’s actions, which portray the difference. Certain signs are culturally understood as equating friendship, such as levels of intimacy and trust. In this context, pragmatic semiotics creates culture, is conventional, and is harmonious. These signs symbolize higher associations, like family and friendship, similarly to ritual propriety. Therefore, a formulation of ritual propriety exists in Western culture. This existence shows that vital parts of Confucianism can be perceived outside of the Eastern context. Thus, Confucianism is portable into a world philosophy.

The similarities between Confucianism’s ren and Christianity’s underscore of family also illustrate a Western understanding of Confucian values. Ren is often translated into a benevolent, human “love”, yet it is also a differentiated form of love, which means that it recognizes a difference between a stronger love for one’s family compared to love for a stranger. Still, ren maintains a compassion for others. In Book One, Confucius states that ‘a young person should be filial when at home’ and that ‘he should display a general care for the masses’.4 In Confucian tradition, filial piety plays a vital role as a virtue.5 Likewise, Christianity emphasizes agape and parental love. The Bible contends that ‘thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself’6; additionally, the Bible instructs people to ‘honour thy father and thy mother’.7 Both traditions hold parallel beliefs pertaining to love. Furthermore, both acknowledge the necessity of filial piety to this love. Hence, an essential aspect of Confucianism, that of ren, is already understood in the Western context under Christianity. This understanding allows the West to grasp the teachings of Confucianism—without the requirement of an Eastern context. Thus, Confucianism is possible as a global philosophy.

  1. Robert Neville, Boston Confucianism: Portable Tradition in the Late-Modern World (Albany, 2000), p. 2. [↩]
  2. Ibid., p. 9. [↩]
  3. Ibid., p. 12. [↩]
  4. Confucius, ‘The Analects’, in Philip J. Ivanhoe and Bryan W. Van Norden (eds), Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (Indianapolis, 2001), p. 22. [↩]
  5. Tu Weiming, Centrality and Commonality: An Essay on Chung-yung, (Honolulu, 1976), p. 55. [↩]
  6. Leviticus 19: 18 (KJV). [↩]
  7. Exodus 20: 21 (KJV). [↩]

Kakuzo Okakura: The Art Historian of Empire

Kakuzo Okakura was part of the Imperial Art Commission sent out by the Japanese Government in 1886 to study the art history and movements of Europe and the United States.1 Later in his career, he pivoted to Asia, visiting India and China to document and preserve what he perceived as an Asiatic art lineage.2 These surveys gave rise to Kakuzo’s main treatise, The Ideals of The East — a useful focal point to explore the implications for art history and criticism when tied to a national project.3)

Kakuzo suggests an alternative art-lineage of the world — one that begins in Asia and spreads outwards, challenging traditional Hellenic theories of art.4 His work displaces Greece as the center of art, tying analyses of Asian art to civilisational discourse. This draws emotive sway by engaging the East-West binary constructed to justify Japanese imperialism. By drawing civilisational links between Asian art, he aided the construction of transnational Japanese authority.

Conducting a comparative study, he traces similarities in the techniques and characteristics of art across Asia. For example, he compares the Ajanta caves in India with Horiuju in Japan.5 He identifies specific methods as distinctly ‘Asiatic’. Covering the ground with white lime followed by rock-pigments, which are accentuated and marked off from each other with strong black lines is one such method.6 

Kakuzo links Asian art and its flows to a broader notion of Asian spirituality that he roots in India and China.7 He sees these forces coalescing in Japan, positioning Japan as the ideal preserve of Asiatic art.8 He references ideas such as Japan’s ‘unbroken sovereignty’ and its people being an ‘unconquered race’, to argue that Japan is the only state in Asia where Asian art and culture was insulated from external influence.9 This insulation is used to justify Japanese superiority and legitimise expansion.

