Learning to Emulate the Wise: The Genesis of Chinese Philosophy as an Academic Discipline in Twentieth-Century China

1. Nishi Amane and the Birth of “Philosophy” and “Chinese Philosophy” in Early Meiji Japan

Chapter 1 Nishi Amane and the Birth of “Philosophy” and “Chinese Philosophy” in Early Meiji Japan Barry D. Steben This chapter examines the early stage of the establishment of Western learning in Japan in the Meiji period (1868–1912) to explore how the concepts of “philosophy” and “Chinese philosophy,” both as traditions of thought and as modern fields of learning, arose through the interaction between Western and Confucian concepts. It focuses on Nishi Amane 西 周 (1829–1897), a rangaku 蘭學 (Dutch learning) scholar who studied in Holland in the 1860s, and aims to clarify (1) the nature and discursive context of the European philosophy to which he was exposed in Holland, including its political and institutional dimensions; and (2) the way in which Confucian concepts became the medium for the reception of this philosophy in Japan through Nishi’s work of translation and propagation. By means of this double clarification, I hope to reveal the basic discursive structure and educational mission of the mode of state-supported philosophical endeavour that was established in Japan through Nishi and his students to become the foundation for the academic field of philosophy (and other modern academic fields) not only in Japan, but in China as well.1 As is well known, because of the centralization of governmental power and national purpose brought about by the Meiji Restoration, the effective reorganization of education and learning in line with European categories and disciplines occurred earlier in Japan than in China, and Japan became the model for China’s modernization after 1895. Because of the huge impact in China of the thousands of Chinese students who studied in Japan after that date,2 mediated by the common Confucian intellectual culture and Sinitic script of the two countries, as well as the widespread use of kanbun 漢文 in Japanese scholarly writing, the influence of Meiji thought in late-Qing and Republican China was great. The early development of Western-style intellectual disciplines in China 40 · Barry D. Steben cannot be fully understood apart from that influence.3 Thus the present chapter, while focusing only on Japan and Holland, can be expected to contribute in important ways to our larger inquiry into the interaction between indigenous grammars of knowledge construction and Western paradigms involved in the formation of the modern discipline of “Chinese philosophy” in China. In the Edo period (1603–1868), the pursuit of Western learning (through the Dutch language supplemented by missionary translations of Western works imported from China) had been regarded with suspicion because of its association with Christianity, contact with which was prohibited by law, so it had to be justified in terms of the more widely established schools of learning originating in China.4 Accordingly, those Western ideas that did manage to enter Japanese intellectual discourse were evaluated and categorized in terms of familiar conceptual systems, principally the Cheng-Zhu school of Confucianism. On this basis, Edo thinkers, even late Edo scholars of Western science like Sakuma Shōzan 佐久間象山 (1811–1864), generally regarded Eastern and Western learning as qualitatively different, the former belonging to the fundamental realm of ethics and spirit and the latter merely to the practical or material realm.5 In order for the study of Western learning beyond the realm of military technology to be fully legitimated, however, this dualism had to be overcome. In the view of translator and socio-political commentator Fukuzawa Yukichi 福澤諭吉 (1834–1901), the difference was quantitative only, a difference in the level of civilization achieved, so both could be seen on the same plane.6 Similarly, as instructor in the Bansho shirabesho 蕃書調所 (Institute for the Study of Barbarian Books), Katō Hiroyuki 加藤 弘之 (1836–1916) had already in 1861 rejected the common belief that the origin of the West’s wealth and power lay in its military technology (the material realm), arguing that the real origin lay in the parliamentary system of government, giving much credit to the Christian tradition as well. Most Confucian scholars, nativist scholars, and even some Westernlearning scholars continued to believe in the superiority of Eastern learning in the moral realm. But for the first ten years or so of the Meiji period, their voices tended to be drowned out by the swing toward Western learning promoted most prominently by the Meirokusha 明六社 (Meiji Six Society). Nishi Amane and the Birth of “Philosophy” and “Chinese Philosophy” · 41 1. The Course of Nishi Amane’s Education and Government Service Nishi Amane is best known as the...