Existential Engagement: Philosophy in Taiwan, the Japanese Era ed. by Hung Tzu-wei (review)

Existential Engagement: Philosophy in Taiwan, the Japanese Era (edited by Tzu-wei Hung) is a seminal work about the development of the humanities during the Japanese colonial era of Taiwan (1895–1945). Some of the thinkers introduced in this book are not exactly philosophers as we might call them today, and it may be more apt to call them Geisteswissenschaftler in the sense that Dilthey had in mind. Readers can grasp the Zeitgeist and the lived experiences of Taiwan's colonial era through their works, and this is exactly what this book intends to do. Nevertheless, to call them Taiwanese philosophers is not the result of sloppy scholarship but a considered choice. The reason could be very simple: if you want to trace the genealogy of Taiwanese philosophy to its nascent stage, you would not want to leave out borderline cases just to satisfy methodological neatness.

Before entering the details, I would like to discuss three major contributions of this book. Its first contribution is an ethical one. Under the postwar authoritarian regime, Taiwan's colonial past was deliberately kept obscure, and even distorted, in order to beautify the so-called "Return to the Motherland." In the late 1940s and early 1950s, many prestigious intellectuals of Taiwanese descent were persecuted by the regime for political reasons. Some were killed, imprisoned, or forced into exile, and some had to keep a low profile all their life and even had to adapt to the coercive ideology of the regime. Taiwan's colonial past has been an empty page for a long time. This book mends the gap and calls on us to do justice to the past, to make the suppressed heard.

The book's second contribution is a historical one. It demonstrates the pivotal role that Japan once played in the cultural enlightenment in East Asia in the first half of the twentieth century. Taiwan is a perfect example. In the colonial era, the Japanese colonists established the first comprehensive public education system and the first university in Taiwan, and most of the Taiwanese thinkers introduced in the book were even able to study abroad in Japan. Most of them studied in Tokyo or Kyoto, and the influences of Japanese Yōmeigaku and the Kyoto school were ubiquitous in their works. By tracing the genealogy of Taiwanese philosophy, the book shows readers how imperial Japan adopted Western philosophy and transformed it and then passed it on to Japanese colonies.

The third contribution of this book is a philosophical one, and arguably the most important. People might wonder: What is Taiwanese philosophy actually? What is its content? Is it mature enough to qualify as a specific philosophy? These are difficult questions. In the informative introduction entitled "The Genealogy and Stages of Taiwanese Philosophy in the Japanese Era" (Tzu-wei Hung, 15–37), Hung argues that prewar Taiwanese philosophers had an immense existential concern for their individual and collective fate due to the pressures of assimilation policy, and that impulse propelled them to engage the sociopolitical reality. Hung argues that the same impulse has not withered away, for the same existential anxiety is still hovering over Taiwan. In that sense, this book is not merely a historical review of a philosophy that has been but also a manifesto for a philosophy that is yet to come.

Hung's paper also offers readers a very useful big picture of prewar Taiwanese philosophers and their works. According to Hung's analysis, these philosophers can be divided into four distinct categories, based on their areas of specialization and educational background. The first category is philosophers of "Continental and Japanese philosophy," who were mostly influenced by German idealism, existential philosophy, and the Kyoto school. The second category is philosophers of "American pragmatism," who had studied abroad in the United States or were influenced by the pragmatism of William James and John Dewey. The third category is philosophers of "modern Sinology and Buddhism," who were inspired by Confucianism or Buddhism...