Here, Kakuzo’s arguments mirror British conceptions of knowledge and Empire. He argues for the merits of Japan as collector, as a space for Asia to be understood through its treasured specimens.8 Scholars argue however, that Kakuzo’s cultural proximity to the rest of Asia made him better placed to understand and preserve the art of these other nations.10 His awareness of culturally particular technique contrasted efforts by European scholars who often unintentionally disfigured art and artefacts with the intention of cleaning and uncovering art.11

Still, he maps the particular onto the universal, arguing that “the history of Japanese art becomes thus the history of Asiatic ideals.”12 Here the tension between the notion of a universal Asian culture and the framing of cultural hegemony becomes apparent. Countering the distinction and differentiation between the people of Asia, he attempts to draw cultural ties to project the notion of a collective civilisation. However, he locates Japan as leader or protector of this civilisation, identifying traits inherent to the nation as legitiimising this superiority.

His arguments are also temporal in nature. He frames India and China as representing Asia’s past, and Japan as presenting Asia’s present and future. This mirrors Japanese imperialist arguments that use the idea of Japan leading Asia’s spiritual rejuvenation as justification for expansion.13 In doing so, Kakuzo provides an alternate pathway for linking past and present in Japanese discourse. While the Japanese imperial state was closely linked to narratives of modernity and a future where Japan led Asia towards a technocratic future, Kakuzo’s emphasis on Japan as a museum of Asiatic civilization provides a cultural legitimacy anchored in notions of an Eastern past.14

  1. Nivedita, Introduction in Kakuzo Okakura The Ideals of the East (London, 1905), p. ix. [↩]
  2. Ibid., p.xi. [↩]
  3. Kakuzo Okakura, The Ideals of the East (London, 1905 [↩]
  4. Ibid., p.76. [↩]
  5. Ibid., p.53. [↩]
  6. Ibid. [↩]
  7. Ibid., p.19. [↩]
  8. Ibid., p.6. [↩] [↩]
  9. Ibid., p.5. [↩]
  10. Nivedita, Introduction, p.xii. [↩]
  11. Ibid., p.xii. [↩]
  12. Kakuzo, The Ideals of the East, p.8. [↩]
  13. Aaron Peters, Comparisons and Deflections: Indian Nationalists in the Political Economy of Japanese Imperialism, 1931–1938, in Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review (8:2, 2019) pp. 548-587, p.561. [↩]
  14. Duara Prasenjit, Asianism and the New Discourse of Civilisation (2004), p.120.; Kakuzo, The Ideals of the East, p.7. [↩]

Confucian Fascism: The Authoritarian Appropriation of Tradition in Interwar East Asia

The selective reinterpretation of Confucian ideas by political actors in China and Japan during the 1930s reveals how traditional philosophical concepts could be mobilised to define political loyalty, justify state violence, and construct alternatives to Western ideologies. These appropriations demonstrate that Confucianism was far more than a relic of dynastic times. Looking at two similar yet different moments shows how seemingly traditional ethical systems can be transformed into tools of modern political extremism. The rise of fascist movements in China and Japan during the 1930s, along with recent support for Confucian constitutionalism, demonstrates this ideological flexibility and its profound historical impact.

The most extreme political use of Confucian ideas occurred within China’s Nationalist Party (NP) and the Japanese imperial state during the turbulent interwar period. NP factions, notably the Blue Shirts and CC Clique, pursued what historian Frederic Wakeman describes as “Confucian fascism” through a domestically rooted fascist ideology rather than mere imitation of European models1 . After Sun Yat-sen died in 1925, figures like Dai Jitao promoted native culture as essential to revolutionary nationalism. Chiang Kai-shek expressed this synthesis in 1933, asserting that Sun’s principles “inherited the morality and vital spirit of ancient China from Emperors Yao and Shun, Kings Wen and Wu, the Duke of Zhou and Confucius” to “lead the revolution and revive the nation” (Clinton, Revolutionary Nativism, 407)

This nativist turn provided ideological justification for the White Terror between 1927 and 1937, during which the Nationalist government murdered and imprisoned Communists, liberals, and critics.2 Violence was depicted as moral purification rather than political repression. The New Life Movement of 1934 represented a practical implementation of this philosophy, aiming to militarise everyday life through reinterpretations of Confucian precepts.3 Chiang mandated that in homes, factories, and offices, everyone’s activities must resemble those in the army, explicitly seeking to turn the population into components of a vast social machine.4 This mechanistic vision combined traditional hierarchical relationships with modern industrial discipline.5 The movement promoted four core Confucian virtues but interpreted them through an authoritarian lens compatible with modernisation while claiming unbroken civilizational continuity.

