JAPANESE PHILOSOPHY

Sem. Saul Tony L. Medel

Discipleship Year III
Rev. Fr. William S. Cajes, DCD, JCL
 MODERN PHILOSOPHY
• Accordingly, the modern period in Japan started when the Tokugawa
shogunate died and when the emperor officially wielded back its power and
authority.
• The shogunate’s incompetence to deal with the invasion of U.S. gunships
into Tokyo harbor led to their terrible downfall.
 MODERN PHILOSOPHY
• Japan knew it had to modernize swiftly; otherwise, they would succumb to
Western imperialism after being forced to accept highly unfavorable trade
accords with the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia.
• While maintaining its essential cultural values, they endeavored to undertake
modernization by striking a balance between “Japanese spirit and Western
innovation” (wakon ysai).
 MODERN PHILOSOPHY
• The Japanese were significantly influenced by empiricism and positivism’s
dissent to the religious metaphysics.
• The intellectuals regarded their period with pride and conviction as the “Meiji
Enlightenment”. This political revolution brought forth major developments in
the political, economic and social aspects, and ushered the Westernization and
modernization of Japan.
 IDEOLOGIES OF
IMPERIAL RESTORATION
• The widespread inefficiency in commandeering the military, extensive
instability in managing the economy, persistent revolution of the peasants
and failure to withstand the imminent threat of foreign invasion compelled
the intellectuals to establish three philosophical ideologies to dethrone the
Tokugawa’s shogunate and reinstate the emperor.
 IDEOLOGIES OF
IMPERIAL RESTORATION
• The first system founded was the Mito School. It was an enterprise of
intellectual historians who wrote the comprehensive history of Japan for
centuries and expounded the “kokutai”. Kokutai is a political exposition of
the imperial system; asserting that the emperor exemplified the state since
time immemorial and that the two are inseparable.
 IDEOLOGIES OF
IMPERIAL RESTORATION
• The Native Studies, in addition, was the second philosophical ideology. It
transcended to its fundamental philological and textual interests to create a
Shinto theory of racial purity. It was based in a world view implicitly
contended in the ancient Japanese language, mythical chronicle, and ancient
view of the land and country.
• Also, it became the core of the “Japanese spirituality and Western
imagination’s” formula of allocation.
 IDEOLOGIES OF
IMPERIAL RESTORATION
• The Imperial Restoration also instituted a militant ideology that made up
the third and last philosophical system.
• It hailed from the ideals of warrior evolving in the Edo period, involving
one’s valor to sacrifice his own life as the ultimate manifestation of
allegiance. The adherence and loyalty had been evidently aimed not to the
shogun anymore but rather to the emperor.
 MODERN ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHIES
• Academic philosophers bitterly experienced government censorship and
imprisonment as they ventured into political philosophy, philosophy of
religion, philosophical anthropology and ethics.
 MODERN ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHIES
• Inoue Tetsujiro provided to the kokutai theory ideas directed against liberal
democracy and aimed to upgrade bushido from a code of samurai warriors
into a National Morality to be included in the public school system and
taught to everyone all throughout the land.
 MODERN ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHIES
• Confucianism served as a secular philosophy rather than a religious
tradition during the Edo period; in other words, it posed no threat to the
"Japanese spirituality" established in modern Japan. The National Morality
curriculum featured edifying accounts of Edo-period virtuous (often
samurai) Confucians, and the Confucian emphasis on academic study was
considered as a model for the modern student.
 MODERN ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHIES
• Buddhism, on the other hand, differed from Confucianism in because it was
both a religion and a philosophy in premodern Japan. It was characterized as
a "foreign" religion that polluted the pure Japanese spirituality of State
Shinto, and it was exposed to various forms of persecution, including mobs
besmirching Buddhist cemeteries and altars in private residences.
 POSTWAR PHILOSOPHIES
• There have been three major developments in the postwar period. First, when
censorship of liberal and leftist ideas was lifted, there was often a purging of
the concept of "Japanese" philosophy, which was seen as overpowering stench
of nativism, ethnocentrism, jingoism, and State Shinto ideology.
