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Meiji

In the Meiji period (1868–1912) Japan took up the Western sciences, and with them the Western word for philosophy. It needed a name in Japanese, and the man who found it was Nishi Amane.

Nishi reached for the Confucian learning he knew. In 1861 he wrote kitetsugaku, the learning that aspires to wisdom, after Zhou Dunyi’s “the sage aspires to Heaven, the worthy to the sage, the scholar to the worthy”; in his lectures of 1862 Socrates’ philosophos is “a person who loves wise virtue”, equal in sense to “aspiring to worthiness”. He then shortened the word. Philosophy, he explains, is what Zhou Dunyi called the scholar’s aspiring to the worthy, and in later usage the learning that discourses on principle; rigaku would be the literal rendering, “but since these are easily confused with other things, I now translate it tetsugaku and distinguish it from the Confucianism of the Eastern continent” (Seisei hatsuun, lectures, 1871–73). In Kaidaimon he held the two to be one in substance: “the Eastern land calls it ju [Confucian learning], the Western continent philosophy; both make clear the Way of Heaven and establish the human pole”. His definition: “to make clear the Way of Heaven and the Way of man, and also to establish the method of teaching, is called philosophy, which I translate and name tetsugaku” (Hyakuichi shinron, published 1874). After Comte he gave the philosopher the whole and the specialists the parts: “establishing a unified view is what the philosopher must investigate; working out the fine detail of learning belongs to those who specialise in each science” (Shōhaku sakki, 1872). In the 1880s some professors still preferred rigaku.

Inoue Enryō (1858–1919) founded the Tetsugakukan, the Academy of Philosophy, in 1887, under the motto “The Basis of All Learning Lies in Philosophy”, and built a Temple of Philosophy honouring four sages: “Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, and Kant”. Inoue Tetsujirō (1855–1944) lectured at Tokyo from 1882 on the history of Eastern philosophy. “Western philosophers thought only the philosophy since Greece was philosophy, and that was a mistake; the philosophy of India and China must also be considered”, he recalled in 1932, and in three volumes (1900–05) he wrote the history of the Japanese Confucian schools as philosophy. He also promoted a “national ethics” (kokumin dōtoku).

In A Year and a Half (Ichinen yūhan, 1901), written after a terminal diagnosis, Nakae Chōmin declared that “our Japan, from antiquity to the present, has had no philosophy”, a charge aimed at Japan’s past thinkers and at the philosophy professors of Tokyo alike. In its sequel, Zoku ichinen yūhan, he wrote of the positivists that their school “seems extremely certain and reliable”, but in holding to the actual it erases whatever experiment cannot verify, and so makes itself “narrow and closed”.