Nationalist Party groups distilled Confucianism into a transhistorical national spirit that abstracted it from feudal contexts, made it compatible with modernisation, while claiming unbroken civilizational continuity.6 Blue Shirts openly advocated fascism in their publications through control of party media during the 1930s.7 As historian Maggie Clinton demonstrates, these groups rendered “Confucianism compatible with a path of modernisation” by linking it to national revolutionary culture and industrial modernity.8 The CC Clique, dominated by civilian bureaucrats Chen Guofu and Chen Lifu, worked alongside the militarily focused Blue Shirts to cement a one-party ideological state through cultural production and nationalist literature. Together, these factions intensified a Janus-faced glance toward both past and future, evident in all nationalisms.9

Japanese intellectuals pursued parallel appropriations of Confucian philosophy during the same period, though with distinct ideological aims. The Shibunkai, a Confucian scholarly society, wielded influence in government policy during the 1930s, serving as “China advisors” and submitting recommendations for joint research institutes and Confucian universities in occupied territories.10 They asserted that Japan’s Confucian-Shinto synthesis represented the Kingly Way of virtuous governance practised in its highest form through its unbroken line of emperors and unparalleled unity of filial piety and loyalty.11 This provided spiritual justification for Japanese expansionism by arguing they were engaged in a paternalistic undertaking, exhorting the Chinese to restore the Confucian Way and monarchical order.12 The transformation of Confucianism into an ideological tool of totalitarianism ironically began with the Meiji Restoration’s authoritarian state suppression of Confucian institutions and religious practice during the 1870s and 1880s, followed by its resurrection within the cold frame of Western philosophy.13

Both Chinese and Japanese appropriations shared fundamental characteristics. They extracted Confucian concepts from their original contexts and deployed them as instruments of state power rather than as ethical systems that constrained authority. Traditional emphasis on hierarchy, social harmony, and cultural continuity was weaponised to justify modern totalitarian projects. The intellectual apparatus constructed to promote this vision represented a profound reversal because the historical Confucian tradition had always maintained that rulers were subject to moral constraints and that Heaven’s mandate could be withdrawn from unrighteous governments. The role that Confucian philosophy played in legitimising fascist organisations demonstrates that gender relations and political systems cannot be reduced to ideological prescription alone. This historical pattern demonstrates that traditional cultural resources can be weaponised for any political project when decoupled from their original institutional contexts and ethical commitments.

 

  1. Frederick Wakeman, ‘A Revisionist View of the Nanjing Decade’, The China Quarterly, 1997 (150), pp.395-432 [↩]
  2. Ibid, 159 [↩]
  3. Ibid, 131 [↩]
  4. Ibid, 135 [↩]
  5. Ibid, 129 [↩]
  6. Ibid, 84 [↩]
  7. Ibid, 66 [↩]
  8. Clinton, p. 199 [↩]
  9. Ibid, 65 and 84 [↩]
  10. Paramore, ‘Japanese Confucianism’, 177-178 [↩]
  11. Ibid, 154-155 [↩]
  12. ibid, 154 [↩]
  13. Ibid, 141 [↩]

Reimagining Tradition: Boston Confucianism’s Transformation of Global Thought

Boston Confucianism illustrates a significant transformation of philosophical traditions in order to be more applicable and relevant to modern intellectual projects. Robert C. Neville and Tu Weiming treat Confucianism as a “portable tradition” that addresses the ever changing multicultural late-modern world.¹ The transformation of ancient philosophical traditions specifically Confucianism occurs through acts of translation, reconstruction, and intercultural dialogue and Neville and Weiming argue that these processes are necessary to unbind Confucianism from the Sinocentric ideas seen in the historical interpretations of Confucianism. 