 POSTWAR PHILOSOPHIES
• The second postwar response has been for traditions such as the Kyoto
School, which existed from 1910 to 1945, which has continuously evolved
without the interference of old official ideology. The Kyoto School, for
example, is beginning to be recognized in philosophical organizations, among
other globally significant schools such as the Marburg and Frankfurt Schools.
 POSTWAR PHILOSOPHIES
• Finally, there are more traces of cross-influence and hybridization with the
increased availability of translations into European languages and the
emergence of learned organizations for Japanese philosophy in Asia, the
United States, and Europe. Cross-pollination of ideas is taking place among
Western philosophers, including those who do not consider themselves
Japanese specialists.
 PHILOSOPHY:
WISSENSCHAFT OR WAY?
• When Japanese philosophy views itself to be a Way rather than a
Wissenschaft, engagement takes precedence over detachment. That Japanese
version of philosophy emphasized loving wisdom over detached knowledge
and knowing oneself over impersonal analysis as an enterprise that can
transform both knower and known through a body-mind theory-praxis.
 REALITY AS FIELD
• Western philosophers frequently consider reality to be made up of elements
that have been discovered, engineered, merged, and altered to satisfy the
purposes of their respective systems.
• Japanese philosophers, on the other hand, tend to see reality as a complex,
organic system of interrelated processes, one in which they are the
knowers.
 THE FIELD OF BODY-MIND PRAXIS
• If reality is a field that includes the philosopher, as the Japanese model
proposes, then the Way of philosophy is a theory-praxis event within that
field. Thus, philosophizing involves the entire body-mind, not simply the
mind. Philosophy, in other words, is a cognitive activity that is integrated.
There would be no philosophy without a flesh-and-blood philosopher.
 THE AGENCY OF NO-I
VS. AUTONOMOUS SELF
• Personal identity is viewed as a discrete, independently existing,
autonomous agency in most Western philosophies and Abrahamic religion
theologies. As a result, assumptions about creative authorship, ethical
responsibility, and religious faith in a transcendent reality emerge. However,
in Japanese philosophy, such a notion of personal identity is uncommon.
Instead, a field of interdependent interactions defines the self.
 ARTISTIC AGENCY
• Although the Japanese tradition has a plethora of aesthetic theories, creative
originality is often regarded to arise not in the artist but in the artist's
involvement with a field that encompasses the medium, the auto-expressive
nature of reality, and the audience. All of these elements—artist, medium,
reality, and audience—combine to form kokoro in its purest form. The
source of art's creation is kokoro's auto-expression, not the individual's self-
expression.
 ETHICS WITHOUT
DISCRETE AGENTS
• Japanese Buddhist philosophers emphasize egoless reactivity within a situation
rather than the individual's responsibility to follow laws, principles, or divine
decrees with their tenet of no-I.
• Shinran, who maintained that ethics should not be based on rationality.
Essentially, he said that attempting to intellectually determine what is correct is to
remove oneself from the field of events, to turn one's self into an ego
disconnected from the flow of reality simply by trying to "figure it out" (hakarai).
 FAITH WITHOUT SELF-ORDER
• As long as a subject has entrusting faith, that faith will direct itself to rely on
the object's power (the Vow of the personal Amida). However, as the subject
(the "I" who has the entrusting faith) becomes completely reliant on that
objectified other-power, the subject (the "I" who has the entrusting faith)
disappears.
 LANGUAGE AND MEANING
• The basic meaning (or truth) of words, according to Western philosophers, is their
ability to refer to previously existing realities. The following assumptions are frequently
implicit in that assumption:
• (1) reality is fixed, or at least stable enough to be pinned down by linguistic expression
• (2) context is not always determinative in meaning
• (3) the audience is irrelevant or at least externally, not internally, related to the meaning
of the expression
• (4) semantic and syntactic, but not phonetic, aspects of the language carry the meaning
• (5) language defines and restricts the possible meanings of things or even people
 CONCLUSION
• These are just a handful of the many facets of Japanese philosophy that
might pique the interest of a philosopher from any culture. As Japanese
philosophy becomes more widely known and accessible through translation
and Western commentaries, it appears likely that it will engage a growing
number of philosophers around the world, serving as a resource for Western
philosophy in the same way that Western philosophy has served as a
resource for it in the past.