- Length
- 96 pagesTucker, Ogyu Sorai's Philosophical Masterworks, Hawaii, 2006 - with Benmei
- Reading
- DemandingReadable with attention; assumes no other book
- Availability
- Specialist pressIn print from an academic publisher, priced accordingly
Bendo
The book that took Neo-Confucianism apart by refusing to read it on its own terms. Sorai argued that the Song philosophers had projected a metaphysics onto texts that contain none, and that the Way of the sages is not a truth about nature but a set of institutions somebody built.
- Date
- c. 1717
- Author
- Ogyu Sorai
- Region
- Edo, Japan
- Language
- Classical Chinese, by a Japanese author
- 2006 English, John Tucker With Benmei; the first English version, in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Genealogical — History of a concept used as a critique of it
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Historical — Read for what it shows about its moment
- Years back to what it answers
- 542 years
The most powerful attack on Neo-Confucian orthodoxy produced anywhere in East Asia, and the beginning of a distinctively Japanese tradition of philological criticism.
What the book says
A short, aggressive treatise arguing that six hundred years of Confucian philosophy had been an elaborate mistake, and that the Way is not what the Song scholars said it was. Sorai's method is philological before it is philosophical: he reads the ancient texts in the language of their own period rather than through the commentaries, and argues that the key terms did not mean then what Neo-Confucianism assumes they mean. The Way, he concludes, is not a pattern inherent in nature and discoverable by reflection. It is something the ancient sage kings made - a set of institutions, rites, music, laws and offices, invented to order human society, in the way a craftsman invents a tool. It follows that the Way cannot be found by looking inward, that morality is not a matter of perfecting one's nature, and that the whole Song and Ming apparatus of pattern, material force, innate knowing and self-cultivation is a metaphysics read back into texts that contain nothing of the kind. What the sages left is not a doctrine to be internalised but institutions to be studied and applied, and the proper business of a scholar is political and historical rather than introspective.
What it argues
That the Way was made rather than found, and that this changes what philosophy is for. If the sage kings invented rites, music, law and office to order a society that would not order itself, then the object of study is those institutions and their history, not one's own nature. Moral cultivation in the Neo-Confucian sense - polishing the mind until the pattern shows - has nothing to work on, because there is no such pattern; what improves people is being placed inside good institutions. The philological argument carries the philosophical one: read the ancient words as they were used, and the Song reading becomes unavailable.
What it answered
The whole Neo-Confucian settlement, Zhu Xi's version first and Wang Yangming's along with it. Sorai's advantage over both is that he is not proposing a rival interpretation of the same terms; he is arguing that the terms have been misconstrued at the level of language, which puts the dispute somewhere neither school had defended. It is the same move Renaissance humanists made against scholastic Latin, arrived at independently and for the same reason: a philosophy resting on a vocabulary can be undone by a historian of that vocabulary.
How it argues
By historical semantics, which is why it belongs to a different genre from the works it attacks. Sorai establishes what a term meant by collecting its ancient uses, shows that the received gloss does not fit them, and then draws the philosophical consequence. The tone is combative and occasionally contemptuous. The method - read the sources in their own language and distrust the intervening tradition - is the beginning of a critical scholarship that later turned on Chinese learning itself and fed the movement that sought a purely Japanese antiquity.
The moment
Tokugawa Japan, where the Zhu Xi school held official standing and philosophy was conducted in a Chinese idiom by Japanese scholars. Sorai ran a private academy in Edo, advised the shogunate, and wrote on government as well as on texts; his political recommendations - that samurai be resettled on the land, that policy be judged by whether it works - follow directly from the view that institutions rather than inner cultivation are what shape conduct.
How it travelled
Within Japan, deeply; outside it, barely. Sorai's school dominated Japanese intellectual life for a generation and its philological method outlasted its doctrines, shaping both the study of Chinese texts and, by reaction, the nativist school that rejected Chinese learning altogether. Maruyama Masao's study of Tokugawa thought in the 1940s made Sorai a central figure in modern Japanese intellectual history by presenting him as the point at which politics separated from morality. The first English translation of this treatise appeared in 2006.
The strongest objection
That the argument saws off the branch it stands on. If the meanings of ancient terms are recoverable only by scholarship, and Sorai's own reading is itself an interpretation made in the eighteenth century, then his reconstruction of what the sages meant is exposed to exactly the charge he brings against the Song - that a later period read its own preoccupations into old words. Nothing in his method secures his own philology against his own critique. There is also a moral objection made in his own time: a philosophy in which institutions do all the work and inner cultivation does none leaves no ground for judging bad institutions.
Why read it
For the method more than the conclusions. It is short, and it is one of the clearest demonstrations anywhere of how a philosophical system can be undone not by counter-argument but by showing that its vocabulary never meant what it needed to mean. Read it after the Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming entries, which is the argument it is answering.
- First printed
- 1737
- First in English
- 2006
- Digitised
- No
Written in classical Chinese, as serious Japanese scholarship of the period was, and normally printed with the companion treatise on the meaning of terms, which supplies the philological detail this one asserts.
There is no public-domain English version. Tucker's 2006 translation with both treatises is in copyright, as are the studies by Maruyama and Najita.
Where it stands
Historical as a programme and live as a case. Nobody advocates Sorai's institutionalism now, but he is a standing example in the history of philosophy of a metaphysical system dismantled by philology, and his separation of political effectiveness from personal virtue is discussed in political theory well outside Japanese studies.
On quoting this book
The Chinese text is public domain; the only English translation is recent and in copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
The date of composition is inferred rather than documented, and the treatise circulated in manuscript before printing. How far Sorai's philology is actually sound by modern standards is disputed, and some of his key readings are now rejected. Maruyama's influential presentation of him as the first modern Japanese political thinker has been criticised as reading a twentieth-century concern back into an eighteenth-century text - which is, pointedly, the charge Sorai made against the Song.