First, Neville argues that Confucianism shouldn’t be exclusively tied to the East in both historical and ethnic contexts but rather put into dialogue with Western philosophers to foster a multicultural understanding of Confucianism.² Neville argues that Confucianism should be approached similarly to Western philosophers who for example, commonly use Greek philosophies in their works without being Greek or knowing classical Greek. The same framework of reinterpreting ideas from thinkers outside one’s own geographic origins should be applied to Confucianism. By restrategizing how Eastern philosophies and intellectual works are studied and interpreted in academia, Confucianism is reframed as a “world philosophy” or a philosophy that is able to reach and transcend cultural and linguistic boundaries while maintaining its integrity and cultural significance.³ Tu Weiming builds upon Neville’s point by emphasizing the importance of breaking through linguistic barriers through translation of works.  Weiming states that Confucianism cannot survive the changing modern ideologies and stay culturally relevant without being accessible to other cultures through language. If Confucianism was to never be translated into other languages the philosophy would be “linguistically forever inscribed in a Sinitic mode”.⁴ The vitality of Confucianism depends on the intercultural exchange of ideas that is only gained through accessibility in new languages and cultural environments. Therefore, translation according to Weiming is not only a semantic technicality but an essential to Confucianism’s current relevance and modernization. 

Along with intercultural exchange through translation, Neville highlights the transformation of Confucianism through reconstruction as seen in Boston Confucianism. Confucianism tradition has always leaned towards being more dynamic and open to reform as seen through critiques such that of the Zhou ritual and Neo-Confucianist metaphysics.⁵ This internal dynamic of critique leads Confucianism to be able to adapt well into new cultural settings. Boston Confucianism demonstrates Confucian adaptation through the feminist critiques at the Berkeley conference.⁶ Boston Confucians responded to the criticism by separating Confucianism from the traditional patriarchal East Asia history and argued that Confucian principles represent reciprocity and harmony over oppressive hierarchies. Through internal structures of criticism and adaptation, Neville demonstrates how Confucianism is reinterpreted to contemporary ethical and social concerns. 

Through using intercultural intellectual resources made available through translation and adaptability Confucianism is transformed into a global philosophy. Neville and Weiming stress the creation of a “world culture of philosophy” which reconstructs all traditions and allows for all ancient philosophies to address late-modern concerns.⁶ Confucianism as seen through Boston Confucianism becomes indispensable among many emerging discourses and displays how tradition can maintain a connection with its heritage and culture while also reshaping itself to be applied in new contexts. 

  1. Tu Weiming, “Foreword,” in Boston Confucianism: Portable Tradition in the Late-Modern World, p. xii.
  2. Neville, Boston “Preface” Boston Confucianism: Portable Tradition in the Late-Modern World, p. xxii.
  3. Ibid, p. xxx.
  4. Ibid, p. xii-xiii.
  5. Philip J. Ivanhoe, “Neo-Confucian Philosophy,” in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy 
  6. Neville, Boston “The Short Happy Life of Boston Confucianism” in Boston Confucianism: Portable Tradition in the Late-Modern World p. 21-22.

Everydayness and Historical Time: Tosaka Jun and Marc Bloch

Tosaka Jun, a marxist philosopher associated with the Kyoto school of the early 20th century, was highly critical of prewar Japanese philosophy. He rejected the abstract metaphysics of members of the Kyoto School on the grounds that their ‘bourgeois’ ideology easily permitted fascist appropriation. He utilized historical materialism to call for a philosophy of the quotidian, centering the concept of ‘everydayness’. This stance led to his imprisonment under the anti-communist Peace Preservation Law, where he died shortly before Japanese surrender.

Placed in a global context, Tosaka’s work reflects a broader current of intellectuals reacting to an increasingly extremist world. His worldview and historical conception parallel the writings of Marc Bloch, the co-founder of the Annales d’histoire economique et social. Although these two conceptions of historical time emerged from different traditions, one from marxist materialism and the other from social history and mentalities, both rejected linear, abstract models of time and grounded historical understanding in human experience1.  Acknowledged in comparison, Marc Bloch and Tosaka Jun’s conceptions of historical time show that history is constantly being made and remade within the quotidian, it is not simply the stories of ‘great men’ but a reflection of contemporary culture.

