Facing "the West" on Philosophical Grounds: A View from the Pavilion of Subjectivity on Meiji Japan

In 1903 the New People's Gazette (Xinmin congbao), the Yokohama-based journal of the Chinese opposition in Japanese exile, began publication of an article titled "The Teachings of Kant, the Greatest Savant of the Modern Age" ("Jinshi di-yi dazhe Kangde zhi xueshuo"), the first printed reference to this thinker ever made in the Chinese language. The commendation was a lengthy one, but that it contained an emphatic endorsement was suggested by its title alone. Signed by one "New Citizen of China" (Zhongguo zhi xinmin), it issued from the brush of Liang Qichao, one of the intellectual leaders of the failed Hundred Days of Reform in 1898.

It seems strange that this article has elicited little commentary so far. The New People's Gazette is one of the most widely consulted sources for the history of modern Chinese thought—perhaps second only to the writings of Mao Zedong, who, incidentally, was among its most avid readers.¹ Liang's article on Immanuel Kant is the longest and most detailed treatment of any thinker that this journal ever printed. Moreover, the publication of Liang's article in five installments spans a period that his biographers have always identified as a major turning point in his political and intellectual career—from Westernizing reformer to Chinese nationalist.

The only study of Liang's Japanese encounter with Kant that has appeared in English so far—Huang Kewu's contribution to a recent volume, The Role of Japan in Liang Qichao's Introduction of Modern Western Civilization to China—is an exception in this regard, but it also confirms the rule.² Before presenting his careful philological analysis of Liang's account of Kant's thought by way of comparison with the Japanese source from which Liang drew, Huang reaffirms the unspoken consensus among interpreters of his thought: the conviction that Liang's interest in Kant is insignificant for an understanding of his broader political views. "Both contemporaries and today's historians," Huang notes, "have paid more attention to his studies of Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jeremy Bentham, Johann Kaspar Bluntschli, Charles Darwin and Benjamin Kidd. Liang's introduction of the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant has caught fewer eyes. This lack of attention can perhaps be explained by the marginal importance of Kantian philosophy in Liang's thinking."³

Kant—or Kant as he was portrayed in Japan at the time—was not a marginal figure in the development of Liang's thought. His role would rather seem to have been a pivotal one. For the purposes of this essay, in any event, Liang's reception of Kant is worth a closer look for the light it casts on a number of Japanese contexts that have found reflection in it.

Liang's writings provide a unique window on how "the West" was viewed in Meiji Japan,⁴ for it was the West with which he sought to acquaint himself during his sojourn there, and his lack of command of any European language forced him to rely entirely on Japanese sources to this end. Since his concern, moreover, was ultimately with a future "renovation" (weixin; Japanese [J]: ishin) of China, Liang's primary intellectual goal was to understand the motivating forces behind Japan's "Meiji Renovation" (Meiji ishin)—"the spirit" (jingshen) behind the rapid modernization of this nation (guomin). Both the title of the journal edited by him in Yokohama, Xinmin congbao, and the pseudonym he used to sign his more programmatic contributions to it, Zhongguo zhi xinmin, underline the centrality of this concern for him.

As any person with a rudimentary education in the Confucian classics would still have known at the time, the term xinmin referred back to the famous opening line of the Great Learning, the foundational text of Neo-Confucianism: "What the Great Learning teaches, is—to illustrate illustrious virtue (ming ming de); to renovate the people (xin min); and to rest in highest excellence."⁵ The term weixin (or ishin in Japanese) for "renovation" appeared in the Great Learning's "Commentary" on this phrase, in a...