Making a Moral Society: Ethics and the State in Meiji Japan

Chapter 4. Resisting Civilizational Hierarchies: The Ethics of Spirit and the Spirit of the People

81 CHAPTER 4 Resisting Civilizational Hierarchies The Ethics of Spirit and the Spirit of the People Without infinite spirit, our own spirit would cease to be. Without our own spirit, we could have no aim, and with no aim, there can be no morality. —Nakashima Rikizō, On the British Neo-Kantian School, 1892 With the flash of a sword and the roar of a gun, Japan’s army demonstrated the pure and unparalleled posture of Japan’s national moral spirit in a dazzling display before all the nations of the world....Japan’s national moral spirit is nothing other than the universal virtue of the human heart, and such virtue of the heart indeed reflects the purity of Oriental morality. —Inoue Tetsujirō, The Philosophy of Japan’s Yōmei School, 1900 In the 1890s, moral philosophers in Japan began to reconfigure the discipline of ethics. The utilitarianism and evolutionary naturalism that dominated the moral discourse of early Meiji gave way to a moral philosophy of spirit. This shift was part of an effort to resist the civilizational hierarchies imposed by the West and internalized by many Japanese thinkers during the foregoing decades. But this required not merely the critique of assertions of Western superiority in the realms of knowledge and virtue, two key markers of “civilization” upheld since Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Outline of a Theory on Civilization .1 It required also the destabilization of the epistemology that grounded and enabled this discourse on civilization. Referred to in earlier chapters as an “epistemology of representation,” this framework for knowledge linked truth with the observable, the measurable, and the rationally verifiable. “Spirit,” the unobservable and intuitively apprehended, provided a means to contest “civilization ” (kaika) and its underlying epistemology, and transformed the topography of moral thought in 1890s Japan. 82 Making a Moral Society Moral discourse, both within and outside academia, played a central role in contesting civilization and articulating a desire for moral particularity. Moreover , the shift in ethics from an epistemology of representation with its marked opposition between subject and object to one positing an identity between self and other, subject and object, was not merely a reflection of the civilization critique , but was integral in initiating and furthering this critique. The critique of civilization took various forms. This chapter will focus on two moral philosophers: Nakashima Rikizō and Inoue Tetsujirō. Both resisted civilization, but in different ways and with varying effect—Nakashima through personalism, an ethics that took “spiritual principle” as its animating force, Inoue through efforts to articulate the moral spirit of the Japanese people. In short, in moral discourse of 1890s Japan, resistance to civilizational hierarchies took the form of a new ethics of spirit and an assertion of “the spirit of the people.” National Character and Personality The idea that each nation possesses its own unique “national character” shaped late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century moral discourse in Japan. Although references to common “Japanese” traits can certainly be found well before the Meiji period,2 the discourse on national character did not become a part of Japan’s intellectual landscape until the late 1880s.3 Unlike prior essentializing efforts to establish Japanese commonality and to differentiate Japan from China and the West, the discourse on national character, asserting that all the people of a nation possess a common set of characteristics shaped by historical and geographical conditions, was closely intertwined with the notion of the “people’s spirit,” a concept with roots in late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury German Romanticism. Drawing on already circulating “counter-enlightenment” arguments, J.G.Herder,ahistorianandleadingfigureinthearticulationofGermanRomanticism , argued that each society must be understood as a Volk (folk, people) with its own Geist (spirit or genius). Each Volk possessed its own unique values, language, customs, and beliefs. These expressions of the Volksgeist (folk spirit), when embodied in the national form, constituted national character. “Every nation,” Herder proclaimed, “is one people, having its own national form, as well as its own language: the climate, it is true, stamps on each its mark, or spreads over it a slight veil, but not sufficient to destroy the original national character.”4 Herder refuted the conception of civilization whereby each society followed a uniform path of development, with some higher, others lower on the hierarchy of civilization. No outward standard, according to Herder, Resisting Civilizational Hierarchies 83 not even “universal reason,” could be applied to judge and rank a particular Volk. For Herder, even reason...