Tosaka argues that understanding time as temporal or spatialized deny the existence of historical time2.  ‘Historical time is the fundamental concept of temporal things. And within that—without overemphasizing or understating it—is the division. But what is a division of historical time?’3 For Tosaka, division is a zeit, which comes from the contents or the character of the time itself.3 To explain this, he makes an analogy wherein character is a ripe fruit that falls from the tree of history, and ‘what manner people faithfully receive this fruit depends on the character of the people themselves.’4 Politics and material relations attach a character to a period.5 Tosaka argues that ‘a period then is none other than the dialectical development of various stages of historical time.’6

‘In the principle of the day- to- day—the principle of the quotidian—in the constant repetition of the same act though it is a different day, in the common activity of drinking tea, in the absolute inevitability of the principle of everyday life—in these things dwells the crystallized core of historical time; here lies the secret of history’7. 

Similarly, Marc Bloch defines historical time as ‘a concrete and living reality with an irreversible onward rush. It is the very plasma in which events are immersed, and the field within which they become intelligible’8. For both Tosaka and Bloch, historical time is grounded in the tangible and material. While Tosaka takes this emphasis on the material a step further due to his marxist conception, Bloch ultimately values the contributions of ‘men in time’ to ‘the science of men’ or history9. Both explicitly reject Rankean historicism which they view as a tool of fascist expansion within the academy. 

Though different in practice, both understandings of historical time ground history in ordinary human life, rejecting the narratives of authoritarian regimes. Both sought to reclaim history from abstraction and restore it to the people whose lives constitute it. In doing so, they participated in a broader global effort to resist authoritarianism not only through politics but through intellectual methodology. The Historians Craft became widely known in global scholarship, while Tosaka’s broader influence has remained limited until fairly recently. While Tosaka would disagree with many aspects of the later Annales, I believe he would find camaraderie in the struggle of the founders of the journal in their fight to invigorate their readers against fascism. Ultimately, both aided in redefining what history is and who produces it for future generations of scholars. 

 

  1. Robert Stolz, Fabian Schäfer, and Ken C. Kawashima, (eds.), Tosaka Jun: A Critical Reader (Ithaca, 2013) p.4 [↩]
  2. Ibid., p. 7 [↩]
  3. Ibid. [↩] [↩]
  4. Ibid,. p. 9 [↩]
  5. Ibid [↩]
  6. Ibid,. p. 10 [↩]
  7. Ibid., p. 12 [↩]
  8. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. Peter Putnam, foreword by Joseph R. Strayer (Manchester, 1976), p. 27 [↩]
  9. Ibid., p. 27 [↩]

Nationalism and Propaganda: The Flaws of Kuki Shūzō’s Iki no kōzō as a Nationalistic Ideology

Nationalist undertones are clearly evident in Kuki Shūzō’s Iki no kōzō, or The Structure of Iki; however, critiques on his exploitation of hermeneutic methodology and his universalization of a term concerning a minority for the whole of Japan undermine his book’s ability to serve as nationalistic ideology.

Published in 1930, Iki no kōzō explored the cultural meaning of iki in order to reconcile Japan’s past against the infringing influences of Western modernity. Kuki argues that iki is a Japanese sensibility of taste which can be symbolized through objectification but only truly understood by personal experience. In other words, one may be able to find attributes of iki in Western aesthetics, yet the works would lack the hermeneutic meaning of iki, ‘as a phenomenon of consciousness’.1 Thus, iki becomes a ‘distinct self-expression of an oriental culture,’ —a uniquely Japanese phenomenon.2 In this exposition as a Japanese exclusive taste, Kuki presents a nationalist view: the realization of iki separates Japan from the vulgarity of the West. Hence, in terms of aesthetics, Japan was culturally superior. Nevertheless, this nationalism fails to successfully manifest into nationalist ideology.

In her article ‘In a Labyrinth of Western Desire: Kuki Shūzō and the Discovery of Japanese Being’, Leslie Pincus critiques a paradox in Kuki’s employment of hermeneutics. Although Pincus’s interpretation is contested as ironic and overreaching— ‘[Pincus] removes Kuki’s work from the Japanese context… and tries to build a culturalscape of Japan’s fascism and imperialism in a discourse of Japan’s aesthetics, that may not have existed exactly as she portrayed’ —her evaluation of the hypocritical impact of hermeneutics in Kuki’s argument should not be discounted.3 The paradox stems from Kuki’s revelation that ‘iki has no place in Western culture as a certain meaning in its ethnic being’ and his assertion ‘the study of iki can exist only as a hermeneutic study of ethnic being’.4 The problem, then, lies in the fact that hermeneutics is a Western mode of analysis. Therefore, Kuki ironically ‘the terms in which he articulated Japan’s difference from the West were clearly marked by a long and productive apprenticeship to European letters’.5 If Kuki must rely on European methodology in order to extract Japan’s distinctive aesthetic, iki, then the question of whether this concept would exist without Western modernity emerges. Since Kuki posits iki in direct opposition to Western influences—that iki remains untainted by the West—this question undercuts his book’s appeal to nationalistic ideology. How can Kuki’s argument purport a superiority of Japanese aesthetics, or issue iki as a national defense, when the only way to comprehend this mode of being is through a Western lens. Thus, Western influence infiltrates the very thing Kuki argues it does not, ultimately weakening his nationalistic argument.

Moreover, Kuki’s decision to universalize a term pertaining to a small selection of Japan’s population, hinders his overall assessment of iki as a national mode of being. Iki, as an aesthetic, grew in popularity during the Edo period of Japan. Denoting a specific style of the mercantile class in the city of Edo, iki represented a resistance to the samurai bureaucracy.6 In other words, historically, iki resided in the sentiments and style of the Edo merchant class—a class holding great wealth but lacking status. By choosing a word associated with one social class in one city, Kuki severely limits the inclusive aspect of his argument. How can iki constitute the mode of being for all of Japan when it is only linked to a small percentage of the population? In employing iki as a cultural signifier, Kuki enlarges this minority group to portray Japan. He essentially fabricates a national identity. The lack of consideration for other groups diminishes Kuki’s declaration of iki as a national phenomenon, for iki does not truly represent all of Japan. Consequently, Kuki’s book is unsuccessful as nationalistic ideology.

  1. Shūzō Kuki, ‘The Structure of Iki’, in Hiroshi Nara, J. Thomas Rimer, and Jon Mark Mikkelson (eds), The Structure of Detachment: The Aesthetic Vision of Kuki Shūzō (Honolulu, 2004), p. 58. [↩]
  2. Ibid., p. 17. [↩]
  3. Yukiko Koshiro, ‘Fascism and Aesthetics – Leslie Pincus: Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Shūzō and the Rise of National Aesthetics’, The Review of Politics, 59: 3 (1997), p. 608. [↩]
  4. Kuki, ‘The Structure of Iki’, pp. 58-59. [↩]
  5. Leslie Pincus, ‘In a Labyrinth of Western Desire: Kuki Shuzo and the Discovery of Japanese Being’, boundary 2, 18: 3 (1991), p. 144. [↩]
  6. Ibid., p. 143. [↩]

Breaking Dialectic: Tanabe Hajime’s Adaptation of Hegelian Reason in the Logic of the Specific

       In modern Japanese philosophy, Tanabe Hajime stands out as a philosopher who assimilated and transformed major parts of Western thought, specifically German idealism. Tanabe’s engagement with Hegel best displays his inspiration from German idealism. While Tanabe draws strongly from Hegelian dialectics in his own works such as the Logic of the Specific (種の論理), Tanabe ultimately reworked Hegel’s logical system to display historical fallibility, ethical failure, and the necessity of radical self-negation.¹ This comparison illuminates both Tanabe’s intellectual development and a broader evolution of the Kyoto School. While philosophers and Japanese society debated between Buddhist notions of impermanence and non-self and Western systematic philosophy, Tanabe Hajime was able to rework both areas of thought to confront guilt concerning unethical historical acts and transform the individual and society through self negotiation. Through deep engagement with Hegel’s dialectical philosophy Tanabe transforms Hegel’s philosophy by rejecting Hegel’s teleological reconciliation of contradictions and replaces it with a model focused on historical fallibility, the instability of communal structures or species, and the need for radical self-negation or metanoesis.

