Ogyu Sorai's Philosophical Masterworks: The Bendo And Benmei (Asian Interactions And Comparisons) (Asian Intersections And Comparisons)

Ogyu Sorai's Philosophical Masterworks: The Bendo And Benmei (Asian Interactions and Comparisons) (Asian Intersections And Comparisons)

Ogy Sorai (16661728) was one of the greatest philosophers of early modern Japan, often compared to Western thinkers such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham. This volume, a monumental work of scholarship, offers for the first time in any Western language unabridged and fully annotated translations of Sorais masterpieces. The Bend (Distinguishing the Way) and Benmei (Distinguishing Names) are works of political philosophy that define the theoretical foundation for a leadership exercising total power, the best remedy, in Sorais view, for a regime in crisis. The translations are based on the 1740 (Genbun 5) woodblock edition, the first major edition of these seminal texts published during the Tokugawa period.In his commentary, John Tucker situates the Bend and Benmei in relation to Neo-Confucianism via what is known as philosophical lexicography. This genre, which links Sorais thinking with Neo-Confucianism, is traced to the early-thirteenth-century Song dynasty text the Xingli ziyi (The Meanings of Neo-Confucian Terms) by Chen Beixi (11591223). Although Sorai was an unrelenting critic of the Neo-Confucian formulations of the great Song synthesizer Zhu Xi (11301200), his thinking remained, due to its genre, methodology, and conceptual repertory, essentially a radical revision of Neo-Confucian discourse. Tuckers introduction also examines the reception of Sorais two Ben during the remainder of the Tokugawa, calling attention to radical tendencies in later developments of Sorais thought as well as to the increasingly scathing critiques of his Chinese approach to philosophy, language, and politics. Finally, it traces the vicissitudes of the two Ben in modern Japanese intellectual history and their role in the formation of the ideas of Meiji intellectuals such as Nishi Amane (18291897) and Kat Hiroyuki (18361916).As before, however, Sorai came under attackthis time for his supposed irreverence toward the throne, the Japanese people, and the imperial nation-state. Though an unpopular philosophy in early twentieth-century Japan, in the postwar years Sorais thought was interpreted (by Maruyama Masao and others) as an important modernizing force. While it critiques such ideologically grounded attempts to cast Sorais Bend and Benmei as theoretical contributions to political modernization, Tuckers study nevertheless acknowledges that Sorais masterworks, in their concern for language analysis as the way to solve philosophical problems, share significant common ground with the analytic approach to philosophy pioneered by various twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophers.