Encounter with «Moral science» in Late Nineteenth-Century Japan
From Firenze University Press Book: East and West Entangled (17th-21st Centuries)
Sayaka Oki, University of Nagoya, Japan
Recent historical studies have deepened our understanding of the history of social science in Europe and North America, from the late eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. The terms «moral science», «moral and political sciences» (and its equivalents in other European languages), or «science of men» were used in universities and academies prior to the emergence of the expression «humanities and social sciences». However, the connection of these terms with the modern eastern Asian context has not yet been sufficiently established. This paper tries to fill this gap by conducting a case study on the import and appropriation of the concept of «moral science» by late nineteenth-century Japan to its socio-cultural sphere. The study achieves this by examining the activities of Meirokusha or the Meiji Six society, a learned society created in 1773 to promote Western studies (yogaku), and the writings of one of its leading members, Yukichi Fukuzawa. T he origin of the expression «moral science» in the European context goes back to the medieval period, especially to the tradition of education for kingship, which included both political and religious moral education. However, during the Age of Enlightenment, the expression «moral and political sciences» gradually took on the meaning of an ambitious intellectual project for organising all the non-physical sciences, which were still emerging. Its scope covered a wide range of intellectual fields corresponding to ethics, law, political economy, economics, history, geography, and a sort of psychology due to the existence of several competing models. Academies and private learned societies played an important role in the diffusion of these endeavours. As Julien Vincent says, the protagonists of «moral and political sciences» created a section in several academies on the European continent, especially during the first half of the nineteenth century, often imitating a model found in other countries. These institutions were places where not only researchers but also practitioners, such as politicians and bureaucrats, could gather, before the universities began to institutionalise social sciences at the end of the century (Vincent 2016). Until the mid-nineteenth century, moral science had not yet diverged into specialised disciplines, and existed as fields of both philosophical and political negotiation between opposing reactions to the changes introduced by modernity. Some desired more rapid economic and political change for «progress», while others the re-establishment of the social order. The frontiers between conservatism, liberalism and socialism were not clarified and each segment proclaimed moral science as an extension of its own social reform programme rather than as a theoretical endeavour (Chappey 2006; Steiner 2006; Vincent 2007). When Japan opened the door to the external world around the 1850s, it encountered this complex intellectual landscape without grasping its complexity. T he Meirokusha began promoting Western studies by bringing together intellectuals and government officials, and tried to import Western moral science into Japan. In the following section, we first describe the process of its development and its possible institutional origin. Secondly, we explain the epistemological assumptions they shared on the structure of knowledge to understand their initial unfamiliarity with the intellectual framework of classifying the sciences into «moral» and «physical (or natural)» ones. Thirdly, we look closely at Fukuzawa’s attempt to understand Wayland’s Elements of Moral Science (1835), a famous American textbook on this subject in his time. We examine his attempts to modify Wayland’s original arguments on moral science into those on moral education, based on his interests, namely the modernisation of Japanese society. Apparently Fukuzawa had little interest in Wayland’s Christian-minded concerns on the epistemological relationship between moral principles and natural laws, being more preoccupied with political concerns, such as national independence and the realisation of a market economy. Finally, we will attempt to create a brief sketch of the divergence among the members of the Meirokusha, following Fukuzawa’s attempt to conceptualise a version of liberalism, in order to situate it as the starting point of the history of social science in Japan.
DOI: 10.36253/979–12–215–0242–8.10
Read Full Text: https://books.fupress.it/chapter/encounter-with-moral-science-in-late-nineteenth-century-japan/14118