       First in order to understand Tanabe, Hegel’s philosophy must be explained. Hegel’s dialectic operates within the teleological movement of Absolute Spirit, where contradictions are ultimately reconciled through sublation or a simultaneous canceling and lifting up of a concept.² For Hegel, the historical process tends toward increasing actualization of freedom through institutions such as the state, ethical life, and shared rational structures. Individuals participate in this rational whole and do not participate in anything outside of the rational whole.³ Historians of philosophy have often seen Hegel as offering a self-confident modernity in which reason’s capacities are affirmed, even when they operate through contradiction.

       In connection to Hegel, Tanabe’s early work heavily drew from the Hegelian model of the rational structures. But by the 1930s and 1940s, Tanabe found many limitations in the idealist assumption of an ultimately harmonizing rational structure or state. In the Logic of the Specific, Tanabe replaces Hegel’s concept of Spirit, an overarching structure where all things in existence are a manifestation of this “Spirit”, with a three part structure: individual, species, and universal.⁴ While this format resembles Hegel’s universal individual mediation, Tanabe assigns a very different role to the mediating term. Hegel’s mediating structures (especially the state) are rational embodiments of universal ethical principles. Tanabe’s “species,” however, are historically contingent communities such as nations, religions, cultures, social institutions that shape the individual’s concept of meaning and are very prone to flaws such a collective delusions or mob mentality. In contrast to Hegel’s confidence in the rationality of historical development, Tanabe depicts these species as inherently unstable, prone to self-absolutization, and capable of generating collective delusions.

       The shift from Hegel’s trust in rational historical development to skepticism can be associated with Tanabe’s interaction with crises of Japanese nationalism during World War II.⁵ While Hegel’s state is the ethical culmination of Spirit’s self-realization, Tanabe saw the Japanese state of his time showcasing the species’ capacity for violent error. Therefore the Logic of the Specific is both a philosophical model but also a historical critique that seeks to explain how rational systems and communal forms can betray their supposed universality.

       The conflict between Tanabe and Japanese nationalism leads to what Tanabe later called metanoetics, or the philosophy of repentance.⁶ While Hegel propels Spirit forward by incorporating contradiction into higher unity, Tanabe believes the Spirit’s self realization signals the breakdown of reason’s self-sufficiency. Tanabe states, reason cannot fully comprehend or repair its own failures and transformation requires not sublation but absolute self-negation through “other-power” (tariki), a concept drawn from Shin Buddhist thought.⁷ Tanabe’s turn to metanoetics marks a significant rejection of Hegel’s rationalism in order to focus on existential and Buddhist forms of dialectic. 

       Overall, Tanabe retains Hegel’s insight that human existence is mediated by communal and historical structures where individuals cannot access the universal directly but Tanabe uses this framework to criticize Japanese imperialism. Where Hegel envisioned reconciliation, Tanabe insists on an ongoing cycle in which individuals are forced to confront their complicity in the failures of the species and must reform it. Tanabe’s Logic of the Specific represents a reorientation of dialectical philosophy toward historical consciousness where Buddhist-influenced self-negation and ethical responsibility are used to navigate modernity’s crises.

  1. Tanabe, Hajime. Philosophy as Metanoetics. Translated by Yoshinori Takeuchi, James W. Heisig, and Valdo Viglielmo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
  2. Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

  3. Hegel, G. W. F. Philosophy of Right. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

  4. Tanabe, Hajime. The Logic of Species (種の論理). In Tanabe Hajime: Collected Works, vol. 7. Trans. Yoshihisa Yamamoto. University of Tokyo Press, 1998.

  5. Heisig, James W. Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001.
  6. Ozaki, Masakatsu. “Tanabe’s Interpretation of Hegel.” The Eastern Buddhist 20, no. 2 (1987): 107–130.
  7. Tanabe, Hajime. Philosophy as Metanoetics. Translated by Yoshinori Takeuchi, James W. Heisig, and Valdo Viglielmo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

Nishitani Keiji’s Self-annihilation and Statehood: the Paradox of Cosmopolitan Freedom.

John Namjun Kim argues that “cosmopolitan freedom mobilises political projects of domination by endowing them with a semblance of ethical legitimacy of winning the approbation of those who will be subjugated.”1 In other words, ethical promises, such as universal freedom, allow for actors to engage (knowingly or unknowingly) in unethical practices behind a shield of benevolence.2

The Kyoto School of Philosophy, a group of thinkers prominent in 20th century Japan, have been criticised for their view of ‘global history’ as a “thinly disguised justification[…]for Japanese aggression and continuing aggression.”3

This post will look at a short case study of Nishitani Keiji, a second-generation thinker of the Kyoto School and a disciple of the originator, Nishida Kitarō, and his Nation of Non-Ego. During the symposium on ‘Overcoming Modernity’ in 1942, Nishitani reflected that moral energy (moralische Energie) “realises a popular and national ethics by having each and every citizen serve the state and annihilate their selves in the state.”4 By moral energy, Nishitani means a “feeling of healthy morality and fresh energy,” a force that “moves world history.”5 By destroying the distinction between self and other, and concentrating moral energy onto solely the state, the “community of the people itself is made ethical.” Nishitani recognises that this exclusive offering up of moral energy to national interests allows room for the “colonial exploitation of other races and states.” He argues around this by proposing that Japan, due to the nation’s founding ‘pure and clear’ spirituality and religiosity of ‘subjective nothingness’ would benefit others by benefitting itself.6  In other words, due to Japan’s founding character as a ‘nation of non-ego,’ Japan’s empire would be cooperative and benevolent rather than a self-centred and aggressive. 

With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see why such theory is not practicable. Indeed, at a separate symposium, responding to Nishitani, Kōsaka Masaaki, another member of the Kyoto school noted that if there was an attempt to put Nishitani’s “worldly ethics” into practice it would be as “the ethical system for a Greater East Asian region.”7 In practice, projects like the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere led to a new Japan-centric colonial order.8

Through this lens, Nishitani’s universalism appears less as a transcendent world ethic and more as a moral vocabulary that excuses coercive power. In practice, the rhetoric of world-historical responsibility functions as a vessel for subjugation rather than liberation. In contemporary contexts, appeals to defending a liberal world order continue to be used as tools to similar ends, justifying military interventions and violations of international law.

  1. John Namjun Kim, ‘The imperial cosmopolitanism of Miki Kiyoshi and Tanabe Hajime’ in Sven Saaler and J. Victor Koschmann (eds), Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History: Colonialism, Regionalism, and Borders (Taylor & Francis Group, 2006), p. 195. [↩]
  2. Kleingeld, Pauline and Eric Brown, ‘Cosmopolitanism’ in Edward N. Zalta (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2019 Edition) [↩]
  3. T Najita and HD Harootunian, ‘Japanese Revolt against the West: Political and Cultural Criticism in the Twentieth Century’ in Duus P (ed.) The Cambridge History of Japan (Cambridge University Press, 1989) p. 741. [↩]
  4. Nishitani Keiji, ‘My Views on Overcoming Modernity’ in Richard F. Calichman (ed.)(trans.) Overcoming modernity: cultural identity in wartime Japan New York, 2008) p. 60. [↩]
  5. David Williams (ed.), The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance A reading, with commentary, of the complete texts of the Kyoto School discussions of ‘The Standpoint of World History and Japan’ (Routledge, 2014), p. 166. [↩]
  6. Nishitani, Overcoming Modernity, p. 60-2. [↩]
  7. Williams, The Philosophy of Japan’s Wartime Resistance, p. 219. [↩]
  8. William L. Swan, ‘Japan’s Intentions for Its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere as Indicated in Its Policy Plans for Thailand.‘ in Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 27:1 (1996), p. 146. [↩]